An analysis by a former auditor.
Curious Senate Results
It's odd that the President would out-perform his 2016 numbers and then be beaten by Joe Biden even though the President doubled his cut of the black vote, on which the Democratic Party often relies. It's even stranger, though, that Joe Biden's titanic landslide didn't come with coat-tails: the Republican Party kept the Senate, and added to the House.
One explanation for why that might happen is if Republican voters turned on Trump, but otherwise continued to vote for Republicans down ballot. If that were true, you'd expect to see lots of races with Republican Senate numbers well in advance of the President's numbers. But the results don't show that.
What the results appear to show is that Trump and the Republican Senators running alongside him mostly posted similar numbers, as you'd expect if Trump voters were also likely to be Republican voters down-ballot. Biden's numbers are the ones that look weird. In swing states Biden votes are not tethered to the Senate numbers.
MichiganSo one possibility is that somebody's inventing Biden votes on a tight schedule. In Georgia, they knew after Tuesday night counting got halted that they needed around 100,000 votes. Since each one takes time to process, time is limited, and you can't expand your personnel much without running risks of being discovered, they're turning out the Biden votes without bothering to fill out the rest of the ballot.
Trump: 2,637,173
GOP Sen: 2,630,042
Dif: 7,131
Biden: 2,787,544
Dem Sen: 2,718,451
Dif: 69,093
Georgia
Trump: 2,432,799
GOP Sen: 2,433,617
Dif: 818
Biden: 2,414,651
Dem Sen: 2,318,850
Dif: 95,801
In Georgia that will be particularly hard to prove, ironically, because of the voting machines being so terrible. I've been complaining about that for years. It will be ironic if Brian Kemp is now unable to prove a fairly large degree of fraud because of his own failure to upgrade to more secure machinery.
Another possibility that occurs to me: at least some of the swamp-creature Congressional Republican leadership is in on the scheme. They've agreed to let the Biden race be stolen in order to get rid of Trump, who is a problem for crony DC types of all parties. However, a condition is that the fraud can't be used to unseat any Republican Congressmen. Those races have to be run straight, or else they'll blow up the game.
The first possibility is one of a party engaged in fraud, in a hurry, while their party machinery buys them time with delays. The second possibility is of a self-appointed ruling class attempting to purge itself of an unwanted democratic element, and to reassert its control over the Federal government.
Are there non-fraud explanations that might be plausible? Lots of voters who know only about American politics that they hate Trump, so they showed up to vote in just one race on the ballot? But only in swing states? One possibility is that these numbers are wrong, and that we'll see in the final analysis that there wasn't such a discrepancy; but if that's true, then why didn't the Biden landslide also carry the Senate?
Oopsie
You can watch the Wisconsin vote tally flip on live TV. Language warning, and if you don't want to sit through the whole thing, start at about 4:30.
"Dude, where's my landslide?"
Steve Hayward at Powerline:
With the GOP keeping the Senate and improving in the House, we have four years of gridlock ahead, and as I always point out, gridlock is the next best thing to constitutional government. Kiss goodbye court packing, ending the filibuster, the Green New Deal, big income tax hikes, a massive blue state bail out (though I suspect McConnell will give them something), and statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Then look ahead to the midterms in 2022, when the GOP can realistically hope to retake the House.
Tennessee River
The Tennessee is not that interesting, but the Little Tennessee and its feeder rivers really are. The French Broad River runs east and then north, wrapping around the mountains to turn west. It is also joined by the Pigeon river, whose headwaters are in the Graveyard Fields atop the Pisgah ridge. Both join with the Little Tennessee into the Tennessee itself. That goes on to join the Mississippi.
Not over yet
Lots to unpack in this Powerline summary. Also, interesting demographics from the New York Times, though I haven't tried to go behind the paywall to figure out whether this is national or regional:
Bingo
This Dennis Prager summary of what Democrats hate about Trump personally and what Republicans hate about the left as an ideology is eerily precise in summing up what I heard from my troubled Democratic niece several days ago--almost to the point to using the same words. He nailed quite a few of my responses, too.
Vote Cimmerian
As a rule I've always thought the 'lamentations of the women' line was a bit harsh, although it's a softening of what Genghis Khan actually said. It's also true that a Greek epic poem characteristically includes lamentations by some of the female characters, so the line was apt for a movie that aspired to the epic mode.
If Trump wins, the lamentations of the women opposing him are definitely likely to be epic in character.
Open Thread
It’s Election Day, as everyone knows from the millions of calls and texts and emails. Have at it.
By the way, I’ve decided to alter the Hall rules on commenting. Except for open threads, like this one, I’ll begin deleting comments that aren’t on topic unless they’re super interesting. I think I’ll enjoy things more within a more focused discussion, and many of you have privately suggested something like this.
But this one’s open. Have at it.
Hope beckons
Powerline is trying to keep my spirits up today. The post contains a short video of a Marco Rubio warm-up speech that I enjoyed more than I expected, particularly the strong ending.
Hands across the aisle
The recent censorship stories got me riled up enough this week to post more provocative material on Facebook than my usual. That yielded some irritable comments from my sister and an aunt, nothing too awful but not exactly conducive to discussion. It's my usual practice to ignore comments from my family rather than try to fight it out in public.
My sister's daughter, however, a lovely young doctor in her early thirties practicing in Philadelphia, who normally doesn't stay in touch, sent me a rather nice text genuinely trying to find out where I was coming from. It turns out she tends to follow my Facebook page, which surprised me, and perhaps was getting a little more information about what I really think than she'd been able to glean before. As in, oh, my goodness, are you REALLY a Trump supporter?
It was not a waste of time. We managed to keep it civil, and she asked me repeatedly in anguish how it was I could support a racist who deliberately lies to conceal the seriousness of the COVID pandemic from a vulnerable public entirely for his personal gain. I tried in various ways to make her understand how differently I view all these things. Possibly I got across the message that, while she may never have thought of it this way, conservatives actually have some of the same misgivings about whether leftists in political office are treating them as enemies and damaging the country. The point is: we disagree about what damages the country, not about whether it's a good thing to damage the country. I also tried to reassure her that I don't think COVID is a hoax, but I do think COVID coverage is politically biased and likely to erode public confidence at a time when we can ill afford to do that.
She remains convinced that Trump is a racist and that there's no good explanation why conservatives hide this obvious truth from themselves. Aside from the COVID and racist angles, and a general detestation of his personal style, she doesn't appear to have strong negative feelings about the rest of his policies. It surprised me that the question of conservative judges didn't come up.
It's odd: the post that bothered her the most was something I thought completely innocuous: a chart showing the declining COVID case fatality rate over the last six months in a variety of countries, including the U.S., which I posted without any comment or conclusions. It's obvious to her that concentrating on this kind of news is a dangerous inducement to complacency, particularly given our President's unaccountable urging of the population to pretend there is no virus. She insisted that she doesn't favor censorship of news, but clearly this somehow is different in her mind.
At one point my niece expressed dismay that, although it might be understandable how I could have been snookered into voting for Trump in 2016, I could do it again in 2020 after he's proved how awful he is. I told her as diplomatically as I could that in 2016 I doubted his conservative principles, while in 2020 I no longer do. But what I was thinking was this:
Election Day Prediction: Trump Wins
It is intellectually interesting to be going into an election with such strongly competing information about who is likely to prevail. All but a few insurgent poll outfits show an easy Biden victory. If these models are in any way accurate, Trump has no chance.
The few insurgents, meanwhile, predict a massive Trump victory.
My sense is that the polls are models, and our ability to predict complex phenomena well enough to model it is quite weak. We think we can because we can model things like physics well enough to put a probe on Mars, or hit an asteroid moving a million miles an hour and millions of miles away. Yet those are relatively simple things to do, because the forces acting on the planet Mars or the asteroid are few in number. You can model the increasing effect of gravity as the asteroid approaches the sun using an inverse square law we've known since Newton.
Try modeling which way a small, light balloon will go in a windstorm here on Earth, though, and you can't model it accurately for a hundred yards. The fluid dynamics of the atmosphere are too complex. We deal with turbulence by the application of main force, not by understanding exactly how it will affect an aircraft.
Our models of complex phenomena are reliably terrible. Viral models were wildly inaccurate; economic models are never any good; climate change theory is based around models we have no reason to trust, and good reasons to distrust if we are honest with ourselves about their predictive history since the 1970s or so.
So I'm going to found my guess on what I think I know about American politics, rather than the modeled outcomes. What I think I know is this:
* Americans hate political violence, and political violence by the Left has been ongoing since the summer. Democrats have actively abetted it in Democratic cities, as for example by not prosecuting rioters. Democrat-controlled cities are boarded up today, and everyone knows which side is the danger causing it. Americans will not like this.
* Though the police are having a bad year in terms of public confidence, they're still more trusted than any branch of elected government. Every major police organization has endorsed the President's re-election as a means of quelling the violence.
* Restrictions on freedom anger Americans, and the Biden campaign is promising new lockdowns and mandates if elected.
* Americans hate being told that they are racists, or that America is racist, and love being made to feel patriotic and hopeful. The Left has built its campaign around the 1619 Project and racial resentment, while the Trump campaign has been relentlessly patriotic and has engaged in positive outreach to minorities.
* Americans love economic booms and hate recessions or depressions. Trump presided over a wild economic boom until COVID, and even now we are in a V-shaped recovery that will flesh out into a boom if he is re-elected. Biden is promising economy-killing tax increases and lockdowns (and nobody loves paying more taxes anyway).
* Trump has started no new wars, and has slimmed our footprint in existing wars as far as he can manage. He has avoided creating pools of instability out of which things like ISIS can spring. He has also overseen the development of unheard-of normalization between Israel and Arab states, and economic normalization in the Kosovo region. Peace and Prosperity are hard to beat.
* The intense hatred facing Trump is largely a class hatred, and although this class controls nearly all of our media and much of our government, it is not large. Elizabeth Warren was the candidate of the college educated white women who make up its core, and she didn't even win her own state in the Democratic primary. They will doubtless persuade many voters through their relentless control of information, but many more regard them with scorn.
* Biden's record includes the 1994 Crime Bill, and repeated threats to cut Social Security. Even his own machine voters have to approach him out of a sense of party loyalty rather than personal affection. Trump, meanwhile, draws rock-star crowds everywhere he goes.
For all those reasons, then, I think Donald Trump will easily win tomorrow. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe the experts will prove right, and the models will work for once.
If so, I'll be surprised. I've been surprised before; I was surprised that Trump won the Republican primary, and again when he got elected. I was surprised when he achieved a major development in Middle East peace, when he didn't start new wars, and when his Presidency was marked by effective outreach to non-white voters rather than a Brazilianization of our politics into racialized factions.
He's surprised me a lot, in other words, but generally in ways that worked to his advantage. My guess is that the surprise that is coming will be for his opponents, as it has often been.
POSTSCRIPT:
It occurs to me that the one factor I'm ignoring is the psychological effect of COVID itself. I don't watch TV, but when I speak to those who do it's clear that they're being subjected to an intense psychological operation designed to make this disease seem terrifying and momentous. In fact -- per Worldometer -- there are only ~85,000 serious or critical cases of COVID currently in the entire world. 99% of cases are mild, and even then it's only 11 million people suffering the mild symptoms in the whole world. Almost everyone recovers.
It's not worth our attention, in my view; just one more risk among the many we run every day, and far from the worst one. I'm excluding it from my calculations because I think it's worth excluding, and I'm outside the psychological bubble that constantly reinforces it as a concern.
If Trump loses tomorrow, it'll be because of that psychological operation combined with the other ones that were designed to hide his accomplishments and play up his mistakes and bad behaviors. That will by itself be remarkable; it will underline that Americans are much more manipulable than is good for a free people.
Nevertheless, I don't expect it. I think the reason we keep hearing about the tyrannical governors and governments coming up with new restrictions is that most people -- not just most Americans -- have decided to proceed with their lives. They're not going to vote to cast themselves into a new darkness of suffering and poverty to address this annoyance. I could be wrong about that, too, of course; my tolerance for risk is very high.
Ray Wylie Hubbard
While he's not dead yet, let's let him tell the story about the late Jerry Jeff Walker's most famous song.
Going to get the beer was apparently a thing in the old days. "I've been beat up worse than that by bikers!"
Feast of All Souls
It was a remarkable Halloween, astrologically at least: the first full moon on Halloween since 1944, and a blue moon at that. Mushrooms sprang up here like I've never seen, indeed that I've never seen.
I played chess with a child who is learning the game, and not too badly; he lost of course, but not without showing some class. I saw his mother, an old friend, and gave her a gift that I hope she'll like. Her children brought laughter to a meadow I know.
