Elon Musk's SpaceX turned a smallbore squabble about an alleged unfair labor practice into a massive assault on the administrative state that could result in the entire enforcement structure of the National Labor Relations Board being declared unconstitutional.
“Kamala Harris in and of herself has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together. They only have six years of public service experience, and I often point out to people, you wouldn’t go into brain surgery and ask for the freshest neurosurgeon out of medical school,” Whitmer said[.]
"Ladies and gentlemen, unlike our opponents, our candidate is a career politician."
Here I thought the prosecutor thing was a dangerous ploy. Or Maybe Whitmer's trying to sabotage Kamala to keep her from being in the way in four years?
Apropos of the last two posts, a Jewish business associate of mine is visiting Asheville next week and wanted to meet up. In case he wanted to meet over a meal, and in case he keeps Kosher, I was trying to see if there are any Kosher restaurants in Asheville. Yelp suggested this one.
I don't know a lot about Kosher, but I do know that shellfish isn't on the list! It turns out there aren't any Kosher restaurants in Asheville, and not many Jews either -- the closest synagogue I know of is actually a Methodist church that loans itself out to them on Saturdays. The very small Jewish population has been around long enough that there's a Jewish section in one of the old segregated cemeteries near Hendersonville, but the population has never grown large. It's no surprise that there are no restaurants that go to the very substantial trouble of maintaining a Kosher kitchen -- you have to have a whole separate kitchen, as well as separate utensils and all the rest -- to cater to such a tiny populace.
However, the Lobster Trap bit reminded me of a joke I read in a book by Isaac Asimov. I no longer have the book, but the joke goes approximately like this:
On the holiday of Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement, a synagogue's congregation sat waiting for their rabbi to turn up. He was late, and later, and still hadn't appeared well into lunchtime. In addition to being hungry, they were very worried that something had happened to him. So they began calling all around town to see if they could locate him or get word of what might have happened to him.
Finally someone reported that he had been seen at a local seafood restaurant. The congregation went to find him, and discovered him eating a big plate of oysters. Looking on in horror, they exclaimed, "Rabbi! Rabbi! How could you do this, on today of all days?"
He looked at them quizzically and replied, "What? There's an 'r' in 'Yom Kippur.'"
“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”Iran, he said, wants to impose “radical Islam” on the world and sees the United States as its greatest enemy because it is “the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power.”He argued that Iran-backed militias like Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, whatever their aggression against Israel, are actually fighting a different war.“Israel is merely a tool,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The main war, the real war, is with America.”
It's definitely true that Iran has been about destroying America from its beginning, and that it aspires to turn the whole world to its brand of Twelver Shi'ite Islam, which can reasonably be described as a radical position within Islam (both Twelver Shi'ite views and the view that the entire world needs to be brought under that particular strain; the view that the whole world should convert to Islam is not especially radical, any more than the view among Christians that every person will someday confess the divinity of Christ).
Normally, in American politics at least, the other side would attempt to rebut such a central claim. Not this time! This time they pulled down the American flags off Union Station's poles and burned them, ran up the flag of Palestine, carried the black flag of ISIS with signs stating that Allah was bringing about "the final solution" (supposedly while protesting against 'genocide'), burned effigies of both Netanyahu and Biden, attacked the police perimeter around the Capitol while successfully storming the Capitol (remember how fighting the Capitol Police and storming the Capitol on J6 was portrayed as an insurrection against America itself?), vandalized every American monument nearby and generally did all they could to underline the same point.
So ok, maybe there's some reasonable argument to make that things would calm down if there was a ceasefire in the war -- at least for a while, until Hamas rearmed and was ready to start the war back up again on its own terms. There isn't, apparently, any real debate that the side Israel is fighting is also an enemy of America. They themselves would like you to know that, would like to demonstrate it as clearly as they can.
Helping your friends and harming your enemies was the account of justice that Plato's Republic attempted to rebut. However, one of the key rebuttals was that you might be mistaken about who your enemies are. At least in this case, it's hard to believe there's any mistake.
UPDATE: NPR: Protests “Largely Peaceful.”
... “In 2003, a district attorney in San Francisco named Terence Hallinan was investigating Mayor Willie Brown’s friends. He was also investigating the priest scandal of sexual abuse in San Francisco, and that touched some very powerful institutions, including an elite prep school that involved the Gettys, Gov. Jerry Brown, etc. Their involvement with that school.”......“The priestly abuse scandal that was taking place, she never prosecuted a single case, Sean,” Schweizer added. “Of the 50 largest cities in America, San Francisco was the only one that that didn’t prosecute a single case, and she covered it up by deep-sixing documents that her predecessor had obtained.
[W]e humans can't possibly understand God's ways. A worm understands more about your 401(k) investment strategy, than we understand about God's plan. To an unborn child, birth is a catastrophe, the end of everything he knows; but to us, we know that it's the start of something far greater, and the end of something that could not possibly go on any longer.I would be very, very cautious about seeing "the hand of God" in anything other than your own life (and even that, mostly in retrospect). God is never doing just one thing, and further is primarily concerned with the salvation of individual souls rather than anything else.
"It's really hopeless" is not a happy claim, but it could be true without being happy. But it may not be functional even if it is true, as Kant said of determinism: even if you decide to believe that you have no free will and everything is determined by physics, the choice to make that decision about what to believe seems to be a free choice. You can't really function as someone who believes in determinism; every day you experience choices that you seem to make and need to reason about (e.g. 'should I have donuts for lunch, or something healthier?' doesn't seem to be deterministic; even if Krispy Kreme just opened across the street and makes donuts right at your lunchtime, it seems like you can at least occasionally decide to eat something else). Students and teachers like Nicholas of Cusa have gone a long way down this path of showing that God's infinity makes him fundamentally unknowable; I myself doubt whether infinity is a proper metaphor, because it seems to be a feature of creation rather than the uncreated. Still, many of Nicholas' basic points hold even if you say that infinity isn't a large enough concept, so to speak.
Fortunately, you have another road you can choose, which is scripture. This seems to be the source of Janet's claim that God is principally interested in saving souls: it's not reasoned from nature, as we can't even prove the existence of souls from nature. Scripture provides a number of positive claims about God. For example, the prophecy of Ezekiel provides an extremely mysterious account of the chariot of God that Moses Maimonides wrote a book about interpreting. Such interpretations do tend to suggest that God takes sides for reasons of his own, as with Moses; we still may not always understand these reasons, as when he orders Joshua to engage in what seems like wholesale genocide. Sometimes people doubt at least some of the scriptures' authenticity, especially when it seems like an argument that God took one group's side over the other's; the scripture really does seem to say that, but it's out of order of deductions like those that begin the Declaration of Independence, i.e. that God loves everybody equally.
For Christians, scripture also includes an apparently easier path: Jesus as intermediary personhood, whom you can relate to directly as one human being to another (fully man and fully god, somehow). This point is raised by Tex; yet of course Jesus is not merely man, though fully man, and by nature exceptional and extraordinary, and thus a model that can't be expected to hold for the ordinary and normal.
Still, it's attractive because then the path is not necessarily much harder than developing a relationship with another person, except that you only get to meet the person through scripture or as you imagine interactions through prayer. However, then you have the same problem as the mystic, who approaches God and knowledge of god through meditation: how much of what you are 'finding out about God' really is your imagination rather than a genuine encounter with the divine? I'm reminded of a favorite quote from the movie Ladyhawke, wherein the thief says to the knight, "Sir I talk to God all the time, and the truth is he never mentioned you." Yet at least in the movie, the thief was just trying to avoid an arduous and scary duty that really did lead to what the author depicts as prophecy and divine justice.
You can try to test your imagination or meditations also against scripture, of course, to see that you're not getting too far astray. But we also have scriptural interactions with God the Father in the Old Testament, especially in the Book of Job. Job is actually full of a set of claims about God that I would say are characteristic of another major approach to theology, which is negative theology. Job, upset about all the misery inflicted upon him even though he has tried to live a just and faithful life, is confronted with evidence of things God is not: specifically, God does not share Job's limitations. Job can't hang the stars in the sky, or set the firmament on its foundations. We aren't really told anything about how God can do those things, so we don't really know much more about him: but we do know that there are ways in which God is different from us, and these are ways in which he lacks our limitations and instead possesses great powers.
Job contains at least one passage, though, that suggests yet another approach to God. I have written before on several occasions about its description of the horse:
Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.This is an interesting passage, though: because horses are like that, but only if men make them so. By pure nature, a horse will avoid any danger, and is scared like a grasshopper -- or of a grasshopper. The Lord's point in speaking to Job, if Job were the kind of man who could understand it, was that this is indeed what men do with horses.
Given the lack of an adequate response from Biden administration officials and the public’s growing mistrust of the Biden FBI and Department of Homeland Security, people are looking at the timeline of the assassination attempt and drawing their own conclusions.Look at what's happening in the polls as more and more people conclude these people are lying to us 24/7/365.
But what about Corey Comperatore, a loving and devoted husband, father, and public servant? Was it God's plan for him to die?For every person who is saved from cancer by the power of prayer, there are thousands for whom those prayers are never answered. When we were in Cambodia, I witnessed more than the horrific effects of human trafficking. We visited some of the Killing Fields....
When my grandmother was buried, child me asked why anyone would fear God, as the scripture said. I know now. God getting involved is terrifying.
People say to pray for the nation. I’m not the sort to say things like that. But I am praying.
The Pagan's MC are accusing the cops of excessive force, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution after a confrontation in a bar suddenly degenerated into violence caused by cops who had been drinking for hours.
Maybe all this secret police stuff is not befitting of a free society.
...at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, per @DanScavino via @cdrsalamander (I don't seem able to post X videos):
https://x.com/DanScavino/status/1813067403703820757
BZ, indeed.
Eric Hines
Cities have used rent control for decades as a way to keep renters from experiencing the price signals of bad policies enacted by local and state politicians, and it's been a disaster without escape all along.Prices are the balance between supply and demand.You can lower demand by creating alternatives. You can raise supply by removing obstacles to the natural tendency for supply to flow in wherever prices are rising. But a sure way to crash supply is to react to high prices by capping them in order to pander to voters who are deserting you in droves. It's an especially unsavory form of pandering when the price shocks your voters are experiencing result from your own boneheaded economic policy, but President Unity likely couldn't have understood economic principles even in what passed for his cognitive prime."Affordable" housing is meaningless if it's unavailable at the state-mandated price, just like "affordable" healthcare.
A volunteer firefighter died saving his family from the shots fired by Trump’s would-be assassin.
Here is their major citation, which unlike the Journal is not behind a paywall.
Earlier that afternoon, before the shooting that left two people dead including the gunman, I asked an 11-year-old: “Is this your first Trump rally?”
“Yeah,” he smiled, “but it’s not going to be my last.”
Caution is in order when such shocking news breaks quickly. But the immediate response from some of the nation’s most biggest news outlets wasn’t cautious; it was unserious. An early Washington Post headline already subject to ridicule on Twitter by 6:33 p.m. declared “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally.” Minutes earlier, a CNN headline had announced, “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.” Reason magazine’s Billy Binion tweeted that “using cautious phrasing before all the information is known is good, actually.” Yes, it is, but “loud noises” and “Trump…falls at rally” plumb depths of journalistic malpractice unfathomed even by such earlier CNN and Washington Post absurdities as “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests” and “austere religious scholar.” The “cautious” way to report the story would be to refer to “apparent” or “possible” shots or an assassination attempt. Many phrases could have been appropriate, but not “loud noises” or “falls at rally.”
Trump yelling 'Fight, fight," after getting grazed by a bullet in the ear, an inch from ending his life.
No panic. No crawling on his knees to safety. The man stands up, faces the crowd, and yells 'fight.'I suppose they'll find a way to construe that as a criminal incitement to riot again.
Don’t forget how a man pushing 80 came to office. The 2020 Democratic primary was dominated by candidates vying to curry favor with a rising progressive left. Worried that Bernie Sanders would kill a chance at the White House, voters turned to the only fixture who claimed to be moderate. He was a two-time presidential primary loser, as old as Methuselah, and slipping even then, but whatever. He was deemed the only candidate able to beat Donald Trump, which was probably true. Even four years ago, the party understood pure progressivism to be a political liability.
That self-preservation went out the window when Mr. Biden gave full rein to the Sanders platform. Blowout spending fueled the worst inflation in 40 years. Open borders caused a migrant flood that is overwhelming cities in red and blue states alike. A climate agenda fed higher energy prices and grid instability and squelched consumer choice. Washington made common cause with progressive prosecutors who enabled a crime wave in major cities. A “foreign policy for the middle class”—whatever that means—emboldened America’s adversaries.
The president who ran on uniting the country and restoring “standards and norms” also bowed to the far left’s worldview that the ends justify the means. The Justice Department signed on to the progressive lawfare campaign, unleashing criminal prosecutions against Mr. Trump and fueling fury among Republicans. Independents and moderates look with unease on actions the courts found unlawful—Covid mandates, student-loan forgiveness, environmental policy—and Democratic promises to pack the Supreme Court and federalize election law.
Rather than running on the Biden administration’s oversight of job growth in distressed areas and its new industrial policy, liberals seem content to do battle on the cultural front. This discursive failing has allowed common sense policies that are more reflective of the governing practice of today’s Democratic party – from defending the social safety net to growing manufacturing jobs – to become rebranded as the bread-and-butter of the Republican party.The Biden administration has been pursuing job growth in distressed areas and a new industrial policy?
In power, it’s likely that Trump will once again betray his working-class supporters and govern like a typical business conservative, because he is utterly committed to more tax cuts and weakening trade unions.The authors appear unaware of the appeal to current working-class supporters of policies like reasonable tax rates and curbs on corrupt trade unions.They complain that Trump was supposed to destroy the Republican Party, but instead he made it stronger.
And in office, he reassured establishment figures by coupling largely symbolic protectionist measures with the deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy that one would have expected from a Mitt Romney administration.In what universe? Where do they get these ideas about what a man like Romney would have done in office?I guess I shouldn't be surprised that they're so baffled. They don't seem able to look at anything outside their own heads.
A coarsening of public discourse and contempt for mainstream parties have politicians on both sides denouncing what they say are extreme positions by their opponents, analysts say.
Wojciech Przybylski, president of Res Publica Foundation, a research group in Warsaw, said there had been a coarsening of political discourse and a growing contempt on both ends of the spectrum for mainstream forces.That, he said, reminded him of Poland between the world wars, when the far left and the far right rallied, sometimes violently, against the central government.Today, he said, both “are united against globalization and claim to be defending the so-called average man against elites.”
Yet food redesign is not the almost painless step it is made out to be but rather a wrenching change for almost everyone involved in agriculture, as shown by 2024 European farmers' protests. Chief among the grievances were proposed environmental regulations (such as a carbon tax, pesticide bans, nitrogen emissions curbs, and restrictions on water and land usage) that are part of the "nature positive" agriculture initiative. The resulting protests ultimately led to the fall of many governments throughout the continent. "Angry farmers are reshaping Europe," proclaims the New York Times, "as the far right senses an opportunity".
“The graduates of elite schools that run this country have no idea about farm life, or even what a day’s labor feels like,” Mr. Monnery said. “They’re perched up there, the successors to our royal family, Macron chief among them."
Is this a case of rural know-nothings resenting their betters or are the farmers right to resist? Because 37 percent of the world's land area is devoted to agriculture, employs a quarter of the global workforce and encompasses so many varied ecosystems and social milieus, changing the way multitudes of people produce food is perhaps the greatest social engineering project in history.
No government has a mandate for that. No ordinary election could generate such a mandate in any event: all elections are for is to decide who will govern the existing polity. Elections by nature are more conservative, as they presume that the incoming party will govern an existing order. This sort of total reform of society requires at minimum something like a constitutional convention; more likely, a revolutionary war.
So you have people, ordinary people who really are 'mainstream' in the proper sense of the term, looking at other options that will resist this revolutionary war that is being fought against them. The radicals are really the conservatives: they both propose to resist that revolution, whether from the right or from the left. The coarsening of discourse is the effect of ordinary people, who aren't so refined as the Wise, getting dragged into politics because their worlds are being destroyed by those who have made politics their profession.
Meanwhile the NYT and its ilk are in no position to talk about coarsening discourse. They're the ones who painted Mitt Romney as a dog-abusing misogynistic monster. I don't like Mitt Romney at all, but he's clearly one of that refined-discourse order, the sort of person who takes jobs with international organizations and addresses them fluently in their native French. You're the ones, liberal journalists, who coarsened the discourse in ways that ended up radicalizing the populace. It's at least as much your fault as anyone's. I can't open a paper today without reading about how your opponents are all racists and haters and liars, led by a "felon." It's the twilight of democracy if you don't get your way!
Even Joe Biden doesn't see it that way, as John Stewart points out (the whole video is a stinging indictment of the Biden campaign, without being an endorsement of Trump).
Right to life advocates view abortion as an attack on human life.
For many, a Pride festival is a fairly straightforward event, a celebration of unity among people marginalized for who they are and who they love. But in a purer sense, Haywood County’s historic first Pride festival and a competing prayer meeting held the night before were both compelling exercises of constitutionally protected rights, suggesting maybe — just maybe — that Americans can, in fact, disagree without being disagreeable.
9 About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. 10 He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. 11 He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. 12 It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. 13 Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”14 “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.”15 The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”
So the argument would be something like: just as God can make clean for eating animals that the Jews were previously told in clear scripture were unclean, so too God could make homosexuality clean even though earlier scripture held that it was not clean.
It's a reasonable parallel. One could argue that no similar vision has been sent to a prophet to inform them of the new status of the previously unclean, but who knows if that's true or not? It's very hard to identify true prophets, and we haven't necessarily heard if God sent that message to one. The argument does show that the clearly and demonstrably unclean has been made clean once; why couldn't it happen twice?
The piece would have been stronger if the journalists had included that argument, without becoming an editorial because it would have just been straight news about what the advocate said at the prayer meeting. But they didn't include it, because it never occurred to them to think that a biblical argument was actually important.
The piece goes on to talk about the Pride festival, giving parts of what it calls the "rousing speech." Again, language on their side is "courageous" and "rousing." The other side is mostly quoted as warning itself not to be hateful, which shows that side is constantly tempted to hate.
It's a good newspaper, really. We're lucky to have it. They're trying their best, too. They just can't do it.
The band Lucero wrote a song about the book, The Bikeriders,
back in 2005. Unsurprisingly, it was included in the movie soundtrack. It’s a
good song and the pictures in the video are actually from the book.
The movie tells the story of the founding, and dark metamorphosis,
of the Vandals Motorcycle Club, a fictional representation of the Outlaws
Motorcycle Club that was the focus of the book. The movie tells the story through
the experiences of Johnny (the club president), Benny (Johnny’s right-hand man),
and Kathy (Benny's wife). These characters were actually in Danny Lyon’s book
and provided some of the recollections he included. Consequently, I didn’t find
it odd that the Kathy character narrated some, by no means all, of the plot. That
is not inconsistent with the book.
Kathy is the perfect character to provide the narration she
does at different times throughout the movie. While she is closely associated
with the club, she is not a member. She is not an outsider but neither is she
an insider. She shares the values and aspirations of mainstream society (a
stable family life and respectability) while simultaneously being immersed in
the biker culture (riding and hard partying) due to her marriage to Benny. Consequently, her character provides a both a
contrast to, and a bridge between, biker culture and mainstream American
society.
In many ways, the male lead of the movie is actually Johnny, played by Tom Hardy. At least he was my favorite character. He represents the original biker culture and ethos while providing the order, discipline, and leadership necessary to forge a group of outcasts into a functioning organization. His story illustrates the fall of the original, post WWII, 1% motorcycle club culture and its replacement with the much darker variant that emerged in the 60’s. Anyone interested in learning about the original motorcycle club culture should read The Original Wild Ones: Tales of the Boozefighters Motorcycle Club
I don’t agree with Grim’s assessment of the Benny character
played by Austin Butler. His character doesn’t lack agency, in fact, his
refusal to surrender it is the central theme of his story. Benny represents the
contradiction at the heart of motorcycle club life. On one hand he seeks the total
freedom the motorcycle club sells itself as representing. On the other hand,
the club is making increased demands on him that will strip that freedom away.
Johnny wants Benny to take over leadership of the club but Benny refuses because
doing so will replace his freedom with responsibility. Kathy wants him to leave
the club as it becomes more violent and drug influenced but he also rejects her
demands because doing so would also surrender his freedom.
Grim said that “In the movie the ending of that story is
very sad, even though (or partly because) the lovebirds escape to a 'happy'
life without motorcycles, brotherhood, honor or valor.” I didn’t see it that
way. Benny didn’t leave the club until after the club abandons brotherhood,
honor, and valor. Once the club became a
criminal organization that had no issue with killing its own members it ceased
to be the club Benny joined and Johnny founded. When the club chose a new darker path that Benny
was unwilling to follow, honor demanded that he leave.
Grim claims the script writer denied the characters agency due
to the choices they made. Once again, I disagree. The story told through the
characters of Johnny, Benny, and Kathy track the experience of Danny Lyon as recounted
in his book. He actually became a patched member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club
but eventually left the club due to the very dark and violent direction the
club eventually followed. As I said at the beginning of this review, you have
to understand the movie in the context of the book upon which it is based.
I do agree with Grim’s statement that the movie is a “Strong
drama, and a good study of an earlier set of generations.” I highly recommend
the movie.
