The Times of London: Trump Was Right, It Was Rigged
A small but noteworthy moment on our current path, wherever it leads.
And people say he's senile
I appreciate the mental agility that allows someone to argue that reducing taxes is spending money, but spending money doesn't cost anything.
Faded Gloryville
Some parts of the place do seem to be getting run down, and I think we all know whose fault that is. There nevertheless remain good things, including this cheerful bit from an album that is all about American decline.
Maybe we can fix it; but even if we can't, at least we can defy our enemies by finding ways to still be happy while we try.
And if you liked that one, here's another one by her. It's neither cheerful nor fun, but it's really pretty good.
Hope You Like Eating Bugs
The $3.5 Trillion "infrastructure" bill under consideration will impose costs on beef cattle at $2,600/head, making meat unaffordable for all but the wealthiest. For dairy cows it's $6,500, so I hope you also like almond milk.
Only Courageous Officer in USMC Now in Brig
The only officer to demand accountability from senior leaders in the Marine Corps for the Afghanistan debacles is also the only officer punished, being first relieved of command and now arrested.
RIP Commander Cody
Another one of our favorites has gone to rest.
“In about 1966 I found a Bob Wills album and marijuana," [he] told No Depression in 2018. "I’m pretty sure those guys were stoned most of the time. I started listening to Jerry Lee Lewis’ album that had 'Crazy Arms' and Buck Owens’ greatest hits. We did [Owens'] 'Tiger by the Tail' regularly. What country music afforded for us was there was no rehearsal, we listened to the record, we drank a bunch of whiskey and coke, and played. Country music is easy to do if someone knows the lyrics and the song, you can follow along relatively easily.”
One of their most famous bits was a cover of Hot Rod Lincoln, a favorite of my father's.
Dad loved the song as a young man, when it reminded him of his youth drag racing along the mountain roads of Tennessee. He grew, I am sorry to say, to understand the father's perspective as well as he experienced my own period of drag racing through the mountains of north Georgia.
Somehow we both survived.
Referenda on Immigration
France's Le Pen is proposing a referendum on immigration if she is elected. She probably won't be elected, but there's a good chance this kind of thing will become more common regardless.
Hers is pretty tame stuff, arguing for limits and regulations about who can come as well as favoritism for actual French citizens when obtaining government benefits. The real deal will be when groups start revoking the immigration status of those who have already been admitted. Germany admitted a million refugees from Syria and the Middle East; France is awash with immigrants from North Africa; the Scandinavian countries are having significant epidemics of bombings and rapes from their own migrant communities.
At some point people are going to start wanting to rethink the admission of groups that don't fit in and cause significant problems. Democratic means can be used for any popular end, not only for globalistic or left-leaning priorities; and if democracy alone justifies the right, then it's just as right to vote for a government to expel the unwanted as for a democratically-elected government to vote to let people in.
Now if there are deeper principles of justice at work, that might not be true. It is not clear to me, however, that Europe has many remaining sources of deep philosophical principles; their governments didn't like the ones they inherited, and so they have worked to abandon them.
Some Concerns About Policing
Over the last year the 'Defund the Police' crowd's significant success in raising concerns about policing resulted in a loss of funding and support for the police in many places. This correlated with a rise in American murder rates of nearly thirty percent, suggesting that at least in urban areas police do in fact perform a service to the ordinary public.
Likewise, the ongoing fiasco of lies being foisted especially by the White House against the Border Patrol is clearly aimed at furthering two of their agenda items: 1) Paint America, and the police, as secret white supremacists; 2) Flood the country with illegal immigrants.
So there is reason to believe that the police are being unfairly treated by politicians and activists. That said, there are also reasons to be concerned about policing and its violence. I have tried to present this argument fairly in this space, but these concerns about violent organized criminality among police are significant enough even to name-brand 'conservatives' to now appear in National Review. The follow-up piece is even worse. (h/t Instapundit).
Meanwhile, in Australia, police are responding to protests against COVID measures with severe violence. (Warning: that link is graphic.) They are shooting at unarmed crowds with what must be nonlethal munitions given the apparent absence of many bodies, but even so are significant violations of the right to peacefully protest.
These findings suggest that police officers cannot be assumed to be reliable, upstanding figures who enforce the moral order. They frequently form internal criminal gangs -- when I was a young man, District Attorneys in Georgia referred to the county sheriff's departments as "the Dixie Mafia" -- and can turn on a disarmed population with tyrannical brutality.
And that's the relatively-safe uniformed police. The secret police are an obvious problem.
There has to be a middle ground here between defunding/eliminating police in urban areas where crime rates will spike without them, or spreading lies about police in order to further a political agenda on the one hand; and, on the other, supporting police in spite of these significant problems. Reforms are and remain necessary, though in some city-based communities those reforms probably cannot go as far as the outright abolition of policing. We need a better approach to this than the one our politicians and activists are pursuing, both parties and all factions.
"Climate Change Started Those Wildfires"
In a way, that turns out to be true. That madness inspired by being taught to believe in catastrophic climate change was in fact responsible.
A former forestry student-turned-shaman and yoga teacher has been charged with starting a huge California wildfire that has destroyed 41 homes - and was being investigated in connection with other fires - after claiming the blaze was triggered accidentally while she tried to boil bear urine so she could drink it.
Now if you think that sounds like a reasonable explanation, hang with us here folks.
During questioning by investigators, Souverneva... claimed that she had been thirsty whilst out hiking and found a puddle in a dry creek bed which contained bear urine.She then claims she attempted to filter the water using a tea bag but when that failed tried to start a fire to boil the water. Souverneva said that it was too wet to start a fire so she drank the water and continued walking.
Boiling urine does not improve it, but she wasn't even actually able to boil it, so she drank it anyway.
Souverneva is known to be a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and former Bay Area biotech employee.She has also worked as a yoga teacher and describes herself as a shaman - a person who claims to have a direct connection with the world's good and evil spirits.
Now, just on the off-chance that any of you out there reading this should think that you're a shaman in contact with good and/or evil spirits, let us have a short safety briefing.
1) Do not drink urine, boiled or otherwise.
2) Do not start forest fires.
That is all.
Riding with the Peshmerga
An American "embedded" with the Peshmerga encounters a suicide bomber in a car bomb ("SVBIED" in the post). Language warning, but he's having fun.
FBI Investigating Vet-Led Afghan Rescue Efforts
The few State Department officials who'd been willing to work with any of us are starting to peel off, citing pressure from on high. Now the FBI is showing up at people's door.
In one instance, agency officials showed up at the home of Scott Mann, founder of Task Force Pineapple, said Tim Parlatore, the group’s legal counsel. Such a visit is normal for the FBI, and the group cooperated fully, Parlatore said.Some of the people described the outreach as nothing out of the ordinary and part of the growing public-private partnership on evacuations. “In my mind, the FBI was trying to be helpful, not intimidating,” a person familiar with the outreach said.Others saw it differently.
Yeah, ask LTG(R) Michael Flynn how that friendly, helpful FBI visit 'just to clear things up' worked out for him.
Related: FBI Admits its Really Hard to Solve Crimes They Didn't Make Up Themselves.
The Mountain Heritage Festival
Mule Train! The Mountain Heritage Festival occurs annually (except in the annus horribilis of 2020) at Western Carolina University. It features mountain crafts, singing, dancing, and general good fun.
A team of Cherokee from the nearby reservation play a spirited game of stickball, "the little brother of war." It involves wrestling as well as running, tossing the ball with the stick, and so forth.
If you enlarge the signs in this photo, you'll find that it is a blacksmith next to and working with a Cherokee coppersmith. The blacksmith produced traditional Scottish arts, including knives, swords, hammers, and chain mail armor. The collaboration between them mirrors that of the Scots immigrants and the Cherokee on the frontier, where the two communities were very close.
Naturally there was bluegrass, gospel, and other mountain music.
Finishing the day with chicken grilled over the coals.
Redrum MC
There were a lot of these guys at the recent bike rally I went to, I think because they're a "First Nations" motorcycle club and it was held on the Cherokee Reservation. They're the only MC to ever address the United Nations; and apparently actor (and one time Conan the Cimmerian actor) Jason Momoa is a patched member.
Momoa, if we take the whole 'nobody from the wrong ethnic group should ever play a character from another,' is definitely not a Cimmerian -- they're, according to Robert E. Howard who created Conan, the ancestors of the Celts and the Gaels and Highlanders. That said, Momoa is apparently a pretty cool guy and I am not in any way bothered that he played the character. It wasn't a great rendition, but that is more the director's and writer's fault. I thought he was great in Road to Paloma, and I'm looking forward to seeing him and others in the new Dune.
All the members I met or interacted with were honorable and upstanding. They say they're about positive images and respect for their traditions, and I notice that they aren't unwilling to take on non-Natives who happen to share their views. In that way they're inclusive beyond the ethnic lines they represent, which is nice to see going the other way as it often does not.
Arizona Audit
The report was published today, and apparently has found issues with ballots at five times the margin of victory. I have not yet had a chance to read it, listen to the hearing, or review the findings. Nevertheless it is important to note.
The margin of victory was only about ten thousand, and normally in an audit of 2.1 million votes a difference of 50,000 wouldn't necessarily be out of line with expectations. It might change the result, but a certain amount of user error and mistakes are to be expected in a large election.
In this case, though, they knew how many extra votes they needed and had extra days to generate them. Sure enough, Wendy Rogers reports, 96% of the duplicate votes that were counted in the audit arrived after election day. The fact that the total numbers are relatively small doesn't mean that this wasn't a fraudulent outcome, because they had the opportunity to know exactly the target they needed to hit.
I'll look at it as I'm able. I hope some of you will as well.
UPDATE: I think she might have misunderstood what he said, but the spike is obvious and significant.
UPDATE: The Federalist has a piece analyzing the results.
A Lamb
He spoke very gently to her when they were first together.For example, she once asked him if he had ever seen a lamb."I saw a lamb this morning," he said. "I looked in his eyes."Then he stopped speaking, and she knew he was not happy.
...And If You Don't Like Me, Then Leave Me Alone
That advice is widely quoted in old folk songs, and it's good advice for these people. (By the way, having old folk songs is evidence of having a culture, though "whiteness" is not what it's properly called.)
Here's one of those old songs, as a matter of fact.
Actually Charlie Daniels says about the same thing in "Long Haired Country Boy."
It's very fine advice. It goes well with the two rules of business: mind yours, and stay out of mine.
UPDATE: Here's a folk song called "Fisherman's Son," which looks to be sung to the same tune as "Moonshiner."
The sea is my lifeline the shore is my homeI've been to your cities I didn't stay longI stared at the bright lights the dark city waysI'll tell you that's not for me, no I couldn't stay....I'm a fisherman's son got fisherman's bloodJust hauling the lobster and jigging the codAnd if you don't like me then leave me aloneAnd I'll go on singing my fisherman's song.
The Barrow Downs
Barrows are rising in popularity in the United Kingdom as a burial option.
From the outside, they typically look just like small grassy hills, perhaps buttressed by some jagged, upright slabs that could’ve been nicked off of Stonehenge. But, each one also has a doorway literally into the hill, and some feature shelves lined with human remains, like a public mausoleum built into the earth....Angel, whose company, Sacred Stones, has built three barrows since 2015 and is exploring building another six, recalls a visit to an ancient barrow.... the Cairn Holy tomb, which dates back to the fourth millennium B.C. The identities of those interred there are long lost, but something caught the eye of Angel and his daughter: fresh flowers recently left inside. “This is thousands of years old,” says Angel. In the intervening millennia, burial practices changed countless times. And yet, he says, he makes a point of returning to this same ancient barrow on every Scottish holiday he takes. Each time, without fail, he finds fresh flowers. The identity of those interred seems less important than celebrating their time on Earth, and the ancient barrow’s permanence made that possible thousands of years later.
Here is another article on the subject.
Who Needs Industries?
The FDA decides to kill vaping. I always thought vaping was silly, but it's no worse than smoking (some argue better) and employed a lot of people. You'd think with the economy like it is that employment issue would be a concern.
It would be paranoid to think that the government was actively trying to destroy small businesses, but this has been a devastating year for small businesses of all sorts thanks to government actions. You might believe that some of those actions were necessary and justified. Even if so, why make it worse?
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