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.
Like most people in life who just don't get it, arrogance is at least half of the problem. If you think you're real smart it's hard to learn anything from anybody, much less from experience.
Brooklyn College President Karen Gould today announced the re-hire of Kristofer Petersen. His appointment to teach a graduate course on the Politics of the Middle East had been rescinded last week, after a furor over his avid pro-Gaza writings, activism and slanted syllabus was brought to light.
In her patently ridiculous statement, Pres. Gould mouths platitudes about academic freedom, and says of her decision:
Today, the Department of Political Science and its appointments committee voted unanimously to recommend Kristofer Petersen-Overton to teach a graduate course on the Middle East. Based on information that has come to light, they are confident he has sufficient depth of knowledge and the intellectual capacity to successfully lead a graduate seminar.
It was a professor in the Political Science who initially hired Petersen. I have his letter in which he recognizes Petersen’s troubling background but expresses confidence in his teaching anyway. That professor then issued a statement along with other PoliSci faculty bemoaning the choice to rescind the appointment. So, the decision to rescind the recission of the appointment was made by the same group that first made it.Well, that’s comforting, isn’t it? Only in an academic bizarro-world.
The federal district court in Pensacola, FL ruled today the entire ObamaCare bill is unconstitutional. The case was brought by 26 states and the major group representing small business.
Their plead had two parts: 1) The mandate to require purchase of medical insurance exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause or the Necessary and Proper Clause of the US Constitition; and 2) The imposition of additional Medicaid costs upon the states violates the 10th Amedment to the Constitution.
The court ruled against the second pleading, as – impractical as it may be – the states could refuse to participate in Medicaid.Actually, in reaction to the increasing costs of Medicaid, many states are already, instead, paring back on Medicaid benefits they themselves have added onto the base required by the federal government.
The judge, however, did rule that the mandate is inextricably wound up with the complex interdependencies of ObamaCare and cannot be severed. Thus, the entire ObamaCare is ruled unconstitutional.(See my earlier post about the Virginia federal district court ruling that the mandate is unconstitutional but can be severed, and the rest of ObamaCare stand.) But, pending appeals, the Florida judge will allow ObamaCare to stay in effect.
The Republican leader in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell – an able practitioner of Senate rules – says he will use the Senate Rule 14 to force a vote in the Senate on the repeal bill passed by an overwhelming majority of the House.It would be a surprise if he can muster 60-votes, but it will force the Democrat Senators to each be on record.
The US Supreme Court is unlikely to rule for another year or two. In the meantime, however, the Obama administration will continue to issue regulations, and the insurance markets will continue to comply and adjust, making it more difficult to excise ObamaCare’s effects.
Some Democrat Senators are floating ideas to neutralize the mandate issue by other means of impelling purchase of medical insurance. Why didn’t they float and support these last year, one may ask.It will take more than these ideas to right what’s wrong with ObamaCare.I floated some in my Op-Ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune ("No GOP Ideas? Try These 10") last year during the Congressional debates. Surely the Republicans in the House and Senate can even do better than I.They better. Reform is needed in some areas, and the better ideas wouldn’t throw out the baby with the washwater as the Democrats did in federalizing control of virtually all aspects of our medical care by throwing out free choice and the freer market.
What that "dysfunction" seems to mean is that one is a lousy boss of oneself. A useful concept, I think. People who achieve their goals make rational, practical plans, follow their plans, and are good at taking orders from themselves. When they tell themelves they are going to do it, they do it.
If Plan A doesn't work, they already have Plan B waiting in the drawer.
I think people vary enormously in their executive functioning.
Went to a very enjoyable and festive Chinese New Year party last night. It's the Year of the Bunny Rabbit, I was told.
The special cocktail of the evening was the Lychee Martini. I don't think I had ever had a Lychee before, much less a Lychee Martini. Delicious and refreshing.
Lychees are tasty fruits, flavor somewhere between a pear and a grape.
"I don't understand it. I don't like it. And I don't think anyone would think differently. There's nothing you're trying to say that hasn't been said before you. And everyone who's said it before you has said it better than you have."
