It's not a bad deal to be poor in America. Government benefits are almost endless, not to mention private charity. Everybody will try to give you money and stuff.

If feeling poor is appealing, there is a sure-fire way to accomplish that. Be single, have kids, and don't work. Don't get any religious sustenance, and don't learn how to do anything useful. Add a little substance abuse to that, for maximum effect. In other words, don't build your life in a rational, civilized manner.

Even Mead gets it: Obama Flubs Inequality Message

Another: The greatest elevator of people from lower class to middle class life is an intact household.

As we posted this morning, it takes over $100,000 household income to be middle class in America today.

And as Mead said a while ago, A Consensus Is Forming on Marriage

Rent control is a malignant residue of 1930s progressivism. Distortion of free markets hurts everybody except the greedy recipients. They vote self-interest.

New York, same as San Francisco.

Hawkins begins his short post with these quotes:

     "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." -- C.S. Lewis

    ”One of the overriding points of Liberal Fascism is that all of the totalitarian ‘isms’ of the left commit the fallacy of the category error. They all want the state to be something it cannot be. They passionately believe the government can love you, that the state can be your God or your church or your tribe or your parent or your village or all of these things at once. Conservatives occasionally make this mistake, libertarians never do, liberals almost always do.” -- Jonah Goldberg

Leftists do dream of a utopia, a Garden of Eden where dreams come true and wants are met - according to their wants for us. They forget what messed up the Garden of Eden: humans. God felt lonely, but was disappointed by his creations. Real humans even rejected God's utopia because we have minds of our own.

Human nature continues to mess up utopian fantasies. Our Dr. Bliss has taught us countless times that utopian ideas are regressive, infantile fantasies, and that life is difficult and challenging. That's why we offer charity to the faint of heart and the terribly-damaged, so their families won't have to bear the burden alone and the government gets the credit (and the votes), thus taking over the role of America's magnificent and munificent tradition of private charity.

America is not designed for the faint-hearted, but the welfare state enables faint-heartedness and often, I see in my rambles in life, encourages it. Spends lots of taxpayer money, in fact, to encourage people to work the system.  However, the vast majority of us are capable of, and desiring of, independence and accomplishment. We take pride in a "can do" attitude, and feel pity for those lacking in American vigor and uninterested in their opportunities which exceed those anywhere else on the planet except, maybe, Singapore.

Nobody can feel dignity without contributing to life, without being useful and productive. It's depressing and degrading not to contribute, even if you are getting free stuff. Why design an entire government-driven society around the few who cannot or will not negotiate life in an independent manner? Just give them money to survive, let them do what they will, and forget about them unless they break laws. It's not realistic to expect everybody to be a noble and honorable pillar of society.

Does "history" inevitably lead to serfdom to government? Are freebies and benevolent control and humble serfdom the future for America, under the dominion of our moral and intellectual superiors?

Here's the post by Hawkins, which mostly represents the Maggie's view of life: Why Liberalism Is On The Wrong Side Of History.

One quote:

Liberals dream of one day seeing all Americans permanently locked in the smothering, cradle-to-grave death grip of the nanny state. Nothing excites a liberal more than the idea of controlling where you go to school, regulating your work and play, deciding what type of health care you're going to have and then deciding when you get to retire and how much money you have when you do. Even if you want to choose, you can't. Even if you want to break free, you're stuck. You're not allowed to make different choices because liberals have made it illegal.

Why do they want this "for me"? Why do they want to control things? I hate it, and it was not what I was raised for. I was not raised to be a recipient of "services" or insane regulations designed by people who have never done my work. We the people are not stupid, and just want to be left alone. Trust me, Lefties: We can figure out what is best for ourselves, our families, and our communities. We're adults, proud citizens. We just ask for freedom from the heavy hand of intrusive government like the rebels in 1775.

Art: The Adam and Eve is by Cranach the Elder

I am highly intolerant of BS, jerks, lazy people, ignorant people, liars, and manipulators. Sometimes these days one might get the idea that "intolerance" is a deadly sin, but I think we're all free, given our manners and sense of propriety, to be intolerant of anything or of anybody we want.

The Intolerance Pimps have realized that nobody really cares much about what other people do as long as they leave them alone. That's real tolerance. However, like global warmist alarmism, lots of people have a stake in perpetuating victimhood alarmism. Most turn out to be fakes going back to even before Al Sharpton.

