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.
Brooks' naivete is usually depressing for me. He needs to spend a month on the streets of Waterville, Maine (no, not in the pot smoke-infused glades of the Colby campus) if he wants to get it. Academics cannot inform him. He needs to chat with the single 22 year-old chickie with a nose ring and tats, on disability for ADD and substance abuse, with three out-of-control kids, with an entrepreneur brother who has a meth lab, a Dad in jail, and an obese 42 year-old mother on "disability" with a "bad back." This is a choice of "life-style" that even Murray cannot comprehend. "Free To Be You and Me." People "find themselves" in different ways...and these folks have "social capital" - just not the sort Murray and Brooks have. They know how to survive, how to have fun, and how to work the system to their advantage.
Barack’s Smug Assault on Freedom of Religion Isn’t Just Anti-American—It’s Unforgivable
MacDonald: California’s Demographic Revolution - If the upward mobility of the impending Hispanic majority doesn’t improve, the state’s economic future is in peril.
Progressives, would assent, that is, to one side of the equation, the side that deployed all those nice-sounding words: Life! Liberty! Happiness! Even the Acquisition of Property (so long as it wasn’t too much). What’s not to like?
What guaranteed all those lovely things was the other side of the equation, limited government, i.e., government that did some few things but expressly did not do other things, not because they weren’t worth doing but because 1) they were outside the scope of a government that was limited by design to foster freedom and 2) to unchain government would be to undermine freedom. It was just this, Mr. Rahe points out, that “the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church forgot.
That's an argument for government control of churches? Christianity 101, Mrs. S: We are all sinners, and we all disappoint God (and ourselves) with our choices and our thoughts. Otherwise, no need for salvation. I think she is an idiot.
...taking on a billion Catholics for no reason, as opposed to taking on a measly 16 million Jews, in order to favor a billion Muslims…lacks pragmatism as well as morality.
I wrote earlier that this fall's campaign would be a showdown between Marx and Mill. The administration seems to have pivoted from Marx to Rawls.
Memo to Mitt and Newt: Read Rawls, also Kloppenberg for clues to Obama's potential misuse of A Theory of Justice in the months ahead. For support, read Nozick.
The bigger the Big Government, the smaller everything else: First, other pillars of civil society are crowded out of the public space; then, the individual gets crowded out, even in his most private, tooth-level space. President Obama, Commissar Sebelius and many others believe in one-size-fits all national government – uniformity, conformity, supremacy from Maine to Hawaii, for all but favored cronies. It is a doomed experiment – and on the morning after it will take a lot more than a morning-after pill to make it all go away.
No president has behaved in anything close to this manner since FDR in the mid-1930s.\
This president is not Bill Clinton, or even Jimmy Carter; he is not Lyndon Johnson or JFK. He and his administration have broken with America’s trademark political mindset of gradualism and respect – however grudging at times – for the people. So why is the narrative by which his administration’s actions are explained the same one the MSM has used for decades? Why is this administration being interpreted on the same terms as its predecessors, when its actions and perspectives, in both domestic and foreign policy, are so very different?
I’m not sure I have an answer for that. But the outcome is consistent. The longer we go in this presidency, the less relation MSM headlines have to reality. If you asked a random sample of journalists at WSJ what the practical effect of Obama’s “retreat” on the contraception mandate would be, I’m betting more than 50% of them would get it right. The Catholics are still stuck with paying for contraception services. But the misleading headlines march on of their own accord, even at WSJ.
5:1 Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the LORD had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy.
5:2 Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman's wife.
5:3 She said to her mistress, "If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy."
5:4 So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said.
5:5 And the king of Aram said, "Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel." He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments.
5:6 He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, "When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy."
5:7 When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, "Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me."
5:8 But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, "Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel."
5:9 So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha's house.
5:10 Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, "Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean."
5:11 But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, "I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the LORD his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy!
5:12 Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?" He turned and went away in a rage.
5:13 But his servants approached and said to him, "Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, 'Wash, and be clean'?"
5:14 So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean.
