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.
Perhaps nothing reflects the descent of the yeomanry than the fading role of the ten million small businesses with under 20 employees, which currently employ upwards of forty million Americans. Long a key source of new jobs, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth from 50 percent in the early 1980s to 35% in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report, revealed that small business “dynamism”, measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century.
Instead of stemming from the grassroots, the recovery after the latest crash was led, unlike in previous expansions, by larger firms while small company hiring remained relatively paltry. Self-employment rose, but increasingly this took the form of sole proprietorships as opposed to expanding smaller companies with employees. By 2013, smaller firms with under one hundred employees added far fewer jobs than in the prior decade. Unlike prior post-war recoveries, since 2007, grassroots companies did not lead the way out of recession and continued to lose ground compared with larger companies that either could afford the costs or avoid the taxes imposed by, the Clerical regime.
Well, happy Monday to you. That's Bird Dog at the beach. He's older than that now, and the trucks are rustier. He left me in charge, and I ran out of his bourbon yesterday, and he won't be back for a week. He asked me to look after his Australian Goldfish, too, and that's not going so well, either. I assume they're Australian, because they're floating upside down right now, and they're so somnolent, I think they think it's nighttime. Ah, well, here's the links:
When deciding whether Google should spend millions or even billions of dollars in acquiring a new company, its chief executive, Larry Page, asks whether the acquisition passes the toothbrush test: Is it something you will use once or twice a day, and does it make your life better?
The New York Times assumes Google is full of geniuses. I don't. They're just sitting on a pile of cash. They have little idea how they got it, and it should have been distributed to investors and paid as taxes. Instead they hoard it and squander it. Nothing but their hijacking of the old fashioned Yellow Pages has ever made a nickel.
Well, why not go out there and change your view of humanity today. Drive to a Starbucks in a unionized cab, and try not to run over the homeless people playing soccer in the parking lot. But whatever you do, don't like anyone on Facebook.
The premise behind campus activism is always the same. The college campus is a microcosm of the larger world. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens at Oberlin or Sweet Briar is imagined to rock the foundations of the old order. Patriarchy trembles. The Zionist Entity is called to account. The coal-breathing capitalist Earth warmers feel the chill of a generation walking on their graves.
Well, Bird Dog must be halfway to Canobie Lake Park by now, wearing black socks and flip-flops and an "I'm With Stupid" T Shirt his wife gave him for Christmas back in Reagan's first term. It's faded a bit with washing, and the arrow on the belly under the text that used to point to his companion has been worn away entirely by the rusty chrome arm of the mower every Saturday, so it's kind of a Zen thing now. Have fun, Bird Dog.
"The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do."
At any given time, there are always a few people that see things as they are, not as they wish them to be. If you put a gun to my head, I'd have trouble naming them right now.
A Google employee forgot to remove Post-it notes and it’s fueling a lawsuit Google, Facebook, Apple et al. are run by the worst kinds of greedy grasping turds ever seen in commerce. They would have had a back desk with no responsibilities in any Gilded Age business that produced anything worthwhile.
They've awarded this year's Fields Medals. It worries me that I completely understood one of the descriptions, because I'm a dolt. I thought they only gave out phony Nobels.
Well, Bird Dog has abandoned the farm for, er, greener pastures, and left me in charge again. You reap what you sow, big feller. I’m going to link to sites without tone. I’m going to link to sites without sand. I’m going to link to sites without panache. I’m going to link to sites without cachet. I’m going to link to sites without je ne sais quoi. I’m going to link to sites that don’t know which fork to use. I’m going link to sites about sausages. You heard me: sausage links!
Still the greatest website on these here Interwebs: Zombo.com
The truck in front of us turns off, revealing an ancient, angry man standing in the road ahead. He has a vast white beard and looks like one of the grumpier Old Testament prophets. In his hand he holds a long wooden staff. Threading his way between cars, the man singles out a stopped truck and starts beating on it as hard as he can with the staff, yelling the whole time.
Don't say that he's hypocritical. Say rather that he's apolitical."Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down; that's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Calm down, civil liberties traditionalists. Policemen have been looking at your face as you walk by since Robert Peel invented them. Besides, if you fill out a 1040 form, you have no rights. The rest is conversation.
For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner. He also wrote poems and speeches that he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged.
Writing everyone a check for $12,000 is cheaper than all federal and state poverty programs combined. But then who would write $12,000 checks to re-election campaigns for politicians? Won’t someone think of the poor politicians?
General William Tecumseh Sherman burned the city of Atlanta in 1864. He warned: “I fear the world will jump to the wrong conclusion that because I am in Atlanta the work is done. Far from it. We must kill three hundred thousand I have told you of so often, and the further they run the harder for us to get them.” Add a zero to calibrate the problem in the Levant today. War in the Middle East is less a strategic than a demographic phenomenon, whose resolution will come with the exhaustion of the pool of potential fighters.
I’ve never seen Spengler be wrong about anything. And he’s right in advance, the only kind of right that matters.
Black guy is fed up with the Ferguson idiocy and criminality which tarnishes the image of black Americans (h/t Vanderleun and others). Devastatingly right, and the anti-Sharpton, anti-race-pimp.
Why Do Most Jews Stay with Obama? When will American Jews finally realize that the endgame of Obama’s "Progressive" dream will be their nightmare?
The GOP Can Attract Young Black Voters—And Already Has - One in five black men under age 30 voted for Romney; youngest 'millennials' lean even more conservative.
Rising to the Authoritarian Challengeby Daniel Calingaert- U.S. policy on democracy support, especially
during the Obama administration, has been largely reactive. We seem to
be constantly playing (and mostly losing) a giant game of Whac-a-Mole.
Supporting democracy doesn't work out well. People frequently elect dictators.Democratic republics are best suited to places with the cultural and historical underpinnings to support it.
No one at all, other than me and my friends, many security guards, bodyguards, police, residents of Washington DC, Brinks drivers, rural folks, minimart workers, border guards, the secret service, responsible homeowners, pilots, etc etc. Plus some bad guys too.
You should be happy when the market tumbles - If you are continuing to add money to an investment fund, you're better off with lower stock prices in the short term.
The Obama-Paul paths in foreign policy are immoral in
undermining self-preservation and in tossing lives into avoidable horrors. Barack
Obama and Rand Paul’s foreign policies are similar in their appeal to tiredness
to argue for US non-involvement with the difficulties of the world. This
amounts to an existential defeatism to avoid the difficulties of being involved
in the world by avoiding the moral and physical exertion of US power even when
and where it could be effective. The extremism of this withdrawal endangers our
security by encouraging the spread of barbaric enemies sworn to our
destruction. Along the way, many millions of innocents are slaughtered or
brutally enslaved.
Both Barack Obama and Rand Paul are products of trends in
thinking about foreign policy that are imbued with erroneous lessons.
Barack Obama epitomizes those who at a young age adopted the
anti-Vietnam war mantras of the US evilly standing athwart the path of leftist
myths supporting communist expansionism thinly masked as harmless peasants
uprising against overlords. Although letting themselves be manipulated by hard
leftists at root they were selfishly trying to avoid the draft and continue
their peaceful existences in the bosom of US wealth and comforts. Some became dedicated
to foreign foes but most to leftist myths. They ignored that the incrementalism
that dribbled our military into the Vietnam war shucked the tried-and-true
military and political strategy of applying overwhelming force and allowed the
enemy to match and adapt. At every opportunity they created new myths of our
brutality and did all they could to blacken the reputation of US soldiers and
Marines, while ignoring the gross and purposeful policies and practices of
terror and slaughter practiced by the communists. Then, when at huge costs we
still succeeded by 1972 in eliminating the communist threat to the South and
building largely self-reliant Asian nations that were formerly at risk, the
dedicated anti-Vietnam apparatchiks led hysterics in canceling our pledges to
the South of arms, air support and logistics, which led to the loss of South Vietnam
in 1975.
Defense of this mindset requires belief that Vietnam was
unwinnable among Barack Obama and most of his foreign policy supporters. Adherence
to this critical error has led their attachment to opposition to every forceful
US foreign policy exertion since.
Rand Paul was raised in this defeatism as spread through the
media and academia by the anti-Vietnam cohorts of Obama. But Paul does not see
the US as evil. Instead his defeatism masks itself in an isolationism based on
a selfishness that believes it can ignore and be insulated from the threats
from abroad and believes that the application of US power is not worth the
bother. In these key respects it shares the existential defeatism among Obama
supporters. This attachment among Paulist isolationists similarly requires
ignoring US successes and concentration on less beneficial outcomes.
Due to the shortage of US military forces following the
demilitarization during the Clinton years, Bush did not have the time nor
support among those more interested in domestic policies to build our forces to
the levels needed to match our commitments. We withdrew from Afghanistan after
2002 and then haltingly re-committed US forces after allowing the taliban to
rebuild, we committed too few forces to Iraq until the temporary and winning “surge”
of 2008 and then too hastily and excessively withdrew our military thus wasting
movement toward a functioning and more representative government and allowing
Iran to expand its influence in Iraq.
The results in encouraged and enlarged hostile terrorists
across the Middle East, furthered by the Obama delusions about an “Arab Spring”
allowing extremists to wipe out those more moderate, are highly threatening to
the security of the US and the West. The terrorists have spread widely in the
territory and resources they command. They are vocal about and capable of
striking us at home.
The Obama administration and most of the media are being as
avoiding and negligent as before 9/11. The Rand Paul isolationists are allies
of this avoidance of self-preservation, while also avoiding the widespread
horrors suffered by millions in the region.
The very limited and very late small measures by the Obama
administration are unlinked to a strategy but mere thin window
dressing to hide its negligence and unlikely to bear positive results. Rand Paul, at least
avoids these lies but also avoids the paths that are necessary.
Hillary Clinton mouths empty words about being a bit more forceful than Obama. She tries to position
herself as wiser despite the contrary evidence of her uselessness as Secretary
of State. Given a choice between Hillary
Clinton and Rand Paul in 2016, the world will suffer more insecurities,
millions more suffer, allies defect, and the US and West will likely be
punished by more 9/11s or worse.
Both the Obama and the Paul
foreign policies share a common immorality of failure to protect ourselves nor
care about the fate of others. The big question is whether the American
electorate will endorse their immorality.
The E.U. is just the latest example of the powerful Enlightenment idea that human nature and civilization, through the expansion of scientific knowledge, are progressing away from the cruelty, oppression, and collective violence created by irrational superstition, religion, and ethnic or nationalist loyalties. Once liberated from this destructive ignorance, people can create political and social orders that will promote peace, social justice, political freedom, and prosperity. Most important will be what Immanuel Kant, in his influential 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” called a “federation of free states” that would form a “pacific alliance . . . different from a treaty of peace, . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars.” Kant predicated the possibility of such global peace on “the uniformity of the progress of the human mind.” A universal human nature progressively becoming more rational and possessing more knowledge about itself and the world can craft a global order that would lessen if not eliminate the evils that had afflicted the human race for all of its previous history.
Are there any limits to what is in America's interest, diplomatically or militarily? Leader of The Free World (not that there is much of that to lead). I do understand that in a globalized new world, everything affects everything else so everything directly or indirectly affects the US, but nasty and wicked things happen everywhere all the time, and always have since the Fall of Man.
Updated list of 29 – Actually 30 – excuses
for the 18 year ‘pause’ in global warming – ‘If you can’t explain the
‘pause’, you can’t explain the cause…’
The modern territorial state, as a post-imperial era expression of nationalist ideology in the West, does not so well fit the Arabs (and many other non-Western ethno-linguistic groups) whose history supplied none of the predicates.
Who could? The UN, the UK, Germany, France, the US, Israel, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, Italy, the Saudis, Turkey, Quatar, Iran, Russia, Iraq, etc. - all could help easily, within hours. Who will step up today?
All they need is water, food, tents, shovels, and maybe some machine guns air-dropped to them prevent a Biblical-style genocide. Where is everybody? On vacation?
I see no reason for Americans to give a darn about Ukrainian politics. Putin may be a lowlife, but he is simply pursuing his national interests as he sees them, and that is fine with me. Trade wars are juvenile. It seems as if at least half of Ukrainians want to be affiliated with Russia. Who cares?
'Siri, 
World’s oldest eel dies at 155 in Swedish well
Updated list of 29 – Actually 30 – excuses 