The French people bring the French government to its knees

France has been burning, with riots over pretty much the whole country and hundreds of people injured and/or arrested.  The trigger for all of this was a big gasoline tax increase - ostensibly to control "climate change" but really just another big ol' tax on the working population by the limousine liberals.

And so the country went up in flames as tens of thousands of citizens threw up barricades on the Champs-Elysées.  Seriously:

Un stand-mobile de restauration finit de carboniser au milieu des Champs-Elysées. #GilestJaunes pic.twitter.com/v3Col3owTJ

— Vincent Serrano (@Vincent_Serrano) November 24, 2018

The protesters all wear yellow safety jackets, which in the last year or two were made mandatory for all drivers.  That was just one of many petty tyrannies that seem to have led up to the current explosion.  There are a LOT of protesters in yellow jackets:

All in all, 36,000 people are protesting across France, and over 5,000 in Paris alone.

Well the French government just blinked:

Fuel tax rises which had led to weeks of violent protests in France have been suspended for six months.

PM Edouard Philippe said that people's anger must be heard, and the measures would not be applied until there had been proper debate with those affected.

The protests have hit major French cities, causing considerable damage for the past three weekends.

The "gilets jaunes" (yellow vest) protests have now grown to reflect more widespread anger at the government.

Three people have died since the unrest began and the resulting violence and vandalism - notably when statues were smashed at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris last Saturday - have been widely condemned.

"Yellow vests" are so called because they have taken to the streets wearing the high-visibility yellow clothing that is required to be carried in every vehicle by French law.

As the Lefties like to say, I guess that this is what Democracy looks like.  Remember, Donald Trump was not a cause, he is a symptom of a reaction to an increasingly aloof and disconnected ruling class. That reaction isn't limited to the United States by any means.

UPDATE 4 December 2018 11:21: It looks like this isn't enough to stop the protests.  At this point you have to start wondering if Macron's government can survive.

And this would have made Dad laugh (he was a Professor of French History):

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) December 4, 2018

Wolves protecting sheep

Via Claire (by way of Zendo Deb and  Wirecutter) we find this story of biker gangs providing security for refugees from the California fires:

To the world at large, their leather club jackets mark them as something to be feared, but to the evacuees, it means safety and a watchful eye. On one, a sharp knife sits holstered on his jeans next to a walkie talkie clip. On others, tattoos and heavy skull rings rest around fingers that grip boxes and lug medical supplies around the shelter. “What we do best is to stand there and look ugly,” Strausbaugh joked. “We look hard and we are hard, and if pushed we can push back in a way that isn’t pleasant. But we also have a soft spot for the little guys.” 

Between five to 12 men from the various clubs are on patrol at all times. When they heard complaints about cars being broken into, the men adjusted their patrols to include the parking lot and the dirt lot next door. They found used needles next to an area where children were playing and “gently escorted” those people out, Dunbar said. 

“We saw a need and came and filled it,” Dunbar said simply. “Bike clubs are often involved in things like this but they’re not the type of guys to go and blow their own horn.”

This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's been around bikers.  Zendo Deb muses on Thomas Hobbes:

People say that Thomas Hobbes was an unrealistic pessimist. But I think the state of that church/shelter before the bikers reestablished some level of order was exactly described by Hobbes’ State of War.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.

Well, until some hard but good men show up.  Men with a realistic view of the world:

For Strausberg, it’s simply a matter of putting the club’s skills where it’s needed most. They’re well aware of their reputation and the way they look to the world, but as he puts it, “We’re like the wolves protecting the lambs. Sometimes it takes a wolf to protect people from the other wolves out there.”

But Claire reminds us that prepping is more than building up stockpiles:

It seems “good citizens” are as unprepared mentally as they were physically.

Harry Burleigh - From The Southland

Image from Ol' Man Wik

There was a wave of nationalism that swept through classical music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  These compositions used "common" themes and folk music as the basis of serious concert hall orchestral music.  We've seen much of this here, with Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, Percy Granger, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and (of course) Aaron Copeland.  Another American was quite famous in his day, and in fact a pioneer who helped open doors for black classical music performers like Marian Anderson.  He broke down doors, and it's a shame that we never hear his music anymore, as it's quite good and his story is fascinating.

He was born in 1866 into a society undergoing big, big changes.  Despite the endemic racism of the day, his singing talent opened doors as he was pretty quickly recognized as the finest baritone in his native Erie, PA.  This led to numerous soloist jobs, and his success there led him to New York City and the National Conservatory of Music where he studied.  He supported himself as a handyman at the Conservatory, where he sang spirituals in the hallways while working.  This brought him to the attention of the Conservatory's Director, none other than Antonín Dvořák (who - unbelievably as it may sound - has never been featured here on Sunday Classical).  Dvořák knew everybody who was anybody in the music world, and not only included some of the black spiritual melodies in his New World symphony, but was likely instrumental in getting Burleigh a job teaching at the Conservatory.

He was considered for the position of soloist at St. George's Episcopal Church but the congregation balked at hiring a black man (the church was segregated at the time).  It was J. P. Morgan himself who cast the deciding vote to hire Burleigh, who held the position for 52 years.  His annual Palm Sunday performance of Fauré's "The Palms" was a 50 year tradition in New York, and Mayor LaGuardia had him broadcast it from the Mayor's office in 1944.

Along the way he composed quite a lot of good music.  This is a great example, with traditional themes (you very well may recognize some) done in a classical format.  The music starts perhaps nine and a half minutes into the video, but there's a fair amount of background on Burleigh there.

Happy birthday, Harry Burleigh!

Elvis Presley and Martina McBride - Blue Christmas

We're pretty close to the time when it won't be easy to tell a manufactured (rather than a filmed) video.  But this is pretty nice.

Don't ever change, NRA

It always feels like you have our backs.

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 30, 2018

How's this for an idea: before a bump stock ban based on its supposed use in the Las Vegas shooting, how about releasing the results of the investigation into the Las Vegas shooting?  We haven't heard anything about it.  Maybe I'm just suspicious of new gun laws and regulations based on vague handwaving, but we've had quite a lot of that before.

And the NRA's silence on this is pretty telling.  You'd think they could negotiate something in return, but they never seem to do it.

Thurl Ravenscroft - You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch

The Queen Of The World and I watched this a few days ago.  I hadn't known that Ravenscroft was also the voice of Tony the Tiger for over 50 years.  He also did voices at Disneyland, including the Enchanted Tiki Room (which freaked out a very young #2 Son, back in the day), Pirates of the Caribbean, and as a singing bust in the Haunted Mansion.  This is his most famous performance.

Security tips for online shopping

Brian Krebs has a good list.  This is practical advice, and I really don't seen anything to argue with.

Lower sales at Dick's Sporting Goods

It seems that their anti-gun policies are at the heart of the revenue drop:

Sales at Dick's Sporting Goods dropped in the past three months amid backlash against tighter gun-sale restrictions following a mass killing early this year at a Florida high school.

Revenue dipped 4.5 percent to $1.86 billion amid challenges in the company's hunting business during the quarter through Nov. 3. Sales at stores open at least 12 months – a key metric for the retail industry – fell 6.1 percent compared to the prior year.

So Dick's management thought that appealing to Social Justice Warriors instead of hunters would juice their sales.  Seriously:

While Chief Executive Officer Edward Stack previously said the firearms policy brought in new customers and sales were reported as flat in August, Dick's has now warned that "negative reaction" could affect future results.

Idiots.

The Democrats' Emily Latella

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 28, 2018

Science as practiced today is very sick

"Sick" as in unhealthy.  Something is very wrong in how science is done, and people are talking about it:

According to theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, impaired methodology and groupthink is retarding the discovery of new physics.

The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal

Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after theother is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries. Sure, there are some anomalies in the data here and there, and maybe one of them will turn out to be real news. But experimentalists are just poking in the dark. They have no clue where new physics may be to find. And their colleagues in theory development are of no help.

Some have called it a crisis. But I don’t think “crisis” describes the current situation well: Crisis is so optimistic. It raises the impression that theorists realized the error of their ways, that change is on the way, that they are waking up now and will abandon their flawed methodology. But I see no awakening. The self-reflection in the community is zero, zilch, nada, nichts, null. They just keep doing what they’ve been doing for 40 years, blathering about naturalness and multiversesand shifting their “predictions,” once again, to the next larger particle collider.

This is a long and detailed discussion which is hard to excerpt.  This bit seems very important as to the institutional rot:

Developing new methodologies is harder than inventing new particles in the dozens, which is why they don’t like to hear my conclusions. Any change will reduce the paper output, and they don’t want this. It’s not institutional pressure that creates this resistance, it’s that scientists themselves don’t want to move their butts.

How long can they go on with this, you ask? How long can they keep on spinning theory-tales?

I am afraid there is nothing that can stop them. They review each other’s papers. They review each other’s grant proposals. And they constantly tell each other that what they are doing is good science. Why should they stop? For them, all is going well. They hold conferences, they publish papers, they discuss their great new ideas. From the inside, it looks like business as usual, just that nothing comes out of it.

This is not a problem that will go away by itself.

As I said, this is hard to excerpt but is really important.  RTWT.

I've been beating the drum of institutional rot in the scientific community for a long time.  This is more than just the chicanery that passes itself off as mainstream Climate Science®, this is describing how the institutions that are supposed to support scientific research are actively hindering it.  Here are a few from the archives:

The Iron Law and the bureaucratization of science.  This post makes the case that scientific discoveries are not appearing faster than they did a century ago, despite the vast increase in the number of people who "do science" for a living.  Long and hard to excerpt but this is the key bit:

The billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on scientific research do not seem to be accelerating the advance of scientific discovery.  Well, not obviously, in any case.  However, they do appear to be stunningly successful in creating and nourishing a scientific bureaucracy (as Lewis points out).  Bureaucracies have particular well understood characteristics, most interesting of which is Pournelle's Iron Law:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Think of the Iron Law, and a representative of each class of people.  Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-Rays (see the chart above), one of the great scientific advances of the 1890s.  Curtis G. Callan, Jr. of Princeton University is President of the American Physical Society.  Who does the Iron Law predict will gain control of the funding?

I can't believe that scientists today are less brilliant than Röntgen.  With so many more of them working today, something must explain the lack of expected progress.  The Iron Law does just that.  Consider all the potential topics that a brilliant young physicist might choose from.  Some of these might threaten Dr. Callan's position and funding.  The Iron Law predicts that the bureaucracy will respond to stifle this threatening research.  

A couple people left comments to the effect that a century ago there was a lot more low hanging fruit than today.  We've discovered the easy things and what's left is harder.  That's a fair assessment but simply can't explain the lack of ground breaking new discoveries.  Surely we haven't learned 80% of all there is to know about the Universe.  Why then are things going so slowly with all these scientists working on it?  This post dovetails so close with Dr. Hossenfelder's as to be a bit eerie.  And it's from almost 8 years ago.

Soviet Science delves into a specific incident that illustrates this "control from the top" problem in science.  Scientists at CERN got their marching orders telling them what they should NOT talk about:

As with Galileo, we see bad things happening when the State intervenes in a scientific discussion.  Good thing that would never happen in the West.  Oh, wait:

The chief of the world's leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment. The CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets") experiment examines the role that energetic particles from deep space play in cloud formation. CLOUD uses CERN's proton synchrotron to examine nucleation.

CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer told Welt Online that the scientists should refrain from drawing conclusions from the latest experiment.

"I have asked the colleagues to present the results clearly, but not to interpret them," reports veteran science editor Nigel Calder on his blog. Why?

Because, Heuer says, "That would go immediately into the highly political arena of the climate change debate. One has to make clear that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters."

If you suspect that scientists are only supposed to enter the "highly political arena of the climate change debate" when they're presenting evidence of Manmade Global Warming, then you're as nasty and suspicious as I am.

The whole brouhaha was about the Svensmark Hypothesis which posits that Cosmic Rays striking the Earth's atmosphere generate aerosols which lead to cloud formation.  This is dangerous to mainstream Climate Science since the number of cosmic rays that hit the atmosphere is controlled by the Sun's magnetic field - a stronger field means fewer strikes and therefore fewer clouds (and a higher temperature).  CERN is involved because as the world's largest cyclotron (what we used to call "Atom Smasher"), it's where the experiment was performed and Svensmark's hypothesis confirmed - cosmic rays striking the atmosphere do indeed lead to aerosol formation.  This clearly threatens the "Carbon Dioxide is the control knob for global temperature" position and so the CERN Director basically told all his people to STFU.  This is another post from 2011 and so this is something that I've been going on about for a long, long time.  RTWT and the post about Svensmark and you'll know more about real climate science that 99% of people.

In Science and the Cold Civil War I give a number of examples showing just how nasty the current situation is, with the "Politics of Personal Destruction" as a key technique to try to keep everyone on the reservation.  This is impossible to excerpt, but you might want to take a shower after reading about the examples.  "Nasty" doesn't even begin to describe the disfunction that is institutional science today.

And I haven't even mentioned Retraction Watch, which publishes retracted scientific papers and other news (did you know that Duke University is about to settle a lawsuit alleging $200M in grant fraud?  I hadn't).  I also haven't talked about the massive crisis in reproduceability that the scientific community is going through.  These two items are effects, not a cause.  The cause it the horrible state of science as practiced today.

Franz Xaver Gruber - Stille Nacht (Silent Night)

Image von der Wik

Now that we're past Thanksgiving, it's now officially Christmas season.  You've heard of today's artist, featured each holiday season.  No, not Hans Gruber, although he's also featured each holiday season.  Yippie kayay ...

No, today we're looking at Franz Gruber, church organist at the German village of Arnsdorf.  200 years ago he composed what may be the most famous Christmas carol of all times, famous in two languages.  The local priest showed him a poem that the priest had written, and Gruber scratched out a tune on a guitar because the organ was broken.  The rest, as they say, is history.

The 1818 Christmas Mass in Arnsdorf was the first time this song was sung.  It is said that the "Christmas Truce" in 1914 began with German and English soldiers singing this to each other across No Man's Land.

Science, explained

By no less than Richard Feynman.

pic.twitter.com/qLNJZX1c3J

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 24, 2018

Global Warming "Scientists" could not be reached for comment.

Whence comes the Thanksgiving bounty?

Perry Metzger muses on the Thanksgiving celebration:

It is a fine time to reflect on the bounty that the productivity increases brought by capital accumulation and technological improvements have brought to us. 

The cost of the ingredients of a Thanksgiving feast for ten are now said to cost an average worker their wages for under 2.25 hours of labor. A 16 pound turkey now costs less than what an average worker earns in an hour. 

We live lives of such astonishing wealth that we scarcely notice it. Only a fool would rather be an Emperor in 1600 than a poor person living today. Compared to a king of several centuries ago, poor people in the developed world live in astonishing luxury. In the developed world, we eat fresh vegetables in midwinter, our homes are heated toasty warm in the winter and cooled and dehumidified in the summer, we travel in enormous comfort (no wooden wheeled carriages without shock absorbers for us, and indeed, we can fly to the other side of the world for a quite modest sum of money), our medical care is incomparably better, our beds more comfortable, our entertainment options beyond any ancient potentate’s wildest dreams. This is true even of quite poor people, at least in developed countries. 

Whence comes this bounty?

Read the whole thing, and marvel at the world in which we live.  And ponder the fact that in the last 30 years, a billion people have escaped poverty.

Being thankful

Thanksgiving has been my favorite holiday for a long time.  It's a meditation that we should do more than once a year, but here it is so meditate, damn it!

I'm thankful for The Queen Of The World who is a whirlwind of cooking and decorating energy.  The table is set and the house smells so good that tummies are rumbling.  And tomorrow she'll start Christmas decorating.  It's not for nothing that a neighbor calls her "Martha Stewart".  I love all this, and today's meditation makes me realize how lucky I am to have her in my life.

I'm thankful for Wolfgang, because without him I probably wouldn't get out looking for deer lurking around Castle Borepatch very often.

I'm thankful for my co-bloggers here, ASM826 and Brigid.  They bring a touch of class to what would just be my ravings, and so it's not just me who should be thankful but you as well ...

Lastly, I'm thankful for you, Gentle Reader.  This has become a community, one which we would never have come to know without the amazing magic of the Internet.  It has let us find each other and enrich each other's lives.  A special thanks and shout out here to long time commenter waepnedmann. Last week when the QOTW and I were in California he offered a bolt hole if the fires got dangerously near.  Fortunately it didn't come to that, but his kind and generous offer would never have been possible without this community that has grown up in our little corner of the 'net.  It's an amazing thing to see, and I am very grateful indeed.

Lastly, since it is Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for the greatest Thanksgiving day humor ever broadcast.



And the closing line, of course:

Tom Lehrer - A Christmas Carol

I know that it's not even Thanksgiving but ASM826 pointed out that the stores are already in a frenzy.  Here's a musical tribute to the corruption of the season by filthy lucre.

This is a perfect example of how Californians have ruined California

The Bay Area had a haze of smoke hanging over it, and by the end of a week I'd developed a nagging cough.  That's gone now that I'm back on the Right Coast.  It looks like the California government has been de-funding fire prevention for years (Governor Brown vetoed a bill to increase funding just a year or so back), so this seems entirely on point;

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 17, 2018

I'm so old that I remember when the rest of the country actually believed that California was an example to emulate, not reject with garlic and Holy Water ...

Global Warming causes cold and snowy winters

The Silicon Graybeard posts that the Earth may be headed into a cold spell - a "Grand Solar Minimum" of reduced solar activity that could lead to much colder weather.  It's a long post (hey, if anyone would know about long posts it's me!) and it has some long videos embedded in it, but you should read it all.

Those of you who are gluttons for punishment should also read this old post of mine, What do Occam's Razor, Sunspots, Climate, and Ernst Mach have in common?  It discusses many of the same issues from a historical perspective, but circles back to the science in the end.  Actually, this is one of my best posts on the whole Global Warming thing - it's held up very well over the years.

But back to the matter at hand.  The last decade has seen a huge amount of winter snow in the US Northeast:

NESIS (Photo Courtesy: WeatherBell)

 The last decade stands out like a sore thumb! It has had 29 major impact northeast winter storms with NO previous 10-year period with more than 10 storms! In Boston, 7 out of the last 10 years have produced snowfall above the average 43.7 inches.

2008-09: 65.9″
2009-10: 35.7″
2010-11: 81.0″
2011-12: 9.3″
2012-13: 63.4″
2013-14: 58.9″
2014-15: 110.6″ Greatest On Record Back To 1872
2015-16: 36.1″
2016-17: 47.6″
2017-18: 59.9″

Ah, but the Global Warmers will say - you're just cherry picking the data here.  Despite what the Nightly News thinks, the world is more than just the Acela corridor from Washington DC to Boston.  Except the trend of greater snowfall is across the entire Northern Hemisphere:

NHEMIS snow (Photo Courtesy: WeatherBell)

Additionally, the trend for fall snow across the northern hemisphere has been increasing, defying the forecasts over the last two decades for snows becoming an increasingly rare event.

Warmer temperatures (we're told) can lead to higher moisture content which can lead to bigger snowfalls.  Sadly for the Warmers, the last decade shows that the Northern Hemisphere has been cooling for the last decade:

Interestingly, some scientists have stated that increasing snow is consistent with climate change because warmer air holds more moisture, more water vapor and this can result in more storms with heavy precipitation. The trick, of course, is having sufficient cold air to produce that snow. But note that 93% of the years with more than 60″ of snow in Boston were colder than average years. The reality is cooling, not warming, increases snowfall. Note the graph depicting declining January through March temperatures for 20 years at a rate of 1.5 degrees F. per decade in the Northeast!

Northeast Average Temperature (Photo Courtesy: WeatherBell)

Like I said, SiGraybeard has to work harder to get as wordy as I am.  But the theoretical predictions that his post points to sure seem to be backed up by the last ten years of actual measurements.

And while I'm on the point of measurements, I want to (once again) point out the terrible state of the temperature databases.  The data are repeatedly adjusted, making older temperatures colder than were measured and newer temperatures hotter than were measured.  This allows regular press releases saying "Hottest year EVAH!!" but interestingly, it does not change records.  Records like Boston's record snowfall of 2014-2015.  Or the record hottest day in United States history, set in 1913.  Or temperature records in any of the 50 states:

What don't get changed are the records.  Consider these:

Chicago - 1934
Milwaukee - 1934
New York State - 1926
Boston - 1911
St. Louis - 1954
USA lower 48 states - 1913

In fact, with all of this year after year of the HOTTEST YEAR EVER, no state has set a highest temperature record is more than 20 years.  In fact, most (39 out of 50) state highest temperature records were set quite long ago - over 50 years ago, sometimes as long ago as 1888 (!).

Stop and think about that - if the science were as settled as people say, wouldn't there be at least one state that set an all time high record recently?  What a strange warming that raises average temperatures but not record high temperatures.

What a weird "science" of Global Warming, where the planet keeps heating up but where cold and snow have been increasing for a decade and no new all time high temperature records are getting set. You might almost wonder how settled all this "science" is - after all, if it were really settled, evidence supporting it would be falling off of every tree.

Add in the almost $50 Trillion cost of "Global Warming mitigation" and you might begin to wonder just how solid the field of climate science really is.  Me, I don't wonder much at all, but you know how nasty and suspicious I am.

The Gettysburg Address at 153

This is the 153rd anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, one of the most famous speeches in American history.  The great Baltimore newspaperman H. L. Mencken wrote the definitive analysis of that even, back in the 1920s.  Back then, the war was still in living memory, and so he had some perspective that we now lack.  And while the Lincoln hagiography was even then beginning to flower, it had not entirely replaced history as it had been lived.

You can - and should - read his full thoughts here, but this is the key bit:

The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost child-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to one graceful and irresistible gesture. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. 

But let us not forget that it is oratory, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it! Put it into the cold words of everyday! The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination — “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i. e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle an absolutely free people; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and vote of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that vote was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely any freedom at all. Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg address? If so, I plead my aesthetic joy in it in amelioration of the sacrilege.

I've been pretty clear for quite some time that I think that Lincoln was the worst President in the Republic's history, and the war was a disaster for both North and South.

Catching up

I'm back home at Castle Borepatch, but still digging out from the trip.  Blogging will be back to normal soon, but in the meantime, here's a thief caught on camera.

The Democrats finally are honest about gun control

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— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) November 18, 2018

The next two years are fixin' to be fun.

Edward MacDowell - Sea Pieces No.3 “A. D. MDCXX”

MacDowell on a US Postage Stamp

Fame is fleeting, and in this day and age is joined at the hip with taste.  As taste changes, so does fame.  This is perhaps nowhere so easy to see as in musical taste and the strange story of Edward MacDowell.

As with many composers we've seen here, he was a musical prodigy as a child.  At 17, he won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatory, probably the world's premier musical college.  This started a long sojourn in Europe for MacDonald, living in France and Germany.  No less than Franz Liszt introduced him to music publishers.

Returning to the United States, he was invited to be the first music professor at Columbia University.  He was one of the first to be enrolled in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  After his untimely death his face appeared on the postage stamp above.

And yet, few have heard of him (I certainly had not).  I think that this is due to the fickle nature of taste.  You see, MacDonald composed at the end of the Romantic era.  While I love that music, it rapidly faded from fashion as the 20th Century progressed.  As Romantic music faded into the past, so to did MacDowell.

That's a shame.  Today's piece was written to commemorate the Mayflower voyage to Cape Cod.  Quite frankly, it seems perfectly appropriate to celebrate the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.



That was the bit about the Mayflower.  Since it was so short, here's the complete Sea Pieces:

Traveling

posting has been the interrupted as I've found myself on the West coast.   It will probably stay interrupted for a while longer.

A century on

One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.

— J.R.R. Tolkien, forward to The Lord of the Rings 

A hundred years is a long time if the hundred years is the 20th century. The Great War didn't end war, nor did the even bigger cataclysm of 1939. But that didn't end things either - the long, strange twilight conflict of the Cold War had its own body count which is all too easy to forget when standing in the shadows of the twin World Wars.

That's a lot of history to pack into what amounts to a single lifespan. The history is so big as to overwhelm the human. Actually, that's a fitting metaphor of the Great War. But the human story is the one we should try to see. And so imagine yourself in Tolkien's shoes. Every single one of your childhood friends were killed, except for one.

We (justly) scorn the appeasement in the run up to the second war,  But we really don't understand it because we've lost that human perspective. A generation was butchered and damned. A few passed echos of that to us in writing - Tolkien, Hemingway, Robert Graves. The futility of the Western Front is on plain display in A Farewell To Arms.

On this centenary of the silence that fell on Flander's fields, remember Tolkien's mates, all save one butchered. And remember that he carried that to the end of his life. That - multiplied ten million times - was the war.

Lessons of the last election

The Czar of Muscovy muses on the outcome of the vote this week.  As always, your Autocrat is clear, thoughtful, and to the point.  First, the Republicans:

You had a heavy majority and, for once, some mandates. You were supposed to remove and replace Obamacare. But it was too hard, and lots of people were starting to get familiar with it, and messing with it could possibly cost you an election. In fact, you were elected to do hard work, and you definitely lost an election because you didn’t want to do hard work. You were supposed to do immigration reform, but didn’t. You were supposed to cut the size of government, but instead increased it. A lot. You were supposed to reduce regulations, but barely got started. So you were fired. 

Know how you can tell? Because you lost the House. That’s the easiest thing to correct, and the voters seemed to have figured that out. Consider it a two-year probation, because that’s how long you have to fix it. 

Sure, you did cut some regulations, and you did indeed slash taxes and get the economy moving. That’s why you lost only a couple dozen seats and not a bunch. Voters still think Republicans can fix things—just that not all of you seemed to want to. And those guys have been fired.

And then the Democrats:

You aren’t going to change the world with a twenty-odd majority. 

In fact, you should probably ask yourselves if you are superheros or just interim replacements. Your newly appointed roles in the House may be nothing more than temporary help until the permanent hires arrive. You could of course make a strong enough impression that you keep those jobs. But to figure out how to do that, you better look to see why the people your replaced got let go. Not because they were Republicans, but because they were weak. They were culled from the herd. You might want to be a little more strong. 

Of course, you won’t listen.

I think it's more like a ten seat majority, which just underlines the Czar's point.  The problem for the Democrats is that they live in the Media bubble - they think that the American public is much more liberal than they really are.  This is actually the big challenge for the party, to recognize reality as it exists, instead of trying to "shape" that reality.  Their success is tied to offering what the public actually wants, rather than what they think that the public wants.  Quite frankly, this looks like a big hill for them to climb.

The Republican party has had a very difficult last two years, psychology-wise.  They have begun to come around to the view that Donald Trump has offered the voters, rather than the view their establishment donors wanted to serve up.  In the past, the donors had a win-win situation: either the Republicans won and implemented the donor's preferred big government crony capitalism (c.f. George Bush senior or junior), or the Democrats won and implemented the donor's preferred big government crony capitalism (c.f. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama).

Trump changed that dynamic, cutting the donors out and offering something much more palatable to the voters.  This is really all you need to know to understand why Hillary doesn't put her pumps up on the Resolute Desk.

But this change was painful for for the GOP.  It's still not over, as the Czar points out.  A similar change needs to occur in the Democratic party, but it not only hasn't begun yet, but there's nobody obvious to start that ball rolling.

Right now the smart money has to be betting on the Democrats continuing the same game of identity politics, radical socialist red meat for their ideological core base, and quite frankly not very smart handling of the inevitable provocations from Trump.  He excels at leading his opponents to self-destruct, and none of the current Democratic leadership inspires confidence that they will be able to impose the required discipline to keep the party from looking barking mad insane.

So it looks that it's Advantage: Trump.  And will continue to be so as the GOP completes its transformation.

Welcome to MittWorld

Looks like Mittens will assume the coveted "John McCain Sunday Morning Talk Show" spot since he has the election in the bag:

The latest polling in Utah’s senate race has Mitt Romney up by some 36 points over Jenny Wilson, his Democratic opponent. Barring an enormous upset, Mr. Romney will join the United States Senate. This will put him a few checks and balances away from a president — the leader of his party — whom he once called “terribly unfit for office.”

Ah, don't ever change, New York Times.

Of course, a deeper understanding of the soon-to-be-Senator Romney could be had by a quick perusal of the archives.  I'm a little shocked to find that the archives have over a hundred entries on Mitt.  (!!!)

He was my Governor when I lived in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.  Now All Y'all will get a chance to enjoy his governing style, good and hard.    Note to self: Utah doesn't elect Republicans; Utah elects Mormons.  But then, I'm clearly biased, having endorsed Obama over Romney*.

But the future is Mitt-tastic, so there.  Gun control opponents beware.

 I expect that my post tag for him might approach 200 before his career is all and done.

* That was one of my finest rants, althoughI could not predict the rise of Donald Trump back in 2012.  I did hint at the reaction, though:

And rather than a million Tea Partiers taking to the streets, it will be two million, or three. Rather than five or ten corrupt GOP Establishment crooks turned out of office, it will be thirty, or fifty.

And this bit (from that same post) is perhaps the most prescient writing I've posted in this last ten years of blogging:

We f***ed up once, trusting him and the rest of the GOP team. How's that working out? Rebuilding a party that Reagan might actually recognize is what this country needs - and right now, damn it - and Mitt Romney isn't the man to do it. 

Barack Obama is.

You might want to click through and read the whole thing - and the over 60 (!) comments it drew.  Welcome to MittWorld.

Perspective

The Queen Of The World and I voted today.  There was a large turnout, and long lines which everyone seemed to put up with fairly cheerfully.

But while this is important, it's not everything.  Standing in line I recalled a post exactly ten years ago, And Back In The Real World:

--------------------

It seems that lots of folks are freaking out about who's going to win the election. I want to tell you a story that relates to this.

I live is a very pretty small town in Massachusetts. Our house is a very short walk to the town Common, and right beyond that is one of the prettiest cemeteries I've ever seen. Here's a picture I posted a while back of one of the little alleyways in the graveyard.

I take the dogs (Little One-Eyed Dog and Ivan the Terrier) there for their daily constitutional, because there's a big field just on the other side. Nobody much goes to the cemetery, so we don't bother anyone on our way through.

Nobody goes there much, but last Saturday someone did. As I walked up through the graveyard, I saw a car parked by one of the graves. A middle aged guy was sitting in a folding chair - the kind that you'd take to the Little League game. He'd decked out the grave for Halloween - pumpkins, decorations, even an oil lantern.

He was still there when we took the dogs back, so I didn't intrude. Yesterday he wasn't there, so I stopped to see whose grave it was.

It was his son's. #1 Son was with me, and said in a quiet voice, "He was in my grade." Cancer.

The lantern was still there. Still burning. It was burning today, too.

So while I care about who wins the election tomorrow, I don't care who wins. Not care like that. Whatever happens, the Republic will continue. The flag will still wave from sea to shining sea.

And a good man will still grieve over his son's grave. Instead of worrying about the election, go hug your family.

The tit-for-tat election

Tomorrow we vote (well, those of us in the USA).  I said recently that the polls are no helpful this election.  Everyone uses models to predict the outcome, but who has a model that knows what's happening when early voting is running twice the rate it was in 2014?  So we'll have to wait until tomorrow evening to find out what happened.

I find it really interesting that pollsters have backed WAY off their earlier "Blue Wave" predictions - even Nate Silver even admits that he just doesn't know what's going on.  And like I said in my post last week, the interesting races are in the House, and as Tip O'Neill said all politics is local.  My sense is general, not specific, and national not local.  But I think that the Democrats are going to be majorly disappointed.  The reason is that I think that the decades of Progressive pushing against the middle class - and the increasingly unhinged behavior of Progressives doing it - have led to a tit-for-tat response.

While this is a common term, there's a specific meaning that actually gives me hope for the Republic. I covered what the specifics mean almost 3 years ago in a post Game Theory and the rise of Donald Trump:

Game Theory is a field of mathematics originally developed to try to mathematically derive optimum solutions for card games in the 18th century.  It has developed into a major field of analysis used in computer science and even the design of crypto systems.  Any of you who saw the film "A Beautiful Mind" have at least a passing familiarity with the subject.

You probably even know the most famous example of Game Theory: The Prisoner's Dilemma.  Two prisoners are (separately) offered a deal - rat out the other guy or keep silent.  If they rat and the other guy doesn't, they go free and he gets a long sentence.  If neither of them rat, they both get short sentences.  If they both rat, they both get long sentences.  And most importantly to the prisoner, if he doesn't rat but the other guy does, he gets a long sentence while the other guy walks.

It's a one-time deal, which makes the math simpler.  Real world situations are not so simple, and a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma has incorporated this.  Tit For Tat is a sequential set of prisoner's dilemma events where the strategy is to play what your opponent played in the previous round.  If your opponent was cooperative, you will be cooperative; if he screwed you, you will screw him back.

What's interesting about Tit For Tat is that mathematical proofs have shown that it leads to the outcome with maximum combined utility.  If your opponent always screws you, you're no worse off playing Tit For Tat, but if your opponent is always cooperative or also plays Tit For Tat then both of you derive the maximum benefit.

The Middle Class has been playing cooperatively for decades, as the Progressives have been pushing and taking advantage of that cooperation.  It's worked very well for Progressives, and very badly for the Middle Class.  As I said in that post (almost a year before the 2016 election) it led to the rise of Donald Trump.

The last two years has been a series of Trump victories where he has shown the Middle Class that you can push back against the Progressives and win.  I believe that this is a fundamental shift in American politics, as the "deplorables" have not only had enough, but have seen that they can win.

Sure, the hard core Democrats hate Donald Trump with the fire of a thousand suns and will turn out heavily to vote against Republicans.  But the rest of their party doesn't seem to feel that way: Blue Collar/Union Democrats are making more money now, Blacks and Hispanics are making more money now, everyone has better employment prospects, Trump's favorability numbers are up.

There's a split between the core of the party and the rest of the party.

At the same time the Republican base has been energized and united - the Kavanaugh hearings in particular seem to have been a huge blunder for the Democrats.  Sure, it energized the Democratic base, but it seems to have united the GOP base against them.

And so we're seeing big turnouts in early voting, and Republicans out voting Democrats pretty much everywhere.  I don't think that any of the election models predicted or planned for this, and so none of the polls or predictions carry any weight.  Like I said, we'll see tomorrow but I think it will be a glum evening for the Democrats.

But I said earlier that this gives me hope for the Republic.  The reason is that tit-for-tat results in a game theory stable outcome.  If Republicans stick to push back, but also keep the Middle Class "we're all  in this together" spirit from the last few decades, game theory suggests that the Democrats may have to adjust to a less confrontational style of politics (if for nothing other than preventing the evaporation of the non-rabid part of their party).  We'll have to see how that plays out.  As I said in my post 3 years ago:

Tit For Tat is essentially a reputational game - get a bad reputation by screwing your opponent and you pay the price.  The mathematics is unmistakeable on that.

The Middle Class finally has an option to play against their opponent.  An opponent who has a deservedly poor reputation.

No wonder Trump's support seems rock solid.  The mathematics is unshakeable.

If the Blue Wave disappears in the face of an enraged GOP base, then the Democrats will have to change their tactics - or keep losing elections.

Domenico Sarro - Sinfonia from the opera Achille in Sciro

The Real Teatro di San Carlo in Naples is the oldest opera house in the world that is still in use.  It was inaugurated on this day in 1737, and this was the very first music performed there.

View from the Royal box.  Image from Il Wik

Domenico Sarro was one of the most important composers of Neapolitan opera in the 18th century, an era when it enjoyed popularity all over Europe.  His reputation was such that his work was chosen to inaugurate the new opera house, in a command performance before the King.  His relative obscurity today can be chalked up to changing musical tastes (and particularly the fading of both baroque and opera in favor of romantic era symphonies).  But at the time this stood equal to Handel and Bach.

Seen on reddit

r/The_Donald delivers!

Hate your neighbor? Does he have Google Home?

Of course, you'd never mess with him like this:

A security researcher says an undocumented API in the Google Home Hub assistant can be exploited to kick the gizmo off its own wireless network. 

Flaw finder Jerry Gamblin says the API allows the device to receive commands from systems and handhelds sharing its local wireless network that can, among other things, reboot the unit, or even cause it to disconnect from the Wi-Fi, necessitating a manual reconfiguration.

In layman's terms, and API is a way for a computer to connect to another computer and configure stuff.  "Undocumented" APIs are considered double plus ungood in the security world, for obvious reasons.  You'd think that Google wouldn't want to give us another reason to be suspicious of them ...

Of course, you'd never do anything like this because you only use your Powers for good.

I love Halloween

I get a real kick out of seeing the villagers dress up their kids for trick-or-treat at Castle Borepatch.  The Queen Of The World loves decorating the place for the spirit (heh) of the season, and so there are jack o'lanterns and headless horsemen and potion vials all over.

And co-blogger ASM826 came by and we went to the local tavern's halloween party.  The QOTW arranged fun constumes:

Last night we were the Flintstones.  The QOTW even dressed up Wolfgang as Dino, and he hung out on the lawn with us as the kids came by.  He's great with kids, and would come up to him for kisses.

Every year it's fun, and getting more fun.  Hope you had as good a time last night as we did.

Can Donald Trump end birthright citizenship for illegal aliens?

Beats me,  I'm not a lawyer.  But Gettoputer is, and has some interesting thoughts about how this might play out.

Election predictions

A common theme here is that I do not trust the polls.  They have been increasingly inaccurate - ignoring the possibility that some of them are designed to mislead.  There seems to be an increasing resistance among the population to answering pollster calls - a New York Times poll had to call 38,000 people to get 700 who would reply.  Don Surber dissects this, and this is the key graf:

Gallup meanwhile has given up on election polling. The grand-daddy of polling admitted it cannot figure out how to get an accurate way to find out how people are voting.

Bottom line: the polls are not helpful forecasting this election.

It's made worse because the interesting race is for the House.  There are only 50 States to poll about Senate races, and there are only about a dozen that are close enough to bother.  In the House, there are maybe 50 districts that count.  Each of these districts contains 711,000 people.  To get a meaningful poll (i.e. one with a margin of error less than 5%), you might need to call 20,000 people.  The cost of polling the key House races will be perhaps ten times as expensive as polling the meaningful Senate races.

Since Senator are likely more powerful and important than Representatives, House polling is not going to happen as often, or be as thorough as Senate polling, because it's a lot tougher to justify the spend when compared to other options (say, Get Out The Vote efforts).

So the first takeaway is that nobody really knows what's going to happen in the House elections.  The polls are sporadic and of questionable accuracy, and so this is really in the realm of informed guesswork.  I have noticed that the closer we get to the election the less sure each side sounds - both the White House and the Mainstream Press/Democratic Party (but I repeat myself) have been making noises in the last couple days that seem intended to cool their supporters expectations.  Maybe the Democrats will take back control of the House, maybe not.  I don't think that anyone remotely knows.

The Senate has always looked like the Republicans would keep the Senate.  The closer we get to election, the more the Republicans look to pick up seats from vulnerable Democrats.  But again, the margin of error for some of the races is very thin, and the polls are of questionable value.  It seems certain that the GOP will pick up a couple, maybe 4 or 5.  It's unlikely they'll pick up the 9 they would need to theoretically avoid a filibuster.  I say "theoretically" because with the likes of the Susan Collins wing of the GOP there wouldn't be a solid 60 GOP votes for almost anything.

Increasing a GOP majority in the Senate will tend to weaken the Susan Collins types, though, which will help reduce gridlock there.  A thin GOP majority in the House will probably result in the rise of Susan Collins types there, and a Democratic majority will basically ensure gridlock for the next two years.

So it really comes down to the House which nobody can handicap with any sort of confidence.

I haz a sad

Nobody has ever blocked me on Twitter.  But Lawrence runs across an NPC who can't handle the truth.  Advantage: Lawrence.

I guess if I ever went on Twitter I might run into one of these idiots, but then I'd have to go on Twitter.  And so, I don't.  Advantage: me.

And this is a good time to add a post tag for NPCs.

I'm glad that the World Series is over

For Red Sox fans such as myself, this has been a season for the ages.  A franchise record in wins was followed by dominating series against the Yankees, Astros, and Dodgers.  There's a good chance that I'll not see a similar season.

But oof, these games have gone late.  It's been two weeks of not getting to bed on time (what, you think I'm going to miss them beating the Yankees in the post season?).  I'm dragging so much that I didn't post anything yesterday, even though there was plenty that was postable.

Fortunately, the season is over, and so after a couple good nights' sleep posting should be back to a regular schedule.

But now folks will have to update this:

It's not the size of the dog in the fight

20 pound French Bulldog chases off two bears.  I love how it makes one bear go up over the fence to escape.



The bears look young, but still.  It seems that the idiot neighbors had been feeding the "cute" bears.  Pro tip for California idiots: wild animals are, like, wild m'kay?

It seems this is from 3 years ago but I just ran across it.

Longest game in World Series history

Last night's game was 18 (!) innings, running 7 hours and 20 minutes.  That's two games played back to back.  Pro tip: watching the game in bed gives you the chance to wake up every two or three innings to see the score.

Both teams pitching staffs are more or less completely disrupted now.  Tonight's game will be interesting - rather than last night's pitcher's duel, tonight could be a real slugfest as tired pitchers get knocked around.

I have to say that this is one of the things I love about baseball - even watching for 50 years I've never seen anything like this.  It's a very old game, but you're always seeing something new.  Or old - heck, one of the Dodgers got caught between first and second and run down.  We used to play "pickle" as kids.

Tony Joe White - Rainy Night In Georgia

Rest in peace.



Hat tip: Irish.

Reasons to Open Carry

Some may be good (I confess to not being a fan, but other people I respect think different).  But some reasons are bad:

pic.twitter.com/igRqaNp7xv

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 26, 2018

Ego validation from fanbois is a bad reason.  If you're going to risk scaring the White Folks, make sure you have a good reason.

The mail bombs, explained

This is funny as heck:

Brian Stelter: What happen?

Chris Cuomo: Someone set up us the bomb.

Ander Copper: We get signal.

Don Lemon: What?

Chri Cumo: Main screen turn on.

Brian Stelter: It's you!

Orange Bad Man: How are you gentlemen?
All your base are belong to us.
You are on the way to destruction.

Don Lemon: What you say?

Orange Bad Man: You have no chance to survive make your time. Ha ha ha...

For those of you were weren't following Internet memes circa 1999, this is the back story:

Open Carry Larping

Tam points out examples the way that only she can.  Sal chimes in as only he can.

pic.twitter.com/fqv5e2l7Gr

— Sal the Agorist (@SallyMayweather) October 25, 2018

UPDATE: Aesop has some thoughts here, and expands on them here.  Key graf:

Just because you haven't tried something doesn't mean you ought to.
Maybe learn a lesson from common sense, and from the example of the 5000 other Open Carry fucktards from coast to coast who've BTDT. 

So, in answer to WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO EXPAND GUN RIGHTS IN FLORIDA?, the answer isn't "Nothing", it's "Reminding the OC Crusaders that acting like fucktards is acting like fucktards, and harms gun rights for everyone, everywhere."

Oh, and "Rambonehead" is the word of the day.