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.
Is this latest Chinese influenza over-hyped, or serious? You never really know until time passes because there are always hysterias. The news is always about hysterias, because they sell.
Already 6000 Americans have died from the ordinary flu this year. It can be the last straw for the frail elderly and otherwise fragile and ailing. Normal, natural final straw.
As greeters at church this morning, I refused to shake hands because I am getting over a stubborn cold/cough. To good friends, I explained "Just back from Wuhan."
Mrs. BD was NOT amused. Your Editor can be a jerk sometimes. I like dark humor but not everybody does, especially when entering church.
She's at the theater and dinner in NYC this afternoon/night with gal theater friends, so my high crimes and misdemeanors will blow over as long as I do the dishes, the laundry, and a bunch of indoor and outdoor pick up (I am doing, including clipping the heck out the the Wisteria as best I can - but I would do them anyway on a winter afternoon without plans. Except a steak supper out with a dear old pal later today cuz whenever She is out for an evening, I get together with pals. Me not much of a sitter except when I edit this darn website - and for my day job).
There is always a reason for not sitting, unless at work. I am off to the damn gym while the laundry cycles. Beer after. Life is pretty good in the good old USA.
A significant new book by Andrew Marantz, a staff writer at the New Yorker, has reinvigorated the gatekeepers’ efforts to censor the internet. Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation is an account of our ongoing democratic revolution, a historical moment that brings into relief two realizations for Marantz: (1) conservative influencers are now able to out-compete legacy media outlets, and (2) it was this that led to the election of Donald J. Trump. “[T]hey helped propel their man to the presidency,” he writes.
For Marantz, these two realizations justify all-out censorship of the internet. But his extremism comes as little surprise when you recognize that, from start to finish, Marantz’s argument is grounded in his contempt for the intellectual and moral capacities of ordinary Americans.
Everything you must know about the biggest diplomatic event in Israel’s history - Who’s coming and who’s boycotting the event? Who will be allowed to speak? Will Putin sit next to Pence? What are the leaders doing in their spare time? And what’s on the menu?
Big issue is that women want/need sex too. They love it. It's not talked about much in media, but women talk amongst themselves about it all the time. Many women are sex-starved (and men too). That's not good for the soul or biology/health.
Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness. He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom. He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor. He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China's comparative advantage, but from American companies' use of slavery by proxy. He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades' worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead. He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.
Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron. It took a change agent. Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies' power over us permanently. It took a change agent. Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe's generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII. It took a change agent. Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead. It took Donald Trump...
Apparently the "cannon" of everything academic is about white supremacy. Science, too. I worry about people whose "identity" and career is based on their ancestry.
This is the Trump Revolution: Pragmatic, non-ideological. He approaches issues as a problem-solving businessman.
It's actually a revolution in ideas and it goes way beyond foreign policy. He is combining the best of traditional conservative ideas with positive populism, appointing conservative judges and leading the way on criminal justice reform, cutting taxes and boosting family leave.
"Despite a new imperative to be scrupulous about affirmative consent, young men are still subject to incessant messages that sexual conquest... remains the measure of a 'real' man..."
There’s no need to panic about coronavirus.
Is this latest Chinese influenza over-hyped, or serious? You never really know until time passes because there are always hysterias. The news is always about hysterias, because they sell.