A Single Political Post

I was not planning on doing any political posts during the holidays, barring unforeseen emergencies; but I do feel that I ought to note this article by David Samuels on the breakdown of the Obama machine that has been successfully manipulating American politics for the last few years. I ought to do so because we all owe Mr. Samuels a great debt, as it was his work that got Obama's messaging imp Ben Rhodes to confess the whole bit because he thought he was talking to a friendly outlet (namely, the New York Times Magazine). 

Mr. Samuels, as it turned out, was an honest journalist who really believed all that talk about the free press serving a watchdog role. In faithfully performing what he had youthfully believed was a sacred duty he was freely assuming, he first revealed what he is now explicating.

My thoughts on having read through it are that his analysis understates Elon Musk's role, even though he puts him first in honor. Musk's breaking Twitter free from the censorship program created the friction in the gears of the machine that recently, and blessedly, caused it to fly apart. Samuels comes as close as a man educated to speak to secular audiences can to referring to blessings in his shorter remarks on the role of Donald Trump's survival of the assassination attempt against him. 

It's a very long piece, and because of its author it deserves discussion. For now I will merely note it, and perhaps we will return to it in the New Year.

Yuletide

The winter solstice is today. That guy, the motorcycle-club leader cum Druid, to whom the movie sword Excalibur was freely given because he had changed his legal name to Arthur Pendragon, he’s still around. Here’s a photo series from today’s revelry at Stonehenge that includes him. 

Christmas Cookies

Strait is considered one of the greats of Texas country music, but he’s a little late for me. He’s more of a revival figure from the 80s than one of the 70s greats who were revolutionary rather than traditional. 

Thus, I’d never heard this piece until tonight. It’s not bad at all. 

A Little Boogie Woogie Christmas

From Lynyrd Skynyrd's Christmas Album

Christmas Tunes

 

It is Illegal, Isn’t It?

I always wondered why DEI-style programs didn’t count as illegal discrimination. I once applied for a job with the Department of the Navy and was told I wasn’t qualified before they actually asked about my qualifications— just my demographics alone sufficed to exclude me from consideration. For any other demographic group, the law explicitly forbids such a ruling. For me and those in mine, somehow the discrimination was explicitly permitted, even required. 

I understood the arguments in favor of such programs as remedial of decades of discrimination and centuries of slavery. Not that my ancestors— red dirt farmers, coal miners, drovers, welders— had benefitted a great deal from any social injustice. One of my grandfathers manufactured concrete blocks by hand, until he got a job as a forklift operator. The other repaired long-haul tractor trailer trucks. Others had it harder still, but this sort of race-based remediation was at best a blunt instrument that didn’t much treat the problem. 

But what always confused me was how it wasn’t just illegal. It seemed to be, following from the principles. Yet every institution practiced some version of it, especially the government. 

Maybe it’s illegal after all. 

The Appalachian Stack Cake

My paternal grandmother always had one of these under glass every time I ever remember visiting. She was a tremendous cook, making three meals every day starting with breakfast before dawn. I learned to make biscuits from her, but she never taught me this recipe. 

Here are two versions, one with dried apples and one with apple butter. If you have never tried it, it’s a great holiday cake. 

The Horrors of Moderation

A group of Kenyan employees have been diagnosed with "severe" PTSD because of their jobs -- as moderators on Facebook.

More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.

The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

They must be doing a good job. I've never seen anything on Facebook that caused me to faint, vomit, or scream and run away. 

If We Make It Through December

 

A Gentle Suggestion

Lord Blackstone defined "gentlemen" as those "qui arma gerit," meaning, "who bear arms." Perhaps it's time to gentle your condition, as Shakespeare tells us Henry V once said.

All About the Drones

 

If you don't have your old Atari defensive gear, T-Rex Labs has some interesting thoughts on defending against drones.

Whistlers and Jugglers

Watch over your shoulder. 

Honesty in Journalism

Cowboy State Daily: “Shooting Drones is Illegal, But a Shotgun Would Work Best”

Magic & the German Shepherd Dog

Tonight Conan found two of his tennis balls in the basement, where they had fallen down the stairs and become lost. I picked each one up in turn and threw it up the stairs, to the main floor. Each time he thought I had thrown it across the basement, and went and searched the other side laboriously. 

Then, after I finished lifting weights, we went back upstairs where he found the balls. He grabbed one and was running around showing it to everyone as if to say, “Daddy is a wizard! He threw this ball in the basement, and it reappeared on the main floor! Look! Wizard!”

A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz, Translated By Czeslaw Milosz & Robert Pinsky

Account

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,

Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,

Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,

The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,

The time when I was among their adherents

Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,

If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,

I was driven because I wanted to be like others.

I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.

For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

So darned unfair

For Schadenfreude, it's hard to beat about 90% of the election post-mortems in the last 5-6 weeks, but this Salon piece is a truly virtuoso performance in Looking Glass world analysis. Apparently Trump unfairly skunked the Democrats by sticking to big-picture themes and speaking about them consistently to national audiences. At the same time, he employed a "divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition." Harris, for her part, micro-targeted to splinter groups, which was apparently better because it had more details.

On the other hand, Trump unfairly micro-targeted those same splinter groups with ads that purported to praise Harris's position on just the issue each group would hate. He targeted Muslims with her pro-Israel positions and Jews with her anti-Israel ones, or alarmed oilfield voters with her threatened ban on fracking, which she didn't even mention while she was campaigning this time! Evidently the ads implied they were from Harris fellow-travelers if not the Harris campaign itself, which research shows makes voters more receptive, again very unfair. It seems Harris's splinter groups were bored by her targeted message, assuming they believed a word of it, while the splinter targets of the Trump effort were galvanized by video evidence of her actual messages over time, which they totally believed.

Salon quotes the NYT's lament that people don't seem to believe experts any more, and they couldn't hear Harris's message of joy/brat/whatever because they were so angry about feeling broke. Evidently nothing can be done to improve this state of affairs except for Democrats to stop playing so nice and try to dominate the culture that is upstream from politics, which they've never tried before and certainly didn't succeed at for decades by capturing most institutions from the press to the justice system to public schools to universities.

Bee Stings

Running Low On Ideas, God Makes Oklahoma

It's a fair cop, though the southeastern and southwestern corners of the state as well as the panhandle have bits of interesting topography. Really, though, is there any interesting topography from Galveston, TX, on up through Kansas?

On This Day In History: St. Nicholas Punches Arius For Claiming 'Die Hard' Is Not A Christmas Movie

However, an even worse heresy has recently arisen: Die Hard is a Harry Potter movie!

Caitlin Clark Explains That White Privilege Feels Weirdly Like Getting Beat Up By Giant Black Lesbians

Man Struggling To Understand How God Could Let Good Things Happen To Bad People Like Him

Updates

Tex sends: Hillary Clinton Awarded Honorary Canadian Medical License

"OTTAWA — Former Rightful-President Hillary Clinton has been awarded an honorary medical license by the Canadian Minister of Health due to her decades of experience providing dignified euthanasia services to men and women in America." 

(It's actually worth the half minute it takes to read the whole article.)

Biden Issues Pardon To The Dark Lord Sauron

"The pardon will reportedly cover any crimes that Sauron may have committed during the entirety of the Second Age of Middle Earth."

'Now Now, Let's Not Be So Hasty To Find And Assassinate Everyone Responsible For The Healthcare Crisis,' Says Nervous Obama