Life can turn on a dime

War Never Changes

Technically these are unregulated, even by the Biden administration.

"200 Shells"

The counterargument they like to make is that firearms are so obviously dangerous that you don't need to understand them to know that we need fewer of them and with more regulations. Still, the refusal to learn even the most basic facts about them before calling for regulations is a commitment to ignorance that is sometimes stunning to behold.

Hold the Phone

What a concept!

This oppressed majority has, finally, found an ally in the form of a bar in Idaho called Old State Saloon, which recently went viral for celebrating “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month”. On Mondays in June, “any heterosexual male dressed like a heterosexual male will receive a free draft beer”…

Idaho is a long way off, but I was there last year… 

Using hostages as a pretext for rescue

"Some things are so stupid, you have to be a UN official to say them."

Banana Republic

Chiquita held responsible for killings by the guerrilla groups that they bankrolled. If this keeps up, we will all end up paying for our crimes. 

Monday Night Music

Merle tells a funny story about Chet Atkins at the beginning of this.

Of course the Tennessee Ernie Ford version is great, but this next one is good as well. The thing's over at about 3:30 or so. I don't know why whoever posted this on YouTube left 2 minutes of nothing on the end.

The girl in the back playing bass, looking like she's tickled to be playing on stage with her dad or something, is actually Tal Wilkenfeld out of Australia who's recorded with a lot of big names (Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Toto, Todd Rundgren, Macy Gray, Dr. John, Trevor Rabin, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, Rod Stewart, John Mayer, Sting, Ben Harper, David Gilmour, Pharrell, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, Lee Ritenour, Hiram Bullock, Susan Tedeschi, and Hans Zimmer, according to Wikipedia). I had no idea who she was.

Do any of you remember when TV stations went off the air around midnight and the last thing they'd play was the national anthem?

Bonds at home

I've been unusually ill, just when my husband has been down and out as well. I have also been lifted up in the most extraordinary way by my community.

Greg injured his back, then suffered first-onset a-fib problems, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps in reaction to oral steroids. A hospital stay with him later, I came back home with a bug. Apparently just as I was most clogged up with garden-variety bronchitis, I got a lungful of nasty garage-cleanup dust in connection with our plans to build out a ground-floor apartment in the garage under our house-on-stilts. Though I don't normally suffer from asthma, I suspect my airways were shrunk down to a point where the dust was the exact size to trigger spasm. Weeks later, I've only just now managed to open up my spasmed airways.

Meanwhile there are all these rescue dogs! And Greg really needs to limit movement and therefore to be waited on hand and foot. I had a dog-walker who unfortunately has a day job that got crazy busy, and in addition she fell ill. I advertised for more help, though, and not only did I snag some great workers, but several people insisted on helping out gratis. One I'd never even met before, but she knows something of my rescue work and does a great deal of it herself. On the whole it has been a profoundly heartwarming experience.

Today I am feeling very nearly normal, but still taking it easy until I'm sure my airways won't seize up again.

All the recent dogs rescued in extremis continue to do well, also an enormous boost to the spirits. There is a great deal to be grateful for.

Bonds

“The blood of your children is mixed with ours. This is an unbreakable bond.”

Am Yisrael Chai.

World's Fair 1982

Lileks is on about the World's Fair today.

It’s been decades since a World’s Fair last made a mark on the American imagination. Knoxville held one in 1982, and while a few may remember its landmark symbol—the Sunsphere—most Americans would look at a picture of the thing and think it was a failed Vegas attraction. The ’82 World’s Fair was a “specialized Expo,” dedicated to a particular theme—in this case, energy. 

I attended that fair! I don't remember it the same way because I was still a child; for me, the most memorable thing beside the Sunsphere was a WWI-fighter themed ride, which I loved because of Snoopy and the Red Baron. The fighters were done up as Sopwith Camels and Fokker Triplanes, in a series that allowed them to be dogfighting each other, strongly suggesting that the architect had the same vision that my youthful self had as well.

Many years later I met my wife under the Sunsphere for the first time. We had 'met' online earlier in a Tolkien appreciation group, long before meeting someone you had first encountered online was considered a safe thing to do. Unfortunately for me the local security was not clear on why I'd be standing around below the landmark, and tried to warn her off that some scary guy was hanging around with no better explanation of why he was there than that he was going to meet some woman he'd 'met online.' 

