Kyl Back to Senate
McCain's term will be finished by his old colleague John Kyl, another 'grand bargain on immigration' guy. Even in 2007, when that article was written, his voters were incensed about the issue. I don't get the sense that the Republican electorate has grown more accepting in the ensuing decade.
Conversational Old Norse
Phrases you can use with friends and family, from our favorite cowboy scholar.
Senescence Affects Ideas
The WSJ has an article today describing our left's ideas as 'exhausted.'
Both items h/t Wretchard.
This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one....Spengler writes that last week's funeral for John McCain was really a funeral held by members of his elite class for the world they thought they lived in. That world, above all, they mourn.
Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.
Both items h/t Wretchard.
Responses to Tyranny from America's Geniuses of Vienna
Three of the great minds of the last century, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek, all wrote pieces on how to respond to tyranny if it ever came to the West. The Economist has a helpful survey of their ideas.
Hayek and Popper were friends but not close to Schumpeter. The men did not co-operate. Nonetheless a division of labour emerged. Popper sought to blow up the intellectual foundations of totalitarianism and explain how to think freely. Hayek set out to demonstrate that, to be safe, economic and political power must be diffuse. Schumpeter provided a new metaphor for describing the energy of a market economy: creative destruction.These are ideas that are well worth considering at length.
Politics as Usual
The funeral of Senator John McCain was a festival of anti-Trump rhetoric, in spite of the fact that some Trump family members were in attendance. Well, that's doubtless just what McCain would have wanted. However, there is a footnote to this story that is worth knowing.
NPR: School Shootings Overestimated by at least 2/3rds
An unexpected but appreciated attempt at real journalism.
This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.It's as if the government bureaucracies can't be trusted to tell citizens the truth.
But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened.... We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents[.]
I Have Returned
The trip to the Swamp was eventful, but I am still thankful to return to the mountain. Yesterday I crossed three great rivers as well as three states, the long Shenandoah valley, and several high mountain passes to get here. It is good to be back.
BB: Feelings Acceptable as Answers on Math Tests
“Any emotion, feeling, statement, or catchphrase is an acceptable answer to most of the problems in the new mathematics standards,” a Common Core representative told reporters. “As long as students are being sincere, genuine, authentic, and true to themselves at the time they are answering the question, that’s all we can ask as educators.”
The Righteous Punishment of the Sun
I am enduring it, having left my mountain fastness for another trip to the Swamp. I’ll be back when I return to places where it is cool enough to think. That will probably be this weekend.
Colloquialisms and Racism
Cross-posted from my blog.
Ron DeSantis, Republican candidate for Governor of Florida,
suggested in an interview shortly after his nomination, that his just-nominated
Progressive-Democrat opponent, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, would, if
elected, monkey up the Florida economy.
Oh, the hue and cry from the Progressive-Democrats, the NLMSM, and Gillum. A colloquialism that plainly
means to mess with things, or to mess things up, suddenly is a racist bull horn—much
more than a dog whistle according to Gillum.
How can this be? One
candidate says another candidate will mess things up, and this is racist!?
Oh, wait—Gillum is black.
Notice that. Gillum
isn't a political candidate who happens to be a black man; he's a black man who
happens to be a political candidate.
Americans for generations have worked hard to make race
irrelevant. All men are created equal, equal
employment, Martin Luther King's dream, and on and on.
But not anymore. The
Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and the Left in general insist that what's
important here is the man's race, not his policies. It's his race that gives meaning to the
colloquialism, not his policies.
This emphasis by the Progressive-Democrat, his Party, and
the Left in general on race is rank racist bigotry. That it's wholly artificial, done by
politicians solely for personal political gain and by pseudo-journalists solely
for click bait makes their racism even worse.
Gillum's cynically artificial racism should disqualify him
from public office.
Eric Hines
Update: I have no sense of time. I wrote this for my blog and scheduled it for tomorrow's posting there. Yet, here it is today in the Hall....
Bravo Sierra
This discussion of "b******* jobs" is very interesting, even though the move to support UBI as an answer is less so. I have definitely noticed this phenomenon, and it does seem to violate the logic of capitalism. Yet it seems to be growing, not shrinking.
FEMA insanity
The Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece today on one of my favorite subjects, the barking madness that is our federal emergency management jurisprudence:
Hurricane Harvey shows what can go wrong. It lumbered through Texas, unloading 5 feet of rain, one year ago. Yet 8% of survivors have not returned to their homes, as per a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study. Some low-income families had their aid requests denied by FEMA because of “insufficient damage” to their homes. But FEMA also denied aid to homes with roofs blown off or mold creeping up the walls.
