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.
Since I am American, I tend to consider people as individuals rather than as a part of any kind of statistical group but at the same time I know that cultures and subcultures can heavily influence individual life choices and goals.
What is of interest to me with any person are basic questions: "What are your goals in life, and how do you plan to pursue them?" It should not be surprising than many people have non-economic goals.
You have your house in Kensington, a flat in Manhattan, get-aways in the Cotswolds, Scotland and Ibiza. Your kids all have trust funds, your first wife is set up very nicely, you have your collection of clubs and art. You have hot- and cold-running help and a cute, sexy personal assistant. You have your favorite charities for world peace and world health. You have a million friends. You do not have a yacht because you get seasick.
Still, your spare cash is burning a hole in your pocket. In a post-austerity UK you need advice from The Financial Times on How To Spend It.
No deep psycho-social comment needed from me. All I can say is that this is not the Yankee Way, not the Yankee Code. I am a live-and-let-live, to-each-his-own guy, but a $35,000 Audemars Piguet gives me a momentary spiritual depression.
nb: I want everybody to be as rich in money, or in life, or in love, or in self-respect, or in fun and diversion, or in relation to God, as they desire. I really don't care too much what others do. Life is brief, so true to myself is second highest on my list. True to my realest instinctual self would be ugly indeed.
Probably 50 years old, petite but not skinny, cute face, tight body. Perhaps a bit of facial youtherizing. Out of the corner of my eye while I was going through my jump-rope routines I watched her place a high box under the bar, jump up onto the bar and proceed to perform 12 chin-ups. I thought she would never finish. After a rest and some water, two more times. She is doing fitness-maintenance.
No visible muscles, just toned. Watching her proved several things to me that I knew anyway: Regular non-athlete women can develop good upper-body strength, people can be very strong and fit without notable muscle, and I suck at pull-ups as I do at many life challenges.
Watching three skinny wiry guys, my roofers these 2 weeks, carrying two packages of 80 lb. shingles (each) on their shoulders up high ladders. That is not just strength, it is balance and agility too. In other words, athleticism. Worthy of admiration and envy.
If nothing else, God and nature and life teaches humility every day. Like it's their job. Maybe it is. Sometimes I wonder whether humility is a psycho-vitamin which, like Vit D from sunshine, we obtain from investing in life challenges. On the other hand, no rewards, however modest, from our efforts are dispiriting instead of healthily humbling. That is a drag for sure.
Or do we live in our own worlds, constructed from various presuppositions, superstitions, traditions, and preferred fantasies about ourselves, about others, and the world?
I have come to believe that everybody including me lives in some degree of a fantasy world, ranging from a little crazy (a few fantasies about self and others) to totally nuts (with minimal reality-testing especially with emotional issues). The further one is from consensual reality, the less effective in life one becomes. And to make it all more complex, consensual "real" is cultural and sub-cultural.
Not asserting that there is no "real," but that that experience is highly subjective and frequently distant from regular "real," in ordinary people. 35% of Americans believe the earth is flat, and God knows how many believe in UFOs. Yes, people are crazy.
TS Eliot: "Humankind can not bear very much reality."
This topic came up over dinner last night. I became the devil's advocate, of course, because everybody tends to think that their reality is the real one. People will defend their own reality to the point of war because so much of what they think about themselves depends on it.
When that is challenged or threatened, people can go berserk. Happens with sports teams, and politics, too. With religion, it's just too much.
" 88’ at 4:30pm and smoke from a wildfire 200 miles away has nearly obscured the mountains and ridge surrounding our valley. However, mountain weather dictates that it will be 67’ by 9pm and 46’ by 6am just as it was 49’ this morning."
Yes, it's a must-read. Amusing too. I forgot how much the Euroland tariffs screw US products. Trump is right to push back.
Long sample:
"Trump’s voters get him because not only is he we, but we are he. We were not snowflaked-for-life by effete professors who themselves never had negotiated tough life-or-death serious deals. Instead we live in the real world, and we know how that works. Not based on social science theories, not based on “conceptual negotiating models.” But based on the people we have met over life and always will hate. That worst boss we ever had. The coworker who tried to sabotage us. We know the sons of bums whom we survived, the dastardly types who are out there, and we learned from those experiences how to deal with them. We won’t have John Kerry soothe us by having James Taylor sing “You’ve Got a Friend” carols.
The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned. The second one screwed up the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of the muddle. Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights. Hillary gave us Benghazi and more. And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack Trump every minute of every day.
So let us understand a few things:
NATO is our friend. They also rip off America. They have been ripping us off forever. We saved their butts — before there even was a NATO — in World War I. They messed up, and 116,456 Americans had to die to save their butts. Then they messed up again for the next two decades because West Europeans are effete and so obsessed with their class manners and their rules of savoir faire and their socialist welfare states and their early retirements that they did not have the character to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s. Peace in our time. So they messed up, and we had to save their butts again. And another 405,399 Americans died for them during World War II. And then we had to rebuild them! And we had to station our boys in Germany and all over their blood-stained continent. So, hey, we love those guys. We love NATO.
It makes sense to divide conditioning efforts into anatomical categories like Lower Body: Legs/Lower back; Upper body: Chest/Upper Back/Arms; and Core, even though most exercises use some of everything.
It is obvious that legs with strength and endurance provide and maintain basic functionality for men and women regardless of age, so let's use Legs/Lower body as an example for applying the Maggie's 3-category fitness model (resistance, calis, and cardio).
What can we do, in each of our exercise categories, to push our lower bodies towards further strength and endurance? Basic lower body-related routines are below.
Rule #1: IF IT ISN'T HARD, IT ISN'T EXERCISE. Our deplorable inner lazy-ass quitter is our enemy in life.
Heavy resistance for lower body strength:
Deadlifts Barbell or goblet squats Kettlebell Farmer's Walks Sled pushes and pulls
Lower body-oriented Calisthenics for muscle application and agility (many or most of these are included in typical cardio/calis gym classes)
High Step-ups (with or without kettlebell) Lunges (with or without kettlebell) Kettlebell Swings Box Jumps and jumping squats Wall sits or isometric 90 degree squat and holds Body weight squat variations (squat and press, squat with heavy ball throw, etc) Mountain Climbers Viper-toss side shuffles
Mostly lower-body Cardio and HIIT Cardio for endurance:
Longer Jogs and short sprints. Nothing long enough to promote arthritis. 20-30 minutes with jogs + sprints is enough. It's the sprints that build endurance anyway. Stair machine Rowing sprints Ski Erg sprints - done right, they are legs, back, and core, not arms Stationary bike (or bike) longs and sprints Jumping Jacks Jump Rope variations
There are many other things and variations to do but we try to keep it simple.
People tend to write about grief in the context of a death, but there are many sources of grief. We see grief reactions in all sorts of losses: loss of physical or mental capacities, losses of a relationship, disappointments and failures in dreams or careers, financial losses, loss of a home, and so forth.
It is inevitable in life that we accumulate scars. Most griefs scar over in time. New adaptations are achieved. Sometimes, grief does not relent.
I was reminded about how much the American press loved Trump until he was nominated, and thought about how much the American press and intelligentsia loved Russia until Trump. The Dems, Obama and Clinton, wanted to cozy up. Then I thought about how much the American left hated the FBI and the DOJ until Trump.
You get the feeling that Trump is living rent-free in a lot of heads, and controlling their brains. Mind games.
Put yourself in Trump's shoes: a highly successful businessman, in the latter years of his life, taking on the Herculean task of running for and winning the U.S. presidency. In victory he finds nothing but abuse, scorn, and betrayal, by friend and foe alike. He is surrounded by landmines, his intelligence community plotting a path to make sure he steps on one landmine after another. This is a journey few mortals would undertake or survive.
Is it any wonder he is pushing back against those trying to destroy him and his presidency, including the FBI, DOJ, and CIA, all in the thick of seditious activity against the duly elected president? He has few friends in Washington, D.C.; many who should have his back are eager to bury a knife in it instead.
The simplest explanations are often the best. Walk a mile in Trump's shoes, and his actions make all the sense in the world. A guy chosen by ordinary people, trying to make America great again despite so much of America trying to stop and destroy him. How would any rational person behave when standing in Trump's shoes?
I think there are essentially two takeaways from this historic event in Helsinki. The first is that Donald Trump is a bold, risk-taking statesman whose demotic style of delivery prevents many from appreciating the beneficently radical nature of his diplomacy. Maybe he will wind up being played by Kim Jong-un. But maybe his astonishing meeting with the tubby tyrant in Singapore is the beginning of the normalization of North Korea. If that happens—and I acknowledge that history suggests it is a big “if”—then President Trump will have achieved a world-historical diplomatic victory. His willingness to meet “jaw to jaw” would then be seen as a gambit of genius.
Maybe Putin is running circles around a gullible Trump. But maybe it is a real, as distinct from an Obama-Clinton merely rhetorical, reset. Then that, too, will be seen as a masterly and peace-enhancing initiative.
Mrs. BD spent a couple of days in Dublin. Quaint tiny picturesque village in southern NH within view of Mt. Monadnock. As her pic shows, it's the home of Yankee Magazine (and of The Olde Farmer's Almanac).
Sheesh. How do you talk with somebody like that? It's always been interesting to me how it is possible to use a victim pose to bully or attack others. Problem is, victim posture supports self-esteem and seems to morally justify obnoxiousness - but gets your own life nowhere. Well, being hostile is fun in some ways.
Apparently UNH is a hotbed of oppression, racism and misogyny, so that's a shame. Poor gal is blind to her incredible privilege. Her superiority tone bugs the heck out of me.
Some people term them "real jobs." This is kinda brilliant even if you think Mike is a twit. Peripitaeia is a good word. So is anagnorisis, but the most painful and tragic version of it is the reality of oneself.
“One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”
“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems – of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”
Self Control: 
Burberry destroyed $38 million worth of clothing and cosmetics —
