No cowering

The President seems more vigorous while fighting COVID than his ostensibly infection-free opponent, who called another "lid" at 9:15am this weekend. 

“Americans overwhelmingly reject the idea that presidents should isolate themselves from the citizenry for safety’s sake.”

* * *

Nor will it soon be forgotten that Trump hatred reached its creepy crescendo when the man became gravely ill.

As Trump said from his Walter Reed office suite:

I was given that alternative, stay in the White House, lock yourself in, don’t ever leave. Don’t even go to the oval office, just stay upstairs and enjoy it. Don’t see people, don’t talk to people.… This is the United States. This is the greatest country in the world. This is the most powerful country in the world. I can’t be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe.… We have to confront problems, as a leader, you have to confront problems. There’s never been a great leader that would have done that.

Meanwhile, for all the cackling about karmic retribution against a political enemy, it remains unclear how useful lockdowns are in bending the virus transmission curve, especially considering their catastrophic cost.

Fact check: True

 From a Neo commenter:  "[T]omorrow the media will be filled with accounts from doctors who had patients who rallied from being at death’s door to releasing youtube videos and working at a desk only to die the next day."

Datil Peppers

 This post is mostly for Mike, but some of you also like spicy cooking.

So my son stopped by a spice shop a few towns over that I visit whenever I roll through. Recognizing him, the proprietor gave him a big sack of something called Datil pepper for him to bring me. The proprietor told him that she'd just gotten it in, and wanted me to see what I could do with it. 

I'd never actually heard of it before, but a little research showed that it was similar to a habanero or Scotch bonnet pepper in heat. It has a nice floral quality compared to those other two. 

I prepared a few recipes for them to thank them for the free pepper. I thought I'd share them with you, too.

Honoring the departed

 

Fact-check by USA Today pending.

Speaking of which.

That reminds me

. . . that I've still got some made used up over the destruction of my health insurance ten years ago.

The Bee:  "You have nothing to worry about, as long as you believe the right things."

Newfound Gap Run

 

A few bikes out, including a group of the Law Enforcement club  Gunfighters MC. 

Punitive liberalism

Powerline notes small, welcome signs of cognition in Seattle journalism:

Mayor Jenny Durkan appears uncomfortable interacting with the business community and has lost power to an assertive council. That body is obsessed with defunding the police without a viable Plan B. Its membership is stuffed with career activists and pols, with thin business experience at best.

No wonder the council is hostile to business. Even the smallest shop is exploitative capitalism. The council’s loudest voices are running a “revolution.” Only in a city made so prosperous by hated capitalism could this intellectual Ponzi scheme be tolerated or seem without consequences.

Never mind small business and retail shops. Big business in Seattle isn’t very happy either. Boeing announced today that it plans to discontinue manufacturing its 787 Dreamliner plane in Washington state and consolidate 787 production in (nonunion) South Carolina.

The governor is reported to be considering punitive tax consequences. 

Welcome to the party, pal

Here's a NYT editor whiffing a faint clue:

In other words, it’s not really about George Floyd or Black lives, but insurrection for insurrection’s sake.

HotAir regrets that we don't have a "Joker Award for Belatedly Discovering That Some People Want to Watch the World Burn":

[O]ne does have to ask why a major American media outlets didn’t connect these dots for itself. It’s been over four months since the start of these riots, and yet an editorial board member for one of the largest media outlets in the country just figured this out. And she only figured it out after reading [Jeremy Lee] Quinn’s blog rather than the work of the reporters she employs. What does that say about the New York Times and its ability to report the truth rather than regurgitate popular narratives?

I wonder who authorized her to start reading blogs with unapproved narratives, anyway?  How secure is her job? 

Your Friday Night Movie: The FBI Releases "The Nevernight Connection"

From American Military News, I learned that the FBI and the National Counterintelligence and Security Center have released a short movie based on a real-life case to raise awareness of how China recruits Americans with security clearances. 

I'll pop the popcorn.

Channeling Pelosi

USA Today probably should fact-check this one, too.

"Will you shut up, man?"

After Biden refused to say whether he'd pack the Supreme Court, inanely responding that he didn't want to make it an issue in the election while people were trying to vote, Zerohedge warned what would happen if Biden's party claws its way into the White House and a Senate majority:

You see, the hard-left Democrat party views our American political system the same way Turkey president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan viewed democracy before becoming a dictator for life: “Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.” This time around, once the Democrats win, they will change the rules so they can never lose again.

As the t-shirts put it (our modern copybook headings), Trump has his personality issues, but the other side is completely insane. Although we have two rather unappealing personalities in the race, the choice between the parties' ideas couldn't be more stark.

Low expectations

 Ed Morrissey argues that Joe Biden should quit while he's ahead:

What else is there left to prove? Biden and his team might calculate that they and the “moderators” can get Trump to say some damaging things in these debates, and that might be true. Of course, Trump can do that without debates, and there’s an almost equal risk for Biden on that same score … theoretically, anyway. His declaration that he won’t take a position on court-packing lest it become an issue in the election was one of the worst dodges in a presidential debate, maybe ever. Biden’s declaration that “the party is me” was also rather risible, especially since he then disclaimed any blame for what his party does or advocates. In a media world with more objectivity, as Jazz noted earlier, Biden’s honesty and integrity would be getting more scrutiny this morning along with Trump’s.

Even if the risk is not the same, neither is the reward. Getting back on stage with Trump changes the expectations game from will Biden fall asleep to will Biden take positions and what are they. It allows Trump to tune his game a bit better, or at least have the opportunity to do so and correct the impression left from this debate. What’s the upside for Biden in a second debate, let alone two more?

