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.
The last fad diagnosis was ADHD: every little boy who didn't act like a good little girl had it. Now, it is Bipolar Disorder for all kids with unruly emotions. In Newsweek, Mommy, Am I Really Bipolar?
A quote from the article:
I believe... that there is no scientific evidence to support the belief that bipolar disorder surfaces in childhood. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case: the evidence against the existence of pediatric bipolar disorder is so strong that it’s difficult to imagine how it has gained the endorsement of anyone in the scientific community. And the effect of this trendy thinking can have devastating consequences. Such children are regularly prescribed medications that are not effective in kids and have unwelcome side effects.
Diagnostic faddishness is rampant in Psychiatry, and an embarassment to the field. Why does it occur? It occurs because our descriptive diagnostic categories are so elastic, and so fundamentally unvalidated, that there is room for much mischief. Not to mention that the drug companies always welcome new opportunities to sell their wares.
Unlike most of the world, I am not allowed to have the Process be the Product. At the end of the day there has to be something tangibly different with the world or we don't eat. Sometimes we don't eat anyway. Most of the world we inhabit now is all Process and no Product. What is Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or a million other things you could name that consist solely of: This is how I go, when I go like this.
The federal government thinks the process is the entire product. The public school system can produce only public school teachers. The EPA is now supposed to protect the air from humans. The Department of Energy doesn't make any, and would prefer you didn't as well --or else. Cities like Detroit are trying to exist with no population now. Search your mind. You'll have to search hard to find exceptions, not examples.
Liberals...have never had any strong attachment to state sovereignty. Since the New Deal, they have regarded centralized power as the best way to advance the welfare state. They may favor state discretion when it favors their causes. But they don't pretend to be consistent on the issue.
Conservatives, however, do. Pretend, that is. When there is a conflict between state sovereignty and conservative policies, their reverence for the 10th Amendment abruptly goes by the wayside.
That became apparent several years ago, when the Bush administration asserted its power to prevent Californians from using medical marijuana after the state allowed it. It also tried to block an Oregon law allowing doctor-assisted suicide. Attorney General John Ashcroft had no qualms about mobilizing the fearsome resources of the federal government when states veered out of line.
He has new company among the GOP presidential aspirants, who support the 10th Amendment except when they don't. When New York legalized same-sex marriage, Perry first said, "That's New York, and that's their business, and that's fine with me." But he soon reversed course, endorsing the Federal Marriage Amendment, which says marriage "shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman."
We support states' rights and state sovereignty. Country too big, too varied, too diverse, for a one-size fits-all.
Naturally, police never know what they are walking into and would be more comfortable if nobody had guns - or knives or baseball bats either - but Chief McCarthy is way out of reality. A quote:
..the culture of any given community will determine its level of violence, with gun laws making a minor difference at best. The devastating cultural changes impacting society -- and the black community in particular -- during the 1960s are largely to blame for the violence we see. Political scientist James Q. Wilson summed up that cultural change perfectly, saying, "[P]eople abandoned the idea that self-control was the standard by which life should be led." The current conditions on the South Side and in ghettos around America are a direct result of generation upon generation of excuses -- wrapped up in social-science garb, righteous indignation, and racial sensitivity -- but excuses all the same. The young men committing violent crimes today have been steeped in generational irresponsibility, and Chicago's police superintendant has kept up the flow.
Most people in my community own guns (legally), but we have not had a murder here in 70 years. And that was done by an intruder, from outside town.
“Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’ That you can have a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ‘We’re here, we’re queer!’ — that’s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.”
Janeane Garofolo, who not only knows no history but who also ignores the fact that the Founders made it possible for those disgusting Christopher St. displays to occur.If you can stand it, more ugly political quotes via Moonbattery
A mountain of Cape Cod steamer clams with garlic bread and a couple of beers will be my supper tonite. Any dessert would ruin the experience by erasing that clammy goodness. I always have a cup or two of the broth. Sometimes I eat the necks, sometimes I don't.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
He’s out of bullets. He’s out of arrows. He’s looking for stones on the seashore. … There’s nothing left in the cupboard. He did a huge Keynesian gamble, and it failed.
The only difference is that they have cops, guns, jails, and armies to back them up and to require their clients' cooperation. An armed monopoly but yes, we consented to the original deal in 1787. I was just a kid back then, but I was all for it, believing it put government in a tight little cage. I did not anticipate, back then, how damn good their mass marketing would become over the centuries. Mass marketing was simple and primitive in those days.
To their credit, the professionals sincerely believe what they're saying. Sure their own interests happen to align with their rhetoric. But so what? Professional politicians have long ago stopped noticing such things and they shortened "Conflict of Interest" to Synergy a while back. They genuinely and truly believe that the government can't afford to make any real spending cuts. That if it did, the system would fall apart. And they're right. Their system would fall apart.
The system is too big to gradually reform. It's interconnected with too many expectations. And a major expectation is that it will keep on going this way. Government is an industry. And numerous industries have grown up around it. You can cut a hundred million, a billion, here and there, and that will just spur on competition among special interests. But you can't dramatically cut spending. If you do an entire supra-economy that has grown up over the regular economy collapses.
Of course that's exactly what has to be done. The professional politician represents the supra-economy. The one that's based on regulation, subsidies and grants. That employs everyone from union organizers to sensitivity trainers, consultants, administrators, suppliers, lawyers, managers and anyone whose job in the private or public sector is tied into the government.
Government is, in fact, the biggest business in the USA - the industry with the most guns, the most revenue, the most employees, the most power, and the most private jets too. But since this leviathan tends to be run by people who could not run a corner candy shop yet has armed persons behind them, it continually expands while losing money every day.
That is, as long as China has a single spare yuan to lend to it to maintain the illusion that it is a going concern. Yes, I know. We voted them all into office. Our bad.
We humans flatter ourselves when we claim to "think" things through, because often our starting point is our conclusion. We rationalize our conclusions and biases, and are attracted to information which confirms them. However, that does not mean that our thoughts are always misguided or wrong.
Anyone who does not know why they hold a particular viewpoint cannot judge fairly whether it should be kept or abandoned. There’s no point in arguing with them.
That's the point. It is in fact a Psychoanalytic point. Two good rules of thumb for introspectives are these: "Don't believe everything you think," and the old AA aphorism, "Feelings aren't facts."
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
Are racist white gun owners 
A mountain of Cape Cod steamer clams with garlic bread and a couple of beers will be my supper tonite. Any dessert would ruin the experience by erasing that clammy goodness. I always have a cup or two of the broth. Sometimes I eat the necks, sometimes I don't.
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.