Recently drone warfare came up in the comments. Here are some videos I've found helpful in understanding this evolution of battlefield technology. There's a lot of focus on drones in warfare, but it's not exclusively that.
I would be very interested in any other sources any of you consider useful for understanding this aspect of warfare.
Task & Purpose offers a 16-minute overview of the development of drone warfare going back to the 19th century and bringing it up to about November 2023. (There's a sponsor ad in it after the intro. Skip to 2:17 to miss that, although it is a drone ad if you're interested.)
T.REX ARMS / LABS has a good series on drones. The first is a 25-minute dive into drone warfare in the Ukraine/Russia conflict. I've then posted the rest of their 5-part series below that.
My wife has houseguests this weekend. I am of course detailed to cook for them. I just made dinner (bacon-wrapped jalapeño shrimp, with bruschetta and honey/balsamic Brussel sprouts as sides). To decide how much jalapeño to use, I yelled downstairs:
"Dear, verify your friends' comfort level with spice?"
"I like spicy!" one of them yelled back.
"I like spicy!" the other one yelled back.
"OK, here it comes," I said and walked away.
Downstairs, I could hear my wife panicking. "No! No! You don't know what you asked for! Mildly spicy! Mildly!"
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday relieved the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices....In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case.Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”
That's what I'm talking about. 'You are relieved and we're going to do it right' is something we need to hear a lot more often pointed at the senior officers corps. Well done.
Unsurprisingly, the economy slipped into recession according to a usual test. Dad29 has been pointing out that indicators have been unfavorable for some time. The price of copper, another heuristic, is at a four-month low as manufacturers don't expect to be making as much stuff. At the same link you can see that the price of lithium is way down, as the much-vaunted shift to electric vehicles stalls out in the face of both technical difficulty and consumer resistance. But the price of gasoline is also down, because people aren't traveling as much -- little money for summer vacations.
It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, but it's hard to see much good here. As D29 points out, even if the recession were to get a new president elected he's going to have a rough couple of years.
"I've known Kamala a long time... She was always of Indian heritage... I didn't know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black"
While it is true that Kamala Harris’ father claimed to be a descendant of a slave owner, Harris and her family’s relationship to Hamilton Brown remains unclear.
In an article published by the Jamaica Globe (here), professor Donald Harris wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” a town in Jamaica.
According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, Hamilton Brown was an Irish resident slave-owner in Jamaica, and founder of Brown’s Town (here). Snopes, which investigated this claim (here) in 2019, reported that Brown owned at least 121 and 124 slaves in 1826 and 1817, respectively.
These in-depth Fact Checks by Snopes and Politifact (here) have determined that while there is no clear evidence to prove Kamala Harris is a descendant of slave owners, it is likely that she is a descendant of both slaves and slave owners.
We've discussed the fact-checker and media love for the phrase "there is no evidence." Here we just get that "there is no clear evidence." But there is clear evidence: we have the direct testimony of her father, which was written down and published. Any historian would consider a direct, published testimonial to be evidence. That in fact is the primary and preferred sort of evidence with which historians work. You can perhaps argue that evidence does not suffice for proof, but you can't deny that there is clear evidence.
I imagine Trump is just throwing bombs because it's fun, but he does incidentally point out a major problem not just for Kamala but for the ideology she represents. The White House is responding that no one has any right to interrogate someone's identity; but if you're going to run a DEI program, in which preference points are assigned based on identity, you have no choice but to question the identities that people claim. Otherwise you end up with Elizabeth Warren cases everywhere.
Further, there is a serious and unaddressed division on identifying as (say) a man/woman versus (say) black or Indian. In fact, let's use the American Indian for this example -- in Warren's honor, the Cherokee. The Cherokee will definitely interrogate your claim to be one of them, and they have a developed methodology for doing it. They defend this methodology in court and use it to deny some people (especially black people descended from Cherokee slaves) status as Cherokee. Because we have a very elaborate set of preferences and awards for verified Native Americans, businesses owned by them, land owned by them, and so forth and so on, this sort of interrogation is unavoidable. If you want a world in which no one can interrogate your identity, your identity can't be used to assign employment or benefits. If it is, others with whom you are in competition have a right to question whether you really deserved the preferences you received over them. They have standing, as the courts say.
When the Surgeon General of the United States adopts female pronouns and dress, however, we're told it's totally improper to question it. Yet here too, women have a lot of protections and advantages -- scholarships not least, but also physical spaces from which they can exclude men in moments of vulnerability -- that are imperiled if everyone can just identify and nobody can question it. So of course there are fights about this everywhere, in legislatures and in courts and in homes and schools.
In addition, Trump is pointing to something that isn't often discussed because it's considered wildly impolite to mention, but that I wonder if a lot of black people don't have concerns about. I'm not the least bit black myself and don't pretend to be, but if I were I would wonder about how different not only Kamala but Barack Obama are from the Black American story. The smaller concern would be that they are each only half black, and are on the other side children of extraordinary privilege: on his white side Obama was a cousin of George Washington and descended from wealth and social connection in the white community; Harris' mother was a Brahmin who received advanced education 60 years ago, being about as well connected among the elite caste of India as Obama's white family was here.
The greater concern is that neither of their black parents shared the Black American experience of slavery and Civil Rights. Obama's father was not descended from slaves or Freedom Riders; he was a Kenyan whose ancestors did not share any of the American experiences. Obama opted in without any of the historical lack of privilege that most Black Americans descend from, and which has defined their struggle. Harris' family, as discussed above, were in her father's generation self-declared descendants from slavers and slave traders, not slaves.
Again, I'm not black and this isn't my fight. I can't help but think that if I were, though, I'd be asking myself how it was that the first black President and Vice President were both of this strange stripe: not really like us, not at all, neither by blood nor by lived experience. I'd ask myself why they both came from such privilege, and opted into our community only when they found an advantage. At least that's what I think I'd ask myself.
But again, it's not my fight. I wonder if it isn't a fight that just got started, though.
The Oriflamme (from Latin aurea flamma, "golden flame"), a pointed, blood-red banner flown from a gilded lance, was the sacred battle standard of the King of France and a symbol of divine intervention on the battlefield from God and Saint Denis in the Middle Ages. The oriflamme originated as the sacred banner of the Abbey of St. Denis, a monastery near Paris. When the oriflamme was raised in battle by the French royalty during the Middle Ages, most notably during the Hundred Years' War, no prisoners were to be taken until it was lowered. Through that tactic, they hoped to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy, especially the nobles, who could usually expect to be taken alive for ransom during such military encounters.
One of the greatest knights of the Hundred Years War died with the Oriflamme in his hands.
Froissart vividly describes porte-oriflamme Geoffroi de Charny's fall at the side of his king at the Battle of Poitiers in this passage:
There Sir Geoffroi de Charny fought gallantly near the king (note: and his fourteen-year-old son). The whole press and cry of battle were upon him because he was carrying the king’s sovereign banner [the Oriflamme]. He also had before him his own banner, gules, three escutcheons argent. So many English and Gascons came around him from all sides that they cracked open the king’s battle formation and smashed it; there were so many English and Gascons that at least five of these men at arms attacked one [French] gentleman. Sir Geoffroi de Charny was killed with the banner of France in his hand, as other French banners fell to earth.
Both of these red banners are supposed to have been sacred, but the idea has a purely profane variation in history. Pirates famously raised a black flag, including the "Jolly Roger," to indicate piratical intentions -- but it also promised quarter if a surrender was given at once. There was a red flag, "the bloody flag," that some would raise to signal that they intended to murder their prey without mercy no matter what.
Coincidentally I was wearing a t-shirt with this flag printed on it during my flight experiences. Sadly, in spite of my massive black beard, no one got the reference.
.svg.png)
Apparently John Wayne loved to play chess. It's featured in McClintock, but apparently it was a big thing of his. One of his wives was a a major tennis player or something like that, and he would come to her events and put up a sign outside their trailer: "Play Chess with John Wayne!"
I like chess myself. I taught my son to play, and probably beat him 10,000 times in a row until he really learned to play. Now I have to really watch myself when we play together.
A young local businessman had gotten wind of apparent indiscretions between his wife and a young man contracted to work on the road from Sylva to Balsam who had recently arrived in the area. He’d apparently become quite worked up, and on a quiet Friday morning in Sylva the alleged suitor pulled up in front of the Woman’s Shop on Main Street.Before he had a chance to get out of his vehicle, the husband stepped from the sidewalk, pulled a revolver and began shooting, striking the man in the face and twice in the right lung. The man emerged from his car and began running, the husband still firing, hitting him once more below the right shoulder.
The husband then went into Hooper’s Drug Store and handed his gun to a town alderman, then on to the jail with a deputy. The shooting victim was rushed to the hospital in Bryson City.
In October of 1927 the Journal reported prayer for judgment for the shooter was continued for two years by Judge W.F. Harding. The paper reported Harding remarked from the bench, “Mr. Solicitor, you may get some judge to pronounce judgment in this case; but you will never get this one to do it.”
The shooter, who entered a plea of guilty of an assault with a deadly weapon, offered testimony of his good character and witnesses who testified to the affair, in addition to letters the wife had written to the suitor. The latter lead the judge to remark “it appeared the wrong man was on trial.”
The judge opined there was no statute the suitor had violated, but said the legislature should make provisions for such cases, as, the Journal reported, “as the law stands there is little left for an injured husband to do except use a shotgun. (The judge) asserted that this is one place in which our law falls down, and that he would like to issue a bench warrant for (the suitor), if there were a law under which be could be tried.
It’s certainly been a long time since shots rang out on the streets of downtown Sylva, but given the drumbeat of other acts that flicker across our screens daily, the question often comes up if we’ve become a more violent society over time.It is worth noting that the front pages relating the above incident also carried stories about a fight and shooting at the Glenville polling place, the murder of a man in the Southern Railway waiting room in Dillsboro, and an assault with a pistol with intent to kill Sylva Police Chief Allen Sutton.Given that, the aforementioned question is one we’ll leave for sociologists and other experts to answer.
UPDATE: I related this story to my wife, who expressed her opinion that the judge showed excellent sense and that the young businessman's conduct was entirely understandable. "Of course he has a genetically predisposition to react badly to another man stealing his mate," is how she put it.
The story reflects what may be a culturally Appalachian or Scottish/Scots-Irish sentiment that such cases call for violence against the other man, but none against the woman. Violence by men against women is always wrong, I was taught when I was raised, almost regardless of provocation. Women could slap a man across the face to demonstrate displeasure, not in self defense against an actual threat; a man was not to respond in any way. I remember that I was quite shocked when I first heard Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger and discovered that the protagonist -- a preacher at that! -- actually killed both his wife and her lover. Yet I think that is a more common standard globally, and the restriction a cultural artifact that is probably fading as we move to emphasize the concept of equality in everything.
Although Wyoming Democrats are mad because Rep. Hageman called Kamala Harris a 'DEI hire,' Hageman said, “If you don’t want people to say she was hired only because she’s a black woman, then maybe Biden shouldn’t have said he was only gonna hire a black woman.”
Kind of a fair point, right? It’s not slandering her to point out that that was the condition her employer clearly stated was his criterion. If diversity hiring were improving things as advertised, people would be proud to be diversity hires. As it is, the chief advocates of the practice are generally outraged if you suggest they are one themselves.
And what happened to those 10 protesters who the police successfully arrested after assaulting police?They're out already--released the SAME DAY. At least some of them. I am not clear whether they all were released, but this is Washington D.C., where the only crime is being a Republican. Some January 6th protesters were held in solitary confinement for over a year before they were even tried.
It seems likely that policing in DC, like prosecuting in NYC and elsewhere, has become a political tool. It was desirable that there be riots on these days, to make Netanyahu look unwelcome within the United States (though he is more popular than many of our own politicians) or to make Republicans look like they were dangerous insurrectionists (though surprisingly few of the 'insurrectionists' brought guns to their 'insurrection').
Coincidentally, police force posture was set to be provocatively weak in the face of those two protests.
On the prosecutorial side, punishment was harsh for the one side and evaporated against the other, to transmit whose rioting is welcomed in the service of the state. The one set of decisions seems likely to have been intentional; the other set inarguably was.
Elon Musk's SpaceX turned a smallbore squabble about an alleged unfair labor practice into a massive assault on the administrative state that could result in the entire enforcement structure of the National Labor Relations Board being declared unconstitutional.
“Kamala Harris in and of herself has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together. They only have six years of public service experience, and I often point out to people, you wouldn’t go into brain surgery and ask for the freshest neurosurgeon out of medical school,” Whitmer said[.]
"Ladies and gentlemen, unlike our opponents, our candidate is a career politician."
Here I thought the prosecutor thing was a dangerous ploy. Or Maybe Whitmer's trying to sabotage Kamala to keep her from being in the way in four years?
Apropos of the last two posts, a Jewish business associate of mine is visiting Asheville next week and wanted to meet up. In case he wanted to meet over a meal, and in case he keeps Kosher, I was trying to see if there are any Kosher restaurants in Asheville. Yelp suggested this one.
I don't know a lot about Kosher, but I do know that shellfish isn't on the list! It turns out there aren't any Kosher restaurants in Asheville, and not many Jews either -- the closest synagogue I know of is actually a Methodist church that loans itself out to them on Saturdays. The very small Jewish population has been around long enough that there's a Jewish section in one of the old segregated cemeteries near Hendersonville, but the population has never grown large. It's no surprise that there are no restaurants that go to the very substantial trouble of maintaining a Kosher kitchen -- you have to have a whole separate kitchen, as well as separate utensils and all the rest -- to cater to such a tiny populace.
However, the Lobster Trap bit reminded me of a joke I read in a book by Isaac Asimov. I no longer have the book, but the joke goes approximately like this:
On the holiday of Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement, a synagogue's congregation sat waiting for their rabbi to turn up. He was late, and later, and still hadn't appeared well into lunchtime. In addition to being hungry, they were very worried that something had happened to him. So they began calling all around town to see if they could locate him or get word of what might have happened to him.
Finally someone reported that he had been seen at a local seafood restaurant. The congregation went to find him, and discovered him eating a big plate of oysters. Looking on in horror, they exclaimed, "Rabbi! Rabbi! How could you do this, on today of all days?"
He looked at them quizzically and replied, "What? There's an 'r' in 'Yom Kippur.'"
“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”Iran, he said, wants to impose “radical Islam” on the world and sees the United States as its greatest enemy because it is “the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power.”He argued that Iran-backed militias like Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, whatever their aggression against Israel, are actually fighting a different war.“Israel is merely a tool,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The main war, the real war, is with America.”
It's definitely true that Iran has been about destroying America from its beginning, and that it aspires to turn the whole world to its brand of Twelver Shi'ite Islam, which can reasonably be described as a radical position within Islam (both Twelver Shi'ite views and the view that the entire world needs to be brought under that particular strain; the view that the whole world should convert to Islam is not especially radical, any more than the view among Christians that every person will someday confess the divinity of Christ).
Normally, in American politics at least, the other side would attempt to rebut such a central claim. Not this time! This time they pulled down the American flags off Union Station's poles and burned them, ran up the flag of Palestine, carried the black flag of ISIS with signs stating that Allah was bringing about "the final solution" (supposedly while protesting against 'genocide'), burned effigies of both Netanyahu and Biden, attacked the police perimeter around the Capitol while successfully storming the Capitol (remember how fighting the Capitol Police and storming the Capitol on J6 was portrayed as an insurrection against America itself?), vandalized every American monument nearby and generally did all they could to underline the same point.
So ok, maybe there's some reasonable argument to make that things would calm down if there was a ceasefire in the war -- at least for a while, until Hamas rearmed and was ready to start the war back up again on its own terms. There isn't, apparently, any real debate that the side Israel is fighting is also an enemy of America. They themselves would like you to know that, would like to demonstrate it as clearly as they can.
Helping your friends and harming your enemies was the account of justice that Plato's Republic attempted to rebut. However, one of the key rebuttals was that you might be mistaken about who your enemies are. At least in this case, it's hard to believe there's any mistake.
UPDATE: NPR: Protests “Largely Peaceful.”
... “In 2003, a district attorney in San Francisco named Terence Hallinan was investigating Mayor Willie Brown’s friends. He was also investigating the priest scandal of sexual abuse in San Francisco, and that touched some very powerful institutions, including an elite prep school that involved the Gettys, Gov. Jerry Brown, etc. Their involvement with that school.”......“The priestly abuse scandal that was taking place, she never prosecuted a single case, Sean,” Schweizer added. “Of the 50 largest cities in America, San Francisco was the only one that that didn’t prosecute a single case, and she covered it up by deep-sixing documents that her predecessor had obtained.
[W]e humans can't possibly understand God's ways. A worm understands more about your 401(k) investment strategy, than we understand about God's plan. To an unborn child, birth is a catastrophe, the end of everything he knows; but to us, we know that it's the start of something far greater, and the end of something that could not possibly go on any longer.I would be very, very cautious about seeing "the hand of God" in anything other than your own life (and even that, mostly in retrospect). God is never doing just one thing, and further is primarily concerned with the salvation of individual souls rather than anything else.
"It's really hopeless" is not a happy claim, but it could be true without being happy. But it may not be functional even if it is true, as Kant said of determinism: even if you decide to believe that you have no free will and everything is determined by physics, the choice to make that decision about what to believe seems to be a free choice. You can't really function as someone who believes in determinism; every day you experience choices that you seem to make and need to reason about (e.g. 'should I have donuts for lunch, or something healthier?' doesn't seem to be deterministic; even if Krispy Kreme just opened across the street and makes donuts right at your lunchtime, it seems like you can at least occasionally decide to eat something else). Students and teachers like Nicholas of Cusa have gone a long way down this path of showing that God's infinity makes him fundamentally unknowable; I myself doubt whether infinity is a proper metaphor, because it seems to be a feature of creation rather than the uncreated. Still, many of Nicholas' basic points hold even if you say that infinity isn't a large enough concept, so to speak.
Fortunately, you have another road you can choose, which is scripture. This seems to be the source of Janet's claim that God is principally interested in saving souls: it's not reasoned from nature, as we can't even prove the existence of souls from nature. Scripture provides a number of positive claims about God. For example, the prophecy of Ezekiel provides an extremely mysterious account of the chariot of God that Moses Maimonides wrote a book about interpreting. Such interpretations do tend to suggest that God takes sides for reasons of his own, as with Moses; we still may not always understand these reasons, as when he orders Joshua to engage in what seems like wholesale genocide. Sometimes people doubt at least some of the scriptures' authenticity, especially when it seems like an argument that God took one group's side over the other's; the scripture really does seem to say that, but it's out of order of deductions like those that begin the Declaration of Independence, i.e. that God loves everybody equally.
For Christians, scripture also includes an apparently easier path: Jesus as intermediary personhood, whom you can relate to directly as one human being to another (fully man and fully god, somehow). This point is raised by Tex; yet of course Jesus is not merely man, though fully man, and by nature exceptional and extraordinary, and thus a model that can't be expected to hold for the ordinary and normal.
Still, it's attractive because then the path is not necessarily much harder than developing a relationship with another person, except that you only get to meet the person through scripture or as you imagine interactions through prayer. However, then you have the same problem as the mystic, who approaches God and knowledge of god through meditation: how much of what you are 'finding out about God' really is your imagination rather than a genuine encounter with the divine? I'm reminded of a favorite quote from the movie Ladyhawke, wherein the thief says to the knight, "Sir I talk to God all the time, and the truth is he never mentioned you." Yet at least in the movie, the thief was just trying to avoid an arduous and scary duty that really did lead to what the author depicts as prophecy and divine justice.
You can try to test your imagination or meditations also against scripture, of course, to see that you're not getting too far astray. But we also have scriptural interactions with God the Father in the Old Testament, especially in the Book of Job. Job is actually full of a set of claims about God that I would say are characteristic of another major approach to theology, which is negative theology. Job, upset about all the misery inflicted upon him even though he has tried to live a just and faithful life, is confronted with evidence of things God is not: specifically, God does not share Job's limitations. Job can't hang the stars in the sky, or set the firmament on its foundations. We aren't really told anything about how God can do those things, so we don't really know much more about him: but we do know that there are ways in which God is different from us, and these are ways in which he lacks our limitations and instead possesses great powers.
Job contains at least one passage, though, that suggests yet another approach to God. I have written before on several occasions about its description of the horse:
Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.This is an interesting passage, though: because horses are like that, but only if men make them so. By pure nature, a horse will avoid any danger, and is scared like a grasshopper -- or of a grasshopper. The Lord's point in speaking to Job, if Job were the kind of man who could understand it, was that this is indeed what men do with horses.
Given the lack of an adequate response from Biden administration officials and the public’s growing mistrust of the Biden FBI and Department of Homeland Security, people are looking at the timeline of the assassination attempt and drawing their own conclusions.Look at what's happening in the polls as more and more people conclude these people are lying to us 24/7/365.
But what about Corey Comperatore, a loving and devoted husband, father, and public servant? Was it God's plan for him to die?For every person who is saved from cancer by the power of prayer, there are thousands for whom those prayers are never answered. When we were in Cambodia, I witnessed more than the horrific effects of human trafficking. We visited some of the Killing Fields....
When my grandmother was buried, child me asked why anyone would fear God, as the scripture said. I know now. God getting involved is terrifying.
People say to pray for the nation. I’m not the sort to say things like that. But I am praying.
The Pagan's MC are accusing the cops of excessive force, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution after a confrontation in a bar suddenly degenerated into violence caused by cops who had been drinking for hours.
Maybe all this secret police stuff is not befitting of a free society.
...at the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, per @DanScavino via @cdrsalamander (I don't seem able to post X videos):
https://x.com/DanScavino/status/1813067403703820757
BZ, indeed.
Eric Hines
Cities have used rent control for decades as a way to keep renters from experiencing the price signals of bad policies enacted by local and state politicians, and it's been a disaster without escape all along.Prices are the balance between supply and demand.You can lower demand by creating alternatives. You can raise supply by removing obstacles to the natural tendency for supply to flow in wherever prices are rising. But a sure way to crash supply is to react to high prices by capping them in order to pander to voters who are deserting you in droves. It's an especially unsavory form of pandering when the price shocks your voters are experiencing result from your own boneheaded economic policy, but President Unity likely couldn't have understood economic principles even in what passed for his cognitive prime."Affordable" housing is meaningless if it's unavailable at the state-mandated price, just like "affordable" healthcare.
A volunteer firefighter died saving his family from the shots fired by Trump’s would-be assassin.
Here is their major citation, which unlike the Journal is not behind a paywall.
Earlier that afternoon, before the shooting that left two people dead including the gunman, I asked an 11-year-old: “Is this your first Trump rally?”
“Yeah,” he smiled, “but it’s not going to be my last.”
Caution is in order when such shocking news breaks quickly. But the immediate response from some of the nation’s most biggest news outlets wasn’t cautious; it was unserious. An early Washington Post headline already subject to ridicule on Twitter by 6:33 p.m. declared “Trump taken away after loud noises at rally.” Minutes earlier, a CNN headline had announced, “Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally.” Reason magazine’s Billy Binion tweeted that “using cautious phrasing before all the information is known is good, actually.” Yes, it is, but “loud noises” and “Trump…falls at rally” plumb depths of journalistic malpractice unfathomed even by such earlier CNN and Washington Post absurdities as “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests” and “austere religious scholar.” The “cautious” way to report the story would be to refer to “apparent” or “possible” shots or an assassination attempt. Many phrases could have been appropriate, but not “loud noises” or “falls at rally.”
Trump yelling 'Fight, fight," after getting grazed by a bullet in the ear, an inch from ending his life.
No panic. No crawling on his knees to safety. The man stands up, faces the crowd, and yells 'fight.'I suppose they'll find a way to construe that as a criminal incitement to riot again.