Skinflints and Skinflints

Joe Biden has, oh so proudly, released his and his wife's  MFJ Federal income tax return. It's revealing, and I have a question for him and for President Donald Trump. 

According to their return, their top-line income was $985,233 before their Standard Deduction. 

According to their Schedule A, the Bidens gave $14,700 to charity.

That's 1.5% of their income--not even a decent tithe.

On the other hand, Trump has, since taking office, donated 100% of his salary to various causes, even if not to outright charities. 

My question: Biden claims Trump isn't paying enough in taxes, but who's the real skinflint, who doesn't care about others, really?

Eric Hines

Malingering yeast

My bread has been giving me fits, refusing to rise.  I finally read up on proofing commercial dry yeast and discovered that when I add it to some water and a little sugar, I should be getting it to foam so as to double its volume in ten minutes or so.  Well, that hasn't been happening!

I figured, since I was getting at least a little reaction, there must be a few yeasts still alive in there, even if most of the package was on strike.  The inactive ones don't do any harm, so I just kept increasing the total dried yeast until I got a good double-sized proof, and then used the whole batch in the bread.  Voila, a loaf with enough rise to make sandwich bread.

Corb Lund -- "Rat Patrol"

 Rock-a-billy-ish ode to rat exterminators.

Time Travel

 It seems time travel is possible, after all, and all without that altering the (ex-)future folderol. University of Queensland professor Fabio Costa, one of the co-authors of the study purporting to solve the time travel paradox, discussed the "grandfather paradox" in the form of going back in time to prevent the Wuhan Virus patient zero from getting infected in the first place. Apparently, The Universe would take corrective action, and someone, perhaps even the time traveler (who knew The Universe might have a sense of humor), would get infected, anyway.

But the grandfather paradox has long been solved: that well-known physicist, Homer, and his equally well-known colleague, the genealogist Jethro, long ago demonstrated that it's eminently possible to be one's own grandfather, with or without time travel.

Eric Hines

Eek, a tax deduction

I'm shocked, I tell you, to learn that if someone loses $100,000 one year and gains $100,000 the next, the income tax law treats that as though he made nothing in either year.  The magic January 1 date is temporarily ignored and the two years net against each other in one big two-year income result that equals zero.  That means you pay no tax for one of those years even though on paper you made big bux in that 12-month period.  We generally expect an organization like the IRS to play by "heads I win, tails you lose" rules, but in this case the rules are what you might call rational and fair.

This net-operating-loss write-off is known as a kind of "deduction," and deductions are actually available to all of us.  Many of us ordinary people have used a "tax avoidance" technique of one kind or another, such as the mortgage deduction.  I'll bet you didn't know that, not only is it not illegal, it's not even wrong!

From Althouse:

It's unAmerican to use the phrase "get away with" to refer to following the law. It's like accusing me of speeding when I'm going 75 in a 75 mph zone. I'm not "getting away with" it. I'm going the speed limit! Change the speed limit if that's the wrong top speed. Crimes are the things that have been defined as crimes. It's particularly irksome for a legislator to talk like that — shifting the blame for the legislature's own failures.

Not to rub salt in the wound

So I just saw this over at Ace's place and just had to comment on it:
https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/1308851669397053440?s=20

So as someone who works in IT at a media company, something immediately jumped out at me, and let me know if you saw it as well.

Others in power

Rod Dreher writes of his long affection for NPR, and how he was recently driven from it to trying Joe Rogan on Spotify. What resonated with me was the constant battle between people who say "but how can you vote for so-and-so, knowing how awful he and his fellow-travelers are"--from both sides of the aisle.

I am sure Joe Rogan differs from Orthodox Christian socially conservative me in a number of ways, but I would a thousand million times rather live in Joe Rogan World than NPR/NYT World. The stories Joe Rogan lives by are not the stories I live by, mostly, but I would trust Joe Rogan to defend people like me against the Pink Police State that the left seems bound and determined to create. One thing he said in that Douglas Murray podcast that resonated deeply with me: him and Murray agreeing on how insane Trump is, but how people on the left simply cannot grasp that they alarm many center-right people so much that they are less worried about crazy Trump than they are about the crazy left. This seems to be the neuralgic point between my self-described anti-woke liberal reader, and me: that we look at the same things, and dislike the same things, but that he is much more alarmed by Trump than by the woke, while I come down on the opposite side.

Where will each of us be in five years? Will we be able to talk to each other at all? This is not at all a crazy question. This was the story of Spain. It went from the fall of the monarchy and the installment of a democratic republic in 1931 to civil war in 1936, because neither the left nor the right trusted each other, and each came to see liberal democracy as a menace, because it provided a means for the Other to come to power.

Faith and Law

Amy Coney Barrett explains that letting one's own moral convictions interfere with interpreting laws as written and enacted is not a problem confined to traditionally religious people:

“All people, of course–well, we hope, most people–have deeply held moral convictions, whether or not they come from faith. People who have no faith, people who are not religious, have deeply held moral convictions,” Barrett noted. “And it’s just as important for those people to be sure– I just spent time talking about the job of a judge being to set aside moral convictions, personal moral convictions, and personal preferences, and follow the law. That’s a challenge for those of faith and for those who have no faith.”

“So I think the public should be absolutely concerned about whether a nominee for judicial office will be willing and able to set aside personal preferences, be they moral, be they political, whatever convictions they are,” Barrett explained. “The public should be concerned about whether a nominee can set those aside in favor of following the law.”

“But that’s not a challenge just for religious people. I mean, that’s a challenge for everyone. And so I think it’s a dangerous road to go down to say that only religious people would not be able to separate out moral convictions from their duty,” she said.