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've been meaning to write this post for a long time. I'd grant that there exists something akin to "white privilege" in the USA, as in all of the western world. It happens to be more like "cultural privilege" than anything to do with skin tone. I am talking about individual qualities which are most in demand and most effective in western cultures.
The markings of cultural privilege are most easily internalized by upbringing, and secondarily by good examples (eg coaches, relatives) and formal education. Good socialization. Wealth is only incidentally associated, not causal, because lots of rich kids are complete a-holes. The western world (except for England) has no caste system, but it has an informal cultural caste system and everybody is aware of it. It has nothing to do with IQ or where you grew up or went to college, but it has to do with how you comport yourself, how properly and grammatically you speak and write, manners and grace, dress, good humor, level of sophistication, being a good dinner companion, playing sports, staying out of trouble with the law, being able to discuss books, and other sorts of things that some people sum up as "presentable."
As a reader notes, other less superficial traits often come under the "whiteness" umbrella:
Privilege aka the work ethic. It incorporates concepts like self actualization, self discipline, persistence, impulse control, fairness, loyalty (though not blind loyalty), integrity, politeness, civic mindedness, punctuality, reliability and accountability, courage, autonomy, problem solving, saving and postponement of gratification, being productive and contributing to the community...
I think "whiteness" is a shorthand for those who are culturally advantaged, adapted to a dominant if not elite culture, because in my life experience you can easily find people of all colors, ethnicities, and wealth who lack those qualities, and those who possess those qualities. It is indeed a handicap in life to lack them.
Obama got to where he got by the combination of skin tone, a natural grace, and his cultural privilege. It can be a winning combination.
Interestingly, Pres. Trump is culturally disadvantaged, or so it seems, and has a strange, alien, orange skin tone. He must be from some alien planet like Queens, NY, who landed in Washington like Mr. Bean.
At the bottom of this, I think the "whiteness" thing is an attempted slo-mo imitation of Mao's cultural revolution with little to do with race or ethnicity.
The people in the media face in toward their masters, rather than looking out over the wall at the rest of us. For those involved in dissident politics, this is useful as it makes it more difficult for the people in charge to respond to the threat.
On my fifth day, I find that they are getting harder to do, not easier. I think that is the necessary stress. My first set of 15 is difficult, second set of 15 easier, and the remaining sets of ten become more challenging. I am only up to 80/day, will get to 100 on Monday. My sets are spread out over hours.
If over age 20, I wonder whether it might make more sense to put in a day of push-up rest every few days for recovery. My goal of course is 100/day, but more specifically 50 in a row. I don't need to do 100 in a row.
A central theme in this Day Of Judgment, which begins tonight, is the importance of seeking out forgiveness from those who we've harmed, and determining to set a better new course in our behavior. The flip side of this is whether the one who is harmed will be forgiving. If not, after several sincere attempts to obtain forgiveness, the duty is satisfied. Yet, the one harmed will bear the burden of bitterness. This video explains how to overcome that.
What is the source of Bastiat’s genius? Arguably it is that he analyzes all things economic through the eyes of the individual. Economies aren’t living, breathing blobs; they’re just collections of individuals. And for an individual, “It is only too obvious that abundance would be advantageous to him.” As individuals, we’re all too aware of how few of life’s necessities or luxuries we could produce on our own. And if imports are wondrous for the individual (whether from across the street, or the other side of the world), which they are, they’re wondrous for an economy that is merely a collection of individuals.
Most yawn that Mark Zuckerberg and Pope Francis have given one too many sanctimonious rants that project their own hypocrisies. And one too many sober and judicious ex-diplomats (of the sort whose mellifluous prior appeasement led to a thermonuclear North Korea) bores us with warnings about Trump’s “incendiary rhetoric.” Apparently in 2016, the deplorables and irredeemables struck back. Donald J. Trump symbolically served as a radiologically hot CAT scan that revealed long-festering inner metastases. Next, as deadly chemotherapy, he unpleasantly saturated the patient until the cancers within slowly began to fester and shrink — even as the convalescent resented the harsh therapy as much as he did the symptoms of the disease.
Here is a sure fire test for a progressive. If given a choice between two worlds:
A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic, chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly distributed, or...
A "progressive" society where everyone is poorer, but income is generally more evenly distributed. In this society, jobs and pay and industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances that they will continue to have what they have today, with little downside but also with very little upside.
It is a general term for all of these things: being pleased with the way you look naked, feeling energetic, and having well-developed strength/musculature, cardiovascular endurance, and athleticism (agility+speed+power).
I pretty much follow something like the Maggie's program of a combination of weight-lifting, calisthenics, and endurance cardio. About 5 hours weekly but I also play sports one night/week and on weekends. I watch my nutrition carefully because many middle-aged women have a tendency to get sloppy regardless of their exercise program. (No rational amount of exertion can produce fat loss, unfortunately, but physical exertion does reduce subjective hunger and "false hunger" - the hunger that overweight people experience.)
Regarding muscle maintenance and strength-building in middle age (40+), I want to highlight a paragraph from yesterday's post:
Research has demonstrated that low load high intensity lifting at 30% of the one repetition max (1RM) to failure can elicit similar rates of muscle protein synthesis as traditional, high load low intensity lifting at 90% of 1RM. Data suggests that low and high load lifting performed to failure yield equivalent hypertrophy over time. So exercise volume (repetitions x sets x load) can achieve maximal muscle fiber activation, including the important larger type II fibers. This is also much less likely to cause injury, an important consideration at any age.
Note that it says "to failure." That is the key, and that is the tricky part because the mental "I give up" almost always precedes the muscles giving up. Fighting that mental part is the discipline of exertion, and why trainers know they can almost always say "C'mon, give me one or two more." Women have no need to fear developing the hard or bulging muscles of their fit and athletic menfolk. That can't happen naturally with females.
To hedge your bets on the current consensus, I suggest going heavy with the weights on power lifts occasionally. You might even see your 1RM increase if you dare to check it (with a spotter) every few months.
I didn't have to get too far into this to begin to see where it was going. Claims the Constitution is outdated, not suited for this era, etc.
The premise is that being shouted down or using troll-bots to humiliate or drown out 'undesirable' voices - using free speech to stop free speech - is, itself, based on an additional premise that is unstated. That premise is people are incapable of thinking for themselves and that it is impossible to discern the truth in the midst of mis- and dis-information.
It also presumes these things didn't exist prior to the internet era.
These tactics are not new. They are old. Kennedy put them to great use against Nixon, although his methods were not high-tech. These methods were used against van Buren, and even Grover Cleveland.
People tend to think technology changes the reasons for certain laws. In rare cases, it may. In the case of the Constitution, I have yet to see a decent example of a need for changes based on changing technology...but the Left will keep trying to make that case.
What They Promised: Smoking Gun Proof of Trump-Russia Collusion What They Walked That Back To: Russia Bought Some FaceBook Ads What It Is Now: Russian Ads Promoted Black Lives Matter
I don't think it'll work out well. TV watching is an indulgence, maybe even a vice if indulged excessively, and people do it partly because they justify it as imparting some secondary benefits -- having a shared social vocabulary, feeling united with other fans, feeling that watching football on Sunday is a shared civic ritual celebrating some worthwhile aspects of the American secular religion.
Take away that goodwill, and rely only on the eleven total minutes of actual football action during a four or four and a half hour game -- and, well.
Physical (and mental) fitness begin slowly going downhill after age 30-35 and accelerate thereafter. Deconditioning by avoiding strenuous exertion makes it worse. I am a skeptic about mental exercise, but not about the role of exercise in slowing natural physical decline.
A variety of social forces extradited muscle from respectable mainstream health. Muscularity once suggested physical labor and therefore a lower class station. More recently body builders hijacked the mesomorphic, minting steroid-fueled Rodin caricatures that were anything but a model of health.
Muscle also has been perceived as anti-intellectual. In the organ kingdom, it is the antithesis of the exalted brain, as in brain or brawn. It is our brain that distinguishes us from the great apes. Even within the muscle category one finds a hierarchy. Cardiac muscle appeared to carry none of skeletal muscle’s stigma. Academics might have jogged, meatheads pumped iron...
Skeletal muscles, and the bones to which they attach (muscle stress is what keeps bones strong), undergo continual alteration and renovation. They are both adaptive: they respond to lack of stress by weakening or atrophying, and to stress by becoming more robust. This occurs regardless of age. Those 80 year-old women I see lifting weights in the gym are doing a smart thing. Weights are good for females.
There is also growing evidence that regular intense physical exertion is good for maintaining mental functioning. It's definitely good for mental health.
As factories began to replace farms in economic importance, skeptics wondered whether old folks could understand and work with the new machines. One of the giants of American medicine, Johns Hopkins Hospital co-founder William Osler, in 1905 decried the “uselessness” of men older than 60 and said they should leave the workforce.
Growing prosperity also meant more people could afford to stop working late in life...
The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.
At one time, almost all black families were poor, regardless of whether one or both parents were present. Today roughly 30 percent of blacks are poor.
However, two-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8 percent of black married-couple families live in poverty. Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full time, the poverty rate is under 5 percent. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37 percent.
Should "Orthorexia Nervosa" be a diagnosis? No. We are already trying to label every human quirk, foolishness, and obsession as a medical diagnosis. Quirks are one thing that makes people interesting if not amusing. Many people ascribe magical properties to food. Some people think more about food, and some people just view it as fuel.
"Symbolic representation" sounds like a dull topic. Prof Peterson here is stunning as he takes on the organizing myths of human existence. Maps of meaning orient us to the world, and without them we encounter the dragons of chaos, confusion, and existential horror.
He connects psychology, myth, art, philosophy, politics, religion, good and evil, heroism, parenthood, and almost everything except the kitchen sink. The man is a Canadian national treasure.
"Any coherent organizing principle is better than none." Interpretive structures. I gave it a few listenings to fully appreciate this 2-hour talk.
Simple question: Are Asians part of white supremacy, or are Asians another minority oppressed by whites? (See Justice Harlan above.) And if they are an oppressed minority, shouldn’t Asians receive affirmative action preferences?
“When our elites attack our national symbols as if they are worthless and loathesome, something important, something monumental has changed here. If the people who benefited most from America despise it–and increasingly they do–where does that leave the rest of us?”
I can’t tell you how many times readers and potential/actual authors have told me they fear loss of job and career damage if they express non-liberal opinions at work or in a way that people at work could find out. There is a reign of terror ongoing in this country, but it’s not from the government, it’s from social-media-empowered leftists who seek to impose the most intrusive political litmus tests in every aspect of our lives.
The most revealing aspect of the culture war is not that the professional entertainment industries are uniformly and aggressively liberal, but that they have pushed politics into every aspect of our lives. You will be made to care in the classroom and now, on the sports field.
The result, for me, is a withdrawal from much of professional culture.
Now (Max) Weber was a very learned and intelligent scholar. After all, he gave us the true definition of government, namely, a monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. It is a definition as full and accurate as it is sadistically useful for torturing our mild social democratic friends in Sweden or Massachusetts, who like to believe that the government is a festival of kindly collectivism, sort of like a loving family.
Does anybody want to join me? I am doing this beginning today, regardless of the rest of my exercise routine.
The idea is to do 100 daily, whether it's 1 or 5 or 10 or 20+ at a time. Just do 100 total with proper form (down low, back and legs like a plank and no dropping your butt). Obviously this is not for those fitter folks who can just get down and do 100 in a row without breaking a sweat. I'll begin with ten sets of ten and try to up the reps in each set each day with a goal of two sets of 50. Women can either do Pushups for women, or the basic version. Supposedly it can tighten gals' boobs, but don't ask me. I just do not want to develop Man-Boobs.
Men can not do Pushups for Women, of course. That would be shameful (although I confess I was forced to, recently. I can't do 50 man pushups in a row - yet).
100 is not a lot for 24 hours, and over time it gets more efficient, more at a time. Probably not a bad idea for those who never do pushups to begin with 30 for the first day, then 50 the next day, then 70, then 100.
Warning: The next Maggie's 30-day challenge in November will be similar, but for Burpees. We want to keep our readers alive. We need every one of our readers to keep getting the big bucks from Dunkin Donuts and Bob Dylan.
It is strange, but nobody pays money to watch athletes display their politics - whatever they are. I still don't know what all this is about other than another Trumpian circus. Pres. Trump is a hit new TV reality show with a crazy new theme each week for people to talk about. Meanwhile, behind the stage, his admin is doing lots of things.
Oppressed Multi-Millionaire Stevie Wonder Takes a Knee
With the publishing of her new book, seems only fair (and balanced) to take a look at excerpts from the 2014 Tax Return for the Clinton Foundation. These are public documents.
2014 Total revenue (line 12) $177,804,612
Total grants to charity (line 13) $5,160,385 (that's less than 3%)
Total expenses of $91,281,145 Expenses include: Salaries (line 15) $34,838,106 Fund raising fees (line 16a) $850,803 Other expenses (line 17) $50,431,851 Travel $8,000,000 Meetings $12,000,000
They list 486 employees (line 5) plus 400 volunteers (line 6)
"Fair Analysis: It took 486 (886?) people who are paid $34.8 million and $91.3 million in fees and expenses to give away $5.1 MILLION. Geez, wonder what all those folks wuz really doin?
Line 22 shows ending year net assets/fund balances of $332,471,349 which is up $85,171,891 from last year's tax return! (No substantial asset increase in 2015 when she was running.....hmmm)
- All these contributions were pure charitable donations?...it's another fair question that should leap to anyone's mind.
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