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.
One of my staunchly Conservative brethren at church today (all are my brethren, regardless of their politics) was adamantly opposed to American intervention in a Libyan civil war, or uprising, or whatever the heck it is.
Naturally, we Americans are being labeled "Crusaders." Not an insulting label in my view (because I view the Crusades as an effort to push back against the Moslem invasion and occupation of the Holy Land which closed it off to pilgrims), but I think it's a roll of the dice, maybe too late, partly designed to prove Obama's - or Hillary's - masculine bona fides.
War is always interesting, horror that it is. I do not know whether this all makes sense or not. Latest update: Allied Forces Attack Libya. That article leaves me confused about goals and purposes, but I am not too smart and have never claimed to be.
Our Commander in Chief is partying in Rio but he knows nothing about military matters so it doesn't make any difference. The Libs are having a fit, and the Arabs suddenly are not pleased either.
Now back to yard and farm chores. Spring is coming, and I see the feisty Redwings at my bird-feeder. Lots to get done here to fend off entropy and nature's relentless rebellion against man's efforts to make things his way.
If you can believe it, I have no strong opinion. The Islamic middle east, and its peripheral outliers like Libya will be sad, barbaric, prehistoric dumps where people live crappy lives (by our standards) for a long time.
It's Cocktail Hour, and I am headed out on the town to meet gals and friends in my local dumps, and to be grateful that I am in NYC and not in Libya.
From Vietnam to today, the majority of US public opinion has supported confronting active threats to US security. And, naturally, Americans sympathize with the oppressed and their human rights. However, as the costs rose, time elapsed, and foreign policy dilettantes recoil from the realities of armed intervention, other firmer supporters increasingly bemoan the restrictions imposed by the half-hearted and the saboteurs of winning that not only cost more US military lives but place the end-goals in jeopardy.
In short, the inherent contradiction in US foreign policy is between those willing to undertake the burdens and those who undermine that will. This leads to initial enthusiasms that fade to regrets, and has created a new isolationism among many who favor strong actions but – having paid the price -- are unwilling to become wasted cannon fodder. This is particularly felt among many veterans who have felt the anguish of their efforts being undercut and frittered.
Most – but not all – of the usual advocates of an assertive US foreign policy argue for the US to be clearer and more forthright in standing by those in the Middle East fighting against its satraps – whether allied to or opponents of the US. The situation in Libya is the current front, while those in Tunisia and Egypt fade from the short attention span of the front pages.
The incoherency of President Obama’s foreign policies, from inauguration to now, however, undermines from the get-go the expectations of focus, perseverance, adequate means, and thus favorable results. The only consistent behavior shown by the Obama administration has been weak and dithering resolve to protect US interests coupled with rewarding enemies and undercutting allies.
There is nothing in the Obama administration’s handling of the current revolts in the Middle East that indicates a meaningful learning or reversal of this course.
Indeed, the ongoing dithering and waffling in the face of events only reinforces the view of an administration at best adrift in confusion, ignorance and denial, and at worst purposely dangerous in furthering US interests abroad.
There are good arguments to be made for the US intervening more actively and forcibly in the Middle East revolts, but in my view they pale before the lack of confidence that the Obama administration has labored so hard to deserve.This is especially so given the likely outcomes just enmeshing the US further in the Arab world’s self-inflicted dysfunctionality, with not even any worthwhile gratitude to result.
It is not easy nor consistent with our decency to see innocents or rebels slaughtered. It is less easy to send our sons and daughters into the cauldron created by the Arabs themselves, with only slightly marginal lasting results the best outcome and more likely not even that.
P.S.: Andrew McCarthy at National Reviewgoes into more detail. Read it all, and think, think, think.
THE INTOLERANCE of the avant-garde. “That helps to explain why the ideas of the avant garde have been the same for more than a century, and why, today, avant garde means defending the statist status quo.”
I believe (Jesse) Jackson and company are intentionally distorting the truth, misleading, manipulating and abusing the American people. They have been getting away with it for far too long. It is time they are called out and held politically accountable.
“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people.
But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
"This General Assembly will not be intimidated by nomadic bands of professional agitators on spring break bent on disruption," he said. "We talk through our differences here. Tennessee is not Wisconsin."
Sipp: Marketing, Advertising, and Sales 101. Great video ad for Telluride. Skiied there one week, a few years ago. Great. I hate the chair lifts without bars, though, especially when you're going over canyons. Yikes. I still have the Osprey backpack I bought there for dumping kids' clothing in when it warmed up during the day, and things were shed. You find challenging and exciting skiing there. Same as tennis: keep those knees bent.
When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it's kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury - and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever - spent, gone.
You do not have to be Tocqueville to recognize that the fundamental American character has always featured a powerful determination to get ahead, to build a better future on the basis of current effort and sacrifice. It is not sectional ethnic animosity that stands in the way of implementing socialism in the United States, it is the fundamental American character and the values and attitudes that the country was built upon.
We are not Canada, not because we have blacks, but because we are the rebels who threw off the yoke of monarchy in favor of Liberty and individualism, and Canada was, practically speaking, founded by the Tories who preferred being subjects and dependents. We will never be Canada.
It's all about buying votes in Iowa. Ethanol belongs in beer and cocktails. I don't know why they don't call it "alcohol" - or moonshine, because that's what the pols want us to inflict on our teetotaling chain saws, lawn mowers, and outboard engines.
...where Hanson says that the opposite of the therapeutic mindset is the tragic worldview, I would say that if therapy sees us living within a utopian world where price doesn’t matter and where consequences don’t count, then the alternative would be a world where thrift rules and where you earn what your work is worth.
...it is nearly unimaginable that anyone on the left would support subsidizing programming imbued with even a subtle right-center bias. Let's be honest; if NPR weren't substantially left-leaning, Democrats wouldn't be such huge fans of federal funding. The rest of us can listen to, say, Nina Totenberg's slanted dispatches with the appropriate filter.
As all deniers, skeptics and heretics know, NASA has been the leading pusher of the global warming hoax here in America. While such august agencies as NOAA and the USGS have been firmly on board, NASA has been the real pioneer.
So it should come as no surprise that NASA has just spent another bazillion dollars of taxpayer money in a vain effort to bolster its feeble, warped and biased conclusions.
Or at least it tried to:
So that's not only good news, but, thanks to the hard efforts of the Washington Examiner, quadruply so! Thanks, Washington Examiner!
Data from more than 1,300 four-year colleges and universities in the United States show that the use of race and ethnicity in admissions declined sharply after the mid-1990s, especially at public institutions. The proportion of public four-year colleges considering minority status in admissions has fallen from more than 60 percent to about 35 percent. Among private institutions, the drop during the same years has been notable but less dramatic, from 57 percent to 45 percent. The major decline came after 1995, when the campaign against affirmative action intensified, and schools, particularly public ones, thrown on the defensive, retreated. They were reacting not only to actual litigation but also to its threat. While colleges and universities that are considered elite are more likely to have practiced affirmative action and to have been more protective of it, even they have retreated. Few innovative or vigorous forms of affirmative action are now in play in the face of courts and federal agencies exercising strict scrutiny when examining admissions procedures and in the face of an increasingly suspicious citizenry.
Another reality is redefining, and probably weakening, the meaning of affirmative action. Although few schools publicize the fact, one of the central historic principles giving rise to affirmative action is being undermined. President Johnson’s speech assumed that affirmative action would help the descendants of former slaves (he made no mention of Hispanics). That assumption from yesteryear is out of sync with today’s realities. Affirmative action more and more functions to open the campus not only to the descendants of former slaves but to black students with different cultural and political heritages. Once championed, as in Johnson’s speech, as a means of reparation or restitution, affirmative action now turns out to be helping hundreds and hundreds of young people who have suffered the wounds of old-fashioned American racism little or not at all. More than a quarter of the black students enrolled at selective American colleges and universities are immigrants or the children of immigrants. African-American students born in the United States thus turn out to be more underrepresented (given their presence in the U.S. population) at selective colleges than one might imagine. At some of the most exclusive institutions (Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania), no less than two-fifths of those admitted as “black” are of immigrant origin. Such facts, as they come into view, blunt the force of arguments favoring affirmative action. Diversity and restitution are better reasons than diversity alone, but restitution seems less and less in play.
Diversity itself, moreover, seems weaker and weaker as an argument for affirmative action when many campuses now appear, at least to the public at large, more diverse than ever before. The increasing presence on campus of students from myriad ethnic groups (Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Iranian, and many others) and the consequent reduction of “white” students (witness student populations at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and other schools) undercut the notion that American higher education is still unfairly monochromatic.
Prof. Chace favors affirmative action only for blacks with American heritage.
"...a romantic buzz-bender and a relationship are not exactly the same thing."
Most of the wealthy in America are Dems and Lefties, and even more so with the mega-wealthy. Whiny millionaire should donate taxes. If they don't do that, they're hypocrites.
Although collective bargaining by government employee unions may offend one’s sense of justice, what’s truly unacceptable is government labor’s stranglehold over the local, state, and federal governments with which they bargain.
...the story is also more disturbing in that it batters our faith that modern economics—whether of the Left or Right—can protect us against great instability and insecurity. The financial panic and subsequent Great Recession have demonstrated that the advances in economic management and financial understanding that supposedly protected us from violent business cycles—ruling out another Great Depression—were oversold, exposing us to larger economic reversals than we thought possible. It’s true that we’ve so far avoided another depression, but it was a close call, and the fact that all the standard weapons (low interest rates, huge government budget deficits) have already been deployed leaves open the disquieting question of what would happen if the economic system again lurched violently into reverse. The economic theorems and tools that we thought could forewarn and protect us are more primitive than we imagined. We have not traveled so far from the panic-prone economies of 1857, 1893, and 1907 as we supposed.
Our experience since 2007 has also revealed a huge contradiction at the center of our politics. Prosperity is almost everyone’s goal, but too much prosperity enjoyed for too long tends to destroy itself.