That was part of the critique the pupette got on her recent college poetry writing course effort. I guess everything is supposed to be new, despite what Ecclesiastes teaches us. She has always been told in the past that she is a talented writer. She did say "I'd like to point out, however, that this professor is phenomenal."
I emailed back something like this:
"That's what we are paying them for - tough criticism, high demands, and a dose of humility. If you could meet their demands already, what would be the point of being there and paying them money? My best teachers ripped me to shreds. They want to stretch you to your max and beyond it to find your limits, and that is good. We can't all be TS Eliots, and few youths have enough life under their belts to write poems that are more than pretty strings of words anyway. Don't worry - you have your friends and family to love you regardless."
Last week I sent her a poem that my brain wrote during a dream. (I never sit down to write a poem, but sometimes they come to me so I try to put them on paper before they disappear. Generally, I only share them with my sis who is a published poet.) I thought this one might have been about my college pup, or maybe any one of my kids, and did not add the title until I guessed what it could be about. I would not want to show it to a Prof.
Child
First you jumped out of my hand, hid in the sand camouflaged by the sand. Then I caught you with two hands but with a laugh you jumped out again into the water where the sea had carved a deeper channel. The water was clear. You dissolved in the water. I dove in to search but I could not find you.
Later, you returned from a foreign shore tall, and painted blue, asking what we do next.
A big snow is a delight to every Yankee who has a camera. Big snow makes everything new. An ordinary snowfall is not as inspiring. Here's the road I live on:
Just kidding re the above. My friend Nathan sent this pic of Central Park yesterday. I'd guess that was his Leica, not his cell phone:
NYC is a wonderland in a good snow. Our buddy Kab sent these to me from NYC too:
A relative sent in this pic of his house in CT. That's a typical, in-town New England house. It provides shelter. Your heart and soul provide the charm and warmth:
Those of you spending tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for your children’s college education, and paying taxes to support colleges, may be interested in a current brouhaha at my alma mater, Brooklyn College.
A doctoral student, 1 ½ years into his studies, was hired by the Political Science department to teach a graduate level course on the Politics of the Middle East. I wrote about his clear and one-sided pro-Palestinian writings and radical associations, and of his slanted syllabus of readings. Subsequently, others wrote to the college administration questioning this hire, including the New York State Assemblyman for the adjoining district. The hire was rescinded, the formal reason given that the hire was insufficiently credentialed.
Predictably, the hire complains that academic freedom has been trampled. Some on campus and the hire’s ideological friends in the blogosphere agree. The NYC press has covered the incident, repeating their charges. The hire himself appears in a TV report saying, “I have very vocal views in favor of the Palestinian cause for self-determination.” At his personal website, the hire says, “Unfortunately, due to external pressure, the Brooklyn College provost has chosen to suppress academic freedom and intervened to cancel my appointment. This is a profoundly unsettling outcome and I am currently challenging it.”
Au contraire writes a retired professor at the college to the Chancellor of the City University of New York:
By now serious academics realize that the propagandists work deliberately to confuse "academic freedom" with freedom of speech per se.Academic freedom is the freedom to teach and write within the constraints and standards of one's discipline, which means paying methodic attention to the relevant sources and domains under a course heading.This is the freedom that needs defending, and has been commendably defended in this instance.
Further, it does not appear this hire has any legal grounds to demand he be hired.
So, what is at stake: academic freedom or academic license, especially when abused, completely inviolate from legitimate concerns of students, parents, or knowledgeable critics?
The hire at Brooklyn College was, most charitably, a mistake, now corrected.
No surprise there. Those students don't know grammar either. What do they know? I hope they know quadratic equations. I hope they read the Constitution - but you don't need a school to do that.
Well, they certainly know what Howard Zinn thinks - I mean, thought. They aren't necessarily lazy and dumb, they just aren't cut out for the really demanding mental stuff. What they need is solid basic knowledge, learn a job, maybe make a family, and they'll be just fine and as happy as they want to be. How many really smart kids do we need?
