Unclear on the concept

Sure, free speech is important, says the Chinese TV network, but everything has common-sense limits:

"We believe any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability do not belong to the category of free speech,” the network said.

Thoughts on Ramblin', with Jerry Reed

Atlanta's own Snowman sings a pair of songs on the subject of sowing one's wild oats...



...or not.

Bee Stings

Radical, Far-Right Library Just Has Books, No Drag Queens

The following line alone is worth reading the whole thing for:

... said Xyle Parson while waving a sign that said, "Love Wins and If You Don't Like It You Can Die in a Fire."

Related: 'Love Trumps Hate!' Screams Protester While Beating Republican To Death With A Shovel

Melvin Morris Walks Morris Island

Morris was awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in Vietnam. Morris Island, SC, was where the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment assaulted the Confederate Ft. Wagner, immortalized in the movie Glory.

Is It Still Satire If It Comes True?

The Babylon Bee: "Hillary Clinton Announces She Will Seek Reelection As President Of The United States"

Real life Hillary Clinton: "Maybe there does need to be a rematch. Obviously I could beat him again."

Go away, Hillary. It's already too hard to tell the difference between reality and satire without you adding to it.

Syria, in or out

Jim Carafano makes sense to me:

[B]y the end of Bush’s term, we had put a lot of pressure on al-Qaeda and groups like ISIS. And the threat of transnational terrorism subsided significantly.

President Obama benefited [from that when he] came in office. And about halfway through his first term, he basically kind of decided the war on terror was over. So he pulled the troops out of Iraq. We backed off in a lot of areas, and basically what we saw is, if you think of those scenes where there’s a forest fire and then the fire’s out and everybody leaves and then the sparks flare up and the forest fire kicks in again, that’s exactly what happened.

So we went from a very high level of terror, global terrorist threat, to a low level, to essentially walking away from the problem and see it reignite. And when Trump came back in office, we did a significant job of kind of putting the forest fire out again.

The challenge now is we have to watch the embers. I’m sympathetic of what Sen. Graham says, if we walk away from worrying about transnational terrorism, it’ll definitely come back. Where I would differ is what’s the most efficacious way to do that? …

There’s an argument [of] let’s have American troops everywhere doing everything. There’s a better argument, I think, which the president has made, which is, there are things that we should be doing, there are things that our friends and allies should be doing, and we should all be working at keeping watch to make sure the fire doesn’t come back together.

In the end, that’s more sustainable and will also be more effective. So I’m not sure that Sen. Graham’s right, that the answer is we put American troops everywhere all the time because we’re worried about forest fires.

Crying wolf

There are real dangers out there.  We can't afford to be jumping at shadows instead.

Brothers in Valor Project

The American Battlefield Trust has teamed up with living Medal of Honor recipients to walk Civil War battlefields and discuss their experiences of war. Here are two of the videos.

Punish Your Friends, Help Your Enemies

It's not new that America is an unreliable ally; that's been true forever. America has elections, and sometimes that means that someone with a completely different view becomes head of our foreign policy. Obama viewed Iran as a potential ally, and turned our Middle East policy upside down trying to realize that goal. Trump doesn't think Iran is an ally, and thinks instead that we shouldn't be militarily engaged there on a long-term basis.

So, for at least the third time by my count, he's attempting to withdraw us from Syria.

The decision represents a dramatic reversal for U.S. policy, which in 2015 provided air support for Kurdish militias to retake the critical town of Kobani from Islamic State and has since used Kurdish fighters as ground troops in the campaign to clear Syria of the group.

The shift could cast further doubt on the reliability of the U.S. in the region, in the wake of policy about-faces including walking away from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was painstakingly negotiated with allies who remain committed to the agreement.

Trump defended Monday his desire to end America’s so-called “endless wars,” saying his country would fight only in it’s [s.i.c.] own interest. That sentiment has been welcomed by some, while leaving allies who rely on the U.S. security umbrella feeling nervous and exposed. An increasingly detached U.S. has also allowed rivals including Iran and Russia to pursue more aggressive foreign policies and expand their influence across the Middle East.

The whole American establishment is against this move, which doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good one. The likelihood of a new, lingering war in the region is high. On the other hand, such a war will draw in and drain Turkish, Iranian, and probably Russian resources rather than American ones. If it drives up oil prices, well, that's good for us now that we're a net exporter of oil -- and very bad for China.

'Good for us,' at least, on the national level -- higher gas prices won't be much fun for the individual consumer. That sort of mercantalism seems to be part of the President's worldview. The US is done footing the bills for other people's peace and prosperity. Individual Americans may rise or fall, but "the US" is going to make more profits and pay fewer costs. Maybe it'll trickle down.

I've got to remember this one

Old and busted:  "problematic."  New and hot:  "complex legacies."

For a while it was fashionable to rebut any inconvenient argument by saying "that's been debunked."  Now I think it will be easier, and more sophisticated, to observe that the idea has a complex legacy.  Find me something with a simple legacy instead.  Something pure.  Something this week.

Customer Appreciation Day at the Feed & Seed

As chaos reigns online, especially on Twitter, outside of the DC area there's a fair amount of sanity. Today we stopped in at a local farm supply store, because we noticed an unusually large number of vehicles there as we passed it. It's the sort of place you call a 'Feed & Seed' because those are its bread and butter items: feed for livestock, seeds for planting. There's always a friendly cat or two whose job it is to hunt the mice who'd like to delve into both the feed and the seed. Sometimes there are dogs as well. Wrangler jeans are for sale to one side, as well as work boots and overalls. Everybody knows you if it's the one near your home, and they know what you probably are stopping in for today. My wife keeps the ladies who work there supplied with African violets, which the ladies continue to kill off about as fast as the wife can supply them.

Turns out the large number of folks present was because it was 'customer appreciation day,' which meant a cookout and a bluegrass band. I had a free hamburger with chili, and baked beans on the side. The wife got a hot dog with all the fixin's. We listened to the band for a while, which interspersed its songs with jokes about how lucrative bluegrass band work tends to be. "We make tens of dollars," they bragged. "Joe here is independently filthy."

I talked with an old man about how good the food was at the local Senior center, and how outrageous the prices were elsewhere. He was quite passionate on the subject. Then I bought some two-stroke oil and some birdseed, since we were there anyway.

Here's Waylon Jenning's take on one of the songs the band played. They swapped in one of the local towns for "...all the way to Georgia," which threw my wife off as she was singing along. She was deeply amused by being caught out that way.

Toward a Small, Weak State

Civil liberties can only now exist in such a context:

I used to think there might be some way to erect a legal bulwark between the ravenous state and the vast troves of private data. I now think that is a losing battle, primarily thanks to the too-common eagerness of the firms we entrusted with our intimate information to hand it over to law enforcement without even the formality of a warrant.

So we cannot keep our secrets much longer. But there is still hope. A minimal state where civil liberties are expansively interpreted and scrupulously protected offers the best chance to preserve the sphere of individual liberty. It matters much less if the state knows everything about you when it has no cause and no right to act on that information unless a genuinely serious crime has been committed.

Real freedom means letting the right people call the shots

Free speech is killing us.

I would have linked to the NYT version, but I'm allergic to their site.  I thought you might enjoy the Babylon Bee version more, anyway.

Getting a handle on the numbers

A Streiff article at RedState charts the average compensation for outside directors at the world's largest oil and gas companies.

Burisma is not quite 1/4 the size of the smallest company on this list. The group of smallest companies pays between $285-$330,000 per year for a non-employee director. Hunter Biden was paid $600,000 (at least) for being a board member of a company whose language he did not speak, whose home country he’d never lived in, and which was in an industry about which Hunter Biden was pig-ignorant.... [N]on-employee directors were paid in a combination of cash and stock, often as much as 60% stock. Biden was paid in 100% cash. 

Permit this, forbid that

Since what's permitted and what's forbidden shows no persuasive pattern of effects that actually improve anything, I'm assuming it's largely the Leninist game of who/whom.  James Lileks does a scorching job on crazy California approaches to the kind of social calamities we couldn't possibly interfere with lest we become callous tyrants, versus virtue-signaling bans on every kind of peripheral nonsense you can imagine.

[T]he real issue is the lack of “affordable housing,” by which they mean housing that can be secured by someone with no means of support who is incapable of holding a job, or spends all their money on intoxicants. Since they have no homes with flush toilets, they use the streets. Good liberals with “Resist!” bumperstickers sulk over stories about typhus-ridden fecal deposits, and wish the one-party government would Do Something. Otherwise they will vote out the ideologically interchangeable politicians and put in some other ideologically interchangeable politicians.

In a similar vein, "But Panera cares."

Gandalfa

Amazon is working on a new Tolkien-themed show. Naturally, the demands for a female Gandalf have begun to crop up.

Carrying the water, drinking the water

Glen Reynolds writes on the origin and destiny of the Tea Party.

This week's issue in my county is a desalination plant that's going through the state permit process in nearby Corpus Christi.  There are a few genuinely thorny issues about how to site the plant, but much of the public commentary is starting to sound to me like Reynolds's contrast between makers and takers.  People seem to have no idea where the things they consume come from.  The trees that were felled to make a site for their own home years ago mean nothing, but the next guy is a criminal for altering a pristine landscape to build something new on land his hyper-virtuous neighbors couldn't be bother to buy and keep as a preserve on their own nickel.  Their drinking water comes from an RO plant that treats brackish groundwater, but no evil corporation should be able to build a desalination facility to serve a new industry, though it relies on exactly the same RO technology.  Where do these people send their wastewater?  They neither know nor care.  The other guy's waste is always the issue.

Outdoor Life Reviews

A fellow who says he'd like to be called JRS wrote to ask to have his blog linked, which I've done under 'Other Halls.' It's not a traditional blog, actually, but a website that collects his reviews of various things related to outdoor life. I looked over his knife reviews and they seemed well-ordered. Likely the others are as well, but judge for yourselves.

Flashback to the Old Hall

Continuing the recent tradition in which only the satirical news makes any real sense, "Nation Longs For More Civilized Age When Politicians Settled Disputes With Pistols."

That was an issue when Grim's Hall was young, way back in 2004. The Honorable Zell Miller had expressed regret that duels were no longer legal, which the media -- then as now dishonest -- chose to interpret as him having challenged a man to a duel.

There really is something to be said for a return to duelling [s.i.c. -- apparently in 2004 I didn't know how to spell a word I had nevertheless used many times. -Grim]. Even the reminder of the institution, though, is clarifying. Consider the "Go to Hell, Zell," John Kerry Infant creeper, for those who think that American life isn't sufficiently profane for children. This shirt allows those of a particularly cowardly persuasion to express obscenity without fear of retribution. No reasonable person would take the baby to task (the baby would be just as happy if the creeper said "Vote Bush, 2004," or said nothing and was decorated only with carrot stains). No decent man would engage the parent in front of the child, as anyone bent out of shape enough to dress an infant in such garb would surely cause a scene upsetting to the innocent....

The image of the crossed pistols reminds us that men used to take responsibility for their words -- that the things they said were things they would risk death to defend....

How many times have I had to hear people toss around the words "lie!" or "liar!" in this election? It seems to be the very first line of defense, when anyone says anything you'd rather not believe. Not only do these people hide behind children, they sound like children. They spit deadly insults freely, knowing that they can never be called to account.

The end of the duel may have brought some good effects, but it has also ended the culture of responsibility that went with it. No one is called to account for their slander. That John Kerry of the VVAW is a candidate for the highest office in the land says this as truly as anything.

I'm with Zell. It is a shame that duels are no longer legal. Duels were private wars, and like wars they could be just. Like wars, for all the harm they did, they often did more good. In a world fallen from hope of perfection, that may be the best you can ask.

Like all of us, I was 15 years younger when I wrote that. I am sure I was hotter of head in those days, but I believe the younger Grim was right. "Liar! Liar!" has been replaced with "Traitor! Traitor!," and the hiding behind children is as prominent a feature today as then.

We should return to the duel. It would restore some manners around here, and drive the loud-mouthed cowards out of the places of power and authority they have so long now occupied.

BB-Snopes Feud Continues

Headline: "Snopes Rates the Devil's Lies as 'Mostly True.'"

Satan claimed that eating a particular fruit would not cause anyone to die, but would instead grant them an improved understanding of moral issues. According to Snopes’ assessment, while consuming the fruit has been followed by billions and billions of deaths, those casualties were more of an indirect result, while the part about gaining knowledge of good and evil was generally accurate. They also checked all the lies Satan told Jesus while He was being tempted in the desert and pointed out that he did quote Scripture, albeit out of context, earning the Prince of Darkness another "Mostly True" rating.