Thanksgiving Follow-Up

On reflection, this was a tougher year than most for ruining Thanksgiving.

Chivalry and "Non-New-Agey Spirituality"

This site looks at first glance like the least likely place you'd expect to find an essay on the glories of chivalry and masculinity, and yet...

The gallantry of a fully expressed man is without compare, and that fully expressed masculinity becomes attractive rather than threatening when a woman knows that her man would not only lay his coat over a puddle for her, or raise his voice to defend her, but that he’d put his body in front of hers to protect her.

Indeed.

*Snicker*

Google's algorithm has determined that your economic plan is a phishing scam.

He's still better than Clinton.

Riding Weather

Everyone listens to "Alice's Restaurant" on Thanksgiving, and this year is the 50th anniversary -- yeah, really -- of that 18-22 year old song of revolt against being drafted. It's a great song in its way. But it wasn't the only great song to come out of that album.

How Medieval is Thanksgiving?

Not entirely, to be sure!  Turkey is a new world bird:  indeed, I was just talking to a professor last week who was telling me that Syrian refugees in Europe have been turning up their noses at processed turkey sandwiches because the meat is unfamiliar to them, and they can't be sure it is halal.  Chicken is known in the Middle East, and well known, but turkey is still unfamiliar.

All the same, it turns out that the answer is "somewhat."

In other words, the Englishmen who landed in Massachusetts didn’t eat turkey because it was the only local food available. Rather, they’d been quite familiar with it back in England, where it was even common to remove the skin and feathers, cook it and serve it with the feathers replaced, as if it were still living – a standard medieval trick.

The side dishes also date back to Europe, with flavor profiles that are actually medieval in origin.

Take cranberry sauce. In medieval Europe, sour fruit sauce with wild fowl was a popular combination, one that balanced a cold and moist condiment with a hot, dry meat. In the mid-17th century, for example, the famous French chef La Varenne served turkey with raspberries.

But the real connection between Thanksgiving and the medieval feast is in the spices. Although today we use the blanket term “pumpkin spice” to characterize variations of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and ginger (and they show up practically everywhere in cheap artificial form), these flavors were the backbone of medieval cuisine, appearing in a wide array of sweet and savory dishes, from chicken to pasta.

Back then, it simply wasn’t a lavish meal without a riot of spices (which, because they needed to be imported from Asia, were wildly expensive). Today the only one of these spices that stays on the table year-round is pepper. But their pivotal role in Thanksgiving again is a reminder of the tradition’s remote origins.

This Should Be A Fun Holiday

Are you ready to be a horrible pain in everyone's neck this Thanksgiving? If not, don't worry! People are here to help you annoy everyone with whom you were planning to share this moment of family togetherness.

Time's Up in California

Los Angeles passed a measure banning all "high capacity" (i.e., normal capacity) detachable magazines and required citizens to turn them in to police. The sixty day "grace period" during which you would "graciously" be allowed to surrender your private property to the government without compensation has now closed, and the total number of magazines received by police is:

Zero.

Advice Pour Les Francois

"What's zee best?"

They Are Breaking The Law, Though, Right?

Headline: "Clinton promises never to say ‘illegal immigrants’ again."

Against Shooting Parachutists

Yeah, No.

Rich Lowry: "Donald Trump’s appeal is as American as Andrew Jackson."

I missed the part where Donald Trump won a major battle, or a series of small wars, or defended his wife's honor, or indeed showed respect for anyone's honor besides his own. Trump may have some of Jackson's flaws, but I see no sign that he has any of Jackson's substantial virtues.

Drink More Whiskey

At least, that's the advice I glean for America from this review:

Cheever describes local taverns as “the cradle of the revolution.” And through the 18th century, she explains, a steady stream of beer and rum helped to unleash the bravado and defiance necessary to inch toward independence. The patriots who tossed tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773 hadn’t planned on doing so, but they were blasted after hours of drunken scheming. “Perhaps if they had been sober,” Cheever writes, “the night would have been different; they were not sober. They were drunk enough to change history.”

As the American Revolution ignited, “drinking seems to have gone hand in hand with heroism.”

We could use some more of that. You might try Leadslinger's.

Duffel Blog Strikes Again

Veteran student center turned into a "safe space."

“The Veterans Center was a place where they could go where they wouldn’t feel marginalized,” Northeastern President Joseph Aoun said. “It was a state of the art building with padded walls, straightjackets, and doors that locked from the outside. Veterans could attend class online to keep them away from the student body. This would allow veterans to have a safe space and keep them contained for campus safety. Unfortunately, something went wrong.”

Just days after the Veteran Center opened, construction workers were seen entering the building with metal poles and hot tubs. An audit revealed the Northeastern Student Veteran’s Association spent their entire budget sponsoring work visas for Thai women.

“We had several reports of odd purchases,” Northeastern University Police Chief Paddy O’Shea Finnegan said. “Huntington Wine and Spirits reported they were sold out. Clerks at Wollaston’s said guys with short haircuts were buying bananas but warning each other not to eat them.”

Members of the ROTC battalion attempted to enter but were only allowed access if they brought cookies from Stetson East. The cadets left the building wide eyed, with an understanding why officers are taught to be scared of enlisted soldiers.

Police were called to the Veteran Center after shirtless men were seen shooting fireworks off the top of the building.

That sounds about right.

Inshallah We Will Not Be Destroyed

The ISIS intern team opens a Twitter account.

"cultural issues of implication involved in the practice"

Yeah, I don't know what that means, either.  Here's a link to the whole thing, but you're not going to be any more enlightened once you've read it.  The gist of it is that the University of Ottawa decided that yoga classes for disabled students were triggering colonialist cultural appropriation cooties or something. The yoga instructor was trying to be sensitive, so she suggested:

“What do you think about having a class that is just stretching for mental health?” she wrote. “We don’t have to call it yoga (because that’s not really what we are doing, we are just stretching). I think that will work because it would literally change nothing about the class. … I know some people are offended but I am sure we can change it so that everyone feels included.... Now that I am aware that this is a sensitivity, I can just leave all yoga-ness out.”

Not so fast, running dog colonialist person of uncolor. The purge must go deeper than that.

“The higher-ups at the student federation got involved, finally we got an e-mail routed through the student federation basically saying they couldn’t get a French name and nobody wants to do it, so we’re going to cancel it for now....”

This Was Bound To Happen

Turkey has reportedly shot down a Russian jet.

The state of play in the air war over this region has been as follows: Russia dispatched substantial air forces, including their "supermaneuverable" Su-30 air superiority fighters. Now, these are plausibly multi-role fighters, so it wasn't totally odd that they would deploy them against an enemy that had no air force. Still, they were clearly testing Turkish airspace, reportedly locking onto Turkish planes and violating Turkish territory. The Pentagon decided to move a bunch of F-15Cs over to Turkey as a guarantor, since Turkey's aging F-16s are probably overmatched by the Russian jets. These are upgraded F-15s specifically structured for air-to-air combat.

Russia took note of the deployment, which wasn't even plausibly aimed at ISIS but at their own jets, and deployed S-300 missiles in Syria. These are thought capable of taking down anything we've got short of true stealth planes such as the F-22 and F-35. So far we haven't sent any, but it's the next logical phase in the escalation.

So today the Russians lost a bomber, an Su 24 according to their defense ministry. Exactly who shot it down -- ground fire or a Turkish F-16 -- is in dispute, as is the Turks' claim that it violated their airspace.

UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that the Russian pilots survived, but were shot dead by Turkish militia.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Poll: "Majority of Americans Support Sending Congress to Syria."

Whatever Happened to those "Little Platoons"?

A leftist worries aloud that America may be falling into fascism. If only we had those 'little platoons' -- whatever happened to them?

This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems richly earned.

This is also the soil in which fascism grows. As political scientists have demonstrated for more than a century, it is mass society, in which people are disconnected from the "little platoons" beloved of Edmund Burke and the local associations celebrated by Tocqueville, where a strongman can suddenly seem the solution to people's inchoate frustrations with their own lives and the irrelevance of politics.

The irony of this remark is biting until you get just a little deeper into the piece, and he explains his version of this idea.

There was a time in America when poor and working class people did have representative institutions that connected them to civic and political life. They were called labor unions.

Oh, I see. If only we could assign all these people to a labor union that would help organize them 'in their own interest' and align them with correct politics. Mao did that. It wasn't exactly Burke's idea, though.

Quelle Suprise

The fruits begin to come in.

[E]ven some secular French journalists have started writing about a phenomenon that’s become difficult to ignore: an increasingly self-confident Catholicism that combines what might be called a dynamic orthodoxy with a determination to shape French society in ways that contest the status quo—both inside and outside the Church.

On October 30, readers of France’s main center-right newspaper, Le Figaro, woke up to the headline “La révolution silencieuse des catholiques de France.” What followed was a description of how those whom Le Figaro calls France’s néocatholiques have come to the forefront of the nation’s political, cultural, and economic debates. Significantly, the new Catholics’ idea of dialogue isn’t about listening to secular intellectuals and responding by nodding sagely and not saying anything that might offend others. Instead, younger observant Catholics have moved beyond—way, way beyond—what was called the “Catholicism of openness” that dominated post-Vatican II French Catholic life. While the néocatholiques are happy to listen, they also want to debate and even critique reigning secular orthodoxies. For them, discussion isn’t a one-way street. This is a generation of French Catholics who are, as Le Figaro put it, “afraid of nothing.”

Secularism was just a phase.

Good Heavens, No

This headline: "After Paris Attacks, a Political Leader Wants to Bring Back This Medieval Execution for Jihadists."

No, no, no.

The guillotine is not medieval. While there were some predecessor devices that were, the guillotine came to be during a debate of the parliament that produced the French Revolution. Its association with that revolution, and especially its frequent use during the Terror, made it a symbol of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

As a member of the assembly Guillotin mainly directed his attention towards medical reform, and it was on 10 October 1789, during a debate on capital punishment, that he proposed that "the criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism." The "mechanism" was defined as "a machine that beheads painlessly". His proposal appeared in the Royalist periodical, Les Actes des Apôtres.

At that time, beheading in France was typically done by axe or sword, which did not always cause immediate death. Additionally, beheading was reserved for the nobility, while commoners were typically hanged. Dr. Guillotin assumed that if a fair system was established where the only method of capital punishment was death by mechanical decapitation, then the public would feel far more appreciative of their rights.

Despite this proposal, Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty and hoped that a more humane and less painful method of execution would be the first step toward a total abolition of the death penalty. He also hoped that fewer families and children would witness executions, and vowed to make them more private and individualized. It was also his belief that a standard death penalty by decapitation would prevent the cruel and unjust system of the day.

So it was all about reforming the law to eliminate distinctions between classes, about bringing reason and science to bear on social problems, and about reducing the pain and cruelty of the death penalty (with an eye towards its eventual abolition, as France did in 1981). It would be ironically appropriate for the Enlightenment's foremost weapon to be brought to bear against ISIS.