Science and math require more disciplined, rigorous, and abstract thinking than most kids want to bother with or, perhaps, are capable of. If a kid says languages - or math, or chem - are "too hard," you know right off that they lack the serious horsepower even if they are "bright and articulate." Most kids like the soft stuff - if they like any of it at all. Trouble is, you don't need a school for the soft stuff: it's all available out there, for free. Everywhere, nowadays.
In our spoiled, decadent culture, most people seem happy to pay others do the heavy mental lifting while they benefit from it all at ridiculously low cost. I know, because I am one of them, although I did plenty of math and hard science in college.
It has always been my contention that nobody should be able to earn a college degree without at least a year of calc, and real college chem, physics, and Bio (also, Econ). Otherwise, however bright you may be, you can't call yourself eddicated because there is too much basic stuff in life you don't understand well enough to have a legitimate opinion about.
Maybe I should have said a High School degree instead of College. If a kid had my kind of High School degree, they would be in a position to learn everything else they were interested in or needed to know on their own, in the library, or from The Teaching Company, or on the job. (Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from getting out there and living and getting into the cage with the Beast of Reality, and taking the knocks and dealing with the BS.)
High Schools should have oral exams on simple basic facts, because kids aren't ready for wisdom. "What's a subordinate clause?" "What's Avogadro's number?" "What's iambic pentameter?" "Why was Alexander Hamilton important?" "Why was Alexander the Great important?" "How does a lever work?" "Why do we care about the Phoenicians?" "How do you find the volume of a cone?" "How does an airfoil work?" Etc. Send in examining teams to do the testing to see whether a High School degree is justified. Paper testing doesn't do it. Nowadays, there are kids graduating from High School who cannot answer those questions.
It's the elite few who design our software, who design and build our computers and X-boxes and cars and refrigerators and airplanes and bridges and office buildings and coffee pots and power plants and missiles and digital cameras and machine tools and oil refineries and robots and hybrid wheat and permanent paintless house siding and our chairs and tables and new medicines and our Blackberries. Those are the unsung heroes of our daily lives.
It's all I can do to repair a horse fence or to replace a cracked windowpane in the barn, yet I am paid better than the people who design and build those useful things I listed above. Understand the workings on my motherboard? Not likely. Not smart enough, yet I am considered "highly educated."
My point is that the kids don't need to know the challenging stuff: Let them learn the elementary basic stuff, and the soft stuff if they want, and get their lightweight diplomas signifying that "they attended," and leave the challenging stuff to the smart, ambitious kids. Let the rest of us lazies flip burgers or teach school or attend meetings or sit in cubicles or express shallow and uninformed opinions about how life works, because we do not know how to make anything useful.
Let those few precious brainiacs work nights to make the tools and toys for us while we fart around with stuff that "interests us." The rest of us don't have to know anything complicated, do we?
Maybe I just have a case of too skeptical for my own good syndrome, with a touch of sick of the bullshit fugue. And maybe a little everybody seems to have a way to scam money from the government but me anxiety. Yeah, there's that.
Indeed, APA members stand to gain from new regulations they lobbied for. In other words, if Til Wykes were an American psychiatrist, he too might be seeing dollar signs in temper tantrums and pot use “disorder.” But when it comes to medicine, America is the special interest state. And make no mistake: this is not the free market at work. It’s what happens when greed and government power commingle under a blanket of good intentions.
(Note Cottontail Rabbit gnawing on my roses. He's my official rose-pruner.) Tree Sparrow, Carolina Wren, Dark Eyed Junco, Cardinal, WT Sparrow, Red Bellied Woodpecker, BC Chickadee, Song Sparrow, Downy Woodpecker, Grey Squirrel (of course), Mourning Dove, Blue Jay.
It just keeps coming. Snow is up to my knees. Got myself plowed and shoveled out at 4 AM this morning, and headed right off into the snowy dark to Dunkin' for my morning fix, and took some snaps.
This would be a good morning to be in Vermont, with skis. It's beautiful.
It's a blizzard right now, strong gusty wind, sleet mixed with snow and gradually turning to all snow. A winter wonderland, and all the kids are excited about a snow day for sledding or skiing.
Not in New Jersey: Slopes behind ropes: fear of lawsuits closing great New Jersey sledding hills. There was an adult in CT who settled for $4 million with a CT town when he injured himself sledding with his kids on a town-owned hill. Is a hill covered with snow an "attractive nuisance"? I don't think I would invite that guy and his kids to a winter sledding party on my hill.
And this one, also from Drudge today, takes the cake - or the sandwich: Rep. Dennis Kucinich sues cafeteria over olive pit in sandwich. I once cracked a tooth in half on an over-done French Fry at McDonalds. Maybe I missed a big payday... but Barrister is an honorable man with still a shred of dignity and decency - I hope.
Remember the bumper sticker: "Please hit me. I need the money"?
Whatever happened to people taking their own chances in life? What happened to "It's my own fault"? Says Prof B, Litigators ruin pretty much everything.
New England government was charged with the creation of a moral society. There was nothing that was not its business: how much did a master pay his apprentices? Who celebrated Christmas? Who was cheating on his or her spouse? The duty of government was to make society live right; the university, the pulpit, the newspaper — these were to be the allies of government in the struggle for good.
Even after the old alliance between church and state in New England was broken up for good (the establishment of religion at the state level lasted almost 50 years after the ratification of the Constitution in Massachusetts and Connecticut) the acolytes of New England righteousness worked to make the American government a force for the moral uplift of the American people. Many of their causes today look prescient: the abolition of slavery and voting rights for women. Others, prohibition, eugenics and various forms of food-nuttery matching the changing scientific fashions of the day, look weird.
Over the centuries, New England has changed its theology while remaining loyal to its cultural foundations.
I think this guy seems reasonable, fine as infotainment. Wants to be a TV professor. Not sure he can tell me much that I don't know. Anyway, I have a day job.
There are an infinite number of ways to live life fully and energetically. I was thinking about that topic since I read the bio of a fellow I admire and have heard speak in the past, Sander Gilman. I am a fan.
Dr. Gilman spoke at a medical meeting I attended in NYC in December. He is a polymath. Here's his bio:
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in that same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University; 2007 to the present as Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College; 2010 to 2013 as a Visiting Research Professor at The University of Hong Kong. He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, and New Zealand. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995. He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007).
I work hard, make myself as useful as I can, and read quite a bit, but I am a slouch. I stand in awe of such productive people, who are blessed with abundant talents and use them to the full.
The New Victory Theater, on 42nd St. in the heart of the theater district. We saw the new Cymbeline there on Sunday afternoon. The Fiasco Theater Company. Six recent Brown MFA grads played all the roles, and the entire stage set was as seen: three wooden boxes. They spoke the Bard's lines in pure American accent and tone, and every word was comprehensible. Each actor played a musical instrument too. Delightful comedy - and the audience got all the jokes. This play is a farce, a sit-com about love, evil, treachery and vengeance, with a happy ending. Entirely lacking in Shakespearian grandiloquence.
We got there a bit early, and I chatted with the lighting board gal about the theater. It's the oldest operating theater in NYC, built in 1900 by Oscar Hammerstein's grandfather for vaudeville. Holds around 500. It's a jewel-box theater.
Its history reflects the history of 42nd St in the 20th Century. Vaudeville, then Burlesque (Gypsy Rose Lee stripped there) under the Minskys, then legit theater (Belasco himself had the electric lights put in), then a porn movie house in the 70s, then shuttered for 20 years, then reopened in the 90s as what it is now: a venue for family-friendly productions.
Thank you, Rudy Giuliani, for civilizing 42nd St.
The Fiasco's Cymbeline is only there for two weeks and is, I think, thanks to a pile of good reviews, sold out. They let me take pics before they began, as people were arriving. The actors hung around on stage talking to people and stretching:
A couple more pics of this jewel of a theater below.
