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.
Politicians want to be important people, right? Somewhere inside their souls maybe they feel small, but have dreams of greater significance and appreciation despite often lacking ordinary life talents and skills other than a compulsion to shmooze and suck up to people.
Above all, they need validation, and the power and money are tied for second. Third comes job security. Not all of the time, but most of the time.
Forget campaign finance reform and all that. The old saying is "Politics is the Hollywood for unappealing people." To level the playing field, to lend some humility to politicians, and to put the process into perspective for the citizens, I propose that anyone running for any public office in the USA must be required to wear the Official Campaign Uniform on the right while campaigning.
That way, we the people will know who they are and know that they are special.
New Yorkers love Uber. The wealthy just phone up their limo or their town cars, but now middle class people and poor people can just summon Uber on their app.
McArdle: "Why was I so glad to read that my ancestors had, in fact, faced nasty discrimination? It's a reaction that needs scrutiny. It's an echo of what happens when activists go looking for outrages..."
In Lewiston, Maine. Amoral lowlifes are everywhere. Why? What happened to the morally-bound, duty-bound America, or did it never exist outside my personal life?
I am glad the issue has been raised. In my wanderings around New England, I see white trash people with tatts and strange body rings lollygagging around all day, and entire black families getting in the way of the Mexican landscapers trying to mow the "lawns" of welfare housing projects on a sunny weekday. A strange sight. The blacks make fun of the Mexicans for working, and the Mexicans despise the blacks.
The Asian (I mean real Asian - Chinese, Koreans, Singaporeans, Vietnamese, etc) legal immigrants are middle-class or more. They tend to arrive with education, skills, and some assets. However, I am not sure that they know much, or care much, about American values or traditions.
What's going on? Around here, the illegals work. Not so in many other areas, I know. Gangs, drugs, welfare, etc. Sometimes, this doesn't feel like "my country" anymore, and I know I am not alone in this.
I have been hearing lately about all of the iPhone photo contests. It's become a big deal. Your pics are not allowed to be cropped or manipulated. A friend of mine is entering one of his iPhone shots from duck hunting in Quebec last fall into a contest/show in New Haven. Too bad he wouldn't email me the pic.
Fancy machines are not necessary for interesting pictures (not that an iPhone is a comprehensible or un-fancy machine to me). Real cameras seem to be becoming seen as clunky, obsolete artifacts except for nature documentation, Japanese tourists, fashion photogs, and the press corps. Often, imperfect and flawed photos are good and fun to look at. Photos from 1900 are wonderful.
In general, I try to avoid taking photos. "Why would I want to do that?" I will never look at them again.
That men of the cloth, of all people, should be blind to what is really happening right now on the global economic scale is remarkable, ironic, and sad. Cure one or two people of blindness and you’re a saint; prevent blindness in millions and you’re Monsanto.
People of the cloth, like many academics, can be insulated from the realities of production and oblivious as to how or where their iPhones, cars, medicines, airplanes, and foods come from. Not from magic fairies or community activists.
Many of us are parasites, may hate to admit it, but it is important that we do so anyway. Including me, selling business services. Free market production is the engine which eliminates poverty and despair. Even Commie China realized that.
The rest of us are, sadly, parasites on that mechanism: doctors, lawyers, financiers, teachers, insurance salesmen, politicians, government employees, etc etc etc. Often useful and valuable, but still parasites on the producers. Over time, with technology, there are fewer producers and more service parasites to the point that we parasites can pretend that we have a functional economy of our own.
I have friends who make real things: sails for sailboats, parts for machines, tables, tires, oil wells, medical devices, artisanal goat cheese, and things like that. Also, harvest lobsters, harvest peaches, and blueberries. They are the foundation and we are the beneficiaries.
But Williamson's main point has to do with the Church's apparent faith in the State. What State, pray tell, run by whom? God? It's utopian lunacy or dystopian lunacy, take your pick.
