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.
The New Yorker: " Lewis’ fiercely considered intellectual reason makes the stuffy Oxford don intriguing company.”
My favorite line from the performance: "My Oxford friend Barfield was raised in an open-minded family... so naturally he knew nothing about Christianity." I also loved the part about his pre-university tutor W T Kirkpatrick. Some teacher, demanding as hell of intellectual consistency and precision. Also, his experiences in combat in WW l.
Lewis' conversion happened like Hemingway's line about how a character's bankruptcy happened, "Gradually, then suddenly."
It's at the Acorn on W 42nd St NYC. Cheap. McLean did another one man show of Screwtape a couple of years ago (which we saw. Also a tour de force). This is only 80 minutes. After, you can grab a bite or a cocktail at our favorite joint in that neck of the woods, The West Bank Cafe, right across the street. Cozy and great service.
When McLean finishes, he takes questions from the audience. Mrs. BD unmasked her intelligence with the best question.
The Acorn is in one of these new sorts of multiplex stage theaters that are emerging around NYC. It's a cool concept: four or so black box theaters on a few floors of an old converted industrial building, all sharing administration etc. Each small theater has its own name.
Also want to mention that all the brand-new high-rises around W 42nd are astonishing. That used to be a lousy area between the Garment District and Hell's Kitchen with a long windy hike to the subway. Every few months there is a new luxury high rise even though the general area is too busy and charmless in my opinion. The Big Apple draws ambitious, determined, and talented people like an apple draws fruit flies.
Imagine you are a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy processing the news that Jim Webb—Annapolis class of '68, recipient of the Navy Cross, former senator and secretary of the Navy, former member of the Annapolis faculty, bestselling novelist and acclaimed journalist—has been forced by political pressure to decline an award for distinguished alumni at your school this week...
I was happy to see that Steiner is still alive. He is one of the smart guys with a lot to say about everything, and it's a shame he doesn't have a website on which to toss out random thoughts and ideas.
"Revealing and exhilarating, A Long Saturday invites readers to pull up a chair and listen in on a conversation with a master." A Long Saturday: Conversations
I'm no gourmet, and I'm not hip enough to even say I'm a 'foodie'. I dabble in cooking occasionally. I'm somewhat adept at certain types of chicken, and while grilling is supposedly the domain of the more masculine of the species (remember, gender is an attitude now), I'm only passable as a grillmeister. I can follow directions well enough, so if required I am actually capable of whipping up a decent meal from time to time.
My wife has a ton of cookbooks on our shelves, so I'm never at a loss for opportunity or options. She is also a fan of cooking shows, and I've learned to enjoy the dulcet tones of such celebrity chefs as Bobby Flay, Giada de Laurentiis, and Ina Garten. I couldn't really tell you what they actually cook or how they do it, but I know who they are and what they do.
Enough is enough, though. We don't need 200,000,000 cookbooks, we don't need new tools, shows and gadgets to get the best meal. By now, the right way to boil water has been fleshed out, and we should be able to provide sufficiently for ourselves. Shouldn't we?
Body-weight squats, lunges with or without weights, wall sits, jump rope, burpees, and step-ups are all excellent lower-focus calisthenics which, like most calisthenics, provide plenty of intense cardio stress too.
We're working on a new game: Pistols. It's like a one-legged squat. Try it from your chair. It's not easy and you might have to begin from a higher perch and work your way lower. You will see what it feels like for elderly people to get up from a chair without using their arms.
The gal in the vid has short legs so she uses a stool for her foot to get the 90 degree knee angle. It stresses lots of accessory leg and core muscles because of the balance challenge. One foot must be solidly-planted, one in the air. We're adding this to our calis repertoire, and I am going to get out of chairs one-legged from now on. Just think of how many times/day you get up from a chair. Why not use it as a good exercise?
Media trying to create a Jew-scaring narrative. MSM is trying to scare the heck out of everybody now with freshly-minted narratives and, yes, fake news. It used to be called Yellow Journalism.
Their medical care costs too much? And their Social Security? 25% of Medicare costs are during the final year of life, so please, people, find a way to die before your last year for the greater good of society and the federal debt. It's very European too.
Not intending to go full Godwin, but the Nazis had lots of bioethicists, didn't they? And Margaret Sanger too. When ethicists, or people in the medical fields in general, begin thinking about "the greater good" instead of individuals, our culture is in trouble.
From the utilitarian, practical standpoint of the State, the economically-unproductive or parastic should go away. Maybe we should ban bioethicists due to their lack of souls.
Back to Drudge for more headlines; it offers a daily survey of events that are contra naturam. … Breitbart is also good, but for my tastes, too engagé. … Maggie’s Farm is for the connoisseurs. … They help you keep up with the Devil’s agenda.
1984 author George Orwell gives us perspective from the past. In a piece entitled “Looking Back on the Spanish War”, in the periodical New Road, (1943), Orwell wrote about the controlling techniques used by the Communists in the Spanish Civil War: “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs…”
We are witnessing the second great era of speech repression in academia, the first coming during the “culture wars” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. One force behind the new wave is a theory of truth, or a picture of reality, developed the first time around. This theory, which we might call “linguistic constructivism,” holds that we don’t merely describe or represent the world in language; language creates the world and ourselves. A favorite slogan of our moment, “Words have power,” reflects that view.
Yes, it is interesting. I remember dorm room bull sessions, often pot-smoke- filled, on such topics. Also, beer cans, pizza boxes, Haagen Dasz. Very difficult to separate the social construction of reality from propaganda.
Anyway, this is all kid stuff. Reality is when you stub your toe on a rock and enlightenment occurs.
"Even gender-neutral pronouns don’t feel as if they fit me. I feel no identity or closeness with any pronouns I’ve come across. What describes me is my name."
Britain, along with France and Germany the linchpin of the 28-nation EU, has opted to leave rather than continue living under the arbitrary, unelected bureaucracy that now runs Europe. A number of other countries — including France, Greece and Italy — are now talking about exit.
All the good intentions of its creation have been buried under a blizzard of regulations, paperwork and quasi-laws intended to definitively write an end to the idea of the nation-state. Right now, however, in country after country, people are getting sick of the EU.
Closely examining how the 11 percent decline of middle-income families was distributed between the upper- and lower-income categories, he points out that not only did 7 percent move into the upper-income group, but that Hispanic immigrants accounted for three-quarters of the 4 percent that enlarged the lower-income category. Absent the influx of lower-skilled immigrants between 1971 and 2015, the share of middle-class households in the American population would have experienced only a 1 percent shift downward at the same time as the number of upper-income families increased by 7 percent. In other words, middle-class people did not so much experience a downward shift as immigrants enlarged the data set. And for many if not most of these immigrants, gaining a foothold in the lower-income group represented a significant economic step upward compared to their position before coming to the United States.
Something similar has happened with education, I think.
So medical "insurance" is no longer true insurance except at the catastrophic end. If the old model was Major Medical insurance against catastrophe, the new model is more of a medical payment system. That has changed everything.
What people 
Gwynnie's photo of overhead Snows 