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 obesity epidemic is a convoluted way of saying that the problem with government health care is the people. But that's not the problem. Obesity may not be healthy, but if we ban sodas and force everyone to exercise in the yard before work, the numbers still won't balance. Because the real problem with government health care is government.
When offering a product or service, the most elementary thing to do is calculate the cost of making the product and the price that people are willing to pay for that product. If you can't bring the two together, then you don't have a product. You have a disaster waiting to happen.
Obama promises the progressive agenda — more executive aggrandizement, more marginalization of Congress, more latitude for unaccountable experts to supervise our lives, more regulatory suffocation of society. Romney promises the reverse.
...consider ... that we were born into the freest, strongest, and wealthiest nation that mankind has ever known—and elected as our president a man who promised to “fundamentally transform” it.
Yes, I think that may have been where we made our mistake. We wished to have an orange for a head.
To the extent that these unions shape the Democratic agenda, Democrats aren’t just the party of government; they are the party of inefficient, expensive, unresponsive, bureaucratic government. They are the party of government workers first and foremost, and if there is a clash between the interests of the providers of government services and their consumers (between, for example, unqualified, unmotivated life-tenured public school teachers and kids), the unions come at these issues from the standpoint of protecting workers first, others second.
In terms of the blue social model, they are the party of the bitter clingers: the power of public sector unions among Democrats is a power that inhibits Democrats from putting forward innovative, future-facing ideas (about schools, health care, and so on) and keeps them focused firmly on the defense of the past.
The left’s analysis of its loss in Wisconsin resorts to some classic tropes: it is despair masked as defiance in order to avoid deep introspection...
A rational Liberal, is Prof. Mead. Slick writer too.
While leaning against a wall sweating after my heroic aerobics the other day, at 5:45 AM, I decided to interview a sweet little (but muscular and fit) trainer about some details on the roughly 60 people who show up when the doors open at 5.
She told me that it is not the same people every day, but it tends to break down like this:
- around 1/3 are Moms who do an early work-out before going home to make breakfast for their kids (while Dad is still home and the kids are sleeping). She said this early-bird approach is increasingly popular with Moms around here, where men typically leave for work at 6 or 6:30. - most of the rest of the folks, 50-50 men and gals - are there before work, with their dress clothes with them on hangers
Plus
- about 7-10 muscular hunks doing weight training - mostly guys but always a couple of gals - and usually an "anorectic or two" on the treadmills
The truth is that union ranks are collapsing as former members are now choosing to opt out. The AFT chapter in Wisconsin lost 6000 members, and AFSCME, the key union of state workers, saw its membership rolls drop from a high of 62,818 to 28,745. If those workers really saw a benefit in union membership and they believed in its principles, they would have stayed members even if dues collection was now voluntary. But these former union members chose to desert the ranks, preferring to keep the extra thousand dollars or so they would have given to the union and to put it in their own pockets.
Since the death of Mao, the People’s Republic of China has almost never hesitated to sign and ratify pacts, conventions, and treaties—and at the same time violate them.
The point remains: Sovereignty belongs to nations, and the European Union is not a nation. The solution to Europe’s economic crisis will belong to nations, not to the union of nations. The euro is not a national currency. As such, it is bound to be challenged. Greece is likely to present the first challenge. Others will follow. The nation states of Europe were never going to sacrifice themselves for the euro or the EU. What we see in Europe today is an old truth playing out. Power most effectively resides in the nation-state, not in the bloodless creation internationalist dreamers.
Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.
If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than sufficient to bring the income of every lower-income American to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly $44,000 per year for a family of four. (This calculation combines potential welfare aid with non-welfare income currently received by the poor.)
He said, ‘Look, what do you care who does the work?’” Liebau recalled Obama saying in reference to her management of the law review. “’It is the same amount of work for you to hand out the work no matter who it goes to, so why fight it? Do what’s easiest for you. Give the work to the people who will do the work, and just don’t worry about the people who don’t want to pull their weight.’”
Liebau wasn’t impressed.
“I guess I was young and naïve: I was like, ‘Ah but that wouldn’t be fair,’” she said.
“And what surprised me is apparently that didn’t bother Barack at all. It was just kind of like — take the easy way out. Why bother yourself with all these silly notions about justice and fairness? Do what works. Revealing? I don’t know. Good advice? I didn’t particularly think so.”
In 1911, the poet-philosopher T. E. Hulme observed that “there must be one word in the language spelt in capital letters. For a long time, and still for sane people, the word was God. Then one became bored with the letter ‘G,’ and went on to ‘R,’ and for a hundred years it was Reason, and now all the best people take off their hats and lower their voices when they speak of Life.” I think Hulme was on to something, both in his observation about the inveterate habit of reverence and the choice that sanity dictates. I wonder, though, whether we as a culture haven’t shifted our attention from “L” for “Life” to “E” for “Egalitarianism” or “P” for “Political Correctness.”
It is noteworthy, in any event, to what extent certain key words live in a state of existential diminishment. Consider the word “Gentleman.” It was not so long ago that it named a critical moral-social-cultural aspiration. What happened to the phenomenon it named? Or think of the word “respectable.” It too has become what the philosopher David Stove called a “smile word,” that is, a word that names a forgotten or neglected or out-of-fashion social virtue that we might remember but no longer publicly practice. The word still exists, but the reality has been ironized out of serious discussion. It is hard to use straight. Just as it would be difficult to call someone “respectable” today without silently adding a dollop of irony, so it is with the word “gentleman.”
Read it all. There is all sorts of good stuff in it.
The conflict today between Democrats and Republicans increasingly pits public sector unions, government employees and contractors, and beneficiaries of government programs against middle-class taxpayers and business interests large and small. . . This impasse between the two parties signals the end game for the system of politics that originated in the 1930s and 1940s. As the “regime party,” the Democrats are in the more vulnerable position because they have built their coalition around public spending, public debt, and publicly guaranteed credit, all sources of funds that appear to be reaching their limits. The end game for the New Deal system, and for the Democrats as our “regime party,” will arrive when those limits are reached or passed.
We attended a delightful Jubilee party that some Brit friends threw yesterday. Jolly good fun. Buckets of Pimm's Cup. Our friends were also celebrating their achievement of American citizenship, about which they feel proud. There are tight citizenship quotas for northern European immigrants despite our friends' being a Cambridge-educated economist and mathematician. I think he has waited ten years, working with a green card. Their house was flying both Brit and American flags for the occasion.
One of a bunch of cool pics from the year of the Queen's coronation (h/t AVI). What are those bags hanging on the wall?
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time; Enjoying one moment at a time; Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace; Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it; Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will; That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him Forever in the next.
The little coat embroidered with birds Is irretrievably ruined. We bought it in the spring. She stood upon a chair And raised her arms like branches. I leaned my head against her breast Listening to that heavy bird Thudding at the center of our happiness.
Everything is dragged away. The clothes that were so gay Lie in attics, like the dolls With which wild children used to play. The bed where the loved one lies Is a river bed on which Enchanting haunting life Is carried where the current may - Tangled among blocks of ice. Nests and singing branches Were the springs of yesterday.
Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907). Ronald Lauder paid 135 million for this painting in 2006. It resides in NYC's Neue Gallery. (Gallery, and the restaurant, are a nice touch of Vienna.)
A pupette and I spent a very pleasant day seeing the Klimts, and other good stuff (Schiele, Kokoshka), at the Belvedere in Vienna two years ago, then moved on by foot, trolley, and subway to lots of other fun things and tasty food treats - Viennese pastries and beers - along the way. She likes Schiele.
Royals 
Why Anchoress 
The entirety of 
My Mom, an avid gardener and an avid reader, recommends Richard Mabey's 
Deconstructed Fluffernutter sandwich via Laughing Squid. Some blame the fluffy Lefty brains of Massachusetts residents on being raised on this stuff.
The Little Coat
