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 shrinkage of government is supposed to be more severe here than in America, where the supposedly “savage,” “draconian,” etc., cuts recently agreed to mean that for a decade Washington must scrape by on $43.7 trillion rather than $46.1 trillion. Really.
The British state is morbidly obese. For a third consecutive year, government will spend more than half the gross domestic product — partly because half of all jobs created during the 13 years of Labor Party governance that ended in May 2010 were in the public sector.
Britain’s debt, now 62 percent of GDP, is scheduled to rise to 71 percent in 2013-14 before declining. Government devours 47 percent of national income.
Let me speak plain. That’s part of the problem in the black community. And many other communities. But a particular problem in the black communities, we have too many men making too many babies that they don’t want to take care of and then we end up dealing with your children. We’re not running a big babysitting service. We’re running a big government and a great city. Take care of your children. All of them. All of them.
Insty: ON THIS WEEK’S INSTAVISION, I celebrate 10 years of blogging and talk about where the blogosphere has been, and where it’s going.
... long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime.
It turns out we are the ones who failed Him. We weren't prepared for a mega-dosage of awesomeness. We were too dimwitted to grasp the decency of central planning. And the insistence of troublemakers to engage in debate and vote, in fact, is the most serious threat to this nation's future.
As in the case of the pitiful Maureen Dowd. What asteroid does she live on? I don't have the time or the patience to point out every error of logic and fact in her piece. It is just mind-boggling. She needs to get out in the world a little.
Until marriage is restored as the norm for child-rearing in the inner city, black and Hispanic crime rates and education failure will continue to be disproportionate. No government program can possibly compensate for the absence of fathers in the home and the absence of the cultural expectation that men will be responsible for their children.
Also,
The mayor is eager to talk about marriage for gays and lesbians, but he cannot bring himself to use the word when it comes to black and Hispanic heterosexual couples. His initiative proposes to ensure that both parents are “fully engaged . . . even if they don’t live together.” But men who have fathered several children by several different women—the dominant pattern of inner-city “multipartner fertility” today—are unlikely to be able to engage “fully” with all their children, even if such out-of-home engagement were an adequate substitute for a married father in the home.
Bloomberg, Soros, et al are insane. That's not a diagnosis: it means that they are not in reality. I doubt that either of them have ever sat down and talked to a 16 year-old single high school drop-out mother of three who happily and willingly consigned herself and her kids to a life of dependency and dysfunction. Have a kid? Get your own apartment! And a check from the city! And free medical care and food stamps! Why not? Their moms did the same thing. Normalization of dysfunction and dependency.
The government incentives are perverse, and it's on our nickel.
Isn't it time for the New York Times to run another 10,000 word essay about how any minute everyone is going to flee the suburbs and flock to the cities, because we all know the quality of life is so low out there in the sticks?
How do these people have any credibility? How do they get away with this? It’s mind boggling that its gotten to a point where the EPA is dictating policy based on what is an obvious fraud, or if you want to be gentle about it, creates enough doubt to back off.
This is looking like another ‘annus horribilis’ for Barack Obama, the ‘hope and change’ president who, on current trajectory, seems destined for failure, with a legacy of declining prosperity at home and dispiriting American weakness abroad.
It's sort of amusing to consider that these are the Riot Police we're watching scurry away like rabbits. One can only imagine what regular old bobbies would do in that situation -- after they wet themselves, I mean.
Lots of websites, this website included, post videos instructing you not to talk to the police. Everyone runs into the street with a video camera, traffic stop and armed robbery alike, trying to catch a YouTube-able Rodney King moment to get their fifteen minutes of Internet fame by proxy. No one has to do that in England, there's a camera everywhere already.
This is what you get when the police know there's nothing but trouble in it for them to protect your homes and businesses, and ultimately, your lives. God help you if you don't sort your recyclables, though.
Oh, sure, you think 'alternative energy' is corny or worthless or just downright silly, right? And the worst form of all is that goofy solar power, right?
Maybe you're just not using it for the right application.
The suit uses conductive thread and thin photo-voltaic panels, creating a sort of chain-mail fabric that gives the bikini a medieval armor-meets-21st century look. The solar power absorbed by the panels charges any gadget that can be plugged into the suit's USB ports, sewn right into the fabric.
Schneider is in the process of creating a men's swimsuit using the same technology to chill beers, cutely-dubbed the iDrink.
Article is here, and a big hat tip to Maggie's Valued Reader™ John who runs On The North River.
Every prognosticator on television news shows is proved wrong about everything within a week's time. Paul Krugman can't predict what's going to happen at dinnertime while he's having lunch. Newspapers can't even tell you what already happened. But a bunch of clowns in 1979 got it about right. Americathon:
They miscast a John Edwards lookalike as President Chet Roosevelt instead of an Obama clone, but they did predict that China would go capitalist, so we'll give them a pass. I wonder if we'll try going capitalist anytime soon? You know, after the telethon.
Last year’s choice by my alma mater CUNY’s Brooklyn College of the sole Common Reading book distributed to all incoming students for discussion and work in required English classes was particularly marred by the author’s additionsof anti-US and anti-Israel comments and statistics that were radical and fraudulent. I had a rolein raising the issue to national attention and criticism.
This year’s choice – Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat -- probably won’t raise as many hackles, as the focus is less a prominent political hotspot, Haiti. That may indicate welcome increased sensitivity by the selection committee, but this year’s choice still suffers most of the deficiencies as last year’s.
The book’s primary theme is the author’s upbringing in Haiti, separated from her parents who had immigrated to the US, she and brothers later joining them, and the relations among the extended family. However, the book’s critical attitude toward the US role in Haiti’s sad history of violence, poverty and instability, and the death in immigration detention of the author’s aged uncle, are strong secondary themes that provide the mileau for the tale.
One may argue that these are the author’s acquired views in this personal narrative. But, the prominence of those secondary themes brings the book, and the college, directly into major current political arguments over broader US foreign and immigration policies. This slant is in stark contrast to the author’s reflections exclusion of gratitude to the US for the youngsters’ success in the US. She is an acclaimed writer, her brothers also established in white collar jobs at the time of writing the book. Further, the book does not provide enough political context to allow a better understanding of the author’s criticisms of US policies in Haiti or US immigration practices.
In short, the book is part of the “victimology” and Leftist memoir literature so popular among our liberal elite, compared to earlier immigrants’ books about thankfully escaping repression and poverty in their countries of birth, then struggling and succeeding in the freedoms in the US.
That isn’t to say there isn’t enough in the book to show the horrible conditions in Haiti, that reading between the lines shows the youngsters’ success in the US, that an autopsy of the 81-year old uncle’s death revealed the cause as a previously unknown pancreatic condition, or that the author’s grandfather and uncle had been rebels and the family’s politics aligned with critics of the US in Haiti.
The book is still a poor choice for launching discussion of the political issues raised by the author. It is marred by the underlying anger of the author and her lack of appreciation of the US, her presentation of the US as an oppressive presence in the consciousness of her family, and the lack of underlying contextual details about US foreign and immigration policies. The incoming student will likely read or hear in the classroom discussions little else about the issues from broader or conflicting perspectives or facts.
Amongthe laudatory comments by some Brooklyn College faculty for the book, a senior professor there – Robert Cherry -- raises some of the problems with the book:
Family Tales in the Service of a Political Agenda
Brother, I’m Dying has little about the daily life of Haitians; their jobs, social and cultural institutions. Instead, Danticat focuses on violent episodes in Haitian history: Trujillo’s killings on the Dominican border; U.S. occupation, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes repression, and Haitian riot policy behavior. Rather than providing the reader with detailed information, Danticat chooses to promote emotional outrage by presenting tales of family members that accompany each of the episodes.
How true are the tales she has been told? How much has she embellished these accounts? What we do know is that telling these tales as first‐person accounts make them seem factual and puts faces and lives onto important episodes in Haitian history. In particular, Brother, I Am Dying uses Danticat’s family’s tales to invest its reader with emotional outrage at U.S. Haitian policy.
For me, this became clear when she placed Uncle Joseph’s childhood tale after this chilling account of his death in a US immigration detention center. Danticat writes, “Fearing that he might be captured by the Americans to work in the labor camps … Granpe Nozial ordered him to never go down the mountain.” Family illness, however, forced Joseph to seek medicine in town where he sees [US Marines] “white men …kicking the thing on the ground as though it was a soccer ball to one and other with the round tips of their boots. Taking small steps to stand the same distance away as other bystanders, my uncle finally saw what it was: a man’s head.” Thus, from the beginning of his life until its end, Joseph experienced first hand the inhumanity of U.S. policies towards Haitians.
