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 have to confess that I'm a person who far prefers playing almost any sport badly to watching other people do it well. When I was in grad school, we had the best "touch" - read "shove very hard so the guy falls in the mud" - football games, weekly. A joy. Being quick and agile then, I was usually a runner (and a ball-dropper). That football is a slippery bugger.
Since every TV sports fan in the US is either hosting or attending a party today (any excuse for a party, or for buying a new big screen), and because I do like to make and eat chicken wings, I offer Alton Brown's very good Buffalo Chicken Wing instructions.
As usual with Alton, the show is a kick - and educational - even if you don't care about the recipe.
For Alton, everything simple is an adventure. Great production.
I don't know how Theo got this pic of my new girlfriend on my fishing boat last summer, in Southington CT harbor. The cool, smart chicks seem to like me. I have no idea why.
When Two People Click - Finding a mate used to be a long quest to uncover a few worthy people, but dating sites now offer hundreds of potential mates at a keystroke.
I have come to the conclusion that current energy and climate policy is probably more dangerous, both economically and ecologically, than climate change itself. This is not the same as arguing that climate has not changed or that mankind is not partly responsible. That the climate has changed because of man-made carbon dioxide I fully accept. What I do not accept is that the change is or will be damaging, or that current policy would prevent it.
For my money, the single most talented voice in the modern history of talk radio is retiring later this month. Not "one of" the most talented — the most talented.
The thing is, I'd tend to agree, except for one little hitch:
Outside of a few brief spots on cable talk shows, I've never heard him utter a peep.
The difference between Neal and — as far as I know — every other radio talk show host on the planet, is that Neal would spend hours writing a for-real blog every morning, whereupon he'd punch out three or four posts on different subjects, some of them fairly lengthy, then finish it up with a handful of must-read links. He took it as seriously as any of us do.
So I'm saying goodbye to Neal Boortz, blogger.
On the subject, though, I would note that, while he's officially retiring from radio and blogging, he's still keeping his hand in when it comes to mouthing off about pet topics now and then. He had an article on Townhall just the other day.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot!
How upside down can things be in America? Mickelson is being called "greedy." Really? So now we define "greed" as wanting to keep more of the money you earn? If that’s greed, what do you call the moochers who go to the poll to vote for the politician that’s going to take that money away from you and give it to them? Oh wait! I know! Obama voters!
Yep, same ol' Neal.
(Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, for the uninitiated, is Boortzspeak for "WTF??")
Below the fold I'll continue this tribute with some of my favorite moments and quotes. A search on my Rainy Day site for "boortz" pops up five articles where I mention him, so I'll include the links. And, just to quell any claims of blatant partisanship, I'll toss in a couple of criticisms. That is, if you call my referring to him as a total dogshit asswipe when it comes to his attitude toward cigarette smokers a 'criticism'.
So thank you, Neal. That was a terrific run — even if you are a total scumbag butthole for redesigning your web site a few years ago.
I can picture the millions of chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep, etc. of the American farms gloriously set free in downtown Oakland, but I suspect they would all quickly end up in peoples' stew pots or hit by cars.
What these people perhaps do not deal with is the simple fact that none of these animals would exist at all without meat and dairy farms.
Worse of all, these annoying people ignore the far worse, massive animal genocide brought about by antibiotic medicines. Why protest the slaughter of only big animals? Does nobody care about the little animals? Are they that heartless?
In the last thirty years the transformation of the American economy has contributed to income polarization. The old industrial middle class, based on mass employment in unionized oligopolies, has been hollowed out, and no comparable source of stable high income employment has emerged. Large groups in America today are living on transfers from the profits of the healthy portions of the private sector recycled through government spending and subsidies. It is easy to see how rational people can conclude that the only hope of preserving mass prosperity in America comes from transfers and subsidies. If we add to this the belief that only a powerful and intrusive regulatory state can prevent destructive climate change, then the case for the blue utopia looks ironclad. To save the planet, save the middle class and provide American minorities and single mothers with the basic elements of an acceptable life, we must set up a far more powerful federal government than we have ever known, and give it sweeping powers over the production and distribution of wealth.
I am confused today by all I have been reading about illegal immigration. Being somewhat Yankee-biased, I tend to feel that the US needs no immigrants from anywhere anymore. Just spend a weekend in NYC and then tell me we need more foreigners around. Half the people you see were born elsewhere, and have no clue what America is all about. They are just using us, trying to get on one gravy train or another. Call me a xenophobe. I don't mind, because I like foreigners - in their own countries and in their own cultures. I do not want my culture changed, or to feel like a stranger in my own country. It's mine, and it is not open to the general global public.
All the Russians too. Sheesh. Unpleasant, loud people without manners and Soviet-style (ie, no) morals. Legal too, I assume, which means they went through the process. They may have to take a test, but there is no civility test. Those lovely Russki girls are silky sociopaths, well-trained in the Soviet system to ignore law and civilization and to follow the money. The turbaned Sikh cab drivers from Whereizitstan are far more pleasant and dignified, but what the heck? We have unemployed college grads who could drive cabs and could probably figure out how to find JFK airport from the Plaza Hotel.
Most nations do not permit any. Just try emigrating to Japan, France, Britain, Sweden, Russia, or Mexico from the US. Can't be done. As we say here, "Don't be lazy, people. Fix your own darn homeland."
If NYC deregulated housing, there would be affordable housing for everybody. Classic example of a government fix of a temporary problem creating a permanent shortage problem. Markets work when government stays out of the way.
Docs can't "do less" without tort reform. Defensive medicine is a huge factor in medicine today. Many claim it's 30-50% of billings. Other major wastes? Most preventive medicine, and annual physicals. Studies prove it.
By a 75% to 19% margin, Latinos are more likely to believe in a bigger government, with more services, to a smaller one. President Obama got 75% of the Latino vote in the LD election eve poll – a perfect match.
Only somebody like Rubio can preach the American gospel to hispanic immigrants. Past large waves of immigrants (Swedes, Jews, Irish, Poles, Italians, Cubans) got the memo, but in the era of big government, this wave doesn't get it.
What could potentially crash ObamaCare -- if the news gets out -- is the fact that it's much cheaper to pay the ObamaCare penalty than it is to pay for insurance, combined with the fact (which Politifact ignores) that ObamaCare removes the biggest incentive to purchase insurance -- the pre-existing condition clause.
I am opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants, partly because it is indeed a crime and we are a nation of law (why begin citizenship as a Federal criminal when there are legal ways to do it?), and partly because I have seen what five-ten year hoops and expenses legal immigrants to the US need to go through, such as physicians from Canada and the UK, and programming geniuses from Singapore. Also, because I believe that vast numbers of immigrants cannot be assimilated. (Case in point: Mexifornia. Case in point: Europistan. Case in point: Dearborn, MI.) And, lastly, people have no idea how impossible it is for an American to emigrate to Mexico. Many American citizens and retirees would like to, if they could. Puerto Vallarta. Cabo. Basically, they have made it illegal to do so. Mexico is hell on immigrants. They want none of them.
Toward the end of the 19th century — when the United States first began to impose meaningful restrictions on immigration — we carved out exemptions for our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, especially Mexico. Mexicans were effectively exempted from the 1885 prohibition on contract labor that marked the first major federal restriction on immigration. When head taxes and other entrance fees were imposed on immigrants in 1907, Mexicans were again given a pass. And when the United States first implemented a literacy test for immigrants (conducted in their native languages) in 1917, Mexicans were specifically exempted from this policy as well.
Most notably, when in the 1920s the U.S. assigned discriminatory, racially motivated quotas that varied among the most common countries of origin, no such limits were imposed on nations in the Western Hemisphere. This substantial carve-out reflected concessions to agricultural employers. But it was also a nod to business interests eager to keep markets open, as well as to the foreign-policy establishment, which worried about offending our neighbors.
It is worth reading. In the end, I suppose, my sentiment is that I would prefer that people who live in crappy countries do what they can to improve them. My blessed and brave ancestors did that here, for me. Half the world would invade the US were they able to do so. If you want to come here, why not try to make your place like ours? We have enough people already, and terrible unemployment with grandiose PhDs working as restaurant waiters. Nothing wrong with educated wait staff, but it's probably not what they envisioned in their Obama Economy.
Bear in mind that I very much enjoy the legal Mexican and Colombian immigrants around here. Great people, family people, ambitious and entrepreneurial, and wonderful restaurants too. They are doing many jobs which unemployed Americans, with their sense of entitlement, spurn. However, it is true that they frequently prefer cash which, as an honest taxpayer, I resent. Not entirely assimilated into American values, know nothing about our history or traditions or even why we are a special place. Willing to work hard, though. It's more about money than political freedom because neither Mexico nor Colombia are totalitarian or oppressive states.
Except for Boston, New England doesn't have the hispanic drug gangs and crims that California has. Most of our crims here are home-grown.
h/t Willisms. Large, interesting chart is below the fold -
Regardless of that info, I'll keep repeating my gun mantra: Government should focus on disarming the bad guys, not the good guys. Begin with Chicago. Disarming the good guys only creates more helpless victims: Milwaukee Sheriff goes national with message to arm yourself.
Police rarely prevent crime. They cannot be everywhere. Their main job is to find crims after the crime. Your own job is to prevent crime against you and your family.
While getting a college degree dramatically improves a person's potential earnings over time, the sheepskin alone is not the sine qua non.
Certainly not, especially in a time when college degrees are so commonplace and when graduate degrees have lost their economic, social, and academic value through dilution.
Listed in the article are not things you learn in college, but things you can learn wherever you are: high school, college, armed forces, crappy job, or on the street. Basic life lessons which I began learning at 12. I have had paid jobs since then. That's where I learned about life even though my book-larnin' has been a blessing to me.
They could or should have said "should learn before leaving high school" because that is when adulthood is supposed to begin. Well before my time, college students wore suits to class. It was a serious adult endeavor. We don't know what it is now, except that they will give you As (or rarely Bs which used to be Ds and Fs) for paying the bill because the customer is always right except in math, physics or chem. Which is why employers like to see the tough courses and the demanding majors in college grads. They grade on curves, so the right stuff shows to potential employers.
Now that I am in a position to interview new hires at our place, it has been a very interesting experience. We are finally doing quite well after post-start-up challenges. I'll write up a post about our hiring process and our hiring filters when I have a chance.
We get 1000 applicants for each job posting at our little shop, but we do not delete the "overqualified" here if they are willing to take a chance with low wages to start.
Gun-rights supporters often say their right to keep and bear arms comes from the Second Amendment.
They're wrong. That right comes, as do all of our rights, from God.* The Founders and Framers presupposed and accepted as self-evident "unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator". None of the Amendments grant us any rights; what they do is forbid the government from infringing on them, as rulers have always done from the beginning of history.
In America, the government does not confer rights. The ideal of freedom, and self-reliance, preceded government. Many immigrants and descendents of more recent immigrants from lands with authoritarian histories don't understand that, nor do many African Americans whose ancestors were involuntary immigrants and even less free than indentured servants or serfs. My ancestors, however, did invent a government to ensure our freedom, and deliberately handcuffed government power for the same reason. Americans do not have delimited rights - the government has delimited powers. That was the radical idea which remains too radical for statists. Such was intended by our Constitution, anyway. Since then, government, intoxicated with its importance, has been at war with our radical Constitution.
The pattern continues: With our fever yet unbroken, we treat weakness and need as some kind of a commodity to be exchanged for products and services, and strength, capability and service to others as some kind of a blight to be tolerated only churlishly, or not tolerated at all. Strength and weakness, each one treated as the other, as the opposite of what it truly is.
