I'm a fair hand at calculating odds in common gambling games, but some of you are more skilled at mathematics than myself. Have a look at this and see what you think of it.
Michael Flynn Pardoned
In a particularly grueling miscarriage of justice, retired general Michael Flynn had to be pardoned for a crime of which he was innocent. Investigated by the FBI at the behest of President Obama, who decided for some reason that Flynn was a Russian spy, Flynn was cleared of all charges as a result of the investigation. The FBI closed the case.
He was prosecuted anyway by a politicized Department of Justice, which nevertheless failed to produce the only piece of evidence it allegedly had against him. That evidence would have been the original "302" form showing that the FBI agents who interviewed him thought that he'd lied to them -- about a case in which the FBI had already cleared him. No such 302 was ever produced, allegedly being lost, but we do have one that we happen to know was edited long after the fact by disgraced liar and political agent Peter Strzok. We know this because he discussed it in unencrypted text messages with his lover, also-married disgraced former prosecutor Lisa Page.
After a financially ruinous prosecution in which the FBI/DOJ produced almost none of the exculpatory evidence that the law requires them to produce -- including the record of the investigation that completely cleared him on all charges -- Flynn's sorry lawyers convinced him to plead guilty. This was done in such a way that the DOJ and his sorry lawyers (perhaps motivated by one of their partners, a former Obama attorney general) made an illegal deal to hide the agreement not to prosecute Flynn's son from the judge! Not only did the judge lack the information he needed to discern whether the guilty plea was coerced, anyone against whom Flynn later might have testified as a result of the deal would have been denied their constitutional right to know of the deal so they could raise it as a defense against the value of his testimony.
That judge -- a personal friend of Obama's, it turns out -- wasn't upset about the fact that the law firm and the DOJ conspired to hide these facts from him in violation of the law. His ire was for Flynn, whom he accused of selling out his country even though the DOJ had never even attempted to charge Flynn with that. What they charged him with was perjury for "lying" to the FBI (in the vanished 302), and a paperwork violation for which the FBI investigation had already cleared him.
(They cleared him of the FARA violation because he had in fact filed paperwork with the government under another act, on the advice of lawyers he hired specifically to help him meet the legal reporting requirements -- thus, he had not tried to hide his lobbying work for a NATO ally, and clearly they could not s how criminal intent. DOJ knew all of that and made him plead guilty to it anyway, if he wanted them not to send his son to prison on trumped-up charges too.)
Then we spent a year while Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, managed to get all the exculpatory information illegally hidden from him in the first place. None of it convinced the judge one bit to let Flynn withdraw the coerced guilty plea, nor to accept the DOJ's determination that it should probably actually drop those baseless charges after all. Ordered to drop the charges by the DC Court of Appeals in a three-judge ruling, the judge instead sought en banc approval to continue the case. He was granted it, provided he would dispose of the matter with "dispatch." That was now several months ago, and instead of disposing of the case he has been dragging it out towards an obvious intent to sentence Flynn in spite of his innocence.
What this case shows is how completely distorted our system has become. The FBI needs to be disbanded; all the lawyers involved except Powell need to be disbarred, if not horsewhipped. The judge should be impeached, and many of those involved should be prosecuted.
But instead what we'll get is a pardon for Flynn, which the judge will probably try to find some way to challenge in court. Whether or not he succeeds, the news media and the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) will continue to speak of Flynn as if he had been convicted of the crimes of which they imagined he was guilty for the rest of his life and beyond.
What a disgusting ending to an infuriating persecution of a good and decent man, one whose work in military intelligence was known to me and respected by me at the height of his career.
On Godot
Or, as it is alternatively spelled, “FBI.”
...The evidence shows that the FBI is one of many institutions that no longer belong to the American public. Rather, its job is to protect and advance the privileges and interests of an increasingly powerful class of elites who draw their wealth and prestige from their relationships with corrupt foreign entities. And that’s why it appears the FBI didn’t investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop, but buried it.He provides many more examples. The evidence is clear: they do not work for us.
4 Years of Waiting for Godot
First we waited for ... was it Jeff Sessions? Then Barr, then Durham, now Powell, er, the Kraken, oh, no, it's Rudy Giuliani. Maybe first it was Roberts?
But always some shocking revelation and a grand vindication was / is just around the corner. But, we never seem to get to the corner, the shocking revelation is put on ice, the vindication is moved to a later, unspecified date in the future. The Kraken feels like it is slowly sinking silently below the sable waves, if it was ever there at all.