A plausible explanation for at least part of the discrepancy is that FEMA’s comparatively strict aid policies are in conflict with Texas’ minimal housing regulations. FEMA aims to restore property to “safe and sanitary” condition while being careful not to make “improvements or additions to the pre-disaster condition.” At the same time, Texas allows families to build their homes to a lower standard than what FEMA considers “safe and sanitary.” In other words, a house can be good enough for Texas but not for FEMA. Consequently, the only way FEMA can rebuild it to the “safe and sanitary” standard is by contradicting the “no improvements” rule.Pro-regulatory do-gooders will respond by suggesting that benighted Texas should ramp up its housing standards. Here's what I would prefer: amend the FEMA rules so that federal emergency aid is available to return houses to FEMA's standard of "safe and sanitary," or the local code-mandated standard of "safe and sanitary," or the home's pre-existing condition, whichever is least. Even a bureaucracy need not tie itself up in this kind of Catch 22 unless it's plain bloody-minded.
Adventures of a Sock Puppet
Glenn Greenwald gets profiled in the New Yorker. This is a great line:
Leading American progressives—speaking off the record, and apologizing for what they describe as cowardice—call Greenwald a bully and a troll.
Dump on the English time
For all you Scots out there, Netflix is going to tackle the Bruce.
And so all you Irish won't feel left out:
Plenty o'mud and blood for all from looks of them.
And so all you Irish won't feel left out:
Plenty o'mud and blood for all from looks of them.
Requiescat in Pace, John McCain
Far from perfect, and a man with whom I have regularly had differences on most serious matters, all the same John McCain was a man who spoke his honest mind and had the good of the Republic in his heart. He may have been wrong at times about how to pursue it; perhaps so are we all. I am glad that his suffering is at an end, and wish the best to his family. Honor and respect to a worthy man, whom I will remember for his service especially as a Prisoner of War, but whom I prefer to remember for his good humor.
Viking Ring Fortress Update
Four years after its discovery, a Viking ring fortress has begun to offer some answers to archaeologists. First, why was it built at all? Originally, they had theorized it was as a show of force, to deter attacks rather than to actually repel them. Now, they think there was an immediate threat in the area -- other Vikings.
And so fortresses were established right across the kingdom. They was a coastal defence: Rather than being Viking fortresses, they were actually “anti-Viking” fortresses.It's an interesting story.
It was this hypothesis that led us to discover Borgring.
It suggested that Harold Bluetooth must also have had a fortress to protect the east coast of the country, which turned out to be the case.
What we couldn’t explain was, how exactly the fortresses were used as a defence. And this is where the discoveries made at Borgring can shed some new light.
With this in mind, we can propose a new explanation for the fortresses, and a more direct connection between Harold Bluetooth’s fight on the southern borders and his need for coastal defences in the rest of the country.
The excavations at Borgring have revealed a fortress built to the same design as Trelleborg and the other ring fortresses. We also see that the fortifications were well planned and completed swiftly.
The landscape was levelled, and the walls were built in a precise circle, with gently sloping sides inside the fortress. The interior is divided into even sections, with four wooden gates placed at exactly 90 degrees to each other.
But then… nothing.
There’s no sign of repairs or extensions to the walls, there are only feeble traces of wooden constructions, which could have supported a high wall, and unlike Trelleborg, Fyrkat, and Aggersborg, there are no signs of construction in the interior of the fortress.
But there are traces of a damaging fire in numerous places around the fortress, and deep wheel tracks that suggest long-term use by traffic coming in and out.
How can we explain these features? It is possible that the construction was interrupted prematurely, but in this case we might have expected to see more clear traces of the building process, and we wouldn’t expect to see any later activity.
The wheel tracks suggest that Borgring was sufficiently ready for use, even without the construction of actual buildings or dwellings inside.
Looking at the excavation drawings from Trelleborg made in the 1930s, we see that the fortress walls were built up numerous times, with the oldest phase most similar to the walls at Borgring.
And Borgring is not alone: One of the other fortresses, Nonnebakken, does not appear to have any interior buildings either. This suggests, that the primary function of the fortresses was not to house a permanent settlement, but to allow people to flee there for short periods of time.
This function as a place for refugees to seek shelter, points to a new and stronger connection between the fortresses and Harold Bluetooth’s was against Otto II....
Placed on top of a fortified wall, it was possible for a poorly armed and untrained person, man or woman, to fight off a well-trained warrior.
If enough people sought refuge in the fortress, then the attackers were unlikely to take it. They could initiate a siege, but time would be against them.
The fortresses offered protection to locals, in the absence of the warriors who had be called up to protect the south. This allowed locals to withstand Viking attacks, and provided Harold Bluetooth with a mobile army that he could deploy to the German border.
Imran Awan Walks
Somehow I don't feel that this trial fully satisfied our need for answers to all of the questions associated with this case.
UPDATE: Just a strange moment in the intersection of courts and politics all around.
UPDATE: Just a strange moment in the intersection of courts and politics all around.
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