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.
...our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.
When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.
Not long ago I asked readers what my time is worth on a per-hour basis. Collectively and independently, they settled on a number of about $500/hr (see the comments). Now look for a moment at what Medicare pays, even at its highest level of billing for a physician’s time for evlauation and management of a medical problem: for 40 minutes of a physician’s time, it’s $140 (or $210/hr) before taxes. Again, we see another disconnect as to how doctors are valued in our current system.
Actually, I'm going to Georgia first, to visit a whole passelful of relatives I haven't seen since I was a teenager.
Wail, howdee, nay-bah! Whuzzup heah in ol' Jo-ja?
Just practicing.
For those of you just tuning in, I'm off to beautiful Mehico to have a cancerous tumor removed. Or, in doctor's parlance, I'm "being treated for my condition". Doctors never use ugly words like "cancer" and "tumor" because it'll cause me to dwell in the depths of despair forever. The back story is here, and it's not too late to donate a few shekels to the cause. I'm still facing some serious post-operative costs.
And certainly my deepest thanks to those who helped make this possible. I honestly thought when I first heard the verdict diagnosis that it was a death sentence, simply because I knew I'd never have the money even for a cut-rate (no pun intended) operation down in Mexico. But, between selling almost everything I own (they can have my Honda Civic when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers), the gang at my mom's rest home (they actually held an official PBS-style 'fundraiser', with skits and songs and magic acts by the residents to entertain the troops during the event), and, of course, the generous people here and on Instapundit.
As for my recuperation and getting back to blogging, I have no idea what to expect. Naturally, I've been hearing wildly different scenarios, although I think the worse ones are referring to a full-fledged colostomy, which is a far cry from what I'm getting, thank God. I have an extremely comfortable computer chair, and, being on a boat, the galley and head are just five feet away, so I should be able to get along just fine. Because the boat's a liveaboard, I've got tons of food and water at the ready should the global warmists be wrong and dirt reaches the point of spontaneous combustion far sooner than expected and I need to quickly head out to sea so I can be boiled alive.
(there's something wrong with that last sentence, but I just can't place it)
And, of course, no Big C update would be complete without a cartoon or two from my two dear, dear friends who have done their utmost to keep my spirits buoyed by sending me every gruesome, morbid, soul-eviscerating cartoon they come across. Bless their little hearts.
And it occurs to me that not only do Americans live longer than Britons, Australians and Canadians, but Hispanics, as well. Or, to be precise, "have more liveable time' than the others.
You know all those extra letters Britons use in words like "colour", "neighbour", "programme", etc? Well, all those little seconds it takes to type those extra letters adds up over time. If it takes 1 second to type the 'u' in 'colour', 'neighbour', etc, times one million uses over a lifetime, that's 12 days, or almost two weeks of wasted life.
And then we notice the unnecessary upside-down exclamation and question marks in Spanish. Again, countless days, wastefully thrown away.
In other words, compared to every Briton, Australian, Canadian and Spanish-speaking person in the world, you just gained 12 days of life.
We should all be very glad that we have a Democratic president right now; otherwise the news would be terrible. We would be seeing a rash of horrible and depressing stories in the newspapers about strategic failure, with unremitting second guessing and belittling of a president who agonized for months before the surge and then saw his plan fail. We’d be hearing non-stop reports in the media about the incompetent and klutzy leader who torpedoed his own policy by announcing a withdrawal date; the man who tried to please everybody and do everything—and failed at all he tried.
Why does Secretary Clinton regard “F** you, God” as a fun toe-tapper for all the family but “F** you, Allah” as “disgusting and reprehensible”?
The Terrorists’ Veto - Around the world, a campaign of religious intimidation and murder intensifies.
A Tale ofTwo Secret Videoshe ASecretary Clinton regard “F*** you, God” as a fun toe-tapper for all the familaker the White House Can No Longer Ignore D'Souza: The Author & Filmmaker the
It's been 45 days since my last post on spy drones. That's when I started saving links for this post. Want to guess how many links I saved in 45 days?
45.
The good news: People are trying to get the word out.
The bad news: Talk is cheap.
When we last left our exciting spy drone story, the airliner you were flying to Denver in had just run into an off-course traffic drone whose guidance system had just been fried by solar radiation and you ended up in a molten pile of burning aluminum and plastic.
U.N. officials describe several narrowly averted disasters in which drones crashed into a refugee camp, flew dangerously close to a fuel dump and almost collided with a large passenger plane over Mogadishu, the capital.
That'll be the real wake-up call. A 747 hits one just entering New York City air space. 293 dead including the crew, 187 on the ground.
And the nightmare of links below the fold?
Actually, I'd suggest you skip it. Why ruin a perfectly good day?
Childlike credulity about presidents’ abilities to subdue turbulent portions of the world by projecting “strength,” or to “manage” the domestic economy, encourages political infantilism.
The overwhelming political objective of the Democratic Party since the 1930’s has been to get as many people as possible enrolled in one government program or another, at least in part to guarantee their votes in subsequent elections: “Tax and tax, spend and spend, and elect and elect.”
And now it’s somehow a scandal when a Republican notes that they succeeded, to the tune of nearly half the country?
In a state of national and international disaster, the worst possible gaffe is telling the truth about the state of affairs we are in. These gaffes disturb the party-goers signing up to work for non-profits and watching cheerful reports about the Arab Spring and the economic recovery while the ship sinks around them. And the party men and women react to it with the outraged demeanor of spoiled children.
Do you believe that man-made global warming is eventually going to cause dirt to reach the point of spontaneous combustion as the above Fox News headline indicates?
Do you believe that the 11% contribution of man-made CO2 to the .3% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is going to set off a chain reaction causing the other 99.7% of the atmosphere to turn into a fireball of death?
Do you believe that solar radiation plays no part in our global climate because your neighbor's SUV tailpipe is more powerful than the sun?
If so, then you're a true AGWer and you have my sympathy.
Because there was a headline floating around the other day that proved, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that man-made global warming is finally here and we're all going to die within months unless we immediately donate $100 to Greenpeace.
Thrilling, isn't it? To a devout AGWer like yourself, you must have shivered in delight as you clicked on the link, knowing that the final proof was here.
And that's when you discovered the cruelest link you ever done saw.
I... I really don't have the heart to say any more.
The rest of you will just have to witness the cruelality for yourself.
I disagree with the tone of that post. Fire is nature's way of rejuvenating, not man's. Fire suppression in national forests is no more than a subsidy to logging. Thanks to Bambi and Smokey the Bear, forest fire has gotten a bum rap.
It is time for a new way, a way in which Muslims will no longer have to learn about America and Americans will no longer have to learn about Islam, where we will give up on winning each other's hearts and minds, and stick to watching each other's property lines. That is the argument that needs to be advanced in the face of Obama's catastrophic Arab Spring failures and the alternative to it is four more years of terror and appeasement.
The Magnitude of the Mess We're In - The next Treasury secretary will confront problems so daunting that even Alexander Hamilton would have trouble preserving the full faith and credit of the United States
Does the State Department not know, for instance, that manufacturing pretexts for religious outrage is Lesson One in the Mideast lexicon of foreign-policy stratagems? The most obscene cartoons of Mohammed that provoked riots throughout the Middle East were actually added by the Muslim clerics who toured the region brandishing them; the Imam who accused a 14-year-old Christian girl of blasphemy has now himself been arrested for disfiguring the Koran and telling co-conspirators that this was the way to drive Christians from Pakistan. This kind of thing has been happening for centuries, but it happens more when both conspirators and rioters are unafraid of any consequences to themselves.
Iceland was a mess after the 2008 meltdown. By 2012, while GDP per capita is still at depressed levels, unemployment is also down dramatically and growth has returned, making Iceland a 'star' among the embattled European nations.
It helps, somewhat, to be a homogeneous and isolated isle. It also helps to let financial institutions fail so debt can be washed out properly.
I'm not a fan of rap music, but Russ Roberts and Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek have done a good job making economics entertaining for the younger crowd. I sent their Hayek vs. Keynes series of videos to my son at college. There is an appropriate correlation to the events in Iceland and Hayek's views. There is no Keynesian stimulus taking place there.
"[W]hen the boom has collapsed, there exist dislocations and disproportionalities in the world of industry, the wreckage of false expectations, which monetary manipulation is not likely to remove."~Lionel Robbins in 1934, writing on the Great Depression
I hope when little Bryan grows up he never Googles himself or his parents. I can’t imagine the horror when he reads that his parents wish they would have killed him. I wonder how quickly he will grasp that his parents think his life, since he has disabilities, isn’t worth living. I wonder if that jury considered how the disabled community would feel if they knew that a jury awarded these parents millions because they missed the opportunity to abort their disabled son.”
As Cabela's prepares the selection of guns it will sell for the holiday season and winter hunting, the outdoor-gear retailer has two plans: one if President Barack Obama is re-elected, and one if he isn't.
It also has been unclear how much of the violence was spontaneously triggered by the film and how much of it was spurred on by anti-American militants using it as a tool to grow and enrage the crowds.
...don’t worry, when your president’s so cool he’s doing gigs in Vegas, what happens in Tunis stays in Tunis.
As a Canadian, I’m interested to see that America has belatedly adopted the divided responsibilities of the Westminster system. Proceeding from the Pimp with the Limp show to Letterman to Beyoncé and back again, Barack Obama makes a perfectly adequate (if somewhat cheesy and downmarket) ceremonial queen.
Our experiment at civilizing the savage failed miserably in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will go on failing as often as we keep attempting it. And at the end of the experiment, there will be burning embassies and savages crying, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger", the same words that the bearded bandit who was one of the first Muslims and their many times great-grandfather was crying out as he was raping the shamelessly unveiled tribal woman who would become their many times great-grandmother.
"There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger" means that the Muslim need not waste time worrying about his conscience. His conscience is a Koran and that book says that he's entitled to kill any time that an infidel offends Islam by mocking his prophet, walking in front of him or building a skyscraper that is taller than a mosque. The Muslim need not waste time pondering the ethical implications of killing another human being to know that he is better than we are. His little black book assures him that he is better than us, that he has every right to kill us and that if he fails, he will be raping demon virgins who are so anorexic that their bones can be seen through their flesh.
But, we oh what good people we are, we will apologize for having an embassy and for having free speech and for getting our embassy in the way of their mob and our free speech in the way of our religious sensibilities.
...our media, terrified that their hero would be unmasked and themselves also then revealed as shallow and unworthy, focused their ire on Mitt Romney while the world burned, hoping that Romney had made a “gaffe” even when it was clear that his analysis, if not his timing, was correct.
Meanwhile, our government and its State Department have been revealed to be criminally negligent in the protection of their own people.
The roots of this negligence are a willed ignorance of the realities of the Middle East.
It hardly matters, and I suspect that nobody cares much including FLOTUS, but it is interesting if true. (h/t Moonbattery.) It is claimed that Obama and ballet dancer Rahm hung out at "Man's Country."
Male dancers are not always gay - see Baryshnikov. Lots of talented guys dance for the money and the chicks.
Strassel: Mr. Romney, Trust Your Pants - Obama tells Americans the terrible things the Republican will do to them. The Republican remains silent about what he would do.
...that aging rock star will win this campaign going away if Romney keeps playing it safe. That is a terrible waste for Republicans, an ominous sign for a country in desperate need of new leadership, and more than enough reason for me to stop bothering to tweet on Saturday nights.
The worst line in the clip you showed was this where she said there are different views around the world about the outer limits of free speech. Why is she engaging in a disquisition on free speech with the mob? The implication here that, perhaps the mob is right, that we ought to be suppressing anything that offends Islam, this is a nation where somebody puts a crucifix in bottle of urine and it ends up in a museum. We allow all kind of expression. But perhaps we ought to make an exception in the case of Islam. This is absurd. She ought to be speaking to the heads of state, to the State Department equivalents in other states and saying ‘You speak to your mob and talk to them and defend the embassy.’ This is return to statement a few days ago, I think and they are totally in meltdown at the State Department.”
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. For today, we'll (semi-ironically) adopt the Democratic Socialist Party's meme: We didn't build Maggie's Farm on our own.
We rely on the geniuses who made the intertunnels possible, the engineers who provide us with our coal- and nuclear-energy, on the geniuses who invented the hyperlink and YouTube, on our Webmeister who keeps this rickety site functioning with duct tape and baling wire, on hundreds of other bloggers, websites, and news sources for content, on our commenters who add zip, on Dunkin Donuts which keeps us going, on Panasonic who built my Lumix, etc etc - and on our readers and the good folks who link to us.
It's a communal effort, and an enjoyable one. Many farm hands make light(er) work. No government involvement or funds, however.
This is our biannual request that our readers pitch in and give us a hand by sending out the word about our eclectic, informative, and politically-Centrist/Libertarian website. As I always say, our readership is our reward for what we do here.
Pic of the Maggie's Farm hard-working back office farm hands - and fact-checkers (Zachriel missed the photo op) - safely below the fold.
If you think I was angry yesterday…then stand by for today. Let’s connect the dots in close to real time. Reasonably, President Bush took aggressive action against the Afghan and Iraqi regimes that sponsored terrorism against the US and its allies, although – along with every intelligence service – in major error believing that Iraq’s WMDs were more and more able. At the same time, reasonably, President Bush exerted himself to inform Americans to separate believers in Islam from radical Islamists.
That latter distinction is still valid. However, experience has demonstrated that the radical Islamists have grasped power in country after country while the voices or efforts of moderates have been inadequate or squelched by both the radical Islamists and by much of the Western media making increasingly tenuous excuses for the radicals.
Cap that off with an Obama administration, from the president himself to his appointed minions in the highest levels at the State Department, apologizing for supposed US sins, as claimed by radical Islamists, and otherwise stubbornly pursuing fairy tale wishes that catering to radicals will transform them into moderates and allies.
This same Obama administration failed to negotiate a reasonable timetable and process for reducing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan while directing our military to leave more quickly. This has increased instability in those two countries in which Americans have sacrificed, persuaded fence-sitters to lean or go into the radical Isalamist camps, and encouraged bolder defiance from Maliki and Karzai of US and Western interests.
With all that and more background, the attacks yesterday on the US Embassy in Cairo and the US Consulate in Benghazi should come as little surprise. It should also come as little surprise that the response by the Obama administration was so initially apologetic -- and little better in its walk-back -- to the attackers instead of calling them out as thugs and demanding apologies from the Egyptian and Libyan governments for standing by. It should come as little surprise when there are more attacks on US Embassies and Consulates in the MidEast. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which has seized almost all power in Egypt, calls for more nationwide demonstrations this Friday. There are strong signs that Islamists in other Arab countries are stampeding in that path.
Apologists for extremism, abroad, in the White House or media, will continue to twist themselves into putrid pretzels of pusillanimity, and the media play along, with the most prominent prime perpetrator of press cover-up, the New York Times, even being so craven to keep yesterday’s outrages off its front page.
Presidential contender Mitt Romney, while pointedly criticizing the weak Obama response, needs to go much further, and quickly, to demonstrate how his administration would put spine back in the deboned eagle of the past four years. MidEast expert Michael Rubin lays out a program. That’s more and better than these offenses just being bantered and battered about without purposeful action.
It’s past time to return the proud and mighty eagle to prominence, talons bared, and let our enemies stand by for a thrashing wherever and whenever we decide. No longer can they be allowed so much initiative to incite without serious consequence, expecting the US to just whimper from the Oval Office.
Average pay for Chicago teachers is $76,000 for 9 months' work with many vacations, not including benefits and defined-benefit pensions. Student performance is terrible, with only 15% of grade school students reading at grade level. In other words, it's not working. If this were a competitive business, it would be out of business but it is a government monopoly, controlled by a wealthy and powerful union.
1. The highest-paid public school teacher in Illinois is a physical education teacher making $191,124 per year (I'm assuming this is a 9-month teaching "year").2. Six of the top 12 highest-paid high school teachers in Illinois teach physical education, each making $170,000 or more. 3. Six state employees teaching driver education make $150,000 or more. 4. Six high school teachers make more than the Illinois Governor's salary of $177,500.5. 14,048 Illinois high school teachers made salaries of $100,000 or more in 2010, which is up 13% over last year.
Please, No More Apologies For Free Speech
Photo: A Lotus blossom at the NYBG
¡Hola!
Jesuit
Image via 
It's been 45 days since my 
Video: The Italian Carpool Lane
Summer is slowly ending up here. Carpe diem. We're kayaking on the upper Hudson River this morning.
I forget where I found today's photo so I can't credit the finder, but