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.
It has been known, probably since humans were human, that many personality traits are hard-wired in the genes and that much of development consists of a gradual revealing of those traits in the same way that physical characteristics are gradually revealed. Thanks to the miracle of the human cerebral cortex, some learning and adaptation occurs but the hard-wired things remain present even if hidden by adaptive maneuvers (eg covering up shyness or hypersensitivity).
Long before you could express yourself with words, you were giving away the signs of your adult temperament. Christian Jarrett explains how.
A friend is in the wedding party at a Dominican wedding this weekend. He's been brushing up on his Salsa and Merengue. He lived in Costa Rica for two years so he had plenty of experience in Latin dance clubs. He says, "With Latin Americans, you can't get chicks if you can't dance." I said I thought Merengue had a bit of happy grinding. It does.
You can learn those dance rhythms and moves on Youtube.
Orban tendered a dire prediction if Europe continues to accept Muslim immigration. “There will eventually be more Muslims than Christians in Europe as the continent’s non-Muslim population is ill-equipped to fight the coming cultural competition.”
Europe’s progressives rejected Orban's warning. “In a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has set himself up as a bulwark against a generous-spirited, pan-European approach,” The Guardian editorialized.
Why should western Europeans listen to Viktor Orban?
Big-time sports simply do not blend well with academic pursuits. Georgia Tech’s Richard DeMillo nailed that point when he wrote in this Pope Center article: “Sports programs are grafted onto universities to extract value from academic programs for the sake of the sports programs. Athletic decision-making cannot be trusted to align itself with academic goals when so many of the incentives are tied to the success of a non-core, big money operation that has virtually no relationship to academic outcomes.”
Is there any hope of escaping from the arms race for sports prestige?
Useless as it may be, it's too popular to go away.
If you plant some now (in the northern hemisphere, temperate zone or above), you will have their foliage and purty flowers busting through the snow in Feb or March. Lenten Rose. Happy with deep shade. The more the better. Too bad they are expensive, but good things often are.
Since the Party was the agent of History itself, it could not be mistaken, and so anything the party did was morally right by definition. “Morality is entirely subordinated to the class struggle of the proletariat,” Lenin declared. At the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, Trotsky explained:
"Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right against his Party. The Party in the last analysis is always right, because the Party is the sole historical instrument given the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems. . . . I know that one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the Party and through the Party for history has not created other ways for the realization of what is right."
On a warm day, you can smell its sweetness 10 yards away. A good thing about this tough vine is that it does not spread undereground, which is why I had to destroy the yellow Trumpet Vine I had there before.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
And the money kept rolling in from every side Eva's pretty hands reached out and they reached wide Now you may feel it should have been a voluntary cause But that's not the point my friends When the money keeps rolling in, you don't ask how Think of all the people guaranteed a good time now Eva's called the hungry to her, open up the doors Never been a fund like the Foundation Eva Peron
The wealthy, the influential, the intelligentsia, and the cultural elite all broadcast their virtues — usually at a cut-rate rhetorical price — to offset their own sense of sin (as defined by feelings of guilt), or in fear that their own lives are antithetical to the ideologies they espouse, or sometimes simply as a wise career move. Sin these days is mostly defined as race/class/gender thought crimes. Wearing a mask of virtue is done not to save one’s soul for eternity but to still feel good about enjoying privilege.
Greenfield: American presidents were meant to retire. They were never supposed to use taxpayer money to set up cabals. It was unthinkable for them to solicit foreign rulers in a bid to return to power.
Mexico has zero tolerance for illegal immigrants who seek to work inside Mexico, happen to break Mexican law or go on public assistance -- or any citizens who aid them.
In Mexico, legal immigration is aimed at privileging lawful arrivals with skill sets that aid the Mexican economy and, according to the country's immigration law, who have the "necessary funds for their sustenance" -- while denying entry to those who are not healthy or would upset the "equilibrium of the national demographics." Translated, that idea of demographic equilibrium apparently means that Mexico tries to withhold citizen status from those who do not look like Mexicans or have little skills to make money.
If the United States were to treat Mexican nationals in the same way that Mexico treats Central American nationals, there would be humanitarian outrage.
…in a culture of abundance and affordable luxury, bodily self-abnegation no longer retains this primeval horror. Rather, the twenty-first-century middle-class American must actively labor not to become fat. Thus eating becomes moralized behavior. How often have you heard a woman describe a rich dessert as “sinful”? To eat is to sin—in secular society, the body replaces the soul. Good and evil are no longer purely spiritual concepts—these words have been transubstantiated into the realm of the flesh.
Qualifications to run for President of the US? Just age and birth citizenship, I believe. In my view, Hillary! is disqualified on moral, ethical, and responsibility grounds. Trump is more qualified than Obama had been, by being an executive, entrepreneur, and by having lots of real life experience.
As I have said many times here, few people care anymore about Hillary's flaws. They are assumed, and she and Bill are somewhat admired for their handling of their countless errors of morality, ethics, and judgement. Having the wind of the media at your back never hurts.
I want one. I used to think they were silly, but now I realize that they are nothing but a permanent campfire. People love to assemble around them, the smoke keeps bugs away, and they are great for burning marshmallows.
And if you go pagan, you can put burnt offerings on it too. It won't hold an ox, but perhaps a goat or unblemished lamb.
I am planning to double the size of our cramped bluestone patio and already know where I want the fire.
This excellent specialty lumber place on Cape Cod, Stonewood, will deliver the cut stone on a pallet with the insert, ready for simple assembly. No mortar.
The Yankee State (CT) was once one of the most prosperous places on the planet, and until 1991 it had no income tax. Its other key attribute was its proximity to high-tax, anti-business New York. But over the last 25 years, Connecticut has been in a free-fall as it has raised its income tax four times, leading to towering deficits.
The joke now in Connecticut is: Will the last person in the state please turn out the lights? As Connecticut depopulates, there may come a time when one super-rich person is left living in a Greenwich mansion who is highly educated and with three patents to his name, and the Times can say: Look how prosperous and highly educated Connecticut is.
By the way, a 2014 poll found that 49% of Connecticut residents say they want to leave the state — second only to Illinois at 50%. The exodus is on: 156,057 people have left Connecticut since 1992, taking $9.5 billion in income with them. As people in Fort Lauderdale and Naples, Fla., will tell you, it seems like every third person here is from Connecticut.
Our view is that the best measure of where the future is happening is to look at where people and businesses are moving to and where they are leaving — voting with their feet. In the day, East Germans fled to West Germany, not the other way around. This rapid migration, more than any distorted statistic that the USSR could cook up, was evidence that free-market capitalism was superior to communism.
Rutenberg recycles one of the progressive media’s most cherished self-justifying myths, that there really is an “objective” journalism they supposedly practice. Such a notion has seldom existed in American history, and has especially been scarce since the 1960s, when activist journalism came out of the closet with its ideological coverage of Vietnam and then Watergate, all perfumed with the spurious claim to journalistic integrity and public service.
The truth is, journalism has been a form of political activism long before Jim Rutenberg noticed. Orville Schell, dean of the prestigious UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism from 1996-2006, was not shy about embracing this role for journalism: “In a democracy,” Schell wrote over a decade ago, “indeed in any intelligent society, the media and politicians have to lead. The media should be introducing us to new things, interesting things, things we don’t already know about; helping us change our minds or make up our minds, not just pandering to lowest-denominator wisdom.”
For overseas travel, we tend to travel heavy. If we're on ships and boats, or renting a car, it's pretty easy to travel heavy except when banging around airports.
We travel heavy because we do so many different things, from dressed-up to rough hiking, and everything in-between. We are partial to staying in tenutas in the countryside, and boutique hotels in town where they have overnight laundry service. Never really tried traveling light since our youth.
For our upcoming trip, we decided it made more sense to forget the Costco International car rental (which we highly recommend) and just to train it between cities even though I enjoy driving in Europe and getting lost usually leads to interesting adventures.
Traveling light means some form of carry-on-sized luggage, and an additional bag of stuff to hand-carry for which I usually use a large LL Bean tote bag containing reading stuff, a smaller day bag or briefcase that I stuff in there, camera, etc. Airlines never seem to mind that bag. I don't bother with laptop for recreation travel.
So my airplane plan is to wear the blazer and tie (which I like to wear traveling anyway because you get treated better if you look good), my largest hiking shoes, maybe a light jacket, wear the hat, etc. and to put other stuff in a carry-on.
But what sort? Gotta figure on needing a couple of dress shirts, nice shoes, polo shirts, toiletries, a few pairs of trousers, etc. No rain gear or sweater needed on this trip.
Good for her, but you do not need to go to Appalachia to find Charles Murray's Fishtowns. There is lots of dysfunction out there, and many people lacking in "Social Capital" and "Cultural Capital". So much, in fact, that the Fishtown life might be a sort of normal. The Belmonts might be exceptions, not normal.
Leading a high-functioning, disciplined, and productive life is far more difficult that it can appear. When dependency becomes normalized, behavioral regression and immaturity are further enabled.
America has never been a classless society. From the beginning, rich and poor have usually lived in different parts of town, gone to different churches, and had somewhat different manners and mores. It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.
Eton 
Dear Media: It Is Not News When ‘Transgender Men’ Get Pregnant
If you plant some now (in the northern hemisphere, temperate zone or above), you will have their foliage and purty flowers busting through the snow in Feb or March. Lenten Rose. Happy with deep shade. The more the better. Too bad they are expensive, but good things often are. 
Cats are bird killers. 
I want one. I used to think they were silly, but now I realize that they are nothing but a permanent campfire. People love to assemble around them, the smoke keeps bugs away, and they are great for burning marshmallows.
A salute to Labor
