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.
Steven Hayward at Powerline blog discussed the Finnis Connection of nominated Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch. Judge Gorsuch took time off from his former law practice to earn a PhD at Oxford under John Finnis. Finnis is noted for his book about how natural law is central to jurispridence. This learning by Gorsuch may portend a renewed attention to the 9th Amendment to our Constitition, a key part of our Bill Of Rights all but ignored since the 1930s. The concept of natural rights reserved to the people is the core of this Amendment, and Gorsuch's learning in this concept may resurrect respect for our inalienable rights, as the Declaration of Independence phrased it.
I'm glad to see this potential, as I wrote about the 9th Amendment here in 2012:
Ancient Israel's National Anthem - The great song marking the Israelites’ safe crossing of the Sea of Reeds is the Hebrew Bible’s only full-length poem recited collectively by the people as a whole. What is it really about?
From the standpoint of the State, if you are not producing tax dollars on their tax farm then you are a liability and a burden. In my view, government involvement with, and control over, important personal things like education and medical care is a dangerous road.
I occasionally write about food superstitions and various peoples' clinging to their various notions of "healthy food." It is all cultural, of course. In America, we have the food obsessionals and the indifferent gourmands, but most are overweight and all will die. Contra most religions (including the Christian Mass), there is no food magic or magic food. Exceptions to that statement might be foie gras and ice cream.
The act of ingestion is embroidered with so much cultural meaning that, for most people, its roots in spare, brutal survival are entirely hidden. Even for people in extreme poverty, for whom survival is a more immediate concern, the cultural meanings of food remain critical. Wealthy or poor, we eat to celebrate, we eat to mourn, we eat because it’s mealtime, we eat as a way to bond with others, we eat for entertainment and pleasure. It is not a coincidence that the survival function of food is buried beneath all of this—who wants to think about staving off death each time they tuck into a bowl of cereal? Forgetting about death is the entire point of food culture.
When it comes to food, Becker said that humans “quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment,” and that the desire for more life—not just delaying death today, but clearing the bar of mortality entirely—grew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object that might achieve a sort of immorality. Diet culture and its variations, such as clean eating, are cultural structures we have built to attempt to transcend our animality.
Sanders is ignorant about real life. New businesses do not make money. They hope to. Reminds me of Hillary's famous "We can't worry about every undercapitalized business in America."
The American Climbing the Ranks of ISIS - John Georgelas was a military brat, a drug enthusiast, a precocious underachiever born in Texas. Now he is a prominent figure within the Islamic State. Here’s the story of his long and troubling journey.
Is The Donald half-nuts? I sort-of think so. It's why he was elected. Overturn tables, rattle cages, slash and burn, etc.
I think I figgered it all out. His mom, Mary Ann Macleod, was a penniless immigrant from the Isle of Lewis, outside Stornaway. Lots of wild and crazy Clan Macleods up there - or used to be before most of them sensibly emigrated to America where the living is easy.
Trump's mom worked as domestic help in NYC before marrying Fred Trump, the real estate developer of German extraction.
As I understand it, the Hebrides islanders are like high-octane Highlanders. They had to be, to fight to survive the elements, the sea, the Danes, rival clans, and the Brits. Women as tough and stubborn as the men. A semi-civilized, fighting, reckless, ignorant, defiant breed.
Conan the Barbarian was modeled after highland Celtic warriors. Barbarians. America was fed up with its elite overlords who always knew better than us, the great unwashed.
Parsi’s cynical histrionics, like the incessant cries over a nonexistent “Muslim ban,” are symptoms of a larger problem with the left’s reaction to Donald Trump, who indeed poses a genuine menace to both this country and the world. Consider: In the months following his upset presidential victory late last year, three white men screaming Trump’s name assaulted a young Muslim woman on the Manhattan 6 train and tried to rip off her hijab, a black church in Mississippi was firebombed with “Vote Trump” spray-painted on its brick wall, a Jewish family fled Lancaster County in Pennsylvania after receiving threats for exempting their child from an elementary school Christmas pageant, and just last week an elderly Iraqi woman died awaiting medical treatment because she was barred from entering the United States due to Trump’s executive order.
Fortunately, none of these things actually happened...
What if time has passed the Left by? What if its future is the past? The frightening question must be faced. One solution says Harris, is for the Left to completely rearchitecture itself, starting with an abanonment of the proletariat by accepting that traditional work no longer exists. Having left the greasy workplace it should become instead a lifestyle party.
... I was bemused as I thought back to those halcyon male chauvinist days of the 1960’s and 70’s when I, along with virtually all American males, were berated because, per the feminists, we supposedly only viewed women as the sum of their bodily parts. It now appears, based on the words of that pillar of intellectual prowess Ashley Judd and others, that women are, in fact, the sum of their bodily parts. By the way ladies, congratulations: you have, in public, far exceeded whatever you think the banter regarding women is in the privacy of male locker rooms. So now what is the sequel to grab attention, as so much time remains in the Trump presidency? There aren’t many options remaining beyond an endless cavalcade of public nudity as these so-called feminist groups have pretty much plumbed the depths of verbal depravity. But the nation will be watching and waiting for the curtain to rise on the next act of the Feminist Follies.
