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.
Black guy is fed up with the Ferguson idiocy and criminality which tarnishes the image of black Americans (h/t Vanderleun and others). Devastatingly right, and the anti-Sharpton, anti-race-pimp.
Why Do Most Jews Stay with Obama? When will American Jews finally realize that the endgame of Obama’s "Progressive" dream will be their nightmare?
The GOP Can Attract Young Black Voters—And Already Has - One in five black men under age 30 voted for Romney; youngest 'millennials' lean even more conservative.
Rising to the Authoritarian Challengeby Daniel Calingaert- U.S. policy on democracy support, especially
during the Obama administration, has been largely reactive. We seem to
be constantly playing (and mostly losing) a giant game of Whac-a-Mole.
Supporting democracy doesn't work out well. People frequently elect dictators.Democratic republics are best suited to places with the cultural and historical underpinnings to support it.
No one at all, other than me and my friends, many security guards, bodyguards, police, residents of Washington DC, Brinks drivers, rural folks, minimart workers, border guards, the secret service, responsible homeowners, pilots, etc etc. Plus some bad guys too.
You should be happy when the market tumbles - If you are continuing to add money to an investment fund, you're better off with lower stock prices in the short term.
The Obama-Paul paths in foreign policy are immoral in
undermining self-preservation and in tossing lives into avoidable horrors. Barack
Obama and Rand Paul’s foreign policies are similar in their appeal to tiredness
to argue for US non-involvement with the difficulties of the world. This
amounts to an existential defeatism to avoid the difficulties of being involved
in the world by avoiding the moral and physical exertion of US power even when
and where it could be effective. The extremism of this withdrawal endangers our
security by encouraging the spread of barbaric enemies sworn to our
destruction. Along the way, many millions of innocents are slaughtered or
brutally enslaved.
Both Barack Obama and Rand Paul are products of trends in
thinking about foreign policy that are imbued with erroneous lessons.
Barack Obama epitomizes those who at a young age adopted the
anti-Vietnam war mantras of the US evilly standing athwart the path of leftist
myths supporting communist expansionism thinly masked as harmless peasants
uprising against overlords. Although letting themselves be manipulated by hard
leftists at root they were selfishly trying to avoid the draft and continue
their peaceful existences in the bosom of US wealth and comforts. Some became dedicated
to foreign foes but most to leftist myths. They ignored that the incrementalism
that dribbled our military into the Vietnam war shucked the tried-and-true
military and political strategy of applying overwhelming force and allowed the
enemy to match and adapt. At every opportunity they created new myths of our
brutality and did all they could to blacken the reputation of US soldiers and
Marines, while ignoring the gross and purposeful policies and practices of
terror and slaughter practiced by the communists. Then, when at huge costs we
still succeeded by 1972 in eliminating the communist threat to the South and
building largely self-reliant Asian nations that were formerly at risk, the
dedicated anti-Vietnam apparatchiks led hysterics in canceling our pledges to
the South of arms, air support and logistics, which led to the loss of South Vietnam
in 1975.
Defense of this mindset requires belief that Vietnam was
unwinnable among Barack Obama and most of his foreign policy supporters. Adherence
to this critical error has led their attachment to opposition to every forceful
US foreign policy exertion since.
Rand Paul was raised in this defeatism as spread through the
media and academia by the anti-Vietnam cohorts of Obama. But Paul does not see
the US as evil. Instead his defeatism masks itself in an isolationism based on
a selfishness that believes it can ignore and be insulated from the threats
from abroad and believes that the application of US power is not worth the
bother. In these key respects it shares the existential defeatism among Obama
supporters. This attachment among Paulist isolationists similarly requires
ignoring US successes and concentration on less beneficial outcomes.
Due to the shortage of US military forces following the
demilitarization during the Clinton years, Bush did not have the time nor
support among those more interested in domestic policies to build our forces to
the levels needed to match our commitments. We withdrew from Afghanistan after
2002 and then haltingly re-committed US forces after allowing the taliban to
rebuild, we committed too few forces to Iraq until the temporary and winning “surge”
of 2008 and then too hastily and excessively withdrew our military thus wasting
movement toward a functioning and more representative government and allowing
Iran to expand its influence in Iraq.
The results in encouraged and enlarged hostile terrorists
across the Middle East, furthered by the Obama delusions about an “Arab Spring”
allowing extremists to wipe out those more moderate, are highly threatening to
the security of the US and the West. The terrorists have spread widely in the
territory and resources they command. They are vocal about and capable of
striking us at home.
The Obama administration and most of the media are being as
avoiding and negligent as before 9/11. The Rand Paul isolationists are allies
of this avoidance of self-preservation, while also avoiding the widespread
horrors suffered by millions in the region.
The very limited and very late small measures by the Obama
administration are unlinked to a strategy but mere thin window
dressing to hide its negligence and unlikely to bear positive results. Rand Paul, at least
avoids these lies but also avoids the paths that are necessary.
Hillary Clinton mouths empty words about being a bit more forceful than Obama. She tries to position
herself as wiser despite the contrary evidence of her uselessness as Secretary
of State. Given a choice between Hillary
Clinton and Rand Paul in 2016, the world will suffer more insecurities,
millions more suffer, allies defect, and the US and West will likely be
punished by more 9/11s or worse.
Both the Obama and the Paul
foreign policies share a common immorality of failure to protect ourselves nor
care about the fate of others. The big question is whether the American
electorate will endorse their immorality.
The E.U. is just the latest example of the powerful Enlightenment idea that human nature and civilization, through the expansion of scientific knowledge, are progressing away from the cruelty, oppression, and collective violence created by irrational superstition, religion, and ethnic or nationalist loyalties. Once liberated from this destructive ignorance, people can create political and social orders that will promote peace, social justice, political freedom, and prosperity. Most important will be what Immanuel Kant, in his influential 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” called a “federation of free states” that would form a “pacific alliance . . . different from a treaty of peace, . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars.” Kant predicated the possibility of such global peace on “the uniformity of the progress of the human mind.” A universal human nature progressively becoming more rational and possessing more knowledge about itself and the world can craft a global order that would lessen if not eliminate the evils that had afflicted the human race for all of its previous history.
Are there any limits to what is in America's interest, diplomatically or militarily? Leader of The Free World (not that there is much of that to lead). I do understand that in a globalized new world, everything affects everything else so everything directly or indirectly affects the US, but nasty and wicked things happen everywhere all the time, and always have since the Fall of Man.
Updated list of 29 – Actually 30 – excuses
for the 18 year ‘pause’ in global warming – ‘If you can’t explain the
‘pause’, you can’t explain the cause…’
The modern territorial state, as a post-imperial era expression of nationalist ideology in the West, does not so well fit the Arabs (and many other non-Western ethno-linguistic groups) whose history supplied none of the predicates.
Who could? The UN, the UK, Germany, France, the US, Israel, the Red Cross, the Red Crescent, Italy, the Saudis, Turkey, Quatar, Iran, Russia, Iraq, etc. - all could help easily, within hours. Who will step up today?
All they need is water, food, tents, shovels, and maybe some machine guns air-dropped to them prevent a Biblical-style genocide. Where is everybody? On vacation?
I see no reason for Americans to give a darn about Ukrainian politics. Putin may be a lowlife, but he is simply pursuing his national interests as he sees them, and that is fine with me. Trade wars are juvenile. It seems as if at least half of Ukrainians want to be affiliated with Russia. Who cares?
9-1-1 Dispatcher’s Insane Instructions To Woman Whose House Was Being Robbed: “Put Down The Gun”
What they’re teaching
in California is not history, but rather homosexual folklore, replete
with cartoonish villains, blameless victims, and courageous heroes
Why do we find more moral gratification in having good intentions than in producing good outcomes? Why do we accept mere symbols of being good—the Facebook photo with the orphan, the public diplomatic démarche, the battleship steaming toward the Oppressor—as evidence of good outcomes, or even as good outcomes in themselves?
It's called "moral narcissism" but some would term it "moral imperialism" or "cultural imperialism." Kipling had the last word on that topic.
Scotland has passed and is beginning to implement a law which assigns every child in Scotland from birth to age eighteen a “named person,” selected by the government, whose job it is to “promote, support, or safeguard the wellbeing” of the child. Parents will not have a choice about whether or not to accept the assignment of an outside government busybody to their children. Some proponents of the law claim that “Families are not required to accept advice” from the named person.
Pardon me if I consider that to be patently disingenuous...
When I read this, I wish he were back in the government. A quote:
If you look at the entire radar screen of things developing both domestically and internationally, we are plunging deep into a perfect storm of policy failure. The American Imperium is collapsing. There is blowback everywhere. The wreckage of prior policy mistakes from our interventionist foreign policy is coming home to roost. The Ukraine is one area at ground zero for that.
But second, monetary central planning is now reaching a dead-end. It is inflating the third financial bubble of the century and the Fed is now clueless as to how it will manage to unwind the massive balance sheet expansion it has been undertaking.
And third, the fiscal doomsday machine continues to crank on. Washington is ignoring the fact that we are six years into a business cycle expansion and we are still running massive deficits and there is no cushion for the next upset that comes to the economy.
I don’t remember what the “Occupy” movement was about. I remember being really mad about stuff, and others being mad at the same thing, I just can’t remember what it was. I went to a few rallies, yelled at things with a megaphone, became a Marxist for a few weeks, and I threw a brick through the windshield of a PT Cruiser, but for the life of me I can’t remember why. It just made so much sense at the time. Something about numbers, there were definitely numbers involved. I might be off here, but I believe 1% of the population currently owns 99% of the nation’s wealth, and 99% of the population only owns like 12% of the nation’s wealth. Which is much too low. Or too high. I don’t know. Anyways, the semantics aren’t important – I’m mad, and I want things to change, immediately. And my straw fell into the juice box, and now I’m thirsty.
Thank God for the government, saving our children from demonic cupcakes
Beyond ‘Beyond Stagnation’- Dissent’s symposium shows the limits of the Left’s thinking about our economic problems:
“Beyond stagnation” is indeed where we, Right and Left alike, want to be. Conservatives can try to educate the Left and those who are attracted by its policies and rhetoric, and we can try to defeat them in the political sphere, which is of course necessary — but it is not sufficient. As a matter of political reality, we are at some point simply going to have to understand why a not-unsubstantial part of the electorate finds the Left’s policies attractive; as I have argued at some length, the conventional, popular conservative explanation — that the Left appeals to the lazy, the juvenile, and the unambitious — is at the very least incomplete, if not flatly wrong. Conservatives’ more thorough rooting in the dismal facts of supply and demand, scarcity, and tradeoffs may give us an intellectual head start, which would be much more exciting if this were a race. But it isn’t a race at all — it is a journey that all of us are going to have to take together.
'Siri, 
World’s oldest eel dies at 155 in Swedish well
Updated list of 29 – Actually 30 – excuses 
I'm sorry but I forget where I found that new