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.
Dr. Sacks published a piece in the New York Times called “Sabbath,” in which he wrote, “And now, weak, short of breath, my once-firm muscles melted away by cancer, I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual, but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life — achieving a sense of peace within oneself. I find my thoughts drifting to the Sabbath, the day of rest, the seventh day of the week, and perhaps the seventh day of one’s life as well, when one can feel that one’s work is done, and one may, in good conscience, rest.”
Digital
pedometers and Swiss health insurance, a match made in heaven - See
more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/the-insurance-culture-that-is-swiss.html#sthash.14mVukEq.dpuf
What’s baffling is the fact that even though I’m supposed to be a rude insensitive xenophobic intolerant racist dick, it would never occur to me to move to Africa, India, Mexico, or Asia and act with anything beyond respect, gratitude, and even caution. I certainly wouldn’t start running my neck about how the culture of my new host nation sucks and how it needs to be tossed into the dustbin of history and how the majority needs to quickly become a minority or justice will never be served. I simply can’t find it within myself to be that much of an asshole. And I certainly wouldn’t expect my new hosts to tolerate five seconds of such behavior.
There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis — some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.
- Took a drive yesterday to Long Island City (part of Queens, NYC).
Long Island City (L.I.C.) is the westernmost residential and commercial neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens. L.I.C. is noted for its rapid and ongoing residential growth and gentrification, its waterfront parks, and its thriving arts community.[1] L.I.C. has among the highest concentration of art galleries, art institutions, and studio space of any neighborhood in New York City.
Went there to see a one-act play festival at The Secret Theater. Golly, LIC is changing. High-rises everywhere under construction. We had supper at a superb tiny French bistro, LIC Market. Everybody who works there is French. You can park on the street in LIC, no problem. As a daughter says, a gritty mix of industrial, residential, and business: Real NYC.
We meandered through Astoria while en route. Got a little lost. I have never been to Astoria. It is one of the most pleasant, middle-class, and remarkably multi-cultural places I have seen. Of all things, a large Maltese population too- over 20,000. Who'da thunk it? But if you think about it, there is little to do in Malta.
It's not too far from where the big game - Jokevitch vs. Federer - is today. I can't miss that.
- Out-of-towners like us are always more familiar with Manhattan, with its totalitarian arithmetical road grid. Here is something wonderful, probably worth a trip from anywhere: Picasso, Completely Himself in 3 Dimensions. It's on my to-do list. We never miss major Picasso shows, because his craft and imagination blows my mind.
- Something else fun: Immersive (aka Interactive) theater in NYC. I have heard reports about how much fun it is. A friend had his daughter's Sweet 16th party for 25 gals at one of the scavenger hunt "plays," and a couple of people told me about the MacBeth one.
- At my point in life, a visit to NYC is always good for a dose of hyper-stimulation and amazement in the works of man but I am always happy to return to my quiet more pastoral home where the loudest noise is a cricket. If I won the Powerball, though, I think I'd buy a brownstone (with working fireplaces) in the West Village in a flash. I need both. Prosperous people in NYC belong to elite clubs as private retreats, and have dachas in the country too. I could handle that.
My lovely daughters live as if they owned NYC despite living on a shoestring. Fearless, undaunted, resourceful and adventurous, they just take daily bites of that apple as so many young people need to, and shoot for the stars. No bourgeois instincts, it seems - like their Mom. All the same, they do love to come home sometimes for love, free food, and to hit some tennis balls like the prepster kids they are.
Mass multicultural immigration is a highly disruptive, if not destructive, event to an established, stable culture. These things used to be called invasions because, even without force of arms, the power of masses of unwanted people can be difficult to resist (see Mexico/US).
Regular people know that mass immigration will assimilate with difficulty, even if they want to. Regular people know that they will not value or respect their history, their legacies, their traditions, as they do. This is why regular people do not welcome mass multicultural invasions.
For us ordinary people, it's much more about preserving a culture and a neighborhood than it is about economics.
... the centuries-long belief that all peoples everywhere are embryonic Westerners should have been shattered by the slaughter in Manhattan and at the Pentagon. The attacks were a horrifically graphic reminder that our core ideals––human rights, sex equality, tolerance of difference, peaceful coexistence, personal and political freedom, material prosperity, the separation of church and state, free speech, and consensual government founded on law––were historical anomalies rather than the destiny of all humanity.
