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.
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.
2015 is the year when I learned to hate my telephone. The FCC's willful neglect of the do not call list has resulted in a large number of commercial calls on top of the charitable and political calls that swamp my line.
I watch caller ID closely and no longer answer calls with numbers I do not recognize, figuring that, if they are friends, they will leave a message on the answering machine and I can pick up, or return the call.
This no longer is sufficient. I have therefore purchased a CPR Call Blocker through Amazon, and it allows me to blacklist frequent political and other calls. It has been very satisfactory to hear yet another call from Newt Gingrich be shut down after the first ring! It shows the most recent call, and then you push the big red octagonal button that says "BLOCK NOW" and that is that!.
Even this device does not help with the anonymous calls with blocked caller ID, but it turns out the phone company can block anonymous calls and this also seems to have worked very well!
It's time for another Maggie's request of our readers.
We want readers. We welcome commenters too, regardless of points of view. We don't only do politics - we do a perspective on Life in America.
We are a good site for international readers too, to get some idea about what ordinary, every-day, middlebrow Americans are up to and thinking about. We are interested in almost everything.
Readership growth is our only reward here, but that grows mainly by word of mouth (which includes others linking to us).
If you wish to do us a favor, let your (blog) readers, friends, colleagues, relatives, neighbors, etc. know about our eclectic website. It might be an uplifting, interesting addition to their days. Cheaper than a newspaper and we have very few ads.
Regarding comments - we do not require your emails, and you can use a fake name. Just follow the Three Unwritten Rules for Commenters:
Pic of old dude deadlifting 300+ lbs. from article below. Mrs. BD felt proud to be deadlifting 100 lbs on Monday. Not bad for a semi-beginner fitness-seeking lady but despite strength she still can't find the strength to "Make me a sammich." "Make your own - and make one for me too. I'm busy." Sheesh. These modern women.
I am reaching towards 200, but my grip is now becoming a limiting factor. I can lift it, but can't hold on to the bar for very many reps. Need more forearm strength to reach my modest goals. A weakling - I admit it. Deadlifts are the best, though, for middle-aged people, because it uses your whole fizzicle and mental self. Man, it is so damn hard. Back flat, chest up, ass back. F- gravity. Pick it up. Grunt loud. Drop it with a big crash. Good hard fun.
By hyphenating or ethnicizing one’s name, creating a non-Western superficial identity, or perhaps writing a diatribe against the West — the more venomous and incoherent the better — one increases one’s chances of tapping Western largesse. And in such a fat society, there are literally billions of dollars in excess that can fund therapeutic “ethnic studies” programs, assistant provosts of Diversity, ethnically separatist houses and centers, unprofitable Hollywood movies such as Truth, and “space to destroy” during times of riot.
... imagine it’s the old Soviet Union, and there’s a colorful dissident saying everything other citizens want to say but fear to. Now imagine the government sends its secret police to silence him, and they just get consumed. Bullets have no effect on him, and with every assault he simply becomes bigger. Imagine how frustrated and fearful the Kremlin commissars would become.
And imagine how the people would be in his corner.
Former State Dept. Rep. Says Stabbing Jews OK Under Islamic Law Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/michigan-woman-stabbing-jews-animals-okay-islamic-law-lina-allan-state-department-154182/#jIwQdiebiyXXtWh7.99
A friend of mine who has been in and out of work for the last few years contacted me today because I have a connection with the president of sales in an organization seeking someone with his skill set. My friend asked if I'd make an introduction. I told him there was a bit of a catch. My connection is old, I hadn't worked with him in 15 years, and I last spoke with him 3 years ago. I was hesitant to just call up and tell him about my friend who would be a great hire by his organization. As we discussed potential ways for me to make the contact, my friend explained the job had been open for some time. He noticed it a few months ago, then it was gone. It reappeared and was again removed from the listings. When he saw it recently he realized either they were having problems filling the job, weren't sure what kind of candidate they wanted, or were looking for a "purple squirrel" - something that doesn't exist. I laughed and suggested that it would be wise for him to speak with my old colleague and perhaps find out more about the organization, which offered me a respectable way to make the introduction as an informational interview.
The "purple squirrel" comment made me laugh because it's perfectly descriptive. I've been involved in many job searches for "purple squirrels." Watching the evolution of the job listing, from purple to brown or gray, as different candidates are interviewed can be alternately frustrating and comical. It's mostly annoying and aggravating, though.
On the other hand, as I pointed out to my friend, you can always have a purple squirrel if you have enough dye and the willingness to hold down the squirrel while you change its colors. It's not a good way to run an organization, but I've seen that happen, too. Happens every day in politics, which is probably why the process of electing a leader is about as enjoyable as the job search for that "purple squirrel." Not only are we trying to find one, but after we elect one, the leader usually becomes the one trying to inflict the dye job on the population.
60,000 pages of fed regs, and mounting. Nobody knows them, so everybody breaks them. Thus is everybody a crim so they can nail you whenever they feel like it
Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok? At a prestigious college like Swarthmore, every student who trampled on other people’s rights could be expelled and there would be plenty of prospective students available to take their places.
National Community Reinvestment Coalition president John Taylor points
to “racial disparities in mortgage lending” in Baltimore as reason
enough for government to force banks to make more loans to blacks
“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally average temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a rollback of the industrial age.”
Photo: It's a dumb holiday, meaningless. Drinking until midnight with a silly hat on no longer appeals to me. Never did, really. Furthermore, I am meeting my trainer at our little gym at 5 tomorrow am to get the year started on the right foot. And champagne gives me heartburn.
I’m
not convinced women who are on Tinder who say “no hookups” actually
mean that. - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/12/ninjaeconomics-on-tinder-from-the-comments.html#sthash.D8NZrvy2.dpuf
US Episcopalians 
Pic: Tree in New England this week 
Authentic Academic Gibberish:
You 
2015 is the year when I learned to hate my telephone. The FCC's willful neglect of the do not call list has resulted in a large number of commercial calls on top of the charitable and political calls that swamp my line.
It's time for another Maggie's request of our readers.
Pic of old dude deadlifting 300+ lbs. from article below. Mrs. BD felt proud to be deadlifting 100 lbs on Monday. Not bad for a semi-beginner fitness-seeking lady but despite strength she still can't find the strength to "Make me a sammich." "Make your own - and make one for me too. I'm busy." Sheesh. These modern women. 
