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.
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.
Hillary Clinton breathed new life into her “girl power” campaign when she complained last week in a New York Magazine interview about latent sexism. According to Mrs. Clinton, she’d encountered people at campaign events who told her
“I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.”
Megan omits from her discussion the likelihood that real, meaningful warming, were it to ever occur, might be good for the planet and for humanity. It certainly was with past warmings.
Yale
Students Demand That Major English Poets Be Abolished for Being
Heterosexual White Males - See more at:
http://moonbattery.com/?p=72797#sthash.XvklNnlF.dpuf
Concert promoters in Europe cancel gigs in order to satiate politically correct millennials, but things are changing here. Where offended students used to get safe rooms and sympathy, they are now being derided. When they said seeing “Trump” written in chalk on their school made them feel “traumatized,” we had #TheChalkening where students all over the country wrote “Trump” in chalk all over schools. I don’t even think they were necessarily Trump supporters. They’d just had enough of whiny liberals and their culture of fear. We lost France a long time ago. Britain is on its deathbed. But Eagles of Death Metal are an American band and we don’t tolerate terror over here. We’ve let the multicult run the show for seven years and they failed. It’s time to take our country back and the first step is to stop apologizing.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, a Clinton supporter, praised the police... “At some point Donald Trump needs to take responsibility for the irresponsible behavior of his campaign”....
Incredible. Liccardo isn't some small-town naif. This is San Jose, and Liccardo is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The violence appears to mostly come from immigrants with Mexican flags, and Bernie people. Trump supporters themselves never bother anybody.
The dynamic in America has always been that the Progressives yank the window toward some fringe issue. The normals would grudgingly go along, kicking and screaming, so that the Overton Window gradually shifted in the direction of the loonies. All of a sudden, the normals appear to have simply let go of it. Set loose of that tether, the American Left is rocketing off into madness. There’s really no other way to describe the trannies in the bathroom business. It’s madness.
The Democrats are now the anti-white party and the anti-male party. In a country that is 70% white and 50% male, that’s going to be a losing hand in the long run. Having a shriveled hag as your candidate makes the task impossible.
Pic below of the High Line last Sunday. I was one of the people who thought the whole idea was stupid. The entire length of the old elevated railroad is now open, from the distant view of the Statue of Liberty in the meatpacking district up to the Javits Center.
A few more pics below the fold -
3.1
Million New Immigrants Arrived Over the Past 2 Years - See more at:
https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/new-analysis-over-3-million-new-immigrants-arrived-over-the-past-2-years#sthash.1Rw9Fb8Z.dpuf
Trump is the Great Disruptor. He is doing the Repub Party a great favor by going to where the votes are - the ordinary people of America like me. The wealthy will always be mostly Dems, as will (for no good reasons) the minorities and the effete snobs. But there are lots of other people in America, and they have felt voiceless in DC.
Winning an election is still very much about connecting personally with key voters and you can only do that if you present a clear personality or brand to the voters in the first place. If you're the person who sees Trump's personality/brand and have decided you hate everything about it, I have news for you: You're not the target audience. But you're still proof that Trump's messaging is at least very clear and that's often more than half the battle in business and politics.
...when “respectable” people won’t talk about things that a lot of voters care about, the less-respectable will eventually rise to meet the need. That’s what Trump’s doing. And a lot of people are cheering him on not so much because they’re fans of Trump personally as because they’re happy to see someone finally stand up to the PC bullies.
The piece has this photo of the wonderful Clintons last week, having a good time pretending to be a couple. I think he's rather be on orgy island, or anywhere else, but he owes her:
... virtually all financial market activity has taken place under the watchful eye of federal regulators since at least the 1930s. True deregulation would establish a market where no government agency regulates the types of products and services people are allowed to produce and purchase. This type of financial market does not currently exist in the U.S., and it certainly did not exist prior to the 2008 crisis. Financial regulators have increasingly micromanaged financial firms’ activities despite the fact that this approach has repeatedly failed to prevent financial market instability.
Talk to a cop that works the ghetto and he’ll be the most cynical guy you will meet. The reason is he spends his days working cases that have no rational explanation. Ray-Ray pops Darius one night not because of a business beef. No, Ray-Ray did not like the way Darius looked at him at a cookout so he walked up on him and started blasting. Sometimes, there’s simply no reason at all. Ray-Ray just decided to kill Darius “cause he got to go.”
Photo is American Egret in CT this week, via reader 
High cholesterol 'does not cause heart disease' new research finds, 
Wolves (dogs) 
Pic from around W 14th St. last weekend, with the wonderful Chelsea Market, housed in an old Nabisco factory, in back