Maggie's Farm

If you can believe it, I have no strong opinion. The Islamic middle east, and its peripheral outliers like Libya will be sad, barbaric, prehistoric dumps where people live crappy lives (by our standards) for a long time.

It's Cocktail Hour, and I am headed out on the town to meet gals and friends in my local dumps, and to be grateful that I am in NYC and not in Libya.

That is all.

Tide of 1,000 Bodies Overwhelms Quake-Hit Japan

Radioactive Releases in Japan Could Last Months, Experts Say

It's not a nuclear catastrophe

Also, Japan's massive earthquake has little effect on culture's impeccable manners

Via Ace:

Massachusetts passed a law in 1663 making the wasting of time a crime: “No person, householder or other shall spend his time idly or unprofitably, under pain of such punishment as the court shall think meet to inflict.” A century later, the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin (“time is money”) proposed a version of daylight saving time as a joke to stop slothful Parisians from sleeping in. But it was an English Puritan, Ralph Thoresby, who invented an early alarm clock.

"Unprofitably"? Maggie's Farm would have been in trouble in 1663.

Roger Simon: Wisconsin: Liberals as Reactionaries:

...why has our left become so reactionary, so unwilling or unable to adapt to a changed world that they “act out” with all the juvenility of adolescents deprived of the family car keys? Some say it is because they have replaced religious faith with politics and I, an agnostic, see some truth in that. But there is more. Liberalism has become a mask for greed in our culture — a way of hiding excessive selfishness from others and, importantly, from the self. It’s a deflection, really.

We humans are greedy by nature. I have learned that mastering greed and just trying to do the best job I can is one of the secrets to life. God has helped me do this. We always want more, in the vain hope that we can achieve happiness that way. I have some money to spare now, and nothing I want to spend it on that I do not already have - my skiing and my summer boat lease - and beer money.

Perhaps it is time for a wife and kids to spend money on. Take them around Europe to revisit all the places I went to during college with my backpack. Go broke on private education. I guess that's a life plan...

The political battles over public unions are seen as Labor's Last Stand. They appear to view government unions as their last source of power in a world which has left the union movement far behind.

But from the WSJ:

Public unions have a monopoly position that gives them undue bargaining power. Their campaign cash—collected via mandatory dues—also helps to elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions. The unions sit, in effect, on both sides of the bargaining table. This is why such famous political friends of the working man as Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia opposed collective bargaining for government workers, even as they championed private unions.

Voegli on Conservative failure:

…people like getting things. And the party that presents itself as the party of giving things to people has a significant built in advantage.

The video interview here.

From A Jacksonian:

End new entrants to Social Security, remove the medical subsidies and entitlements via a block-grant to the States and then phase them out over 5 years, the clean-sheet the tax code to get a single tax rate for all Americans, remove all deductions and benefits from the code, and proportionately reduce that under the poverty line so that each and every working American has a stake in the US government.  In addition clean-sheet government starting with just the few functions of the Treasury, Mint, Commerce, Defense, Coast Guard, and any interstate laws not connected to a federal agency (such as kidnapping, wire fraud and such). 

All other government agencies and quasi-government entities would be abolished, and the postal system put into a standards carrier system to which any carrier could apply for pick-up and delivery service so long as they abided by a system neutral concept for exchange of packages.  We can pay for those already in Social Security through higher taxes, but Social Security, itself, must go as a concept.  States are better able to gauge the need for their poor for health care, and by removing the cost overhead of the current system, prices across the board for health care will drop.  State and local systems already duplicate many of the large scale systems at more sustainable and accountable levels and removing the duplicate work that is 'One Size Fits All, Fits None Well' from the federal side will allow for leaner and better crafted systems to take over at the State and local levels.

All of us at Maggie's Farm enjoy a Bloody Mary at brunch. Extra horseradish, please. Some of us prefer it made with Spicy Clamato, or sometimes as a Bloody Bull (with beef bouillon - canned beef broth, added, which is the way Bill Buckley liked it).

At a nice restaurant at Sugarbush they make something that is new to me for apres ski - a Hot Bloody Bull. They make a Bloody Bull, then stick that air-heater thing they use for making cappucino into the mug to heat it up.

I have always liked a few beers after skiing in 5 or 10 degrees all day, but this is a good find. It's almost a complete meal, too - vegetable, protein, and alcohol. Two of these beverages are perfect as a medicine to combat the growing public health crisis of frostbite.

Now it's David Cameron (via Drudge): State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron

Where did multiculturalism come from?

British Public Schools to Push Homosexual Curriculum. Are the Moslems OK with that?

Magnetic north is migrating faster. Isn't it time the UN did something about that?

So Maybe it was Global Freezing After All?

Killing the Medical Industry Softly

Q&O: And you wonder why health insurance is expensive?

Jammie: Why Do Dems Hate School Choice So Much?

Chait: Democrats are attacking House Republicans for slashing funds for research, education and science.

It's why they call them Euroweenies: Plans for a European press charter committing the media to “prudence” when reporting on Islam and other religions, were unveiled yesterday.

See New Massacre of Copts. Can that be reported in Euroland?

Chapin: On the Left, It’s Fake Sophisticates, Real Snobs. Who will come to liberals' emotional rescue?

Like most people in life who just don't get it, arrogance is at least half of the problem. If you think you're real smart it's hard to learn anything from anybody, much less from experience.

From Dr. Sanity:

What made America 'exceptional' is the moral and political vision of its Founders, who clearly understood that a country established on the principles of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' was, not only an historical anomoly, but also represented the embodiment of the highest values to which mankind could aspire.

What continues to make America exceptional is the extent to which we still live up to those same values bequeathed to us by a group of exceptional and extraordinary men.

Tatler: What Obama didn’t mention in his speech

Tiger's amusing State of the Onion open thread

Powerline on Sputnik

More fact-checking at Wiz

How did we miss this? Hymowitz: Sarah Palin and the Battle for Feminism. A quote:

...“calm and collected” are not the words that come to mind to describe the feminist response to the governor from Alaska. The young feminist Jessica Grose, writing on the popular website Jezebel just after the Republican convention, was—well, we’ll let her describe it: “When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. . . . What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage.” Grose’s readers left more than 700 comments, according to the late New York Sun, including one from a reader who wanted to “vomit with rage.” Other haters damned Palin as a traitor to her sex or an “insult to women,” as Judith Warner spat in the New York Times. “Turncoat bitch!” the comedian Sandra Bernhard railed in a performance caught on YouTube. “You whore in your cheap fucking . . . cheap-ass plastic glasses and your hair up!”

Krauthammer:

Suppose someone - say, the president of United States - proposed the following... I've got a great idea for deficit reduction: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion. He'd be laughed out of town.

Related, Why Obama Should Drop the Insurance Mandate - Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden has a face-saving way out.

In Norway, an Awakening to the Islamist Danger: Islamists have made no secret of their desire to impose sharia law on the country.

SDA always quotes "Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends."

We linked the hysterical HHS scare report this morning. As a corrective, via Front Page's informative Obama’s “Death Panel” Moment,

As Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the conservative Cato Institute rightly pointed out, only about 1% of Americans are ever denied health care coverage due to pre-existing conditions. In fact, a HHS survey administered in 2001 (yes, the same HHS) “found that…only 1 percent of Americans had ever been denied health insurance.”

Medical insurance companies do not deny coverage for most things, but they will deny coverage for the most chronic and expensive ongoing or imminently fatal illnesses. That's one reason to get a job with group coverage: the actuaries know how to handle risk.

The real challenge is life insurance, which is best obtained before you ever get the flu, or God forbid, a major carbuncle.