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.
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?
So here’s my plea, Mr. President: Make it easier for others to keep the faith. You’ll accomplish much more and many more Americans will be proud to stand with you.
Around 25% of medicare and medicaid spending has to do with complications related to overweight-connected diabetes. That is huge but likely underestimates overweight costs because arthritis, breast cancer, heart disease, and many other problems are also related to or caused by being overweight. For that, and related interesting medical cost info, A Provocative Health Care Proposal
The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Sabotage! It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot.
The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed. The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.
"His testimony last week before the Senate was viewed by many as so bizarre, so self-indulgent, so self-righteous, that that many people believed he had really lost it and could no longer effectively function as the leader of the FBI and they were absolutely correct."
When I went to college, I was on the far left. Those views began to change, in part because taking an economics course shifted my paradigm from small-community intuition to thinking about a complex society in more systemic terms. I am not sure that today’s young leftists will undergo a similar transition.
Photo is the famous Magnolia Bakery, where we bought organic, naturally-sweetened gluten-free incredibly-delicious cupcakes for the whole hiking crew yesterday afternoon
Highly effective. It never fails for weight loss, except for the bosses who always seem to be fat.
Humans will work hard for themselves, their families, and their friends. Somewhat less for their tribe. Further out, not so much. It's human nature. Warfare is in a different category entirely.
None of us, no voter or official or institution, has yet to fully assimilate the fact that Donald Trump is president, that this unpopular and unpredictable man holds what has become the primary office of our constitutional system. He certainly doesn't make our jobs any easier: It is hard to read or watch his recent interviews without holding one's head in one's hands. And yet there he is. His daily presence is an accusation, a rebuke, an admonishment, a reminder that the country we thought we lived in might not have actually existed. The shocks of deindustrialization and the financial crisis, of unchecked immigration, multiculturalism, and the transgender revolution, of digital and social media, of inconclusive decades-long wars, of rampant heroin addiction seem to have made large parts of the country unrecognizable to those of us living in coastal cities and their affluent suburbs. Is our country really this divided, our politics this polarized, and our culture this degraded? Was 2016 not a fluke but a warning? What of?
No one wants to answer that last question; no one knows the answer.
Continetti is trying to make too much out of it. Not enough people liked or trusted Hillary. Biden could have won and he is loony too.
If you were a visitor from a distant solar system come to our nation or even a time traveler from our own nineteenth century, I submit you would be perplexed. This Trump person (being?) doesn't seem to be all that different from many leaders who have come before him. I mean, what has he done exactly? Enforced some immigration laws that were enacted by the Congress over several administrations? Tried to fix a mediocre healthcare plan with another plan that may or may not be as mediocre? Called for a tax reduction similar to those enacted by previous Republican and Democratic administrations? Cut back on some regulations that became overly burdensome? Called for a temporary halt to immigration from a half-dozen countries his predecessor had already cited as dangerous hotbeds of terrorism? Shot off a few dozen cruise missiles at the airfield of a dictator who was gassing his own people, but didn't harm a single person in the process?
“I thought I was a Tahitian Eskimo Mexican until I sent in my DNA test kit, and boy was I flummoxed when the results came back! I’m really Croatian with a mix of sub-Saharan! I guess I’ll be turning in my furry hat!”
In Rural Alaska,
Photo is the famous Magnolia Bakery, where we bought 
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Just a few links this morning - thanks a lot United Airlines. Do you guys have any flights without 6-hour delays?