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.
23:1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 23:2 "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat; 23:3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 23:4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 23:5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. 23:6 They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, 23:7 and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi. 23:8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. 23:9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father--the one in heaven. 23:10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. 23:11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 23:12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
On a chilly evening in early March 1507, high in the Apennine Mountains of northern Italy, a group of cultivated gentlemen and ladies sit around the fire in the audience chamber of the Duchess of Urbino discussing the qualities of the perfect courtier.
Such is the setting of one of the most celebrated books of the Italian Renaissance, The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del cortegiano) by Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529), which was an international best-seller for a century after its first publication in 1528. The author, a minor nobleman from Mantua, was a humanistically-educated diplomat who served at the courts of northern Italy for most of his life, ending his career in Spain as Pope Clement VII’s nuncio to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V...
So sensitive to offended students, aren't they? As we keep trying to point out to the academic so-called grownups, these kids are manipulating you. And, as with 3 year-olds, the more you give in, the more they want.
Read shows that none of us knows enough to plan the creative actions and decisions of others.
We recall that American Indians had traded clam shells from Long Island (NY) for obsidian from the Dakotas. Free trade. I once saw that somebody tracked the pre-Columbian Indian trade routes across the Americas. I can't find it now.
" My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon...."
It's dominating the news these days, and rightly so.
With humans, for whom it is natural to live within cultural/religious contexts, questions about "natural" are always fraught. However, I will claim that sexual abuse by women and men, but more by men because of dominance hierarchies, is part of the animal side of human nature like violence, etc. Human nature contains much unpleasantness.
There are errors in Freud's Civilization and It's Discontents, but he got the big picture right. Living a bourgeois civilized life is challenging for humanoid animals and, depending on the culture, demands some sorts of instinctual restraints or constraints, at least on regular folks. The elites get away with more, and the poor folks often end up in jail.
Claiming that something is "natural" does not claim any moral valence. However, even in a Christian culture like medieval Europe the knights and nobles pretty much had access to any female who took his fancy (and vice versa, in the fancy courts of Europe - if a princess summons you to her boudoir, No is not an answer). Today in American, females teachers are routinely called on the carpet for seducing their high school students (which is not very difficult to do). For many women, "star-f-ing" is a diverting hobby, so it works both ways.
One of the perquisites of wealth, power, dominance, or celebrity is access to sexual adventure without consequences. In our culture, we consider some of it immoral and some of it illegal. Other cultures have very different rules about sexual behavior.
My point is simply that, in our society, there is and has been far more sexual libertinism, rape, and abuse at all levels of society (but perhaps most at the lowest and highest) than people like to admit or confess. Until they are caught. The unleashed sex drive is a powerful force and in people who don't care much, power, money, lust, and indifference to law or societal codes can let animal spirits loose. Attila the Hun is said to have fathered 10,000 children, which is why most Europeans claim him as an ancestor. 10,000 were not consensual, I am certain. But I wasn't there.
An engaging random session about human history, climate change, Ice Ages, etc. Just advance past the ads for cashews. Carlson does make the point that atmospheric CO2 is now at the bottom of the scale. He is fun to listen to.
Most experienced trainers will tell you that it takes that long for a middle-aged-to-older person get into decent functional condition.
The human body is remarkably adaptable, but adaptation is not quick except at the very beginning of a 5-6 day/week program. Progress can seem fast for the first few months, assuming the starting point is poor condition, but then it gets slow.
What is poor condition? It's where I used to be. To find out, take a gym calisthenics class and see how you do, or get a trainer's assessment. He or she will discover your limits very quickly with agility tests, cardio tests, strength tests, endurance tests, and just by observing your body at rest and under effort. When I began, I was not overweight on a scale, but I was - with excess fat, and underweight in muscle. I ended up gaining 15+ lbs with little visible fat.
Why does it take that long to build a good foundation for future fitness-building and maintenance? Not for great fitness, just for passable fitness?
As I write, eight are dead - all men, five Argentines, one Belgian, all in the path of an Uzbek Muslim who decided to take a Home Depot pick-up truck down the bike path for 20 blocks mowing down bicycle after bicycle after bicycle before exiting the vehicle and yelling - go on, take a wild guess - "Allahu Akbar!" Well, I never! You could knock me over with a feather duster
I’ve been a journalist for a long time. Long enough to know that it wasn’t always like this. There was a time not so long ago when journalists were trusted and admired. We were generally seen as trying to report the news in a fair and straightforward manner. Today, all that has changed. For that, we can blame the 2016 election or, more accurately, how some news organizations chose to cover it. Among the many firsts, last year’s election gave us the gobsmacking revelation that most of the mainstream media puts both thumbs on the scale—that most of what you read, watch, and listen to is distorted by intentional bias and hostility. I have never seen anything like it. Not even close...