Or maybe the Kraken is what has hold of Durham, of Barr, maybe previously of many others who seemingly could have stepped up and delivered some measure of justice but did not.
This battle is not quite over, so there is hope. There is a fight still.
But it's beginning to feel like our position is being overrun. Our media is full of reports of victories coming soon, of being in the vicinity of vindication, like good propaganda shoring up the morale of a beleaguered army. Their media is full of derision for what they believe are, or fervently desire to be, or are determined to turn into, right-wing hallucinations. Some allies are fleeing for safety, casting away their arms and uniforms, while the Left draws up its firing squads, as they always do.
Yes, yes, it's always darkest before the dawn and all that. All that. Still, I have barely any faith remaining in our federal "justice" system, legislative or executive or judicial, when it comes to anything political, and night could be just falling. Anything after civil twilight is just dark, you know.
But this is only a political war, right now, so we'll all live, whether we win or lose. Thus we get to ask, and we will be required to answer, what next? What next?
I don't expect any answers, really. We each will have our own. And all this is just my musing on the dark waters as the ship steams on toward some unknown shore. I guess it's all part of the grand adventure, and adventures always have dragons and whatnot, eh? Well, where did I put my whetstone?
Studying Problems
It’s pretty easy to get grants for studies of man-made environmental devastation. So why does this clear case of Soviet destruction not get much study?
When Gill asked the team why they weren’t conducting fieldwork at the Aral Sea, they responded: “Are you crazy? No way! It’s too remote and dangerous there, you can’t really collect any data, and it’s so treacherous if you go there you could die!”
The Hound of the Hall is Dead
We saved him from a kill shelter back in 2008. I knew I was going back to Iraq, and had been looking for a dog to leave with my family while I was gone again. I had met many and none were right. They were taking me out to see a beagle they thought I'd like, and there was this other dog in a cage along the walls. I said, "What about that one?" They said, "You don't want that one." But I knew I did, as soon as I saw him.
He was the best dog I've ever had, and I've had some great ones. None were so eager to please, or so intent on being good. He wasn't always in spite of his heart; he killed chickens and cats and kittens, and didn't really understand why he shouldn't. He killed racoons, including a rabid one, and once ran down and killed a deer -- and then brought it to me. I came home that day and he was sitting on the back porch, proud as could be, with a deer propped up between his front paws as a gift for me.
He watched my family while I was at war, and was my most faithful companion for years and years. I hoped he would pass peacefully in his sleep, but he didn't, and it fell to me to do what I greatly wished I would never have to do. I couldn't send him to die in among strangers in a place that smelled like medicine. When the last day came and he could no longer enjoy even the sun on his fur, when every breath was a labor and the cancer had hold of him, I did what had to be done.
Such is life, and death. I don't understand why the world was made this way. I am grateful for our time together, though. I raised a mighty cairn over him.
Who's safe now?
More wisdom from our betters at Politico: Suddenly the allure of safe spaces is tarnished. Who would have thought that wrongthinking people might find a safe space to share ideas, without even petitioning the legislature or their college presidents for permission, armed guards at the perimeter, and suitable social annihilation for transgressors, not to mention pillows and plushy stuffed comfort animals? Parler is terrifying the people who cheered on Twitter and Facebook for silencing all the bad voices:
The set-up gives MAGA conservatives an easy way to simply dismiss the post-election beliefs of the public at large, the widely accepted reports in mainstream news outlets and the word of experts and even some government officials.I'm speechless. There are people who dismiss beliefs of the public? Who doubt the widely accepted reports of the MSM? . . . the word of experts and even some government officials? Can't these people simply be locked up and shot?
Hispanic panic
I've lost count of the articles published in the last couple of weeks about the collapse of the craziest face of the Progressive movement in some of its most promising former strongholds. At Politico, Mark Caputo reports on the carnage:
Giancarlo Sopo, one of the Trump campaign's Hispanic communication strategists, who used to be a Democrat, said he has doubts about his former party’s ability to learn from Trump’s gains.
"Many Hispanics view the Democrats and their allies as moralistic snobs,” Sopo said. “No one wants to come home after a long day of work to be wokesplained that they need to change their language, stop buying Goya, and that they're bad people if they're concerned about border security.”Maybe the damage wasn't enough this time to lose Biden the election, assuming he did win it, but 2022 looms:
“I’m worried that there is a chink in that armor — that what Trump did sends a signal that now allows more Latinos to feel like they have permission to think about the Republicans, that’s it’s perhaps socially acceptable to do so,” [said Carlos Odio, a Democratic co-founder of the Hispanic research firm EquisLabs]. “Right now, I think like, it's still limited ... but nobody knows how it’s going to play out.”It's unbelievably dangerous to give people permission to think--almost as dangerous as it is to imply that they need your permission.
Next Best Thing
Here's a Hank Jr. tune.
I said he wasn't around for the Outlaw Country heyday of the early 70s, but this is 1967 so I guess he put out some stuff in the old days too. He was very young, though, compared to the legends of the genre. Like Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock; just about the same age, in fact.
God and the Military
No offense, Reverend, but I've known a fair number of chaplains who would disagree with you here. In fact I own two military-issued Bibles, complete with unit insignia printed on the cover.
There's some tension between Mt. 6:24, the apparent source for this admonition, and Mt. 22:21 (or the parallel Luke verse) about rendering unto Caesar. You can't serve two masters; but perhaps you can serve one at a time.
Alternatively, you can adopt the traditional answer (for Catholics and Muslims alike, as it happens, although they differ on important details) that the leader of the military has a kind of divinely-appointed duty: to protect the weak, uphold the law, ensure the peace, and so forth. Thus, service to one is a kind of service to the other.
Theories: A Quick Ranking
There are a number of theories about the election, not all of them equally good. Some should be discarded at once; others merit investigation.
Here is a quick sketch of a view. Feel free to opine in the comments about others, or about why you do or don't agree with my list.
Dismiss:
"Scorecard"/"Hammer" theories. These are nonsense.
Auditing Georgia's absentee signatures. The President keeps talking about this. It's a great idea in principle, but in practice it's impossible because they set up the system to separate the envelope signatures from the ballots and discard the signed envelopes. There's no way to audit this aspect of the election, just as they intended, the scoundrels.
Take Seriously:
Dominion. This one has robust bipartisan support, at least if you abstract from the current moment and look at recent years. It drew a great deal of hostile coverage from the media, including from PBS; Elizabeth Warren was hotly opposed to it. Also, Wretchard thinks the system is fundamentally insecure, and he's a tech-centric guy and one of the smartest writers out there.
Georgia uses Dominion for the non-absentee votes, by the way, which means it ought to be a bipartisan issue even in the current moment. The Democrats would like to win the January 5 Senate runoffs, and how can they have confidence that the vote will be fair in a Republican-held state with a Republican governor and Secretary of State, and no less a governor than Kemp, whom they already regard as a chief voter fraud agent?
3 AM Election Drops: There were apparently several of these, all massively to 100% in favor of Biden, often in numbers sufficient to overcome Trump election-night margins. So too similar stories of corruption attested-to in sworn affidavits by people who were there to know what they saw.
Wild Turnout: Turnout was high this election, but some places it was far higher than in others. That is worth a look.
Joe-Only Ballots: These look a lot like fakery. Who stands in line, or goes to the trouble to apply for a ballot, and then votes in only one race? One goofball, ok, but 95,000 of them in a single state?
Statistical Evidence: Trump won all but one bellweather county; he won Florida and Ohio and North Carolina; the Republicans won all 27 'toss-up' Congressional races. He increased his vote count by 10 million, doubled his percentage of the black vote, and increased among Latinos strongly enough to win Florida and the border of Texas on the strength of their votes. Democrats almost lost the House of Representatives and are skin-of-their-teeth in having a Republican Senate too.
That kind of thing suggests Republicans had a really good year. Trump is personally hated by many, but not generally by Republicans. Supposedly Biden won on the strength of turnout -- but Trump had people standing in freezing weather, in a pandemic, for massive rallies every city he went to. If the story is to be believed, Biden had no coat-tails for a guy who drove the biggest turnout ever; Trump had coat-tails, but no coat.
Just a running list of thoughts for now. Feel free to add, or try to subtract.
PoMo Vampires
The ZOOM-recorded meltdown in which a Wayne County Ruling Party canvassing board operative soft-doxxed the children of two unruly board members ("nice kids, wouldn't want to see anything happen to them") calls to mind this excerpt from Richard Bledsoe's Remodern America:
Postmodernists compensate for the lack of a genuine inner life by showing off what they think is expected of them. Postmodernists pretend to feel whatever their situational ethics informs them is the politically correct way to feel. Their stance is perpetual posturing.
In this delusional state, they misname their ravenous appetite for domination as “pragmatism.” Their version of pragmatism basically means they get their way, always. Yet their position is essentially one of weakness. Having no substance of their own, they are reduced to living vampire-like, trying to suck resources and obedience out of society, while offering nothing useful in return.
It’s hard to get normal people to cooperate with this hunger, since Postmodernists are fundamentally bottomless maws in desperate need of validation. There is no end to their demands. But the Postmodernists have a strategy for petty tyranny so simple it’s known to two year olds; they whip their unregulated emotions into what they hope is an intimidating frenzy.Imagine a moral and intellectual bankruptcy so profound you can achieve your political goals only by branding your enemies' children as racist for the purpose of calling down mob violence on them.
Hank Jr. At the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar
The Million Dollar Cowboy Bar is an establishment in Jackson, Wyoming. I was there once in 2015. It has barstools made out of saddles, and a lot of relics on display. It also has quite a history of hosting Outlaw Country greats -- note the Waylon and Willie cards in the displays below.
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.
Hank Jr. is seventy-one this year, a little too young to have been part of the musical movement's heyday in the 1970s. Fortunately, though, he's still around.
DR650
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.
Irony and Antifa
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."
"How Dare You Suggest Election Fraud?"
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.
Those darn effective messages
Florida Democrats are unhappy with party messaging.
“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?
Truth doesn't work, let's try something else
I couldn't even bring myself to read a Salon article entitled "Enough with "both sides"! Faux-neutral journalism is no way to fight the truth-deniers."
Unity or homogeneity?
Back when racial politics stumbled on the idea of solidarity among all "people of color," they were probably onto something. It's not a terrible idea to try to find common ground with all the different people who feel left out of the game. That was before the idea morphed into the absurd notion that any organizer was wise to pretend to himself that all people of color naturally had the same view of the "system" that by definition disrespects and excludes them, and that they would vote as a bloc no matter how crazy the organizer's platform got. It's not a package deal. They're entitled to unbundle the suite. They'll probably keep unbundling it even if you accuse them of racism or treason for leaving the reservation.
A Kolakovic moment
From "A Quiet Totalitarian Movement" by Rod Dreher:
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
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.
Art I Sec 8 Clauses 2 & 5
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.
Is the "Socialist" tag unfair?
I didn't follow the Florida races closely, so I have no idea whether the press or the Republicans callously misrepresented Donna Shalala, as Bill Scher asserts.
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.
It's a Mystery
Gun control support drops sharply to 4 year low, Gallup finds. "Whyever would that be?" asks Hot Air.
Source on Differential Cities
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.
It's not that nice kind of socialism
I picked this up from HotAir, but as far as I can tell it's a snippet from the New York Times, which I won't link to. Still, if it is the NYT, someone's hearing something he'd rather not hear:
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.
The Fury of the Fatherless
From First Things:
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.
The stink of fear
It's not exactly Atticus Finch, is it?
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?
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
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Curious Senate Results
It's odd that the President would out-perform his 2016 numbers and then be beaten by Joe Biden even though the President doubled his cut of the black vote, on which the Democratic Party often relies. It's even stranger, though, that Joe Biden's titanic landslide didn't come with coat-tails: the Republican Party kept the Senate, and added to the House.
One explanation for why that might happen is if Republican voters turned on Trump, but otherwise continued to vote for Republicans down ballot. If that were true, you'd expect to see lots of races with Republican Senate numbers well in advance of the President's numbers. But the results don't show that.
What the results appear to show is that Trump and the Republican Senators running alongside him mostly posted similar numbers, as you'd expect if Trump voters were also likely to be Republican voters down-ballot. Biden's numbers are the ones that look weird. In swing states Biden votes are not tethered to the Senate numbers.
MichiganSo one possibility is that somebody's inventing Biden votes on a tight schedule. In Georgia, they knew after Tuesday night counting got halted that they needed around 100,000 votes. Since each one takes time to process, time is limited, and you can't expand your personnel much without running risks of being discovered, they're turning out the Biden votes without bothering to fill out the rest of the ballot.
Trump: 2,637,173
GOP Sen: 2,630,042
Dif: 7,131
Biden: 2,787,544
Dem Sen: 2,718,451
Dif: 69,093
Georgia
Trump: 2,432,799
GOP Sen: 2,433,617
Dif: 818
Biden: 2,414,651
Dem Sen: 2,318,850
Dif: 95,801
In Georgia that will be particularly hard to prove, ironically, because of the voting machines being so terrible. I've been complaining about that for years. It will be ironic if Brian Kemp is now unable to prove a fairly large degree of fraud because of his own failure to upgrade to more secure machinery.
Another possibility that occurs to me: at least some of the swamp-creature Congressional Republican leadership is in on the scheme. They've agreed to let the Biden race be stolen in order to get rid of Trump, who is a problem for crony DC types of all parties. However, a condition is that the fraud can't be used to unseat any Republican Congressmen. Those races have to be run straight, or else they'll blow up the game.
The first possibility is one of a party engaged in fraud, in a hurry, while their party machinery buys them time with delays. The second possibility is of a self-appointed ruling class attempting to purge itself of an unwanted democratic element, and to reassert its control over the Federal government.
Are there non-fraud explanations that might be plausible? Lots of voters who know only about American politics that they hate Trump, so they showed up to vote in just one race on the ballot? But only in swing states? One possibility is that these numbers are wrong, and that we'll see in the final analysis that there wasn't such a discrepancy; but if that's true, then why didn't the Biden landslide also carry the Senate?
Oopsie
You can watch the Wisconsin vote tally flip on live TV. Language warning, and if you don't want to sit through the whole thing, start at about 4:30.
"Dude, where's my landslide?"
Steve Hayward at Powerline:
With the GOP keeping the Senate and improving in the House, we have four years of gridlock ahead, and as I always point out, gridlock is the next best thing to constitutional government. Kiss goodbye court packing, ending the filibuster, the Green New Deal, big income tax hikes, a massive blue state bail out (though I suspect McConnell will give them something), and statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Then look ahead to the midterms in 2022, when the GOP can realistically hope to retake the House.
Tennessee River
The Tennessee is not that interesting, but the Little Tennessee and its feeder rivers really are. The French Broad River runs east and then north, wrapping around the mountains to turn west. It is also joined by the Pigeon river, whose headwaters are in the Graveyard Fields atop the Pisgah ridge. Both join with the Little Tennessee into the Tennessee itself. That goes on to join the Mississippi.
Not over yet
Lots to unpack in this Powerline summary. Also, interesting demographics from the New York Times, though I haven't tried to go behind the paywall to figure out whether this is national or regional:
Bingo
This Dennis Prager summary of what Democrats hate about Trump personally and what Republicans hate about the left as an ideology is eerily precise in summing up what I heard from my troubled Democratic niece several days ago--almost to the point to using the same words. He nailed quite a few of my responses, too.
Vote Cimmerian
As a rule I've always thought the 'lamentations of the women' line was a bit harsh, although it's a softening of what Genghis Khan actually said. It's also true that a Greek epic poem characteristically includes lamentations by some of the female characters, so the line was apt for a movie that aspired to the epic mode.
If Trump wins, the lamentations of the women opposing him are definitely likely to be epic in character.
Open Thread
It’s Election Day, as everyone knows from the millions of calls and texts and emails. Have at it.
By the way, I’ve decided to alter the Hall rules on commenting. Except for open threads, like this one, I’ll begin deleting comments that aren’t on topic unless they’re super interesting. I think I’ll enjoy things more within a more focused discussion, and many of you have privately suggested something like this.
But this one’s open. Have at it.
Hope beckons
Powerline is trying to keep my spirits up today. The post contains a short video of a Marco Rubio warm-up speech that I enjoyed more than I expected, particularly the strong ending.
Hands across the aisle
The recent censorship stories got me riled up enough this week to post more provocative material on Facebook than my usual. That yielded some irritable comments from my sister and an aunt, nothing too awful but not exactly conducive to discussion. It's my usual practice to ignore comments from my family rather than try to fight it out in public.
My sister's daughter, however, a lovely young doctor in her early thirties practicing in Philadelphia, who normally doesn't stay in touch, sent me a rather nice text genuinely trying to find out where I was coming from. It turns out she tends to follow my Facebook page, which surprised me, and perhaps was getting a little more information about what I really think than she'd been able to glean before. As in, oh, my goodness, are you REALLY a Trump supporter?
It was not a waste of time. We managed to keep it civil, and she asked me repeatedly in anguish how it was I could support a racist who deliberately lies to conceal the seriousness of the COVID pandemic from a vulnerable public entirely for his personal gain. I tried in various ways to make her understand how differently I view all these things. Possibly I got across the message that, while she may never have thought of it this way, conservatives actually have some of the same misgivings about whether leftists in political office are treating them as enemies and damaging the country. The point is: we disagree about what damages the country, not about whether it's a good thing to damage the country. I also tried to reassure her that I don't think COVID is a hoax, but I do think COVID coverage is politically biased and likely to erode public confidence at a time when we can ill afford to do that.
She remains convinced that Trump is a racist and that there's no good explanation why conservatives hide this obvious truth from themselves. Aside from the COVID and racist angles, and a general detestation of his personal style, she doesn't appear to have strong negative feelings about the rest of his policies. It surprised me that the question of conservative judges didn't come up.
It's odd: the post that bothered her the most was something I thought completely innocuous: a chart showing the declining COVID case fatality rate over the last six months in a variety of countries, including the U.S., which I posted without any comment or conclusions. It's obvious to her that concentrating on this kind of news is a dangerous inducement to complacency, particularly given our President's unaccountable urging of the population to pretend there is no virus. She insisted that she doesn't favor censorship of news, but clearly this somehow is different in her mind.
At one point my niece expressed dismay that, although it might be understandable how I could have been snookered into voting for Trump in 2016, I could do it again in 2020 after he's proved how awful he is. I told her as diplomatically as I could that in 2016 I doubted his conservative principles, while in 2020 I no longer do. But what I was thinking was this:
Election Day Prediction: Trump Wins
It is intellectually interesting to be going into an election with such strongly competing information about who is likely to prevail. All but a few insurgent poll outfits show an easy Biden victory. If these models are in any way accurate, Trump has no chance.
The few insurgents, meanwhile, predict a massive Trump victory.
My sense is that the polls are models, and our ability to predict complex phenomena well enough to model it is quite weak. We think we can because we can model things like physics well enough to put a probe on Mars, or hit an asteroid moving a million miles an hour and millions of miles away. Yet those are relatively simple things to do, because the forces acting on the planet Mars or the asteroid are few in number. You can model the increasing effect of gravity as the asteroid approaches the sun using an inverse square law we've known since Newton.
Try modeling which way a small, light balloon will go in a windstorm here on Earth, though, and you can't model it accurately for a hundred yards. The fluid dynamics of the atmosphere are too complex. We deal with turbulence by the application of main force, not by understanding exactly how it will affect an aircraft.
Our models of complex phenomena are reliably terrible. Viral models were wildly inaccurate; economic models are never any good; climate change theory is based around models we have no reason to trust, and good reasons to distrust if we are honest with ourselves about their predictive history since the 1970s or so.
So I'm going to found my guess on what I think I know about American politics, rather than the modeled outcomes. What I think I know is this:
* Americans hate political violence, and political violence by the Left has been ongoing since the summer. Democrats have actively abetted it in Democratic cities, as for example by not prosecuting rioters. Democrat-controlled cities are boarded up today, and everyone knows which side is the danger causing it. Americans will not like this.
* Though the police are having a bad year in terms of public confidence, they're still more trusted than any branch of elected government. Every major police organization has endorsed the President's re-election as a means of quelling the violence.
* Restrictions on freedom anger Americans, and the Biden campaign is promising new lockdowns and mandates if elected.
* Americans hate being told that they are racists, or that America is racist, and love being made to feel patriotic and hopeful. The Left has built its campaign around the 1619 Project and racial resentment, while the Trump campaign has been relentlessly patriotic and has engaged in positive outreach to minorities.
* Americans love economic booms and hate recessions or depressions. Trump presided over a wild economic boom until COVID, and even now we are in a V-shaped recovery that will flesh out into a boom if he is re-elected. Biden is promising economy-killing tax increases and lockdowns (and nobody loves paying more taxes anyway).
* Trump has started no new wars, and has slimmed our footprint in existing wars as far as he can manage. He has avoided creating pools of instability out of which things like ISIS can spring. He has also overseen the development of unheard-of normalization between Israel and Arab states, and economic normalization in the Kosovo region. Peace and Prosperity are hard to beat.
* The intense hatred facing Trump is largely a class hatred, and although this class controls nearly all of our media and much of our government, it is not large. Elizabeth Warren was the candidate of the college educated white women who make up its core, and she didn't even win her own state in the Democratic primary. They will doubtless persuade many voters through their relentless control of information, but many more regard them with scorn.
