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.
I spent 4 hours in dental chairs yesterday, three with oral surgeon and one with the prosthodontist in the adjacent office.This was not a pleasant experience despite the fact that my oral surgeon and his young gal assistants are like stand-up comics and as anti-PC as can be imagined. Highly-entertaining repartee which would get anyone fired in three minutes in a corporate setting.
I just wish they would quit asking me questions with a mouth full of steel tools. Doc tells me they teach them to to ask questions when you can't answer, when they are in dental school. Says he'd like those sorts of one-sided chats with his wife.
They give me a valium first so I do not jump up and run out of there because dental torture is just not my thing. I tell the doc that what he is doing is against the Geneva Convention and that I intend to report him to the UN.
My teeth have sucked since I was young, despite not being a sweets addict. Also lost a couple playing hockey in high school. Now the fun is about some extractions, implants, bridges. This is needed to be able to eat steak and lobster, and so as not to look like I am from England or West Virginia. It's just a shame that Oxycodone does not make me feel good because I have lots of it.
My dental work is insanely expensive, requires a payment plan. If Obama really cared, he'd pay the bill for me. Sharks have it good. They keep growing new ones.
What are your worst and most expensive dental experiences?
Pic: Right on the fish dock in Wellfleet. It used to be Harbor Freeze, now it's Macs. It's unusual not to run into somebody you know in the ice cream line at night
The old Appalachian tunes borrowed lines from each other. That's how both Old Joe Clark and Cotton-Eyed Joe happened to die from a toothache in the heel.
Cotton-eye used to be more common. It's usually a blindness in one eye caused by a retinal detachment.
So certain that their god wants them to do this. Maybe that is what their god wants. Gods do not tend to be like kindergarten teachers. Neither is mine, but mine demands "Do unto others..." which is an extremely challenging and unnatural demand.
People (since I live in NYC and have so many liberal or so-called 'moderate' leaning friends) wonder why I consider Obama divisive. He is, without a doubt, among the most deliberately divisive presidents in our history. Bush was divisive, but not deliberately so. His mere existence caused Progressives to vomit (I considered him divisive because he caused me to leave the Republican Party based on his behavior, which I'm not sure was deliberate, but he certainly behaved like he had to do the things he did).
But the Obama speech at the Dallas memorial was a classic in division politics. His supporters have cheered him as a 'caring' man, someone who is 'willing to do something' - even if that something is lie. Lying seems to come easily to this man, and his supporters love it.
The memorial was no place to make a political statement. Yet he did. He made outrageous claims about "our" lack of willingness to fund schools, fund health programs, and how it's easier to buy a Glock than get a computer or a book. Yet school funding is at all time highs, with many of the worst districts among the most heavily funded on a per student basis, and health support is also at all time highs. Meanwhile, I've noticed that Barnes & Noble and Amazon are still making some decent money, while schools hand out computers to their students for use during the school year. How does he have the gall to lie so brazenly? Because he can. Nobody questions him, particularly at a memorial for slain officers.
Meanwhile, his speech was another call for gun control. Which, in the aftermath of the Bastille Day massacre, should raise some eyebrows. After all, are we likely to start asking for 'truck control' now? France did a good job of controlling guns, so I suppose that is the logical next step, is it not?
I tired of emotional appeals in politics long ago, but it seems this is all we get any more. From the bombastic and aggressive emotional outbursts of Trump to the lies and deceit of the 'caring' Left wing triumvirate of Bernie, Hillary, and Barry. We're a nation divided more over feelings and lacking the capacity or willingness to look at what we can, and have, accomplished.
...what makes helicopter money so positively insidious is that it relieves elected politicians entirely from their vestigial fears of the public debt and from accountability for the burdens it imposes on future generations. And that’s especially true owing to the Bernanke fillip.
Folks, the Bernank is no hero whatsoever—–notwithstanding his self-conferred glorification for the courage to print. He is a demented paint-by-the-numbers Keynesian who has a worse grasp on the real world than the typical astrologer.
The argument for a public option now amounts to a back-door opening for the single-payer system that Democrats wanted all along. Unlike the co-ops, which didn’t have direct access to general-fund spending, public-option plans would allow the executive branch to direct funds on a nearly unlimited basis as an entitlement program, removing the barriers to a sea of red ink. All it does is rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking ship – and like the Titanic, there won’t be nearly enough lifeboats for the rescue needed from the coming disaster.
