The first beer describes itself as a “grumpy German helles.”
More puppet scenes
At this rate I may manage to get both puppet stages in the mail in time for Christmas.
Paintings From the Hall
Speaking of paintings, which rarely enter my mind, my wife is having a sale on her fine art paintings. Both her landscapes and her work from life are on sale (and on display, if any of you happen by Asheville, both at the Asheville Gallery of Art and on Woolworth’s Walk).
The latter includes this fellow, which I’ll be sad if she sells because he currently hangs in my stairwell. A soulful hound is a fine companion.
She loves to paint portraits of striking dogs and horses, by the way, so if you have one you’d like painted she does sometimes take commissions for such orders.
Crafty time of year
At Christmas the urge to paint often comes over me. This year I'm working on a couple of puppet stages for a toddler great-niece. I found on Etsy a clever folding stage with wings that open up, which seemed to lend itself toward painting different sets on each panel. I ordered two, thinking I wouldn't have time to paint one before Christmas, so I'd send the blank one for now and follow up later with the other after painting it, but the work is going so quickly that it seems I'll have time to let the first one dry in time to wrap and ship it. The first one has just three panels:
Then it occurred to me that I can paint the back side, too, and she can turn it around. I've just started on the second stage now, having completed the first panel of six.
The Feast of St. Andrew
It is often remarked that Andrew was a strange choice for a patron of Scotland, which has several native saints of her own.
All the same.
A Hopeful Tale
Wretchard writes that all powers may be collapsing, ‘a failure not of this or that hegemony but of hegemony itself.’
Advent
Today being the first Sunday of Advent I got some initial decorating done. The lights at least are hung, and a small tree set up and given a first-pass decoration. We lit a candle at dinner in the Advent wreath.
We are still eating Thanksgiving leftovers -- at this point leftover-leftovers, as the leftovers I made into Turkey chorizo and nachos still had some life in them for dinner tonight. I've got one more meal's worth of turkey on the carcass, which I can turn into a leftovers dish; and then if there are leftovers of that as well, we'll have eaten from Thursday to Tuesday on the same bird.
It occurred to me as I was carving meat from the bird that I did not know if turkeys had a carving word. In the Middle Ages, there were a whole host of these terms for different animals, and carving was considered a sort of Aristotelian science. Turkeys are a New World bird, though, and I don't see one on at least this list. Here are some that are close:
- allay a pheasant
- disfigure a peacock
- display a quail
- fract a chicken
- rear a goose
- sauce a capon
- spoil a hen
- unbrace a mallard
- wing a partridge
I would say that turkeys are probably closer to geese than any of the others, but in our present culture 'to rear a turkey' would inevitably be taken as a euphemism for a despicable practice. Plus it should really have its own name, that being in the spirit of the thing. Perhaps one might 'leftover a turkey.'
Soon I will begin the holiday baking, so that we can send cookies and the like out to all and sundry. Once the Yuletide proper gets here, there will be meat pies to be served in the Hall itself. For now, though, it is only the beginning of the time of preparation.
How the First Amendment works
Seth Barrett Tillman didn't think much of David Frum's recent OpEd arguing that the Russia Hoax wasn't really a hoax:
Frum’s position amounts to this. If you express the wrong political views in public—by which he means, political views he disagrees with—that is a reason for the government to investigate you. Frum is not embarrassed by his position. Millions of Americans agree with Frum. He and they are entirely wrong. And the continuing viability of American and Western democracy depends on changing the hearts and minds of those millions.
Nightingale
Judy Collins is best known for covering songs. Her voice isn't great, but her arrangements were spectacular, and I often forget that she could write a pretty good song herself. Her 1970 release "Whales and Nightingales" included this beautiful "Nightingale" song in two versions, one sung with the lyrics below and the other a very nice instrumental arrangement. (I can't get YouTubes to embed today, so I'm linking.)
Jacob’s heart bent with fear, like a bow with death for its arrow;In vain he searched for the final truth, to set his soul free of doubt.Over the mountains he walked, with his head bent searching for reasons;Then he called out to God for help, and climbed to the top of a hill.Wind swept the sunlight through the wheat fields,
In the orchard the nightingale sang,
While the plums that she broke with her brown beak,
Tomorrow would turn into songs.Then she flew up through the rain, with the sun silver bright on her feathers,Jacob put back his frowns and sighed and walked back down the hill:"God doesn’t answer me, and He never will."
"Albatross" is a well-written and well-arranged song, too:
Fear in Ethiopia
The government is collapsing in the face of rebels, and the State Department is worried... chiefly about themselves.
The chaos that unfolded as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban and the struggle the U.S. faced when attempting to withdraw Americans and allies from the country reportedly caused a wave of mental health issues in the State Department, Politico reported.The Department of Veterans Affairs reportedly offered its 24-7 support line to help officials work through the strain of the situation, but the State Department turned down the offer, Politico reported. One State Department employee described this decision as “really disturbing” and “a disgrace.”“The mental health ramifications of the Afghanistan evacuation are not over — we expect employees to potentially have adverse mental health in the months and years to come,” State Department spokesperson Ned Price said while commenting on the reporting, Politico reported.
The American citizens and allies abandoned in Afghanistan may have had some mental health issues as well, though we don't hear a lot about them for some reason.
A Preposterous Story
Harper's is an old magazine, and I assume one must be a worthy writer to be included in its pages. I really wanted an answer to the question -- excerpted at the excellent Arts & Letters Daily -- that was supposed to be the topic of the essay.
How did a bowdlerized rendering of a marginal psychpathology — trauma theory — come to dominate our culture?
More and more I hear people (especially women) talking about 'healing' their 'trauma' as a necessary part of everyday life. Most of them strike me as more bored than injured, looking for their 'healing' through activities like wine and yoga. Some of the trauma is supposed to have happened in past lives, even, so it must first be remembered somehow before it can be addressed and healed. Yet they talk very earnestly about the need for this healing for wounds of the psyche barely recalled from childhood or from some time during the Middle Ages.
Unfortunately the answer to this question was not forthcoming in the essay, which is ridiculous.
And so we commence our search for the cultural significance of trauma not on the Freudian chaise, but with the nineteenth-century concept of “railway spine.” For it is with the arrival of the train that the phenomenon eventually termed PTSD steams into view.
The essay goes on to theorize that the imposition of 'clock time' on the natural experience of time created a novel sort of alienation and discomfort, one that led to accidents that were traumatic in a new way.
Now clocks were not new in the 19th century. The first mechanical clock was built before the year 1000 by a man who would later become Pope Sylvester II. Church life in the Medieval period was divided into bells, which rang day and night to call people to the appropriate prayers. Wrist watches date to the 1500s, as do clocks accurate to the minute. By 1656, the pendulum clock made them accurate to the second, and gave them the classing grandfather 'tick, tock' sound.
Steam trains were a new technology at one time yet they were hardly the first mode of transportation in which "[c]rucially, passengers felt powerless, confronted with a technology over which they had no obvious means of control." One has a great deal of control over a steam train compared to a ship, even as a passenger who might pull the emergency stop cord. A shipwreck in a storm is as traumatic as anything it is easy to imagine; it is, in art and literature, often the very image of life-altering trauma.
The author is much more interested in those literary treatments of trauma than in the actual victims of real PTSD, for whom he has little sympathy. Describing the American Marines who came down with it after Fallujah, he sniffs, "Performing 'very well'... is reducing a city to rubble using depleted uranium shells and then incinerating enemy combatants and civilians alike." Likewise of Vietnam war veterans he writes, "That the traumas experienced by Vietnam veterans were as much a function of acts they had perpetrated as they were of those inflicted upon them in part explains why contemporary trauma theorists’ conceptions of the malady, and their attendant therapies, collapse [a] fundamental ethical distinction."
Yet the question we began with still needs an answer. Veterans of Vietnam or Fallujah may well have real trauma -- although often it proves to be traumatic brain injury more than anything else -- but what of the way the culture has turned into a celebration and engagement with wine-and-yoga trauma? He does get there, but only for a moment:
This outbreak of mass hysteria shared with trauma theory the underlying conviction that the recall of trauma could be delayed, even by years and decades, and that its authenticity was guaranteed by its own belatedness. Uncorrupted by interlocution (which would necessarily entail confabulation), the victim retained an absolutely reliable memory of whatever satanism they’d been subjected to—such as the bloody pentagram being inscribed and the naked, chanting figures wearing animal masks forming a circle around them. To collapse the Marxian dialectic of premature revolution: this was history simultaneously as tragedy and farce.
Yet then it is back to real trauma -- the Holocaust, and its Remembrance Days. He returns to the anti-industrial critique again: Hiroshima and the Holocaust required technologies. Yes, and the Battle of Towton required different technologies. The crossbow was banned by the Pope at one time because it was thought so traumatic a weapon.
The theory that technology and technological change produces trauma leads to a conclusion that the real reason our culture is so focused on trauma is things like Instagram.
Into the crepuscular realm of social media, for example. If we understand trauma to be a function of technologies that engender in us a sense of profound security underscored by high anxiety, then platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok would seem purpose-built for its manufacture, offering as they do the coziness of Marshall McLuhan’s global village and its inevitable social problems: global gossip, global reviling, and global abuse. A recent article in Slate pointed out that on TikTok, any number of behaviors are now dubbed “trauma responses” by the self-styled “coaches” who post videos on the app telling their followers how to identify the trauma within themselves. Many thousands of people are becoming convinced that perfectly ordinary reactions to such commonplace problems as overbearing bosses or perfidious friends are, in fact, reflex responses seared into their psyches by the white heat of trauma, which suggests to me that this medium is indeed its own message.
I'm open to the idea that Instagram can be a traumatizing experience -- or any social media that can leave one open to receiving the hate or anger or lust of all of humanity at once. That technology really might be inhumane in that it strips us of our ability to relate to others on a human scale; though again it is not fully novel. It might be why celebrities of an earlier era often fared badly, now available at least potentially to everyone with a cell phone.
Yet I don't think the issue is that people are really more traumatized, so much as they have come to think and talk as if trauma were a ubiquitous experience that is at the center of human life and meaning. They clearly like the idea; maybe because it justifies them focusing on themselves instead of others. That is certainly not novel in human history either.
Sea pirates
Matt Taibbi on enjoying Thanksgiving like a grownup:
How can I eat turkey and stuffing with a smile, when Columbus massacred the Arawaks?... How? Maybe because you’re more than three years old, and don’t need fairy tales to be real in order to enjoy dinner with family and a football game?
* * *
We’ve lost touch with our real story, which is about us, not the centuries-old adventures of toffs in wigs. The Founding Fathers may have been scum, but they didn’t just steal a continent from the indigenous residents, they stole one from a British King, which is, come on, hilarious....
Almost none of us are related to Pilgrims or Founders. Nearly all of us descended from those subsequent waves of weirdos and refugees who came from all over, some not by choice, and forged the real character of our stolen nation. Many of our ancestors had their hands forced elsewhere, from Jews in the Pale fleeing pogroms to Irish escaping famines to Armenians running from Ottoman genocides. Once they got here, they happily planted Sea Pirate flags on their front doors and set about inventing everything from cat litter to alternating current, while mostly refraining from murdering one another. It was an insane setup, but they made the whole thing work, which is a pretty amazing story even figuring in the horribleness, and really what we’re celebrating every November. You have to reduce the American experience to a few ridiculously grim variables, and remove everything from movies to rock n’ roll to monster dunks, to spend today sulking.
... On Thanksgiving one year, I told [a Swedish friend] I was going to the consulate for dinner. “Thanksgiving,” he said. “That’s the one where you killed all the Indians, right?”
“Not me personally, but yes.”
“Bring back leftovers,” he answered.
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
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!'
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Brilliant solution
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 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.
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.
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.
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