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.
Worse, he has no one to blame but himself. Double-worse, he knows he deserves extry blame because he's friends with the wise and fabled Dr. Mercury who's been harping about this friggin' subject for years.
As his friend, and knowing he deserves extry blame, I've naturally been doing my part by sending him little cheer-up notes, like "Are you still blaming yourself? I would," and "Have you forgiven yourself yet? Why should you?" I'm particularly fond of "Don't worry, everyone makes incredibly stupid mistakes in their lives. I'm sure there's plenty more where this one came from."
His name is something akin to "Stephen Gerald McKinley". Not uncommon names, but not particularly common, either. But uncommon enough that, put together, you'd figure there couldn't be all that many of them in the world, and what are the odds that they'd all want personal sites of one type or another?
Pretty good, as it turns out.
When he finally — finally! — got around to checking, there wasn't one single variation on his name available. That includes abbreviated spelling and using hyphens, and at one point he actually tried "stephengeraldmckinley2.com" — and even that was taken.
That's when he knew he had really screwed the pooch big time. Because domain names never return to the public trough. The domain harvesters figure — correctly — that if one person wanted it, then someone else will want it, so they're snatched up electronically the micro-instant they become available.
And, just as a small side note, with many of the domain harvesters, you don't buy the domain from them for the tidy sum of $4,999, you lease it from them for time eternal. It's not pretty.
So if you EVER think you might want a site, even years and years down the road so you can post pictures of yourself looking mournful and bedraggled so your children will take pity on you and treat you to a dinner consisting of something other than dog food, now's the time to grab it.
Conversely, it's a great way to help the grandparents do their Christmas shopping. First, post pictures of 2-year-old Timmy on your personal site. If possible, catch him when he's off-guard and not trying to set the cat on fire. Send the link to Grandma.
When the swooning Grandma asks on the phone what little Timmy wants for Christmas, tell her "Timmy said a large gift card from Best Buy would 'best' suit his tastes -- ha-ha. Quite the precocious child, isn't he? I think he gets it from you."
Of course, you could make tons of money from your domain, but who wants to discuss such a crass subject? Besides, those thousands of dollars a day don't just roll in by themselves. Sometimes the site owner has to spend a good ten or fifteen minutes doing site chores, which can really cut into one's golf and bowling time.
Personally, I suggest you start with actually getting the domain name — then we'll make you a millionaire.
It should be noted that you don't actually have to put up some kind of web or blog site to hold the domain. All we're talking about is reserving it. Cost is a whopping $6.95/mo.
The jump-off point is here. That'll give you some background on the hosting company I use, some tips on picking a domain name and a link to get started.
Our thoughts are now actions. There literally is nothing the federal government cannot regulate provided there is even a hypothetical connection to the economy, even if the connection at most is in the future.
Our thoughts are now actions. Whoops, I already said that. I just can't get over it. The following sentence has now become a justification for regulating decision-making even where the decision is just to do nothing:
The Congress shall have power.... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
I think I'm going to be ill. Which of course, is now subject to regulations to be promulgated by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Any serious conversation about American decline must start with the fact that too many of our countrymen have lost the plot about how the United States became the beacon of the free world, the world's largest economy, and the lone superpower.
Saw him perform, as a lad. Bridgeport, Ct., in that stadium behind the county jail. Wrote the review for the local paper too. I am too dumb to write reviews anymore about anything. You have to be young to know what to say. Older you get, the less you have to say about anything: you just say what it is. I think that's wisdom, but maybe it's brain cell death.
I know two Oncologists who are being pushed out of private practice by Medicare price controls. Why are they losing money on their practices? Medicare price controls on their services, despite the huge costs of chemotherapies.
As I understand it, chemotherapy administered in a hospital can be charged at a higher rate than in an office. Thus it is viable for a hospital to take over a private practice and make money, or at least break even, on it.
Medicare ignores the market, setting prices for physician services based on an academic theory with its roots in the Soviet Union and implemented by the American Medical Association. Those prices do not reflect the value patients receive from their care, and they do not reflect shifts in the demand for particular kinds of services (such as primary care) as the population ages or as more people have health insurance.
Here's what I do: I teach, for free. I work at an urban charity clinic where I donate my time. (I have no idea whether, if, or how the clinic is compensated.) I have a private practice in which I adjust fees in order to consult anybody who is referred to me. I accept no insurance plans, no Medicare, no Medicaid. All I have to worry about is covering my monthly bills.
Docs with high overheads - large staff, machinery, materials, high rents, high malpractice insurances, etc. do not have the luxury of operating as I do.
I count myself as very fortunate to be able to have an old-fashioned practice. I can do whatever I chose to do, and I like it that way.
Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give in to them for the sake of their own survival. Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.
What the heck is he talking about? Forests and woods and global cooling or warming or whatever, and what?
There is something deeply the matter with this poor fellow. I mean, besides his greed for money and massages and estates and jetting around the world.
Why doesn't he donate his tobacco farm and his mining land to a conservation organization so happy trees can grow there? At Maggie's, we support all rational land and habitat conservation efforts, and we even are big supporters of good sustainable nuclear energy.
And who are all of these wealthy consumerists who applaud him? Probably people who want all of the little people like me to change their ways of life. It's not gonna happen.
Our pal Gwynnie likes Coleman gas lanterns. They are good, but I don't have any of them.
I like lamps and lanterns. I do not care to use kerosene indoors. Lamp oil is fine with me. Whale oil is hard to come by, nowadays. (We have to remember that people like Mr. Rockefeller saved the whales with their oil from the dirt.)
Not feeling confident that the TSA would let me onboard with an oil lamp as a carry-on, I only bought one at the antique shop junk shop in Ohio to which the pupette dragged us a few weeks ago, looking for props for her next digital animation effort. Glad she did - the place was full of cool old junk. Disconcerting, of course, to see stuff for sale as "antique" that was quite ordinary when one was a youngster. Mrs. BD said I should have taken a photo of their supply of old salt and pepper shakers, and she was right. The Mickey and Minnie Mouse ones. Maybe next time.
The place must have had 100 old oil lamps, all sizes and all types. The Amish and Mennonites still use them, and who knows when all of the remote old farms were electrified. On my next trip, now confident that the TSA is cool with them, I think I will stock up on some more of them. We lose power regularly here, and if I cannot read I go insane.
Oil lamps produce a very pleasant light, and small ones are a good alternative to candles on a dining table. You can get repros for high cost, but you can find nice old ones in heartland junk shops for cheap. I am partial to the old green or red-glass ones that look like whorehouse illumination, or the cheesy milk glass ones with flowers painted on the glass that were probably bedroom or parlor lamps, but I bought the one in the picture instead. Large and handsome, I think. $40. I think it's silver plate because it is tarnished in places. It works fine. Most of them were considerably less.
Let me tell you the one thing I have against Moses. He took us forty years into the desert in order to bring us to the one place in the Middle East that has no oil.
...why has our left become so reactionary, so unwilling or unable to adapt to a changed world that they “act out” with all the juvenility of adolescents deprived of the family car keys? Some say it is because they have replaced religious faith with politics and I, an agnostic, see some truth in that. But there is more. Liberalism has become a mask for greed in our culture — a way of hiding excessive selfishness from others and, importantly, from the self. It’s a deflection, really.
We humans are greedy by nature. I have learned that mastering greed and just trying to do the best job I can is one of the secrets to life. God has helped me do this. We always want more, in the vain hope that we can achieve happiness that way. I have some money to spare now, and nothing I want to spend it on that I do not already have - my skiing and my summer boat lease - and beer money.
Perhaps it is time for a wife and kids to spend money on. Take them around Europe to revisit all the places I went to during college with my backpack. Go broke on private education. I guess that's a life plan...
First, the Democratic Party is the party of government, not only because of its extravagant sense of government's competence and proper scope, but also because the party's base is government employees. Second, government employees have an increasingly adversarial relationship with the governed. Third, Obama's "move to the center" is fictitious.
Only a year too late to recognize the blatantly cooked numbers used to justify the passage of ObamaCare, the New York Times can’t avoid reporting the awakening because the Obama administration had to fess up to the new Congress.
In March 2010, I wrote about ObamaCare’s CLASS Failure. CLASS is ObamaCare’s long term care program, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act. The primary motivation for its inclusion in ObamaCare was to game the Congressional Budget Office’s calculation of budget gains from ObamaCare.
The best objective and factual summary and analysis of CLASS I’ve found is that by one of the preeminent global consulting firms on benefits, Towers Perrin.
“The Senate version is projected to bring in $72 billion, with an average monthly premium of $123. The initial positive cash flows come, of course, from the five-year period before participants vest, when premiums are paid but benefits are not. Tens of billions are foreseen to flow into the trust fund during those five years. In later decades, however, the flows would turn negative and increase the federal deficit.”
Well, guess what?
HHS Secretary and chief commissar of ObamaCare now admits the CLASS program was flawed from the inception and requires major overhaul. CLASS, reports the New York Times, “is too costly to survive without major changes, Obama administration officials now say.”
To make the program viable, Ms. Sebelius said, she is considering changes in the eligibility criteria, including employment and earnings requirements, to ensure that only active workers may enroll. She also said she favored adjusting premiums to rise with inflation.
Even then, experts say, CLASS will fail, in what is called an insurance death spiral: premiums rise to meet costs, which drives away the healthier, leaving those more likely to use the benefits, and further increase costs, further driving away the healthy and those unable to afford premiums, leaving a yet higher proportion most likely to need benefits, and so on.
Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; Alicia H. Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College; and leaders of the American Academy of Actuaries all said the program would be unstable if, as expected, it attracts disproportionate numbers of people with health problems.
Mr. Foster said his analysis showed the program faced “a significant risk of failure” because people who are or expect to be sick or disabled were more likely to sign up. In a study issued this month, Ms. Munnell, an economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, said more stringent work requirements and an effective national advertising campaign could help attract young, healthy people to the insurance pool.
Even so, she said, “premiums may never reach an affordable level for middle-class households,” so “the program faces enormous challenges.”
Mr. Obama’s debt-reduction commission, a bipartisan advisory body, said in its report late last year that Congress should “reform or repeal” the program.
“The program’s earliest beneficiaries will pay modest premiums for only a few years and receive benefits many times larger,” the panel said, “so that sustaining the system over time will require increasing premiums and reducing benefits to the point that the program is neither appealing to potential customers nor able to accomplish its stated function.”
Well now, there's another fine kettle of fish(iness) you've gotten us into, Obama.
In the past year, I realize I have heard my share of live music but have not bought a single piece of recorded music.
Part of that must be that I already own so much of what I want to listen to, including Barenboim's set of Beethoven's Piano Concertos, and all of Beethoven's string quartets including his astonishing and complicated masterpiece, Opus 133, the Grosse Fuge. The hook brings you back.
(It takes me many listenings to see what a composer is doing with an ambitious piece. Composers, like performers, tend not to realize that the average music listener cannot key into what they worked so hard on - at great length and fussing over every note for months or weeks - in one drowsy after-dinner session in a concert hall.)
This morning the Muslim Brotherhood warned the United States that if it does not stop meddling in Egypt they intend to cut off America's supply of 7-11 and Motel 6 managers.
If this action does not yield sufficient results, cab drivers will be next, followed by Dell, AT&T and AOL customer service reps.
Finally, if all else fails, they have threatened not to send us any more presidents either.
“If he does that, he [George Washington] will be the Greatest Man in the World!“
King George III, upon hearing of Washington's plan to retire as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army (1783), surrender power to Congress and go home to Mt. Vernon. Washington did exactly that. He also refused a third term as President of the US.
The way we used to think about politics and, unfortunately, the way I fear they’re thinking about politics still in Washington” involves “the old playbook [which] says, “lie, deceive, obfuscate and make it to the next election.”
Being old-school folks with an appreciation for the variety of interests and talents that exist in different people, we view education as having three components:
1. What everybody needs to know to function as a citizen in a free republic 2. What somebody needs to function in a job 3. The opening up of the life of the mind without regard to utility
#3 is, of course, what the original Liberal Arts college education was designed for. It was assumed that #1 was accomplished already, and #2 for most non-professional jobs.
Prof. Fish is not happy with the invasion of the marketplace into academia, but I think it is inevitable; inevitable because employment demands are requiring college degrees, whatever they might be and however silly such requirements might be. It's about monopoly credentialization, like education degrees.
We all know people with good IQs but without degrees who know more and are more interested in life than most of the folks we know with fancy degrees. I need not refer to George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Bob Dylan, or Bill Gates: I need only refer to our appliance repairman who is an impressive Shakespeare scholar (about whom I have posted here in the past).
The identity of the "college" has changed enormously over time, as has the amount of stuff to learn about. In 1700, many barbers doubled as dentists and surgeons, and our few colleges were as much about producing educated and literate Congregationalist ministers as anything else. Things have changed. A "college degree" can mean almost anything now.
A quote from Fish's piece:
What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the higher learning. John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that expand their minds nonsense.
The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.
In this latter model , the mode of delivery a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up doesn't matter so long as delivery occurs.
Yes, it's a downscale, mass-market Kollege-Mart now. Read Fish's brief, poignant NYT essay, The Last Professor.
An old friend of mine is seriously PO'd.
Volokh: 
Algore: 
Candles and flashlights are never sufficient for when your power goes out for a day or three. We have discussed the topic on our annual post, 
It's always been said that snow on the roof is an indication of good home insulation. It is 
“If he does that, he [George Washington] will be the Greatest Man in the World!“ 
Stanley Fish, who we just happen to have linked last week