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.
Obamacare
Officials Hire Detective Force to Go With Their Armed Tax Agents - See
more at:
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/08/feds-hire-obamacare-detective-force-to-go-with-their-armed-tax-agents/#sthash.URtmUZhH.dpuf
If a guy has had some drinks, is it OK for a gal to have sex with him just to satisfy her immediate lust? Horny women take advantage of guys every day, and nobody says a word about it.Seducing guys is the easiest thing in the world and every female knows it. Vice-versa, not so easy.
Perhaps the "bored youth" need more access to government midnight basketball?
And with this sort of cash lying around, if you got really bored you could take a vacation trip to California or Europe. Or maybe spend it on some summer computer programming courses. When I was a bored youth with only the money I had from my paper route, I'd go fishing or read a book or throw together a little baseball in the neighborhood.
However, I never desired any jail cred. I think jail cred, for these youths, is what Eagle Scout was in my neighborhood. It's a multicultural issue to which we are supposed to be sensitive.
It's not enough to accept any government's explanations for censorship or unlawful detention. We have to consider what compels government to do what it does, in general. That is, the pursuit of power.
The promise to "fight terrorism" may provide a fig leaf, but barely that. "Terrorism" is whatever a government chooses it to be, and this definition will be used by those in power to pursue more power.
my view will be informed by these points:
1. Governments lieabout the scope of their surveillance measures against us.
2. Governments say that what they are doing in the war on terrorism needs to be secret, but governments have an established record of lying about their need for secrecy.
3. When governments say that they are using their powers to fight terrorists, government are lying. Government actually use their expanded powers to pursue whatever they want, including copyright infringement and the War of Drugs. Therefore it would not surprise me in the least if a nominally anti-terrorist measure were stretched here to accommodate a leak investigation.
"... a memo sent to China's universities told them to avoid “seven evil subjects" -- listed as "universal values; western ideas of the freedom of the press; civil society; civic rights; historical mistakes of the Communist party; crony networks; and judicial independence.""
America's Libertarian Moment - A longtime libertarian policy wonk talks about whether the
philosophy can save the GOP -- and why he still doesn't think Rand Paul
can win the presidency.
There is no evidence that people on welfare are lazy. Indeed, surveys of them consistently show their desire for a job. But they’re also not stupid. If you pay them more not to work than they can earn by working, many will choose not to work.
While this makes sense for them in the short term, it may actually hurt them over the long term. One of the most important steps toward avoiding or getting out of poverty is a job.Only 2.6 percent of full-time workers are poor, vs. 23.9 percent of adults who don’t work. And, while many anti-poverty activists decry low-wage jobs, even starting at a minimum-wage job can be a springboard out of poverty.
Thus, by providing such generous welfare payments, we may actually not be helping recipients.
Avoiding poverty is easy. Get a job. Work hard. Save money. Make friends. Get married before you have kids.
When investors and entrepreneurs consider important decisions like where to establish a residence, where to operate a business and, yes, where to die, they compare their options. From a financial point of view, Connecticut turns out not to be a great option.
I love this state, or parts of it anyway. However, it is one of those states, like California, which once were independent-minded and traditionalist Yankee Red, but gradually turned Blue and then finally Dark Blue. They took their prosperity for granted. Farms, inventors, entrepreneurs, booming factories, great private schools, and great universities and colleges; the summer homes of the prosperous of NYC and even Hollywood; a charming coastline great for swimming, sailing, and fishing; old-time Yankee towns and virtues.
Jobs for all. Minimal taxation. A huge middle-class, with more upper-middle than most states had, to spread their money around. Huge Hartford insurance industry. Horses, cattle, fine Connecticut shade tobacco. Old town greens with their Congregational churches. Town Meeting governments where every wise old guy and every crank had his say. The southern half is close to NYC, and the northern half goes to Boston for baseball and football and hockey. Good choices.
Government policies did their damage. State taxes and local property taxes. Unions corrupted urban governments, along with some of the immigrant Mafioso components. Semi-skilled blacks from the rural South moved north in a vast migration for the industrial jobs, jobs which fled this high-tax, heavily-unionized post-War state leaving them with nothing while immigrant Mexicans happily do most of the hard labor and even skilled labor like masonry and construction, and are happy to work in our Dunkin Donuts shops.
For many businesses and many individuals, economics now trump sentimental home-town and home-state attachments.
Probably, like many Californians, government is doing their best to drive me away but it's still home to me. Roots, family, friends, traditions, church, clubs, colleagues. Some of my wealthy friends retire to elite enclaves in Florida for six months plus one day, and spend the rest of their time up here. Not that they really retire, but you know what I mean: they keep working via the internet and phone.
Attorneys and accountants are needed to minimize the damage of the government greed which, unlike private desire for profit, comes to us at gunpoint.
Nothing about Florida holds any charm for me (sorry, Florida readers). It's just how I feel. I have enjoyed visits to the Everglades, and other places in Florida. But not to live. It's just not my subculture.
Now I must be off to a neighborhood cocktail party. Some of the old traditions persist amongst the traditionalist old minority here, where a blazer and tie are still never the wrong attire for a Connecticut Yankee.
Nobody has informed Bridgeport about that yet, but I still hold some hope for that old town if they can starve out the mob, the unions, and etc. "Park City."
The “Cadillac” health plan is a myth - A doctor explains that limiting the scope of
employer-based health care has long been a dream of the establishment
Zinn hated the country which made him millions with his 1930s-style propaganda, and which bought his nice summer place on Cape Cod. He even bought the theater there. There is something twisted about people who welcome opportunity for themselves, but hate it for others.
The alienation of citizens from their government is not limited to people whom the government decides to prosecute. Because so many regulations are so unconnected to anything resembling right or wrong, people who want to be law-abiding find themselves picking and choosing the laws that they deem worthy of respect. It is a pernicious process regardless of whether they get caught when they break the rules. People who feel compelled to judge laws on a case-by-case basis have attached provisos to one of their most basic civic loyalties.
Photo is of the Obamacare law. Nobody in America knows all of what's in it, to this day. No doctor or lawyer ever will and, God knows, no politician will ever bother to know: they exempted all national politicians from it. Teams of hundreds of junior staffers wrote that stuff, and put in whatever they felt like.
The detailed regulations to that pile of crap will fill a library, and every hospital, drug company, medical device company, insurance company, doctor, and nursing home in America will be in violation of something. Work for attorneys, for sure, so I guess that's a good thing.
Our government is insane. My personal definition of insanity is not knowing that you are nuts. If you worry about being nuts, you probably aren't.
When, why, and where, did around 50% of Americans get the notion that government was a good thing rather than the necessary but strictly-limited evil which our founders envisioned? What made tough, independent American pioneers into willing children of the State? Is European-style serfdom contagious?
My ancestors escaped serfdom, at great personal risk. I will be loyal to that. I have no gratitude for government "services." I want to be left alone and never "helped." That's American to me.
There's some old advice about not drawing a gun unless you intend to use it. It's true for individuals and for nations. If you go to war, then you had better mean it. Wars are bloody and messy. They're not for the sort of people who think that putting "Smart" ahead of something automatically makes it better. And "meaning it" means being committed to crushing the enemy.
Washington State fulfills two Jewish laws in one shot... and it would have been even more generous to have been reminded about Washington State’s wisdom in overhauling liquor distribution laws…
Two Laws in the Torah were fulfilled on the same day, and it makes good sense that they become laws at the same time.
The two landmark laws just passed in Washington State, concerning Same-Sex Marriage and the (partial) Legalization of Marijuana, passed on the same day as they might have been considered on the same day because they relate, together, to the list of important prescriptions and proscriptions in Leviticus, the Book Concerning the Levites, the Vayikra, the third of the Great Books that make up The One Great Book, whose thirteenth chapter contains, among other edicts concerning social customs and personal mores, this verse, the 13th, which, it seems, hasn’t often, in the last 2,000 or more years in the history of The One Great Book, hasn’t often, we were saying, been interpreted correctly.
It reads,
"If a man lies with another man, they should be stoned."
Seriously, she was an idiot kid at the time, in a family dispute. Her mess began when the grievance crews showed up and exploited a foolish kid. I feel sorry for her. I think she was just trying to avoid a whuppin' from her father or stepfather or whoever, and quickly got in over her head with her teenage fibs.
In a way, I see both her and Pagones as victims of the race industry.
Flashback:
“Full audio of 1998 ‘redistribution’ speech: Obama saw welfare
recipients as ‘majority coalition’” - See more at:
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=50494#sthash.2xiuODlQ.dpuf
Flashback:
“Full audio of 1998 ‘redistribution’ speech: Obama saw welfare
recipients as ‘majority coalition’” - See more at:
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=50494#sthash.2xiuODlQ.dpuf
In honor of the cool new pic Bird Dog chose for the banner:
Showboat comin' up the river See her lanterns flicker in the gentle breeze I can hear the crickets singin' in the evenin' Old Dixie Lily moving past the Cypress trees.
My little boat, she rocks easy I've been catchin' catfish in the creek all day Oh, and I've never seen ladies like those on the big boats Must be fancy breedin' lets you live that way.
Dixie Lily, chuggin' like a grand old lady Paddles hittin' home in the noonday sun Ploughin' through the water with your whistles blowin' Down from Louisiana on the Vicksburg run.
Papa says that I'm a dreamer Says them mosquitoes a'bit me one too many times Oh, but I never get lonesome livin' on the river Watchin' old Lily leave the world behind.
Republicans still believe in being the party of good government, while Democrats, under lefty influence, believing in being the party of moral government. The more pragmatic authoritarianism of the good government party only paves the way for the moral authoritarianism of the left.
The cycle ensures that the left will always have a right to clean up their messes and to rebel against. They need their Nixons to get them out of Vietnam, try to make their social welfare policy disasters seem workable, and act as the father figure that they can pull down and destroy. They need the Reagans and Giulianis and Eisenhowers to denounce as authoritarian conformists, thoughtless buffoons who prevent progress, because the alternative is the eternally stultifying rule of the left whose existence in a country destroys the left as a meaningful moral force in human affairs.
The authoritarian cycle allows the right to claim credit for cleaning up the messes and the left and allows the left to claim credit for cleaning up the messes of the right. The left blames the right and its "budget cuts" to social welfare programs for causing the mess. The right blames the left's flirtation with criminality and its hostility to the solid citizen. The dynamic is a familiar one from elections.
200 New York Cities 
An 
With good reason. 
