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.
Want to Know If Your Food Is Genetically Modified? Across the country, an aggressive grassroots movement is winning support with its demands for GMO labeling. If only it had science on its side.
I'll bet anybody $1000 that Miami will not be underwater in ten years. Any takers?
Here's the scare headline: Miami Will Likely Be Underwater Before Congress Acts on Climate Change. Oh no - I'm scared. Not Miami! Not the US Congress! Yikes. Only Congress can save us from drowning. Or do they mean in 4000 years, when they do not realize next ice age will have lowered the oceans once again so that you can walk from Britain to France as they used to do before our SUVs ruined everything? I am deeply, deeply, seriously concerned, and it keeps me up at night. If you are not "deeply concerned" about something, there must be something morally wrong with you.
We all must become deeply, seriously concerned about something. Otherwise, what's the point of our existence? How do we otherwise justify it, right? We are foolish animals, me included. OMG, I think I accidentally ate a non-organic, GMO tomato last night. I am doomed.
Meanwhile, backtracking climate gurus warn that you should not expect their models to be correct. Not to worry, I do not and will not worry about models of any sort. All of the genius market models have been wrong, and those guys are much smarter than climate scientists.
... Marx has never vanished from the academy. The stubborn refusal of applied Marxism to produce anything but mass murder merely led to efforts to reframe the philosophy. Through much of the 20th century, Marx was clearly the greatest economist of all time, but his ideas had never been properly put into practice. Then he might have dwindled as an economist but was indisputably an important historian. When that didn’t pan out, Gramscian “cultural Marxism” allowed overwhelmed graduate students to avoid economics and history altogether in order to focus on Batman. When all else failed (and with Marxism, it always fails), Marx lived on through the claim that while his ideas may have faded, he was still an important figure of literature — a particular howler to anybody familiar with his clotted, vituperative, headache-inducing prose.
I forget from whom I stole the above image about home economics. However, I would dispute the "Low Difficulty" label of vegetable gardening. It's plenty of work and you have to love doing it as a hobby, like growing flower gardens.No, of course it's not worth the effort if your time and effort have any value - except for the tomatoes.
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, the enchanting, and the absurd.
Speaking of the absurd, I'm back to work on today's collection:
Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after all.
It's Sunday. Have a pleasant Sunday. But remember, Sunday is Monday's mother. She seems nice, but she's just as likely to smack you with a hairbrush as not. Happens almost every week.
But we were good boys. We didn't break the Sabbath often enough to signify--once a week perhaps. Anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold. --Twain
There are some fairly bright people abroad in the land that don't understand that if the velocity of money is zero, as far as inflation is concerned it doesn't exist.
Check out their blog. As with all such schemes, the only people who want to show themselves naked are the only people you don't want to see naked. And the books suck.
It would be unchristian of me to point out who the little darlings voted for twice, wouldn't it? Pardon me while I go find a pagan to laugh at them and tell them to stop sh*tting where they eat.
‘New evidence strongly suggests that the very different kinds of society seen in the various races and in the world’s great civilizations differ not just because of their received culture – in other words, in what is learned from birth – but also because of variations in the social behaviour of their members, carried down in their genes.’
Erm, I don't want to rain on your parade, but that's only earthshaking news to people who Occupy public parks.
Several waiters in white coats told the council they, too, didn't like Brunei's laws but they asked why workers should possibly suffer for the City Council's vote of condemnation.
"It strangles our livelihood," said Ann Romer, a server in the hotel's Polo Lounge, a renowned gathering spot for Hollywood stars and filmmakers. "It causes us to be unable to support our families, my children and my sick grandmother in Vietnam."
There's more than a hint of Two Minutes Hate when the media mob gets interested in any particular thing. The object of their vitriol is chosen at random, by persons who stand to lose nothing, at the expense of the usual innocent people. And by the way, when I have sketchy outlays from strip joints and casinos I need to put on my expense report, I prefer listing them under "Entertainment", not "My sick mother in Vietnam." It's good accounting practice.
H.M.’s operation took place on September 1,
1953. Scoville peeled back his patient’s scalp, then used a hand crank
and one-dollar drill saw from a local hardware store to remove a bottle
cap’s worth of bone from above each eye. As cerebrospinal fluid drained
away, the brain settled down in its cavity, giving Scoville more room to
work. With what looked like an elongated shoehorn, he nudged aside
H.M.’s frontal and temporal lobes and peered inside.
PHYSICIAN, n. One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well.
“You know,” he said to me, “it’s just wood.”It took me a moment to realize how liberating this statement was. To him, woodworking held no mystery at all - it was just a thing you did. If he wanted a garden bed, there’d be no question in his mind that he’d make it himself. Why spend more on something suboptimal when you can build exactly what you want?
I think I've heard this line of reasoning before. My toddlers experienced it the first time they went boom boom by themselves.
My son has decided which college to attend in August. Yesterday I received a survey from one of the colleges he turned down. It was a series of questions about his decision, who influenced the decision, and which factors guided him.
It ended with two questions which surprised me. The first was to what degree allowing freshmen to have a car on campus would have altered his decision. I responded "Definitely would have no impact." I see no reason for a car on campus and certainly not freshman year.
The second question was "To what degree did the university's commitment to environmental issues play a role?" I replied "None at all."
Seriously? I know a few wingnuts take this seriously, but frankly I can't understand this devotion to 'environmental issues' I keep seeing at the colleges I visited. It truly is a religion and it's astounding when you consider the improved state of our environment today as opposed to, say, 60 years ago.
I suppose in another 18 years we'll only send kids to schools powered by sun, wind and geothermal energy. The glass, paper and plastic will all be in separated trashcans, every five feet, which are emptied every 20 minutes. Or maybe we're there already.
I know when I want to learn, it must be in the most eco-friendly environment possible and I don't care about the academics, it's all about saving the earth.
I had no idea snails had a preference for handedness, since they have no hands. Apparently they do, however. There's lots of interesting stuff before the final paragraph, where they discuss the issue of dextral or sinistral snails.
I'm taking turns lifting my eyelids. One seems to force the other down, like a teeter totter would.
I dislike teeter totters. Playgrounds should be free of physics examinations. Weight, lever arms, torque... bah! Archimedes has ruined my life. Taken the whimsy right out of it.
What Ruth’s doctor had done was unusual, or maybe even inappropriate, they told me—delivering bad news, especially over the phone, before it needed to be conveyed. When I asked them when the right time was to tell someone that death is unavoidable, they most often told me that the moment occurs after several successive attempts at stopping the cancer have failed. Only then, when the patient is cornered by cancer, that’s the time.
I'm not your buddy, guy. If you need a friend, get a dog. A doctor is supposed to give you competent care and then leave you alone.
He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical
punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is
Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on
unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed
to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross,
Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell.
Duh. Writers like money. Writers really don't like anything but money. In this country, the man who gives victory in battle is prized beyond every other man.
In the new Internet economy, pious leftist code jockeys found companies that do nothing but put people out of work, then use the money they make to support redistributionist leftist politicians. It's the circle of life.
For example, say there's limited food in the environment. In such a
context those persons that associate food with anger and turn aggression
into an attack response to get the food are more likely to survive. "If
the food does not make you angry or doesn't produce aggression in your
system, you may starve and lose the battle," Aarts says.
I see the scientific community has discovered the Taco Bell drive through lane. Keep up the good work, guys.
In my day, you whippersnapper, "walk up music" was salsa music I heard through the door, being played at 90 decibels by the guy in 7A when I walked up the stairs to my third floor apartment. Don't get me started on the trumpet player.
Let's have a good day, people. And be careful out there
I tried to read the Drudge Report this morning but it's like TMZ from some alternate universe where slime molds sit on golden thrones and the statues in their temples are fashioned from earwax after a Pantheon of lesser gods like the god of thunderjugs and the demigod of Big Gulps. But other than that, Happy Tuesday!
And all the ones that are being created are just four Asperger agoraphobes in San Francisco that haven't run out of angel funding yet for their potential Twitter app that will let you post reviews of artisanal pottery clay in real time.
Ah, remember Orson Welles? Not skinny Orson Welles. I mean Fat Orson. He grew a big beard so he'd have the semblance of a chin, and hawked cheap wine on television in between reminding Merv Griffin (thanks, Bulldog) or Mike Douglas how big a deal he used to be. Whatever those brigands at Paul Masson paid the talented dirigible to utter their slogan, it wasn't enough. I remember it as clearly, and with affection, as the day it was uttered. I remember the only glass of Paul Masson I ever tried too, for other reasons.
By many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads. Vindico, an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”“The advertiser sees a report on an Excel spreadsheet that says, ‘Yeah, these ads ran,’ ” says Matt Timothy, Vindico’s president. “But more than half of them ran without being seen by a human being.”
Oh look: The Great Unread wants to point out their competitors for ad revenue are the Great Unwatched. Awesome concern trolling.
Let's be jerks. Let's read it, and then run away without leaving a quarter.
There you go. Have a great Monday. I have no idea why I said that. And I have no idea in the hell what a great Monday might look like. I've never seen one.
Happy Sunday. I advise you to go to church and pray for the sins you're planning during the sermon.
"What is your religion my son?" inquired the Archbishop of Rheims. "Pardon, monseigneur," replied Rochebriant; "I am ashamed of it." "Then why do you not become an atheist?" "Impossible! I should be ashamed of atheism." "In that case, monsieur, you should join the Protestants."
I thought that was his job description. Good luck with that show without him. He made a hit out of the equivalent of describing naked women to blind teenage boys. I'm sorry, was that offensive?
If you even hesitated to answer this question, there's something wrong with you. You shouldn't need to see the picture of a child with smallpox to answer it, either.
We used to shoot enemy combatants found out of uniform. Now we just round up the other army from time to time to ask them questions like The Usual Suspects. Turn to the right...
I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that I have no tyrannical leanings, though no doubt like everyone else there are a few things that I should like to see prohibited, such as (in my case) chewing gum, drinks sold in cans, baseball caps, rock and other forms of pop music in public places, and preferably in private as well, fast food, men wearing suits without ties, television, mobile telephones in trains and restaurants, burqas (except for drunken British girls on Friday and Saturday nights, for whom they should be compulsory), tattoos, piercings, celebrity magazines, pasteurised cheese, the use of the word chair for chairman, conversations in public about football, the Olympic Games, jeans, skateboards, eating in the streets, coffee served in plastic containers, basketball, etc.
He's the only author on the Internets I find essential. It was nice of him to write that list for me, to save me the trouble.
Well, we all hate Chicago Transit Authority, don't we? When did it become OK for wedding bands to get real, live, rock band careers? Who signed off on that? I know I wasn't consulted. Maybe it's not Chicago's fault. Maybe they thought they were just going to play the Bernstein wedding at another Mediterranean-themed stripmall function room; four hours, twenty minute breaks each hour; chicken and shells for dinner. Perhaps their agent bollixed it up and sent them to a recording studio instead. Back before GPS, it could happen. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Besides, Blood Sweat and Tears was much, much worse, and sooner.
I sort this sort of thing out the old-fashioned way: If suspicious, I punch them, hard, on the nose without warning. If they cry, they're usually innocent.
He was handed the greatest cash cow in the history of the world and tried to ride it in the derby. Should go on the Rushmore of incompetence,
despite the money he's made.
"Poor people get fat, and watch TV" because they are too passive: The Myth of Poverty:
When we think of true poverty, the famous picture of the migrant mother in the Dust Bowl comes to mind, but today’s poor look more like Honey Boo Boo’s mom. They live in big houses or subsidized apartments. They play video games. They watch TV on a massive screen and they stuff their faces.
What do these people do in exchange, to justify their existence and to pay back to a generous society which helps support them and, often, their kids? Or does the entitlement state erase a sense of obligation, duty, and gratitude to tribe, community, and nation?
The free-loaders are what bother me. I have known plenty of people who are poor by life-style choice, but they are not seeking freebies from their neighbors via government programs and they are neither fat nor lazy. You know some such people too, I'm sure. What do they do?
I'll start with a few people I have known in that latter category: Maine Guides, ski instructors, organic farmers with small plots, tennis bums, aspiring artists, actors, writers, and dancers, pastors with tiny congregations, grad students, Catholic priests, nuns and monks, older people with minimal savings who would rather try to live on Social Security than to keep working at something - and I could go on. Many do not choose to make accumulating money their life priority although few people would refuse a windfall.
Your examples of such people are welcome in the comments.
When Bird Dog told me he needed a rest, and was heading out to "take the waters," I pictured him going to one of those fancy hotels with lots of ceramic tile on the walls, within sight of the Danube, where all the women speak with a heavy Bavarian accent and they smear you with the local mud. Silly me. Let's get these links out of the way so I can go post Bird Dog's bail. Apparently, to him, "taking the waters" means shoplifting a couple of bottles of Poland Spring and some beef jerky in a convenience store on Staten Island.
Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro,1 you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."
They have a point. Mordor sucks, and it's certainly more physically taxing to dig a tunnel than poke at a keyboard unless you're an ant. But, for the sake of the argument, can we agree that stress and insanity are bad things? Awesome. Welcome to programming.
It's an enormous misappropriation of the word to call software designers "engineers." You're stressed because your stuff doesn't work, you're incompetent, and people notice it from time to time.
There you go. Read all that stuff. It won't make you any dumber, I promise. After I bail out Bird Dog, I'm going to ask him to chain me to an oar on the other side of Maggie's Farm's Trireme. My left bicep needs work.
Between the Bundy mess, ACA, and a myriad of other issues currently presented to the American citizen, we may be faced with another situation of government overreach very soon.
Is it any surprise the idea emanates from a Democratic Party Think Tank? No, not really. Force and coercion are their stock in trade.
Compulsory voting is a very bad idea. While there is sometimes more than one choice on any ballot, I have definitely felt the need to abstain from voting simply because I didn't like the choices. Furthermore, not voting is a 'vote'. It is an expression of either complacency (I'll accept whatever everyone else wants) or disgust (I have no use for anyone on the ballot). When I abstain, it's always out of disgust.
The right to vote is akin to a right of free expression. In fact, it is free expression. Compulsory voting, as a result, is a violation of your right to free speech.
Chalk this up to the two parties (because while the Republicans would likely oppose it, if it passed they would support it just like they are beginning to give up on repealing the ACA) wanting to make false claims of 'popular support' where none exists, and further increase their choke hold on the voting public.
College Bans Fencing Team 
An interesting website: 
What's your favorite - granite or gelato? Pic is my fresh mandarin orange granite in the nifty
Thanks to Roger De Hauteville, King of Sicily, who kept our morning links going over the past week and a half. Kings are busy people, and I am grateful to him for having given us the time and for sharing his talent for the rare, the odd, the enchanting, and the absurd. 
