Check out the "Trumpmobile." (Note that the owner/builder is an immigrant -- a legal one, from Finland.)
It reminds me of the Johnny Cash tune about the auto worker who 'borrowed' a piece from the factory every day for 20 years, and then tried to build a car out of it. "This is Red Ryder in the pscyhobilly Cadillac."
That's some real Americana.
Jim Webb: "The Promise of President Trump"
I might have titled it "the opportunity for" rather than "the promise of," but my favored candidate for President last year has penned a short piece on some hopes he has for the next few years. First, he hopes to break the hold of the group that thinks of itself as our 'governing class,' in favor of the ideal of Cincinnatus. Second, he would like to see us refocus our affirmative action policies on Americans, rather than using them to 'increase diversity' at the expense of those Americans who are already quite poor.
So far, we have no idea what Trump will actually do as President, but those seem like plausible things to think that he might do. We'll see, soon enough, if they happen.
So far, we have no idea what Trump will actually do as President, but those seem like plausible things to think that he might do. We'll see, soon enough, if they happen.
DB: Obama Touts Legacy of Renaming Wars
When pressed to explain the current military operations against ISIS in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama responded with “I said I ended the wars didn’t I? There’s no more war. What’s going on now is more like ‘kinetic foreign advising.’”
...The Obama administration’s reluctance to call the actions in Iraq against ISIS which have claimed the lives of three US serviceman “combat operations” has angered veterans and the other dozen or so Americans who pay attention to the nation’s continuing wars.
“The third time we took indirect and sniper fire, I asked my squad leader if we’d get our CIBs (Combat Infantryman Badge) yet,” said Army Pvt. Anthony Dunn, “but he just shrugged and said the commander was going to see if we could get a pizza night in the DFAC.”
Taking Up the Colors
Symbolically, the US is broken up into red states and blue states, and if we end up in another Civil War, those may well be the colors of the two major sides.
However, this is very recent, as many of you probably know. Beginning in 1976, red and blue were used on TV broadcasts to differentiate states on election night, but there was no consistency. One network might have the Democrats red and Republicans blue, another the opposite. After the 2000 election, the networks coordinated and began consistently our current color scheme.
I've wondered quite a bit about why the colors sorted out the way they did. Blue is the traditional color for conservative parties, and red is normal for the left. In fact, blue used to be more common to represent the Republican Party because of its Civil War association with the Union. So how did the Republicans end up red?
Honestly, it could well have been just a random thing. According to the All-Knowing Wikipedia, journalist Tim Russert started using the terms "red state" and "blue state" while covering the 2000 election, and it has stuck. Maybe that's all there is to it.
On the other hand, the conspiracy theorist in me whispers that it could have been an intentional thing. If the Democrats were red, it would be too easy to just call them reds. Maybe journalists anticipated this and protected their own.
In any case, each side now has a permanent color to rally to, the beginnings of a flag, semi-permanent colors marking territories on our maps. This seems to have emerged out of a genuine increase in polarization, but at the same time, I wonder if, now commonplace, it doesn't also support that polarization by making what had been abstract and fleeting designations used only on election nights into permanent or semi-permanent representations.
Compared with economics and ideologies and cultures, this is a very small thing, but it makes it easier to imagine us as separate peoples, maybe even separate nations, and imagination has its own kind of power.
However, this is very recent, as many of you probably know. Beginning in 1976, red and blue were used on TV broadcasts to differentiate states on election night, but there was no consistency. One network might have the Democrats red and Republicans blue, another the opposite. After the 2000 election, the networks coordinated and began consistently our current color scheme.
I've wondered quite a bit about why the colors sorted out the way they did. Blue is the traditional color for conservative parties, and red is normal for the left. In fact, blue used to be more common to represent the Republican Party because of its Civil War association with the Union. So how did the Republicans end up red?
Honestly, it could well have been just a random thing. According to the All-Knowing Wikipedia, journalist Tim Russert started using the terms "red state" and "blue state" while covering the 2000 election, and it has stuck. Maybe that's all there is to it.
On the other hand, the conspiracy theorist in me whispers that it could have been an intentional thing. If the Democrats were red, it would be too easy to just call them reds. Maybe journalists anticipated this and protected their own.
In any case, each side now has a permanent color to rally to, the beginnings of a flag, semi-permanent colors marking territories on our maps. This seems to have emerged out of a genuine increase in polarization, but at the same time, I wonder if, now commonplace, it doesn't also support that polarization by making what had been abstract and fleeting designations used only on election nights into permanent or semi-permanent representations.
Compared with economics and ideologies and cultures, this is a very small thing, but it makes it easier to imagine us as separate peoples, maybe even separate nations, and imagination has its own kind of power.
DB: NATO Called 'Obsolete' by Trump, Anyone Who Saw them in Afghanistan
Remarks from President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week calling NATO allies ‘obsolete’ have been labeled completely unprecedented by everyone except the thousands of American soldiers who have fought alongside them in Afghanistan, sources confirmed today.The Coalition soldiers in Iraq in 2007/8/9 included some sharp looking guys, but I don't know that they ever left the wire. The Georgians, who weren't in NATO, did so regularly. Admittedly, they wrecked a lot of Hummers because of their sizable liquor ration, but they were willing to go out.
Oh, That's Brutal
As Devos made her way around a crowd and proceeded to shake hands with the senators who questioned her, she extended her hand to Senator Elizabeth Warren, but the progressive icon and 2020 Democratic frontrunner promptly “waved her off” and left the room.
Warren’s apparent snub was widely criticized on social media by pundits on the political right, who called the move classless and another example of the erosion of proper decorum in Washington...
Upon closer examination, Warren appears to be signaling to DeVos in her native Cherokee.
Agriculture
I thought I recalled that Grim didn't think much of ex-Georgia-governor Sonny Perdue. I was right. Anyway, Trump has picked him for Secretary of Agriculture.
The Intelligence Community vs. Trump?
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist gives a good history of this conflict from the election until this week. At the beginning, she frames it as the intelligence community taking on Trump, but later on she specifies that she is talking about political appointees within that community. The value of the article is its thoroughness (for an article, mind you), so it isn't worth much to excerpt it here.
In my earlier post, Trump Does Counter-Intelligence against the IC?, I asked a couple of questions that trouble me, and for which I have no answers.
In my earlier post, Trump Does Counter-Intelligence against the IC?, I asked a couple of questions that trouble me, and for which I have no answers.
What if we find out the IC in general is partisan? How could a problem like that be solved? These are the folks who have permission to hide information from us and lie to us for our own good, whose job is ideally proper management of information, but who could easily manipulate it for their own purposes, all protected from scrutiny by law.Hemingway narrows the conflict to Obama's political appointees in those agencies, but I'm not sure that's the case, and what if it isn't? Intelligence services are essential, and they do very valuable work. But the people in them go through the same schools and programs our neo-Marxian radicals do, and it is likely that many of them identify with the same socio-cultural elite Trump just defeated.
The Speed of Rubber
Joerg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel demonstrates and explains his full-auto crossbow.
Ha ha ha ha!
Ha ha ha ha!
Tombstone: 2nd A City
So says a town proclamation just issued.
I was hoping they'd explain just why the phrase is so aptly applied, but they didn't. So here's an old post of my own:
I was hoping they'd explain just why the phrase is so aptly applied, but they didn't. So here's an old post of my own:
The phrase "O. K. Corral" has been invoked on the floor of Congress numerous times as an argument in favor of gun control measures that would limit firearms to policemen and officers of the law. If such measures are meant to avoid the O.K. Corral, how to interpret the fact that it was precisely such a law that precipitated it? It was the attempt to enforce Tombstone's gun control law that was the proximate cause of the gunfight. A even worse problem is that the survivors of the losing side got themselves deputized by the Sheriff and went after the town and Federal marshals. A police-officer-only model of gun control would have done nothing to avoid the shootout, or reduce the violence that followed it.
The one thing that did reduce the violence is the very thing that Congress most hates to consider: citizen vigilantes, who informed the participants that any future shootouts had better be conducted outside of town or there would be some hangings. This maneuver was so effective that historians still have trouble deciding exactly what happened in the rest of the war between those factions, as very little of it occurred close enough for nonpartisan witnesses to view.
Stopping Violence Against Women
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the US military is on the job. How? By teaching self-defense.
Offering the classes, utilizing combatives-certified Special Operations personnel, including Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, will raise awareness of domestic violence and sexual assault and give women the skills they need to defend themselves. The classes also provide an opportunity to demonstrate a softer side of the U.S. military.I trust that it's "softer" in the same way that jujitsu is considered a "soft" as opposed to "hard" art. Although it looks like there's a lot of punching and kicking going on, so who knows.
More on "Toxic Masculinity"
In discussing the cartoon in Grim's post This Was An Insult?, both there and in his follow-up Another Look at Ideas on Male Physique, I think something missing is the current SJW assault on traditional masculinity, which they are now calling "toxic masculinity."
Over at PJ Media, Tom Knighton has an article on this topic, Colleges Ramp Up Assault on Masculinity for Spring Semester. He offers some details and links to attempts at colleges to tear down the old masculinity and build a new one. Here is one such:
Over at PJ Media, Tom Knighton has an article on this topic, Colleges Ramp Up Assault on Masculinity for Spring Semester. He offers some details and links to attempts at colleges to tear down the old masculinity and build a new one. Here is one such:
Duke University’s “Men’s Project,” meanwhile, is looking for applicants for a “nine-week long discussion group” that will also “examine the ways we present -- or don’t present -- our masculinities, so we can better understand how masculinity exists on our campus -- often in toxic ways -- and begin the work of unlearning violence.”“We want to explore, dissect, and construct an intersectional understanding of masculinity and maleness, as well as to create destabilized spaces for those with privilege,” a description of the program explains. “Duke is an environment where some are rarely made uncomfortable while others are made to bear the weight of their identities on a daily basis -- we aim to flip that paradigm.”
"destabilized spaces for those with privilege" -- there's an Orwellian euphemism for you. I wonder if it will be held in room 101.
Manning is a Traitor
Manning stole hundreds of thousands of secrets and exposed them to the very same Wikileaks that "Trump is a traitor!" people point to as a known front for Russian intelligence. Manning did it knowing that it would expose our secrets to clear and present enemies -- jihadists who were killing our soldiers and Marines every day. He did this while wearing the uniform, under oath, a soldier deployed at war who was intentionally betraying his brothers in arms.
He should have been shot. He was already treated mercifully by the system by avoiding being tried as the traitor he is.
I will take no talk of "treason" seriously from anyone who celebrates this commutation. They don't understand the concept well enough to discuss it.
He should have been shot. He was already treated mercifully by the system by avoiding being tried as the traitor he is.
I will take no talk of "treason" seriously from anyone who celebrates this commutation. They don't understand the concept well enough to discuss it.
Pushing National Pride to the Limits
Vladimir Putin:
[Trump is] a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world. I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.
Literature & Capitalism
Arts & Letters Daily has two pieces today on the relationship between writing and making a living. The first notes that the complaint that writers want to be paid for what ought to be a work of love goes as far back as Ancient Greece. The author, a professional writer, is not enamored of this view. "Potlatch, like any gift economy, can never be a one-way process; those who receive gifts are indebted, and they are obligated to return the favor in order to save face. If editors and publishers—appealing to love, not money—ask for the gift of free words, then by the logic of the gift those writers can expect a return, with interest."
The second, by a columnist who writes about books, notes that even authors of best-sellers rarely make any money anyway.
The second, by a columnist who writes about books, notes that even authors of best-sellers rarely make any money anyway.
That books still make money at all is something of a miracle. (And to be fair, the vast majority of books don’t make money; publishing, like baseball, is a game predicated on failure.) No market could be less rationalized, or as Strayed puts it, “There’s no other job in the world where you get your master’s degree in that field and you’re like, ‘Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million.’ ”I'm not sure it's true that there's no other job in the world in which the range goes from zero to five million, or even higher yet. Still, it does make it hard to predict the value of the degree you are pursuing -- although, I wonder how much value a degree in writing has in predicting whether you will even produce good writing.
How to be a Roman Patriarch
An article written in the voice of a man nobly born and of worthy service in the Legions. It's intended only as a teaching tool, to introduce you to the idea of what the Roman family was like as an institution. Some of the advice is a terrible fit for modern America, as you would expect. It is especially pronounced in the Roman disdain for females, both wives and girl children.
All the same, I thought the bit about a father's role in raising and educating sons was surprisingly good.
All the same, I thought the bit about a father's role in raising and educating sons was surprisingly good.
A Marker
The AP provides a marker against which to test the upcoming inauguration. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson's inauguration was also challenged by a women's march:
The 1913 women's march, timed to get maximum publicity by coinciding with the inauguration, was not without controversy.Sometimes historical perspective can be helpful.
According to the Library of Congress' American Memory archives, crowds in town for the inauguration — mostly men — surged into the streets and made it difficult for the marchers to pass, forcing them to go single file at times. Women were jeered, tripped, shoved and spat upon, and police did little to assist them or quell the unrest. Some 100 marchers were taken to the hospital with injuries.
The participants included Helen Keller, the deaf and blind political activist and author. She was so unnerved by the disruptions that she was unable to speak later that day at Continental Hall.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson authorized a troop of cavalry to help control the crowd, according to the archives.
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