Violence by firearms is most prevalent in big cities with the strictest gun laws. In Chicago and Washington, D.C., for example, it is only the criminals who have guns, the law-abiding populace having been disarmed, and so crime runs riot. Cities of similar size in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and elsewhere, which leave the citizen the right to keep and bear arms, guaranteed in the Constitution, typically are much safer. More legal guns equal less crime. What criminal would be foolish enough to rob a gun store? But the government alleges that the citizen does not need this or that gun, number of guns, or amount of ammunition.
It's always gratifying to see a formerly knee-jerk Lefty come around to rational sanity. None of us is required to think the way we thought twenty years ago. We are meant to learn as we go through life.
The concept of an elite guiding national development for the benefit of those it governs remains operative today among blue partisans, but what’s changed is that the blue elite no longer sees a bright future for the masses. It turns out that there are two ways to think about the trajectory of liberal society. The traditional view is that over time the differences between elites and non-elites can and should shrink, and it is the proper goal of liberal policy to ensure that they do.
The other view is to believe that differences of talent and ambition ensure that the world will always be divided between a creative minority and an inert majority, and that the goal of social policy isn’t to eliminate that ineradicable difference, but to ensure that the process of recruitment into the elite is genuinely fair. Once the privileges of race, gender and fortune have been neutralized so that the elite is a purely meritocratic body, the members of the elite are obliged to concern themselves for the welfare of the majority, but there is nothing more to be done about equalizing their condition with that of the elite. Authority must rest in the hands of the qualified; those who score poorly on aptitude tests, don’t do well in classes and/or lack extraordinary beauty, artistic talent or ambition must resign themselves to taking direction from the natural aristocracy that a well ordered society has brought so smoothly to the fore.
Whenever I do a movie review, I always include a clip highlighting the main actor doing his or her thing.
What a disgrace.
It seems as though I'm bedazzled by star power, completely ignoring all the lesser actors; those who really make the movie click.
But not this time.
No, this time I'm determined to focus on the supporting cast, those who really make the movie work; those who provide the surrounding aura so that Keanu Reeves may shine.
Heather on women in combat: "I am not aware of any comparable crusade to create gender-integrated football teams. At least America knows what’s really important."
However, we know that Leviathan's hunger for money and control is never sated. If you imagine that there is ever "enough," just ask a Leftist where the endpoint should be, the point at which government's task is complete.
There will always be a list, the job will never be done, and, still, utopia will never arrive because dystopia always arrives first.
Related: Gerard found that One Cosmos has reviewed Our Logophobic President, with his sarcasm button turned on. One sample:
"A great nation must protect its people from life's worst hazards and misfortune."
Hmm. Does that include protection from the most devastating hazard and misfortune of them all, the tyrannical and intrusive state?
Because if the 20th century taught us one lesson, it is that there is nothing more destructive than the all-wise and all-powerful state predicated on the fantasy that it will protect its citizens from all of life's unavoidable exigencies. I mean, just protect me from domestic and foreign enemies, okay? And stop violating with the Constitution. Then we'll talk.
What are life's worst hazards, anyway? Probably the same they've always been: war. Famine. Disease. Poverty. So, why don't we cure hunger by imitating the Soviet Union and putting the state in charge of food production and distribution? While we're at it, why doesn't the federal government create millions of pretend jobs and lavish its worthless employees with absurdly generous wages and benefits?
Oh, right. I guess Obama noticed how effectively that model is working here in California
America's Baby Bust -
All you can do is laugh. 
I have to confess that I'm a person who far prefers playing almost any sport badly to watching other people do it well. When I was in grad school, we had the best "touch" - read "shove very hard so the guy falls in the mud" - football games, weekly. A joy. Being quick and agile then, I was usually a runner (and a ball-dropper). That football is a slippery bugger.
I don't know how 
The thing is, I'd tend to agree, except for one little hitch:
1 in 4 Swedish Women 
About the