We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Mark Edmundsen has written a piece at The Chronicle about one of my favorite bugabooos in Health Now: A Provocation. Here's a quote:
Francis Fukuyama glances at this matter in a passage from The End of History and the Last Man. "In America today, we feel entitled to criticize another person's smoking habits, but not his or her religious beliefs or moral behavior. For Americans, the health of their bodies—what they eat and drink, the exercise they get, the shape they are in—has become a far greater obsession than the moral questions that tormented their forebears."
I entirely believe in the value of remaining fit, strong, trim, sexy, and attractive but it is the fetishizing of health and the common delusions about food that annoy me the most. In the end, we are not in control of our fates. And I hate brown rice, don't know why anybody would eat it willingly. The Chinese won't eat it.
I'm going to do a post on Perry this Friday and would like to include a video. I've looked over a handful on YouTube and most of them are 'okay', but nothing really jumps out. If anyone has a favorite vid that puts him in his best light, please leave the link or name in the comments.
Also, any links or other juicy tidbits would be appreciated. If there's any truth to the rumor that he's secretly a transgender drag queen posing as a closet transvestite, let me know. We'll get to the bottom of this sordid story, and I note for the record that the Perry camp has not officially denied it, which probably means it's true.
Pic: Chuck Norris + Rick Perry = Awesomeness Unveiled
Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting).
Do us a favor, if you haven't already done so: Give the folks you know a chance to learn about Maggie's. They might enjoy us.
After a nine year binge of borrowing and spending; euro members began defaulting. Early in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis; euro states announced agreements in principal to solve isolated cases of small countries experiencing “temporary setbacks” with short term loans. First Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Italy; and now virtually every euro member except Germany is experiencing rising financial stress. The euro-debt burdens are so onerous; defaulting nations have no capacity to ever pay back their bondholding banks; making their banks also insolvent.
The supposed euro benefits allowed Germany to lure its neighbors into debt traps. Defaulting euro-members could then chose to either; start a new currency and suffer the same brutal inflationary consequences as Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War One; or surrender to Germany as the only power in Europe with the economic size and financial wealth to stabilize the euro-system. In the end, bureaucrats from all seventeen euro-members nations agreed to give control of future bailouts to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), a secretive private bank managed and funded by Germany. The ESFS has authority to loan money and impose whatever financial conditions it would like on borrowers. Over the next two years ESFS will bailout Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and their banks. Austria; Belgium; and Italy will soon follow and France and her banks eventually flirt with insolvency. The European Sovereign Debt Crisis is over; Germany won.
Even this reasonable piece misses the real points: America has no permanent underclass, the poor in America are not poor by any world standards, bad choices result in bad results, and many people do not chose material gain as their life goal. I have talked to poor people, I know poor people.
Much of it has only been available in French. Review here. A quote from the review:
Peace and freedom were at the top of Bastiat's agenda, each cause being indispensable to the other, he believed. Statism was his bane. "The dominant notion, the one that has permeated every class of society," he wrote in the wake of the Revolution of 1848, "is that the state is responsible for providing a living for everyone."
"Poor people!" he lamented of the duped French populace in the same tumultuous year. "How much disillusionment is in store for them! It would have been so simple and so just to ease their burden by decreasing their taxes; they want to achieve this through the plentiful bounty of the state and they cannot see that the whole mechanism consists in taking away ten to give it back eight, not to mention the true freedom that will be destroyed in the operation!"
F-16, call sign Stroke 3, dodging 6 SAM launches during Desert Storm
As the package proceeded to the Iraqi border the weather become steadily worse until everyone was in the weather, unable to climb out into the clear. As planes got out of position, the package finally broke out into the clear just past the Iraqi border. At this time, a large calibre AAA gun began firing on the aircraft. The AAA consisted of extremely large airbursts that looked like big black rain clouds. The AAA, coupled with the confusion of sorting out the package formation, resulted in 25% of the package being sent home at that time. Meanwhile the package, now a 12-ship, pressed on to Baghdad.
As the flight approached the Baghdad IP, AAA began firing at tremendous rates. Most of the AAA was at 10-12,000ft (3,658m), but there were some very heavy, large calibre explosions up to 27,000ft (8,230m). Low altitude AAA became so thick it appeared to be an undercast. At this time, the 388th TFW F-16’s were hitting the Nuclear Research Centre outside of the city, and the Weasels had fired off all their HARMs in support of initial parts of the strike and warnings to the 614th F-16’s going further into downtown went unheard. The F-15’s also provided air cover and departed with the first part of the strike group. Again, a warning that went unheard. Without knowing it 614th TFS F-16’s were all pretty much alone in downtown Baghdad with no air cover and no electronic support assets.
