Maggie's FarmWe 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. |
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Thursday, July 13. 2017Thursday morning linksThe Toscanini Wars - No maestro was more revered—or more reviled. On the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth, it’s time to give him a fair hearing. Why 10,000 Steps a Day Won't Make You Thin - If you start walking with the expectation of losing weight, it might be smart to reevaluate No, poor people don't eat the most fast food Transgender Men in Women’s Showers Must Get ‘Dignity and Respect,’ Says U.S. Army Batshit insane. Will Combining Purdue and Kaplan Improve Higher Education? Wind And Solar Power Don't Work Newspapers: All the rich are screaming Jeff Sessions Wants More Mandatory Minimums, Less Justice - The attorney general is determined to reverse the recent trend toward more judicious use of severe penalties. Sessions is wrong about this Can Democrats Make Nice with Deplorables? A few prominent liberal writers venture outside of the partisan bunker. NY Post: Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot No, but he is an amateur Team Trump Is Getting Buried In Political Warfare This Time We Liberals Have Totally Got Trump. Mirengoff: THIS DAY IN “COLLUSION” HYSTERIA Over 120,000 Palestinian Children Attend Summer Camps Run By Hamas Terrorists … The Terrifying Way Sweden Is Killing Itself
India's Gruesome New Welfare Trend France Unveils Plan To ‘Systematically’ Deport Illegal Migrants Trackbacks
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Outside the bunker:
I highly doubt that Dems/Progressives will ever give up on scapegoating the Middle, the Working People. Even the linked article was dripping with condescension. Re: Donald Trump, Jr
Yes, how dare someone not raise their children to be dirty rotten pieces of subhuman shit politicians! The outrage! What were they thinking? re Outside the bunker
It's been fascinating to watch the dems morph from being a champion of the working man to deriding him for being deplorable. One wonders. Did it just happen? Did the victim groups drive out the blue collar advocates? Or was this a calculated strategy? Originally the Progressive movement championed the average Joe, and his family, when it was allied with the Farm/Labor movement. This has been completely turned on its head. The sellout to the Globalists, Financialists, Public Sector Unions, and the Identity Group Hustlers has been going on for at least 20 years. Their agendas are self serving and not for the Good of All. To be clear, they are not allied with the traditional value added manufacturing sector but New Business which dominates and is internationalist in orientation and funds political campaigns.
Historical note for post above: It's almost 100 years ago that the be all and end all, of Woodrow Wilson's presidency, thoroughly discredited the Progressive agenda. I don't know if history will repeat; government dependency is exponentially greater today, and not just by individuals. But "the elites cannot grapple with the offensiveness of their overreach or their increasingly glaring incompetence. They can't connect the two phenomena and are too blind to the causal relationship to change course." As an alumnus of Purdue, I find the purchase of Kaplan Univ. interesting. The purchase will provide Kaplan students with access to a much better faculty and much better resources.
However, I don't think it will affect Purdue's undergraduate enrollments very much, if at all. Young people, still maturing, go to a residential college for the experience, and that experience cannot be gotten online or by commuting. Young people make life long friends, find spouses, get to interact with highly educated professionals (yes, I know about the quacks, and I know a few), get hands-on experiences with modern libraries and laboratories, and experience college athletics, both directly and indirectly. You would be amazed at the number of students participating in intramural and varsity sports. All of this, especially for still maturing individuals is transformative, and is intended to be so. No one who has ever attended a residential college would trade that experience for an online connection or a commute. I was in Indianapolis a few weeks ago. Overheard some talking that Kaplan diplomas would be refigured to be Purdue diplomas.
That retroactive approach doesn't bode well for true W. Lafayette grads. It will dilute their value when it's understood what's gone on. You have a point. My undergraduate degree is from Norteastern Universty (now, but not then, of ill repute). They once had a enormous night school in parallel to NU itself, and they went to lengths to keep the two separate.
" Jeff Sessions Wants More Mandatory Minimums, Less Justice - The attorney general is determined to reverse the recent trend toward more judicious use of severe penalties.
Sessions is wrong about this " _________________________________ What makes Sessions "reasonable" in this, is the fact that "judicious use" of sentencing by fake compassionate liberal judges, really means wildly disparate sentencing for substantially similar offenses. I read a fairly interesting series of tweets the other day. Not sure how true it is, but I think it holds some value in this discussion. It was claimed that the DOJ pushed courts to reduce charges for certain crimes that used to be felonies...and I don't mean just minor crimes like 1 oz. of marijuana in your vehicle. All kinds of crimes that you would not like happening in your city or town.
If that is true, I am pretty certain that is what Sessions is talking about. If the Obama DOJ reduced felony crimes to misdemeanors, many bad criminals would be let free and continue to commit crimes. Drug offenses are not the only offenses, mind you. I like a tough stance on crime, but I also don't like to see trumped charges for something fairly benign. So, the balance would be: police need to pursue the crimes worth pursuing and charge appropriately. Lesser crimes that were not as harmful, maybe give a warning or a fine. Rather than push for the toughest string of charges you can think of. It starts with the police and how they target criminal activity. The DOJ is merely putting in place appropriate sentencing guidelines for various crimes. I agree with that. I'll bet if we checked those would be felonies committed mostly by a certain criminal cohort.
it would help to look at at least a summary and have passing knowledge of how federal sentencing actually works, right?
he United States Sentencing Commission today released a new publication—An Overview of Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System (2017 Overview)—that examines the use of federal mandatory minimum penalties and the impact of those penalties on the federal prison population. QUOTE: Among the key data findings in the publication are: The average sentence length for federal offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty in fiscal year 2016 was 110 months of prison, nearly four times the average sentence (28 months) for offenders whose offense did not carry a mandatory minimum. Slightly more than half (55.7%) of federal inmates in custody as of September 30, 2016 were convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum. Over one-third (38.7%) of federal offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty in fiscal year 2016 received relief from the mandatory minimum at sentencing, which is a decrease from 46.7 percent in fiscal year 2010. Hispanic offenders continued to represent the largest group of federal offenders (40.4%) convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty in fiscal year 2016. White offenders had the longest average sentence (127 months) among federal offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty in fiscal year 2016, which is a shift from fiscal year 2010 when Black offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty had the longest average sentence (127 months). While Black offenders convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum penalty continued to receive relief from the mandatory minimum penalty least often, the gap between Black offenders and White offenders has narrowed from a difference of 11.6 percent in fiscal year 2010 to 3.2 percent in fiscal year 2016. The 2017 Overview is part of a multi-year study included in the Commission’s policy priorities over the past several amendment cycles and is intended to be the first in a series of reports on mandatory minimum penalties. Continuation of the study is listed as a tentative policy priority for the amendment year ending May 1, 2018. The Commission will accept public comment on proposed priorities through July 31, 2017. I'll be forwarding No. 3's insightful and useful comment to the Commission, as soon as I figure out what he's trying to say. I know all you people are angry in the way that only the self righteous can be, but for f's sake, buy a clue. "NY Post: Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot
No, but he is an amateur " I think both points are wrong. Trump Jr did nothing wrong and nothing that every previous presidential candidates team had not done both winners and losers. This is exactly what candidates do to get elected. They talk to a lot of people and take hastily arranged meetings where they hope to learn something and sometimes are disappointed. But in this case Trump Jr acted correctly and in fact meritoriously. He brought two people to the meeting to back him up. As soon as he knew the meeting was a sham he ended it. So what is the difference between this meeting and the hundreds of such meetings by other candidates? The MSM, the DNC and some never Trumpers are out to destroy Trump and his family. This is the fake news we are all enchanted with and are foolishly buying into. All Don Jr. did wrong was trust Rob Goldman. That's about it. He assumed Goldman would not do anything underhanded. Thought there was some more evidence to find out about well-known Clinton conduct with Russia and that was it.
Don Jr.'s "in hindsight" comment makes that clear. "In hindsight" means that if he'd known this whole Russia thing would appear, he never would've taken the meeting. Which means, to him, it is clear that something strange was going on and now he can possibly see it was a manipulated event. I'm pretty certain this is one of the pieces of 'evidence' that the Obama admin used to spy on the Trump campaign. Devin Nunes said specifically the intel he read with unmasked names were from Trump's 'inner circle,' and in June of last year, Trump's inner circle was very very small. "Team Trump Is Getting Buried In Political Warfare"
_______________________ Poor old NeverTrumper, Holman Jenkins! As a long standing "journalist", he still watches and believes his former colleagues in their fake-news peddling efforts! TRUMP actually reminds me of those old Warner Bros. cartoon tough guys who easily hold a furiously-swinging adversary at arms length, while relaxingly picking their teeth with the other hand. If you're not easily distracted by "Muh Russia", you'd discover Trump's administration is doing quite well, thank you! (SEE Energy Self-sufficiency and VA Reform, for starters!) The media, DemProgs, pundits and NeverTrumpers are getting buried, but by all appearances Trump is unperturbed. The talkers in the Admin have to talk about it, but it seems to have no impact on the doers who are, well, doing what they were sent there to do.
DC is all atwitter because the denizens are mostly of the chattering class and not the doer class. Trump confuses them as someone who does not speak eloquently, but accomplishes more than they could dream of. So called transgender men don't need respect, they need psychiatric help.
"No, but he is an amateur "
It's true, he walked right into that meeting without a cutout or a plan for the cover up as "professional" DC denizens do. re eff Sessions Wants More Mandatory Minimums, Less Justice - The attorney general is determined to reverse the recent trend toward more judicious use of severe penalties.
QUOTE: Sessions is wrong about this Agreed. He is also wrong about asset forfeiture. He's a big fan of stealing. Re: Sweden
The rhetoric around all the social change happening in Sweden right now is really weird. Swedish people seem to feel the need to stoutly defend these immigrant policies as a matter of national pride. They keep insisting that the entire country is as safe as it ever was, even though it is pretty obviously not. Just because a situation isn't happening everywhere doesn't mean it isn't happening anywhere. But no, apparently every neighborhood in all of Sweden is completely, totally safe for women. Not to be facetious, but it kind of seems like the entire country has Stockholm Syndrome regarding their third-world immigrants. Wind And Solar Power Don't Work
From the link: QUOTE: The transition to a 35% wind powered system left the SA grid very vulnerable. My understanding is that 20% is about the limit for wind energy, given its irregularity. So, the Aussies were pushing it. PLEASE FORWARD TO TRUMP FAMILY
This is from 2009 please someone forward to the Trump Family. From Senator Patty Murray's family. Murray's Husband http://archive.seattleweekly.com/2004-08-04/news/pork-pillow-politics/ |