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.
I graduated from Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin's students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods — such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived — but there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. There were occasional after-school fights — rumbles, we called them — but within the school, there was order. Students didn't use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.
How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black schools during earlier periods compared with today?
By a clear majority, Americans support getting free stuff over not getting free stuff. And once established, getting free stuff becomes a basic right, and a part of the Democratic Party platform. We cannot win the free stuff war.
Seeking to avoid a politically toxic vote, Congress has failed to pass a federal budget for three years. This year's new twist? Congress might not even try.
His perspective on cultural history is so wide as to view history as a series of births, flowering, decay and finally decadence. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. A decadent culture offers opportunity mainly to the satirist…”4 which describes our time perfectly. But just as in the natural world, the cultural world holds the seeds of rebirth within.
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.
Hazard of the Trade: 
See the dog show last night? Lots of wonderful sporting breeds, including the
Don’t Be Dissin’ the Bohr Model!
Writing about Attraction to Professors 
Constitutional Right to Moderately Corporally Punish One’s Child
