These are in Maryland, a few miles outside of DC…they generally bloom a few days later than the ones at the Tidal Basin. I’m guessing peak bloom by this weekend.
Goldberg Chipping the Signal
In football, “chipping” is when an offensive player makes brief contact with an onrushing defender. The goal is not to halt them or apply a full-on block but to delay the other player just long enough to slow their scheme and allow the offense to make a play.
We need to remember that media people may claim to be “reporters,” but the fact that they file “stories” is closer to the real truth, which is that events are merely plot devices used to move the preferred narrative (story) along. It’s always been this way, think “Remember the Maine.”
So having gotten that out of the way, let’s deal with the unfolding story regarding how, allegedly, a media type got access to a principal’s call re: military strikes against the Houthis.
My introduction to the story came yesterday when somebody alerted me to a story in Politico. I found it strange that despite their assigning four reporters to the story, Politico was in fact only following up on a story broken by The Atlantic. Also the entire Politico story, nearly 1,000 words, was about reporting the reaction to The Atlantic. All those words, all that manpower, and they added nothing really of value.
Questions for Our Time
I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.
Elon Musk and the 80/20 Split
Eight weeks in to Trump 47 and the Left is in complete disarray.
As Insty and some others have pointed out, it seems that on every issue where the country is split 80/20 – like, say, trans-identifying men in women’s sports, or deporting illegal immigrant gang bangers – the Left unerringly picks the 20% side of the equation. That tells me as a group that they have lost their collective external framework of reality and are now acting reflexively. It’s like poking a drunken hobo with a stick, the hobo’s reaction is as predictable as it is mindless. The fact that it’s Trump holding the stick just makes it more amusing.
James Carville’s suggestion that the Democrats should just sit back a bit and let the Trump 47 Offensive run out of momentum is not only smart politics (never get in the way of a train), but it would force everyone on the Left to take a badly needed mental timeout. No such luck.
The fact that they have basically exiled Carville and now look to do the same with Schumer, the man who is the Left’s only elected power base left in DC, is just further validation that they are nuts.
Ouroboro-ed
The ouroboros was an ancient iconographic depicting a snake or a dragon biting on its own tail, and used to symbolize a mad variety of concepts in different cultures: birth, death, the continuity of life, disorder, yin and yang, infinity, circular reasoning, elements of alchemy … basically, a handy and interesting picture of some kind of circular concept. The notion of an organism busily munching down on its own substance also occurred to me on contemplating the likely movie disaster that will be the live-action version (with CGI-generated dwarves, so exactly how live-action is it, really?) of Disney’s Snow White. Which hotly-anticipated disaster is finally lumbering into the port of general release this week, where it is expected to crash into the dock and immolate. Not only may it likely crash and burn itself, but also the future career of Rachael Zegler … who might be able to sing and dance, but otherwise off-screen seems to have all the charm and tempting appeal of a liverwurst sandwich forgotten in the back of the employees’ break room refrigerator for a month or so.