In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely ‘First Servant’. All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund – have fine, long term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed as his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.Yes, just so.
A Fine Part
James via AVI:
Happy Thanksgiving
This year I’m making just a turkey breast. Quick meal for only three people this year; no holiday travel, either. It’s not that I am virtuous, but everyone is either too far or too old this year.
I am going to make a traditional pound cake. One pound each butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. No salt, baking powder, soda, or flavoring. My grandmother used to make them. Hers were always good.
Some Anomalies
I'm a fair hand at calculating odds in common gambling games, but some of you are more skilled at mathematics than myself. Have a look at this and see what you think of it.
Michael Flynn Pardoned
In a particularly grueling miscarriage of justice, retired general Michael Flynn had to be pardoned for a crime of which he was innocent. Investigated by the FBI at the behest of President Obama, who decided for some reason that Flynn was a Russian spy, Flynn was cleared of all charges as a result of the investigation. The FBI closed the case.
He was prosecuted anyway by a politicized Department of Justice, which nevertheless failed to produce the only piece of evidence it allegedly had against him. That evidence would have been the original "302" form showing that the FBI agents who interviewed him thought that he'd lied to them -- about a case in which the FBI had already cleared him. No such 302 was ever produced, allegedly being lost, but we do have one that we happen to know was edited long after the fact by disgraced liar and political agent Peter Strzok. We know this because he discussed it in unencrypted text messages with his lover, also-married disgraced former prosecutor Lisa Page.
After a financially ruinous prosecution in which the FBI/DOJ produced almost none of the exculpatory evidence that the law requires them to produce -- including the record of the investigation that completely cleared him on all charges -- Flynn's sorry lawyers convinced him to plead guilty. This was done in such a way that the DOJ and his sorry lawyers (perhaps motivated by one of their partners, a former Obama attorney general) made an illegal deal to hide the agreement not to prosecute Flynn's son from the judge! Not only did the judge lack the information he needed to discern whether the guilty plea was coerced, anyone against whom Flynn later might have testified as a result of the deal would have been denied their constitutional right to know of the deal so they could raise it as a defense against the value of his testimony.
That judge -- a personal friend of Obama's, it turns out -- wasn't upset about the fact that the law firm and the DOJ conspired to hide these facts from him in violation of the law. His ire was for Flynn, whom he accused of selling out his country even though the DOJ had never even attempted to charge Flynn with that. What they charged him with was perjury for "lying" to the FBI (in the vanished 302), and a paperwork violation for which the FBI investigation had already cleared him.
(They cleared him of the FARA violation because he had in fact filed paperwork with the government under another act, on the advice of lawyers he hired specifically to help him meet the legal reporting requirements -- thus, he had not tried to hide his lobbying work for a NATO ally, and clearly they could not s how criminal intent. DOJ knew all of that and made him plead guilty to it anyway, if he wanted them not to send his son to prison on trumped-up charges too.)
Then we spent a year while Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, managed to get all the exculpatory information illegally hidden from him in the first place. None of it convinced the judge one bit to let Flynn withdraw the coerced guilty plea, nor to accept the DOJ's determination that it should probably actually drop those baseless charges after all. Ordered to drop the charges by the DC Court of Appeals in a three-judge ruling, the judge instead sought en banc approval to continue the case. He was granted it, provided he would dispose of the matter with "dispatch." That was now several months ago, and instead of disposing of the case he has been dragging it out towards an obvious intent to sentence Flynn in spite of his innocence.
What this case shows is how completely distorted our system has become. The FBI needs to be disbanded; all the lawyers involved except Powell need to be disbarred, if not horsewhipped. The judge should be impeached, and many of those involved should be prosecuted.
But instead what we'll get is a pardon for Flynn, which the judge will probably try to find some way to challenge in court. Whether or not he succeeds, the news media and the Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) will continue to speak of Flynn as if he had been convicted of the crimes of which they imagined he was guilty for the rest of his life and beyond.
What a disgusting ending to an infuriating persecution of a good and decent man, one whose work in military intelligence was known to me and respected by me at the height of his career.
On Godot
Or, as it is alternatively spelled, “FBI.”
...The evidence shows that the FBI is one of many institutions that no longer belong to the American public. Rather, its job is to protect and advance the privileges and interests of an increasingly powerful class of elites who draw their wealth and prestige from their relationships with corrupt foreign entities. And that’s why it appears the FBI didn’t investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop, but buried it.He provides many more examples. The evidence is clear: they do not work for us.
4 Years of Waiting for Godot
First we waited for ... was it Jeff Sessions? Then Barr, then Durham, now Powell, er, the Kraken, oh, no, it's Rudy Giuliani. Maybe first it was Roberts?
But always some shocking revelation and a grand vindication was / is just around the corner. But, we never seem to get to the corner, the shocking revelation is put on ice, the vindication is moved to a later, unspecified date in the future. The Kraken feels like it is slowly sinking silently below the sable waves, if it was ever there at all.
Or maybe the Kraken is what has hold of Durham, of Barr, maybe previously of many others who seemingly could have stepped up and delivered some measure of justice but did not.
This battle is not quite over, so there is hope. There is a fight still.
But it's beginning to feel like our position is being overrun. Our media is full of reports of victories coming soon, of being in the vicinity of vindication, like good propaganda shoring up the morale of a beleaguered army. Their media is full of derision for what they believe are, or fervently desire to be, or are determined to turn into, right-wing hallucinations. Some allies are fleeing for safety, casting away their arms and uniforms, while the Left draws up its firing squads, as they always do.
Yes, yes, it's always darkest before the dawn and all that. All that. Still, I have barely any faith remaining in our federal "justice" system, legislative or executive or judicial, when it comes to anything political, and night could be just falling. Anything after civil twilight is just dark, you know.
But this is only a political war, right now, so we'll all live, whether we win or lose. Thus we get to ask, and we will be required to answer, what next? What next?
I don't expect any answers, really. We each will have our own. And all this is just my musing on the dark waters as the ship steams on toward some unknown shore. I guess it's all part of the grand adventure, and adventures always have dragons and whatnot, eh? Well, where did I put my whetstone?
Studying Problems
It’s pretty easy to get grants for studies of man-made environmental devastation. So why does this clear case of Soviet destruction not get much study?
When Gill asked the team why they weren’t conducting fieldwork at the Aral Sea, they responded: “Are you crazy? No way! It’s too remote and dangerous there, you can’t really collect any data, and it’s so treacherous if you go there you could die!”
The Hound of the Hall is Dead
We saved him from a kill shelter back in 2008. I knew I was going back to Iraq, and had been looking for a dog to leave with my family while I was gone again. I had met many and none were right. They were taking me out to see a beagle they thought I'd like, and there was this other dog in a cage along the walls. I said, "What about that one?" They said, "You don't want that one." But I knew I did, as soon as I saw him.
He was the best dog I've ever had, and I've had some great ones. None were so eager to please, or so intent on being good. He wasn't always in spite of his heart; he killed chickens and cats and kittens, and didn't really understand why he shouldn't. He killed racoons, including a rabid one, and once ran down and killed a deer -- and then brought it to me. I came home that day and he was sitting on the back porch, proud as could be, with a deer propped up between his front paws as a gift for me.
He watched my family while I was at war, and was my most faithful companion for years and years. I hoped he would pass peacefully in his sleep, but he didn't, and it fell to me to do what I greatly wished I would never have to do. I couldn't send him to die in among strangers in a place that smelled like medicine. When the last day came and he could no longer enjoy even the sun on his fur, when every breath was a labor and the cancer had hold of him, I did what had to be done.
Such is life, and death. I don't understand why the world was made this way. I am grateful for our time together, though. I raised a mighty cairn over him.
Who's safe now?
More wisdom from our betters at Politico: Suddenly the allure of safe spaces is tarnished. Who would have thought that wrongthinking people might find a safe space to share ideas, without even petitioning the legislature or their college presidents for permission, armed guards at the perimeter, and suitable social annihilation for transgressors, not to mention pillows and plushy stuffed comfort animals? Parler is terrifying the people who cheered on Twitter and Facebook for silencing all the bad voices:
The set-up gives MAGA conservatives an easy way to simply dismiss the post-election beliefs of the public at large, the widely accepted reports in mainstream news outlets and the word of experts and even some government officials.I'm speechless. There are people who dismiss beliefs of the public? Who doubt the widely accepted reports of the MSM? . . . the word of experts and even some government officials? Can't these people simply be locked up and shot?
Hispanic panic
I've lost count of the articles published in the last couple of weeks about the collapse of the craziest face of the Progressive movement in some of its most promising former strongholds. At Politico, Mark Caputo reports on the carnage:
Giancarlo Sopo, one of the Trump campaign's Hispanic communication strategists, who used to be a Democrat, said he has doubts about his former party’s ability to learn from Trump’s gains.
"Many Hispanics view the Democrats and their allies as moralistic snobs,” Sopo said. “No one wants to come home after a long day of work to be wokesplained that they need to change their language, stop buying Goya, and that they're bad people if they're concerned about border security.”Maybe the damage wasn't enough this time to lose Biden the election, assuming he did win it, but 2022 looms:
“I’m worried that there is a chink in that armor — that what Trump did sends a signal that now allows more Latinos to feel like they have permission to think about the Republicans, that’s it’s perhaps socially acceptable to do so,” [said Carlos Odio, a Democratic co-founder of the Hispanic research firm EquisLabs]. “Right now, I think like, it's still limited ... but nobody knows how it’s going to play out.”It's unbelievably dangerous to give people permission to think--almost as dangerous as it is to imply that they need your permission.
Next Best Thing
Here's a Hank Jr. tune.
I said he wasn't around for the Outlaw Country heyday of the early 70s, but this is 1967 so I guess he put out some stuff in the old days too. He was very young, though, compared to the legends of the genre. Like Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock; just about the same age, in fact.
God and the Military
No offense, Reverend, but I've known a fair number of chaplains who would disagree with you here. In fact I own two military-issued Bibles, complete with unit insignia printed on the cover.
