The Hunter Biden Pardon

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A Political Theory of Relativity would dictate that what you see depends on where you sit. Where one sees Trump and his incoming cabinet as a modern-day incarnation of The Untouchables coming to take the crooked city down to the studs, others see such an endeavor as something worse than Watergate. It just depends on where you are sitting.

Kamala Harris spent more than $1 billion on her 100 day campaign and she still lost. That’s a lot of money to push out the door in such a short time, so where did all the money go? A clue lies in the revelation that the Harris campaign had donated $500,000 to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit ahead of a friendly interview.

While it is hard to imagine Sharpton ever doing an unfriendly interview with Kamala, there was a commonality of interest. She had the need to spend money that other people had given her and he liked to spend the money that other people gave him. In fact Sharpton has used his past as an inciter of antisemitic riots and racial hoaxes to good effect because he, like mobsters and politicians, understands that the difference between a donation and extortion depends on where you sit.

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Seth Barrett Tillman: “In Remembrance of P.J. O’Rourke: Let’s Make a List”

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You’re going to need a bigger list! Seth brings it.

Worth reading as usual.

Springs, Cables, and the Rebirth of America

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Last year, I came across an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a Free Press essay contest. She spoke of The taut cable of high expectations and the bad consequences that occur when that cable is slackened.  The essay reminded me in a passage in Antoine de St-Exupery’s novel of ideas, Citadelle, about which I had recently been thinking.

In this book (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom.   One night, he visits the prison which holds a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that the soul of this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps his sentence should be commuted?…but decides otherwise:

For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.

The particular context in which I had been thinking of this St-Exupery passage was the situation in San Francisco.  Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote. And not only in San Francisco.

Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls. Over the past several years, both of these (related) failure modes have become increasingly dominant.  I believe that we were on a track to a very dark time…see my post Head-Heart-Stomach…but that we now have a real chance to turn things around.  There really does seem to be a new feeling among a high proportion of Americans and across several dimensions of attitudes and opinions.  Not all Americans, of course…but a lot. And while there are many ways things can go wrong, there is plenty of reason for hope.  We’ll discuss some of the threats and challenges later (soon), but for the moment, let’s briefly relax and breathe a sigh of relief as to what has been–at least for now–avoided.

Nothing is saved forever, as Connie Willis noted in one of her novels, but in America, something very important has been saved, at least for now. It will need to be saved many more times in the future, both the near future and the far future, but for now, thankfulness and celebration are appropriate.

(I discussed the Ruby LaRocca essay and the St-Exupery passage previously, here)

Make Family Holidays Great Again

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

I saw a news clip the other day about how Thanksgiving is “America’s Favorite Holiday!” I’m not sure if that’s true, and anything produced by the media should be treated with extreme suspicion but hey, yes, Thanksgiving is up there as far as holidays.

In what seems to be part of the Thanksgiving tradition, we are inundated with stories about the difficulties involved in getting through the day without families and guests tearing each part over their political differences. This year, we are warned, everyone will be at general quarters because of the recent election.

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What do American Indians Have to be Thankful For?

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Much of the modern left views the migration of Europeans to the Americas as one of history’s greatest tragedies. This cynicism represents a failure to examine both sides of the balance sheet, to recognize both good and bad consequences of trans-Atlantic colonization, as well as the consequences of having no European colonization at all. The answer to the question posed in the title comes down to at least four items.

Access to advanced technology. Recall this quote from Life of Brian: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” One can nitpick and identify a few things the Judeans already had (e.g. wine), but overall the Romans significantly improved infrastructure that increased quality of life. The technological gap between Renaissance Europeans and pre-Columbian Americans was vastly greater. The Europeans also brought a non-technological advance that benefited some tribes in the short term: the horse.

And end to the constant threat of warfare. Before Europeans displaced the American natives, the natives were displacing each other. Such is life in a continent where one can find little land that isn’t frontier. As nation-states emerged and maintained long-term power, warfare became a less frequent concern.

Rule of law and relative freedom under the law. These principles evolved in Northern Europe and especially in England. They were exported to the Anglosphere colonies where they were developed further. Latin America was settled by the most autocratic region of Western Europe; centuries of existential threat under Moorish rule is not the sort of environment that breeds high-cooperation societies. Democratic reforms eventually came to many parts of the region with varying degrees of success. 

The Chinese did not colonize the Americas. If Ming Dynasty maritime exploration had taken a different turn…

Happy Thanksgiving!