In addition, people who were overweight in their 70s lived longer than people who were normal or underweight in their 70s.Do I believe it? No ... but I very much suspect that happiness, friends, and a positive outlook are WAY more important to longevity than constant attention to the latest set of rules to increase your lifespan!
The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to investigate allegations of criminal misconduct pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached to Uranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges. Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
If you thought the Republicans are now running the Department of Justice–merely because Donald Trump was elected president!–you don’t understand how the federal bureaucracy, the unelected, non-constitutional fourth branch of government, operates."The Party" (TP-D) **IS** the government! It is the home team providing all the refs and having the home team coaches do all the "reviews" of the "close plays".
One might note that it has been festering for a very long time. The relevant events are now six years in the past. The Obama administration was astonishingly successful at stonewalling investigations, and its stonewalling continues under a Department of Justice nominally led by a Republican, but staffed overwhelmingly by Democratic Party loyalists.BO / Hillary had a KNOWN disaster in Libya (actually two -- they destabilized the country without Congressional approval, THEN they lost an embassy AND and the ambassador) THEN, they claimed it was due to an internet video rather than being a terrorist attack!
“I was extraordinarily proud of the Paris accords because — you know, I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy, and by the way, American energy production,” Obama told the audience gathered at Rice University’s Baker Institute on Tuesday night. “You wouldn’t always know it but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas — that was me, people.”
Without naming Gingrich, Obama appeared to target that remark Thursday, saying to cheers that "anyone who tells you we can drill our way out of this problem doesn't know what they're talking about -- or just isn't telling you the truth."
Lucianne Walkowicz: I can’t give you an example of what a decolonized Mars looks like, but it starts by having multidisciplinary conversations about the things that happen here on Earth. I often give examples of Standing Rock as an Earth-based example of interests colliding, where you have indigenous people opposing a large-scale project that, much like space exploration, ...Sadly the techical difficulties of Mars colinization are WAY bigger than the question of wether or not the Martians are going to set up a camp and protest.
Obama, speaking at the Obama Foundation Summit on Monday night, said the answers already exist to solve many of the problems facing both the U.S. and the world, but that the nation was not making progress “because we are still confused, blind, shrouded with hate, anger, racism, mommy issues.”So what is a "mommy issue"? Taking care of your kids? Getting up in the middle of the night when they are sick? Wiping their tears, etc? Always seemed to me that BO was really really big on the " Mommy State" -- taking responsibility away from independent Americans and telling them what to do from cradle to grave. BOistan is a lot like "Neverland" ... nobody ever grows up.
Officials can be vindictive creatures, eager to use the power of the state to penalize those whose lifestyles, economic activity, and political affiliations they dislike. Tax power was long ago turned to such misuse, probably because tax collectors had authority to intrude into people's lives before other government employees gained such clout. "My father may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution," Elliott Roosevelt observed of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Obama used "The Chicago Way" ... "reward your friends, punish your enemies". This is ALWAYS one of the ways that people in power will operate -- and the more power we give them, the more it is worth fighting, up to and including violence to get "your side" in power!
The murder of Mr. Khashoggi was a brutal and grotesque act. The United States has registered its feelings loudly and clearly by putting sanctions on the 17 men who were directly involved in the killing. Punishing the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia will not bring justice for Mr. Khashoggi, nor will it make Saudi Arabia a more dependable ally. It will simply diminish the influence of the United States and embolden its enemies.
The biblical advice to be as “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” offers sound counsel to anyone who seeks to see their principles influence the world. The advice of Mr. Trump’s critics is long on abstract morality but lacking in strategic wisdom.
And yet, two-thirds of Democrats say it is either “definitely true” (31%) or “probably true” (36%) that Russia tampered with vote tallies. Women are especially gullible; 48%, across all party lines, have fallen for this fake news. Sadly, 70% of blacks have bought it hook, line and sinker. The Northeast is the country’s most ignorant region, apparently: 47% of Northeasterners have fallen for the hoax.
So the Democrats, by their constant hysteria and innuendo, have convinced a large majority of their followers, and 42% of all Americans, of a palpable falsehood that was fabricated in order to assure Hillary Clinton’s election and then, when that effort failed, perpetuated in an attempt to cripple President Trump’s administration.
And so, as the secular Left pressed up against the church, it looked behind and saw the flames in its own camp. Peterson held the match, but the kindling was all around him. It’s not that men (and many women) failed to adjust to the new gender ideologies, it’s that the new gender ideologies too often fail to reckon with our deepest human longings and fail to recognize our fundamental human nature. As Peterson writes in 12 Rules, “We cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls.”
Under Harvard’s current admissions regime, according to an analysis of the data by SFFA expert witness Peter Arcidiacano, a GPA-test score combination that would give an Asian-American applicant only a 25 percent chance of admission would give an otherwise identical African-American a 95 percent chance, a Latino a 77 percent chance, and a white a 36 -percent chance. Asian Americans, though, are a far larger percentage of Harvard’s admitted students (22.7 percent this year, for example) than of the college-age U.S. population (about 6 percent). This still does not preclude a finding that Harvard discriminates against Asian Americans.
They are so much stronger academically than all other racial groups that the SFFA estimates if “Harvard admitted students based only on their academic index, Asian Americans would comprise over 50 percent of the admitted class.” (The school has increased Asian-American admissions substantially since the lawsuit was filed in 2014, which the plaintiff dismisses as a litigation strategy.)
So what’s the answer? Gilder is clear and unequivocal: Blockchain is the future, not just because it will protect user data but because it will allow every user safe and immediate access to that data. It will usher in a world beyond Google.
To understand how, it’s useful to have a basic grasp of how blockchain technology works. Essentially, information in a blockchain exists as a shared — and continually reconciled — database. The blockchain database isn’t stored in any single location; no centralized version of the information exists (as it does in Google’s Dalles data center) for a hacker to penetrate. Instead, it’s hosted by millions of computers simultaneously, like a spreadsheet duplicated across an entire network whose data are constantly updated and accessible to anyone on the network.
The report, “Hidden Tribes,” breaks Americans into seven groups, from left to right, with names like Traditional Liberals, Moderates, Politically Disengaged and so on. It won’t surprise you to learn that the most active groups are on the extremes — Progressive Activists on the left (8 percent of Americans) and Devoted Conservatives on the right (6 percent).
These two groups are the richest of all the groups. They are the whitest of the groups. Their members have among the highest education levels, and they report high levels of personal security.His biggest takeaway from this particluar survey is:
Brooks the intellectual seems to miss that tribalism is NATURAL, it is wired into ALL of us. He could read Amy Chua, "Political Tribes and the Fall of Nations" to get a better handle on that.
You could say that tribalism is the fruit of privilege. People with more stresses in their lives necessarily pay less attention to politics. People with college degrees are more likely to describe their ideology as central to their identity. They are much more likely to derive moral meaning from their label, more likely to affiliate with a herd based on their label and more likely to vote on the party line.
On page 40-41 she does a good job of quickly covering the basic science that we already know -- "our brains are hardwired to identify, value, and individualize in-group members, while outgroup members are processed as interchangeable members of a general social category".
"Humans aren't just a little tribal. We're VERY tribal and it distorts the way we think and feel".
"The key to ethnic identity is that it is built around the idea of shared blood; ... For most human beings, the family is primal".The BASIS that we select our tribe may vary, but there are really only two hopes for rising above tribalism, religion or education. Brooks is saying that "education fails" ... although he likely doesn't know what he has said. His second big takeaway is ...
My second big takeaway from the report is that ideas really do drive history. Progressive Activists and Devoted Conservatives organize around coherent philosophical narratives. These narratives aren’t visions of a just society. They are narratives of menace — about who needs to be exorcised from society.Historically, FAITH drove Western history, specifically, Christian faith. I'd argue that it is still faith driving history -- it is just that the tribal faith of both the rich white segments he talks about is no longer a transcendent religious faith grounded in classic historical and SHARED cultural heritage. As he says in his own roundabout way, the "Progressive Activists" want to destroy what is left of "America", and the "Devoted Conservatives" want to preserve it -- so they don't get along.
Now, I am not sure the higher purpose that religion offers its adherents can ever be replaced by any other human enterprise. Nor do I discount religion’s positive contributions to the building of community, or to the development of our culture. I am just not convinced that there was ever a way for religiosity to have fully survived Charles Darwin. Even if secularization is in some ways undesirable, it is at least partly inevitable. Most of Europe, for one, has renounced Christianity. Deneen mourns the death of God, and understandably so, but as a political theorist in modern society he cannot just assume that the strength of organized religion can be easily regenerated. He must grapple with, rather than just complain about, the rise of secularism. And his inability to cope with it, ironically enough, serves to demonstrate the wisdom of liberalism — for part of liberalism’s genius is that its pluralistic capacity to foster freedom of association can incorporate atheists and people of faith into the same body politic.
Deneen’s book is valuable because it focuses on today’s central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order. Nonetheless, he is wrong. Liberal democracy has had a pretty good run for 300 years. If the problem were really in the roots, wouldn’t it have shown up before now?
The problem, Deneen argues, started at the beginning. Greek and medieval philosophies valued liberty, but they understood that before a person could help govern society, he had to be able to govern himself. People had to be habituated in virtue by institutions they didn’t choose — family, religion, community, social norms.While liberalism was far from perfect in basic construction, the fact that up until maybe "1930 or 1940", "culture" at least in the US still involved the CULTIVATION (root of "culture") of the basic virtues of governing yourself as Buckley expertly pointed out in "God And Man at Yale". Unfortunately NR, founded by Buckley has obviously strayed from this key quote from that work ...
"The duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world, and the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level".
Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self-definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the state. Nisbet saw the rise of fascism and communism as the predictable consequence of the liberal attack upon smaller associations and communities.
Our “community” was now to consist of countless fellow humans who shared an abstract allegiance to a political entity that would assuage all of our loneliness, alienation, and isolation. It would provide for our wants and needs; all it asked in return was complete devotion to the state and the elimination of any allegiance to any other intermediary entity.Say that when you discover that you are completely alone with only a cold uncaring state as a constant companion, you decide to make some friends of your fellow "citizens". Remember the root of "culture" so gleefully fled and then destroyed was "cultivation" -- both you and they needed to have an actual culture to CULTIVATE what it means to be the sort of human that can have meaningful relationships with other humans.
These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names.
People who are “uncultivated” in the consumption of both food and sex, Aristotle observed, are the most vicious of creatures, literally consuming other humans to slake their base and untutored appetites. Far from being understood as opposites of human nature, customs and manners were understood to be derived from, governed by, and necessary to the realization of human nature.Since we are now mostly atomic individuals who are proud of **OURSELVES**, we choose our vaunted "identity" -- through what we consume, where we live, where we go to school, our sexuality, our degrees, our tats, .... always our "own creation", or more accurately, the creation of a godless state and godless corporate marketing tricking us to the false belief of our "independence".
After a five hundred–year philosophical experiment that has now run its course, the way is clear to building anew and better. The greatest proof of human freedom today lies in our ability to imagine, and build, liberty after liberalism.I STRONGLY recommend reading this fairly short work. Almost certainly it will make you uncomfortable no matter what your political, religious, or philisophical stripe. Which for me is one of the most important things a book can do -- because only through pain can there be growth!
In his new book, MSNBC political correspondent Steve Kornacki attempts to put the current state of America’s uncivil politics in historical context. He does so, naturally, by blaming Republicans. To get a sense of how objective he is in his outlook -- and rigorous in his research -- the reader only need know that Kornacki repeats the same untruth about Reagan that Hillary Clinton put in in her tedious 512-page alibi published last year. Clinton and Kornacki both wrote that Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Miss.
Here is a teaser from the article ... just go read it!
“On the highest throne in the world, man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement - the joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man’s dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real.”
The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of. They skip Davos every year and watch Fox News. Not even the very best has the dazzling brilliance of a Chuck Schumer, not to mention a Michelle Obama. In truth they are dumb as sheep.
Rick Moran writes at PJ Media: “A gay man who describes himself as a liberal Democrat is accusing New Jersey Senator Cory Booker of sexually assaulting him in 2014…The man, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, penned a lengthy open letter that was posted on Twitter. In the letter he describes the assault that occurred in a bathroom following a meeting at his workplace, where the two met.” Moran links to the letter posted here on Twitter. As Moran puts it, the letter “goes into excruciating detail.”
It turns out that "Beto" (Bob) , while a common Hispanic nickname, has not even 1/1,024th Hispanic blood in him -- although lots of people THINK he is Hispanic, something that Ted Cruz actually IS -- 1/2 Cuban descent from his father.
Mr. O’Rourke announced Friday that he had raised over $38 million in the last three months alone, a staggering sum for a statewide race and the most of any Senate candidate in history. But a new poll completed Thursday night by The New York Times Upshot and Siena College indicated that Mr. Cruz now leads Mr. O’Rourke by eight percentage points, 51 percent to 43 percent, with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.6 points.
O’Rourke was so drunk that he could barely get out of the car without falling, so perhaps he would not have gotten far — or he was simply confused. Perhaps in his memory, O’Rourke believes he did not try to leave. But, given his blood alcohol content at the time of the crash, O’Rourke’s memory 20 years after the fact is not nearly as credible as the police reports written just hours after the crash. Even if one is inclined to dismiss police reports as riddled with errors, it is the one contemporary record we have.
O’Rourke could have dodged the question during the debate or he could have said his memory of the night is not clear. Instead, he chose to dispute the factual record. We also believe in second chances, and O’Rourke should revise his answer if given another opportunity. In the meantime, he earns Four Pinocchios.They certainly believe in 2nd, 3rd, or 40th chances for DEMOCRATS! For Republicans, well, we just saw with Kavenaugh, any 35 year old assertion against you with no corroboration is as good as a conviction, and 35 years of exemplary life are not evidence of a "2nd chance". For Republicans, the WaPo / TP standard is "One accusal and DONE"!
Of the countless head-scratching elements of the O’Rourke phenomenon, one wins handily as the head-scratchingest of all: A troubling percentage of the Betomaniacs I have met in Texas moved here after fleeing places ruined by Beto’s favored policies. These locales are often expensive, increasingly dysfunctional, wildly overregulated and inevitably run by Democrats. Why does no one seem to make this connection? I don’t know! One hero in Austin has taken to posting stickers around town featuring an image of a giant locust, paired with the following text: “I MIGRATED TO A THRIVING TEXAS FROM A LEFTIST (NIGHTMARE) AND NOW I’M VOTING FOR BETO FOR SENATE.” (The posters feature a word much worse than “nightmare,” which I’m not reprinting because I run a PG-13 column here.)
This also feels worse than the divisions over Vietnam and civil rights because there were three huge forces holding us together back then that are missing today: a growing middle class, the Cold War and a sane Republican Party.Well, no ... The NY Times of that day thought Goldwater was definitely INsane, and naturally they were happy -- they held giant majorities in Congress, had the White House, and a SCOTUS that was headed to make baby killing a liberal sacrament! They didn't like Republicans then either -- they were just certain that the left was WINNING as they have been up to Trump! (with a little time for self-reflection under Reagan, and then Gingerich)
And nothing is sacred. Brett Kavanaugh defended himself the other day with the kind of nasty partisan attacks and ugly conspiracy theories that you’d expect only from a talk radio host — never from a would-be justice of the Supreme Court. Who can expect fairness from him now?Even the generally far left "Politifact" finds the supposedly "worst" of the Kavenaugh statement to be very questionable as being as "politically biased" as the NY Times, TP, and the general TP media want to make it to be. "What goes around DOES eventually come around" -- it is a matter of faith in pretty much all religions, karma in Bhuddism, reap what you sow" in Christianity.
It would be easy to blame both sides equally for this shift, noted Ornstein, but it is just not true. After the end of the Cold War, he said, “tribal politics were introduced by Newt Gingrich when he came to Congress 40 years ago,” and then perfected by Mitch McConnell during the Barack Obama presidency, when McConnell declared his intention to use his G.O.P. Senate caucus to make Obama fail as a strategy for getting Republicans back in power.Yea, right. Watergate was tribal, the attacks on Reagan were tribal, Borking was tribal, Clarence Thomas confirmation was tribal, Plame was tribal and Kavenaugh as well as the whole "resistance" is totally transparently tribal.
“You cannot be civil with a political party,” she explained, “that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about.” She added that if Democrats retake a house of Congress, well, then, “that’s when civility can start again.I suspect that Friedman agrees -- as long as the left is in power, they will be certain to operate with THEIR brand of "civility"! TRIBAL "civilty" -- we win, and we exterminate you if we can. Perfectly sane in the natural world, "Red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson)
"Meliorism is, then, a way of discriminating between activities according to how effectively they produce rsults in which we happen to be interested. The various doctrines to which it gives rise are really tangental to meliorism itself; and at the center lies the metaphor of "building"."I am reminded of Don Henley ... wow, they have cracked down on at least SOME songs available on Youtube!
One thing that needs to be remembered in this happy occasion, though, is that Rush Limbaugh was only made possible by the Reagan Administration’s repeal of the so-called “fairness doctrine,” which required “equal time” for “opposing viewpoints,” which meant in practice that conservatives existed on short rations in electronic media. There was some sentiment on the left to bring back the “fairness doctrine” under Bill Clinton, and everyone understood it was really a proposal for a “Hush Rush” regulation, and it died quickly. But rest assured that if the left gets back in power again, they will propose a new “fairness doctrine” whose intent will be to shut down Rush and Fox News.
So everything from Facebook and Twitter censorship to politically recalibrating the order of Google searches serves the larger collective “good.” Even ancient ideas of wealth and poverty fade before our current ideology. If riches are used for social change, even if cynically and for careerist and self-interested reasons, then how they were obtained or otherwise used is irrelevant; if not, then they are proof of greed in their acquisition. Multibillionaire George Soros might be a wanted felon in France or have attempted to break the Bank of England and thereby ruin small depositors. But his wealth is welcomed because he invests a small percentage of it in progressive causes and thereby purchases his own progressive insurance and protection. As did the Catholic Church in the Dark Ages of yore, the Progressive Church now sells indulgences.
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….
The Iowa House of Representatives sided with the industry, approving the bill on a vote of 75-22. Thankfully, Democrats in the Iowa Senate believed the health and safety of Iowans was more important than the profits of ATV dealers and put a stop to the legislation. But that action did nothing with regard to county roads, which is why counties continue to pass ordinances allowing ATVs on their roads.
State legislators should ban ATVs from public roads, and while they’re at it, they should take a hard look at the existing state law on age limits. Today in Iowa, a child of any age can drive an all-terrain vehicle of any size on private property, without regard to training, certification or parental supervision. That’s a prescription for disaster.Letting people decide what their children are capable of doing on their own private property is "a prescription for disaster" in the liberal mind. Only the Nanny State may decide what is "good" and "prudent" in the liberal state. What they totally fail to understand is that "life" is not equivalent to "safety". One of the old benefits of Christian Faith was the idea that this mortal coil was only a prelude to a greater life to follow. It was a life to be LIVED in gratitude and joy, NOT a life to be hidden away by like the man that hid the talent in the parable of the talents (Matt 25 14:30).
