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.
People often tell me that feminist dogma often backfires and makes women look ineffective. But looking ineffective is not a problem for many women. They see it as an asset and it is a form of power.
The Next Assault on Civil Rights - The Roberts court has been hostile toward voting rights and affirmative action. Its next target is the Fair Housing Act.
...Obama’s not without ideas. He’s full of ideas, all of them out of date. All of them from the last century’s paradigms. He wanted to become like European social democracy at the very moment when it finally collapsed into the dust-bin of history. He hankered after the ideals of ‘progressivism’ when it had already become reactionary. He is like a man who has saved all his life to buy a pair of bell-bottomed pants only to reach the required sum just when they were 40 years out of style. He’s at the store looking to buy them and can’t find them on the rack.
Too many Asians: Making Merit Subjective - The de Blasio administration floats a proposal to water down the admissions test to the city’s specialized high schools.
LIKE SO MANY HAPPENINGS IN THIS ADMINISTRATION, IF YOU PUT THIS IN A NOVEL IT WOULD SEEM CRUDE AND UNREALISTIC: Obama slams billionaires at the home of a guy named Rich Richman. Who is . . . wait for it, wait for it . . . rich!
I’m sick of it all, especially the obsessions of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, whose editors seem to have great difficulty getting their heads out of their, or other people’s, crotches. I am unashamedly old-fashioned: I think public discussion of intimate sexual matters is unseemly, a word that has become as quaint as outlandish mass-culture fare has become hideously sexualized. I don’t care if the subject to hand is essentially heterosexual in nature, or homosexual, transsexual, omnisexual, multisexual, interspecies-sexual, or all the other kinds of sexual that I’m sure exist but know nothing about. I could not give a damn what consenting adults do with their genitalia in private, but I don’t need or want to hear about it in public—and these days you nearly have to hole up in a mountain cave somewhere to escape it.
Common Core and Common Lunch: The ‘Common Calorie’ Revolt- Schools and students fight the tasteless, small lunches required by Michelle Obama’s signature initiative.
Where is it written that the Feds have power over tater tots?
Gerard Vanderleun refers to this sort of thing as a "Manhattan Death March."
We have some takers. We'll definitely start at 10 AM at South Ferry. Rain or shine.
Even though we are only doing parts of southern Manhattan, we are going to try to keep the walking distance under 11 miles, and the time under 7 hours (including stops). Lots of meandering (and lots of street crossings which slow things down a lot).
We'll have to delete some things from our wish list but if people like it - and survive it - we can do a different route next year.
Can you identify that cool building? Answer below the fold -
Planners have tried all kinds of incentives to get us to cycle more. Toronto has built dedicated bike lanes, as well as semi-dedicated lanes (a safety menace, in my view). It even invested in a money-losing bike-share program. Sadly, though, I’m no more inclined to ride a bike than ever. My reasons are pedestrian: Sweatiness, helmet hair, inability to pick up dinner and 10 kilograms of cat litter on the way home. And the weather, which is crummy half the year.
But mostly, I enjoy not having my teeth knocked out.
“I once worked for a lawyer who said something that I have never forgotten,” Donizger recalled in another outtake. “‘Facts do not exist. Facts are created.’ Ever since that day, I realized how the law works.”
Ex-mayor Bloomberg was asked why he decided to go back to his job running Bloomberg. His reply: "I could stay home listening to Elaine talk about her feelings, or go back to work. Now, what would you do?"
BATTERED, BEREAVED, AND BEHIND BARS -Arlena Lindley’s boyfriend Alonzo Turner beat her for months and murdered her child — so why was she sent to prison for 45 years? A BuzzFeed News Investigation.
For me, speech about criminalizing incorrect speech amounts to fighting words. It provokes me towards evil, defiant ideas.
But maybe it can be taken further. Forget speech, how about criminalizing incorrect but unspoken thoughts? Government doctors and neuroscientists could decide who is guilty. "If my thought-dreams could be seen they'd probably put my head in a guillotine, but it's all right, Ma..."
Let him without thought crime cast the first stone.
Klein argues, we need to break free of market fundamentalism and implement long-term planning, strict regulation of business, more taxation, more government spending and reversals of privatization to return key infrastructure to public control.
I'm not ashamed of the fact that I've been laid off 4 times in the last 20 years. I work in a business which has undergone significant transformations in the last 15 years and it is particularly sensitive to recessions. More importantly, it is an industry which has engaged and embraced 'diversity' as a goal, meaning the supposed benefits of being a white male (which were slim to begin with) are more or less nonexistent today.
2 years of unemployment over a 20 year period isn't too bad when you consider how many people are still looking for steady work since 2008. I have a number of friends who have left this industry and entered new careers. It's tough to start over when you're past the age of 45. Which is why I'm glad I'm working and complain very little about my job. I make less than others with similar experience to mine, mainly because each bout of unemployment forced me to rearrange my salary needs and alter spending patterns. This is unfortunate, now that I have 2 kids in college, but it's good, too. I'm less likely to face the ax again since my experience comes cheap.
But I haven't been around Maggie's lately, and it's because I've had issues I'd classify as "First World Problems" over the past few months, which are better than the alternative "Big Problems". But it's worth sharing one in particular because it may help others with perspective, and it sure helps me with dealing with it.
My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
When Prayer Makes Anxiety Worse - Several new studies show that praying might help alleviate worries—but only if the person has a secure relationship with God
Political entities and boundaries come and go. They should never be frozen in history, because so many are accidents of history anyway. Should powerful empires, crazy-quilt conglomerates - China, Russia, the EU, maybe the USA - devolve? Why not? Would it be worse, or better?
In the US, I can easily see California and Texas as their own countries. They were never envisioned at the beginning anyway. Either one would be more of a nation than Canada, Australia, or Austria. Smalleer governments are more accountable and more responsive.
Even Spain could break into its constituent parts if the empire permits a vote.
They deserve what they get. No one forced this on Britain. The English had a long conversation with themselves, and decided to commit mass suicide and welcome the Muslim hordes intent on replacing them. If anything, Britain should serve as a haunting lesson of what happens when a people intellectualizes themselves into a position so far to the left it condones their own self-destruction.
China has only 31 government and party employees per thousand residents. The number of civil servants per thousand residents in France is 95, in the United States, 75, and in Germany 53.
China
has only 31 government and party employees per thousand residents. The
number of civil servants per thousand residents in France is 95, in the
United States, 75, and in Germany 53. - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/09/china-fact-of-the-day-21.html#sthash.tv0GCjgE.dpuf
China
has only 31 government and party employees per thousand residents. The
number of civil servants per thousand residents in France is 95, in the
United States, 75, and in Germany 53. - See more at:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/09/china-fact-of-the-day-21.html#sthash.tv0GCjgE.dpuf
The radical movement that the FSM spawned soon imploded into violence and mindless anti-Americanism. After helping to instigate riots in Newark, New Jersey (and writing about his accomplishments for The New York Review of Books), New Left stalwart Tom Hayden heard the siren song of the FSM and moved to Berkeley. He settled into one of the city’s many radical communes and rallied students to support the Black Panthers—America’s “internal Vietcong,” according to Hayden—and to create “liberated zones” to serve as Panther sanctuaries. He pushed the Berkeley radicals to learn how to use guns because the revolution was surely coming. Hayden and some movement veterans organized trips to North Vietnam and North Korea. The youthful political pilgrims came back singing the praises of Ho Chi Minh and Kim Il Sung. Left untold by most of the friendly narratives about the FSM and the New Left is the story of how a once-idealistic student movement crossed the line to antidemocratic ideologies and undermined the possibility of a decent Left in America.
Examples of sexual violence include: discounting the partner's feelings regarding sex; criticizing the partner sexually; touching the partner sexually in inappropriate and uncomfortable ways; withholding sex and affection...
I think the GOP, without a message, can have one simple message — we’re the grown ups who will keep you safe and get out of your way. Many middle class mothers remember their grandfathers fondly. They were men who stormed beaches to kill monsters. They don’t see men like that around here now. They don’t see anyone honoring their grandfathers’ legacies. The world has come undone. America needs grownups, not technocrats, to fix it.
Barack Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly was so insubstantial, so full of airy platitudes, and so adulterated with the gaseous clichés of bankrupt internationalism and progressive bromides that I thought at any minute he might just float away.
My explanation: He has already retired. Job is too easy. Also,
This speech proves once again that Obama is not a serious man. His badly trained mind is a warehouse of the sort of leftist and progressive received wisdom and dull clichés that pollute our universities, media, and popular culture. He represents the moral idiocy and fashionable self-loathing that signals to our enemies and rivals that the United States can be had.
Republicans can win a Senate majority, take back the presidency, repeal Obamacare, build the Keystone pipeline, slash oppressive government regulations, end special tax deals and government contracts for the Democrats’ big donors, restore an honest IRS and nominate serious people to the federal bench.
But they’ll never do any of those things if they can’t learn that mass immigration from the Third World is wildly unpopular with voters.
“We have the highest overall corporate tax rates in the world, and we are now the only O.E.C.D. country that also taxes overseas earnings,” Mr. Clinton said. “A lot of these executives, even if they wanted to bring the money home, they think this is crazy.”
Things That Make You Go Hmmm... Like 
Remember this good vid? 
Hong Kong Demonstrators 
Pic: rainy day in NYC on Thursday
Thornton:
You Don’t 
Napoleon and Josephine had a prenup