King Sockpuppet Has A Point

Glen Greenwald writes:

Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former first lady, two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and current establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.... Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats, nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of Hillary Clinton.

Try setting up a 501(c)3 with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in the name, though, and see what happens.

Or, you know, try giving money to an existing one.

(I suppose it's been long enough that we might consider letting Greenwald walk from the sockpuppet thing, but it's still what I think of every time I see his name.)

What Wrong Looks Like

Nick Palmisciano finds his picture used by the Army as a bad example:

I think they've got you fair and square on this one, Nick.



(Not entirely safe for work.)

Enemy of the State

The odyssey of a cake baker.

Appreciating the Effort

A "liberal sociologist," also known as a "sociologist," spent 5 years in what the article describes as "Trump's America." She was actually trying to find the Tea Party's America, but this was back before the Obama IRS did its best to prevent any actual grassroots Tea Party groups from forming. As a consequence, the Tea Party groups that formed were just fronts for establishment Republicans like Karl Rove, and the popular movement became even more hostile to Washington.

Thus, Trump, the only figure in either party's race who was clearly not a part of anyone's establishment. Whatever bad things can be said about him, that much at least is true.

Here are some of her conclusions. On overall motivation:

They feel their cultural beliefs are denigrated by the culture at large. They feel that they’re seen as rednecks, that they live in a region that’s being discredited. Many of them are deeply devout, but they see the culture at large becoming more secular. And then they see economically that this trapdoor that used to only affect black people and people one class below them is now opening and gobbling up them and their children too. So altogether it makes them feel like a forgotten tribe. “Strangers in their own land” is a phrase that kept recurring to me as I spent time there.

And the main point is that they feel the government, the federal government, has been an instrument of their marginalization. If you give it an arm, it’ll take a leg....

On what she calls "deep story":

Think of people waiting in a long line that stretches up a hill. And at the top of that is the American dream. And the people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their best, and were waiting for something they deserved. And this line is increasingly not moving, or moving more slowly [i.e., as the economy stalls].

Then they see people cutting ahead of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public-sector workers. And even an oil-drenched brown pelican getting priority. In their view, people are cutting ahead unfairly. And then in this narrative, there is Barack Obama, to the side, the line supervisor who seems to be waving these people (and the pelican) ahead. So the government seemed to be on the side of the people who were cutting in line and pushing the people in line back.

On hard work and social class:

Another thing, a lot of the people I talked to were doing really well now — but they had grown up in poverty, or their parents had, they’d struggled hard, and they’d worked hard. They were also white men, and they felt that there was no cultural sympathy for them, in fact there was a tendency to blame the categories of whiteness and maleness. I came to realize that there is a whole sector of society in which the privilege of whiteness and maleness didn’t really trickle down. And I think we have grown highly insensitive to that fact.

I think she puts too much emphasis on race, but she says that someone like me would think that. In any case, it's nice that she actually wanted to know what people like us think about things.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a less generous take on her book.

Firm Founded by Clinton Chair Reps Corrupt Serbian Oligarch’s Business Interests

Here is the second big Free Beacon story:

A lobbying firm founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and run by one of her top fundraisers represents the business interests of a Serbian oligarch accused by U.S. and Serbian authorities of widespread corruption, public records show.

Since 2013, the Podesta Group has represented two companies run by Miroslav Miskovic, a Serbian billionaire recently convicted of tax evasion charges stemming from a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme....

A diplomatic cable sent to the State Department by the U.S. ambassador to Serbia in 2007 recommended that Miskovic be denied entry to the United States due to his involvement in corrupt business practices.... “We now have solid [evidence] that Miskovic was the beneficiary of egregious political corruption, which has had a serious adverse effect on U.S. national interests, … namely the stability of democratic institutions and U.S. foreign assistance goals,” according to the cable, which was posted online by the group WikiLeaks.

It recommended employing a presidential proclamation designed to combat corruption to preemptively deny Miskovic a U.S. visa “so that he does not derive the further benefit of access to the U.S. from his pillaging of Serbia.”

Read the rest.

How Much Did Beijing Give the Clinton Foundation?

The Washington Free Beacon is on a roll. Story #1: Clinton turned in a Chinese defector to aid Beijing. The case was known, but apparently her story about it was -- as usual -- false.

Earlier, Clinton said during remarks to Chatham House, a British think tank, that Wang “did not fit any of the categories for the United States giving him asylum.” She said he “had a record of corruption, of thuggishness, brutality” and was “an enforcer for Bo Xilai.”

But a State Department document from 2010 contradicts her assertion. The document, labeled “secret,” outlines in detail how officials at U.S. diplomatic outposts should handle foreign nationals who seek to defect. The foreign nationals are called “walk-ins” and can provide valuable intelligence.

“Walk-ins (1) may be sources of invaluable intelligence; (2) pose numerous security challenges; and (3) may need protection,”states the cable, made public by Wikileaks. “Improper handling of walk-ins can put them and post personnel at risk and result in the loss of important intelligence.”

The document lists all categories of potential defectors expected as walk-ins, including “members of the national police and the military,” as well as “political party officials.”

Wang held several senior positions in Chongqing, including deputy Communist Party chief; deputy chief, party chief, and head of Chongqing police, and vice mayor.

Instead of asylum, Clinton could have helped Wang by authorizing “temporary refuge” at the consulate, but that option also was rejected.

He Did Say He Was Going to Pivot to Asia

Having lost America's position in the northern Middle East to Russia and Iran, the Obama administration appears to be losing the Philippines to China.

Obama's framing of Duterte's drug war as a human rights problem, which it doubtless is, missed a key dimension. The drug war is the symptom of a national security problem: the narco invasion of the Philippines. The killings are a result and not the cause in themselves of the problem. And now that the diplomatic breach has opened the door to Chinese subversion on an unprecedented scale with incalculable consequences to regional security it is likely to get worse.

The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide. If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars, preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China would you have believed it? If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain would you not have laughed?

He has been very consistent.

I Doubt the Quality of This Advice

When the New York Times is willing to publish an op-ed partially entitled, "Save the Republican Party," you can guess what the second part of the headline is.

Editorial Understatement Award

The IBT conveys a judgment:

"ISIS has a poor record when it comes to women's rights, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report."

Nessie

It's unclear whether the Loch Ness Monster still exists, but once upon a time it did. Scotland is finally devoting some resources to researching its native sea monster, some fifty years after its discovery.

The Perfect Story for the Hall

Combining several recent themes, goose hunters in Iceland recovered a 9th century Viking sword.

We can all take the rest of the day off.

Diversity is Good, Right?

War History: "The American WWII Ace Who Shot Down 7 German, 1 Italian, 1 Japanese, And 1 American Plane!"

What I love about the story is that, instead of courtmartialing him and stripping him of flight status, they just put an American flag kill mark on his plane next to all the others.

Vox on 'the Clinton rules' that cause the media to treat Hillary Clinton so unfairly:

[T]he more power a person wants in our republic, the more voters should know about her or him. But it's also an essential frame for thinking about the long-toxic relationship between the Clintons and the media, why the coverage of Hillary Clinton differs from coverage of other candidates for the presidency, and whether that difference encourages distortions that will ultimately affect the presidential race.

RCP, on the media having a rare interaction with Clinton:

Clinton, under pressure for not holding a press conference for nearly 280 days, was peppered with questions like, "How was your Labor Day weekend?" Another question: "Are you ready?"

"Do you have a Labor Day message?" one reporter asked.

"I do, you'll hear it," Clinton answered. "I definitely, I definitely do. If you want more happy Labor Days, you know who to vote for."

"Thanks, I'll come back later," Clinton said as she exited the cabin that holds the press.

Later, you know, like maybe in mid-November.

The Alt-Right at Chicago Boyz

They have a post wrestling with the term, and what they think the evidence behind the movement looks like.

There is a predictably long comments section, featuring some names you'll recognize.

G20 in Hangzhou

I spent a lot of time in Hangzhou around the turn of the century. This report from the Guardian sounds perfectly plausible to me. China of course has no real property rights, and if they want to show up and bulldoze your building to expand a road (or otherwise for 'the common good'), well, you're just out of luck. You can live in the rubble until you find something better, maybe. So, yes, I'm completely prepared to believe that the Communist Party forced a third of the city's residents to leave for the week.

The article's pictures don't show the pretty parts of Hangzhou, though, just the post-Commie industrial architecture. Hangzhou was a capital during the Southern Song dyansty, and is full of temples and statuary around the beautiful West Lake (Xi Hu). We used to climb Precious Stone Hill and overlook the lake frequently, or take hikes in the tea country near the Dragon Well.

Unfortunately, the massive air pollution from the coal plants that power the city have done a great deal to harm the city's beauty (as well as the health of anyone living there). Still, you can get the sense that it was once very lovely, and almost is still.

Google has many better images of the place. If anything, this collection errs in the other direction. I noticed when I lived there that I had carefully cropped out all the huge piles of trash and rubble from my pictures, all the ugly stuff of Communism, to try to capture just the beautiful things. I went around and took a bunch of photos of that awful stuff as well, so that I wouldn't forget what the city was really like. It is beautiful, almost, in places. But that beauty exists beside incredible ugliness and damage. Parts of Hangzhou looked worse than Baghdad, as even a war in a merely socialist state cannot do damage like peace in a fully Communist one. Such a government destroys merely by its ordinary existence, both directly and indirectly. Unfree to hold any part of it as their own, the people finally give up caring about it.

Trump Supporters

Salena Zito spent some time in Pennsylvania to learn about Trump supporters first hand.

It's a good piece. Here are some excerpts:

In interview after interview in all corners of the state, I've found that Trump's support across the ideological spectrum remains strong. Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who have not voted in presidential elections for years — they have not wavered in their support.

Two components of these voters' answers and profiles remain consistent: They are middle-class, and they do not live in a big city....

While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you'll always find one or two who make race the issue) but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power.

Not power in the way that Washington or Wall Street board rooms view power, but power in the sense that these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile ...

These are voters who are intellectually offended watching the Affordable Care Act crumble because they warned six years ago that it was an unworkable government overreach. They are the same people who wonder why President Obama has not taken a break from a week of golfing to address the devastating floods in Louisiana. (As one woman told me, “It appears as if he only makes statements during tragedies if there is political gain attached.”)

Voice such a remark, and you risk being labeled a racist in many parts of America. ...

It is no surprise that white identity politics is, if not rising, as least more visible today. The Progressives, especially the culture warriors, have been using identity politics as a political arsenal for decades. At some point, it was probably inevitable that some whites would surrender to the Progressive agenda and embrace identity politics themselves.

That said, I think the vast majority of Trump supporters are not thinking about "white identity" themselves, but are concerned about the racism that's been used against them for the last couple of generations, and which seems to be getting worse. That's a legitimate concern, and no one needs to adopt white identity politics to address that.

Zito's claims make sense to me: Trump support is in large part about being on the losing-but-right side in the culture wars, and it's about the unjust economic consequences of that for the future. She notes that Trump supporters themselves are more likely to be employed and solidly middle class; it is their children and grandchildren they fear for.

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.'