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.
"Athleticism" is a measure of physical functionality or functionalities, but everybody's graph has a different shape.
Genius Trainer and I were watching some NCAA reruns on TV while I was resting between deadlift sets, and we talked about the role of "quickness" in basketball. We separated the dancelike but predatory quicksilver moves in elite basketball players from speed, which is an entirely different quality, and proceeded to break down athleticism into components (some more valuable for some endeavors, some for others) during other between-set rests as we worked the weight up for 5 sets.
We came up with quite a few: power (= strengthXspeed), pure strength, speed (running speed), agility (rapid precision of bodily position. balance, and posture), quickness (of instant movement, acceleration/deceleration and directional changes), explosiveness (power bursts), situational awareness (mental), overall physical endurance, stability, mobility, flexibility, and all kinds of eye-hand and other sorts of coordination talents which are difficult to put into words.
I don't watch basketball but I used to enjoy playing it quite a bit in high school because it took a lot of movement and total concentration, despite basically sucking at it. Like everything in life, you can train all of these things but biology is foundational and you can't shine sh-t.
Elite basketball players, it seems to me, have the largest collection of athletic components.
Legend and anthropology hold that some American Indian cultures believed that, if you rescued somebody, saved somebody's life, or prevented them from disaster, you were indebted to them forever. That is, the saver was beholden to the saved.
My fantasy is that the issue is that you postponed their arrival to the Happy Hunting Grounds.
In Western culture we tend to see it the other way around because of a Christian foundation, or because we want to see this life as heaven (?), but as an American physician who works for nobody - not government, not insurance, not a hospital - except my patients, I see it both ways. If I get you out of big trouble, you sort of own me as long as you want to.
I was reading pretty well at 5 with phonics. Mom taught me to read. Expecting school to teach a kid to read is like expecting government to be your doctor.
... it appears that at least one person has perjured himself over this and that one person is FBI Director Comey. There’s no way to square his testimony with these new revelations. The best he can do is split hairs and claim he was not part of the spying effort. Of course, there’s no way to touch him as he runs the FBI. In fact, there’s no way to investigate any of the intelligence organizations. This is the point where many of the robot historians of the future will say the American political class murdered itself.
As long as people are still free to criticize Christianity, I'm cool. Christianity is used to it. Christian guy or gal might feel hurt or insulted, but all they will actually do is to throw in a prayer for your soul. They won't scare the crap out of you the way the Canadians are askeered of their Muslims.
‘No European…can walk safely on the streets,’ Turkey’s Islamist President Erdogan Warns Europe
I only have two kettlebell exercises in my miscellaneous assortment of Calisthenic circuits: Swings and Farmer Walks. Sometimes I do walking swings and sometimes stationary.
I keep the weight to a level when I can keep good swing technique with sets of 10-15. It is more demanding than it looks. As in any exercise, technique is key to avoid injury and for best gain. For Farmer Walks, I use the heaviest I can hang on to for a minute or two while maintaining strong posture.
We aren’t a nation that has a cost-growth problem; we’re a nation that had a problem a couple of decades ago, when we failed to keep costs from outpacing the hog-wild inflation of the 1970s. Which means that we can’t even hope to get our costs down in the future, relative to other countries, by switching to a more government-driven system now, as many people have suggested when I pointed this out.
Let me repeat Josh Barro’s point that health care is 1/6th of our economy but nobody wants to spend 1/6th of their income on it. When health care spending was lower as a share of GDP, we had the luxury of setting up a system dominated by third-party payments, without the insurance companies or the government imposing difficult restrictions on what procedures could be approved or what doctors could receive in compensation. But health care spending has gotten to be too large a fraction of GDP to be handled that way. The system is bound to change, and the change is bound to feel uncomfortable to many people.
Nationalism was the centerpiece of the rise of liberal democracies because liberal democracy was built around the liberation of nations. Liberals in Europe and America did not deny that, but they simply could not grasp that the nation cannot exist unless the people feel a common bond that makes them distinct. The claim was that it was legitimate to have a nation, but not legitimate to love it inordinately, to love it more than other nations, to value the things that made it different, and above all, to insist that the differences be preserved, not diluted.
if America and Europe are becoming more insular to guard their welfare states, Canada is becoming more exclusive. All of this flies in the face of using the welfare state to create a "just society" full of compassion and caring communities. Indeed, in their effort to use the welfare state as a vehicle to create a new spirit of cosmopolitan socialism, liberals have only fueled a resurgence of the mean-spirited tribalism that they'd wished to purge.
Far from making all of humanity hold hands and sweetly sing kumbaya in a newfound brotherhood, welfare statists have ironically produced new fissures and divisions for nativism to prey on.
"To Europe, America has always been a bad man." That is insightful. They like to condescend to us God-and gun-loving barbarians and only love us when they need some rough guys. Otherwise, they only want American dollars and banks.
Europe: Another day, another Muslim atrocity in Europe. Can those people ever learn from experience? Can they learn the real meaning of multiculturalism, which is that cultures are deeply different and often conflicting?
His op-ed is partly right, partly wrong. His naivety about human nature, especially late-adolescent/young adult nature, is where he gets things wrong. Opinion writers tend to be naive about the college youth, and take them far too seriously. Perhaps they identify with them. College administrators are even worse castrati.
For a subgroup of kids that age who are in fancy schools and usually lack jobs, creating mayhem, especially when cloaked in some imitation of higher virtue (but is also fun when it is not cloaked in anything as in mayhem in Fort Lauderdale or Nassau), it's an attempt to unleash their warrior, reckless natures without fear of being shot by an enemy. It is a sort of play warfare, really. Paintball.
In almost all of human history, it would have been real clubs or arrows or spears or bullets at their age. No safe spaces for anybody.
Can I earn distinction among my peers by shutting down Charles Murray? Seems rather pathetic to me but these are bubble-wrapped kids with the Teenage Diseases. Some of their profs, for sure, never recovered from their own by avoiding the Big World Outside the bubble.
In elite schools, this play war is mostly for kids who didn't make the sports teams. In non-elite schools there is little of this foolishness because there is a diploma to be earned and they have side jobs or their parents are stretched to pay for them to have a positive experience to graduate with a supply of useful skills and enough socio-cultural tools to maybe handle a managerial role and a mortgage at some point.
Were I a college president (which I would not mind being), I would have any disruptors expelled and/or arrested (which is just one of many reasons I am not a college president).
Who was it who said recently that what America needs is a Good War? With a co-ed, or, should I say, pangender draft. There must be people worth suppressing more than a refined, gentle, scholarly grandpa like Murray. Where is the heroism in war against Grandpa?
The people who have an explicit legal obligation to work not on our behalf but on behalf of their shareholders do a pretty good job of giving us what we want; the people who vow to work on our behalf do not. That is a paradox only if you do not think about it too much, and not thinking about it too much is the business that politicians are in.
If capitalism – which is to say, human ingenuity set free to follow its own natural course – is a kind of social machine, then politicians are something like children who take apart complex machines without understanding what they do or how to put them back together. (At their worst, they are simply saboteurs.) When they rail against capitalism, automation, trade, and the like, they resemble nothing so much as those hominids at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, shrieking hysterically at something that is simply beyond their comprehension.
Of course, most politicians really do know better. They are just bullshitting people, which is their mission if they want to keep their easy job.
A sample post on that site about being rich: Scraping By On $500,000 A Year. Of course, as he points out, what is a rich income depends entirely on where you live, how you live, and your attitude towards life.
It's no mystery to anybody, at this point. As we have said, this is war but I am still not sure what this war is about. Bathrooms? Or just to hamstring a player who is not on your team?
Even Megan McArdle can't really see what the fuss is about. She says the administration is asking these simple questions which any federal government should ask:
- Can the government actually make this problem better?
- If so, must this problem be solved at the Federal level, or could it be done as easily or better by the states?
- Even if the government might help solve this problem, would the associated costs in terms of loss of freedom, deadweight losses from regulation or taxation, and the declining accountability and manageability of government as it grows, actually be worth the benefit?
Thanks to California rains, the Anza-Borrego Desert Park is experiencing one of its rare wildflower superblooms. There is plenty of usually-hidden life in deserts. Maggie's Farmer Bruce Kesler sent me some of his pics -
Good. In my high school, we had randomly-assigned tables rotating every 6 weeks, with a teacher at each table. That was good, civilized, and over time everybody met a lot of people that they might have never spoken with.
Fair enough, but he's done many more things than I have and at least he lacks false humility. Seems to live with a sort of reckless abandon, or maybe that is his persona. He did teach at Harvard for many years, and is apparently now his university's most popular prof because he brings life to his topics. I like him even though he seems like a prickly SOB. I don't mind prickly SOBs as long as they seem to like me.
Here's Peterson's Self-Authoring Suite . Yeah, it is a self-help thing but it seems intelligent. Lots of people are stuck in their lives.
Good stuff. I would add that DiCaprio, like Al Gore, could convince me, at least, of his seriousness if he got rid of his many giant houses, giant boats, and constant private jet travel. My view: conspicuous, fashionable virtue-signaling by people who would not recognize a virtue if they stubbed their toe on one.
I will recommend, for anyone who can, visit Cuba now. On one level, it will provide a great appreciation for everything we have in the US. In addition, the food is so good (and inexpensive) you will wonder how they got so many great chefs. Finally, the culture is unparalleled, an amazing amalgamation of past and present.
Visiting Cuba provoked many thoughts about what could have been, as well as visions of the past. I will post as many as I can, but I will start with a simple travelogue. It’s the best way to introduce the country, and the city of Havana, without provoking much commentary about such a wonderful destination. Still untouched in many ways, clearly this will not be the same country in 10, and possibly even 5, years.
There is a raw beauty to Cuba. It is almost impossible to not fall in love with this country upon arrival. The people are friendly, the climate nearly perfect, while the cityscapes of Havana and surrounding country retain an air of the not-so-distant past. Bt, it is a crumbling place, the majority of exteriors falling apart, much of the infrastructure antiquated and in need of update, and modern services and conveniences (for locals who can’t afford to pay) subpar. Even tourist spots are in the process of updating. They are improving rapidly. Often, entering a building you are convinced must be a hole-in-the-wall, only to find a modern and beautiful interior with wonderful food and music.
David Rockefeller 
Behold The Big Bend - the incredible U-shaped New York skyscraper 
West Virginia 