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.
'There's an old joke . . . two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life.'
6:6 Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment;
6:7 for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it;
6:8 but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.
6:9 But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.
6:10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
6:11 But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.
6:12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
6:13 In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you
6:14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
6:15 which he will bring about at the right time--he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.
6:16 It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
6:17 As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
6:18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,
6:19 thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
The relentlessly arrogant and condescending Noam Chomsky is wrong about most things. The fame which gave him a voice in politics was, of course, his linguistic theory on which, as it turns out, a generation of Linguists have wasted their careers.
There's a Black President There's a Black Congressman There's a Black Chief of Police There's a Black District Attorney There's a Black Mayor until 2014 (Jailed) There's a Black Officer who pulled a trigger There's a Black Man Dead of that gunshot wound
For inexplicable reasons, the Left believes that the violence wrought by angry minorities will benefit them, so they encourage it. They subsidize it. Obama has given his not-so-tacit permission to riot every time one of these tragic events occurs, from the Henry Louis Gates minor incident, to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, the Dallas officers. And now BLM is rolling in money, $100m from "social justice" organizations. Soros gave them $33m.
Probably an inbred trait of human nature renders the attraction of censorship perennial. Most people (the highly literate are among the worst) believe that what is good for them will be good for others. Besides, a regime of censorship must claim to derive its authority from settled knowledge and not opinion. Once enforcement and exclusion have done their work, this assumption becomes almost irresistible; and it is relied on to produce a fortunate and economical result: self-censorship. We stay out of trouble by gagging ourselves. Among the few motives that may strengthen the power of resistance is the consciousness of having been deeply wrong oneself, either regarding some abstract question or in personal or public life. Another motive of resistance occasionally pitches in: a radical, quasi-physical horror of seeing people coerce other people without having to supply reasons. For better or worse, this second motive is likely to be mixed with misanthropy...
Another:
Margaret Thatcher declined to prosecute The Satanic Verses for blasphemy; and once the fatwa was issued Rushdie was accorded police protection from the extraordinary threat. Still, the cravenness of the early reactions has not yet been forgotten. The novel was initially banned in Canada, and US bookstores were slow to risk the title on their shelves. Cautionary words about the need for sensitivity were uttered by academic as well as priestly authorities. ‘We respect each other’s religious beliefs,’ wrote Syed Shahabuddin, who led the campaign to ban The Satanic Verses in India. ‘We do not intentionally outrage the religious feelings of others or insult their religion or ridicule the personalities to whom we are emotionally attached or mock our religious susceptibility.’ The chief rabbi of England, Immanuel Jakobovits, emphatically concurred: it was wrong to ‘tolerate a form of denigration and ridicule which can only breed resentment’. In an essay on ‘Religious Anger and Minority Rights’, Tariq Modood, the director of Bristol University’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, wrote that ‘the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place.’ On this view, to experience the feeling is to suffer the injury.
Rushdie’s defenders were on solid ground when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for conciliation or compromise, ‘it would be suicidal to suppose that any concession made to the superstitious will ever be the last.’ But the odd appearance of the word ‘philistine’, in such a strictly political context turned the argument from a libertarian defence of publication to an aesthetic defence of the contents of the book – a sign of things to come. On the cable network C-Span, on 21 February 1989, Hitchens broadened his criticism:
"Tomorrow, shopping malls of the United States, which contain now one third of the book outlets in this country, will, of their own volition, not sell that book, because they are scared of a foreign despot … To be scared of a crazy foreign tyrant in this way is a really serious challenge to what we think of as the safe assumption of free speech and free inquiry, free expression and the necessity to defend it."
Destruction of subpoenaed evidence, at the request of Hillary's flunkies. A crime that makes Nixon's cover-ups seem trivial. But never mind, it was just about yoga classes - but it doesn't look like Hillary does yoga with her weight and her inability to climb stairs.
Is
Trump the Only Republican Who Can Handle the Media Onslaught? - See
more at:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/onslaught-trump-media#sthash.2PvEMs0W.dpuf
I hope some lefties are reading us because they need to know how many of us non-lefty people think and feel. Case in point, "Alt-Right." First off, there is no Alt-Right. However, there are lots of people fed up with the recent waves of Lefty insanity which we take the trouble to post here because the MSM refuses to.
In other words, the non-existent Alt-Right is a creation of a wacko left fringe which has left truth and reality far behind.
...it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.
Immigration and outsourcing are huge issues for Trump—the cornerstone of his campaign—but they’re not the only ones. It’s also about culture. It’s about the soul-bludgeoning insanity of egalitotalitarianism run amok, about the witch hunts and moral panics and PC tattletales. It’s about the blatant white-bashing and male-bashing and straight-bashing that masquerade as “progress” but merely serve to sow division. Too many people have been politely silent about this relentless PSYOP campaign of cultural demoralization to the point where they’re biting their lips bloody.
