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.
Photo via Salt Water New England: When there's no snow or ice, Christmas week is a good time for a hunt in Yankeeland
'They shall not grow old' a box office blowout - for good reason
Meet Bai Shaofeng, a Beijing bachelor looking for love. Shaofeng’s problem — one faced by millions of his countrymen — is a product of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology. In China, there are simply too many men.
I'll just add that I can barely read the news these days (and I absolutely cannot watch it on TV). The negativity toward Trump is so relentless, cluttering up everything. It's crying wolf times a thousand. If anything is worth taking seriously, I'm afraid I won't be able to notice.
These endless Happiness Studies bother me. What is happiness anyway? A warm gun? Seems to me that not feeling depressed or overly-anxious is worth feeling grateful for.
Researchers reported in 2016 that men who ejaculated more frequently were less likely to have prostate cancer—but the researchers didn’t know why. They now believe they have an explanation.
Photo is our Christmas card from Uberhof Duer in Bulla, Italy. Dolomites' Val Gardena. Nice place to stay, classic hiking of course and great high skiing. Yes, the food up there is mainly German/Austrian. There is no single Italy.
Betrothed gays looking for wedding cakes and floral arrangements are not just carelessly stumbling into homophobic bakeries and florists. It's an organized campaign consciously targeting particular establishments. That's why no gay couples have wandered into a Muslim patisserie in Dearborn... and, if they did, they'd be the ones in hiding. Tim Cook, the Apple CEO who'll have no truck with hoosier homophobes, is happy to enrich Iran's mullahs so they can build fancier gay gallows on which to hang the sodomites. Muscle respects muscle.
We hear a lot about “male privilege” but historically it has been the “privilege” of men to make their way in the hard world in order to first win a woman’s affections, and then support the family structure financially. We might call this “patriarchy,” but this term isn’t the synonym for misogyny that contemporary progressive political culture seems to think it is. (One has to appreciate the misplaced sincerity of many of my university students who roundly condemn The Patriarchy, while driving their father’s Toyota to campus every day, and using his savings to pay for their tuition. Not infrequently it occurs to me that the people who are most vocal against The Patriarchy are those who have benefited from it the most.)
It's getting closer to the time to begin Christmas shopping. Whether you like Bezos or not, Amazon Prime is your friend. A daughter says Macy's is her friend now, too (the big store in Manhattan).
I am not convinced that the SAT is a measure of merit. It's really just an IQ test. Achievements tests are better merit measures but lots of schools do not have AP courses. Grades are not very reliable measures these days. If I ran a school, I'd use an IQ test, a Curiosity test, a Talent test, and an Energy test. No straight-A drones please.
The 30,000 alarmists gathered in Katowice, Poland expected to slam-dunk their report proclaiming a planet-threatening climate crisis, finalize rules for implementing the Paris accords, redistribute infinite billions of dollars from industrialized nations to “climate victim” countries, and solidify their control over people’s energy, jobs, living standards and liberties. It didn’t work out quite that way.
The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.
In a word, the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward state-managed social justice if you will—to end up as a sort of global Menlo Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the fated, but sometimes stalled, process along...
Are you kidding? I view bread and crackers, etc., mainly as food delivery vehicles. Other than the rare sandwich, in an Italian restaurant I like hard-crust white bread soaked in olive oil with roasted garlic schmeared on top. I dislike other than white bread because other breads interfere with the flavors of the real food. Exception: Pastrami on rye.
A recovering Lefty claims that his ex-brethren consist mostly of malcontents who are sad or angry that reality is not as they wish it to be.
Instead of developing a relationship to God and a recognition of one’s own imperfection, we wanted our non-anarchist families and friends to develop their “analysis” and recognize their complicity in the evil of capitalism. These non-anarchist friends grew increasingly sparse the longer I was an anarchist. They didn’t see how terrible the world was, and they used problematic language that revealed hopelessly bad politics. Frustrated with them, I retreated further and further into the grey echo-chamber of my “chosen family.”
Photo: Christmas Eve moon over the Maggie's HQ after church and a late Christmas Eve party
The 10 
The 
DNA tests: 
Why the Boston Tea Party 
Survey reveals 