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.
21:33 "Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.
21:34 When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.
21:35 But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.
21:36 Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way.
21:37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'
21:38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.'
21:39 So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
21:40 Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"
21:41 They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."
21:42 Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures: 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?
21:43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.
21:44 The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls."
21:45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.
21:46 They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
I visited Breezy Point last weekend. It's a small private beach community on the western end of Rockaway on the other side of Jamaica Bay and not far from JFK airport. No high-rises are allowed.
It doesn't feel like New York City, but you can see the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Is it heavily Irish? Yes. Very comfortably rustic. Since Rockaway is an Atlantic barrier beach, the land (sand) is always in motion. It was hit hard by Sandy.
NYC has so many unique neighborhoods that only one man, Curtis Sliwa, knows them all.
My chef friend told me that home-made Reese's are better than store-bought, and you can make whatever sizes you want. (I wonder whether you can make them pie-sized and cut them in slices. Why not? Might be good with ice cream on top)
Easy:
- Buy whatever sort of peanut butter you want. Put it in silicone candy molds and freeze in freezer. - Make some tempered chocolate.That's the specialized part. - Dip the frozen pieces of peanut butter in the tempered chocolate, and let air-dry at room temperature on waxed paper. Done.
- To make them even better, sprinkle a little kosher salt on top before the chocolate hardens.
After more research and experience, and taking into account reader comments, I have come up with two or three good ideas for rugged hiking, eg Europe's "Moderate hill-walking, or Level 2" which is what they call "Difficult" or "Challenging" in the wimpy US hiking ratings.
For colder weather, you can just use winter underwear with them. These are not really hunting and brush-busting pants, or for happy weekend walks-in-the-woods either, but for extended hikes in mixed weather with some mud, mountains, boulders, and scree, etc. White Mountain, Rockies, and Dolomites hikes. I am eager to get on Mt. Washington, but next on our schedule is good old Storm King.
BTW, what is it with the word "pant" ? I always thought it was a plural.
Reason has little to do with the firearms issue. I'm sorry, cutie, but The Second Amendment isn't about hunting and shooting sports. It's about freedom.
Can we please make murder illegal? It might help, or do the guns kill people? Can't we just Do Something?!?!?
I suspect that they are just terminally, willingly, spinelessly naive. Willingly naive is a kind of denial of reality so it is not too far from insane. They will not admit to themselves that they are being played because that would expose their moral and spiritual frailty.
The world, and academia, needs more Prof. Petersons and fewer profs and administrators who fold like a cheap camera, as they used to say.
The argument that introducing modern civilization to more primitive societies may have been more of a blessing than a curse in many cases seems to be One Of Those Things You Can Not Say.
What would India be without the British Raj? Well, hard to say, but debatable.
She is so wrong. Under British law, commoners were not allowed to own swords for centuries. Commoners want weapons too for whatever reason. Now the elites want their armed bodyguards but they don't want me to have my .22?
Harsanyi: Come And Take Them, Bret Stephens - As an American-Jew whose ancestors came here escaping both Nazism and communism, I totally 'get' the Second Amendment 'fetishists.'
Of course, the grandstanding hacks and moral midgets in DC are going for the guns; most shockingly (or not, really, when you think about it) some in the GOP are going wobbly as well. What-the-actual-F**K; I mean, here we are, with majorities in both houses and holding the Oval Office, a political third rail to end all third rails, science, statistics, reason, history, the friggin' US Constitution and 200 million legal, responsible gun owners to back us up and McYertle meat-puppet John Cornyn is stuttering and muttering about a possible bump-stock ban. For the love of all that is righteous and good, will no one who is putatively on our side in the Senate or Congress rise and shut these tyrants up once and for all? You've sold us out on healthcare, the budget, prosecuting the IRS and other bureaucratic tyrants and laughing at us while you do it. But on the Second Amendment, is it too much to ask to reject the propaganda and fight?! I guess it is.
I haven't visited Budapest. It certainly is a very popular destination, partly because it has become a world-class city but also because, having been commie-controlled for so long, much of it is frozen in amber due to poverty and lack of development. Well, WW2 did a lot of damage to Budapest as it did to Vienna.
100 is getting easier already. I had to take one day off, though, for "recovery". We did a 3-hour woodsy hill hike instead. Well, now I am doing sets of 15 instead of 10, and next week it will be sets of 20. Raise that efficiency despite the burn. One thing I notice is that the quicker you do them, the better.
Also, I do not do the push-ups on my bench press day. That would not be sensible.
Two years ago, I could hardly do 3 pushups. My shoulder pain problem didn't help (it has improved a lot with exercise), but I was weak too. OK, I do not have a muscular build but I am somewhat fit for my age and build at this point. Plenty of guys my age are fitter than me and I still suck and can't do pull ups. My goal for this 100/day challenge is to do 50 in one set with good form. I'll be satisfied with that. Or maybe I won't be.
A good part of fitness is that you can pursue it even if you have no special athletic talent and are not highly coordinated. The only sport I can play with any competence at all now is tennis, but fitness can be a sport or hobby of its own and it's good for mental, spiritual, physical, and sexual health. We all want to approach life with as much vigor as we can muster for as long as we can.
How are our readers doing with this game? The gals too. Any cheaters? Any quitters?
"The only reason to fire so many rounds so fast is to kill large numbers of people,” Ms. Feinstein said in a statement. “No one except the government should be able to easily and cheaply modify legal weapons into what are essentially machine guns.""
Pepper market in Budapest, the land of paprika, from my riverboat friend. Hungarian food must have been bland before peppers arrived from the New World in the 1500s
Everybody knows that having a belly is the major risk factor for heart and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and dozens of other nasty ailments, but the association of overweight with at least 13 cancers is not so well known.
Being heavy may be one of the greatest risk factors for a large variety of cancers. There are many theories about why this might be. Breast and prostate cancers are high on the list.
It is worth thinking about, even though we all must accept that the odds are, now that we can handle most infectious diseases, that we will die either of cancer or cardiovascular disease sooner or later. But why rush it?
"The immigration seen in recent years is changing our country not in a positive but in a negative way... Uncontrolled immigration destroys the order in a country." — Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz.
According to a leaked German government report, up to 6.6 million migrants -- both refugees and migrants seeking a better life -- are currently waiting to cross to Europe from Africa.
The Science 
A book: 
New York’s 9/11 tribute mesmerizes birds — a
