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.
I will be elsewhere for the next three days, but I want to deposit these droppings. Yes, I am remembering this weekend. My gratitude for those who have fought and died in the service of this country is endless.
RIP Les Lines. (h/t, NYM). I grew up with Lines' mag. Great stuff. Audubon Mag sucks now. BTW, Bodio's site has wonderfuo potential, but they do not post enough - especially given the size of their roster.
AVI wonders why it is so difficult to discuss issues with Liberals. His readers have some thoughts.
When I heard the story and saw the pics, it was clear to me that our Editor happily does the "jobs Americans won't do." Such as outdoor labor. Supposedly only illegal Mexicans will do that hard work.
Two months ago I posted a sign at the High School jobs bulletin board. It said "Yard, Garden, and Farm Work, through the season. $10/hr," and I gave my phone number. Unbelievably, given how hard it for kids to find jobs right now, I only received two replies, a guy and a gal. They have been doing chores for me on weekends, and will begin working 5 or 6 days/week until everything on my list is done. It will take at least into August. They are wonderful, do not mind heavy lifting or getting dirty, and tell me this job will get them buff and tan for their summer nights.
My list for them includes painting the shed and the barn and a garden fence, splitting wood for the fall (I won't let them do chain-sawing), weekly lawn mowing, clearing out some downed trees in the pasture, mucking the barn, putting up hay when it comes in, weeding the gardens, trimming hedges, edging borders, putting down mulch, re-setting a long slate walkway in stone dust, replacing some horse fence, cleaning the barn windows, rebuilding my garden compost bins, replacing or repairing a couple of gates and garden fences, etc. The Mrs. will give them lunch, and promises me that she will be demanding of them and will treat them formally, as employees and not like kids (which they do not seem to require thus far). It's much more work than I have time to do on weekends.
If they stick with it, it's worth $3-4,000 for each of them. A costly summer for me, but many of these jobs have been accumulating and need to get done now. Furthermore, it will give me more time for riding with the Mrs., which she very much appreciates even though I am no great fan of horses. Golf too.
Remind me to let you know how it works out, but so far, so good.
Humans: Why They Triumphed. How did one ape 45,000 years ago happen to turn into a planet dominator? The answer lies in an epochal collision of creativity.
“Vote yourself a home!” has been our national motto for the last fifty years and today Americans are as addicted to the home mortgage deduction (and the even less justifiable deductions for second mortgages and home equity loans) as Greeks are to early retirement and government employment. Political popularity makes the policies harder to change — but no less damaging and destructive.
Liberalism, as we have known it for decades, is on the defensive. With the welfare state unsustainable, it has nowhere to turn and its adherents are turning tail in every direction. They are mad and they are, in many cases, unmoored. Lifetime ideologies are beginning to crumble. Personality constructs are at risk.
My only meaningful disagreement might be that I do not see Rush's bragging as genuine, but as radio shtick. Nobody who says "I speak with half my brain tied behind my back, just to keep it fair" is a serious braggart.
I think what drives Lefties nuts about Rush (besides his opinions) are his cheerfulness, infectious optimism, fair-handedness and kindness with callers, and his regular-American (as opposed to elite American) points of view.
The lack of angst and anger is simply not fashionable and is, indeed, repugnant to the elite Liberal mind.
Catch up with Washington Reb. One quote: "even peace & love finds that violence is a final measure of intellectual, ethical and philosophical conviction."
This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country’s future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise—limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.
We are, I fear, living on inherited social capital. We have cultural patterns and folkways in our society that were created in a time when conscious moral struggle and individual moral responsibility were the subject of more serious introspection and education than they often are today. These patterns are eroding and the folkways are losing their power and, unfortunately, so far we seem to be falling short in our efforts to find new ways of building spiritual commitment and a striving for moral excellence in the rising generation.
This almost never ends well; fortunately a surprisingly large number of young people today are worried about the moral and spiritual vacuum around them.
Tracy is believed to have smuggled 270 Somalis into the U.S. through Mexico. Let me say it again: An associate of al-Shabaab has snuck in nearly 300 Somalis from where they operate into the country. They remain here and we don’t know what they are up to.
