Installed Brave as per your recommendation. Faster and works better than the Pale Moon I’d used for years. Going to take awhile to get things setup as I wish them to be. Exported my bookmarks by turning them into an html file which Brave uses. Thank you.
Quote: “The oligarchs are not fooling around. Appealing to the Constitution can only increase their determination to bury its remnants under the administrative powers it creates or enhances. This is a regime alien and inimical to ours. That is good as well as bad news. The good aspect of it is that we who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country. Nor can we persuade them about right and wrong. If we are to avoid becoming the oligarchy’s mere subjects we can and must treat them as the enemies they are: deny their legitimacy, and rebuild the republic amongst those of us who love it.”
This speaks to the question GB, AesopFan, and I were kicking around in the sub-thread about active-duty military personnel and their oath of allegiance to the Constitution.
Codevilla writes clearly, fearlessly, and compellingly on these issues. My fear is that he may meet with an unfortunate (non-)accident.
Patient bird.
Re: Loyalty and the Left.
This is from a book I’m presently reading “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, 1951. The excerpt is from page 323 of the 1973 paperback edition.
‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This demand is made by the party leaders of totalitarian movements even before they seize power. It usually precedes the total organization of the country under their actual rule and it follows from the claim of their ideologies that their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race… Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.’
Community Organizing aimed at creating this form of mass organization of atomized individuals whose loyalty is only to those who run the organization. Social Media has contributed mightily in recent years.
Read “Prairie Fire” from 47 years ago to see what has been in progress for over half a century.
Geoffb,
Thanks for this. If one keeps subtracting all the nice things in life: fire, water, toilets, shoes, clothes, eyeglasses, hearing aids, cars, voting, writing, easy to get food, health and long life, dental repair…..on and on…you finally reach how it was to be a member of a hominid tribe in the Paleolithic.
This is how every nucleotide in our DNA, all three billion, were tuned and evolved so that we could survive this period.
At this point you can guess pretty accurately exactly how our distant ancestors were behaving. This is precisely what you were saying above.
We were rough and hungry and cold and constantly frightened. We were losing our loved ones and kids way too often. We were mean and had to follow tough guys. There was no heterodoxy. You did as you were told or you were abandoned and some animal would eat your scraps. This was going on for 300,000 years. No wonder we lapse.
Geoffb, Our history was like that song “Hang On” by Alabama Shakes.
An idea that I believe could gather some momentum:
A very public, national drive to fund scholarships for elementary and high school aged children whose parents want to pull them from public schools.
Others here are much more politically active than I am. I am willing to help, but I wonder if those of you more plugged in would have suggestions on how to get this rolling.
I know such scholarships already exist; I’ve taught at an inner-city school completely funded by such donations. We don’t need to reinvent the scholarships, or schools, we just need to get the word out to people who might have a little extra cash between their couch cushions who want to help kids from poor households receive a good education*.
*During the big push for nationalized health care in the early days of Obama’s first term I was very skeptical of many supporters’ motives because none of them were offering to fund healthcare for poor people. We already have private insurance. Someone like Michael Moore could have done P.R. for a national campaign to purchase private insurance for poor people and the problem would have been fixed by the private sector and charity. The fact that no one talked about that made me doubt the actual concern was for individuals lacking health care.
Well, here we are. Many, many Americans seemed concerned teachers’ unions and public schools are not ideal for young people and all the talk is on the political side. Sure, school vouchers would be great, and that’s a good fight, but before fall semester starts a public movement to fund scholarships could ensure hundreds of thousands of kids start private school by Labor Day. It’s kind of like the March of Dimes or UNICEF. When I was a kid our local zoo needed an updated home for an elephant and there was a campaign asking school kids to solicit quarters from family and friends. It was very successful.
Excellent idea Original Frank and geoffb!
I just installed Brave. This visit to the new neo is my first, official browse in the Brave browser. So far so good! Thanks for the recommendation!
Wow! Even grabbed my gravatar. Cool!
Rufus, my gravatar too.
One thing Brave allows me to do again is easily go to Ace-of-Spades which somehow locked up Pale Moon, on my system, and took forever to load in other browsers, IE, Firefox.
Ha! ace of spades was the second site I visited after downloading Brave, right after coming here.
An insightful and glowing review of a movie that I saw at the theatre and enjoyed.
Now I want to watch it again …. Master And Commander
About 25 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMv_LOGMZN0
In this country, we managed to count ballots for 370 years before there was any such thing as ‘software’. Get rid of it.
Good evening. I’ve decided to start getting a little collection of display flags together to add some color to my little patio this year (and subsequent, of course, Lord willing). Just got done drilling for and putting up a real Stars and Stripes – retiring that poor little cheap thing I had out there before.