We'll be 25 years married later this month. 

Gandalf Bewildered

Hot Air quotes "Gandalf" -- actually the actor who played him -- as criticizing Trump's rhetorical skills. I understand exactly where he goes wrong because I did it myself.

 'Trump is an absolute bewilderment. I haven't seen him live. But he's one of the worst public speakers there has ever been. Whether he’s reading a script or not, it’s so patent what he is.”

I've always read transcripts of speeches rather than listening to them live because I wanted to understand the arguments being made, without being affected by the rhetorical flourishes. If you read the transcript of a Trump speech, it's almost incoherent. If that's what "Gandalf" is doing, I completely understand where he's coming from.

Yet the first time I heard Trump speak in 2016, at an airport where I couldn't get away from the monitors, I realized that he was definitely going to win. At the time the polls said he was 95% certain to lose. Nevertheless, I was sure about it. 

The style transposes as incoherent because he's in dialogue with the audience. He constantly stops, interrupts himself, begins a new line of inquiry based on the feedback he is getting. As a transcript you can't understand what he even thinks he is talking about. As a member of the audience, it's obvious. 

He is in fact an excellent rhetorician just because he's not on a script. He talks with people rather than to them. It's so different from ordinary politics that it just doesn't make sense until you immerse yourself in it once, and then it is clear why and how it works.

Another Song

 

[UPDATE: Some of the visuals in this YouTube version of the song are erotic and may be unwelcome to some viewers. I didn't realize that when I posted it; I was just looking for the song.]

Naturally “king” and “mountain” together produce other sentiments in me. 

It's All Going to Pot

The money follows the student

This is a good round-up article about the recent smashing success of the school choice platform in Texas and the likely effects in other states. Some rare good news.

"No Evidence"

In an article about Biden's D-Day speech, the Washington Post has this paragraph:

Trump has sought to spin around concerns about his authoritarian instincts by accusing Biden of acting like a dictator or undermining democracy. He has repeatedly accused Biden of spearheading political prosecutions, though there is no evidence of White House involvement in the four criminal cases against Trump.

This has become a favorite locution since the 2020 election, about which we were endlessly told that there was "no evidence" of fraud or bad practices. In fact there is nearly endless evidence about it; what there wasn't was a formal inquiry that could turn evidence into proof. This is because courts resolved questions on issues like standing or timing, avoiding evidentiary hearings. But we never had proof that Saddam stole his 97% victories either; we just had evidence, evidence of exactly the same kind as we have about 2020.

As for these trials, there is also evidence that the Biden administration is involved. 

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating a top prosecutor on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Trump for his past work as a senior Justice Department official during the Biden administration. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland turn over records related to the employment of Bragg prosecutor Matthew Colangelo amid a "perception" of coordination. 

The Post knows about this, because they wrote a story claiming to debunk what they described as a "theory." 

Among them: the idea that President Biden’s Justice Department was involved in the successful Manhattan criminal prosecution of Trump. (Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts last week.) Trump has long blamed Biden for this prosecution, without any evidence.

The evidence that Garland didn't dispatch him to assist is, by the way, that Garland denies it. Of course you should believe the word of a public servant like Garland, or any FBI or ATF agent for that matter. So there's no evidence for the 'theory,' but Garland's denial is firm evidence. 

It's science, you know. Political science.

80 Years On

AI Cowboy

Out at the Cowboy State Daily, regular columnist Rod Miller had an AI produce this week's column after studying his style. 

I've been considering that as an experiment, but I can see from his results that it's not quite time yet.

Another Stupid Train Idea

The love affair with spending vast sums of money on trains nobody will ride continues. Asheville is in the early (but still expensive!) planning stages of adding an Amtrak spur line for tourism. It'll take many years and cost a fortune, but if all that money is spent we can expect the following travel times: 

Salisbury to Asheville

Train: 3 hours and 35 minutes

Car: 2 hours and 10 minutes

Bus: 3 hours and 30 minutes 

Raleigh to Asheville

Train: 6 hours and 47 minutes

Car: 3 hours and 50 minutes

Bus: 6 hours and 20 minutes 

Charlotte to Asheville

Train: 4 hours and 26 minutes

Car: 2 hours and 10 minutes

Bus: 2 hours and 55 minutes

So it's objectively worse on every option, as well as extremely expensive. (They're not even offering a comparison to flight times: Charlotte to Asheville is a route I fly regularly, and it takes about 30 minutes although you have to factor in security and other things too.) But it's a train, and good people love trains. 

Look, I like riding on trains too. It's peaceful and kind of a pleasant throwback to an earlier time. However, this isn't Europe, and trains just aren't practical in most of America. 

Virtue and Physical Fitness

Occasionally one reads columns like this one that suggest that physical fitness is somehow related to politics. 

OK, this is going to sound a little hypocritical, as I have hard-recommended every activity and pursuit, every wellness wheeze and rejuvenation exercise the modern world has dreamed up.... at some time or another, I have insisted to anyone who will listen that it’s only their failure to incorporate, say, a horse into their weekly schedule that is standing between them and their best self.

As a matter of fact, I have also written extensively about the importance of horses to achieving one's best self. It's been a while since it was a regular topic, but at one time that was a major focus of the blog. What I thought it inculcated was courage, not recklessness; gentleness, and the compassion necessary to understand a very different kind of mind and build trust with it; honor, to ride with other people as well as with your horse; and a capacity for building each of these virtues that can become a skill at building virtue itself. 

She worries that it might bring traits that she finds objectionable in politics.

The mechanism is incredibly simple: you embark on this voyage of self-improvement, and more or less immediately see results. You feel stronger and more energetic, probably your mood lifts, and pretty soon you think you are master of your own destiny. You’re still not, by the way: destiny does not care about your step count. But until that fact catches up with you, which it may never, there you are, high on self-righteousness. You can tell this has happened to you when you start inhaling performatively, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel.

Inescapably, you start to situate other people’s problems within their failure to be as fit as you. This is particularly true if you don’t know them and they’re just a bunch of numbers. All those statistics – depressed people, obese people, people with IBS – imagine how much better they would be if only they took responsibility for their health, the way that you have.

There's always a correlation/causation issue with things like physical fitness and, say, disease; maybe people who are healthier are more likely to engage in physical activities than those who are less healthy to begin with, say. On the other hand, some causal events like stronger bones from strength training and stronger hearts from cardio are provable, and these seem to have follow-on causal effects on health. Likewise, it's pretty clear that exercise both teaches the body to adapt to stress and encourages it to produce higher levels of its own antioxidants. 

Still, what she's really worried about is that you might blame people for their bad luck if they aren't also physically fit. That's fair to some degree, and something to consider.

On the other hand, she is wrong about the nature of virtue. 

I realise it’s not really a question of an unwitting slide into fascism, hastened by a treadmill. It’s more that there is a fixed amount of excellence in any self, and the more you spend on your biceps, the less you have for your personality. 

It's only true that there's a zero-sum game insofar as you're spending all your time building virtue; then you might be building one sort or another. No one, however, is 100% focused on virtue-building. There's always capacity for more.

Rather, virtue building is a skill that you can learn, and you learn it by practice just like you do any of the virtues. Like many things in Aristotle, this is a matter that is conceptually severable even though as a matter of fact the activities are the same. I mean that you practice horseback riding (say) and you develop skill at horseback riding, but also courage, and gentleness, and the rest. Severably, you are learning how to build virtues by building all these virtues. When you want to build another one, you will have greater skill at the business of building any sort of virtue.

The question of what kind of morals one should have thus also ends up being severable. Whatever kind they ought to be, building the moral virtues to support successful practice of those things is just another virtue you can learn. If you've been developing your skills at virtue-building, it'll be easier and you will likely be more successful. All sorts of physical fitness can help with this (although you should be careful of ones that produce concussions, like boxing, where the negative physical effects on cognition may outweigh the virtue-building). It's good for you all the way around.

Killdozer

How is it that this spectacular event occurred 20 years, and I never heard a whisper of it? You'd think it would have been all anyone talked about for weeks.