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.
"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help" was the usual warning. But somewhere along the line conventional wisdom discarded this injunction and media began to create the myth that there were special people to rule over us. Celebrities. A cultural elite. Role models. The only adults in the room. The smartest woman in the world. As social media exposes celebrity after celebrity as flawed, we are relearning just how fragile that foundation is.
"Anyone who doesn't know that Hollywood has been the epicenter of filth, perversion, sex, drugs, and other reprehensible behavior has been living in a cave in Afghanistan.
Scratch that. The Taliban gave that as one of their reasons for attacking us. So even cave dwellers in Afghanistan aren't immune to the disease Hollywood has spread."
Good news is hard to find at this year’s United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany. Diplomats from nearly 200 countries have gathered to review progress made on the “historic” Paris climate accords, signed two years ago. But as the champagne-fueled self-congratulation of Paris recedes into memory, the agreement’s underlying fraud is becoming obvious.
Next, we ban golf clubs. After that, how to deal with fists – boxing gloves? If killing is already illegal, does making the instrumentality thereof also illegal have any relevance
Eliminate all deductions in the individual income tax code except for a single personal deduction Eliminate the corporate income tax. Tax capital gains and dividends as regular income. Eliminate the death tax as well as the write-up of asset values at death
Mountain Climbers are plank position, so they are full body exertions: shoulders, arms, core, legs. And cardio of course.
To do them correctly, knees to elbow, and no humping your back or butt - flat back. No jumping either. A left and right leg counts as one Mountain Climber. Start slow, and do not try 200/day at first unless you are in tough shape. As with the pushups, divide your sets in time but push for the most you can do in one set. If too easy, push the speed.
And don't quit with your pushups. 100/day should be comfortable by now, so maybe go to every other day with them, or vary the type of pushup to reduce the number. I did.
Looking back, the improbable election of 2016 proved a Rubicon moment. Once Trump crossed over the Rubicon, carried by his base of “crazies,” “irredeemables,” and “deplorables,” the die had been cast, and those who were fearful where America had been headed had no choice but to follow him through the river.
Either Trump will restore economic growth, national security, the melting pot, legality, and individual liberty or he will fail and we will go the way of Europe.
For now, there is no one else in the opposition standing in the way of radical progressivism. At best, some not actively promoting progressivism are only begging it to slow down a bit; at worst, the “I told you so” others wish for now progressivism to prevail to demonstrate what happens when the hoi polloi do not listen to their supposed betters.
As we'd suspect, the shootings in Texas are being politicized by the anti-gun groups. It seems I can't turn around without some anti-gun nut calling for more laws, if not outright elimination of guns. As if that would actually stop these events. Of course, none of these people have called for elimination of autos or trucks, particularly after last week's events in NYC.
What we hear is 'but that was only 8 people killed by a truck while there were 58 in Vegas and 26 in Texas' as if scale is somehow meaningful. Frankly, I'm less concerned about numbers, and more concerned about means, motive and outcome. The assumption is that the means is a desire to use a weapon, so being concerned with autos is silly since few people use them as weapons. There is a massive flaw in this concept. Two flaws, really. First, they are used as weapons (Nice and London are just 2 recent examples, and ISIS has called for them to be used more...but I should add Charlottesville to the list) often enough to be of concern. Second, whether they are used as weapons or not, autos kill far more people every year than guns, and people aren't even trying. Imagine how the numbers would rise if they were. By any comparative measure, it's not even close. WE MUST BAN AUTOS AND TRUCKS!!
It's a class thing, not a policy thing. They would blackball Trump at their clubs, and so would I. But I prefer him as Pres to Hillary. I did not vote for somebody to be my friend.
It's dominating the news these days, and rightly so.
With humans, for whom it is natural to live within cultural/religious contexts, questions about "natural" are always fraught. However, I will claim that sexual abuse by women and men, but more by men because of dominance hierarchies, is part of the animal side of human nature like violence, etc. Human nature contains much unpleasantness.
There are errors in Freud's Civilization and It's Discontents, but he got the big picture right. Living a bourgeois civilized life is challenging for humanoid animals and, depending on the culture, demands some sorts of instinctual restraints or constraints, at least on regular folks. The elites get away with more, and the poor folks often end up in jail.
Claiming that something is "natural" does not claim any moral valence. However, even in a Christian culture like medieval Europe the knights and nobles pretty much had access to any female who took his fancy (and vice versa, in the fancy courts of Europe - if a princess summons you to her boudoir, No is not an answer). Today in American, females teachers are routinely called on the carpet for seducing their high school students (which is not very difficult to do). For many women, "star-f-ing" is a diverting hobby, so it works both ways.
One of the perquisites of wealth, power, dominance, or celebrity is access to sexual adventure without consequences. In our culture, we consider some of it immoral and some of it illegal. Other cultures have very different rules about sexual behavior.
My point is simply that, in our society, there is and has been far more sexual libertinism, rape, and abuse at all levels of society (but perhaps most at the lowest and highest) than people like to admit or confess. Until they are caught. The unleashed sex drive is a powerful force and in people who don't care much, power, money, lust, and indifference to law or societal codes can let animal spirits loose. Attila the Hun is said to have fathered 10,000 children, which is why most Europeans claim him as an ancestor. 10,000 were not consensual, I am certain. But I wasn't there.
An engaging random session about human history, climate change, Ice Ages, etc. Just advance past the ads for cashews. Carlson does make the point that atmospheric CO2 is now at the bottom of the scale. He is fun to listen to.
As I write, eight are dead - all men, five Argentines, one Belgian, all in the path of an Uzbek Muslim who decided to take a Home Depot pick-up truck down the bike path for 20 blocks mowing down bicycle after bicycle after bicycle before exiting the vehicle and yelling - go on, take a wild guess - "Allahu Akbar!" Well, I never! You could knock me over with a feather duster
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Thanks to all US military veterans, living and dead 
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Via Dan Mitchell's 
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Humans love dogs 
Why do they always term these Muslim terrorists "deranged" and "cowardly"? They are neither.