Remember all those church burnings during Clinton's election? It was made into a big deal to promote black turnout. Turned out to be nothing. Small churches burn down regularly, as was shown after the election.

Sultan: Manufacturing Intolerance

Today's example: All Republicans are racist.  The hate crime? Meliorism: implying that racism was dying in America. I guess you can't say that. It's racist to be a racism meliorist.

h/t Theo

Europe Climate Policy Blows Engine…”Giant Failure” … Scientists “Failed Tricking Their Way Past Democracy” … Mood Of Resignation

More on the topic here: Schellnhuber hits the wall of reality: full stop

Maybe German global totalitarianism isn't too popular these days.

Just one half-page document. The Mayflower Compact, 1620: An American Founding Document

Where does matter come from?

So where did all this extra matter come from? Why was it extra matter that was created and not extra antimatter? And when did it happen, and how did it happen?  I’m going to be honest with you: this is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in all of physics today.

Readers are probably slowly recovering from yesterday's feast day in America, but this is very good if you have 5 minutes, by Williamson: The Problem of Selfishness - Political self-interest is no less selfish than economic self-interest.

Presidents, Popes, everything except pumpkin pie. One quote:

The notion that the pursuit of power is somehow less selfish than the pursuit of money found its way into Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium, in which the pope rehearses some ancient Catholic criticisms of market liberalism that have excited anti-capitalists throughout the world, who are always eager for any scrap of economic encouragement from an institution and a man with views they otherwise detest utterly...

Readers know that I am a Christian, probably some sort of re-born variety I guess. Jewish friends tease me by saying that I belong to a strange Jewish cult. While raised Roman Catholic, I somehow became a member of the well-known Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan. An acquaintance at work dragged me there.

As a Christian, I am always interested in our Jewish foundations, but I am not very well-informed. I felt this was good from Daniel Greenfield (Sultan Knish): Jewish Culture, Revelation and Continuity:

Faith is not grappling with difficult existential questions. It is best expressed in the dialogue between the Prophet Ezekiel and G-d. "And He said unto me: 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And I answered: 'O Lord GOD, Thou knowest." (Ezekiel 37:3)

And so faith answers its own question.

That is the essential humility that is the true character of the prophet. Liberal streams of Judaism claim to focus on prophetic value of social justice. But the calls of the prophets for justice did not come from them. They came from G-d. In their natural state they were humble men, like Moses, who did not strive to impose their will on others, but waited to hear what G-d would tell them to do.

That humility of action is faith. And without that humility, there is no room for faith or G-d.

A Common Core 3rd grade textbook (story at Gateway)

The 5 Most Insane Obamacare Talking Points You Can Expect To Hear From Your Crazy Uncle This Week

2. And see how seriously the MSM takes this crazy story of hate:

Family Says They Did Tip Gay Server, Didn't Leave Note

3. And we received a comment from a site called Mondoweiss asking that we never link their stories again. We linked the report on Chucky Shumer. I checked their website, where they say  "To publish a diversity of voices to promote dialogue on these important issues."  Hmmm.

Is it abuse of the system, or is it the Obama economy? As Disability Spending Surges, So Does Gov't Dependence

There was a time when anybody would be ashamed to take charity, and would knock themselves out to avoid it or to get out from it. The way some people talk nowadays, you're a chump if you don't take what you can. There is never gratitude towards the taxpaying neighbor. No Thank You notes for the charity.

People should never give up on engagement with life. Can you find dignity?

White Paper from Heritage: The 2013 Index of Dependence on Government

Manias, Panics and ObamaCare Crashes - A reader's guide to the coming Affordable Care Act traumas.

A synopsis of what patients, hospitals and doctors have to look forward to, thanks to our moral and intellectual superiors who take pride and pleasure in forcing "our own good" down our throats.

Let's give thanks to government this year for all of its benevolence:

Barack suggests we give thanks for obamacare at Thanksgiving

Bloomberg suggests we address gun control around the table.

Thanks for the handy social tips, geniuses. These are recommendations for intra-family mass murder.

Make a guess before you check the answer.

The map is quite interesting. I thought the country was mostly Anglo in heritage, never saw that invasion coming.

'How nakedly political can you get?': Obamacare year-two signups delayed until after 2014 election.

Fool me once...

The US is not the Soviet Union. I am reaching my boiling point with this BS: The 5 Economic "Big Lies" The Government Is Telling You.

