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.
Jane Austen was a rebel against the chick lit of her time. From a review:
This collection reveals a Jane who even as a fourteen-year-old—a little sister publishing within the family—is already compassionate, and also already something of a meanie, already artful in her depictions of the Demolition Derby that was an eighteenth-century drawing room. Moreover—and this is an odd thrill—this collection shows glimpses of a bawdy Jane...
So unlikely did the election of Donald Trump seem to Washington and its denizens that the reality of it still has not sunk in. All of the city’s worst traits — the self-regard, the group think, the obsessions with trivia, the worship of credentials, the virtue signaling, the imperiousness, the ignorance of perspectives and people from outside major metropolitan centers and college towns — not only persist. They have been magnified with Trump’s arrival. There is so much negative energy coursing through the city that circuits are overloaded.
He has very little time to normalize things, but he is a Honey Badger for sure.
I think the "Hard Left," with which many ordinary Dems have now allied themselves, will discredit their party and their even their reasonable arguments.
Conspiring to engage in political violence aimed at depriving others of their civil rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly, is a federal crime. I hope that the administration will investigate it as thoroughly as the Obama Administration would have investigated a similar violent campaign conducted by the right — had such a campaign ever existed.
I have posted in the past about my ideas about how Reality Therapy can help people be their best. Hiding from discomfort gets us nowhere. Bumping against reality teaches us our limits and weaknesses, and invites us to either accept them or to try to figure out how to overcome them.
I have advised people, over the years, to seek rejection as a way to help them deal with their rejection fears. Rejection fears are not neurotic really, just human because we all know that nobody can love or appreciate us as much as Mom did when we were little. Also, because we know our flaws and, as adults, we know we are not precious snowflakes but just ordinary people who are fortunate if we are liked, much less loved.
I once urged a shy, awkward young man to approach the girl he most admired in his class to engage his courage and to face rejection gracefully. Experiment failed: She liked him.
A big reader friend told me at lunch yesterday that she had had the depressing realization last weekend that she will never be able to read all the books she wants to read in her lifetime.
She is a very active, adventurous person whose appetite for new experiences equals her appetite for new knowledge. Rather than depressing, I found her comment uplifting. We'd like to die, maybe, dropping a half-read book onto our chest. Is there a library in heaven?
“Although we object strenuously to Yiannopoulos’s views — he advocates white supremacy, transphobia and misogyny — it is rather his harmful conduct to which we call attention in asking for the cancellation of this event.”
There are plenty of Republicans who support Trump and a surprising number of people in the bureaucracy who know reform is long overdue. Some of the harshest critiques of the state you will hear come from people in the system. There’s also the fact that Trump is proving to be an exceptional political athlete. He has a knack for baiting the media in order to gain public support for his positions. No person has moved the Overton Window further to the right than Trump has done in my lifetime. It truly is amazing.
Even so, the next year will be about the Cloud Party conspiring to undermine the Trump administration, while Trump figures out how to work around the system to undermine the system. His immigration order is a foreshadow of what is to come. Instead of looking for compromise, Team Trump will go big in order to trigger the political class and their media to overreact. This tends to turn off the public and thus turn the Cloud Party assets into liabilities, as we are seeing with these ridiculous protests.
At some point, the Cloud People will shift gears, but for now, the game will be Trump picking fights and the establishment going bonkers.This gives Trump cover to do some important stuff, like we see with the H1B executive order. While the Cloud People are wailing about the so-called Muslim ban, they did not have time to notice the order to shake up the visa program Silicon Valley uses to screw its employees. This sort of cat and mouse game is how an insurgent party must use its speed and agility to overcome the establishment’s size.
Pic is Gorsuch with Scalia in Colorado. Gorsuch is a gentle, warm, refined outdoorsman, a Christian, with a crushing resume. He is 49 years old. A remarkable individual, superstar intellectual. We are fortunate that he is willing to do this job.
My poker night is this Friday, and I look forward to it each month. 50 people, food, libations, conversation and competition. There are afew heated moments. Not many, mostly good fun and the chance to take your friends' and neighbors' money. I have more or less broken even in this game. I keep pretty good records. We play a cash game for an hour, then a tournament, followed by cash games as people are bounced.
