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.
Related: The Clock Ticks on Racial Preferences - The Supreme Court may soon rule that universities cannot anymore use race as a factor in admissions—some 15 years sooner than Justice O'Connor predicted in 2003.
Smart move by Amazon. A heck of a lot more people read Goodreads than read the NYT Book Review or, God knows, the NY Review of Books or The London Review of Books. I do enjoy the intelligence of the London Review.
People still love books but, with the appealing Teaching Company DVDs, it's tough for me to do more than a book per week.
I am just back from my assigned 1- hour Good Friday vigil at church (4-5 AM). So quiet, peaceful, serious, in semi-darkness (but with an almost -full moon shining in the windows) with the black-draped cross. I imagined being one of those who kept him company during his execution. I prayed for the souls of all of those I care about, and I prayed that his death would indeed redeem my sinful nature and my flawed soul. Lay it all at the foot of the cross, Pastor advises.
We can't even be trusted to feed ourselves anymore. Who anointed these guardians? Aren't they just lowly politicos - a widely-disrespected class of people in America?
If marriage is primarily a legal contract, then why can't two elderly sisters marry? It might very well be to their advantage, and they may love eachother deeply. Or does marriage have to involve sex? If so, who from the government is going to check to make sure that sex is happening? God knows, the world is full of sexless marriages.
And, yes, what about polygamy? Why not? It's not Christian but it is Old Testament Jewish and it is modern (quietly) Mormon - and Islam. How many wives did David have? I read that Solomon had 200 wives and 800 concubines, or maybe the other way around. I do not know when the Israelites gave up polygamy.
The whole topic becomes more and more absurd and confusing as cultural traditions are undermined. Gays can get married while the heterosexual people are now up to 50% childbirth out of wedlock. Crazy world. It's called cultural change.
Then I noticed this: Kagan ’09: ‘There Is No Constitutional Right To Same-Sex Marriage’. That statement signifies to me that she is an unwise person. The Constitution does not set up government to dole out rights to the people, but rather to protect the mostly-unlimited rights of a free people. But I am repeating myself.
Freedom and privacy require no "penumbra." Back to the US Constitution, the American social contract:
This list of rights should not be read to limit in any way any other rights of the people.
The powers not specifically granted to the federal government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by the Constitution to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Obamacare is not medical insurance in any real sense of the term "insurance." It is set up to pay your medical bills. It is no freebie, however. It's expensive.
I have two annoyed comments, and a few brief questions:
- Would my hernia repair have cost me $18,000 to the hospital if there were no insurance?
- Obamacare will render my medical insurace plan, an old-fashioned family Major Medical, illegal next year. So I can't keep the insurance I like.
- Will it be illegal for businesses, and rich folks, to self-insure under Obamacare? How would that work? And what about people like me, who like to pay their doctors themselves? Will that be permitted? What if I want to take Granny to Switzerland for herbal treatments for her dementia?
I want a "leave me alone" society -- one where Christian schools can turn people away for rejecting their doctrine, just as gay rights groups can reject those who don't share their beliefs. I don't want us all to get along -- not because I'm misanthropic (well, not just because I'm misanthropic), but because I know that "consensus" is usually a fancy word for muting minority viewpoints. I want us all to be free to be annoyed with each other from our separate corners. Is that too much to ask?
1. Marriage. Everybody is writing about the gay marriage topic. How is marriage defined? Is the Supreme Court being asked to be a dictionary? To revise the dictionary? That's above their pay grade.
2. Is there a "right" to gay marriage? Isn't that the wrong question? The Federal government was never assigned the power to determine such personal things in a country in which the presumption of local and, most importantly, individual liberty is the centerpiece. We do not have, or need, delimited rights. Government has delimited powers (supposedly). I guess the issue had to become a federal case because marriage is not so much about a relationship, but, maybe unfortunately, about a legal status with many legal implications.
Reality must be faced. A generation has grown up rejecting the truths that its grandparents lived. And while population growth among our native born halted decades ago, scores of millions have come in from abroad to fill the empty spaces. And they are still coming. They like what Big Government has to offer, and seem uninterested in what the GOP has to sell.
In that case, you try harder to sell your product, change your product, or go out of business.
Charles Krauthammer, MD, gets it. He always did. Our money- and power-greedy government has always drooled over the idea of control of medical care because so much emotion and money is involved. Votes, power, control.
Believe me, personal care does not lie in the future. At that point, I will give up. I will give up charity care too, if there is any of it left. I did not enter Medicine to be an employee or a peon. If that is what the people want, they can have it.
For me, it's a calling but I will not do it as a government peon.
I have no idea. I prefer Bach to Beyonce. In fact, never listened to the latter despite being a hip youngish New Yorker. Here's the argument: Can Republicans Close the Pop Culture Gap?
Just curious, but how does Obama have so much time to watch TV and to listen to tunes? I find no time for TV. Not that that bothers me very much but I spose it would matter if I were running for office.
Tried it a few times with my Mom as a lad. Scary and exhilarating. We had a local hunt club. We had a member die on a hunt (overhead branch). Broken bones galore, of course.It sucks to fall off a galloping horse.
