I posted what follows on my own blog site. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea as it relates primarily to the growing cultural and theological fault lines within American evangelicalism. I’m pretty sure the fracturing that is currently taking place there is not confined to evangelicalism per se, so maybe this will have some interest to a few outside the evangelical sphere.

Dr. Russell Moore gave a talk at a Plough Magazine event. The transcript is posted here. I take exception to Dr. Moore’s remarks. In part because he puts his thumb on the scales in support of progressivism. But, more importantly, he does so in a way that lacks forthrightness and transparency. I’ve seen his kind of movie before, and I find it both oily and uncompelling.

This is great stuff. I won’t post the whole article, of course, because you need to give them the clicks. But, this is my favorite bit:

No excuses, no quarter. I don’t care if it’s difficult. It is the business of leaders to lead, not to hide or fiddle or pshaw away existential threats like all these while their cities and country burn. If Republicans can’t do difficult things for the sake of a country in peril, they don’t deserve to be in office.

Hi everyone,

Scott Immergut, he of the Blue Yeti microphone and benevolent kingship Ricochet.com, has kindly offered to let me tell everyone here about my new weekly newsletter. It’s free — hurrah — and I send it out every week, on Saturday mornings. It includes a round-up of everything I’ve done during the previous week, as well as the rotating music, television, restaurant, and tech sections from my old newsletter, Café Americano.

Powerline blog alerts us to an impending food crisis in Great Britain and other disruptions in Europe arising from “green” policies: WILL “GREEN” ENERGY DESTROY EUROPE? Who knew getting rid of CO2 could starve people?!

Ignoring the details of this particular crisis there is a larger point about the hubris of political leaders to believe they can organize life into abundance. As Adam Smith observed over two centuries ago, life organizes itself around rules extant at the creation. Mankind, when properly understanding those rules, can affect things in beneficial ways for society, but cannot interfere with the operation of those rules to force alternative outcomes without suffering adverse consequences.

There has yet to be an actual COVID-19 superspreader event. The Sturgis biker rallies, the 2020 Thanksgiving homeward migrations, the evil open beaches in Florida did not create even a ripple. COVID infections have risen and fallen in seasonality waves of nearly identical size and duration across large regions no matter who is governor or what NPIs were imposed or when they were imposed or lifted or whether and when people were permitted to gather.

Saturday, there were enormous unmasked crowds at college football games. Of particular interest could be Penn State’s big win over Auburn in front of over 100,000 unmasked fans (20,000 students) from all over Pennsylvania and elsewhere. (Penn St is always one of the top five college programs in home attendance.) The stadium is in the center of a populous state. It may be COVID’s last chance for a superspreader event in the mid-Atlantic.

COVID-19 has a dim future because increasing acquired immunity plus resistance provided by vaccines are together rapidly building herd immunity or its functional equivalent. This winter’s flu season will almost certainly be a last hurrah before the bug recedes into an endemic annoyance. And the last chance for an anomalous, actual superspreader peak would appear to be right now through mid-October.

General H. R. McMaster and military historian Victor Davis Hanson are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution. In this frank, no-holds-barred conversation, they discuss the United States’ mission in Afghanistan: how it began, how it was conducted, and its ignominious end. McMaster and Hanson debate what worked and what failed, how social issues in the United States may have influenced our mission in Afghanistan and our decision to leave, and whether or not the United States should have continued to maintain a presence instead of leaving in a matter of weeks, abandoning thousands of Afghans loyal to the US mission there (as well as an unknown number of US citizens) after 20 years of military operations in the country.

I’m genuinely curious about something that the media are reporting but (of course) only superficially. As usual, there are questions no one seems to be asking.

We all remember how, in the spring of 2020, we went into lockdown to “flatten the curve,” essentially a desperate attempt to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. Whether the lockdown had any effect or not, the feared crisis didn’t happen; hospitals were busy, even very busy, but never beyond their ability to cope.

You know how it is: You’re saying something, but before you can finish saying it you think of something else you have to say, and it seems important, so you say it immediately, interrupting yourself.  Maybe you forgot what you were saying entirely. Or maybe you decided it didn’t matter. Or maybe you thought you could come back to it.  Maybe you did come back to it, but maybe not.

I know I do that.  I think just about everyone does.

3,380,272 is the number of “yes” votes to change course in California. Sadly that was only 36% of the total vote. So California has democratically decided to become more and more autocratic, race critical, and socialist. 3,380,272 voters tried to save their state, but now most assuredly know that the state is doomed. Rational people will leave. Gavin Newsom was already “U-Haul employee of the Year 2020” and stands to successfully defend his title in 2021. 

I was setting up an online account for our fire department’s Costco account this morning. After I had created my user name and password, I was asked in an email to verify my account, and a pop-up window told me they used a third-party service to identify people.

Each question was multiple choice. The first question asked was the color of a motorcycle I purchased in 2015 (and still own). The second was in what state did I live in from 1970 to 1975; the third gave the name of the street where my wife and I lived in our senior year of college (1981-82), and asked me to select the city.  I think it asked a fourth question which I have forgotten.

I assume this data is likely sourced from credit reporting places, but it still amazes me how quickly it could access these details. After all, we didn’t have any credit cards when we were in college, I paid cash for the motorcycle, and from ’70 to ’75 I was a middle and high schooler. Of course, once it’s in the database it’s virtually instantly accessible.