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.
You can’t swing a dead cat by the tail these days without hitting a news story about the lack of legislation issuing from the 113th Congress. From CNN to McClatchy to NPR to the L.A. Times, the air is thick with pieces lamenting that the 113th makes “the infamous ‘do-nothing Congress’ of the late 1940s look downright prolific.”
Apparently we’re all supposed to feel really bad about that.
IMO, talking about inequality is a diversion from talking about how lousy the economy is for almost everybody except for the very rich - and for government employees
The light bulb ban
provides a useful window into the mindset of liberals: the debate has
nothing to do with which bulb is better, but rather who gets to decide
Almost every act regarded in the mid-20th century as a vice was, by the opening of the 21st century, considered a virtue. As gambling, obscenity, pornography, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, abortion and sneering disaffection became The New Virtue, government at all levels began to move in on the action, starting with casinos and currently involving, in several states and the District of Columbia, an officially approved and bureaucratically managed narcotics trade...
...the next time you see/read/hear about "dark money" and ALEC or the Kochs
in your media outlet of choice, and you don't see anything about Tides,
it's time to fire your media outlet.
Easily done. Tax the businesses, the prosperous, and the middle class until they move out. Camden, NJ, has excellent economic equality, while NYC is the place half the planet would like to move to for risk and opportunity. And for the generous Welfare, too.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.
Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher. At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.
And this is for the median. Those below him -- half of all households -- would be shut out of what is considered middle-class lifE...
10,988,269:
2013 Closes With Record Number on Disability Getting Highest-Ever
Monthly Benefits - See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/10988269-2013-closes-record-number-disability-getting-highest-ever#sthash.sYxSrXaK.dpuf
Every now and then... something truly egregious bubbles up from the dismal pit of pseudo-intellectual academic lucubration, some special gem of fatuous, wood-pulp darkening nonsense that even now, at the fag-end of Anno Domini 2013, has the capacity to spark a little frisson of nauseated wonderment in this jaded breast. As it happens, the latest such production comes to us courtesy of our friends at the American Studies Association, that’s to say it comes from its official literary organ, the American Quarterly. Perhaps your subscription to this pointless agglomeration of polysyllabic, reader-proof grievance-mongering has lapsed. Mine has, too. But my fellow connoisseurs of repellent academic nonentity will not want to miss “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” by one Greta Gaard, “an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker.” (According to an opus called Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, she is “one of the most influential ecofeminist scholars.” Ponder that.)
...the Robertson-A&E dust-up was merely the latest in a long — very long — line of leftist attempts to impose supposedly sophisticated moral pretensions on the rest of the country.
This laughable air of moral superiority has been at the root of everything from the violence of the anti-Vietnam War rioters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and Obama pal Bill Ayers’ Weathermen to today’s Occupy Wall Street crowd. And all manner of things in between.
In 1969 alone this seemingly bottomless well of sniffy moral arrogance and condescension propelled student strikes or shutdowns at some 400-plus universities...
The NYT tries to pull Hillary’s Benghazi acorns out of the fire, they get burned
Class-consciousness has always been a fact of American life, but rarely is it about how the poor, or even the middle class, feel toward the very rich. It has been about how the professional class—lawyers, journalists, administrators, academics—feel toward the financial class. It's what Volvo America thinks about S-class America.
That idiot you knew freshman year, always fondling a lacrosse stick, before he became the head of his fraternity—his bonus last year was how much?
"...how is it that paying 1.3 million Americans not to work creates jobs? That one has never been explained. Every respectable economist I've consulted states that when unemployment benefits run out, a greater number of workers return to the labor force."
He calls it "Wonderland." Dr. Essex is Prof. of Applied Mathematics at Univ. Western Ontario, and former director of its theoretical physics program. The math part isn't too bad:
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk- What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
Single parenthood accounts for most of it. It's a poor life plan, unless wealthy. Some people never plan their lives at all. That's not being an adult. However, people always change paths, and that works too.
Environmentalism as Fundamentalism - The environmentalist religious paradigm actually makes it more difficult to protect the environment.
Martin Scorsese’s new movie hits the ground running with a montage of dwarf tossing, sex grappling and extreme drug behavior of a sort I don’t believe I’ve ever seen on-screen before. Then it gets really crazy.
A better secular name for Christmastime than Festivus would be Frenzius. You could barely get in the door of my neighborhood bookstore or wine shop today. Still, everybody was cheerful and mannerly. Tonight, people won't be able to fit into church to light the candles, to hear that same old eternal Christmas story, and to sing the carols.
For many years now, the drill has become familiar. Someone speaks out in favor of maintaining the traditions of marriage, and instantly the gay rights organizations are up in arms, making threats, filing lawsuits, and mobilizing protests. Then, instead of Christians putting up a serious resistance, there is apathy, apology, and defeat. The script was repeated over and again, time after time.
This time was different.
We have nothing against gays here at Maggie's. We just hate thought police, thuggishness, and speech codes..
Well, we finally took the family Christmas card photo on Saturday afternoon, after brunch, so I doubt the card made from it will arrive by Christmas Eve. We forgot to take the photo at Thanksgiving and it's difficult to get everybody together in one place at one time. You do the best you can. Christmastime is hectic, too much packed into a short while.
How come it's OK for Muslims to hang gays and to hate them, to endorse bestiality, child marriage/sex and rape, but not ok for some Christians to opine that homosexual behavior goes against Biblical teaching while still loving them as God's children?
Multiculturalism gets quite complex. Above my pay grade, as Obama would say. Or is everybody just scared of Muslims? Nobody is askeered of Christians, and rightly so. Christianity teaches that we are all fallen, all sinners, all in need of redemption through Christ. I believe that, and I do not dislike gays at all although I do find all of the LGBT stuff very weird and distasteful.
New Lawsuit over San Diego Sea Lion Poop
Sued for a medical study?
An entrepreneurial colleague has a smart start-up in 
A book: 
Time to Stock Up on Incandescent Bulbs 
Tablets a hit with kids, 
Hotel Ducks Gone Wild 
Well, we finally took the family Christmas card photo on Saturday afternoon, after brunch, so I doubt the card made from it will arrive by Christmas Eve. We forgot to take the photo at Thanksgiving and it's difficult to get everybody together in one place at one time. You do the best you can. Christmastime is hectic, too much packed into a short while.
Bloomberg’s ultimate victory: NYC bans e-cigarettes in indoor public