A low overcast deck covered the northern portion of the city which extended south to the point where the AF Headquarters and the Republican Guard Headquarters were mostly obscured, and the package commander, Maj. John Nips Nichols, called a weather abort for those two targets. The southern portion of the city was clear, and the oil refinery was clearly visible to Crud and Stroke flights. As they approached the action point to roll in on the refinery, an SA-2 launch warning was received. The fighters turned to honour the threat missile launch warning, and some SAMs were seen in the air, but they were not an immediate threat. The remaining F-16’s each pinpoint bombed separate refectory towers on the site, and set the refinery ablaze. The destruction was so complete that the flames from the refinery were seen on Cable News Network (CNN) film for the next two weeks.
As the initial SA-2 launch warning faded however, Maj. ET Tullia, Stroke 3, received additional SA-2 and SA-3 acquisition warnings that went unheeded as he rolled in on the towers. The high angle diving delivery, combined with the on-board ECM pod delayed a full SAM missile system acquisition until he pulled off the target and turned south. As the missiles closed, ET's tape reveals the screams of the radar warning receiver into his headset of a missile launch. The missiles overshot and harmlessly detonated above his aircraft, and he turned back to the egress heading.
Multiple SAMs were launched at the package, some ballistic and unguided and some tracking with a full system lock-on. In spite of this, some members of the package refused to jettison their bombs until clear of the city to avoid possible damage to civilian non-combatants. One of the missiles guided toward Clap 4, piloted by Capt. Mike Cujo Roberts. A missile break warning sounded over the radio and Cujo saw the missile as it guided towards him. It passes behind his aircraft and detonates, and Cujo believes he is safe until his aircraft begins to pitch over and he loses control. As the jet approaches negative 1'g', Cujo ejected over downtown Baghdad. No one observed an ejection, nor saw a 'chute.
I found Dr. Bob's post to be honest, sad, and deeply discouraging. I hear things like that all over from my colleagues these days. Here's a quote from his Still Breathing…
... I am weary. After nearly 30 years in private practice, I am not sure which straw broke the camel’s back, but it is most surely broken. It is a weariness born of 14 hour days; of dictating charts and finishing paperwork until 8 or 9 pm each night, after starting the day at 7 am; of endless audits by the insurance industry and Medicare; of the constant threat of litigation; of the crushing burden of one more federal requirement mandated but never recompensed; of a host of ever-expanding administrative burdens having nothing to do with patient care, and everything to do with bureaucratic micromanagement of the profession. And this before we have even begun to see the nightmare which Obamacare will inflict. Camels weren’t designed to carry such a load.
That's the loss of just one more doctor who would know you and your family, and care about you and your life - and who would be working for you, and you only. Soon enough, the tort lawyers and government bureaurats will have the pleasure of going to an assembly line government clinic, staffed by docs trained in Russia, Mexico, and Croatia, to take care of them in 4 minutes according to a government protocol, with only approved and cost-effective methods depending on your age (and potential productivity).
Life has hardened my cynicism about power and government. I am not a paranoid sort, but I think the Fathers had it right about their determination to limit power. They own half my labor now, and want to own more of it - and my body too. For my own good, of course.
As a traditionalist Yankee born and bred, I somehow cannot find any gratitude in me for such unwanted favors.
Readers know that we at Maggie's are conservationists. (That is different from being Greenies. We are not Greenies.) Conservation of the world's fish (and fisheries) is always a concern, especially with the technology and efficiency which is applied to modern commercial fishing. It has been painful to see the Northeast Cod fishery, especially that of George's Bank, go the way of the Passenger Pigeon and the Buffalo.
Americans' political ideology at the midyear point of 2011 looks similar to 2009 and 2010, with 41% self-identifying as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.
“Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party ‘Totalitarian.’ This has to be the first ‘Totalitarian’ movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.”
“The Affordable Care Act helps stop health problems before they start,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement. “These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need.”
Photo is of a woman's hideous health problem, tragically not cured in time, for free, by modern science. It's sort-of like a tumor, I suppose, but a healthy one which has a strange way of popping out of a lady's hoo-ha when it grows too big.
Americans' confident belief in the uniqueness, yes the exceptionalism, of their country, rested on an essential faith in liberty, and individualism and anti-statism at home, and in the power of our example, and muscle now and then, in foreign lands. Mr. Obama is ill-at-ease with that worldview. Our country has had pessimism on offer and has invariably rejected it. At crucial points in its history, it has remained unshaken in the belief that tomorrow can be better.
Obama suffers from the typically American condescending elite view of life: "America sucks because our retarded citizenry sucks."
Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head…Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.
G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News 1907, from a selection of Chesterton quotes at Anchoress
The deal between the Congressional leadership and the President is much ado about nothing, in that – contrary to the kudos, rationalizations or moans – it actually does and will do little to affect the rapidly rising federal deficits and debts. It is less than trivial in the next year that it actually affects and almost entirely a lie over the next decade as future Congresses and presidents work around or ignore it.
The deal will cause increased demoralization among the citizenry both over its lack of real content and as politicians wrangle vigorously over scraps treated like whole cloth. It will also cause a new sobriety, already in painful motion, among the citizenry who have lesser prospects than before this deep recession and little reason to believe the future will personally be much better. Consumption will be restrained.
It is clear that the status quo is continued, for now at least and likely into the foreseeable future.
Spending is not reduced. It only promises a reduction in the present trendline of forecast spending, a fraction of the increases that will actually occur. And, there is little reason to believe that either Medicare or defense spending will be more than trimmed slightly in 2012. Part of that trendline, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a $multi-trillion increase in taxes as the Bush tax-cuts are allowed to expire right after the 2012 elections. There is little reason to believe that such a drastic increase in taxes will be allowed to occur. Longer term, even if a trillion$ or three-$trillion dollars of spending were most optimistically avoided over the next decade, that’s a hundred to three-hundred $billion per year, a small fraction of federal spending.
If, as seems likely, the 2012 elections result in a Republican president and both houses of Congress, there will be more trims to spending, a good thing surely but likely to increase the howls of real and defensive pains and hardly likely to actually reduce the deficits significantly. The Cut, Cap and Balance that the Republican House passed is likely, and decidedly a better thing, yet as tides and lobbies weigh in will be weakened and end-run over time.
Fears about the crash of the dollar are overblown, as there is no viable alternative in a euro-myth euro or speciously corrupt Chinese renminbi. Lenders will demand higher interest rates and that will increase the deficits worldwide. Fears about more global conflict are not overblown. Enemies of order or Western civilization will continue to probe and attack. Reducing mental and defense preparedness by the US will encourage such foes and increase the needs to confront, which will be less successful and more costly to servicemembers and foregone goals.
So, long story short, the status quo will continue. It will be perceived as or really be painful for all, even under the best of circumstances.
One can argue that far more severe governmental actions or changes would reverse this. They are unlikely to occur. There will be more restraints on deepening the hole, but the hole remains. We’ve already dug it by a generation or two of profligacy and excuses. Only a generation or two of serious reduction in personal and government spending, plus economic recovery that must depend upon lessened government regulation and interference, will begin to maybe return us to realistic optimism.
I predict that the demoralization will be temporary and the new sobriety will ultimately triumph and set us right. The path will be long and hard to dig out of several generations of delusions that we could spend our seed-corn, requiring perseverance and sacrifice of self and illusions, but it is well marked.
BTW, I'm encoraged that the cautious and knowledgeable Mitt Romney is opposed to the debt deal, both as an economic realist and political positioner. The debt deal will pass anyway but he will be demonstrated as correct during the coming election season. That may not win him enough points to score, but does indicate a will among Republican moderates that together with the more conservative and Independent centrists -- as polls presently show -- will lead to the next vital step up with a Republican White House and Congress. The road of a thousand steps begins with the first. We've taken the first and 999 remain.
[T]he cure for: a) the budget deficit = more taxes; b) unemployment = more taxes; c) recession = more taxes; d) environmental problems = more taxes; e) illiteracy = more taxes; f) L.A. riots = more taxes. It doesn’t matter what the nature of the problem is.
Combine class warfare, demonizing the rich, getting as many people onto the welfare rolls as possible, and pushing the economic system to collapse and you have a flawless formula for Cloward-Piven 2.0 -- and a vehicle that ensures Obama remains in power.
Barack Obama will be remembered not so much for being the nation’s first African-American president, or even the man who ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden, or even for his Obamacare, but as the president who grew government the largest, ran up the largest deficits during any presidential tenure, and laid out most candidly and confidently the argument of why the United States is an intrinsically unfair society and how that must be remedied by government.
Governments are bad at compassion, in part because it is a candle to power-seeking moths. The heavy lifting of compassion belongs in the private sector, where it is divorced from the impulse to impose continually greater levels of control.
