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 a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close...
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During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.
The rest of that journalistic ethos—“afflict the comfortable”—leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened...
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The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.
But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension.
Big Journalists: Because we're smart and you are stupid, we are idealists and you are not. When you think about it, it's tough on the ego to be a journalist, always watching others, never doing anything. But always imagining that you know better than the common folk or even the big people they write about. Egotism is for people who feel small. Well, that is not really fair to reporters. Most likely most reporters are humble folk who enjoy their reporter roles covering the Zoning Commission and the obits, but the ones in the big time want to be players not observers, moral leaders or some such grandiose BS. Baloney. Nobody anointed you. Just the facts, please. Thank God for the internet.
Michael Goodwin has always been one of the humble guys.
I guess that is an obsolete question in the post-modern universe where it's all gender all the time. As a cis-gendered man-identified white-identified human, I realize I have no right to any opinion whatsoever, so I can only offer my confusion. My confusion is that the current pop theory is that gender identification differences are all-important instead of trivial. That's the opposite of why Larry Summers lost his job due to a crying female-identified scholar at Harvard.
It's difficult to keep up. If they want to Stamp out Masculinity,then these haters must find something different about biological males (via Thompson):
A feminist professor at Occidental College recently argued that men must renounce their masculinity and “denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it.” Calling masculinity a “dangerous idea,” Wade argues that, “The problem is not toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic,” adding that masculinity is “simply not compatible with liberty and justice for all.” Wade concludes her essay by urging people to “call masculinity out as a hazardous ideology and denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it,” saying that doing so is crucial for “gender revolution.”
Clearly 99.9% of normal American females do not see things in this crackpot way. We link such things for amusement purposes. Women tend to like manly men, but growing into a "manly man" from a hormone-fueled feral child or man-child is not an easy developmental task in western culture. We all know the list of Manly Virtues (strength/athleticism, success/dominance, honor/integrity, loyalty, courage, respect for females/protectiveness, generosity, helpfulness, etc etc) into which males struggle to learn to channel their primitive apelike biological selves.
What do women struggle to become, as their best and highest selves, to make their parents and children proud?
On Sunday night, Mrs. BD had an all-pumpkin supper: Spicy Pumpkin-Apple Soup, Pumpkin Ravioli, and a Profiterole with Pumpkin Ice Cream. It's Pumpkin season, and Pumpkin is good food.
Pumpkin is a winter squash whose original small plant is native to the Americas. For the Eastern American Indians, winter squashes were one of the Three sisters: Squash, Corn (Maize), and Beans.Indians ate healthy, organic whole foods despite, or because, they were genetically-modified foods. They didn't live very long, though. Indians in their 50s were old men while men in their 50s and 60s and 70s today run marathons, pump iron, and climb Alps. My neighbor climbed all of the Dolomites in his 80s by eating steak.
All of those Indian crops had been greatly genetically-modified over 2,000+ years by Native American geneticists, because the wild plants they started with were weeds, hardly worth bothering with. Of course, what we grow now has been greatly improved from the Indian versions.
All humans knew about genetics long before Mendel explained it.
'The walls are closing in,' said one senior Republican in close contact with top staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. 'Everyone is freaking out.'"
They call it "Ultimate," but it seems like just a good fitness test for 25 year-old men.I can do a lot of it now and I know guys older than me who can too. Problem is, as you get older you get joint problems. Thus, no burpees for me anymore. Shoulder agony.
A romp through Jerusalem, now imagined as an amusement park with rides and odd characters. This hike begins Professor Osef's reminiscences with his niece about his year in this City, a City with which he is now beginning to fall out of love...
I have a friend who was a reverend in the Episcopal Church. He is technically still in the church, but he has decided to find another vocation. The main reason is that most of the people running the church are women, along with a high number of homosexuals. The result is the people running the church care more about social justice and their genitals than anything else. Like most of the mainline Protestants churches, the Episcopal Church has become a circus of degeneracy and general lunacy. As a result their pews are empty.
Repost - I guess this is Part 2 or 3 of our Outerwear mini-series, and part of our world-famous Winter Warmth series which we will begin to post in view of the coming Global Cooling Crisis -
The invention of Gore-tex rendered plenty of waterproof and windproof fabrics obsolete - or quaint. For example, rubberized raingear, or waxed cotton or waxed canvas. Gore-tex is much lighter, it breathes, it requires no maintenance, and Gore-tex outerwear is cheaper to produce and can be made with the blaze orange patches which American field hunting (unlike European) requires by law.
Trouble is that waxed cotton jackets, wellies, a dog, and a nice gun look so natural together. It's about fashion to some extent: how many Americans wear their Barbour when brush-busting for grouse or mucking the stall vs. the number that wear theirs to the hardware store, the mall, and their kids' soccer games?
I own a Lewis Creek and an old Browning waxed jacket, but I have plenty of Gore-tex parkas and field gear for various purposes: camo, blaze, parkas, outer-jackets, etc. Gore-tex hunting brush pants, too - insulated and uninsulated (insulated hunting trousers was a waste of $ - all you need is winter underwear of whatever weight you select for the weather of the day).
Despite all the above, I'll just address waxed cotton here despite its impractibility. Gore-tex is great stuff, but it's boring. Waxed cotton has character and Gore Tex is industrial.
For true heavy-duty waterproof outerwear, Filson's tin cloth is the ultimate. That waxed canvas is so tough that it stands up by itself after you take it off. In fact, if you died standing in a goose blind or in the woods the tincloth jacket and tincloth trousers would probably still hold you up straight like a scarecrow until a strong winter storm blew you over. Their "shelter cloth" is lighter weight. I have some of the stuff. Its durability:comfort ratio is high. Feels like medieval armor before it warms up and softens a bit.
The latest Solzhenitsyn book to appear in English, March 1917, focuses on the great turning point of Russian, indeed world, history: the Russian Revolution. Just a century ago, that upheaval and the Bolshevik coup eight months later ushered in something entirely new and uniquely horrible. Totalitarianism, as invented by Lenin and developed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and others, aspired to control every aspect of life, to redesign the earth and to remake the human soul. As a result, the environment suffered unequaled devastation and tens of millions of lives were lost in the Soviet Union alone. Solzhenitsyn, who spent the years 1945 to 1953 as a prisoner in the labor camp system known as the Gulag archipelago, devoted his life to showing just what happened so it could not be forgotten. One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic, Stalin supposedly remarked, but Solzhenitsyn makes us envision life after ruined life. He aimed to shake the conscience of the world, and he succeeded, at least for a time.
In taking literature so seriously, Solzhenitsyn claimed the mantle of a “Russian writer,” which, as all Russians understand, means much more than a writer who happens to be Russian. It is a status less comparable to “American writer” than to “Hebrew prophet.”
"I’m still trying to get my mind around the Vassar College campus reaction to my planned lecture on “hate speech” and free speech..."
You can listen to his speech and the Q&A here.Actually, nothing controversial at all from my view. Even the kids' questions were pretty good for a third-tier $60,000/year college. Some angry-sounding women of course, as usual.
A friend emailed this photo of his foot this week. Ouch. It's the classic presentation. Fortunately, Gout is easily treated these days.
Gout occurs more commonly in those who eat a lot of meat, drink a lot of beer, or are overweight. Diagnosis of gout may be confirmed by seeing the crystals in joint fluid or tophus. Blood uric acid levels may be normal during an attack.
America was never intended to be united culturally or spiritually. The Founders understood that the original colonies had different characteristics, due to the different founding populations. It’s why they maintained the sovereignty of the states in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. America was supposed to be a collection of states and cultures, that cooperated economically and for common defense, but otherwise existed independent of one another. It’s why they wanted a weak national government.
Economists are vocal proponents of the simplistic scientific method. If they can’t present their work as experimental, they strive to label it “quasi-experimental.” But if you read an introductory economics text, virtually none of the content is based on experiments. Instead, good economics texts are packed with truisms based on calm observation of humanity: incentives change behavior, trade is mutually beneficial, supply slopes up, demand slopes down, excess supply leads to surpluses, excess demand leads to shortages, externalities lead to inefficiency. These lessons are as undeniable as “the heart pumps blood” and “the stomach digests food.” But they’re nevertheless supremely insightful and useful. Designing social institutions without considering incentives is as absurd trying to stuff food down people’s lungs.
Between 1830 and 1840 U.S. immigration quadrupled, and between 1840 and 1850, it tripled again. Particularly troubling to lawmakers at the time was the fact that many of these new immigrants were Irish Catholics who threatened the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural and religious customs. "Those now pouring in upon us, in masses of thousands upon thousands, are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect," mourned the Massachusetts state legislature regarding the new Boston immigrants.
Universal, taxpayer-funded “common schools” became the mechanism to rein in these masses and “Americanize” them...
Sciency Liberals 
The invention of Gore-tex rendered plenty of waterproof and windproof fabrics obsolete - or quaint. For example, rubberized raingear, or waxed cotton or waxed canvas. Gore-tex is much lighter, it breathes, it requires no maintenance, and Gore-tex outerwear is cheaper to produce and can be made with the blaze orange patches which American field hunting (unlike European) requires by law. 
A friend emailed this photo of his foot this week. Ouch. It's the classic presentation. Fortunately,
Quote image via 
Cowen loves this new book: