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.
Middle Eastern Muslims are not all jihadists. Are they sympathizers? I don't know. Many, for sure. The jihadist movement is a death cult with an outsized impact on the rest of the world. Their random terror acts are designed to produce disruption, reaction, and to build enthusiasm for their movement. It works, it magnifies them and politically stirs the West into forfeiting freedoms for security, which is a terrible thing.
9-11 was not Pearl Harbor, but the world would be a more pleasant place if these ardent Muslims dedicated themselves to more constructive secular pursuits rather than killing Westerners, Jews, and eachother. Theirs is a mission and a holy purpose, and many people want their life to mean something dramatic. Furthermore, killing and blowing things up is so easy that anybody can do it. Checking out, in a blaze of glory.
Theirs is not a Western culture. It has different cultural premises and assumptions, and, like cockroaches in a building, they will never be eliminated. All I want is to keep them out of my life and to let them wreak havoc, if they must, in their own habitat. Israel can take care of itself very well.
Islamophobia? I'll confess to a mild case of that due to reading the news. It might not be fair, but I am human with healthy tribal instincts. They have managed to make themselves my bogeymen and I do not like to ride airplanes with them.
Several thousand were killed on that day in 2001 — the anniversary of the Ottoman defeat at the Gates of Vienna. This was a comparatively small number, by modern standards. The rich symbolism of this Islamist operation was lost on the West, which no longer cares for history or legend. A brilliant assault of “asymmetric warfare,” it fulfilled all of its objectives. The torch has since been passed from the more moderate al-Qaeda to the more fanatic Daesh, and will be passed again in due course. Osama bin-Laden personally lost face by being hunted down and killed like a rat, but his vision of a restored Islamic Caliphate survives him. It inspires still the young in heart and mind.
51:1 Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
51:2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
51:3 For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
51:4 Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.
51:5 Indeed, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me.
51:6 You desire truth in the inward being; therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
51:7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
51:8 Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have crushed rejoice.
51:9 Hide your face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities.
51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
Hillary! descends to a Trumpian level with name-calling and insults just as Trump begins to (tries to) behave in a more dignified way. As the man says,
There is a bracing purity about this.
Clinton made the comments before introducing Barbra Streisand at an LGBT fundraiser in downtown New York. According to average ticket prices and attendance figures provided by the campaign, Clinton raised around $6 million at the fundraiser, at which some attendees paid $50,00
She must have been trying to tell the attendees that they were the good people in contrast to the great unwashed who think trannies are strange. How is Trump a racist? He has integrated everything he touched, including his fancy golf clubs. He has no problem with gays or anybody else unless they attack him. Those smears will not stick. Many regular folks like the guy's style although I do not. Even Bill Clinton likes him.
The Common Snapping Turtle of the Eastern and Central US is indeed common wherever there is mud and water.
Their eyes are like jewels.
Unless you do a lot of pond fishing, these large turtles are most often seen on land, searching for egg sites or seeking a new habitat. Leave them alone.
It has been known, probably since humans were human, that many personality traits are hard-wired in the genes and that much of development consists of a gradual revealing of those traits in the same way that physical characteristics are gradually revealed. Thanks to the miracle of the human cerebral cortex, some learning and adaptation occurs but the hard-wired things remain present even if hidden by adaptive maneuvers (eg covering up shyness or hypersensitivity).
Long before you could express yourself with words, you were giving away the signs of your adult temperament. Christian Jarrett explains how.
A friend is in the wedding party at a Dominican wedding this weekend. He's been brushing up on his Salsa and Merengue. He lived in Costa Rica for two years so he had plenty of experience in Latin dance clubs. He says, "With Latin Americans, you can't get chicks if you can't dance." I said I thought Merengue had a bit of happy grinding. It does.
You can learn those dance rhythms and moves on Youtube.
Orban tendered a dire prediction if Europe continues to accept Muslim immigration. “There will eventually be more Muslims than Christians in Europe as the continent’s non-Muslim population is ill-equipped to fight the coming cultural competition.”
Europe’s progressives rejected Orban's warning. “In a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, has set himself up as a bulwark against a generous-spirited, pan-European approach,” The Guardian editorialized.
Why should western Europeans listen to Viktor Orban?
Big-time sports simply do not blend well with academic pursuits. Georgia Tech’s Richard DeMillo nailed that point when he wrote in this Pope Center article: “Sports programs are grafted onto universities to extract value from academic programs for the sake of the sports programs. Athletic decision-making cannot be trusted to align itself with academic goals when so many of the incentives are tied to the success of a non-core, big money operation that has virtually no relationship to academic outcomes.”
Is there any hope of escaping from the arms race for sports prestige?
Useless as it may be, it's too popular to go away.
If you plant some now (in the northern hemisphere, temperate zone or above), you will have their foliage and purty flowers busting through the snow in Feb or March. Lenten Rose. Happy with deep shade. The more the better. Too bad they are expensive, but good things often are.
Since the Party was the agent of History itself, it could not be mistaken, and so anything the party did was morally right by definition. “Morality is entirely subordinated to the class struggle of the proletariat,” Lenin declared. At the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1924, Trotsky explained:
"Comrades, none of us wishes or is able to be right against his Party. The Party in the last analysis is always right, because the Party is the sole historical instrument given the proletariat for the solution of its basic problems. . . . I know that one cannot be right against the party. It is only possible to be right with the Party and through the Party for history has not created other ways for the realization of what is right."
On a warm day, you can smell its sweetness 10 yards away. A good thing about this tough vine is that it does not spread undereground, which is why I had to destroy the yellow Trumpet Vine I had there before.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
And the money kept rolling in from every side Eva's pretty hands reached out and they reached wide Now you may feel it should have been a voluntary cause But that's not the point my friends When the money keeps rolling in, you don't ask how Think of all the people guaranteed a good time now Eva's called the hungry to her, open up the doors Never been a fund like the Foundation Eva Peron
The wealthy, the influential, the intelligentsia, and the cultural elite all broadcast their virtues — usually at a cut-rate rhetorical price — to offset their own sense of sin (as defined by feelings of guilt), or in fear that their own lives are antithetical to the ideologies they espouse, or sometimes simply as a wise career move. Sin these days is mostly defined as race/class/gender thought crimes. Wearing a mask of virtue is done not to save one’s soul for eternity but to still feel good about enjoying privilege.
Greenfield: American presidents were meant to retire. They were never supposed to use taxpayer money to set up cabals. It was unthinkable for them to solicit foreign rulers in a bid to return to power.
Mexico has zero tolerance for illegal immigrants who seek to work inside Mexico, happen to break Mexican law or go on public assistance -- or any citizens who aid them.
In Mexico, legal immigration is aimed at privileging lawful arrivals with skill sets that aid the Mexican economy and, according to the country's immigration law, who have the "necessary funds for their sustenance" -- while denying entry to those who are not healthy or would upset the "equilibrium of the national demographics." Translated, that idea of demographic equilibrium apparently means that Mexico tries to withhold citizen status from those who do not look like Mexicans or have little skills to make money.
If the United States were to treat Mexican nationals in the same way that Mexico treats Central American nationals, there would be humanitarian outrage.
…in a culture of abundance and affordable luxury, bodily self-abnegation no longer retains this primeval horror. Rather, the twenty-first-century middle-class American must actively labor not to become fat. Thus eating becomes moralized behavior. How often have you heard a woman describe a rich dessert as “sinful”? To eat is to sin—in secular society, the body replaces the soul. Good and evil are no longer purely spiritual concepts—these words have been transubstantiated into the realm of the flesh.
The 
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Dear Media: It Is Not News When ‘Transgender Men’ Get Pregnant
If you plant some now (in the northern hemisphere, temperate zone or above), you will have their foliage and purty flowers busting through the snow in Feb or March. Lenten Rose. Happy with deep shade. The more the better. Too bad they are expensive, but good things often are. 
Cats are bird killers.