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.
When people ask me why I moved from liberal to conservative, I have a one-word answer: Detroit. I grew up there, on a middle-class grid street in northwest Detroit and a curving street in affluent suburban Birmingham, and I got a job as an intern in the office of the mayor in the summer of 1967 when Detroit rioted. I was at the side of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and occasionally Governor George Romney during the six days and nights in which 43 people, mostly innocent bystanders, died. I listened to the radio in the police commissioner's office as commanders announced, shortly after sundown, that they were abandoning one square mile after another. The riot ended only after federal troops were called in and restored order.
The last few weeks since Edward Snowden released not only the data he had, but also made his name and face public, have been quite interesting. It has caused many heated discussions in my household, as well as between myself and friends. After all, the US is split regarding whether Snowden did something 'wrong' and put our nation at risk. But I don't think anyone properly understands the case. I'll include myself, because I don't think anyone can fully grasp the various threads of law which surround the story. Primarily, though, it's because this involves classified documents and laws regarding these are arcane and biased toward the support of governmental authority rather than Constitutionally derived freedoms. Regardless, there are some essential facts which even the most simple of us can understand and make good judgements based on.
The most common arguments against my stance, which supports Snowden's actions, are these:
We don't have any privacy, and in never having it, we shouldn't worry if the government sees anything if we have nothing to hide. One part of this argument is almost correct but meaningless, the second part is downright frightening if we're so naive as to believe having nothing to hide is a useful rationale.
Snowden broke an oath, and in breaking that oath made the US less safe. Again, a portion of this is correct, but if it's important to you, you must stretch your moral guidelines regarding what an oath is designed to do, and the second part is just plain wrong, even after the NSA has listed its "successes" in thwarting terrorist plots with PRISM.
Mac Donald: The Real Risks of Amnesty - American competitiveness and educational achievement are the worry, not an increased threat to national security.
Mayor Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to compost their garbage. Where? In the hallway of the Plaza Hotel?
Who is "we", by the way? Royal "we"?
As we (Royal "We") frequently say at Maggie's, "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?"
NYC remains the greatest city in the world, and the most fun to visit with endless interesting things to do and jammed with smart, ambitious people from all over the world, but it has plenty of issues to be tackled: public education, debt, too much welfare, union control of everything, governmental over-regulation of everything including the housing market, etc. However, Bloomberg focuses on the small, elitist, feel-good issues: smoking, composting, diet, salt, gays, illegal immigration, and other baloney. Why?
We suspect it's because he gave up on the hard issues a few years ago, and decided to deal with the little stuff. He's a Jewish mother at heart, and a pain in the ass. "It's raining. Don't go out without your rubbers." "They're in my wallet, Ma." Rainy Day Women.
I agree with Palin that Americans, much less tough New Yorkers, do not need to be treated like children and neither need to be, nor want to be, preached to by anybody other than a pastor, priest, or a rabbi. I lived there for a while and love to visit, and it's not a place for sissies. It always was a good place to meet tall, elegant and refined debutantes with pedigrees acceptable to my Mother. I did, a long time ago, and so far, so good.
NOCD was the kiss of death when I was young. Snobs.
Almost every aspect of illegal immigration is illiberal to the core. Respect for the law? The elite decides that for a particular political constituency, the law is now fluid. If you are a Bulgarian M.D. and overstay your visa, beware. A Korean engineer wouldn’t dare to fly to Mexico City and cross illegally into Arizona. Without ethnic bosses and millions of compatriots within our borders, all others are lawbreakers subject to deportation.
They will have your medical records too. They need your medical records.Everybody's. Not to worry, because they won't tell anybody about your herpes or your Bipolar Disorder.
Amusing, and heart-warming, to see how this gal who gamed the college diversity scam got in touch with her true inner racial identity, and was able to build a career on it.
At a paltry 6,900 yards, probably the shortest U.S. Open since the last time they played at Merion in 1981, the pundits were all raving about how it wouldn't stand up to the modern beefed-up player and his technological bag of tricks in the form of 12th-generation Big Bertha drivers and multi-faceted computer-generated putters. They were predicting scores of 8 or 9 under par, easy.
The current tied two leaders after two days of play?
1 under.
There are three playing at even par and the entire rest of the field is in the plus column.
Like I said, a spanking.
Of the four masters, the Open is usually considered the 'nastiest' of the lot. While the others might rely upon ultra-long holes, ultra-slick greens and ultra-tough pin placements, the Open is usually defined by a zillion sand traps and rough that goes halfway up your calf.
And there's even more to it than that, such as the toughness of the grass. Merion uses a particularly tough grass around the greens, a lesson Tiger Woods handily learned just yesterday. The ball was a few feet off the green, embedded in some short, gnarly rough. He took the proper swack at it and the ball plopped about 10 inches. He took another swack and it flopped onto the green a few feet and stopped nine feet from the pin. Welcome to Merion Golf Club, Mr. Woods, still catering to that old, pre-modern tough-love style.
They also don't have pin flags at Merion; they use straw baskets which were originally used to store the players' lunches so they'd stay safely out of reach of deer, caddies, and other course varmints. What this means is that the players are forced to use such ancient, archaic means of determining wind direction as "blowing tree branches" and "clouds". This 'getting back to the basics' approach is enough to throw the strongest player off his game.
Broadcast time is noon (ET), NBC. Original info and slideshow here, updates here. Live streaming is here, fairly decent full-screen quality.
What's going to add to a spanking good time is that Merion was drenched with rain in the week up through Thursday, so it's actually been playing slow these last two days. As things dry out, the fairways will become even faster (giving the ball an even greater chance of rolling off into the rough, something that happened over and over again on a couple of particular holes yesterday, even to the greats like Mickelson and Woods) and, of course, the greens will make a big jump on the Stimpmeter. They were already in the 'scary' category yesterday (it was raining Thursday to the point where they were basically putting around small lakes, so yesterday was the first day in which the course could actually be judged), so today should take a fairly dramatic jump in green speeds.
There's something somewhat interesting about the game of golf:
It's not a game.
It's not a sport.
It's not a contest.
It's not a competition.
It's not really much at all.
It's just you, a field, a ball and some clubs, and the only fellow competitor within sight is a man who might have died twenty years before.
It can be made into a sport, of course, but golf, in its essence, involves no one but you and the course designer, perhaps long passed on these many years.
Even when others are on the field, you're not playing against these players. There's none of the sez you mentality you see in normal sports. It's just you, the course, and the fewest number of swings you can make to see it through to the end.
Except for the pros, where they really do have the option of cutting the corner by knocking it over the trees on a par-5 dogleg, for everyone else there's really just one shot in the bag, and you really want nothing more than for it to be your best shot — and the score and fellow competitors be damned.
In that moment you step up to the ball, it is nothing but essence.
This clip from The Legend of Bagger Vance demonstrates this fairly well.
Parents who read their kids stories about happy, human-like animals like Franklin the Turtle or Arthur at bedtime are exposing their kids to racism, materialism, homophobia and patriarchal norms, according to a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
I think everybody's ideal is to have an internist or family practice doc who knows you well personally as well as medically, and where you can call or come in anytime if you have a concern. For various reasons this has become elusive.
Based on what I have seen, three trends are growing. The first is the Doc-in-a-Box or, more likely, a PA in a pharmacy.
The second is concierge medicine in which, for a modest annual fee, you have unlimited contact - 24/7 - with your generalist.
The third is generalist docs who will not accept insurance but who charge modest fees and will offer a bill that you can send for your own reimbursement, if any. They can charge modest fees because they do not need to hire a large back office staff for coding and billing.
It's a good idea to have a generalist who knows you and your family. With ObamaCare, I think all three of these modes will grow in popularity, especially the last one. They are all working mostly outside the system. They are not likely to want to make time to see you, however, unless they have met you (except for the PA in a box trend).
Generalist physicians, whether Family Practice, Internal Medicine, or whatever, are the ultimate docs. They see everything, major and minor, and know when to refer. People who want to use their Medicare and Medicaid are going to have a tough time with office visits in the future.
I had always aspired to be a country doc, a generalist, in the New Hampshire countryside, but became too fascinated with what I now do. I had dreams of fixing broken arms, stitching up nasty cuts, treating poison ivy, delivering babies, consoling the terminal, sending appendicitis patients to a surgeon friend, etc. It's kind of funny, but my generalist friends tell me that half of their work is Psychiatry anyway.
With the training I had, I suspect that I could still do those country doc things pretty well, but my malpractice insurance does not cover it. In my training, I caught 42 babies. Some were dangerous and complicated. As I have admitted here in the past, I refused to participate in abortions not because I am so religious but because I did not want it in my memory.
I think these teen transgenders are probably just terribly mixed-up confused people. Some days I feel like I am trapped inside a human body, and not a particularly wonderful body either.
But I cope with it. I am taking a cute little gal on a fishing trip off Block Island this weekend. How good is that for June 15? Is that a keeper?
Government requires trust. Government by progressives, however, demands such inordinate amounts of trust that the demand itself should provoke distrust. Progressivism can be distilled into two words: “Trust us.” The antecedent of the pronoun is: The wise, disinterested experts through whom the vast powers of the regulatory state’s executive branch will deliver progress for our own good, as the executive branch understands this, whether we understand it or not. Lois Lerner is the scowling face of this state, which has earned Americans’ distrust.
Whatever inchoate anxieties predated this presidency are now worse: a politics rife with suspicion and retribution, and most of the people believing the government, for starters, threatens their freedom.
We've all known for a while that the DHS has been building a potent paramilitary organization. The justification for that eludes me. Of course, the FBI and ATF are paramilitary too. What am I missing among federal paramilitary agencies?
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 5th July, 2005: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant….”
That was written 8 years ago but I believe, to be more accurate, there has been slight cooling since 1995, not 98.
Dr. Phil Jones – CRU emails – 7th May, 2009: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
"Worried"? I thought we were supposed to get worried if it got warmer, not if it didn't...but I don't really care what the weather does. I like any and all weathers except for tornadoes.
Sugar protectionism is government planning. It is industrial policy —
government picking winners and losers — applied to agriculture. It is
politics supplanting the market in allocating wealth and opportunity.
And it is perfectly all right with 20 of the 45 Republican senators.
Would it be criminal to call this guy an un-American jackass? This guy ought to watch the harassment that takes place in every Question Time in the Brit Parliament. The guy is pathetic. Harassment of others is poor manners, but frequently necessary in life because so many deserve it. Including him.
Medical group recognizes 
Navy to inspect bathrooms for 
Mayor Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to 
Amusing: 
The U.S. Open golf tournament is on this weekend.
There's something somewhat interesting about the game of golf:
Image via 
I think everybody's ideal is to have an internist or family practice doc who knows you well personally as well as medically, and where you can call or come in anytime if you have a concern. For various reasons this has become elusive. 
Where should transgender teens pee when at school? In some precincts, this seems to be a burning civil rights issue.
From George Will's 