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.
FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing — the press — is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI. Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime.
I enjoy them greatly. It's like being back in college, except that his thinking is so far-ranging that it doesn't really fit in a syllabus. OK, he gets minor things wrong sometimes but so does everybody. One heck of a talker, and it's a delight to listen to a genius talker.
One of my favorite Petersonisms is "The university should be the most intellectually unsafe and dangerous place in the world." Right, same as church. Another: "You can't fix your own car and you've never held a job but you think you can fix something as complex as society?" I have found a few things which have been useful refreshments to my own thinking in Peterson's rigorously systematic approach to topics, so here they are:
1. His focus on "levels of analysis." He often says "It depends on which level of analysis you subject this to."
2. His insistence on multivariate analysis of data. Yes, that is scientific but civilians often don't think that way. We civilians find it easier to think "One cause, one effect."
3. His confidence and comfort in the ideas of the transcendent and of the ineffable.
4. His repeatedly asserting the role of "framing" and "narrative" in perception and thought. Presenting people with new frames is threatening and disturbing. It is something that Psychologists and philosophers do for a living.
5. His talking about Logos, the Word, at the beginning, which creates order out of chaos. The world is made of meaning, not matter. Meaning illuminates the world. "Let there be light."
6. "Abstraction is sometimes more useful and real than material reality. Look at the power of numbers."
7. His "tragic" view of humanity: We are weak, flawed, ugly, short-lived, malevolent, foolish, and live in or with suffering - but we aspire for the stars, in our own ways, nonetheless. Or we do not.
Do you find his talks illuminating and, if so, how? Put in the Comments, please.
Here'a a ten year-old Peterson talk on art, dance, chess, and music. For a master of words ("The divine gift"), the guy has huge admiration for things that can not be put into words, meaning beyond reason:
If we're talking about building lower body strength and power (as opposed to endurance, agility, etc), then you really need to do things like barbell squats and deadlifts. Men and women, all ages. Walking and running do nothing to improve lower body strength.
For ordinary "functional" fitness, lots of people skip the weights and do body-weight lower body strength workouts. These are the basuc things you need to hike up hills all day. Body-weight Lunges and Squats . And although Stair Machines are usually considered a cardio/endurance activity, they are a body-weight lower body muscle stressor for sure so I consider them cardio/calisthenic if done at a good intensity.
Predictably, I come down to my usual recommendations: Do all of it: Weights for strength and bone, cardio for heart, endurance, and stamina, and body-weight exercise/calisthenics for everything.
This 15- minute set of leg calisthenics with no breaks from Mindy looks good and tough. I would find it challenging at the least. Feel the burn. An hour of calisthenics like this will make you feel great the rest of the day.
" Ms Schaefer, who teaches performance art to those less gifted than herself, is a recipient of the Boston ICA’s 2015 Foster Prize, and has been described by the ICA’s senior curator as “amazing,” “compelling” and yet inexplicably “underfunded.”"
FBI and DOJ Officials Broke The Law And Tried To Decide The Election - an Annotated Timeline(h/t reader)
Two points were missed there. First, the info that Carter Page was an FBI agent/spy, and, second, the fact that Loretta Lynch has no grandkids to discuss on the tarmac.
I’m basically a kid. Sure I’m 55 going on 56, and I am starting to feel the aches and pains which we associate with age. Herniated and bulging discs make moving difficult sometimes. I have to watch what I eat and work out regularly to keep weight off. I miss the days of eating as much as I want, and as indiscriminately as I did. Bags of chips, tubs of ice cream, a whole pizza. Those days are memories. But one thing keeps me young. Sports. I love sports of all kinds.
I played soccer and beach volleyball in my youth, but really enjoyed being team statistician for basketball. I love numbers, and sports are about numbers. Sabermetrics got me back into baseball after all the scandals and negative stories of the 80's and 90's caused me to lose interest. When you get right down to it, sports are a great combination of the things I love. Physical activity, competition, and data.
But one sport has always been my favorite. Football. Never played it, always loved it. Especially one team in particular, where the team is mostly religion.
The city I grew up in has a rich history, and is a great place to visit. Even after my family moved when I was 10, I continued to love the city and its teams. Starting my career, I landed in New York City, making it nearly impossible to get (at least unbiased) sports information. I then married into a family of New York sports fans. I affectionately call ours a mixed marriage. Believe me, there is no love lost between New York and Philadelphia. Twice a year, at least, my wife and I have difficult days. I have had to root for her (not her team, just her happiness) in the Super Bowl twice. Very painful....but it’s what we do.
So I am fully aware of her pain this past weekend. I did not ask her to root for my team, and I know she struggled. Marriages have their rocky moments. Pun intended.
Over the years, the 800-acre Plum Island in the outer part of Long Island Sound has been the site of several forts, and in recent decades, the site of the federal Animal Disease Center.
The latter is moving to Kansas, and for ten years the feds have wanted to sell the mostly-wild island to the highest bidder (most likely developers). Perfect place for a high-end resort with a helicopter pad and a links golf course - but...
There are very few precious plots of undeveloped coastal land in southern New England, and most of those are so frequented by people that they are unsuited for nesting shorebirds or breeding seals, etc.
The feds just want the $, and NY State seems uninterested. My preference would for the island to become a NWR or something like that. Or for the Nature Conservancy to buy it (but they aren't buying much land outright any more).
My other choice would be for somebody conservation-minded to buy it as a private preserve as Louis Bacon did with Robin's Island and as Hank Paulson did with Little St Simon's Island in Georgia (11,000 acres, 32 guests). We love to visit LSS.
Let’s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject—with a black cover and some title like “The Path to Tyranny”—would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.
It depends on what college is for, and it seems to have many purposes these days including that of a long adolescent vacation. With coeducation, a heck of a lot of undergrad higher ed seems social and recreational. I have nothing against climbing walls or sex, however. Within reason, but is anything with adolescents within reason?
A somewhat disparaging article says Peterson’s been described as “the stupid man’s smart person,” which is a good enough euphemism for saying “effective public intellectual.” It's because he preaches "Count your blessings and get yourself together" rather than social change.
However, he is a polymath and speaks on all sorts of subjects including what seems to be his favorite theme: myth and religion. He is not a political conservative, as far as I can tell. He does believe in accepting facts and truth, though, which can sound conservative these days, and he questions everything. Also, he detests victimology as a psychological cancer.
High- fat diets have no correlation with arterial disease. Being overweight definitely does, but dietary fat does not make you fat.
"... the conclusion of a massive new study published in Lancet that followed 135,335 people in 18 countries on five continents.The study found that consumption of fat was associated with a lower risk of mortality, while consumption of carbohydrates was associated with a higher risk. It found that the kind of fat didn't matter when it came to heart disease, and that saturated fat consumption was inversely related to strokes.
The researchers say, ever so politely, that "dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.""
When the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles meet Sunday for the Super Bowl, they'll play inside the newly completed U.S. Bank Stadium near downtown Minneapolis. The $1.1 billion stadium was built with almost $500 million from state and local taxpayers, with the city paying an additional $7.5 million each year for operations and maintenance.
For some strange reason, the destination that formed in my mind for this shopping excursion was “CostCo.” A vague mention of a friend about the “great deals on small televisions” put it in my mind like a BuyMe earworm. This small mental disorder was even stranger since the last thing I need in my life is another, smaller television. On second thought, the absence of a real need was probably why I really wanted one. In America, as noted above, if you don’t need it, you gotta have it.
On the border between the two areas was a vast shopping mall in which both the hamburger- and organic, gluten-free-bread-eating classes, worried about the state of their bowels in thirty years’ time, were catered for, though the mall mainly attracted the typical British shopper, that is to say insolvent in pursuit of the unnecessary.
These wonderful guys miss the extent to which shopping is recreational for many people. Don't despise the recreational shoppers. Looking at stuff and buying stuff can be a lifestyle. I think it has been thus since the dawn of urbanism. Or even before that. Much as I hate shopping (including going to the market for bread, cookies, and vegetables), I find the sheer abundance of Costco to be a real kick. So you go home with 4 months worth of toilet paper. That's not a bad thing.
40:21 Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?
40:22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in;
40:23 who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.
40:24 Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble.
40:25 To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One.
40:26 Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.
40:27 Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the LORD, and my right is disregarded by my God"?
40:28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.
40:29 He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.
40:30 Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted;
40:31 but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.
I could not fit one of those killer Cardio/Calisthenics classes into my sched this week, so I did my own thing for an hour. Actually, it was 75 minutes. I admit I did have to stop and breathe a few times, which the classes do not really permit because they try to keep heart rate very high for an hour to kick your ass. The variety is fun. I usually vary my calis except for the jump rope and pushups which I always include.
The thing about an hour of calisthenics is that, like your cardio/HIIT, it needs no more than a 24-hr recovery so you can do them the day after your weights day. My preferred sequence is Wts Mon, Calis Tues, Cardio Weds, Wts Thurs, Calis and/or Cardio Fri, Calis Sat.
After a ten-minute warm-up on elliptical, the rest below the fold:
Looks like a Dayquil day for Bird Dog. How about you? Maybe even a Nyquil nap later. Good day to feel lousy. Mrs. BD going to ballet and luncheon with a friend, and I'll organize a pile of paperwork. Or not.
My Mom, who was a vigorous and athletic woman into her 80s and a big hiker, instructed me that the best way to observe nature was to find a good spot on the edge of a meadow, at the edge of a marsh, along a stone wall, in the woods at the edge of a ridge or hill, and to sit alone. Ideally, on an edge so there is a mixed habitat.
To sit in dull, non-synthetic clothing, and just to watch and look around for an hour in an relaxed, meditative, but alert state. For hunters, this is normal in a deer stand or in a duck blind, but it can be done without a firearm too.
Do not move much except to scratch your nose. Compose yourself. No camera, no binoculars, no firearm, no dog, no friend. An hour sitting quietly, especially at dawn or dusk, can be an education.
My short version: The Dems hired people to connect with Russian spies (barely arm's length) to find or invent dirt on Trump. The government then hired those go-betweens. Then the government spooks took that to spy on Trump and his associates. The government people hated Trump. Nice job, Russkies. Well-done. Mission accomplished, which was probably political chaos in the US.
The Russian spies also tried to engage the Trump people, but it didn't work for some reason. Anyway, those old KGB hands are far too cunning to let us play those games with them. Even our sick deep state seems to think it is easier to spy on Americans. Sure is.
Via Gateway, Assange tweeted, “James Comey, master of logic: FISA memo is nothing — and also the destroyer of worlds.”
Interesting to me that the feds say they took the dossier as a tip instead of as the campaign ploy that it was. Strange. Seems like the Dems were SWATting Trump. Call from a burner phone: "Hey there, FBI. I think I saw my neighbor at 22 Maple St. talking to a Russian last week."
Love vs. Lust: 
Image from 
People Are Actually Considering Not Having Kids
Looks like a Dayquil day for Bird Dog. How about you? Maybe even a Nyquil nap later. Good day to feel lousy. Mrs. BD going to ballet and luncheon with a friend, and I'll organize a pile of paperwork. Or not.
