Sentence first, verdict afterwards

When even Slate has given up on impeachment, you know it's dire. This article jams in just about every stale metaphor we have to describe a boring exercise: clown car, muddying the question, summer rerun season, miring in a sloppy fight, confusing mishmash, food fight, circus, boxes checked, hoops jumped through. My favorite line, though, is

Compared with the staid and productive fact-finding work conducted by the House Intelligence Committee over the past few weeks, this hearing will almost certainly be a disaster.

"Staid and productive fact-finding work." The author is being kind, but it's also damning with faint praise.

I take it back. My real favorite is the Republican complaint that Nadler plans to give the jury instructions before the evidence. That one's actually good, like the Red Queen declaring "Sentence first--verdict afterwards."

The article also bemoans Nadler's probable unwillingness to improve matters by simply gaveling Republicans into silence.  And maybe his stated intention of wearing a big red clown nose with a kangaroo suit.

Cutting Off One’s Nose...

...to spite one’s face.

Guidestones

Ymar mentioned the Georgia Guidestones in the comments below. There's a bit of a secret about who put them up, although it's almost certainly a collection of university professors -- most of the guidelines are ordinary parts of the sensus communis of the sort of folk who used to teach at major Southern universities. It's a little bit liberal, a little bit anti-government, a lot of 'peace and love and beauty.'

It's a nice motorcycle ride through flat country from Athens, Georgia. There's nowhere to eat and nothing to do anywhere near them, but if the ride is the point -- as it was for me -- it's not the worst way to spend an afternoon, riding out to see them.

Demographics and Philosophical Intuition

What if it doesn't matter who you are?

Top Tier

This may be the highlight of the 2020 campaign, so it's worth noticing: Kamala Harris is out. Whatever eventuates now, at least we will not have a President who has already proven her eagerness to prosecute people while withholding exculpatory evidence.

Many thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, who helped this moment come about. In spite of all the reasons why I can't in good conscience vote for her, she has done a service to her country in bringing this day about.

Swinging for the Fences

Virginia, home of the NRA, has recently elected a solid blue government. Bills are already being filed that intend to impose heavy restrictions on 2nd Amendment rights; dozens of localities have passed 'sanctuary' laws or resolutions that defy proposed enforcement.

This is going to be an interesting year.

"People are Very Concerned"

I'd never heard of Peloton before yesterday, but apparently people hate it.

There are a lot of benefits to exercise besides weight loss. It's basically the best thing you can do for yourself. If you exercise more-or-less daily, with occasional exceptions to rest and heal, you will be happier and healthier across the board. It's not crazy to think that a woman who did so in a disciplined way for a year would feel like her life had been transformed for the better. This is true even though she's thin or whatever to start with.

How much of this is really projected guilt, I wonder, from people who know they should be exercising but are not?

Maybe not a bad trade-off

From Jim Geraghty:

It’s not hard to find analysts, usually Trump-leaning, scoffing and confidently predicting that the Democrats will not pass a single article of impeachment. That scenario is hard to envision. The House not impeaching Trump after all of this would set off a civil war within the Democratic party. That scenario would require 15 House Democrats to quietly and privately go to Nancy Pelosi and tell her they can’t vote for impeachment. Only two House Democrats voted against starting the inquiry. Recall that about ten years ago, a lot of House Democrats voted for Obamacare, knowing it would probably cost them their seats; back then, support for Obamacare was lower than the current support for impeachment, around 40 percent in most polls. When the Democratic party really wants to pass legislation, its leaders can make legislators take votes that will end their careers in order to get something passed.

Dangerous Virtue

Theodore Dalrymple cites a passage by Chesterton in a piece on the London attack.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues . . . The vices are indeed let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

That passage is valuable. Another author, reading Chesterton, commented on the idea. "I had never considered virtues as something potentially dangerous, but that is exactly what Chesterton says is happening."

But of course virtues are potentially dangerous, because virtues are strengths. Strength can help you break chains, but strength also helps you forge them. Worse, if not connected to the virtue of practical wisdom, you may not know whether forging or breaking chains is the better course.

Mission Already Accomplished

Bernie says he wants "population control" as part of his climate agenda.

An audience member asked Sanders about "educating everyone on the need to curb population growth."

"Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth. I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it's crucial to face," the audience member asked. "Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?"

"The answer is yes," Sanders responded. "And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions."

In fact, we may already be there. Too, it is exactly for the reason Bernie cites as his goal: education, particularly of women. Women are simply deciding to have a lot fewer kids, and medicine has given them the power to control that decision.

In Praise of Censure

Writing in The Hill, a former Republican Congressional staffer offers a proposal: Censure the President rather than impeaching him.

He has a number of arguments in favor of doing this, one of which is important: Nancy Pelosi would get to control the process, rather than turning it all over to the Republican-led Senate. That would allow the Congressional Democrats to escape from the trap they have built for themselves by staging this drama on Ukraine, where not only Joe Biden but Nancy Pelosi herself, along with John Kerry and Mitt Romney, have children with sweetheart deals from energy companies. If this goes to a Senate trial, there's the potential for humiliating blowback once the Republicans are in charge of who gets called as a witness and what they are asked.

He also suggests that a censure might be bipartisan, though he himself wouldn't vote for it. Of course, we have already had a bipartisan vote on this: some Democrats voted against opening the impeachment inquiry, after all.

Jigsaw puzzles

More pieces to fill in:

The Obama holdover heading the Pentagon office reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney who is conducting the criminal probe of the Trump–Russia investigation was accused of leaking a classified document, in a recent court filing for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The connection hasn't been previously reported.

According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA's director, James H. Baker, "is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn’s calls" to The Washington Post. Specifically, the filing states, "ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post Reporter David Ignatius."

The filing adds that Baker "was Halper's 'handler'" at ONA.

From Epoch Times (possible paywall) via Ace.

Best Coffee Commercial Ever

Surviving a Saga Christmas

Trickier than you might think.

Thanksgiving Retrospective

A graphic showing the passengers of the Mayflower, and those who survived to the first Thanksgiving.

Fighting Terror with a Unicorn's Horn

Today in London, a convicted terrorist who'd been let free (albeit with a tracker on his person) attacked people on London Bridge with a knife. He was battled by a guy with a five-foot Narwhal tusk, which the fellow took off the wall at Fishmonger's Hall. Police later showed up and shot the bad guy, although presumably our hero could have done that himself if he hadn't been disarmed by his own government.

Well, and he found himself a proper tool. The Narwhal tusk was long sold in Europe by the Vikings as unicorn horns that could dispel poison. The story is an amusing one, and touches both Eiríkr Thorvaldsson, better known as 'Erik the Red,' and his son the famous Lief Erikson.

And not a knee taken

Post-Thanksgiving cooking

It's leftovers week!  We're already at work on turkey soup, and I'll insist on our usual turkey tetrazzini tomorrow.  For lunch I'm chewing on turkey wings with dressing, gravy, and smoky greens.

The news yesterday and today about our dangerously ill next-door neighbor is so encouraging that I find myself coming out of a dejected fog and being inspired to cook.  I volunteered to bring a dessert to a public gathering tomorrow.  It seemed a good time to try something I've been tempted by on Facebook:  pecan pie brownies.

Mine didn't come out as self-contained or dignified as this stock photo, being more like a pecan-pie-brownie cobbler, but admirably gooey inside and crunchy outside, like the old joke about the polar bear and the igloo.  Because the Facebook recipe advocated a brownie mix, which is out of the question, I substituted a Julia Child fudge-style brownie base with a Craig Claiborne pecan pie filling for the top.  (You pour the brownie mix in the bottom and the pecan pie filling on the top, then bake at 350 degrees until it's Alton-Brown-style GBD, "golden brown and delicious.")

Presentation-wise, it might work better with a cake-style brownie and a shorter cooking time, so the pecan pie topping would be easier to cut while at the same time the brownie base would set up a little more.  Nevertheless, I'll let people spoon out their servings, and there's certainly nothing wrong with the flavor.  If I make it again, I may cut back on the sugar in the brownies, for contrast.  Barely-sweetened whipped cream wouldn't hurt a thing.

So now it's about the rule of law again?

These dizzying reversals:  when conservatives object that the impeachment farce is ignoring due process, we hear that impeachment is a political process that obeys political rules rather than all those tiresome and legalistic restraints.  That's actually close to my own view:  impeachments, like elections, are a vehicle for political opposition, not law enforcement.  Legal violations affect public opinion indirectly just as they do in elections and other disputes, but the people called upon to make a judgment aren't bound by the same intricate and straitlaced rules that are enforced in a criminal trial.

The prosecuting party in an impeachment, therefore, is technically allowed to throw due process in the trash.  The flip-side, however, is that the defense gets to use political tools of its own to ridicule the essentially free choices of the prosecution, and voters are free to decide what they think about it all.  So far, to the prosecution's horror, voters are bored or hostile about the results.

Predictably, the anti-Trump camp now begins to worry that their sacred ritual of impeachment is being infected by lowdown politics.  Well, if this dumpster fire clears the House and the Senate conducts a trial, they'll get a chance to see how they fare in a more traditional legal setting.  Nevertheless, the political problem won't go away.  If the charges are as spurious in that more formal trial setting as they are in the current kangaroo court, the political problem will only intensify.

A Considerable Irony

The World Socialist, that grand elder of anti-American Communist propaganda outlets, publishes an interview with noted historian Gordon Wood on how unfair the New York Times “1619 Project” is to the Founding.

Q. For our readership, perhaps you could discuss something of the world-historical significance of the Revolution. Of course, we are under no illusion that it represented a socialist transformation. Yet it was a powerful revolution in its time.
A. It was very important that the American colonial crisis, the imperial crisis, occurred right at the height of what we call the Enlightenment, where Western Europe was full of new ideas and was confident that culture—what people believed and thought—was man-made and thus could be changed. The Old World, the Ancién Regime, could be transformed and made anew. It was an age of revolution, and it’s not surprising that the French Revolution and other revolutions occur in in the wake of the American Revolution.
The notion of equality was really crucial. When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth. It is the most powerful statement ever made in our history, and it lies behind almost everything we Americans believe in and attempt to do.

There’s a lot to like here. It’s worth reading to see how much the actual Communists object to the assumptions that the Times is making.