Mrs. BD thought that some of our readers, especially those remote from NYC, might like a sample of the retrospective, Savage Beauty, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which ends next week. She particularly singled out ex-New Yorker Marianne.
The show is a big deal. It has been sold out since the opening, and yesterday you had to wait in line 2-3 hrs to get in (unless a member of the Met, as we are, in which case you go right past the lines. It was crowded.).
I liked the show. We usually use those good headphone things, but, for some reason, we did not this time.
This Scotsman, who recently committed suicide, was quite an artist. All the husbands and boyfriends there seemed interested to look, as was I (up to a point). It would have been more fun with live models wearing the things.
They put on a remarkably dramatic presentation of McQueen's stuff with what I presume is edgy-artsy-fashionista music and spooky lighting. My photos are not very good because pics were not technically allowed so I had to be discreet. (I do it for you, our readers.)
And yes, I was rewarded with a good lunch afterwards.
"Rep. Barney Frank of Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac fame told Neil Cavuto this morning that if Moody’s downgrades the US debt, “We just don’t pay much attention to them… Don’t sell.” He then went on to blame the ratings agencies for ignoring the mortgage crisis… that he helped create. Unreal."
14:13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns.
14:14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick.
14:15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, "This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves."
14:16 Jesus said to them, "They need not go away; you give them something to eat."
14:17 They replied, "We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish."
14:18 And he said, "Bring them here to me."
14:19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds.
14:20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.
14:21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
They are supported by honor, but not enforceable in court. Hence the word "gentleman." One would like to think that gentlemen still keep their word:
Informal, oral understanding resting on the sense of personal honor of the involved parties. Generally, such agreements are not enforceable through courts.
Have you heard Trombone Shorty? I enjoyed hearing him and his band live, last summer. Had a quick chat with him, too, after the set. He is a sweetheart, and very humble despite being such a prodigy and, now, a star.
I know folks who will drive 40 minutes to the Red Rooster Drive-In on Route 22 in Brewster, NY, when they get a jones for their burgers, fries, and onion rings - all made to order, the old-fashioned way. Slow food. Good hot dogs too. Worth a trip from Great Falls, or Phoenix.
Is it over-rated? Maybe. I love it, though.
The place is unchanged since the 50s. There is really no seating, but lots of picnic benches outside. Or eat in the pick-up and drip juice and ketchup on your shirt in the manly American-style.
Mrs. BD is dragging me to see this. I hope I at least get a good NYC lunch out of this because fashion is not really my thing. Being a decent husband is.
Apparently it is tough to get into the show without being a member, which we are. Very long lines, otherwise. I think NYC has more fashionistas per square mile than either Paris or Milan.
I am weary. After nearly 30 years in private practice, I am not sure which straw broke the camel’s back, but it is most surely broken. It is a weariness born of 14 hour days; of dictating charts and finishing paperwork until 8 or 9 pm each night, after starting the day at 7 am; of endless audits by the insurance industry and Medicare; of the constant threat of litigation; of the crushing burden of one more federal requirement mandated but never recompensed; of a host of ever-expanding administrative burdens having nothing to do with patient care, and everything to do with bureaucratic micromanagement of the profession. And this before we have even begun to see the nightmare which Obamacare will inflict. Camels weren’t designed to carry such a load.
But the change (ie the change Dr. Bob is making) is nevertheless much anticipated in a host of other ways, with its reduced administrative and regulatory burdens, and substantial increase in free time. For me, the war is over: I have fought the good fight, and no longer see it as profitable to battle the inexorable forces which threaten to crush a beloved profession.
Mark Edmundsen has written a piece at The Chronicle about one of my favorite bugabooos in 
I'm going to do a post on Perry this Friday and would like to include a video. I've looked over a handful on YouTube and most of them are 'okay', but nothing really jumps out. If anyone has a favorite vid that puts him in his best light, please leave the link or name in the comments.
Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting). 
I found Dr. Bob's post to be honest, sad, and deeply discouraging. I hear things like that all over from my colleagues these days. Here's a quote from his 
Readers know that we at Maggie's are conservationists. (That is different from being Greenies. We are not Greenies.) Conservation of the world's fish (and fisheries) is always a concern, especially with the technology and efficiency which is applied to modern commercial fishing. It has been painful to see the Northeast Cod fishery, especially that of 
Podhoretz: 
I thought it was a blessing and a gift from God - and I naively thought that medical insurance was meant to help cover costly diseases. 
Best Road Burger in the Northeast
Some studies say coffee is good for you; others say it's bad.