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.
In a drastic move that would further exasperate the European Union’s east-west divide, the European Commission, the EU executive arm, has given a month’s notice to the Polish government to roll back its national judicial reform. Poland risks forfeiting its voting rights within the EU if it does not back down in the current dispute with Brussels.
The EU officials oppose the legal reform undertaken by Warsaw, arguing that it weakens the judiciary and gives more power to the country’s elected government. Polish government dismissed these allegations and insists that is acting within the purview of the national constitution.
The EU has already threatened Poland with legal action for opposing a pan-European migrant resettlement plan. Poland, along with Hungary and Slovakia, has refused to back the EU plan to relocate hundreds of thousands of migrants across Europe.
"Sister Margaret Ann holds a chainsaw near Miami, Florida, on September 12, 2017. Police said the nun was cutting trees to clear the roadways around Archbishop Coleman Carrol High School in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma."
Bless her, but those are not safe tree-cutting garments.
A "bum" was/is a term for an idle adult male. A shameful condition. These three bums are from the South Ferry (NYC) Flophouse, 1941. I wonder how they ended up. Maybe in the Army. Guy on the right should have gone to Hollywood.
People get off on it. For a couple of weeks, it has replaced Trump porn on the teevee.
Funniest thing I saw was some valiant reporter in the wind and rain talking about how terrible it was, how hard it was to stand up in this danger, when a guy went walking his three-legged dog on the sidewalk behind him. Maybe it was Tampa, where the Mayor says that it's not so bad, we're fine. Not what the reporter wanted to hear, because it wasn't Weather Porn.
I am thankful that the people of Florida were not hit very hard. If you live there, you are used to this sort of thing with flooding and no power for a while. It's a predictable part of life.
It's the most beautiful day of the year here in NYC, abnormally so. Put that in the record books too. Being so lovely, it can only get worse. If every storm (and every storm and every Hot-cold-wet-dry day) is proof of global warmening, then what does every beautiful day prove?
Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin … In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low …
Instead of terrible gym music, I would prefer jodies that you could keep the beat, double-time, or half-time. Is this pentatonic?
These guys are third-day trainees. The guy on the far right is injured, participating anyway.
Good too. "My way is the right way, your way is the wrong way." It's not liberal arts college. More like medical school with physical exertion. Marching intently is much tougher cardio with response and call.
"Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another."
The urge to denigrate is an attempt to establish your own superiority by imposing humiliation on someone else—as well as a naked admission that you have no other way to demonstrate your personal merit.
If you read the news you might almost get the idea that storms and floods are an abnormal modern event. The news forgot about Noah. In fact, floods and storms are not only natural but beneficial in every way to nature's processes but injurious to human hubris and property.
For examples, when a river overflows its banks it delivers fresh silt and soil to the flood plain, rejuvenating it (eg the Nile, eg the Mississippi Delta). When a strong storm blows through a forest and knocks down miles of trees, it restarts the forest cycle providing fresh habitat for all sorts of species who live in forest openings. For the Indians, that was an excellent thing.
The disaster part is man-defined, not nature-defined. When people build on flood plains (eg Houston) or on sea-level marshes (New Orleans), big trouble is predictable. And when man covers those flood zones with asphalt and buildings, or alters rivers with canals and levees, it makes it all worse.
Of course governments and benevolent souls have to step in when these "natural disasters" threaten lives, but a good way to think about it would be, in future at least, market pricing for flood and storm insurance. Let the actuaries figure out the real risk and cost of what people do and put a price on that.
Somebody ought to explain to David that, for many of us, the issue is not an obsession with politics or the need to "get a life," but offense taken with the obnoxious intrusion of government into our personal pursuit of happiness. David is fully-insulated from that in his Manhattan bubble. When was the last time he tried to start a business?
I find his comments condescending, preachy, and self-congratulatory. One year in a real job in a real place might teach him something.
I think you want to rely on the power of conservative ideas and sort of hope they spontaneously erupt into a conservative paradise via a right wing Big Bang without you actually having to fight for them. After all, fighting is messy and unseemly, and you also have to ally yourselves with … those kind of people, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. It’s so embarrassing having to explain them to your liberal peers. Many of these misbegotten normals are baffled by fancy sandwiches and stuff.
Because of the eminent importance of Diversity, we at WMBriggs.com, like at Google and every other major entity, will be hiring a Diversity Enforcer. So that when anybody claims to be troubled by what is written here, we can point to our black female lesbian Jewish Enforcer (who will be paid very, very well) to show how devoted we truly are to Diversity. And then you’ll leave us alone.
For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
We have seen other countries, particularly in this century, where this has been the case. And we have always regarded them with a mixture of pity, and to be truthful, some amusement, because it has struck us as so strange that people would allow a situation to develop where they would be afraid of what words they used. But we now have this situation in this country. We have it primarily on college campuses, but it is spreading throughout the whole society. Were does it come from? What is it?
When young, we would scream "Shark" at the little kids in the pool. "Snake" also works. Try it. It works well, amusing effect. It's also a political strategy.