“The French must die by the thousands…. Towards paradise, that is the path….Come, brother, let’s go to paradise, our women are waiting for us there, with angels as servants. You will have a palace, a winged horse of gold and rubies….With a little rocket-launcher, you can easily get one of them… you do something like that in the name of Dawla (Islamic State), and France will be traumatised for a century.”
Never in the history of world has a human being been so completely buried under a mountain of no evidence. Hillary Clinton can say there’s no evidence she sent classified emails until the evidence shows up, at which point there is no evidence she knew they were classified, until evidence of that shows up, at which point there is no evidence anyone got hold of it, until 400 people are willing to stake their lives that it was certainly compromised by sophisticated bad actors, at which point there is no evidence that it mattered.
Grow up, Republicans. Your Party nominated Donald Trump and there must have been a reason for it.
The Dems did not do very well either, if you feel Trump is a loser. The Dems had only two plausible candidates, both elderly, and they are going with Bill's wife because she has a vagina - a compulsive liar and possibly the greediest and nastiest woman in America. In contrast, the Repubs selected the only one from their supposed-star roster who could have played Russell Crowe's role in Master and Commander.
The household Repub names who are sitting this one out are looking foolish and petulant to me. If they are mad at Trump they have to be mad at their own party too. Trump did nothing wrong, just offered himself as an option to the voters.
The size of his personality and his fearlessness made the other options appear overly-cautious, depressive, and small by comparison. Thus a candidate (like Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan) who gets the disapproval of the elites. I thought the Bushies were bigger than that but low-energy Jeb was the heir-apparent. Rejection hurts, but come on! Get over it.
There have always been natural meritocracies of talent and skill. In the Western world, the idea of meritocracy has been a conscious push-back against aristocracy, inheritance, class, prejudice, and patronage.
These days, some complain that meritocracy is a cover for sexism and racism. The history: The New Ruling Class. A quote:
...Peter is not at St. Paul’s because his parents went to Harvard; as he makes clear to Khan, he is there because of his hard work and academic achievement. Here we have the meritocratic delusion most in need of smashing: the notion that the people who make up our elite are especially smart. They are not—and I do not mean that in the feel-good democratic sense that we are all smart in our own ways, the homely-wise farmer no less than the scholar. I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “My students today are…so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are.… [I]t’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the twentieth century—just sees a fog. A blank.”42 Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”
... the experts (the educated elite) are always wrong in their prescriptions for the country—always. If they got their remedies right, we would be a happy country with few problems, and we wouldn’t care that the ruling class feels superior to the rest of us. They would deserve to feel superior.
Unfortunately, that has not been the case since at least 1960. Everything the experts have done has failed. Not just been disappointing, not just not lived up to the expectations, but failed spectacularly, making conditions far worse than they were before and destroying lives in the process. The list of examples is endless, but here are a few...
I am always a skeptic because it has served me well thus far in life - and because experts often lack common sense and they often fall in love with ideas.
Mrs. BD and I are 14 months into our program, so we are now officially past the Beginner phase of weights and calisthenics. Novices, now.
Trainers say that it takes two years with 1 hr. 5-6 days/wk (approx 2 hrs of weights, 2 of calis, 1+ of cardio not counting fast walks) for middle-aged people with the right work-out diet to reach a good level of conditioning for a given age and build. Not for bulging muscles, but for full fitness for life and a fairly tight, firm, beachable, streetable, athletic bod.
Athleticism is a good goal for the middle-aged because almost everybody in America has a sport or two which they love.
Based on my dedication to this, I think that the time frame must be right because, for example, I still can not do a deep barbell squat of my body weight. Bench press? Almost there, a few more weeks to press my weight for one or two reps. Those are normal, modest and realistic strength goals for the average middle-aged guy. We up the heavy weight exercises by 5 lbs/wk and I practice holds with much heavier weight.
Anyway, Mrs. BD and I have decided that we can now do our calis without trainer supervision, so we do them together. Good fun, terribly fatiguing. For example, I'll do a plank while she does wall slams, I'll jump rope while she does the burpee/ mtn climber/ j jack routine. etc. We can group them up as supersets or triplets, and switch off.
One day/week we'll do three sets of almost each pair or triplet on our list (our cali list below the fold) for about 40 mins, and finish with 20 min. cardio intervals. Two days/wk we'll do 20 min of additional calis and 20 min cardio intervals. Saves money this way, and we can push each other and correct each other. Married couples are very good and experienced at that... fun.
