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 champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau."
I am not wealthy enough for venture funds or other alternative investments. My simple goals are an interesting, adventurous, and pleasant life, and some prudent capital preservation. I have a million hobbies and interests. I have no interest in the American notion of retirement. Kids are mostly educated, which absorbed much more of my income that the mortgage did (and does). I've been advised to keep a sizable mortgage until death or severe illness.
Readers know well how much we Maggie's Farmers thrive on the Teaching Company series, but this is a welcome addition to our self-education arsenal: The Very Short Introductions series from the Oxford Univ. Press.
Their "very short" paperbacks on all sorts of topics are elegantly-written and will leave you as well-informed as a kid taking a college course.
I perused two of them, one on The Cell and one on Christianity. Excellent. Most can be gotten on Amazon.
A poll showed that 13% of the world’s adults or 150 million people would move to the United States if they were allowed to. If 1 million immigrants can’t fill all those jobs that Americans won’t do, let’s try 150 million immigrants.
So say the students: "(It's) a college campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence and full of victims/survivors..."
Sounds terrible. I thought it was a goofy artsy-fartsy, metrosexual, granola place for kids with tats, pink hair, and nose rings - not a dangerous hellhole.
Malloy inflicts on our moribund economy ever-stronger doses of the treatment that laid us low, compulsively seizing on each new radical cause so he might seem a leader. At his insistence, we became the first state to mandate paid sick leave, have passed the highest minimum wage in the nation, and now contemplate a special tax on corporations that pay any employee less than $15 an hour. For more than 20 years, since we passed the cursed state income tax, Connecticut has ranked dead last in economic growth in our nation. Progressive policies have destroyed the oldest and finest manufacturing base in America.
I am not saying they are crooks. I'm just asking whether, if you are a reasonably-informed person, they are worth the cost?
John Bogle did not convince me. Reality did. I am a Vanguard guy and I never speak with them. I trust their people with their bond funds more than I would trust myself.
However, help with financial planning is always good.
The left's deconstruction of social institutions is not a quest for equality, but for destruction. As long as the institutions that preceded it exist, it will go on deconstructing them until there is nothing left but a blank canvas, an unthinking anarchy, on which it can impose its perfect and ideal conception of how everyone should live.
Equality is merely a pretext for deconstruction. Change the parameters of a thing and it ceases to function. Redefine it and expand it and it no longer means anything at all. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but if you change 'rose' to mean anything that sticks out of the ground, then the entire notion of what is being discussed has gone and cannot be reclaimed without also reclaiming language.
Other topics there, but I can say that, without my marriage of many years, my life would be terrible. To each his or her own, though. Invent your own life if you want, and go for it! Just do not ask me to pay your bills because I have organized my life to pay my own.
I suppose private organizations are free to limit any speech or behavior they wish, so an affirmation of American ideals against the PC bullies seems like a good step.
An associate is on a business trip to Alaska for 2 weeks. He sent me this pic from his office window overlooking the harbor. Cold and damp, he says, requiring a good cocktail hour.
In dry climate areas, which much of California is, precious water must be provided from distant sources. As far as I know, in most of the US water is provided either from private wells of from for-profit water utilities or ordinary water companies. Water is market-priced or you pump your own.
California does not have market-pricing for water, yet they historically have had less of it than most parts of the US and, as agriculture boomed there just like the population, there was no market-induced water planning. The government (!) organized water. How does that work out?
I am on board. I'm the guy who had to litigate being required to rebuild the fence around my pool by the town after a flood knocked it down, but was forbidden to replace the fence around the pool by the state EPA because the area was technically wetlands. It cost me $12,000 in legal costs to finally get a waiver from the EPA. The new fence was installed in one day for $1500.
Next time, I will just quietly hire some Mexicans to put the fence back.
Mind you, just 60' from the end of my pool there is a highly-dangerous - and unfenced - small river with steep banks. A true attractive nuisance and a nice trout stream too.
Universities exist to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and culture that will prepare them for life, while enhancing the intellectual capital upon which we all depend. Evidently the two purposes are distinct. One concerns the growth of the individual, the other our shared need for knowledge. But they are also intertwined, so that damage to the one purpose is damage to the other. That is what we are now seeing, as our universities increasingly turn against the culture that created them, withholding it from the young.
The years spent at university belong with the rites of initiation studied by the Victorian anthropologists, in which those born into the tribe assume the burden of perpetuating it. If we lose sight of this, it seems to me, then we are in danger of detaching the university from its social and moral purpose, which is that of handing on both a store of knowledge and the culture that makes sense of it...
Especially younger men - and why not females too? 
Over the years, I am convinced that it is.
His speech on the topic: