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 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.
Saw one yesterday, flitting slowly through some shrubs. You will occasionally see them in the winter everywhere in the eastern US, hunting for bug larvae.
Darker and maybe smaller than a House Wren (which cannot survive a northern winter), they tend to be quiet and secretive in the winter as they pick through brambles and wood piles in the snow. Tough little guys. Survivors.
Prelutsky: Shooting Holes Into Obama’s Campaign Strategy
I have to admit that I don’t understand the “I am the 99%” shtick coming out of OWS. If these people are saying that 99% of the country is poor, with only 1% holding the wealth, perhaps I don’t understand poverty as well as I should.
In aBangkokTemple: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER A WOMAN, EVEN A FOREIGNER, IF DRESSED AS A MAN.
Cocktail lounge,Norway: LADIES ARE REQUESTED NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN IN THE BAR.
Doctor's office,Rome: SPECIALIST IN WOMEN AND OTHER DISEASES.
Dry cleaners,Bangkok: DROP YOUR TROUSERS HERE FOR THE BEST RESULTS.
In aNairobirestaurant: CUSTOMERS WHO FIND OUR WAITRESSES RUDE, OUGHT TO SEE THE MANAGER.
On the main road toMombasa, leavingNairobi: TAKE NOTICE: WHEN THIS SIGN IS UNDER WATER, THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE.
On a poster at Kencom: ARE YOU AN ADULT THAT CANNOT READ? IF SO WE CAN HELP.
In a City restaurant: OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK AND WEEKENDS. In a Cemetery: PERSONS ARE PROHIBITED FROM PICKING FLOWERS, FROM ANY BUT THEIR OWNGRAVES.
Tokyo hotel's rules and regulations: GUESTS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO SMOKE, OR DO OTHER DISGUSTING BEHAVIOURS IN BED.
On the menu of a Swiss Restaurant: OUR WINES LEAVE YOU NOTHING TO HOPE FOR.
In a Tokyo Bar: SPECIAL COCKTAILS FOR THE LADIES WITH NUTS.
Hotel,Yugoslavia: THE FLATTENING OF UNDERWEAR WITH PLEASURE, IS THE JOB OF THE CHAMBERMAID.
Hotel,Japan: YOU ARE INVITED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CHAMBERMAID.
In the lobby of a Moscow Hotel, across from a Russian Orthodox Monastery: YOU ARE WELCOME TO VISIT THE CEMETERY, WHERE FAMOUS RUSSIAN AND SOVIET COMPOSERS, ARTISTS AND WRITERS ARE BURIED DAILY, EXCEPT THURSDAY.
A sign posted inGermany'sBlack Forest: IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN ON OURBLACKFORESTCAMPING SITE, THAT PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT SEX, FOR INSTANCE, MEN AND WOMEN, LIVE TOGETHER IN ONE TENT, UNLESS THEY ARE MARRIED WITH EACH OTHER FOR THIS PURPOSE.
Hotel,Zurich: BECAUSE OF THE IMPROPRIETY OF ENTERTAINING GUESTS OF THE OPPOSITE SEX IN THE BEDROOM, IT IS SUGGESTED THAT THE LOBBY BE USED FOR THIS PURPOSE.
Advertisement for donkey rides,Thailand: WOULD YOU LIKE TO RIDE ON YOUR OWN ASS?
Airline ticket office,Copenhagen: WE TAKE YOUR BAGS AND SEND THEM IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
A Laundry inRome: LADIES, LEAVE YOUR CLOTHES HERE AND THEN SPEND THE AFTERNOON HAVING A GOOD TIME.
And finally the all time classic: Seen in anAbu DhabiSouk shop window:
IF THE FRONT IS CLOSED PLEASE ENTER THROUGH MY BACKSIDE…
How ObamaCare Guts Medicare - The president's pledge that 'If you like your health plan, you will be able to keep it' clearly does not apply to America's seniors.
I was alive then, and I'm not that old. I remember life without an Education Department, for example. We somehow learned the times-table and how to diagram sentences without the "help" of the federal government, and also without mandatory teacher certification. The guys who put men on the moon all went to grade school before even the first New Math, much less the Education Department.
There's a good reason old Ohio architecture resembles that of New England and upstate NY - that's where the people came from. The central Ohio highlands have a similar geographic feel to that of New England, too.
The extension on the left is clearly modern (wrong - readers suggest that it is a renovated old barn or carriage house), but attempts to reflect the older building.
Alinsky, Cloward-Piven, the whole of the Community Organizing movement, in which flak catchers are mau-maued — these are all intellectual blue prints for bringing about the desired social upheaval that is to lead to the fall of the capitalist system as we know it, to be replaced (in theory) by the democratic socialism Obama and his left-wing academic cohert desire. Even as this very same cohort knows that liberal fascism and corporatism — a centralized command and control economy run by government in partnership with those big businesses they hold regulatory control over — is the real end point, one in which a new class system is drawn up, with the masses returned to their place as masses, and the government class taking exclusive control over wealth and power, creating a permanent relationship between citizen and government wherein the citizen is dependent exclusively upon the government for survival.
The guy can't spell his way out of a wet paper bag, but I think he is right
My sweep pal was here yesterday morning for my biennial or triennial chimney cleanings. We have posted here several times about chimney fires and chimney cleaning, such as here.
Attention recent college grads: He gets $150/chimney, and it takes him 20-30 minutes. A discount for multiple chimneys. He runs his own life his own way. Retired USMC.
He is a fireplace buff and keeps a wood stove burning in his kitchen all fall and winter. He has a place on Cape Cod and burns there on those cool damp summer evenings too. He agrees with me that a clean fireplace makes a lousy fire. You need a 5 or 6" pile of ash underneath. A clean chimney is another matter. I keep the Maggie's Farm home fire burning all day, October-May. Generally, he scrapes a bucket of stuff out of my flue each time he comes.
Why don't I invest in the brushes and do it myself?
Perhaps I will. We have protection these days from ye olde Chimney Sweep's Cancer - cancer of the scrotum. Nasty disease.
"... we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would not be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us."
Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
Desperately Seeking Talent - Employers worry more about the effects of a bad hire than about the problems of hiring someone who is competent but not exceptional.
Despite frosty relations with the titans of Wall Street, President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data...
Wall St. is overwhelmingly Democratic, esp in the upper echelons
The AFL-CIO is making headlines by running ads promoting “Occupy Wall Street.” One seriously doubts that members of the working class have much in common with the left-wing professional agitators running these protests and the tent cities they are erecting illegally in private and public parks in New York, Washington, D.C. and other cities. The most interesting part of this story, however, is that one of the AFL-CIO affiliates behind the campaign, the Working America group, is headed by a veteran of the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba, a progressive activist by the name of Karen Nussbaum. Equally significant, her husband works for the public relations firm that represented billionaire hedge fund operator George Soros.
The St. Paul speech only made manifest what is implicit in much of Obama’s presentation of himself. How could Obama have brought himself to utter such laughable pap? This is either one politician who takes himself way too seriously, or who holds his supporters in incredibly low esteem, or both.
If you’ve lived through the past four decades, does it really seem like America is no better off today? It doesn’t to Jason Furman, the deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Here is Furman back in 2006: “Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?”
No doubt the past few years have been terrible. But the past few decades have been pretty good—for everybody
“Again, if you can’t cut back the government bureaucracy in good times (because there is enough tax money and we have ‘unmet needs,’ etc.) and you can’t cut it in bad times (because we have to preserve those jobs as ‘stimulus’) when does the government stop growing? Has Obama even attempted to answer this concern?”
This is an oldie, but still good for a chuckle for me:
AVI gave us a free mini-post in his comment, here:
Journalism at present involves a great deal of believing that you know other people's motives. We are told that OWS has some legitimate complaints. Not because very many of them are actually clearly articulating legitimate complaints, but because journalists can think of reasons that people might be upset that sell better. This is common in the type of anti-American rhetoric we get explained to us: "Well can you blame them? America has done blah, blah, blah..." Those are not, in fact, the reasons why foreigners hate us. They are the reasons liberals hate us. They project this crap onto others all the time, because they really are that narcissistic and tribal.
So helping out OWS is just a natural extension of that. They are "giving voice to the voiceless, to the inarticulate rage of the disenfranchised, who deeply resent the inequitable distribution of wealth that allows people with unapproved attitudes to...oops, I mean, 'that saddles future generations...' no wait, I'm looking for the right words here... 'that finds a way to make a fortune even in hard times...' damn, this is hard..."
Because they see it as Us vs. Them, zero-sum, for cultural hegemony and prestige. That is the subtext.
Hegemony, prestige... and cash, AVI. OPM. That's what they really want.
Neither in good times nor in bad does the middle class have a narrative nearly as compelling as those between which it is sandwiched. And it suffers accordingly.
I wish the media would go down to Union Square and interview all the happy young people there. Here's my comment for these envious and hate-filled kids and their media-invented movement - self-important kids and superannuated kids who somehow have time to do street theater which I am sure must be fun and somewhat gratifying if you have no responsibilities in life:
The OWS people have a very minimal impact on NYC. We went down to the city yesterday afternoon with friends for matinee theater and dinner, had a little time to kill so wandered around Union Square Park and Broadway.
Happy parks filled with young happy people do not make the news. These are the people Obama should be celebrating. More people here enjoying a lovely October day than in Zucotti Park.
It was Sukkot, so there were plenty of Hassidim around with their citrons and palms. They ask you "Are you Jewish?" and if you are, they will wish you a good Sukkot.
Same as in Washington Square, these speed chess guys with their tables set up will play you for money.
10 
Saw one yesterday, flitting slowly through some shrubs. You will occasionally see them in the winter everywhere in the eastern US, hunting for bug larvae. 
Major ALS Breakthrough – Common Cause of All Forms of ALS Discovered
After nearly 3,000 years, 
Mrs. BD likes 
115 year old electric car
