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.
The Trump backlash was a slap in the face to most, utterly unexpected because they simply don’t even acknowledge that a world exists outside of their gated communities, the suburban soccer moms and Whole Foods customers have no clue that they just destroyed the entire coal industry or put people out of work as they hurry to Pilates. Given that ignorance, Trump was a political asteroid impact, the most unlikely and devastating thing many of them had ever seen as he crashed into their world. The anger from them is one of class, the upending of their perceived social status by someone so beneath them as to not even warrant an opinion. It is difficult to put this concept into words if you have not experienced those social circles, the level of outrage would be akin to a janitor walking into an Exxon Mobile board meeting and overruling the entire table of executives.
The anger is palpable within the Beltway and it’s coastal fiefdoms, which is understandable. The idea that someone who shakes parmesan from a can contravened the wishes of those who can taste the difference between serrano and iberico Jamón is simply unacceptable...
Donald Trump has been given a great gift in that his gaffes are seen by most Americans in the context of an obsessed and unhinged Democratic-media nexus. He is pitted against a new fusion party of media elites and aging political functionaries, who all believe that America should operate on their norms, the norms of Washington, New York, Hollywood, and Malibu — all places that symbolize, to most Americans, exactly how the country has gone wrong.
The more matters we push down to the state level, the less Red America and Blue America will have to quarrel about. And given how nasty our quarrels currently are, this seems like it would come as a welcome relief for almost everyone.
Europe refuses to see that they are being hijacked. In a predatory Islam, they are just dhimmis to be taken advantage of. Euroland gave up seeing evil the same time they gave up on God.
A BD addendum,Islam and the West: We Can’t Coexist?Wars of religion are different from wars over territory and resources. I am sure not every Muslim in the US or UK wants Sharia law to replace existing law, but I suspect many wouldn't mind. Some, as we can see, view it as a holy, sacred mission to destroy non-Muslims until they submit. In the UK, the government seems to want to semi-submit, but it will never be enough. Like student rioters, if you give them an inch they'll take a mile. Euroland is already getting used to having a nasty case of cultural cancer.
Even in the most soft-hearted practices of Christianity, we are taught that discernment (aka discriminating good from terrible, helpful from unhelpful, destructive from constructive, etc) must be a component of Christian wisdom and practice. "I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."
Did a post-Christian world retain the dove part and forget the snake part? Why? Decadence, comfort, and cowardice?
American society has divided along unreconcilable visions of the good, held by countrymen who increasingly regard each other as enemies. Any attempt by either side to coerce the other into submission augurs only the fate that has befallen other peoples who let themselves slide into revolution. It follows that the path to peace must lie in each side’s contentment to have its own way—but only among those who consent to it. This implies limiting the U.S. government’s reach to what it can grasp without wrecking what remains of our national cohesion.
The application for the inaugural students asks aspiring Social Justice Advocates to explain their interest in social justice, list their preferred gender pronouns (such as “zi” and “hir”), and describe any experience they have in facilitating workshops on “social justice” issues. Be a part of the BEST (Bruin Excellence & Student Transformation) inaugural Social Justice Advocates initiative supported by VC Kang’s office and Residential Life. We are seeking 8-10 Social Justice Advocates! The Social Justice Advocates initiative aims to empower students by developing them as conscious and critical leaders and equipping them with cultural and political capital as they navigate a world that operates on whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity as the primary ideologies. Social Justice Advocates will learn about systems oppression and how they intersect and build upon one another maintain the status quo. Most importantly individuals and the collective will be empowered through liberatory scholarship and practices and strengthening their emotional intelligence to create change within their spheres of influence. students will be paid a quarterly stipend.
Whether news or science, nobody can tell real from fake anymore. Everything seems to be from The Onion. Is there anything we can take at face value, or is everything fake?
Nothing has changed. The Yale Daily News was full of despicable little leftwing shits back in my day just like today. If they could see what Yale became, Henry Luce & Briton Hadden would be throwing up in the street.
The media mouth-frothing has reached unbearable levels, and quickly. ... This is not a new observation by any means. It was almost as bad in favor of candidate Obama in 2008, but a slobbering lovefest was far different a media trying to bring down a presidency without a single shred of substantive evidence to date.
Let's face it, there's going to be a new, and most likely completely baseless, instance of Trump derangement blaring from the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post more or less every day for at least the next three and a half years. It can be amusing to make fun of these things, but at some point the Manhattan Contrarian has to find something better to do. How about looking into recent reporting on Venezuela?
Based on a tip from a reader, I turned to interior page A4 of Monday's edition of the New York Times...
OK, but worse probably in the social sciences. Generally, it is very easy to cheat in science. Biggest problem might be that negative results are almost never published.
...power, while dangerous in anyone’s hands, is especially dangerous in the hands of people who are enticed during early adulthood into believing both that they are fit to order others about and that such commandeering of the lives of others is noble rather than nefarious.
LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!
Good morning, kids. I am actually sitting here absolutely stunned and amazed at the spectacle we are witnessing. A duly elected President and his advisors are being systematically, methodically crippled by a witch hunt that has been manufactured out of whole cloth by the media. It has been so pervasive and poisonous that the media's underlings in the Democrat party, along with their willing accomplices in the GOP wing, are now openly discussing impeachment proceedings, based on nothing. Actually, less than nothing. Nothing-Lite. Remember that the standard Leftist playbook is that the veracity of the allegation is not important: it's the seriousness of the charge. When Jeff Sessions recused himself way back when, it opened the door for the Left to demand more and more concessions and put the President and his team on perpetual defense. I'm not a fan of Dick Morris at all, but he's 100% correct in his analysis that the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate, again NOTHING, does one thing: puts a taint of guilt on the President and serves to delegitimize his entire agenda, which is exactly what the Left wants, impeachment or not. And let's not forget the crickets coming from our putative side of the aisle. Call it fear or call it collusion with the Left (let's face it, PDT is an enemy to the GOP-e as much as he is to the Left), this is sabotage, or as Jeffrey Lord puts it "a high-tech lynching of an uppity president."
But let's step back for a moment...
Read it all. Of course the press wants to take Trump down. It is just a partisan thing, the sport called scalp-hunting, because Trump isn't even a conservative.
The retired general said he can live with Trump's inexperience, as everyone lacks experience when they start a new job. However, he said he's more focused on Trump's "seeming lack of humility in the face of obvious inexperience."
"Here is a president who seems to go into these encounters with, frankly, an unjustified self-confidence in the ability of his person to make these things come out right," said Hayden. "He throws away, pushes to the side, and doesn't pay attention to what the institutions of the government have set up for him to be successful."
... wait a minute! Isn't the President specifically allowed to reveal classified information to other countries if he wants to? Indeed, isn't that the very essence of being given the authority (by the Constitution!) to conduct the foreign policy of the United States? Of course the President has that authority! I would have said that the whole idea behind collecting classified information in the first place is to assist the President in conducting the foreign policy of the United States in whatever manner as he may see fit in his discretion. And, while Russia and the U.S. may be geopolitical rivals on many subjects, the two countries certainly share an interest in preventing having their aircraft blown up by ISIS terrorists. (Recall that an ISIS bomb blew up a Russian aircraft over Egypt back in December 2015.) Why wouldn't the President and senior Russian officials discuss this subject when they have one of their infrequent chances to meet? And why wouldn't they share information to help each other prevent future attacks?
So what is it about this story that makes it news at all, let alone front page news?
This is not the first time Berkeley administrators have lost control of the campus. The supposed irony that the home of the legendary 1960s Free Speech Movement has become inhospitable to the speech of anyone who departs from campus orthodoxy has become a commonplace observation in recent weeks. But this perception has the matter backwards. The seeds of today's stifling campus conformism trace back directly to that misunderstood episode. Far from being an example of true campus openness, the Free Speech Movement was a key inflection point on the way to the ruin of our universities. The one common denominator then and now is the ineptitude and pusillanimity of college administrators and the capitulation of faculties to the demands of radicalized students.
Dying towns are indeed due to labor needs and labor markets, but I do not see any positive role for government in that. Negative role? Certainly. It's easy to tax businesses away. Some towns have to shrink into villages and hamlets, while other places far away become boom towns. It was forever thus.
When a town loses its tax base, it is done as a place. Ghost town, EBT-land, tattooland, boarded-up-land, meth and heroin-land. It does come to that. I have seen those towns, and so has Charles Murray. Eventually, the only decent jobs are government jobs, and then they go away too. Feudalism was good for villages and the serfs always had work.
Major urban centers, worldwide, continue to be the places with economic opportunity and cultural vitality. Rural life isn't the romantic fantasy that some imagine, unless it's a rustic second home getaway.
How ya gonna keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?
Learning
It Was ‘No Picnic,’ but All Nine Bond Brothers Signed Up for World War II.
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