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.
The options are risky because the White House knows the hacking story was made up to pacify the lunatics. They also know the Russians know it was made up. Creating a diplomatic crisis over something both sides know is a fiction – and a ridiculous one at that – is very dangerous.
We are not those - or at least hope we are not. Just people trying to stay fit and ready for all of what life sends our way. Some readers find our fitness posts boring and/or obnoxious, some find companionship in them. Same with everything. I can say that I carried ten 60 lb. bags of sand from Home Depot easily on Sunday afternoon (for anticipated driveway ice to be stored in my sand storage), and that I was happy to find that it was a quick and effortless task.
A year ago, it would have been more difficult for me so I am happy about that. If I can't be overly smart, at least I can be functional in practical ways.
Regardless of the above, whether you exercise hard or make lame excuses, we all need extra mental protein and if you need more today, peruse American Digest. And not just for the Melville.
Feeling Grinch-like this morning, and so is my trainer. I told him this morning how good it was to walk into a place without Christmas music. He said that, as long as he is there, there will never be any. We agree that it is destroyed by overuse, and that 99% of the time you hear it, it is meant to induce you to spend money you don't have. Carols stay warm and sweet and rare in church during Advent, and Chrismas songs are good for a party song-along. Otherwise, if I hear Little Drummer Boy one more time in the supermarket I might go postal.
... there was never any serious argument for reelecting the Democrats, their whole campaign was to defame Trump as a sexist and a racist. There was never a jot of truth to any of it, as his cabinet appointments are showing. Trump’s popularity is rising steadily and most Americans think Obama has already gone as president. The president-elect is driving a bulldozer at 60 miles per hour toward the wreckage of decades of misgovernment and misinformation, while the departing incumbents crawl around on their hands and knees complaining that the lights have gone out. For them, they have.
Trump might be a wackjob, and I did think so, but I can't object to his employees who will do the real work. Even some of my ardent Dem friends are hopeful. Donald may have ADD or Bipolar Disorder, and is a Democrat at heart, but with Pence and Priebus in charge, and The Donald as larger-than-life figurehead, seems like a promising mix...We'll see.
“Lawmakers are overall the reason we have the problems that we have, because they think that they’re the smartest people in the world and they sit in D.C. and talk to themselves, and if you don’t sit on the cocktail circuit there you don’t know anything about anything,” said a senior transition aide. “I think they’re intimidated by a guy like this — they don’t know him and he doesn’t owe them anything.”
As far as I know, there was never any "hacked election." That is complete bullshit, a non-story. The story is the non-story. All I know is that Podesta got stupidly hacked from a phishing effort which resulted in some embarassment, and rightly so, to him and his team. All of the wikileaks info was true and accurate, and nobody disputes that.
Whatever went on - if anything - it's just ordinary spy games that all spies play. Putin is still reportedly pissed about the CIA messing with his last election. How's this:
As a rule, the Obama administration is staffed by the crème de la crème of academically trained policy and legal scholars. Harvard is the number one school represented. Columbia is second. Law schools and schools of public administration are the majority. A vast (and we mean vast) portion of the current administration’s work experience has been in politics and government. In other words, they are professional bureaucrats, trained by academics in the process of government.
The Trump administration is virtually the opposite. Military, medical, and business backgrounds are the norm. These individuals went to school all over the country...
Plutocrats in the top three dozen richest people in the country in 2014 who were publicly donating money to boost immigration numbers included Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch, and the widow Jobs.
That’s a rather daunting list of opponents. Staring at their names just now, I realize I must have been nuts to devote my career to opposing the whims of people like them. What was I thinking?
On December 15, Clinton is having a big party in Manhattan at the Plaza Hotel, once owned by Trump, for her campaign donors, as a sort of thank-you and keep-in-touch farewell. It is expected to cost more than $100,000 and be paid for with excess campaign funds. Clintonworld insiders will be interested to see if Abedin shows up or whether she chooses to skip the celebration to stay at home to nurse her wounds.
I think that America’s biggest problem right now is that anyone that disagrees with a liberal on race is called a racist; anyone that disagrees with a liberal on gender is called a sexist; anyone that disagrees with the LGBT mafia is called a hater and a homophobe; anyone that disagrees with a liberal on immigration is called a xenophobe. There is no way we can bring America together while you liberals are running around calling people names and getting away with it. Meanwhile president-elect Trump and his whole team are dedicated to one thing, and one thing only. We want to bring Americans together and Make America Great Again. And we say to you naysayers and name-callers and speech curators that you can take your vile pejoratives and put them where the sun don’t shine.”
We cannot pinpoint the moment when the American people came to their senses and recognized that political correctness was ruining the country. At one time it had all seemed like an innocent game. Let’s pretend that men and women are the same, that the difference between the sexes was a patriarchal plot, a social construct.
It became less innocent when the thought police started tyrannizing everyone’s mind, forcing them to use made-up pronouns and never to say the least disparaging thing about any member of the distaff sex. Since most of us prefer not to say disparaging things about anyone, it seemed acceptable.
But then, political correctness might have reached a tipping point when the courts decided that a he who thought he was a she had to be allowed into the girls’ locker room in high school. Or was it the moment when the politically correct ideologically driven Obama Defense Department decided to ignore all the relevant science and to integrate women into military combat infantry units?
When professors or administrators act as if Trump and his supporters are uniquely evil, as opposed to simply one political coalition, they are engaging in “othering.” The message is that Trump — and, more significantly, his supporters on campus — aren’t really members of the community in good standing. They’re a dangerous “other” who must be closely watched, carefully scrutinized, thoroughly stigmatized, and maybe shunned.
Normally, the NYT is super-enthused to talk to enemies, even wanting normalized relations, such as with Cuba and Iran. But, that’s when a Democrat is in office.
1) Rioting on the streets 2) Intimidating Electoral College Voters (ECVs) 3) Still trying to persuade ECVs to change their votes 4) Demanded vote recounts 5) Blamed Fake News for their humiliating defeat 6) They labelled people as Alt-Right and K K K 7) Are now blaming hacking by the Russian government.
Federalism, as enshrined in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, is an essential bulwark against despotism. In America, we don’t usually talk about “collective rights” and for good reason. But it’s important to understand that we have them. Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, gays, or whites (sorry alt-right), etc. don’t have collective rights — but communities do.
Specifically, the states. Vermonters have the right to live the way they want to live, so long as they don’t violate the constitutional rights of the Americans who live there. So, no slavery or Jim Crow (again, sorry alt-right). But that still leaves an enormous amount of wiggle room for Vermont to do things the people running the federal government at any given time may or may not like. And that’s good, because states, and the communities that make them up, have a better idea of how they want to live — and what will work for them — than people in Washington do. This is why federalism, within constitutional restraints, is the greatest system ever conceived of for maximizing human happiness.
Most readers can probably surmise that I think liberals have good reason to worry that Donald Trump’s fidelity to the Constitution is at best rhetorical. And even here the commitment is flimsy. Trump prefers to think in Nietzschean terms — Strength! Winning! — than in Lockean terms. But it’s worth bearing in mind that if the Constitution is an afterthought for Trump, it is a dangerous relic for most Democratic politicians.
The specter of identity politics is haunting the left. It shows up at teary-eyed election parties in Berkeley, debates over craft beers in Williamsburg and the editorial pages of the big opinion shaper papers.
...
Democrats have to choose between identity politics and the working class. Abandoning identity politics would be a painful process while abandoning the working class has proven to be painless and disastrous. But identity politics without mass migration and social transformation is unworkable. Immigration determines the future of the Democrats. This election is forcing Democrats to make a choice.
Via Insty, "... many religious Christians of a traditionalist bent believed that liberals not only reduce their deeply held beliefs to bigotry, but want to run them out of their jobs, close down their stores and undermine their institutions."
With Obama in office all of the news was good… or at least spun to look as positive as possible. For the next four years at least you can expect to see headlines like the one linked above. Everything is terrible and there is nothing good upon the land as long as Trump is in charge.
Here's what I told my 15 year old daughter: "Hillary's loss does not mean that your hopes and aspirations can't be fulfilled. And the path that Hillary blazed is still the best path for achieving those hopes and aspirations. So go to college, find a man who is bright and engaging and ambitious. Do everything you can to help him reach those ambitions. Stick with that husband, no matter how badly he treats you, because it is through his successes (and the credit that you deserve for those successes) that you can achieve your own success. "
So what does a Master Persuader do when he needs to create a good first impression to last for years? He looks around for any opportunity that is visible, memorable, newsworthy, true to his brand, and easy to change.
Once again, we are seeing what is a core failing of technocracy. Public policy is about trade-offs. In a liberal democracy, the people, through their representatives, wrangle over these trade-offs and arrive at a compromise that satisfies most people well enough to keep the peace. Logic is not what drives these deliberations. Tradition, culture and vested interests play the leading roles. Smart people know how to create a better health system, for example, but getting everyone to go along with it is impossible.
Got
are not those - or at least hope we are not. Just people trying to stay fit and ready for all of what life sends our way. Some readers find our fitness posts boring and/or obnoxious, some find companionship in them. Same with everything. I can say that I carried ten 60 lb. bags of sand from Home Depot easily on Sunday afternoon (for anticipated driveway ice to be stored in my sand storage), and that I was happy to find that it was a quick and effortless task.
Re today's image: Can I please have both?
Image via Moonbattery 
Global warming 
Image via 
Image from a Mitchell piece on