Does Playing the Bagpipes neccesitate wearing some form of

odd clothing?
Apparently. -though still feeling a bit under the weather I got up and about Sunday..... hearing the far off drone of the pipes, which I am probably bread like a dog to  a silent  whistle to respond to, I  stumbled by the India day parade:

Ah America. Where everyone stumbles over one another to come to, then once, here, march down our avenues waving the flags of their home countries and telling us how great their country is.

Actually, once there i was hoping to hear more of the famous Sikh drummers and what not, but it mostly turned out to be like most other parades- 'floats' blaring techno music and advertisements though there was some nice color, mostly families and well behaved young people, and no sign of heavy drinking or drugs.... unlike some other ethno-parades which shall go unmentioned.

Okay, I have written this entire little piece without one "Black Irish" joke. I must be getting PC.

He's Right, But We Won't

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned

By Jeremy Grant in Washington

Published: August 14 2007 00:06 | Last updated: August 14 2007 00:06

The US government is on a 'burning platform' of unsustainable policies and practices with fiscal deficits, chronic healthcare underfunding, immigration and overseas military commitments threatening a crisis if action is not taken soon, the country's top government inspector has warned.

David Walker, comptroller general of the US, issued the unusually downbeat assessment of his country's future in a report that lays out what he called "chilling long-term simulations".

These include "dramatic" tax rises, slashed government services and the large-scale dumping by foreign governments of holdings of US debt.

The End of the Biggest Lie of Our Era?

Diversity is good. We need to be more diverse. Diversity enriches. Diversity is a goal. If a university, town or country is not diverse enough, it should be changed as a matter of policy. Those mantras have been repeated mindlessly for the past three decades and if you didn't already see the devasting results in the UK, France, Sweden, the US and pretty much all of the Western World (the only people foolish and naive and self destructive enough to adapt such polices) -now researchers are telling us what common sense told us all along:

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Comes now a blockbuster report by political scientist Robert Putnam, author of the runaway bestseller "Bowling Alone." Putnam provides supporting fire from Harvard Yard for those who say America needs a time-out from mass immigration, be it legal or illegal, like the immigration moratorium we had from 1924-1965.

"E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the 21st Century" is the title of Putnam's five-year study, which makes hash out of the politically correct cliché, "Our diversity is our strength."

After 30,000 interviews, Putnam concludes and reports, against his own progressive convictions, that ethnic and racial diversity can be devastating to communities and destructive of community values.

The greater the diversity the greater the distrust, says Putnam. In racially and ethnically mixed communities, not only do people not trust strangers, they do not even trust their own kind. They withdraw into themselves, they support community activity less, they vote less. 

....more.

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Such a population is much easier to controll by an elite because authority comes from top down by default - since there is no community. It is no accident that our elite, left and right are aggresively pushing for more, not less diverisity. It is a weapon against the Republic, plain and simple.

City Journal Weighs In on Crumbling Infrastructure

City Journal Weighs In on Crumbling Infrastructure::

As a nation, we’ve long borrowed from our future; everybody knows about the inevitable Social Security and Medicare crises that will happen in the next three decades as the number of retirees expands in relation to the number of workers. Far fewer people understand that we’ve also been borrowing from our past. The federal highway system, the backbone of America’s modern economy, turned 50 last year. But, as I wrote in Forbes magazine in April, we haven’t spent enough, or thought enough, to keep it—and other physical assets that previous generations built—in good working order. We spend only 60 percent of what’s needed to keep roads in good condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. In New York State, for instance, 35 percent of major roads are in “poor or mediocre condition,” the ASCE says, while 38 percent of bridges are “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.”

Even where they’re safe enough, transportation assets suffer from obsolescence, as traffic and vehicle weights increase annually while road spending lags

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yet we're building 'bridges to nowhere" and shelling millions to greedy developers like Bruce Ratner to further tax the infrastructure.

The Minnisota Bridge Collapse and Alantic Yards.

You think this would be a wake up call to corrupt politicians, but no, it will just be another reason so raid public coffers to provide lucrative inspection and building programs to favored companies - of course the real profit comes in cutting corners::

Steve Sailer writes:

Spend More On Infrastructure? Or Cut Back On Immigration?
[Steve Sailer] @ 8:30 am [Email author] [Email This Article] [Print This Article]

In the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse, Ross Douthat wants to. A few observations:

* - Road-building is a national disgrace. It’s corrupt — Mayor Daley’s closest buddies in Chicago are the road-builders who finance his campaigns in return for enormous contracts–and thus the quality of our roads intentionally stink, wearing down our cars and lowering our gas mileage. They’re supposed to fall apart because that puts more money in campaign donors’ pockets. Roads in Belgium are made to last 40 years, in Chicago 12 years.
* - The more densely populated the country gets, the harder it is to build infrastructure because of Not In My Backyardism, which increases with the number of backyards. There will never be another freeway built in Southern California, even though the population is expected to climb sharply, because land is now so expensive.
*
* - Compared to 1950, it takes forever to build anything these days, largely because of environmentalism, but every activist has his hand out too. To finish the Century Freeway to LAX, for example, CalTrans had to payoff hundreds of “community“ organizations, including an AIDS group in West Hollywood, ten miles and two freeways to the north!
* - The simplest way to slow the worsening of the population-to-infrastructure ratio is to cut back on immigration, just as it’s also the simplest way to lessen the increasing stress on other problem spots, such as public schools, inequality, and health insurance. Instead, what we constantly hear is: “Oh, no, all we have to do is fix the public schools [inequality] [health care] [or various other problems that we have no likelihood of ever coming up with a magic bullet fix for].

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New York City politicians either bribed by campaign contributions from developers or anticipations of more tax revenue, are letting developers like Ratner build build build without improving infrastructure -they just keep piling and piling on more buildings and people without seriously looking at mundane but necessary things like sewage, electricity and subway capacity. Ratner doesn't care, nor the does Bloomberg, because it doesn't effect them and serous consideration gets in the way of their objectives (in Ratner's case lining his own pockets at public expense).

Its well known that Bloomberg has flippantly ignored doing anything long term that might help with our seriously antiquated infrastructure, while allowing developers to build at an unprecedented rate. It will be up New Yorkers of the future to pay for it...and as Minnesota shows us, the cost might be more than many of us care to contemplate.