* Biden's record includes the 1994 Crime Bill, and repeated threats to cut Social Security. Even his own machine voters have to approach him out of a sense of party loyalty rather than personal affection. Trump, meanwhile, draws rock-star crowds everywhere he goes.
For all those reasons, then, I think Donald Trump will easily win tomorrow. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe the experts will prove right, and the models will work for once.
If so, I'll be surprised. I've been surprised before; I was surprised that Trump won the Republican primary, and again when he got elected. I was surprised when he achieved a major development in Middle East peace, when he didn't start new wars, and when his Presidency was marked by effective outreach to non-white voters rather than a Brazilianization of our politics into racialized factions.
He's surprised me a lot, in other words, but generally in ways that worked to his advantage. My guess is that the surprise that is coming will be for his opponents, as it has often been.
POSTSCRIPT:
It occurs to me that the one factor I'm ignoring is the psychological effect of COVID itself. I don't watch TV, but when I speak to those who do it's clear that they're being subjected to an intense psychological operation designed to make this disease seem terrifying and momentous. In fact -- per Worldometer -- there are only ~85,000 serious or critical cases of COVID currently in the entire world. 99% of cases are mild, and even then it's only 11 million people suffering the mild symptoms in the whole world. Almost everyone recovers.
It's not worth our attention, in my view; just one more risk among the many we run every day, and far from the worst one. I'm excluding it from my calculations because I think it's worth excluding, and I'm outside the psychological bubble that constantly reinforces it as a concern.
If Trump loses tomorrow, it'll be because of that psychological operation combined with the other ones that were designed to hide his accomplishments and play up his mistakes and bad behaviors. That will by itself be remarkable; it will underline that Americans are much more manipulable than is good for a free people.
Nevertheless, I don't expect it. I think the reason we keep hearing about the tyrannical governors and governments coming up with new restrictions is that most people -- not just most Americans -- have decided to proceed with their lives. They're not going to vote to cast themselves into a new darkness of suffering and poverty to address this annoyance. I could be wrong about that, too, of course; my tolerance for risk is very high.
Ray Wylie Hubbard
While he's not dead yet, let's let him tell the story about the late Jerry Jeff Walker's most famous song.
Going to get the beer was apparently a thing in the old days. "I've been beat up worse than that by bikers!"
Feast of All Souls
It was a remarkable Halloween, astrologically at least: the first full moon on Halloween since 1944, and a blue moon at that. Mushrooms sprang up here like I've never seen, indeed that I've never seen.
I played chess with a child who is learning the game, and not too badly; he lost of course, but not without showing some class. I saw his mother, an old friend, and gave her a gift that I hope she'll like. Her children brought laughter to a meadow I know.
Children remind you that we always live in the morning of the world. We grow too old to recognize it, if we don't have them around. But every morning is fresh and new, if your eyes are young enough to see it. Every mushroom is a miracle, and every leaf, and every blade of grass. Chesterton was good on this subject, but reading him only reminds you of the facts. You don't experience it until you see the child encounter it anew and for the first time.
But there's always a new child, and it is always fresh. In the mind of God perhaps it never grows old; as Chesterton put it, "Our father is younger than we."
Tragic Week
So, this week was tragic for Outlaw Country because we lost two of the greats. Jerry Jeff Walker died, and then Billy Joe Shaver.
Both of these men deserve stories told about them in their honor. There are two in those links; but you can find a lot more about both of them, and maybe especially Billy Joe.
No, definitely about Billy Joe.
Jerry Jeff did a bunch of good songs. Probably the most famous was Mr. Bojangles, but I always liked this one.
Billy Joe wrote a ton of songs, many of them great. You can listen to Waylon Jenning's best album, "Honky Tonk Heroes." He wrote almost every single one of those songs. Here's my favorite.
But this one is better, even if I don't like it as much.
That's Billy Joe in the white shirt. If you ever followed "Tales from the Tour Bus," Billy Joe has an episode devoted to him. The first season of that is fantastic.
"Recruiting Challenges"
A US Attorney asks people to please consider becoming police officers at this difficult time:
Challenge to recruit qualified police officers is real. Departures exceed recruits by large margin. National narrative, defund efforts and assaults on those in “Blue” dramatically harm recruiting.I'll say it's challenging. Passing by Asheville on I-26 today I saw a billboard advertising immediate openings for new or transferred police officers —- in Fort Wayne, Indiana, four states and more than five hundred miles away.
