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.
We’re a bit slow in maintaining consistency, although I suppose we will eventually succeed in making everyone equal. That means treating someone with a serious mental illness as if her preferences are merely preferences. It means only allowing for a voluntary commitment, a non-secure transport, and a facility from which you are free to leave at any time. It is one thing to remove gender so that sexual delusion can find itself comfortable in a nondescript stall… but it seems quite another thing to remove sanity so that all the world can be an asylum. It seems terribly obvious to look at prisons and madhouses and recidivism, to observe that this system of ours is broken in the sense that it is imperfect in its attempt to create a utopia; almost as obvious as to look at the results of closing them all down, and observe that Eden is no closer, and the world is still broken. But like the Bolsheviks who rallied for change and destruction, rightly pointing to existing flaws, we stand staring at Chesterton’s fence; we see the cracks and want to remove it, wholly unable to articulate why it was placed there to begin with.
I have no answer. There are many people who can not be helped. The world is an asylum, and life is tragic.
Jefferson well knew that one of those rights—to pursue our own happiness in our own way—would yield wildly different outcomes for individuals. Even this most radical of the Founding Fathers knew that the equality of rights on which American independence rests would necessarily lead to inequality of condition. Indeed, he believed that something like an aristocracy would arise—springing from talent and virtue, he ardently hoped, not from inherited wealth or status.
In the greatest of the Federalist Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed (as did all the Founding Fathers), to safeguard rights that come from nature, not from government—rights to life, to liberty, and to the acquisition and ownership of property. Before we joined forces in society and chose an official cloaked with the authority to wield our collective power to restrain or punish violators of our natural rights, those rights were at constant risk of being trampled by someone stronger than we.
Portrait is the deeply-wise dead white male James Madison.To be an American, you need to know what he thought about this experiment in freedom.
Let's hope not. Actually the article is a critique of behavioral genetics, aka evolutionary psychology, as much as anything else.
Humans are a highly-sexualized sort of ape, with no estrus period as most mammals and even monkeys have (except for the "great apes" of which we are one). It's difficult if not impossible to determine what sexual behaviors are "natural" for humans because mental activity, fantasy, relationships, and culture are such major parts of being human. After all, rape, murder, theft, violence, pedophilia, etc. are all sort-of "natural" for humankind, and there are cultures in which monogamy is considered a mental illness or a form of infantile behavior. It's safe to say that the Western bourgeois ideal of lifelong monogamous marriage and the nuclear family is very far from "natural" despite being fairly effective for child-rearing and overall life stability in Western culture.
It also is safe to say that humans are the horniest of animals and, with our capacity for wild imagination and strange (by animal terms) sexual desires and fantasies, a rather insane species.
The purpose of the NHS is political, not medical. In the UK, in our Coronation of the State as our Bountiful Lord, it is the Crown, the dole is the Orb and State Education is the sceptic sceptre.
Those who question the State threaten to leave you without medical treatment, leading to a horrible death, or starve or be illiterate. Yet a Slaughterhouse like the Mid-Staffs can kill on a scale that an early 1940s German bureaucrat might admire, and nothing happens until hospital the pile of corpses becomes too obvious for excuses not to be shuffled out.
Put a couple of thousand of hormone-intoxicated boys and girls in the same place, in the same dorms (and in the same bathrooms) in a place with no rules which encourages kinky sex and sexual adventurism, then add alcohol and various other recreational drugs, and it seems guaranteed that some bad things will occur. That is not to excuse sexual violence at all, just a prediction based on common sense. Lots of people are dirtbags, but Bill Clinton set the new national standard for sexual liberation.
Why? I was never convinced about the adventure in Iraq in the first place. Contra Dick and Liz Cheney, this has nothing to do with American freedom. The greatest threats to American freedom come from our own government. Governments will use any excuse to impinge on individual liberty.
I entirely understand why eating tacos and drinking Margueritas on cinque de mayo is a racist act and offensive to lunatic grievance-seeking Latinas and Latinos who own that bogus holiday, but I still do not understand what is offensive about "redskin."
In the US, it's a silly narcissistic badge of something to be part redskin. I am 1/16th, can prove it, and I stupidly think it's cool.
Indians aren't really red-skinned. It was a term based on the habit of eastern Indians coating themselves with bear grease to stay warm in winter and, I think, other Indians decorating themselves with reddish make-up.
If the young are to be instructed at all, it seems to me that they ought to be instructed in the high human value of this toleration. They should be taught what they learn by experience in the school yard: that human beings differ enormously, one from the other, and that it is stupid and imprudent for A to try to change B. They should be taught that mutual confidence and good will are worth all the laws ever heard of, ghostly or secular, and that one man who minds his own business is more valuable to the world than 10,000 cocksure moralists.
There have only been three BIG THINGS in music in my lifetime.
1.The Beatles making rock music important, then self-important, then self-absorbed, and then self-destructive, then atomized. 2. I remember the first time I heard Desmond Dekker very clearly. It was a revelation. 3. Bossa Nova.
As usual, the sixties get the credit for all three, but all of these things were born in 1950s culture. The fifties were supposed to be this sterile uptight time, but that's a joke to anyone that can crack a book.
One of Bush's major errors was creating the Dept. of Homeland Security. Something like that was bound to become trouble in the future. It has produced a police/surveillance state which, I would suggest, no American wants: Has the Dept. of Homeland Security become America’s standing army?
What do traffic cameras on my semi-rural Main St. have to do with preventing another 9-11? Nothing, but they are getting a nice shot of me waving crazily at the camera as I park in front of the hardware store to buy a door hinge.
"Just stopping in to get a door hinge," I shout out to the camera as I wave. "Harmless errand."
You do not have to be paranoid to get creeped out by this stuff, and the NSA. It's not American. I would abolish it all. The FBI was enough.
I would like to make the case for giving due deference to ordinary human experience as the proper guide for understanding human beings. Such deference may be contrasted with the field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work of Paul and Patricia Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms” — such as “reflection” and “deliberation” — with terms that describe brain states. Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely epiphenomenal. For example, if you are told your mother has died, your dismayed comprehension of the fact, which is a subjective mental event, will cause an objective physiological change in your brain.
In light of this causal power of the mental over the physical, we begin to wonder if it is right to think of these two types of reality as layered, in the sense that one is more causally effective than the other. It would follow from this doubt that re-describing our introspective experience of our own mental life in terms of brain states is optional, in this sense: the choice of description ought to depend on what you’re trying to explain. Each description answers to a different sort of “explanatory request,” issuing from different realms of practice. The “folk” description answers to the realm of everyday human experience, and the brain description answers to the realm of physiological investigation.
Mokita is a word in the Kivila language, spoken on the largest of the Papua New GuineanTrobriand IslandsKiriwina, which describes the concept of "truth we all know but agree not to talk about."
As the Thought Police gain influence, the amount of mokita increases.
Pic above is Eaton's Ranch in Wyoming, a place my Mom loved.
Lots of places to explore on this planet, but we do love dude ranches.What is a dude? - How the strange history of the ‘dude’ helps throw a light on why the West still feels like the real America
Dude ranches might be a bit phony compared to real ones, but if you don't have a friend with a real ranch in Wyoming or somewhere, they are great fun. We recommend dude ranch holidays in the American West. It sure beats DisneyWorld.
Yes, at least one wrangler always has a rifle. Horrors!
The three schools of originalism are... incomplete at best. The framers did not intend to enable democracy simply through the Constitution's open-ended rights provisions, nor did they mean to constrain it just through those provisions; both Balkin and his libertarian-originalist counterparts simplify their claims too much. Rather, the framers wanted to enable democracy, but they wanted to enable it specifically by constraining its excesses — and thus the presumption-of-constitutionality originalists also oversimplify the political theory of the Constitution. No construction like a "presumption of liberty" or a "presumption of constitutionality" can reliably be used in determining original meaning because the framers had to make compromises among the ends of government and the three grounds of legitimacy.
Instead of reading the Constitution through the lens of a single theory of original meaning, we should simply read it with an awareness of its compromises and philosophic inconsistencies. This may actually be what a more complete and true originalism would entail — that we interpret the Constitution without resort to any modern construction, be it a presumption of liberty, of democracy, or of constitutionality.
With all the recent talk about couscous here, I decided to find out what it was. I imagined it was some sort of healthy natural grain or something. All it is is a form of pasta. Empty calories.
A book: 
Americans seem to want a little bit of both. 
Have any of our readers read this book? 
When it comes to sex, will humans ever be 
The Majority of Stay-at-Home Dads 
I entirely understand why eating tacos and drinking Margueritas on cinque de mayo is a racist act and offensive to lunatic grievance-seeking Latinas and Latinos who own that bogus holiday, but I still do not understand what is 
Fun 