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.
MacDonald: The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity - When Shakespeare lost out to 'rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class' at UCLA, something vital was harmed. (paywall)
Plenty of my family members and good pals are Liberals. They probably think I'm half-crazy. I quietly notice that they do not live like Lefties.They are often more materially-oriented and money-oriented than I am, minimize their taxes,and like cars. They just like that virtuous, self-congratulatory Lefty feeling.
Flights of Fancy in Avian Evolution - From mousebirds to terror birds, the class Aves has encompassed a remarkable diversity of species over the past 150 million years.
Pic below is a Snowy Owl. They come down here in winter and are diurnal, but I haven't seen one lately. They like big open spaces - beaches, marshes, dumps, meadows - that remind them of the tundra. Terror bird, for rats.
God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The creator of the world took the hit we had coming. The anger, the condemnation, the judgment all fell on Jesus, who bore it all out of love. That, for Christians, is what makes Christmas such a special time of year. God really knows us; he knows the worst things about us and isn’t fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And he still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.
IMO, talking about inequality is a diversion from talking about how lousy the economy is for almost everybody except for the very rich - and for government employees
The light bulb ban
provides a useful window into the mindset of liberals: the debate has
nothing to do with which bulb is better, but rather who gets to decide
Almost every act regarded in the mid-20th century as a vice was, by the opening of the 21st century, considered a virtue. As gambling, obscenity, pornography, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, abortion and sneering disaffection became The New Virtue, government at all levels began to move in on the action, starting with casinos and currently involving, in several states and the District of Columbia, an officially approved and bureaucratically managed narcotics trade...
...the next time you see/read/hear about "dark money" and ALEC or the Kochs
in your media outlet of choice, and you don't see anything about Tides,
it's time to fire your media outlet.
Easily done. Tax the businesses, the prosperous, and the middle class until they move out. Camden, NJ, has excellent economic equality, while NYC is the place half the planet would like to move to for risk and opportunity. And for the generous Welfare, too.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the median income allowed you to live with a single earner -- normally the husband, with the wife typically working as homemaker -- and roughly three children. It permitted the purchase of modest tract housing, one late model car and an older one. It allowed a driving vacation somewhere and, with care, some savings as well. I know this because my family was lower-middle class, and this is how we lived, and I know many others in my generation who had the same background. It was not an easy life and many luxuries were denied us, but it wasn't a bad life at all.
Someone earning the median income today might just pull this off, but it wouldn't be easy. Assuming that he did not have college loans to pay off but did have two car loans to pay totaling $700 a month, and that he could buy food, clothing and cover his utilities for $1,200 a month, he would have $1,400 a month for mortgage, real estate taxes and insurance, plus some funds for fixing the air conditioner and dishwasher. At a 5 percent mortgage rate, that would allow him to buy a house in the $200,000 range. He would get a refund back on his taxes from deductions but that would go to pay credit card bills he had from Christmas presents and emergencies. It could be done, but not easily and with great difficulty in major metropolitan areas. And if his employer didn't cover health insurance, that $4,000-5,000 for three or four people would severely limit his expenses. And of course, he would have to have $20,000-40,000 for a down payment and closing costs on his home. There would be little else left over for a week at the seashore with the kids.
And this is for the median. Those below him -- half of all households -- would be shut out of what is considered middle-class lifE...
10,988,269:
2013 Closes With Record Number on Disability Getting Highest-Ever
Monthly Benefits - See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/10988269-2013-closes-record-number-disability-getting-highest-ever#sthash.sYxSrXaK.dpuf
As the Christmas trees come down and the holiday cheer is stored away, this from Mead:Born of a WHAT???
The specifically Christian idea of the Virgin Birth is one of the most controversial and confusing theological concepts around, and a Yuletide blog which didn’t take on the topic wouldn’t be doing its job.
Every now and then... something truly egregious bubbles up from the dismal pit of pseudo-intellectual academic lucubration, some special gem of fatuous, wood-pulp darkening nonsense that even now, at the fag-end of Anno Domini 2013, has the capacity to spark a little frisson of nauseated wonderment in this jaded breast. As it happens, the latest such production comes to us courtesy of our friends at the American Studies Association, that’s to say it comes from its official literary organ, the American Quarterly. Perhaps your subscription to this pointless agglomeration of polysyllabic, reader-proof grievance-mongering has lapsed. Mine has, too. But my fellow connoisseurs of repellent academic nonentity will not want to miss “Toward a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies,” by one Greta Gaard, “an ecofeminist writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker.” (According to an opus called Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, she is “one of the most influential ecofeminist scholars.” Ponder that.)
...the Robertson-A&E dust-up was merely the latest in a long — very long — line of leftist attempts to impose supposedly sophisticated moral pretensions on the rest of the country.
This laughable air of moral superiority has been at the root of everything from the violence of the anti-Vietnam War rioters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention and Obama pal Bill Ayers’ Weathermen to today’s Occupy Wall Street crowd. And all manner of things in between.
In 1969 alone this seemingly bottomless well of sniffy moral arrogance and condescension propelled student strikes or shutdowns at some 400-plus universities...
The NYT tries to pull Hillary’s Benghazi acorns out of the fire, they get burned
Class-consciousness has always been a fact of American life, but rarely is it about how the poor, or even the middle class, feel toward the very rich. It has been about how the professional class—lawyers, journalists, administrators, academics—feel toward the financial class. It's what Volvo America thinks about S-class America.
That idiot you knew freshman year, always fondling a lacrosse stick, before he became the head of his fraternity—his bonus last year was how much?
"...how is it that paying 1.3 million Americans not to work creates jobs? That one has never been explained. Every respectable economist I've consulted states that when unemployment benefits run out, a greater number of workers return to the labor force."
He calls it "Wonderland." Dr. Essex is Prof. of Applied Mathematics at Univ. Western Ontario, and former director of its theoretical physics program. The math part isn't too bad:
Despite their grimly statist ways, the utopians continue to pass themselves off as well-meaning hipsters, anti-establishment rebels and earthy pro-underdog types, united by a devotion to freedom and tolerance. This has to be the most successful PR exercise in history – no less astonishing than if Hitler had convinced the world he was an avid Judeophile. The people responsible for hate crimes, speech codes, the smoking ban, debilitating taxes, and a soul-sucking state bureaucracy would have us believe that they are chilled-out hepcats, who totally dig your scene. If you think what they think, do what they say, and accept the terms of their ‘generosity’, it might be possible to enjoy their simulacrum of freedom as though it’s the real thing. But wander too far from the coop and soon you’ll soon collide with the chicken wire.
Also
Young people once looked forward to the day they would escape the family home and forge their own path through life. Holding down a job, managing their finances and taking responsibility for their actions were what defined them as adults. And a society of such people, working together, was the cornerstone of Western civilisation. But for the past few decades, the Left has sold us a different dream. They have promised to look after the boring admin of life, so we might set off on its great adventure, like Georgian gentlemen embarking on Grand Tours. Even if this vision had not soured to a living nightmare, it would have still been profoundly dehumanising. Coping with the vagaries of life is life. It’s how we express our individuality and become more mature, rounded human beings. By seeking to liberate us from life’s challenges, the Left has turned us into a nation of children, trapped in a shabby, impoverished society, the primary function of which is to subsidise its least productive members.
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk- What does the way you speak say about where you’re from? Answer all the questions below to see your personal dialect map.
Single parenthood accounts for most of it. It's a poor life plan, unless wealthy. Some people never plan their lives at all. That's not being an adult. However, people always change paths, and that works too.
Environmentalism as Fundamentalism - The environmentalist religious paradigm actually makes it more difficult to protect the environment.
Martin Scorsese’s new movie hits the ground running with a montage of dwarf tossing, sex grappling and extreme drug behavior of a sort I don’t believe I’ve ever seen on-screen before. Then it gets really crazy.
Christians believe, as I understand it, that Jesus was the "son" of God, "son" being used figuratively to describe a human-like incarnation of the deity which was made manifest by the resurrection and other remarkable phenomena.
Don't ask me to explain the Trinity - it's a mystery to me.
To non-believers, it sounds like science fiction, but even non-believers and Doubting Thomases have no doubt that Jesus (the Latinized version of Yeshua, Joshua) was an inspired and spiritually revolutionary rabbi who has been rocking the world since he lived.
For Christmas, the Beatitudes (beginning with Matthew 5), the beginning of The Sermon on the Mount.
"And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
"Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you....
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?"
Fish is required on Christmas Eve. Instead of the usual poached salmon, for after church tonight with in-laws, the kids, and friends, we are doing a big mess o' Marcella's Baked Filet of Sole with Tomato and Capers.
Great stuff, zingy. Easy, too, and only 15 minutes in the oven. Plus potatoes roasted in butter and olive oil, and steamed asparagus splashed with olive oil.
An app for your dreams
John 1:(1-9), 10-18
Sued for a medical study?
A book: 
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace; 
Time to Stock Up on Incandescent Bulbs 
Green Grow the Rashes O!
Tablets a hit with kids, 
Hotel Ducks Gone Wild 
Christians believe, as I understand it, that Jesus was the "son" of God, "son" being used figuratively to describe a human-like incarnation of the deity which was made manifest by the resurrection and other remarkable phenomena.