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.
The lady advice columnist suggests she might need therapy for wanting to wait for sex a few weeks with a new date. I'm sure the fellows would heartily agree...
Nice conservative people have no idea of what an institutionalized, ruthless, partially-corrupt apparatus they are up against. It's the big leagues. Voters do not study the Constitution before they go to the polls.
School choice is not a Democrat-Conservative split. Nobody likes the government monopoly and everybody wants school choices, the same school choices that the Obama kids have. Inner city families long for school choices for their kids. The only problems the Dems have are to deal with are their wealthy allies in the teachers unions.
Obedience to arbitrary authority is counter to everything that America stands for. We didn’t reluctantly cede a tiny bit of our personal sovereignty to the government so a bunch of know-it-all twerps could tell us what to eat, what to smoke, what to do and how to live. We did it to allow them the ability to keep order, which they have manifestly failed to do, and to perform a few basic governmental functions, which they have likewise failed to do.
So, a government that has failed to adequately perform the few discrete tasks which it should be performing now wishes to do a bunch of other things which it has no business doing in the first place, and which it will inevitably do badly and thereby cause even more problems than existed in the first place.
I was rummaging through the digital attic yesterday and came across this little gem.
If you weren't hanging around Maggie's during the 2008 presidential election, you really missed something.
The media attention we received was simply fierce.
Ah, they just don't make presidential races like that anymore.
And, unfortunately, that's true. They didn't do a 2012 update, but the above is still active. To make your own, click here. If you want to embed the player on your own site, like above, open the source code of the displayed page and copy the block from <OBJECT> to </OBJECT> to the source code of your own page. It may not be topical, with that glaring '2008', but at least you can file it in your 'Favorite Memories' section.
I present this not only for fun, but as a casual reminder of how easy it's become to overlay video on top of video and have it look 100% perfect. The only scene where they flubbed up was the bus going by, but the rest was excellent.
On the subject, I hereby move we strike the word incontrovertible from the language.
At this very moment, someone out there is doctoring a video to make an innocent man look guilty of murder. This video, the prosecuting attorney will tell the jury, is incontrovertible proof of the defendant's guilt. You will watch the accused murder the innocent victim with (slamming fist on jury box railing) your own two eyes!
It's a word whose time has come and gone.
Looking For Links Dept.
On the subject of video doctoring, I once saw a terrific video on YouTube of a UFO flying along, right there in front of you, big as day. As I recall, it was shot from inside a moving vehicle driving through the brush. Despite years of skepticism on your part, you had to admit that the final proof was right there before your very eyes.
Then they re-played it, this time with a split screen, with the original video on one side and the identical-but-doctored video on the other. When it comes to 'home gimmickry' and the average slob fooling around with modern video editing programs, it was a masterpiece, and I'd like to include it in a future post on the subject.
Also, I have a page of web vids in my Art Gallery where the music really makes the video. I have the half-feeling I've asked this before, but I'll give it another shot.
I once saw a commercial on TV (which I presume has since been videoized to YouTube) that took place in the downtown part of a city, presumably New York. I can't remember if it was a smile or a nice gesture, like helping out a stranger with something small, but it traveled from person to person through the streets, finally making some kind of loop at the end. I honestly don't remember if the music was anything special, but there's a pretty good chance it was, and, if so, I'd like to include it on the page.
Let Them Eat Fat - Listening to the doctors on cable TV, you might
think that it's better to cook up a batch of meth than to cook with
butter. But eating basic, earthy, fatty foods isn't just a supreme
experience of the senses—it can actually be good for you.
Fear of fat has become a national sickness, an all-American eating
disorder: Call it fatnorexia. Where is Uncle Toby from Shakespeare's
"Twelfth Night" lamenting that, under the oncoming reign of Puritan
strictures, "there shall be no cakes and ale"?
There is great risk in that life plan. I often remind people that being put out to pasture is a quite modern invention. Originally an ideal of European Socialists, in the US it did not become a plausible plan until the Depression when it seemed politically useful to take "mature" adults - "seasoned citizens" - out of the labor force to reduce unemployment.
I have never understood what is so ideal about being unproductive and useless with a life of recreation, errand-running, and lawn-mowing. In my experience, people thrive on productivity and responsbility (while bitching about it of course) and frequently decay without it. If Heaven entails floating around blissfully on clouds all day, I have no interest in it. Anybody who wants that can have it today. It's called heroin.
Still, people pursue a degree of economic security, because constant worry is no fun. Except for the most ambitious and talent-driven, it seems to me that most people will be as resourceful as they need to be to try to construct whatever life they desire. I just hate to see people seduced by phoney pop-cultural dreams of lying in the hammock or farting into the sofa for 25 years.
I don't know who Palin's speechwriter is — and, for all I know, she writes them herself — but whoever it is, he or she is just terrific. Practically every third line in her CPAC speech was like something out of a book of Great Conservative Quotes.
Here Ted Cruz, like a good Texan; he comes to town, he chews barbed wire and spits our rust.
No, it's not about the bad guys, it's all about the lead, like solely that chunk of metal did the crime. That's like saying, solely that fork made me fat.
And background checks? Yeah, I guess, to learn more about a person's thinking and associations and intentions? More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President. Shoulda started with yours.
Remember 'No Drama Obama'? If only. Now it's All-Drama Obama. We don't have leadership coming out of Washington. We have reality television.
Whether it's green energy or free Obama phones — or prophylactics — if you don't have a team of lobbyists in D.C. or a cancelled campaign contribution check, well, you're not at the table. You're on the menu.
It was about then that she took a sip from a Big Gulp and brought down the house.
I suppose a lot of politicians use the phrase "we, the people" in their speeches, but the only two politicos who I ever believed actually meant it were Teddy Roosevelt and Sarah Palin.
Man, that article is interesting. Look at the room that thing's in. Linenfold wainscot. Looks like oak. You might already know this, but wainscot means the side of a wagon -- a wain. Pitsawn lumber was hard to come by, so joiners would split green oak to make lumber for everything. Eventually the split wagon sides started getting nailed on the lower half of the walls indoors. They'd carve the panels inside the frames to look like an open book, or a piece of linen, folded up. It was considered barbarous after a while, (gothic) so only the oldest houses in England had it, until it was revived three hundred years later or so. Neato.
Unlike today, if tech companies were generally run by conservatives, the liberal MSM would treat this like the Scandal Of The Decade.
As it stands, I can almost guarantee you this will be the only time you'll hear of it.
Enjoy the moment.
So to speak.
The other day, a commenter in one of my global warming articles (I wouldn't want to mention any names, but his initials are Z.A.C.H.R.I.E.L.) and I were discussing the issue and I asked him if some of the stuff coming out of the AGW debate wasn't just a little bit embarrassing for his side.
Me: How about the EPA declaring your breath is a toxic gas?
Z.A.C.H.R.I.E.L.: Animal respiration is carbon neutral.
Now, I will admit that he's half-right:
The intake part of your breath is carbon neutral.
But the exhalation? As every good-thinking, earth-hugging person knows, your exhalation is a deadly planet-killing toxic gas, verified by the greatest and most impartial collection of scientists on the planet, the respected (some might even say revered) Environmental Protection Agency.
So, wishing to fortify my point with a link, I cruised over to Google and did a search for "your breath is a toxic gas epa".
I came up with zip.
In the first 20 hits, I didn't come up with one article mocking how the EPA had just turned breath into a toxic gas. It was nothing but how bad, bad, bad that evil CO2 is for all living creatures and how the EPA is the only thing standing between you and being boiled alive by an angry rising sea.
Thinking this a tad strange, I went over to Bing and tried the exact same search. In the first 10 hits:
The next 10 hits yielded another three articles along the same lines, which is about what I had originally expected. Given the formidable opposition, getting 3 out of 10 links is probably doing pretty good.
Okay, so what about Google? Would you like to guess how many articles Google displayed before linking to an article that even remotely criticized the EPA's ruling?