While I sympathize with her pain, and even sympathize with her political agenda, it does not negate my concerns. Absence its political agenda, the book offers little to inform us about the Haitian experience. Brother, I’m Dying should be supplemented by panel discussions of the important issues it raises: U.S. Haitian policy, Immigration Detention Centers, and the issues children face when they are reunited with their parents in the U.S. when they are teenagers.
Professor Cherry informs me that the English Department is considering such discussions. If so, one may expect the Left and liberal leanings of the English Department faculty to emphasize the charges of economic imperialism prompting the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934, but notthat the dominance of its economy by German immigrants was feared in the midst of WWI, the huge building of infrastructure there by the US, or that its liberal constitution was written by then Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt.
One may expect the criticisms by pro-immigration lobbies that detention practices are substandard and harsh, but not that the deaths from all causes in detention are a tiny fraction of detainees (about 107 out of over 2.5 million, about 5 per 10,000, during 2003-2008; even the January 2010 New York Times reportof critics says, “In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.”). The Center for Immigration Studies, opposed to liberal immigration policies, contendsthis is a much lower rate of death than in US prisons. The comparison, however, raises many apples and oranges measurement difficulties that need to be clarified. Both sides agree that many improvements to detention policies and practices have been made in the past six-years, after the author’s uncle died in detention, and both sides agree that there is much – if differing – that needs to be done. – Of note here is that the author’s 81-year old uncle, with a valid visa to enter the US, was fleeing gangs that wanted to behead him and asked for temporary political asylum instead of just entering the US on his visa and overstaying it as so many do, so he entered the detention-adjudication system for a few days, dying there from a previously unknown pancreatic condition despite blood/urine and scan tests provided.
I’ll add a personal note. The apartment that the author’s parents lived in was in my Flatbush neighborhood in Brooklyn, less that 20-years later. I walked a mile to Prospect Park. Their apartment was a block away from the park. The apartment buildings where her parents lived were considered much better than the one in which I was raised. The author’s father was a tailor who in the US became a gypsy cab driver. He raised and educated successful children. My poor immigrant grandparents were, also, tailors, who sewed until retirement for poor health in their ‘60s, and raised and educated a successful family (my aunt was in the first classes at the new Brooklyn College). I drove a cab on graveyard shifts while at Brooklyn College, and like the author’s father was mugged. We were raised to be appreciative of the freedoms and opportunities in the US. It seems that the author of Brooklyn College’s 2011 Common Reading is less so. That is a distinct problem plaguing colleges and the US today.
Naturally, police never know what they are walking into and would be more comfortable if nobody had guns - or knives or baseball bats either - but Chief McCarthy is way out of reality. A quote:
..the culture of any given community will determine its level of violence, with gun laws making a minor difference at best. The devastating cultural changes impacting society -- and the black community in particular -- during the 1960s are largely to blame for the violence we see. Political scientist James Q. Wilson summed up that cultural change perfectly, saying, "[P]eople abandoned the idea that self-control was the standard by which life should be led." The current conditions on the South Side and in ghettos around America are a direct result of generation upon generation of excuses -- wrapped up in social-science garb, righteous indignation, and racial sensitivity -- but excuses all the same. The young men committing violent crimes today have been steeped in generational irresponsibility, and Chicago's police superintendant has kept up the flow.
Most people in my community own guns (legally), but we have not had a murder here in 70 years. And that was done by an intruder, from outside town.
“Our country is founded on a sham: our forefathers were slave-owning rich white guys who wanted it their way. So when I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’ That you can have a gay parade on Christopher Street in New York, with naked men and women on a float cheering, ‘We’re here, we’re queer!’ — that’s what makes my heart swell. Not the flag, but a gay naked man or woman burning the flag. I get choked up with pride.”
Janeane Garofolo, who not only knows no history but who also ignores the fact that the Founders made it possible for those disgusting Christopher St. displays to occur.If you can stand it, more ugly political quotes via Moonbattery
A mountain of Cape Cod steamer clams with garlic bread and a couple of beers will be my supper tonite. Any dessert would ruin the experience by erasing that clammy goodness. I always have a cup or two of the broth. Sometimes I eat the necks, sometimes I don't.
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
He’s out of bullets. He’s out of arrows. He’s looking for stones on the seashore. … There’s nothing left in the cupboard. He did a huge Keynesian gamble, and it failed.
Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting).
Do us a favor, if you haven't already done so: Give the folks you know a chance to learn about Maggie's. They might enjoy us.
After a nine year binge of borrowing and spending; euro members began defaulting. Early in the European Sovereign Debt Crisis; euro states announced agreements in principal to solve isolated cases of small countries experiencing “temporary setbacks” with short term loans. First Greece; then Ireland; then Portugal; then Spain; then Italy; and now virtually every euro member except Germany is experiencing rising financial stress. The euro-debt burdens are so onerous; defaulting nations have no capacity to ever pay back their bondholding banks; making their banks also insolvent.
The supposed euro benefits allowed Germany to lure its neighbors into debt traps. Defaulting euro-members could then chose to either; start a new currency and suffer the same brutal inflationary consequences as Germany’s Weimar Republic after World War One; or surrender to Germany as the only power in Europe with the economic size and financial wealth to stabilize the euro-system. In the end, bureaucrats from all seventeen euro-members nations agreed to give control of future bailouts to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), a secretive private bank managed and funded by Germany. The ESFS has authority to loan money and impose whatever financial conditions it would like on borrowers. Over the next two years ESFS will bailout Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and their banks. Austria; Belgium; and Italy will soon follow and France and her banks eventually flirt with insolvency. The European Sovereign Debt Crisis is over; Germany won.
Even this reasonable piece misses the real points: America has no permanent underclass, the poor in America are not poor by any world standards, bad choices result in bad results, and many people do not chose material gain as their life goal. I have talked to poor people, I know poor people.
I found Dr. Bob's post to be honest, sad, and deeply discouraging. I hear things like that all over from my colleagues these days. Here's a quote from his Still Breathing…
... I am weary. After nearly 30 years in private practice, I am not sure which straw broke the camel’s back, but it is most surely broken. It is a weariness born of 14 hour days; of dictating charts and finishing paperwork until 8 or 9 pm each night, after starting the day at 7 am; of endless audits by the insurance industry and Medicare; of the constant threat of litigation; of the crushing burden of one more federal requirement mandated but never recompensed; of a host of ever-expanding administrative burdens having nothing to do with patient care, and everything to do with bureaucratic micromanagement of the profession. And this before we have even begun to see the nightmare which Obamacare will inflict. Camels weren’t designed to carry such a load.
That's the loss of just one more doctor who would know you and your family, and care about you and your life - and who would be working for you, and you only. Soon enough, the tort lawyers and government bureaurats will have the pleasure of going to an assembly line government clinic, staffed by docs trained in Russia, Mexico, and Croatia, to take care of them in 4 minutes according to a government protocol, with only approved and cost-effective methods depending on your age (and potential productivity).
Life has hardened my cynicism about power and government. I am not a paranoid sort, but I think the Fathers had it right about their determination to limit power. They own half my labor now, and want to own more of it - and my body too. For my own good, of course.
As a traditionalist Yankee born and bred, I somehow cannot find any gratitude in me for such unwanted favors.
Americans' political ideology at the midyear point of 2011 looks similar to 2009 and 2010, with 41% self-identifying as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.
“Incidentally, nice bit of Orwellian doublethink to call the grass-roots, libertarian-oriented Tea Party ‘Totalitarian.’ This has to be the first ‘Totalitarian’ movement in the history of mankind that, if it gets everything it wants…will leave you the hell alone.”
“The Affordable Care Act helps stop health problems before they start,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a statement. “These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need.”
Photo is of a woman's hideous health problem, tragically not cured in time, for free, by modern science. It's sort-of like a tumor, I suppose, but a healthy one which has a strange way of popping out of a lady's hoo-ha when it grows too big.
Americans' confident belief in the uniqueness, yes the exceptionalism, of their country, rested on an essential faith in liberty, and individualism and anti-statism at home, and in the power of our example, and muscle now and then, in foreign lands. Mr. Obama is ill-at-ease with that worldview. Our country has had pessimism on offer and has invariably rejected it. At crucial points in its history, it has remained unshaken in the belief that tomorrow can be better.
Obama suffers from the typically American condescending elite view of life: "America sucks because our retarded citizenry sucks."
The deal between the Congressional leadership and the President is much ado about nothing, in that – contrary to the kudos, rationalizations or moans – it actually does and will do little to affect the rapidly rising federal deficits and debts. It is less than trivial in the next year that it actually affects and almost entirely a lie over the next decade as future Congresses and presidents work around or ignore it.
The deal will cause increased demoralization among the citizenry both over its lack of real content and as politicians wrangle vigorously over scraps treated like whole cloth. It will also cause a new sobriety, already in painful motion, among the citizenry who have lesser prospects than before this deep recession and little reason to believe the future will personally be much better. Consumption will be restrained.
It is clear that the status quo is continued, for now at least and likely into the foreseeable future.
Spending is not reduced. It only promises a reduction in the present trendline of forecast spending, a fraction of the increases that will actually occur. And, there is little reason to believe that either Medicare or defense spending will be more than trimmed slightly in 2012. Part of that trendline, as scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is a $multi-trillion increase in taxes as the Bush tax-cuts are allowed to expire right after the 2012 elections. There is little reason to believe that such a drastic increase in taxes will be allowed to occur. Longer term, even if a trillion$ or three-$trillion dollars of spending were most optimistically avoided over the next decade, that’s a hundred to three-hundred $billion per year, a small fraction of federal spending.
If, as seems likely, the 2012 elections result in a Republican president and both houses of Congress, there will be more trims to spending, a good thing surely but likely to increase the howls of real and defensive pains and hardly likely to actually reduce the deficits significantly. The Cut, Cap and Balance that the Republican House passed is likely, and decidedly a better thing, yet as tides and lobbies weigh in will be weakened and end-run over time.
Fears about the crash of the dollar are overblown, as there is no viable alternative in a euro-myth euro or speciously corrupt Chinese renminbi. Lenders will demand higher interest rates and that will increase the deficits worldwide. Fears about more global conflict are not overblown. Enemies of order or Western civilization will continue to probe and attack. Reducing mental and defense preparedness by the US will encourage such foes and increase the needs to confront, which will be less successful and more costly to servicemembers and foregone goals.
So, long story short, the status quo will continue. It will be perceived as or really be painful for all, even under the best of circumstances.
One can argue that far more severe governmental actions or changes would reverse this. They are unlikely to occur. There will be more restraints on deepening the hole, but the hole remains. We’ve already dug it by a generation or two of profligacy and excuses. Only a generation or two of serious reduction in personal and government spending, plus economic recovery that must depend upon lessened government regulation and interference, will begin to maybe return us to realistic optimism.
I predict that the demoralization will be temporary and the new sobriety will ultimately triumph and set us right. The path will be long and hard to dig out of several generations of delusions that we could spend our seed-corn, requiring perseverance and sacrifice of self and illusions, but it is well marked.
BTW, I'm encoraged that the cautious and knowledgeable Mitt Romney is opposed to the debt deal, both as an economic realist and political positioner. The debt deal will pass anyway but he will be demonstrated as correct during the coming election season. That may not win him enough points to score, but does indicate a will among Republican moderates that together with the more conservative and Independent centrists -- as polls presently show -- will lead to the next vital step up with a Republican White House and Congress. The road of a thousand steps begins with the first. We've taken the first and 999 remain.
What is worth preserving? 
‘Is Marriage for White People?’
Gateway reminded me of this one: 
Are racist white gun owners 
A mountain of Cape Cod steamer clams with garlic bread and a couple of beers will be my supper tonite. Any dessert would ruin the experience by erasing that clammy goodness. I always have a cup or two of the broth. Sometimes I eat the necks, sometimes I don't.
Scroll down to our recent posts - our humble site hit it out of the park in the past 24 hrs during these summer doldrums (even tho we strive to always be interesting). 
I found Dr. Bob's post to be honest, sad, and deeply discouraging. I hear things like that all over from my colleagues these days. Here's a quote from his 
I thought it was a blessing and a gift from God - and I naively thought that medical insurance was meant to help cover costly diseases.