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.
It turns out that the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” The future is a conference call on which a cheery 30-something says things like “progressively coordinate functional strategic theme areas” – forever.
He is a man of the sort that was behind the American revolution. Brexit was the only freedom cause he could find. A Maggie's hero. A shame that he, like Farage, will leave politics after seeing their mission accomplished.
However, that is as it should be. Career pols are pathetic. I recently reviewed Washington's farewell address. Served humbly, reluctantly, and went home to the farm.
Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.
Since The Very #Principled #NeverTrumpers Never Talk About the
Downside of Electing Their Preferred Candidate Hillary Clinton, I'll
Talk About It A Bit
Pic is your editor busting through a thick alder patch. If a woodcock jumps up, often a branch blocks your swing of the shotgun. That is annoying.
My favorite hunting is for the Ruffed Grouse, aka Partidge, aka "Paatrich," aka "chicken". Best done with dog - pointer or flusher - but it can be done alone too, if alert.
In the autumn, a Ruffed Grouse hunt generally involves Woodcock too. This is real hunting, because even in good habitat you might be lucky to raise a bird or two every few hours of rough hiking. Then the bird flies behind a tree and you miss it. These birds have every advantage.
This good guy shot a Sage Grouse. I've seen them out west, never shot one. I wouldn't shoot one. Once I almost shot a Spruce Grouse by mistake, in Maine. They are protected, and not really edible. I have shot my share of Sharp-Tailed Grouse up in Canadian prairie. That might be the most enjoyable hunting I have ever had. A firing line of a few guys stalking through low brush, scrub, and prairie grasses, for a few miles. Then a sudden burst of grouse occurs right when you have stopped to take a leak.
Regardless of the species, grouse are killed with legs, not shotguns. You walk. A grouse hunt is an excuse to take long gnarly off-trail walks with a dog and thus to earn a glass of warm whiskey by the fire afterwards. That's about as good as life gets.
We have lost track of the volume of our readership, but we know it is substantial and could be monetized in some way if we wanted to do that. We do not, because we do not want another Job.
However, if you have not done so, please let your friends, neighbors, relatives, enemies, colleagues, etc. know about us. Our readership is our reward.
Our eclectic site can be of interest to all sorts of people. As far as the political component goes, we just try to put up stuff that the MSM avoids. Tom Paine sort-of-thing. No need to agree with our political or other points of view.
In this election, Clinton’s honesty problem is not a big issue because her lying does not change the voter’s sense of where she stands on the big three items. On the other hand, Trump’s authenticity is a great benefit because it makes him trustworthy. You may not agree with his position on an issue, but you know what you are getting with Trump. His authenticity not only helps him on a personal basis, it helps him overcome the uncertainty issue all newcomers face. It makes him seem less of a risk.
You all know that physical conditioning consists of strength-building, cardio-pulmonary conditioning, and calisthenics (+ weight adjustments if needed). This guy is focusing mostly on the strength component (and, like most guys, wants to have big muscles), but his advice here is pretty good and applies to women too.
Does he work out too obsessively? Probably, but he is a trainer and body-building is a hobby for this presumably eastern Massachusetts guy.
Pic is from Mrs. BD. She is doing a project there this week, in Mwaukee. Interesting to me that she would never take photos, ever. Felt they interfered with direct experience. Since her iPhone, she takes snaps all the time.
The meaning of the cross is both deeply disturbing and deeply hopeful. I am not sure how it could be construed as offensive, tho, since my religion holds that Christ died on that thing as a human sacrifice to redeem humanity from its sins.
He's not fit for office. This guy doesn't have the temperament, doesn't have the qualifications. He's an embarrassment. He's dangerous. "We can't let this guy get near the nuke button. This guy is so off the wall, he has no business being in this business," is basically her point. "This guy is so gauche, this guy is so uncouth, this guy is so yuck, he has no business being in our business! He has no business being president; he has no business running for president. He's unfit. He's ill-tempered."
Right? Well, I'm sure Hillary thought she had ample opportunity to make that point last night, but she didn't, did she?
I was much younger then. The youth today need a similar song. I hate the way this group of giant rock stars turn the refrain into an insipid, zipless line, but otherwise, good fun. McGuinn's guitar sets the tone. Bob his usual humble self.
Commenter here: "I expected more from him. I believe average citizens did too."
Can we say that many people hoped he would be commanding and dominate the discussion, but failed to do so? It seems easy for him to be a petty man at times.
I guarantee that she does not know a single Trump voter. Problem with the writing and talking heads: they observe the common folk from a distance, but they do not live in the world like we do.
No, I am not discussing Mrs. Bill Clinton or any other human female.It's just that I have encountered a few shrews this weekend while doing gardening jobs. (Shrubs, grasses, and flowers, not food although I did pick some sweet figs for breakfast from my new fig tree. Perfect breakfast: slice of cold chicken, a tomato, some mouse melons from the garden, and a fresh fig).
Our common shrew is the Northern Long Tailed. I think that is what these guys are that I see but if they are Northern Short-tailed I would not be surprised. I did not try to catch one to measure its tail, and their bites are painful anyway. Shrews are said to taste bad, but I never tried one.
The ones I see like leaf litter and mulch, ground cover like Pachysandra, thick weed patches, and the like. You mainly see a flash of grey fur zooming past your feet. They are almost blind, it is said.
'There's an old joke . . . two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life.'
6:6 Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment;
6:7 for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it;
6:8 but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these.
6:9 But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.
6:10 For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
6:11 But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.
6:12 Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
6:13 In the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, I charge you
6:14 to keep the commandment without spot or blame until the manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
6:15 which he will bring about at the right time--he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords.
