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.
There is a day coming. It is not on the horizon yet, but it is not far over it. Prospective employers are going to look at your children's resume, and if it refers to any sort of "public school" on it, they're going to roundfile it without hesitation, and they're going to call HR and ask them to find another homeschooled kid. Maybe they'll settle for an expensive privately schooled kid if there's no "non-socialized" kids available.
From a news point of view this is dog bites man: the usual people are doing the usual things. They are doing it in an unusual place — and over time they may be doing it in unusual numbers. But leftie protests that go nowhere are part of the background noise of modern American life. Drums and granola in the park is not news. Until OWS breaks that mold, expect public interest to remain tepid.
Rush is right, as always. Mitt is a successful businessman and talented executive turned pol, and not deeply ideological. I think lots of people are comfortable with that. Romneycare? Big error, but the people who have not fled MA yet seem to sort-of like it thus far. I would hate it, on principle, just like Medicare. Socialism never adds up because job-creators won't take risks for nothing.
Sheesh. Ask your parents before asking me to pay it. I have my own to pay for, shmuck. Next, they will want us to buy their cars and to pay for their car insurance.
Amusingly, such people are blind to their own greed which they project onto others. Gimme, gimme. If you gave him a free tuition, he'd want something free after that. An entitlement/freebie mindset never stops, and creates permanent infants instead of self-reliant adults. Or sociopaths, which this guy sounds like with his lack of shame and humility for asking for charity.
Our struggle is not with Obama or Reid or Pelosi, it is with the system that they advance. A system of unrestricted power that mandates absolute dominance over all human affairs backed by an ideology that treats all human activity as political and in need of control in the name of the greater good. Getting them all out is a plus, but it's a battle, not the war.
Today, Slovakia has the lowest average salaries in the euro zone. How am I supposed to explain to people that they are going to have to pay a higher value-added tax (VAT) so that Greeks can get pensions three times as high as the ones in Slovakia?
Hmmmmm. In the US, shrinking unions have retreated to the bastions of monopoly - schools and givernment (sp), where they wield great power to plunder the people:
Bob Samuels, the president of the union, says this effectively gives the union veto power over any online initiative that might endangers the jobs or work lives of its members. “We feel that we could stop almost any online program through this contract,” Samuels told Inside Higher Ed.
"... Meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the government. All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations ... The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for ... officials ... to bind the employer ... The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives ...
"Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of government employees. Upon employees in the federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people ... This obligation is paramount ... A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent ... to prevent or obstruct ... Government ... Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government ... is unthinkable and intolerable."
I can't tell what these stoners think because it is difficult to decipher their logic. However, their demeanor is what probably turns people off. These are not good poster children for the Democratic party (below from Gateway):
What a loss to humanity it would have been if Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best.
In a 2007 graduation speech to economics undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor Sargent offered “a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches,” among them,“Many things that are desirable are not feasible,” and, “Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.”
Lots of very smart people suck at those social things, however. That's why they should start their own operations. I am glad that Prasher got a few bucks from his work, and, finally, a job.
Style and approx date, if you can, of this elegant house in Deerfield, MA. Don't say "colonial" - that was an era but is not a design style - although there is something called Colonial Revival. I am having fun learning about this.
When scientists say we know something, we mean only that we have certain ideas and theories whose predictions have been well tested over a certain range of distances or energies. These ideas and theories are not necessarily the eternal laws for the ages or the most fundamental of physical laws. They are rules that apply as well as any experiment could possibly test, over the range of parameters available to current technology. This doesn’t mean that these laws will never be overtaken by new ones. Newton’s laws are instrumental and correct, but they cease to apply at or near the speed of light where Einstein’s theory applies. Newton’s laws are at the same time both correct and incomplete. They apply over a limited domain.
..if I had to pick just one French term of art popularized by a 19th-century German philologist to describe the Occupy Wall Street set and its attendants, it would be Nietzsche’s Ressentiment. Why does good old English “resentment” not suffice? Why is the extra ‘s’ and fancy French pronunciation required? Well, resentment is about begrudging the success of your betters as a way to avoid self-reflection on your own failures. The Nietzsche scholar Robert Solomon described resentment as an “impotence self-righteousness” directed at your superiors, and contrasted it with anger (directed at your equals) and contempt (directed at your inferiors). But ressentiment is what happens when you take that impotent self-righteousness and define a whole morality of good and evil in terms of it, build a whole belief system out of it, build an ideology, a political movement — an occupation.
Waves of nostalgia swept over me. This was exactly how I spent my college years, which were theoretically dedicated to creating a more humane society and stopping the war in Vietnam, but, in reality, mainly involved meetings. Endless meetings in which it was alleged that the winner was the person who managed to remain sitting while everyone else toppled over with boredom. I can’t say definitely, because I never made it to the end.
This Italian (Genoa) adventurer in the employ of Spain didn't discover the New World but, with the help of people like Vespucci, he sure did help put it on the map. New Spain!
If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.
"Even the people who did the experiment will tell you that the chances are very, very small that it's right," Carroll said. "They just want people to understand that it's on the table, it's possible. They don't know what's wrong with their experiment. They would like someone else to check it, to duplicate it, to see what might be wrong."
