Winning over the unindoctrinated

David Shor draws lessons from the 2020 election results and concludes that it doesn't look good for credentialed progressives for the next 10 years:

But if we can’t reduce the structural biases that have appeared in the last ten years by changing the rules of the game, we will have to make the hard choice of changing our party so that we can appeal to these non-college-educated voters who are turning against us.

. . .

Turnout was up, but it was up for both parties. According to Nate Cohn’s estimates, Black turnout was probably up by around 8 percent, but non-Black turnout was up by something like 15 to 20 percent. So we had the highest-turnout election in a century, and despite that, we still only won because a bunch of people switched their votes in our direction.

Well, a bunch of people switched a bunch of people's votes in his direction, but the question is, were they the same people?

So the median voter in the presidential election is about 50 years old, watches about six hours of TV a day, and mostly gets their news from mainstream sources. And that means that, if you want to influence what this person believes, you’re probably not going to get them at the door or even through a paid message. They’re going to form their opinions based on how the media reports on and characterizes the parties.

Luckily, that generally works like a charm for the Party of Highly Intelligent College Types, but there is a dark undercurrent of doubt:

I think the reality now is that whenever any elected Democrat goes out and says something that’s unpopular, unless the rest of the party very forcefully pushes back — in a way that I think is actually very rare within the Democratic Party currently — every Democrat will face an electoral penalty. And that’s awkward. . . . I think that the only option that we have is to move toward the median voter. And I think that really comes down to embracing the popular parts of our agenda and making sure that no one in our party is vocally embracing unpopular things. I know that sounds reactionary.

The upshot:

And we also still have a chance to limit how much we need to compromise by winning in Georgia and then passing sweeping structural reforms. But if we don’t, then the reality is that the median voter who gets to determine Senate control is going to remain a non-college-educated 55-year-old in a pretty Republican state who voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. That’s who we’ll need to win over in order to govern.

Good luck with that, unless you start lying a lot more effectively. And sure enough:

When you think through the optimization problem of, “How do we enact the most left-wing legislation possible without running over these trip wires that will make the public turn against us,” one part of it is that there are things that poll badly but are low salience. . . . And then there are also a lot of accounting gimmicks that are very promising. I will point out that we actually did finance a very large section of the ACA by nationalizing the entire student-loan industry.

Apparently these lies have been successfully market-tested on the Smart Credentialed demographic.

I always thought I got a decent education--but my alma mater wasn't like this when I was there.

When does it start to be a person, again?

Disney's Star-Wars-universe show "The Mandalorian" is enjoyable science fiction, but it ain't very woke. A recent storyline involved adorable Baby Yoda, who is always hungry, filching and devouring some of the incubated eggs of a minor character who's trying to reunite with her husband and prevent the extinction of her species. Twitter took to its fainting couch.

I don't get the outrage. He wasn't selling them for parts, was he?

Different aims, same tools

From "The Woke Supremacy" by Evan Sayet:

The Russian Socialists chose gulags and work camps, permanent confinement to mental institutions, and exile to frozen tundra. The German socialists opted for the more efficient and effective gas chambers and ovens, while the Chinese socialists, seeking to save on infrastructure and material costs, went with mass starvation and other low-tech means.

While these kinds of atrocities are typically blamed on the ideologies of these various Socialist entities--giving comfort to some that "this time," with today's Socialists embracing a different ideology, things will somehow be different--the fact is that gulags, death camps, and killing fields are not ideologically driven. Who is sent to them is.

We were blind, how can we contrive to stay blind?

I find articles like this hilarious.  This one at least tries to figure out what it means to have been so completely wrong about what so many voters think.  The author even proposes to view some of President Trump's achievements honestly, painful as that is.  In the end, though, he just moans about how wrong all those bad voters are, especially when there are so many of them.

Some of these numbers seem a little fishy

 Powerline has a good statistical analysis up.

And again, red flags are not proof of fraud, but they're a sure sign that some serious investigation is in order.  Listen to the experts on this.

Trust the experts, or else

Pandemic Hypocrites Produce Pandemic Cynics.  Also known as the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome. I think COVID really is a wolf, but if people in power lie about it enough, they'll erode the public's willingness to obey edicts, even if some of the edicts would turn out to be a pretty good idea once we actually talked about it respectfully and honestly.

I've been deluged with arguments this week from people who blame practically everything that has gone wrong in the U.S. in 2020 on President Trump's crime of not taking COVID seriously enough. It's impossible to engage them in a discussion of any action he took that supposedly stemmed from this improper attitude, or of a result that credibly followed from the action. Instead I hear claims that, if the President had made people understand how seriously they must take the danger, we would somehow have handled better the convulsive rush to universal mail-in voting.  If I object that the big problems were not just the difficulty of imposing enough antifraud measure but the concerted opposition to antifraud measures as a cruel and unconstitutional burden on the franchise, I get back an argument that somehow this would have resolved itself reasonably if Orange Man hadn't poisoned the well of public discussion.

Similarly, all the jobs lost? Somehow his fault for not talking the virus seriously. The 200K-plus deaths? Somehow there would have been fewer. Not up for discussion, it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer. Riots? Arson? Murder? Catch-and-release perpetrators of same? Major problem: his attitude:

(1) Doubt in the public mind.

(2) . . . ?

(3) Bad result.

My own view, of course, is that's it's a lot easier to make the case that, if COVID-restraining measures really aren't working as well as they might in a perfect world, a large part of the explanation is that people are going through the motions on measures they don't believe in, at least in part because reminds them of hearing that eggs are good, then bad, then good for your health. It doesn't help when the most prominent and powerful voices for the most personally costly containment measures treat them with contempt in their own lives whenever they're inconvenient.

At least when President Trump sheds doubt on the effectiveness of a measure, he's acting consistently with his stated beliefs. What I hear him saying is, sure the virus can be dangerous, but some dangers have to be faced. We don't necessarily have a choice of a world in which we can eliminate the danger without bringing on consequences that are even more damaging. We wish we had that option, but acknowledging that we may not is not the same as wanting to kill Grandma. Nor am I entitled to believe that half the country is guilty of attempted murder because they're not as convinced as their not-very-trustworthy betters wish they were.

There Are No General Laws of History

 AVI had a post the other day citing an article from the Economist about this same guy; I find this version from the Atlantic more interesting. I disagree sharply with his basic approach, although his five year estimate sounds plausible. Joseph Schumpeter made the same argument in the latter part of his life -- I had thought it was earlier, but the discussion is from 1975.

Marx, of course, thought so too -- for different reasons, he regarded the socialist revolution as inevitable. 

Really, though, Nietzsche pegged this mechanism in his lifetime too. Absent God to admire, and absent divine assurance of one's dignity and ultimate ascension, human beings resent each other for their own failures. An elite that has nowhere to go be elite (and large student loans they can't pay back) is likely to resent everything and everyone they see as keeping themselves out of power. It's the way they keep from having to blame themselves.

Come to think of it, Aristotle has a bit to say about this in his Politics, too.

Yet even though this issue recurs throughout our history, and has occurred to great thinkers in several ages, I still reject the notion that Peter Turchin is putting forward. There are no general laws to history. 

The basic idea Marx adopted from Hegel was that reality evolves along a set path, which is pre-determined because its evolution is logical. In other words, since each step follows logically, each step has to happen and will happen in a certain way. Thus, Marx believed he could predict the future (at least a few steps out) by understanding the logic at work. He also believed that he and his followers could bring about this future by understanding the process and working towards making the next step come true.

That is the basic connection with revolutionary politics. Later Communists were trying to bring about revolution because they believed that capitalism (the ‘thesis’) would fall into revolutionary conflict as it impoverished most people to enrich only some (the ‘antithesis’). The synthesis position, which they called ‘Socialism,’ was something they were working to bring about. Since the violent revolution was a necessary logical step between capitalism and socialism, it was to be pursued ardently. (The Nazis, of course, are “National Socialists,” different from Communists but possessed of the same basic idea about how to proceed).

Now, the important thing is that Marx was wrong (and Hegel probably was too). It turns out that history and economics don’t follow pre-set, logically-determined paths. Countries like the UK and the US adopted different approaches to synthesizing the goods of capitalism with the harms that can follow from it. Other countries found other ways still. It turns out that it is not true that very smart people can ‘see’ the future, and thus it is unlikely that rushing into revolutionary wars is wise because you can’t really be sure of how well they will turn out.

However, you can see how attractive is the idea that smart people could ‘see’ the future and bring about wonderful changes through their brilliance and courage. For more than a century now, people who thought themselves smarter than most others around them have been enamored of the idea.

There are no laws binding us to this future. We may get there; we may certainly get to a war over the issue of whether we get there. It is not ordained, however. We can pick a different road.

Since when did disagreement become "disrespectful"?

 I was recently in a disagreement with a friend of mine (friend of a friend, more accurately) on social media (he posted something I disagreed with on his wall).  Nothing acrimonious, just we see things differently on that particular topic.  This friend happens to be black.  Another friend of mine who also knows the one I'm disagreeing with came into the conversation with "Mike, sometimes we as white people need to just listen to people of color and not speak."

By Foreign Standards

The NYT sends out a morning email, which this morning is trying to browbeat Trump into conceding the election. (Gore, of course, didn't concede in 2000 until mid-December, which they fail to mention.) "A president is trying to undo an election result: How would you describe that situation in another country?"

Well, if a President in a foreign country were asking for recounts and audits of suspicious votes, I don't think I'd call it anything except the election process playing out. Those are ordinary enough things in close races or races with questions about their conduct.

Fair enough, though: what would we say about an election like this if it happened in a foreign country? It happens that the State Department had a report on an election in Ukraine that it called "rigged." Streiff at RedState, a fellow I've met once and know to be a veteran of unimpeachable taste in Scotch, reports.

You can read the State Department report in their official archives here. Among the reasons they thought the vote was rigged were "Illegal Use of Absentee Ballots (massive electoral fraud was committed through the illegal use of absentee voter certificates).... Opposition Observers Ejected.... North Korean-Style Turnout in the East: (Turnout in the pro-Yanukovych eastern oblasts was unnaturally high)... Mobile Ballot Box Fraud.... Computer Data Allegedly Altered To Favor Yanukovych..."

So basically everything that Trump's lawyers have sworn affidavits for in their appeals to the courts, in other words.

Apparently we call that "rigged."  Well, G. W. Bush's State Department did, anyway.

A Small Matter of Formalities

What's the difference anyway? It's all rhetoric, these days, a few old-fashioned folks aside. 

Happy Veteran’s Day

I salute those of honorable service. Thank you all. 

Happy Birthday Marines

 245 years, if my math is right. 

Gatlinburg

Rode to Gatlinburg this weekend through the Newfound Gap. 

I think this haunted house has been there since I was a boy. If it’s the same one, it has a balcony that is hinged to “fall” an inch or so when you walk out on it. Gives kids quite a jump. 

These ridgeline houses were all destroyed in a recent fire. I have a cousin who is doing well for himself rebuilding, as he is one of the few civil engineers who understands how to build here.  

It’s a tourist town. Lots of fake moonshine and fake everything. The best pizza in town really is, though: it’s the Mellow Mushroom, since 1974 makers of the Southern style of American pizza. 

The great thing about Gatlinburg is that it presses right up to the border of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. You can ride down into town, eat at the Mellow Mushroom, get back on your bike, and be in the woods again in less than two minutes. 

There’s more traffic in the park than elsewhere in the mountains, but the views are pretty. 

