Never say Never

I never imagined that I would recommend listening to an accordion player. But the YouTube channel Sergei Teleshev Accordion is astonishing. I’ve never (that I can recall) seen accordions like that (they’re called button accordions, I guess) or heard them making serious, even thrilling, music, like this father and daughter do. (The daughter is 16, by the way.)

Trigger warning: The remainder of this post is (more or less) political

The Calvinball Presidency

I like arguments about ideas. The only way to have a good argument about ideas is if the person or people you’re arguing with have some degree of sincerity about what they are arguing for—or against. Being a political commentator in the Trump era is like being a sportscaster covering a game of Calvinball. The rules change all the time, so arguing about them is an exhausting waste of time.

Jonah Goldberg, The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era – The Dispatch

Inspectors General

When hoodlums start disabling security cameras, you can bet they’ve got nothing good in mind.

The Trump administration on Wednesday withdrew funding for the Council of Inspectors General, a federal watchdog group, and the entity’s website was disabled. The group oversaw a network of 72 inspectors general. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had decided last week to pull the group’s funding.

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

[W]e are a nation divided by algorithms. If your algorithm knows you as conservative and interested in military matters, you got a lot of videos of young soldiers and sailors acting out the past few years, and of service branches tweeting out showy political sentiments. You felt understandable alarm. If your algorithm knows you as liberal and not interested in military affairs, you haven’t seen that content, and will have been surprised by Mr. Hegseth’s reference to “dudes in dresses.” We are all getting different versions of reality every time we look at a screen, and it’s hurting us.

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

As if on cue, some folks known to the algorithm as conservative and interested in military matters let it be known that they thought Hegseth’s show was just fine:

Much depends on the details and execution, but if implemented with both verve and prudence, Hegseth’s commonsense reforms will profit the American profession of arms.

As noted in my standard footer for blog posts, I am a participant on something called micro.blog: I follow people I’ve found interesting and some of them follow me. Yet I sensed it wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter/X. It was pleasant. It was sane.

I think Noonan has put her finger on why it is so: it has no algorithms.

In fact, I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

Speaking of The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth, Kevin D. Williamson has a few choice words:

I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code.

The Flag Code is written into federal law, though there is no penalty for violating it. It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration. Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the members of the movement they represent are habitual violators of the Flag Code, which is not merely an aesthetic concern.

Part of the point of the Flag Code is the notion that the flag is not to be treated as though it were merely an item of personal property. It is not to be used for tawdry, tacky, or self-interested purposes such as advertising. Hegseth has obvious contempt for rules of this kind, and Trump has equally obvious contempt for any kind of rule that would put any kind of limitation on his self-aggrandizement and vanity. You can be sure that if Hegseth or Trump preferred to wear a beard, then beards would be mandatory in the military, possibly even for women.

…

The allure of delusional self-adoration can be powerful. When a junior high vice principal made me cut my hair (picture your obedient correspondent at 15 with a blond Robert Smith-circa-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me rats’ nest), I was much offended. I believed, in the sincerest possible way, that I was a unique, very special, possibly heroic 15-year-old, one destined for great things, and, above all, one whose autonomy and personal sense of self had to be respected at all times, damn the rules. It all seemed incontrovertible at the time. But I am not in junior high school anymore. Pete Hegseth somehow is. Princeton owes him a refund.

Mau-mauing the NFL

I’d bet a modest amount that our Censor-in-Chief will figure out some threat to the NFL sufficient to motivate a change of the Superbowl Halftime Show from Bad Bunny to someone markedly more WASPish.

In any event, I’ll miss the game and the show. I’m expecting an emergency call then.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Howl

My goodness, these people talk like cretins

Imagine being Pete Hegseth … a Princeton- and Harvard-educated … idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

… “Midnight Hammer” … wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history.

… my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc.

…

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration … (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult?

Kevin D. Williamson, at the top of his game.

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime

The Trump administration found yesterday that Harvard University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus violated civil rights law. In a letter to Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, officials from four government agencies said the university’s “commitment to racial hierarchies” had “enabled antisemitism to fester.”

The Free Press

Does anybody doubt that if Harvard had suppressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiments, the Trump administration would have found that Harvard violated free speech rights?

This isn’t about antisemitism; Trump just wants to wound or destroy Harvard for the perverse pleasure of the sans-culottes.

Hocus-Pocus

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis News Items

Deporting those nasty Christians

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation:

…

If deported back to their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians – and many other severely oppressed groups – is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin (hyperlink added).

The entrepreneur’s new clothes

These days, Donald Trump (the man who “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program) and Jeff Bezos (the man whose second nuptials raised the bar for vulgar displays of wealth and celebrity connection) are kindred spirits:

Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.

Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.

Frank Bruni

Well, when you put it that way …

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the majority opinion, wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Morning Dispatch

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

Eleventh Day of Christmas

Liberal democracy versus Populism

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

M. Gessen, New York Times

Limited supply, infinite demand

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand—or don’t seem to want to understand—is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care. In some, it’s a government bureaucracy. In others, it’s a private for-profit or nonprofit insurer. In America, it’s a mix of all three. Many insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente, are nonprofits. The biggest insurers are Medicare and Medicaid, which are single-payer public programs. So is the Veterans Affairs Department. Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.

You don’t have to be a fan of the way that UnitedHealthcare makes its decisions to acknowledge the difficulty of mediating between providers and patients. Private insurers make their rationing decisions in ways that are relatively transparent but always far from perfectly simple or fair. But if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Peter Wehner (emphasis added)

“Scarcity” doesn’t mean we should educate more doctors, build more hospitals, etc. (nor that we shouldn’t). It means that aggregate demand for healthcare services will always exceed the funds available to pay for them all, in every imaginable system of funding healthcare.

Everybody knows the Emperor is naked

[I]f you want to understand what happened in politics this year, you can get by with two sentences from the Washington Post: “[Joe] Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated [Donald] Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”

…

Never Trump is heavy on moralizing, and how could it not be? Trump hasn’t just upended the conservative agenda, he’s cultivated an anti-morality in the American right that’s turned scumminess into a leadership credential. For Reaganites of a certain age, watching traditional “values” voters grant moral carte blanche to a seedy authoritarian is so baffling that it leaves one thinking there must be a conscientious impulse still buried in them somewhere that might be roused if only the right appeal can be made.

And so we Never Trumpers often end up behaving like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. If only we say out loud that the emperor is wearing nothing at all—and say it and say it and say it—the spell will eventually be broken and the crowd will come to its senses. By all means, run Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and have her recite the thousandth iteration of her civic indictment of Trumpism. Maybe the thousandth time will be the charm.

… Most Americans understand very well, after all, that Emperor Trump is sleazy, oafish, and dangerous. But they concluded that there would still be more upside to his presidency, warts and all, than to Harris’.

They know the emperor is naked. They watched the news on January 6. They either like it that way, as Trump’s base does, or they don’t care overly much, as swing voters ultimately did not. Never Trumpers reminding them of it incessantly anyway—surely you’re not going to reelect the coup-plotter—resembles the so-called definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Nick Catoggio

Nick has given a good description of me for the last eight-or-so years. I finally grokked why voters might reject the Democrats in favor of Trump (for instance), but I’d cast a protest vote for Angela Davis first, I think.

And that’s quite apart from the absurd journalistic murmurations to protect Joe Biden.

A wan Audie Murphy

I am an admirer of Audie Murphy, the celebrated yet troubled hero who was the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II but struggled with mental illness and addiction for the rest of his relatively short life before dying at the age of 45 …

He was a hell of a soldier, by all accounts.

Nobody ever thought he should be secretary of defense.

Pete Hegseth is something of a soft echo of Audie Murphy—an Ivy League version for our wan times. Like Murphy, Hegseth served honorably in combat (you will have heard that he was awarded two Bronze Stars), went into the entertainment business (his last job was as one of the hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend), took up drinking, wrecked some marriages (he is on his third), etc. He is today one year younger than Murphy was when he died.

Hegseth has an excellent general education, having done his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his master’s in public policy at Harvard. Harvard’s MPP program will graduate almost 700 students in its next class, and those are the only 700 people in the world who think any of them ought to be the next secretary of defense.

Kevin D. Williamson

Scientific realism

European scientists have started work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalizing on theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology … “Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”

John Ellis (hyperlink relocated from omitted text)

For the records, de-novo creation of living systems is not a dream of mine. Rather, I think of C.S. Lewis when I read things like this: “Man’s ‘power over nature’ is the power of some men over other men with nature as their instrument.”

Wonder not

Wonder not that Evangelicals are ga-ga over Donald Trump. “Evangelicalism is Protestant populism.” (Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline)

God, Human Rights and other woo-woo

[T]he existence of human rights [is] no more provable than the existence of God.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.