Maybe it should be the economy, stupid, but a lot of it is culture wars. The culture radicals and cultural Marxists have won the battles, it seems, so they are pushing their advantages to the point of utter, joke-worthy irrationality. But the joke could lose you your job.
I believe that life is deepened by physical, spiritual, emotional, social, and intellectual stress. Added as a bonus: discovering one's limitations. Doing what we "feel like doing" tends to be a dead end in life, paths of least resistance. Doing what we don't feel like doing can be amazing. A quote:
.. .the author Charles Duhigg, in his 2012 bestseller The Power of Habit, calls exercise a “keystone habit,” or a change in one area life that brings about positive effects in other areas. Duhigg says keystone habits are powerful because “they change our sense of self and our sense of what is possible.”
...than listen to this woman screeching at me for four years. What is wrong with her? Her behavior is so inconsistent. Not that it matters. She makes it clear, for sure, that she is against Right to Work. Sheesh. Listen at your own risk.
Who advised her and coached her about talking and looking like this? It's either ludicrous or scary... which makes me think that she's decided to try to sound like Trump. In that view, this is her statement of what Trump seems to be. This is what she thinks Trump's fans are responding to in Trump. It's so wrong on so many levels. And I guess that's a clue why she's not 50 points ahead.
No secrets there. Some drink a lot, some don't. Some smoke a lot, some do not. Some eat "healthy," many do not. Good genetics. In small southern Italian towns, everybody is a cugino.
I tend to dislike zoning and urban planning in general. I prefer organically-grown spaces. I like commercial spaces embedded in residential spaces, and even in suburbia candy shops, corner drug stores, and pubs would appear as gathering places in residential areas if they were allowed. That big divide makes no sense.
Urban planners are central planners, meaning that they usually are arrogant and get things wrong. Nowadays, few people wish to live full-time in the countryside or in the woods except for misanthropes. People like a vibrant, human-scale community whether in New York City or in Rumford, Maine.
We feel like the decision rule ought to be the one articulated by now retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, which is: “If something does not improve the battlefield lethality of our military, we ought to be very hesitant to undertake it.”
Because I am in a weight-training program, I take a scoop (5 gms) of it every morning along with a 20-gm. protein shake. There is no reason for either of those things unless you are trying to move heavy weights and pushing your limits to 5-9 reps.
I don't think it causes noticeable water retention. Your body makes about 2 gms of it per day, and you get a little bit from eating meat. The idea behind supplemental creatine is that, by giving your muscles a little extra ATP, you can theoretically stress your muscles harder, thus resulting in more good muscle microfiber damage, resulting in strength increase during the recovery process. Creatine doesn't build muscle; it is supposed to help you damage muscle.
Does it work? Experts say it does. It's difficult for me to say whether it has helped me in my program because I have no basis for comparison. At the least, a placebo effect.
Can women who lift use it? Sure. Many women these days do weight-training programs for general fitness for life, for osteopenia, and for sports. The same reasons the average guy does it. We have an 80 year-old gal in our gym lifting every morning a 6 am. And yes, Mrs. BD does 2 hrs of weights each week along with her other exercise. She loves those deadlifts. I hate it all, but I give it my best anyway. Delayed gratification.
Like Britain, we assume everyone will eventually become Western and enjoy the same liberties we do if we can just get through this rough patch. The time for this level of naïveté has passed. We are no longer importing “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” We are importing people who want to choke us to death.
If you dressed that way in college today, people would assume that you were as gay as Milo. However, kids in fine private schools still dress in ties for class, and those youths in the photo were probably just wearing something similar to what they had always worn to school. People used to dress for church too. I still do. It shows respect for the occasion. Please do not wear cut-off jeans to church. I am sure God doesn't care, but I do. (And you gals, please do not dress too sexy. It is a terrible distraction for us guys.)
It seems to me that part of the post-war cultural change in the US, and in the West generally, contained a degree of psychological regression, a clinging to childhood or adolescence. I do not know why that happened (decadence from prosperity and comfort?), but there was a time when people aged 18 were adults, viewed themselves as adults, comported themselves as adults, dressed like adults and, in short, aspired to be dignified grown-ups. I know this from my parents, but I grew up after that. Adulthood was difficult for them (military service, war, money, etc) but adulthood is always a deadly serious matter for which children are not equipped.
Dress expectations are superficial for sure, but they still mean something. So do all other cultural expectations. I am most comfortable associating with those who share my cultural expectations. Generally, know what to expect. Birds of a feather...
Solway discusses The Infantilizing of the Academy. I will not blame anybody or anything for the cultural regressions, but it is an interesting question.
Fireplace at a place I am quite fond of 
Toddler survives 
How to live to 100: 
Photo from 
