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.
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.
Pomona junior Steven Glick, admits being taken aback when he arrived in Claremont from his home in Chicago for freshman orientation. “The first day, we got together in groups to go over everyone’s list of triggers and their preferred gender pronoun. I was shocked, couldn’t believe these were real things that people actually did, but it immediately drove home that that’s the way it is at the school, the accepted set of norms.” Still, he says, since he avoids liberal arts classes and hangs out with fellow economics majors and athletes, the political correctness affects him less than it otherwise might; and, while it’s safe to assume that every new acquaintance will lean left, the militant activists remain a minority. This was apparent in the reaction to the editorial. “All we said was, ‘Hey, not everyone supports these protests,’ and we got a lot of support for saying it. Because some people actually do want to be able to talk freely about these kinds of issues.”
Knives are the tool used in 5 times more killings in the US than guns.
Admittedly, though, a firearm can kill more people at a time, making for scary headlines. Omitting 9-11 from the stats, however, the number of mass murders in the US has been on a multi-decade decline.
There is an argument that there are too many knives guns in the US. Admittedly, there are too many illegal handguns in the US. You can buy an illegal handgun on the right ghetto street corner in any American city in 15 minutes if you have the cash. Illegally-obtained handguns are the firearm of choice for criminals.
It is a very rare bad guy who uses a long gun. Too hard to conceal. Mass murderers sometimes prefer long guns because they are more accurate than handguns.
With the exception of Switzerland where firearm ownership is close to required by law, most governments want their citizens disarmed. Disarmed citizens are more helpless citizens. Most of these governments want their police and government agencies well-armed. Why? Because bad guys have firearms even in disarmed places. New Flash: bad guys ignore laws. Police have weapons because bad guys have them, illegally. They were not purchased in gun shops.
You can't keep guns away from bad guys and the occasional lunatic. Impossible. Thus governments try to limit guns going to good guys. Pointless, but good politics in some places.
Essentially all legal firearm sales in the US are for sport and recreation, self-defense, and for collectors. The extremely rare violent exceptions are Muslims and the mentally disturbed. Firearms are as American as apple pie, and as common. The average American is quite comfortable with a firearm. Many if not most American boys and girls learn to use them. They all should. My parents taught us.
The 2nd amendment is not there because of militias so much as because weapons were forbidden for the common man in England. Only aristocrats could own their own swords and firearms. Same as in the UK now.
If by some miracle firearms could be kept from jihadists in the US, they would simply make bombs.
"Assault-looking" rifles? These are just light-weight rifles that look mean. Best-selling rifle in the US today. True assault weapons are illegal in the US except for government agents and the military. Even IRS agents have an arsenal of assault weapons. Isn't that nice?
I think all of the politicizing of the Orlando jihadist's firearms is virtue posing and grandstanding. BTW, I am in favor of vetting all gun buyers, all knife-buyers, and all immigrants from anywhere. Did you know that it is easier for an illegal immigrant in California to stay and to get government freebies than it is to legally-import a hunting dog from England?
I also think anyone using violence or threat of violence whether with firearm, knife, baseball bat, or anything else in commitment of a crime deserves execution. Not tolerable in civilization.
Photo: Good self-defense handgun, the Taurus Judge which fires .45 and .410 shotshells. Popular with judges. With a .45, it takes training to hit anything, but the .410 makes it easy. Best home defense firearm? A pump 12 ga.: Just the sound of the pump action will send any bad guy running for the hills unless they are crazed rural meth-heads. Home defense is like buying insurance. You hope you never need it.
No, Joe. It's Muslims. They use our freedoms against us.
At some point, maybe sooner than we realize, the pols in Washington will
decide they have had enough with the voters. It’s simply too much of a
hassle.
Somehow, over the last half-century, Western elites managed to convince themselves that nationalism was not real. Perhaps it had been real in the past, like cholera and telegraph machines, but now that we were smarter and more modern, it would be forgotten in the due course of time as better ideas supplanted it.
"There’s no doubt the media viscerally loathes Trump — in large part because Trump isn’t afraid to get in their faces and punch back twice as a hard, as a wise community organizer would advise. But they’d be battering any presidential candidate with an (R) after his name right around this time. The old rules are very much in force."
I think part of the issue is that everything in Disney is fake and phony, and happy happy. A hungry real gator in a fake "lagoon" is therefore inconceivable.
The reality of a transnational political confederation was now its overarching purpose. What had begun for Britons as an arrangement to trade well with our European neighbors turned into an expansive exercise in cohabitation under one roof.
Of course the inexorability of this political union had its setbacks. But the increasingly detached and ever-less-accountable officials in Brussels never allowed these to actually set them back. When the French and Dutch were allowed to vote on the latest iteration of the EU Constitution in 2005 referendums, both publics rejected it. The EU steamrollered on anyway. From then on, whenever countries were granted votes on further unification and cast them “wrong” (such as Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008), they were ordered to redo the vote until they came up with the “correct” answer. The EU’s will was not to be resisted.
During the last two decades the major central banks of the world have been colonized lock, stock and barrel by Keynesian crackpots. These academic scribblers and power-hungry apparatchiks have now pushed interest rate repression, massive monetization (QE) and relentless rigging of the financial markets to the limits of sanity and beyond. Honest, market-driven price discovery is dead as a doornail.
In absolutely no surprise to anyone, Obama's response to the tragedy in Orlando is to call for gun control. No mention of radical Islam, no discussion of the fellow caught with bombs in LA, and how restrictions on bombs have stopped their use. The Tsarnaev incident alone, which Obama also avoided tying to radical Islam, should be proof enough that bans don't stop tragedies of this nature since bomb-making is illegal. But logic hasn't been his strong suit.
After all, when housing prices collapsed in 2008, he didn't call for a ban on hammers, nails, bulldozers and scaffolding. Bans which, since they are tool specific just like gun restrictions, would have made house building much more difficult and helped prices rise. A gun is a tool, too. It didn't walk into the club on its own, it didn't pull its own trigger. It required a sick and deluded person to perpetrate the crime.
Great weekend of boating and fishing on Block Island Sound. No Muslim killers out there on the water. Why can't Muslims find simple ways to enjoy life too? Or is raping and killing their idea of fun? They should try fishing. Or even bowling.
Bluegrass Legend 
How Subarus 
Knives are the tool used in 5 times more killings in the US than guns.
Photo from NY Post: 
Photo is American Egret in CT this week, via reader 