Fascinating

Today I learned that you can’t buy an ad to run in Times Square that is critical of someone without their written permission. This is true of dictators: want to complain about Xi or Putin? Not unless they consent. 

Happy Mother’s Day

To those among you who have earned the title, our best. To the rest of you, remember yours today. 

Humor and History

If you are unaware of the Flappr YouTube channel you are in for a treat. There you will find some of the funniest and informative historical videos ever made. The Good Thing, Bad Thing series is a must watch. There are separate videos on the French, Chinese, and Russian revolutions. I recommend them all. Don't be put off by the length. All are time well spent. 

More Comedy Unleashed

The earlier Nicholas De Santo bit was from Comedy Unleashed, and they have a number of funny comedians on. Here's Mary Bourke, "I Feel Sorry for Millennials":

Here's Konstantin Kisin:

And here's the channel. Pretty funny stuff.

5/18/23 Update: When I first found this channel, I watched maybe 5 comedians in a row who were all funny, so I thought I'd share it here. Since then, I've hit about 4 in a row who just weren't that funny, so I'm less enthused. Anyway, it's a comedy club, so I should expect it to be hit or miss.

Cowboy Poetry: Bear Tale

The Biblical reference is to Ecclesiastes 11, if you don’t recognize it. 

Ireland, Free Speech, and God-Given Rights

There is no reasonable defense for Ireland's new law on 'hate speech,' which is the kind of law one couldn't hope to comply with because it places the burden of proof on your opponent's feelings. 'You are guilty if your opponent feels that you are' is an insurmountable burden for any citizen to meet, no matter how well-intentioned and inclined to law abiding. 

However, it's Ireland's problem, and they'll have to deal with it. When the consequences of it become evident, the Irish have established traditions for throwing off tyranny as necessary. 

I won't, therefore, bother discussing the law at length; but the frame raises an old debate in an interesting way.

To begin: freedom of speech is not a "God-given" right; no rights really are. We may hold certain rights to be "self-evident," but that is simply a comforting fiction derived from the American Revolution. Rights must be taken, not given and, once won, any attempt to nullify them must be resisted by (in the Communist Left's favorite phrase) "any means necessary." ...

Nor are the enshrinement of rights in a nation's constitution any guarantee of perpetuity. Countries come and go; regimes change. The populace undergoes a philosophical and ethnic shift -- a quiet revolution -- and no longer feels any loyalty or allegiance to even bedrock cultural notions from hundreds of years ago. Constitutions become "living," which is to say, dead. 

Joel and I had a lengthy debate about whether or not that was the right conception of rights back in 2007, which was itself part of a subset of a debate that had already gone on for quite a while. I was taking roughly the same position as the fellow here: whatever God wants us to have in terms of rights, we have to do the work, in the same way that God created a world in which men could have wine, but there will only actually be wine to drink if we make it anew every year and all the time. 

You can find this debate on the sidebar under the heading "Frith & Freedom," it being the first several entries ("The Endowment of Rights" and then several posts citing Beowulf and the Founders). 

If you take the position that "a right" belongs to whatever level at which it practically comes to be, the only "natural rights" are the right to die and the right to think. The right to die Nature will defend herself; no matter what efforts are put into trying to force you to stay alive, your right to die really cannot be denied but only delayed. (That formulation puts an unwanted division between Divine Law and Natural Law, but Nature is said to be fallen; in at least this one way the Natural Law is out of order with God's Law). 

The right to think, likewise, is beyond human power to deny you. You can be drugged, deprived of sleep, tortured, or killed, and these things can delay thought or prevent it. But as long as you are not dead, during whatever moments of clarity your torturers leave you, you have the power to keep your own counsel. You may not be able to say anything about it or do anything about it, but your ability to think through the world is something they can only try to influence from the outside.

I have, in more recent years, argued that this inalienable right to thought implies also a right to speak: if your ability to think rationally about the world is a source of your human dignity (or the source, as Kant has it), then we ought also to respect your right to express those thoughts. By the same token, I have argued that the dignity that inheres in human beings implies an inalienable right to self-defense, which in turn grants necessarily the right to the means to defend one's self. 

Those things I think are rational truths that ought to follow from the limited things that Nature really does defend. They can be said to be natural rights because they are direct or necessary logical consequences of natural rights. In that way, they really ought to be part of any political system whatsoever; no government, which is always and only a human-created institution, ought to violate these pre-political truths about human nature. 

Even so, if that view is to be realized in the face of all the human beings who desperately want to exert their domination and mastery over others, it must be defended. These defenses may morally be as emphatic as necessary, and furthermore they ought to be, because something more fundamental and important to humanity than that particular government's survival is at stake. 

Religious Humor

Tex's comments in the post below reminded me of an old post on religious jokes, from way back in 2007. There was a follow-up post in 2009, in both of which I retold one of Jerry Clower's jokes. It's better when he tells it.

In any case, the posts are in line with Tex's complaint about jokes being "all hostility and no punchline." There's some bad jokes out there, and some great ones too.

Nicholas De Santo, Right-Wing Italian Comedian

Discovered this fellow in the comments over at the Sage of Knoxville's place. Mostly not vulgar and there's no profanity, but it may be hazardous if there are left-wing passersby. In my work environment, it would be NSFW.

A Bit of Byzantine Chant at the Coronation

King Charles's father, Prince Philip, was raised in the Greek Orthodox church. He was received into the Church of England in 1947, the month before he wed Princess Elizabeth, according to Wikipedia.

My guess is that that family background was behind the Byzantine chant at the coronation today, but maybe it was just an ecumenical gesture.

Psalm 71 in the Orthodox reckoning is 72 for everyone else, I believe. The Orthodox join what everyone else has as Psalm 9 and 10 together into Psalm 9, so the count gets off by one after that.

This Psalm is fitting for a coronation: 

Marking Lightfoot's Passing

Not something I listen to regularly, but I've always found the "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" haunting.

He has a number of other good songs I grew up with. Here's a couple. 

An Amazing Cover and a Fitting Tribute

Sabaton, a band that has quickly become a favorite, has covered Motorhead's (a band that has ALWAYS been a favorite), song "1916," an anthem to the fallen of WWI. 1916 was the title track of Motorhead's album of the same name released in January 1991. Sabaton has done an a amazing job covering the song and the video is very powerful. It is a fitting tribute to Motorhead's front man Lemmy and, more importantly, our fallen dead.   

A Bit of Stan Rogers

We've had this next one before, but it was a long time ago, and since it's probably my favorite from Stan, let's have it again.

In the Navy

On the newest Navy recruiting tactic:

The US Navy has embraced the Bud Light approach to selling itself — enlisting an active-duty drag queen to boost recruitment in the face of serious personnel shortfalls.

It’s hard to say which is more surprising — that the Navy would do such a thing, or that it has a drag queen on active duty in the first place.

 Oh, it’s definitely not the latter.

Rathcrogan

A Celtic archaeological site of less renown. 

Scenes from Willie Nelson's 90th Birthday Concert

 One of the last of the Outlaws celebrated his birthday last week.

May Day

I hope you find the Cathedral of May to be glorious. Memento mori, and enjoy your time here. 

UPDATE: Conan’s Maypole. 

Embedding Rumble Videos

Here's a quick how-to for embedding Rumble videos in Blogger. Most of this will be below the fold.

Before we get started, it's vital to ignore the video icon in the Blogger interface throughout this entire process. It will persistently refuse to help you with this task, so you should snub it like a stuck-up ex who broke your heart and stole the cash in your sock drawer on the way out.

Now, let's begin below the fold.

Rumble Test #2

 To see if the HTML Blogger option embeds from Rumble.

The Blogger facility within the HTML option still limits me to YouTube or my computer. Following, though, is the standard HTML URL underlie of a video title rather than the URL itself.

2023 SLS Chicago: Women’s & Men’s Final

The HTML option, though, is too cumbersome to use to suit me.

Eric Hines

Edudopia

It's school board election season here in my little county. Since my shackles were struck off at the beginning of this year, I've dipped only the occasional toe in local politics. I told myself I deserved a break from meetings, at any rate, and even skipped a candidates' forum that a year ago I'd have felt obligated to attend.

Still, with the election date approaching in a week, I broke down and watched a 2-hour video of a candidates forum. Yikes. School board elections draw some pudding-headed candidates, don't they? Luckily the choice this year was a little better defined than last year, when it was hard to distinguish among the candidates at all. One incumbent seems like a reasonably solid guy, while his challenger couldn't even manage to field the basic "Are you willing to assure us you'll have no truck at all with any CRT or gender-affirming nonsense?" The challenger went down the usual rabbit trail about law school curricula and affecting not to understand what the questioner was concerned about.

The two guys I plan to vote for (out of 5 candidates for two board slots) both came right out and said CRT and gender-affirmation had no place in the schools. One deftly avoided arguing about what CRT technically means and whether it's technically taught in public schools by simply saying people should be judged by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin. The other said it was pure garbage that he had no patience with. Both clearly were focused on academic excellence and were capable of formulating reasonably clear sentences. Best I can expect!

The challenger with the depressing CRT answer also assured us solemnly that the science has established that childish brains are biologically unsuited to learning to read before the age of 6 or 7. It follows, therefore, that we should spend more money on early childhood development, which should consist entirely of play. All I hear when someone talks that way is "Increase our budget, because it's not our fault that the effort is futile and the money is wasted." Not that I want to browbeat very young children into learning to read if they happen not to be ready, but then why are we spending education tax revenues on their playcare? It's the same reaction I have when people explain to me that it's not a school's fault when revenues per student are doubled but no one's learning improves. Granted that it may not be the school's fault what's going on in the kids' home lives, but the fact remains that we're throwing money away on techniques that even their loyal proponents don't think are working. It's as if the point of the school were to be a playground, not so much for the kids, as for the people pursuing hobbies in childhood development studies.

I wrote up the 2-hour discussion to the limit of my ability to decipher what they were trying to say, and to the limit of my patience ("I've had my patience tested, and it was 'negative'!"). This morning the "I don't know what CRT is" candidate complained in a comment to my post that I'd misunderstood certain parts of her fragmentary answers. No doubt; I responded that it was good that she'd read my summary and had carte blanche to add to or correct my rendition right there in the comments section. She explained solemnly how people often doubt her views on the appropriate age to learn to read, basing their erroneous opinions on their own experience instead of on the science. No need for me to respond; that's a campaign ad for her opponent, as I see it. I was probably a little brusque in my summary of what I took to be her views, but I actually left out the worst part, fearing I was not understanding her words and not wanting to embarrass her. I could have sworn that, when asked her views on the proper role of parents, she answered that parents were important, because if they didn't produce the kids, the schools would have no one to work with. She managed to get out the statement that parents were "partners," and I left it at that.

Were schools run by nimcompoops when I was a kid, and I just didn't have the opportunity to see it? I could swear that most of my teachers and administrators had more on the ball. Of course I have no idea what was going on at the school board meetings, which probably would have curled my toes. At least they didn't try to make me wait until I was 7 years old to learn to read, for pity's sake, not that it would have mattered. My family taught me to read before I ever walked into a schoolroom, without inflicting any evident cognitive damage. Perhaps today that would be grounds for a CPS intervention, or penalties for practicing education without a license and a union card.

Rumble Test

 What can I do to post a randomly selected Rumble video?

Here's the URL, copied from the address field of my browser: https://rumble.com/v2klc9a-2023-sls-chicago-womens-final-and-mens-final.html But that's not the video itself, only a path to it.

Here's the blogger's video embed effort: oops--can't do it. The blogger facility only allows "Upload from computer" or from YouTube in particular.

Maybe the problem isn't unique to Rumble. Maybe it's that Alphabet allows embeds only from Alphabet's wholly owned video facility or from personal equipment.

Eric Hines