When I was a lad, a tiny wee lad, my mother said to me, "Come see the Northern Lights my boy, they're bright as they can be." She called them the heavenly dancers, merry dancers in the sky, I'll never forget that wonderful sight, they made the heavens bright. The Northern Lights of Aberdeen are what I long to see I've been a wand'rer all of my life and many a sight I've seen. God speed the day when I'm on my way to my home in Aberdeen.
I've wandered in many far-off lands, and travelled many a mile, I've missed the folk I've cherished most, the joy of a friendly smile. It warms up the heart of the wand'rer the clasp of a welcoming hand. To greet me when I return, home to my native land.
Liberals are the aggressors in the culture war (and not always for the worse, as the civil-rights movement demonstrates). What they object to isn’t so much the government imposing its values on people — heck, they love that. They see nothing wrong with imposing their views about diet, exercise, sex, race, and the environment on Americans. What outrages them is resistance or even non-compliance with their agenda. “Why are you making such a scene?” progressives complain. “Just do what we want, and there will be no fuss.”
A few items from the Duncan Phyfe show at the Met. His workshop/factory in Manhattan copied, but simplified, the popular styles of the time. Not exactly my taste, but much in demand at the time:
Obama helped train NPA's leaders in Alinsky's bank shakedown tactics. Now, outrageously, he and the thugs he coached are demanding massive reparations for the damages that resulted from the lower underwriting standards that they demanded. Banks had better build up more reserves. This gang is not finished.
The American financial crisis was no more a failure of free markets than the European crisis was. Just as investors tried to signal that something was wrong with the euro, they tried for decades to show that something was rotten in American finance. The rot remains, but Washington has spent the past two years demonstrating that it would rather distort or block market signals than rely on them. This strategy thwarts economic recovery.
The financial system crashed in 2008 because vital checks on the financial industry had eroded long before. One of these checks was that the bondholders who lent money to banks had known that they would lose money if those banks failed and didn’t leave behind sufficient assets to pay their debt; only small depositors enjoyed government protection. But in 1984, the U.S. government saved a failing bank, Continental Illinois, from the normal bankruptcy process because its failure would have posed a threat to the global financial system. Thus was born the phenomenon popularly called “too big to fail.” Bondholders and other lenders to banks began to realize that in a crisis, they could count on intervention from the U.S. government, and they started lending to banks more and more carelessly—so banks grew still bigger and still more threatening to worldwide finance. Immunized by the government against losses, investors could no longer provide important market discipline for big banks.
Six square miles of this crap in the Mohave Desert, and not a sound from the Greenies. A landfill would be a more practical use, if you assume that desert is not a worthy ecosystem.
Who’s Afraid of Dirty Harry? Well, this didn’t take long. Clint Eastwood is going to regret doing that “halftime” ad after all the parodists get done with it. (link fixed)
There's a long-distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write. There's a woman I long to touch and I'm missing her so much, but she's drifting like a satellite. There's a neon light ablaze in a green smoky haze, and laughter down on Elizabeth Street And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone where she bathed in a stream of pure heat. Her father would emphasize you got to be more than street-wise but he practiced what he preached from the heart. A full-blooded Cherokee, he predicted to me the time and the place that we'd part.
There's a babe in the arms of a woman in a rage And a longtime golden-haired stripper onstage As she winds back the clock and she turns back the page Of a book that nobody can write. Oh, where are you tonight?
The rest of the astonishing lyrics are below the fold -
The greatest of storytellers, with an eye for vivid details of life and character types, and a tendency for unlikely dramatic plots.
He had no formal education after age 15, when he went to work. Sold his first book at 21, and fame and fortune ensued for this lad whose dad was in debtor's prison.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
He wrote casually, effortlessly, humorously. You can learn all anybody needs to know about human nature from Dickens. He had been there and done that.
Don’t Be Dissin’ the Bohr Model!
Writing about Attraction to Professors 
Constitutional Right to Moderately Corporally Punish One’s Child
After College, What?
The greatest of storytellers, with an eye for vivid details of life and character types, and a tendency for unlikely dramatic plots.