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.
That's on the advice of our NYC theatrical daughter, who thought Hamilton was a typical,schlocky, over-hyped pseudo-historical Broadway spectacle. We are generally off-Broadway if not off-off-Broadway people, but that daughter is discerning so I guess we ought to listen to her. Other daughter loved Hamilton.
Why bust your rear end when the government immediately will take at least 39.6 percent (actually more when you consider Medicare taxes, state taxes, and double taxation of interest, dividends, and capital gains) of your income, and then another 40 percent of what you’ve saved and invested when you kick the bucket?
Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to care about such matters. She actually just decided to double down on her destructive tax agenda by endorsing an even bigger increase in the death tax.
Kimball: One of the most conspicuous strategies to limit free speech on campuses
in the United States these last few years has been via the weaponization
of victimhood.
Demonstrating her devotion to purposeful, tactical race-baiting, Berry in 2010 endorsed the practice of gratuitously smearing conservative Tea Party political activists as racists. “Tainting the Tea Party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats,” she said. “There is no evidence that Tea Party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.”
It turns out that the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” The future is a conference call on which a cheery 30-something says things like “progressively coordinate functional strategic theme areas” – forever.
At Drudge, more reasons to go Trump even if you disapprove of him. Why the anger with Trump? Get mad at the American voters instead, because Trump is gaining with them despite his abundant flaws:
Utopia has a class system. At the top are the thinkers, the philosopher kings who develop plans based on how things ought to be and then turn them over to lesser men to actually implement. They are the priestly class of an ideological movement whose deity is politics and whose priests are politicians.
Since The Very #Principled #NeverTrumpers Never Talk About the
Downside of Electing Their Preferred Candidate Hillary Clinton, I'll
Talk About It A Bit
Credit to Glenn Reynolds for coining the phrase for this year's peak campus and SJW insanity. Here's my favorite of the day: annual hike at Claremont Colleges canceled for not being inclusive. Apparently not everybody can hike up a mountain in revealing clothing. Or, probably, in any sort of clothing.
My solution is to ban everything, starting with the fun stuff.
In this election, Clinton’s honesty problem is not a big issue because her lying does not change the voter’s sense of where she stands on the big three items. On the other hand, Trump’s authenticity is a great benefit because it makes him trustworthy. You may not agree with his position on an issue, but you know what you are getting with Trump. His authenticity not only helps him on a personal basis, it helps him overcome the uncertainty issue all newcomers face. It makes him seem less of a risk.
I think the Likeability Factor is overrated in American national politics. It matters more in more local politics where dedicated schmoozers are the usual fare. However, I would rather have a beer with Donald than with Hillary.
Part of it is that I think Donald is educable (and has a long way to go), but she is not. She is a snotty know-it-all, and mostly wrong.
Also, he strikes me as being warm and interested in people, while I imagine Hillary would have half of her attention on the door to see if anybody more important than my deplorable self might come in. Somebody with more money or with higher social status. I think she is that sort of deplorable person.
Pic is from Mrs. BD. She is doing a project there this week, in Mwaukee. Interesting to me that she would never take photos, ever. Felt they interfered with direct experience. Since her iPhone, she takes snaps all the time.
The meaning of the cross is both deeply disturbing and deeply hopeful. I am not sure how it could be construed as offensive, tho, since my religion holds that Christ died on that thing as a human sacrifice to redeem humanity from its sins.
He's not fit for office. This guy doesn't have the temperament, doesn't have the qualifications. He's an embarrassment. He's dangerous. "We can't let this guy get near the nuke button. This guy is so off the wall, he has no business being in this business," is basically her point. "This guy is so gauche, this guy is so uncouth, this guy is so yuck, he has no business being in our business! He has no business being president; he has no business running for president. He's unfit. He's ill-tempered."
Right? Well, I'm sure Hillary thought she had ample opportunity to make that point last night, but she didn't, did she?
I was much younger then. The youth today need a similar song. I hate the way this group of giant rock stars turn the refrain into an insipid, zipless line, but otherwise, good fun. McGuinn's guitar sets the tone. Bob his usual humble self.
People who have only seen Trump in sound bites watched him go the distance without faltering. Were his remarks long on general observation and short on detail? Yes they were. Did Hillary know more than he did? Probably. Does it matter? Only to people who think the President should be a college professor. You don’t have to know how to do anything as President. You have to have the right instincts and you have to hire the right people.
Commenter here: "I expected more from him. I believe average citizens did too."
Can we say that many people hoped he would be commanding and dominate the discussion, but failed to do so? It seems easy for him to be a petty man at times.
The youth will not recall one of the more idiotic TV shows of the 1970s. Tonight's Really Big Show will not be a re-run. It will be live, and it will be exciting. The MSM has been building up the tension for days.
I will welcome your comments below before, during, and after the TV show (9 pm EST). Two deplorable people will compete for your affection or disgust.
So the weekend before the first presidential debate, four major news publications all print the same story, the content and tone of which (calling out one candidate over the other as a serial liar) Stelter concedes is “extraordinary,” and it’s all just a “coincidence” with no coordination between the publications and certainly none with the campaign? Uh huh.
I guarantee that she does not know a single Trump voter. Problem with the writing and talking heads: they observe the common folk from a distance, but they do not live in the world like we do.
There's a Black President There's a Black Congressman There's a Black Chief of Police There's a Black District Attorney There's a Black Mayor until 2014 (Jailed) There's a Black Officer who pulled a trigger There's a Black Man Dead of that gunshot wound
For inexplicable reasons, the Left believes that the violence wrought by angry minorities will benefit them, so they encourage it. They subsidize it. Obama has given his not-so-tacit permission to riot every time one of these tragic events occurs, from the Henry Louis Gates minor incident, to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, the Dallas officers. And now BLM is rolling in money, $100m from "social justice" organizations. Soros gave them $33m.
Probably an inbred trait of human nature renders the attraction of censorship perennial. Most people (the highly literate are among the worst) believe that what is good for them will be good for others. Besides, a regime of censorship must claim to derive its authority from settled knowledge and not opinion. Once enforcement and exclusion have done their work, this assumption becomes almost irresistible; and it is relied on to produce a fortunate and economical result: self-censorship. We stay out of trouble by gagging ourselves. Among the few motives that may strengthen the power of resistance is the consciousness of having been deeply wrong oneself, either regarding some abstract question or in personal or public life. Another motive of resistance occasionally pitches in: a radical, quasi-physical horror of seeing people coerce other people without having to supply reasons. For better or worse, this second motive is likely to be mixed with misanthropy...
Another:
Margaret Thatcher declined to prosecute The Satanic Verses for blasphemy; and once the fatwa was issued Rushdie was accorded police protection from the extraordinary threat. Still, the cravenness of the early reactions has not yet been forgotten. The novel was initially banned in Canada, and US bookstores were slow to risk the title on their shelves. Cautionary words about the need for sensitivity were uttered by academic as well as priestly authorities. ‘We respect each other’s religious beliefs,’ wrote Syed Shahabuddin, who led the campaign to ban The Satanic Verses in India. ‘We do not intentionally outrage the religious feelings of others or insult their religion or ridicule the personalities to whom we are emotionally attached or mock our religious susceptibility.’ The chief rabbi of England, Immanuel Jakobovits, emphatically concurred: it was wrong to ‘tolerate a form of denigration and ridicule which can only breed resentment’. In an essay on ‘Religious Anger and Minority Rights’, Tariq Modood, the director of Bristol University’s Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, wrote that ‘the group which feels hurt is the ultimate arbiter of whether a hurt has taken place.’ On this view, to experience the feeling is to suffer the injury.
Rushdie’s defenders were on solid ground when they invoked his right to publish a book that could elicit a plausible charge of blasphemy. Christopher Hitchens spoke early and courageously on those lines. ‘Behind the use of bleating words like “offensive”,’ he wrote in his Nation column on 13 March 1989, ‘one can sense abject trahison: the ecumenicism of the philistines’; as for conciliation or compromise, ‘it would be suicidal to suppose that any concession made to the superstitious will ever be the last.’ But the odd appearance of the word ‘philistine’, in such a strictly political context turned the argument from a libertarian defence of publication to an aesthetic defence of the contents of the book – a sign of things to come. On the cable network C-Span, on 21 February 1989, Hitchens broadened his criticism:
"Tomorrow, shopping malls of the United States, which contain now one third of the book outlets in this country, will, of their own volition, not sell that book, because they are scared of a foreign despot … To be scared of a crazy foreign tyrant in this way is a really serious challenge to what we think of as the safe assumption of free speech and free inquiry, free expression and the necessity to defend it."
Destruction of subpoenaed evidence, at the request of Hillary's flunkies. A crime that makes Nixon's cover-ups seem trivial. But never mind, it was just about yoga classes - but it doesn't look like Hillary does yoga with her weight and her inability to climb stairs.
Is
Trump the Only Republican Who Can Handle the Media Onslaught? - See
more at:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/onslaught-trump-media#sthash.2PvEMs0W.dpuf
I hope some lefties are reading us because they need to know how many of us non-lefty people think and feel. Case in point, "Alt-Right." First off, there is no Alt-Right. However, there are lots of people fed up with the recent waves of Lefty insanity which we take the trouble to post here because the MSM refuses to.
In other words, the non-existent Alt-Right is a creation of a wacko left fringe which has left truth and reality far behind.
...it remains an advantage for the G.O.P., and a liability for the Democratic Party, that the new cultural orthodoxy is sufficiently stifling to leave many Americans looking to the voting booth as a way to register dissent.
Immigration and outsourcing are huge issues for Trump—the cornerstone of his campaign—but they’re not the only ones. It’s also about culture. It’s about the soul-bludgeoning insanity of egalitotalitarianism run amok, about the witch hunts and moral panics and PC tattletales. It’s about the blatant white-bashing and male-bashing and straight-bashing that masquerade as “progress” but merely serve to sow division. Too many people have been politely silent about this relentless PSYOP campaign of cultural demoralization to the point where they’re biting their lips bloody.
Maybe it should be the economy, stupid, but a lot of it is culture wars. The culture radicals and cultural Marxists have won the battles, it seems, so they are pushing their advantages to the point of utter, joke-worthy irrationality. But the joke could lose you your job.
The Hermeneutics of the Expensive Watch
Pic: Bragging pal sent photo of his tomato vine in California growing onto his roof. I bet he waters it illegally...
Former Navy SEAL commanders explain why they still wake up before dawn every day — 
I think the Likeability Factor is overrated in American national politics. It matters more in more local politics where dedicated schmoozers are the usual fare. However, I would rather have a beer with Donald than with Hillary. 
Pic is from Mrs. BD. She is doing a project there this week, in Mwaukee. Interesting to me that she would never take photos, ever. Felt they interfered with direct experience. Since her iPhone, she takes snaps all the time. 
Fireplace at a place I am quite fond of 
Toddler survives