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.
Hayward: "The only surprising thing about the total catastrophe in Puerto Rico is that it took so long for the “Trump-Is-A-Bigot-Who-Hates-Brown-People” refrain to get cranked up to eleven..."
The idea that Trump hates brown people is totally nuts. It's meant to scare brown people. Does it work?
Puerto Rico is basically a poor third-world country with a fragile infrastructure, dysfunctional and corrupt governments, and a long experience with bad weather. We had to send in the Marines to clear their roads. Why? Are there no chain saws in Puerto Rico?
The CEO linked above says:
I have a message for the U.S. Congress: Watch out what relief funds you approve and let our local government handle. Don’t let the Puerto Rican government play the victim and fool you. They have no clue what they are doing, and I worry that they will mishandle anything that comes their way.
“It’s a lack of drivers for the transport trucks, the 18 wheelers. Supplies we have. Trucks we have. There are ships full of supplies, backed up in the ports, waiting to have a vehicle to unload into. However, only 20% of the truck drivers show up to work. These are private citizens in Puerto Rico, paid by companies that are contracted by the government,” says Col. Valle.
“The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump,” the president wrote on Twitter. “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help.”
Mr. Trump said the people of Puerto Rico should not depend entirely on the federal government. “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort,” he wrote. “10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job. The military and first responders, despite no electric, roads, phones etc., have done an amazing job. Puerto Rico was totally destroyed.
Trump is probably correct to imagine that some are attempting to stage another Katrina scenario:
I've been meaning to write this post for a long time. I'd grant that there exists something akin to "white privilege" in the USA, as in all of the western world. It happens to be more like "cultural privilege" than anything to do with skin tone. I am talking about individual qualities which are most in demand and most effective in western cultures.
The markings of cultural privilege are most easily internalized by upbringing, and secondarily by good examples (eg coaches, relatives) and formal education. Good socialization. Wealth is only incidentally associated, not causal, because lots of rich kids are complete a-holes. The western world (except for England) has no caste system, but it has an informal cultural caste system and everybody is aware of it. It has nothing to do with IQ or where you grew up or went to college, but it has to do with how you comport yourself, how properly and grammatically you speak and write, manners and grace, dress, good humor, level of sophistication, being a good dinner companion, playing sports, staying out of trouble with the law, being able to discuss books, and other sorts of things that some people sum up as "presentable."
As a reader notes, other less superficial traits often come under the "whiteness" umbrella:
Privilege aka the work ethic. It incorporates concepts like self actualization, self discipline, persistence, impulse control, fairness, loyalty (though not blind loyalty), integrity, politeness, civic mindedness, punctuality, reliability and accountability, courage, autonomy, problem solving, saving and postponement of gratification, being productive and contributing to the community...
I think "whiteness" is a shorthand for those who are culturally advantaged, adapted to a dominant if not elite culture, because in my life experience you can easily find people of all colors, ethnicities, and wealth who lack those qualities, and those who possess those qualities. It is indeed a handicap in life to lack them.
Obama got to where he got by the combination of skin tone, a natural grace, and his cultural privilege. It can be a winning combination.
Interestingly, Pres. Trump is culturally disadvantaged, or so it seems, and has a strange, alien, orange skin tone. He must be from some alien planet like Queens, NY, who landed in Washington like Mr. Bean.
At the bottom of this, I think the "whiteness" thing is an attempted slo-mo imitation of Mao's cultural revolution with little to do with race or ethnicity.
The people in the media face in toward their masters, rather than looking out over the wall at the rest of us. For those involved in dissident politics, this is useful as it makes it more difficult for the people in charge to respond to the threat.
Most yawn that Mark Zuckerberg and Pope Francis have given one too many sanctimonious rants that project their own hypocrisies. And one too many sober and judicious ex-diplomats (of the sort whose mellifluous prior appeasement led to a thermonuclear North Korea) bores us with warnings about Trump’s “incendiary rhetoric.” Apparently in 2016, the deplorables and irredeemables struck back. Donald J. Trump symbolically served as a radiologically hot CAT scan that revealed long-festering inner metastases. Next, as deadly chemotherapy, he unpleasantly saturated the patient until the cancers within slowly began to fester and shrink — even as the convalescent resented the harsh therapy as much as he did the symptoms of the disease.
Here is a sure fire test for a progressive. If given a choice between two worlds:
A capitalist society where the overall levels of wealth and technology continue to increase, though in a pattern that is dynamic, chaotic, generally unpredictable, and whose rewards are unevenly distributed, or...
A "progressive" society where everyone is poorer, but income is generally more evenly distributed. In this society, jobs and pay and industries change only very slowly, and people have good assurances that they will continue to have what they have today, with little downside but also with very little upside.
What They Promised: Smoking Gun Proof of Trump-Russia Collusion What They Walked That Back To: Russia Bought Some FaceBook Ads What It Is Now: Russian Ads Promoted Black Lives Matter
I don't think it'll work out well. TV watching is an indulgence, maybe even a vice if indulged excessively, and people do it partly because they justify it as imparting some secondary benefits -- having a shared social vocabulary, feeling united with other fans, feeling that watching football on Sunday is a shared civic ritual celebrating some worthwhile aspects of the American secular religion.
Take away that goodwill, and rely only on the eleven total minutes of actual football action during a four or four and a half hour game -- and, well.
The bottom line is that the black family was stronger the first 100 years after slavery than during what will be the second 100 years.
At one time, almost all black families were poor, regardless of whether one or both parents were present. Today roughly 30 percent of blacks are poor.
However, two-parent black families are rarely poor. Only 8 percent of black married-couple families live in poverty. Among black families in which both the husband and wife work full time, the poverty rate is under 5 percent. Poverty in black families headed by single women is 37 percent.
Simple question: Are Asians part of white supremacy, or are Asians another minority oppressed by whites? (See Justice Harlan above.) And if they are an oppressed minority, shouldn’t Asians receive affirmative action preferences?
“When our elites attack our national symbols as if they are worthless and loathesome, something important, something monumental has changed here. If the people who benefited most from America despise it–and increasingly they do–where does that leave the rest of us?”
I can’t tell you how many times readers and potential/actual authors have told me they fear loss of job and career damage if they express non-liberal opinions at work or in a way that people at work could find out. There is a reign of terror ongoing in this country, but it’s not from the government, it’s from social-media-empowered leftists who seek to impose the most intrusive political litmus tests in every aspect of our lives.
The most revealing aspect of the culture war is not that the professional entertainment industries are uniformly and aggressively liberal, but that they have pushed politics into every aspect of our lives. You will be made to care in the classroom and now, on the sports field.
The result, for me, is a withdrawal from much of professional culture.
It is strange, but nobody pays money to watch athletes display their politics - whatever they are. I still don't know what all this is about other than another Trumpian circus. Pres. Trump is a hit new TV reality show with a crazy new theme each week for people to talk about. Meanwhile, behind the stage, his admin is doing lots of things.
Oppressed Multi-Millionaire Stevie Wonder Takes a Knee
With the publishing of her new book, seems only fair (and balanced) to take a look at excerpts from the 2014 Tax Return for the Clinton Foundation. These are public documents.
2014 Total revenue (line 12) $177,804,612
Total grants to charity (line 13) $5,160,385 (that's less than 3%)
Total expenses of $91,281,145 Expenses include: Salaries (line 15) $34,838,106 Fund raising fees (line 16a) $850,803 Other expenses (line 17) $50,431,851 Travel $8,000,000 Meetings $12,000,000
They list 486 employees (line 5) plus 400 volunteers (line 6)
"Fair Analysis: It took 486 (886?) people who are paid $34.8 million and $91.3 million in fees and expenses to give away $5.1 MILLION. Geez, wonder what all those folks wuz really doin?
Line 22 shows ending year net assets/fund balances of $332,471,349 which is up $85,171,891 from last year's tax return! (No substantial asset increase in 2015 when she was running.....hmmm)
- All these contributions were pure charitable donations?...it's another fair question that should leap to anyone's mind.
In response to several warnings, I responded to my browser and mail provider. It's been a 12 hour on and off conversation with some guys in Delhi. They seem to know exactly what they are doing, and are polite with perfectly-grammatical if accented English. I am fairly sure one of the guys learned English from a Scottish teacher.
The point is that I had a few hundred attacks on my computer over 48 hours, some foiled and some not. Some of these evil programs penetrated my email and my laptop. Of course, nobody cares about my info, but I do not like roaming intruder programs, worms and all that, messing with my machine. Russians?
So the guys in Delhi sold me on a fancy new firewall and got rid of a lot of stuff that CCleaner could not. My old firewall was obsolete, about 4 years old. As readers know, it is a bit creepy the way the techies can take over your machine and do whatever they need to do. I guess you just have to trust them.
... rabbis, this year, please don’t pander to your congregants, spoon-feeding them bromides straight from cable news. Use your words to raise us up, together, and enlighten us with wisdom that transcends the contemporary scene.
... the electoral college seemed loaded for the Democrats from the get-go, as it has been for many recent years. It is they who begin each Presidential race with California (55 votes), New York (29), Illinois (20), Massachusetts (11), Washington (12), and New Jersey (14) locked up. Add after-thoughts like Oregon (7), Rhode Island (4), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Hawaii (4), and Vermont (3), and the Democrats begin the race with 172 electoral votes. The winning candidate needs 270 of the 538 total electors to win, so the race begins with the Democrat needing to secure only 98 of the remaining 366 to hit payday. Even if one concedes that Texas and smaller conservative states like Alabama, Mississippi, Idaho, and Montana are predetermined for the Republicans, the odds for a Democrat to win the electoral college from the remaining pot of states that legitimately remain “in play” remain overwhelming. Republicans mope with fellow conservatives over those odds every four years, viewing each approaching Presidential contest glumly. For those looking beyond the forthcoming bi-elections with 20/20 vision, it still seems unfair...
... my response to a statue you don't approve of is "So put up your own statue." Or even more to the point "Go do something that is worthy of commemoration in that way. No one is stopping you, with your own mixed bag of moral history, from going and doing something heroic or laudable."
Photo: Granny Smiths from a reader's garden this week
Ikea’s stuff is tough to assemble,
Toon via 
Prof Peterson
Photo: You probably 
4 Ancient prayers
Did Fashion Week Just 