Children remind you that we always live in the morning of the world. We grow too old to recognize it, if we don't have them around. But every morning is fresh and new, if your eyes are young enough to see it. Every mushroom is a miracle, and every leaf, and every blade of grass. Chesterton was good on this subject, but reading him only reminds you of the facts. You don't experience it until you see the child encounter it anew and for the first time.
But there's always a new child, and it is always fresh. In the mind of God perhaps it never grows old; as Chesterton put it, "Our father is younger than we."
Tragic Week
So, this week was tragic for Outlaw Country because we lost two of the greats. Jerry Jeff Walker died, and then Billy Joe Shaver.
Both of these men deserve stories told about them in their honor. There are two in those links; but you can find a lot more about both of them, and maybe especially Billy Joe.
No, definitely about Billy Joe.
Jerry Jeff did a bunch of good songs. Probably the most famous was Mr. Bojangles, but I always liked this one.
Billy Joe wrote a ton of songs, many of them great. You can listen to Waylon Jenning's best album, "Honky Tonk Heroes." He wrote almost every single one of those songs. Here's my favorite.
But this one is better, even if I don't like it as much.
That's Billy Joe in the white shirt. If you ever followed "Tales from the Tour Bus," Billy Joe has an episode devoted to him. The first season of that is fantastic.
"Recruiting Challenges"
A US Attorney asks people to please consider becoming police officers at this difficult time:
Challenge to recruit qualified police officers is real. Departures exceed recruits by large margin. National narrative, defund efforts and assaults on those in “Blue” dramatically harm recruiting.I'll say it's challenging. Passing by Asheville on I-26 today I saw a billboard advertising immediate openings for new or transferred police officers —- in Fort Wayne, Indiana, four states and more than five hundred miles away.
Plausible deniability
The phrase that may define Biden's career as "modified limited hangout" defined Nixon's.
There's still a nearly complete traditional press blackout of this story, the only exceptions being the New York Post and Tucker Carlson's show on Fox.
Flavors of political violence
You guys have probably already seen this AVI post, but I think it's brilliant, so I'm going to link it here.
I've never gone deeply into "hole up and wait for the bad guys" territory, but I have to admit that I'm much closer to it this year than I've ever been before. I've never felt quite this betrayed by so many supposedly protective institutions at once. The press somehow managed to plumb deeper depths by memory-holing both the riots and the Hunter Biden bag-man-for-my-dad story more thoroughly than even I believed possible. I never believed elected officials could get away with wantonly destroying this many jobs at once. The craziness feels like it's mushroomed obscenely and is knocking even now at my front door.
My neighborhood doesn't have a militia yet, but I'm beginning to wonder if we should. In past years, I suppose I always thought it was enough that we were ready to form one if needed.
Well, hey, we have a terrible local prosecutor, but she'll be gone in a couple of months and will be replaced by a much better public servant that we went to a lot of trouble to find. So at least we don't have a Soros plant to contend with. We have a Sheriff about whom probably the worst thing you could say is that he's reluctant to use his power to the fullest to get repeat offender predators under control; in every other way he appears to be a good Joe who doesn't believe the government should overstep its bounds. Our county leadership is feckless and secretive but normally not too intrusive or power-mad. That won't help too much if the national leadership goes full psycho, but it may delay things for a while.
Eucatastrophe
One of the benefits of faith is that you need not trust in the powers of the world, because you can always hope for a miracle. If it turns out that a matter of honor saves our almost-fallen Republic, whose sons and daughters have all but forgotten honor's very name, it will be a miracle Tolkien himself would have appreciated.
Bread still on my mind
THE BRONX, NY—AOC blasted election officials this week after discovering that people were actually waiting in line to vote rather than to receive bread from the government. According to sources, people are sometimes waiting up to 2 hours at polling stations, but are able to get bread within 5 minutes due to America's evil capitalist system.
An exceptional candidate
Congratulations to our newest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett.
She's not the first Justice to serve alongside a Justice for whom she had clerked--that was Gorsuch, who clerked for Kennedy--but she's the first one to have been sworn in by that Justice (in this case, Clarence Thomas).
I'm not convinced Justice Barrett is a conservative in the usual sense of the word. I think she's a textualist, which will lead her to many results embraced by conservatives and some that will drive conservatives crazy. Her decisions may also remind us that some changes are supposed to be brought about by legislation and, if necessary, by constitutional amendments, rather than by judges.
Mountain Folk
If you've been around the Hall for a long time, you've read about shootings before. I heard about another one today, a man up by Bates Gap who shot his own nephew. They were McCalls, I hear. Allow me to reproduce a bit of that history:
This is a derivation of the personal name "Cath-mhaol" which translates as "Battle Chief", or in this case "son of Battle-chief". An Alternate possibility is that it may be a variant of the patronymic Mac Cathail, "the son of Cathal" from the Olde Welsh "Catgual" meaning "war-wielder". Either way it is clear that the first nameholders were very much descendants of fighting men. The 'modern' surname is first recorded in Scotland in the latter half of the 14th Century, and is very much connected with Dumfriess. Early examples of recordings include Finlay MacChaell, who was bailie of Rothesay in 1501, and Finlay Makcaill, who was recorded in Bute in 1506. In 1607 Matthew McCall of Mayhole, Dumfriess, was charged with assisting the rebels, probably the Clan MacGregor, who had been outlawed by King James V1 of Scotland for persistent acts of violence against the government.Now that about tells you what you need to know about this part of the country, which was settled by Scots who drove out most but not all of the Cherokee. The toughest bunch of them, the Eastern Band, are here yet. Good people, both sets.
I can't say too much about it. My grandfather once chased my cousin out of his house with gunfire from a .38 revolver. The old man was right, and the boy had it coming. I don't let him come around here.
The neighbor who told me about it turned it into a disquisition on "White Liquor," which was apparently made everywhere up here in the old days. It still is, on a smaller scale. I know a neighbor I can walk to who has a still. I brew mead out of the local honey myself -- legally, of course. Picked a bunch of cider apples this week.
A Gentle Question
So, without doubt this "I had to remind him he was black" bit is racist (and probably not the persuasive argument she thinks it is). Everyone seems to realize that, to judge from the reception it's getting online.
How to account for her closing argument, that she 'might be willing to seal the deal in more ways than one' if he changes his vote, though? No commentary I've seen addresses what is really a vicious argument in several ways:
1) It assumes his moral judgment about how to vote is for sale, and not even for cash, but for a mere night's pleasure;
2) It proposes that her sexuality is for sale, and not even for cash, but for one vote out of tens of millions in a state that is all but certain not to be swung by his vote nor even his influence;
3) It suggests that his morality is therefore cheaply bought;
4) ...and that her sexuality likewise.
