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.
So what we have now in the middle east is a replay of the bloody religious wars that once traumatized the West when Protestants accused Catholics of being idolatrous heretics and the latter returned the favor by putting Protestants to the stakes and the racks. In the present instance, the real war being waged by ISIS is not against the liberties which pertain on the streets of New York City, but in Leupp’s words, “against the Shiites, Christians, Yezidis, secularists, and others it sees as unbelievers and as stooges of the west. But its primary target is the Shiites”.
Photo is another from Zambia - a Great Egret. Basically the same bird in North America, which we used to term American Egret.
Remembrance of Trumpets Past -Rosh Hashanah as described in the Torah looks very different from the Rosh Hashanah we know today. What happened, and what exactly are Jews celebrating?
For the Western political observer, Russia judged by common metrics always seems on the verge of being a spent force. As Joseph Conrad reminds us, Russia never seems to vanish from the map, and remains a font of imperialism and war.
Photo: A pal and his wife just returned from two weeks in Zambia. I had to wiki Zambia. They loved the trip. He promises some photos, but sent me just one thus far: A Lilac-Breasted Roller
Obama’s fecklessness is so unique that our adversaries and enemies surely realize they will never face a weaker president. They must assume the next commander in chief will take a more muscular approach to America’s interests and be more determined to forge alliances than the estranged man who occupies the Oval Office now.
Good grief. Well, I guess a lot of politics in democracies is about scaring the morons and bribing the others. Hey, conservatives want to take away birth control from women so they can't have fun, take away Social Security, starve the poor to death, shoot all the brown people, send immigrants to the gas chamber, and then burn up the planet afterwards. Who would vote for that in good conscience?
I'd like to see the Fed abolished. I guess I'd also like to see every grandiose imperial-Roman-looking building in DC knocked down and replaced by ordinary humble office buildings.The grandiosity of DC, the silly memorials to dead politicians, the lines of limos and tinted-window black Suburbans etc., all disgust me.It's not American and it does not represent the American spirit: quite the opposite.
Iraq? We should have left it to Saddam. He understood that craphole same as Quaddaffi did his: government terrorism works better than random, volunteer terrorism. All governments use fear, to varying degrees of barbarity. If some Americans want to bomb bad people, how about bombing the Castros out of Cuba? They have been "Death to America" for generations.
I want to visit Cuba, though, before Capitalism ruins it (and turns it into a new Miami). For the slumming and the cheap stuff and the incredibly beautiful women. Seriously though, for the fishing.
Paranoids, grievance-collectors, and excuse-seekers cannot be too alert to the microaggressions and micro- acts of disrespect which occur all day long on the oppressive, hostile American college campi. Microaggression is an epidemic oppression, and microaggressors must be brought to justice. I'd include the nanoaggressors too because they are the sneakiest.
Remember, micro may mean teeny-weeny or invisible, but so is Ebola.
... anyone who believes ISIS is a non-trivial threat to ordinary Americans at home, at work, or at play would be frightened of their shadows. Indeed, if the danger ISIS presents to the sovereignty and people of the United States satisfies a threshold to justify war, then we should not tarry in attacking Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, Cuba, the Mexican drug cartels, or otherwise. Moreover, even if we destroyed ISIS, the dynamics behind its creation would remain to create a new variety, just as ISIS has eclipsed Al Qaeda: namely, utterly dysfunctional and tyrannical Arab governments ruling over artificial nations whose boundaries were drawn by a handful of donnish European diplomats a century ago with ulterior motives.
All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa’ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies… So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.
It's a tar baby, Mr. President. There are no good guys. Let's just help protect the Kurds from genocide.
The MSM really does think of its consumers as children, minds of tabla
rasa to be molded into a leftwing worldview, objectivity and facts be
damned.
America is running out of jobs. It's time for a universal basic income. The politics of a guaranteed income get a lot easier when you acknowledge that the U.S. is no longer the land of opportunity
Nice. Like retirement, rockin' on the porch sippin beer and smokin legal weed.
The European Union is one of the noblest political experiments in human history, but its future looks increasingly precarious.
WTH? A noble empire, I guess? They have created a structure which is so elitist, so condescending, so remote, so clueless, and so all-powerful that I don't know why anybody would up with it put. Time for rebellion before the EU gets its own army. They should take lessons from what happened in the USA to the member states - crushed by the feds.
Because it doesn't have to work in competitive industries, the clerisy favors regulations, land-use rules and environmental restrictions that make things worse for businesses — especially the small "yeoman" businesses that traditionally sustained much of the middle class — thus further hollowing out the middle of the income distribution. But the lower classes, sustained by government handouts and by rhetoric from the clerisy, provide enough votes to keep the machine running, at least for a while.
Not all Muslims are terrorists but substantially all terrorists are Muslims and until people are permitted to say that without the hypocrisy and irony of being labeled dangerous themselves, we will not be safe.
The federal snack rules take effect this year for school districts across the country that participate in the federal free and reduced lunch program. They restrict snack foods sold at schools to those with at least 50 percent whole grain, with low sugar, fat and sodium content. Each snack must also come in under 200 calories, according to the news site.
Viking 'ring fortress' discovered in Denmark - Historians believe distinctive geometric fortresses may have been built by Sweyn Forkbeard as a military training camp from which to launch his invasion of England
First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed, noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories. Now they say there is a pause (or “hiatus”), but that it doesn’t after all invalidate their theories.
On domestic policy, liberals see history as a story of progress from tiny government to ever-larger government — though never stating exactly how far that movement should go.
The Most Expensive Train Station in the US The Wall Street Journal has a humdinger of a piece that beautifully illustrates why we can’t have nice things
Failure on the Home Front- Where is the domestic prosperity that the president’s global retreat was designed to enable?
Industrial Espionage and Cutthroat Competition 
Photo: A pal and his wife just returned from two weeks in Zambia. I had to wiki Zambia. They loved the trip. He promises some photos, but sent me just one thus far: A Lilac-Breasted Roller
Revisiting 
Warming update: Shocking’ 
Grouch: 
Search continues for mountain lion 
A book: