Quick Hits About the Dumbest Timeline
Boy, the news is stupid these days.
People are saying: “David Brooks is supporting reparations after reading Ta-Nehisi Coates! Wow! And he’s a conservative!”
Meanwhile, “conservative” Jen Rubin denounces conservatives for voting against that “All Hate Matters” resolution that Dana took apart here. Hey, who said this? “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” Which whitewashing of evil by condemning both sides do you like, and which do you hate, partisans?
A hack judge praises Manafort’s “otherwise blameless life” of lobbying for dictatorial monsters.
Eric Holder says Democrats should pack the court. Good timing, man! The White House and U.S. Senate are currently controlled by … whom, again?
Donald Trump’s inauguration received tens of thousands of dollars from shell companies that masked the involvement of a foreign contributor or others with foreign ties.
The Guardian has identified the creators of three obscure firms that contributed money to Trump’s inaugural committee, which collected a record $107m as he entered the White House in 2017.
The three companies each gave $25,000 to Trump’s inaugural fund. At least one of the contributions was made for a foreign national who appears ineligible to make political donations in the US.
File it under “Things Trump Superfans Would Go Ape-Poopie About if It Were Obama, But Will Ignore, Justify, or Rationalize When It’s Trump.”
I’m in Friendly Mode today. Enjoy.
P.S. On the recommendation of commenter Slugger, I’m about 1/3 of the way through A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa. Good stuff. I will probably write about this and Escape from Camp 14 soon. (Both links are affiliate links. Buy the books!)
P.P.S. If you have noticed that I tend to blog less lately, it’s largely because I’d rather read books than pay attention to the news. Hopefully the idiocy of all these stories helps explain that decision.
[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]
Good morning!
Gryph (08c844) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:17 amIs it possible for an elected official to criticize Israeli policy without being immediately called out as anti-semetic?
John B Boddie (66f464) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:43 amas mike doran pointed out, Obama built this gangplank into the Israel two minute hate,
narciso (d1f714) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:47 am2. Yes, it is. The debate over various Israeli policies (particularly civilian settlements) is one thing. Omar’s accusations of dual loyalties crossed a very clear line and had nothing to do with any particular policy.
Gryph (08c844) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:49 amI think Manafort’s sentence is a little bit on the high side, actually. The federal prison industry made its profit off of him in advance just with the bond fee, and got a windfall with the voluntary forfeiture of his assets.
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:50 amKinda disappointed the guy eaten by one of his two pet lions after he accidentally locked himself in the cage didn’t make it.
harkin (58beea) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:52 amWell that is awkward but unsurprising
https://dougcollins.house.gov/ohr
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 8:14 am‘Hey, who said this? “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” ‘
That analogy only works in a revised history where Steve King wasn’t singled out and punished.
Or, can we take the easy route and just dismiss that as a Whataboutism?
Munroe (133d6e) — 3/8/2019 @ 8:47 amGeneric ‘hate’ vs thoughtcrime we know the difference.
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 8:57 amPatterico, this current dumpster fire of a political scene reminds me of P.J. O’Rourke. He once stated that giving power and money to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to fifteen year olds.
We see proof of this all across the political spectrum today.
O’Rourke also stated that Congress had this strategy: the person who was still awake at the end of the session got to spend the tax money.
We need a new Jonathan Swift, I think.
P.S. Thank you for the book recommendations
Simon Jester (c8876d) — 3/8/2019 @ 9:10 am“If you have noticed that I tend to blog less lately”
One of the new American Gods….technology….has taken us down a path where we are addicted to what I would call junk-information….the digital equivalent of Hostess Twinkees. We need constant stimulation…..text messages, tweets, blog comments, internet posts, cable news….to feel normal and to get our dose of sugary drama, confirmation bias,….and release. There is so much irritableness and anger and incivility and mundanity….is this evolution or devolution? Ideas used to percolate…simmer….be allowed to grow. Now everything is mowed under with ideological urgency. Good-faith discussions have been replaced by a repetition of two minutes of outrage…we breathlessly wait for Tweets and BREAKING NEWS. Baaaaah! This sheep wants more….
AJ_Liberty (3c84de) — 3/8/2019 @ 9:21 amHow long until Vegas has odds on when Pelosi is forced into wearing a hijab?
mg (8cbc69) — 3/8/2019 @ 10:03 amShe already did when she visited Syria in 2007.
nk (dbc370) — 3/8/2019 @ 10:07 amJust doing relaxing reading lately. I know there are some who aren’t fans of the modern Fantasy Fiction, but there are still plenty of good authors out there from Sanderson to Abercrombie to Correia. Then there are the others who are lesser known, but can still write. Much better than the junk coming out of the Hugo and Nebula awards lately.
NJRob (61e54f) — 3/8/2019 @ 10:12 amCharles stross was good until he went full sjw Scottish division,
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 10:19 amShe looks good in yellow, nk.
mg (8512fd) — 3/8/2019 @ 10:43 amAlas, she did do the sign of the cross in a mosque on the same trip.
urbanleftbehind (5eecdb) — 3/8/2019 @ 10:57 amKind of makes me wonder about a previous guest in these haunts:
urbanleftbehind (5eecdb) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:05 amhttp://splinternews.com/heres-donald-trump-with-the-founder-of-robert-krafts-fa-1833150689
The Dems just said: “Hold our beers”
House votes in favor of illegal immigrant voting
https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/8/house-votes-favor-illegal-immigrant-voting/
harkin (58beea) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:07 amrip jan Michael Vincent, aka stringfellow hawke,
narciso (d1f714) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:09 amIf no fences exist or walls exist how will the mooslums and democrats whip their women?
mg (8cbc69) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:09 amwhat was what happening while the circus was going on in another corner,
narciso (d1f714) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:12 ammeanwhile the 9th circus just voided immigration law, I forget which apparatchik,
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/03/judge-dismisses-stormy-daniels-lawsuit-over-trump-130000-non-disclosure-agreement/
narciso (d1f714) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:17 amThey had been giving preliminary screening
for asylum and rejecting many cases with a perfunctory
reviewe by some kind of a judge.
The court said they could not do that. They could not make final determinations thatw ay.
The case involved someone from Sri Lanka who apparently satisfied the court he hasd agood case which was summarily rejected.
Sammy Finkelman (102c75) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:42 am10. P.J. O’Rourke wrote for the National Lampoon back in the day and even ascended to the Editor-in-Chief position. Great stuff, although much of it is NSFW.
Gryph (08c844) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:46 amThen there is this book about the last time we got involved in Korea:
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Stand-Fox-Company-Marines/dp/0802144519
Three Medals of Honor were awarded, and that might have been too few.
Kevin M (21ca15) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:54 amCharles stross was good until he went full sjw
If you avoid a couple later books in his “Family Trade” series, where he went positively bonkers regarding W, he’s not that political. The “Laundry” books are pretty good.
Kevin M (21ca15) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:58 amHave moo slums intergrated peacefully anywhere?
mg (8cbc69) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:59 amThe world building in his last family trade was interesting
https://www.nysun.com/national/chicago-veering-leftward-with-democrats-collapse/90602/
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:00 pm“Things Trump Superfans Would Go Ape-Poopie About if It Were Obama, But Will Ignore, Justify, or Rationalize When It’s Trump.”
Or, perhaps, something most people ignore since it’s just noise in the system, but some find remarkable because they don’t like Trump.
Kevin M (21ca15) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:01 pmBut the laundry has gotten stale,
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:02 pmThe Shine is off the White House.
DCSCA (797bc0) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:20 pmanti trumpers are feeling pressure from their free trade corporate masters. reparations or anything else must be supported to stop trump from protecting the american workers from libertarian conservatives free trade/ pro illegal alien immigration policy. these never trumper establishment corporatists have made a lot of money destroying the american workers with their free trade policies and wish to continue!
lany (82b8df) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:31 pmKameron Hurley has some interesting scenarios in his earlier work.
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:39 pm11. AJ_Liberty (3c84de) — 3/8/2019 @ 9:21 am
The turn-around time is too fast.
What tends to insidiously cause that is that in many, many systems, mail is shown in reverse chronological order.
That’s the cause of all of this.
I would propose 3 levels, set by the user, with defaults, and all in forward chronlogical order.
Sammy Finkelman (102c75) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:43 pm“rip jan Michael Vincent, aka stringfellow hawke”
Man, I’m feeling real old today, he was 73.
Matt Johnson in Big Wednesday
Steve McKenna in The Mechanic
Link Simmons on Danger Island
“Uh oh, Chongo!”
harkin (58beea) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:48 pm2. John B Boddie (66f464) — 3/8/2019 @ 7:43 am
Yes, of course.
They get called out for being anti-semitic when they offer invidious reasons why other people don’t agree with them. (implying that only corruption, skilled lying or wrong loyalty, can explain it)
And sometimes also for the nature, or the absoluteness, of the criticism; or for their failure to properly rank Israel against its enemies, and vs. a vs. many other governnents in the world.
Sammy Finkelman (102c75) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:50 pmKevin M (21ca15) — 3/8/2019 @ 11:54 am
Last Stand was great. Another really good Korean War book is “Breakout” by Martin Russ.
Have you read The Candy Bombers by Andrei Cherni (about the Berlin Airlift), or Battle of Wits by Stephen Budiansky (about WW II codebreaking – gets into the Joe Rochefort – Midway story.)
ColoComment (b48a15) — 3/8/2019 @ 12:53 pmJMV… also good in Bronson’s “The Mechanic”.
Are these the “Crazy Years” Heinlein described?
Colonel Haiku (e2ff85) — 3/8/2019 @ 1:03 pmOh you betcha, hastings story about code breaking is a good bookend
Narciso (8816df) — 3/8/2019 @ 1:06 pmCongratulations to the young teams at NASA and SpaceX on the successful undocking, reentry, splashdown and recovery from the Atlantic of Demo-1 this morning. Splendid engineering. Google it for 10 minutes of some positive TeeVee news viewing. Outstanding job, boys and girls.
Next phase, in-flight abort systems test this spring reusing the same spacecraft then on to a crewed flight to the ISS by early summer. On deck, Boeing CST-100 Starliner flight test and Virgin Galactic expecting to begin suborbital, customer-paying tourist flights this July as well. Get cracking, Bezos: Blue Origin is bringing up the rear.
It’s back to the future; a space age renaissance. Well done, kids.
“There can be no thought of finishing, for ‘aiming at the stars’ both literally and figuratively, is a problem to occupy generations, so that no matter how much progress one makes, there is always the thrill of just beginning.” – Dr. Robert Goddard, 1932
DCSCA (797bc0) — 3/8/2019 @ 1:10 pm‘A hack judge praises Manafort’s “otherwise blameless life” of lobbying for dictatorial monsters.’
Monica Lewinsky agrees!
https://www.oregonlive.com//politics/2019/03/monica-lewinsky-joins-in-criticism-of-manafort-sentence-says-she-was-threatened-with-27-years-for-lying.html
The treatment of Manafort was another example of white-collar criminals eluding harsh penalties, wrote Louis Laverone, an international financial-crimes attorney.
Nowhere in the article is Hillary mentioned. Nor Andrew McCabe. WaPo — Oh, the irony! Does a $250 million libel suit count as a harsh penalty? Let’s find out!
Is having a “hack judge” worse than never appearing before a judge?
Munroe (7ff072) — 3/8/2019 @ 2:58 pm“WaPo — Oh, the irony! Does a $250 million libel suit count as a harsh penalty? Let’s find out!”
– Munroe
Lol. Only if they outsource their 12(b)(6) motion instead of having their in-house guys do it. D.C. lawyers are expensive, even for simple tasks.
Leviticus (efada1) — 3/8/2019 @ 3:03 pmI too would certainly rather read books than watch the news, although I suspect my interests are different and more eclectic than Patterico’s. I majored in the Romantics and the Humanities in graduate school, wrote my master’s thesis on William Blake, so what drives my independent studies now is a survey of mythology, literature, drama, philosophy, history, science, art, and culture through the ages. I’m finding my quest for understanding liberating, in that I don’t have to conform to a curriculum and am free to follow my research wherever it leads me. I’ve been amassing a private library for years–thank you, Amazon.com–and in the end hope to synthesize my discoveries and realizations into a book, which I have not yet begun to write.
In this regard, I am currently about 3/4 of the way through Provocations by Camille Paglia. (Like I said, I am an eclectic reader.) For those seeking to understand or at least gain a unique perspective on the “crazy years” Heinlein wrote or prophesied of, in which apparently we now live, this is the book to read.
Paglia is what we in Texas would call a “weird duck” or “strange bird,” an odd character. She is a walking contradiction–an atheist who respects religion, a feminist who respects men. In a sense, she is the contemporary living embodiment of Walt Whitman–“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” She is though an astute scholar, a close reader and a keen observer of modern times.
In graduate school at Yale, Paglia studied under Harold Bloom, who is perhaps the last great traditional scholar, author of The Western Canon and The Anxiety of Influence. In the Sterling Library, which was the reason she chose Yale, she found inspiration in Jung’s The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Neuman’s The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a 12-volume comprehensive study of culture and art through the centuries. These sources are what guide her perspective in her criticism of contemporary culture.
A collection of essays that span her thirty years as a social critic, Provocations presents an extraordinary range of views. While several of the chapters deal mainly with her observations on cultural icons and celebrities, it is the chapters in which she analyzes 1960s Counter Culture and 1970s New Age that are the most profound and insightful, particularly in how they both embrace mystery cults and astrology, which she interprets, correctly I think, as modern manifestations of ancient movements. History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain remarked.
Paglia reserves her most biting criticism though for the fatally flawed linguistic theories of Saussure and the social theories of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, French post-structuralism and post-modernism, as well as the Frankfurt School of German origin, which she correctly observes invades American academia in the 1970s and utterly corrupted the entire education system, most especially the Humanities. These are the forces, Paglia argues, that usurped the Counter Revolution of the Sixties and the New Age of the Seventies, and ultimately produced the degradation of American culture and academics we are now suffering under and through.
Hers is a perspective unlike any other, because her knowledge of mythology, literature, art, culture, and history is expansive and well grounded in authentic scholarship. She rails against contemporary culture, because she sees it for what it is–derivative, reactionary, over wrought, and lacking in the foundation that is soul of the Western culture and tradition.
I highly recommend Provocations. It is a book that will make you think. Her call for a complete reformation of the education system is astute, and one I definitely agree with. A return to an emphasis on the Trivium (logic, grammar, rhetoric) and the Quadrivium (literature, music, science, art)–for development of the mind–along with a return to the inclusion of trades–carpentry, electric and plumbing, automotive, etc., building something–for development of skills–would produce intelligent, skilled graduates by the age of fourteen. Young people ready to take on the world and achieve success in whatever field they endeavored. What we have now is a factory system that retards development, traps students in rote learning of exerts in textbooks without context, and produces illiterate and unskilled graduates by social promotion based on age. That is the real problem facing this country, and I speak from experience, having worked in the education system for twenty years before I had to resign and go into real estate to help my mother (who owns the company) take care of my dying father. Mine is a sad story; I was on the verge of achieving what I had worked so hard for so many years to achieve, when life took its toll and forced a redirection. My academic career has been postponed, but that doesn’t mean I can’t continue my studies, as I do.
Perhaps sometime in the future, I will be able to enter the PhD program at UT and finish what I started. Probably not, I mean, I really don’t need a PhD as I will never be a tenured professor. But in the mean time, I can absolutely continue to build my library and read, think, prepare to write, hopefully to publish one day. Albeit, I will the first to admit that my perspective, like Paglia’s, is, shall we say, different than most. There is no place for me in the Academy at this time. I’m all in on chaos theory, fractal geometry and complexity science, how these most recent developments of the computer age are really only repetitions of the Celtic age. Does anyone else besides me notice that Celtic artisans were creating fractal images 3,000 years before the invention of the super computer? It is a serious mistake to think that ancient peoples were not highly sophisticated. They just had a different conception of things, one that was more in tune with nature, but their “sciences,” particularly astronomy, were incredibly accurate.
It goes to and descends from my study of ethology–the animal in its world. That is what I base by theory of literary criticism on–the artist in his or her milieu. Every work is a product of the artist’s response to the intellectual, cultural, historical environment of the time. This is where I depart from the New Criticism. While I certainly agree with its emphasis on close reading and etymological study, following Bloom and Paglia, I cannot more disagree with the premise that any work of art, whether it be literature, poetry, drama, music, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, can be understood in isolation, in and of itself by itself, disassociated or divorced from the artist. One must know the poet in order to understand the poem. There can be no separation between the two, because the poem is the product of the poet’s response to the milieu.
Thus, true scholarship and honest criticism necessarily requires biographical and historical study. An artist can only be interpreted in the context of the times, because the art is a response to the times, just as an animal can only be can only be understood in its natural habitat, its world. Nothing an animal does in captivity, a cage, a laboratory or a zoo, will tell you anything about how the animal behaves in nature, where it is free. The same is true of artists. Their work can only be interpreted or properly understood in the context of the milieu they are responding to. Art divorced from artist is not art. The assumption that any work of art can be studied in isolation, as if it were some random product, is absurd.
I find Paglia noteworthy, because she emphasizes art and culture in context, with a thorough understanding of the classics. I do not agree with some of her conclusions, but I cannot say that her observations and criticisms are not acute.
Gawain's Ghost (b25cd1) — 3/9/2019 @ 11:10 amSo the Guardian article managed to find $125K out of $107M which is about 0.1168 0f the total.
steveg (a9dcab) — 3/9/2019 @ 5:44 pmSo no I’m not outraged.
I wasn’t about Obama’s inaugural donations either