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It’s our last podcast of the summer and to mark the change of season, we’ve reunited the crew after their far-flung vacations and adventures.This week, we answer the burning questions of the day: Is Rob Long actually a gift from God? What in Pharaoh’s name is going on in Egypt? What’s the deal with Chris Christie? And finally, will California change Paul Rahe or will Paul Rahe change California? We’re betting on the latter.
Music from this week’s show:
Get Lucky by Daft Punk
The Ricochet Podcast opening theme was composed and produced by James Lileks.
So it shall be written, so it shall be done, EJHill!
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Great, now the Egypt scene from Joseph is running through my head.
Somebody has to do it.
Thank God! This is just what I needed today. Perfect timing, guys!
You mean there’s no podcast till September 22? Ugh!!!
Even if you are saying summer ends with Labor Day, does that mean no podcast next week?
With apologies to Jay Nordlinger, after listening to the podcast, I beg to differ. Rob Long is God’s gift to Rob Long. :)
This Stanford professor can afford a house close to the University.
Here’s the full video of Get Lucky.
It is not so much the presence of elections that confirms liberty in the U.S. but rather the peaceful transfer of power. This is what moderates our system and does more to protect us from tyrannical ‘leaders’, the fact that those in power now cannot reasonably hope to retain power past the next (or the next few) elections.
As it became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood meant to make Egypt’s election a one-man one-vote one-time thing the more reasonable elements in Egypt (Military, etc.) began to seek an opportunity to turn them out. Elections may return at some future time but I hope they will not until most Egyptians are ready to ensure regular, free and fair elections that do not guarantee returning those in power to office.
RE: The Bullis School
There’s one in Potomac, Maryland. I think it would be an odd coincidence to find a Bullis School in California that is unaffiliated with the Potomac campus. A place to start your research, Professor Rahe.
Rob’s democratic description of the Republican presidential primary process leaves out of the story the “Money Primary” — the competition for big early donors — which determines the candidates that have the resources to gain early consideration. The dynamic in ’12 was: Romney won the Money Primary, but he so nonplussed primary voters that there was a series of “Anyone But Romney” candidates who had a shot at displacing him, none of them in the end proving up to the task. The party would have been better off if Romney hadn’t been favored by donors initially and had been forced to compete on equal terms with his competitors, and it’ll be good for the party and the eventual nominee if no candidate prohibitively wins the Money Primary and every candidate has to compete on the basis of message. (Prediction: The big wedge issue between voters in the Money Primary and in the plebeian primaries in the ’16 cycle will be immigration/border control.)
Robinson == Yul Brynner? Love it!
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3943/begin-saturday-finish-sunday
So let it be written. So let it be done.
Romney was electable if he had actually fought but on the advice of the beltway consultants and perhaps his own personality he refused to actually fight. To paraphrase Ben Shapiro, while Romney was calling Obama a reasonable guy who’s merely wrong, Obama was calling Romney a murdering tax cheat.
The Republican ‘brand’ problem is a direct result of the Bush/Rove eight year fetal crouch policy. After a blunder like that the decent thing for Rove to do would be to retire from public pronouncements about anything.
As to the ‘crime novel in the sky’ think Holodeck, maybe in Heaven everyone gets to create their on world.
OWN
Yeah, I nearly drove off the road this morning when hearing Rob say that the true believers were the ones who select the candidates.
No. In the primaries, we true-believing-conservatives have a limited range to choose from. Had other, more conservative candidates entered the race, they would have gotten the votes from the true believers.
Remember, Buckley’s Electoral Advice (BEA) has two components: (a) most conservative (b) who’s electable. Except for Romney, none of the other candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, etc.) looked electable.It wasn’t that we chose Romney. We had no one we liked, and we were forced to choose the best of the rest. We didn’t really like McCain or Romney as conservatives, but we had no other realistic option.
You can’t sweep those details away, and make a broad claim that Romney emerged from the primaries, therefore he was the candidate that the true believers “selected.” He was just the last one standing; we had to run somebody. Don’t blame him on us.
The story of the family vacationing in Gaza dredged up an old memory from the dark recesses of my brain.
So, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I spent a summer in Gaza, engaged in various sorts of do-gooding. ( I wasn’t an anti-Israeli zealot, merely a 20-year-old eager to see the world, who realized that volunteering in Gaza is the sort of thing you can get other people to sponsor when you’re a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergraduate.)
Among the people I met in that crazy, crazy summer was a local guy who was trying to promote tourism to Gaza. He told me that tourism could be a total game-changer for Palestinians. He had made a promotional video that he persuaded me to watch, after which he asked for suggestions. What would persuade Westerners to vacation in Gaza?
I was somewhat at a loss. I mean, I admired the guy’s entrepreneurial spirit, but of course my real answer was: absolutely nothing! Even if it weren’t a hotbed of political violence, there’s nothing to do or see there.
But maybe I underestimated the man?
Interesting books recommended – I may even go for Audible to hear Omar Sharif read the Cairo trilogy.
Per Peter Robinson’s a-book recommendation, I recently listened to London’s Sea Wolf which was excellent and then the Call of the Wild which was very good but not as much a revelation as the first.
Correct. Next show will be the week of September 2nd.
I was somewhat at a loss. I mean, I admired the guy’s entrepreneurial spirit, but of course my real answer was:absolutely nothing! Even if it weren’t a hotbed of political violence, there’s nothing to do or see there.
East Cleveland in July would have the same charm at a fraction of the price.
In order to argue that America should not necessarily defend the legitimacy of democratic elections in other countries, you don’t have to fall back to America’s self interest or the other country’s lack of readiness to conduct workable elections. (Although I think those are both good points with respect to Egypt.)
A serious problem with Egypt’s “democracy” is that it is not premised on constitutionally protected individual rights. Without taking protected rights off of the table of election-decided issues, democracy becomes the proverbial two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Of course, our constitutional protections only work because we still revere our Constitution unlike many other countries. If we abandon that reverence (which seems to have started happening already), democracy will be a sham. What difference does it make how individual citizens vote if the individual is not important?
Should have gone all Shakespearean and called it “Summer’s Lease.”
I am completely in awe. James’ first segue to the Audible commercial was the most well-disguised, artful transition that he was halfway through it before I realized we were in a commercial.
James needs to replace Stan Freberg as the King of Advertising.
It’s a mild nitpick, I know, but hearing Professor Rahe’s cracks at the “Church of Self Realization” put me off a little. Perhaps I am too close to the situation to be objective: I am not a believer myself, but I am a close relation to several prominent members of Ananda, which has a small church and school in Palo Alto. Still, I get my hackles up when people assume that, because the name is rather yippy-ish, that they’re just another parasite group brown-nosing around all the Silicon Valley nouveau-riche. Though their society has…rather idiosyncratic views concerning such things as reincarnation and alternative medicine, I can assure you that they on the whole are good, kind, charitable, and humble people intent on pursuing God and virtue in their own, quiet way. There’s rather more organic farming than there would be at St. Athanasius (minutes from my apartment), but they aren’t charlatans.
Still, no sense in getting offended over some good-natured humor. “Life is a contact sport” and all that. Thanks for the podcast, and I’ll miss you all terribly until I can hear the next one in late September.
I don’t listen to podcasts to hear the hosts kibitz about their personal lives or what they’ve been doing since the last podcast. It borders on wasting the listeners’ limited time which they have chosen to spend consuming this content.
Well, geez, they already give us over and hour’s worth of entertainment.
Besides, if I don’t get to hear about James’s weekly trip to Target, then I feel deprived.
This may come off as rude, but it’s really just a personal preference I wish to express.
I don’t listen to podcasts to hear the hosts kibitz about their personal lives or what they’ve been doing since the last podcast. It borders on wasting the listeners’ limited time which they have chosen to spend consuming this content.
This isn’t a big deal as I just skip the first ten minutes of every Ricochet podcast. But IMO the best podcasts spend maybe a minute at most introducing who the hosts are and then get right into the content.
This might be a minority opinion and I know some people value the sense of intimacy and community such conversations can create. You feel a (false?) connection with the hosts when they share aspects of their personal lives in this manner.
Why am i getting and “x” in the upper right corner of the podcast page? I have resubscribed, as requested and I can get all the earlier podcasts.
Ted Volckhausen