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.
Given the effectiveness of marriage in reducing poverty and other social problems, you would think that strengthening marriage would be a top priority for the welfare state. Wrong. The welfare system does the opposite. Welfare actively penalizes marriage by reducing benefits when low-income couples do marry.
Nearly all the Islamic State’s decisions adhere to what it calls, on its billboards, license plates, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology.”
There is a temptation to rehearse this observation—that jihadists are modern secular people, with modern political concerns, wearing medieval religious disguise—and make it fit the Islamic State. In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
It's a challenge to be multiculturally-understanding when the cultures want to kill youbut, like the Swedes, Danes, Germans, Brits, and French, we must tryanyway.
We jumped into a chilly and breezy NYC right after early church to catch the Lauder Cubism Show at the Met. Thanks, Leonard Lauder, for this amazing gift to the public. Tomorrow (Monday) is the last day.
In my opinion, pictures like these are best seen in a house, best lived-with, and not in a museum, but such is the world today. Regular people cannot afford them, but really nothing wrong with good prints. Fun.
81 paintings and drawings from 1904-1925 - spectacular but overwhelming. I am a Cubism fan. I consider it highly decorative - eye candy - interesting to the eye, and I imagine that my hero Cezanne would have been fascinated had he lived long enough to see it.
Below is Picasso's 1909 The Oil Mill. Cubism is as abstract as the genius Picasso ever got. His authority of line, color, and design never ceases to amaze me regardless of whatever style he was exploring or inventing. He kept moving but, for a while, he and Braque had a cool thing going with Cubist experimentation.
... the better way of looking at the great divide is between those who think there is a perfect social arrangement and those who do not. The former imagine there is a perfect way to order human affairs to achieve maximum happiness. That perfect way is both discoverable and achievable. Morality dictates that anything and everything be done in order to reach this state of social perfection. The Rousseau-ists are entirely focused on the end and are willing to use any means necessary to achieve those ends. It’s why the body count for the various Rousseau-ist cults is staggeringly high. The other mode of thought rejects the notion that there can be a perfect arrangement. The human condition is immutable. The best we can do is incrementally improve the material state of society by adding a few grains of sand, each generation, to the foundations of society. That necessitates preserving the traditional institutions, while adding to them as they are the storehouse of knowledge, built up over countless generations through trial and error. The Burkeans focus entirely on the means knowing the ends are beyond the ability of man to perfect.
and
One side is willing to use any means necessary to reach the promised land. The other side is restrained by the means they will tolerate and they are willing to accept less than optimal results. If the people prefer high tariffs, for example, that’s fine as long as it is debated and enacted in a constitutional process. The Right can argue for something on rational grounds, but accept less knowing that people are seldom rational. That’s the claim, least ways.
That would be great, if it were true, but it has not been the case for a long time now, at least in American politics. In fact, what we call “conservative” is pretty much just the same stuff we call “liberal” but with slightly different ends...
Like most religions, the Green movement attempts to define codes of right behavior. It contains an original sin: Existing. The battle against entropy requires the consumption of resources and the production of waste. These actions wrack the environmentally conscious with tremendous guilt, which can only be assuaged with an act of contrition.
A friend researched where our local recyling goes. It all goes to a landfill in West Virginia, along with the rest of the garbage.
9:2 Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them,
9:3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.
9:4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus.
9:5 Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah."
9:6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.
9:7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!"
9:8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.
9:9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.
My Mom (right)and my Dad (l) with a family friend on Monhegan. They loved rustic Monhegan (Pop. 75) - and a lot of other places too. Mom was about 40 in that pic, had five kids. They liked to go to some places together, without kids.
Lazy Mary, ie Cela Luna, plus other jolly Italian wedding tunes, with Vince Bruno et al. Italians know how to do weddings, and they always include kids.
When Judith Somerby married Tristram Coffin in March of 1653, she was a widow with three children: Sarah, who was eight, Elizabeth, who was six, and Daniel, almost three. (Another son had died in infancy.) In the next sixteen years Judith gave birth to ten Coffin children, all of whom, remarkably, survived infancy. There is an almost saucy irony in the family name, as though some wind of Yankee humor had swept Puritan Newbury. Death seldom visited the Coffins.
By the time Judith's last baby was born in March 1669 she already had six grandchildren. From 1667 until her death in 1705 - twenty-eight years - at least one grandchild was born each year. In the most prolific period from 1686 to 1696, thirty eight infants were born, almost four a year. Judith's gravestone should probably be taken literally when its says she lived to see 177 descendants...
The release posted on Kakuhidou’s website for this year’s anti-Valentines parade says “the blood-soaked conspiracy of Valentine’s Day, driven by the oppressive chocolate capitalists, has arrived once again. In order to create a brighter future, we call for solidarity among our unloved comrades, so that we may demonstrate in resolute opposition to Valentine’s Day and the romantic industrial complex.”
At previous events, leaders of the group have yelled slogans such as “I hope all riyajuus explode! But we’re still a little jealous!” while wearing shirts that say, roughly, “sex is useless.”
The story of the changing American diet over the last 60 years is a story of junk science funded by both government and corporate interests, as well as a cascade of health panics and regulations aimed at one "demon" ingredient after another. The result is an unhealthier, more obese population than the one that ate more dairy and nearly three times as much red meat a century ago.
Eggs may finally be coming off the demon list, but it seems like it's going to be decades more of industry-corrupted science, lobbyist-corrupted government, Olestra-like food substances, obesity and heart diseases, and a whole lot of nonionic surfactants before we figure out that traditional staples like butter and pork fat really are best.
...it’s one of the blackest jokes of history, that the Holocaust enabled the Islamization of Europe and the Islamization of Europe has enabled the destruction of what remains, post-Holocaust, of Jewish life in Europe.
Rauner has it wrong. Republicans do not want to "kill unions." They do want to tame or, ideally, eliminate government unions. Government's relationship with government unions is corrupt by definition, incestuous.
You need to have spare money to run a hobby farm, whether it's vegetables, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc. Often, such things are set up as tax dodges (agricultural land), never expected to make any meaningful profit themselves.
Photo above - winter Robins taken by a reader. Many Robins and Bluebirds in New England do not migrate, and live on old fruit. Sometimes they get drunk on fermented fruit and berries.
From It’s The End Of Sex As We Know It - Feminism has gone off the deep end, commercializing both sex and women and claiming that their subjugation is instead a demonstration of their power:
Given the Dr. Frankenstein aspects of modern medical technology, Kendall’s biologically mystifying claim, “You don’t have to have a vagina in order to be pregnant,” is true, but a more obvious explanation seems to be that Kendall and a great many of her peers have lost their minds...
Leslie Gore, 
Some 
St. Valentine's Day 
Come live with me and be my love, 
Nobody told these people that they were creating a hobby farm, not a real business: 