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.
Snow on the way. I blame global warmening. Stock up on beer, canned goods, and batteries - and keep your TV or radio turned on for the latest catastrophizing. Sheesh.
Oxford Union backs motion to remove Cecil Rhodes statue - Students narrowly back Rhodes Must Fall campaign despite hearing that next step would be to tear down statues of Winston Churchill and anyone else with a blemished historical record
In the US, the Federal state is The Borg, gobbling up the rights and responsibilities of state and local government. At the dawn of the First World War, it was possible for an American to have no interaction with the national government, outside of the Post Office. His government was the town, village or city. Even his state government was alien to him. Today, it is impossible to live as an American without rubbing against the rasp of national government.
These are not your grandfather's Marxists'. These are not the deadly, self-sacrificing, true believers of Lenin's time. Joe Biden is not Leon Trotsky, Hillary Clinton is not Rosa Luxemburg. Time has taken its toll on their movement. It has evolved into a stinking mélange of government corruption and crony capitalism and self-interest. Their hatred of traditional America is unabated but they are old and soft and have not had a new idea in fifty years. Their entire political base is on the take and is bought and paid for with our money. Tenured, overweight, overaged, academic leftovers from the 60's and 70's. Taxpayer funded race hustlers, the professional grievance industry, and all the other assorted thugs, criminals and perverts we see on TV every night. The beer drinkers and pot smokers sitting home living on your back. The young inmates of our university system, a bunch of overeducated, overindulged, overprotected, overmedicated punks who will vanish like the morning fog at the first drop of sweat or first pang of fear. Self-aggrandizing celebrity and media air heads who equate a tight ass with intellect.
Trump is not tapping into anger. He’s tapping into the sensibility of the great majority. The people look up and see an endless parade of frivolous parasites who defend nothing but their own prerogatives at the expense of everyone else. What’s the point of voting for one party or the other when both sides are colluding against your interests? Why do we have these parties?
The GOP electorate doesn’t trust the establishment on spending. It doesn’t trust it on immigration. It doesn’t trust it on, well, much of anything. And Jeb is the face of that establishment.
They include "unwanted advances" as harassment. How is a fellow to know if it's unwanted, in advance? In workplaces with young women, romance is always in the air.
I should have known better from my experience in hospital that when it comes to the forms of self-evident stupidity and self-destruction, man’s inventiveness is infinite.
I could not understand how the entire German mass media, on nominal “right” and “left” alike, and I assume with little cross-consultation, agreed to shut the story down as if it had not happened; consciously lying to report that there were “no incidents” that night. And in the same Germany whose motto, seventy years ago, was, “I did not know.”
Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms,” bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.
2015 is the year when I learned to hate my telephone. The FCC's willful neglect of the do not call list has resulted in a large number of commercial calls on top of the charitable and political calls that swamp my line.
I watch caller ID closely and no longer answer calls with numbers I do not recognize, figuring that, if they are friends, they will leave a message on the answering machine and I can pick up, or return the call.
This no longer is sufficient. I have therefore purchased a CPR Call Blocker through Amazon, and it allows me to blacklist frequent political and other calls. It has been very satisfactory to hear yet another call from Newt Gingrich be shut down after the first ring! It shows the most recent call, and then you push the big red octagonal button that says "BLOCK NOW" and that is that!.
Even this device does not help with the anonymous calls with blocked caller ID, but it turns out the phone company can block anonymous calls and this also seems to have worked very well!
It's time for another Maggie's request of our readers.
We want readers. We welcome commenters too, regardless of points of view. We don't only do politics - we do a perspective on Life in America.
We are a good site for international readers too, to get some idea about what ordinary, every-day, middlebrow Americans are up to and thinking about. We are interested in almost everything.
Readership growth is our only reward here, but that grows mainly by word of mouth (which includes others linking to us).
If you wish to do us a favor, let your (blog) readers, friends, colleagues, relatives, neighbors, etc. know about our eclectic website. It might be an uplifting, interesting addition to their days. Cheaper than a newspaper and we have very few ads.
Regarding comments - we do not require your emails, and you can use a fake name. Just follow the Three Unwritten Rules for Commenters: