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.
"... where did the Magnum come from? Again, it was Doug Wesson who made the call. The Major was a renowned connoisseur of fine champagne, and in the vintner’s world the term “magnum” refers to a slightly larger than standard bottle. When Wesson went out to dine, he never ordered anything less than a magnum bottle, and it seemed to him a natural extension of the term to the slightly larger than standard case of the new cartridge. And so was coined one of the most enduring—and misunderstood—labels in firearms and ammunition history. "
When President Obama cited the Crusades as an example of Christian bad behavior toward Islam, he wasn’t speaking with historical accuracy. But you’d never know that if you only know the conventional wisdom about the Crusades.
Instead of condemning ISIS barbarism as barbarism directed at Christians, Obama has sought to divorce the barbarism from theology. There are many reason for this, reasons covered by many others here at PJ Media and elsewhere. Among them is the fact that Obama and his movement see the world through such thick secular lenses that they are incapable of understanding the vast majority of the world (and the United States) that still sees the world through theological lenses.
Obama and his followers are a radical secular minority attempting to manage a theological world...
He is talking about the moonbat churches. They are not very representative, and I do not think many people attend them. Why would they? Those are not the churches I know.
Snow falling, a silent and peaceful world, first Sunday of Lent. Email says church is cancelled. That never happens except with hurricanes, so I think it means they can't get the parking area plowed and de-iced.
All of us in positions to employ people know that a college degree, in many or most cases, is meaningless credentialism much of the time, these days.
For life-enrichment or for the hard sciences, college can great, especially if money is no object and if the kid is a natural scholar. The latter is, at most, 5-6%.
In choosing friends, we might prefer people who know a lot about a lot of things, but for employees one applies different metrics. We train all of our own people, including our paralegals. We use a marine corps boot camp system. Many wash out, but are better for it. Some even thank us for letting them discover what level of effort and learning is expected from work in the for-profit world.
Many times, college is a negative from a business standpoint. We exist to make money honestly and nothing more. When we hire, all we ask ourselves is "Can this person make, or save, us money?" And in case they do not, can we let them go without a lawsuit? I would never say that we avoid women, older folks, or minorities, for that reason because there are laws, but we have had enough expensive troubles with that in the past. We just want the highest performance and we want you available 24 hrs/day if needed, no excuses.
Do an extraordinary job, exceed expectations, go the extra mile, make yourself attractive, and spread good cheer? We will reward you handsomely with money, benefits, love and appreciation.
When we hire new lawyers (rarely in recent years, unless they come with deep portfolios of corporate clients), of course they have degrees. We ignore their degrees, bearing in mind that legal work required degrees only recently (historically). We see people with recent law degrees working in Starbucks and living with their parents.
All real law is learned in apprenticeship, preferably under a genius mentor. All real learning is, ultimately, self-education.
Marie Harf and the State Dept. are right: the solution to Violent Extremism does belong in your Community ... as long as your Community is Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, LA ... Home of the USAF Global Strike Command.
I bought a dollar and a half’s worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, and in the mountain oaks I overheard the birds were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the road-side stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, she swore, from New Jersey. “Eat, eat,” she said, “Even if you don’t I’ll say you did.”
Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames, they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 before I went away, before he began to kill himself, and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste what I’m saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious, it stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong, it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt, in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.
Was reading Cafe Hayek today, as I do every day, and this piece struck me as interesting.
In our nation, we have taxation with representation. However, given the size of our current debt, and the length of financing being pushed out to 20 and 30 year bonds, much of the repayment will be provided by another generation.
This generation, of course, has no say in the introduction of debt, and this is a fairly common theme when the size of our debt is discussed. However, I've seen relatively few people discuss the political implications of forcing taxation without representation on these future generations.
Is there a moral issue related to deficit spending, over 20 to 30 years, since it is essentially taxation without representation? I think there can be a strong case made, though I've never seen it discussed. Has anyone else?
We should re-think the subject boundaries in high school education so that they align with important ideas and concepts that will give our children useful analytical lenses for viewing the world.
This education theorist is obviously an idiot. He proposes to teach prepared. synthetic synthesis before those empty brains have any fundamental knowledge. Maybe the foundational knowledge is just too hard to learn or teach. It is both.
Synthesis? Do it on your own time if you can. Got your calc? Got Avogadro's Law? Gas laws? Got the laws of thermodynamics? And the laws of electromagnetism? Got the math of cardiac physiology? If you have these things, and more, maybe we can talk "synthesis." I would wager the author knows none of these.
New ideas about formal education can be assumed to be wrong.
... all our money is, in effect, pocket money, doled out by the
government-parent to the citizen-child. We are the wards, not the
masters, of the state.
Deputy State Department spokesman Marie Harf gives the catastrophic foreign policy of the Obama administration a lighter than air, Valley Girl kind of feel. She is a walking self-parody. As such, she presents a novel use of expressive form.
The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.
- Please, if you must walk, or walk your dogs, in the street in the nightime dark or the morning dark because the sidewalks are snowdrifts, wear something light-colored instead of black. Sheesh. I swerve over the icy roads to try to avoid hitting you.
