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.
Brits vote to leave the Borg. Elites horrified, peasants pleased. Regular folks like Nigel. Farage's life's work comes to fruition with stunning Brexit vote as he lauds a 'new dawn' for Britain outside the EU and calls for new bank holiday to mark UK's 'Independence Day.'
Though an exceptionally short book, Mind and Cosmos is nevertheless, in one respect, extraordinarily ambitious. Nagel proposes not merely a new explanation for the origin of life and consciousness, but a new type of explanation: “natural teleology.” If psychophysical reduction is implausible, as Nagel has always insisted, then no materialist neo-Darwinian explanation will ever be satisfactory. The apparent alternative, a theistic-intentional account (i.e., intelligent design by a divinity), does not appeal to Nagel. He simply lacks, he explains, any sense of the divine. His interest is in the territory between the two: a secular account that allows for the emergence of mind as mind...
Are the leaders of our academic institutions complicit in the current student-led challenge to free speech and free expression on college campuses? Jonathan R. Cole thinks so.
You will have to take it on faith (or not) that I have very little racism in me. I find almost all individuals interesting and I can learn about life from anybody.
Perhaps Charles Murray has lots of thoughts about this question: Why is black male unemployment so high today among American-born blacks? Black women work.
When I was young, black guys worked and did all they could to improve themselves. The kids of black tenant farms came up from the south for jobs in industry and the trades. They got married, demanded a lot from their kids, went to church, lived with dignity but some of the women got on the government trough, dads abandoned any progeny, and kids without dads skyrocketed. Today, black male employment is surely higher than it was a decade or two ago. That ain't racism. It's not IQ either, as some argue because I see plenty of fine young black guys working all sorts of jobs - nurses, exercise trainers, UPS guys, etc., and of course as professionals too.
In entry level and second-level service jobs hereabouts, all I see are Bangladeshis, Mexicans, Guatemalans, white kids, Pakistanis, Dot-Indians, Haitians, Africans, and Jamaicans. No European, Russian, or Asian immigrants seem to be working at these beginning levels of responsibility - but no American-born black males either despite their huge unemployment levels. They are not working at all, even at the levels of new immigrants with poor English.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
If the government secretly can put an American's name on a secret list and, as a result, his liberty is lost, then there are no freedoms—just government-granted privileges. And if it can do this to the natural rights to travel and self-defense, can other fundamental rights be far behind?
Tomorrow is your first chance in recent history to repel German tyranny without needing an army to do it. Vote for independence, sovereignty, self-determination: Vote "Leave"!
It's your last chance. You can always rejoin if you want to.
What the heck is this tree seen in bloom on a walk with Mrs. BD and pup last weekend? Small tree growing on a riverbank, and last year's seed pods still hung on it looking like vanilla beans. Large almost grape-looking leaves.
In the early 1800s, there were more than 30 million buffalo in North America, ranging in massive herds from Alaska to Mexico. By 1890, only about 500 animals were left. By the early 1900s, there were only about 30 genetically pure animals surviving in isolated areas, such as private ranches and the Yellowstone caldera.
Well, the bison ecological niche was replaced by herds of semi-domestic cattle but sheesh - I thought people were the national mammal.
With more than 4,000 crimes in federal statutes and more than 300,000 more crimes specified in various federal regulations, every complex commercial enterprise is inevitably vulnerable to federal prosecution-and thus, given federal prosecutors' leverage, to oversight through a deferred- or non-prosecution agreement. What that means is that the Department of Justice has sweeping regulatory authority, which according to the D.C. Circuit's April decision in United States v. Fokker Services, federal judges have next to no power to review.
I think that the press and most of the politicians do not know the difference between an AR-15 and an AK-47. More likely, they don't care because incremental gun-grabbing is one of their missions. Thus any new regulation is a step towards the goal of citizen disarmament.
Apparently CT can outlaw some semiautomatic firearms. I have semi-automatic shotguns which I am certain will not fall under regulations - yet. The magazine is internal, so there is no visible clip. To comply with game laws, I have plugs in them to limit me to 3 cartridges (or bullets, as we term them).
Besides being black and ugly, I do not get the functional appeal of the highly-popular AR-15. It is not particularly powerful or useful at long distances. I think it is good fun at the range or close-in game hunting but there are better firearms for that. There is no accounting for taste, and the best thing to do is to pick a firearm for your use and to get good with it.
I think it might be the clips that the grabbers are using, in this case.
Should Employers Be Prohibited from Asking Applicants About College Credentials? From the article:
The justices in Griggs thought they were simultaneously applying the Civil Rights Act and helping to make life more fair for people who didn’t have high school credentials or good test-taking abilities. Little did they suspect that a consequence of their ruling decades later would be to keep such individuals from having a chance at numerous jobs just because they lack a college degree.
And the logic of the case seems every bit as applicable to college degree requirements as to the sort of job requirements the Court struck down in Griggs. If companies violated the Civil Rights Act when they set arbitrary and seemingly irrelevant educational requirements for employment in 1971, why are they allowed to use the absence of college credentials to screen out people today?
Pomona junior Steven Glick, admits being taken aback when he arrived in Claremont from his home in Chicago for freshman orientation. “The first day, we got together in groups to go over everyone’s list of triggers and their preferred gender pronoun. I was shocked, couldn’t believe these were real things that people actually did, but it immediately drove home that that’s the way it is at the school, the accepted set of norms.” Still, he says, since he avoids liberal arts classes and hangs out with fellow economics majors and athletes, the political correctness affects him less than it otherwise might; and, while it’s safe to assume that every new acquaintance will lean left, the militant activists remain a minority. This was apparent in the reaction to the editorial. “All we said was, ‘Hey, not everyone supports these protests,’ and we got a lot of support for saying it. Because some people actually do want to be able to talk freely about these kinds of issues.”
Might be my favorite. They can sing like crazy, but most of the time they are rarely seen and skulk in thick underbrush on edges. At the farm, for many years we had a pair nesting in a giant overgrown forsythia in the middle of a field. Stick nests with a little soft lining.
No it is not hard. It is just not easy for most people. Like learning a language, it requires IQ and mental discipline, and it takes time to comprehend what a mathematical process is about. It's high abstraction.
Each step of math mastery offers advantages in life, but all of the math steps are steps toward yet another level of mastery and, if you choose and have talent, it can never end.
There are three reasons for this: 1. Math is hard so I'll go to a school that doesn't make me do it. 2. It is often claimed that, statistically, women are worse with math. So make the curriculum less daunting for women. 3. IQ. Math above the ordinary high school level probably takes more IQ than many modern college students possess.
My view is that a college degree means little unless it includes some proficiency in statistics and calc. The more, the better.
Most people do not care about it. Just look around - it's obvious. That is because, unless your daily work involves manual labor, in the modern world most of us do not use our bodies in the ways for which they were designed.
We are designed to be hunter-gatherers and warriors, which entail day-long physical activity and often required lengthy periods of inadequate nutrition and starvation (which is why human fat cells are such sponges for hoarding carbs). The hunter-gatherer activities involve endurance, and the warrior activities entail strength and athleticism.
All of the people who do not care about their fitness have a strong case. In Western civilization, hunting is recreation, gathering is done at the market or the backyard garden, and we play sports for fun and hire our warriors. Speaking of warriors, last night I watched a live match between McEnroe and Jim Currier. Gosh, what beautiful and powerful games they still have in their late 50s.
But why would any ordinary man or woman want to spend discretionary time imitating primitive hunter-gatherer and warrior exertions? Well, they mostly don't. Furthermore, they know that fitness, except in the case of overweight and obesity, has little correlation with health or life-expectancy.
Here are the reasons Mrs. BD and I devote a mere 5 or 6 hours per week for structured physical conditioning (trying to compact a full day's activity into a brief time via intensity), and generally try to keep our weights at a fit and youthful level. It's about quality of life:
- we feel better, look better, and have more energy without any excess fat on us. Fat fatigues. And a sloppy appearance makes a poor impression in our Anglosphere culture. - becoming stronger makes us more functional in every way. - we want to be at our best for sports - a body is a gift, and deserves decent stewardship - we want to get a head start on fending off the physical deterioration of age - tough physical exertion to exhaustion is good for our heads - the discipline required is a good life challenge. Progress is stressful and unpleasant, and the rewards are slow to come so it's a good test of delayed gratification. Is it rewarding to lift up 200 lbs without spraining a muscle? Yup. It's a cool feeling of masculine competence and it has many practical applications. - and for us dads, we must consider what sort of condition the mothers of our kids would appreciate in us. Chances are they appreciate good attitude, high energy, a bit of visible muscle, and a trim physique.
Bluegrass Legend 
How Subarus 
I think that the press and most of the politicians do not know the difference between an AR-15 and an AK-47. More likely, they don't care because incremental gun-grabbing is one of their missions. Thus any new regulation is a step towards the goal of citizen disarmament.
Might be my favorite. They can sing like crazy, but most of the time they are rarely seen and skulk in thick underbrush on edges. At the farm, for many years we had a pair nesting in a giant overgrown forsythia in the middle of a field. Stick nests with a little soft lining.
Most people do not care about it. Just look around - it's obvious. That is because, unless your daily work involves manual labor, in the modern world most of us do not use our bodies in the ways for which they were designed.