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.
Depending on how you define it, "American interests" deserving of military force or threats thereof can be construed to involve everywhere on earth. However, we have just elected a guy with far less warlike or quasi-imperialist tendencies than the John Boltons, the Bushies, the Neocons, and Hillary. That's good. Governments often look for enemies for their own purposes.
Just because countries like pathetic Russia or growing but still adolescent China want to play geopolitics does not make them enemies or even adversaries. America today has no credible enemies but, as always there are plenty of bad actors and nasty talkers in the world. There always are and always will be.
The world is not America's sandbox. In my view, Europe can take care of itself. NATO is obsolete. If China wants to be a tough guy in south Asia, it's fine with me. It's not critical to the US. The middle east will be a mess for another 100 years unless the Ottoman Empire is restored. Of course America should be militarily competent - Always Be Prepared.
Trump does have a chance to do some of this if it is the priority.
For all the awfulness associated with Trump, his election stemmed from a disinclination among Americans to accept their place in the new technocratic order. Trump is best praised for some of the enemies he has made—movie stars and hierarchs of the environmental left, the racial grievance industry, the high-tech oligarchs, the bureaucracy and a university system that serves largely as a giant re-education camp. Not surprisingly, those enemies are having a collective fit about his victory.
Annual re-post for Thanksgiving: The potato is a native American food, as American as turkey. Good for your soul. I suspect my Indian ancestors made their holiday mash with Moose or Elk milk and cream. This is my Mom's delicious Thanksgiving and Christmas recipe:
4 lbs. Yukon Gold potatoes, or whatever you like 8 ounces sour cream 1 stick butter 2 ounces chopped fresh chives (one bunch) 1/2 cup heavy cream Salt and pepper
1. Boil potatoes (peeled or unpeeled - I prefer peeled) in water till they're tender (when you can stick a fork in and it comes right out). 2. Drain and let the steam evaporate off, then cut them up. 3. Mix in the ingredients and cut or mash to preferred consistency. (I prefer them casually mashed and lumpy - but I do understand that the Irish expect them to be creamy, and that a single lump is the shameful sign of an incompetent wife.) 4. Season with salt and pepper. 5. Put in serving pan/plate and lightly brown in oven.
Serve, if you must, with a side of steak, roast beef, turkey, pork chops, lamb chops, or roast chicken, and daintily drizzle a reduced jus of the meat on top of your potato piece de resistance.
Elections are too important because government has too much power. Presdential elections are too important because the presidency is reaching towards imperial power.
Leftist pundits (which is almost redundant) always write that, sorrowfully, but only when their team loses. Of course the country is divided: It's a big country and there are only two teams. I happen to feel that division and disputation is mostly good and healthy.
A good Repub plan would be to turn it into something entirely different. For starters, an interstate marketplace with all sorts of medical insurances offered.
By the time he began to publish in the 1890s, academic economics was in the throes of a counter-revolution sponsored by large landholders, bankers and monopolists denying that there was any such thing as unearned income. The new post-classical mainstream accepted existing property rights and privileges as a “given.” In contrast to Veblen’s argument that the economy was all about organizing predatory schemes, this approach culminated in Milton Friedman’s Chicago School defense the pro-rentier argument: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
This blunt denial rejected the preceding three centuries of classical value and price theory, along with its policy conclusions promoting taxation of land and other natural endowments, and financial reform. Dropped from view was rentier overhead in the form of predatory and unproductive forms of wealth seeking. The post-classical mainstream treats all income as “earned,” including that of rentiers. Lacking the classical concepts of unproductive labor, credit or investment, today’s textbooks describe income as a reward for one’s contribution to production, and wealth is being “saved up” as a result of someone’s productive investment effort, not as an unearned or predatory free lunch...
Much of higher ed consists of trade schools of sorts - as in business or accounting majors, computer science majors, nursing, performing arts, engineering, etc. Another big part of higher ed is civilizational transfer with little practical work application.
I like trade schools and I like apprenticeships. Many entry level jobs are in fact apprenticeships even if not labeled as such.
"I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself – that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of."
... going to your school’s Halloween party wearing pants embroidered with sailboats, carrying a gin-and-tonic, and wearing a name tag that says “Chip” or “Muffy” while spouting off-color jokes about Catholics, Jews, Negroes, Homosexuals and Communists trivializes the 400 years of toil it took our ancestors to build a life for us in suburban Connecticut.
I think America has thousands of dedicated teachers, thousands of time-servers, thousands of cynical and discouraged teachers, thousands of low-IQ teachers who "love kids" (which I have never believed or understood), and thousands of teachers having a great life nurturing kids.
Only Prussians could have designed the industrial, military model that American public education has applied since the mid-1800s. Then head-in-the-clouds John Dewey screwed things up even more in the US.
One of the fallacies is that kids are passive recipients of something called education. Another fallacy is that all kids are "creative," curious creatures who can be excited about "learning."
The industrial model focuses on curriculum, as it were a nutritional plan. Of course a curriculum matters, but everybody has his own opinion on what every citizen ought to know. I know I do. However, curriculum planners like to pretend that 50% of students have below-average IQs.
Bad science is ubiquitous, and bad science writing even more so. I have no confidence in any science journalism, and I approach any scientific results with deepest skepticism. The more hyped the "Studies show..." articles are, the more my skepticism grows.
The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Sweden, France, Germany, or the United Kingdom. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those who are classified as poor.)
Poverty in the US is measured by percentile of non-governmental income and does not include non-cash governmental benefits. Thus non-Americans are often surprised that American poor receive free medical care, subsidized or free housing, are often overweight, have large-screen TVs, and often one or two vehicles.
As I have observed here in the past, poverty in America is not material poverty.
Not much has changed in Progressive populist appeals since then:
Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume.
A pretty good definition at Wiki: "It can be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words."
In other words, figures of speech add poetry and color to language. When over-used, they lose their power and fade into ordinary and become, really, unheard.
If you had OCD you could have been a Renaissance scholar classifying the 184 types of figures of speech, but the five most of us learned in grade school are simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification and synecdoche.
From what I hear, Craig's List is the best way to quickly unload your excess or unwanted stuff. Also, a good source for stuff you might need to furnish an empty room.
One thing to bear in mind is that your excess, old, or even antique furniture, however sentimentally-attached to it you might feel, is worth very little. Probably a tenth of what was paid for it. Brown-colored furniture (ie antiques or old stuff with dark-stained wood) is particularly undesirable. If you think it's worth $500, it might be saleable for $20-40 at best. Many people use Craig's just to get a few bucks to have somebody take it away because stuff has little value unless somebody wants/needs that exact thing at that exact moment.
