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It's a strange world, but sometimes good things happen.

 

"Permanent Emergency Powers"

Australia has hit upon the winning idea of disqualifying legislators over COVID mandates, "giving Labor a majority in both houses of parliament, allowing them to pass proposed permanent emergency powers."

That's Australia. Here in North Carolina, they're about to disqualify Republican-appointed justices on the state supreme court -- NOT over COVID excuses -- in order to overturn a constitutional amendment requiring Voter ID. 

We are getting to the point that there's no pretense, only power plays. 

No one wants to hear it

Kurt Schlichter looks forward to a GOP primary battle in 2024. He assumes it may be with Mike Pompeo, whom he likes well enough in a (yawn) way, but he'd prefer Trump if his President in Exile can run the right campaign:

Trump has to work out some kinks in his delivery. As Byron York observed, at a recent rally he had the crowd rocking when he was roasting President * over his myriad failures, from the border to Afghanistan to inflation and beyond. Yet, when Trump started going on and on about 2020 in excruciating detail, the rally got off to a flying stop.

The Closer

We watched and enjoyed "The Closer." It's a little startling to see Netflix show some spine about this. "People can and should disagree with one another, but canceling speech is not an argument."

An Eldritch Tale

Once upon a time there was a college of wizards who strove for light and knowledge. Unbeknownst to them, however, their most trusted body of elders were swayed by love of wealth and power into the service of ancient, dark gods. 

For years the college heard dark rumors of graduate students being exploited, forced to work for poverty wages while taking on massive student loans. They heard about students mortgaging their futures to gamble on being one of ten thousand chosen for a tenure-track job. They watched those students work for free for years, producing journal articles for free in the hope of bolstering their chances at one of those rare jobs. 

The tenured wizards watched with dismay, too, as most of their students failed and ended up in adjunct or lecturer positions that held no hope of rising to the security or pay they themselves knew. A scant few managed to obtain positions on the tenure track, but even these lucky few sacrificed years more in unpaid service and free labor producing 'peer-reviewed' scholarship in hopes of finally gaining tenure.

All the while, however great their discomfort, the tenured wizardry let the wicked cabal feast upon the blood of the young and the weak. They kept their own safety around them like a cloak, sorrowing for their students but defending their own gain.

And then one day, it turned out that the blood feasts had brought unspeakable power to the wicked circle at the core of the college. That was the day they proved strong enough to feast upon the tenured, too. 

Least This Complaint is Real

Our Lieutenant Governor is a pretty cool guy, but he shares the conservative black community’s idea about trans*\gay stuff. Normally attempts to cancel conservatives are spun sugar, but this guy is definitely clear about his thoughts.

“I’m saying this now, and I’ve been saying it, and I don’t care who likes it: Those issues have no place in a school,” Robinson said at Asbury Baptist Church in Seagrove, N.C. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth.”

This is much harsher than my own opinion about homosexuality at least, but it is the traditional understanding— indeed it would have been an unexceptional thing for a man to say, even a politician, when I was young. Critics say that it now represents an unacceptable proof of discrimination, even hate speech. 

He’s an elected official, so you could say that the voters will decide what is acceptable. One might say instead that political officers ought not to hate or discriminate; but I notice that standard is never applied to those who hate conservatives. 

I suppose I care a lot more about his robust defense of gun rights than his opinion of sexual minorities. I can see how a gay man might be alarmed, though. 

Straw men

As this Washington Examiner article notes, it's hard enough to reach a compromise when you have some idea what your opponent wants:

A 2018 study asked 2,100 adults to identify what they believed about a wide range of political issues and then asked them to estimate what people in the other political party believed about those same issues.

The study found that centrists and those not interested in politics did much better at estimating what the other party believed than politically involved partisans. But while a person’s level of education made no difference when Republicans estimated what Democrats believe, the more time Democrats spent in school, the worse they did at identifying what Republicans believed. Democrats with a high school degree did worse than those without. Democrats with a college degree did worse than high school graduates. And Democrats with a graduate degree did worst of all.

It seems that the longer liberals stay walled off in communities dominated by their own kind, which is exactly what higher education has become, the worse they are at understanding and empathizing with those who hold other views.

Censoring all the unclean thoughts comes with a price.

Report on Post-Vaccination Peri/Myocarditis Side Effect

This is a presentation by a cardiology fellow on the issue of pericarditis (inflammation of the pericardial sack around the heart) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart tissue itself) following COVID-19 vaccination.

I've set it to start when he discusses the wider conclusions and implications. The first roughly 10 minutes are a detailed discussion of two patients who suffered these side effect.

TL; DL (too long; didn't listen):

This side effect is mostly seen in male (76%) patients aged 12-29 (57%). Out of 52 million people vaccinated in that age group, there have been 1,226 reports of this side effect. It's not nothing, but it's pretty rare.

Update: Instapundit has other reports on this topic.

Now that's a press secretary

Selective trust

Grim's post about the Ships of Tarshish reminded me of the excellent Orthosphere site, where I found this useful guide to selective trust and distrust of experts. I can scarcely remember a time in my life when so many people were leaning on me to believe them uncritically, and with so little demonstrated justification. Meanwhile, people who think I should take their journalism seriously are doing their best to hide a fairly big story about a growing trend toward general strike. Could these people finally have jumped the shark?

Blackstrap Molasses

Mentioned in the recent recipe, blackstrap has a long history of recommendation as a health food. 

Not Working Your Service Job is Terrorism

This is getting a little predictable. 

Beware the Ships of Tarshish

A very nice post at the Orthosphere.

CNN: American Forces in Fallujah were Murderers

It’s par for the course these days, as contemporary left-leaning media continue to play out their Vietnam-redux fantasy. They even mention Vietnam, while quoting only servicemen who describe the battle as a source of shame and moral concern. 

Yale: Official Commitments to Academic Freedom Don't Represent Who We Are as a University

'We're more of a woke kind of place, really.' 

"What are Yale’s promises worth? If we are to believe its lawyers in court a few weeks ago, they’re not worth that fancy paper the Woodward report is printed on."

The princess and the pea

"Come and get me, copper!" I guess we're talking about psychic violence, because otherwise I can't make much sense of allegations of terrorism against soccer moms who raise their voices at school board meetings.

So [in] this crazy time that we’re living in, I can’t even believe it’s happening, you really learn who’s willing to put their boots on your neck, given the opportunity. And when this is all over, we all need to remember who those people were, because we can’t trust them anymore.

Our local schools are nothing to write home about, but the school board doesn't have jackbooted goons on it, either.

Grim's Barbecue Sauce

Tonight I'm making pulled pork and smoked chicken for my guests, the pork being a Boston butt seared on the grill and then slow cooked overnight in the crock pot. I like barbecue as a meal for traveling guests (at least those who are not ethical vegetarians -- I'm not quite sure what I'll feed her yet) because it can enhance the touring experience. Barbecue is a food with many regional sauce variations, and some cooking variations, so you can show outsiders both what the barbecue is like here and what it is like in various regions nearby.

I secured the local barbecue sauce from the firefighter who makes it for the annual VFD fundraiser barbecue. It's more vinegar-based than I like myself, but it is locally very popular. Across the border in South Carolina they make a mustard-based sauce, and across the border in Tennessee they make a ketchup-based sauce.

I grew up in the Great State of Georgia, though, so I make a Georgia-style sauce that is spicy and slightly sweet. I thought some of you might like to try it. I never measure anything, so measurements are somewhat guesswork -- if you make it yourself add more of whatever you think you'd like more of, and less if you'd like less of it.

Grim's Barbecue Sauce

1 can (8 oz) tomato paste

Several cups brewed black coffee

1 tbsp packed brown sugar

1 tbsp blackstrap molasses

1 tbsp onion powder

1 tbsp garlic powder

1 tbsp chipotle powder (a smaller amount of cayenne would be more typical for a Georgia sauce, but the larger quantity of chipotle adds to the smoky flavor)

1 tsp smoked or hot paprika

1 tsp chili powder (or just ancho chili powder)

1 tsp black pepper

Small shot, Apple cider vinegar

Salt to taste

Scrape the tomato paste out of the can and into a warm (not hot) cast iron pan (or you can do it in a crockpot on low heat). Dissolve the tomato paste in hot black coffee. When I'm doing it, I use French roasted coffee, make more coffee than usual that morning, and leave it to cook down for hours until it is very strong. Dissolve sugar and molasses into this mixture, tasting to ensure it is sweet enough but not sweeter than you'd like. (You might try dividing the tablespoon into three teaspoons if you'd like a not-very-sweet sauce, and adding one of each until it's where you want it. As I said, I'm only guessing about how much I use anyway.)

After you get the sweetness where you want it, add the spices, adjusting as you like until it suits your particular preference.

Cook over low heat until the sugars caramelize, adding more brewed black coffee as necessary to thin it so it doesn't burn. You can also thin it with more apple cider vinegar if you think you'd enjoy a brighter, more acidic flavor. Once the sugars are caramelized properly, you can allow it to thicken. Remove from heat and serve. 

Alternatively, you can double the recipe and cook it all together with the meat in the crock pot. That will give it a much meatier flavor as the sauce will absorb the juices from the pork. 

UPDATE: I often add oregano or sage to it once it boils, especially if they're in season.

Childproof caps

I never thought I'd come to enjoy Matt Taibbi so much. 

This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law. It couldn’t be people were just tuning out papers for a hundred different reasons, including sheer boredom. It had to be that their traditional work product was just too damned subtle. The only way to avoid the certain evil of audiences engaging in unsupervised pondering over information was to eliminate all possibility of subtext, through a new communication style that was 100% literal and didactic. Everyone would get the same news and also be instructed, often mid-sentence, on how to respond.

Sleepwalking into disaster

Ezra devotes a great deal of this very interesting political analysis of pollster-strategist David Shor to bemoaning the fact that Democrats are pushing policies that voters should love but in fact hate, and to evaluating competing strategies for finding a way of talking about unpopular policies so that voters see the light and fall in line.  Failing that, to hiding the Dems views on toxic subjects.  Sadly, voters sometimes resist falling in line and even, horrifyingly, find out what Dems really are like to do and therefore vote for the bad people on the right.

Shor’s critics [including Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.] argue that he’s too focused on the popularity of what Democrats say, rather than the enthusiasm it can unleash. When pressed, Podhorzer called this theory “viralism” and pointed to Trump as an example of what it can see that popularism cannot. “A lot of things Trump did were grossly unpopular but got him enormous turnout and support from the evangelical community,” Podhorzer said. “Polling is blind to that. Politics isn’t just saying a thing at people who’re evaluating it rationally. It’s about creating energy. Policy positions don’t create energy.”

Podhorzer also pointed to Biden: “He’s done much more than I thought he’d be able to do. All the things he’s doing are popular. And yet he’s underwater.”

I'm not sure how to account for Podhorzer's belief that "all the things Biden's doing are popular," unless he means that they're popular with his buddies. The polls have been brutal lately across the entire board, from COVID strategy to Afghanistan to taxing and spending to the border to Biden's character and mental decline. In any case, Dem strategists betray a strange disconnect from the idea that they are accountable to voters, tending instead to view themselves as doctors who need to slip us a mickey so they can undertake massive reconstructive surgery that we'll thank them for later.

What does create energy, Podhorzer thinks, is fear of the other side. His view is that Democrats’ best chance, even now, is to mobilize their base against Trump and everything he represents. “The challenge in 2022 is to convince people that they’re again voting on whether or not the country is going in a Trumpist direction,” he said.

What he doesn't see, presumably, is the kind of fear his own party creates in its opponents, though he and his friends will speak casually about how much conservative Hispanics turn from blue to red because they fear job destruction, border chaos, and socialism.

This is an argument Shor is happy to have. “I think the conventional wisdom has swung too far toward believing policy isn’t important,” he said. He agrees that enthusiasm matters, but it has to be enthusiasm for a message that doesn’t alienate the undecided. “A lot of politics is about what you talk about,” he told me. You should sort your ideas, he said, by popularity. “Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people. But I think that what actually happens is people sort by excitement first. And the problem is the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”

This can read as an affront to those who want to use politics to change Americans’ positions on those issues. “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said,” Shenker-Osorio told me.

Unexpectedly!

 I wonder if there were any energy policies we might have been pursuing that could have avoided some of this trouble?

A "global energy crisis caused by weather" is one way to put it, if you want to obscure the fact that the weather in question is cold, while still beating this drum: "Further complicating the picture is mounting pressure on governments to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in November."

Just keep digging that hole.