Reason for the Season
When I was in Ocean City, Maryland, earlier this month most of the businesses were closed for the season. I was a little shocked at how much this was true; Savannah, Georgia, is a similar sort of town but has a large enough resident population that even in the depth of winter pretty much everything is still open. Not so here! Not just hotels and restaurants and bars but grocery stores and other purveyors of regularly-required necessities were shut down.
Of the few hotels that were still operating, one of them had on its sign, "Let's keep the Christ in Christmas," or something similar to that. This greatly upset one of the comrades I had come to see, who felt it was exclusionary, perhaps even discriminatory, when displayed on a public accommodation. I said that I thought they should grant the Christians the justice of the statement, and, ah, 'turn the other cheek.'
That is not the spirit of what has come to be known as "liberalism," which used to mean "being ok with other people disagreeing with you." Today's Asheville Citizen-Times presents locals with a lecture from a retired superintendent from Vermont who has, like so very many before him, chosen to move South and then lecture us about how we need to change to be more like it is up North.
Naturally, the newspaper was delighted to publish the letter.
Opinion: Christmas season not about religion, but about pure and simple love[Really? Not at all about religion? -Grim]It is the time of the year that we are compelled to tell this wonderful story. In reality, the circumstances and conditions of this story are foreign to many of us. It is a story about poor people. It is a story about people of color. It is a story where might and wealth are on the opposite side. It is a story of Arabs. It is a story of Jews. It is a story of Phoenicians, at least that is what we are led to believe. It is a story where pieces and parts from separate Biblical writings are pulled together to give us a compelling version of what happened.Most know what story I am talking about. While it is a story that is embraced by the Christian faith, it might also be embraced by people of all faiths or people of no faith at all for it is a story of love.
That's enough to give you the flavor of the thing; you can read the rest if you want to, but you've probably read it before. The man was a career educator, which explains a great deal about the state of our society.
A Single Political Post
I was not planning on doing any political posts during the holidays, barring unforeseen emergencies; but I do feel that I ought to note this article by David Samuels on the breakdown of the Obama machine that has been successfully manipulating American politics for the last few years. I ought to do so because we all owe Mr. Samuels a great debt, as it was his work that got Obama's messaging imp Ben Rhodes to confess the whole bit because he thought he was talking to a friendly outlet (namely, the New York Times Magazine).
Mr. Samuels, as it turned out, was an honest journalist who really believed all that talk about the free press serving a watchdog role. In faithfully performing what he had youthfully believed was a sacred duty he was freely assuming, he first revealed what he is now explicating.
My thoughts on having read through it are that his analysis understates Elon Musk's role, even though he puts him first in honor. Musk's breaking Twitter free from the censorship program created the friction in the gears of the machine that recently, and blessedly, caused it to fly apart. Samuels comes as close as a man educated to speak to secular audiences can to referring to blessings in his shorter remarks on the role of Donald Trump's survival of the assassination attempt against him.
It's a very long piece, and because of its author it deserves discussion. For now I will merely note it, and perhaps we will return to it in the New Year.
Yuletide
Christmas Cookies
Strait is considered one of the greats of Texas country music, but he’s a little late for me. He’s more of a revival figure from the 80s than one of the 70s greats who were revolutionary rather than traditional.
Thus, I’d never heard this piece until tonight. It’s not bad at all.
It is Illegal, Isn’t It?
I always wondered why DEI-style programs didn’t count as illegal discrimination. I once applied for a job with the Department of the Navy and was told I wasn’t qualified before they actually asked about my qualifications— just my demographics alone sufficed to exclude me from consideration. For any other demographic group, the law explicitly forbids such a ruling. For me and those in mine, somehow the discrimination was explicitly permitted, even required.
I understood the arguments in favor of such programs as remedial of decades of discrimination and centuries of slavery. Not that my ancestors— red dirt farmers, coal miners, drovers, welders— had benefitted a great deal from any social injustice. One of my grandfathers manufactured concrete blocks by hand, until he got a job as a forklift operator. The other repaired long-haul tractor trailer trucks. Others had it harder still, but this sort of race-based remediation was at best a blunt instrument that didn’t much treat the problem.
But what always confused me was how it wasn’t just illegal. It seemed to be, following from the principles. Yet every institution practiced some version of it, especially the government.
Maybe it’s illegal after all.
The Appalachian Stack Cake
My paternal grandmother always had one of these under glass every time I ever remember visiting. She was a tremendous cook, making three meals every day starting with breakfast before dawn. I learned to make biscuits from her, but she never taught me this recipe.
Here are two versions, one with dried apples and one with apple butter. If you have never tried it, it’s a great holiday cake.
The Horrors of Moderation
A group of Kenyan employees have been diagnosed with "severe" PTSD because of their jobs -- as moderators on Facebook.
More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.
They must be doing a good job. I've never seen anything on Facebook that caused me to faint, vomit, or scream and run away.
A Gentle Suggestion
Lord Blackstone defined "gentlemen" as those "qui arma gerit," meaning, "who bear arms." Perhaps it's time to gentle your condition, as Shakespeare tells us Henry V once said.
All About the Drones
If you don't have your old Atari defensive gear, T-Rex Labs has some interesting thoughts on defending against drones.
Honesty in Journalism
Cowboy State Daily: “Shooting Drones is Illegal, But a Shotgun Would Work Best”
Magic & the German Shepherd Dog
Tonight Conan found two of his tennis balls in the basement, where they had fallen down the stairs and become lost. I picked each one up in turn and threw it up the stairs, to the main floor. Each time he thought I had thrown it across the basement, and went and searched the other side laboriously.
Then, after I finished lifting weights, we went back upstairs where he found the balls. He grabbed one and was running around showing it to everyone as if to say, “Daddy is a wizard! He threw this ball in the basement, and it reappeared on the main floor! Look! Wizard!”
A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz, Translated By Czeslaw Milosz & Robert Pinsky
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.
But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.
So darned unfair
For Schadenfreude, it's hard to beat about 90% of the election post-mortems in the last 5-6 weeks, but this Salon piece is a truly virtuoso performance in Looking Glass world analysis. Apparently Trump unfairly skunked the Democrats by sticking to big-picture themes and speaking about them consistently to national audiences. At the same time, he employed a "divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition." Harris, for her part, micro-targeted to splinter groups, which was apparently better because it had more details.On the other hand, Trump unfairly micro-targeted those same splinter groups with ads that purported to praise Harris's position on just the issue each group would hate. He targeted Muslims with her pro-Israel positions and Jews with her anti-Israel ones, or alarmed oilfield voters with her threatened ban on fracking, which she didn't even mention while she was campaigning this time! Evidently the ads implied they were from Harris fellow-travelers if not the Harris campaign itself, which research shows makes voters more receptive, again very unfair. It seems Harris's splinter groups were bored by her targeted message, assuming they believed a word of it, while the splinter targets of the Trump effort were galvanized by video evidence of her actual messages over time, which they totally believed.Salon quotes the NYT's lament that people don't seem to believe experts any more, and they couldn't hear Harris's message of joy/brat/whatever because they were so angry about feeling broke. Evidently nothing can be done to improve this state of affairs except for Democrats to stop playing so nice and try to dominate the culture that is upstream from politics, which they've never tried before and certainly didn't succeed at for decades by capturing most institutions from the press to the justice system to public schools to universities.
Bee Stings
Running Low On Ideas, God Makes Oklahoma
It's a fair cop, though the southeastern and southwestern corners of the state as well as the panhandle have bits of interesting topography. Really, though, is there any interesting topography from Galveston, TX, on up through Kansas?
However, an even worse heresy has recently arisen: Die Hard is a Harry Potter movie!
Updates
"OTTAWA — Former Rightful-President Hillary Clinton has been awarded an honorary medical license by the Canadian Minister of Health due to her decades of experience providing dignified euthanasia services to men and women in America."
(It's actually worth the half minute it takes to read the whole article.)
"The pardon will reportedly cover any crimes that Sauron may have committed during the entirety of the Second Age of Middle Earth."
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