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.
It was a New Yorky weekend for us - Brooklyn Sat night, Manhattan Sunday afternoon to join the climate march to attend the opening of the Met Museum's From Assyria to Iberia show. The climate parade did snarl up midtown traffic.
I am convinced there is nothing they would enjoy more than to be targets of America. It elevates them. It's a booby trap, and beheadings are the bait. You can find as many justifications for attacking Iran, Nigeria, North Korea, or Saudi Arabia for that matter. The Jihad of the True Believers will never end, at least in our lifetimes. They are convinced they are doing God's work and do not mind dying for that. It's been going on for 1500 years.
As for borders in the ME, they are all bogus anyway. The concept of the nation-state is not really in their lexicon. Caliphate is - Kingdom of Allah on earth, won by arms if not by faith. It's a culture.
Related, the concept of the nation-state is relatively recent, and possibly obsolete: Did Industry Cause Nations?
The latest culinary fad: famine food - Middle-class foodies are paying a fortune to eat what peasants once lived on.
How Sugar Daddies Are Financing College Education - The popular website Seeking Arrangement sets up "mutually
beneficial relationships" between wealthy older men and young female
students.
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.
Thousands March in New York to End Industrialized Civilization
Johns Hopkins study: Huge gulf between D.C. political class and the rest of America
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