Bob Dylan: “Sometimes the ‘you’ in my songs is me. Other times I can be talking to somebody else. It’s up to you to figure out who’s who. The ‘I’ also changes. And also it could be another person who’s saying ‘I’. When I say ‘I’ right now, I don’t know who I’m talking about.” pic.twitter.com/NJ2qTTVFtt
— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) December 18, 2024
Robert Randolph & The Family Band. Robert on pedal steel and his cousins on bass and drums. Great message. A live act not to miss - I've seen 'em three times.
I was 5 1/2 when we moved from our apartment in Stamford to a house in Norwalk CT in the fall of 1956. One of the things I remember from my time in that apartment was watching two Westerns on TV (along with the Disney Davy Crockett series); Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger, the latter with its stirring opening and closing theme from the William Tell Overture. Although I remembered The Lone Ranger, there was only one show I specifically recalled in detail - the origin story of the character. I recently came across that show and it turns out it was the first episode of the first season. I must have seen it as a rerun because the show began in 1949 and ran through 1957.
Watching that first episode for the first time in more than 65 years I realized why it made such a big impression on me. We learn in that first episode that John Reid, about to become The Lone Ranger, vows never shoot to kill, only to wound, believing that justice belongs to the legal system. Yet that first show is very violent though, in keeping with the times, not graphically so.
Reid, along with five other Texas Rangers, including his brother, are in pursuit of a gang of outlaws. They ride into a box canyon and are ambushed. Reid is badly wounded and the other Rangers killed. This is the scene I remembered all these years and I think it was the unusual level of violence that made it stay in my mind. Reid's life is saved when the Indian Tonto rides into the canyon while hunting, finds the wounded Ranger and helps nurse him to recovery. We also find out that years earlier, Reid had saved Tonto after his family was killed by raiders from another tribe. The outlaws believe Reid dead, and Reid decides it is better for them to continue to believe it, and adopts his new identity as The Lone Ranger.
Clayton Moore plays The Lone Ranger and Jay Silverheels is Tonto. Silverheels was a Mohawk and an outstanding athlete before making his film debut in 1938. Silverheels appeared in all 217 episodes of The Lone Ranger, while Moore missed one season because of a contract dispute.
The bulk of the post below was written several months ago and has been in draft form since. I had hesitated to publish it because the topic had been thoroughly explored in my lengthy 2023 post The Danger Within. However, I came across recent remarks by Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which prompted me to update and publish this post.
Greenblatt appeared on CNBC to talk about a recent study funded by the ADL. The study involved submitting resumes for white collar jobs from candidates with European names, Jewish names, and Israeli names, finding that those with Jewish and Israeli names needed to submit substantially more resumes before getting interviews. I've not read the studies so can't comment on the methodology which is critical to determining the legitmacy of the results, but I was interested in Greenblatt's comments on DEI. One of the interviewers makes several remarks about the problems with DEI. Greenblatt responds:
"DEI industrial complex which excludes, rather than includes, Jews, it magnifies the problem."
"It's hard for me to make sense of a program trying to create more diverse environments when we see it is diminishing that".
Is the ADL's embrace of DEI, described below, weakening? It's hard to tell, but I think Greenbaltt is still hoping to have DEI embrace, rather than reject Jews. Looking at the ADL website I can't find anything about DEI, but the organization is full on in support of social justice and of all the other causes now falling under the rubric of DEI. It looks like it can't face directly into the nature of the problem.
However, maybe there is something going on below the surface with the ADL and other American Jewish organizations. There certainly needs to be. As pointed out in my previous post on this, DEI is simply incompatible with Jews being included. To do so would undermine the very logic and rationale for DEI which is based on the oppressor versus oppressed framework. You cannot include the most disproportionately successful group in America within DEI. It would make a mockery of the ideology.
In the news right now is a story about the University of Michigan firing its Director of the Office of Academic Multicultural Initiatives for allegedly saying that the university is "controlled by wealthy Jews" and that Jewish students are "wealthy and privileged" and so do not need diversity services. She's actually correct, according to DEI doctrine. That's the reality that needs to be faced in to and why DEI is such a corrupt, divisive, and racist way of thinking. It is a repudiation of the tenets of the Civil Rights Movement, a denial of our common humanity, while embracing a reactionary view of tolerance.
In a piece earlier this year, The Real Rupture in American Jewish Life, Ben Koan best summarized the situation for American Jews,
As Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic, the real rupture is between traditional Jewish-American liberalism and an antisemitism-ridden, illiberal left. According to Foer, “The intersectional left self-consciously rebelled against the liberalism that had animated so much of institutional Judaism, which fought to install civil liberties and civil rights enforced by a disinterested state.” Instead, the new left “considered the idea of neutrality—whether objectivity in journalism or color blindness in the courts—as a guise for white supremacy,” with Jews “treated in sectors of the left as the epitome of whiteness.”
While the old Jewish-American liberalism espoused cultural pluralism, for the left influenced by Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, there are only racists and antiracists, colonizers and colonized, oppressors and oppressed. In this Manichean, literally black-and-white worldview, Israel is wholly in the wrong and the October 7 attacks are to be justified or even celebrated. Liberal Zionists are, at best, the equivalent of whites who refuse to see their privilege and thus contribute to structural racism. At worst, they are de facto oppressors and legitimate targets of ostracism or violence themselves.
Accordingly, the choice for most American Jews is not whether to adhere to liberal principles or to support the existence of Israel; it’s whether to fight for traditional liberal principles on the left or to abandon the left entirely.
Here's what I wrote a few months ago:
Those Jewish organizations who had been collaborating with the DEI crowd seem to have decided to maintain that course of action. In an interview with the Jewish Insider, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt once again tells us he sees nothing wrong with DEI, other than that Jews are not included:
We’re going to judge these institutions based on not what they say but what they do. And so whether it’s how they update and expand their DEI programming, whether it’s how they apply consequences to student organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or Students for Justice in Palestine, that seriously violate their codes of conduct and target and intimidate and threaten Jewish students, whether it’s ensuring that those Jewish kids or Israeli kids don’t experience discrimination.
And so, DEI is here, and, you know, at ADL we believe that diversity education is really important. We live in the most heterodox, multicultural society in the world. Understanding your peers, your colleagues, your employees — understanding them, knowing their histories, ensuring that you can approach the issues from a more informed perspective, I think that makes you a better peer or a better manager or a better leader. You are able to demonstrate empathy. But if DEI perpetuates not diversity, equity, inclusion, but the exclusion of Jews and Israelis, we have a problem. So my hope would be that we will see the change that will ensure that Jewish people are going to be treated it with decency that are treated fairly and that are treated in the same manner as all others.
The problem with Greenblatt's position can be best seen in this tweet:
It's critical for any push for diversity in any industry to be inclusive of Jews. If your project of inclusion perpetuates the exclusion of Jews, you are failing. So, we applaud the many celebrities for their courage in standing up, speaking out and writing to @TheAcademy to… pic.twitter.com/lbOPuP9TrQ
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 10, 2024
The tweet links to this article,
in which well-off Jews demand inclusion in the Academy of Motion
Pictures Arts & Sciences Representation & Inclusion Standards
promulgated in 2020 in the midst of the George Floyd hysteria.
Here's another example that occurred in September 2023, predating the October 7 attack. The American Jewish Committee (AJC) joined a lawsuit against the Santa Ana Unified School District because it inserted antisemitic material into its mandated Ethnic Studies course. So far, so good. But the article goes on to quote the AJC Chief Legal Officer saying:
"Done right, ethnic studies prepare students to live in an increasingly diverse society. Done wrong, they can be divisive and discriminatory."
The
futility of this is evidenced by how Harvard defanged its
antisemitism advisory task force by naming Professor Derek Penslar as
co-chair, ensuring it would be a puppet of the administration. While much attention
has focused on Penslar's issues with Israel, the real problem is that he
is a hard-core DEI advocate. His role is to provide some
window-dressing designed to do the minimum possible to address
antisemitism and keep Jewish donors happy while failing to address the
core issue of DEI, from which all of the campus hostility to Jews
springs from. Also little noticed is that at the same time Harvard
announced formation of a task force on Islamophobia. The idea is to
create an equivalence between a virulent outbreak of antisemitism with a
non-outbreak of Islamophobia. These things are not alike but Harvard
will do its best to play Jews for fools.
This is the
reality of DEI and settler-colonialism link Israel and America. Settler-colonialism is not limited to
Israel. As the professor below states, "the goal is to dismantle the
settler project that is the United States" because "the U.S. is the
greatest predator empire that has ever existed". A few years ago, I
would have dismissed such talk as just crazy campus stuff, but since
2020 we've discovered the incredible power this set of beliefs holds,
not just in academia but across most of our elite institutions and the
Biden administration. (1)
The speaker quoted above is not some random person. It is Professor Melanie Yazzie of the University of Minnesota, whose biography states:
She writes and teaches about a range of topics, including Navajo/American Indian history; (neo)liberalism; settler colonialism; Indigenous feminisms; Native American studies; social movements; urban Native experience; political ecology; queer Indigenous studies; biopolitics; water; media; Marxism; and theories of policing and the state. [NOTE - most of these are even real things]
Yazzie
has been helped along the way by the academic and foundation networks
backing the effort to instill race essentialism into our society. She
was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Diversity Predoctoral Fellowship;
Andrew W Mellon Dissertation Fellowship; and University of California
Postdoctoral Fellowship. This is not happening by accident, these
institutions are deliberately fomenting divisiveness. These people mean
what they say and must be taken seriously. Don't believe it? In April
2022, a communist "anti-colonial" black activist attempted to
assassinate a Jewish mayoral candidate in Louisville, Kentucky. Though
he fired four shots, he fortunately did not succeed. Didn't hear about
it? No surprise, as it was a one-day story in those media outlets that
reported it at all. No need to start a national conversation about that!
“Land back is going to happen," University of Minnesota professor Melanie Yazzie said during a "teach-in" about the Israel-Palestine conflict. “The goal is to dismantle the settler project that is the United States.” pic.twitter.com/glgwZpLmmD
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) December 21, 2023
You can get a further flavor of Yazzie's thinking in her TED Talk.
Yazzie is not alone in academia. On October 7, 2023 Yale Professor Zareena Grewal tweeted, "Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard." She went on to tweet, "My heart is in my throat. Prayers for Palestinians. Israeli is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity."
Grewal is still an Associate Professor of American Studies, Ethnicity, Race, & Migration, and Religious Studies(!). Yale seems fine, as do many other academic institutions, with having an advocate for murder and genocide on its faculty. Grewal also, like Yazzie, gets foundation support, in her case from Fullbright and Luce. Anytime you look at the most radical faculty at American universities you will find a network of progressive foundation support. There is a lot of philanthropic money to help those who want to destroy America.
For a different perspective read, "America Works, DEI Doesn't" by Corey Brook, a pastor on the South Side of Chicago.
The reality is that DEI is an ideology for the privileged. It helps people like Claudine Gay who exploit race for power and prestige and it hurts communities like mine by exploiting them for poverty-porn.
DEI ideology didn’t offer Jonathan a better life; it has no ability to help him. It doesn’t offer faith, and it doesn’t offer meaningful work. It doesn’t live with us on the South Side of Chicago. It’s manipulative rhetoric, a way of exploiting Jonathan’s tragedy, and the tragedy of thousands of young men like him, on behalf of professional-class ideologues who seek to use our pain to fuel their rise through American institutions. Their stock-in-trade is a soul-destroying poison whose moral and real-world effects are as negative for our communities as those of any other drug that is sold here.
An anonymous former academic, The Ivy Exile, wrote something similar from his perspective.
But by the mid-2010s their once-searing insights had become frozen in time like it was forever the 1980s—that even with the federal bureaucracy and Fortune 500 on board they remained scrappy underdogs against all odds. Even as America grew vastly more diverse, old black and white categories blurring and dissolving, the systematized version insisted that little had changed.
At least the campus wars of the ’80s and early ’90s around political correctness had offered critical race theorists spirited pushback in the public square, encouraging them to hone and diversify their ideas. With critique verboten in the age of Black Lives Matter, they’ve become increasingly insulated, cranking out the same faded dogma even as ill-conceived schemes like cashless bail and defunding police take disproportionate toll on minority communities.
Whatever the latest disaster, it’s always somebody else’s fault, and further proof that ever more DEI officials and administrators are needed to fix things. If not for white and adjacent privilege, plus the rest of the intersecting spectra of oppression, statistical parity of all indices across all groups would be the default state of global society.
You should read his entire piece with an example of the sloppy scholarship of the DEI academics.
-----------------------------------------------------
(1) The Democratic controlled Minnesota Legislature passed legislation enacting a mandatory ethnic studies curriculum based upon DEI principles, legislation signed by Governor Tim Walz, who then appointed a committee to develop the cirriculum, a committee chaired by an academic who advocates the destruction of the United States because it is a settler-colonial project.
Umberto Eco: "When we read a really great book, the book doesn't end on the last page. The book is only one stage in a lifelong dialogue between the reader and the author. The beauty of reading is that we never finish a book when we read it; we can always come back to it..." pic.twitter.com/D3dkCC5oPU
— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) December 4, 2024
How true. How many books have I read and re-read over the years. How many more will I in the future. And, as I get older, I take different things from your favorite books upon each reading.
You can read more about Umberto Eco here.
I like Edward Hopper paintings. This one, from 1930, is called Cobbs Barn and Distant Houses.
A thousand years is but a day they sayAnd maybe in a thousand more I'll find my way
Let Lalo Salamanca give you some tips on making the perfect taco.
Two lines of dialogue from Breaking Bad mention Lalo and Nacho, who are never mentioned again and never appear in the series, but later become major characters in Better Call Saul; the charming and extremely lethal Lalo Salamanca, and soulful and tragic Nacho Varga.
Amazing how only a few seconds of context in Breaking Bad gave us 2 of the best characters in Better Call Saul pic.twitter.com/Gi4aIeGx5i
— Saul Goodman ⚖ (@itsSaulGoodman) November 26, 2024
Great progress has been made on reading the carbonized scrolls found at the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. It's required some amazing applications of new technologies to do so and you can read more about the details here and here.
And now you have a chance to participate as the team has just posted an opening for a full time annotation specialist paying up to $40 an hour!
Rick Beato has been on a roll lately, recently interviewing the elusive David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and then, a few days ago, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, lead guitarist for Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, and session player for many other famous artists. Rick is the best music interviewer going. He focuses on the music, not on anything else, asks good questions and gives interviewees the space to talk. Even when I don't understand all the musical details I still enjoy it. Skunk comes across as a true gentleman and it was wonderful to listen to his stories about the Dan, the Doobies, as well as Segovia, Hendrix, Slash, and others. Hendrix and Jeff Beck are on his Mt Rushmore of guitarists.
Skunk features on the first three Steely Dan albums, before Fagen and Becker decided to stop performing as a live act, and he then moved seamlessly into the Doobies and was the guy responsible for later bringing Michael McDonald, who'd been a backup singer on Dan albums, into the Doobies.
Rick gets Skunk to talk about two of his most famous solos for the Dan, My Old School and Rikki Don't Lose That Number. Another favorite solo (not mentioned in the video) is in The Boston Rag, starting about 3 minutes in. We also learn that his favorite instrument is the pedal steel guitar. There wasn't much call for that in Steely Dan, but it does show up in a couple of their tunes, most notably Fire In The Hole, where Skunk adds a tasty solo at the end (the song also features outstanding piano parts).
Beginning in the 1980s, Skunk developed a parallel second career as an expert on defense technologies. Here's how Wikipedia explains it:
Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices.
His next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system.
He gave the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began. Baxter received a series of security clearances so he could work with classified information. In 1995, Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, then the chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, nominated Baxter to chair the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense.
Baxter's work with that panel led to consulting contracts with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. He consults for the US Department of Defense and the US intelligence community, as well as defense-oriented manufacturers such as Science Applications International Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corp., General Dynamics, and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. He has said his unconventional approach to thinking about terrorism, tied to his interest in technology, is a major reason the government sought his assistance.
"We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles," Baxter has said. "My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at."
Baxter has also appeared in public debates and as a guest on CNN and Fox News advocating missile defense. He served as a national spokesman for Americans for Missile Defense, a coalition of organizations devoted to the issue.
In April 2005, he joined the NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee.
Baxter was a member of an independent study group that produced the Civil Applications Committee Blue Ribbon Study recommending an increased domestic role for US spy satellites in September 2005. This study was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2007. He is listed as "Senior Thinker and Raconteur" at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and is a Senior Fellow and Member of the Board of Regents at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.
While Beato does not cover the military side of Skunk's career, American security remains important to him. In the interview, when discussing his friendship with Jimi Hendrix, Baxter mentions Jimi's service in the 101st Airborne and refers to him as a "patriot".
This is an interview where Skunk shares his thoughts about Ringo Starr (very complimentary) as well as a bit on his military career.
For all my past Larry Bird posts, I've never done one on his birthday. It's time to start. Happy 68th, Larry. Let's watch some passing by #33.
Today is the 83rd anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor. A tragic day for America, with more than 2,400 servicemen dying
and, longer-term, a disaster for Japan.
On December 8, 1941 President Franklin D Roosevelt asked
Congress to declare that since the prior day a state of war had existed
between the Empire of Japan and the United States. In his "day of infamy" speech you can
hear the anger and outrage in his voice, reflecting that Japanese peace
negotiators were in the US Capital, even as Japanese carriers launched
their air strike on Pearl Harbor. You can also hear his recital of the
other attacks simultaneously carried out by Japan across the Pacific
which conveys the massive scale of the assault. For an edited, but very
high quality audio and picture, version click here.
Something
often missed is that the US did not declare war on Germany on December
8. This created a dilemma for American policy and military planners who
believed American involvement in WWII was inevitable and who viewed
Germany as the greater threat. In fact, it had already been agreed that
in the event of war with both Germany and Japan that 85% of America's
resources would be devoted to defeating the Nazis. Hitler solved the
American dilemma by declaring war on the US (for reasons that are still
debated today) on December 11.
Over the decades there
have been suggestions that FDR knew of the planned attack on Pearl
Harbor and let it proceed in order to draw the US into WWII. I've read
quite a lot about these accusations and believe them to be utterly
without merit as do most historians who've reviewed the documents.
In
1941 was FDR seeking a way to get the US to intervene in the war? Yes,
but it was on the side of Britain against Germany. War with Japan
would interfere with that goal.
There have also been
exhaustive studies of the intelligence (particularly via code-breaking)
that the US had available to it in the weeks leading up to Pearl
Harbor. During those last days, FDR and our military were tracking
Japanese naval forces and believed an attack was imminent with the
likely targets being the British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia
and/or the Kingdom of Siam along with a lesser probability that American
forces in the Philippines would be attacked. There were only very
scattered references to Pearl Harbor amongst a blizzard of intelligence
from the broken codes.
As is often the case I'll let Winston Churchill have the last word with his reaction to Pearl Harbor:
"No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy . . . So we had won after all! . . . We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end . . . I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before - that the United states is like 'a giant boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate'. Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."
Japan's decision to wage war against America was a monumental miscalculation. There were many within the Japanese military who had misgivings; one was the Emperor Hirohito's brother, Rear Admiral Takamatsu Nobuhito who told his brother a week before Pearl Harbor;
"The navy cannot afford to fight. There is a feeling that, if possible, the navy would want to avoid a Japanese-American war. If we pass up this opportunity [for peace], war will be impossible to avoid".Relinked here are my posts Japan Decides On War, along with Dereliction of Duty, on America's military escalation in Vietnam. Both are examples of how bad decisions can be made, despite the misgivings of many of those involved. Useful lessons to keep in mind, particularly with war, the weightiest of human endeavors.
From Astronomy Picture of the Day.
"Explanation: If you could stand on Mars -- what might you see? You might look out over a vast orange landscape covered with rocks under a dusty orange sky, with a blue-tinted Sun over the horizon, and odd-shaped water clouds hovering high overhead. This was just the view captured last March by NASA's rolling explorer, Perseverance. The orange coloring is caused by rusted iron in the Martian dirt, some of which is small enough to be swept up by winds into the atmosphere. The blue tint near the rising Sun is caused by blue light being preferentially scattered out from the Sun by the floating dust. The light-colored clouds on the right are likely composed of water-ice and appear high in the Martian atmosphere. The shapes of some of these clouds are unusual for Earth and remain a topic of research."
It's coming on ChristmasThey're cutting down treesThey're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh, I wish I had a riverI could skate away on
Irving Finkel has been Assistant Keeper in the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum for the past 48 years, where he is responsible for the museum's collection of 130,000 cuneiform tablets.
The video is worth watching in its entirety. Finkel is a wonderful instructor.
I first learned about Finkel from this substack article by Brian Klaas, The Mirthful Assyriologist, the Real Noah's Ark, and the Oldest Writing in the World, which is also worth a full read.
These principles become even more rigorous when it is a matter of dealing with privileged orders. I take “privileged” to mean anyone who falls outside the provisions of the common legal system either because he claims not to be subject to common legality at all or because he claims to have exclusive rights. We have provided sufficient proof of the fact that any privilege is by nature unjust, odious, and contrary to the social pact. A privileged class is to the Nation what individual advantages are to the citizen. Like them, it is not something that can be represented. But even this is not quite enough. A privileged class is to the Nation what harmful individual advantages are to the citizen. The legislator does his duty in sup-
pressing them. The parallel also serves to reveal a final difference, which is that an individual advantage that is harmful to others is at least useful to its owner, while a privileged class is a pestilence upon the nation that is forced to suffer its existence. To make the comparison more exact, one would have to compare a privileged class in a nation to a frightful disease devouring the living flesh of the body of its unhappy victim. With this in mind, it is easy to see why a privileged class might feel a need to cloak itself in all the honorable distinctions it can find. A privileged class is therefore harmful not only because of its corporate spirit but simply because it exists. The more it has been able to obtain of those favors that are necessarily opposed to common liberty, the more it is essential to exclude it from the National Assembly.But if privileged individuals enjoy an estate that makes them the enemy of the common order, not the beneficiaries of simple distinctions that are almost indifferent to the law, then they should be positively excluded.
- What is the third estate? by Abbe Sieyes (Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes)
What Is The Third Estate? by Sieyes, a Roman Catholic clergyman, was published in January 1789, several months before the meeting of the Estates General at Versailles and proved very influential with the delegates. The Estates being convened were those of the Clergy (First Estate), Nobility (Second Estate), and Commons (Third Estate). The French monarchy, desperate to solve its financial crisis, was forced to call the Estates General together for the first time in more than 170 years. What was to be the relative status of each estate was a subject of much controversy leading to the meeting, and during its first month.
The essay starts with this memorable line:
What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it desire to be? Something.
Though Sieyes was a member of the First Estate, he was elected as a delegate of the Third Estate to the assemblage at Versailles.
While
seeking the overturning of the existing system of hierarchy in France,
Sieyes was a moderate in the context of what became the French
Revolution, which plunged into violence and terror, though some
historians, like Simon Schama, contend violence was an essential element
from the start, leading to the ascension of Napoleon Bonaparte and a
quarter century of European war. However, whatever his intent, the dehumanizing rhetoric deployed by Sieyes was one of the earliest signs of the direction the Revolution would eventually take.
In the National Assembly (as the Estates General redesignated itself in 1789), Sieyes eventually lost influence because of his opposition to the abolishment of tithes and confiscation of Church lands. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI though, unlike most, he avoided making any statement about why he cast his vote; he supported the Girondin and was not a Jacobin, though managed to kowtow enough during the height of the Terror to avoid the guillotine. Years later, asked what he did during the Terror he responded, "I survived".
After the
Jacobin Terror ended in 1794 with Robespierre's beheading, Sieyes served on diplomatic missions to The
Hague and Prussia. In 1799, he became a member of the Directory,
France's governing body, supporting the efforts of Napoleon to seize
power the following year, retiring from politics soon after. He died in
1836. Sieyes was a survivor.
I was going to do a post on Wilson Pickett's breakthrough 1965 hit, In The Midnight Hour, co-written with Steve Cropper, guitarist with the Stax house band (aka Booker T and the MGs), at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the location where Martin Luther King Jr would be assassinated three years later. When I discovered that Cropper was inspired to come up with the title from the lyric of the 1962 single I Found A Love by The Falcons, with their lead singer Wilson Pickett(!), I decided to go with the lesser-known song. Here it is:
Looking for a quiet, unique, and little known spot for a getaway? Kate and Greg Barrington are happy to welcome you to Forrest, Australia where they have six lovely cottages ready and waiting for you. Just go here for info on contacting the caretakers.
A couple of things you should know before making your reservation. Forrest is in the State of Western Australia near its border with South Australia. It's in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain, the almost treeless, flat, 77,000 square mile area, containing the world's largest formation of exposed limestone bedrock. However, it is conveniently located along the line of the Trans-Australian Railroad; in fact it's on the stretch of the railroad which is the longest straight track anywhere in the world - 297 miles! Unfortunately, the trains no longer regularly stop there. But don't let that discourage you; if you have a sturdy 4-wheel drive vehicle you can reach it by a 68 mile drive along a dirt road. And, best of all, there's an airstrip there; used for aircraft having emergencies, but I'm sure they'd let your private plane land there if you're a pilot.
For more on Forrest and the Barrington, watch The Big Wait on Vimeo.
Unlike the WW1 battlefields we visited in September, where the battles lasted for months over areas covering 100 to 500 square miles, Waterloo, which we saw on the last day of our trip, happened on one day, June 18, 1815. Though it was only one day, it was bloody, with 45-50,000 men killed or wounded, twice the toll of Antietam, the worst single day of America's Civil War.
Today, it is peaceful. But for the occasional monument and the two fortified farms on the flanks that still exist, Le Haye Sainte (privately owned) and Hougomont (open to the public), it is mostly open farm land (see this panorama from Wikipedia).
The very well done museum is underground and behind the main English/Dutch battle line. And then there is the Lion's Mound, the artificial hill, located at the center of the British position, constructed at the order of King William I of the Netherlands between 1820 and 1826. It rises 141 feet above the surrounding surface, with 226 steps to climb to the top. Unfortunately, its construction caused the topography to be dramatically changed, a change the Duke of Wellington found most distressing when he returned in 1828.
We did make the trek up and down the Lion's Mound.
On the 162nd anniversary of Lincoln's speech at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, here's Charles Laughton's recitation of the Address from the 1935 film, Ruggles of Red Gap, a clip I've posted before. Laughton plays an English butler, Marmaduke Ruggles, won by an American in a poker game, who comes to the States and discovers a new way of life, ultimately deciding to make his way on his own.
From our WWI battlefield tour in September. Three sets of photos of the trenches in which so many soldiers spent months.
The first is at Ypres and are a small section of actual trenches preserved since the war.
The second is a reconstructed section of trench (which includes some materials used during the war) at the WW1 in Ypres.
The third from our visit to the Butte de Vauquois.
Preserved trenches at Ypres
Reconstructed trenches at Ypres
Preserved trenches at Butte de Vauquois
Old School Boston has the best photos of Boston from the "old days". I lived in the Boston area from 1973 through 1992, so I guess that's now the old days.
The Wursthaus - Harvard Square, 1917- 1996. @Historicimage pic.twitter.com/rJIWnHZBCH
— Old School Boston (@OldSchoolBoston) November 16, 2024
The Wursthaus was just outside of Harvard Square. The food was heavy German and not that good but in the 70s it was the only place you could find that offered a large selection of foreign beers and that was enough for us. It closed in 1996, after almost eighty years at that location.
Less than 100 feet down the street and down some stairs was Jonathan Swift's, a club that featured the best in local New England music acts, including NRBQ, the Pousette-Dart Band, and the Estes Boys' in which one of my roommates played pedal steel (later, for several years, he played pedal steel with Mickey Gilley's Urban Cowboy Band). It's also where I sat having beers with Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee as he hilariously described the debacle of the 1978 season. Swift's closed in 1986.
For my memories of one of the great Boston area eateries of the 70s read Rita's Place.
Yes, that's about right when it comes to my New England days.
John Atkinson Grimshaw: 'November,' 1879. #Leeds pic.twitter.com/O3En7nYTNU
— Darrell Epp (@DarrellEpp) November 1, 2024
This is last night in Phoenix metro.
Video on the construction of Roman bridges, explaining their durability. Supported by the pressure of stone on stone and anchored in place by their own weight, several still carry traffic twenty centuries later.
Initial thoughts on Trump's intent to nominate Matt Gaetz as Attorney General:
Many do not appreciate the subtlety and nuance of Donald Trump's thinking on political philosophy and governance. It was a recent rereading of The Federalist, a copy of which he keeps on his bedstand, that inspired him to devise this test of the political and moral strength of our institutions and of the system of checks and balances developed by our Founders. It's a test reminiscent of Solomon's in the Old Testament. Just another example of 4-D chess from The Master.
On second thought:
Nominating Matt Gaetz for AG is a political and moral atrocity. A disaster should he actually become AG.
There is nothing 4-D about it. Trump will only appoint as AG a person that he has complete faith will unquestioningly follow his instructions and desires and be his "wingman" just as Bobby Kennedy was for his brother and Eric Holder for Barack Obama. Expertise in the law or in the day to day issues addressed by the Department of Justice is of a secondary, or even tertiary, concern.
To understand why, we need to go back to January 2017, when the Russia collusion story explodes publicly. Trump knows the allegations contained in the Steele Dossier are phony, though much of the public, including myself, don't know what to make of it.
He's appointed Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. Sessions is not a personal friend, but was the first senator to endorse Trump. However, he's also an old-fashioned "honorable Republican" statesman and when presented by the Democrats with a phony conflict of interest story about the Russian ambassador he recuses himself from anything to do with the Russia collusion allegations (something Eric Holder would never have done in similar circumstances). It effectively leaves the Justice Department's actions in that matter in the hands of Trump's political enemies.
By later in the spring, Trump becomes aware James Comey at the FBI is actively conspiring against him and fires the FBI Director, but allows Andrew McCabe to become acting director, not realizing he is also part of the conspiracy to get the president.
In May, Robert Mueller is appointed Special Counsel for the Russia investigation. By now, Trump has his own lawyers to represent him in that investigation. Those lawyers are experienced hands, but not previously known to Trump and hired on the recommendation of people around him. They tell the president that Mueller is a straight shooter with a great reputation and advise him to cooperate fully which they think will quickly put an end to the investigation.
Trump takes that advice, does not invoke Executive Privilege, and turns over more than 1 million White House documents and allows his own White House Counsel to be interviewed about conversations he had with Trump, an unprecedented move by any president in American history.
It is from his counsel's interviews that we know, as reported in the Mueller Report, on at least two occasions, Trump complained that he needed an Attorney General like Bobby Kennedy or Eric Holder to protect him, just like they protected their presidents.
But despite giving the cooperation as advised by his lawyers, Mueller did not go away. To what extent Mueller was already mentally slowed down, as we saw in 2019, is unknown, but it was no secret he despised Trump and he hired a rabid pack of Democratic partisan lawyers who were never going to stop their investigation, regardless of the facts.
To become the new FBI Director, Trump nominated Christopher Wray, as suggested by Chris Christie. Wray was not personally familiar to Trump and has turned out to be horrible at the agency.
In February 2019, William Barr became Attorney General. Barr saved the Trump presidency by finally shutting down the Mueller gang, and provided good advice to help advance several of the president's initiatives. However, Barr was not a MAGA devotee who would do anything the president demanded, several times disagreeing with Trump. Things finally cratered between the two of them when, after the 2020 election, Barr reported (correctly) to Trump that he found no evidence the election was stolen. Now Barr is considered an agent of the Deep State.
The bottom line is Trump will no longer rely on the advice of others to appoint someone he doesn't personally know, with a track record of loyalty, to oversee DOJ and the FBI. The problem is that the lawyers Trump knows with such a record are second and third-rate, with poor legal skills, and with questionable judgement and character. There are conservative lawyers who'd love a chance to clear out DOJ and FBI and restore integrity to those agencies but Trump does not know them, they have not proved their loyalty to him so, as it stands now, they will not have the opportunity to effectively do what needs to be done.
As I am writing this, several news outlets are reporting that Trump is going to nominate Robert Kennedy Jr as Secretary of HHS. This is lunacy. One of the reasons I did not vote for Trump is I thought his presidency would implode, but this is happening faster than I thought.
[UPDATE Nov. 21 - One down, one to go! Though I'm less optimistic about getting the second one.]
Now I know that nothing really matters to us but the people we love. Of course, if we realized that when we are young, and just sat down and loved each other, the beds would not get made and very little of the world's work ever get done.
- Willa Cather (1874-1947) in a 1945 letter to a friend
Just finished reading Benjamin Taylor's new biography of Willa Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas. It's a literary biography, well-written, and clocks in at less than 200 pages, a relief in an era where door-stopper biographies are more common.
Over the past year I've read two Cather novels, My Antonia, and Death Comes For The Archbishop. Cather is a wonderful, vivid, yet subtle writer, with powerful descriptive abilities when it comes to settings, landscape, and character. My Antonia set in the central Nebraska prairie lands in the late 19th century, where Cather grew up, portrays the struggles and everyday lives of a multicultural cast - mostly immigrants from northern, central, and eastern Europe. Death Comes For The Archbishop is a masterpiece, beautifully written and moving, one of the finest novels I've ever read and one I will return to. The roughness of mid-19th century New Mexico is the setting for an unusual tale. Told in episodic vignettes over the years, with settlers, renegades, and native Mexicans and Indians, along with guest appearances by the Navajo elder Eusebio, and Kit Carson, the story centers on the first bishop of the new diocese, Father Latour and his vicar Father Vaillant, both native Frenchmen, who set out to build a cathedral in Santa Fe.
It is a moving portrayal of faith and friendship. At one point, Latour says to Vaillant, "One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph, I see you through my affection for you."
Taylor quotes a Catholic critic writing of the book when it was published in 1927:
Her book is wonderful proof of the power of a true artist to penetrate and understand and to express things not a part of the equipment of the artist as a person. Miss Cather is not a Catholic, yet certainly no Catholic American writer that I know of has ever written so many pages so steeped in spiritual knowledge and understanding of Catholic motives . . .
In our modern era when to write of something beyond your personal experience is dangerous and may even lead to the failure to be published, it is refreshing to read this perspective from a century ago.
Cather was a phenomenon even as a child. She was class valedictorian in 1890 (though, to be sure, it was a class of three!) and can you imagine hearing this from a 16-year old:
There is another book of God than that of scriptural revelation, a book written in chapters of creation upon the pages of the universe bound by mystery.She would end of spending most of the rest of her life in the East; Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, Maine, and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. Taylor tells of her two great loves, both women, one of whom she lived with for the last four decades of her life, though he notes that sexuality and sexual matters seemed to play a small role in her life.
According to Taylor, Cather was "a cosmopolitan while she was still a provincial", her "deeper theme: the nation as a gathering of peoples from elsewhere, adding Americanness to some earlier identity".
He goes on:
What sets her apart from her younger contemporaries - Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos - is that her idealism about American possibility was unironic. What makes her the greatest of anti-modernists is that ideals were what were most real to her.
Cather expressed it best in a 1922 address:
There is such a thing in life as nobility, and novels which celebrate it will always be the novels which are finally loved.
Over 15 months in 1965 and 1966 Bob Dylan released three albums (one of them a double). Before March 1965 Bob Dylan was America's top folk singer, beginning to come to wider national attention, but those months transformed him into DYLAN, an iconic figure with major cultural and musical impact.
If the 1964 arrival of The Beatles and the ensuing British Invasion revolutionized pop music and culture, 1965 was the year that revolution deepened and expanded, proving it was not a fad. The Beatles kept on the move, releasing three consecutive singles, each of which would have been considered unusual before '65 - Ticket To Ride, Help!, and Yesterday, ending the year with the release of Rubber Soul, an album much different from their earlier efforts and clearly influenced by Dylan.
The breadth of the change was also expanding. At Motown, Berry Gordy had been trying for several years to break into white radio. He'd had occasional success since 1961, and '64 was a breakthrough with the label having three #1's - Mary Wells' My Guy, and the first two hit singles from The Supremes, Where Did Our Love Go? and Baby Love (essentially the same songs with different lyrics), while Martha & The Vandellas reached #2 with Dancing In The Streets.
In 1965 Motown greatly expanded its beachhead, becoming a fixture on white AM radio, a position it maintained for the rest of the 60s. The Supremes continued with their stream of #1's, Come See About Me, Stop! In The Name of Love (their finest song), Back In My Arms Again, and I Hear A Symphony. The Four Tops (I Can't Help Myself) and The Temptations (My Girl) scored their first #1's, and a slew of other singles became hits including Ain't That Peculiar (Marvin Gaye's first hit), Uptight (Stevie Wonder's return after his voice changed), The Tracks of My Tears (The Miracles), Nowhere to Run (Martha & The Vandellas), and Shotgun (Junior Walker & The All Stars).
In Memphis, Stax, with its rougher sound, also broke through with Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour and 634-5789.
The three Dylan albums were Bringing It All Back Home (March 22, 1965), Highway 61 Revisited (August 30, 1965), and Blonde on Blonde (June 20, 1966). Prior to the first of these, Dylan had released four albums, with none of them charting higher than #20. All three of the new records reached the Top Ten, with Highway 61 reaching #3. Dylan had never had a hit single, but then came Like A Rolling Stone in 1965.
There were four factors contributing to Dylan's breakthrough:
The first was a decision Dylan made in late 1964. Though he had achieved huge success and a devoted following as a folk singer he decided to turn his back on that phase of his career and change both the content of his lyrics and the way his music was played. The latter is the well-known switch from acoustic guitar and harmonica to drums, bass guitar, keyboards, and electric guitar. It didn't happen completely, one side of Bringing It All Back Home was acoustic but it was dramatic and offended part of his fan base.
Dylan always wrote on a variety of topics, but in his folk days there were a lot of"protest" songs like Masters of War, The Times They Are A-Changin, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, and, my favorite of that genre, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. He deliberately stopped writing those types of songs, not wanted to be branded as a protest singer and wanting to chart his own path, independent of the expectations of his audience. Dylan wrote a song in '64, My Back Pages, about his feelings on political songs. There are no protest songs on the 1965 and 1966 albums. 1965 was the year the American military presence became large in Vietnam, but Dylan never wrote a song about the war nor, to my knowledge, did he every make any public statement about it.
The second was the decision by a new band, The Byrds, to record Mr Tambourine Man and release it as its first single. The founders of The Byrds, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby were folkies who were inspired by The Beatles to go electric. They knew Dylan's music and heard a pre-release version of Mr Tambourine Man which would be on Bringing It All Back Home. Adding twelve string guitar, a memorable bass riff, soaring harmonies, and dropping several verses of the original, their version of Mr Tambourine Man was released in April 1965, just after Bringing It All Back Home hit the record stores. It was a giant hit, the first Dylan song to chart and it made #1. For my 14 year old ears it was unique and thrilling, the bass and jangling twelve string sounding great on a car radio, and I got the single as well as the album of the same name when it was released in June and which contained three more Dylan covers. It brought Dylan into the mainstream.
The third was the July 20, 1965 release of Like A Rolling Stone as a single, a month in advance of Highway 61 Revisited. It became a sensation. You heard it everywhere in August and September and no one had ever heard lyrics like that before on AM radio.
Ahh you've gone to the finest schools, alright Miss LonelyBut you know you only used to get juiced in itNobody's ever taught you how to live out on the streetAnd now you're gonna have to get used to itYou say you never compromiseWith the mystery tramp, but now you realizeHe's not selling any alibisAs you stare into the vacuum of his eyesAnd say do you want to make a deal?
And it wasn't just the lyrics, it was the way Dylan sang them with the band behind him on fire, never letting up. The single was the same length as the album cut, six minutes, but to conform to current radio practices, most stations just played the first two verses making it three minutes long. He followed it up with another hit (not included on an album), Positively 4th Street, the most scathing put-down song in pop history.
I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoesAnd just for that one moment I could be youYes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoesYou'd know what a drag it is to see you
The success of Mr Tambourine Man and Like A Rolling Stone led to the final step. For about a year it seemed like everyone in pop music was releasing covers of Dylan songs, many of which became big sellers. We had hits like All I Really Want To Do by Cher, It Ain't Me Babe by The Turtles (also recorded by Johnny Cash and June Carter), and Blowin' In The Wind by Stevie Wonder. Even Elvis Presley got into the act, recording a beautiful version of an early Dylan ballad, Tomorrow Is A Long Time.
Dylan even influenced music that wasn't a cover. Just after Blonde On Blonde came out in '66, the Four Tops released Reach Out (I'll Be There), my favorite Motown tune and a #1 song, written by the great Motown hitmakers Holland-Dozier-Holland. While researching the background of the song, I discovered the HDH had been inspired by Like A Rolling Stone. Dylan's half-singing, half speaking vocal was their model for the melody, which they pitched at the top of singer Levi Stubbs' range causing him to adopt the same singing/speaking approach, almost preaching, just like Dylan. The pulsating rhythm section was also modeled on the relentless approach of Dylan's backing band.
The quality of the songs from those three albums is also impressive. Along with those already mentioned here are some other notables:
Bringing It All Back Home
An essential song from the end of the hippie era. From It's A Beautiful Day, composed by Linda and David LaFlamme. David passed last year, while his ex-wife Linda just passed, which reminded me of the song. This is a live version from 1970. Vocals by the LaFlammes, electric violin by David. The guitar solo is definitely San Francisco style in its tone and attack, along with being overly long and self-indulgent. This is the studio version.
I saw them as the opening act for The Who at the Fillmore East in May 1969. Terrific set and still remember their performance of this song.
Gulp. I am about to praise Donald Trump. Didn't vote for him and there are many things I dislike about his personality but am moved to write this because of a recent piece by Evan Barker, a young woman from a impoverished background who worked on the campaigns of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders and voted for Donald Trump this year. The article, which you can read here, explains her political journey, but it was an anecdote she tells at the end that caught my eye.
Leaving Donald Trump's official election night party at the Palm Beach Convention Center she writes:
As the night in Palm Beach, Florida, melded into Wednesday morning, and dawn neared on a new day in America, I crawled into the backseat of my cab to return to my hotel. My cabbie was a middle-aged black man. I asked him how he felt about the night. Giddily, he exclaimed: “READY to make America great again!”
When I asked him why he didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, he answered: “She just didn’t speak to me. It’s like she was pretending to speak like a black person. It felt fake.”
“Trump,” he concluded, “speaks to all of us the same.”
Whatever else negative I think about Trump, that last sentence is completely accurate. Donald Trump does not care if you are black, white, red, or any other color (other than green!). He will treat you the same. If you praise him, he'll praise you back in the same way regardless of color. If you attack him, he'll attack you back in the same way regardless of color. He will not stop to think, "maybe I should say something different because of this person's color". In this regard, Trump's actions and reactions are authentic.
I'm reminded of a study done by the Yale psychiatry department a few years ago. It looked at the comparative speech patterns of self-identified white liberals, moderates, and conservatives when speaking with whites and blacks. The study found that moderates and conservatives tended to speak with whites and blacks in the same way, while liberals tended to "simplify" their language when speaking with blacks.
The racist label Democrats have tried to pin on him is just wrong, and ironic considering the Democrats own views on the merits and demerits of different races. Trump is egalitarian in both his praise and abuse of people. He's the guy praised by Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton when he was a Democrat. While Trump was president I read both his official White House and personal twitter feeds, because I could not trust what was being reported in the media. On occasion I would stop reading the personal feed when Trump went on one of his bizarre middle of the night rants, but overall I found it interesting how much of both feeds was filled with events featuring black and Hispanic people. His administration provided record funding to Historically Black Colleges & Universities.
He was subject to some deliberately outrageously inaccurate reporting by the media when it came to race, most notoriously the "very fine people on both sides" remarks regarding Charlottesville in 2017. As I came to realize when reading the full transcript of his remarks a couple of years later, he twice stated he was not speaking about neo-nazis and white nationalists, going on to call them "bad people". Yet, this year, Joe Biden and Barack Obama both cited the out of context remark.
I think he crossed the line in 2016 in an incident I wrote about in What Would Otter Do? in which I also noted that if Democrats were correct in their views on race, then Trump was correct in his remarks. Since I think the D's are wrong I thought Trump was also wrong.
One other thing I remember. In the 1990s we lived in Palm Beach County, Florida. Donald Trump purchased Mar-a-Largo in 1985, converting it into a members only club in 1994. Shortly after, a local magazine published an article about Trump's new venture. It reported that the snobby, exclusionary, and conservative residents of Palm Beach island didn't like having the club, thought Trump was crude and gauche, and also didn't like the fact that he had opened membership to blacks and Jews. As I said, the only color Donald Trump really cares about is green.
Hey, we're still faster than California!
Arizona Announces They Have Finished Counting And Calvin Coolidge Has Won Their 3 Electoral Votes https://t.co/Krubw5nFPY pic.twitter.com/1DPYMb4pkf
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 8, 2024
Can someone please ask Florida how they do it and can our legislature just enact it?
We also need less on our ballots. Mine had 44 races (some where you voted for more than one candidate) and 19 propositions to vote on.
On Tuesday's event:
1. I've seen some comments about the "mysterious" disappearance of 15 million Biden voters from 2020 this time around, with implications about that election being stolen. Calm down, there are still over ten million votes to be counted, with two-thirds of them in California. The final total turnout number will be close to 2020, though probably a couple of million short. Because most of the remaining ballots are in Democratic states I expect that Trump's margin in the popular vote will be 2-3 million rather than the nearly 5 million as it stands now. The extreme D lean of California, Oregon, and Washington continues. As of now, Trump leads in the other 47 states by over seven million votes.
2. Trump gained nationally and it is remarkable how much individual states moved towards him since 2020. Here are the Top 10 in percentage moves from 2020 to 2024:
What is far more telling is that the Democratic Party has explicitly branded itself AWAY from all nine of these points over the last decade. https://t.co/UvdiidbftO
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) November 7, 2024
"I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists""Solidarity to everyone whose meanest, dumbest, most bigoted high school classmates are celebrating early results because fuck them to the moon and back.""Every four years I remember why I left Indiana (where I grew up) and remember why I respect the people who stayed and are trying to make it less racist and sexist. The moral arc of the universe is not going to bend itself."
I made a series of inappropriate and offensive posts on my personal bluesky account on election night, and I am sorry. I respect and value people across the political spectrum. These posts, which I have deleted, do not reflect my beliefs; they were a mistaken expression of shock and disbelief about the election results. These posts of course do not reflect the position of Scientific American or my colleagues. I am committed to civil communication and scientific objectivity.
The first from Holman Jenkins, writing in the Wall St Journal in 2019:
Mr Trump is said to upset the norms of our political life, but how exactly? By lying? By engaging in demagoguery? By making absurd claims? His real trick has been to be a one-man satire of our politics. And so far he has yet to find an opponent or critic - whether Mr Biden, or Hillary Clinton or Mitt Romney - who doesn't prove his point.The second from Henry Kissinger in 2018:
To show what a liar he is, his enemies entangle themselves in lies. Democrats have turned themselves into a party of Adam Schiffs, who, whatever his previous virtues, now is wholly defined by his promotion of the collusion canard. It's an amazing psychological feat to squander their advantage over Mr Trump in this way.
Ditto the media. In their eagerness to traffic in falsehoods about Mr Trump, his media critics lend him strength. We face the weird prospect now of a world-class scandal involving the FBI and the intelligence community being aired even while much of the press is committed to being part of the coverup.
I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn't necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.
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(1) Try telling someone that Biden's first order of business was revoking a Trump Executive Order that allowed federal employees to be trained about diversity and the benefits of multiculturalism but forbid training based on racial stereotypes and scapegoating.
Try telling someone that Biden issued an Executive Order requiring any AI used by the Federal government incorporate racial and gender bias and stereotyping.
Try telling someone that Biden issued regulations ending women-only sports and facilitating the transing of elementary school children.
Try telling someone that the Biden administration advised a pro-trans activist medical organization to drop its draft recommendation that puberty blockers and other dangerous medications not be given to those 14 and under because such a recommendation could be damaging politically. And the organization, WPATH, followed Biden's advice!
Try telling someone about the efforts by Biden to censor opposing viewpoints on social media and about the FBI monitoring, as potential terrorists, parents who objected to the inclusion of race essentialism in public schools.
Here's Andrew Sullivan, a gay man who did not vote for Trump, on the nuttiness:
It matters when the elites decide to re-educate the masses in Neo-Marxism. Young men are sick of being pathologized, as they should be. Urban residents — from San Francisco to New Jersey — are maddened by Democrats’ seeming indifference to violent crime. And one of Trump’s most effective ads — “it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Mr. Trump’s favor,” according to the NYT — was on Harris’ support for public funding for sex reassignments for illegal aliens and prison inmates. It packed a real punch among black and Latino men and suburban women.
The Democrats’ insistence that women have penises and men give birth is perhaps the most insane position any major political party has ever taken in US history. And how exactly do you remain a pro-woman candidate when you favor boys competing against girls in sports and women prisoners being forced to share intimate space with biological men convicted of rape? At some point, as Harris found out, you can’t. But can she and her party extricate themselves from this hole they keep digging ever deeper? I doubt it.
Sounds crazy, doesn't it?
For a while, it was difficult to get people to accept that the Biden administration opened our borders. It was a brilliant stroke for governors of border states to start shipping illegal immigrants to sanctuary states and cities, finally waking up more people to what was actually going on.
