Fight

Trying to post an image, but getting weird obstruction from Google, which shows that I'm signed in but keeps asking me to sign in. Scroll down through this to see the "Fight" content.
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.

Pretty Morning for a Ride

According to the Havamal dictum that you don’t praise a day until evening, today was a good day. 

Up by Craggy Gardens.

Near Mt. Mitchell.

My son.

Three Knobs.

Sons of Confederate Veterans “Mechanized Cavalry” in the background at Grandfather Mountain. We also ran into the Blue Knights MC, a law enforcement club. 

Hobbit Mellow Mushroom in Blowing Rock.


Missed it by That Much


Just the other day we were talking about Trump needing to fear assassination. I figured someone would try to kill him sooner or later. There’s so much intense hate and fear that it was inevitable. 

Aiming for the head, they clearly meant it. Just got nervous and screwed up the kill shot. Alternatively, perhaps they’re not a real shooter. 

This would be a great time for the media to engage in some sober reflection about their fear mongering. I doubt they will. 

Signs from the Road

I recall that AVI visited Craggy Gardens on a recent trip. Maybe he’ll link his post in the comments. 

The “Federal Facility” they are threatening me with five years in prison for entering without removal of my belt knife is a gift shop.

Apparently they think motorcycle pipes are like Jake brakes.

There is exactly one book in the Philosophy section, and it’s on psychology.

On the other hand, this is the best selection of “Witchy stickers” that I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s the only one I’ve ever seen.

Now you’re talking.

On the Road

Highway 281 could use some attention, NCDOT

My son and I are riding up to the Grandfather Mountain Scottish Highland Games. There may be posts from the road. 

Happy 12th of July

 


It's not just the brain pudding

As Kim Strassel points out, it's the abysmal policies:
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.

Terrorists!

Fort Liberty (known as Fort Bragg until this administration) is training its gate guards on threats. 


Not fake news: FT Liberty Public Affairs has issued a statement about it via their Facebook page and Twitter page

Farcical Reagan

As the editor points out in commentary to a link Tex posted in the comments, there's an exception on the subject of immigration; but in general, the effect of Trump on the Republican agenda has been one of moderating its crusader positions in favor of a federalist approach of letting different states do different things

It's not just abortion, which the Republican party now no longer pledges to see banned nationwide; it's also gun rights, which are now mentioned only once in passing. There's no national agenda to expand them, or to nominate judges who will defend them, or to have nationwide concealed carry reciprocity nor Constitutional carry. With my carry license from North Carolina, I can carry freely in 38 states; in a few of the remaining states, it's a felony for me to do so. Trump doesn't care about that, and isn't planning to devote time or energy to it.

He's also expressed public derision for the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which has sourced some fifty-thousand plus loyalists who are ready and vetted to go to work for him. (I've heard good things about this from Jim Hanson, who has discussed the program with Heritage; I haven't personally done so.) Trump's first term was bedeviled by personnel problems of exactly the sort they are trying to help him avoid, but for now he just seems to want to avoid anything that scares the normals.

He may also possibly fear assassination, which is a live possibility if people consider him the tyrannical threat he's painted as in the media. However, Democrats know that's not really true, as we saw Joe Biden admitting yesterday, and as a new article says many Democrats admit privately. Trump was himself a New York Democrat most of his life, and his positions -- soft on abortion, soft on guns, focused on improving the economy and bringing in prosperity -- are something like the consensus positions of the 80s and 90s that were his real heyday. 

On the 'history repeats itself, the second time as farce' model, Trump can be seen as the farcical version of Reagan. Reagan was soft on guns too: the main check on people buying automatic weapons isn't the 1930s NFA, which allows it with extra background checks and permits, but a Reagan-era law that requires that all such weapons for sale privately be manufactured before 1986. As time goes on, that means that practically there are fewer and fewer available for purchase, and they are more and more expensive. Reagan was rhetorically strong on abortion but appointed the justice who wrote Casey, and he himself had signed legislation as governor of California that allowed abortion to 20 weeks. 

So New York or California values, married to occasionally strong rhetoric but lacking in conviction practically. Trump may share Reagan's suspicion of the Federal Government now that he's been subjected to its harassment, but he isn't philosophically opposed to a strong central government exercising power in the same way; my only hope there is that he will end up dismantling a lot of the parts that need it out of personal animus. 

Not exactly the 'Hitler in waiting' we are daily promised in the media. Of course, the media treated Reagan much the same way; you'd have thought he was going to destroy the world any second now if you listened to them. 

NC Board of Elections

The North Carolina Board of Elections has decided not to allow three third parties on the ballot for the general election this year — but they are making room for the Constitution Party. 

So, all three parties that give Democratic voters an option (RFK’s, Cornel West’s, and the Green Party) will be omitted from the ballot. The one party likely to draw from the Republican vote will be included. They had earlier added the Libertarians and No Labels. 

The BoE is controlled by Democrats because the Governor, Roy Cooper, is a Democrat. 

Topsy-turvy world

Articles like this Guardian piece confuse me. The authors seem to be serious, but there's such a looking-glass quality to the arguments and assumptions. They're alarmed that the new Republican platform, attributed to Trump, is moderate and popular, which makes it dangerous, because people might like it. They complain that Trump is adoping policies and positions that by rights belong to Democrats; they're apparently unaware that it's been a long time since Democrats pursued those policies.
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 Happier Conan


I built that toy for him when he was a little puppy

Against World-Changers

The NYT explains France:
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.
They draw this subhead from a man they interviewed:
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.”
The loss of confidence in what they are calling "mainstream" parties was well-earned. These include both of our parties as well as they do Macron's or Merkel's. As Richard Fernandez writes, these parties internationally are trying to commit humanity to one of the greatest gambles humanity has ever taken. And they're doing it by force, against the will of the majority of humanity as well as their citizenries. 
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).


If you don't like this, stop using political power to destroy your own civilizations. As long as the political professionals keep doing that, they're going to run into opposition. They deserve to run into opposition. It is vital and important that they be opposed and defeated. 

It's also important who does it -- the Communist Party in France is one of those claiming that they'll be the successful destroyers, a claim that their résumé does at least support. You definitely don't want to be ruled by Communists, whose very similar effort to reform farming led to some 30-60 million deaths in China alone. Hopefully beating the world-changers can be done without committing yourself to another world-changing philosophy with no better track record of avoiding massive human misery. Still, it's no surprise that there's a unifying call to defeat these 'mainstream' parties from both left and right. They deserve to be defeated. 

Good!

A series of pre-election lawsuits against bad voting practices has been initiated by the GOP. This is one of the things that was missing in 2020, meaning that after the election courts mostly dismissed lawsuits about bad practices as laches, 'too late.' These may well be dismissed as unripe, meaning 'too early.' However, they may not all be; and if they are, at least when they're brought up again after the election it will be harder to just rule them too late since an earlier court will have explicitly told them to wait. 

Unfortunately, in the current environment lawsuits will have to accompany major elections all the time. This has been a longstanding practice on the other side, where voter ID rules or other election security practices are routinely subject to lawsuits to try to get a court to suspend them. It's not usually the DNC but an allied 'civil rights' group, claiming that the intent is not ballot security but disenfranchisement of a class of voters. It's about time that election security advocates got in the game, because they've been getting drug over the coals by similar practices for decades.

Dog Wanting Rescue

Don’t be so dramatic, Conan. It’s just a bath.

Dog rescue

Inspiring before and after pictures of our most recent dog rescue: 58 lbs., which was skeletal, to 89 lbs., which appears to be his ideal weight:
He's about to start heartworm treatment, but in about 2-3 months he'll be available for adoption. The rescue group for which I'm fostering him would like to place him somewhere a little further north. He has beautiful indoor and outdoor manners with people, other dogs, and cats, but is a large vigorous animal who would be happiest somewhere he could run around outdoors in a cooler climate. The rescue group pays for transport.

I was feeding this guy 16 cups of food a day when he arrived in April or May. I tapered him off as he recovered, and he's eating 4 cups a day now.

What'd'ja Expect?

DB: "President who dropped Afghans from sky asks why you thought Gaza pier would go any better."

Liberal Language

I really like our local paper, the Smoky Mountain News, in spite of its very clear liberal bent. They do good journalism and get the facts right. It is wearisome having every single story described in that liberal context, but compared to the way that far wealthier outfits don't even bother to get the facts right, it's good for what journalism has become. 

The problem is that the profession has become such an echo chamber that they can't even be fair when they're trying to be fair. It's not as if they don't make an effort to be. They just can't.

For example, here's a story about the abortion issue. The headline is  as "Roundtable sheds light on threat to abortion care." So (a) the opposing view is a threat, and (b) abortion isn't just abortion, it's a form of "care." The story is literally an attempt to describe a roundtable that discusses the issue, and the news involves giving the views of each side. And they try:
Right to life advocates view abortion as an attack on human life.
It's not the opinion, i.e. 'view,' of right to life advocates that abortion is an attack on human life. It is an indisputable fact that abortion necessarily involves the destruction of a human life. The view is that it is wrong to destroy an innocent human life absent some very compelling reason to do so -- usually even right to life advocates are willing to accept genuine medical necessities arising from things like intratubal pregnancies, where a refusal to perform the abortion would not save the baby but would ensure the death of the mother. 

You don't have to take that view, but you can't reasonably reject the fact

A lot of right-to-life advocates even think that rape and/or incest are good enough reasons to allow killing the innocent human being. The guy they are citing as an example, Mark Robinson, takes that view. They credit him for that view, and say he has "softened" his stance over time. Softness and caring are on the pro-killing side. Hardness and uncaring is, unconsciously I believe, associated with the side that is opposed to the killing of human beings. 

Here's another story where they legitimately are trying to be fair, and just can't quite. This one is about the new Pride festival in Haywood County's seat of Waynesville, for some reason scheduled after Pride month. (The one in Sylva is much later still -- they've taken over Labor Day weekend for it, even though Labor Day was a good left-wing cause already. The burly union man has been getting less and less popular among this crowd for a generation or so, though once the mainstay of their political influence.)
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.
That's not a bad opening. It does suggest that the normal opinion, "for many," is that Pride is "straightforward" and about love. It does allow the "competing prayer meeting" to exist in an permissible category of constitutional activity that can even be respectful. 

They go on to frame the story in terms of the one LGBTQ advocate who showed up to the prayer meeting, and offered a biblical citation in support of her position -- a citation they don't bother to quote, but that they do praise as a "courageous speech." Later on they mention it involved citations from Acts 10, but they don't offer the citations or the argument so that it might be evaluated. Why would you? They don't quote anyone else's biblical citations either; the only approved use of biblical citations is to defend left-wing political positions, and it's not really important whether those citations are plausibly constructed. Nobody serious believes in the Bible anyway, not really

They did quote her as saying "I just wanted to offer it to you, with an open heart, to consider that maybe that which you are calling 'unclean' God does not call 'unclean.'" Thus, I'm guessing it was this passage:
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.

That's OK, We'll Just Vote Again

It's an interesting feature of the French constitution that the loss of an election can allow the sitting-but-just-voted-against President to call for another election immediately. This time they got a more palatable result to the elites: instead of a right-wing government, they'll have a coalition with their very hard left. Whatever it takes to keep the right wing out of power! They could have voted ten more times if necessary.

UPDATE: See discussion for further clarification of French election laws.

Bikeriders: The Song.


 

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.

News of a more local sort

This is the difference a small path divergence can make for a small tropical system: A much weakened Beryl took steady aim for several days at an area just south of the Mexican border. Then for a day or two the forecast pointed right at my home, before it started to drift further up the coast on Thursday. At that point I released my reservation with a contractor to put up my storm shutters, even knowing that I'm still convalescing and couldn't do it alone, while Greg's back (though improving) wouldn't permit him to help at all. Friday the track wobbled between us and further east.

On Saturday I managed to get two strapping young men out here to pull lawn furniture and some potted plants into the garage, but I released them as well without making them stay to put a shutter even on a big double door that opens inward and gave us the worst time during Harvey.

In the end, the storm has set sail for tiny Palacios, halfway to Houston from here. It may briefly regain hurricane status and make landfall with 75-85mph winds, heading almost directly for the coastal and isolated South Texas Nuclear Plant on its way to College Station and then Texarkana, missing both Houston and Dallas.

On this map, our little peninsula is just west of the first bay shown east of Corpus Christi, called "Espiritu Santo." (Our bay, Copano, is too small to show up here; not even Corpus's much bigger bay is visible. Landfall is expected just east of Matagorda Bay, the large bay down the coast from Houston's Galveston Bay.) Here at home, we'll likely get some light wind and, if we're lucky, 2-3 inches of rain.

Greg is dutifully but gingerly doing his PT. Knock on wood, it seems he may not need surgery, if his little enzymes continue to eat up the bits of extruded disc. Considering that he's been out of commission for two months, that's surprising but welcome news, like this storm track and minor intensity.