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 only good thing Ikea sells is Loganberry Jam. Excellent stuff. Have not heard of child sex slaves for sale there yet, but with Sweden going the way it is going, who knows what the future holds for Ikea?
The United States has no interest in Syria. There are no good guys to back. There’s no “solution” to what ails that part of the world, short of another flood. Syria is a mess because it is full of Syrians. The only sane policy is to make sure it remains full of Syrians. Let them kill each other there, not in Paris or Portland. If the Russians want to build their pipeline there and pay the price for it, good for them. If the Saudis want to stop them, best of luck with it. This is not an American problem. It is their problem. Let them own it.
It's unclear what in particular they wish to resist about Washington, but it is quite clear that they wish to support gay Palestinians. Pathetic. And to build bridges between gay American blacks and gay Palestinians to change America. Good luck with that. As if there were any gay Palestinians left anyway.
I am afraid that they have no idea what this sort of thing sounds like to ordinary Americans. It sounds psychotic, out of reality, worse than Portlandia.
Exactly where is Syria? What is it? Why should I care? Well, I do care about any people who are being tortured, abused, killed, etc., but that is the way of much of the world. It pains me terribly and only increases my gratitude for living in civilization. Still, I had hopes that Trump would stay out of the Middle East messes and leave it to others. I guess not.
And, for the 1000th time, the UN proves itself useless for its supposed purpose. Why do we bother with it?
An historian seeks to 'disprove' the 'myth' of Social Security being a Ponzi scheme. His assessment? The fact that is has worked for almost 80 years. Just because it's operated for 80 years doesn't mean it's not a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi didn't last that long because his scheme just didn't force everyone into it. In addition, while the math indeed proves SocSec will go broke (to me, proof of a Ponzi scheme is that the investment, under constant conditions, will go broke eventually), what makes it a non-Ponzi is that government just has to raise taxes!
Brilliant! And all Ponzi had to do was get more people to join and charge them more as he got closer to failure!
Sorry, any pay-as-you-go system which has regular payouts in perpetuity and no clear way to link dollars in to dollars out in the future, and without a clear method of investment and growth, is a Ponzi Scheme. Saying government bonds fulfills the method of investment is like saying investing in the next big bank heist is an investment. You're relying on coerced collections rather than actual organic progress and growth.
I see something similar unfolding now as during the Iran deal. Whether Rhodes was or is involved is not clear, though he has been particularly active in attacking the Trump administration. But the methodology is the same, a fact-free narrative endlessly parroted by the media in a circular fashion so that media reporting on what other media are saying creates an endless cycle of news stories about news stories.
It’s worth noting that while the media shows keen interest in building up the anti-Trump collusion narrative, it seems highly motivated to tear down the improper surveillance narrative asserted by Congressman Devin Nunes and others. The media worries more about whether Trump’s tweets about “wiretapping” were accurate than whether the powers of our spy agencies were abused for political purposes, and whether the Obama administration deliberately tried to undermine the incoming president.
American culture, economics and religion can’t survive the rule of Anti-America. That is what we saw in the Obama years. But Anti-America would do even worse if Republicans got serious about a reform agenda. That’s one reason why Democrats are beginning to engage in a political secession.
Immigration enforcement, school choice and big government cuts frighten them worse than anything.
The left reshaped the culture until an ideological conflict became a culture war. The Two Americas have less in common than the North and the South did. The divisions accelerated sharply throughout the last century. In this century, the division is becoming an irresolvable political conflict. A civil war.
The new media is fearless, more like the hearty newspapermen (before there were "journalists") of old. Why were Woodward and Bernstein famous? Because they caught a devious Republican (actually, a RINO). Had they caught a devious Democrat, it would have all gone into the black hole of unreported news and W and B would have been back on the police beat.
This guy Cernovitch broke the Rice story. He is not a member of the Club:
On-campus attitudes to sex are, by Kipnis’s account, growing ever more sharply contradictory. As in the wider world, sexuality is often on public display. But people are also ready to be offended, and students ready to sue: hence the cautionary “dear colleague” emails. And into this mess has stepped officialdom, in the form of Title IX, whose guidelines are at once so vague and so all-encompassing that Kipnis could be accused of “creating a hostile environment on campus” simply for having written an essay.
People need to be heroes and to stand up to the PC terrorists. It must be frightening, though, if you need your job.
The Swamp is filled with incestuous power and money relationships, while the regular citizen wonders why the heck they aren't listening to them. Hence Trump.
... no one is supposed to notice that one government did interfere in the U.S. election — ours. For months and months, the Obama administration was spying on Trump and leaking hints of its investigation to the press in the hopes of helping Hillary, who, by the way, colluded in the effort. Yet even the ruthless partisan Adam Schiff can’t “definitively” cite a single proof of collusion on Trump’s part, as he reluctantly acknowledged on Sunday. Given all the spying and leaking on Trump, wouldn’t we know by now if they had any evidence of collusion?
To say that Trump in this matter is more sinned against than sinning is an understatement. He was the blatant victim of political espionage and criminal leaking by the Obama administration, then when he complained about it, he was smeared anew.
"Maggie Haberman had it. She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration." "Eli Lake had it. He didn't want to run it and Bloomberg didn't want to run it because it vindicates Trump's claim that he had been spied upon. And Eli Lake is a 'never Trumper.' Bloomberg was a 'never Trump' publication."
"I'm showing you the politics of 'real journalism'. 'Real journalism' is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn't run it because they don't want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that's why they sat on it."
"So where did I get the story? I didn't get it from the intelligence community. Everybody's trying to figure out where I got it from. I got it from somebody who works in one of those media companies. I have spies in every media organization. I got people in news rooms. I got it from a source within the news room who said 'Cernovich, they're sitting on this story, they're not going to run it, so you can run it'."
... this reality denying madness we see going on with Progressives, has a late phase degeneracy vibe to it. Most of this nonsense is happening in well insulated compounds like the college campus. The Progs have total control so all of their worst instincts are free to run riot. It’s not some new phase in the long civil war, but the final burst of maniacal lunacy before there is the knock on the door and reality bursts in.
So you drastically expand the definition of "sexual harassment," and then promote an ethic that says that all accusations must be believed, and then you're shocked that workplace men don't want to hang out with women?
Though the leaders of the US security services have denied the President’s allegation that they wire-tapped him – though they were careful not to deny that they mounted surveillance on him and his associates – the President’s claim that they did, in effect smoked them out.
Thus former DNI James Clapper admitted that he had seen no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians up to the point of his retirement on 20th January 2017, and former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell more recently has publicly trashed the whole story of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Possibly the single most important admission that no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians has been found came however from within the FBI itself, though it has gone almost completely unnoticed...
Heard from Axelrod on CNN (at the gym this morning): "Trump Administration paralyzed by deepening Russia scandals."
... attention to the Kremlin was bad news for Clinton. It invited scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation’s corrupt foreign dealings; the sulfurous interplay of Putin cronies, Bill Clinton’s lucrative speech racket, and Hillary’s biddable State Department that resulted in Russia’s acquisition of major U.S. uranium supplies; the embarrassing “Russian reset” whereby, during Clinton’s State Department stewardship, the supine Obama administration watched Putin capture territory in Eastern Europe and muscle into the Middle East, while arming and aligning with Iran; and the intriguing relationship between Podesta (the Clinton-campaign chairman and former Obama White House official) and Putin’s circle — specifically, a $35 million investment by a Putin-created venture capital firm, Rusano, into a small Massachusetts energy company, Joule Energy, just two months after Podesta joined Joule’s board.
Imagine you are a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy processing the news that Jim Webb—Annapolis class of '68, recipient of the Navy Cross, former senator and secretary of the Navy, former member of the Annapolis faculty, bestselling novelist and acclaimed journalist—has been forced by political pressure to decline an award for distinguished alumni at your school this week...
“Sex Traffickers at Ikea?” 
As Steyn says,
Update on 
Breastfeeding Is