The Power of Innocence

The 2012 movie Snow White and the Huntsman unexpectedly asserted many ancient themes, and first among them was the power of innocence. Within the film, innocence brings with it faith, hope, and charity. Two other Christian themes include the power of evil coming from subversion of good and the redemption of the fallen. Although there is almost no visual Christian presence in the movie, no crosses or other symbols, Snow White does recite the Lord's Prayer early on, which I think shows the writer and / or director were aware of some or all of these themes.

Medieval themes include birds as messengers, the power of blood, the dark and dangerous forest, the importance of a virtuous ruler for the natural phenomenon of a kingdom, and chaste love. That last is also a Christian theme, but here it seemed more medieval in expression to me.

And, of course, the story of Snow White is about the nature of Beauty.

The images of Snow White-as-war-leader in the movie are reminiscent of Joan of Arc. With a quick search, this was the best I could find of Snow White:

Here are two images of Joan of Arc from the website Catholic Saint Medals.

 

 

Another aspect of the movie is that, while she does wear armor and fight, she is not shown as a great warrior. Rather, she is portrayed as a natural leader: Broken, hopeless warriors who have turned to drunkenness, outlawry, or despair, are redeemed by her innocence and her sense of the mission of redeeming their land and people. With her, they are given new hope and faith. She leads, and with the tremendous power of hope and faithfulness she brings, they fight and die to restore their land and themselves.

A New Rallying Point for the Nation: End Geese

Rich Cromwell over at the Federalist claims that "Geese are the worst animals on the planet and we should end them." Here's a taste of the rest:

Winged Sky Trash

Geese, [compared with venomous snakes who serve a purpose], are actually horrible and deserving of hatred and scorn. They’re big, nasty beasts. They serve no purpose, they’re disgusting, and they definitely do not prefer to leave you alone. You don’t even have to pick them up or accidentally step on them to experience their wrath. Yet some people inexplicably like them.

Can a new War on Geese unite Americans?

Cool

Here's a new nanomaterial that blocks visible light, so you don't have to walk around looking naked, but lets infrared radiation pass through, so you stay cooler.  It even wicks moisture.  Next challenge, making it feel nice so someone might actually wear it.  I wish I had some right now: as soon as it gets light I'm about to head out into the breathable soup to take the black dog on a jog.

The end of summer is just coming into sight.  Although it's not what you would call comfortable to run in this, it's no longer asking for heatstroke.  We've even begun planting salad greens for the fall crop.  Fall is right around the corner, marking the beginning of our six-month glorious season.

Nearly 90 lbs. lost, in the neighborhood of 35 to go.  I was really, really fat.  ("Not circus fat, but she gettin' there.")  Now I'm just a bit fat, very close to the high end of medically normal.  It truly is a new life.  Last year at this time I could not have dreamed of jogging.

Okay, the sun is just about riz.  I'm off.

Saturday Night Music

Since we're doing it, try this.



Pair with a bitter -- I like Foster's Oil Can ESB.

UPDATE:

This one's from 1981, the tail end of the big wave of Outlaw Country. It's an instrumental piece, but it hits the right notes. Pair it with an American whiskey.



UPDATE:

How about the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club? You can stand to that good American whiskey for this one too. Good luck in the morning, though.



UPDATE:



This one's for getting sober again, after all the things you did wrong. Somehow you have to get over being lonesome, onery, and mean. I don't know how it works, but some of these old hands might guide you better than I can. I stay pretty ornery, and pretty mean. I have moments when I don't feel very lonely. You pick good people to bring in close, if you want that.

And if you're going to do Waylon Jennings, do this one too:



Cause after all, that was the point at which he started trying to think about 'leaving well enough alone.'

KONGOS for Saturday Night

This is not my usual thing, but I like it. See what you think.

Anybody Ever Lose A Piece of "Sensitive Equipment" In the Military?

Or, for that matter, been involved in any way with a unit that lost a piece of sensitive equipment?

Headline: "FBI: Hillary Clinton Lost Cell Phones with Classified Emails."

How'd that work out for you?

UPDATE: Did you ever try to ship a SIPR computer, say, in the actual mail? What do you think would have happened if you had? What if it got lost?

UPDATE: Wretchard:

What's really astonishing about the Hillary email saga is that we're not talking about the correspondence of the foreign minister of a two bit no account country like Upper Slobovia. We're talking about the Secretary of State of the USA.

Do you have 18 mobile devices? Do you smash them with hammers? Do you mail them somewhere and lose everything? Is it your practice to migrate your emails via Gmail?

She apparently did. How do these people think?

What Clinton told the FBI on Classification

Clinton thought the "C" 'that denoted classified information' had something to do with alphabetical order. (It actually denotes "confidential," not "classified," and specifies a specific level of classification.) How could you make such a mistake? Well, for one thing, the entire document was improperly marked, as were all of the documents in her email containing classified information. All such documents should, in addition to the paragraph markings that are abbreviated, be clearly marked with non-abbreviated classification marks in the header and footer. No document bearing such markings nor even eligible for such markings should ever have been transmitted on an unclassified system.

That is not a defense excusing her mistake (if it was a mistake, and not just a lie to cover her negligence). It is a separate set of offenses. State operated with astonishing laxity in handling these communications. She is responsible for that, as the head of the department in question.

The rest of her defenses, well:

“Clinton stated deliberation over a future drone strike did not give her cause for concern regarding classification,” the notes said.

"Clinton stated she believed no policy or practice existed related to communicating around holidays, and it was often necessary to communicate in code or do the best you can considering the email system you were using."

“Clinton could not give an example of how classification of a document was determined."

“Clinton did not recall receiving any emails she thought should not be on an unclassified system."

One wonders how much Tylenol the FBI agents had to consume during the course of this meeting. Just reading the notes is making my head hurt terribly.

UPDATE: Unexpectedly.

Joe Bob Briggs: We Could Use Some Of Those Burkinis, Please

This is the kind of essay that has fallen out of favor in the last generation, as it's too long for the culture now. These days the rampant takers-of-offense will be so mad after his first few paragraphs, for the once-insouciant but now forbidden 'Married with Children'-style jokes, that they won't get to the serious point at the end. Indeed, the operative theory today seems to be that anyone who would make an offensive joke (let alone a series of them) couldn't have a serious point worth considering.

The serious point is that there's an American heritage of religious life that differs from the French approach, but that he thinks is worth preserving; and that he is willing to take seriously the idea that Muslim women are deserving of a kind of honor for devotion to a holy life.

Jonah Goldberg on the "Core Alt-Right"

Reading Ed Morrissey this evening, I thought this was interesting:

So what does the “core alt-right” represent? “The one thing they all agree on,” Jonah says, “is what they call racial realism, or racialism, which is just a social science sounding term for racism. … the one thing they all agree on is that we need to organize this society on the assumption that white people are genetically superior, or that white culture is inherently superior, and that we should have either state-imposed or culturally-imposed segregation between the races, no race mixing with the lower brown people.”

If you don’t agree with that philosophy — if you’re animated more by border security, national security, and a tougher trade policy — then you’re not really alt-right, Jonah argues. ...

This comes up in a discussion between Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt that Morrissey refers to. The audio is at the link and fairly interesting, if you want to hear the whole thing.

Here's what Goldberg argues we should do:

HH: ... Now does the term alt right get used exclusively in that fashion?

JG: No, which is one of the things that we should be doing, is we should be helping sharpen the distinction, not blur the distinction. I agree with you. There are a lot of people who don’t know what the alt right is. I live in these swamps. I’ve been having these fights for 20 years. I didn’t hear the term alt right until Donald Trump came up. But I know a lot of the people behind the alt right, because I’ve been getting it, they’ve been attacking me and then saying nasty anti-Semitic stuff to me since I started working at National Review. I mean, people are like, the guys at VDARE and these other places, they’ve all coalesced around this idea of the alt right, and it is not a coalitional idea where they want to be part of the conservative movement. It’s that they want to replace the conservative movement.

HH: And they have to be driven out of the Republican Party.

JG: Yes.

HH: I’m speaking as a partisan now. As William F. Buckley led the effort to drive the Birchers out of the party, so must genuine conservatives drive out what you and I agree is the core alt right.

JG: Right.

They both understand the difficulty of doing this, but agree it's what should be done. Beyond the problem of nomenclature, I don't know if it's possible today to do what Buckley did.

What do you think about all this? The nomenclature, what should be done, etc.? I'd be interested to know.

Even For CNN, This is Something

Rarely does CNN engage in censorship to the extent of applying a “blur” to images unless there’s some nudity or a close up of an actual dead body. But this week their sister network, Headline News, finally found an image too objectionable to air. It was a gentleman (identified as a hero) from New Jersey who had saved a toddler from a sweltering hot vehicle. So what required the blur?

He was wearing a Trump 2016 shirt.

Emphasis added. Presumably the image itself wasn't offensive: if he'd been a criminal wearing a Trump t-shirt, I expect it would have passed muster. A hero who saved a toddler from a horrible death, though? We can't have him associated with support of Trump in the public's mind.

The Best Party

I was just adding to my list of reasons to love Iceland, when I remembered actor, comedian, and mayor, Jon Gnarr.

The All-Knowing Wikipedia informs us that:

In late 2009, Gnarr formed the Best Party with a number of other people who had no background in politics, including Einar [Örn Benediktsson]. The Best Party, which is a satirical political party that parodies Icelandic politics and aims to make the life of the citizens more fun, managed a plurality in the 2010 municipal elections in Reykjavík, with the party gaining six out of 15 seats on the Reykjavík City Council (34.7 percent of the vote). Einar, who was second on the party's list behind Jón, won one of the seats on the city council.

Jón ended up defeating the centre-right Independence Party-led municipal government of Hanna Birna Kristjánsdóttir, which came as "a shock" to Icelandic Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir. Jón's victory is widely seen as a backlash against establishment politicians in the wake of Iceland's 2008-2011 financial crisis.

Gnarr won the mayoral race in that election, and I've always wondered whether he actually did add any blathering loons to the Reykjavik zoo. Here's one of the Best Party's political ads, with probably one of the best campaign speeches ever at the end.

Compare & Contrast

Brazil's impeachment scandal involves corruption at high levels, and an attempt to use political clout to protect a favored political ally from prosecution. It looks as if the money involved was bigger than what we're seeing so far with regard to the Clinton Foundation: the Clintons have only managed to raise about half as much money as the Petrobras scandal involves.

Also, Brazil's political structure is sound enough that impeachment is a real possibility.

Advantage Brazil?

Russian MMA

H/t: We Are The Mighty.



It's a pretty good likeness.

Ah, said Turquine, Launcelot, thou art unto me most welcome that ever was knight, for we shall never depart till the one of us be dead. Then they hurtled together as two wild bulls rushing and lashing with their shields and swords, that sometime they fell both over their noses. Thus they fought still two hours and more, and never would have rest, and Sir Turquine gave Sir Launcelot many wounds that all the ground thereas they fought was all bespeckled with blood.

THEN at the last Sir Turquine waxed faint, and gave somewhat aback, and bare his shield low for weariness. That espied Sir Launcelot, and leapt upon him fiercely and gat him by the beaver of his helmet, and plucked him down on his knees, and anon he raced off his helm, and smote his neck in sunder.

Iceland Bows

Iceland has been forced to bow to pressure from elves and uncover a supposedly enchanted elfin rock after highway workers accidentally buried it - infuriating the mythical creatures, reports said on Tuesday. The angry elves were suspected of causing a series of mishaps after the rock was covered over when workers cleared away the debris from a landslide, the Morgunbladid daily reported.

“Hey hey, ho ho, innovation-stifling regulatory regimes have got go!” [sic]

A snarky punk reviews Charles Murray's By the People: Rebuilding Liberty without Permission, and it's not a bad review. If you ignore the snarky punkishness.

Murray spends the first third of his book explaining what’s so wretched about our democracy today. ...

You can all fill in the blanks. Murray's points here would only remind you how doomed we are. Let's get to the good stuff: Answers!

A Republican president and GOP congressional majorities would not set things right. The system is too ingrained, and besides, Murray admits, Republicans are no better than Democrats at constraining government or upholding individual liberties. (This is not an anti-Obama book; Murray sees the current president as symptom, not cause.) Tired of waiting for America to do the right thing, he wants it to do the wrong thing in service of a righteous cause.

How, you ask?

The regulatory state has two related weaknesses, he explains: It relies on voluntary compliance, and its enforcement capabilities are far inferior to its expansive mandate. So he proposes a private legal defense fund — the “Madison Fund,” honoring the father of the Constitution — that businesses and citizens can rely on for representation against federal regulators. By engaging in expensive and time-consuming litigation on behalf of clients that refuse to comply with pointless rules, the fund drains the government’s enforcement resources and eventually undercuts its ambitions. The state can compel submission from an individual or company with the threat of ruinous legal proceedings, Murray writes, “but Goliath cannot afford to make good on that threat against hundreds of Davids.”

Sounds like a good idea. Where's their Kickstarter page?

The review makes it sound interesting. I may read this one, in 2020 or so, after the other million books I've promised to read.

Update: Sic & link to article added. Can't believe I missed that.

Templars

Here's an interesting GoFundMe page.

We want to build a monastery with facilities for training templars in the Word of God and in the meaning of bring a true templar, that they may become Lambs in the church and Lions in the field, and also to train them in other skills of self-preservation as the earlier Templars were trained also to learn to battle in spirit. Once the land is ours we will begin looking into the cost of building. In the first phase we may use just tents for the housing of monks and staff. We ask not just for financial support but your prayers as well.

Help spread the word!

There aren't a lot more details, so I don't even know for sure what denomination they are from -- or if they're very concerned about the question.

Is Perjury Still A Crime?

Is anything, if your name is Clinton?

'Today's disclosure that 30 additional emails about Benghazi were discovered on Hillary Clinton's private server raises additional questions about the more than 30,000 emails she deleted,' Trump campaign Senior Communications Advisor Jason Miller said in a statement.

'Hillary Clinton swore before a federal court and told the American people she handed over all of her work-related emails.'

Special War

You may have noticed an uptick in Russian propaganda efforts targeting the United States and its political process. John R. Schindler reports:

There’s general consensus that the Kremlin’s weaponized propaganda represents a significant component of Russia’s arsenal in the shadow conflict of ideas, information, espionage, and secret warriors that I’ve called Special War.... This is merely an online version of the well-honed Cold War practice of what Kremlin spies term Active Measures, meaning the dissemination of lies and semi-lies at the West for political effect.

There’s really nothing new about this except how the Internet gives such propaganda unprecedented reach, quickly. This is merely an online version of the well-honed Cold War practice of what Kremlin spies term Active Measures, meaning the dissemination of lies and semi-lies at the West for political effect. More properly it’s called disinformation – dezinformatsiya or deza for short among Kremlin insiders — a murky amalgam of fact and sordid fiction.

This has been ongoing throughout the Global War on Terror, or whatever we're now calling it (or, more likely, refusing to call it anything). The former Soviets are trying to do something interesting, and from a position of demographic weakness: they're trying to reassert Russian regional power, while knocking America out of the northern Middle East. They're also trying to portray themselves not as Godless Communists this time, but as the real defenders of Christian civilization against the Islamic tide -- while, at the same time, setting America up as the real enemy of Islam, in the hope that the heat from the various radical Islamic groups will point at us instead of at them.

Their alliance with Iran and burgeoning activity in Syria is kinetic, but a major part of the effort really is this sort of "Special War." The United States has some capacities here: the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (now called the Open Source Center at the CIA), the Broadcasting Board of Governors at the State Department, public diplomacy worldwide, and military information operations and psychological operations. The military especially employs contractors in a supporting role here, so that they can draw on industry expertise -- global strategic information operations are run by the Strategic Command.

Schindler lists some other assets, although a number of those resources are Cold War relics that were disbanded ages ago. Still, we've got assets we could use. The problem is, we're really not in the game. It's for the usual reason. Schindler notes a recently abandoned State Department initiative and asks:

Who killed the Counter-Disinformation Team and why? What did the team produce during the time it existed? What has become of this product? How many people were on it? Does the State Department not consider countering Kremlin disinformation to be in its remit? Does the White House agree? What about the National Security Council? Is anybody in the U.S. government authorized to debunk Putin’s lies – if so, who? If not, why not?

Good questions.

Religious Liberty is a Gift from God

...not an indulgence by the state.

The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to exempt the nuns because it considered their understanding of their own religious beliefs “unconvincing.”

That's just the kind of thing that is going to bring this situation to a head.

UPDATE: It's not just nuns.

Coming to the fore over issues of personal identity, most saliently in relation to the gay-rights movement, same-sex marriage, and transgender rights, it has resulted in a legal battle in which the radioactive charge of “discrimination,” borrowed from the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, is wielded as a weapon to isolate, impugn, and penalize dissenting views held by Americans of faith and informing the conduct of their religious lives.

Jews are hardly the only group at risk from developments in this area of progressive agitation; up till now, its main targets have been believing Christians. Perhaps for that same reason, Jews have also not been in the front ranks of those raising an alarm. Nevertheless, the threat to them, and to the practice of Judaism, especially by Orthodox Jews, is very real. Unlike in the past, the threat comes not from private initiatives; it comes from government.

1,200 Year Old Viking Sword Discovered

This story is a month or so old, but I don't remember seeing the picture before.

While hiking an old mountain trail in Haukeli (on the border of Telemark County, Norway), Goran Olsen was surprised to discover a 1250 year old Viking sword among some rocks near the road when he sat down to rest. The sword was in excellent condition, especially considering its immense age.