I forget where this fine recipe came from (maybe Mr. Free Market. No, it was The Englishman), but I'd think it would work fine for any game bird except duck, and certainly for chicken:
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Peel the potatoes first thing in the morning as the second cup of tea and Aspirin take effect. Put in a pan with lots of cold water and handful of salt, bring to the boil on the Aga as your bacon and eggs cook. Finish breakfast, ablute and then pour the boiling water out of the pan over your breakfast plate in the sink to clean the eggy stains off. Leave pan lid off for the potatoes to steam dry as you walk the dogs.
On your return, sniff the grouse hanging in the woodshed and pick a couple, or more, of the ripe ones. Do the dirty deeds and return indoors with your fresh plucked grouse.
Rummage in the larder and pull out all the root vegetables you can find. Cut off the grotty bits, put in the hen food bucket (it's legal as long as you don't take them into the kitchen first).
Open up the Sunday paper on the kitchen table and put the vegetables on it; read, cut, slice and swear all at the same time. When finished screw up the soiled paper and use in the bottom of the fire grate.
Open a bottle of red.
Heat a large knob of dripping [fat from roasted meat] in your largest roasting pan until it is smoking, drop in the potatoes, swirl about and sprinkle with lots of salt. A sprig of rosemary can be added on top. Bung in the oven. Pour a glass of wine.
Second roasting tray, butter and oil and put to heat. When you have finished the wine, take out of oven and put the veg in, shake and return.
Your frying pan that you cooked your bacon in this morning should be returned to the hot plate and all that lovely bacony grease heated up. Pour another glass of wine.
Take birds and roll around in hot pan until they are brown and your fingers hurt.
As Agas only fit two roasting trays you will probably now need to add them to the potato tray.
Drink the glass and check how laying the table in the dining room is going.
Your guests should now arrive, have a sherry with them; make your excuse as soon as he mentions his work at the bank, retreat to the kitchen, open another bottle of really meaty red, get all the stuff out of the oven, birds on the carving plate on the table to breathe, veggies in the bowls that were warming in the bottom oven. Splash some wine in a glass to check it and then into the meat roasting pan, pinch of this, spoon of that and your gravy is made.
Take through and carve and let the guests help themselves to vegetables.
If you have been away from Maggie's this weekend, catch up on our posts. Good fun, as always.
Readers who have not strolled down West 42nd St. in the past ten years would be amazed by it. Clean, no sense of menace, no porn, no creeps, tons of regular people on the streets day and night. I didn't even see any cops - there always used to be patrol cars everywhere there. Multi-million dollar luxury apartments going up between 10th Ave. and the West Side Highway.
Funky, funky Broadway is now a place you can take your kids.
I took a few pics before and after the matinee yesterday:
A fun walk to the parking garage, despite the 15 degree temps and strong wind. NYC is all about walking. New Yorkers walk more miles just in their daily lives than any country folk do. That's why the gals are all so svelte compared to country gals. Streets filled with people. Wonderful.
I really do need to plan a 15-mile NYC Official Maggie's Farm walking tour of Manhattan this spring or summer, with an architectural/cultural guide. I meant to do it last year, but life got busy. The Battery to Central Park, with a snakey route hitting some old joints and pubs. Maybe I will plan it. If I build it, will you come? (I refer to our bigcityphobes.)
Having things to look forward to, whether a good snow storm, or a trip someplace new, a new lamp, a new Teaching Company series, a possible new friend, or reservations for a good dinner out, is part of the charm of life.
Mrs. BD has just laid on me our trip adventures for 2011 which she has kindly planned and paid for. (It seems like the villa in Provence or Tuscany for the whole family, plus the Gwynnies and the Sipps and some other fun pals, will have to wait 'til 2012 - God willing - because the gal wants to get me back to Turkey, and to the Holy Land, first. Maybe she is wondering how long I will last...)
