Events over the past few weeks have given me grounds for optimism. Here they are:

1: The counterprotesters, the “USA” chants, the people standing up for what is good and right… we are no longer ceding the fields to the idiots. People are pushing back. Hugely important.

On August 12, 2022, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed nearly to death while he was giving a speech at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. As he spoke, a man dressed in black came running down the aisle, leaped onto the podium, and began wildly stabbing Mr. Rushdie as the crowd looked on in shock. Mr. Rushdie is alive today because of the intervention of the onlookers, the work of medical personnel, and the love of his wife. But he now lives his life with permanent scars – both physical and emotional – and is blind in one eye.

Almost thirty years prior to the attempted murder at Chautauqua, David Gelernter, at the time a relatively obscure professor of computer science at Yale, opened a package delivered to him through the mail and was blown up by a bomb the package contained. He survived the attempted murder by the Unabomber and, like Mr. Rushdie, now lives with the permanent scars.

Kristi Noem is in the dog house (ahem) with people of every political leaning for shooting her 15-month-old dog, Cricket, after he killed her neighbor’s chickens, as documented in her new autobiography. Some on the Right are criticizing her for being out of touch with the electorate and sabotaging her electoral future. Others are defending her for honestly exposing the rural versus urban divide in attitudes among Americans. As a lifelong dog lover, I’m here to explain why I’m in the latter camp and to open the discussion to the cultural implications of the reaction to Noem’s story.

What I’m not going to do is spend much time here on Noem and her political career. I just don’t know enough about her. My overall impression is she’s a typical Republican ladder-climber — talks a good game and ultimately disappoints.

The other day I posted about how proud I was with my alma mater’s response to the proposed Marxist-Palestinian Love Fest on the university quad. (Basically, free speech until you threaten someone or take over a building, then discipline.)  Welp. I spoke too soon. The U of C campus is now a circus too. The basic problem is, you can’t “negotiate” with entitled little children. They don’t want to negotiate. They don’t even know how, since most of them have never been told “no.” They just want media attention and for their videos to go viral. So the issue du jour (Occupy Wall Street, BLM, now this) is never the real issue.

Very disappointed that the administration has apparently caved in.  But I thought you might be amused at the gift requests of the “protestors.” So here they are. They’re either preparing for a vigorous game of Rollerball or an orgy. Not sure which.

Yesterday I witnessed an accident on our local beltway (I-695). I was behind another vehicle. The driver partially moved into the left lane, realized another car was there (though it was tight, she was not actually going to hit it), thought she was going to collide, over-corrected (twice) to get back into her own lane, almost rolled, and ended up glancing off the concrete median barrier. No other cars were hit, but it could very easily have become a multi-car pileup.

I avoided the collision because I watched it happen, and took appropriate evasive action. But I know that had I been distracted at all, we would have been in the middle of a lot of dissipating kinetic energy. 

It seems to me that most of the “impossible” things in Star Trek – all the shows, movies, etc – are solvable with adequate energy, technology, etc.

The things I think are likely unsolvable even with advanced technology – and a whole lot of energy – are:

Arnold George Dorsey must have thought quite deeply about the answer to Shakespeare’s question, one which seems, at least in his case, to have boiled down to, “quite a lot, really.”

Born eighty-eight years ago today in Madras, India (the date is sometimes given as May 2), young Mr. Dorsey riffled through several options before deciding on his stage name:

 At first I thought I should be a second Beethoven; presently I found that to be another Schubert would be good; then, gradually, satisfied with less and less, I resigned to be a Humperdinck.

A long time ago, Ben Stein wrote a funny, insightful book (The View from Sunset Boulevard) about the collective mindset of those who make movies and TV shows.  It explained why the Puerto Rican kid arrested in the first 15 minutes of a Kojak episode was innocent because it was really the rich white stockbroker who murdered the prostitute with a heart of gold.  He described the industry’s view of America as a few urban oases in an otherwise dangerous hinterland filled with dangerous racist troglodytes patiently waiting for the appearance of their Führer to give the order to arise.  Forty-five years later, the book is still surprisingly applicable.

It turns out that there really is a dangerous mass of malformed intellects in America awaiting a spark or orders to arise but it was not the Red State working class.  It was our grossly miseducated, deformed upscale youth.

 The classic Christian understanding is that Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden because they disobeyed G-d’s commandment not to eat the fruit. This is not actually what the text says, but everyone is guilty, to some extent, of changing the story to make it align with our expectations.

I used to point out that Adam and Eve were not expelled until after they denied responsibility for their actions – which means that they must have been expelled as a punishment for a failure in owning up to their mistakes. In that reading of the text, the core lesson of Eden is that G-d wants people to act on free will, and understand that with great power comes great responsibility. Isn’t that both logical and textual?

My latest audiobook dropped this afternoon. This is #83. Don’t stop me, I’m on a roll.

This time I got to do science. Soil to Foil: Aluminum and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability has plenty in it to make anyone who remembers high school science classes happy. There is also a lot of good information on the history and operation of mineral extraction, and it is presented without a lot of enviro hand-wringing; we need this stuff, so what are good ways of getting it and using it that make sense for both the immediate need and the long term? I found it accessible and non-political.

From the blurb: Soil to Foil tells the extraordinary story of aluminum. Saleem H. Ali reveals its pivotal role in the histories of scientific inquiry and technological innovation as well as its importance to sustainability. He offers compelling portraits of the scientists and innovators who discovered new uses for this remarkable element, ranging from chemistry and geoscience to engineering and industrial design. Ali argues that aluminum exemplifies broader lessons about stewardship of nonrenewable resources. Soil to Foil shows that the story of aluminum’s use and misuse helps us rethink how to sustainably manage the resources of our planet.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/05/02/unredactions_reveal_early_white_house_involvement_in_trump_documents_case_1028630.html

Top Biden administration officials worked with the National Archives to develop Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involving the former president’s alleged mishandling of classified material, according to recently unsealed court documents in the case pending in southern Florida.

“Baker Shot,” Bikini Atoll, 1946. (Wikimedia Commons)

The study of history is always tainted by the fact that we know how things turned out.  So, in retrospect, it seems inevitable that things would go the way they did, and we look for reasons for that outcome that fit our preconceived worldview.  So we’re misled before we even begin, even if we’re making an honest effort to understand.

Spring seems a little late where I am.  But there are calves in the fields and things are greening up, and I am ready for the change of seasons.

My little patch is cluttered and weedy, but I decided to capture some of the short-lived blossoms and blooms.  After a while I realized that I have a nice collection of colorful and beautiful things.  The closer one looks, the better the view.

Or maybe it’s LARPing (which term isn’t so easy to fit into a succinct and clever title).

In either case, it’s people with privilege (talking about actual, personal, individual privilege, such as students, whatever their background, who’ve been accepted into some of the most elite educational institutions in the world and who, as a result, have traditionally had their ticket punched for a lifetime of success) identifying with, and pretending that they are–in all equivalent respects to actual victims–actual victims.

Examples abound, and like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, they come “thick and fast” these days, but the most egregious of them to come recently has been the idiotic  Johannah King-Slutsky: