Tag: vaccine

Midweek, 6/10/26

It’s the 59th anniversary of my high school graduation. Maybe if you went off to boarding school at 14, you’d remember the date of your graduation, too. After that warmup, I was the most grounded college freshman you ever saw.

Nth Thoughts on Charlie Kirk

I didn’t really know much about Charlie Kirk, but since his death, the more I’ve gotten to know about him, … the more it has become clear to me that Charlie’s personality, and especially his Christianity, was what held back the tide of darkness that is now rolling across the young Right like a tsunami. My general thesis — subject to change once I go even deeper into my investigation — is that active, serious Christianity is the only barrier that will keep this from happening to the Right, and the country.

Rod Dreher, Kirk Killing: The Radical Right’s Reichstag Fire.

Charlie Kirk was way too Trumpy/MAGA for my pure (Pharisaic?) tastes. For instance, he was complicit in some of the 2020 Election subversion:

Several people affiliated with the Falkirk Center [Namesakes: Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Charlie Kirk] were among the most prominent supporters of the Trump team’s efforts to overturn the election, including Falkirk fellows Jenna Ellis, a central member of Trump’s “elite strike force” legal team, and Eric Metaxas, who literally called for “fight[ing] to the death, to the last drop of blood” over the election.

Calum Best, The Falkirk Center: Liberty University’s Slime Factory

But I’ve got to admit that I had forgotten one of my own frequent barbs: If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the irreligious Right.

If Charlie Kirk helped hold back the tide of that darkness, bless him. I increasingly am persuaded in my pessimistic gut that there is no “that” that “can’t happen here.” We’re well down some treacherous paths already. Co-belligerent bringers-of-light-to-darkness may have to bracket some disagreements.

I appreciate stumbling onto this observation by Dreher.

(FWIW, TPUSA carries on or stumbles on or … we shall see: At TPUSA’s women’s summit, Christian influencers say feminism threatens motherhood.)

60 Minutes

First they came for the preening, powdered popinjays of television news, but I did not speak out because I am not a popinjay.

Forgive the sarcasm. Perhaps Mr. Pelley and his long career deserve more respect. But can we at least be proportionate and, unlike much of what he and his colleagues have been for so long, objective for a moment?

Mr. Pelley’s hysterical reaction—and that of many of his friends in the media—came in response to some editorial changes made by a new team at CBS News led by Bari Weiss, its president, whose sin is to want a different sort of journalism from that practiced at CBS and almost all other traditional media organizations for decades.

…

[I]f you think the traditional news networks have anything like the role they had 50 years ago, you’re living in a fantasy. The reasons for that decline are the whole point that the media people themselves miss. (Gerard Baker)

…

I’m not crazy about corporate bosses cringing before political power to advance their own interests, as may be happening with CBS. It is a further sign of America’s rapid slide into banana-republic territory, as a creeping crony capitalism favors those who can get closest to the government. But again, have a sense of proportion about the reality of our media landscape. You may not like the method, but any obeisance to President Trump is producing only incremental shifts in the wider media picture. The American news environment is vast and expanding. If viewers think they can no longer trust CBS News, they can read, watch or listen to literally thousands of other TV shows, podcasts, newspapers, social-media influencers and more. It is vanity in every sense of the term to think they are somehow less trustworthy than a superannuated news organization dominated by one political viewpoint.

Mr. Pelley was still at it this weekend, expanding his weird homicide analogy. In an interview with the New York Times, he described the firing of some of his colleagues as being like the murder of close family members. It was another example of the solipsistic specialness these media panjandrums possess. Millions of Americans lose their jobs every year because of corporate decisions, and most of them don’t provoke it by criticizing their employer. When it’s a TV personality, it’s a crime scene.

There was something unconsciously fitting about it all: the spectacle of one old media company offering a platform to an icon of another to say something unhinged, self-obsessed and divorced from reality.

Gerard Baker

I was a big fan of The Free Press when Bari Weiss left the New York Times and started it. I’m less enamored today, and I certainly assume no infallibility about Bari’s decisions at CBS.

But Baker is right that CBS has lost much relevance in today’s chaotic internet media environment, when even a distractible autodidact can put his opinions out there for anyone in the world to see. Heck, I don’t even write letters to the editor of our local Gannet rag any more, and they don’t really publish them.

War crimes in our name

In none of the [Caribbean and eastern Pacific] boat strikes has the military seized drugs or produced evidence that those it killed were involved in the drug trade. Many of the victims appear to have been fishermen or other laborers. This hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing those killed or members of his administration from releasing celebratory video clips of vessels being destroyed from high above. Vice President J. D. Vance has cracked that he “wouldn’t go fishing right now in that part of the world.” In defending the campaign, called “Operation Southern Spear,” Hegseth uses bizarre theocratic rhetoric, warning that “Christian nations, under God” cannot be led astray by “radical narco-communists.”

Trump, meanwhile, spouts nonsense about the targeting program’s effectiveness. He has claimed that the strikes have prevented twenty-five thousand cocaine-related deaths in one year, though experts say that there have not been that many such deaths over the past fifty years in total.

Dominic Preziosi, ‘Simply Murder’.

A jilted lover’s wish for the sweet bluebird of happiness to crap all over the GOP’s birthday cake

Every once in a while, Kevin D. Williamson lets it all hang out:

Do you hear that? Skitter. Scuffle. Scurry … splash!

… As the SS Trump founders and careens, it is impossible to miss the sound of rat bellies hitting the water, with the rats snug in their little rat life-preservers and praying for a ratty little lifeboat to come along and pick them up. 

And you know what that means: It is time to strafe the lifeboats. 

How bad are things for Donald Trump? His overall approval rating is down to 38 percent, according to the New York Times poll, a reminder that half of any population has below-average intelligence and that 38 percent evidently couldn’t beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe. 

…

Celebrity-wise, Trump is down to his hardcore groupies: Kid Rock, a 55-year-old white rapper who cannot figure out which is the front end of a fedora, and Lee Greenwood, a guy older than Joe Biden (really!) who is known for one treacly anthem so deeply impregnated with artificial sweetener that it’ll probably give listeners cancer through their hearing aids. 

…

Even congressional Republicans are making squeaky little verminous noises vaguely suggestive of independence. 

…

If Congress wants to stop the corruption, the illegal war, the trade anarchy, the massacres at sea, and the rest of it, then Congress can—and should—do what Congress has failed to do twice in Trump’s sorry career, which is to use the power of impeachment to remove him from office and to bar him from serving in any other office. Of course, Republicans will give no thought to doing that—it is, after all, the right thing, the patriotic thing, and the honorable thing. 

… Mike Pence, who was Trump’s most fervid and po-faced apologist for years until by means of some bizarre moral parthenogenesis he produced a conscience at the very moment Trump’s star seemed to be setting in 2021, is out there trying to rally Republicans to the banner of Reaganism when what he should really do, if he had an ounce of self-respect, is don ashes and sackcloth, or maybe set himself on fire on the National Mall like one of those Vietnamese monks protesting the Ngô Đình Diệm regime way back when, while those of us who were willing to pay the price to be on the right side of this question from the beginning (and it was not inexpensive) roast a few s’mores over the hot embers of his smoldering sanctimony. 

Which is basically what we should be doing to the Republican Party as a whole, because the Republican Party is still going to be what it is—dangerous and depraved—even when Trump has left the scene. Republicans from Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Johnson to their media cheerleaders, allies, and apologists should go down with the Trump ship—and, if necessary, they should be made to go down with it. The Republican Party has, in this past decade and some, shown itself to be willing to embrace anything, to tolerate anything, and to justify anything, no matter how fundamentally opposed to the values and virtues Republicans once claimed to cherish and champion, no matter how grotesque or unpatriotic or un-Christian, as long as it helps them stay in office—not even in power, which would be an almost understandable thing, but simply in office, sinecure-ensconced castrati who offer nothing to Congress and who cling to their seats only for the sake of their modest salaries and some staff and an air-conditioned place to hang out on Capitol Hill between Fox News hits. 

In anno Domini 2026, there simply is no honorable way to be associated with the Republican Party.

After such lascivious quotation, I think I owe y’all a gift link.

Me, too

Williamson keeps posting daily:

[M]y preferred electoral outcome for the immediate future is seeing Republicans “stomped into goo.” I know what that means in practical terms. I don’t know that we have a word for negative polarization that is bipartisan, but, if there is one, that is approximately what I am feeling right now. If there were a way to get Republicans stomped without the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting more power, then I’d be all for that. But there isn’t.

My feelings almost exactly.

For the record

I have noted the re-emergence of preventable diseases like measles due to vaccine opposition.

I have nothing to say except What is wrong with you people?!

Although I have never understood generalized objections to vaccines (sometimes justified by “religion” of some vague sort), I tolerated a very low level of it. But the higher levels of vaccine objection are leading to systemic stresses. This may be a case, like motorcycle helmets, where we’re just going to have to say “sorry about your baffling conscience, mate” and make something mandatory. (But then my religious freedom lawyer instincts kick in, and I see some legal timebombs if they try to forbid religious objections while exempting for medical contraindications. It’s complicated.)

Indiana Election Update

I previously wrote:

Indiana does not register voters by political party, but it has some arcane rules intended to avoid mischievous crossover voting: basically, you are not entitled to vote in a party’s primary unless you voted for a majority of its candidates in the last election or intend to vote for a majority of its candidates in the upcoming election.

…

But let’s take the obnoxious system for what it is. Mischievous crossover voting is supposed to be eliminable by the arcane rules alluded to. But the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers to challenge voters they think are not qualified to vote in the parties’ primaries.

Copenhaver and her supporters did not recruit such poll-watchers, but waited confidently for the election results and then, shocked by the results, went combing desperately through social media for people who boasted (truthfully or falsely — you know how social media roll) that they took crossover ballots to vote for Spencer Deery but intend to vote for the Democrat in the General Election.

Now they have filed, under seal, a list of 14 such people whose depositions they apparently intend to take in order to reduce Deery’s vote count, after the fact, instead of the normal course of challenging those voters upfront. So much for ballot secrecy and norms.

The good news:

  1. The MAGA list of 14 is now down to 11 because 3 of the people they listed didn’t live or vote in the district.
  2. There are reports that something like 7 of the 11 remaining challenged crossover voters have been crossing over (and back) repeatedly over many election cycles.
  3. It appears to me clearer than before that there is no Indiana legal precedent for challenging crossover votes after the election; as I wrote, “the way to enforce those arcane rules, normally, is to have partisan poll-watchers [on election day] to challenge voters they think are not qualified.”
  4. A lot of conscientious local Democrats are reporting that they regularly cross over because this is a sufficiently Red part of the state that the GOP primary is, for practical purposes, the election.
  5. It doesn’t appear to me that public outrage over this stunt is waning any when the topic comes up.
  6. Finally, the Recount Commission is going to finish the recount before they officially consider the MAGA ploy.

Finally, on that 4th point, I’m going to retreat a bit from my opposition to the state conducting partisan primaries. I’ve learned, quite coincidentally, that deeming party primaries purely “private” was one of the Jim Crow-related ploys to deprive black voters of an effective voice in heavily-partisan areas where the primary election effectively was the real election. Perhaps a deep dive into history (or a focused dive into an AI chatbot) would have told me that, but I think I got it from a reliable person on a podcast.

Shorts

  • Universities have started to treat education like a designer handbag: you claim it is valuable because it is scarce, not because a lot of really meaningful stuff happens in the eight semesters you’re there. (Walter Russell Meade on Ben Sasse’s Not Dead Yet podcast)
  • Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, formally known as the Secretary of Defense, warned on June 6 that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy. (Ummmm. Like, Normandy is in Europe, right? But I suppose Hegseth arrived by air, so it’s okay.)
  • Mindless optimism is the only antidote I know to rational despair. (Bret Stephens via Frank Bruni)
  • Mary Geddry rolled her eyes at one of the president’s favorite boasts: “Trump has been posting and ranting about the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the MoCA … In his telling, passing a basic cognitive screening is proof of ‘extreme intelligence,’ because nothing says genius like repeatedly announcing that you successfully identified a camel and drew a clock.” (Frank Bruni)
  • Grace Dent appraised the diners at the exclusive, expensive restaurant Skof in Manchester, England: “The crowd, during this particular service, at least, was older, possibly retired, and wantonly spending their children’s inheritance on compressed malwina strawberries with jasmine cream and amasake sorbet with milk oolong tea. The more I travel, the more I’m convinced that millennials stand to inherit nothing more than a pile of Michelin-starred restaurant receipts and gout medication.”(Frank Bruni)
  • I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city. (Frank Lloyd Wright)
  • He wrote poems and threw them away the moment they were finished, because to keep them would have been to take them seriously, and to take them seriously would have been to betray them. The one thing he feared was the doctor who wanted to cure him of being himself. (Idle News Pantheon)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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

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.

Summer Solstice 2023

Culture

Commencement Wisdom

I’ve always liked the story with the punchline “What the hell is water?” But I don’t think I’d ever read the full commencement address from which I got it.

Quite good, with anticipations of Iain McGillchrist and of “pay attention to what you’re paying attention to;” but David Foster Wallace’s way may be better.

Is SCOTUS out of step?

About the Supreme Court, the New York Times wants to know “whether the court’s decisions are out of step with public opinion.” Here is the answer to that question:

It does not matter.

The law says what the law says. The job of the Supreme Court is to apply the law, not to make up the law, not to reform the law, not to ensure that the law accords with public opinion. If public opinion is opposed to the law, then the public can elect new lawmakers and write new laws. It is not up to the Supreme Court to do that for them. If representative democracy means anything, it is that the law is made by lawmakers who are elected by the people and democratically accountable to them.

…

Even Nina Totenberg has noticed that the progressives on the Supreme Court are more inclined toward bloc voting while the so-called conservatives are more inclined toward intellectual disagreement. If your bookie took bets on how individual justices were going to vote in any given hot-button case, you’d make more money betting on the progressives, who are predictable. When it comes to their most important political commitments, they sometimes have reached their decision before the first arguments are made.

Kevin D. Williamson, When Public Opinion Is Irrelevant.

I’m not sure how Williamson supports that last sentence, but otherwise it’s solid.

Damon Linker’s sober assessment

I’m not really interested in debating the substance of the issue. I’m fully vaccinated, so is my wife, and so are my kids. That includes several rounds of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine. But I’m not anything close to being a medical doctor or an expert on immunology or epidemiology. I’m not even an especially informed amateur observer of issues in public health. What I am is a broadly well-educated writer and citizen who trusts doctors, public-health professionals, government agencies, and the media’s myriad mechanisms of publicity to provide me with accurate information about the world. I trust that since tens of millions of Americans (and hundreds of millions more all over the world) have taken these vaccines, I would have heard about it in the form of a blockbuster news story if they actually did more harm than good.

But note: I don’t know that vaccines are safe in the same way that I know it’s a cloudy day in the Philadelphia suburbs, where I live and am writing this post. And this is true about an enormous number of things. Anytime anyone says “I know X” about a matter that goes beyond direct personal experience—I can see the clouds outside my window with my own eyes—it implicitly involves an act of trust: “I know X because Y says X, and I trust that Y knows what s/he is talking about and wouldn’t deceive me.”

Do you distrust the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci? Fine. But why would that lead you to trust RFK or Joe Rogan more? Just because they’re not employed by the government?

Why indeed? I know full well that governments lie to me constantly — but nowhere near so constantly that I can say “government said it so it must be a lie.” But what I also know believe is that crackpots and grifters are even less reliable than the government (do I really need to cite examples?), and that I lack the time and the knowledge to personally check out every contrarian claim.

Especially at age 74, I am very aware of my mortality, and of the much higher priorities for spending the time until that day.

Maslow’s Hierarchy, level 1

For all I complain about the empty materialism of the West, there is a certain level of wealth essential to human happiness, below which family, faith, and work as a craft, isn’t solace enough. We need a certain amount of stuff to escape the drudgery and toil of existence. That level is probably somewhere above Senegal ($1,800 per capita GDP) and below Vietnam ($4,000).

Chris Arnade

Vote your vice

The policies implementing the Sexual Revolution now have the priority that peace and prosperity used to occupy in political loyalties and discourse. The revolutionary ideology now holds the place of esteem once held by the Judeo-Christian religions.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

In general, I did not care for this book, but this particular point is powerful. The Biden administration has proven the truth of it vividly in its enthusiastic celebrations of Pride Month. (If you missed the details, Rod Dreher is ever ready to fill you in.)

The late Joseph Sobran said decades ago that the Democrats had become the “vote your vice” party. It has only gotten worse (with an admixture of perverse obsequiousness toward transgender ideology).

(I grant that there are vices other than sexual, and that when Republicans are in power they either leave the declining status quo untouched or else pass performative and draconian bans that the courts strike down on various grounds, some of those grounds being solid.)

Scotomas

Speaking of vice, the current issue of The American Conservative devotes its current issue to the topic.

Yup. They’ve got the biggies:

  • Porn
  • Gambling
  • Marijuana
  • Witchcraft
  • Social Media

But I almost laughed out loud at the absence of binge drinking and at the article titled and subtitled The No Smoking Garden: The crusade against tobacco has depended on shameless propaganda.

I’m thinking the common thread here is “calls to legalize newer vices are bad; traditional legal vices are fine.”

This is typical of why I keep waiting for The American Conservative to realize that my subscription has lapsed.

Don’t worry; science has it all figured out

(An archaeologist finds a motel centuries hence:)

Surrounding almost the entire complex was a vast flat area, marked with parallel white lines. In several of the spaces stood freely interpreted metal sculptures of animals. To avoid the misunderstanding that often arises with free interpretation, each sculpture was clearly labeled. They were inscribed with such names as Cougar, Skylark, and Thunderbird, to name but a few. The importance of animal worship in Yank burial customs has never been more clearly illustrated.

David Macaulay, Motel of the Mysteries

Politics

Donald Trump as an occasion of sin

It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about.

Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism. When you see well-meaning people on your side who were catastrophically wrong about profound moral and political issues, humility comes more easily.

These days, however, many conservatives are so ridiculous that I fear they are robbing us liberals of that well-earned humility.

Nicholas Kristof, In the Age of Trump, It’s Hard to Be Humble

Florida Man is one-of-a-kind

Peter Wehner can always be counted on to oppose Florida Man, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head more squarely than other times:

  • Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.
  • Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.
  • Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.
  • Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.

Mind you, I’m among those who succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (the first Presidency so to afflict me), so I can’t fault Wehner for a bit of obsessiveness.

What is the reason for Mike Pence?

Pence recently did an interview with right-wing radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, in which he refused to say whether he’d pardon Trump once in office. The hosts wanted Trump pardoned, and Pence basically had three answers. First, he riffed on the fact that he believes these are “serious charges” and he “can’t defend what’s been alleged.” Second, he says it’s “premature” to discuss a pardon because we don’t know what “the president’s defense is” or “what are the facts.” And then third, he says “we either believe in our judicial process in this country or we don’t; we either stand by the rule of law or we don’t.”

…

Normally, I’m not impressed with candidates who refuse to answer questions because they look like they’re being evasive for political reasons. The lack of authenticity is like nails on a chalkboard. But here, it actually is a real answer. He thinks the charges are real, but he’s open to hearing Trump’s side of the story.

Sarah Isgur. She analyzes the other GOP candidates, too.

Pence is right, but being right often requires nuance for which voters have no patience.

I was aware of, but did not share, a Pence Derangement Syndrome when he was Governor of Indiana. I have nothing in particular against him now. But on 1/6/21, he assuredly was aware that by honoring our electoral college system over the shenannigans of Florida Man, he was ending his political career.

In 2023, Pence is a stone-cold loser, lacking even the “what the hell, why not tell the truth?” rationale of Chris Christie.

Wordplay

1

Filiation and affiliation

The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge.