- I love the wintry cold. Problem is dressing. You go from outside frigid to frigid-then-warm auto, then to cold again, then to heated building. There is no way to dress for the changes.
- Feeding birds. Either do it daily, or not at all. They become dependent on your food to survive, like people on welfare. If you miss a day, they will die unless neighbors are feeding them. If you don't feed them at all, they will figure it out on their own. Or go south.
I was wondering whether Gore is now working on a second documentary, “An even more inconvenient Truth – I was wrong”. But of course he is not doing this. Ideas that have become an ideology do not admit falsification. Global warming has become an ideology, mostly but not exclusively concentrated in the progressive portion of the political spectrum. Its three central propositions have become axiomatic among progressives: that significant global warming is in fact occurring (“the science is in”); that its consequences will be dire; and that its major cause is industrial pollution (especially by evil American capitalism—never mind the fog of pollution hanging over the cities of India and China). Deeply committed progressives are as eager to sign petitions to stop this or that “carbon footprint” as petitions to pull American troops out of Afghanistan or to boycott Israeli products. The only (rather ambiguous) concession to the notion that, just maybe, all the science is not in, has been a shift in language from “global warming” to “climate change”. Critics of the ideology are pelted with pejorative labels—political reactionaries, uneducated ignoramuses (comparable to creatonists or flat-earth theorists), or agents of the petroleum industry.
I am not a climate scientist. But I can claim to be a specialist in ideologues who claim to be privileged epistemologically and thus entitled to disdain anyone who dares to reject their alleged truth...
I was a tough-minded secularist with the kind of soul that looked at the pictures of life with a hard, unblinking eye. Oh, yeah? Show me.
Ditto, Gerard. That is good. Been there, done that too. The sterile life, arrogant life, the "it's about me" life. I am long done with that; got the good infection by finally just letting it happen, opening my cold heart, and letting it in to change me. Or at least to try to.
In the piously denied but ongoing clash of cultures, Islam has multiple advantages. Most are not self-made: the PC-defined victim contributes them. Whatever presents itself as a “religion” benefits from a tolerance that is unwarranted by the facts. Curtailing religious liberty is harder than it is to limit the freedom of speech. In the case of secular opinions, free expression is granted but not unlimited. Example: the exploitation of freedoms to abolish democracy. The softness against extreme leftists shows, the assertion against all subversives determined to abolish democracy suffers from the one-sidedly applied Nazi precedent.
All they want is more love and understanding? Well, so do I...and I am not getting any from them and, on a bad day, I don't even get enough tolerance from my girlfriend.
It's all interesting. However, it's all a repeat of ancient history. Except for the UK, most of the anglosphere has little to do with all of this. Who needs to watch out? Europe, the Saudis, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia. The US can get out of the way and let them all work it out. They have all done this before. Gates of Vienna, Poitiers, Lopanto, and all that.That's why I dislike the FOX warmongers and fearmongers, Yellow Journalism. Chill, and let the locals deal with their issues as they have always done.It's just a blip in a long history of cultural warfare. Let's include Thermopylae.
“I thought the Crown Heights riots were a pogrom because you’re going out trying to kill Jews,” Giuliani said. “Why is this man incapable of saying that? You’ve got to be able to criticize Islam for the parts of Islam that are wrong. You criticize Christianity for the part of Christianity that is wrong. I’m not sure how wrong the Crusades are. The Crusades were kind of an equal battle between two groups of barbarians. The Muslims and the crusading barbarians. What the hell? What’s wrong with this man that he can’t stand up and say there’s a part of Islam that’s sick?”
It's not so much about bubble-wrapping our precious snowflake kids as it is about municipal lawsuits. "Sled at your own risk" does not insulate. Same goes for skating on ponds, etc. Something is deeply wrong with the American tort system, but it's about politics. The wealthy tort bar fills the Democrat cash register. There will never be tort reform, and all outdoor fun will be illegal except on your own property.
It's a rare kid in the northeast who has not broken or sprained something sledding or skiing, not to mention concussions, etc.
The issues with ski areas are complex, and ambulance-chasers abound. Very few things in life have zero risk and even waivers are limited. In the US, almost anybody can sue somebody for anything and get a settlement just to go away. Generally, a settlement is cheaper than defending a case.
"... where did the Magnum come from? Again, it was Doug Wesson who made the call. The Major was a renowned connoisseur of fine champagne, and in the vintner’s world the term “magnum” refers to a slightly larger than standard bottle. When Wesson went out to dine, he never ordered anything less than a magnum bottle, and it seemed to him a natural extension of the term to the slightly larger than standard case of the new cartridge. And so was coined one of the most enduring—and misunderstood—labels in firearms and ammunition history. "
J Christian Adams:
All of us in positions to employ people know that a college degree, in many or most cases, is meaningless credentialism much of the time, these days. 
He 
Winter's Tale: 
It's chilly in olde Newe Englande. I like to say "invigorating." Five below zero F here, with blustery wind. Almost like a normal day in Minneapolis. 
Embarrassed to admit that, being Protestant, I missed Ash Wednesday but that is rare for me.
Indeed we do because we refuse to 
My Doctor Just Gave Me His Cell Phone Number …