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.
Please give me the power. I promise to make everything new and beautiful for you ignorant little people who do not understand what you really want or what is best for you. Furthermore, I'll turn your slob husbands into young studs, your wives into Miss Americas, your bank accounts into mountains of gold, and I'll make the oceans recede by shipping water to the moon (with apologies to those with waterfront property).
Maintaining a social fabric, social cohesion, shared values and culture, some degree of community, seem important to living in a pleasant place. Despite the melting pot dream, in America, as everywhere in the world, birds of a feather tend to flock together for a long time.
We have posted in the past about the travails of legal immigrants to the US. It's not easy, especially if you are educated and from Europe. Would amnesty apply to Brit, Canadian, and South African MDs? PhDs from India and China? Budding jihadists from the middle east?
In my view, you don't go to a party without an invitation. What is going on, an unarmed invasion? Drudge has this today:
If you think Delta is a mess, try partially-government-owned Alitalia...from Wiki:
On 3 May 2013, in a sting codenamed "Operation Clean Holds", police made 49 arrests at Rome's Fiumicino airport, with another 37 in major Italian airports including Bari, Bologna, Milan Linate, Naples, Palermo and Verona. All were Alitalia employees caught on camera and most were charged with aggravated theft and damage.[21] Hidden camera footage has been released showing employees rifling through, stealing from, and intentionally damaging passenger's baggage belonging to various carriers.
We'll fly them anyway. Travel is always an interesting challenge.
The Green fanatics tend to be irrational or, at best, factually ignorant. From Mead:
Too many greens take their science a la carte. Where scientific research tells greens things they like to hear, greens get all self righteous about “science deniers.” But whenever some poor scientist somewhere attacks a cherished green shibboleth, hordes of vicious and bitter green activists hurl angry accusations about the corruption of the scientific process by corporate interests.
We need solutions grounded in our best understanding of science, and we need to put those into practice. We need fracking, just like we need nuclear, just like we need GMOs. And we need an environmental movement that is realistic, balanced, and committed to the needs of human beings.
So: to save the planet, beat the greens.
"To save the planet"? I hope they are being a bit ironic there, and do not really believe that they will do that.
Climate
science in chaos due to shortage of scary synonyms - See more at:
http://www.thepeoplescube.com/peoples-blog/shortage-of-frightening-new-euphemisms-latest-climate-crisis-t13985.html#sthash.sfktswla.dpuf
I refuse to eat or buy anything with an "organic" label. It's just stupid, Gwyneth Paltrow stupid. Well, I have smoked some organic weed, but only when the good stuff wasn't available and, anyway, I didn't inhale it - and it didn't make me stupid enough to want Ben & Jerry's.
Rise and Fall of the Pocket Protector - Designed to keep shirts clean and tools handy, this ubiquitous invention declined into a social stigma but rebounded as a symbol of nerd pride
When Doctors Ignore ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ Orders - Over 88 percent of physicians don’t want to be kept alive in a situation where doing so only prolongs their existence. So why aren’t they listening to patients who ask for the same?
At Maggie's Farm, we believe that politics has become too important in life because government has become too large and powerful. Perhaps it has always seemed thus to regular people, through all history.
It's a provocative article, and I'm not sure that I agree with it. It makes it sound as if people were nothing but victims of the "powerful." Today, as in the past, people have to construct their own lives. It must be true, though, that there are fewer "good, steady jobs" in the US for the semi-skilled (factories, farms, offices) than there once were. Most people do not aspire to a big career, just honest work and a nice family life.
There is something deeply wrong with all of this domestic spying. America is not China or North Korea. Are we supposed to love our government? What's going on?
Can somebody explain to me why it so much resembles the global warming crisis graph? H.L. Mencken claimed that governments create a sense of crisis to justify their existence and their growing powers.
Critics suggested not only that I be fired for my views but that I should be prosecuted for them, and that the government should ensure that such views are not published. Live-and-let-live is not the Left’s way, never has been, and never will be. It is not sufficient that transsexuals should be free to act on their delusions — the rest of us are expected to participate in them with unreserved enthusiasm, and the Left is willing to use the state to compel us to do so. To simply believe otherwise and to share those views in print is in the minds of many on the Left not only a social transgression but something that should be a crime. The belief that members of minority political tendencies should be jailed for their views is very much in vogue for the Left at the moment. Democrats in the Senate are seeking to repeal the First Amendment. All of us — conservatives and whatever traditional liberals there still may be on the left side of the spectrum — should fully appreciate the sobering fact that there is a nascent, popular, authoritarian movement among members of the Left that supports everything from censorship to literal, non-metaphorical gulags in which to imprison people for their political beliefs.
It's necessary to be fearless in the face of these jerks and lunatics. On further thought, "fearless" is not the word. The right approach is mockery, not courage.
...liberty is not an economic good, but an existential one. The economic good is a mere bonus. The argument that liberty is good for economic activity or for growth of the system feels lowly and commercial (an argument used by consequentialists). If you were a wild animal, would you elect to be in a zoo because the economy is better over there than in the wild? Liberty is my raison d’être.
Like many if not most medical students, I spent some time at the VA hospital attached to the school. I did a thoracic surgery rotation and a psychiatry rotation there, at least. Also worked in their ER, which was inexplicably and redundantly separate from the general hospital's ER a block away.
The joint medical school-VA staff there were wonderful and more practically-minded than the full-time academics and researchers at the med school. They let us do things and procedures which the regular med center would never have let us do, and that was good experience. The patients, mostly WW 2 and Korea vets, but some Vietnam vets (they were still youthful and healthy then) were poor, on the whole, lacking in financial and overall life resources. There were plenty of veterans admitted to the regular medical center too but, at the time, I had no interest in how these systems worked.
Now I understand the the VA is plain old government medicine. Here's Charles Krauthammer, MD:
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: If you are non-ideological, if you brought in some experts and say how do you attack the problem right now? You give everybody on the list a voucher to go anywhere they want and they'll get their care within days. And if the budget won't hold it, then you do a separate appropriation. I can't see anybody in Congress who would oppose that. However, as you point out, this administration has been arguing for five years that the government knows best, it should allocate resources, and we won't even think of this.
And for the long-run, I think the question is this -- you know, this was started by Abraham Lincoln after the Civil War and at the time it made sense. But now that the country is so much larger, medicine is so much dispersed in areas of the country where there are other expertise. The budget for the VA is $85 billion a year, the number of patients is 6.5 [million] or so. Do the math. That's almost $10,000 a year per patient.
Why not have each of those vets get a voucher for $10,000 to purchase private insurance and to go anywhere? But of course an administration like this would never even contemplate that. But it is a question. If these problems are systemic and chronic, and they are from the bureaucrat structure of a government-run system, why wouldn't you contemplate voucherizing and privatizing it?
WHEN will The People finally realize that the Veterans Administration is National Health -- what you get when the government runs a healthcare system? Its shabby service and uninterested administration are followed every decade or so by a scandal and the resignation of an administrator or two. Doctors in private practice must build their reputations for quality service, and then their incomes will follow. Doctors in national health are secure in their income, and indifferent to their reputations. When will we ever learn such a simple lesson?
NYC's 
University of London Student Union Votes to Bans Nietzsche Club
1st-Grader Accidentally Brings Toy Gun To School, 
Warning label for