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.
My father in law wants to give me his .38 Colt Detective Special. I'd be happy to have it. He carried it for many years, and it slept in his bedside table at night. Just one of many reasons to respect his daughter.
It's a safe firearm to carry fully loaded.
I have plenty of long guns and I have a CC permit, but figuring out how to legally accept and register a handgun gift from a family member from one state to a blue New England state was not easy to figure out until I reached the right person.
All he has to do is to bring the gun to his local dealer. That dealer will mail it to my local gun shop, where it gets re-registered to me. Simple enough. Main thing to remember, once you have possession, is not to transport the handgun out of state unless there is reciprocity.
I have a place quite near by where people can play with handguns. Not being a handgun afficionado, a simple revolver instead of a 9 mm is all I want or need. For home defense, I still think the Taurus that fires shotgun shells might be best. However, I can hit close targets with handguns.
When we were kids, we had a loaded .22 revolver in the kitchen drawer and a loaded 12 ga. leaning against the kitchen entry. Not paranoid at all - just country ways. Shooting beer bottles off of stumps was the main handgun violence. Difficult to hit them - easier with a snowball.
I taught all of my kids - and Mrs. BD - firearm handling and firearm safety. Learned it from my sportsman gramps and my ex-Army Dad. Hope to pass it on to grandkids, God willing.
When sellers manipulate you, that's bad: It's phishing for phools. When the government nudges you, that's good: It's behavioral economics for the benefit of the public.
Then lenders will scrutinize their loans more closely, then government will give them lending mandates. Same thing happened with mortgages. The government's playbook is to screw something up, then to appear to fix what they did with even more rules and constraints. A downward spiral.
"From the 11, 994 papers, 32.6 per cent endorsed AGW, 66.4 per cent stated no position on AGW, 0.7 per cent rejected AGW and in 0.3 per cent of papers, the authors said the cause of global warming was uncertain."
CBS
News Slams Rathergate Film: 'It's Astounding How Little Truth There Is
In TRUTH' - See more at:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2015/10/08/cbs-news-slams-rathergate-film-its-astounding-how-little-truth-there#sthash.T12QA45F.sqhxOuHy.dpuf
CBS
News Slams Rathergate Film: 'It's Astounding How Little Truth There Is
In TRUTH' - See more at:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2015/10/08/cbs-news-slams-rathergate-film-its-astounding-how-little-truth-there#sthash.T12QA45F.sqhxOuHy.dpuf
It's not just that humans are tribal, although they are. I am almost always curious about people with other backgrounds and stories, but I am most "at home," most relaxed, with people whose backgrounds and stories are similar to mine. You can help me explain all of the reasons for that, but part of it is social predictability. For example, it is difficult to build trust when you do not know or understand another person's definition.
A good degree of cultural homogeneity is good for a society because there is a shared context, shared values, shared referents, and shared meanings. This goes far beyond language itself, so assimilation into a culture takes several generations, with real effort, if it is to happen at all.
I suspect that the only places into which I could assimilate would be Canada, England, Oz, and Germany. In other places, I visit more as an amateur anthropologist, an outsider, and I know I will never really get it. Mind you, I live in NYC which is a United Nations of immigrants, a tower of babel. It's fun, but there is a right amount of it.
I think I am in the mainstream to hold the simple view that a society/culture can handle a modest or moderate degree of immigration, but not an invasion. Borders and armies exist primarily to prevent invasions. Today in a few parts of the world we see unarmed invasions, and many governments do not seem to know what to do. Suppose that Charles Martel had met 200,000 unarmed Muslims thronging towards Poitiers on their way to Paris?
The greater the cultural disconnect, and the fewer the cultural connections and traditions, the more likely one will feel like a stranger in a strange land and the more likely that the immigrant will be viewed as one. Whatever the multicults claim, there is a shared American culture from California to New Jersey, from Michigan to Alabama. Lots of subcultures, but an overarching set of shared ideas and assumptions.
Europe and the US seem to have had enough. I think it's a combination of the volume and of the feeling of being exploited. My basic question to legal immigrants would be "What will you do for America?" (I question myself every day about what I do for friends, family, community, God, and country. Scouting brainwashed me that way. Whenever I ask what is done for me, I squash the thought). For illegals, I tend to be with Trump. I guess that makes me a meany.
De
Blasio threatens New York City’s museums and cultural institutions over
“diversity” - See more at:
http://proteinwisdom.com/?p=57745#sthash.mFG0XDxz.dpuf
“Our experience is that diminishing opportunities for unsupervised play in our society have left kids with a very thin understanding of how to manage their own play and that it is important to have grown-ups introduce some basic rules to make play work,” the Playworks website states.
It is emphatically not the case that the South, or the United States in general, engages in less manufacturing today than it did in the so-called golden age of the postwar era (during which years a lot of poor people in the South, members of my family included, supplemented the wages they were earning during the manufacturing boom by . . . picking cotton, by hand, and being paid by the pound). We manufacture much more today than we did in the 1950s, and we grow a lot more cotton, too — and both enterprises require fewer workers today than they did back then. When one worker can produce what ten workers used to produce, or a hundred, wages go up, which is why you can make $100,000 a year harvesting cotton today, massive capital investments and innovation having turned what was once the work of slaves into a fairly lucrative skilled occupation.
The ME is one of those little disputatious, duplicitous corners of the world which attract the interest of diplomats and strategists far out of proportion to their intrinsic importance or value. Small pawns in the big game of international politics.
Obama or not, the world is not America's sandbox. Most of the world does not think like Westerners, much less think like Americans, and they never will see life through our eyes.
Furthermore, while the American people like the idea of being the world superpower, they have not been particularly enthused about geopolitical adventures and military maneuverings in minor places since WW2 - none of which have ended very successfully anyway (eg Korea, Cuba, Southeast Asia, the Muslim world, Nicaragua, Ukraine, etc.). Reagan's pressure for the dismantling of the Soviet empire was a success without a single military death, but the result is less than beautiful except for a few ex-eastern bloc nations.
The argument is always that X is critical to America's interests. Really? Syria? Ukraine?
Syria has been a Russian client/ally for a long time. Some good points here: The Mind of Mr. Putin
If you wish to debate, first tell me a few places in the world which can not be construed as"critical to US interests." (I'll use "critical" meaning worth going to war about.)
Global
Warming Hoaxer Jagadish Shukla Involved in “Largest Science Scandal in
US History” - See more at:
http://moonbattery.com/?p=63767#sthash.twBfVuky.dpuf
The Breakdown of the Black Family - Any attempt to
address mass incarceration has to begin with an effort to tackle
crime—and the social conditions linked to its rise.
We have known how much of a scam it is for many years. Still, people make money from it via governments.
The upside is that it provides an avenue to an easy and costless feeling of virtue. Either that or, in some municipalities, protects you from a garbage ticket. We have noted that most recyled garbage ends up in landfills anyway.
Pope Francis claimed that firearms and firearm makers cannot be Christian. A curious statement as he is surrounded by heavily-armed guards whenever he leaves his house. The Vatican is equally protected.
The same thing applies to Obama's pontificating about firearms. He is surrounded by firearms every day, and will be provided with armed guards for free for the rest of his life. I guess it's supposed to be different for us little people but not for me. I carry. If you worked in today's Hartford, CT, you might too.
The HK MP7 (probably) rides shotgun with the dark (purple) suit wearing Swiss Guardsmen closest to the pope.
Mental illness. The press also mentally-disturbed.
Psychologist
Pours Drain Cleaner in Woman’s Eyes Because She Thinks She Was Meant to
Be Blind - See more at:
http://moonbattery.com/?p=63680#sthash.13Z9hwbd.dpuf
“An aggressive foreign interference has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions. ... Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster. Nobody cares a bit about human rights, including the right to life.”
These Muslims are not looking to become German, even if that were a possibility. They are not seeking temporary shelter from a storm back home. The majority are men of military age, who should be back home fighting to make their country safe again. No, this is just a bunch of people looking for a better deal.
It is excruciating. The tone is professorial, patronizing, obnoxious, and unmanly. Obama challenged, and was followed by, Vladimir Putin. Putting the merits to one side, the contrast was not to Obama’s advantage.
Best
estimates are that American debt cannot be fixed with taxes on capital -
See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/best-estimates-are-that-american-debt-is-not-sustainable.html#sthash.mPDXxVzD.dpuf
In the article, Sanneh likens free speech advocates (like me, I assume) to "gun nuts," claims that campus speech codes have mostly been repealed (which is completely false), then bizarrely questions if people can believe in a diversity of belief. Those of us who are big fans of the concept of pluralism found the latter particularly mystifying.
It sure does. It used to be done by wise old politicos in smoke-filled rooms, shrewd guys who really knew the people. Now it's up to the press, amateur and professional.
Normal Americans would never even consider these sorts of scams. Even normal sleazy and corrupt politicians:
These email summaries show that the Clinton Foundation was the State Department and the State Department was the Clinton Foundation. All one, big, seamless, Clinton-promoting entity. We would know far more if State released the full emails. It is citing personal privacy as one reason not to make some public. In others, it claims the emails “shed no light on the conduct of U.S. Government business.”
I am waiting for The Donald to label the Clintons as grifters. Somebody needs to say the obvious.
Among the islanders, signing was considered a life skill, like knowing how to fish, more than a formal language to be taught. “It was passed on to kids as part of, ‘Here’s the stuff you need to know to make a living in this corner of the world,’” Van Riper said. Children picked it up from their parents; no records indicate that it was ever taught in schools.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a message, she has ambition. Her obsession with becoming president has overshadowed any reason that anyone might have to vote for her. She offers no hope and less change. Her candidacy is historic… but only for her. There is no promise she can make that anyone will believe.
After having spent much of her life trying to become president, she will leave once again a failure.
My father in law wants to give me his
Grateful immigrant: 
Image via
Cool site:
U.S. 
New clay tablet adds 20 lines to Epic of Gilgamesh
Toon via 
Seattle-area school 
Image stolen from 
Have A Doughnut: 