It is not extraordinary that someone might make a proposal like this, but it is extraordinary that they would do so in public -- without shame -- and be called on it by no one whatsoever as far as I can tell. This seems to be quite in alignment with our self-declared elite's mores on sexuality.
How do we deal with this?
The staff of life
I'm still experimenting with bread. My new King Arthur yeast works much better than the packets that probably spent too much time in a hot warehouse. Now I'm working on making the dough wetter, for a larger "crumb," and leaving the loaf in the oven longer to get a deeper crust. We're getting a cold front in a few days and plan to get the wood-fired outdoor oven cranked up again, which should also help with the crust.
This loaf is about 4 hours start to finish, with only one kneading at the beginning (10 minutes in a mixer) and a few minutes of effort every hour or so after that. All it takes is flour, water, salt, and yeast, and the oven just as hot as you can get it. The loaf takes 6 cups of flour; my hand is in the picture for some scale.
Wolf Lake
From the Panthertown Approach.
On the Lake, One.
On the Lake, Two.
Gorge Spillway.
Wolf Lake is one of three lakes built in these mountains for aircraft aluminum production during World War II. Aluminum requires vast amounts of electricity to produce, so they built new hydroelectric dams to create the power. The others are Bear Lake and Cedar Cliff Lakes, both of which have names that are appropriate to their environments. Wolf Lake refers to a species of wolf, the Red Wolf, that hasn't been around here for a long time.
This Seems Apropos in Our Current Time
"For better is a laudable war than a peace which severs a man from God: and therefore it is that the Spirit arms the gentle warrior, as one who is able to wage war in a good cause"
-St. Gregory of Nazianzus
Brave Sir Robin
I apologize for posting this link without first supplying you with context that will make you feel safer. I don't think Snopes has had time to fact-check it yet.
I'm Identifying As 18, How About You?
"You can't sacrifice truth because some people are going to actually suffer because of the truth."
Clarity and the Constitution
The Constitution is the crisis, writes Osita Nwanevu.
The American left should work toward abolishing the Constitution someday—either for a new document or a new democratic order without a written constitution....
This and this alone was the genius of the Founders and Framers: not a special capacity for principled compromise and not extraordinary foresight or a collective wisdom sure to endure through the ages, but rather the force of their will...
It is beyond debate that we are their moral superiors... it is certain that we will do better—securing for truly all Americans not only a framework of now familiar political freedoms but a framework of economic rights rooted in the notion that democratic values and a revulsion for arbitrary, unchallenged authority should shape more than just our system of government. Until then, a half-measure: If it is given the opportunity, the Democratic Party—without hesitation, guilt, or apology—should pack the Supreme Court to its advantage.That's clear enough, at least. "It is beyond debate that we are their moral superiors," he says, meaning that he thinks it is not just beyond doubt but beyond any sort of devil's-advocate discussion of any theoretical possibility he might be wrong about that. He is twenty-six years old.
Pro tip for old sickish people like us
This time of year I catch up on my continuing legal education hours by doing online seminars, so you're going to get the occasional hot consumer law tip. I chose a couple of Medicare courses this year, my husband and I being of That Age. An interesting warning* about hospital stays: some hospitals don't want to "admit" a new patient, for fear that Medicare will dispute the necessity, so they call it keeping the patient "under observation." The hospital will get paid less this way but also is in less danger of having 100% of the bill denied by Medicare, so the trade-off makes sense for the hospital. It makes less for you.
Being held for observation but not "admitted" has two big impacts on the patient's Medicare reimbursement. First, the whole stay, which can last a week or more and involve fantastic amounts of expensive consultations and tests, will be billed under Medicare Part "B," the part that covers outpatient services, rather than Part “A,” which covers hospitalization. Part “B” has higher deductibles and copays (unless you have a private supplement, a/k/a "supplement" policy), and your prescriptions will not be covered unless you have separate prescription coverage.
Those two effects alone could mean a big unexpected bill. Even worse, however, you won't qualify for any Medicare reimbursement at all for followup long-term care unless you had been a formally admitted inpatient for 72 hours, no matter how long you stayed "under observation.” You know how high the daily charges for long-term care in a nursing home can be. If you were an inpatient, you may find the coverage cuts off after 100 days (though there are exceptions), but if you weren’t even an inpatient to start with, you get zero days covered.
This can happen even if you're too sick for your initial hospital doctor to allow you to leave other than "against medical advice." You're supposed to get a written notice within some period (36 hours?) warning you that you're not technically "admitted.” Even better, you should insist on being told immediately whether you’ve been admitted or not. Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it if you complain but the hospital won't budge, other than agitate to be transferred to a hospital that will admit you—or demand to go home, if you can do that safely.
* The actual seminar I had to suffer through merely mentioned the inpatient/observation danger without explaining it. Someone in the audience asked why a hospital would do this, but the lecturer said she was baffled. A Google search yielding the linked answer in about a nanosecond, along with a lot more detail about the dangers of the trap, and the infuriating way it can work out for patients and their families.
Being held for observation but not "admitted" has two big impacts on the patient's Medicare reimbursement. First, the whole stay, which can last a week or more and involve fantastic amounts of expensive consultations and tests, will be billed under Medicare Part "B," the part that covers outpatient services, rather than Part “A,” which covers hospitalization. Part “B” has higher deductibles and copays (unless you have a private supplement, a/k/a "supplement" policy), and your prescriptions will not be covered unless you have separate prescription coverage.
Those two effects alone could mean a big unexpected bill. Even worse, however, you won't qualify for any Medicare reimbursement at all for followup long-term care unless you had been a formally admitted inpatient for 72 hours, no matter how long you stayed "under observation.” You know how high the daily charges for long-term care in a nursing home can be. If you were an inpatient, you may find the coverage cuts off after 100 days (though there are exceptions), but if you weren’t even an inpatient to start with, you get zero days covered.
This can happen even if you're too sick for your initial hospital doctor to allow you to leave other than "against medical advice." You're supposed to get a written notice within some period (36 hours?) warning you that you're not technically "admitted.” Even better, you should insist on being told immediately whether you’ve been admitted or not. Unfortunately I don't know what to do about it if you complain but the hospital won't budge, other than agitate to be transferred to a hospital that will admit you—or demand to go home, if you can do that safely.
* The actual seminar I had to suffer through merely mentioned the inpatient/observation danger without explaining it. Someone in the audience asked why a hospital would do this, but the lecturer said she was baffled. A Google search yielding the linked answer in about a nanosecond, along with a lot more detail about the dangers of the trap, and the infuriating way it can work out for patients and their families.
QOTD
Or maybe it's the quote of the week. Or the month. Or the year.
It seems that 44 San Francisco schools are looking to change their evil names in order to lose their association with potential connections to slavery, genocide, and colonization. The name changes would include changing away from Washington and Lincoln.
About which one concerned parent commented,
We're not actually helping disadvantaged children by changing the name of the school they can't attend.
Eric Hines
Hegel in Kyoto
A post by an American philosopher currently living in Hong Kong.
Why is there something rather than nothing? The fact of existence cannot be explained by an appeal to any beings, since this would assume what it wants to prove. Nishida Kitarō, the Japanese philosopher and founder of the Kyoto School, therefore proclaimed that only nothingness can be the ultimate source of existence.An important thing going on here is a lack of univocal terminology. The Japanese don't mean the same thing by "nothing" that Western thinkers do, since they are informed by the Buddhist (and hidden behind it, Hindu) tradition that nothingness is a kind of field of possibility.
Of course, Western thinkers run into univocal/equivocal problems here too. We don't appeal to "any being" in resolving the question with the One/God/"The Father," because that is not a being in the same sense that any of the things we encounter are. All beings that are beings like us come to be and perish; the kind of being who could be the source of existence is not like that. Avicenna (and after him Aquinas, etc) argues that such a being must exist essentially; and since that being's essence is existence, such a being must exist in a different, transcendent, and permanent way.
Both of these answers end up saying that the ultimate ground of our existence can't be anything like us. Either we are grounded in a kind of everlasting field of potency, or the world was brought into being by a process set up from outside of it.
Yet the first answer, the Japanese one, doesn't really find a solid ground. Why should the potential exist, rather than no potential? After all, potentiality is already a kind of existence (per Aristotle, etc). A potential house is already something: bricks or stones or something else that could be made into a house (as opposed to, say, fire). The potential already has an actuality that allows it to serve as the potential for something else. So too a potential world, however much the Japanese philosopher insists that he means absolutely nothing.
What Avicenna called the Necessary Existant really is necessary. His proof isn't a proof that God exists as anything like our conception of Him, but it is a proof all the same.
A Contract with Black America
Ice Cube, the famous hip hop artist from the 1990s, has gotten into a lot of trouble for meeting with Donald Trump to talk over Cube's "Contract with Black America." Apparently he offered it to the Democrats, and they told him to try them after the elections. When he offered it to Trump, Trump set a meeting and then adjusted at least some of his platform to account for the demands he thought most reasonable.
You can read the whole thing here, if you're interested. Some of it is easy common ground to which many of us could readily agree; other parts are not. If you're interested to know what kind of deal he thinks would set things right between white and black America, though, here you go.
Courage to Speak the Hard Truths
Police Captain Frank Umbrino of Rochester, New York got up in front of the press after the recent shooting at a house party that killed two, and injured fourteen others, and spoke about the hard truths our society has been dodging for too long. I have no idea if he is a Republican or Democrat, but either way, I think he should run for local or state office. The citizens of Rochester deserve better than the politicians, and he seems the right man for the job. If you can spare a little under nine minutes, it's a good listen-
Must Be Important
Both Facebook and Twitter decided to censor this story.
Guess you’d better read it so you can decide for yourself.
Keeping the law in its place
Amy Coney Barrett was speaking my language when she described her philosophy for not making courts so important that everything they do becomes a matter of life and death, so that all rules must be thrown out:
[Justice Scalia’s] judicial philosophy was straightforward. A judge must apply the law as it is written, not as she wishes it were. Sometimes that approach meant reaching results that he did not like, but as he put it in one of his best known opinions, that is what it means to say that we have a government of laws and not of men....
I worked hard as a lawyer and as a professor, I owed that to my clients, to my students and to myself, but I never let the law define my identity or crowd out the rest of my life. A similar principle applies to the role of courts. Courts have a vital responsibility to the rule of law, which is critical to a free society, but courts are not designed to solve every problem or right every wrong in our public life.
The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches, elected by and accountable to the people. The public should not expect courts to do so and courts should not try....
When I write an opinion resolving a case, I read every word from the perspective of the losing party. I ask myself how I would view the decision if one of my children was the party that I was ruling against. Even though I would not like the result, would I understand that the decision was fairly reasoned and grounded in law.Ann Althouse adds: "That is, she uses her rich, personal life as a foundation for a spare judicial life. This is the opposite of what liberals tend to say, which is that a judge with a rich life brings dimension and empathy to the task of judging."
Giving urban voters a choice
Just yesterday, I was typing about how residents of the most unsafe cities generally tend NOT to support gun control, but also have been raised on the (unofficial) mantra of "Blue No Matter Who". And I posited that it will take a new wave of Republicans to appeal to those voters, not on abstract issues, but on the very real and undeniable facts that they've been voting for Democrats for decades and it's gotten them nowhere. It will take these candidates pointing this out, pointing out that their chosen "leaders" are not helping and, in fact, oppose the rights that those citizens need to protect themselves. And I pointed to Kim Klacik as an example of this new Republican candidate. Well, I'm pleased to say I've now seen another who knocks it out of the park in his most recent ad. Check it (and him) out.
Lee Keltner Apparently Made Fine Hats
I'm sure you've all heard about the murder of a Trump supporter by a leftist in Denver Saturday. The victim was Lee Keltner, and apparently he made hats for a living, and seems like the sort of fellow who'd have been right at home here in the Hall. This video is of him in his shop making hats and talking about it a little. God rest his soul.
Update: For some reason, in their infinite 'wisdom', YouTube has made that video unavailable. Here is a working link to the same footage:
And when I went looking for that, I found this one, which only reinforces the idea that Lee would have been more than welcome here.
Cassie Jaye Discusses Lessons Learned Making The Red Pill
Best TEDx talk I've seen in quite a while.
Here's the Wikipedia article on The Red Pill, if you aren't familiar with it.
Ballade #4 in F minor, Op. 52
I think that's an 11-foot Steinway. This is a favorite piece of mine, performed by someone recommended by a YouTube stranger. It turns out her Chopin interpretations agree with me, so it's lucky that three of her Chopin recital albums are on iTunes.
It's bread-baking day again, using some better yeast I ordered from King Arthur Baking Co. What could be nicer than listening to Chopin and doing Project Gutenberg biblical exegesis pages with lots of Greek while waiting for dough to rise? The weather's beautiful, too, finally cooling off a bit. There are storks in the pond, rare visitors.
Who gave this guy a mike?
A Rochester police captain takes the usual tired questions about "more gun laws," and expresses his own theories about what's causing the problem: a removal of social consequences that starts with irresponsible child-rearing and continues with "bail reform"--basically treating grownups as children and being being bad parents to them. He talks mostly about enforcing the gun laws that already are on the books, but I hear a different message: what concerns us is not the guns but the actions of people with guns. He points out that he can't think of a case of gun violence committed by a registered owner that wasn't justified. The problem is that the gun violence committed by unregistered owners isn't justified, and isn't effectively punished or deterred. The problem isn't that we're not punishing illegal gun ownership, it's that we aren't distinguishing between crime and self-defense, and are if anything obsessing on gun ownership instead of on whether a crime is occurring along with the gun ownership. On top of that, we keep excusing the crime, on the basis of some kind of half-baked political theory about roots causes of robbery and murder, and distracting ourselves with the problem of the weaponry--no matter how clear the evidence is of how weapons are used differently by criminals and non-criminals. It's as if we thought social nirvana were achieved by making people weaker and weaker until they lack tools to do any more harm.
The police captain's message throughout is that we can't solve problems if we keep lying to ourselves and each other about what's happening right in front of us.
The video link doesn't say, but the captain is Frank Umbrino. He was involved in early decisions not to release information about the death of Daniel Prude, video of whose arrest sparked riots when it finally came out months later. He's still standing after the decapitation of the police department leadership and the indictment of Mayor Lovely Warren on campaign fraud charges. Was Umbirno wrong? He accurately predicted the effects of the video, and it's easy to understand his decision, but it was futile. You can't keep a lid on in-custody deaths, and shouldn't, no matter how clearly you see the consequences in a tinderbox like the present one.
What to believe?
It's an article of faith among a certain excitable contingent that COVID is rapidly fatal in 100% of cases, ergo there appears to be no way to process the President's experience. AceHQ notes that some of the press are having trouble settling on a conspiracy theory:
First conspiracy theory: Trump really doesn't have covid, he's lying, this is a sympathy play.
Second revised conspiracy theory: Trump is actually dying of covid, they're covering it up.
Third revised conspiracy theory: See First Conspiracy Theory. It's a classic for a reason.
As someone noted earlier today, a surprisingly swath of the President's inveterate enemies are channeling Pat Buchanan's attitude towards people unlucky enough to contract AIDS in the 1980s: the wages of sin is COVID. But as Paula Poundstone said, "I imagine the wages of sin is death, but by the time you take out the taxes, it's just more of a tired feeling, really."
If we weren't in the grips of rampant black-and-white thinking, we might remember that COVID is a sporadically cruel and dangerous disease that can kill quickly and rather unexpectedly in all age groups, though particularly in the elderly and infirm, while at the same time in the vast majority of cases it is not terribly serious. Even among patients of the President's age, it spares 95% or more of sufferers from the ultimate penalty.
Free Americans
If any of you are interested, I have published a collection of political philosophical essays. You can get it on Kindle now, and in paperback after I've seen the proofs -- I learned that lesson the hard way from the Arthurian novel.
However, you can also read almost all of it for free on the SSG website, since the essays are lightly edited versions of things already published. Only the first chapter is really new, and I'd be happy to send it to any of you who wanted to review the book.
My wife did the Veterans Exempt flag for the cover. She's a much better artist than that, though. If any of you are in Asheville, her paintings will be in the Asheville Gallery of Art from next month.
Not sissies
I don't remember ever reading about Teddy Roosevelt's being shot in the chest a month before his election.
Johnny Paycheck vs. Dolly Parton
I've done Jonny Paycheck a disservice. I always thought he stole the basic idea of this song from Dolly Parton. In truth, he recorded this in 1971.
Parton got around to this in 1973.
Parton was still way better.
The World vs. Donald Trump
"Sose the Ghost," a self-described former member of the Crips street gang, current member of a 1% ("outlaw") motorcycle club, black Puerto Rican, talks about why he loves and respects Donald Trump.
This is not what you've been told to expect.
Stand-downs and self-defense
H/t Glen Reynolds, an analysis of politically motivated police stand-down orders as a refutation of the argument that the 2d Amendment is moot in a time of effective police protection.
No cowering
The President seems more vigorous while fighting COVID than his ostensibly infection-free opponent, who called another "lid" at 9:15am this weekend.
“Americans overwhelmingly reject the idea that presidents should isolate themselves from the citizenry for safety’s sake.”
* * *
Nor will it soon be forgotten that Trump hatred reached its creepy crescendo when the man became gravely ill.As Trump said from his Walter Reed office suite:
I was given that alternative, stay in the White House, lock yourself in, don’t ever leave. Don’t even go to the oval office, just stay upstairs and enjoy it. Don’t see people, don’t talk to people.… This is the United States. This is the greatest country in the world. This is the most powerful country in the world. I can’t be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe.… We have to confront problems, as a leader, you have to confront problems. There’s never been a great leader that would have done that.
Meanwhile, for all the cackling about karmic retribution against a political enemy, it remains unclear how useful lockdowns are in bending the virus transmission curve, especially considering their catastrophic cost.
Fact check: True
From a Neo commenter: "[T]omorrow the media will be filled with accounts from doctors who had patients who rallied from being at death’s door to releasing youtube videos and working at a desk only to die the next day."
Datil Peppers
This post is mostly for Mike, but some of you also like spicy cooking.
So my son stopped by a spice shop a few towns over that I visit whenever I roll through. Recognizing him, the proprietor gave him a big sack of something called Datil pepper for him to bring me. The proprietor told him that she'd just gotten it in, and wanted me to see what I could do with it.
I'd never actually heard of it before, but a little research showed that it was similar to a habanero or Scotch bonnet pepper in heat. It has a nice floral quality compared to those other two.
I prepared a few recipes for them to thank them for the free pepper. I thought I'd share them with you, too.
That reminds me
. . . that I've still got some made used up over the destruction of my health insurance ten years ago.
The Bee: "You have nothing to worry about, as long as you believe the right things."
Punitive liberalism
Powerline notes small, welcome signs of cognition in Seattle journalism:
Mayor Jenny Durkan appears uncomfortable interacting with the business community and has lost power to an assertive council. That body is obsessed with defunding the police without a viable Plan B. Its membership is stuffed with career activists and pols, with thin business experience at best.
No wonder the council is hostile to business. Even the smallest shop is exploitative capitalism. The council’s loudest voices are running a “revolution.” Only in a city made so prosperous by hated capitalism could this intellectual Ponzi scheme be tolerated or seem without consequences.
Never mind small business and retail shops. Big business in Seattle isn’t very happy either. Boeing announced today that it plans to discontinue manufacturing its 787 Dreamliner plane in Washington state and consolidate 787 production in (nonunion) South Carolina.
The governor is reported to be considering punitive tax consequences.
Welcome to the party, pal
Here's a NYT editor whiffing a faint clue:
In other words, it’s not really about George Floyd or Black lives, but insurrection for insurrection’s sake.
HotAir regrets that we don't have a "Joker Award for Belatedly Discovering That Some People Want to Watch the World Burn":
[O]ne does have to ask why a major American media outlets didn’t connect these dots for itself. It’s been over four months since the start of these riots, and yet an editorial board member for one of the largest media outlets in the country just figured this out. And she only figured it out after reading [Jeremy Lee] Quinn’s blog rather than the work of the reporters she employs. What does that say about the New York Times and its ability to report the truth rather than regurgitate popular narratives?
I wonder who authorized her to start reading blogs with unapproved narratives, anyway? How secure is her job?
Your Friday Night Movie: The FBI Releases "The Nevernight Connection"
From American Military News, I learned that the FBI and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center have released a short movie based on a real-life case to raise awareness of how China recruits Americans with security clearances.
I'll pop the popcorn.
"Will you shut up, man?"
After Biden refused to say whether he'd pack the Supreme Court, inanely responding that he didn't want to make it an issue in the election while people were trying to vote, Zerohedge warned what would happen if Biden's party claws its way into the White House and a Senate majority:
You see, the hard-left Democrat party views our American political system the same way Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan viewed democracy before becoming a dictator for life: “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.” This time around, once the Democrats win, they will change the rules so they can never lose again.As the t-shirts put it (our modern copybook headings), Trump has his personality issues, but the other side is completely insane. Although we have two rather unappealing personalities in the race, the choice between the parties' ideas couldn't be more stark.
Low expectations
Ed Morrissey argues that Joe Biden should quit while he's ahead:
What else is there left to prove? Biden and his team might calculate that they and the “moderators” can get Trump to say some damaging things in these debates, and that might be true. Of course, Trump can do that without debates, and there’s an almost equal risk for Biden on that same score … theoretically, anyway. His declaration that he won’t take a position on court-packing lest it become an issue in the election was one of the worst dodges in a presidential debate, maybe ever. Biden’s declaration that “the party is me” was also rather risible, especially since he then disclaimed any blame for what his party does or advocates. In a media world with more objectivity, as Jazz noted earlier, Biden’s honesty and integrity would be getting more scrutiny this morning along with Trump’s.
Even if the risk is not the same, neither is the reward. Getting back on stage with Trump changes the expectations game from will Biden fall asleep to will Biden take positions and what are they. It allows Trump to tune his game a bit better, or at least have the opportunity to do so and correct the impression left from this debate. What’s the upside for Biden in a second debate, let alone two more?
Skinflints and Skinflints
Joe Biden has, oh so proudly, released his and his wife's MFJ Federal income tax return. It's revealing, and I have a question for him and for President Donald Trump.
According to their return, their top-line income was $985,233 before their Standard Deduction.
According to their Schedule A, the Bidens gave $14,700 to charity.
That's 1.5% of their income--not even a decent tithe.
On the other hand, Trump has, since taking office, donated 100% of his salary to various causes, even if not to outright charities.
My question: Biden claims Trump isn't paying enough in taxes, but who's the real skinflint, who doesn't care about others, really?
Eric HinesMalingering yeast
My bread has been giving me fits, refusing to rise. I finally read up on proofing commercial dry yeast and discovered that when I add it to some water and a little sugar, I should be getting it to foam so as to double its volume in ten minutes or so. Well, that hasn't been happening!
I figured, since I was getting at least a little reaction, there must be a few yeasts still alive in there, even if most of the package was on strike. The inactive ones don't do any harm, so I just kept increasing the total dried yeast until I got a good double-sized proof, and then used the whole batch in the bread. Voila, a loaf with enough rise to make sandwich bread.
Time Travel
It seems time travel is possible, after all, and all without that altering the (ex-)future folderol. University of Queensland professor Fabio Costa, one of the co-authors of the study purporting to solve the time travel paradox, discussed the "grandfather paradox" in the form of going back in time to prevent the Wuhan Virus patient zero from getting infected in the first place. Apparently, The Universe would take corrective action, and someone, perhaps even the time traveler (who knew The Universe might have a sense of humor), would get infected, anyway.
But the grandfather paradox has long been solved: that well-known physicist, Homer, and his equally well-known colleague, the genealogist Jethro, long ago demonstrated that it's eminently possible to be one's own grandfather, with or without time travel.
Eric Hines
Eek, a tax deduction
I'm shocked, I tell you, to learn that if someone loses $100,000 one year and gains $100,000 the next, the income tax law treats that as though he made nothing in either year. The magic January 1 date is temporarily ignored and the two years net against each other in one big two-year income result that equals zero. That means you pay no tax for one of those years even though on paper you made big bux in that 12-month period. We generally expect an organization like the IRS to play by "heads I win, tails you lose" rules, but in this case the rules are what you might call rational and fair.
This net-operating-loss write-off is known as a kind of "deduction," and deductions are actually available to all of us. Many of us ordinary people have used a "tax avoidance" technique of one kind or another, such as the mortgage deduction. I'll bet you didn't know that, not only is it not illegal, it's not even wrong!
From Althouse:
It's unAmerican to use the phrase "get away with" to refer to following the law. It's like accusing me of speeding when I'm going 75 in a 75 mph zone. I'm not "getting away with" it. I'm going the speed limit! Change the speed limit if that's the wrong top speed. Crimes are the things that have been defined as crimes. It's particularly irksome for a legislator to talk like that — shifting the blame for the legislature's own failures.
Not to rub salt in the wound
So I just saw this over at Ace's place and just had to comment on it:
https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/1308851669397053440?s=20
So as someone who works in IT at a media company, something immediately jumped out at me, and let me know if you saw it as well.
Others in power
Rod Dreher writes of his long affection for NPR, and how he was recently driven from it to trying Joe Rogan on Spotify. What resonated with me was the constant battle between people who say "but how can you vote for so-and-so, knowing how awful he and his fellow-travelers are"--from both sides of the aisle.
I am sure Joe Rogan differs from Orthodox Christian socially conservative me in a number of ways, but I would a thousand million times rather live in Joe Rogan World than NPR/NYT World. The stories Joe Rogan lives by are not the stories I live by, mostly, but I would trust Joe Rogan to defend people like me against the Pink Police State that the left seems bound and determined to create. One thing he said in that Douglas Murray podcast that resonated deeply with me: him and Murray agreeing on how insane Trump is, but how people on the left simply cannot grasp that they alarm many center-right people so much that they are less worried about crazy Trump than they are about the crazy left. This seems to be the neuralgic point between my self-described anti-woke liberal reader, and me: that we look at the same things, and dislike the same things, but that he is much more alarmed by Trump than by the woke, while I come down on the opposite side.
Where will each of us be in five years? Will we be able to talk to each other at all? This is not at all a crazy question. This was the story of Spain. It went from the fall of the monarchy and the installment of a democratic republic in 1931 to civil war in 1936, because neither the left nor the right trusted each other, and each came to see liberal democracy as a menace, because it provided a means for the Other to come to power.
Faith and Law
Amy Coney Barrett explains that letting one's own moral convictions interfere with interpreting laws as written and enacted is not a problem confined to traditionally religious people:
“All people, of course–well, we hope, most people–have deeply held moral convictions, whether or not they come from faith. People who have no faith, people who are not religious, have deeply held moral convictions,” Barrett noted. “And it’s just as important for those people to be sure– I just spent time talking about the job of a judge being to set aside moral convictions, personal moral convictions, and personal preferences, and follow the law. That’s a challenge for those of faith and for those who have no faith.”
“So I think the public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences, be they moral, be they political, whatever convictions they are,” Barrett explained. “The public should be concerned about whether a nominee can set those aside in favor of following the law.”
“But that’s not a challenge just for religious people. I mean, that’s a challenge for everyone. And so I think it’s a dangerous road to go down to say that only religious people would not be able to separate out moral convictions from their duty,” she said.
Supreme Court Nominee
Now there's a move afoot--I have no idea how serious it is--to skip a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Supreme Court nominee, whomever she might be, and take the matter straight to the floor of the Senate for an up or down vote.
That certainly would be an interesting answer to the Progressive-Democrats' stall tactic of invoking the two-hour rule on Committee hearings (although the rule can be waived on a case by case basis by a privileged motion being voted up).
Hearings aren't required for nominations; they've just been habitually done. The Progressive-Democrats, though, with their performances on the last several Republican nominee hearings, have destroyed the utility of such hearings. On the other hand, skipping the hearing might have negative impacts on some of the more borderline Republicans.
Eric Hines
My take on the Breonna Taylor debacle
With the recent acquittal of two of the two detectives in the raid on the apartment of Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend Kenneth Walker, things are going to get violent in Louisville tonight (and apparently already have). And I think we can all agree that while anger may be appropriate, burning and looting the town is not (and would not ever solve anything). But I have some things to say about the incident that sparked this, and I'll put them below the fold.
U.S. death rate down
I've been wondering if the "death from all causes" rate was going to drop in 2021, as a result of a virus whose defining characteristic may be its ability to carry off vulnerable and/or elderly people with unusually short life expectancies. Are we already seeing the trend begin? The September number took a real dive.
Does this really play the way they think it does?
Kamala Harris's campaign managers are said to be looking forward to her grilling the President's nominee for the Supreme Court, based on her riveting question in 2019 to a candidate (later confirmed) for the U.S. District Court for Nebraska:
“Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men,” Harris began. “In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as ‘a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.’ Mr. Anderson went on to say that ‘abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.’ Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?”Way to score points. He belonged to an all-male group composed solely of Catholics! Also an all-Catholic group composed solely of men.
If I'd been Ms. Harris's campaign adviser, I'd have suggested that she be less specific about the terrible things the Knights of Columbus believe, maybe sticking with "fringe religious fanatical notions you crazy racists all agree on." Reading out phrases like "abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale" can only cause people, however unconsciously, to entertain thoughts about the moral gravity of this controversy.
"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of a group that opposes the killing of the innocent on a massive scale?"
Cuomo sounds comparatively sane
It's a tall order, but Don Lemon brings out the rational side of [correction] Fredo Cuomo:
“We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” Lemon said.
“I don’t know about that,” Cuomo reacted, who argued that Americans just have to vote.
“You know what we’re going to have to do?… You’re going to have to get rid of the electoral college,” Lemon continued. “Because the minority in this country get to decide who our judges are and who our president is. Is that fair?”
“You need a constitutional amendment to do that,” Cuomo replied.
“And if Joe Biden wins, Democrats can stack the courts and they can do that amendment and get it passed,” Lemon shot back.
* * *
“Look, this [S. Ct. appointment] is a short-term win,” Cuomo said. [I]f they get this judge, it’s a win because if he wants people to vote for him, if he doesn’t deliver a nominee and it doesn’t get acted on by the Republicans, they’ve got trouble.”
Cuomo continued, “I know that people say, ‘Well in races that are close.’ Who’s voting or thinking about voting for a Republican who doesn’t want them to pick a judge right now?”
Political Philosophy and Honor
The American Mind just re-posted an interesting essay by this title, by one of Leo Strauss's students, Harry V. Jaffa. Below is their introduction to the essay. Click over to read it.
This September, the American Political Science Association gave its annual Leo Strauss Award for best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy to Elena Gambino for her “‘Presence in Our Own Land:’ Second Wave Feminism and the Lesbian Body Politic.” When the award was founded, Strauss’s student and Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute Harry V. Jaffa wrote that “the prize will…discourage, rather than encourage the emulation of Leo Strauss.” Jaffa is quite roundly vindicated by this latest development, and so we reprint here his essay, originally published in Modern Age, Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 1977 and reprinted as the appendix to How to Think About the American Revolution (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1978) and again in Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).–Eds.
And it introduced me to a new word:
1. The belief that the human condition can be improved through concerted effort.
2. The belief that there is an inherent tendency toward progress or improvement in the human condition.
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