I am grateful to our clergy, and if my criticism herein seems unduly uncharitable to these princes of the Church, it is only because their backward views on capitalism are doing real, material, irreversible damage to the world and especially to the lives of poor people, who are most in need of what only capitalism has to offer. His Eminence may not entirely understand it, but the banks and boardrooms are full of men and women doing more in real terms for the least of these than he is — more, in fact, than he would even understand how to do — and what he proposes mainly is to stand in their way. For God’s sake, stop it.
Me? Raised Roman Catholic, love the Church in the abstract, but an evangelical protestant at present. A long story of course, which I will never be able to find the words to explain, but wish the Church would focus on the blood of Christ instead of secular matters.
Now gone fishin' for the weekend. Block Island Sound. Maybe stop up by Cuttyhunk. Got beer, got girl, got boat, got gas, got bathing suit, got flip-flops. Will feed on Blues, Stripers, clams, and oysters. Life is good in New England. (Too bad the retarded government makes us throw back the small stripers and keep the big ones. As usual, government has it ass-backwards - kill the producer-breeders and throw back the useless small ones of whom 1/5000 will survive the Tuna, sharks, and Swordfish.)
Recipe tip: When you filet your Striper on the boat, cut out some thin slices, smear a little wasabi on them and maybe a splash of teriyaki. Then take a swig of Corona with lime in it to wash it down. That is heaven on earth.
More and more decisions, from the music business to the sports field, are being delegated to data. But where does that leave our intuition? With stories about John Hammond. Among others, he discovered Billy Holiday, Benny Goodman, and Bob Dylan.
I can hit the windshield of a fast-moving car with a snowball, but I can't do the math of it.
... a couple of SEALs came over to ask me if I was the press secretary and if they could get a photograph with me. As their buddy got his camera ready, I decided to make a little small talk.
“What made you want to become a Navy SEAL – family tradition, sense of adventure, chance to see the world, physical challenge?
“Oh no, ma’am, chicks dig it,” he said.
I then asked the second SEAL, “When you are preparing to go…wherever it is that you may be going. Do you have to take a lot of language courses?”
A wonderful book, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, has done a lot to rebalance the early history of America. It is rarely recalled that the Pilgrims were headed to the New Amsterdam area - already a busy and growing Dutch settlement - but got stuck in Plymouth due to weather climate change and made the best of it.
If you think the transgendered are normal and gays want to get married, you’re not going outside. Marriage has a lot of benefits for gays like getting your spouse’s health care and pension, but it also comes with a lot of work. “For better or for worse” means you can have some bad months, even bad years. Fortunately, you make it through those times because you want to be there for your children. Take kids out of the equation and add in people you want to fuck and monogamy is just not possible. Most gays concede this and have come up with new terms like “monogamish.” In other words, they’re redefining marriage. Unlike the pundits on TV such as Jon Stewart, I actually know gays. There are so many homos at my place upstate we call it a GAYted community. I’m also married to a fag hag so they regularly fill up my apartment in the city, too. They don’t want to get married. They want to party. The only ones screaming about equality are a handful of annoying nerds nobody gives a shit about (look at the guy who got Brendan Eich fired). Real homos aren’t tweeting about social justice. They’re in Paris, fornicating. LGBT isn’t an alliance. It’s a hodgepodge of outcasts who have absolutely nothing in common with one another. LG needs to cut BT loose. B is lying and T’s insane.
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Edward Pincus let Chen off with probation—for murder—after an anthropologist testified that, in Chinese culture, the shame of a man being cuckolded justified murder…. The female head of the Asian-American Defense and Education Fund, Margaret Fung, applauded Chen’s light sentence, saying that a harsher penalty would “promote the idea that when people come to America they have to give up their own way of doing things. This is an idea we cannot support.”
Politicians want to be important people, right? Somewhere inside their souls maybe they feel small, but have dreams of greater significance and appreciation despite often lacking ordinary life talents and skills other than a compulsion to shmooze and suck up to people.
A masterful and wise piece from Williamson: 
Small beer