Don't worry about what color you're acting

We rarely go wrong when we remember not to be preoccupied by skin color.  Ammo Grrrll is in serious mode again today:

Let me spell out the Left’s advice to blacks: Every attitude and behavior that can possibly assure a healthy and productive future is “white” and, therefore, off limits. But that’s OK. Because everything you need to know about yourself is the color of your skin. That’s not only your “hole” card, but your entire hand, your All-Areas Backstage Pass.

* * *

Well, most of the Confederate statues are gone now. Did that convince the 70 percent of unwed fathers to marry one of the mothers of their offspring? Did it inspire some young black man to aspire to dental school or a plumber’s apprenticeship instead of joining a drug gang? The sad truth is that if a magic wand could be waved over the land to erase any and all negative or “racist” thoughts in the minds of white people, not one thing would change. We aren’t the problem; so we can’t be the solution.

I never wasted much time worrying about whether I was "acting masculine." I just wanted to be able to make a good living and retire in comfort. It's less the fashion today, but when I was young it was still quite the cultural thing to warn women that the path to success in dating and marriage, with all its benefits in terms of freebies, ran through a territory I can only describe as "acting feminine," including dumbing down and camouflaging any hint of assertiveness or self-sufficiency. If you want a guy who wants that kind of thing, and you're looking for an economic sinecure, it's probably reasonably good advice. In fact, it's about like the advice that would lead a black teenager today to wreck his life in service of finding a permanent spot in a system of government dependency. As an alternative, I recommend learning to act like a grownup. If your peers don't like it, find better peers.

Colonel Maggie

About the same time as Arlo was writing his song about Thanksgiving, a woman who didn’t have to face a draft was willingly in Vietnam. 

...just before Thanksgiving ’67 and we were ferrying dead and wounded from a large GRF west of Pleiku. We had run out of body bags by noon, so the Hook ( *CH-47 CHINOOK*) was pretty rough in the back. All of a sudden, we heard a ‘take-charge’ woman’s voice in the rear.

There was the singer and actress, Martha Raye, with a Special Forces beret and jungle fatigues, with subdued markings, helping the wounded into the Chinook, and carrying the dead aboard.

Good news

A nice thing happened this morning: I connected a found-dog post on my neighborhood's Nextdoor app with a lost-dog post on Facebook, and got finder and loser together for a Thanksgiving reunion. For all the awful things about social media, it's a great way to reunite families and pets.

   

Ton deuil se changera en une danse joyeuse.

Regard neuf, mains tendues, le cœur plein de refrains.

Vers la ville qui t'attend tu marcheras radieuse,

pour œuvrer au chantier du grand effort humain.

* * *

Your mourning will change into a jubilant dance,

Eyes refreshed, hands reaching, your heart full of song.

Toward the awaiting town, you'll walk bright and beaming

To join in the work on the great human endeavor.

A Small Family Feast

 

Turkey, broccoli casserole, fresh bread with honey and butter, cheeses, stuffing, gravy, and cranberry sauce. Dessert table not pictured. 

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Lucky pot

We're having seven neighbors over, so we will be nine for Thanksgiving dinner.  The guests are bringing a variety of dishes that are traditional within their own families.  Greg has made his usual wonderful brined spice-rubbed turkey, a recipe we stumbled on about 40 years ago and have never wanted to replace.  Also, by iron-bound tradition, spinach Madeleine.  He's trying a new stuffing this year based on oysters and bread crumbs.  We'll cube and roast some sweet potatoes and serve a salad with arugula, beets, goat cheese, and nuts.

Neighbors will bring veg,  including what I call Presbyterian green beans, which happen to be among my favorites, as well as a summer squash dish, cheesy peas, and an apple-cranberry salad.  They will also bring a loaf of wild sourdough bread and pies:  sweet potato and pecan.

My taste in cranberry relish runs to fiery, bitter mixes with whole grapefruits and candied ginger and peppers that I've reluctantly concluded no one enjoys but me, so I dialed it way back this year.  One relish will be finely chopped mixture of raw cranberries, a raw orange (peel and all), lots of sugar, and a bit of cinnamon.  Another, even more accessible, will be a simple compote of cranberries and  sugar cooked down for 30 minutes or so.  For myself, I'll also put out a bowl of a hot-sweet Indonesian condiment called Sambal Manis on the table, so I can mix it into either of the two cranberry relishes, because it's killer that way, with the added salt and heat.

Our neighbor's late-season eggplant harvest will furnish caponata, an eggplant soup, and baba ganooj.  We're almost certain to have enough to eat.

Happy Thanksgiving to the Hall!

Old Arlo

More popular around here is another track from that album. 

Colter Wall references this story in a song of his. 

Representative Government

“This case is about whether Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) regulations can abolish representative government in the creation of public health laws, and whether it can authorize closure of a school or assembly based on the unfettered opinion of an unelected official. This court finds it cannot.”

Good judges are hard to find, but it is a blessing when you find one.  

I Don't Have To Work

Jimmie Rodgers says you'll find his name on the tail of his shirt. Louis Armstrong is on the trumpet:

Waylon Jennings said that his name was painted on the shirt. Jimmie, who's dead and a long time gone, is the same Jimmie. In fact he'd been gone since 1933.

Rats Love Turkey, Too

Maybe you’ll leave Thanksgiving dinner as divided as you were when you sat down at the table five hours and 4,000 calories ago. Or maybe you’ll plant the seed, sow just a little doubt about whatever Tucker Carlson is saying now. Maybe you’ll even change a heart or a mind. Maybe you’ll bring the temperature down just a tiny bit. Or maybe you’ll need to report a relative to the FBI! 

It was bad enough when they were just encouraging people to be impossible bores about politics on Thanksgiving. 

"The Safety Fears of Lawmakers"

Just yesterday, the New York Times' morning newsletter was so titled. "Despite a congressman’s censure, Republicans have shown a growing tolerance for violent rhetoric."

Also yesterday, Illinois Democrat:  'SUV Rampage was 'Karma' for Rittenhouse Verdict.'

Today, Democrat/BLM activist: 'Sounds like the revolution has started!'

Friday: "The only solution / is Communist revolution!"

Has anybody actually seen this video that Rep. Gosar was censored censured [these phones are making me look illiterate] for putting up on social media? I haven't been able to find a copy of it to see just how awful this rhetoric actually is. I'm assured by all the right people that it's terrible, but nobody wants to show me so I can judge for myself.

Did… the Turkeys Write This?

Dad29 has a theory about NBC’s Thanksgiving reporting. 

Assymetry

 Is this a fair picture?

Several people in the Democratic Party have told me they believe the party’s voters — especially its Black voters — saved them from a debacle by selecting Biden as the nominee, rather than any of the candidates vying for progressive-activist approval. The dynamic is an inversion of the structure of the Republican Party, in which the donors try to promote slick, broadly acceptable candidates while voters routinely flock to the angriest and craziest candidate they can find. “The Koch brothers are strategic; their voters are bananas,” one leading Democrat confided. “Our voters are moderate, but our funders are crazy.”

The scheme works best if a pundit of the Blue persuasion identifies with centrist voters while imagining the Red team almost exclusively in terms of its rightest wing. Otherwise, we could as easily say that the core of Dem elected officials are strategic, while their loudest proselytizers are bananas, and that centrist Republicans are moderate, but the QAnon Shaman and his crew are crazy. The way I see it, the middle mass of voters, who increasingly call themselves Independent, are repelled by both the Squad and QAnon, while the moderate Blue and Red wings would be happy to call themselves the natural homes of the Independents, and even think of the Independents as the "centrist wings" of their respective parties:  "our voters."

American Kulaks

Some Soviet history, and some predictions about America's future. 

Good fun

An Ace post recounts a finance guy's experience with a trendy progressive workplace he was trying (unsuccessfully) to save from bankruptcy. The firm had no dress code, which meant that everyone but our correspondent dressed identically in jeans and sneakers, while he chose to wear a collared shirt, slacks, and loafers.

Don't you want to be comfortable?--I am comfortable.--Everyone else is comfortable wearing jeans and sneakers.--Good for them.

My favorite: the boss finally almost admits he wants to impose a jeans-and-sneakers dress code when he begs, won't you please at least wear jeans and sneakers for the company photo shoot? "Of course. I’ll wear whatever you tell me to wear, any time you request that I do so."

The boss was tying himself into a pretzel trying not to admit that he wanted to order the finance guy what to wear. Naturally what he wanted was for the finance guy to want to do what the boss wanted without being told to do so, not because the finance guy was averse to following orders, but because the boss couldn't admit to himself that he wanted obedience and had a right to expect it of an employee.

Anti-Masking Laws

New Black Panthers march with loaded rifles and masked faces outside the courthouse considering the Arbery case in Georgia.

Georgia law bans this use of masks. The law was passed to target exactly this kind of terroristic behavior, specifically by the Ku Klux Klan. In yet another unconstitutional action by an executive during the pandemic, Georgia governor Brian Kemp issued an executive order 'suspending the law' -- which he has no authority to do -- in order to encourage mask wearing.

Now you have terrorist actions designed to intimidate jurors and courts, hoping to compel a desired verdict out of the frightened populace. 

This is another reason why we must never allow these unconstitutional executive actions, not even in a pandemic, no matter how compelling their argument is about how they're acting for the public good. The laws, the constitutions, these things exist for reasons that have survived pandemics and epidemics, wars and famines. They are the inherited wisdom of the ages, and even this most-well-intentioned unconstitutional exception has returned armed terrorist mobs to our streets. 

Something a little less erudite

Kurt Schlicter:

Stand strong and militant. We do not recognize any duty to not be anywhere because it inconveniences the military wing of the Democrat Party, and we do not recognize any duty to not legally pack heat in doing so. We do not recognize a duty to suck up to petty administrators and flunkies. And we’ll swear about that desiccated old freak if we feel like it. The GOP better get on board or we’ll toss it off the train.

"Fell Doctors and Fell Doctrines"

 Another very good post from the Orthosphere.

A man did not become a Frenchman simply by taking up residence in France, or because a bureaucrat issued a passport bearing his name.  Nor did a Frenchman remain a Frenchman if French doctors lost the war of opinion and that Frenchman came under the tutelage of fell doctors and fell doctrine.  That Frenchman might murmur, he might even squeal, but his grandchildren, at least, will spit on his grave.

Yes, that is where we are today with many of our children or grandchildren.  

Memetic Fantasy

AVI remarks on something modern fantasy does:

Modern girls look on the lives of women in the past and think "I would never put up with that."  Sure you would.  It was normal life. You would have the same focus and concerns as the women around you.* We put up with a lot because we don't really think of it s putting up with anything....

* The world where you go back there and refuse to put up with it and set a good example is more fantastical than the time travel itself. Yes, modern fantasy novelists like to set up stories like that, of girls trying to break out(!) of old ways and become a wizard, or a warrior, or a bard or some other previously forbidden role. (Tolkien and Lewis were early examples and did it well.) But that is largely a modern value.

Only somewhat. I have commented before on how many medieval history thesis papers I have read that begin like this: 'As a feminist, I am interested in how women of an intensely patriarchal period could live lives of their own construction. I find that my subject today was hugely successful at doing this, and that in fact her strongest allies were often male relatives and friends.' 

It really was a lot more common than you might think; what is surprising to the authors of these papers is that it is often groups of women who were most invested in enforcing limits on women, and men who loved a particular women who were their chief allies in defying societal limits on females. That's actually in keeping with my understanding of human nature, though, in which men are much more likely to try to win a particular woman's heart  by giving her things she desires than they are to bond up for the purpose of suppressing women as a class; or wherein fathers of particularly beloved daughters are likely to give them their way if seems really important to making them happy.

That said, I was amused by this send-up of Red Sonja-type portrayals of women in medieval-themed video games. I saw it on FB, but I believe this may be the original artist.

That's a pretty fair critique, all the way around. I note that the admin of the FB group where I saw it nearly immediately deleted it and followed it up with a strongly-worded criticism about how offensive all forms of sexism are. 

Australia Moving Citizens to Concentration Camps

It has begun: in the wake of a COVID outbreak, Australia has banned people from leaving their homes for any reason except medical treatment, and is using military forces to arrest the sick and their close contacts and deport them to concentration camps. 

Self Defense in Soviet Russia

The Soviets imposed hard limits on the right of self defense. 

Sanitized panegyrics to whiteness

Tom Wolfe said, "The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." James Lileks runs with it:

Soon the streets will fill with angry men who want to break store windows and set cars on fire.

No no not those guys, they’re good! We mean the bad ones.

There will be mobs who attack Jews. No no not those guys, they’re angry about colonialism or acting out whiteness doctrines of otherizing, please keep up.

There will be throngs of white men in positions of authority demanding that Asians be suppressed in academic admissions –

What? No, no, that’s different. Please, you’re not conversant in the prismatic subtleties of the intersectional matrix, so maybe sit this one out? Once you’ve done the work, then perhaps you will be alert to the neo-Fascist elements who will restructure society to otherize those who do not have pure blood –

What? No, no, that’s different. That’s a matter of public health. Of course, you should have to show your papers. Point is, America is a lost cause. Soon, very soon, a group of people will try to burn down a city because they saw some tweets about a thing, and there will be a horrifying moment when the authorities prevent it. The nascent subterranean Fascist instinct ignites in the citizens, and they will join the police to prevent the people from smashing the store windows and burning down the legislature building.

When the morning rises and the streets are not twinkling with broken glass – Kristall-not! – and the legislature is not a smoldering heap – well, then you’ll know. The Second Wave of Fascism has crashed on the shores of America, and engulfed us all.

Related:

It sounds crazy, but The System could wake up tomorrow and convince half this country that the sky is green.

* * *

And the shaming would begin. Oh the shaming. Anyone talking about a blue sky would be treated like some deranged conspiracy theorist. Families would divide over it. Facebook would ban you for discussing “blue skies”.

Both h/t Glen Reynolds.

Don't forget the "victims"

They enjoyed long walks on the beach, relaxed barbecues with friends, raping children, beating grandmothers, strangling brothers, and all the other things that show us we humans are in this together.

The soft-focus NPR piece, to give it credit, does cite the bald evidence of the three men's convictions for violent crimes, but somehow the information doesn't seem to penetrate into the author's tone.  Not that it's OK to shoot them on the street on the strength of their criminal records or otherwise shattered and chaotic lives of mental illness, drug abuse, brutality, and complete failure of self-control, but one would think that their background might have some slight bearing on how easy it is to believe that they were enraged, rash, and stupid enough to chase down and endanger an armed teen.

One more example of youths who were about to turn their lives around.  If only their mothers had kept them home that night.

Don't Mention the War

Oops.

Biblical Defense

In the post below on Natural Right, I cited Aquinas’ philosophical account. If any of you happen to prefer to reason from Scripture, here is an article on the subject. 

More than you wanted to know about Ivermectin

 Scott Alexander does write long articles.  All of this one is at least somewhat interesting, but I particularly recommend scrolling down to the final section, the "Political Takeaway."  He's on one of my favorite topics, the difficulty of persuading people of anything when you clearly hold them in enough contempt to lie to them, and you give them excellent reason to believe you're hostile to their best interests because you consider them outside your tribe.

Spoiler on the specific issue of Ivermectin:  he leans toward the view that's becoming more common, and which I'm guessing has some validity, that Ivermectin seems most effective in societies with lots of worm problems, perhaps because worm infestations inhibit an effective immune response to COVID.  This is at best a tentative conclusion, however, and we'd all benefit from adopting a reasonably skeptical scientific viewpoint until the data are much clearer.

Put it on the usual footing

 An old Doonesbury cartoon from the 1970s showed a slow afternoon during the Watergate hearings.  "Have we got any more witnesses lined up?  No?  Well, then, the Chair opens the floor to hearsay and innuendo."

Natural Right

If you were a Briton in a village by the sea when the Saxons came to loot and burn your village, you would have a right to resist the looting and burning of your home even if you weren't a soldier. If you were, later, a Saxon on the same shore when the Vikings came to loot and burn your home, you would have a right to resist even if you weren't a thane. If you were, later still, an Anglo-Norman living on the same shore when the French came to loot and burn your village, you would have a right to resist having your home looted or burned even if you weren't a knight. 

This kind of thing is called a natural right. It is rooted in what St. Thomas Aquinas called the natural law. 

The natural inclination of humans to achieve their proper end through reason and free will is the natural law. Formally defined, the natural law is humans’ participation in the eternal law, through reason and will. Humans actively participate in the eternal law of God (the governance of the world) by using reason in conformity with the natural law to discern what is good and evil.... On the level that we share with all substances, the natural law commands that we preserve ourselves in being.... Natural law also commands those things that make for the harmonious functioning of society (“Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not steal”). 

'Thou shall not kill' is one of the more famous mistranslations in the Bible. 

“The original Hebrew, lo tirtsah., is very clear, since the verb ratsah. means ‘murder,’ not ‘kill.’ If the commandment proscribed killing as such, it would position Judaism against capital punishment and make it pacifist even in wartime. These may be defensible or admirable views, but they’re certainly not biblical.”

So you can kill, but not murder. When might killing not be murder? Well, when it is necessary to fulfill the natural law: to preserve life, and the harmonious functioning of society. For example, when resisting a horde intent on burning and looting your village. Allowing looting and burning might actually kill people who were just minding their own business, and it will definitely degrade the harmonious function of society. The latter is the higher and better end, notice: you might think avoiding death was more important, but in fact on Aquinas' model that is just a thing that we have in common with plants and animals. The better end, proper to human beings as creatures of reason, is to preserve a harmonious society that fulfills the human good in a fuller way. 

Dying to do that is honorable; it is why we praise soldiers who fought and died for our way of life. Killing to do that is acceptable, if necessary, and at least according to George S. Patton it is preferable to kill than to die for your country. 

Positive laws that come to defy or refuse the natural law are rightly reformed. Today we saw that our positive laws in fact defended the natural rights. It is important to ensure they continue to do, and to reject attempts to reframe them in ways that would defy this natural right to preserve our homes against lawless violence.

The reactions to the verdict are as unhinged as you expected

 This is barely an exaggeration:

They're pretty much lying to you all the time

Drew Holden gives a good summary of how blindingly bad the anti-Rittenhouse propaganda was.  I'll just add two more examples:  GoFundMe and Fundly shut down defense funds in August 2020, and Facebook started removing pro-Rittenhouse statements, and even videos, in September 2020.

Rittenhouse Acquitted

According to the New York Post:

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted Friday on all charges for shootings that killed two men and injured a third during last year’s violence in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Emotions have been running high in anticipation of the jury’s verdict, with protests and shouting outside the courthouse and Gov. Tony Evers deploying National Guard troops to Kenosha.

The case left Americans divided over whether Rittenhouse, 18, was a patriot taking a stand against lawlessness or a vigilante.

The teen faced five charges, including intentional homicide in the fatal shootings of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, as well as attempted homicide for wounding Gaige Grosskreutz, 27.

Judge Bruce Schroeder threw out a weapons charge against Rittenhouse on a technicality over the length of the gun’s barrel.

A seventh count against the teen for violating curfew on the night of the shootings was also dismissed after the judge ruled that prosecutors failed to present sufficient evidence.

Parents of a clump of cells

The idea started as several days of bereavement leave for parents who lost a child to stillbirth.  At some point someone added coverage for abortion. Now it's 12 weeks of parental leave:

One thing that’s important to note about the Pittsburgh and Portland policies is that they are classified as “bereavement leave.” This must be confusing for the “clump of cells” crowd, because if no actual person was lost, of what is the sufferer bereft? But to the rest of us, this policy is, again, compassionate and humane. I’m not here to judge any woman who decides she needs to terminate a pregnancy, and I pray for her spiritual and emotional healing. Also, like a natural miscarriage, an abortion causes physical and emotional trauma. A few days’ rest and recovery (and maybe even prayer) is well advised.

But we all know that “progress” usually involves taking a reasonable idea and driving it right off a cliff.

Really liking DeSantis

And not just because he held the bill-signing ceremony in Brandon, Florida.  He's one of the few politicians who can talk about the limitations of government power like a real person instead of a geek.

HD for me, not for thee

I hope there will be serious consequences for the prosecution if they really did this, particularly in a case they attempted to turn into  dispute over what one blurry frame suggests:

Don't Take Your Guns to Town, Bill

 

Tex gets at a big problem for the Rittenhouse defense in her comment to the post below. In discussions with people who want to see him convicted of something, I run into the same intuition over and over. "He shouldn't have been there," they say, "and he definitely shouldn't have brought a rifle." (Especially, I suspect, a scary rifle like the AR-15 they've been taught to fear.)

There's definitely a longstanding concern, expressed in the Johnny Cash song that heads this post, about young men taking guns to town. It's definitely a risk, given that young men have not fully grown into maturity of judgment and are still driven by hot pride and hormones. The fact is that this particular young man exercised exceptional judgment with his firearm. The facts show that he did not fire first, that he fired fewer shots than his attackers, that they had more guns and assaulted him in multiple ways, yet he constantly retreated from conflict and fired only when absolutely necessary. Yet the intuition, which is a moral feeling, is stronger than the facts.

It is also stronger than the law. The law is that 16 and 17 year-olds may carry rifles and shotguns in that state. A citizen, even a youth, has a legal right to be in public places (the claim that he was violating curfew was unsubstantiated and abandoned by the prosecution). He has a right to travel freely, without being stopped or assaulted or fired upon. Stopping to render aid to the wounded is permitted of citizens even if they are not government employees, and in fact often required by law: in many states, if you come upon an accident you are legally required to render aid and assistance if capable. There is no reason citizen volunteers should not put out fires in the streets even if the fire department has not shown up yet. 

Everything he was doing was legal, in other words, but it is felt to have been a provocation that should void his other legal rights -- up to and including his right to defend himself from assault, battery, theft of property such as that rifle, and so forth. 

Would he have been harmed if he had been unarmed, without the rifle as provocation? Maybe! Also in those riots an elderly man with a fire extinguisher was beaten by similar thugs just for trying to stop the fires they were starting. Just because he had a fire extinguisher in his hands, was that a provocation that voids his right to self-defense? The older man was trying to prevent arson of a fraternal organization, the Danish Lodge, which was destroyed in the fire after his beating.

Ultimately self-defense is not the right place to hang the defense of Rittenhouse. What he was engaged in was good citizenship. Citizens have a moral right to defend their community from lawless violence, even with rifles, even if they constitute themselves as a militia for the purpose of doing so. Yes, even if the government chooses to abandon its duty to protect the community from such lawless violence -- especially if they do. 

That he was defending himself is true, and a legal reason not to prosecute him. The moral feeling that he was doing something wrong is misplaced. He was doing something right. We should all respond so well in the face of danger, of arson, of mobs. We have the moral right and we have the legal right. So did he.

Catholic Archbishop Against Globalism

There’s an obvious irony in a high official of the Catholic Church protesting a global conspiracy to unite humanity under a single system of belief. That said, there’s a live issue if one such conspiracy is false and the other might be true. 

Mistrial issue takes the stage again

Be darned if I know any more what's going on in the Rittenhouse case.  There was an oral motion last week for a mistrial with prejudice to refiling, but no ruling and no further discussion during the arguments on Friday or Monday.  Suddenly today a written motion shows up, adding an explosive new claim:  that the prosecution withheld its HD version of some crucial FBI drone video and supplied the defense, the court, and the jury only with the blurry low-res version.  This post contains the HD version.

It's still not easy to see what happened, and the clearer video certainly doesn't support the prosecution's argument that Rittenhouse twisted around in a bizarre fashion for an instant to point his rifle at the Zimisky couple just before the final, fatal portion of the chase began.  Nevertheless, I hope the judge will react very forcefully indeed if he believes that the prosecution deliberately showed the jury a blurry version, particularly after all the nonsense about having its expert blow up a blobby portion of it to make its weird "provocation" argument.  It was bad enough that the video showed up on the eve of trial as it is.

It seems the judge has suggested he's going to hold off on ruling on the mistrial motion until the jury renders a verdict.  The speculation, which I think is reasonable, is that he doesn't want to take the decision from the jury as long as it's possible they'll acquit.  A jury acquittal would be better for the country than a judicial interference--unless it's a conviction or even hung jury procured by prosecutorial fraud.  Since the defense has done no wrong, there's no problem with this unequal treatment.

The red circle is drawn around the pursuer, Rosenbaum.  Rittenhouse is to the left, about to get cornered in the pack of cars before he turns and shoots Rosenbaum as Rosenbaum is catching up and lunging at him.

An Islamic Confucianism

A paper recently awarded the Aristotle prize points to a largely unstudied tradition of metaphysics in the west of what is now China. 

Scholars have written much about the Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and his attempts to make Christianity and Confucianism palatable to each other. Yet, although Muslim communities have a long-established presence in China, we know little about the philosophical system that blended Islam and Confucianism in the heart-minds of Chinese Muslims. A careful search into the history of Chinese philosophy reveals a rich, fascinating, but hitherto understudied philosophical tradition indigenous to China, the Han-Kitab 汉克 塔布(a Chinese-Arabic compound literally meaning “the Chinese books”). In this groundbreaking project, I set out to investigate the creationist theory developed by Wang Daiyu, the earliest and one of the most influential figures in the Han-Kitab. My central undertaking is to provide a systematic analysis of Wang’s appropriation of two neo-Confucian concepts to articulate a creationist account of the origin of being: the Non-Ultimate ( wuji ⽆极 ) and the Great-Ultimate ( taiji 太极). My analysis shows these two Ultimates in Wang’s system are quite different in nature from their neo-Confucian counterparts. Deeply influenced by Sufism, Wang embeds the two Ultimates within an emanativist ontology, thereby offering a distinct model of the Ultimates from neo-Confucians’. I argue that in so doing, Wang makes a significant contribution to the history of Chinese metaphysics.

An 'emanativist' account, as she calls it, is an account of creation similar to (and probably ultimately derived from) the Neoplatonic account of creation. This system was adapted for Islam by Avicenna in his metaphysics, which is the thirteenth book of his The Healing. Wang Diayu, who was fluent in Persian and Arabic and translated the great works of Islamic philosophy into Chinese, would certainly have known of it. 

Avicenna's basic account was also adopted to Catholicism by St. Thomas Aquinas and others, and as such brings this full circle with the Catholic attempt to address Confucianism with which she begins. As it was also adapted for Judaism by Maimonides and others, this mode of thinking about how the world came to be has a claim to be the most important and widely-accepted one.

The basic way that it works in Neoplatonism is that originally all is One, and the One (which you will remember from our reading of the Parmenides -- see the sidebar if you want a refresher) is in an important sense the only real being. The One emanates the rest of creation when the One decides to examine itself, which necessitates a division between the part that is thinking, and the part that it is examining and thinking about. Such a division ends up creating more divisions as the thoughts proliferate: categories like good and bad are created, and number comes to be, and ordering these thoughts requires further divisions. Eventually the idea of everything exists, and as a further way of exploring the nature of those ideas the world is created so the ideas can play out. (An example: imagine the Platonic Ideal of a lion. It is a masterful hunter; but it cannot hunt, because it is just an idea. So the Thinker decides to make a place where lions exist, and can exercise this essence in practice).

You can see how this initial division can readily model the two Confucian Ultimates she mentions. In Catholicism, the two are The Father and the Son, which need a third thing to hold them together in relationship, and that thing is the third person of the Trinity, and the beginning of Creation. 

If you would like to read her full paper, she has made it available online.

A Hundred Thousand Overdose Deaths

So reports the NYT. 

Maybe we're having another debate

 I remember my amazement when Kamala Harris accused Joe Biden of racism in a debate, only to accept the position of his Vice President later.  She laughed and shrieked, "It was literally a debate!"  Ace theorizes that she believes lying is a legitimate tactic in a political debate just as bluffing is a legitimate tactic in poker.

Apparently the coast is clear to deploy the tactic again, as Harris complains that the bad white men around her "failed to position her for success."

I hate it when men fail to position me for success.  As Ace puts it, I deserve to have them hold the door for me and carry me over the threshold, so I can be a star in my own right.

Any landing you can swim away from

 I stole the line from one of my neighbors, commenting on this small plane that went down in the small bay between us and the nearest small town.

We don't know what happened yet.  He was flying into our small community airport and lost power at the end of about an hour's flight, a mile or so from the runway.  He wasn't hurt so's you'd notice.  Apparently the fishing guide who was meeting him saw him going down and hotfooted it out to the bay to bail him out, so he didn't stay long in the only mildly cool water, still somewhere in the 70s.

Consideration: A Cookbook

Occasionally I have posted recipes here, recently for my barbecue sauce, several for chili and also several recipes for using datil pepper. I'm thinking of putting together a cookbook of my favorites, to include meat pies and breads, perhaps my mead recipe, and so forth and so on. Would any of you be interested in such a thing? I would probably self-publish it through Amazon like I did my other books. 

School Board Meetings Are Getting Spicy

I would never have thought that the local school board would turn out to be the most dangerous place in America, but lately people are being threatened with FBI investigations for attending them and opposing the bureaucrats.

This guy went a little further, suggesting that he has "a thousand soldiers" he'll be bringing to the next meeting. Now, I don't actually believe that he has any soldiers, not even metaphorical ones. He seems rather unhinged to be able to command the loyalty of a regiment-sized force that is not bound to him by any official military discipline. 

Still, who knows what the limits are here? PTAs across the country may transform into counter-revolutionary elements. These are strange times. 

"Everyone Takes a Beating Once in a While"

This is the standard they'd like to apply to all of us, not just Kyle. If you get attacked by Antifa or BLM, your duty is to take your licks. It's just part of life, getting beaten.

That's not the standard that our legislatures have set regarding self-defense. Nor is it in keeping with our legal traditions, nor our rights as free men and women. We do not have to submit to beatings. We have the right to defend ourselves from being beaten, even with rifles if necessary. That is the law, and these prosecutors are lying scoundrels of the worst sort. 

A Spectacular Collection of Lies

The prosecution's closing argument today in the Rittenhouse case fantastically misrepresented both the facts and the law. It is not the case -- contra the prosecution -- that you give up your right to self-defense by virtue of having brought a gun. The main reason most citizens carry guns who do is to provide themselves with an option for self-defense. The law fully supports defending yourself against criminal harm, including with lethal force if a reasonable person would fear death or grievous bodily harm from the criminal violence. 

Likewise, there is no standard whereby 'bringing a gun to a fistfight' is even wrong. It's tactically wise, and perfectly legal given that no one is obligated to submit to being made a party to a fistfight without his permission. Kyle didn't go there to fistfight. He went to put out fires and render medical aid. 

Furthermore, it wasn't 'a fistfight.' Testimony established that Kyle was fired upon, and one of the witnesses admitted pointing a gun at Kyle's head. One of the prosecution's witnesses!

Don't even get me started on the prosecutor pointing a rifle at the jury without even checking it to be sure it was unloaded. He should have been arrested on the spot. That's how people get shot -- ask Alec Baldwin. 

This has been a travesty. How is it acceptable for a prosecutor to lie to the jury about the legal standards, or the facts in evidence? These aren't matters of interpretation. They're black letter law, or matters proven by undisputed eyewitness testimony.

Fake News Today

DB: Draft dodgers vote to make women register for the draft.

BB: 'Kamala Harris is extremely likeable and good at her job,' announces Psaki for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Actually, that last one's not fake. I don't think the first one is either.

Georgia Ballots Missing

The ballot images created by the electronic Dominion systems in almost half of Georgia’s counties have been destroyed, in spite of Federal laws requiring keeping them for approximately two years. 

Satire or Prophecy?

Hard to tell, these days. From the prophets at SNL, The Bubble:

And in just one example of the prophecy being fulfilled, NYPD Cops Settling Into Florida Nicely.

Happy Birthday, Sandhal Bergman

She is 70. In 1982, she played Valeria in a film of some renown. 

Brilliant solution

In what is proving to be the standard cognitive avoidance technique, pioneered by the Commander in Chief, one of my neighbors first objected that the $450K number was ridiculous and demanded to know where I got it, then did a quick search and came back to change her argument to "But you know they actually deserve it." Either way, Mr. Cruz's proposal is sound: pay them with Hunter Biden paintings. Win-win.

Nailed it

Admitting Rittenhouse acted in self-defense means admitting the fiery but mostly peaceful protest in Kenosha was really just a straight-up riot. That's why a large part of the American public can't allow the thought to intrude on their consciousness.

Diversity is Our Greatest Weakness

The United States Marine Corps, which just got its ass handed to it by the British Royal Marines in a major wargame, has decided that the biggest problem facing it is a lack of diversity.

Now there's nothing wrong with losing a wargame, even catastrophically. That can mean that you have an opportunity to learn something about a weakness you hadn't suspected or noticed. That can only happen, however, if you are focused on learning those lessons. Combat effectiveness is what matters; this stuff is at best a distraction, and can become a poison. 

It's All Anyone Wants to Talk About

The prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association and its JAMA network of other periodicals have published about 950 articles on race, racism, and racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in the past five years – about a third appearing in just the past year.

Isn't there a named medical condition whereby one becomes obsessed with something, to the exclusion of legitimately urgent matters? Allegedly there was a pandemic going on last year, but they found time for hundreds of articles about this stuff instead.  

"Now I Know Why You've Got So Many Rock Walls in this Country"

The quote is from The Quiet Man, but New England also has a lot of stone walls. 

WALK INTO A PATCH OF forest in New England, and chances are you will—almost literally—stumble across a stone wall....  estimates [are] that there are more than 100,000 miles of old, disused stone walls out there, or enough to circle the globe four times.

Who would build a stone wall, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles of them, in the middle of the forest? No one. 

Rather, they were built around farms that have fallen back into forest.

The supply of stone seemed endless. A field would be cleared in the autumn, and there would be a whole new crop of stones in the spring. This is due to a process known as “frost heave.” As deforested soils freeze and thaw, stones shift and migrate to the surface. “People in the Northeast thought that the devil had put them there,” says Susan Allport, author of the book Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York. “They just kept coming.”

This is also true here. There are a lot of rock walls on the mountain, where once there were cattle pastures. Now there is forest again, with a few groves of old apple trees marking where once someone's home stood.

Though the population continues to climb, we are over a demographic cliff in much of the world as birth rates drop below replacement levels. China, for example, is likely to have fewer people than the United States by the end of the century.  It will be interesting, for those who come after, to wander in the renewed wilderness where once were farms -- neighborhoods -- cities. 

This racism stuff is hard

Maybe I need to get my hearing checked, because I'm having trouble detecting the dog whistles.

Fifth Circuit stays the vax mandate

States have extensive public health powers. It's less clear that the feds do, and even less clear that OSHA has the power to enforce a vaccination mandate, let alone the particular mandate the White House came up with. This is not a final ruling, however, and no matter how clearly it expresses the views of a 3-judge panel, we don't know yet how it will fare en banc or in the Supreme Court.

Ray Wylie Hubbard

Tex mentioned him in passing in a post below, which is a good enough reason to have a song. 

That does sound like a problem

The Biden DOJ has opened an "environmental justice" investigation of Alabama wastewater treatment policies with an alleged "disparate impact" on racial groups, under the authority of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Just one thing:

In Alexander v. Sandoval, a 2001 case, the Supreme Court noted that interpreting Title VI to cover unintentional discrimination is in “considerable tension” with the fact that the Title VI statute itself “prohibits only intentional discrimination.”

I mean, if you're going to get technical. "Disparate impact" analysis once seemed like a good idea: it sometimes flushed out superficially race-neutral policies that were secretly operated to mistreat particular skin colors, generally as demonstrated by smoking-gun admissions on paper or tape. Now that the fashion needle has shifted back to overtly racist quotas and exclusions, but with the colors reversed in order to create the impression that this is progress, it's probably time to admit that "disparate impact" analysis no longer makes sense. Applied honestly, it would prohibit affirmative action and its unholy racist progeny.

Gyndyr cryme

Ammo Grrl tells us that Margaret Atwood is the latest target of Twittercide--or as AG puts it, "The moving finger Tweets, and having Twit, moves on."  During the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings I noticed a weird tendency for "Blessed be the fruit" to pop up in social media comments, an apparent reference to the even weirder theory that Justice Barrett was a member of a secret society seeking to put American wymyn in the Western equivalent of burqas.  Anyway, Ms. Atwood, now 81 years old, managed to outlive her hipness and has been shoved out on an ice floe of wokery for some misgenderizing thought crime or another.  AG's conclusion:

Who will be next? Maybe start a Twitter war with Texan Ray Wylie Hubbard, who wrote “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” when he should have written “Up Against the Wall, Neck of Color Birthing Person with a Cervix.” Just FYI, Ray Wylie’s 75th birthday is tomorrow! You gotta love a guy whose autobiography is called A Life…Well, Lived.

Lawless law enforcement

It's not shocking that a journalist who specializes in infiltrating corrupt organizations in disguise would consult with its lawyers about how to avoid being prosecuted afterwards because someone dreams up a theory under which they were "lying to law enforcement."

It is shocking that law enforcement would gin up a thin excuse to raid the journalists' files, leak the raid to the NYT after instructing the target to keep quiet, then leak privileged attorney-client communications to the NYT while a judge was busy issuing an order to make them stop snooping until their First-Amendment-shredding witch-hunt could be properly supervised.

When you add the context that the pretext for the raid was concern over how someone got hold of a diary that the journalist declined to publish a year ago for lack of proof that it was genuine, which the journalist attempted to return to the purported author's counsel but was refused, and which the journalist then turned over to law enforcement, the story is even more alarming.  Did I mention that the purported author is the President's daughter?  Nothing to see here.

When progressives report dirt, the news is the dirt no matter what criminal behavior was involved in getting it, or in manufacturing and then spreading it through government channels.  When conservatives report dirt, the news is any wild-eyed theory someone can imagine about how the process by which they got it might have been improper.  With every passing year, the public reports a lower trust in the press, and they're not enchanted with the White House, either.

On Veterans Day, though, journalists reminded us that they are the real heroes.

A Veteran's Day Song

Of John Paul Jones.

A fresh take

 Yes, it seems unhinged, but this is actually the argument from 538:

For many white GOP voters, anti-Black views don’t seem to get in the way of supporting a Black Republican.

It takes a while to explain it, but when that's done, it's still incomprehensible. Just trust us, it means you're a racist.

I'm struggling toward an insight, though.  It's . . . almost as if a white GOP voter were considering the policy positions of a candidate instead of the color of his skin.  But that's crazy talk.  Only a racist would think that way.

I thought that might be what he was up to

The prosecutor was weirdly focused yesterday on exactly how Rittenhouse got his hands on the rifle on the day of the shootings. He asked all kinds of questions about whether the rifle had been locked up, where it was stored, how he knew where it was, and so on. It seemed to have so little bearing on charges against Rittenhouse, other than to undermine the state's inexplicable "carrying a gun across state lines" charge, that I began to wonder whether he was setting up charges against third parties. Sure enough, today multiple charges have been filed against Dominic Black, 19-year-old the brother-like friend who bought the rifle and agreed to hold it for Rittenhouse until he was of legal age.

If you want to read something truly insane that reflects the same philosophy the Rittenhouse prosecutor is busy shoveling at the jury, try this NBC Think piece, which sees the whole problem as people "picking up guns they shouldn't have":

The truth is that too many white Americans probably see themselves in Rittenhouse — afraid of anyone, whether white or of color, who wants to live in a more equitable country — even if some don’t want to say so out loud.

So it turns out that what the riots were about: helping us live in a more equitable country. Only an evil white American could fear for his life if people advocating for a more equitable country cornered him alone during a riot and tried to kill him.

I say give it a try

It's bound to help in the midterms, D operatives. Go for it.

“We need to spend trillions more to reduce inflation” is an … interesting perspective, one that’ll be popular with Biden’s progressive base and no one else. If we take his advice and the newly passed spending package doesn’t ease inflation, I assume the left’s recommendation will be to pass a few trillion more on top of that and see if that does it. I wonder, though, if Sleepy Joe is privately hoping that the Manchin blocks the reconciliation bill, sparing him and his party the consequences from further upward pressure on prices.

Through the looking glass

 I've been calling the Rittenhouse prosecution Kafkaesque, but Power Line's take is on point, too:

George Floyd found himself being choked by a police officer because he tried to pass counterfeit currency and then violently resisted arrest. At the officer’s trial, Floyd’s criminal behavior didn’t matter in assessing the officer’s conduct once he had Floyd under control.

Why, then, does it matter how Rittenhouse got to the point where he had to shoot the three guys who threatened him with lethal force? He’s not being tried for trespassing on a riot.

It strikes me that with this trial (but not only with this trial), we are through the looking glass. Let’s hope the Rittenhouse jury helps pull us back to the right side of it.

That's it, right there. The prosecution's theory is felony trespass on the good kind of riot.

A Beautiful Woman

Not just physically, either. That's a fine and beautiful sentiment. 

Governments fail sometimes. That's ok. Citizens step up, because it all really belongs to us. A government that fails can be replaced, by citizens. If you don't like that, governments, don't fail. 

Veterans' Day

I especially extend greetings to those of you who fought in Afghanistan, so ignobly abandoned this year. It has been long obvious that our strategy in Afghanistan was fatally flawed, but that does not excuse the reckless and heedless way in which the retreat was managed. It could have been better, and it is not your fault that it was not.

Yet wherever you fought, and however it ended, remember Conan's prayer. When next we fight, let it be in a great cause and for a good end. Fortuna audaces iuvat.

That about sums it up

Ace's succinct summary is exactly what I this afternoon.  My mouth hung open throughout:

This series of questions:

Rosenbaum only chased you and tried to take your gun.

The guy who kicked you only stomped you in your face.

Huber only hit you in the head with a skateboard used as a club.

And now: Grosskreutz only pointed a handgun at you.

You had an AR-15 and should have just absorbed all these attacks because it is the only Real Weapon at the scene.

He actually said, Jump-Kick guy only used one foot, not a weapon.

Part of the argument was, and I am not making this up though I'm paraphrasing, "You had a sling on your rifle, so what did you care if some guy who earlier threatened to kill you if he got you alone came up and tried to wrestle it away from you?  What's the worst that could happen?" Followed up by, "After you shot him, why didn't you stay and render first aid?" Well, because a mob chanting "get him" was starting to close in on me.  "So you're saying you didn't care?"

Earlier: "Before Rosenbaum ambushed you, why were you running down the street in the first place?" Um, I got a call asking me to go help put out a fire there that the rioters had just started. "Yes, but what was your hurry?" It was like the old joke, "Where's the fire?" At one point, if I understood correctly, the prosecutor was blaming Rittenhouse for antagonizing the rioters by putting out their fires. Who did he think he was, "taking it upon himself" to put out fires instead of calling 911?  Rittenhouse never blew up; he was simply dumbfounded, seemingly unable to understand how anyone could even ask these things.  What is an 18-year-old thinking about the madhouse he has been plunged into, where rioters aren't initiating altercations, it's the citizens who spoil their fun by putting out their virtuous fires?

If you've ever watched a courtroom drama on TV and thought, "Oh, come on. People don't really get to say things like that," you were wrong.

Just before the lunch break, the defense threatened to file a motion for a mistrial with prejudice to retrial, on the ground of the prosecutor's bad faith in trying to sneak in two different kinds of excluded evidence and argument. The prosecutor tried to argue that somehow under the circumstances he had acted in good faith. The judge snapped, "I don't believe you." Nevertheless, the judge hasn't ruled on the motion. Apparently the trial will resume next Monday.

Happy Birthday, Marines

Feast and celebrate. You’ve earned it. 

Burn the witch

Winsome Sears is nothing but a white supremacist tool of the patriarchy.  She thinks her own actions have something to do with the way her life turns out, which is an insult to aspiring victims everywhere:

I am a heartbeat away from the governorship, in case anything happens to the governor. How are you going to tell me I am a victim? And I didn’t do anything special to get here, except stay in school and study. I took advantage of the opportunities available here in America.

Hmm....

 

 

Via TexasGirl https://twitter.com/PatriotSkyrific/status/1458076574788489221?s=20

Eric Hines

I ain't noways woke

The new wokeness:  stop saying "woke."  They figured out it wasn't polling well.  It's one of them dang wedge issues that the GOP drives between them and their former voters, which if you think about it is very unfair and not nice, also a dogwhistle.

I remember in mid-2020 when they figured out riots weren't polling well.  Abruptly, riots disappeared from the news, if not immediately from the streets.  Well, riots going away is never a bad thing, even if they're mostly peaceful.

You know what else doesn't poll well?  Enabling voter fraud.  I realize there's no such thing as voter fraud.

New park

This is exciting: an enormous ranch that includes much of the Guadalupe Delta is going under conservation, to be a state park at some point. It's 17,000 acres, which is over 26 square miles. It includes the old site of Indianola, the 19th century settlement that was wiped off the face of the earth by two catastrophic hurricanes. Indianola was just north of what is now Port O'Connor.

For context, the red dot in the map below is us, and the dark green shows existing wildlife conservation areas, including the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge (whooping crane refuge) and parkland along the barrier islands.

This is the way I like to see it done. The family that owned the huge Powderhorn Ranch voluntarily sold it at a below-market price to a consortium of donors. Lots of the money did come from the BP oilspill guilt money. The spill frankly didn't hurt us down here, but the settlement has been very, very good to our part of the coast.

Anyway, this didn't get done because a lot of people got used to the Powderhorn Ranch being wild and started imagining that they had the right to force the owners to leave it undeveloped. It got done because the owners made a gift of their own bounty, because they preferred to see it wild than to make a fortune developing it. Not that much of it was what you would call prime development land, but the inland part, near State Highway 35, might have been someday.

Here is what the beautiful swamp looks like, in a still from this good short video:

Tex’s Point

Prosecutors actually facepalm over today’s testimony. 

Clintons all the way down

I continue my hunt for stories that make sense of the mind-numbingly wheels-within-wheels developments in the Russia hoax, especially with the recent arrest of Igor Danchenko. From now on the Steele Dossier should be known as the Clinton Dossier, though the NYT Dossier might be as good. This Powerline report is good, as is the National Review summary it links to. In conclusion,

Although we have become inured to it, the degradation and corruption of the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Justice should retain the ability to shock. The transformation of the press into the eager tool of these agencies for the rankest of purposes must be included in reckoning the deep meaning of the Danchenko case . . . .

Seriously, they want to topple a U.S. President, and the go-to guy is named Igor? Who writes these B-list scripts?

Self-defense

I've spent the last few hours watching testimony in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. I'm starting to wonder whether the defense will make a successful motion for a directed verdict at the close of the state's case. Once self-defense is alleged, it is the state's burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that one or more of the four exceptions to the self-defense doctrine applies. Not only is it hard to imagine a reasonable jury getting beyond a reasonable doubt on any of them, I'm not sure I can see that the state has put on even a scintilla of evidence. The state's witnesses are if anything supporting the defense's case. It makes you wonder if the state was unable to find any rioters willing to testify, from among the rag-tag, hostile, erratic group caught on the Daily Caller's video that night. Instead, the prosecutor is stuck with witnesses who are at worst neutral to Rittenhouse, if not positively sympathetic. To make matters worse, they have detailed memories, they know what they saw and what the basis is for their perceptions and judgments, and they come across as highly credible. All it will take is one sensible juror with a backbone to end this nightmare for Rittenhouse. The defendant appears to have been lucky enough to draw a judge with good sense and a strong grasp of the rules of evidence.

More Cooking: Frybread

This NYT article is on frybread, a kind of bread that is made by Native Americans. The central dynamic of the article is that it is both a deeply meaningful cuisine embraced by many because of the beloved family members who made it a particular way; and also because it comes out of their traditions of shared suffering; but also that it is often rejected by activists because it is not in fact a traditional Native American food at all. It is a food that was developed after the United States government removed many of them from their lands and traditional foodways, one that they had to figure out from whatever dry good supplies the government put in their box.

Southerners will notice many parallels with our own cornbread debate. Also a few with our debate about biscuits, e.g., everyone's grandmother made the best ones and no one else does it quite right. Mine made them with bacon grease from yesterday's bacon, and served them with today's bacon, from which she reserved the grease for tomorrow's biscuits. She had a little tin she'd pour the hot grease into as she served the bacon, and tomorrow if you got up to watch her cook she'd scoop grease right back out of it to mix with the flour, baking powder, salt, and milk.

Cornbread, though, is where the big regional issue arises. Ask a Southerner if cornbread should be sweet, for example. There are passionate differences, but they really come down to questions about what kinds of materials were available in the very hard times either on the frontier or, later for the Deep South, after the Civil War. Appalachian Southerners deny that sweetness is at all appropriate, because sugar was not to be had in the hard times. Deep South Southerners, especially Black Southerners, insist that it is only proper if it is a bit sweet -- because sugar cane was relatively easy to come by in the wetter, hotter regions further South. Cotton grew better there also, which is why the black population came to know that particular kind of cornbread rather than the dry sort served in the mountains.

But of course this kind of hardship is where what I was just calling an essential cultural food develops. It is, I gather, why the Jews still eat certain foods at certain holidays -- in memory of hard times, some of them thousands of years ago. 

There's a place over on the Cherokee reservation that serves frybread with chili, chili being another food whose proper composition is hotly debated. The Eastern Band of Cherokee will have learned this frybread some other way, since they were never removed (in spite of significant efforts by the Federal government). I haven't had the stuff, so I don't know how either their frybread or their chili will sort along the debatable lines, but I will have to ride over and try it sometime. 

$449K per illegal immigrant, tops

The WH handlers clarify the President's meaning when he said the WSJ story about paying illegal immigrants $450K apiece for pain and suffering was "garbage." I consider this a $1 billion contribution in kind to the GOP 2022 campaign fund.

Cooking, High and Low

My wife and I were having a conversation yesterday about food, and how there is a strange disconnect between Americans and the French about which French dishes associated with country folk and common folk are a kind of 'high cuisine.' This is of course an accident of history, associated with the mid-century popularity of noted early special operator and famous cook Julia Child. Child was of course capable of cooking the 'highest' French dishes, having fallen in love with French cuisine after the war and arranging to become fully trained in the best schools. But she taught Americans a lot of common dishes as well, blurring the lines between the stuff that the French thought of as 'high' and 'low' so that the Americans came to see French cooking as a kind of high cooking per se. 

However, it occurs to me that it is often the country folk dishes -- the lowest of the low cuisine -- that ends up being recognized as the essential dish of that nationality. For Scots it is of course the Haggis; the Mexican national dish is mole that is made of various chilis and seeds, particularly served over turkey, and originally concoctions as much designed to try to preserve meats as to flavor them. You can all doubtless think of your own favorite examples of this. 

Yet then I thought of my time in China, where the 'essential' dish is surely Peking Duck -- a 'high' cuisine if ever there was one. The rural dishes sometimes make the running, like Sichuan cookery (my personal favorite of Chinese regional cuisines) or Hunan. The class hierarchy is better preserved there, though, even in spite of decades of Maoist leveling aimed at culture and class. 

Is this a feature of democratic revolutions in the West (certainly including Mexico and the United States, but also France and the United Kingdom)? Or is something else at work, do you think? 

Good excuse for an exit ramp from a policy that's killing them at the ballot box

And good news anyway, even if it is cynically appropriated: Pfizer seeks FDA approval for a COVID treatment pill that's even more effective, and a lot cheaper and easier, than monoclonal antibodies. Now if they can just resist the temptation to lie about the treatment's pros and cons and to make the treatment mandatory.

We'll do better next time

"Bottom line is, we simply came up short. The votes in the key 3 a.m. demographic just weren’t there.” Also, I can't get over the NJ trucker who upset the state senate president with a shoestring campaign. Not that anything untoward would ever happen in a state like NJ, but you have to think that if anyone had noticed what was going on they might have prepared a little package of extra ballots. As the joke goes, though, they probably were printed in China and got hung up on a container ship.

It's not vulgar, but it COULD have been

Lovely embedded cartoon about people borrowing trouble melting down over an inoffensive word that reminds them of something else that they'd like to be offended by, if only they could catch someone saying it out loud instead of simply understanding that they're probably thinking it really, really hard.

"I can't keep up with you kids and your crazy vulgarity."

“Lost,” You Say?

The FBI claims it lost high quality video of the Rittenhouse shootings. 

[Defense attorney] Richards reportedly said it is “preposterous” that the FBI allegedly lost the footage. Thomas Binger, the lead prosecutor, then told [Judge] Schroeder in regard to the FBI’s plane footage, that “the federal government is not under our control.”

Boy, that’s the truth.  

The Brandon Administration

This is such a strange time to be alive.

Regiment of Foot

"White women voters are footsoldiers of white supremacist patriarchy."

At this point we've traveled so far that the insults are farcical.

UPDATE: Even more than I realized: apparently Virginia elected a female former Marine who happens to be black to the lieutenant governor's position, a first ever for a black woman in Virginia, or even just a woman. There have probably been Marines before. 

For once, the media is helpful

Normally having an unprincipled media on your side is the wind at your back in an election, but it can backfire if the candidate smokes his own product. Timothy Carney argues that Terry McAuliffe listened to the WaPo's theory that parental concern about education was code for white supremacy and assumed that anything WaPo spouted was bound to work like a charm on undecided independent Virginia voters.

Having the news media as a yes man is dangerous.

* * *

Having the whole news media on your side is often helpful — such as when Joe Biden enjoyed a media blackout on his son’s influence-peddling. But when it convinces you that issues matter that don’t, or that issues don’t matter that do, it’s a handicap.

As Ben Shapiro put it the other day when Juan Williams floated this same theory, "Please, Democrats, make this your platform for 2022. I'm begging you." As a winning campaign message, it's right up there with "CRT doesn't exist--and it's awesome."

I realize McAuliffe hasn't conceded yet, but with so few votes uncounted this morning, I have my fingers crossed that even he and the national machine will judge this one a bridge too far.  if 138,000 D votes suddenly appear from someone's car trunk, another election contest may do them more harm than good nationally, no matter what it gets them in Virginia, especially if the message is "We had to contest this election, because Virginia parents are racist." 

Market fail

 I regret that this t-shirt does not yet appear to be offered for sale.

Elon Hits One Out of the Park

The UN should probably not play with this guy.

Saving America

The real issue here isn't that 30% of Republicans think that violence may be necessary, but that people still believe that America can be saved.

The finding is part of PRRI’s 12th annual American Values Survey released Monday which, among other things, highlights the continued impact of the same falsehoods and conspiracy theories...

If that's where you're starting from, of course you can't see the truth. At this point it's obvious that election laws were widely violated, and the Constitution ignored. What remains to be decided is whether a legitimate election can ever be held again; or, if not, what that means. 

The Most Important Matter

Keeping these people from being in charge matters more than anything else, except for metaphysical matters like salvation of our souls.

One More

 

The rift by Dillsboro. 

It’s going to be in the 20s this coming week. Fall is suddenly over. 

Early Afternoon

The only problem with the mountains is how early the afternoon sun vanishes behind the ridge. The Nantahala gets its name from a Cherokee word for "land of the noon-day sun," or as it is more popularly translated, "the land where the sun sets at noon." 

This is from a roadside stand near the forks of the French Broad River, where there's a nice taproom and occasionally a good food truck called Mama Bear's (although she's going offline for the winter starting tomorrow to pursue motherhood rather than food-truckery). It may be technically in the Pisgah Ranger district rather than one of the Nantahala ones, as the border between those is right about here. The road that runs up to the Blue Ridge Parkway from this spot also serves as the border between the Middle Prong Wilderness and the Shining Rock Wilderness. 

SE Texas does have fall

Granted, fall down here may last a month, week, or happen intermittently between October and February.  Still it was a great day to take the DR out.  This is on the Brazos river.