Oh Dear
"'Guns should not be in the hands of the mentally unstable' says senile old man with nukes."
The Government is Worse than Useless
Parents with guns would have solved this a lot faster, and would have saved some of their children doing so. Possibly some of them might have died trying to save their children; any parent worth the name would.
Freebird
I still don't think this will make much difference at all -- and at first glance I read this as him preparing to slap the nervous bird rather than him graciously granting it freedom -- but here's hoping something comes of it.
The West Hunter blog guy (G. Cochran?) has gotten a little strange over the years. Still, he posts interesting things every couple of months. Today's post, if not entirely persuasive to the non-paranoid among us, would at least make a terrific premise for a thriller. He mentions something that most science fiction writers noticed in the 1940s, and that my father confirmed to me from his own experience, which is that people who paid attention to these things were quite aware of the likely significance of the sudden radio silence in the early 1940s in the field of nuclear fission research publication. As I recall, the U.S. authorities actually interrogated some science fiction writers and other civilians about where they were getting their ideas. They were able to point out persuasively that it was hard to miss the sudden disappearance from public life of nearly everyone in the field.
Cochran's theory is that we were naive back then. Instead of an abrupt cessation of research publication, we should have reduced the output gradually, replacing it with word salad and irreproducible results, just like . . . hmmmm.
We All Seem to Agree that Courage is Lacking today- So What Do We Do?
The subject of courage is one modern society hardly talks about- at least in traditional terms- and waters down to utter meaninglessness when it does (by design).
So how to address this? One fellow seems to have made a start at it, and it seems interesting.
I think his analysis of the problem and how it's related to "safetyism" seems to me to be on the money:
He seems well on the right track.
He also seems to understand the importance of Horsemanship in the process-
Let us hope his dream of establishing an "Academy of Chivalry" by 2030 becomes manifest. It can't happen soon enough for our society.
What he needs now are benefactors, hopefully he can find some.
Rain, Rain
Go away.
We’ve had one call after another up here. Trees are falling left and right. Roofs punched through by trees. Flash floods, warnings of floods, watches for floods.
Supposedly it’ll stop tomorrow.
Aristotle on Storytelling
A new translation of the Poetics aims to show contemporary writers that Aristotle still has a lot to offer their craft.
Dragon of Death
It's a cool name, anyway. " Scientists have uncovered the remains of one of the largest pterosaurs on record, researchers announced in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research."
Another Shooting
There's nothing new here, so there's nothing new to say. The shooter was, again, a crazy person known to police. This is true approximately 100% of the time. The obvious solution is to empower the police to go after unstable people, but the police work for a government that nobody trusts enough to do that. Neither engaged political faction, at least: the right correctly fears that red-flag laws would be applied politically, subjecting ordinary people to SWAT raids aimed at disarming them; the left is pushing for laws to remove police from schools because they don't trust the police either.
So we end up debating things that are obvious non-starters, like banning the most popular rifle in America -- clearly protected by the Heller interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (see section II) -- in order to 'make it harder' for crazy people to get guns by making it harder for everyone to get guns. There's no political support sufficient for that, and a Supreme Court majority that would reject it; and it would create far greater violence trying to effect it in the teeth of political resistance than could possibly be avoided by it.
In addition, even if it were successfully done it would subject Americans to the same kind of criminal violence as Mexicans or Brazilians from cartels and other organized crime. Brazil and Mexico, big multi-ethnic American states, are much better analogs for the USA than the European nations people like to cite. The same cartels operate here as there. They terrorize Mexico's citizens because they are disarmed, not because they are weaker people than Americans. They terrorize their police into accepting bribes in lieu of death because the police are isolated and alone, rather than being supported by a large armed populace. We're able to hold all this in check as well as we do because of our broad, deep capacity to resist organized criminal violence.
So we're not going to do the practical thing that nobody trusts the government nor the police to do; and we're not going to do the impossible thing that would be foolish anyway. Therefore, we have to accept that this kind of thing is going to happen once in a while. There's nothing to be done about it within the realm of the possible, and politics is the art of the possible.
Punching Down
The NYT has a job opening:
A recent Times job listing asks for applicants to cover “personalities,” news outlets, and “online communities” of the “right-wing media ecosystem that now serves many conservative Americans who no longer rely on the mainstream media to inform themselves.”Where a regular reporter might cover “subjects” or come prepared with a rolodex of “sources,” The Times notes in a telling choice of words that the ideal candidate for its new opening will already have a “robust list of reporting targets.”
'Corporate giants with deep political ties to our government's intelligence/surveillance community seek spy to infiltrate and report on suspicious fellow citizens.' Great.
Bison Born in Wanuskewin
In Saskatchewan, Canada, a bison has been born on Wanuskewin land for the first time since 1876. More are expect to follow as part of a reintroduction program.
"Xinjiang"
Chinese "re-education" facilities are overcrowded in what they are pleased to call their 'new frontier.'
450 Buses
Texas has been busing illegal immigrants to D.C. in an attempt to pressure the government to stop leaving the border wide open. The governor, Greg Abbot, has apparently decided to up his game.
‘And we’re up to our 45th bus now, when you add a zero to that, I think Washington D.C. is going to soon find out they’re dealing with the same consequences as we’re dealing with,’ Abbott proposed.
This is not actually working as intended, though perhaps the increased numbers will force the government to take a hand in it. So far, the government and the pro-immigration NGOs -- Catholic and other churches especially -- have largely ignored this effort, and left these people to be sorted out by small-scale activist groups on the ground. These activists have been housing and feeding the migrants long enough to find out where they have family already in the USA, and then buying them Greyhound bus tickets back to wherever they want to be. Their stay in DC is short, and they end up wherever they wanted to go.
Abbot is putting a lot of pressure on these "mutual aid" activist groups, however, both organizational and financial. An increase in scale of this sort is likely to break their capacity to handle the migrants in this way. Either the actual government or the bigger NGOs will have to start playing, which may begin to have the effect Abbot intends.
War and Taiwan
CDR Salamander says that war isn't necessarily inevitable, but the need to prepare for one is -- especially if we want to avoid one.
Feeling the fury of parents
The NASB has given itself a good scare. Not only has it watched mad wokiness drag down a stunning number of candidates over the last six or seven months, it lost about 40% of its members (and revenues, more to the point) in the furious reaction to its collaborating with the White House to sic the federal judicial system on uppity parents. Some of the NASB members, it seems, didn't appreciate the blowback from its characterizing parents as domestic terrorists for having the effrontery to speak up at school board meetings. Parents should be seen to drop off the bums on seats, not heard.The NASB official who seemed to have the chummiest relationship with White House staff was given the ax early. NASB then followed up with an outside audit that established two valuable points: the White House's fingerprints were all over this disgraceful episode, and the NASB board itself can make a case that it was cut out of the loop by a rogue official who's now been safely defenestrated. Whether or not the latter claim is true, the NASB certainly making some very different policy noices these days:
The organization said it was implementing several actions based on the review’s findings. These include amending its constitution to confine its advocacy to “a united, nonpartisan national movement.”
The NSBA also said it would adopt a resolution that opposes federal intrusion and expansion of executive authority by the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies in the absence of authorizing legislation.Soccer moms vote. I doubt this travesty contributed as much to President Biden's amazing slide in the polls as the Afghanistan debacle, inflation, or the empty shelves where infant formula should be, but any professional political advisor can read the tea leaves in the many elections that have swung against educrats on school boards and in state houses.
That's a good one
Apparently Lara Logan's fall from woke grace is complete. The NYT put together together one of those "should we have guess our neighbor was a terrorist? He always seemed so polite" pieces with this absolute howler:
More than half a dozen journalists and executives who worked with Ms. Logan at “60 Minutes,” most of whom spoke anonymously to discuss private interactions with her, said she sometimes revealed political leanings that made them question whether she could objectively cover the Obama administration’s military and foreign policy moves. She appeared increasingly conservative in her politics over the years, they said, and more outspoken about her suspicions of the White House’s motives and war strategy.The horror. The horror.
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