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 End of Retirement As We Know It? - As Chairman of the Milken Institute Center for the Future of Aging, Paul Irving wonders if retirement actually makes sense today.
Retirement is a modern concept, dating back only to the 1930s in the US. I have an IRA for tax purposes, but we have no retirement plans of any sort. We enjoy like life as it is, she enjoys my being out of the house all day, and if I quit working some things would need to change. Making income and being out in the world is a good thing at any age. I see plenty of guys working in their mid-70s, sometimes doing much less prestigious jobs than they once had. Clearly good for their mind, body, and soul.
Example: sales guy at our local Jos. A. Bank used to sell bonds. He's 72. Wife died, decided he had to get out of the house and off the golf course and away from the bar there. Top salesman, loves seeing people all day. Bought 3 suits from him for my lad.
Also, people who have paid lots of tuitions probably still need some income to maintain their lives as they like them.
Sure, it can be subjected to a vote, but the vote will only show the current majority view of the current state of the data and interpretation. Rarely Truth. Today's Truthwill be tomorrow's object of mockery.
Pope Francis claimed that firearms and firearm makers cannot be Christian. A curious statement as he is surrounded by heavily-armed guards whenever he leaves his house. The Vatican is equally protected.
The same thing applies to Obama's pontificating about firearms. He is surrounded by firearms every day, and will be provided with armed guards for free for the rest of his life. I guess it's supposed to be different for us little people but not for me. I carry. If you worked in today's Hartford, CT, you might too.
The HK MP7 (probably) rides shotgun with the dark (purple) suit wearing Swiss Guardsmen closest to the pope.
1. Eliminate all deductions in the individual income tax code 2. Eliminate the corporate income tax. 3. Tax capital gains and dividends as regular income. 4. Eliminate the death tax as well as the write-up of asset values at death
The main problem with the above would be an unemployment crisis for lobbyists, accountants, and tax and estate lawyers, and we can't have that. And golly, what would it do to the muni market?
At least until Wagner got his hands on it, opera was more like the pop music of the 19th century than its jazz. Serious People often thought about it the way they think about Broadway musicals today—there were a few good works in the old repertory, perhaps, but silly Disney movie makeovers developed for the mass out-of-town tourist audience are not the best respected art form around.
...
In 20th-century America, opera had something else going against it: As a “light” musical form that dealt heavily in emotionalism and spectacle, opera was something that women and gay men were passionate about—and that straight men were supposed to despise. The banker was supposed to snore through the opera that his social climbing wife forced him to attend; gay men, meanwhile, swooned over divas and worshipped at the shrine of Maria Callas. The one exception to the rule that straight men were anti-opera was for the true upper class elite, like Eustace Tilley and a handful of his peers. Loving opera was a sign of an aristocratic background and European tastes.
That’s a lot of baggage for an art form to carry, and it does great credit to the Met and the other American opera houses that opera has, if not exactly flourished, at least established a firm foothold in the United States.
Broadway musicals are opera. Often, "light opera" but still opera. Light opera and opera buffa have longer histories than grand opera. Indeed, Verdi was the pop music of his time. Shakespeare's plays were the hit tv shows of his time too.
Nothing can be more pop, or more delightful, than this. The spartan production highlights the music:
Hollywood Squares: These great questions and answers are from the days when ' Hollywood Squares' game show responses were spontaneous, not scripted, as they are now. Peter Marshall was the host asking the questions, of course...
Q.. Paul, what is a good reason for pounding meat? A. Paul Lynde: Loneliness!
Q . Do female frogs croak? A. Paul Lynde: If you hold their little heads under water long enough.
Q. If you're going to make a parachute jump, at least how high should you be? A. Charley Weaver: Three days of steady drinking should do it.
Q. True or False, a pea can last as long as 5,000 years. A. George Gobel: Boy, it sure seems that way sometimes.
Q. You've been having trouble going to sleep. Are you probably a man or a woman? A.. Don Knotts: That's what's been keeping me awake.
