San Francisco is a special place

The rules for government workers aren't quite the same as for the rest of you people, because trust the science.

The "R" word

Old and busted:  mostly peaceful protests.

New and chic:  radical protest tactics.

Some wishful thinking in the WaPo:

It also moves the needle of what is considered a peaceful protest. . . .

That may be true, depending on what ordinary voters think of WaPo's latest effort to avoid the word "riots."  Personally, I'm looking forward to President Trump's re-election after an evening of mostly successful D attempts to lock up electoral votes.

The face of the movement

Matt Taibbi warns: "If no one in the party says anything, Trump will argue, with some justice, this is the true face of his opposition."

This new Trump campaign ad makes the point visually in about 30 seconds.

Conspiracy theories

 

It's like a giant vending machine

 A fully automated stop'n'rob store lets you in with a smartphone swipe and checks you out the same way.  No one gets a part-time job operating it, but on the other hand no one gets shot and killed, either.  The whole thing folds up into a nearly impregnable containing-shipping steel box and can be deployed with minimal risk even into an area populated with youths who need to turn their lives around, temporarily engaged in undocumented shopping and reparations programs.

When peace intensifies into violence

 Watching different movies:

On August 31st The Point, CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza’s newsletter, ran with the headline “‘Protests’ or ‘riots?’ It makes a BIG difference.” Cillizza can’t have thought very hard about the photograph he chose to feature: two law enforcement officers in full riot gear stand by a hulking truck labelled “SHERIFF” while a building in the background goes entirely up in flames. The orange light of the fire engulfs the whole frame of the picture. It sure doesn’t look like a protest—even one that’s only mostly peaceful. Yet that’s the spin Cillizza pushes. Anything else is a vast right-wing conspiracy: “Trump’s efforts to label what is happening in major cities as ‘riots’ speaks at least somewhat to his desperation, politically speaking, at the moment,” writes Cillizza in the missive. The bad man is just trying to scare us. Everything is fine. Pay no attention to the man behind the flaming curtain.

Subjects on the right, meanwhile, receive none of the sympathy and credulity afforded to our mostly peaceful arsonists. It was apparently necessary for the CBS News report mentioned above to remind us that the left-wing protestors “include moms and veterans,” but no such human casting of right-leaning protestors can be found in any major outlet. In fact, the New York Times practically presents the last 3 months as a bit of lighthearted roughhousing between benevolent demonstrators and police. “But in recent days,” the report goes on, “the protests in Portland and in Kenosha, Wis., have taken a more perilous turn — right-wing activists have arrived, many carrying firearms, and they are bent on countering the racial justice protests with an opposing vision of America.”

I worry about the backlash

 Please observe rioting safety protocols.

Portland keeps getting weirder

Yesterday the "100% Antifa" fellow who had previously been identified from video as the shooter of the "Patriot Prayer" anti-Antifa protester in Portland several days ago broadcast an interview claiming he shot the Patriot Prayer fellow in self-defense.  Last night U.S. Marshals tried to arrest him and returned fire when he began shooting at them.  Now he's dead, too.

It's hard to find any coverage of the event that doesn't identify the Patriot Prayer guy as a "far-right protester."  Maybe "far right" is fair, but it sure looks as though he was walking quietly down the street, having incautiously found himself separated from his friends, and was shot in cold blood after someone called out "We got two right here."  I guess we'll never know what the self-defense argument was going to look like once it got developed.

No U.S. Marshals were injured.

Notes from the underground

Don't try this at home.

What are school taxes for again?

Way to convince me that schools are mostly a childcare program operated by a government monopoly:  complain that the big problem with shuttering the schools is that parents don't know where to park their kids during the day.

Some enterprising school systems have stepped up their game:

Perhaps the most puzzling option, at least for parents, has been the opening of day camps in public schools and other spaces. In addition to public schools, 28 states and the District of Columbia now have YMCAs that operate virtual-learning labs for small cohorts of school-age kids.

These labs and camps operate very much like schools. Kids come in wearing masks, work all day on a computer, and then do an enrichment activity before returning home. To reduce the risk of infection, they don’t intermingle with other cohorts or eat in cafeterias. But there is a twist: Parents pay for this privilege. Judging by local news stories, the rate is about $100 to $200 a week.

"We were outgunned"

Sometimes spouting two contradictory rationales, without making any attempt to reconcile them honestly by trading off risks and benefits, leaves you in a really tough spot:

[B]ig-city mayors including Atlanta’s Keisha Lance Bottoms, New York’s Bill de Blasio, and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot face a daunting challenge. They have to navigate two problems at the same time: reining in overpolicing while also preventing underpolicing, the consequences of which are every bit as dire. And a great many lives are riding on how well they pull that off.

It's almost as if lying to people and betraying their trust ensured they won't be there for you the next time you need them.  Life is terribly unfair for people who think they can do what they like and still count on commandeering the heartfelt efforts of their neighbors.

A former Seattle police officer who was on the force during the consent-decree period explained how this dynamic often played out. . . . Among the elements of the city’s consent decree was a broadened definition of “use of force,” which required reporting even an arrestee’s complaint that handcuffs had caused physical pain. The decree also put in place an early-warning system for officers racking up use-of-force incidents at a high rate. Many officers concluded that it wasn’t worth the hassle to arrest someone for relatively minor offenses, such as public disturbance or loitering, the former officer said.

“I made two arrests two days in a row one week, and both turned into paperwork cluster****s,” the former officer said. “When you’ve accumulated two or three use-of-force complaints in a week, you’ll say, ‘I just need to stop. I need to stop doing this.’” Among the sort of policing that fell away, the former officer said, was officers’ routine sweeps of areas where drug users congregated, to check their names for outstanding warrants, which would often net suspects in local burglaries. Meanwhile, he said, several dozen of the department’s more proactive-minded officers responded to the new rules and paperwork by simply deciding to “lateral out” to a job in another police department.

The article goes on to argue that voluntary, institutional moderation of stringent "broken window" policing does not result in crime waves, but informal rank-and-file pullbacks responding to overpunishment of police in "excessive force" incidents do. After the Freddie Gray crisis in Baltimore in 2015,

the underpolicing was so conspicuous that even some community activists who had long pushed for more restrained policing were left desperate as violence rose in their neighborhoods. “We saw a pullback in this community for over a month where it was up to the community to police the community. And quite frankly, we were outgunned,” the West Baltimore community organizer Ray Kelly told me in 2018. In fact, the violence got so out of hand—a 62 percent increase in homicides over the year before—that even some street-level drug dealers were pleading for greater police presence. One police commander, Melvin Russell, told New York in 2015 that he’d been approached by a drug dealer in the same area where Freddie Gray had been arrested, who asked him to send a message back to the police commissioner. “We know they still mad at us,” the dealer said. “We p***ed at them. But we need our police.”

The effect of police demoralization is slow to dissipate, and even slower if the igniting incident leaves behind ambiguous police-control protocols under which officers never know what misstep will end their careers and expose them to criminal prosecution.

In Baltimore, the pullback has persisted five years later, in an evolved form. The resentment that police harbored over the charges against the six officers has dissipated; none of the cases ended with a conviction. Now, the veteran officer said, the continued decline in arrest rates and proactive-policing levels are driven more by uncertainty over what is allowed under the city’s new consent decree, even after multiple training sessions. Some of the sessions have been useful, the officer said—for instance, on the rules regarding searches and seizures. But officers are still uncertain about the expanded use-of-force definitions, he said, which include forcible handcuffing, as in Seattle, and about when and how they are allowed to clear crowds from major drug corners. So they often choose to simply drive by them. “The officers are confused. I have no idea what I can do and what I can’t do, and I’ve been an officer for 20 years,” he said. “The good members of the community want us to do our job. But the small number of noisy people who are getting in trouble over and over are out there dictating policy to the detriment of the city.”

Police officers don't want to die in service of the desire of party bosses to have the hard issues both ways.

Political permission slips

Neo has a post up about trends in sociopathic behavior that features a brief excerpt from a YouTube interview with a lawyer named Robert Barnes, addressing the best explanation for Antifa outbreaks.  He studied peaks and troughs of violent Klan behavior between 1870 and 1960 and concluded, first, that it's primarily a function of sociopathy, for which racism is just the handy excuse, and second, that it rises and falls with what he calls "political permission slips."  He believes that the incidence of sociopathy in humans is fairly stable over time, and found you could best match the changing pattern of politicized violence by examining the message put out by people in positions of political prominence.  In the case of the Klan, the key was local White Citizens Councils.  In the case of Antifa, the key is the Democratic Party leadership.

Could it be, as leftists are arguing, that it's really President Trump who hands out the permission slips to white nationalists, who are stirring up violence among mostly peaceful but fiery protesters?  Daniel Greenberg notes Joe Biden's recent speech claiming something of the sort, in which Biden argues that there were no riots when he was in the White House.  Greenberg counters that there were no riots, except when there were riots, and asks:  If the current riots are Trump's fault, whose fault were the Ferguson riots?  Who misreports racially charged incidents so that riots are in full force before anyone even has a chance to examine the evidence and figure out who did what?  Who painted Trayvon Martin as a small, innocent 12-year-old murdered without provocation by a "white Hispanic"?  Who perpetrated the myth that a Ferguson cop shot Michael Brown while he had his hands up in an unthreatening posture?  Who pushes the narrative of vague "systemic racism" when nothing about a particular incident supports the charge of individual racism?

Who preaches violence?

How to destroy a chameleon

Powerline muses on the exhausting life of someone who tries to curry favor by matching a constantly shifting milieu.

The thing about chameleons is that they mostly work only against a solid background. Franklin Roosevelt loved the joke about how he once placed a pet chameleon against a plaid background: “The chameleon died.” Trump is the ideal plaid background against which to place Biden, which is why Democrats are spinning so furiously to get Biden out of debating Trump.

Courage is contagious

Rasmussen noticed that its usual polling competitors have been strangely reluctant to post the usual polling updates since the party conventions.  It suspects that left-biased pollsters don't want to give Trump supporters the sense that public opinion is shifting their way, for fear of inspiring their courage to take a public stand in an era of violent retribution on the streets.  American Thinker agrees that it's very dangerous when even a few begin to take a stand, linking to this classic scene:

Effective politics, effective citizenship

 A Trump-campaign-endorsed group called "Black Voices for Trump" is moving in to clean up riot-ravaged neighborhoods.

Exit, Voice and Loyalty

In part because of my county's local upheaval, but also because of the national balkanization, I've been reflecting on Albert Hirschman's 1970 "Exit, Voice and Loyalty."  The thesis is that if people don't feel they have a way to influence a response to an institution's problems (voice), they'll vote with their feet (exit).  Loyalty discourages exit, but can be built only by supporting voice.  I guess you could say voice = loyalty and gag = exit.

It works for me.  If I feel I can speak up and achieve healthy change, I'm not only more likely to stick around, I'm also more committed to the institution.  Remember a time you've had a problem with a merchant, which was promptly fixed when you spoke up.  Not only do you not take your business elsewhere, you're positively warm about sticking with the store and recommending it to your friends.  It works that way for local government, too, not to mention clubs, friends, and marriages:  any conflict successfully resolved makes you want to stick around.  A silent resentment festers until one day you hit the road.  In the meantime, the attitude tends to be "Fine, be that way, but you'd better not count on me for anything, because, oh, are you listening now that you need something from me?"

If you block both exit and voice, you not only forfeit loyalty, you back people into a corner in which sullen disengagement or even violence will seem the only choices.

Back to our regularly scheduled darkness

 

On a lighter note

 My pastor's hair isn't anything like any of these, nor is his theology, thank goodness.

This is a bad idea

The little people

Salena Zito continues her valuable and nearly solo effort to listen to what real voters think. I read constantly that it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that Trump is incompetent, dishonest, and divisively racist. Clearly I lack the imagination to understand how anyone reaches these positions, and I take some comfort from the fact that a large swathe of voters are as puzzled as I am.

Mahoning Valley, Ohio, suffered when a GM plant was shut down. Biden's campaign blames President Trump, just as it blames him for COVID deaths and the lockdown's brutal destruction of jobs--but voters don't necessarily see it that way, according to Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University:

“These voters are not hung up on how Trump talks," said Sracic. "He delivered on the issue that they care about: trade. On that issue, he is the most honest politician that they’ve ever heard.”

* * *

“Ironically, the closing of a manufacturing plant might actually increase support for Trump’s anti-globalization message,” he said. "This also goes to COVID-19. To argue that Trump is to blame for the explosion of cases and deaths in the U.S. assumes that Americans agree on a way that the virus could have been stopped. Masks and lockdowns, however, remain hugely controversial."

Sracic says the national press located far from this region and national Democrats holed up in the same bubble see a floundering president too preoccupied with bashing his opponents on Twitter to deal with a national crisis such as COVID-19, his supporters in the Mahoning Valley and in similar places may see a president who, for the first time in their lives, says what they believe about globalization and has actually delivered on some of his explicit promises.

“Democrats seem to think they steal these voters back by arguing, on the one hand, that Trump is incompetent, and on the other hand, that Democrats also want to protect American jobs and have a better plan [than] Trump. These are going to be hard sells,” said Sracic.

“How was renegotiating NAFTA to provide more protection for labor incompetent? Because it didn’t go far enough? Is a politician like Joe Biden who voted for NAFTA, been in government for nearly 50 years, eight as Vice-President, while never changing a word of NAFTA, going to be able to make this argument effectively and believably?” Sracic wonders, adding: “The result could be even more votes for Trump.”

Wedgies

Michael Goodwin, like many commentators this week, sees a preference cascade building over revulsion for the pretense rioters, looters, arsonists, and murders are "protestors."  Then he touched on an issue that's puzzled me for a long time:

A laughably biased [Saturday NYT] story on the campaign dynamics called the president’s handling of the coronavirus the most important issue and reduced crime to a “wedge” issue, meaning it is divisive without being significant.

In every election someone complains that an opponent's effective issue is only a "wedge" issue. Goodwin explains the implication well:  the issue doesn't deserve attention, but inexplicably is costing votes on one's preferred side. So what do we mean by insignificant? Obviously the issue is significant enough to a lot of voters to make them switch sides over it. All that's left is the complaint that those bad voters are switching sides over an issue we good guys are convinced is "insignificant." Well, keep that attitude up and see how it works for you.

Every time the mask slips on the Marxism that increasingly motivates the mainstream Democratic Party, I'm torn between a hope and a fear.  The hope is that normal people will turn their backs once and for all.  The fear is that fewer and fewer people seem to understand what's wrong with Marxism.  The execrable Vicki Osterweil isn't beating around the bush:

[Looting] does a number of important things. It gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage—which, during COVID times, is widely unreliable or, particularly in these communities is often not available, or it comes at great risk. That's looting's most basic tactical power as a political mode of action.

It also attacks the very way in which food and things are distributed. It attacks the idea of property, and it attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head or have a meal ticket, they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that's unjust. And the reason that the world is organized that way, obviously, is for the profit of the people who own the stores and the factories. So you get to the heart of that property relation, and demonstrate that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.

Osterweil defends looting on the ground that not only should people not be put to the pain of paying for what they need, they shouldn't even have to pay for whatever they want.  By paying, all they're doing is supporting the same system that forced distant strangers to make the goodies as a condition of receiving a living wage.  In the socialist paradise, distant strangers would satisfy our desire for widescreen TVs out of solidarity, and we would naturally reciprocate.  A century of murder and famine will never convince Osterweil that she's a deadly raving fool, or many voters that they should never cast a ballot for any party that doesn't ride her out of town on a rail.

More panic about blind spots

A lot of people are getting that sinking feeling, apparently.  Here's another NYT piece from someone who just noticed that you can find out a lot about what those "silent majority" voters think if you look at their unfashionable Facebook pages instead of spending all your time on Twitter.   (I won't link to the NYT, but you can find this article by searching for "What If Facebook Is the Real Silent Majority?" 

Listen, liberals. If you don’t think Donald Trump can get re-elected in November, you need to spend more time on Facebook.

They're just now learning that it can be frustrating to deal with a media machine hostile to one's own narrative:

Pro-Trump political influencers have spent years building a well-oiled media machine that swarms around every major news story, creating a torrent of viral commentary that reliably drowns out both the mainstream media and the liberal opposition.

The result is a kind of parallel media universe that left-of-center Facebook users may never encounter, but that has been stunningly effective in shaping its own version of reality. Inside the right-wing Facebook bubble, President Trump’s response to Covid-19 has been strong and effective, Joe Biden is barely capable of forming sentences, and Black Lives Matter is a dangerous group of violent looters.

Um, well, yeah. 

Maybe Mr. Trump’s “silent majority,” in other words, only seems silent because we’re not looking at their Facebook feeds.

“We live in two different countries right now,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and digital director of Marco Rubio’s 2016 campaign. Facebook’s media ecosystem, he said, is “a huge blind spot for people who are up to speed on what’s on the front page of The New York Times and what’s leading the hour on CNN.”

The closing argument is that right-wingers have an unfair advantage in emotional engagement, and Facebook doesn't help censor them enough.

Chaser from the Atlantic:

After the 2016 election, the Times admitted that it had somehow missed the story, and it earnestly set about at self-correction. Like many other outlets, the paper sent reporters to talk to Americans who had put Trump in the White House. It was a new beat, almost a foreign bureau—heartland reporting—but that focus soon faded as the president’s daily depredations consumed the media’s attention. This election year, news organizations grown more activist might miss the story again, this time on principle—as they avoid stories that don’t support their preferred narrative. Trump supporters are hoping for it. . . . Nothing will harm a campaign like the wishful thinking, fearful hesitation, or sheer complacency that fails to address what voters can plainly see.

As Glenn Reynolds warns nearly every day, though, don't get cocky.

Yep, that would be the problem

The Guardian is starting to panic, too: 

But the right has a very clear message and they hammer it home with relentless force: the Democrats want lawless anarchy in the streets and destructive socialist economic policy, your children will not be safe. There will be mob rule, riots, looting. Immigrants will pour across the border. Anarchy and mayhem will take hold. The Republicans are the voice of our patriotic heroes, while Democrats want to tear down the Washington Monument, defund the police, and silence your political opinions with their “cancel culture”.

Of course, a great deal of this is utterly ridiculous, considering that the Democratic candidate is Joe Biden rather than Bernie Sanders. Those of us on the left certainly wish Biden would promise full socialism, amnesty for unauthorized immigrants, and prison abolition. But Biden won’t even support popular social democratic policies like Medicare for All, and by appointing controversial “top cop” Kamala Harris as his running mate, he’s doing anything but show support for “anarchists” and rioters. Biden is a conservative Democrat who supported the Iraq war and helped to build the contemporary system of mass incarceration, which is why those of us on the left are so deeply unenthused about having to drag ourselves to the polls for him.

. . . Trump’s message is a simple and powerful one: I love America, they hate America, I will create greatness, they will create poverty, violence and misery.

North Country Blues

News that President Trump is sweeping the Minnesota Iron Range brought to mind this song.

They complain in the East that they're paying too high;
They say that your ore ain't worth digging.
They'd rather go down to South American town
Where the miners work almost for nothing.

If that's not Trump, I don't know what is.  It's time for a realignment.

Made in the U.S.A.

 The Spectator didn't much like President Trump's acceptance speech, but I did:

Then he went for the jugular, ‘Joe Biden is not a savior of America’s soul,’ he said.

‘He is the destroyer of America’s jobs, and if given the chance, he will be the destroyer of America’s greatness. For 47 years, Joe Biden took the donations of blue-collar workers, gave them hugs, and even kisses, and told them he felt their pain, and then he flew back to Washington and voted to ship our jobs to China and many other distant lands.

‘Joe Biden spent his entire career outsourcing their dreams and the dreams of American workers, offshoring their jobs, opening their borders and sending their sons and daughters to fight in endless foreign wars, wars that never ended.’

* * *

‘Biden’s record is a shameful roll call of the most catastrophic betrayals and blunders in our lifetime… He has spent his entire career on the wrong side of history. Biden voted for the NAFTA disaster, the single worst trade deal ever enacted. He supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, one of the greatest economic disasters of all time. After those Biden calamities, the United States lost one in four manufacturing jobs. We laid off workers in Michigan, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and many other states. They did not want to hear Biden’s hollow words of empathy. They wanted their jobs back.’

. . . ‘Joe Biden’s agenda is Made in China. Mine is Made in the USA.’ Trump defended his record on COVID-19, widely seen as his weakest point in this election. He contrasted all his achievements with what he said Biden would do. He echoed the ‘Trojan horse for socialism’ theme which Mike Pence has touched on. Biden, he said, would not stand up to the ‘wild-eyed radicals’ and added that Biden would ‘abolish cash bail, immediately releasing 400,000 criminals onto the streets and into your neighborhoods. When asked if he supports cutting police funding, Joe Biden replied, “yes, absolutely“.’

Trump also pointed out that the Democrats had not mentioned ‘the rioters and criminals spreading mayhem in Democrat-run cities’ in their convention. ‘Now, they are starting to mention it because their poll numbers are going down like a rock in water,’ he added.

Pushing Back on the Narrative of Modern Systemic Racism

 A former infantryman and current electrical engineer takes on the narrative of modern systemic racism and white privilege.

Swing states

 This is a good 538 piece about red-blue swings in key states.

The New York Times gets the memo

Don Lemon let the cat out of the bag by complaining that the rioting was affecting the polling now, you guys, time to cut it out.  By the next day the memo clearly had gone out to practically everyone, because the messaging was disciplined and unified.  The New York Times made it official by running a piece that actually quotes moderate voters and attempts to explain their disgust with the collapse of law and order and the paralysis of leaders in its face.

I try not to link to the NYT, but you can read excerpts from it here at Powerline.

Backup Contact Info

I'd like to have a way to stay in touch with the regulars if the blog ever goes away, or if we ever decide to have a reunion party (Can it be a "re" union if we've never met?) or whatnot.

I'm putting a contact email in the comments for anyone else who is interested in staying in touch. Just send me an email and I'll add you to the list.

Laboratories of democracy

My messy local government spat over tax policy, debt, and voters' rights is still evolving.  To my amazement, the relatively non-functional county government managed to get its act together in time to put our proposed bond on the November ballot by the August 17 deadline, thus ensuring that (if we win voter approval) we can borrow our funds by early 2021 and not blow the construction schedule for our new courthouse or imperil our partial grant funding.

Meanwhile, the comparatively transparent and orderly city government simply didn't.  They'd just witnessed a rapid and successful petition effort to force an election on the county's separate $20MM bond proposal to build a courthouse.  The city was using the same negative-notice bond proposal statute to attempt to borrow its own $20MM for a city hall without an election.  The petitioners moved off their county bond triumph to mount a petition drive on the city bond.  It was obvious they would quickly succeed--it took only one weekend--but their deadline for presenting the petition was the day after the deadline for putting the city bond on the ballot.  The city, which should have taken the same pre-emptive action the county took, simply missed its deadline to put the city bond on the November ballot.  Denial?  Fury?  Distraction?  Inability to escape the bubble of their like-minded friends?  I really don't get it.  They're usually pretty sober.  Now the city has to wait until next May for an election to approve its bond, if they don't abandon the bond effort completely.  This is disastrous for the city but not an overwhelming problem for the petitioners.  It makes no sense.

Meanwhile, as we all gear up for a November election on the county bond, both the county and the city boosters seem to want to continue to spend time complaining about those deplorable voters who exercised their right to demand an election.  Why, oh why, did they demand it at the last minute?  Why didn't they get comfortable with the proposed bonds, as the government leaders vaguely hoped they would, though without troubling themselves to inform or convince anyone that $40 million in debt was a fine idea?  I find myself having to say repeatedly that the city and the county had complete control over their own schedules for when to publish the twin 45-day notices of intent to borrow without an election, both of which were always and by statute subject to the right of voters to petition for an election.  The voters could not force the city or county to publish the notices weeks or months earlier, but I cannot find any reason why the city or county couldn't have done so.  The numbers may not have been crystal clear last spring, but they're not crystal clear now, either.  You pick the best number you can and try to borrow that, explaining to the public as best you can why it's the right number.  What is the difficulty here?

There is also continued grousing over the idea that 5% of voters can override the presumptive will of most voters to approve these wonderful bonds.  My own view:  the alternative is to let 5 people control the bond decision for the entire city full of voters, and another 5 people control the bond decision for the entire county full of voters.  At least this way, all the voters will get a chance to decide how wonderful the bonds are.

Did either the county or the city leadership deliberately wait until the last minute?  I can't think why they would, but I guess it's possible.  They're not talking.  They're just resentful it didn't work.  I understand the resentment, in a way, but I'll be darned if I can understand why they think it's a good idea to keep talking about the resentment when what they really need is to win a vote on the bonds.  They should be falling all over themselves to congratulate the voters on their franchise rights, and working hard to give them good facts and arguments in favor of the bonds.  Instead, they're up to their usual strategies of fighting transparency with a bitter determination born of the conviction that it's simply wrong to distrust them and joggle their expert elbows.  Monday's Commissioners Court meeting was practically a morality play entitled "what local government officials act like when you presume to ask questions and they despise you for it."

Not many people watched the Democratic National Convention

. . . and that's the good news, says Glenn Reynolds.

He also says he got an unusual amount of hate speech for this USA weekly article, which he attributes to people having moved from the denial to the anger stage of bereavement. 

Choosing America

 Cuban-American Maximo Alvarez warns us what his father warned him when they arrived in this county:  Don't lose this place.  If we let happen here what we let happen in Cuba, there is nowhere else to go.

How transmissible is COVID really?

 A Chinese study (I know, I know) of 391 primary COVID cases did some good work sorting out the incidence of transmission to the patients' aggregate 3,410 close contacts--about 9 close contacts per index patient.  It found that only 3.7% of those close contacts caught the disease.  Of that 3.7%, 6.3% of cases were asymptomatic, 16.8% were mild, 73.1% were moderate, and 10.1% were severe or critical.  That means less than half a percent of the close contacts of the original patients picked up a severe or critical disease as a result.

There was considerable difference in the kind of contact that encouraged transmission as well.  The transmission rate to household members was 10.3%, much higher than the average 3.7% rate.  The transmission rate to healthcare workers was 1.0%, much lower than the average rate.  The transmission rate on public transportation was even lower:  0.1%.

It also makes a big difference whether the index case is mild or severe.  For asymptomatic index cases, the transmission rate was only 0.3%.  For mild index cases, it was 3.3%; for moderate cases, 5.6%; and for severe or critical cases, 6.2%.  The highest transmission rate was for index cases "with expectoration," 13.6%.  The overall transmission rate for all kinds of cases without expectoration was 3.0%.

The lesson here is that the transmission rate is surprisingly low, even for obviously ill index patients, and the biggest societal risk factor is the size of their group of "close contacts."  If infected people managed to keep their close contacts under 9, they'd be spreading their illness even less on average.  That might prove difficult for severely ill people who require intensive care, but it shouldn't be that hard for anyone with a moderate case.  The spread rate for asymptomatic cases is so small--a tenth or twentieth of the spread rate for symptomatic cases--that it barely figures into public policy.

The bottom line is that the disease will bounce off of 86% even of people in close contact with an "expectorating" COVID patient.  It will bounce off an astounding 99.7% of people whose only exposure is to a completely asymptomatic COVID patient.

Who had simultaneous Gulf Coast tropical storm landfalls for August?

 

How to Be a Woke White Person

 

When Wokes and Racists Actually Agree on Everything

 Another Ryan Long video:

What internet politics looks like to normal people

I'd embed the YouTube video directly, but that way it comes with an intro ad.  This is a link to PowerLine, where you can watch it without that annoyance, and maybe enjoy other PowerLine articles while you're at it.

I sure hope this is how the independents are seeing it.

Why'dya believe me? It was just a debate

 Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris seems to be confused about the difference between a lawyer taking a position she doesn't believe during a trial, on behalf of a client, and a candidate for president taking a position she doesn't believe during a debate.

"These are my principles.  If you don't like them, I have others."

"The Walls Are Closing In"

The first Durham indictment! Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith will plead guilty to

doctoring an email used as part of a process to secure court approval to renew surveillance on a onetime Trump campaign junior adviser, Carter Page. The Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, referred the matter for criminal review. . . . Despite the federal surveillance of Carter Page, he was never charged with any crime.

NPR reports the Klinesmith indictment pretty straight, with nothing like my title's nostalgia for how this kind of thing was reported when the shoe was on the other foot a couple of years ago. Not to worry, most of the rest of the NLMSM are is accompanied by headlines and ledes suggesting that the investigation does not, repeat not, point to any higher-up conspiracy of any kind, quit saying it does, nothing to see here, move along.  When they're done with that message, they turn to worries that the timing of further Durham indictments may be calculated to affect the election.  They also spend some time explaining that there's no indication--really! none!--that Klinesmith has cut a deal and is singing like a canary.

Medical Politics

I don't claim to know much about how COVID treatments work, but I find this article pretty persuasive.

Hiatus

Thanks for all the commentary on the post below about closing the Hall.  For now I will follow the advice some of you gave and leave the Hall open for archival use and for my co-bloggers to continue to use as they prefer.  AVI's recommendation based on his own experience is what I'll follow:  for now consider me on at least temporary hiatus, which may become permanent if I don't rediscover a desire to do this. 

I might be around to comment on posts from time to time, but I will not be visiting or posting on a daily, weekly, or any regular basis.  

Some posts from the archive will be deleted if I want to publish them elsewhere, or if in my review of the archives I decide to remove them.  

You can contact me by email if you need me, but I won't necessarily be checking that regularly either.  I need to focus on professional duties when I'm behind a keyboard; and I need to spend less time behind keyboards, too. More in the wind.

Truth and justice prevail in my hometown

My county's citizens prevailed in their move to force the Commissioners Court to set a proposed bond for election.  The powers-that-be are glum.  The bond is mostly to fund the construction of a new courthouse, a project I believe would have been more likely to win voter approval in November if we (1) made it smaller and cheaper and (2) not tried to pull it off without an election first.  But we'll see what my neighbors think.  The proposed new courthouse, though expensive, is pretty nice, and our post-storm temporary quarters really aren't a long-term fix.

One of the pleasures of the process has been a woman who spoke at yesterday's contentious Commissioners Court meeting.  Oh, she was a star!  The whole package:  telegenic, good writing, good delivery, seemingly effortless ability to deflect bullying.  She spoke simply and intelligently for about five minutes about the importance of preserving the right to vote in a time when our civil rights are under assault.  I'm determined to get her to run for office.

Bats and madness

Powerline notes in The Week in Pictures that the Libertarian presidential candidate has been bitten by a possibly rabid bat, and adds

That’s no way to compete for Biden’s voting base.

Sanity

I am proofreading a book on William Blake by G. K. Chesterton.  Addressing the question whether the passionate Blake was mad, Chesterton argues that the wild supernaturalism of the classical world was conquered by the coolly rational Romans, followed by a reversion to mysticism by Christianity, tempered but never strictly sane in the Roman sense:

it may be said in passing that the

chief claim of Christianity is exactly this--that

it revived the pre-Roman madness, yet brought

into it the Roman order. The gods had really

died long before Christ was born. What had

taken their place was simply the god of

government--Divus Cæsar. The pagans of

the real Roman Empire were nothing if not

respectable. It is said that when Christ was

born the cry went through the world that Pan

was dead. The truth is that when Christ was

born Pan for the first time began to stir in his

grave. The pagan gods had become pure

fables when Christianity gave them a new lease

of life as devils. . . . But it put upon this occult

chaos the Roman idea of balance and sanity.

Thus, marriage was a sacrament, but mere sex

was not a sacrament as it was in many of the

frenzies of the forest. Thus wine was a sacrament

with Christ; but drunkenness was not a

sacrament as with Dionysus. In short, Christianity

(merely historically seen) can best be

understood as an attempt to combine the

reason of the market-place with the mysticism

of the forest. It was an attempt to accept all

the superstitions that are necessary to man and

to be philosophic at the end of them. Pagan

Rome has sought to bring order or reason

among men. Christian Rome sought to bring

order and reason among gods.

Yikes

Help.

Always root for the underdog

Insanity Wrap: 

After seven decades in power, the [Chinese] ruling party has faced potentially existential challenges over the past year, from pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and an economic slowdown to a devastating coronavirus and, most recently, once-in-a-generation floods that have wreaked destruction across central China.

But far from diminishing its stature at home, as some in the Trump administration appear to believe, the party’s response to some of these crises has helped solidify the support of existing and aspiring members — or at least neutralized grumbling.

That’s right: WaPo’s Anna Fifield actually wrote a puff-piece celebrating that scrappy little Chinese Communist Party for overcoming long odds in a difficult year.

Robert E Howard, Gangsters & Bootleggers

A historical essay into the Conan author’s world. 

Violence and Growth

So as promised, here are my reflections on the subject of violence and growth.  We began the discussion in the comments of this post, and continued it briefly here.  You can find links to the Classical readings at the second of those links.

The issue at stake is how violence creates capacities to excel -- a capacity for excellence is arete in the Greek, and virtus in Latin, "virtue" in English -- yet also can create serious damage. That it does both is obvious, as the comments note at the first link; practical experience shows it. 

One might hope that the damage could be avoided, and the good still gained in another way.  This is the subject of the discussion among the Greeks in Plato's Laches, which Socrates is invited to join as he is a man of proven military valor. All the participants in the discussion are. The question is whether having sons practice 'fighting in armor' with masters who travel around teaching fighting techniques -- the ancient Greek version of martial arts teachers -- will also teach their sons courage. The debate ends in aporia, that is, with the members of the discussion stating that they aren't sure about the answer after all the talk.  Yet several things do emerge. One is that, while these men cannot say for certain exactly what courage is, they have all demonstrated it practically. Whether or not 'practicing in armor' can bring forth courage, war certainly can and does. 

It seems as if the quality of war that does what practice may not is the exposure to the genuine possibility of harm. Some practice, then, looks better than others. This weekend the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit suffered a tragic loss at sea of eight Marines and a sailor.  These men were literally 'practicing in armor,' and trying to develop an excellence of capacity through that practice:  an excellence in amphibious warfare. Their deaths are not in vain, for their comrades will be more successful in developing courage as well as other virtues given the clear example of how perilous the training itself can be. If it felt safe -- worse even than if it was safe -- there would be no more benefit to one's courage than comes from 'fighting' in pads, with padded objects.

Likewise in the Middle Ages, knights engaged in tournaments that were very nearly as brutal as war. An essay whose author and title I cannot currently recall points out that one of the most marked features of knights in the chivalric literature is wounds: the experience of being wounded, and of recovering from wounds (or not recovering from them) suffuses the literature. Even Lancelot is occasionally bed-bound and near death, tended by another and dependent on their care. Sometimes this is a lady, but often it is a former knight who has become a religious hermit or brother -- and whose expertise with such wounds comes from experience. To be brave and skilled seems to require the practice of doing dangerous things, which sometimes entails getting hurt.

This is what we would expect from reading Aristotle. All virtues of character, he notes, arise from practice. This is because the thing exists in us already as a potential (here we have what AVI would point to in terms of genetic heritage). But a potential is only a 'first actuality'; at first one's courage is only that one has the ability to become courageous. One's character changes by actually doing the things, until such time as one does them without needing to work up to it very much. Eventually courage is so habitual that it requires no thought, yet this does not make it irrational, says Aristotle: because it was rationally chosen and inculcated, the courageous man will do immediately what the thinking man would choose if he had time to think it through. So with all the virtues.

Yet Aristotle only gives us the happy part of the picture. Indeed for Aristotle, courage entails success in war:  the brave conquer, if they are brave enough. Practically we know this is not true. Often the bravest fall to superior numbers, but also -- like our bold Marines fallen this weekend -- to bad luck. This is what I think is absent from the Classical discussion: the role of moral luck.

In fact I have been extremely lucky, for which I am deeply grateful. I have been to war three times. I have been rocketed, mortared, machine-gunned and shot at with Kalashnikovs, and so many times that I long ago lost count. Yet I have experienced no serious harm from the wars. Another friend, whom I've written of before, experienced a mortar in a different way. A mortarman himself, one with extensive combat experience in OIF I, he was eventually badly concussed -- badly enough that he was forced to transfer out of the infantry. The damage to his brain is obvious and lingering, and he has trouble keeping it together; indeed, sometimes he doesn't manage to keep it together.  He is still courageous, but now also dangerous in bad ways because of the loss of the virtue of self-control. The loss is not his fault; it was bad luck. 

We have some limited control over this, but only insofar as we are the ones with the sword. We can learn to recognize the kinds of harms that cause trauma, and to avoid doing that kind of damage in preference to others. Sometimes this is impractical or unwise, as it would be unwise to risk your comrades clearing a room full of al Qaeda when a grenade would do it without similar risk (and anyway the hope is not to traumatize the foe, but to kill him, after which he will suffer no harm save from whatever judgment may befall his soul, the justice of which we have no ground to doubt). We can learn, though, not to inflict psychological harms on people in less warlike conflicts; we can choose to fight them fairly, preferring even physical wounds to psychic ones (though there is clear overlap with issues like traumatic brain injury). 

Even this kind of control is limited, and it flows downstream from us to our foes. Hopefully they might respond in kind; probably they will not. This was the ideal of the knights, who praised chivalrous treatment of one's enemies very highly. In practice, even for them, it was rare. The practicality of ransom might save a knight or a nobleman who fell on the battlefield; but as likely as not, a wounded man would be knifed and his body looted. Practically in recent wars our foes would behead captives on film, or burn them alive; or enslave them, if they were women. In the next war our foes are likely to be Communists again, and the Communist treatment of prisoners has historically been built around psychological abuse -- or summary execution. So if we do it, at least at war, we do it because it is right and itself virtuous rather than because it is likely to return any benefit to us. The best we can hope for from it is that it might give us people to negotiate with at the end of the war, veterans of the conflict who will understand the hardships of war as we do and who have reasons not to hate us as much as others do.

It is more beneficial in the cases under discussion in the comments. We have strong practical reasons to oppose abuse of children, the elderly, and weaker parties in general. We know this causes harms that are not easily fixed, even into adulthood. The abused may develop a courageous capacity out of learning to survive abuse, but there are cleaner ways to develop their capacities. I suppose that is not controversial.

What Aristotle might suggest to those who have suffered abuses, or bad luck, is probably that they should continue to practice the virtues they need. Last year I attended a MARSOC-oriented charity dinner (called the Brothers in Arms Foundation, if you happen to be looking to donate to something). One of the speakers was a former member of MARSOC who, after years of what he described as the best possible life -- the life of suiting up in armor and killing America's enemies -- stepped on a pressure-plate IED and lost his ability to walk. He was learning again, and could at this point stand with a cane. His speech was impressive, and he received much genuine admiration from all present, but his case cannot be as happy as he bravely made out. His sacrifice was terrible, yet he is doing his best with it. That may be the best that can be done. 

It may be necessary in less physical matters too. It might be necessary to practice being brave enough to confess (as happened here in the comments of the first post) that one cannot connect emotionally as some do. Perhaps this might give rise to some trusted relationships in which one can practice trying to do so, to nurture whatever potential for it remains. We can often only do our best with what we have; Fate sends what she does, and we must do what we can. 

That is practical advice, but it is not great advice. It is a hard road. Some of us choose to dare it, and our injured Marine shows why:  because it is the best possible life, to live boldly and free. It does not last forever, and it might end at any time. We may hope, as I do, that it ends in a quick and worthy death rather than in trauma, in painful labor without any hope of returning to the glories that went before. We should bear friendship and fellowship to those who have had that bad luck, though, because the bad luck came to them for reasons apart from their virtues. They may well be -- likely are -- better men than we are, in part just because they are having to practice harder with less hope.

As always, I leave the discussion open. These thoughts will be less valuable than your own. 

CItizens rise up

My county government has managed to bungle the roll-out of a proposal to borrow a ton of money to finance a new courthouse so stupendously that it inspired a tax revolt. The county tried to proceed by what's called a "certificate of obligation" bond, which under Texas law requires only a 45-day notice and no election unless 5% of registered voters petition for one. County leadership waited until the 45th day before the deadline for setting the year's budget and taxes, not only to announce the intent to borrow, but even to release the long-awaited plans and budget for a courthouse to replace the one that was destroyed by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. On that same day, they announced that we have to borrow the money this year or the world will end, and the only way to borrow it this year is to have the dedicated tax approved by the tax and budget deadline at the end of August. Hey, sorry there's no time for your input! You'll take this courthouse plan and budget and eat it! I say "they," because as a commissioner even I learned about all this when the public did, though clearly the County Judge must have been cooking it up for some time.

If the timeline hadn't been so mismanaged, we could still hold an election and get to work bringing the taxpayers on board, not an impossible task, since it's one thing to get 5% of voters on a petition but another to get 51% to vote down the courthouse project. As it is, however, the next available election date is in November, which means the whole thing has to wait until next year, because that's too late to dovetail the borrowing with the tax rate and approve them both by August 31. It's not ideal to delay the financing by a full year, but it beats denying the citizens a bond election.

The more I learn about "certificates of obligation" the less I like them. They were intended to give county governments a little emergency flexilibility, but there are no caps, so we are legally entitled to jam through $20MM in debt in a county whose typical ad valorem tax receipts are only $13MM, without an automatic election requirement. In some Texas counties, local officials have developed the unseemly habit of floating an ordinary bond proposal, losing the election, then jamming through a CO bond without an election, for the same purpose. The legislature put a stop to that by forbidding a CO bond that was identical to a failed general obligation bond election, which only inspired some counties to make trivial changes in the proposal and jam it through anyway.

It's going to be a serious problem for the county to put its reconstruction plans off for a year, but I'm beginning to think it's well worth it for the lesson in the consequences of overreaching with voters. I'm proud of my fellow citizens who stepped up. It's a small county, and the required 5% of registered means they need only about 850 signatures. In only two days, they've already collected about 500.

Closing Action

I’m thinking about hanging it up with blogging. I’ve got too much to do these days, and little time for an idle hobby. I don’t know that I have much left to say in this format anyway, and taking it offline would allow me to republish the best parts under my right name. 

Still, this is a community. You deserve say in how we wind it up. It’s been going for more than 17 years, and a few of you’ve been around that whole time. It would be wrong not to invite comment and consider your opinions. 

Consider this notice. Whatever you want to say, now’s the time. 

Ymar’s Post

Monday. 

Second Wave Sweden

Another set of data. 

Third Crusade Victory

Richard the Lionheart defeated Saladin in the battle of Arsuf, the location of which has been discovered. 

Ymar’s Post

Friday. 

You’re Doing What Now?

Portland bans urinals because women can’t use them. 

"We will continue to have gender-specific (male and female) multi-stall restrooms that are readily available to any employee that prefers to use one. But there will be no urinals in any restroom in the building."

The city is also designing men's restrooms to be gender-neutral, which means there will no longer be urinals in the men's restrooms either.

You are making the men's rooms gender neutral?

Also, it’s not true that women can’t use urinals. 

Metallica Covered Whisky in the Jar?

Really? Well, here they are at Slane Castle, Meath:

American Son

The late Charlie Daniels is featured in this.

Violence and Growth

In a post below, I promised a discussion in a few days of the issue of whether violence enables personal growth in crucial ways; I want to draw your attention to the comments, where some excellent arguments have already been fielded.  I'm going to think about that over the weekend and try to construct something worthy.

Preparatory readings, for those of you interested:  The Smell of Death, by myself; the Laches, by Plato; and Aristotle's arguments about courage and practice, from the Nicomachean Ethics.  (I don't mean to suggest that my writing is as useful or worthy as theirs, but since I'm the one writing the introduction to the discussion, it will be on my mind.)

Mixed News in Legal Affairs Today

The bad news is that the DC Circuit Court agreed to an en banc rehearing of the Flynn case, meaning that poor General Flynn is in for at least another month of this punishing process.  If they rule in favor of Sullivan, he'll have to appeal to SCOTUS for relief, which will take even longer. 

The good news?  The couple who defended their home against BLM threats and trespassers is having the nonsense charges dropped by the Missouri AG.  (UPDATE:  The headline and opening paragraph are apparently misleading.  No good news today.  See comments.)

The Devil's Dance Floor

One last one for the night, to wash away the ska or just for the tin whistle and quick tune.

Ska: The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Yeah, not a Hall thing, but ... well, it's Wednesday. The Wanderer wouldn't mind.

Is ska even a thing anymore?

Um, update ... Don't post videos without watching them first. Reel Big Fish's version of "Brown Eyed Girl" ... not really anything I would ever post anywhere, I think.

Mick Jones Nicked My Pudding

In Defence of the Bad, White Working Class

A Hillbilly Elegy type article from Australia. I think many of the same social dynamics are playing out across the Anglosphere.

It's hard to excerpt. It's a well-written essay and it is well worth reading in its entirety. But here's something I think will resonate here:

Even if I was wronged or oppressed or marginalised, claiming victim status seemed absurd (since I often came across people who were more unfortunate than me), limiting (since there were other, enriching aspects of life to focus on), humiliating (because in the working-class world self-pity is reviled), and self-defeating (because if you allow yourself to think and behave like a victim, you quickly fall into lumpen despair).

At university, I discovered that this ethos didn’t apply. A season of despair would not send middle-class teens spiralling into a life of drug-addled indigence; they could simply brush themselves off and enrol again next year. Strong, class-enforced safety nets meant that self-pity could be accommodated, and victimhood could even form part of a functional identity.

Indeed, the willingness to expose your wounds is another sign of privilege. Those for whom injury has a use-value will display their injuries; those for whom woundedness is a survival risk, won’t. As a consequence, middle-class grievances now drown out lower class pain. This is why the wounded lower classes come to embrace conservative discourses that ridicule middle-class anguish. Those who cannot afford to see themselves as disadvantaged are instinctively repulsed by those who harp on about disadvantage.

Language is another site of class-conflict. I grew up in violent environments. For people like me, ‘symbolic violence’ or ‘offensive speech’ were, if anything, a benign alternative to real violence and real hate. It was often registered as a joke—or yes, banter—because we understood its relative harmlessness. When I first came across someone who reacted to something that was said to him as though something had been done to him, I thought he was insane. But he wasn’t. He was from a lower middle-class family and was unfamiliar with our habits of speech. He’d never been beaten, so the words felt ‘violent’ enough for him to react in a way that was, in our environment, laughable.

The witness will please refrain from testifying

I'm surprised at Attorney General Barr, thinking he was supposed to be speaking when so many important people had points to make in front of the cameras.

Virtue and cowardice

John Kass nails it:

Human beings do not wish to see themselves as cowards. They want to see themselves as heroes.

And, as they are shaped and taught to fear even the slightest accusation of thought crime, they will not view themselves as weak for falling in line. Instead they will view themselves as virtuous. And that is the sin of it.

The proper role of violence in civil society

I'm not sure this was what BLM wanted, but it seems that even in places like the NYT comments sections, fellow-travelers find themselves debating what violence is, whether it's wrong, and what it means to enable it without engaging in it personally.

Some of our society's old discussions about whether words and symbolic actions like Tweets and cross-burning are really "violence" will need to be revisited, if we're to excuse trashing retail outlets, injuring cops, and forming a mostly peaceful cordon of non-violent protestors around the violent ones to protect them from the cops.  We may also have to re-think what it means to acquiesce to a corrupt "system."  Many NYT commenters are at least thinking about the strategic ramifications of failing to prevent the entangling of their pristine message from the insane display that is repelling a lot of potential voters.

The Church Militant

For Catholic readers, a priest has decided that it is obligatory to fight the evils in Democratic platform planks. 

Ymar’s Post

Wednesday. 

Men’s Rea

Conversation with left leaning friend tonight:

Her: “Why can’t cops treat us the same way they treat white collar, middle class criminals?”

Grim: “I hate to break this to you, but you are a white collar, middle class criminal.”

Her: “What crimes have I committed?”

Grim: [Explains crimes]

Her: ‘AAAAHHH!’

Well, at least they won’t be able to prove that she meant to break the law. 

Higher Math

Xenon

New headlights, to go with all the other new stuff. Brakes, oil, plugs, clutch cables, tires — the bikes are newer than they’ve been in a while. 

Barr is Having a Day

It's unusual to hear a two-time US Attorney General state that he's not confident that Congress would defend even its own building from defacing or destruction.

Let the money follow the student

Heads came to a sharp point when the President put a voucher proposal into the latest COVID relief bill:

Drawing on his history of supporting school-choice initiatives, he announced an ambitious new effort to give parents billions in federal funds – as much as $10,000 per child -- and allow them to pick the emergency-education method that would best fit their child’s and families’ needs.

“If the schools do not reopen, the funding should go to parents to send their children to [the] public, private, charter, religious or home school of their choice,” Trump told reporters Thursday during a press briefing. “The key word being ‘choice.’ If the school is closed, the money should follow the student so the parents and families are in control of their own decisions.”

And if not that, then at least require the schools to go back to their core role as babysitters.  The only thing worse than spending $10K a kid for an ideologically corrupt non-education is to fail to get some expensive childcare out of it.

As my husband says, with all the kids staying home, how long before families pass the hat to hire a schoolmarm to come out here on the train from back East?

Medical mystery

West Hunter poses a mystery:  why have premature births dropped like a rock during lockdown?  His readers offer two main theories:  protection from an unknown pathogen, and decreased access to doctors who induce premature deliveries.

Ymar’s Post

It’s Monday. Time for more. 

Old Norse “Class”

First in a series, if you wanted to learn. 

Three Gorges

It’s going to be a massive issue if the dam fails, worldwide for supply chains. Watch this space for links to advice about that. 

What’s your over/under on failure?  The CCP’s confidence is probably a bald lie. 

Who had baboons armed with chainsaws for August?

Granted, "armed" may be stretching a point, just because they're carrying them around, but it's not a good look.

Grizzly Bear Blues

Yeah, Corb Lund has a new album out.

Capitalism

From the Week in Pictures at Powerline.



I'm reading "Apocalypse Never," whose author makes much the same point about the best approach to what he considers to be serious environmental risks:  we'd do better to increase prosperity and increase resilience across a number of possible fronts, than to tie ourselves down to cripplingly expensive solutions to badly understood risks that may never ripen into real problems.  Prosperous societies do less environmental damage than poor ones, despite the "Noble Savage" fantasies of limousine liberals, and the Noble Savages don't have the same ambitions for their children that Hollywood wishes they did.

Riders, Keep Your Heads on a Swivel More Than Usual- You're Now a Target

The media isn't covering this because it certainly doesn't fit their narrative, but I think many of us knew things like this were coming down the pike sooner or later-  Man deliberately swerves head on into a Harley rider because  "The Harley culture is made up of white racists"
Now I understand that this man is almost certainly suffering from mental issues, but then so are a lot of people around the country, so I have no sense that we won't see other similarly motivated acts in the future.  Beware and stay safe.

Whisky or Gin?

Ymar’s Post

Ok, you said you wanted to talk about aliens. Apparently today is the day. 

Inevitable: Resolution to Ban the Democratic Party

If the Republicans had left it alone, the Democrats would have gotten there themselves. 

Enjoy your “Washington Football Team,” by the way. 

Where is the Order of Chivalry?

The Church established several orders of knighthood to protect churches and shrines, pilgrims and congregations. Now it blanches to employ them. 

May God Receive Them

Nuns trend older, a fact that has been punishing at one convent. 

Well, yeah

From the Examiner:

Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee and a dogged Trump defender, last week told Fox Business: “The No. 1 question I get, whether I'm in the 4th District of Ohio or traveling around our state or traveling around the country, the No. 1 question I get from people is, they will walk up to me and say, 'when is somebody going to jail?'”

Wait, is a fetus a person again now?

How can it be eugenics if no humans are harmed?

Ymar’s Post

For Wednesday. What do you think about this Qanon ban on Twitter?

Witch Hunts, Then and Now

An excellent essay.

He's had it

The CEO of Red Bull GmbH just gave all of his woke executives their walking papers over their pushing a BLM agenda during the last month. The how-DARE-you reports speak darkly of his Austrian headquarters and Trump support, his skepticism about German immigration policy, and his Scrooge-McDuck ownership of an island off Fiji, so I thought I should look up his Wiki to find out how evil Dietrich Mateschitz really is. The Wiki page as of 10 a.m. July 21 was pretty benign. There aren't even any Nazi tie-ins yet, but I predict that by 2 p.m. it will contain a lot of new and scandalous entries. In the meantime, besides the information that Mateschitz bought his island from the Forbes family for a mere seven million pounds--which everyone who watches the island-acquisition TV shows knows is chicken feed--there is the interesting fact that he owns a custom submarine for the use of his island guests. How many anti-woke world-dominating billionaire moguls can go full Captain Nemo? All he needs now is a volcano and a nuclear arsenal.

Louis L'Amour

It’s a Damn Shame He’s Mad

Kanye West for President.

Another Peaceful Protest

It takes gall to attack a pro-law enforcement protest (6 years running).

Goodness knows our justice system is broken, and there’s a lot that desperately needs fixing. I’m not impressed with this approach, though none of the others are working either. It’s another area where both parties are both wrong, and both lying. That doesn’t excuse cracking the heads of innocent people.

The Obvious Answer

For some reason few have heard of this idea; here again it is presented as radical and new. But if global warming is a problem, well, essentially all of the heat input is solar. So why not reflect more of the solar energy back into space for a while?  Weather balloons and hoses are relatively cheap. You can solve the problem with little of the expense or (this is why I think the idea gets little attention) centralized political power.

Ymar’s Post

Monday.

Let Us Be Entertaining

I don’t know that I buy the hypothesis that masks provide effective screening; I wear a bandanna to try to encourage terrified people to leave home and spend money floating our economy. But hey, let’s entertain the possibility that it works. Then something like this makes sense.

George Floyd transcript

This transcript doesn't sound at all like the impression you get from any of the videos I've seen. Neo argues that it sounds like Floyd was having a heart attack, with the characteristic sense of impending doom. He was recovering from a COVID infection, had at least some heart disease, and may have been having a bad fentanyl reaction. The police sound like guys who were trying to figure out a delirious panic attack.

You have a solid point there

If the North Carolina teachers' union feels it can't go back to work, who am I to urge them?  It's time to find an alternative, maybe something private, perhaps voucher funded.  Something involving a lot of home-schooling and parent choice, with more safety and free time for the unionized teachers.

Fund students, not schools:

If a neighborhood grocery store refuses to reopen, it may be inconvenient, but families wouldn't be devastated; they could take their money elsewhere. Imagine if you were forced to pay your neighborhood Walmart the same amount of money each week regardless of whether they provided your family with any groceries. The store would have little incentive to reopen in an effective or timely manner.

It sounds absurd. But you have essentially just imagined today's compulsory K–12 school system.

Let Portland go, too.

Never give in, never, never, never.

If Winston Churchill were campaigning today, his rhetoric would be called divisive.



"If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning."