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.
Between 1830 and 1840 U.S. immigration quadrupled, and between 1840 and 1850, it tripled again. Particularly troubling to lawmakers at the time was the fact that many of these new immigrants were Irish Catholics who threatened the dominant Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural and religious customs. "Those now pouring in upon us, in masses of thousands upon thousands, are wholly of another kind in morals and intellect," mourned the Massachusetts state legislature regarding the new Boston immigrants.
Universal, taxpayer-funded “common schools” became the mechanism to rein in these masses and “Americanize” them...
My parents would be in jail today for neglect. I think the theory used to be that kids needed adventure and freedom, along with a load of mandatory chores, because the goal was to create resilient and independent people as soon as possible.
We had BB guns and made campfires in the woods. Nobody knew where the heck we were because we had bikes. As long as we got home for tennis lessons, there was no problem.
It's high school bio, but it's easy to forget even these big ones. When I took Gross Anatomy, they injected the arteries with red plastic and the veins with blue. That was a big help because arteries and veins in cadavers collapse and turn brown otherwise.
Everybody ought to know the major muscle groups too, but that's easy.
Derek Bok thinks so. I don't think so, but I am in favor of more rigorous secondary ed. Leef comments:
The real problem here is that a great many young Americans don’t really want an education. They want college fun and they want a degree as long as it doesn’t put much of a burden on them. And since other people are paying for their schooling, why put much effort into it? The education system is giving them what they want. If and to the extent that Americans start wanting education and having to pay for it, things will change from the bottom up.
A young person I know recently transferred from Colorado State to UConn. Business major. Says at Colorado there was too much weed, he never cracked a book and got straight As by listening in class. At UConn, has to study every night and can't keep up - and UConn is far from an elite institution. Mediocre at best but they love basketball.
To me, it's no longer clear what "college grad" means. Is it adolescent daycare?
I got 100 in on most days but I was not perfect. I do my best physical work in the gym, not home. Got my 100 today, sets of 15, 20 and 25.
There is no doubt that your chest and shoulder muscles respond to this sort of abuse demand. Plus it is a core exercise, like planks. Great for women. Women cannot grow visible muscles with resistance exercise due to relative lack of testosterone, but they sure can firm up and tighten up and that is rewarding.
From now on, I am probably going to plan on the 100 mostly on my Calisthenic Days, not daily. These weeks were a good start for my push-ups, for sure. I find the first set the hardest. I will now do a set of 15 as a warm-up set, then they get easier.
I had planned the next 4 weeks to be a 100-Burpee/day Challenge, but I can't do it. It just kills my injured shoulder to the point that I can't sleep on my right side. Maybe 100 Mountain Climbers? Or is that too easy? With Mountain Climbers, it's all about the speed. Mountain Climbers are HIIT Cardio/Calisthenics, not strength-building but definitely fitness-building.
My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit. Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything.
The creation of a scientific utopia requires mass murder, terror, and a complete loss of individual freedom. Then, if you survive long enough, and wait long enough, utopia appears. Or doesn't.
Unlike the leftist media narrative of Trump/Russia collusion, there is actual evidence to show we have been compromised, and it’s not Trump who has compromised or colluded. It’s the group of people the leftist media has vowed to protect. The Obama/Clinton/Democratic party complex.
The worst thing about these f-ing errors is that one tends to discount everything else the person is writing. The thing is, they could have something smart to say but somehow missed class the day they reviewed The Common Writing Errors of People Who Did Not Pay Attention in 3rd Grade.
You know how it is. People with English accents sound smarter than what they are saying and, for many Yankees I am sad to say, people with Hillbilly accents sound dumber than what they are saying. Both of these biases, interestingly, can work to the advantage of the object of the bias.
A reader offered this comment: " I heard Prince Harry or William express appreciation of a gift given “to my brother and I”. We’re doomed!"
Meanwhile no worries about Asians and people from India doing better, overall, than those white kids. I noted that she is not a Math Prof, but a Math Education Prof. But still...
Look, Harvey is a lowlife. But Hollywood hos are not as the sanctimonious Sean Hannity portrays them: “naive, innocent young things,” dreams shattered.
There are several reasons why calories- in and calories- burned equations are too simple for the complexity of animal physiology. For one thing, the calories in protein are handled differently from those in fat or in carbohydrates. Another reason is that our metabolism adapts to our nutritional intake as best it is able to.
Other than hibernating animals, few animals are adapted to handle the sort of abundance that humans have remarkably produced with brains capable of entirely changing the planet's surface and modifying nutritional sources for its own purposes. Humans are nutritional outliers, and it is not "natural." In a sense, humans are not natural animals because of the extent to which they remake nature for their convenience.
It means you have trained your body to adapt to a plentiful flow of fresh carbs and sugars (sugar is carbs and vice-versa) so it takes the burden off using fat as a fuel. Intake trains the body that way. Thus what we term the "False Hunger" of overweight people. Human physiology will never adapt to modern abundance of food because fatness tends to kill or disable people after child-bearing years.
Among other reasons, Fat Adaptation is one of the reasons heavy people feel more hunger and end up consuming food more avidly and in higher volume than trim people. In fact, overweight people have zero dietary energy requirements and minimal nutritional requirements despite subjective hunger.
In a recent discussion with a fairly knowledgeable person of centrist views we raised the question to each other, what does the government do well? Sure, there’s education, but it has become too much an exercise in inculcating left-liberal themes and not preparing needed skills. Sure, there’s the military, but it has become undersupported and used poorly by timid careerists and ignorant of war political leadership. Sure, there’s welfare, but it is a virtually unrestrained and lax stipend to secure votes from those without ambition, self-discipline, and illegal immigrants they want to legalize. Sure, there's infrastructure, but it is usually dome ineptly, overly costly due to paying off unions, and the funds drained away for pet projects outside core infrastucture needs. I could go on. What we came up with is the sole thing that government does well is to use our tax money to line the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats, most of who are really not needed except in the view of those who support interfering with and controlling the private lives of productive citizens.
The establishment is largely without merit.
That is the core understanding of at least half the voters nationally, and probably more when directly faced with the question of worth that we discussed. This well may be somewhat exaggerated, but probably not by very much.
The one-sided and contemptuous behavior and writing of the left’s politicians and their media and cultural allies in the NY-Washington, L.A.-San Francisco, and academic self-congratulatory circuits merely confirms this view of the establishment every day almost every time they open their mouths.
The half of America that takes umbrage and rejects their snotty and ignorant disregard of reality, the half of America that really toils and pays the tolls, stand up behind the Trump agenda because they understand it. The Trump agenda is to bring down and destroy if possible the corrupt establishment. It’s an imperfect agenda, opening ground that the establishment thought it has plowed under and sanitized against independent thought, but it is felt and believed to be necessary. That’s why the pouting of the left is disregarded as an immaterial and misleading defense of their status quo establishment’s self-serving.
“What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!”
Cowen loves this new book: 
It's high school bio, but it's easy to forget even these big ones. When I took Gross Anatomy, they injected the arteries with red plastic and the veins with blue. That was a big help because arteries and veins in cadavers collapse and turn brown otherwise.
I got 100 in on most days but I was not perfect. I do my best physical work in the gym, not home. Got my 100 today, sets of 15, 20 and 25.
Male icons, then and now, 
The worst thing about these f-ing errors is that one tends to discount everything else the person is writing. The thing is, they could have something smart to say but somehow missed class the day they reviewed The Common Writing Errors of People Who Did Not Pay Attention in 3rd Grade.
Internet is a big deal.
Image borrowed from Ace 
Consider the Brooks 24-pounder. Brand new and ready for firing. The bore is too small for tennis balls, so I am not sure what you can shoot out of it.