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.
Thirty years ago, the training and practice of medicine was deeply rooted in "inherited" values as much as craft. Physicians were in a noble discipline recast into paladins protecting society, even a bit of its soul, against an implacable adversary. Training was both arduous and flawed (inflated egos and autocratic mice that roared) but with a central purpose. When done well, doctors successfully confronted their most difficult internal challenges, fear of the power of illness and the willfulness to make important decisions when the consequence was uncertain. This "old" medical culture was best expressed by a single term: "My patient." It was as far from provider and client as you could possibly get. "My patient" conveyed both bond and responsibility.
We are about to burn the bridges to this tradition from both ends.
Read it all, because this is what is coming to your town soon with Obamacare. Some of you have already seen it. Mass-market medicine, by the rule-book, "delivered" by anonymous "providers" to the masses. I plan to stick with the old ways for as long as I can.
A theme that recurs throughout the book is that most of X’s students aren’t in college by choice. They aren’t in his class because they want to learn about literature or even because they realize that they are weak in reading and writing. Instead, they’re in college because they have to get the credential!
Drawing an analogy to the housing bubble (as we at the Pope Center have on several occasions), Professor X writes, “In much the same way the country spent the first decade of the 2000s redefining what it meant to be a homeowner (to disastrous effect), so too have we reclassified which jobs require a college degree of some sort. Industry, including the civil service, wants its workers to be as credentialed as possible.” Therefore we find college degree “requirements” for jobs like managing a video store.
One result is that poor kids (and sometimes middle-aged adults) who want to escape from the drudgery of their current jobs and have a chance at even such mundane work as managing a video store have to get college degrees. Their coursework will enhance their ability to do that job scarcely one smidgen, but it’s the credential that matters. They have to spend or borrow money to take X’s evening course (and many others) just to get out of the “no college” trap.
Well, since others are weighing in with their election predictions, I thought I'd do the same. No sense in dawdling, right?
Obama in a landslide.
Pending change in circumstance, I hastily add.
As it stands now, I just can't see a Republican win. All of the declared candidates contain major flaws which the MSM will mercilessly exploit, both overtly and covertly, blatantly and subliminally, and I find none of the candidates inspirational in the slightest.
And the poor selection is only one of our worries.
The one, basic, inherent problem here is that conservatives are conservative. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. And, as such, by definition alone they're not very activistic, tending to sit around on their duffs while the liberals make all the moves. It's no mystery why so many institutions and the major media realms, including the tech world, are dominated by liberals. It's because they try.
My job here is to get some of you to try.
My initial leap into the upcoming election was to create SpeakUp! 2012, a how-to guide for putting together a snappy blog site and then spreading the word around. If you want to show a little gumption and have a say in the election, that's the way to do it. The free WordPress software (the stuff that Power Line just switched to) is terrific and very easy to use. The guide will walk you through the entire process from this moment on. Plus, you've got me trapped here to pester with questions if you run into a snag.
Below the fold I'll run through the candidates in my usual calm, careful, deliberate manner as I soundly castigate, shred, thrash, defile, lambaste, maul, abuseandabase view them with the same objectivity I always show.
Pot should not be illegal. It's just like Prohibition - everybody who wants pot gets it anyway. It's wrong to outlaw every dumb thing there is to do in life. Part of freedom is freedom to do dumb things - and to deal with the consequences.
There is something truly wrong about that. You might term it an implicit conspiracy against the people, similar to the conspiracies between governments and government unions.
It is a phenomenon we see over and over again: a liberal will make a wild accusation or engage in defamatory speculation about a political opponent. The accusation will then be taken up by left-wingers across the internet and, if it looks promising, it will be repeated in far-left newspapers like the New York Times. Liberals everywhere will eat it up and elaborate on it. Then, in due course, it will be proved entirely baseless.
What happens next? Do liberal web sites, columnists and reporters retract their fictitious claims and apologize? Hardly ever. By the time the truth comes out, they have moved on to some new libel or conspiracy theory.
It's an upscale village of 19,000 now, but 25 years ago it was just turning from semi-rural to suburban. The farms are all gone. Even with a train connection to NYC, it's a hike. Wiki again:
The town is one of the most affluent communities in the United States. In 2008, CNN Money ranked New Canaan first in the nation with the highest median family income.
(Prosperous, indeed, but what those stats really mean, in part, is that there are no poor neighborhoods there to drag down the average.)
Caroline Glick and her satire site Latma have done it again, thanks to the Beach Boys. The Audacity of Dopes monicker is gentler than the international band of failed flotillans deserve. They know exactly what they are trying to do. And it's not humanitarian. Only dopes would believe that. Only enemies of Israel's survival would try to put that one over. These purposeful aiders of murderers want to open Gaza to the import by Hamas of more weapons to kill Israelis, and any others around. Glick brings them the satirical ridicule they deserve.
Most folks (if lucky enough to have work to do) work far more than that these days.
I work 7:30 to noon, then a little more than an hour in the gym or just walking around outdoors (then an apple, cigar, and a coffee for lunch while preparing a Maggie's post), then around 1:30 - 6 or 6:30 (on a typical work day). I have a roughly 35-45 minute commute, too. Not sure whether you'd call that a 10 or 11-hour day, but it suits me just fine. When I have deadlines, I work weekends but I try to avoid that as much as I can during the summertime. And I am linked into the office at home.
"Man May Work from Sun to Sun; But Woman's Work is Never Done." Is that still true? I find that my work is never "done" either. "Done" is when you're dead.
In the last go-round, they accused the raters of being too lenient. I think the raters are trying to find a delicate way of opining that Greece and Portugal are technically bankrupt.
Catholics keep talking about “calling,” and asking people to stop yakking about what they “deserve” long enough to seriously ask, “Is it truly for me? Is it what I am called to? Is there a possibility that I am not supposed to have this, in order to open my life up to something else? What might that be? Am I being led somewhere I had not imagined?”
We humans have a remarkable talent for rationalizing our feelings and behaviors. The world is full of hot guys and hot babes, and all sorts of other tempting things. One cannot have them all.
I know this supermarket well. It's the last supermarket before you turn north, last chance to stock up. After that, not much except Lema's and Cumbie's.
The overgrown thing had taken on a corroded aspect from the depredations of the beetles; it looked like a leprous dragon, smelled like a grandmother, and pinched like a mortgage when you touched it looking for errant shuttlecocks or wiffleballs.
What happened to all of those Japanese Beetles that used to eat the roses? I haven't seen one in years. My Mom used to send us out to pick them off of her roses and drop them in little jars of gasoline. Like picking blueberries.
Pork for all! Greece is bankrupt, and everybody knows it. There is no way they will ever pay back what they have borrowed to sustain their vote-buying politics. Maybe they could just sell the whole country to Club Med, and change those Euros or Drachmas into drink beads.
Brits can't get top students to go to medical school anymore (nobody really wants to work for the NHS) - so they have to import docs from Whereisitstan.
She sort-of agrees with David Brooks. I don't know what I think except that the Dems cannot stop spending money they don't have to give people stuff they don't want. Plunder politics.
"There are 80,000 bartenders in the United States with bachelor's degrees," Vedder said. He says that 17 percent of baggage porters and bellhops have a college degree, 15 percent of taxi and limo drivers.
Nothing wrong with that (a bartender who can discuss Paradise Lost with you is a good thing) - unless those folks were scammed into getting those diplomas as a financial investment. I see many parallels with sub-prime mortgage sales. Most colleges these days are all about sales - warm bodies with loans in hand. It's become the Big Education industry, built on debt.
No Republican has won the presidency without significant name recognition entering primary season since Warren G. Harding in 1920. That is because Republicans have to face down Democrats’ constant attacks on their personhood, attacks are made more effective because the Republican platform is supposed to be personal responsibility and aspirational performance standards, while the Democratic platform is handouts, pure and simple. The only way for Republicans to win is to make it widely known to the American public prior to their demonization that they are good and decent human beings.
President Obama’s only hope, by contrast, is to personalize, polarize, and destroy. It’s pure Alinsky, and it will work unless Republicans nominate someone so honest and eminently kind that Obama’s criticism seems as foolish as it clearly is.
One of our white mophead varieties - Blushing Bride - in bloom right now, and, in typical hydrangea style, with a little mid-day wilt from being planted (by me) in a tad too much sunshine:
The alarmists are playing whack-a-mole with any data which does not fit their hypotheses and predictions. This is the stuff of politicians, children, and litigators, not scientists.
One definition: An error in reasoning in which one assumes that the observed relationship between current events and some historical events represents a causal relationship.
Such reasoning is not consistent with the scientific method. When data don't fit your hypothesis, you can't makes excuses for your data while leaving your hypothesis unchanged.
If you play that game, you also violate the rules of Falsifiability by making a non-falsifiable hypothesis. My bold:
(Karl Popper) A conjecture or hypothesis must be accepted as true until such time as it is proven to be false. Popper maintains that scientists approach the truth through what he calls "conjecture and refutation." In actuality, scientists approach the truth not through conjecture and refutation, but through conjecture and CONFIRMATION, i.e. demonstration, by means of careful experiment, that a hypothesis corresponds to the facts of reality. Until the phenomenon is proven TRUE there is no obligation to base my attitude toward it on the assumption that it MIGHT be true. If there were such an obligation, then I would be obliged to give serious consideration to every crackpot notion that has ever been put forward.
If an hypothesis cannot be refuted by data, it's not science: it's a belief system. The evidence that there has been no warming for over a decade is difficult data indeed in light of their hysterical predictions, so now they have invented covert warming. This is pathetic and embarassing. Tweaking computer models to fit unexpected data is not science. It's overt fudging.
As a commenter at Watts pointed out, with some math adjusting you can prove Ptolemy's solar system to be an accurate model.
What... emerges from this is a convenient flexible device to explain any climate change and blame it on humans. Is there warming? Its caused by CO2. Cooling? It can only be smokestack particles.
"Just like we can’t make the organic morphology of slums fit into the modern rules of property ownership, we can’t make traditionally emergent cities through the current planning system. (All efforts to produce traditional neighborhoods have so far produced only imitations of them.) ..."
Indeed, a neigborhood can not be "made." I think of planned development like Disneyworld: phoney to the point of creepy. Stepford places where you can't grow things in your front lawn.
Have you ever seen a new housing development in the US with a corner store, a cheap barbershop, or a local pub? Apparently there is a market for the unreal and sanitized.
It is hard to understand politics if you are hung up on reality. Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.
Under Johnson, an important Democratic operative, Fannie Mae became, Morgenson and Rosner say, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.” Its power derived from the unstated certainty that the government would be ultimately liable for Fannie’s obligations. This assumption and other perquisites were subsidies to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worth an estimated $7 billion a year. They retained about a third of this.
Morgenson and Rosner report that in 1998, when Fannie Mae’s lending hit $1 trillion, its top officials began manipulating the company’s results to generate bonuses for themselves. That year Johnson’s $1.9 million bonus brought his compensation to $21 million. In nine years, Johnson received $100 million.
At Big Government yesterday, Phillip Dennis asked, “What Has Happened to Liberals In the Past 50 Years?” Here’s one answer: They went from viewing America as a beacon of freedom (or a Shining City upon a Hill, to borrow a phrase popular with both liberal icon JFK and former Roosevelt liberal Ronald Wilson Reagan) worth sharing with a beleaguered world to a Show About Nothing during that time. If only they had Upped Their Game during this period, instead.
Time-saving projects always take more time than one expects.
We have always been partial to a gardening mix with hanging baskets, large pots, and planters. According to my local expert Mrs. BD, pots can add structure and height to flower gardens. The only thing that drives her nuts are clashing colors, and she does not like to permit annuals to steal the show from precious perennials and flowering shrubs with their frequently more subtle colors. (Furthermore, she believes that varied and interesting foliage is just as important in a garden as are blooms.) Red annuals? Fugeddaboutit. She says they are for McDonald's and banks - commercial-looking. She is right that overly-bright flowers look commercial and tacky rather than homey unless they are the only thing you are growing.
You could say that she feels that using any annuals is cheating, but I am not so doctrinaire about the elite gardening rules.
Our gardening trick for in-ground gardens is to use plenty of mulch instead of using irrigation, but if you enjoy pots and planters the way the Italians do, and do not always remember to, or bother to, lug watering cans around every night or every morning with all of the other things that need doing, you can assemble one of these sorts of cool dripper systems, set the timer, and forget about them until frost. Our cousins on Nantucket use them for all of their rental houses, and they work great. The mini-hoses are invisible.
Trust me. They'll look much better and grow better with daily water. Pots and planters dry out in one sunny summer day. (Smaller pots don't even make it through a day.) The occasional light dose of Miracle Gro in planters doesn't hurt either.
This post may seem to some as “inside baseball” but it illustrates a wider issue of being diligently informed for civil discourse and for effectiveness in supporting a cause, while not shirking from calling out those -- even allies -- who dangerously undermine that cause.
Europe has a deeper and historic anti-Semitism than in the US, and its Jews are proportionately and politically weaker than in the US. In this sense, European Jews may be more dependent on the efforts of non-Jews to defend themselves and Israel. This defense – here or there -- is based on the increasing realization, among Jews and gentiles, that it is part of a wider defense of the West, its culture and security against Islamist jihadists. Europe has also been more accomodationist toward Islamist offenses and offenders, partly out of post-WWII pacifism and retreat from global responsibilities and partly from it placing its energy and trade interests paramount. Both the US and Europe have activist Leftist and pro-Palestinian communities, but in the US they are far more marginalized in both public opinion and government policy, and there is lower tolerance for them. In Europe, allies are harder to come by, which can lead to infiltration by some who are anti-Islamist jihad but anti-Semitic, and slower reaction.
There is a blog dispute between blog friends, Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs blog and"Baron Bodissey and Dymphna" at Gates Of Vienna (GOV) blog, about the infiltration by some anti-Semites tarnishing of anti-jihadist English Defense League. Geller, an early supporter of the EDL, says she "did not want to write" her post exposing anti-Semitism infiltration within EDL but is required to go there as "I cannot and will not sanction anti-Semitic infiltration." Accordingly, subject to EDL leadership's promised purge of such elements, she has distanced herself from the EDL. The GOV bloggers have reacted with an Open Letter in which they criticize Geller as over-reacting. Geller's reply, in her typical fashion, minces few words:
By Dr. Joel Levine: 
Giant hogweed
It's 
American Front Lawn Update: 
Sipp recalls 
A perfect example of it: 