Rules, limits and boundaries are critically important aspects of psychological life, necessary to a sense of safety and security. Even if we don't always appreciate this fact consciously, boundary violations are perceived unconsciously as wrongful, serious threats to our safety. Without an appreciation for the profound psychological significance of boundaries, we cannot begin to appreciate why it is inevitable that immigrants unlawfully streaming across the border into Arizona are perceived as a menace to safety by many Arizonans.
But not just "perceived," Dr. X. People are getting fed up with flagrant violation of the law. It is not the best way to begin a new life in a new place as an outlaw, and this sort of thing does not help the illegal cause.
Till Bruckner worked for NGOs in Georgia and Afghanistan before managing Transparency International's Georgia’s aid monitoring programme in 2008-2009. He writes in Aid Watch: Just Asking That Aid Benefit The Poor about Secret NGO Budgets.
Are you ashamed of your organization’s budgets? Do you think your supporters would be shocked if they could see exactly how you are spending their money? Do you feel the need to keep your finances hidden from your local partners and clients? If you answered all three questions with “yes,” you might be working for an international NGO.
Private donors in wealthy countries simply lack the information needed to hold aid and development NGOs to account for how their donations are used thousands of miles away. The only information available is that which is voluntarily provided by the NGOs, which are extremely reluctant to open their operations to scrutiny....
Institutional donors like USAID usually do have a presence on the ground in developing countries, but they rarely directly monitor NGO activities in the field. Instead, they usually, though not always, rely on information provided by their grantees. Interviews with dozens of donor and NGO representatives in Georgia, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan suggest that neither NGOs nor donor country offices have an incentive to document instances in which aid money is stolen, wasted, or unwisely spent. Projects are almost invariably portrayed as successful, irrespective of realities on the ground....
Aid organizations have responded to concerns about their lack of accountability through a variety of initiatives and mechanisms intended to create transparency within the aid community. Senior staff members at NGOs’ global headquarters readily sign up to noble-sounding initiatives and commit their organizations to meeting certain standards. But these measures lack teeth and often require organizations to act as a whistleblower against a partner agency. As a result, they are almost universally ignored in practice.
A respondent to Bruckner's top piece says he's afraid to alarm the natives:
Although open accounting can seem like a good practice, it is very tricky in poor countries. I have been running international projects for twenty years. The rent on my house is higher than the salary of many of my staff. My salary is nearly triple the highest local salary. Additionally, my top staff is paid well–many times more than what our beneficiaries receive. I think that telling our beneficiaries how much we earn would reinforce the gap between them and us. It would also complicate relations with our government partners (who earn less). I am always happy to share general information about costs (our program in the Haitian-Dominican borderlands is around $650,000/year), but see little upside to sharing details.
President Barack Obama has nominated Dr. Donald Berwick to a position largely unstaffed during the Bush administration: head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the two Great Society programs.
Berwick has decades of experience in health policy and, on paper, would seem a perfect candidate for the job. But he has fallen into the trap of many intellectual elites, which we might call the Harvard Disease: assuming that a government committee can guide one-sixth of the national economy into efficiency
The State Board of Education's offense is great -- namely, restoring to notice in Texas textbooks, to a certain eminence even, quaint ideas about federalism and the religious viewpoint of the American founders.
Harvard professor Ruth Wisse, author of Jews and Power, argues that the defensive self-blame and even self-abasement that Jews adopted in the millennia since the fall of the Temple is counterproductive to survival.
This argument is at the heart of today’s critiques of Obama’s feckless and failing foreign policy.
On May 20, Wisse addressed the thirteen Jewish cadets graduating West Point.the Naval Academy.The Weekly Standard has the text.
Wisse uses the humor about schlemiels to make her point.There are many definitions of the Yiddish term, mostly varying in emphasis, but basically a schlemiel is naïve, gullible, even a simpleton.
Wisse starts with some Old World jokes about schlemiels in combat who don’t recognize they are in a mortal situation.Then Wisse comments:
Hilarious in Yiddish, this joke hardly works in English, which has trouble imagining someone so unworldly that he cannot grasp that a man may be shot just for stepping on the wrong side of a border. The joke may likewise fall flat because we now know what happened to the people who created those jokes. They were slaughtered in the millions. What we call the Holocaust targeted precisely the population that created schlemiel comedy. We learned from that episode that sweetness was no laughing matter and that joking—which momentarily releases tension—offered no defense against real belligerents. The schlemiel who initially made us laugh also taught us to raise our guard.When I wrote about the schlemiel in the 1960s, I had in mind the culture of Jews, but nowadays, we Americans similarly confront enemies who intend to destroy our way of life. Like the Jews of Europe, we are tempted to ignore them. We enjoy getting along with the rest of the world. We have no passion for war, favoring peace and prosperity. Like the schlemiel, some among us think that warfare is a ridiculous pursuit….