Plausible deniability
The phrase that may define Biden's career as "modified limited hangout" defined Nixon's.
There's still a nearly complete traditional press blackout of this story, the only exceptions being the New York Post and Tucker Carlson's show on Fox.
Flavors of political violence
You guys have probably already seen this AVI post, but I think it's brilliant, so I'm going to link it here.
I've never gone deeply into "hole up and wait for the bad guys" territory, but I have to admit that I'm much closer to it this year than I've ever been before. I've never felt quite this betrayed by so many supposedly protective institutions at once. The press somehow managed to plumb deeper depths by memory-holing both the riots and the Hunter Biden bag-man-for-my-dad story more thoroughly than even I believed possible. I never believed elected officials could get away with wantonly destroying this many jobs at once. The craziness feels like it's mushroomed obscenely and is knocking even now at my front door.
My neighborhood doesn't have a militia yet, but I'm beginning to wonder if we should. In past years, I suppose I always thought it was enough that we were ready to form one if needed.
Well, hey, we have a terrible local prosecutor, but she'll be gone in a couple of months and will be replaced by a much better public servant that we went to a lot of trouble to find. So at least we don't have a Soros plant to contend with. We have a Sheriff about whom probably the worst thing you could say is that he's reluctant to use his power to the fullest to get repeat offender predators under control; in every other way he appears to be a good Joe who doesn't believe the government should overstep its bounds. Our county leadership is feckless and secretive but normally not too intrusive or power-mad. That won't help too much if the national leadership goes full psycho, but it may delay things for a while.
Eucatastrophe
One of the benefits of faith is that you need not trust in the powers of the world, because you can always hope for a miracle. If it turns out that a matter of honor saves our almost-fallen Republic, whose sons and daughters have all but forgotten honor's very name, it will be a miracle Tolkien himself would have appreciated.
Bread still on my mind
THE BRONX, NY—AOC blasted election officials this week after discovering that people were actually waiting in line to vote rather than to receive bread from the government. According to sources, people are sometimes waiting up to 2 hours at polling stations, but are able to get bread within 5 minutes due to America's evil capitalist system.
An exceptional candidate
Congratulations to our newest Supreme Court Justice, Amy Coney Barrett.
She's not the first Justice to serve alongside a Justice for whom she had clerked--that was Gorsuch, who clerked for Kennedy--but she's the first one to have been sworn in by that Justice (in this case, Clarence Thomas).
I'm not convinced Justice Barrett is a conservative in the usual sense of the word. I think she's a textualist, which will lead her to many results embraced by conservatives and some that will drive conservatives crazy. Her decisions may also remind us that some changes are supposed to be brought about by legislation and, if necessary, by constitutional amendments, rather than by judges.
Mountain Folk
If you've been around the Hall for a long time, you've read about shootings before. I heard about another one today, a man up by Bates Gap who shot his own nephew. They were McCalls, I hear. Allow me to reproduce a bit of that history:
This is a derivation of the personal name "Cath-mhaol" which translates as "Battle Chief", or in this case "son of Battle-chief". An Alternate possibility is that it may be a variant of the patronymic Mac Cathail, "the son of Cathal" from the Olde Welsh "Catgual" meaning "war-wielder". Either way it is clear that the first nameholders were very much descendants of fighting men. The 'modern' surname is first recorded in Scotland in the latter half of the 14th Century, and is very much connected with Dumfriess. Early examples of recordings include Finlay MacChaell, who was bailie of Rothesay in 1501, and Finlay Makcaill, who was recorded in Bute in 1506. In 1607 Matthew McCall of Mayhole, Dumfriess, was charged with assisting the rebels, probably the Clan MacGregor, who had been outlawed by King James V1 of Scotland for persistent acts of violence against the government.Now that about tells you what you need to know about this part of the country, which was settled by Scots who drove out most but not all of the Cherokee. The toughest bunch of them, the Eastern Band, are here yet. Good people, both sets.
I can't say too much about it. My grandfather once chased my cousin out of his house with gunfire from a .38 revolver. The old man was right, and the boy had it coming. I don't let him come around here.
The neighbor who told me about it turned it into a disquisition on "White Liquor," which was apparently made everywhere up here in the old days. It still is, on a smaller scale. I know a neighbor I can walk to who has a still. I brew mead out of the local honey myself -- legally, of course. Picked a bunch of cider apples this week.
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