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.
... there is a tendency to believe that existing in the natural state of every person would mean their body functions perfectly. In reality the human body is a kluge, a series of evolutionary compromises that functions well enough to breed, and exists in a constant state of decay, barely staving off entropy for seven or eight decades until finally succumbing to the inevitable.
Don’t get me wrong, the human body is also a marvel of evolutionary complexity. Biology is subtle and powerful. But it is also messy and imperfect. Everything that can go wrong, does (in someone). I think most people intellectually know this, but just don’t want it to be true.
Presidential candidates always have flaws. Personal flaws, and flaws in the sense that they do not agree with me about everything. Elections are not about messiahs.
I am your basic Libertarian-ish Conservative Constitutionalist "Leave me alone" American, but I am practical.
Ted Cruz is impressive but unelectable. Keep him in the Senate to stir the pot, and thank Texas. Trump is more fun than a barrel of drunk monkeys but he is deeply incurious about anything, to put it nicely. His remarkable work is done for now. Some of the others (eg Kasich, Bush) might be fine but they do not have the pizzazz for the circus this year.
For me, Marco Rubio is at the intersection of the lines where acceptability to me meets electability. He is a serious person.
He is in error on some topics, I feel. Every person has deep flaws (pols maybe more than most), and political errors. Bill's Wife has more personal than political flaws from a general election standpoint, but she is not my candidate.
Snow on the way. I blame global warmening. Stock up on beer, canned goods, and batteries - and keep your TV or radio turned on for the latest catastrophizing. Sheesh.
Oxford Union backs motion to remove Cecil Rhodes statue - Students narrowly back Rhodes Must Fall campaign despite hearing that next step would be to tear down statues of Winston Churchill and anyone else with a blemished historical record
In the US, the Federal state is The Borg, gobbling up the rights and responsibilities of state and local government. At the dawn of the First World War, it was possible for an American to have no interaction with the national government, outside of the Post Office. His government was the town, village or city. Even his state government was alien to him. Today, it is impossible to live as an American without rubbing against the rasp of national government.
These are not your grandfather's Marxists'. These are not the deadly, self-sacrificing, true believers of Lenin's time. Joe Biden is not Leon Trotsky, Hillary Clinton is not Rosa Luxemburg. Time has taken its toll on their movement. It has evolved into a stinking mélange of government corruption and crony capitalism and self-interest. Their hatred of traditional America is unabated but they are old and soft and have not had a new idea in fifty years. Their entire political base is on the take and is bought and paid for with our money. Tenured, overweight, overaged, academic leftovers from the 60's and 70's. Taxpayer funded race hustlers, the professional grievance industry, and all the other assorted thugs, criminals and perverts we see on TV every night. The beer drinkers and pot smokers sitting home living on your back. The young inmates of our university system, a bunch of overeducated, overindulged, overprotected, overmedicated punks who will vanish like the morning fog at the first drop of sweat or first pang of fear. Self-aggrandizing celebrity and media air heads who equate a tight ass with intellect.
Trump is not tapping into anger. He’s tapping into the sensibility of the great majority. The people look up and see an endless parade of frivolous parasites who defend nothing but their own prerogatives at the expense of everyone else. What’s the point of voting for one party or the other when both sides are colluding against your interests? Why do we have these parties?
The GOP electorate doesn’t trust the establishment on spending. It doesn’t trust it on immigration. It doesn’t trust it on, well, much of anything. And Jeb is the face of that establishment.
They include "unwanted advances" as harassment. How is a fellow to know if it's unwanted, in advance? In workplaces with young women, romance is always in the air.
I should have known better from my experience in hospital that when it comes to the forms of self-evident stupidity and self-destruction, man’s inventiveness is infinite.
I could not understand how the entire German mass media, on nominal “right” and “left” alike, and I assume with little cross-consultation, agreed to shut the story down as if it had not happened; consciously lying to report that there were “no incidents” that night. And in the same Germany whose motto, seventy years ago, was, “I did not know.”
Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms,” bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.
The clean eating delusion:
A day to remember MLK. An American hero. Not a day off work for most people, though.
Titanosaur, Museum's Biggest Dinosaur Ever,
Pic: Tree in New England this week 
Authentic Academic Gibberish: