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 agree with Hanson that Trump was the only person with a chance against the Clinton-Dem-media machine. He begins:
Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.
A friend returned from a bachelor party weekend in the US heartland. His report:
Fri nite: Cookout at his friend's parents' house, with kegs, a bonfire, and fireworks of course in the back field. Sat: 6 hours at the shooting range, with unlimited shotgun, handgun, and rifle sports. Sat nite: They drove a few hrs from Ohio to Pittsburgh for a nice big dinner event, had to wear neat, clean clothes. Sun: They went to a dirt track race after early church. Box seats! Then everybody drove home to wherever they came from. Nobody flew, cuz firearms are not carry-on.
I have never attended a bachelor party as good as that. This was outside the Beltway for sure. Flyover Country where people change their own oil in their cars and trucks.
The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.
...the “values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination” are not values anyone in the Cloud actually follows, but they like the way it sounds so they say it a lot. Show up at a faculty meeting with a Trump hat on and these people will run screaming for security. You will be arrested and thrown in a pit, all in the name of tolerance and inclusion. The words no longer have a literal meaning for the Cloud People. They are magic words and the point of using them is make you shut-up so they can boss you around without having to explain themselves.
It's about time that a national politician made an issue of public K-12 education. Only somebody with the audacity of Trump would do it. In some ways promotion of school choice seems most relevant (and appealing) to inner-city blacks but there is no reason it should not be appealing to others.
While elite private schools can be prohibitively expensive, most charter schools cost less to run than government education. Prosperous people (like Clintons and Trumps) have school choice for their families. Nobody else does. What matters is choice. Probably most public ed in the US does a fine job but, fine or not so fine, why not give parents a choice?
Everyone with eyes knows that the urban public school system in America is a travesty. Over decades the Left took a basically good system that churned out good citizens, entrepreneurs, and employees, and transformed it into a jobs program for adults, especially Democratic Party supporters and labor bosses. It amounts to a gigantic partisan slush fund that everyone who pays taxes in America is forced to support. And no matter how much money gets spent, things never seem to improve...
An AVI quote: "When your current-event justice argument is basically founded on long-past injustices, it means your current argument isn't very strong. "
The media’s new war on their readers is part of the general unrest we are seeing in the West. People in the media have long viewed themselves as the fourth estate, part of the ruling class, but policing the ruling class. This was always nonsense.
“Mexicans? Splendid hard-working guys. Great family folk. Love ’em. And when we’ve got the economy booming again as a result of my policies, they’ll have their place in the sun. Until then, though, we have to give our own hard-working Americans the first crack at the new jobs. Look, the Mexicans are fine people. They’ll understand.”
Once or twice a year we organize artsy-fartsy outings for our artsy art-loving friends. On Saturday, the most beautiful day of the year up here, we all got up to Storm King Art Center to spend four hours hiking around the lovely park-like grounds in the Hudson Highlands.
Wonderful outing. I determined that one of the potties in the woods was a Richard Serra, but it was just a potty. Saw a fox and a few migrating raptors. Plus lots of Calders, Serras, Di Suveros, Goldsworthys, etc. These large constructions look their best in large spaces with plenty of 360 degree perspective. Good fun. Tired legs.
The place is growing. It's a destination for worldwide art-lovers, and you will hear all sorts of languages spoken as you hike the 500+ acres. Photo is a Goldsworthy stone wall, diving into the lake. I do not know whether it's art, but it is fun to see a finely-constructed wall and that is good enough for me.
Thanks to wealthy people with good taste, America became the fine arts center of the world. For now, anyway.
Check out Storm King sometime. You can bring a picnic or have a sammich at their little outdoor cafe. In 3 1/2 hours of walking outdoors you can not see it all. Our next expedition will be in winter, to DIA Beacon. That's another famous worldwide art destination.
Off topic, but for Northeast hiking, google Hudson Highlands hiking. Great stuff with countless trails of all lengths, and excellent for the fall migration.
Common Loon. After a day chasing grouse and woodcock, and after dinner, it's nice to step out of the cabin by the lake with the pup, a ceegar, and a glass of whiskey to listen to the Loons calling.
In winter, they migrate to salt water, and have their drab non-breeding plumage. Some of these pics show winter plumage.
Had occasion to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge yesterday. Seeing the progress of the new bridge, adjacent to the old, is a thrill. Once in a while a government does something worthy. My only regret is that the bridge does not have rail. It should. I think there is not a single rail bridge over the southern Hudson River, which is odd and unfortunate.
The issue pits the conservationists against the sentimentalists. It comes down to this: If you want to protect the native fauna and flora of the American West, the imported ungulates need to go. (The same goes for feral pigs, aka Wild Boar).
A healthy distrust of experts, especially government experts, is a good trend. Government "expertise" is always contaminated by politics (eg the Ethanol scam). Caveat emptor.
As the threat of communicable diseases receded, public medicine began to turn its attention to treating and preventing health problems that weren’t germ-caused, such as chronic heart disease and strokes, the death rates for which seemed to be soaring after World War II. Some observers cautioned that the apparent increase might be the result of diagnostic advances, which had improved doctors’ ability to detect heart ailments. This possibility, however, failed to deter the press and advocacy groups like the American Heart Association from declaring the arrival of a frightening epidemic.
That is a major but unknown scandal. Think of all of the gullible Americans who avoided "red meat" and "animal fat" over a generation, for no reason at all.
Marc Jacobs is accused of 'cultural appropriation' after sending white models including Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid down the catwalk with fake dreadlocks
“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
G K Chesterton, as quoted in Warren's On the need to remain cheerful. Warren's short essay reminded me a bit of Kipling's eternal IF:
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Related, for many years Obama (aka Barry Soetoro) did indeed claim to have been born in Kenya. Even his bio on this first book said so. The Rickroll - Brilliant and amusing tricksteration. The Donald is having fun. Like I say, not a fan but have to cast my meaningless vote for some fool, so why not him? National politics in America was a reality show long before TV.
Our now-retired pastor was always attentive to angels in our midst. Angels, with the meaning of messengers with holy messages. You can also always wonder about Christ in the Stranger’s Guise.
If we had been civilized, then 9/11 would have been a temporary tragedy. But we had lost the ability to distinguish between ourselves and the barbarians. Out of this loss of confidence, we set out on a missionary expedition to save them by converting them to our faith in democracy. When that failed, we encouraged them to come and convert us to their faith in our inferiority and their superiority.
It has become increasingly clear as the imperatives of political correctness make ever greater inroads against free speech and the perquisites of dispassionate inquiry that the battle against this provinciality of time is one of the central cultural tasks of our age. It is a battle from which the traditional trustees of civilization—schools and colleges, museums, many churches—have fled. Increasingly, it has seemed to us, the responsibility for defending those “intellectual and spiritual foundations of Western civilization” of which George Nash spoke has fallen to individuals and institutions that are largely distant from, when they are not indeed explicitly disenfranchised from, the dominant cultural establishment. Leading universities today command tax-exempt endowments in the tens of billions of dollars. But it is by no means clear, notwithstanding the prestige they confer upon their graduates, whether they do anything to challenge the temporal provinciality of their charges. No, let us emend that: it is blindingly clear that they do everything in their considerable power to reinforce that provinciality, not least by their slavish capitulation to the dictates of the enslaving presentism of political correctness.
Travelogue: The Imperial Capital. It's a part of the world where there is never a recession, pay and benefits are generous, and where few can feel good about their job. Managers and paper-pushers by the tens of thousands, and a large load of talented schmoozers. A modern Ancient Rome.
As an urban, aspiring-elite, I want legal immigration of the type and to the extent that the American people view is in their interest. Illegal immigration is invasion, in my view, with or without weapons. I am a proud nationalist despite the fact that our humble biz has now finally gone international. After seven years, we can now afford more than beer and pizza.
If you like roller-coasters, you will love entrepreneurship. Just do it before you have a family to support or you could get stuck in a dreary life in a cubicle.
A reptilian anachronism:
Low- functioning men 