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.
Jonathan Haidt on "the Coddling of the American Mind" and How We Should Address It. Students rather than deans are calling for less speech and expression. That should worry us all.
One of the reasons that the costs of medical care services in the US have increased more than twice as much as general consumer prices since 1998 is that a large and increasing share of medical costs are paid by third parties (private health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Veterans Affairs, etc.) and only a small and shrinking percentage of health care costs are paid out-of-pocket by consumers.
From time to time I'm called simple minded. I take it as a compliment and thank my accuser for noticing. Few things are as complicated as they're made out to be. Examples: before ObamaCare there was no ObamaCare. Duh. It made things worse. Repeal it and make things better instantly.
Nullify and denounce every federal, state and municipal gun control act, law and regulation ever passed, including the commerce clause stuff. The Constitution prohibits government from interfering, in any way, with our right to keep and bear arms. So stop doing it.
And illegal aliens. They have to go. It's the law. Don't like it? Change the law. Until then it's the will of the people, duly enacted. Either enforce it or stop saying 'representative democracy' and 'rule of law'. => Insert "it's not that simple" and pictures of baby seals here <=.
And why is it a routine winter snowstorm can cross the whole country unremarked until it reaches the east coast, then it becomes a blizzard emergency with a name and 'round-the-clock national breaking news?
List is far too short. Wait - "short" is disparaging to short people. Why do people look down on short people and look up to tall people? We should get rid of up and down also.
I'd like to suggest a resistance is already underway in America, and has been for quite some time now. The resistance is not to "anyone who isn't sufficiently leftist" as guys like Moore say. Its people sick of the system and demanding things be different. For the most part, Americans want to be left alone, and they want their representatives to listen to what they say. Not what lobbyists say, not what fat cats say, not what big money says, not what the news media and the entertainment community says, but what they want.
And the resistance is not to one policy group or another per se, but rather to the arrogance, dismissive attitude, condescension, and contempt they feel from their government. Americans are increasingly fed up with the crap they're being handed almost daily and want real change.
It is a government sickness. It is evil. Even those road cameras are evil. America does not deserve a Big Brother surveillance state. The CIA is legally prohibited from surveillance inside the United States.
We were chatting with a couple of other people about this and that when someone she knew from the Times joined in. I then overheard him explain to her that she had to be careful about what she posted on Facebook, Twitter, etc., because anything too explicitly anti-Trump could be used against her when that glorious day came and "they" -- the conventional fraternity of groupthink scribblers -- finally took down that horrible, despicable man.
"We've got dozens of people working on it all the time," he explained, adding that it was only a matter of time before they got the goods on Trump and destroyed him.
There in a nutshell, I thought, is the existential imperative that has been so gloriously productive of fake news and its exacerbated allotrope, first delineated by Donald Trump in his famous media-bashing presser on February 16, "very fake news."
Speaking of Obamacare, it seems increasingly clear that it has moved the Overton Window on health care policy. You are not allowed to substitute individual responsibility for Obamacare. Instead, you must come up with a “better” system. The ground rules for any new health care system now state that responsibility for your ability to obtain health insurance ultimately rests with the Federal government.
Obamacare did create a new entitlement expectation.
- you to have to wait 72 hrs after you go out and buy a woman to have your background investigation completed - women to be banned from entering school and college campuses? - women to be banned from any establishment selling alcohol? - women to be banned from polling places on election days - women to be banned from any official government group meetings? - all women to be banned from all airports? - you to have to pay a fee to the state before you can carry a woman on your person? - some women to be banned outright simply because they look too scary? - all women to be locked up at all times that they are not in use?
Hmmmm. And does she think that all guys should have more than one?
The proof of this is the fact that the GOP has no plans ready for the 2017 legislative session. They have been talking for years about ObamaCare and now we know they never planned to do anything. The same is true of taxes, which is the one thing Republicans like doing. They have no plans for anything, not even something symbolic. They not only have no plans, they are still staggering around in shock, not sure what they should be doing. Suddenly nothing makes sense to the people inside the bubble and they are scared.
...
in a world where the scrupulous following of protocol is essential to maintaining the status quo, a break down in the rules puts everyone at risk. That seems to be Trump’s game here with the spying charges. The establishment has tossed out the rules in their effort to attack him, so he is threatening to further bust up the system, which works to his favor and to their disadvantage. it’s a foolish game the Left has decided to play as they have much more to lose in a world without rules.
There’s another aspect to this. Trump has fewer skeletons in his closet than any president in generations. In Washington, that makes him a very dangerous man.
Your current group of students have dishonored your elite, bucolic school. If police are not called in, and kids are not expelled, the school's reputation and image will suffer for years no matter how excellent the faculty. Forget the college rules of conduct because many laws were broken.
If this is a typical administration, nothing will happen unless the Board and the alums put pressure on a seemingly spineless, castrated administration. Typical administrators.
It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do. Like everything else in America, no doubt much has changed at the now-trendy college, nestled in Vermont’s maple-clad mountains, in four decades. Back in the 1970s, the Arab-launched oil crisis forced school officials to choose between shutting off the electricity to the library or to the school’s private ski lift. After a student referendum, the library went dark.
... I remember two salient traits of the majority of students in those days. One was their extraordinary intellectual laziness and lack of curiosity, especially infuriating because so many were such intelligent kids. The other was their immense privilege. Shiny new BMWs filled the student parking lot, each fitted with racks holding the most technologically advanced skis for whizzing down the slopes. There were battered Volvos, too. They belonged to us teachers.
Rush is right. It is a remarkable and disturbing situation, and the MSM is fully on board. Time for the trumpists to bring a machine gun to the gunfight.
...news merged Thursday that Obama Administration officials ran a government intel operation on the Trump campaign. The New York Times reports that political appointees signed off on surveillance of “associates” of the Trump campaign, though “the nature of these contacts remains unknown.” The officials then spread this raw intelligence throughout the government and to foreign counterparts, ensuring they’d be widely read and supposedly to prevent their Trump successors from covering up the truth.
We are in an entirely new age. When drivers listen to local or national talk radio, they assume that the host, often without a BA, is more informed, astute, and reliable than bylines from the echo chamber of Columbia journalism MAs.
DEM RED FACES... ALL OF THEIR MEETINGS WITH RUSSIAN AMBASSADOR... PHOTO CONTRADICTS PELOSI STATEMENT... History of Exchanging Gifts... RUSSIAN FM CALLS SESSIONS UPROAR A REPLAY OF MCCARTHYISM... STUDY: 7X More Coverage Than Holder Contempt... Basic Formula For Every 'Shocking Revelation'... FLASHBACK: Valerie Jarrett's Daughter Hired At CNN To Cover Trump DOJ... Prosecutor Obama promoted would oversee probes...
Dems and allies have declared all-out warfare. Let's see how tough the trumpists are, because they have few insider allies. Lots of outsider allies, though.
NYC ‘mega-pastor’ Tim Keller 
Here's What Happens to Your Brain 
Toon via Lucianne 
Too Much Emotional Intelligence
Image via 
Stuck Inside of Stockholm 
I guess that means...
11 
WHY PEOPLE