Tomorrow night, it will host Hank Williams, Jr. for his second show there. The first one was in 1980. It's already too late to get tickets for the small live show, even if you happen to be in Jackson Hole, but you can livestream it tomorrow evening here.
I started off May buying a brand new thumper. This is where I'm at today. Have it kitted out for back-country camping. It's been one fun year.
Talking with another friend, who is Antifa-aligned, she was ranting about this weekend's Trump marches in D.C. She characterized them as offensive because of the claimed focus by some of them on trying to destroy the makeshift BLM memorial fence (or, as the Trump protesters phrased it, 'clean up litter on public property').
"I confronted them and told them they were bad guests," she said. "Can you imagine coming into someone's town and destroying their memorials to the dead?"
"Are you kidding me?" I said, taken aback. "Going to people's towns and destroying their statutes and memorials is what your people have been doing for a year!"
"Those had white supremacist ties."
"Ulysses Grant?"
"That one shouldn't have happened, and we confronted the people who took it down afterwards to explain."
"Abraham Lincoln?"
I didn't get anywhere with this conversation, as it was apparently impossible to convey that her outrage was completely parallel to their own. She thinks of their heroes as white supremacists, justifying the destruction of their statues; they think of the pictures on that fence as a collection of mostly criminals.
In fact they are mostly criminals, just as in fact many of the statues depict people who held slaves in their lifetimes. Neither side can see that the other side isn't trying to honor the bad parts, but the exemplary aspects of the person's life. It's impossible to find a human being to honor who didn't do anything that is unworthy. It's rare to find one worthy of any kind of honor. Yet it is important -- it is necessary -- that we show honor to those who are worthy of it.
As Malcolm Reynolds put it, "It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind son of a bitch or another. Ain’t about you... It’s about what they need."
I can attest that I'm seeing left-leaning contacts on Facebook discussing these sorts of plans for getting people to 'move' to Georgia temporarily to vote in the Senate runoffs. It'd be easier to accept that they'd never countenance an attack on the sanctity of our elections if they didn't plan it right in front of us.
“Given the fact every Hispanic voter is either directly or [has] indirectly gone through their own experience as a victim of a socialist or communist regime, the potency around the branding of a political party as the second coming of socialism or communism in the United States is very effective,” Miami-based pollster Fernand Amandi said.
. . .
“Donald Trump did not make any bones about what he was running on and voters here said they wanted more of that,” said Raymond Paultre, a consultant aligned with The Alliance, a loosely aligned collection of progressive Florida donors. “That is disheartening.”
. . .
Centrists, who traditionally have made up the party’s base of power in Florida, say a lurch to the left will decisively doom the party’s chances of taking the governor’s mansion in 2022.
. . .
“I’m not a f---ing socialist,” Pizzo later said in an interview. “My life is a manifestation of the American dream. I believe in free markets.”Maybe you belong to the wrong party?
In 1943, a Croatian priest named Tomislav Kolakovic escaped the Gestapo, and took refuge in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Father Kolakovic began teaching in the Catholic university there, and told his students that after the Germans were defeated, the Soviets would rule their country. The Communists would come after the Church, he said — and he meant to get the young people ready for resistance, while they still had the freedom to strategize.
Slovak bishops chastised Father Kolakovic, saying that he was being alarmist. The priest didn’t listen to them. He knew the Communist mind, because he had studied it to prepare for missionary work in the Soviet Union. Father Kolakovic’s young followers came together in cells scattered across the country to pray, to discuss what was happening in their country, and to lay out plans of action. His method was a simple one: See, Judge, Act. That is, open your eyes to what is really happening in your country, come together to discern the meaning, and what you are all called to do to respond to it — then do it.
In 1948, Czech Communists staged a putsch. Shortly after, they began to persecute the Church, just as Father Kolakovic, who had expelled from the country two years earlier, had prophesied. The network the visionary priest built became the backbone of the underground church, and the only meaningful opposition to totalitarianism for the next forty years.
And so it begins; the pushing of "reasonable" gun control. Reading through those bills, I don't find any of that reasonable. Thankfully democrats did not make any gains in the pro-2nd Amendment Texas legislature. Even worse, for them, the 2021 legislative session will feature redistricting, which will not happen again until 2031.
Maybe we can finally get rid of Queen Sheila.
A US Senator actually said out loud that he opposes a FED nominee because he's afraid she might give control of the money supply to Congress.
Shalala made an unforced error when she called herself in an October TV interview a “pragmatic socialist,” which her opponent gleefully used in a late attack ad. Shalala clearly misspoke; in the same interview she said, “I’m as far from being a socialist as anyone that you’ll ever meet. I’m a capitalist.” But while it was disingenuous for her opponent to use the truncated clip, if Shalala had a deeper connection with her district, the attack wouldn’t have stuck so easily.Still, if I'd heard Shalala make both those statements, it would take more than the press or her opponent being fair to her to make me think she could be trusted in office. One or the other, if not both, has to be a lie or pandering, if not both.
Gun control support drops sharply to 4 year low, Gallup finds. "Whyever would that be?" asks Hot Air.
I've seen this claim on social media that Biden underperformed Clinton's 2016 numbers everywhere but a few swing state cities, but here's an actual source for it. The source is Richard Baris of Big Data Poll. He's cited by another writer cited by this writer. It's hard to track things back given all the noise around this stuff.
The “average white person,” Mr. Gonzalez added, may associate socialism with Nordic countries, but to Asian and Hispanic migrants it recalls despotic “left-wing regimes.”…To make matters worse, that Nordic "socialism" took a hard U-turn on the socialism thing some time back, which is why they still have an economy.
Like Edmund in King Lear, who despised his half-brother Edgar, these disinherited young are beyond furious. Like Edmund, too, they resent and envy their fellows born to an ordered paternity, those with secure attachments to family and faith and country.
That last point is critical. Their resentment is why the triply dispossessed tear down statues not only of Confederates, but of Founding Fathers and town fathers and city fathers and anything else that looks like a father, period. It is why we see generational vituperation toward the Baby Boomers, like the diss of “OK, Boomer” and the epithet “Karen.” It is why bands of what might be called “chosen protest families” disrupt actual family meals. It is why BLM disrupts bedroom communities late at night, where real, non-chosen families are otherwise at peace.
Why go all-out, launching a boycott campaign targeting Jones Day, and doxxing lawyers, if the whole thing is futile? If Trump can't win, then conservatives are just wasting money that won't be spent on protecting the Senate majority in Georgia?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.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.
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."
Rode to Gatlinburg this weekend through the Newfound Gap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
If Trump wins, the lamentations of the women opposing him are definitely likely to be epic in character.
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.
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.
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.
While he's not dead yet, let's let him tell the story about the late Jerry Jeff Walker's most famous song.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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-
[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."