Mean tweets

Stacey Lennox on the Lincoln Project:

The most puzzling thing about the Lincoln Project crowd is that they have never succinctly articulated exactly which of President Trump’s policies they disagreed with. Was it the judges with fidelity to the Constitution? The tax reform that favored investment? We’ve been pursuing peace in the Middle East my entire life, and the first real gains have been in the last few months. Energy independence and deregulation unleashed the economy and gave us leverage globally.

Freedom is still worth pursuing

I'm taking a break from putting up "Celebrate! Unite!" signs in my front yard to read Jay Valentine's hope for success in various legal challenges to widespread vote fraud.  May some of it be true, and may we all support the legal challenges with money, attention, and refusal to be silenced.

Replicating failure

From a comment to the Manhattan Contrarian's discourse on blue basket-case cities whose people-helping warm fuzzy charitable organizations function primarily as vote factories ("a/k/a Tammany Hall poverty pimps"):

Ok, Trump has an unlikeable personality, but his actual record in accomplishing conservative objectives is easily the best since Reagan and arguably superior since he did it in 4 years with the threat of impeachment hanging over his administration from day 1. And your take is that Mr. and Mrs. Middle of the Road or Mr. and Mrs. Traditional Republican would rather vote for a senile, corrupt, and Leftist Joe Biden for the big job because they prefer higher energy prices, higher taxes, Constitution ignoring judges, open borders, bending over to please China, and the threat of Supreme Court packing and two new Democrat states rather than put up with 4 more years of ugly Tweets? Yea that makes a lot more sense than massive vote fraud coming exclusively out of inner city Democrat run districts.

Also, cheerful thoughts from another commenter on why the fraud exploded this year while 2016 kept it down to the usual dull roar:

2016 might well have been the result of Democrats thinking it would be such a landslide, that it wasn't worth the risk of fully engaging 'the apparatus.'

2020 may well be payback along with a YOLO risk mentality, which will hopefully make it possible to nail them this time.

We're waiting

 

Go back to sleep

 The press is incurious when it gets the result it wanted.  Otherwise, it's insatiable, even if that means poring over your high school yearbook.

Cracking the code

It's all a question of making the words mean what you want them to mean:

When liberal journalists say something is racist or white supremacist, they don’t use the words the way normal people use them. We see now that they detach concepts of whiteness, blackness, etc., from skin color, family, or ancestry and attach it instead to ideology and party.

You’re white if you’re a Hispanic who votes Republican. You’re white supremacist if you’re a black voter who votes Republican. This shows us that racist and white supremacist, coming from these quarters, might just mean Republican or conservative.

Still not a good look

 Kyle Mann edits the Bee.

A Few Red Flags

 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.

Michigan
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

So 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. 

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?

Darn populace

 The Bee.

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. 

What a Fine Evening it's Turning Out to Be

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."

Put the champagne on ice

"Americans value liberty; we will see to our own safety."

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, II

 You know, this sounds pretty familiar too. 

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. 

Asheville Gallery of Art

 My wife’s work is now hanging there, if any of you pass through. 

Johnny Motorhead

"If somebody hates you for no reason, give that sucker a reason."

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.

A Good Use of A.I.

 Trying to crack long-forgotten languages.

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.

The USS Kidd and Pirate Flags

Apparently, the destroyer USS Kidd has perpetual permission to fly pirate flags, looking back to both Rear Admiral Kidd of USS Arizona fame and Captain Kidd the pirate / privateer.

Also, from the same place, the appropriately named destroyer USS Stout has just set a new Navy record for continuous days at sea: 215.

Spent a Lot of Time in Oklahoma

 

Orientation

 

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.

I 💗 Science

XKCD:

Stone Mountain

 

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.

Corb Lund Interviews a Grizzly Expert

 

A Story and a Song

 

Speaking of Police

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.

I Think I've Got Paycheck on This One

 Merle Haggard, 1968:

Paycheck, 1977:

Happy Leif Erikson Day

 The White House calls for a day of Viking adventure. 

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.

Honoring the departed

 

Fact-check by USA Today pending.

Speaking of which.

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."