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Rob Long and Charles C.W. Cooke enjoy chatting over a couple Sazeracs with Ricochet members at our 2023 meetup in New Orleans. Especially special thanks to Randy Weivoda for hosting the meetup, Melissa Praemonitus who made the recording possible and to our Ricochet friends who attended.
Be sure to come to the next one! Below are some posts to prove it’ll be worth your while.
The New Orleans School of Cooking
The National World War II Museum
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What a fun time!
Concerning kids carrying rifles across New York City, the late Justice Scalia spoke frequently of his high school days carrying his rifle on the New York subway from his Catholic school (which did not have a shooting team) to a Catholic school that did have a shooting team on which he competed.
I’m intrigued that for @roblong it was the fall of the Berlin Wall that opened his eyes to the problems of socialism / communism. For me (I am much older than Rob) it was seeing in person the Berlin Wall a couple of years after it was started, and as it was being built up in 1963 (I was 7 years old). The economic disparity between East Berlin and West Berlin was obvious even to a second grader. I saw the museum of efforts people had already undertaken to try to cross the wall, and observed that it was always people tryin to get from East to West. Why would people be so desperate to leave East Berlin, and why did the East German government have to work so hard to keep people in? Any place that has that many people trying to get out, and a government working so hard to prevent them from getting out must not be a place I would want to live. Even 7 year olds know the difference between a fortress designed to keep invaders out and a prison designed to keep residents in.
@6foot2inhighheels deserves a lot of credit for her work making this podcast happen. She brought the recording equipment, set it up, and directed the recording. I have to assume it was very time consuming editing it because only the three of us at the table had microphones, so I’m sure she had to tweak the volume in dozens of places so that you can hear the people who do and don’t have microphones. Melissa is my hero!
After hearing that Charles hadn’t seen “Rocky” but that he should, I watched it myself for the first time. (I never would have done that if the movie hadn’t come up in the conversation.)
The summer of ’68 or ’69, my family went on a European vacation (not the National Lampoon kind). One leg of the trip, we flew from Munich to West Berlin for a couple of days. We took a bus tour of East Berlin, going through Checkpoint Charlie. The bleakness of East Berlin – almost no cars, very few pedestrians, and soldiers everywhere made a lasting impression on me . . .
FYI: Rocky III is my favorite . . .
Anyone interested in more discussion of cannons may enjoy this post by @postmodernhoplite, which was inspired by this podcast.
Isn’t the plural of cannon, also cannon?
Starting around 1:06:23, a woman without a microphone says:
“Yeah, I think __ __ indicated that he won’t run.”
@charlescwcooke “No, he won’t run. He’s sensible.”
@roblong “Who won’t run?”
@charlescwcooke “He’s fabulous though.”
@roblong “Oh, yeah, yeah. But I mean, he’s like, … he’s like the governor of a big state, an important state. That person’s almost automatically … You talk about that person as a presidential candidate naturally, like in American history. It’s weird.”
What was the (not quite audible) name that was mentioned in the blank of that first quote?
Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, I believe.
cannon
noun
/ˈkænən//ˈkænən/(plural cannon, cannons)
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/cannon_1 It seems both spellings are used.
Rob was just talking about Brian Kemp a moment before. So that part fits.
My problem was that, no matter how many times I listen to the statement, to my ear it didn’t sound like “Brian Kemp”. It sounded like the last name had at least three syllables.
However, it seems that what I took for a last name was actually a muffled “has already”. Now, I’m persuaded it is the following.
“Yeah, I think Kemp has already indicated that he won’t run.”
Which answers Rob’s earlier question, “I don’t know why people aren’t talking more about Brian Kemp, successful Governor of Georgia. …”
Thanks @randyweivoda !
But “cannon” is shown first, so I’ll call that a win. :-)
Alphabetical order . . .
Perry did a good job with the postprocessing too (I assume both he and 6foot2 worked on it) . . .
In the 1980s lots of guys brought rifles to my high school hanging in the gun racks in the back windows of their pickups. There were probably a fair number of pistols under the seats as well. No one ever thought about killing a student or teacher with those guns. And if there had been a school shooting, the shooter would have been massively outgunned.
It’s not the guns that cause school shootings – something has gone badly wrong in the hearts of young men. It’s not a coincidence that we have taken God out of schools (and society as a whole) and then expect that nothing will go wrong.
We can get a distorted view of what is really going on in America when unusual events (e.g., school shootings) get massive coverage, while common events (e.g., violence in the inner city) get little or no coverage.
Typically, the Left builds its worldview from (selected, atypical) anecdotes; while the Right gets its more accurate picture of the world from statistics.
I am curious if anyone has tried a Sazerac cocktail who never had one before, after hearing Rob talking about it.
Good point.
I immediately thought of the classic example of how the intense coverage of a plane crash (an unusual event) can lead people to suppose that flying is quite dangerous when in reality the statistics are that it is safer than driving your car. But the common events of car crashes don’t get the same massive level of coverage as a plane crash — precisely because the car crashes are common.
Or as the news saying goes…
Dog bites man is not news.
Man bites dog could be news.
p.s. On top of the issue of whether an event is common or rare, news coverage can also be influenced by the issue of whether events support a desired narrative or not.
For example, if a news source wants to promote the narrative of cops killing blacks, it doesn’t serve that narrative to give equivalent attention to cases where cops killed someone who was white. Even though those cases are also uncommon events, nevertheless they don’t become big news. This creates a skewed picture that gives a false appearance of racial bias even though the statistics disprove that idea.
Similarly, the cases where good cops do their job well are both common and contrary to the narrative of racist cops bent on killing blacks.
Likewise, the narrative is not served by the massive number of cases where a black person is more likely to be killed by another black person (e.g. inner city gang violence).
The net result is that the skewed picture assists the crazy idea that black people would be better off if the police were defunded.
Also, apparently, black police.
Rob Long had asked how many Ricochet Meetups I have hosted. I didn’t know, but I just reviewed my records and it looks like New Orleans was the 16th one. Winston-Salem will be #17, and I want to host one in my new hometown of Cookeville, TN in the fall.