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 teacher put a sample of her 6th Grade summary math exam online, here.
I had forgotten what sorts of things 6th Grade math entailed, but found that I did not forget any that basic stuff because one keeps using it in daily life. 6th Grade math is fun math, no abstractions at all.
Full Civic Literacy ExamAre you more knowledgeable than the average citizen? The average score for all 2,508 Americans taking the following test was 49%; college educators scored 55%. Can you do better?
Sowell on income inequality: Young people make less money than more experienced people, single-parent households have less income than two parent households. So what?
The lost Leonardo - London's National Gallery will exhibit 'Salvator Mundi' in a show of Leonardo da Vinci. The painting has attributes suggesting it's of the period, and experts have weighed in positively.
The big college scam - It's bad enough; the president's loan initiative will make it that much worse
"If it was a kill mission you don't need Seal Team 6; you need a box of hand grenades," he added, explaining they were forced to shoot Bin Laden as he reached for his AK-47.
...the chairman of the supervisory board of China Investment Corporation, the country’s sovereign wealth fund, put further distance between China and the eurozone bail-out, saying that Europe’s bloated welfare state meant that people did not work hard enough.
“I think if you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of their worn out welfare societies,” Jin Liqun said in an interview with Al Jazeera television. “I think the labour laws are outdated – the labour laws induce sloth, indolence rather than hard working. The incentive system is totally out of whack.”
Eurozone leaders had been hoping that China would use some of its trade surplus to back the bail-out fund.
“I don’t know what I am going to do!” said Katchpole, a freelance account manager at a political consulting firm called Winning Over Washington. (Its main client is the progressive group MoveOn.org.) “I am going to have to defer my loans. I have no idea. Why should I be expected to pay them off now? Why are colleges charging interest on that stuff? Give us a break. Really.”
She is infantile. Purchases a service, but doesn't want to pay for it. Borrows money, but doesn't want to pay it back. Boo hoo.
Buckley, If Not God, Returns to Yale-What the late, great controversialist would have said to Mitt Romney, Rick Perry and today's conservative talking heads.
The newly formed Spokes Council claims to adhere to the “statement of principles” adopted by the New York City General Assembly, including “direct-democracy, non-hierarchy, participation, and inclusion.” The Spokes Council differs from the NYC-GA, however, in three main respects: the Spokes Council has the power to exclude new groups that don’t receive a 90% majority vote for admission; in the NYC-GA, everybody technically has the right to speak, whereas in the Spokes Council each Working Group has a spokesperson, who can be recalled only by a 90% majority; and the NYC-GA allows one vote per person, whereas the Spokes Council operates more indirectly, granting each Working Group one vote.
When I pointed out the contradictions these differences present to the Council’s stated principles, the leaders of Sunday’s teach-in insisted that the Spokes Council was the most participatory, democratic organization possible—the same slogan they repeated last month about the General Assembly. I felt like I was watching a local production of Animal Farm.
"I think I have an ongoing conversation with God. Throughout the day I'm constantly asking myself questions about what I'm doing, why I am doing it." --Barack Obama
Confusing an inner dialogue with speaking with God is never a wise plan
Today it's a powerful and majestic predator, which comes to mind because our friends who cover hawk migration in New Haven, CT, have seen a few of them passing through recently.
Lucky them. I have never seen a Golden Eagle in the Eastern US, but have seen them in the West, where they are not uncommon. Medium-sized mammals are their main prey, and the wide, open spaces are their dominion.
Picture by J. J. Audubon, as can be easily recognized by the awkward and un-lifelike pose of the animal. Audubon typically painted from dead specimens - he was a famous shot with a rifle, and he liked to get a good, close look at the animal he was painting.
Seabourn Cruises. Nice vacation ideas, and less costly than you might think. Ships are cool, and smaller ones are more cool. In our humble view, the modern mega-ships are horrible. You might as well be on land, and they do not rock 'n roll in storms. If you cannot feel the sea, what's the point?
The next great realignment in American politics is very likely to be a Democratic realignment. It cannot be a Republican realignment, because the GOP has moved so far to the extreme right that it is now far outside the mainstream of American opinion.
I don't know. Many Americans talk conservative, but love their freebies.
NYT: Bleak Portrait of American Poverty Is Off the Mark, Experts Say
Poverty stats ignore government benefits and charitable contributions - and, of course, income from working off the books. Thanks to tax-payers, the US has eliminated serious poverty but, as a side-effect, created two generations of free-loaders. That can't be helped because any safety net also catches those sad souls who jump willingly into the net of dependency.
One The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said to him, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar, Of things exactly as they are."
Two I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero's head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man, Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man. If a serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar.
---read last two verses on continuation page below
Also via Insty: Have you considered the myriad difficulties associated with carrying concealed while shopping? Here are some great ways to overcome those issues.
Cain lacks the grounding and depth needed to be president. If he is serious about wanting to be president, he should be running for the U.S. Senate, or for a governorship, to prepare, because if anything is clear right now, it’s that experience matters. (By the way, it’s interesting to see how widely Republicans are responding to his avuncular warmth; my teenage daughters just love him in the debates, probably because we usually get hard-to-love cold fish, or raffish jerks, as our candidates.) Yes, he’d be better than Barack Obama as president. Much better. And yes, it’s nice that he’s black and conservative, and all these white Republicans are embracing him. But if the GOP’s goal is to win, Cain is a distraction. At the end of the day, if he is the candidate, we lose — even if it turns out that he had no behavior, ever, which could be confused with sexual harassment.
Our contributor Gwynnie will not be seeing this sunset from his duck boat in the reeds this fall, due to (non-serious) medical repairs.
Nice weather and clear skies are terrible for duck hunting. What you want is wind and snowy sleet, because when you are uncomfortable, the ducks are too - so they fly around. Otherwise, they sit and loaf and work on their tans in huge rafts out in the middle of the lake. Photo is not the lake itself - it's a good-sized bay on the lake.
Sunset is quittin' time. When he gets back to the lodge, he would typically clean up and dress in tweeds and a bow tie, and have a couple of single malts and a Habana ceegar in front of this fireplace before dinner. And probably some ancient port and another ceegar after the pumpkin pie with Maple Syrup on top, at the evening post-prandial confab at which non-PC jokes and lies predominate. Women not allowed as guests here. Jimmy Doolittle used to sit in front of this fireplace on his duck hunting trips (It's easy to tell that I'd like to be there now):
If sociological reportage describes one main stream of commentary about Occupy Wall Street, yearning nostalgia describes the other. It turns out that 1960s radicals never die, they just turn rancid and say ridiculous things. They may long ago have lost track of their love beads and peace pins, but somewhere deep down there lives an unextirpatable feeling of solidarity with the Age of Aquarius. The New York Times has been one reliable source of the phenomenon. The columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example, took one look at the spoiled children and social misfits cluttering up Zuccotti Park and declared that it was “reminiscent of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.” Here’s a question: How many things had to go wrong in Mr. Kristof’s brain for him to make that comparison with a straight face? “Reminiscent of” implies “analogous to.” In what sense is an aggregation of permanent adolescents in a park in downtown Manhattan analogous to the regime-changing tumult that exploded in Egypt last winter? In no sense. Mr. Kristof’s heady tweet was nonsense.
It's a good piece, but I have grown weary of these clowns, half-wits, and sociopaths.
Deutscher was a fine example of the scholar who knew a lot and understood little (including, or especially, himself). A man may smile and smile and be a villain. A man may read and read, and experience and experience, and understand nothing.
American life, as journalist Sebastian Junger observed in 1999, "has become staggeringly easy," even "vaguely unfulfilling." The context of Junger's remarks was an exploration into why some people deliberately seek danger nowadays, whether it's bungee-jumping from a high bridge or teasing grizzly bears in the (ultimately fatal) manner of Timothy Treadwell.
The political parallel to Junger's thesis is the oft-cited "solution in search of a problem," of which the Our Children's Trust lawsuit is but one example. (For others, I need only refer you to any Democratic Party political platform.) While it is certainly true that our water and air are not 100% pure (whatever that may be), the fact is that the goal posts keep getting moved back with every improvement in observation that we achieve.
Mayor Mike said this morning that if there is anyone to blame for the mortgage crisis that led the collapse of the financial industry, it's not the "big banks," but Congress.
He is an amateur. That's part of why people like him, but not a reason that people will decide to vote for him. Obama is still surprisingly popular.
Israel: A true ally in the Middle East - Israeli contributions to U.S. national interests, underappreciated by many, include enhanced counter-terrorism, intelligence and technology useful in urban warfare.
Magnificent place, wonderful gardens. Gardens make a house a home. Hydrangeas and cottage gardens make a garden homey. Note that many if not most of the charming homes in Woodstock are second homes, summer and ski-season getaways. This one too, no doubt:
Shanghai Gets Supersized - Boasting 200 skyscrapers, China's financial capital has grown like no other city on earth – and shows few signs of stopping
Are Twentysomethings Expecting Too Much? - They were raised to believe they could do anything, and now they’re demanding more from work than previous generations ever did. Will they change the world or have to lower their sights?
Right now we have what the Left so fervently desires — an us-against-them Tocquevillian nightmare that can only exacerbate the class warfare currently being whipped up in Washington.
In many parts of the country prospective homebuyers will pay almost as much in property taxes as in mortgage interest! No wonder the residential real estate market can’t come up for air, and why the American middle class feels that it is fighting for its existence
The fair-lending task force’s original policy paper undercuts the notion the financial crisis was all about banker “greed,” though it certainly played a role after the fact. Rather, it offers compelling evidence that the crisis evolved chiefly from government mandates and threats to increase lending to applicants who could not afford them.
Just got power back at ye olde Maggie's HQ. Looks like our servers held up with my pre-posts and the other postings. These links are from Bruce, mostly, because I had a productive internet-free, heat-free and electric-illumination-free weekend -
What is worrying is that almost a decade of energy investing hasn’t produced any home runs -- no green-energy equivalents of eBay, Amazon, Google or Facebook. The modest, incremental advances we have seen don’t perceptibly move the needle on the energy problem.
In the meantime, however, a real revolution has happened in traditional energy -- one that poses a serious challenge to companies and investors betting on alternative energy. This breakthrough is arguably one of the greatest advances in energy production since the 1960s. And it came not from a Silicon Valley company, or from MIT or Stanford, but from George Mitchell, the son of a Greek goatherd who immigrated to the U.S.
I usually get my identifications wrong, but I think Sipp would say that this old house in Wellfleet, MA is not so much an architectural style as a local New England vernacular. Tell me why I am wrong.
Like so many homes of its era (I would date this one 1850-80), they put expensive clapboard on the front, and cheaper cedar shakes elsewhere. Wish I had done that with my house because painting is so damn expensive if you hire it out.
My plan for the future is either that new semi-fake impermeable artificial, pigment-infused "wood", or natural cedar shakes. Can't afford continual painting. Just cannot win against the laws of entropy.
I love homey houses like this one, right there on the street so you can say "Howdy" to your neighbors on their evening stroll, and invite them up on the porch for a lemonade or a beer if you are in the mood for a chat.
10 Unbelievable Things the Chinese Believe
...get a dog.
How New York City 
powerful and majestic predator, which comes to mind 
Learn How to Break Down a Door (Without Hurting Yourself)
One
SC Sheriff 
21st Century baby names
