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.
Sipp: Marketing, Advertising, and Sales 101. Great video ad for Telluride. Skiied there one week, a few years ago. Great. I hate the chair lifts without bars, though, especially when you're going over canyons. Yikes. I still have the Osprey backpack I bought there for dumping kids' clothing in when it warmed up during the day, and things were shed. You find challenging and exciting skiing there. Same as tennis: keep those knees bent.
When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it's kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury - and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever - spent, gone.
You do not have to be Tocqueville to recognize that the fundamental American character has always featured a powerful determination to get ahead, to build a better future on the basis of current effort and sacrifice. It is not sectional ethnic animosity that stands in the way of implementing socialism in the United States, it is the fundamental American character and the values and attitudes that the country was built upon.
We are not Canada, not because we have blacks, but because we are the rebels who threw off the yoke of monarchy in favor of Liberty and individualism, and Canada was, practically speaking, founded by the Tories who preferred being subjects and dependents. We will never be Canada.
It's all about buying votes in Iowa. Ethanol belongs in beer and cocktails. I don't know why they don't call it "alcohol" - or moonshine, because that's what the pols want us to inflict on our teetotaling chain saws, lawn mowers, and outboard engines.
...where Hanson says that the opposite of the therapeutic mindset is the tragic worldview, I would say that if therapy sees us living within a utopian world where price doesn’t matter and where consequences don’t count, then the alternative would be a world where thrift rules and where you earn what your work is worth.
...it is nearly unimaginable that anyone on the left would support subsidizing programming imbued with even a subtle right-center bias. Let's be honest; if NPR weren't substantially left-leaning, Democrats wouldn't be such huge fans of federal funding. The rest of us can listen to, say, Nina Totenberg's slanted dispatches with the appropriate filter.
As all deniers, skeptics and heretics know, NASA has been the leading pusher of the global warming hoax here in America. While such august agencies as NOAA and the USGS have been firmly on board, NASA has been the real pioneer.
So it should come as no surprise that NASA has just spent another bazillion dollars of taxpayer money in a vain effort to bolster its feeble, warped and biased conclusions.
Or at least it tried to:
So that's not only good news, but, thanks to the hard efforts of the Washington Examiner, quadruply so! Thanks, Washington Examiner!
Data from more than 1,300 four-year colleges and universities in the United States show that the use of race and ethnicity in admissions declined sharply after the mid-1990s, especially at public institutions. The proportion of public four-year colleges considering minority status in admissions has fallen from more than 60 percent to about 35 percent. Among private institutions, the drop during the same years has been notable but less dramatic, from 57 percent to 45 percent. The major decline came after 1995, when the campaign against affirmative action intensified, and schools, particularly public ones, thrown on the defensive, retreated. They were reacting not only to actual litigation but also to its threat. While colleges and universities that are considered elite are more likely to have practiced affirmative action and to have been more protective of it, even they have retreated. Few innovative or vigorous forms of affirmative action are now in play in the face of courts and federal agencies exercising strict scrutiny when examining admissions procedures and in the face of an increasingly suspicious citizenry.
Another reality is redefining, and probably weakening, the meaning of affirmative action. Although few schools publicize the fact, one of the central historic principles giving rise to affirmative action is being undermined. President Johnson’s speech assumed that affirmative action would help the descendants of former slaves (he made no mention of Hispanics). That assumption from yesteryear is out of sync with today’s realities. Affirmative action more and more functions to open the campus not only to the descendants of former slaves but to black students with different cultural and political heritages. Once championed, as in Johnson’s speech, as a means of reparation or restitution, affirmative action now turns out to be helping hundreds and hundreds of young people who have suffered the wounds of old-fashioned American racism little or not at all. More than a quarter of the black students enrolled at selective American colleges and universities are immigrants or the children of immigrants. African-American students born in the United States thus turn out to be more underrepresented (given their presence in the U.S. population) at selective colleges than one might imagine. At some of the most exclusive institutions (Columbia, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania), no less than two-fifths of those admitted as “black” are of immigrant origin. Such facts, as they come into view, blunt the force of arguments favoring affirmative action. Diversity and restitution are better reasons than diversity alone, but restitution seems less and less in play.
Diversity itself, moreover, seems weaker and weaker as an argument for affirmative action when many campuses now appear, at least to the public at large, more diverse than ever before. The increasing presence on campus of students from myriad ethnic groups (Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Iranian, and many others) and the consequent reduction of “white” students (witness student populations at the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, USC, Columbia, and other schools) undercut the notion that American higher education is still unfairly monochromatic.
Prof. Chace favors affirmative action only for blacks with American heritage.
"...a romantic buzz-bender and a relationship are not exactly the same thing."
Most of the wealthy in America are Dems and Lefties, and even more so with the mega-wealthy. Whiny millionaire should donate taxes. If they don't do that, they're hypocrites.
Although collective bargaining by government employee unions may offend one’s sense of justice, what’s truly unacceptable is government labor’s stranglehold over the local, state, and federal governments with which they bargain.
...the story is also more disturbing in that it batters our faith that modern economics—whether of the Left or Right—can protect us against great instability and insecurity. The financial panic and subsequent Great Recession have demonstrated that the advances in economic management and financial understanding that supposedly protected us from violent business cycles—ruling out another Great Depression—were oversold, exposing us to larger economic reversals than we thought possible. It’s true that we’ve so far avoided another depression, but it was a close call, and the fact that all the standard weapons (low interest rates, huge government budget deficits) have already been deployed leaves open the disquieting question of what would happen if the economic system again lurched violently into reverse. The economic theorems and tools that we thought could forewarn and protect us are more primitive than we imagined. We have not traveled so far from the panic-prone economies of 1857, 1893, and 1907 as we supposed.
Our experience since 2007 has also revealed a huge contradiction at the center of our politics. Prosperity is almost everyone’s goal, but too much prosperity enjoyed for too long tends to destroy itself.
OK, PETA didn't really make that demand so that horses aren't abused by being ridden. (Sounds like something they'd do, though, doesn't it?)
Actually, in a bid for triumph over sense or learning, a Queens, NY congressman demands that a statue in front of the borough hall be taken down, titled "Triumph of Civic Virtue," because the male figure has his foot on the neck of a female. It was sculpted by a famed 19th century US artist and unveiled in 1922 to depict, as its defenders write "a strong, muscular, heroic man overcoming temptation represented by two female sirens representing corruption and vice." The sculptor is quoted: "The heroic figure, the sculptor said, "looks out into the distance so concentrated on his great ideal that he does not even see the temptation" of the pleasure and luxury that lead to "devious ways".
His sin, according to the congressman who wants the statue removed: "it is ugly and sexist" because "The statue by sculptor Frederick MacMonnies depicts a nude male figure standing atop two women who represent evil sirens."
The congressman, Anthony Weiner, will next week have his last name changed from a synonym for putz.
P.S.: Veterans statuary does not get respect from the Left, either.
The following post has just gone up at New Criterion's blog, Arma Virumque, one of the most prestigious in the blogosphere. The editor, Roger Kimball, also runs Encounter Books, one of the best sources for serious considerations of issues. I am most grateful, and humbled, to be included as a contributor to serious discussion of a serious issue. Thank you Roger Kimball for all you do.
The stereotype of ruler-wielding, dogma-enforcing Catholic nuns has nothing on the parody-proofing self-image being created by the AAUP of college professors as academic thugs.
In its latest draft document to define academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors has gone abroad to authoritarian regimes and overboard to try to suck the air out of critiques of academia.
Who is to blame for the AAUP’s draft? It seems that I am, at least in major part as the stimulus to putting the fear of criticism into AAUP. I launched critiques last Fall and again for the Spring semesters of politically biased practices at Brooklyn College, my alma mater. My critiques reverberated throughout New York City and nationally.
The AAUP denigrates and seeks to negate the views of anyone other than the usually incestuous faculty majority or insider group in control. Although couched in proceduralism, the AAUP’sExecutive Summary reveals the motivation and the cure for insulating faculty from critique:
Current political threats to academic freedom have intensified with the rapid growth of new media and Internet connectivity that has made it possible for talk-show hosts, bloggers, and well-funded interest groups to supplement the trustees, politicians, corporate and religious groups, and journalists who previously put untoward pressure on the university.
Therefore:
1.Complaints regarding alleged classroom statements forwarded by outside agencies or individuals should be generally ruled out of consideration in initiating or conducting personnel reviews.
2.When complaints regarding alleged classroom speech arise from or are promoted by student political groups, the complaints should be respected only to the extent merited by the complaints and only when they are based on evidence from students who were actually enrolled in the course or courses in which the alleged inappropriate conduct occurred and who were present to observe that conduct.
Who is to judge?
1.It is essential that the hearing committee be elected or appointed by an appropriate elected faculty body.
Here’s the real point: If you want to work for government (which can be a very honorable or practical or neutral thing to do), you are forced to pay union dues. You know, when you pay those dues that they will be used to fund the Democrats. This is true whether or not you, personally, want to fund the Democrats.
Once elected, the Democrats shower benefits on the public sector unions, since that ensures that the unions will then shower money right back on the Democrats. What’s important to remember is that these elected Democrats are your employees, just as the public sector workers are. Nevertheless, you, the tax payer, have been cut out of the loop. Instead, there’s an endlessly cycling mutually beneficial relationship going on between unions and benefits, that you’re paying for.
Our thoughts are now actions. There literally is nothing the federal government cannot regulate provided there is even a hypothetical connection to the economy, even if the connection at most is in the future.
Our thoughts are now actions. Whoops, I already said that. I just can't get over it. The following sentence has now become a justification for regulating decision-making even where the decision is just to do nothing:
The Congress shall have power.... To regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes;
I think I'm going to be ill. Which of course, is now subject to regulations to be promulgated by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Any serious conversation about American decline must start with the fact that too many of our countrymen have lost the plot about how the United States became the beacon of the free world, the world's largest economy, and the lone superpower.
Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give in to them for the sake of their own survival. Most important, public sector unions help choose those they negotiate with. Through gigantic campaign contributions and overall clout, they have enormous influence over who gets elected to bargain with them, especially in state and local races.
What the heck is he talking about? Forests and woods and global cooling or warming or whatever, and what?
There is something deeply the matter with this poor fellow. I mean, besides his greed for money and massages and estates and jetting around the world.
Why doesn't he donate his tobacco farm and his mining land to a conservation organization so happy trees can grow there? At Maggie's, we support all rational land and habitat conservation efforts, and we even are big supporters of good sustainable nuclear energy.
And who are all of these wealthy consumerists who applaud him? Probably people who want all of the little people like me to change their ways of life. It's not gonna happen.
First, the Democratic Party is the party of government, not only because of its extravagant sense of government's competence and proper scope, but also because the party's base is government employees. Second, government employees have an increasingly adversarial relationship with the governed. Third, Obama's "move to the center" is fictitious.
What it's like to have 
T-shirt via 
Independents 
The invention of adolescence
Juan Williams 
It was sculpted by a famed 19th century US artist and unveiled in 1922 to depict, as its 
Algore: