Let's Check in on the Department of Justice

Just a collection of news here.

Buzzfeed (BF): Secret DOJ report clears itself of political wrongdoing in Gen. Flynn unmasking

AP: Clinton lawyer cleared of wrongdoing in Durham case

Fox: Former US Attorney Brett Tolman: "There is not a single district court in this country other than Washington, D.C., where this [Clinton lawyer acquittal] would have happened."

WLTX: A Year and a Half Later, More People from the Carolinas now being arrested by DOJ in January 6th probe. "The FBI and prosecutors with the U.S. Department of Justice are not slowing down their effort to track the hundreds of people believed to be involved in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol."

The Guardian (UK): DOJ Appears to be Investigating Donald Trump

Sword and Sorcery

An essay by Richard Fernandez.

UPDATE: Somehow I accidentally linked that originally to a YouTube performance of the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. The link is now fixed, but I kept the Conan link here in case anyone happened to want a link to that soundtrack.

Memorial Day 2022

The chaplain said in his prayer that we are a broken nation, and begged God to forgive and restore us. Another year that might have seemed unpatriotic; but not this year. 

Women failing for no good reason

Unfortunately, when you fail for no good reason, you're likely to latch onto a dumb explanation for failure and therefore advocate fixing the wrong thing.

The Wall Street Journal descended to a little pandering recently with an article about how women don't get promoted enough because they get asked to do scut work that's considered "non-promotable."

It should be obvious that any corporation not run by saintly geniuses is full of people who are very good at figuring out which hapless co-workers can be conned into doing their scutwork. The ones who qualify for promotions have the good sense to decline. It does seem that men disproportionately figure this gambit out, perhaps because women are too focused on playing Nice Girl and expecting a a warm, nurturing pat on the head as they are positioned for success, and therefore miss the chance to play Competent Team Member and earn a promotion honestly. If Nice Girl is more important, fine, more power to you, but accept that a promotion isn't in the cards. Your reward will have to take another form. Luxuriate in your indifference to filthy lucre and rejection of tainted patriarchal status.

The Journal cut off comments after receiving only about 55, but not before several women exposed the article's absurd premise.

"We will kill you graveyard dead"

The short version:



The long version:

Oh Dear

"'Guns should not be in the hands of the mentally unstable' says senile old man with nukes."

Chanconne

We’re the Apex Predators

 That bear was headed for the hills. 

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.

More grist for the thriller mill

A large underwater laboratory has abruptly disappeared from the sea floor.

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.'