Maggie's Farm

October 7: The Feast of Our Lady of Victory

 And there's this: What the Arab World Produces

Common Core and Common Lunch: The ‘Common Calorie’ Revolt - Schools and students fight the tasteless, small lunches required by Michelle Obama’s signature initiative.

Where is it written that the Feds have power over tater tots?

Holiday season is fast upon us, which means conflict, tension, and related frivolity. Here's something useful: An Idiot’s Guide to the Right

We are getting sick of explaining the basics of the non-liberal world every Thanksgiving.

Please forward this link to your nephew and refuse to argue with him until he’s read it.

51% of Democrats support criminalizing hate speech

For me, speech about criminalizing incorrect speech amounts to fighting words. It provokes me towards evil, defiant ideas.

But maybe it can be taken further. Forget speech, how about criminalizing incorrect but unspoken thoughts? Government doctors and neuroscientists could decide who is guilty. "If my thought-dreams could be seen they'd probably put my head in a guillotine, but it's all right, Ma..."

Let him without thought crime cast the first stone.

"I am stunned at the immaturity of this administration.... We elected a man as president who had no experience at anything."

Steve Wynn

Chart below via The Truth Behind Warren Buffett's $31,500 House

Can this be accurate? And how does inflation fit in?

If scientists cannot or will not explain the issue, then farmers have
very little chance of protecting a technology that has immense value to
consumers.

Food superstitions will never die; they just change over time.

McArdle: How the Poor Can Afford to Live in New York

All it takes is a little savvy. Government has totally distorted this housing market, but that's just the way it is for now. That's politics. NYC is fortunate that so many people, young and old, rich, middle, and poor, want to live here and are willing to deal with the discomforts.

America Stalled:

 On the domestic front, the travails of Obamacare suggest that for the first time in recent memory Americans are coming face to face with a new entitlement they don't like. And a political storm has been gathering over the budgetary costs and pension entitlements of state and city workforces.  In three very different policy realms--foreign affairs, social welfare, state and local entitlements--a similar discontent is evident: an anti-progressivism that is in some ways the antithesis of the Progressive movement of a century and more ago.

Political entities and boundaries come and go. They should never be frozen in history, because so many are accidents of history anyway. Should powerful empires, crazy-quilt  conglomerates - China, Russia, the EU, maybe the USA - devolve?  Why not? Would it be worse, or better?

In the US, I can easily see California and Texas as their own countries. They were never envisioned at the beginning anyway. Either one would be more of a nation than Canada, Australia, or Austria. Smalleer governments are more accountable and more responsive.

Even Spain could break into its constituent parts if the empire permits a vote.

Dismantling Empires Through Devolution - Democracy is not the most potent political force of the 21st century.

Should the American civil war have been subject to a confederate referendum first?

US Homeland Security moves to tackle climate change risks

That stupid organization should never have been created in the first place.  I blame Bush for that. It's on my short list of government agencies to be eliminated.

Thornton:

 Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.

My explanation: He has already retired. Job is too easy. Also,

This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clichés that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.

And from Curl, Obama’s Breathtaking Naivete at the United Nations

via Surber:

Robert Kennedy Jr., Aspiring Tyrant - He’d like to charge the Kochs with treason and send climate-change dissenters to jail.

Why does anybody listen to this jerk? Why did I?

It's totally hyped-up and overblown, which is what they want. 3 Reasons to NOT Fight ISIS

I am convinced there is nothing they would enjoy more than to be targets of America. It elevates them. It's a booby trap, and beheadings are the bait. You can find as many justifications for attacking Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia for that matter. The Jihad of the True Believers will never end, at least in our lifetimes. They are convinced they are doing God's work and do not mind dying for that. It's been going on for 1500 years.

As for borders in the ME, they are all bogus anyway. The concept of the nation-state is not really in their lexicon. Caliphate is - Kingdom of Allah on earth, won by arms if not by faith. It's a culture.

Related, the concept of the nation-state is relatively recent, and possibly obsolete: Did Industry Cause Nations?

h/t, Doug Ross:

Via a Powerline toon selection:

62% of Republicans support sending ground troops into Iraq and Syria

What for? I think this is senseless. Note this: Syrian rebels openly admit: We’re going to use America’s money to fight Assad, not just ISIS

As I see it, the US has no dog in this fight, no allies, no friends, no goals. And don't tell me "stability in the Middle East." That's a joke.

From David Stockman, a scathing essay with which I agree:

 So what we have now in the middle east is a replay of the bloody religious wars that once traumatized the West when Protestants accused Catholics of being idolatrous heretics and the latter returned the favor by putting Protestants to the stakes and the racks.  In the present instance, the real war being waged by ISIS is not against the liberties which pertain on the streets of New York City, but in Leupp’s words, “against the Shiites, Christians, Yezidis, secularists, and others it sees as unbelievers and as stooges of the west. But its primary target is the Shiites”.

As Part of Sharia Crackdown in Syria, ISIS Now Covering Up Goat Genitalia

It's about time. Burkhas?