What Happened? I'll tell you what happened, Hillary: you insulted most Americans, and you continue to do so

why don't you love me?!!!

Hillary, in India, blames "white married women" for allowing themselves to be cowed by their husbands into voting for Trump, claims that all Trump voters are racists. And the whole group comprise the  "deplorables", of course.

“[Democrats] do not do well with white men, and we don't do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”

Clinton also claimed Trump's campaign and slogan — “Make America Great Again” — was targeted toward voters who “didn't like black people getting rights” and “don't like women getting jobs.”

Hard to believe, and dispiriting,  that this stupid, silly crook came close to winning the election.

Outdated, discredited "science" from 2011: "the difference between men and women"

Biceps? I'm just the girl next door. Look, I'm wearing earrings!

It's hard to believe how backward we were just seven years ago. 

"Sexual dimorphism" is the scientific term for physical differences between males and females of a species. Many extreme examples exist: Peacocks far outclass peahens, for instance, while female anglerfish both outsize and outwit their tiny, rudimentary, parasitic male counterparts.

Unlike those animals, men and women are more physically similar than we are different. Nonetheless, there are a few key distinctions in our physiques. Some of them are designed to suit each sex for the role it plays in reproduction, while others exist to help us tell each other apart and to aid in our mutual attraction

Nothing that surgery and hormone treatment can't cure

 

UCLA students protest our "bullying" of North Korea

North Korean camping adventure for political prisoners — stop picking on the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" !

UCLA resisted releasing a video of its students shutting down a speech of our Treasury Secretary, but caved after "free speech" advocates insisted.

The video shows audience members hissing at Mnuchin throughout the February 26 event in Los Angeles. The hissing was so loud the secretary barely spoke a sentence without commenting about it.

Seven minutes into Mnuchin's opening remarks, three different women shouted at him and were either carried or escorted out of the room by police after they ignored warnings to stop. 

They yelled that the US is bullying North Korea and criticized President Trump's tax legislation.
 

Considering that its students were demanding that we stop picking on what's possibly the most ruthless dictatorship in the world, I'm guessing the university was embarrassed to show the world the quality of its students. 

With Arnold as a co-defendant?

climate denier

Schwarzenegger announces that he'll be suing oil companies for "first degree murder"

AUSTIN, Texas — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s next mission: taking oil companies to court “for knowingly killing people all over the world.” 

The former California governor and global environmental activist announced the move Sunday at a live recording of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast here at the SXSW festival, revealing that he’s in talks with several private law firms and preparing a public push around the effort.

“This is no different from the smoking issue. The tobacco industry knew for years and years and years and decades, that smoking would kill people, would harm people and create cancer, and were hiding that fact from the people and denied it. Then eventually they were taken to court and had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because of that,” Schwarzenegger said. “The oil companies knew from 1959 on, they did their own study that there would be global warming happening because of fossil fuels, and on top of it that it would be risky for people’s lives, that it would kill.” 

Schwarzenegger said he’s still working on a timeline for filing, but the news comes as he prepares to help host a major environmental conference in May in Vienna. 

“We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to be in there like an Alabama tick. Because to me it’s absolutely irresponsible to know that your product is killing people and not have a warning label on it, like tobacco,” he said. “Every gas station on it, every car should have a warning label on it, every product that has fossil fuels should have a warning label on it.”

Muscle brain might want to reconsider, or at least include himself as one of the defendants.

The idiot has a huge collection of gas-guzzling muscle cars, Porsches, Hummers, and Mercedes Gelendawagons, with, I'd guess, an average MPG of 12. 

ETC.

Big ticket, mid-country homes are still a drag on the market.

(out of the office all day, so just catching up on posting)

There are mortar additives that can prevent that bleaching from chimneys, but they can cost hundreds of dollars.

110 Clapboard Ridge, which started at $35 million in September, 2015, is priced as of today at $25 million. It certainly seems to be an expensively finished home, but so far, no one has wanted it. The place was listed in 2009, "80 % completed", for $21.5 million, but eventually sold for $10.5. Maybe, now that it's been completed, that $10.5 price can be duplicated; hope springs eternal. 

Mel Gibson's house on Old Mill Road also had one of these life-sized chess games, but even with 75 acres (this one's on 5) it failed, badly, to fetch its own $35 million  asking price. Maybe chess is too complicated for today's buyer, and a checker game employed instead?. 

And why should she, now that gender and racial identities are determined by feelings, rather than biology?

"Science" is just a male construct, irrelevant to actual truth unless, of course, it relates to global warming

Pocahontas refuses to take DNA test that would, or wouldn't, confirm her claim to be an Indian.

Warren, who originally denied that she had ever pretended to be an Indian, was later forced to admit that she had, but "only so I could attend lunches with Native-Americans". 

Well who wants to hear from the local police chief on the issue of school safety when there are politicians available to talk about it?

BOO!

 PTA refuses to let police chief and his lieutenant speak at a panel discussion of school safety because they wouldn't disarm. The panel was comprised of five local politicians and an "educator", so, with all solutions certain to be covered, no further voices were needed.

The Ramapo, New York Police Department revealed that its chief and lieutenant were met with opposition when they wanted to attend a parent-teacher organization-sponsored event — and it was because they refused to disarm for the affair.

What are the details?

A Saturday post on the Town of Ramapo Police Department’s Facebook revealed that the department’s chief and lieutenant — both of whom are in charge of local “school-based policing” — had plans to attend Saturday’s Central Hudson Region PTA-sponsored breakfast.

The event was an “opportunity to have a direct conversation about our children’s education and safety with [the New York State] Education leadership and legislators,” according to a posting on the PTA’s Facebook page.

The PTA org apparently had a different idea about police attendance, because according to the posting, the event moderator — and school teacher — told the chief that armed police were not permitted to attend the event, and that “armed uniformed police officers would make people uncomfortable.”

Presumably the school has already been declared a "gun-free" zone, so a PTA-sponsored discussion on the puzzle of why students in similar gun-free zones are still being killed despite signs declaring that policy and posted at every entrance wouldn't want to hear from an armed individual. The focus would be centered on what other steps could be taken beyond a strict rule forbidding guns on the premises. My suggestion would be to post greeters wearing smiley-face buttons at the door, to greet every visitor, and to remind them, especially those carrying "assault rifles", of the rule. 

My guess is that the people who organized this meeting would welcome the idea of good will ambassadors, and are of the type who would be triggered by the sight of any gun, wielded by friend or foe, holstered or not.

So good for the moderator, who shielded his fellow panel participants from such emotional harm.

Without comment

More on Iris DeMent — and there's always room for more on Iris DeMent

Emmylou, left, Iris dement, right

In response to last Saturday's post on one of my very favorite singers, a reader sent along this link to a 2015 interview with the singer/song writer. Excerpts below, but the link takes you to the original podcast, with several YouTubes of her songs. I'm including two of them — an earlier commenter sent along a great video of "Our Town" (see original post), but this one includes the incomparable Emmylou Harris, and "'Aly Bain (from Scotland) playing the fiddle, and Jerry Douglas on steel guitar." Good stuff.

Growing up as the youngest of 14 children, singer Iris DeMent and her family attended a Pentecostal church, which taught that each person would get a calling from God. DeMent remembers waiting in vain for her calling to come — and being disillusioned when it didn't.

But then, when she was 25, DeMent wrote her first song. "And when that song came to me," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "I knew that meant: 'That's your calling. That's what you're gonna do.'"

DeMent, who describes herself as "extremely shy," says she never wanted to be on a stage. But, she says, "The music propelled me there. When the songs started coming to me, I felt I didn't have the option to hide and avoid my ... least desirable spot in life, which is in the spotlight."

DeMent is no longer affiliated with a church, but her music still comes from the spirit. Her song, "Let the Mystery Be," which she played in the Fresh Air studio, is about not knowing what happens after we die.

On the role of music in her life

Another thing that I learned from my parents, who had pretty difficult, challenging lives, to put it mildly: I saw my parents use music to survive. They had to have that music. My mom had to sing and my dad had to go to church and he had to hear that music washing over him and through him. It wasn't a, "Oh, this is nice"; it was a, "I'm not going to make it if I don't have that." So I've felt that that's my job. That's how I think of what I do. I have to give people that lifeline, you know, that I saw my parents reach out for, and that I was taught to reach out for, and so that's what I aim to do. And I guess I don't feel like I can do that without that connection to the spirit.

On doing a duet with her mother for the gospel song 'Higher Ground'

It had been my mom's dream to go off and be a singer in Nashville ... and keep in mind, my mom was born in 1918, so we're going way back there. She never made it, married my dad and had a bunch of kids instead. But [when] I did my first record, I brought her to Nashville and we got in the studio and I wanted her to sing that song with me. And the original plan was that she would harmonize with me — which, I don't know, the producer, everybody thought, that's how this should go, it's my record. So we get in there, we did that a bunch of times. Oh, it was just awful, it was awful. It just wouldn't work. Mom couldn't get with it, and we decided to just give up on it. We didn't say that, but we stopped and we were starting to leave the room, all the players were leaving, and my mom grabbed the lyrics. She said, "Let's get on in there," and she told the piano player what key to play it in. And she did the song, and we just followed her, and at the end, I don't know if you can hear it, but at the end, she says, "Now that was my key."

On leaving the church when she was 16

For a long time when I was growing up ... I made it my job to try to get my school friends saved. I thought, "Could there be any other priority?" I mean, if my friends are going to burn in the fiery furnace, how can I be thinking of anything else? I can't eat my lunch. So I took that really seriously, and I remember one day asking somebody at the church, "Well, I need some New Testaments to give to all the kids at school. That'll help them stay out of the fiery furnace," and I remember ... the person I asked kind of smiled at me ... like, "Oh, cute little kid," and I realized, you don't believe this stuff. So there was a lot of little things like that along the way that started heading me into another direction. And by the time I was 16, I didn't believe that story, that there was all this separation between me and all these other people in the world just because they didn't claim Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I didn't buy it, and I have to say, it wasn't my choice to not buy it, because it meant having to leave the church.

On writing her first song, 'Our Town'

I remember passing through this little town that was your typical dead town there in the Midwest, a lot of boarded-up windows, little white buildings with peeling paint, all the life had gone right on out of it. And that was the first time in my life that I felt a song coming on like it wasn't just me trying to make something happen. It felt very different. I just started seeing all these visions of the life that had gone on there. So when I got down to my brother's house, I remember asking him if I could borrow his guitar, and I had promised I would bring it back on my next visit, and he was nice enough to let me. When I got home from that trip, it might've been a day or two later, I remember sitting down on the floor and I had had all those images in my mind. I guess my brain had been working ... on the trip, and next thing you know, this song came out, and it came out just exactly as it is now. It's one of those rare [songs] for me that I didn't have to fool around with or change. It was just there, and it was my first song.

 

Bonus track: searching for an image to illustrate this post, I came across this performance, and discovered that all three of these come from the same BBC 2 broadcast,"The Trans Atlantic Sessions". Got to find that whole show.

Free fall in Khakum Wood

Going down?

6 Khakum Drive, listed in January, 2017 for $7.9 million, has (again) cut it price, now down to $5.9. The owners paid $8.896 for it in 2014, on an original 2012 asking price of $15 million.

There's nothing wrong with this Round Hill Road development that I'm aware of, but the market for this era's — 1920s — homes is definitely dwindling.