It's a game of incomplete information. Computers are good at games that have lots of available information, not games lacking in it. But poker often has more information available than we care to admit. Betting trends are like prices. They give signals. Being able to sort through the signals and recognize where value lies is a skill. But humans also think and behave in linear ways. If you have a non-random betting approach, a computer should be able to sniff it out.
A computer beating a human at Texas Hold 'em, even a limited table such as this, is quite a feat. The fact I happen to know the inventor of the computer makes it doubly interesting for me. He presented some of his yield optimization techniques to our team several times. I have suggested to our team we bring him back in.
That isn't news. However, the egalitarian fantasy which nobody truly believes hangs over much of America's educational industry.
Efficient primary education for the masses probably does work best for the most according to the Prussian model which American schools adopted during the 1800s as primary ed became government-run. One-size-fits-all authoritarian ed is in fact efficient, if terrible for boys, to learn the basics of readin, ritin, and rithmetic that any citizen needs to function in the world. The fundamentals are not much fun unless there is competition added to the mix.
When the primary school basics are not achieved, I tend not to blame the school because there are too many external variables at play.
When it comes to post-primary ed, the external variables increase. Native curiosity plays a larger role, as does family support and structure, IQ, etc. etc. However, the Prussian model begins to work less well for boys as they grow up. But I am wandering from the topic: According to Albert Jay Nock, America's theory of education is off.
I remember back in the old days, public conversations between liberals and conservatives usually went something like this:
1. liberal: says something 2. conservative: responds 3. liberal: you're a racist | sexist | bigot | pejorative du jour 4a. conservative: I am not a racist | sexist | bigot | pejorative du jour 4b. conservative attempts to give evidence for statement 4a. 5. liberal: not good enough 6. Go to step 3
The new, Trump-era "honey badger conservative" playbook appears to be this:
1. conservative: says something 2. liberal: you're a racist | sexist | bigot | pejorative du jour 3. conservative: fuck you.
Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Three Generations. Family wealth usually doesn't last very long unless it is vast and managed by people with the job to maintain it: Kennedys keep their wealth offshore and untaxed, and Rockefellers have a huge family office to protect and build the family $ - but by three generations ordinary wealth tends to be spent/wasted/diluted/frittered away by generations which are less effective at, or less interested in, wealth accumulation. Thus downward mobility.
In my work, I see as much downward financial mobility as upward. Naturally, the upward is more rewarding for me and the downward more painful to watch. I just tell myself "Regression to the mean is a law of nature."
Social class, which is more about culture than about wealth, but still implies a little loose cash, continues to be of value because of relationships, manners, life experiences, sophistication, etc. Nowadays, though, life in America is far more democratic than a generation or two or three ago when your family clubs, prep school, summer communities, and Ivy colleges guaranteed you social and occupational entree. No more pedigree in the USA, if there ever was because here "old money" was always rather new. America is far more meritocratic than it once was, but it has always been more meritocratic than Euroland or other places in general. The American Dream and all that. Andrew Carnegie: penniless Scottish immigrant makes good.
Financial mobility works both ways, goes up and down. The medium-prosperous naturally want to maintain their family traditions of perquisites and cultural advantages, but that is difficult to do for most people if they do not dodge estate taxes (which many do). Better off to have scrappy kids and if they can golf, sail, play tennis, can tell a Breughel from a Rembrandt, and have perfect dinner party manners with snappy repartee, so much the better. They can set an example for others and get on with the program.
Lefties (although McArdle is not one, really) love to focus on money and income mobility: So, What Do Your Parents Do? And Your Great-Grandparents? There are advantages that come with genes, manner of upbringing, and social background. It's the rare black ghetto kid in Baltimore or Hartford who has a prayer to escape his background. Some do, but it takes more drive and brains than for the middle class white kid in central Ohio whose dream is to get off the farm and go to New York to start a business with his or her algorithm.
The vast majority of middle-class Americans do not care much about such things and just want to build some security and comfort for their families. Many, however, are ambitious wealth-builders too. They are necessary, the job and wealth-creators. Everybody else is a parasite. Including me.
Zuckerberg 
Is Groundhog Day one of your top ten favorites? In New England, we call them 
Afraid Government Will Ruin Your Life? Reduce Their Power.