Q. According to Cosmopolitan, if you meet a stranger at a party and you think that he is attractive, is it okay to come out and ask him if he's married? A.. Rose Marie: No, wait until morning.
We're getting into apple-picking season around here. Depending on the variety, it will run through October or early November. Apple trees prefer cold winters for their dormancy.
Many apple varieties were carried to the New World by early colonists. They were not as flavorful or varied as the modern types, but it's all they had. The only apple species native to the New World is the (mostly) inedible crabapple.
Should we mention once again that apples are not particularly "healthy" as they are mainly sugar and water, but they do make a good sugary snack or dessert, especially with cheese. Like all fruits, they are designed to sweetly tempt critters to eat, and to later poop out their seeds to spread their genes around.
When you do a high-risk adventure, you are supposed to be willing to die doing it. Isn't that the point? Expecting others to rescue you at public expense and risk to themselves is wrong.
At HeterodoxAcademy, our contributors have documented the near absence of political diversity in many fields, and we have demonstrated the damaging effects that this homogeneity has on scholarship in those fields. We are not the first to do so. Scholars have been calling attention to this problem for decades… and nothing has been done.
This time will be different. We have come together to pool resources, analyze current trends in the academy, discuss possible solutions, and advocate for policies and systemic changes that will increase viewpoint diversity in the academy and therefore improve the quality of work that the academy makes available to the public, and to policymakers.
Their free-thought manifesto sounds like the Berkeley Free Speech movement.
Corny as it sounds, my idea of America is individual freedom. Placing individual liberty as the major factor in every policy and political equation, despite all of the risks entailed, is what is supposed to make our nation unique. As the Founders reiterated, that can only work with a population with a strong foundation of Western Judeo-Christian morals and responsibility, culture, and traditions.
Reno goes to our cultural roots, just deeply enough for me. Powerful stuff. Renewing a Culture of Freedom featuring R.R. Reno:
Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century. Auguste Comte formulated a Religion of Humanity based on “the positive philosophy” or Positivism. Karl Marx went to his grave convinced that his discovery of laws of history had made him the Darwin or Newton of social science.
Positivism mercifully had little political influence, except in 19th-century Brazil, to which it contributed the national motto “Order and Progress.” In the 20th century Marxism split between a revisionist branch which became indistinguishable from welfare-state capitalism and communist totalitarianism, which survives in pure form today only in North Korea, and from the devastating effects of which Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam and other countries are slowly recovering.
By the mid-20th century, the utopian fervor that had inspired earlier attempts at comprehensive sciences of society had burned out...
I would classify myself as a person who believes in the Austrian School of Economics – absolutely. The books that have influenced me the most in my life, I would list as: Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton, The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater and The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek.
Humans love stories. "Mom, read me/tell me a story." Fiction is/was written for entertainment. Before movies, there was mostly music, theater and fiction. There are well-told stories and poorly-told. There are revelatory stories, life-contaminating stories, and everything in between. There are stories which vary in their demands on the reader.
One quote:
I once delivered a paper in Norway on Anna Karenina, and a prominent scholar replied: “All my career I have been telling students not to do what you have done, that is, treat characters as real people with real problems and real human psychology. Characters in a novel are nothing more than words on a page. It is primitive to treat fictional people as real, as primitive as the spectator who rushed on stage to save Jesus from crucifixion.” Here is the crux of it: Characters in a novel are neither words on a page nor real people. Characters in a novel are possible people. When we think of their ethical dilemmas, we do not need to imagine that such people actually exist, only that such people and such dilemmas could exist.
More reason to worry? Here are some higher ed students, and I wonder how they were ever accepted anywhere other than the need for warm butts to fill empty seats:
6 Tiny Cavers, 15 Odd Skeletons, and 1 Amazing New Species of Ancient Human -