A problem is that many of these people seem to lack the physical and personality charms which appeal to men, so I suspect that nudity is not a good political tactic. If men want to connect with harsh, cranky, or manly women who lack feminine charm, they can just link up with guys and get the real deal. Nobody cares nowadays.
Photo is the Maggie's Farm professional Tractor Traction Tester. Equal wages.
While I voted for Trump, I always suspected that he was a closet NY lefty. He is not. He is neither lefty nor righty, but a common-sense pragmatist with big balls and, while he acts thin-skinned, in many ways he is fearless and just doesn't care. Interesting character, for whom a political career is only secondary.
That was quite a game last night, wasn't it? Commenter at Gateway:
The Falcons plan to file a lawsuit saying the Patriots may have had the highest score but Atlanta should be declared the winner since they rushed for the most yards.
I don't follow pro football, so it doesn't mean much to me. It does seem like a decent excuse for a cheery mid-winter party, though. Just spare me the revolting chips and guacamole.
Serious football fans seem not to like Superbowl parties. My father-in-law would never attend one. Too much noise and distraction. When it comes to football, he likes to focus like a laser beam, in solitude.
So unlikely did the election of Donald Trump seem to Washington and its denizens that the reality of it still has not sunk in. All of the city’s worst traits — the self-regard, the group think, the obsessions with trivia, the worship of credentials, the virtue signaling, the imperiousness, the ignorance of perspectives and people from outside major metropolitan centers and college towns — not only persist. They have been magnified with Trump’s arrival. There is so much negative energy coursing through the city that circuits are overloaded.
He has very little time to normalize things, but he is a Honey Badger for sure.
I think the "Hard Left," with which many ordinary Dems have now allied themselves, will discredit their party and their even their reasonable arguments.
Conspiring to engage in political violence aimed at depriving others of their civil rights, such as freedom of speech and assembly, is a federal crime. I hope that the administration will investigate it as thoroughly as the Obama Administration would have investigated a similar violent campaign conducted by the right — had such a campaign ever existed.
“Although we object strenuously to Yiannopoulos’s views — he advocates white supremacy, transphobia and misogyny — it is rather his harmful conduct to which we call attention in asking for the cancellation of this event.”
There are plenty of Republicans who support Trump and a surprising number of people in the bureaucracy who know reform is long overdue. Some of the harshest critiques of the state you will hear come from people in the system. There’s also the fact that Trump is proving to be an exceptional political athlete. He has a knack for baiting the media in order to gain public support for his positions. No person has moved the Overton Window further to the right than Trump has done in my lifetime. It truly is amazing.
Even so, the next year will be about the Cloud Party conspiring to undermine the Trump administration, while Trump figures out how to work around the system to undermine the system. His immigration order is a foreshadow of what is to come. Instead of looking for compromise, Team Trump will go big in order to trigger the political class and their media to overreact. This tends to turn off the public and thus turn the Cloud Party assets into liabilities, as we are seeing with these ridiculous protests.
At some point, the Cloud People will shift gears, but for now, the game will be Trump picking fights and the establishment going bonkers.This gives Trump cover to do some important stuff, like we see with the H1B executive order. While the Cloud People are wailing about the so-called Muslim ban, they did not have time to notice the order to shake up the visa program Silicon Valley uses to screw its employees. This sort of cat and mouse game is how an insurgent party must use its speed and agility to overcome the establishment’s size.
Pic is Gorsuch with Scalia in Colorado. Gorsuch is a gentle, warm, refined outdoorsman, a Christian, with a crushing resume. He is 49 years old. A remarkable individual, superstar intellectual. We are fortunate that he is willing to do this job.
My poker night is this Friday, and I look forward to it each month. 50 people, food, libations, conversation and competition. There are afew heated moments. Not many, mostly good fun and the chance to take your friends' and neighbors' money. I have more or less broken even in this game. I keep pretty good records. We play a cash game for an hour, then a tournament, followed by cash games as people are bounced.
It's a game of incomplete information. Computers are good at games that have lots of available information, not games lacking in it. But poker often has more information available than we care to admit. Betting trends are like prices. They give signals. Being able to sort through the signals and recognize where value lies is a skill. But humans also think and behave in linear ways. If you have a non-random betting approach, a computer should be able to sniff it out.
A computer beating a human at Texas Hold 'em, even a limited table such as this, is quite a feat. The fact I happen to know the inventor of the computer makes it doubly interesting for me. He presented some of his yield optimization techniques to our team several times. I have suggested to our team we bring him back in.
Toons on top via Orwellian Happenings: Twitter Censors Trump,
A reason to 
Gwynnie's photo from yesterday. Buried in snow today 
Is The Donald half-nuts? I sort-of think so. It's why he was elected. Overturn tables, rattle cages, slash and burn, etc.
An Eagle
From 
Study: 
Today's real headline: 
Is Groundhog Day one of your top ten favorites? In New England, we call them 
