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.
It's grade school information: The colonies were British colonies, each separately governed by Brit governors beholden to London. Just like Brit colonies all over the world.
Unification, and rebellion, was extremely difficult requiring all sorts of compromises. Some ugly, some wonderful and wise.
Art is mostly fraud perpetrated by narcissistic academic quacks on a public easily gulled. They should be prosecuted. This is as true of literature as of painting and sculpture. If modern sculpture were placed in a junkyard, art critics couldn’t find it. Most of what we are told are great works are great works only because we are told that they are.
Consider the Mona Lisa, for mysterious reasons regarded an epochal detonation of artistry. Why? She is an excessively round woman who looks as if she is about to spit. We have to be told that she was an astonishment and marvel. Otherwise we would rate her a a pretty fair effort for an art student somewhere in Nebraska...
It seems as if the official Maggie's Farm view is that government should be put into humble shopping centers and abandoned buildings in odd places rather than in grandiose, imperial-style rockpiles.
I am all in favor of grand public building, though. Just not governmental. Grand Central Terminal, for example. Public places which uplift the spirits of the common man or woman and government structures which humble our public servants.
I have long held ambivalent feelings about Lincoln. Freeing slaves, good. Overpowering the federal government, bad. Killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, bad.
I do not idolize any human. Monuments in Washington disgust me. We are not the Roman Empire.
I read it in a college course. It's a long novel. In retrospect you could call it a bildungsroman. Tom was a good guy, full of vitality unlike his sour "brother".
The USA is an exceptional country because of its freedoms and its constitution which protects them. However, Britain is our mother. Britain's exceptionalism, in its rebellions against state and government power, and its honoring of freedom was the inspiration to take the idea of individual freedom further.
To a point, it seems to. After that point, not much. Teacher quality matters of course, but I do not see how school buildings matter. Do high-tech blackboards improve education? I do not see how. Blackboards (now whiteboards mostly), pencils, and paper do the trick.
Tower shoots (not "hunts") are the American version of British and European driven shoots. High birds, flying fast although they have never really flown in their lives - pen-raised birds. Disney shooting.
Supershoots throw up 1000 birds in a morning.
When I was younger, I enjoyed these shoots a lot. Plenty of fun for the "sports". Now, not so much because it just feels like slaughter. I do enjoy the nice lunches and drinks afterwards. I now prefer real bird hunting in the north woods. Killing birds is fun, but hunt is a real thing. Good exercise, and you miss most of the time.
It has been a project of the American Left to destroy Western civilization, or at least its history. It seems like a fool's errand to me, but also evil in a way.
It might work in spineless academia, but not in real life. Stop by to see a show at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC sometime. There will be a line of thousands from all over the world waiting to get in. Every language, nationality, color, etc. Universally known as best museum in the world if not best in every single area.
People know what is amazing to look at, despite academic fads.
My high school Art History course was mind-expanding, cave art through Egyptian and Assyrian up to the Renaissance (yes, we had to learn the math of the Parthenon's steps and of the columns), and the required semester of Art History Intro in college almost equally-so. We learned a bit about Asian and African art too because of their influences on Western art and design.
Pieta was carved by Michelangelo at age 23. That is just not normal. What have I done lately? What have those students and academics done lately? Those smartypants are not Michelangelo.
The Academy has gone commercial. Mass market. We all know that. STEM hasn't dumbed down yet. Pretty much nobody gets an A at MIT, even today. I hear the stories. A C+ in math can be high praise.
A Nick Gillespie interview with the always-interesting and fast-talking Amity Shlaes about her new book Great Society: A New History.
Here's the interview podcast. A lot of history of elite experts packed in there, with their social programs to solve everything. Shlaes is one smart cookie, seems like a nice person too.
It's a heck of a tale. Somewhere around the first third of it it dawned on me that I had read it long ago, but that didn't matter because I had forgotten the ending.
“The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living, even submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures, and otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.”
Advice from Harold Bloom, shortly before his recent death
"To paraphrase Sheldon Richman, however, just because some people cannot be trusted with liberty does not mean other people can be trusted with power.
DBx: No single human inclination has done more harm to humanity than that which turns us to power as the first and surest ‘solution’ to problems imaginary and even real."
Wilfred Reilly at Quillette 
I have long held ambivalent feelings about Lincoln. Freeing slaves, good. Overpowering the federal government, bad. Killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, bad.
It has been a project of the American Left to destroy Western civilization, or at least its history. It seems like a fool's errand to me, but also evil in a way.