There's some tension between Mt. 6:24, the apparent source for this admonition, and Mt. 22:21 (or the parallel Luke verse) about rendering unto Caesar. You can't serve two masters; but perhaps you can serve one at a time.
Alternatively, you can adopt the traditional answer (for Catholics and Muslims alike, as it happens, although they differ on important details) that the leader of the military has a kind of divinely-appointed duty: to protect the weak, uphold the law, ensure the peace, and so forth. Thus, service to one is a kind of service to the other.
Theories: A Quick Ranking
There are a number of theories about the election, not all of them equally good. Some should be discarded at once; others merit investigation.
Here is a quick sketch of a view. Feel free to opine in the comments about others, or about why you do or don't agree with my list.
Dismiss:
"Scorecard"/"Hammer" theories. These are nonsense.
Auditing Georgia's absentee signatures. The President keeps talking about this. It's a great idea in principle, but in practice it's impossible because they set up the system to separate the envelope signatures from the ballots and discard the signed envelopes. There's no way to audit this aspect of the election, just as they intended, the scoundrels.
Take Seriously:
Dominion. This one has robust bipartisan support, at least if you abstract from the current moment and look at recent years. It drew a great deal of hostile coverage from the media, including from PBS; Elizabeth Warren was hotly opposed to it. Also, Wretchard thinks the system is fundamentally insecure, and he's a tech-centric guy and one of the smartest writers out there.
Georgia uses Dominion for the non-absentee votes, by the way, which means it ought to be a bipartisan issue even in the current moment. The Democrats would like to win the January 5 Senate runoffs, and how can they have confidence that the vote will be fair in a Republican-held state with a Republican governor and Secretary of State, and no less a governor than Kemp, whom they already regard as a chief voter fraud agent?
3 AM Election Drops: There were apparently several of these, all massively to 100% in favor of Biden, often in numbers sufficient to overcome Trump election-night margins. So too similar stories of corruption attested-to in sworn affidavits by people who were there to know what they saw.
Wild Turnout: Turnout was high this election, but some places it was far higher than in others. That is worth a look.
Joe-Only Ballots: These look a lot like fakery. Who stands in line, or goes to the trouble to apply for a ballot, and then votes in only one race? One goofball, ok, but 95,000 of them in a single state?
Statistical Evidence: Trump won all but one bellweather county; he won Florida and Ohio and North Carolina; the Republicans won all 27 'toss-up' Congressional races. He increased his vote count by 10 million, doubled his percentage of the black vote, and increased among Latinos strongly enough to win Florida and the border of Texas on the strength of their votes. Democrats almost lost the House of Representatives and are skin-of-their-teeth in having a Republican Senate too.
That kind of thing suggests Republicans had a really good year. Trump is personally hated by many, but not generally by Republicans. Supposedly Biden won on the strength of turnout -- but Trump had people standing in freezing weather, in a pandemic, for massive rallies every city he went to. If the story is to be believed, Biden had no coat-tails for a guy who drove the biggest turnout ever; Trump had coat-tails, but no coat.
Just a running list of thoughts for now. Feel free to add, or try to subtract.
PoMo Vampires
The ZOOM-recorded meltdown in which a Wayne County Ruling Party canvassing board operative soft-doxxed the children of two unruly board members ("nice kids, wouldn't want to see anything happen to them") calls to mind this excerpt from Richard Bledsoe's Remodern America:
Postmodernists compensate for the lack of a genuine inner life by showing off what they think is expected of them. Postmodernists pretend to feel whatever their situational ethics informs them is the politically correct way to feel. Their stance is perpetual posturing.
In this delusional state, they misname their ravenous appetite for domination as “pragmatism.” Their version of pragmatism basically means they get their way, always. Yet their position is essentially one of weakness. Having no substance of their own, they are reduced to living vampire-like, trying to suck resources and obedience out of society, while offering nothing useful in return.
It’s hard to get normal people to cooperate with this hunger, since Postmodernists are fundamentally bottomless maws in desperate need of validation. There is no end to their demands. But the Postmodernists have a strategy for petty tyranny so simple it’s known to two year olds; they whip their unregulated emotions into what they hope is an intimidating frenzy.Imagine a moral and intellectual bankruptcy so profound you can achieve your political goals only by branding your enemies' children as racist for the purpose of calling down mob violence on them.
Hank Jr. At the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar
The Million Dollar Cowboy Bar is an establishment in Jackson, Wyoming. I was there once in 2015. It has barstools made out of saddles, and a lot of relics on display. It also has quite a history of hosting Outlaw Country greats -- note the Waylon and Willie cards in the displays below.
Tomorrow night, it will host Hank Williams, Jr. for his second show there. The first one was in 1980. It's already too late to get tickets for the small live show, even if you happen to be in Jackson Hole, but you can livestream it tomorrow evening here.
Hank Jr. is seventy-one this year, a little too young to have been part of the musical movement's heyday in the 1970s. Fortunately, though, he's still around.
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