It is a mystery as to why Planned Parenthood seems so much in favor of single teens raising children. Seems obvious to me that the "root cause" is kids having sex and not going to Planned Parenthood. One quote from MacDonald:
Even were it the case that poverty indeed causes teen pregnancy, crime, or any of the other destructive behaviors that the advocates claim are economically determined, surely it is better to tell children and teens that they have the power to determine their own fate through hard work and self-control, rather than sending the message that society expects them to fail.
The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from Newtown as they drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that weapons are bad, the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the tool that matters. It’s the man.
Under Obamacare, more and more doctors are becoming employees of large hospitals, where there will be more control over how they practice medicine. Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Dr. Scott Atlas fears this will cause a brain drain in medicine. "Really smart people want autonomy, and when you take that away it's naive to think you're going to get really bright people becoming doctors," says Atlas. "The best doctors could excel at any profession, so why go into medicine if they won't have the opportunity to be their best?"
The people interviewed practice the same way I, and plenty of my colleagues, practice. No insurance, and thus no back office staff and low overhead. No boss, practice exactly the way I want to as I decide with my patients.
The Cruelty of the Hook-Up Culture - At least one Duke University staff member is acutely aware of the problems of casual sex on campus.
First World Financial Problems: Do college or retirement savings come first? How much of my huge cash stockpile should I spend while working on a startup?
Although curbing obesity is the official rationale for restricting beverage servings, the city planned to make exceptions for drinks that have more calories per ounce than soda, such as fruit juices, milk shakes and beer. The exemption for milk-based beverages meant that Starbucks customers could order, say, a Venti White Hot Chocolate with whole milk and whipped cream (640 calories) but not a venti black coffee with four teaspoons of sugar (60 calories). A 20-ounce Coca-Cola, which the city would ban outright from food service establishments, has 243 calories.
“Do you think if you raised people so that you make a school counselor to available to them in cased they’ve been traumatized by someone who was nibbled a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun — do you think if they’re ever called upon to get out those ships and the storm the beaches of Normandy, do you think they’re going to be up to that? ‘Oh no look, the Germans, they’re all holding Pop Tarts! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!’ No society can survive this level of stupidity. These small things are not small. They tell you a lot about the institutionalized stupidity of our institutions.”
Pop tarts worry me because you never know what they might be loaded with. Strawberry jam is dangerous.
Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments. Government nowadays is not just embarrassing, it is — let us not mince words — inappropriate.
First off, a commenter (I wouldn't want to mention any names but his initials are Z.A.C.H.) made a very good suggestion in my AGW post the other day.
According to him, belching volcanoes lower the earth's temperature. This, despite hearing about the dreaded 'greenhouse effect' for the past 50 years.
This esteemed commenter noted that it's estimated when Mt. Pinatubo blew its stack back in '91, the planetary temperature lowered by 1/4 degree.
By implication, then, he was suggesting that we nuke a number of volcanoes, causing them to belch their mightiest into the atmosphere, thereby saving the planet from immolation because of your neighbor's SUV. At 1/4 degree of cooling apiece, I figure about a dozen of them should hold things off for at least a few decades, then we can set off a few more should the need arise.
The commenter raised the issue of having to breathe all that volcanic dust, but I quickly pointed out that (1) at least volcanic dust was natural and organic, as referred to smog and smoke, and (2) breathing volcanic dust was scientifically proven to be better than melting.
As it turns out, though, we're all wrong on this direst of subjects. Me, I've got 8,144 words spread over twoarticles that's about to get flushed down the toilet because of what I just found out.
Almost every major news site carried this story yesterday, some of them right at the top.
Before we get to the big surprise, though, let's first attack this piece like any AGW screed, just for old time's sake.
It begins:
Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest -- in just one century.
Decades? Decades?? Judging geological climatology by decades is like judging how your day went by evaluating one minute. When you're speaking in global geologic terms, 'decades' are irrelevant.
Ice age? Pardon me? Although it eventually earned the sobriquet Little Ice Age, it only covered a few hundred years, hardly a geologic 'age' by any definition. Slight Cooling Trend Period would be more accurate.
And, if we're admitting the Little Ice Age existed, then doesn't that indicate that the temp must have dropped pretty far for it to have earned such a lofty title? Might this extra-warm period it dropped from be the Medieval Warm Period? But, if so, then why was it missing from Prof. Mann's infamous 'hockey stick' graph that so swayed the Kyoto delegates?
And wait, didn't it say this is just one of the century's hottest decades? You mean, there were other hot decades in the distant past — like the Dust Bowl 30's — but without an SUV or coal plant in sight?
And that was just the first sentence of the article.
But, rather than continue in this vein, let's get right to the facts of the matter.
I guarantee you'll be stunned.
If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according to the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University.
So, to sum up, SUV owners should be thanked for helping to save the planet. Remember, without them, as the article clearly states, it wouldbe getting even colder right now, with Florida projected to be the last state with unfrozen summers by 2060. See accompanying picture for specific details.
As usual, Maggie's Farm has some suggestions on how you, too, can fight the impending menace of Natural Global Cooling:
— Let your car sit there idling whenever you're not using it. This might cost you a few bucks in gas, but what price, saving the planet?
— Buy some cows and feed them lots of baked beans to encourage high methane output. Methane, remember, is 21 times better at saving our planet than mere CO2.
— Start a campaign to bring back the SST. Because of the ultra-high altitudes it flew at, it was estimated that it did hundreds of times more damage to the upper atmosphere than regular commercial airliners. Put another way, and with what we've learned today, the higher up you go, the more help CO2 can offer.
— If the SST project seems a bit daunting, you can do the same thing from the comfort of your own back yard. Merely start a compost pile, then collect the resultant methane, pump up large weather balloons with it and release them. Once they hit max elevation and pop, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done. While they cost a bit more, get the ones that don't pop until they hit 50,000 feet as they're deemed to be much more effective than the 30,000-foot model when it comes to preventing the current ice age that's threatening to engulf us all.
The latest scientific results are in, folks. We're literally fighting for the survival of the planet and it's up to each and every one of us to do our part in staving off this menace.
If you won't do it for yourself, do it for the children.
As we often mention here, the (eventual but inevitable) global cooling is a far greater threat than any global warming. The most recent glacial insursion had Manhattan Island under a mile of ice.
Jeff Daniels, from the TV show The Newsroom, lists out America's standing in the world in a few choice categories. (language warning in effect)
I loved the comment about angels. One of my sisters-in-law believes in them. (Or is it fairies?)
Of course, all of the above could be easily dismissed as 'So what?'. Okay, friggin' Uganda beat us in math. So what? It doesn't make any difference. The only bottom-line question is, would you rather live here or in Uganda?
And there's one facet of life that America's so good at that there's not even a second place:
Weather.
Because our one big mountain range is placed exactly where it is, slightly off to one side, our continent has the vast Food Belt in the center, and on the outside of the eastern coast runs the Gulf Stream current, protecting that side of the continent with a belt of warmth. On the west coast, the Sierras and Cascades act as a buffer, keeping the worse ravages the Pacific has to offer at bay.
In South America, the mountain range is too near the coast, so you end up with very little habitable land on one side and lots of barren or swampy nothingness on the other.
The Eurasian continent is simply too big and is becluttered by large mountain ranges, and what little 'food belt' there is lies in some of the poorest, most underpopulated, underindustrialized countries on the continent, the ex-Russian -stan states.
So, when it comes to a nation's overall weather — you know, the stuff you actually have to live in — ours is so bountiful that, as I said, there's not even a second place.
Sorry, greenies. 
Cow manure is 
Burning fossil fuels is
Unlike today, if tech companies were generally run by conservatives, the liberal MSM would treat this like the Scandal Of The Decade.
Fatal Distraction: Teen Drivers And Passengers Are A Deadly Mix
The Obamacare Revolt: 
First off, a commenter (I wouldn't want to mention any names but his initials are Z.A.C.H.) made a very good suggestion in my AGW post the other day.
Some Ivy League Students