James Matthew Wilson

2

Mr. Robertson ran for president in 1988, hoping to channel evangelistic popularity from his growing television empire, the Christian Broadcasting Network, into Republican political might. Ultimately he failed — even devout Christians worried about the intensity with which the celebrity minister blended church and state.

And yet, by the time of his death on Thursday, the vision he championed had gained more power than he could have ever thought possible. The alliance between evangelical Christianity and Republican politics has fused, even as America has grown increasingly secular. The polarizing rhetoric of his often inflammatory views has become a defining feature of American politics.

Elizabeth Dias at the New York Times, writing about the political side of Pat Robertson, who died June 8. (Emphasis added)

“Evangelistic popularity” is pretty clumsy. It skips over primary and secondary meanings of evangelism and evangelistic to mash up a tertiary meaning (a meaning which I suggest arose from journalistic misusage, which eventually “makes proper” I guess, as “literal” now is a hyperbolic form of “metaphorical.”)

I have no idea, apart from context, what happens when an alliance fuses, and I’m not persuaded by it.

3

hysteria

Boy! I had never stopped to think how loaded that word is!

“Mass hysteria” is out; “psychogenic illness” is in.

4

If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

5

Getting offended by something on the internet is like choosing to to step in dog crap instead of walking around it.

Found by my wife on Pinterest

6

ESPN is now a gambling-promotion network that finds sports useful.

Alan Jacobs

7

holobionts: a united meta-organism whose components evolve in concert with each other. (The idea of “holobionts” represents a paradigm shift in biology). See also, of course, Wikipedia.

8

Word of the Era: Religion

I recently read Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept 📚 The idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history. That’s not a complete surprise to me, but I’d never before read so much on how that came about. Spoiler alert: there’s a bit of cultural imperialism in the sense of “imposing” on other cultures how the secularized West parses things.

9

Baksheesh, a word meaning bribes in Arabic, which police frequently ask for in Egypt. Read the full story.

10

Happiness writes white ink on a white page.

Henry de Montherlant via Things Worth Remembering: The Joy of Requited Love

This probably is in the same thought constellation as how notoriously hard it is to create compelling good fictional characters.

11

“Random” vs. “Mystery”

To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known … To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns … But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

12

From Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences” segment:

A

We can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.

Maureen Dowd

B

So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice — as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly

Andrew Coyne

C

What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, “we are what we pretend to be.”

Tom Nichols on the transmogrification of J.D. Vance into a Trumpist.

D

Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is being fragile and in formation — a human construction site.

Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.

Thursday, 7/21/22

Newsie

Good guys with guns

[A] common argument in favor of "high capacity" magazine bans is that defensive gun use never needs more than a few bullets. Here, the good samaritan used ten bullets, and he could have needed even more. In California, for example, magazines are limited to ten rounds. Had the good samaritan needed one more bullet to drop the assailant, he would have been out of luck in California.

…

Update 2: The Greenwood Police now report that the Good Samaritan acted quickly. In the span of 15 seconds (not 2 minutes), he fired 10 rounds, eight of which hit the assailant. And his first shot hit the assailant from 40 yards!

That is some top-level accuracy.

Josh Blackmun

I wasn’t going to say much about this until I saw that second update. That was the first time I heard that 8 of 10 shots hit the terrorist, one from 40 yards. It kind of boggles the mind.

Covid vaccination breakthrough?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday recommended Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in people age 18 and older, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before the shot’s widespread distribution in the U.S. Novavax’s two-dose vaccine relies on well-established vaccine technology, providing an alternative for people reluctant to take the newer mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. The U.S. has purchased 3.2 million doses of the Novavax shot.

The Morning Dispatch makes a good point about the likely nexus between new mRNA technology and vaccine resistance. I thought mRNA, which I didn’t really understand, was a lesser evil than Covid, but some other opinions varied.

News you can abuse, ignore

In the parts of the world where monkeypox is newly spreading, like the United States and Europe, the people currently most at risk of getting the disease are gay and bisexual men. A recent update from the World Health Organization noted that cases in newly afflicted countries have mainly been among “men who have had recent sexual contact with a new or multiple male partners.” In Europe, just 0.2 percent of the men who have gotten the disease identify as heterosexual. Reports from the center of the U.S. outbreak—New York City—show that “the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men.” The infectious-disease and LGBTQ-health journalist Benjamin Ryan notes that though the U.S. is, frustratingly, not collecting demographic details on monkeypox patients, Britain is, and the numbers there are clear: “Half of men screened for monkeypox tested positive; women, by contrast, tested positive only 0.6 percent of the time.”

Opening paragraph of U.S. Messaging on Monkeypox Is Deeply Flawed.

If AIDS was the first politically-protected disease, Monkeypox is the second. Most of our media and government simply cannot find the integrity to speak plain, helpful English about diseases that are sexually transmitted among gay men. They’re probably trying to protect them; as so often, they may accomplish the opposite of their intention.

Politics and Legal Wrangling

Contraception, Sodomy, Same-sex marriage

I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” … we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in the Dobbs case (which overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey).

I looked this up because I doubted news stories that said Thomas had "called for" re-examination of these other "substantive due process" decisions. I publish what I found to acknowledge that he did call for that, and to provide context:

  • Justice Thomas’s dictum tacitly invites challenges to these other "substantive due process" decisions, but I’m not sure he’ll get any challenges unless some government in the U.S. tries to undermine the court-decreed rights to contraception, consensual adult sodomy or same-sex marriage. Unlike the situation with abortion, I’m just not sure there’s anywhere left in the U.S. where a legislative majority could mistake opposition to these for a winning political position. In other words, how would SCOTUS get a case challenging contraception, consensual adult sodomy or same-sex marriage? Am I missing something?
  • You can certainly accuse Thomas of pedantry in his criticism of "substantive due process" while explicitly leaving open a door to recognizing the selfsame rights as "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," but that strikes many as a better legal foundation. Liberal Yale Law School Professor Akhil Amar heartily respects, perhaps even embraces, that approach.

Where should America go legislatively on abortion?

I’ve said that any legislative resolution will have greater constitutional legitimacy than did Roe‘s bogus constitutional pretexts, and I meant and mean that.

But I now should add the qualifier that I’m not sure this is a fit subject for national legislation on the circumstances where abortion should or shouldn’t be lawful. Maybe there’s room for some Congressional legislation, like maybe protecting the right to travel (which already is judicially recognized, be it noted), but historically, abortion is a matter for the states. (I’d say the same, by the way, if Congress was weighing restriction rather than liberalization.)

I’ve always assumed that once Roe was out of the way, we’d eventually reach some ideologically-unsatisfying legislative compromise, as have western European nations. I don’t think my opinionating could change that.

A Bill with exceptions exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother was introduced in Indiana’s Special Session Wednesday (a Session called to rebate some of our budget surplus, but expanded after Dobbs). Legislators who are fighting against those compassionate exceptions (and there are some) are likely to pay a political price.

Democracy and distrust

The Secret Service reportedly told the January 6 select committee on Tuesday that it cannot recover deleted text messages from the days surrounding the Capitol attack after all, and has no new messages to provide. The agency says the messages were lost as part of a technology upgrade. The National Archives has asked the Secret Service to report within 30 days on the “potential unauthorized deletion” of agency records, including what was lost and how.

The Morning Dispatch.

This story has me as frustrated as any recent story. I would have thought the Secret Service above such stuff. Everything Orange Man/Reverse Midas touches turns to merde.

Norms

We no longer honor norms; we weaponize them.

Jonah Goldberg on Bari Weiss’ Honestly podcast Election Denial: A Roundtable. Jonah had Bari laughing out loud so many times (e.g., Trump "Tweeting like a monkey escaped from a cocaine study") that I see one of two futures:

  1. Jonah becomes a frequent flyer with Bari; or
  2. Bari, fearing loss of gravitas, never invites him again.

For what it’s worth, I found her laughter delightful.

Why we need philosophers

Over forty years, Kant taught this lecture series forty-eight times. In his Physische Geographie, as the series was called, Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense. He used the image of a house to explain this: before constructing it brick by brick and piece by piece, it was necessary to have an idea of how the entire building would look. It was this concept of a system that became the linchpin of Humboldt’s later thinking.

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World.

Note that Kant was referring to knowledge, not just scientific knowledge.

Why we don’t need end-times opinions

“We may have another year, maybe two years, to work for Jesus Christ, and [then] . . . it’s all going to be over,” he said in 1951. Two years later he said, “I sincerely believe, if I can study the Scriptures aright and read current events and keep with my current reading, that we are living in the latter days. I sincerely believe that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

I admired Billy Graham. Now, I’d call him "consequential" rather than "great." Maybe that’s hair-splitting.

Self-sabotage

Many years ago I had a student who took several classes from me and never got anything better than a C. At the beginning of his senior year he came to my office and asked me why. I reminded him that I had always made detailed comments on his paper; he said, yeah, he knew that, but he had never read the comments and always just threw the papers away. So I explained what his problem was. He nodded, thanked me, went away, and in the two classes he had from me that year he got the highest grades in the class.

improving – Snakes and Ladders

Organic towns, functional cities

Town and city are no longer the organic growths they once were. They have begun to operate on a purely functional level that has little to do with what actually brings grace into our lives. You eviscerate a habitat of its culture and the species it supports will find it increasingly difficult to survive or else they’ll mutate into something else.

Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum in the Book Trade, via Prufrock

Why do we so mythologize the sixties?

So why do those that would lead us treat the sixties as though they were our Heroic Age?

My theory is very simple: it is the last time that any of them mattered.

Those on the left pretend that society can be guided with the right policies from powerful institutional centres. They flatter themselves otherwise, but so do those on the right, even if their versions of ‘right policies’ often involves slimming down some institutional centres. The seventies taught us a harsher lesson. They ended one of modernity’s founding political myths, the idea that the vast bureaucratic engines the modern state uses to intimately order the lives of millions could be understood as a variation on the Greek city-states. They cannot: a modern state is a different order of being. It cannot be controlled by institutional centres, and even those centres can no longer be controlled. Any attempt to limit them only renders them more powerful. Nowadays, even the Machine’s smaller cogs are too big for human hands. This is the truth that our ‘leaders’ cannot even whisper. For if social institutions have become invulnerable to meaningful control, then their entire caste – politicians, journalists, civil service managers, researchers, and all – serve no purpose. To admit their pointlessness would end them. So, liberal and conservative alike, they retreat to the sixties and pretend that it matters as they launch into another round of culture war. It doesn’t matter and they don’t matter. They cannot prevent the end that is coming.

FFatalism, The culture wars were irrelevant by 1976

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Martinet pronouns (and much more)

Best thing I read Monday: Are We Still Thinking?.

There’s a lot more to it than this, one of my favorite quotes of an American Founder:

In the 1780’s, John Adams wrote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

I have a reminder set to re-read the article. It’s that good.

Bari Weiss turned most of her column over to the lament of a Romanian-born mathematician:

Sergiu wrote me in an email that the situation in his field reminds him of this line from Thomas Sowell: “Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.”

Bari Weiss, introducing There Is No Such Thing as "White" Math – Common Sense with Bari Weiss

The centerpiece of Sergiu’s complaint is an 83-page piece of idiocy that proves, if nothing else, that its funding source, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, does not have perfect pitch.

Legal writing guru Bryan Garner puts a pin in the "what are your pronouns?" bullshit:

What’s new isn’t the generic pronoun but the referential pronoun: the one that refers to a known person (Bill, John, Krys, or Emily). People are deciding for themselves how they want to be referred to behind their backs — in the third person. If you were addressing them directly, of course, you’d simply use you and your. A social movement is behind the idea that people get to decide how references to them should sound when they’re absent.

Bryan Garner, Pronominal Strife – Los Angeles Review of Books (emphasis added)

"Legislating by letterhead" belongs in our lexicon, though I think I recall conservatives doing the same sort of thing as this:

The precursor to the hearing was a revealing letter sent Monday by two California Democrats, Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney. The duo demanded the CEOs of a dozen cable, satellite and broadband providers explain what “response” they intended to take to the “right-wing media ecosystem” that is spreading “lies” and “disinformation” that enable “insurrection” and provokes “non-compliance with public health guidelines.” Specifically they asked each CEO: “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax and OANN . . .? If so, why?”

When Republican members of the committee and outside groups shouted censorship, Ms. Eshoo shrugged. “The First Amendment, my friends, starts with four words: Congress shall make no laws,” and she, Anna Eshoo, had no intention of enacting a law to shut down conservatives. She was merely asking “strong, important questions”—i.e., whether private regulated companies understand that (if they know what’s good for them) they’ll do the dirty work for her, thereby saving her the hassle of complying with the Constitution. She was just asking.

…

“Right now, the greatest threat to free speech in this country is not any law passed by the government—the First Amendment stands as a bulwark,” says Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr. “The threat comes in the form of legislating by letterhead.

Kim Strassel, ‘Just Asking’ for Censorship – WSJ

After a long absence, Garrison Keillor assaulted my RSS aggregator yesterday with multiple postings. I have no explanation for this delightful onslaught or for the preceding absence.

I’ll be selective, minimizing politics.

I married a pro-vaxxer, which is good to know after all these years — we never discussed vaccines during courtship — and in addition to her respect for science, she has the patience to track down clinics online and spend time on Hold and so now I am vaccinated …

I was not asked for a credit card at any point, or a Medicare card, so evidently the country is slipping into socialism, as Republicans predicted, but I am too old to argue, I obey. Young people wearing badges told me which line to get in and I did. A young woman who said she was a nurse gave the shot and I didn’t ask to see her license. Nor did I ask for assurance that the vaccine did not contain a hallucinogen that would make me accept the Fake News: I already accept that Joe Biden was elected president and that Trump supporters invaded the Capitol on January 6. It’s too laborious to believe otherwise. This is Occam’s Razor, the principle they taught in high school science: the simpler theory tends to be true. You’d have to devote weeks to working up a new theory of massive electoral fraud by Venezuelans and Antifans buying thousands of MAGA hats to storm the Capitol, and at 78 I don’t have the time for that. The vaccine may extend my lifetime but there are no guarantees.

The old scout stands in line at the clinic | Garrison Keillor

The joy at the heart of the lockdown in the pandemic is the daily reassurance that you married the right person. A funny person with her own life who is never at a loss for words and so is good company and who reads the news for me and passes along the good stuff.

She read me a story in the Times last week about the hellish life in the skinny skinny new skyscrapers of Manhattan. Developers have taken tiny lots and thrown up a 90-story needle and sold apartments for vast amounts to people who want to look down on the rest of us but meanwhile high winds cause the needle to sway dramatically, which often snaps water pipes and causes major leaks and brings elevators to a stop and causes eerie whining sounds. It gave us joy, to think that architects and developers have found a way to earn big profits from torturing oligarchs from authoritarian countries who have way too much money.

The pandemic: one man’s appreciation | Garrison Keillor

In the Fifties, they tore down sixteen acres of tenements in Hell’s Kitchen and under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller brothers they built a symphony hall, an opera house, a theater, and a dance theater around a plaza with a fountain. Republicans were behind it and Lincoln’s name is on it and when you attend events here, you brush elbows with a good many moguls and grande dames who probably miss Ronald Reagan keenly and you go in to watch performers, 95 percent of them Democrats, some to the left of Bernie Sanders, but the conflicting views between the stage and the box seats are forgotten in the glory of “Der Rosenkavalier” or Beethoven or “Les Sylphides.” If your heart is open to the gifts of genius, you will walk across the plaza afterward, past the fountain, and feel transformed.

I first saw the U.S. Capitol in 1962, heading for Baltimore to attend a wedding, got lost, saw a lighted dome and realized I was in Washington. I parked and walked up the steps and in the door, past one policeman sitting on a folding chair in the foyer, and walked in under the great dome and looked at the statues and murals, and saw only a couple of cops relaxing in a hallway, not paying much attention to anybody.

When I tell people about that night, it feels like ancient history. Those days will never return. Even at the opera, security men wand you as you come through the turnstile. After the Capitol insurrection of January 6, security will be iron-tight forever to come, metal detectors will beep at every steel zipper, uniformed men with assault weapons will watch your every move. Walking into the Capitol of 1962, the openness of it told you that we are a civilized society with a high level of mutual trust. I don’t care to ever visit Washington again and see our government on wartime alert for attacks by our fellow Americans. Too painful.

A night outside, eating with friends | Garrison Keillor

Will Hollywood rise from the dead when the pandemic ends? It must. Truly. I decided it was my duty to sit down and write a screenplay for a movie to hold a theater of young people transfixed for a hundred and ten minutes, but it’s no use, I’m too old and comfortable, too well-married. I live with a woman who sits across from me at the breakfast table and reads the paper and tells me what I need to know from it, which takes her five minutes, and leaves me free to think my own thoughts. I spend less time worrying about our democracy than I do trying to remember Natalie Wood’s costar in “Splendor In The Grass.” (Warren Beatty.) William Inge wrote that movie and he felt entitled to torture beautiful Natalie and throw her into a loony bin because he was an alcoholic gay male suffering from depression. I don’t have that privilege, having had a happy childhood. I write a scene and it’s two people remembering their childhoods. No drama. Dishes need to be thrown, tables overturned.

The end of the worst, bring on the better | Garrison Keillor

Micah Mattix respects Christopher Lasch, but thinks Robert Penn Warren is needed as a corrective. He starts showing where Lasch over-sold his case:

For Lasch, the unbounded pursuit of capital has led to the commodification of nearly all of life. The decline in American manufacturing has made it difficult for working-class families to live on a single salary. The result, often, is both parents work full-time and outsource child-rearing to “professionals.” Small stores and local hangouts, where people of different classes might interact, have been replaced by big box stores and impersonal chain restaurants in pursuit of greater margins. The result is that informal conversations between groups has ceased. The wealthy go to private cocktail parties and exclusive clubs while the plebs stare at TV screens in Chili’s. The “decline of participatory democracy,” Lasch writes, may be directly related to the disappearance of these “third places.” Education has abandoned moral formation in favor of creating efficient workers while, at the same time, nourishing a sense of entitlement though victimhood narratives that postpone adulthood. Math and science—the golden tools of the market—are funded while history and English are either cut or repurposed to teach “soft skills.” Doing right is replaced with feeling good in homes and churches. The list goes on.

But this has been going on for much longer than 25 years. I am reminded of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which was first published in 1952 and which can be read as a commentary on post-WW II life in the South. It’s set in the fictional Taulkinham—a town of shops and movie theaters. “No one was paying any attention to the sky,” O’Connor writes. “The stores . . . stayed open on Thursday nights so that people could have an extra opportunity to see what was for sale.” In one scene, a man sets up “an altar” to sell a new kind of potato peeler. All everyone does in Taulkinham is shop and go to the movies. There are no two-parent families in the novel. Young men are either unemployed or work menial jobs. And the only religion that anyone shows any interest in is Hoover Shoat’s prosperity gospel, where, he tells the townsfolk “You don’t have to believe nothing you don’t understand and approve of.”

Warren’s corrective, distilled:

Warren’s argument for role of poetry in a democracy reminds us not only of the importance of taking the long view but also of the centrality of excellence for a good society. This is Lasch’s concern, too, but it cannot be recovered through economic reforms alone.

Micah Mattix, Saving the American Experiment – Law & Liberty

Of the Golden Trump at CPAC 2021:

“It’s definitely not an idol,” Mr. Zegan insisted. (“I was a youth pastor for 18 years,” he noted.) “An idol is something somebody worships and bows down to. This is a sculpture. It’s two different things.”

At CPAC, a Reverence for Trump – The New York Times

"Trust me; I’m a former youth pastor" is a nonsequitur right out of the gate, but "an idol is something somebody worships and bows down to" is a particularly risible affirmation coming from within a Christianish tradition whose dumbed-down "worship" of God almost certainly includes no bowing.

CPAC was full of Trumpists saying they’re conservative, not Republican. I have no taste to vote for saving the Republican Party from their ilk, but I hate to see the term "conservative" debased.

Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

I John 3:2

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.