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 only good thing Ikea sells is Loganberry Jam. Excellent stuff. Have not heard of child sex slaves for sale there yet, but with Sweden going the way it is going, who knows what the future holds for Ikea?
The United States has no interest in Syria. There are no good guys to back. There’s no “solution” to what ails that part of the world, short of another flood. Syria is a mess because it is full of Syrians. The only sane policy is to make sure it remains full of Syrians. Let them kill each other there, not in Paris or Portland. If the Russians want to build their pipeline there and pay the price for it, good for them. If the Saudis want to stop them, best of luck with it. This is not an American problem. It is their problem. Let them own it.
And few people are entirely satisfied with their souls and minds either. Often, we make reasonable efforts to work on all of those things, but at what point do our goals become crazy? If I need to look like Melania, I am crazy. If I need to look like a man, I am double-crazy and should want help separating fantasy from reality.
Fortunately in the USA it is rare that Psychiatric help can be forced, but it distresses me when people seem to endorse double-crazy as normal. But, as I say, in a free country you are free to be crazy, and free to get help with it if you want to. Lots of people are half-crazy, crazy, and double-crazy, but I see no need for the culture to pretend to deny that reality. Or any other reality.
It is interesting to me that the Psychiatric officialdom is expanding the list of "disorders" to the point that nobody can keep track of them anymore, at the same time that the elite culture is normalizing other ones. Something strange is going on on both sides.
It's unclear what in particular they wish to resist about Washington, but it is quite clear that they wish to support gay Palestinians. Pathetic. And to build bridges between gay American blacks and gay Palestinians to change America. Good luck with that. As if there were any gay Palestinians left anyway.
I am afraid that they have no idea what this sort of thing sounds like to ordinary Americans. It sounds psychotic, out of reality, worse than Portlandia.
Exactly where is Syria? What is it? Why should I care? Well, I do care about any people who are being tortured, abused, killed, etc., but that is the way of much of the world. It pains me terribly and only increases my gratitude for living in civilization. Still, I had hopes that Trump would stay out of the Middle East messes and leave it to others. I guess not.
And, for the 1000th time, the UN proves itself useless for its supposed purpose. Why do we bother with it?
Their findings are mainly gross-anatomical, but the connectome mapping goes further. Unsurprisingly, there is some male-female overlap in this effort to define structural sex differences. Anyway, it would be news if no differences were seen in male and female brains.
An historian seeks to 'disprove' the 'myth' of Social Security being a Ponzi scheme. His assessment? The fact that is has worked for almost 80 years. Just because it's operated for 80 years doesn't mean it's not a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi didn't last that long because his scheme just didn't force everyone into it. In addition, while the math indeed proves SocSec will go broke (to me, proof of a Ponzi scheme is that the investment, under constant conditions, will go broke eventually), what makes it a non-Ponzi is that government just has to raise taxes!
Brilliant! And all Ponzi had to do was get more people to join and charge them more as he got closer to failure!
Sorry, any pay-as-you-go system which has regular payouts in perpetuity and no clear way to link dollars in to dollars out in the future, and without a clear method of investment and growth, is a Ponzi Scheme. Saying government bonds fulfills the method of investment is like saying investing in the next big bank heist is an investment. You're relying on coerced collections rather than actual organic progress and growth.
I see something similar unfolding now as during the Iran deal. Whether Rhodes was or is involved is not clear, though he has been particularly active in attacking the Trump administration. But the methodology is the same, a fact-free narrative endlessly parroted by the media in a circular fashion so that media reporting on what other media are saying creates an endless cycle of news stories about news stories.
It’s worth noting that while the media shows keen interest in building up the anti-Trump collusion narrative, it seems highly motivated to tear down the improper surveillance narrative asserted by Congressman Devin Nunes and others. The media worries more about whether Trump’s tweets about “wiretapping” were accurate than whether the powers of our spy agencies were abused for political purposes, and whether the Obama administration deliberately tried to undermine the incoming president.
This is a rant. If you think government works for the people, you may not want to read this. If you know government is essentially a means for legal theft, read on. I have just gone through a mind-numbing process which has left me absolutely cold and more determinedly Libertarian. Shrink the government, and shrink it fast. Don't worry about the process. Just time to get rid of the stupid, inefficient and idiotic things it does.
When my son was born, a friend bought a single share of Disney stock for him. Today, that would be slightly more than 3 (3.04) shares. At today's price, that represents $339.
When my son graduated from college, he began to pull together all his savings bonds, gifts, and various financial instruments to see what was at his disposal. Sadly, he couldn't get the stock. It had been taken by the state of NJ in 2012. Presumably because the corporation had had no contact with me for over 5 years. Which is strange. I contacted the corporate offices and they had my name, address, email, and phone number. All of the correct information.
I never received any notifications of escheatment, never received any kind of warning from the shareholder office or the state.
What is even more galling is what happened after escheatment. NJ law stipulates after 1 year any financial instruments are to be sold. This meant the state was now holding about $220 in my son's unclaimed property, rather than the stock itself.
It's amazing to me that the state will have no problem finding me in 10 days to take my taxes. But when they take my property, they won't lift a finger to find me.
In fact, that's literally what the two brainless bureaucrats at Unclaimed Property Administration said to me. The state does nothing, outside of advertise in newspapers and the web, to contact people whose property they are holding. Here's the kicker. I was told the stock was sold in 2013, but the advertisement wasn't made until 2014. In other words, they held it for 2 years before even letting the world know they held it. So there was no way we were getting the stock back.
I can point fingers at the corporate shareholder office for not trying hard enough. They certainly didn't. But they would, presumably, keep trying unless the law steps in. The law did, in fact, step in and once its process started, nothing was done to assist in 'finding' me. The state, which presumably has greater resources to contact me when they want my taxes, didn't lift a finger to find me. The response from the unclaimed property division is that they have no relationship with the tax division. Of course not. That would actually require intelligence.
My son is only out $110, so this isn't the end of the world. As a big picture example of how useless government is, though - this is a classic example.
We post here frequently about the components of general fitness and physical training goals: strength, athleticism, power, endurance, etc. The variety of exercises that we recommend are stressing and training neuro-muscular and cardiac systems.
However, while we are stressing and challenging our bodies in all of the ways needed for balanced fitness, we are also training our metabolic energy systems for higher capactiy and efficiency. There is no need to know anything about it, but it is interesting.
It's basic high school biology. Animals (and plants) use ATP as an energy source for cellular functioning. ATP is generated and regenerated in the mitochondria.
However, our resting ATP batteries store very little reserve energy so 5- 20 seconds of high intensity, maximum anaerobic effort (eg 20-second sprints and HIIT sprints, or a set of heavy deadlifts) require instant regeneration of ATP. That's our "emergency" Phosphagen System. After depleted, it takes a couple of minutes to restore itself which is why you rest between deadlift sets or walk ("active recovery") between sprints. The Phosphagen system is trained by stressing it, but it has its limits.
After 10-20 seconds of high intensity, our cells turn to splitting sugar (mainly derived from carbs unless you have a Coke before exercise) - Glycolysis - to produce more ATP. This energy system, also requiring no oxygen, can keep us going for up to 2 minutes of intense effort. Like the Phosphagen system, Glycolysis is trained by short bursts of high intensity exertions of any sort.
A body can't live long, though, without oxygen. Both of the above are anaerobic (oxygen-independent) systems and neither can be sustained for very long without rest and oxygen to restore them. Aerobic exertion (using oxygen to burn sugars and fats - the Aerobic System -) can slowly but almost endlessly produce enough energy to maintain us during less intense activity in which we maintain a pretty good oxygen balance (or at rest, for that matter). Aerobic energy systems are trained and stressed by, say, 1-hour endurance exercises which keep the heart rate continuously well-above a walking heart rate, eg continuous calisthenics, and non-sprinting exercises like swimming speedy but not sprinting laps, treadmill intervals but not HIIT intervals, jogging, and similar exercises when you can breathe uncomfortably but effectively-enough to keep going.
Can aerobic exercise count as "cardio" exercise? Sort-of, maybe. It depends on where you keep your heart rate. High-intensity, high heart-rate bursts are the best heart-stressors and if it doesn't kill you it will make it stronger. Endurance is a different matter. Is normal walking "exercise"? Basically, no. It's just basic functioning unless it's fast and over 5 miles. "Cardio" means heart rate significantly elevated above walking.
Aerobic metabolism is highly efficient, which is why it takes 3 hours on an elliptical to burn the calories (270) in one plain bagel. It is why you can not lose weight by exercising unless you are fast- hiking 8 hrs/day on minimal caloric intake for a week or two. The average sedentary person (meaning under 5-10,000 "steps" daily with no other stressful exercise) probably needs less than 2000 calories per day to maintain their status quo. Remarkably, in the USA, it is not unusual for one single cheap meal to provide that much energy.In all of human history, remarkable indeed. Caloric abundance has a downside, thus the "overweight crisis" especially among our American poor.
A balanced fitness program (resistance, calisthenics, cardio, and endurance) ends up stressing all 3 energy systems without your having to think about it at all. That is just one of the many reasons why we endorse balanced fitness exercise programs instead of a single path (such as all weights, or all aerobics).
American culture, economics and religion can’t survive the rule of Anti-America. That is what we saw in the Obama years. But Anti-America would do even worse if Republicans got serious about a reform agenda. That’s one reason why Democrats are beginning to engage in a political secession.
Immigration enforcement, school choice and big government cuts frighten them worse than anything.
The left reshaped the culture until an ideological conflict became a culture war. The Two Americas have less in common than the North and the South did. The divisions accelerated sharply throughout the last century. In this century, the division is becoming an irresolvable political conflict. A civil war.
The new media is fearless, more like the hearty newspapermen (before there were "journalists") of old. Why were Woodward and Bernstein famous? Because they caught a devious Republican (actually, a RINO). Had they caught a devious Democrat, it would have all gone into the black hole of unreported news and W and B would have been back on the police beat.
This guy Cernovitch broke the Rice story. He is not a member of the Club:
On-campus attitudes to sex are, by Kipnis’s account, growing ever more sharply contradictory. As in the wider world, sexuality is often on public display. But people are also ready to be offended, and students ready to sue: hence the cautionary “dear colleague” emails. And into this mess has stepped officialdom, in the form of Title IX, whose guidelines are at once so vague and so all-encompassing that Kipnis could be accused of “creating a hostile environment on campus” simply for having written an essay.
People need to be heroes and to stand up to the PC terrorists. It must be frightening, though, if you need your job.
His legal advice: "God back to your safe little life and shut your mouth."
Academia is becoming a dangerous profession these days. Toe the party line or else. It's not an environment for free-thinkers. Seems like Mao's Cultural Revolution. Academics feel intimidated, and they need their jobs. Seems like Mao's Cultural Revolution. Academics feel intimidated, and they need their jobs so they behave like fearful mice.
The Swamp is filled with incestuous power and money relationships, while the regular citizen wonders why the heck they aren't listening to them. Hence Trump.
... no one is supposed to notice that one government did interfere in the U.S. election — ours. For months and months, the Obama administration was spying on Trump and leaking hints of its investigation to the press in the hopes of helping Hillary, who, by the way, colluded in the effort. Yet even the ruthless partisan Adam Schiff can’t “definitively” cite a single proof of collusion on Trump’s part, as he reluctantly acknowledged on Sunday. Given all the spying and leaking on Trump, wouldn’t we know by now if they had any evidence of collusion?
To say that Trump in this matter is more sinned against than sinning is an understatement. He was the blatant victim of political espionage and criminal leaking by the Obama administration, then when he complained about it, he was smeared anew.
"Maggie Haberman had it. She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration." "Eli Lake had it. He didn't want to run it and Bloomberg didn't want to run it because it vindicates Trump's claim that he had been spied upon. And Eli Lake is a 'never Trumper.' Bloomberg was a 'never Trump' publication."
"I'm showing you the politics of 'real journalism'. 'Real journalism' is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn't run it because they don't want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that's why they sat on it."
"So where did I get the story? I didn't get it from the intelligence community. Everybody's trying to figure out where I got it from. I got it from somebody who works in one of those media companies. I have spies in every media organization. I got people in news rooms. I got it from a source within the news room who said 'Cernovich, they're sitting on this story, they're not going to run it, so you can run it'."
“Sex Traffickers at Ikea?” 
As Steyn says,
Update on 
It's basic high school biology. Animals (and plants) use ATP as an energy source for cellular functioning. ATP is generated and regenerated in the 