No doubt these lies are "for my own good," just like the Obamacare lies. I am sick of an overly-powerful federal government, and sick of the fawning respect it gets from the media. It disgusts me, this culture of branding and pop-culture, high-school, leg-tingling nonsense which has invaded government.

From a good post on Washington DC and it's over-importance and self-importance, Fifty Years after Dallas - In a TV cult like Kennedy’s, there is more than a whiff of Roman decadence.

The real difficulty is that the presidency has come to occupy too large a place in our individual psyches, even as the federal nation-state over which the president presides has come to occupy too large a place in our individual lives. The imperial presidency that had its beginnings in the administrations of the first Roosevelt and Wilson has grown up with the imperial state, a noxious weed that is only too likely to culminate in a kind of Caesarian first magistracy, an office very different from the one the Founders envisioned when they drafted the second article of the Constitution.

As the federal government grows ever more potent, local and regional culture diminish apace; we are left only with national power and the national sanctities. Kennedy, who made the slenderest of marks on the policy of the nation, left the greatest impression on its imaginative life. He had, indeed, an eye for the enchanting symbol. He approved the peculiar logo that is to this day blazoned on the presidential aircraft; he conceived the Medal of Freedom; he laid down the protocols for the pageantry of the modern state visit. What is more, he chose for his mate a brunette of excellent taste who turned the dowdy White House into the most stylish of 20th-century courts, and selected for his (most notable) concubine a platinum blonde who continues to haunt that dream-vision of an America in which Huck Finn, Abe Lincoln, and Betsy Ross (or some such mythical company) are forever laughing and swapping yarns on a raft on the Mississippi.

It is, alas, a spurious dream.

JFK was not much as a president, but he was a pre-Beatles pop-idol for the gals, and he enchanted the media. The only good thing about him was his basic conservatism. Rich and handsome, with good, expensive speech-writers. So what?

...it would be the 13th largest economy in the world.

Quite remarkable, really. It could be like Singapore or Hong Kong, or something, but much bigger, I guess. It is odd that such a thriving metropolis would elect a Commie mayor. Something in the water, maybe. Sure, it's expensive, but that's supply and demand. There is high demand to be here. Sometimes it feels like the whole world wants to move here, despite the living challenges and the fierce, if invigorating, competition.

I will ask one more time: "Why don't all the ardent Lefties who love living in this terrible, capitalistic, and thriving NYC move to Portland, Oregon? Better yet, Mexico City, Havana or Managua."

The brief article is here. Politicians like Keynes because he encourages them to give money to their supporters. The economics might not add up, but the politics does.

Dalrymple is good on this topic: Are We Free To Reform Ourselves? A quote:

The inability of any party seriously to retrench is surely the consequence of the growth of central government, which is now so deeply imbricated in the economy that it is often difficult to distinguish the public from the private. There are many companies – and very large ones too – that are at least as dependent on the government as any single welfare mother: and therefore so are their employees, managers and shareholders. It is not just welfare mothers, therefore, who will vote for the continuation or extension of dependence on government spending, but many of the most prosperous. When the government in Britain finally gave up on its project of the unification of all health care records in a single IT system, after having spent up to $20,000,000,000 on it, there was nothing to show for it except many IT millionaires. Unsurprisingly they were not against the government expenditure that was the foundation of their wealth.

The government is now so big that when it sneezes the whole economy catches cold. That is why, in matters of economics, we are all fascists now.

Why do Asians and Ashkenazi Jews seem to be so smart, multi-talented, and clever? Is it genetics, cultural, or both, or what?

Or do we just see the smartest of them in the USA? In any event, they often make those of us descended from northern European immigrant bumpkins seem a little slow on the uptake.

Is this a racist question?

From Daniel Hannan: The World of English Freedoms - It's no accident that the English-speaking nations are the ones most devoted to law and individual rights, writes Daniel Hannan. A quote:

Wasn't the American) republic founded in a violent rejection of the British Empire? Didn't Paul Revere rouse a nation with his cry of "the British are coming"?

Actually, no. That would have been a remarkably odd thing to yell at a Massachusetts population that had never considered itself anything other than British (what the plucky Boston silversmith actually shouted was "The regulars are coming out!"). The American Founders were arguing not for the rejection but for the assertion of what they took to be their birthright as Englishmen. They were revolutionaries in the 18th-century sense of the word, whereby a revolution was understood to be a complete turn of the wheel: a setting upright of that which had been placed on its head.