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.
These Muslims are not looking to become German, even if that were a possibility. They are not seeking temporary shelter from a storm back home. The majority are men of military age, who should be back home fighting to make their country safe again. No, this is just a bunch of people looking for a better deal.
It is excruciating. The tone is professorial, patronizing, obnoxious, and unmanly. Obama challenged, and was followed by, Vladimir Putin. Putting the merits to one side, the contrast was not to Obama’s advantage.
Best
estimates are that American debt cannot be fixed with taxes on capital -
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/best-estimates-are-that-american-debt-is-not-sustainable.html#sthash.mPDXxVzD.dpuf
In the article, Sanneh likens free speech advocates (like me, I assume) to "gun nuts," claims that campus speech codes have mostly been repealed (which is completely false), then bizarrely questions if people can believe in a diversity of belief. Those of us who are big fans of the concept of pluralism found the latter particularly mystifying.
It sure does. It used to be done by wise old politicos in smoke-filled rooms, shrewd guys who really knew the people. Now it's up to the press, amateur and professional.
Normal Americans would never even consider these sorts of scams. Even normal sleazy and corrupt politicians:
These email summaries show that the Clinton Foundation was the State Department and the State Department was the Clinton Foundation. All one, big, seamless, Clinton-promoting entity. We would know far more if State released the full emails. It is citing personal privacy as one reason not to make some public. In others, it claims the emails “shed no light on the conduct of U.S. Government business.”
I am waiting for The Donald to label the Clintons as grifters. Somebody needs to say the obvious.
Among the islanders, signing was considered a life skill, like knowing how to fish, more than a formal language to be taught. “It was passed on to kids as part of, ‘Here’s the stuff you need to know to make a living in this corner of the world,’” Van Riper said. Children picked it up from their parents; no records indicate that it was ever taught in schools.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a message, she has ambition. Her obsession with becoming president has overshadowed any reason that anyone might have to vote for her. She offers no hope and less change. Her candidacy is historic… but only for her. There is no promise she can make that anyone will believe.
After having spent much of her life trying to become president, she will leave once again a failure.
Some people just can't or won't make it on their own. Some people are not functional and lack family supports. Even England had poor-houses, as did colonial US.
In what may be the classic example of bad journalism in the field of economics, I offer this example
"In what may go down in history as the textbook example of how dangerous an unregulated free market can be when a company decides it wants to be greedy, Turing Pharmaceuticals of New York hiked the cost of a powerful drug used to treat people with life-threatening illnesses like AIDS and cancer by over 5,000 percent overnight."
The last time I looked, patents were government-protected monopolies. The benefits of patents are debatable in the discussion of free markets. Most economists recognize their value as an tool for creating the incentive for innovation. However, it is recognized as a temporarily assigned privilege.
I don't hold a particular stance on whether or not patents are viable tools. Unlike Jeffrey Tucker, I'd venture that removing patents altogether would not be good for innovation. I'm willing to accept his arguments, they do make a great deal of sense, I just don't think they have practical applications (I could be wrong...saying something doesn't have practical application just means it hasn't been tried, so we're wary. In fact, patents didn't exist for many years and humans still made tremendous innovations without intellectual property rights.)
Since patents are a government rigging of market management (controlling production), perhaps the length of patents should be reduced. Or perhaps upon the sale of a patent, the protections are eliminated within a shortened time frame.
Patents are government regulation and an inhibition on markets. Thus, the government has the means to 'fix' what it broke with patents. That said, the journalist needs to learn quite a bit about what a free market is.
Late note: A comment mentions that Daraprim is off-patent and the firm purchased 'exclusive rights', which the journalist failed to look into and assumed was a patent. I looked into it at lunch, because I'd assume the same thing. There are no 'exclusive rights' without a patent. What the firm purchased was the only factory currently making the drug. There are no 'exclusive rights' at all. By keeping the price down, the current company was making a profit and reducing competition (which should have, oddly enough, brought it up on anti-trust laws). But the new owner may make a short term large margin, only to face a competitor who decides to now enter this market and drive prices down.
All in all, the free market is working far better than this journalist ever imagined, even if the short term hit for people is substantial. My guess is the competition will push the price for the drug far lower than it was previously.
The big danger ever since this migration got underway is that it would get stopped up somewhere. The day after Germany closed its border with Austria, there were 20,000 migrants stuck in the Austrian villages of Nickelsdorf and Heiligenkreuz. And the further south you go, the fewer resources residents have to give the travelers a welcome. The migrants are largely young men from rough, tough parts of the Muslim world. There is now a queue of them that stretches all the way east to Bangladesh and beyond, and deep down into sub-Saharan Africa. People have sold cattle, abandoned houses, robbed employers, left wives and children, and burned all sorts of bridges to come. There are now hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of them. Many are war-hardened. They are looking for money, food, and female companionship, and they are convinced that Europeans are gullible sissies.
This is where Frau Merkel’s Willkommenskultur has led: With the impending closure of the Croatian border, hundreds of thousands of young Muslim men are about to hit a brick wall in Serbia. Serbia!
America is destroying its values on an industrial scale. In a post-industrial nation, the destruction of values has become one of its chief industries. And while there is value in challenging values, in the conflict and clash of ideas, that requires that values go on existing, or there is no longer anything to challenge. And then there is nothing left but emptiness and madness.
Pope Francis Doesn’t Understand How to Alleviate Poverty. This pope is not equipped for either politics or diplomacy. Those are not his jobs anyway. His special job is ministering to poverty of spirit and not material comforts.
Undaunted: Attended a charity event last night at which Dinesh D'Souza was the main speaker. A Christian social conservative, entertaining and forceful speaker. He noted that he has had a bumpy year or so (no kidding) and that he has a new documentary coming out next year. I liked him. I just don't get the big fuss about physician-assisted suicide. What's wrong with a little morphine to ease the dying?
Democratic
elites don’t seem to care much about equality - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/democratic-elites-dont-seem-to-care-much-about-equality-sentences-to-ponder.html#sthash.CxM20UTA.dpuf
Says Moonbattery: "She has achieved exactly one thing in her life: marrying a dirtbag who constantly cheated on her but who thanks to Ross Perot was elected president."
"Since Slovakia is a Christian country, we cannot tolerate an influx of 300,000-400,000 Muslim immigrants who would like to start building mosques all over our land and trying to change the nature, culture and values of the state.... If we do not start telling the truth about migration, we will never move from this spot." — Prime Minister Robert Fico, Slovakia.
Getting involved in the intolerance of intolerance racket is a political tar baby. Everybody gets mad and intolerant of each other. Meanwhile, the Asians just keep their noses to the grindstone.
Is she a Conservative or a Libertarian? Another general question - Why do the Repubs sound so hawkish re the ME? The US has no vital interests in that horrible, backward place.
Nick Cohen: Why I’ve finally given up on the left - Left-wing thought has shifted towards movements it would once have denounced as racist, imperialist and fascistic. It is insupportable.
The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent events in Syria and have therefore raised their security level from "Miffed" to "Peeved." Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to "Irritated" or even "A Bit Cross." The English have not been "A Bit Cross" since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies nearly ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from "Tiresome" to "A Bloody Nuisance." The last time the British issued a "Bloody Nuisance" warning level was in 1588, when threatened by the Spanish Armada.
Dr. Sacks published a piece in the New York Times called “Sabbath,” in which he wrote, “And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
Digital
pedometers and Swiss health insurance, a match made in heaven - See
more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the-insurance-culture-that-is-swiss.html#sthash.14mVukEq.dpuf
What’s baffling is the fact that even though I’m supposed to be a rude insensitive xenophobic intolerant racist dick, it would never occur to me to move to Africa, India, Mexico, or Asia and act with anything beyond respect, gratitude, and even caution. I certainly wouldn’t start running my neck about how the culture of my new host nation sucks and how it needs to be tossed into the dustbin of history and how the majority needs to quickly become a minority or justice will never be served. I simply can’t find it within myself to be that much of an asshole. And I certainly wouldn’t expect my new hosts to tolerate five seconds of such behavior.
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis — some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
New clay tablet adds 20 lines to Epic of Gilgamesh
Is empathy 
Toon via 
Seattle-area school 
Image stolen from 
Have A Doughnut: 
Photo: Yesterday's pickings from a friend's garden. That's some heritage tomato 
8-Year-Olds Can’t Be Left Alone in British Columbia. No Exceptions.
Photo: Yesterday's Beauty Pageant.
Photo of George Orwell's house via 