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.
Cheery photo stolen from Pirate. I figger it's ok to steal from a Pirate. Technically, this is an abuse of the flag but we'll give them a pass for being so cute.
So claims the WaPo. It made me laugh because this is America's #1 barbecue weekend and only quite peculiar people are not grilling meat.
A few thoughts.
If cows and sheep and goats are killing the planet, what about all of the wild animals that roamed the globe before domestication? Should we kill all the farting deer, caribou, bison, wild pigs and Wildebeests?
Why do they always talk about Red Meat? What's so specially bad about it compared to pork or chicken? Not a thing, as far as I know. That old beef about red meat's health badness has long been disproven.
And how bad can red meat be, given that the human body is made of it? Are the cannibals worried?
Would Robert Reich be directing that warning to all new immigrants, or to the children and grandchildren of immigrants, who left everything behind to come to this lovely place for freedom and opportunity?
Lynch doesn't want her indicted. She doesn't want to be indicted. Bill Clinton doesn't want her to be indicted. The idea that rank partisans like this are going to let some process play out with no influence on it whatsoever and run the risk that somebody might actually indict Hillary Clinton, they're not gonna let that happen. That's not who these people are. And yet look at all the people who are holding all this hope out, thinking this might be the one. They say, "She is so guilty, they can't hide this. She's so guilty, they can't cover this up. This is so bad." What do you mean, they can't cover it up, they can't ignore it? They can do all of that, and they will. It's who they are.
Lynch’s plan to “remove herself” and “accept the FBI decision” over Clinton’s emails is probably a smokescreen
Anglo-American conservatism has never been a single thing. That was the whole point about conservatism, beginning with the British Glorious Revolution of 1699, which helped to define English rights and liberties against a power-grabbing royal house.
This is the drama we just saw play out again in Europe when the Brits revolted against the absurd new Juncker Class, trying to exert Franco-German power over Britain. That Sovietized political machine is not going to give up its drive to dictate the size of cherry tomatoes in Scotland: That is its only mission in life. Without those forty thousand regulations from Brussels, the Euro Soviets would have no function at all.
They are parasites. They do not produce anything useful, anymore than the Soviet Apparat did before the crumbling of the State. Vladimir Putin just pointed out the eerie similarities between the end of Soviet dominance and the end of the EU. That similarity is not an accident. It represents the eternal fight between self-serving power freaks and ordinary people trying to live their lives.
Ordinary Europe has wandered into the ancient trap of deceptive political con artists talking people into giving up their rights and powers. Obama has tried to do the same thing to us.
“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.
Interesting topic. It usually only comes up when an establishment consistently deviates far from the majority. In the case of the UK, the politics are special: Cameron was elected in part by promising a referendum on EU membership. So their national election was, in effect, a referendum on a referendum. It seems to me that, if national sovereignty can not be held to a referendum of the citizens, then nothing can be presented to the direct will of the citizens.
Lyme, CT is a quaint little village, perfectly located on the Connecticut River but close to Long Island Sound. I love this 1789 farmhouse and its easily-manageable 6 acres. It's for sale. I want it. Good for boats and birds and plenty of hunting nearby. Perfect.
And, with our friends, church, kids, and complex lives, I would never have time to get there. A shame we can't have everything we like. Even billionaires can't, because time can not be purchased and it is a rare item.
This is not a vote against Europeans or even against Europe, nor will it divide the U.K. as the ungracious Remainers are saying. It is a vote for Britain to be governed by the British and to co-operate closely and fairly with the European countries. It is not really a vote to leave, but a vote to renegotiate for the next two years. Gove and Johnson are broad-minded, fair-minded modern Thatcherites, and they will strike the right balance between defence of British domestic interests and retention of good relations with the European powers. Prime minister Edward Heath threw Britain’s lot in with Europe, and put the Commonwealth over the side. Thatcher bet on the special relationship with the U.S., and she and Ronald Reagan were the principal victors in the Cold War, but that relationship couldn’t survive the last two American presidents. Britain has come full circle.
Sessions on Brexit: "The interests of powerful international corporations, media, special interests, and leftist international forces are not coterminous with those of our people.
Britain is leaving the European Union. But that reality doesn't begin to tell the story of the larger historical forces at work that are reshaping global politics, the global economy, and global culture and have been for much of the last decade...
When has that approach ever worked in the world? Now, the US like Europe offers government benefits to new (including illegal) immigrants. Is that a good idea? It has never been tried in the US in the past, and immigrants did very well over time.
From 1925 to 1965 the US permitted essentially no immigration. The people had decided, and the politicians had agreed, that we had enough of them. The country thrived.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
If the government secretly can put an American's name on a secret list and, as a result, his liberty is lost, then there are no freedoms—just government-granted privileges. And if it can do this to the natural rights to travel and self-defense, can other fundamental rights be far behind?
Tomorrow is your first chance in recent history to repel German tyranny without needing an army to do it. Vote for independence, sovereignty, self-determination: Vote "Leave"!
It's your last chance. You can always rejoin if you want to.
Cheery photo stolen
Photo: If you know what that is, you are old 
Photo: If you know what that is called, you're old 
The 
If you are from New Jersey, do you term this food-like product 
Bluegrass Legend