Independence, Live and On Time

Theresa May has reportedly made peace with a no-deal Brexit next week.

Satire, or No?

Headline #1: ""The 'Burn It Down' Democrats."

Headline #2: "Candidates Propose Changes To Fix Flaw In Constitution That Allows Republicans To Be Elected."

Black Flag Cut Down

The last ISIS stronghold has fallen.

Troops here are now bringing down the black flags of ISIS. The flags no longer fly over the town, instilling fear.

The last five days, Fox News has witnessed the last major offensive up close -– with U.S.-backed SDF forces attacking ISIS from three sides, pushing the fighters back, house to house, then tent to tent, against the Euphrates River.

Egyptian Iconoclasm

Why do so many statues from ancient Egypt have broken noses?

Gaslighting Success

I've heard this so many times that I actually had come around to believing this story about 'very fine people.'

"Haters"

Facebook might turn on you, warns Joe Bob Briggs.

Multiverse

An article in Forbes argues that the multiverse is inevitably real, given cosmic inflation and quantum physics.

Some Good Kipling, Thanks to James

James mentioned this poem in the "More toxic masculinity" comments. I had never read it before, and it seems fitting for the Hall. It's almost a hundred lines, so I'll put it below the fold.

All American Polka

Shades of Helen, Georgia.



Happy Spring, killers.

UPDATE: If you'd like a live version, here it is.

Genocide Poetry

Headline: "The word 'cowboy' is now equivalent to genocide."





I don't have decent words to reject the foolishness anymore; maybe none of us do. Harder words might follow, or harder acts. In general I prefer violence to discourtesy: one might have adequate reason to kill a man without wishing to insult him.

I guess they don't get that. It's a hard road they're mapping out for themselves.

Equinox

Red flags

I've been following with interest the controversy over Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 aircraft, without being able to make out whether the aircraft or pilot training is the biggest problem.  HotAir's Jazz Shaw published a startling piece this morning reporting that the Lion Air flight that went down last year had narrowly escaped almost exactly the same fate the day before.  They were saved by the coincidental presence in the cockpit of an off-duty co-pilot who correctly diagnosed the problem and told the crew how to disconnect the malfunctioning flight control system.

There must be strong pressures to put the cone of silence over near-misses like this. Still, how would you like to be the guy who didn't speak up, or the guy who squelched his report?

Bad Times at the El Royale

I saw this movie on the recent trip. I found it highly engaging. It is the kind of movie in which a set of secrets are buried at the beginning, and their revelation creates interference patterns with each other. It is also beautifully shot, with an ear for music.

Some of you might enjoy it.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that some might be concerned that the priest character heralds the usual abuse of Catholicism and/or Christianity in the mouth of Hollywood. Without wanting to give away any secrets, I think you may be pleasantly surprised by the handling of that matter.

Objective

A quantum experiment is said to "call into question whether or not there is objective reality."

It doesn't really do that. What it does do is suggest that objective reality may somehow contain two sets of apparently contradictory facts. If so, that is itself an objective fact about reality. It's a confusing one, to be sure; it may well reframe some of our thinking and discussions. However, it still would happen to be an objective description of reality.

"Do you really want to jump? Do you?"

Politico likes to talk about what a great idea it would be for progressives to pack the Supreme Court.  HotAir responds:

Eh, why not? All the cool kids are talking about it for 2021, according to Politico, without any apparent worry about what might happen in 2019 and 2020.

* * *

So why wait on this terrible idea? Let’s do it now. Donald Trump should announce that he has nominated six justices to the Supreme Court to expand it to 15 seats. With a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Mitch McConnell could get them all confirmed by the end of the summer at the latest.

* * *

This is not a Swiftian Modest Proposal-esque satirical suggestion. I’d like to see Trump do it — but not to get those seats added to the Supreme Court. If Trump tries it, Congress would move heaven and earth to block him from succeeding at his court-packing plan, and that would be a bipartisan effort. We’ll have more later on the bipartisan project to curtail the National Emergencies Act after Trump’s border-wall declaration, but this would generation an outrage of an order of multitude higher. Legislation to limit the Supreme Court to nine seats might even pass on unanimous votes, or at least far more than would be needed for a veto override.

Executive emergency

Congress is finally starting to think about whether the problem is that it doesn't like this president or that president, or maybe instead that it should quit handing over its functions to the executive branch with a big red bow tied on them:

The existence of the NEA is inexplicable anyway. Winston Churchill’s observation that “bad kings make for good law” was utterly confounded in 1976 when a Democrat-controlled Congress passed this power usurpation to a Republican president. Gerald Ford had assumed the office two years earlier after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace for having abused the power of his office in numerous ways. One would have assumed under those circumstances that the Congress elected after that fiasco would have special care in preventing further executive abuse, but perhaps only if one was entirely unfamiliar with the impulse of Congress to avoid doing any of its own work.

The Return of Grim

This time, I sought different mountains.

Wyoming is interesting country. I'll be out there more often, I think.

More toxic masculinity

HotAir observes that with this guy, the drinks are on us for the rest of his life.

Smart kids/dumb kids

A Popular Mechanics series sorts through cliches and social prejudices distorting choices in education.  Are liberal arts programs fancy-pantsy hotbeds of sophomoric socialist posturing?  Are votech programs mind-numbing economic dead ends?  Do both sorts of programs bilk unsuspecting parents, students, and taxpayers out of increasingly mountainous piles of tuition that will never be reflected in paychecks?

To judge purely from the lifetime impact on earnings, many of our preconceptions don't pan out.  None of this answers the question whether we should be focusing on more than lifetime earnings, but before families and taxpayers incur big IOUs on higher education strategies, it's at least worth looking at.  I'm no fan of federal regulations in education, but I wouldn't mind seeing schools have to show wage outcome data before they get federal funding.  Pay for your own operations, and you can experiment with whatever academic philosophy suits and your customers.

I really enjoy Popular Mechanics articles.

Communicable violence

A Quillette article about the Christchurch shootings draws a parallel between the printing press and the internet as innovations that ushered in sectarian clashes:

The disruptive nature of the internet has been compared many times to the disruption caused by the printing press. And the frightening realisation one has when making this analogy is that the printing press precipitated hundreds of years of religious warring. We do not yet know what will be the long-term impact of the internet—obviously, it will be both good and bad, and most likely the upside will vastly outweigh the downside—but we must also be prepared for a fragmenting of our societies, and continual fracturing along ideological and tribal lines.

Here at home, I continue my experiment in local politics, relying heavily on the internet for communication. At this week's public meeting the county attorney was inspired to suggest that the County Judge ask the bailiff to restrain me from speaking further. The Judge wisely ignored her and contented himself with bringing debate to a close by the usual procedures and calling a vote.

The controversy was over the "agenda packets" that are distributed to department heads and commissioners in preparation for each meeting. I had proposed that the county should resume the traditional practice of distributing the agenda packets to the press and the public as well, instead of making them file an open-records request and wait until at least two weeks after the meeting.  Even the local paper is taking an interest, which is surprising, given that the editor normally is rather a cheerleader and averse to controversy--but of course, he resents suddenly being denied access to the packets before each meeting. The voters, for the most part, would like to see more transparency, which is of course why they elected me.

I spend a lot of time answering forum comments about how all this procedure is supposed to work.  I explain why, even when I'm disappointed by not winning support for a proposal, the really important thing for me is the freedom to post an item on the agenda and debate it in open session. After that, we decide what we decide, and then the voters evaluate our performance. There's an odd perception that, when an elected official has discretion to control a policy, that means his decision is not subject to scrutiny or comment. Obviously I take a different view.

The presence of the internet makes the scrutiny and comment more immediate and widely accessible. The discussion can get heated and, like all impromptu unmediated public discussion, can veer off-course and demonstrate how disconnected and ill-informed some voters are. Still, they're what we've got. I just plug away at presenting the facts and try not to let even the most outrageous comments lead me into snippiness or sarcasm--no easy feat for me.  Flawed as internet arguments are, I prefer them to an information lockdown.