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During the years I spent teaching at the Columbia University School of Journalism, I often found myself telling my students that the job of the reporter was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I’m not even sure where I first heard that line, but it still captures the way most journalists think about what they do. Translate the first part of that compassionate-sounding idea into the daily decisions about what makes news, and it is easy to fall into the habit of thinking that every person afflicted by something is entitled to help. Or, as liberals like to say, “Government is what we do together.” From there, it’s a short drive to the conclusion that every problem has a government solution.
The rest of that journalistic ethos—“afflict the comfortable”—leads to the knee-jerk support of endless taxation. Somebody has to pay for that government intervention the media loves to demand. In the same vein, and for the same reason, the average reporter will support every conceivable regulation as a way to equalize conditions for the poor. He will also give sympathetic coverage to groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
I knew all of this about the media mindset going into the 2016 presidential campaign. But I was still shocked at what happened...
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The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.
But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension.
Big Journalists: Because we're smart and you are stupid, we are idealists and you are not. When you think about it, it's tough on the ego to be a journalist, always watching others, never doing anything. But always imagining that you know better than the common folk or even the big people they write about. Egotism is for people who feel small. Well, that is not really fair to reporters. Most likely most reporters are humble folk who enjoy their reporter roles covering the Zoning Commission and the obits, but the ones in the big time want to be players not observers, moral leaders or some such grandiose BS. Baloney. Nobody anointed you. Just the facts, please. Thank God for the internet.
Michael Goodwin has always been one of the humble guys.
I guess that is an obsolete question in the post-modern universe where it's all gender all the time. As a cis-gendered man-identified white-identified human, I realize I have no right to any opinion whatsoever, so I can only offer my confusion. My confusion is that the current pop theory is that gender identification differences are all-important instead of trivial. That's the opposite of why Larry Summers lost his job due to a crying female-identified scholar at Harvard.
It's difficult to keep up. If they want to Stamp out Masculinity,then these haters must find something different about biological males (via Thompson):
A feminist professor at Occidental College recently argued that men must renounce their masculinity and “denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it.” Calling masculinity a “dangerous idea,” Wade argues that, “The problem is not toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic,” adding that masculinity is “simply not compatible with liberty and justice for all.” Wade concludes her essay by urging people to “call masculinity out as a hazardous ideology and denounce anyone who chooses to identify with it,” saying that doing so is crucial for “gender revolution.”
Clearly 99.9% of normal American females do not see things in this crackpot way. We link such things for amusement purposes. Women tend to like manly men, but growing into a "manly man" from a hormone-fueled feral child or man-child is not an easy developmental task in western culture. We all know the list of Manly Virtues (strength/athleticism, success/dominance, honor/integrity, loyalty, courage, respect for females/protectiveness, generosity, helpfulness, etc etc) into which males struggle to learn to channel their primitive apelike biological selves.
What do women struggle to become, as their best and highest selves, to make their parents and children proud?
On Sunday night, Mrs. BD had an all-pumpkin supper: Spicy Pumpkin-Apple Soup, Pumpkin Ravioli, and a Profiterole with Pumpkin Ice Cream. It's Pumpkin season, and Pumpkin is good food.
Pumpkin is a winter squash whose original small plant is native to the Americas. For the Eastern American Indians, winter squashes were one of the Three sisters: Squash, Corn (Maize), and Beans.Indians ate healthy, organic whole foods despite, or because, they were genetically-modified foods. They didn't live very long, though. Indians in their 50s were old men while men in their 50s and 60s and 70s today run marathons, pump iron, and climb Alps. My neighbor climbed all of the Dolomites in his 80s by eating steak.
All of those Indian crops had been greatly genetically-modified over 2,000+ years by Native American geneticists, because the wild plants they started with were weeds, hardly worth bothering with. Of course, what we grow now has been greatly improved from the Indian versions.
All humans knew about genetics long before Mendel explained it.
'The walls are closing in,' said one senior Republican in close contact with top staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. 'Everyone is freaking out.'"
They call it "Ultimate," but it seems like just a good fitness test for 25 year-old men.I can do a lot of it now and I know guys older than me who can too. Problem is, as you get older you get joint problems. Thus, no burpees for me anymore. Shoulder agony.
A romp through Jerusalem, now imagined as an amusement park with rides and odd characters. This hike begins Professor Osef's reminiscences with his niece about his year in this City, a City with which he is now beginning to fall out of love...
At 94, Rose Marie has the longest ongoing career is show biz in the US. 
Humans love dogs 
Most experienced trainers will tell you that it takes that long for a middle-aged-to-older person get into decent functional condition.
Why do they always term these Muslim terrorists "deranged" and "cowardly"? They are neither. 