...the Obama administration — let me be candid here — seems clueless, overpopulated as it is by policy nerds, academic overachievers, and tenured functionaries (cf. Larry Summers’ “there is no adult in charge”). They tend to flash Ivy League certificates, but otherwise have little record of achievement in the private sector. Officials seem to think that long ago test scores, a now Neolithic nod from an Ivy League professor, or a past prize translates into knowing what makes America run in places like Idaho and southern Michigan.
“Healthy men should no longer receive a P.S.A. blood test to screen for prostate cancer because the test does not save lives over all and often leads to more tests and treatments that needlessly cause pain, impotence and incontinence in many, a key government health panel has decided,” reports the New York Times. But JunkScience.com was all over this more than 13 years ago.
Our readers have all been educated on the Cloward-Piven strategy. We have an admin in DC which is steeped in Alinsky, Gramsci, and Cloward-Piven. Just add Lenin and you have their Founding Fathers.
...only three economists predicted job gains anywhere near what Obama claimed. And the median forecast was a piddling 288,000 new jobs. Given the $447 billion price tag, that comes to $1.6 million per job.
How often does the MSM call the O out on his habitual lying?
22:1 Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying:
22:2 "The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son.
22:3 He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come.
22:4 Again he sent other slaves, saying, 'Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.'
22:5 But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business,
22:6 while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.
22:7 The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city.
22:8 Then he said to his slaves, 'The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy.
22:9 Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.'
22:10 Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
22:11 "But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe,
22:12 and he said to him, 'Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?' And he was speechless.
22:13 Then the king said to the attendants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
A couple of years ago we took the train up from Stresa to Domodossola, then the Centovalli train over to Locarno in Switzerland, and then the ferry back down Lago Maggiore to Baveno.
We got off the train in some little town to take a hike, but took a left instead of a right and ended up with a multi-mile hike through mountain roads and some amazing tiny alpine towns instead of hiking to the center of the town.
We had to hitchike back just in time to catch the last train of the day to Locarno, and had to run down to catch the last ferry down the lake. Funny now, but it was not funny to me at the time.
It's a cool 2-hour train ride into Switzerland, then back down the lake to Italy through steep gorges, mountain passes, tiny farm villages, vineyards, and alpine forests:
Independents and some Democrats must be joining nearly all Republicans in the recognition of deep dysfunction in the Obama-Reid-Pelosi leadership axis. The lefty pollsters must be telling them that the numbers --weighted correctly and unspun for the MSM-- are collapsing at every level, which is making an already desperate group collectively unhinged.
Let us recall that it was Obama – not McCain – who picked up the most money from the banking, hedge fund, and securities sectors. It was a majority of House Democrats – not Republicans – who voted for TARP. And it was the Democratic financial reform bill – not the GOP’s – that ignored Fannie & Freddie and watered down the Volcker Rule to irrelevance. Tim Geithner's financial bailout plan prompted even John Heilemann (no GOP partisan!) to declare that it was “strikingly favorable to Wall Street.” So, if there was ever a cycle that the charge--“The GOP is a tool of fat cats!”--won’t stick, it is 2012.
Over the long term, however, it’s a different story, and Republicans should pay close attention to what’s happening. The protests on Wall Street this month are only a taste of what will come should the GOP win the White House in 2013.
Not everybody who is complaining was wronged. The We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr includes complaints like this: “My father (multiple PhD’s) lives in his car so that he can do what he loves for a living rather than be a slave to the system.” A Columbia graduate student complained to the Associated Press that she has to eat rice and beans. These are not people who got screwed. These are people who have gainful employment available to them and made follow-your-dreams life choices that reduce their incomes. That’s their prerogative; it’s not anybody else’s problem.
I. There was a naughty boy, A naughty boy was he, He would not stop at home, He could not quiet be- He took In his knapsack A book Full of vowels And a shirt With some towels, A slight cap For night cap, A hair brush, Comb ditto, New stockings For old ones Would split O! This knapsack Tight at's back He rivetted close And followed his nose To the north, To the north, And follow'd his nose To the north.
II. There was a naughty boy And a naughty boy was he, For nothing would he do But scribble poetry- He took An ink stand In his hand And a pen Big as ten In the other, And away In a pother He ran To the mountains And fountains And ghostes And postes And witches And ditches And wrote In his coat When the weather Was cool. Fear of gout, And without When the weather Was warm- Och the charm When we choose To follow one's nose To the north, To the north, To follow one's nose To the north!
III. There was a naughty boy And a naughty boy was he, He kept little fishes In washing tubs three In spite Of the might Of the maid Nor afraid Of his Granny-good- He often would Hurly burly Get up early And go By hook or crook To the brook And bring home Miller's thumb, Tittlebat Not over fat, Minnows small As the stall Of a glove, Not above The size Of a nice Little baby's Little fingers- O he made 'Twas his trade Of fish a pretty kettle A kettle- A kettle Of fish a pretty kettle A kettle!
IV. There was a naughty boy, And a naughty boy was he, He ran away to Scotland The people for to see- There he found That the ground Was as hard, That a yard Was as long, That a song Was as merry, That a cherry Was as red, That lead Was as weighty, That fourscore Was as eighty, That a door Was as wooden As in England- So he stood in his shoes And he wonder'd, He wonder'd, He stood in his Shoes and he wonder'd.
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