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.
35:4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you."
35:5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
35:6 then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert;
35:7a the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.
Jonathan Turley: Is Roe vs. Wade finished? The mainstream media just can't hold back: It is not the first time that actual orders or decisions seemed immaterial to the mainstream media's coverage (Whatever the ultimate outcome, it pays to know the facts.....unless facts interfere with bias.)
“For 97 per cent of human history, all people had about the same power and access to goods. How did inequality ratchet up?” Um, if can be said to have been “equal” for 97 percent of human history, it was because WE WERE POOR AND MISERABLE LEADING VIOLENCE-FILLED SUBSISTENCE LIVES!
The overwhelmingly left/liberal professoriate has been looking for psychological defects in their political opponents for some time, but the intensity of these efforts has increased markedly in the last two decades. The literature is now replete with correlations linking conservatism with intolerance, prejudice, low intelligence, close-minded thinking styles, and just about any other undesirable cognitive and personality characteristic. But most of these relationships were attenuated or disappeared entirely when the ideological assumptions behind the research were examined more closely...
The Internet, after all, is a playground of impossible fantasies. The digital self, as L.M. Sacassas has noted, is a featureless and colorless reproduction of an actual human being, intrinsically devoid of identity, so that, in principle, it is capable of becoming anyone or anything. The will to believe in a hidden prophet called “Q” is no more bizarre than the will to believe in a proliferating variety of “genders.” For those born with a smartphone in hand, the whole concept of reality, to the degree it exists, appears in the guise of a soft and pliable substance to be molded according to one’s dreams.
This corporate hustle is the subject of a new, bestselling book called Woke Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam by biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy makes the compelling case that “stakeholder capitalism” sounds like a good thing, but is in fact deeply damaging our democracy.
China may be the most prominent example of stakeholder capitalism gone awry, but it is hardly alone.
Any number of American corporations now lavishing untold sums of capital on diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives in the United States are eager to do business in countries with reprehensible human-rights records
..So persists an inescapable contradiction of stakeholder capitalism: All of these corporations have successfully rebranded themselves as good citizens, global stewards and combatants in the war against systemic racism, which has obviously proven good for business, but very bad for America, blurring the moral distinction between democracies and closed societies, between the free West and fear-based societies like China.
And because this business strategy is dressed in the garments of justice, it only compounds our innumerable confusions about what makes us us.
Age is a factor. Also, there is an amount which is optimal. More is not always better. I do heavy weights (powerlifts, etc) twice weekly, but have been slacking off on the nutrition.
Early in their conversations in Barcelona, Huber, Erker and their colleagues realized that a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area. Energy tends to dissipate — and entropy, a measure of its dissipation, tends to increase — simply because there are far, far more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be highly concentrated. This numerical asymmetry, and the curious fact that energy started out ultra-concentrated at the beginning of the universe, are why energy now moves toward increasingly dispersed arrangements, one cooling coffee cup at a time.
One of my daughters and her pal caught 12 Porgies this morning from the boat. It is Porgie season in New England.
Last night I made a bowl of Peach salsa from our peaches to accompany Indian take-out, and Mrs. BD made a peach pie (yeah, she always makes her own crust - rolls them out with her grandma's rolling pin).
Thing about peaches is, for cooking, best if they are firm and far from ripe. For salsa, not ripe but slightly softer and crunchy like an apple. A skewer of hard peach chunks on a grill makes them perfect.
For fresh peach chutney that you don't want to bother canning (I am done with canning - it's a pain), you want to use unripe fruit. Just cook it up and put it in the fridge. Peach salsa and peach chutney go with everything, but especially shrimp and fish. And Porgies.
Cannabis
Study shows evidence of 
The New Thermodynamic Understanding of Clocks. 
One of my daughters and her pal caught 12 Porgies this morning from the boat. It is