I also got a Betsy Ross flag and have a city flag on backorder (I like the old-style Dutch colors and the motto, not that I’m particularly attached to the city itself, though the city line is just a stone’s throw away). Does anyone know if there are rules and regs around display of the Betsy Ross flag?
I’ve got several more on the way: a couple of states, a few foreign ones. By the time I have them all in hand, I should have an excuse to run up at least one on many days of the year.
(Amusingly, my somewhat casual research suggests that many versions of the Bavarian colors sold these days are, in the eyes of Bavarian law, technically adulterated or illegal to fly in most circumstances.)
I love the firmness with which the parrot turns the faucet back. It knows what it wants.
“I am leaving Colorado for palm trees and less communism,” wrote Daniel Bertelson, who is a 16-year veteran of the Aurora Police Department (APD), according to CBS Denver.
“Try to ignore the politicians and media,” he urged his colleagues. “They know nothing of this profession or honor; they’re self-serving con artists, well-dressed pimps and prostitutes at best.”
—
According to CBS Denver, the number of police officers leaving APD has risen in recent years, growing to over 60 percent from 2019 to 2020.
“That comes as the city is also seeing rising crime rates, a trend seen in other Colorado cities and across the country,” the report stated.
In March, Fox 31 reported Aurora overtook Colorado Springs as the second most violent city in the state.
Con-artists, pimps, and prostitutes, Oh my! Sounds like he had first hand experience with the political class.
Happy Warm Feel of the Day:
Black on White. So of course it’s national news ‘Hate Crime’. Not.
That’s a useful formulation for the many who are bound by an oath to protect the Constitution. It’s reasonable and not a Define ‘It’ type argument. I hadn’t thought of it that way at all, being a solipsistic fellow who has never taken an oath to protect the Big C. I hereby take back all my rantings about Codevilla not dealing with the problem that the Constitution did nothing to stop the US getting from 1789 to 2021.
Baby steps.
Being bound by an Oath was a serious issue for many otherwise disenchanted Heer officers in the Last Great Unpleasantness. So he’s more of a pragmatist than I’d grasped.
Like you, I hope he continues to lead a charmed life.
Stop it stop it bad human sez the bird.
For Original Frank;
Installed Brave as per your recommendation. Faster and works better than the Pale Moon I’d used for years. Going to take awhile to get things setup as I wish them to be. Exported my bookmarks by turning them into an html file which Brave uses. Thank you.
Codevilla’s latest:
https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/20/regime-vs-regime
Quote: “The oligarchs are not fooling around. Appealing to the Constitution can only increase their determination to bury its remnants under the administrative powers it creates or enhances. This is a regime alien and inimical to ours. That is good as well as bad news. The good aspect of it is that we who swear to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic owe no allegiance whatever to the oligarchy that now runs this country. Nor can we persuade them about right and wrong. If we are to avoid becoming the oligarchy’s mere subjects we can and must treat them as the enemies they are: deny their legitimacy, and rebuild the republic amongst those of us who love it.”
This speaks to the question GB, AesopFan, and I were kicking around in the sub-thread about active-duty military personnel and their oath of allegiance to the Constitution.
Codevilla writes clearly, fearlessly, and compellingly on these issues. My fear is that he may meet with an unfortunate (non-)accident.
Patient bird.
Re: Loyalty and the Left.
This is from a book I’m presently reading “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, 1951. The excerpt is from page 323 of the 1973 paperback edition.
‘Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Compared with all other parties and movements, their most conspicuous external characteristic is their demand for total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. This demand is made by the party leaders of totalitarian movements even before they seize power. It usually precedes the total organization of the country under their actual rule and it follows from the claim of their ideologies that their organization will encompass, in due course, the entire human race… Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.’
Community Organizing aimed at creating this form of mass organization of atomized individuals whose loyalty is only to those who run the organization. Social Media has contributed mightily in recent years.
Read “Prairie Fire” from 47 years ago to see what has been in progress for over half a century.
Geoffb,
Thanks for this. If one keeps subtracting all the nice things in life: fire, water, toilets, shoes, clothes, eyeglasses, hearing aids, cars, voting, writing, easy to get food, health and long life, dental repair…..on and on…you finally reach how it was to be a member of a hominid tribe in the Paleolithic.
This is how every nucleotide in our DNA, all three billion, were tuned and evolved so that we could survive this period.
At this point you can guess pretty accurately exactly how our distant ancestors were behaving. This is precisely what you were saying above.
We were rough and hungry and cold and constantly frightened. We were losing our loved ones and kids way too often. We were mean and had to follow tough guys. There was no heterodoxy. You did as you were told or you were abandoned and some animal would eat your scraps. This was going on for 300,000 years. No wonder we lapse.
Geoffb, Our history was like that song “Hang On” by Alabama Shakes.
An idea that I believe could gather some momentum:
A very public, national drive to fund scholarships for elementary and high school aged children whose parents want to pull them from public schools.
Others here are much more politically active than I am. I am willing to help, but I wonder if those of you more plugged in would have suggestions on how to get this rolling.
I know such scholarships already exist; I’ve taught at an inner-city school completely funded by such donations. We don’t need to reinvent the scholarships, or schools, we just need to get the word out to people who might have a little extra cash between their couch cushions who want to help kids from poor households receive a good education*.
*During the big push for nationalized health care in the early days of Obama’s first term I was very skeptical of many supporters’ motives because none of them were offering to fund healthcare for poor people. We already have private insurance. Someone like Michael Moore could have done P.R. for a national campaign to purchase private insurance for poor people and the problem would have been fixed by the private sector and charity. The fact that no one talked about that made me doubt the actual concern was for individuals lacking health care.
Well, here we are. Many, many Americans seemed concerned teachers’ unions and public schools are not ideal for young people and all the talk is on the political side. Sure, school vouchers would be great, and that’s a good fight, but before fall semester starts a public movement to fund scholarships could ensure hundreds of thousands of kids start private school by Labor Day. It’s kind of like the March of Dimes or UNICEF. When I was a kid our local zoo needed an updated home for an elephant and there was a campaign asking school kids to solicit quarters from family and friends. It was very successful.
Excellent idea Original Frank and geoffb!
I just installed Brave. This visit to the new neo is my first, official browse in the Brave browser. So far so good! Thanks for the recommendation!
Wow! Even grabbed my gravatar. Cool!
Rufus, my gravatar too.
One thing Brave allows me to do again is easily go to Ace-of-Spades which somehow locked up Pale Moon, on my system, and took forever to load in other browsers, IE, Firefox.
Miss Iris is lucky she’s a bird and not a kitten– Momcats don’t mess around when it comes to cleaning the young’uns:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSDNJaJHPhg
Ha! ace of spades was the second site I visited after downloading Brave, right after coming here.
An insightful and glowing review of a movie that I saw at the theatre and enjoyed.
Now I want to watch it again …. Master And Commander
About 25 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMv_LOGMZN0
OK, this is not sophisticated humor but BEE GEES!!!!!
Invest 1 minute.
Brought a smile to my face
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FEbFLsA59M
In this country, we managed to count ballots for 370 years before there was any such thing as ‘software’. Get rid of it.
Good evening. I’ve decided to start getting a little collection of display flags together to add some color to my little patio this year (and subsequent, of course, Lord willing). Just got done drilling for and putting up a real Stars and Stripes – retiring that poor little cheap thing I had out there before.
I also got a Betsy Ross flag and have a city flag on backorder (I like the old-style Dutch colors and the motto, not that I’m particularly attached to the city itself, though the city line is just a stone’s throw away). Does anyone know if there are rules and regs around display of the Betsy Ross flag?
I’ve got several more on the way: a couple of states, a few foreign ones. By the time I have them all in hand, I should have an excuse to run up at least one on many days of the year.
(Amusingly, my somewhat casual research suggests that many versions of the Bavarian colors sold these days are, in the eyes of Bavarian law, technically adulterated or illegal to fly in most circumstances.)
I love the firmness with which the parrot turns the faucet back. It knows what it wants.
Sad but amusing:
Con-artists, pimps, and prostitutes, Oh my! Sounds like he had first hand experience with the political class.
Happy Warm Feel of the Day:
Black on White. So of course it’s national news ‘Hate Crime’. Not.
https://www.cbs42.com/news/crime/missing-arkansas-woman-found-wrapped-in-sheet-under-ex-boyfriends-bed-authorities-say/
@Hubert:
That’s a useful formulation for the many who are bound by an oath to protect the Constitution. It’s reasonable and not a Define ‘It’ type argument. I hadn’t thought of it that way at all, being a solipsistic fellow who has never taken an oath to protect the Big C. I hereby take back all my rantings about Codevilla not dealing with the problem that the Constitution did nothing to stop the US getting from 1789 to 2021.
Baby steps.
Being bound by an Oath was a serious issue for many otherwise disenchanted Heer officers in the Last Great Unpleasantness. So he’s more of a pragmatist than I’d grasped.
Like you, I hope he continues to lead a charmed life.
Matt Gaetz – Joel Greenberg Carnival Continues:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2021/05/theres-no-smoke-without-fire-but-whos.html
Anybody interested in Bee Gees tribute bands?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BFRnqbuV_JM
Somehow this picture of a train wheel, flat, iron, made me think of City of New Orleans.
https://www.facebook.com/tpwca/photos/495942461852655
The (not) Bee Gees getting “high” was quite funny, thanks JimNorCal.
(I’m ex- Sili Valli )