Think Ethanol is Environmentally Friendly? Think Again.
The lady advice columnist suggests she might need therapy for wanting to wait for sex a few weeks with a new date. I'm sure the fellows would heartily agree...
Nice conservative people have no idea of what an institutionalized, ruthless, partially-corrupt apparatus they are up against. It's the big leagues. Voters do not study the Constitution before they go to the polls.
School choice is not a Democrat-Conservative split. Nobody likes the government monopoly and everybody wants school choices, the same school choices that the Obama kids have. Inner city families long for school choices for their kids. The only problems the Dems have are to deal with are their wealthy allies in the teachers unions.
Obedience to arbitrary authority is counter to everything that America stands for. We didn’t reluctantly cede a tiny bit of our personal sovereignty to the government so a bunch of know-it-all twerps could tell us what to eat, what to smoke, what to do and how to live. We did it to allow them the ability to keep order, which they have manifestly failed to do, and to perform a few basic governmental functions, which they have likewise failed to do.
So, a government that has failed to adequately perform the few discrete tasks which it should be performing now wishes to do a bunch of other things which it has no business doing in the first place, and which it will inevitably do badly and thereby cause even more problems than existed in the first place.
I was rummaging through the digital attic yesterday and came across this little gem.
If you weren't hanging around Maggie's during the 2008 presidential election, you really missed something.
The media attention we received was simply fierce.
Ah, they just don't make presidential races like that anymore.
And, unfortunately, that's true. They didn't do a 2012 update, but the above is still active. To make your own, click here. If you want to embed the player on your own site, like above, open the source code of the displayed page and copy the block from <OBJECT> to </OBJECT> to the source code of your own page. It may not be topical, with that glaring '2008', but at least you can file it in your 'Favorite Memories' section.
I present this not only for fun, but as a casual reminder of how easy it's become to overlay video on top of video and have it look 100% perfect. The only scene where they flubbed up was the bus going by, but the rest was excellent.
On the subject, I hereby move we strike the word incontrovertible from the language.
At this very moment, someone out there is doctoring a video to make an innocent man look guilty of murder. This video, the prosecuting attorney will tell the jury, is incontrovertible proof of the defendant's guilt. You will watch the accused murder the innocent victim with (slamming fist on jury box railing) your own two eyes!
It's a word whose time has come and gone.
Looking For Links Dept.
On the subject of video doctoring, I once saw a terrific video on YouTube of a UFO flying along, right there in front of you, big as day. As I recall, it was shot from inside a moving vehicle driving through the brush. Despite years of skepticism on your part, you had to admit that the final proof was right there before your very eyes.
Then they re-played it, this time with a split screen, with the original video on one side and the identical-but-doctored video on the other. When it comes to 'home gimmickry' and the average slob fooling around with modern video editing programs, it was a masterpiece, and I'd like to include it in a future post on the subject.
Also, I have a page of web vids in my Art Gallery where the music really makes the video. I have the half-feeling I've asked this before, but I'll give it another shot.
I once saw a commercial on TV (which I presume has since been videoized to YouTube) that took place in the downtown part of a city, presumably New York. I can't remember if it was a smile or a nice gesture, like helping out a stranger with something small, but it traveled from person to person through the streets, finally making some kind of loop at the end. I honestly don't remember if the music was anything special, but there's a pretty good chance it was, and, if so, I'd like to include it on the page.
Let Them Eat Fat - Listening to the doctors on cable TV, you might
think that it's better to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with
butter. But eating basic, earthy, fatty foods isn't just a supreme
experience of the senses—it can actually be good for you.
Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating
disorder: Call it fatnorexia. Where is Uncle Toby from Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night" lamenting that, under the oncoming reign of Puritan
strictures, "there shall be no cakes and ale"?
There is great risk in that life plan. I often remind people that being put out to pasture is a quite modern invention. Originally an ideal of European Socialists, in the US it did not become a plausible plan until the Depression when it seemed politically useful to take "mature" adults - "seasoned citizens" - out of the labor force to reduce unemployment.
I have never understood what is so ideal about being unproductive and useless with a life of recreation, errand-running, and lawn-mowing. In my experience, people thrive on productivity and responsbility (while bitching about it of course) and frequently decay without it. If Heaven entails floating around blissfully on clouds all day, I have no interest in it. Anybody who wants that can have it today. It's called heroin.
Still, people pursue a degree of economic security, because constant worry is no fun. Except for the most ambitious and talent-driven, it seems to me that most people will be as resourceful as they need to be to try to construct whatever life they desire. I just hate to see people seduced by phoney pop-cultural dreams of lying in the hammock or farting into the sofa for 25 years.
Bruce Walker: 
"Obscurity and a competence—
If marriage is primarily a legal contract, then why can't two elderly sisters marry? It might very well be to their advantage, and they may love eachother deeply. Or does marriage have to involve sex? If so, who from the government is going to check to make sure that sex is happening? God knows, the world is full of sexless marriages.
Cow manure is