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.
I often mistype Marital as Martial. Freudian typos? It's an impossible job, but sometimes highly gratifying and always interesting. I enjoy doing it when I get a chance to. Generally speaking, as a therapist you fly by the seat of your pants but it's never dull. I have even done couples therapy with gay guys. Never a dull moment.
Haven't you heard? Top 10 lists are so 2010. Why, no one that doesn't eat their vegetables by scooping up mashed potatoes with a butter knife and smooshing them in the peas refers to TOP TEN lists any longer. It's just not done by our class of people, dear. We're busy, important people who don't have time to peruse ten entries on any topic. If we wanted a decalogue, we'd hire Moses and a headstone company. We live in a Snapchat society. Keep it under a half a dozen, will ya?
In order to get in the spirit of the exercise, we've come up with a sort of test pattern of TOP FIVE lists. Don't strain yourself reading them all at once. I tried, and my lips got really tired. My advice is to dip into this treasure trove of minutiae over a period of days. When you're all done, you'll have bulked-up reading muscles and can move on to reading the comment sections on the daily crop reports from the USDA. It's bracing stuff.
So without further ado, here's our TOP FIVE LIST OF TOP FIVE LISTS:
This is dedicated to all the people promising to leave the country if Donald Trump wins the election. It also works for all the preppers that are promising to leave the country if Donald Trump loses. It's also handy for Libertarians who promise to leave the country whether Donald Trump wins or loses.
It's against the law in Georgia to use foul language in front of a dead body in a funeral home? People in Georgia must know a different class of people than I do. There's no other reason to attend a wake in my social set.
Hmm. I didn't see clerk at the Quik-E-Mart on there. On the plus side, it's an infographic, which is great for people who think a TOP FIVE list is a workout.
I'm really dull, so I just bought 1,100 Neon Tetras and dumped them into a goldfish bowl. It saves a lot of time, because there's only room for 17 tablespoons of water, making it much easier to clean.
Bucket lists are things you're supposed to do before you die, aren't they? Well, my list only has one item on it. I want to move to Georgia so no one can tell me what they think of me after I croak.
If you're dissatisfied with our selection of TOP FIVE lists, suggest one in the comments. Remember, six or more is right out!
But even amidst the torrent of meaningless platitudes, it is possible to discern a political vision in this speech: It is a vision where government -- the federal government of the United States -- has the solution to every human problem, big, small and medium. A vision where the government can eliminate all down side risks from life by just spending a little more of the free money from the infinite credit card. A vision where the fundamental role of the politician is to promise goodies to pass out to buy the votes of the electorate. And a vision where we pretend that essentially everybody but a few bogeymen ("Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich") can be a net gainer from the government handout game.
The almost total absence of public mourning for an 85-year-old Christian priest whose throat was slit by Islamicist terrorists while he led prayer in a small church in Normandy, France, is a scandal.
Let's grant that a hack—a way of obtaining information—and a leak—a means of disseminating information—are very different things. But, still, does the particular distinction Foer draws between the two make sense? Suppose, for example, that Russian intelligence, instead of feeding its trove of hacked secrets to WikiLeaks, had chosen to pass them along to an American investigative reporter, who then wrote about a selection of them in, say, the pages of the New Yorker or the New York Times. Would Foer have any grounds for objection?
Readers know that we believe that jumping is an excellent and intense cardio-calisthenic for general athleticism. All I can do is singles and running jumps, doubt I will ever be able to do double-unders.
Anyway, my tech-oriented trainer introduced me to this cool thing last week: A rope which miraculously displays the count in the air in front of you with LED, and also sends the count to your smart phone.
Cool exercise toy. It's a heavy rope (as contrasted with light and medium-weight ropes), so it is extremely fatiguing for me. But that's the point - brief with high intensity.
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name, George Orwell, remains an iconic figure in literature to this day. He's most famous for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both books which warn against oppressive totalitarian authority and the nature in which power corrupts.
A Haverhill, Mass., newspaperman teaches seniors how to tell their life story for the last time; ‘don’t think that your life is any more insignificant than anyone else’s’. As a local newspaper reporter for 50 years, Tom Vartabedian has written thousands of obituaries. In May, he wrote one about himself. After finishing a draft, he felt relief. “I had written probably the most important story of my life,” he said.
Mr. Vartabedian was following his own advice. The 75-year-old weekly columnist for the Haverhill Gazette recently taught a class on writing your own obituary at a senior center in town. “Don’t leave anything to chance,” he said, “the chance that somebody else makes a debacle of it.” Tom Vartabedian wrote hundreds of obituaries during his newspaper career. This year he was asked to teach a class to senior citizens on how to write their own....
Outside Plato's fantasies, the Philosopher Kings always turn out to be power-mad psychotics divorced from reality and morality. Governance by your moral and intellectual superiors, that is, by the genius experts: The Fourth Circle of Statist Hell
1:2 Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
1:12 I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem,
1:13 applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with.
1:14 I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.
2:18 I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me
2:19 --and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.
2:20 So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the toil of my labors under the sun,
2:21 because sometimes one who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil.
2:22 What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun?
2:23 For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.
Politics is transactional in nature; some people receive this, others that. It involves compromises, bending, accommodation. To try any one discrete act of legislation, especially in isolation from the whole, on the grounds of discrete reason-giving is to misapprehend the nature of the legislative process, which is more Hayekian than Platonic. It is not directed by philosopher-kings. It is the product of a vast array of individual accommodations that accrete into a whole that—like the “market”—becomes falsely personified as though its behavior were susceptible of rational explanation.
That is a hot, ugly mess and no partisan of liberty should want it otherwise.
Higher min wage kills off Mom and Pop shops, benefits the big boys like McDonalds and WalMart who have the tools to adjust. Mom and Pop end up working at WalMart.
... as John Quincy Adams so profoundly observed, America’s security does not require that it search the world for monsters to destroy.
Apparently, Hillary Clinton does, however. For her Secretary of Defense-Designate is none other than Michelle Flournoy. Both share an obliviousness to Adams’ profound truth because they are credentialed member of the Washington War Party.
And as a team, they are as good a reason as any to give Donald Trump a shot at the commander–in-chief job.
And the just man trailed God's shining agent, over a black mountain, in his giant track, while a restless voice kept harrying his woman: 'It's not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom, the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed, at the empty windows set in the tall house where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.' A single glance: a sudden dart of pain stitching her eyes before she made a sound... Her body flaked into transparent salt, and her swift legs rooted to the ground.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem too insignificant for our concern? Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn.
Where did that middle-class term "parenting" come from? And is gardening a useful metaphor for raising kids?
Our approach was to try to set good examples in every way we were able given our imperfections, to make parental praise rare and valuable and parental disapproval painful, to forbid TV with rare exceptions, to indulge their interests, to expose the kids to as many experiences and opportunities as we could and try to prevent them from being killed or maimed while allowing enough space for initiative, adventure, and failure. We had no better ideas than those.
The post-modern male has only his own strange and unaccountable package of appetites and lusts; and the strange and unaccountable restraints upon them, beyond self-regulation. He is pure consumer, and he is lost. That is what lies behind, “No more war!” It is not principled pacifism, ready to sacrifice — to die, rather than to kill — but a consumer choice, a lifestyle option.
Hillary Clinton Begins Building Her Coalition - The Democratic nominee for United States president made a play for progressives, moderates, and Independents alike during her address in Philadelphia on Thursday night.
If you leave out the Indigo Snake of the southern US, which can appear black under some lighting conditions, we are down to two species: The Blacksnake (aka Black Rat Snake, aka Western Rat Snake,aka Pilot Black Snake, etc, as in photo) and the skinny Black Racer.
During my years tramping and working outdoors, I have seen plenty of both. I have seen 6' Blacksnakes sunning on ledges on a warm April day on Cape Cod. It is a bit startling to encounter one, at first, because of their daunting size. The fat Blacksnakes like to be near water, and climb trees sometimes. You are more likely to see a Racer racing away on a grassy woodland edge if you have sharp Indian Eyes.
I love to see and identify snakes in the wild. I do not pick them up anymore to say hello as I did when younger. It just annoys the heck out of a snake and they snap at you and pee on you. You cannot catch a Black Racer. Like greased lightning.
Are you old enough to remember when articles were written about whether a critter was "beneficial" or a "pest"? Nobody writes like that anymore in an era where humans are considered the greatest pest in nature.
Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine.
A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90% of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science...
Science is fetishized only by people who do not know science.
Absent a beneficent deus ex machina, I will probably vote for Donald Trump. Since I live one of the brain-dead, deep-blue "progressive" states of the Northeast, my vote won't count. But it will be some small satisfaction to make a gesture, however futile, against the most corrupt person ever to run for the presidency.
Haven't you heard? Top 10 lists are so 2010. Why, no one that doesn't eat their vegetables by scooping up mashed potatoes with a butter knife and smooshing them in the peas refers to TOP TEN lists any longer. It's just not done by our class of people, dear. We're busy, important people who don't have time to peruse ten entries on any topic. If we wanted a decalogue, we'd hire Moses and a headstone company. We live in a Snapchat society. Keep it under a half a dozen, will ya?
Why Verizon 
Readers know that we believe that jumping is an excellent and intense cardio-calisthenic for general athleticism. All I can do is singles and running jumps, doubt I will ever be able to do double-unders.
Why 
If you leave out the Indigo Snake of the southern US, which can appear black under some lighting conditions, we are down to two species: The 
Image: Yesterday was early Mondrian, today late (c 1922) 