A schlemiel doesn’t know how to find the notch in a saw.Sound like Obama? Oy vey!
But, it's even worse than that among many leading Jews, as Jennifer Rubin points out about the Rabbis selected as safe for Obama to meet with:
This is what passes for “leadership” in American Jewry. A kabuki dance is orchestrated by an Obama fan to gather other Obama fans to air the mildest criticism and to avoid challenging the factual representations of an administration that is the most hostile to the Jewish state in history. As one Israeli hand who definitely isn’t going to be invited to any meetings with this president put it: “They may be fine rabbis, but they are out of their league here.” And by not directly and strongly taking on the president, they are, in fact, enabling the president’s anti-Israel stance. It is, come to think of it, more than an embarrassment; it is an egregious misuse of their status and it is every bit as dangerous as the quietude of American Jews in the 1930s.
That “security strategy based in diplomacy” is actually based in both self-delusion and believing that other nations and foes can be similarly deluded.
“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system,” the president told graduating cadets. “But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation. We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice, so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”
Mr. Obama said the United States “will be steadfast in strengthening those old alliances that have served us so well” while also trying to “build new partnerships and shape stronger international standards and institutions.” He added: “This engagement is not an end in itself. The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times.”
On the other hand of reality, as Belmont Club’s Richard Fernandez sums up the dysfunctional Obama foreign policy, that no one abroad wants much part of:
It’s easy to believe the dysfunction is real. Faced by the linked yet separate crises in the Middle East and in Northeast Asia the Obama administration is acting like it was shot through the central nervous system, acting in uncoordinated jerks. The alliances with Korea and Japan and the special relationships with Israel and Britain lie almost forgotten like neglected toys on the floor of a spoiled child distracted by his latest bauble. Gone are the heady prospects of Grand Bargains with the Muslim world kicked off by dramatic speeches in Cairo. Gone is the idea of a swift drawdown from Iraq; or of a comprehensive solution in the Middle East. Gone is the promise of catching Osama Bin Laden. Gone is the notion that Europe, which once hated America because of George Bush, would turn like a blossoming rose to Obama. In their place are half-finished begun threads without closure: a growing Hezbollah menace in Lebanon; a defiant Iran; a belligerent North Korea; a buffoonish but menacing Chavez; a drug war on the southern border; an Eastern Europe with the shadow of the Russian bear growing ever longer across it.
How strong would regulations have to be before you’d say that a prolonged period of no big disaster suggests we need weaker regulations? When did you last hear someone using this reason to suggest we weaken a particular regulation?
And what do you think about my construction of the plural possessive "y'all's"? Correct, or a problem for the Grammar Nazi? Should it be y'alls'? In the South, I have even heard it said as "y'allses," as in "Where did you park y'allses car?"
Blumenthal has never given anyone a break. He has made a career out of holding others to the strictest standards of truth—and mercilessly prosecuting them when they fall short.
What the Dems have begun to master over recent cycles is to run as Conservative-sounding centrists. When they get to DC, however, they end up, willingly or unwillingly, under the thumb of the Pelosi leadership. That's how our system tends to work.
So whether they run with more conservative local themes or not, in the end it doesn't matter. In the House, it is Party that matters, 99% of the time. That's why voting Party instead of Person makes sense most of the time, and why, for federal elections, being an Independent, even though it sounds nice, just means you don't care.
As we noted in our amicus brief supporting Citizens United, the FEC now has regulations for 33 types of contributions and speech and 71 different types of speakers. Regardless of the abstract merit of the various arguments for and against limits on political contributions and spending, this very complexity raises serious concerns about whether the law can be enforced consistent with the First Amendment.
I will be elsewhere for the next three days, but I want to deposit these droppings. Yes, I am remembering this weekend. My gratitude for those who have fought and died in the service of this country is endless.
Villainous: 
AVI reflects on