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.
A tree guy I know just dumped me off a cord or so of green wood, for free and freshly cut from one of his jobs. Some logs large enough for splitting, but much of easily-burnable size.
People who are not fireplace experts think you need kiln-dried split wood for heat or for fireplaces. You do not.
As readers know, I keep the fire going in the MF HQ from October to May. I keep a supply of split and outdoor-dried wood, but once a fire is happy with coals I like to burn either green or wet logs. More heat, less flame, slower burn. Green wood burns fine once you have some coals. Sometimes, I throw a couple of hunks of charcoal in there to keep it hot and happy.
That's a soft point, but for a real dinner bird he'll produce a hard, classic point. Really immoveable on a grouse or pheasant. This guy is from a line of red Standards into which the hunt talent is being bred back.
Lovely snow today. The pup is soft-pointing every sparrow in every bush. He loves snow.
Snow and wind headed to Yankeeland. A Nor'easter. Don't be surprised if our servers go down sometime tonight or tomorrow. As it is, they are just held together with baling wire, duct tape, and hope. New England Yankees are cheap - we always just patch it up. Anyway, how soon before an early snow is blamed on global warming?
Swamp Yankee is a colloquialism that has a variety of meanings. Generally, it refers to Yankees or WASPs (northeasterners with English colonial ancestry) from rural Rhode Island and nearby eastern Connecticut and southeastern Massachusetts. The term "Yankee" connotes urbane industriousness, while the term "Swamp Yankee" signifies a more countrified, stubborn, independent and less refined subtype.
That would be us, more or less, I think. I have plenty of ancestors buried in Kingstown, RI.
What I find most dispiriting is not the decline, which as Gardiner notes is not yet irreversible, but that over 40% of the population still approves of the job Obama is doing.
TRADERS TALK BACK to OccupyChicago.“Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.”
Ha! Joke’s on you, dudes — the Occupy folks don’t have jobs.
There’s lots of talk about self-reliance, and depending on one’s self to get along. Nice thoughts, when you are getting along. Not such a good proposition when you have to spend your last bucks for gasoline to drive to the church’s food pantry to feed your family.
And thanks to Uniworld for the check for $400,000 plus five free trip vouchers (for six people) for posting this ad. Owning a website can be fun and profitable! Especially when you refuse to share the considerable income with the other contributors! That is evil oppressive Capitalism for ya.
I cannot find an image of the old Liberty and Property flag from the American Revolution, but it seems to have been flown often, and certainly in the town of Falls Village (part of Canaan, CT - not to be confused with the wealthy NYC suburb of New Canaan, CT).
The history of Falls Village with some info about the flag here.
Falls Village is still quaint, rustic, and desirable because its grand plans for industrialization failed.
I am reminded that Jefferson's first draft said "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property," but that it was changed in later drafts to the more general but hopelessly vague "Happiness."
The dam on ye olde Housatonic River in Falls Village (not my photo):
...for Phil and me the beer was the facilitator of the point but never the point. It was a vehicle the purpose of which was to get us to the problem of irony as a default mode of consciousness—and with luck direct us toward a solution. It brought us together on Friday nights or Saturday afternoons and it bore us upon its wings toward an answer, but it was never itself the answer. And this, I take it, is strict theology. Perhaps we violated St. Augustine’s injunction to use but not enjoy the vehicle, but at any rate we could justifiably say of the keg what a charitable and mysterious auto mechanic says to Hazel Motes in the novel by Flannnery O’Connor I just mentioned: The mechanic is unimpressed by the car Hazel has put all his trust in, but he says “Some cars’ll get some folks somewheres.” Hazel has no idea where his will get him. (He’s being undermined by a thing called grace.) He has no idea that the car he drives, lives in, preaches his creed of unbelief from, and eventually renounces will get him where he’s going, or where that place is, but then in O’Connor’s fiction no one ever knows what hits him. In this respect her characters are just like us.
Someone who is young and knows very little may occupy Wall Street and call for the abolition of capitalism, yet this same young person has enjoyed a high standard of living because of capitalism. Whether he knows it or not, the protestor who calls for the abolition of the market economy is siding with a totalitarian principle. He is siding with the followers of Lenin and Hitler. Those who decry “economic inequality” may not realize that equality is a totalitarian objective, while economic inequality is the condition which continually raises the level of civilization and the general standard of living.
Read the whole thing. As Milton Friedman often said, there can be no freedom without economic freedom. Free markets are simply what free people chose to do in the course of a day to pursue their own goals, dreams, and wishes.
Every red-blooded American kid should know how to handle firearms. And a lot of other things, too.
As I always say to my critical sisters, it's more morally consistent to kill your own food than to buy it at the supermarket after other people kill it.
Happy Hunting season to all Maggie's Farmers, whether you participate in the fun, or not.
Another major diarist: Everywhere Man - Count Harry Kessler dined with Diaghilev, fought for Germany, and penned one of the greatest diaries ever published.
The Real Lessons of Moneyball - The efficient market hypothesis in Michael Lewis’s book essentially holds fast, but there are still inefficiencies to be exploited
At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.
Let’s hope the next generation of environmentalists is a generation of tinkerers, innovators and builders rather than a generation of leaflet distributors, envelope stuffers and foundation-fund scroungers.
Amazingly how quickly the bunch of free wheeling individuals have set up a ruling party, an intelligence service "documenting" the disruptive elements and a people's militia. They claim to be the 99%, as popular as Stalin in an election, so crushing dissent is justified.
If only I had a Lambeg Drum I would be down there beating the fuck out of it 24/7 shouting "No Surrender" and seeing how they like it.
There should be laws limiting working hours! Not fair for some people to work too hard! Sheesh. Dairy farmers in MA have already been working for 4 hours when these socialist people are just waking up for their free breakfasts.
“The part of the universe we are part of will all collapse down into a giant super-galaxy and the stars in the super galaxy will slowly use up their nuclear fuel and turn into little stellar embers that just fade into oblivion. It will be a very cold, lonely universe in the future.”
Sheesh. Sounds like Maine. I blame climate change.
"Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-state of mind."
Escaping the dysfunctional NCLB is certainly good news for many professional educators and parents, but like every other recent alleged panacea, Obama's fix will fail it since it ignores the one feature of American education that dares not speak its name in public: the intellectual quality of students. If reformers insisted on transforming all ordinary kids into world-class athletes, this would be a joke, since everybody would know the truth. But when it comes to upping academic performance, nothing is said about individual ability or motivation; the culprit is always something else, and this avoidance of reality applies across the entire ideological spectrum. Better to waste billions and fail than speak frankly
CBC running scared: State broadcaster's false attack ads demonstrate how financial probe is desperately needed
The Wild Ride of the 1% - The once-stable incomes of America's biggest earners now fluctuate dramatically from year to year. And as go the rich, so goes much of the economy.
Where are 
The 
Free diapers for babies or parents? Taranto on 
Happy Hunting, 
I forgot where I found today's image
Loving the Chambered Nautilus to Death
Toon is another one from 