Private industry employers spent an average of $31.39 per hour worked for employee compensation in
June 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Wages and salaries averaged $21.82 per
hour worked and accounted for 69.5 percent of these costs, while benefits averaged $9.56 and accounted
for the remaining 30.5 percent. Total compensation costs for state and local government workers
averaged $44.22 per hour worked in June 2015. Total compensation costs for civilian workers, which
include private industry and state and local government workers, averaged $33.19 per hour worked in
June 2015.
Employees of Federal Contractors to Get Paid Sick Leave " 'Contractors should take note that this requirement
does not take effect immediately and is not self-implementing. It takes effect
in 2017 and only after the Department of Labor issues rules,' [said Shlomo Katz,
a government contracts lawyer at Brown Rudnick].... 'The executive order
requires covered contractors to provide sick leave in addition to vacation and
other fringe benefits already required by the Service Contract Act and Davis
Bacon Act,' Katz added. 'Some will argue that the President is exceeding his
authority by mandating sick leave because Congress has already legislated via
those two laws (SCA and Davis-Bacon) that government contractors provide
'prevailing' fringe benefits to workers, and there is no indication that the
President has done any studies to determine that sick leave is a "prevailing"
fringe benefit.' " (Bloomberg BNA)
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just reported that President Obama has already effectively raised the minimum wage.
How so? The Obamacare employer mandate requires employers that do not provide “qualifying” health benefits to pay a steep penalty. Few minimum-wage employers provide Obamacare-compliant health coverage. So the penalty adds to their cost of hiring—and thus reduces employment. As the CBO puts it:
[S]ome employers will respond to the penalty by hiring fewer people at or just above the minimum wage—an effect that would be similar to the impact of raising the minimum wage for those companies’ employees.
Increasing the minimum wage would have two principal effects on low-wage workers. Most of them would receive higher pay that would increase their family’s income, and some of those families would see their income rise above the federal poverty threshold. But some jobs for low-wage workers would probably be eliminated, the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially, and the share of low-wage workers who were employed would probably fall slightly.
If I were to approach a person on the street and list off traits like "doesn’t drive," "needs food prepared," "needs help with the remote control," "needs people to bring her beverages," "has trouble remembering things,” and "doesn't pay her own bills" about someone anonymously, he wouldn’t think I was referring to a current presidential front-runner in the year 2015. He would think I was referring to his poor nana, whom he had to place in a home because she wouldn’t stop yelling at the lamp and was at risk of accidentally microwaving her dentures.
Nine Signs of the Impending American Collapse - The unmistakable signs of a disaster from which we would all suffer, the fall of the once-greatest nation on earth, have left me “shaken.”
One of the many reasons people detest Boehner and McConnell is this very same thing: lack of energy. They must have done something to get to their present positions—something rather Machiavellian, I’d imagine. But it certainly doesn’t come across in anything that would give people the impression that they will fight for them. They don’t just fail to walk the walk, they fail to talk the talk.
It speaks of the helplessness of a man in the street, who feels he has no control over the policies made in Brussels, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg, not to speak of Washington, and whose political power, enshrined in his vote, has been devalued to the point of irrelevance. It speaks of the frustration of the blue-collar workers, whose jobs have been taken over by foreigners from other parts of Europe and whose unemployment insurance and social benefits must be shared with foreigners from outside Europe. The influx of immigrants makes it more difficult to find a job in times of crisis and keeps the wages low in times of growth. It is thus easy to blame the unemployment and stagnant wages on them, although the root causes may lie elsewhere.
Like so many regulations (manicurists? barbers?), I understand that part of the impetus comes from protection of existing guilds, but why can't government just leave people alone to pursue their honest trades?
Photo: Yesterday's Beauty Pageant.
Photo of George Orwell's house via 
Like many really dumb ideas, this one started in San Francisco. In 2007, San Francisco
- Took a drive yesterday to 
Image via 
Photo: My entry wall yesterday morning. I asked him to come back on Thanksgiving.
Are We Shifting to 
Photo is a recent one of your Editor laboring on the farm, even on Labor Day. There is no rest for the weary.
Get Grillin’! Common Grilling Mistakes & How to Avoid Them
Image to celebrate Labor Day weekend, which seems to begin today 
A recommended book: 
Image stolen from 
Is the Fed Necessary?