For one thing, I know she is planning supper at this joint:
Screw the Death Tax. The grim reaper is forever snapping at our heels while we run like hell to keep one step ahead of him. Die broke. They keep reminding me that it's a big, inviting world out there, full of interesting, confusing, and exciting things. Ruts are bad because they shorten life. Comfort zones are mainly valuable as places to return to. I have learned this, in life. Timidity fails, constricts life, creates regrets that just accumulate and grow mold.
It's just kinda odd, though, that Mrs. BD had none of my hunting trips to my old familiar places on her list: Maine, New Brunswick, Manitoba. What's up with that? She has lots of theater and opera tix done too, but never even bothered to check out Bob's tour this year. Guess that's my responsibility.
What adventures are y'all planning this year?
Pic on top is the club where some of us Maggie's Farmers like to go to hunt critters with wings in Manitoba in early October.
Aristotle's "Man is a political animal" means, as you know, that man is an animal who lives in a polis. Most normal folks prefer to live amongst others, to cluster, whether for convenience, socializing, or for security. I happen to enjoy both town and country, and find suburbia to be an imperfect if often necessary compromise.
Urbanism is about studying cities and towns. The topic has always been of interest to me, whether from the archeological view or from the present view.
Our blog colleague with his shiny new site The Old Urbanist (a word-play on The New Urbanism) blogrolls several sites which I have found quite absorbing and informative:
There are a handful of species of Juncos in North America. Most familiar is the Dark-Eyed Junco, formerly known as the Slate-Colored Junco. Why they changed that name is totally beyond me. Who can see their eye color?
Flocks of these sparrows - yes, they are in the sparrow family - are common around the US during migration and in winter, generally feeding on or near the ground, in fields, edges, and brush. The dual flash of white in their tail is an easy field mark in flight. They enjoy our bird feeders, and they do not mind snow at all.
They breed pretty much throughout Canada. Their arrival in the US in November, along with the White-Throated Sparrows, is a sign that winter is coming. They will begin to push north in March.
You can read more about these cheerful critters here.
It is time to discuss the developments in the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy and its urgent drive toward sea control in Asian waters. I believe that it is only a matter of time before the People's Republic of China invokes a duplicate of the Monroe Doctrine for all of Asia. [For those educated in the past couple of decades, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine stated that efforts by European countries to colonize land or interfere with states in the Americas would be viewed as acts of aggression requiring U.S. intervention].
The Forces
The media is focusing on the new J-20 Stealth fighter, and appear to have forgotten that "the Chinese have built, tested and are on schedule to deploy next year a missile designed to kill an American carrier. The Dong Feng 21D, according to published reports based on Chinese sources, could penetrate the carrier's existing antimissile defenses from 900 miles away with a nonnuclear precision warhead. A version of this missile was seen publicly for the first time in a Chinese military parade last year. American defense analysts acknowledge that this missile could be a game-changer, immediately affecting American naval operations within 1,000 miles of the Chinese coast." [1].
In fact, the government is not paying attention either. "On Feb. 11, 2010, the ... U.S. Missile Defense Agency airborne laser in a Boeing 747-400F successfully shot down a sea-launched liquid-fueled ballistic missile in ignition stage (within two minutes of launch) and, within one hour later, shot down a solid-state land-launched rocket. . . .
"Once in office, Obama cut the program's budget, eliminated a second airborne laser 747 and scaled back the ground-based antimissile weapons scheduled to be built in Europe to defend against Iranian threats, and in Alaska to counter North Korean missiles aimed at Los Angeles and Seattle. After the successful February 2010 test, no further tests were scheduled or conducted by the administration. Obama's proposed 2011 federal budget eliminates all funding for laser-based antimissile weapons systems." [2]
Completely forgotten now are the 81 (in 2009)[3] Australian designed (thanks, mates) high-speed wave piercing 140 ft. catamaran missile boats which carry 8 anti-ship missiles each - that's 480 missiles, which can be fired from a distance of 100 miles [3].
The USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group homeported in Yokosuka, Japan, is composed of the carrier plus two guided missile cruisers (CG), seven guided missile destroyers (DDG), an attack sub (SSN) and an oiler [3]; that makes eleven surface targets. Each combatant ship is equipped with two Phalanx 20mm radar-aimed guns (Close In Weapons System) able to fire off their full magazine of 1,550 rounds in 20 seconds for last ditch defense, plus a variety of missile launchers firing 500-1,500 pound missiles with ranges of 5 to 15 miles.
The argument could be made that 480 incoming missiles could overwhelm the strike group's defenses!
The Tactics
"Well, one might certainly say, "the Chinese certainly aren't going to go to war with a country that owes them over one trillion dollars." Agreed - they aren't going to go to war! But there's a lot of conflict that falls short of war. Remember when the Israelis deliberately sank the USS Liberty?
"[Chinese] PLA planners are focused on targeting surface ships at long ranges. US DOD analyses of current and projected force structure improvements suggested as of 2007 that in the near term, China was seeking the capacity to hold surface ships at risk through a layered defense that reaches out to the "second island chain" (i.e., the islands extending south and east from Japan, to and beyond Guam in the western Pacific Ocean).[6]
The Chinese were offended at the US Navy's proposed exercises in the East China Sea off the western coast of South Korea in November, 2010, and so the US moved it to the east side of Korea. If the US hadn't cooperated, or if conflict arose in Korea or Taiwan, one can imagine the Chinese saying that those countries are in China's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), and that although they sincerely wish to retain trading and financial relationships with the United States, any intrusion of US forces into those territorial waters would be an aggression which could and would repulsed by what will shortly be credible force, even as our countries remained at peace.
I believe that the current government of the United States would capitulate and remain outside whatever EEZ China declared, and that our influence in Asia will be at an end unless measures are taken today to restore and expand our missile defense capabilities.
I tend to believe that ordinary public education, with all of its flaws, shortcomings, and loony political agendas, generally does a pretty good job overall from K-12.
They did OK with me. I turned out literate and mathematically-literate (but I have to give my parents lots of credit for that too. My idea of a Dad was a tall guy with either a book, a chainsaw, a shovel, or a hammer in his hand. A cigarette, also.).
Well-motivated, bright, and well-disciplined kids can learn all they need there to get a good start, and if they are truly motivated and curious and in pursuit of mastery, they will take what is offered as far as they want on their own time. That's the whole point - to offer a foundation.
The challenge for school rankings (which is what school boards care a lot about) is the kids who are not in that category. They drag down the ranking, and thus property values. It's quite obvious that many if not most kids do not find academic learning to be of particular interest, even something as basic to life as algebra. Our schools aren't "failing;" our expectations are the problem.
Most kids are neither scholarly nor studious (girls are more inclined to sit than boys), and the latest stats that many or most kids learn little in college confirms that. College is whatever somebody makes of it, like everything in life.
When people talk about reforming schools, they generally are talking about trying to "meet the needs" of those who aren't very interested, talented, pushed, encouraged, or able - for whatever reasons. For them who wants it, basic eddication ain't expensive at all. For them who don't want it in youth, they can go to the internets or the library and learn all they want when they are older and more interested in things. For kids, the internets are a total time-waster and brain-killer, same as TV used to be. Well, if you have the Britannica online, maybe that might be an exception. I was raised to always review the Britannica before venturing into any new topic, for the overview and context.
Went to a very enjoyable and festive Chinese New Year party last night. It's the Year of the Bunny Rabbit, I was told. 
Sander L. Gilman
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Aristotle's "Man is a political animal" means, as you know, that man is an animal who lives in a polis. Most normal folks prefer to live amongst others, to cluster, whether for convenience, socializing, or for security. I happen to enjoy both town and country, and find suburbia to be an imperfect if often necessary compromise.
There are a handful of species of Juncos in North America. Most familiar is the Dark-Eyed Junco, formerly known as the Slate-Colored Junco. Why they changed that name is totally beyond me. Who can see their eye color?
I tend to believe that ordinary public education, with all of its flaws, shortcomings, and loony political agendas, generally does a pretty good job overall from K-12.