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.
Lots of people have a bit of oddball in them. I like them. I also like hearty, wholesome, uncomplicated people too.
This Stanford undergrad is a good writer and has a fine future. I do not view her as autistic in the usual sense, but she does have "issues" as she discusses. She has been through the entire Psychiatric gauntlet without much apparent result. Nevertheless, she is at Stanford, is obviously talented and perceptive: My Brief Spell as an (autism) Activist.
Without trying to diagnose somebody I have ever met, I think this young lady could use some basic life counseling, or life coaching if you want to call it that. There is plenty of room in the world for "outsiders."
Regarding the claim that “black social problems” are due to “white oppression,” Mead argued, “By that logic, the problems should have been worst prior to the civil rights reforms in the 1960s.” Yet in his reading of events, “The collapse of the black family occurred mostly after civil rights rather than before.” Hence Mead not only suggested that Western culture is better than non-Western culture, at least when it comes to getting ahead in America, but also that higher poverty rates among blacks and Hispanics are attributable to factors other than racial discrimination. As you can imagine, this message was not warmly received...
There are black (and white) subcultures which are not positive in orientation. But in 2020, everything is racism. Racism, or some other sort of victimology. Maybe it's an election year. Identifying as a victim is not a good approach to life though. A recipe for misery or dysfunction.
This uplifting piece always reminds me of a sail (yes, sails) from Lisbon, down to Morocco - Casablanca and Marrakesh - then out to the Canary Islands, a few years ago. Our Captain always blasted this tune when leaving a port.
As I have mentioned before, Columbus' house is still there on Las Palmas. We checked it out, and the cathedral next door. Some lady farmer gave him a bunch of sugar cane so he could find out whether it could grow in the West Indies. It sure did, for better or worse.
I did bring home a bunch of varieties of Canary Island rum. Stupid not to.
There are three things you need to determine about a candidate: talent, judgement, and personality. Think of hiring an engineer as if you're buying a race car. The first thing you must look for in a race car is horsepower, because without horsepower the car is useless for racing. The horsepower of engineers is talent. Without talent, engineers are useless for building products, so it's the first thing you must look for in a candidate. It doesn't matter how nice the person is, or how hard-working. No horsepower, no race.
Talent alone is insufficient. The world is filled with talented people who never get anywhere for a myriad reasons. Laziness, anxiety, fragility, impulsivity, egotism, victimhood, just to list a few. So once you've identified talent, you have to determine the shape and quality of its vessel. Where will the person direct their talent? And are they well-adapted to the demands of the external world?
“In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians' hacking of the Democratic National Committee.”
A campaign dirty trick became a CIA/FBI scandal. Mind-boggling.
The approach Reilly takes in defending the Founding is to demonstrate that the principles upon which it was based were the most positive and productive ideas of Western culture. The application that the Founders gave to those principles was unquestionably original, but the principles themselves were not. The Founders took full advantage of the pregnant ideas that had been bequeathed to them by a tradition whose three originating sources were the thoughts of ancient Greece, Judaism, and Christianity. His book, Reilly explains, “is not so much about the Founding itself as the provenance of its ideas,” the ideas that made the United States possible.
The idea of individual agency, which lay at the core of the case for traditional human rights, is now seen as part of the vernacular of oppression, as it interferes with the movement to separate people into racially defined categories. Likewise, the idea of dialogue rested on the idea of a shared language. Instead, we now are required to accede to the belief that we all inhabit mutually impenetrable realms marked by our identity, and that some of these realms confer special insight and intuitive powers that allow one to interpret and identify hidden meaning and concealed bias in the language of others.
It is a long read, mixing public policy with religion. The personal parts are good, but the public policy parts get complicated. Religion is mostly about the transcendent (to me, anyway), but policy is about hard core earthly reality.
I liked the way One Cosmos talked about Vertical Being and Horizontal Being. How they do, or should, intersect is above my pay grade.
His book is a must-read for anybody. It is a maritime classic. This is fun - who knew that the Brooklyn Bridge blocked tall ships? Melville changed his life, it seems.
Yes,
NYC photo from a reader 
Will the Cultural Revolution Be Canceled? 
Don’t Defend Columbus—Celebrate Him.