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.
We grow them in pots. Pretty colors, but the main point is for salads.
The smaller leaves (the largest leaves are a bit tough) add a spicy, peppery flavor to a salato misto. We also like to throw Nasturtium flowers on top of a salad (after tossing it). The flowers look good and taste good.
The great Thunderbird email program just went through a major revision and a number of its add-ons stopped working. According to the sleuths over at their forum, many of them actually still work, but have a built-in limit as to their validity (which versions of T-Bird they'll work with), so when Thunderbird hit the big 5-point-oh, they declared themselves to be 'possibly incompatible' and T-Bird took that to mean they were toast.
What makes this program so great is that it handles multiple identities, yet treats them completely separately when it comes to ISP configurations, passwords and the 'From' identity when replying to people. Plus, it nicely lists the identities along the left sidebar, each one followed by its own 'Inbox', 'Sent', etc, folder. Not bad for a free program. My page on it is here.
As far as the wayward add-ons go, I use one to organize the sidebar and another to minimize the program to the SysTray, both of which turned belly-up with the latest update and both of which I found working replacements for. They're on the page above. For the rest, you'll either have to do a Google search, looking for "thunderbird add-on" and a concise description of what you want it to do, or tweak the version number of your current add-on as described on the above forum page.
...longtime anti-gun activist Sarah Brady has said that in March, the president told her “I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control] ... We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.”
From: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the soothing thoughts that spring Out of human suffering; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.
This is one of our Pee Wee Oakleaf Hydrangeas. It shows what happens when you prune them: almost no blooms. Even though it is a dwarf version Oakleaf, it outgrew its space and I had to shape it aggressively this winter.
It's a vicious cycle. The more you drive enterprise away, the more you need to soak the remaining people and the remaining businesses who have any money, and thus the more you drive business away or out of business.
Plunder only works to a point, and then you end up with Detroit or Greece.
CT even just placed a stiff tax on non-profit hospitals, if you can believe that. It is bad, and getting worse. One might easily imagine that they are trying to drive all of us to Florida. Personally, I do not care for Florida very much, and snow doesn't bother me at all. Weather is what you make of it and I make the best of it.
It's getting to the point that my state is only a good deal for the very rich (who can afford to avoid taxes or who don't care what they are) and the very poor. Oh yes, I almost forgot - and for government unions. The urban, unemployed poor, the government unions, and the limo Liberals in West Hartford, Litchfield County, and Fairfield County, own my state, at the moment.
It hardly seems like rugged Yankeeland here, politically, anymore. It's Gimme-land. The people with the olde codes have died or are no longer breeding. And to think that our Conservative governor candidate lost by only 6000 votes found, several days after the election, in bags in a Bridgeport warehouse or post office or something. Maybe it was legit. I don't know, but anything in Bridgeport is dubious these days.
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:
We grow them in pots. Pretty colors, but the main point is for salads. 
The great Thunderbird email program just went through a major revision and a number of its add-ons stopped working. According to the sleuths over at their 
The Big Apple Celebrates the King James Bible
What though the radiance which was once so bright 
From Ace: 
By Dr. Joel Levine: 
Giant hogweed
It's 
American Front Lawn Update: 
Sipp recalls 