6:16 It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
6:17 As for those who in the present age are rich, command them not to be haughty, or to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment.
6:18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, generous, and ready to share,
6:19 thus storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
There's a Black President There's a Black Congressman There's a Black Chief of Police There's a Black District Attorney There's a Black Mayor until 2014 (Jailed) There's a Black Officer who pulled a trigger There's a Black Man Dead of that gunshot wound
For inexplicable reasons, the Left believes that the violence wrought by angry minorities will benefit them, so they encourage it. They subsidize it. Obama has given his not-so-tacit permission to riot every time one of these tragic events occurs, from the Henry Louis Gates minor incident, to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, the Dallas officers. And now BLM is rolling in money, $100m from "social justice" organizations. Soros gave them $33m.
Probably an inbred trait of human nature renders the attraction of censorship perennial. Most people (the highly literate are among the worst) believe that what is good for them will be good for others. Besides, a regime of censorship must claim to derive its authority from settled knowledge and not opinion. Once enforcement and exclusion have done their work, this assumption becomes almost irresistible; and it is relied on to produce a fortunate and economical result: self-censorship. We stay out of trouble by gagging ourselves. Among the few motives that may strengthen the power of resistance is the consciousness of having been deeply wrong oneself, either regarding some abstract question or in personal or public life. Another motive of resistance occasionally pitches in: a radical, quasi-physical horror of seeing people coerce other people without having to supply reasons. For better or worse, this second motive is likely to be mixed with misanthropy...
Another:
Margaret Thatcher declined to prosecute The Satanic Verses for blasphemy; and once the fatwa was issued Rushdie was accorded police protection from the extraordinary threat. Still, the cravenness of the early reactions has not yet been forgotten. The novel was initially banned in Canada, and US bookstores were slow to risk the title on their shelves. Cautionary words about the need for sensitivity were uttered by academic as well as priestly authorities. ‘We respect each other’s religious beliefs,’ wrote Syed Shahabuddin, who led the campaign to ban The Satanic Verses in India. ‘We do not intentionally outrage the religious feelings of others or insult their religion or ridicule the personalities to whom we are emotionally attached or mock our religious susceptibility.’ The chief rabbi of England, Immanuel Jakobovits, emphatically concurred: it was wrong to ‘tolerate a form of denigration and ridicule which can only breed resentment’. In an essay on ‘Religious Anger and Minority Rights’, Tariq Modood, the director of Bristol University’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, wrote that ‘the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place.’ On this view, to experience the feeling is to suffer the injury.
Rushdie’s defenders were on solid ground when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for conciliation or compromise, ‘it would be suicidal to suppose that any concession made to the superstitious will ever be the last.’ But the odd appearance of the word ‘philistine’, in such a strictly political context turned the argument from a libertarian defence of publication to an aesthetic defence of the contents of the book – a sign of things to come. On the cable network C-Span, on 21 February 1989, Hitchens broadened his criticism:
"Tomorrow, shopping malls of the United States, which contain now one third of the book outlets in this country, will, of their own volition, not sell that book, because they are scared of a foreign despot … To be scared of a crazy foreign tyrant in this way is a really serious challenge to what we think of as the safe assumption of free speech and free inquiry, free expression and the necessity to defend it."
Is
Trump the Only Republican Who Can Handle the Media Onslaught? - See
more at:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/onslaught-trump-media#sthash.2PvEMs0W.dpuf
I hope some lefties are reading us because they need to know how many of us non-lefty people think and feel. Case in point, "Alt-Right." First off, there is no Alt-Right. However, there are lots of people fed up with the recent waves of Lefty insanity which we take the trouble to post here because the MSM refuses to.
In other words, the non-existent Alt-Right is a creation of a wacko left fringe which has left truth and reality far behind.
...it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.
Immigration and outsourcing are huge issues for Trump—the cornerstone of his campaign—but they’re not the only ones. It’s also about culture. It’s about the soul-bludgeoning insanity of egalitotalitarianism run amok, about the witch hunts and moral panics and PC tattletales. It’s about the blatant white-bashing and male-bashing and straight-bashing that masquerade as “progress” but merely serve to sow division. Too many people have been politely silent about this relentless PSYOP campaign of cultural demoralization to the point where they’re biting their lips bloody.
Maybe it should be the economy, stupid, but a lot of it is culture wars. The culture radicals and cultural Marxists have won the battles, it seems, so they are pushing their advantages to the point of utter, joke-worthy irrationality. But the joke could lose you your job.
No secrets there. Some drink a lot, some don't. Some smoke a lot, some do not. Some eat "healthy," many do not. Good genetics. In small southern Italian towns, everybody is a cugino.
Pic: Bragging pal sent photo of his tomato vine in California growing onto his roof. I bet he waters it illegally...
Dog 
Pic is your editor busting through a thick alder patch. If a woodcock jumps up, often a branch blocks your swing of the shotgun. That is annoying.
We have lost track of the volume of our readership, but we know it is substantial and could be monetized in some way if we wanted to do that. We do not, because we do not want another Job.
Former Navy SEAL commanders explain why they still wake up before dawn every day — 
Pic is from Mrs. BD. She is doing a project there this week, in Mwaukee. Interesting to me that she would never take photos, ever. Felt they interfered with direct experience. Since her iPhone, she takes snaps all the time. 
No, I am not discussing Mrs. Bill Clinton or any other human female.It's just that I have encountered a few shrews this weekend while doing gardening jobs. (Shrubs, grasses, and flowers, not food although I did pick some sweet figs for breakfast from my new fig tree. Perfect breakfast: slice of cold chicken, a tomato, some mouse melons from the garden, and a fresh fig).
Fireplace at a place I am quite fond of 
Toddler survives 
How to live to 100: 