We'll keep our trainer for two individual hours of weights per week for now. It is difficult to advance in strength training without a pro watching you like a hawk and pushing you further like a sadist.
Mrs. BD also does Yoga, but I do not. Interestingly, the weight work has done wonders for her ex-dancer joint pains. She is now doing deadlifts, weighted squats, bench press, leg press, rows, overhead presses, curls, etc - all the things I do. Pain-free at last thanks to our genius trainer. Muscle and stronger tendons can help compensate for half-rotten joints.
Black Lives Matter activists and their propagandists have waged a very effective War On Honesty. Black Lives Matter leaders employ vicious charges of racism to silence political opponents, or, failing that, deter media criticism of their radical tactics, which include violent language and occasional violent incidents. The goal is political provocation and divisiveness. Yes, Black Lives Matter benefits as an organization from divisiveness. It serves their political goals.
Simple, juicy, and crunchy on the surface:Sauteed Parmesan Chicken Breast
Slice the chicken breasts horizontally in half for thinner filets. Season with s&p, and dip filets in egg, mayo, or sour cream. Then cover with a mix of plain bread crumbs and grated parmesan and sautee in a mix of butter and olive oil until toasty brown.
Amazing the way it stays juicy and tender. It is obviously served with mashed taters, or preferably garlic mashed taters.
There are many dysfunctional and criminal subcultures in America, as there are everywhere. In the US, these are overwhelmingly white of course, and, it seems, disproportionately low among American Asians and Muslims (except for the Somalis in Minneapolis). They need to up their stats to keep up.
American blacks, however, have a lock on violent crime, with Hispanic immigrants (mostly gang-related) coming in as a distant second. Why this has evolved this way I do not know. History tells us it was not this way in 1960.
I do business with plenty of black and hispanic Americans, and they are fine, hard-working and pleasant people. There is almost no racism in America as far as I can tell. None. There is far more bigotry against white tattooed meth heads, white beggars, and whites with nose rings.
In the USA, there is a social contract. Obey laws, aspire to independence and integrity, and be a good contributing citizen. That is all that is required. Otherwise, expect to be poorly-regarded.
A powerful heart-felt comment from police officer Jay Stalien:
I have come to realize something that is still hard for me to understand to this day. The following may be a shock to some coming from an African American, but the mere fact that it may be shocking to some is prima facie evidence of the sad state of affairs that we are in as Humans.
I used to be so torn inside growing up. Here I am, a young African-American born and raised in Brooklyn, NY wanting to be a cop. I watched and lived through the crime that took place in the hood. My own black people killing others over nothing. Crack heads and heroin addicts lined the lobby of my building as I shuffled around them to make my way to our 1 bedroom apartment with 6 of us living inside. I used to be woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of gun fire, only to look outside and see that it was 2 African Americans shooting at each other.
It never sat right with me. I wanted to help my community and stop watching the blood of African Americans spilled on the street at the hands of a fellow black man. I became a cop because black lives in my community, along with ALL lives, mattered to me, and wanted to help stop the bloodshed.
As time went by in my law enforcement career, I quickly began to realize something. I remember the countless times I stood 2 inches from a young black man, around my age, laying on his back, gasping for air as blood filled his lungs. I remember them bleeding profusely with the unforgettable smell of deoxygenated dark red blood in the air, as it leaked from the bullet holes in his body on to the hot sidewalk on a summer day. I remember the countless family members who attacked me, spit on me, cursed me out, as I put up crime scene tape to cordon off the crime scene, yelling and screaming out of pain and anger at the sight of their loved ones taking their last breath. I never took it personally, I knew they were hurting. I remember the countless times I had to order new uniforms, because the ones I had on, were bloody from the blood of another black victim…of black on black crime. I remember the countless times I got back in my patrol car, distraught after having watched another black male die in front me, having to start my preliminary report something like this...
It's a Prohibition-era summer cocktail from the 21 Club.
I spent 4 hours in dental chairs yesterday, three with oral surgeon and one with the prosthodontist in the adjacent office.This was not a pleasant experience despite the fact that my oral surgeon and his young gal assistants are like stand-up comics and as anti-PC as can be imagined. Highly-entertaining repartee which would get anyone fired in three minutes in a corporate setting.
Media Blames Truck, Not Terrorists or Islam, For Nice Attack
Mrs. BD and I are 14 months into our program, so we are now officially past the Beginner phase of weights and calisthenics. Novices, now. 
Dam Good! 
Japan's