What’s going on at NPR? I was dreading hearing a constant regurgitation of the Trump recording this morning. Not a peep about it, but rather a regurgitation of the Russian mutiny! After three days, they seem to be finding nothing new, but they just love talking about how Putin is damaged goods.
Of course not a peep about the damaged goods problem at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, either!
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”
— Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
A recent NBC poll has Trump losing to Biden in swing states but DeSantis beating Biden in those same states fairly handily. In fact, “generic Republican” beats Biden.
Of course Trump currently has an absolutely commanding lead over DeSantis of almost 30 points in the primary. It appears as if the Regime’s lawfare is having the dual intended effect of more strongly adhering Trump’s base to him and making him less appealing in the general.
Kinda cool (as natural convergences go)…in Yosemite (where else?)…
Trigger warning, though (on a number of planes), so you may want to strap yerselves in… https://instapundit.com/591874/
Excellent movie w/Greer Garson & Gregory Peck, ‘Valley of Decision’, about a Pittsburgh steel mill and the family that owns it, will be on TCM Thursday…based on an even better book. I reviewed both:
Do people actually pay attention to NBC polls? Or any news media polls? Or any polls 16 months before an election?
Nonapod – It amazes me that the Republican base is so bound and determined to put a Democrat back in the White House next year. I’m hoping that Trump starts to fade once GOP voters begin to realize that.
Stan – I’m not sure the “16-months before an election thing” has as much salience this cycle. These polls are between two current/former presidents. There’s really not much more for the electorate to learn about them between now and then. I also find 46% to be very believable for Trump. He’s won 46% in every election he’s run.
Barry Meislin–
“Animal lovers” are frequently putting up “heartwarming” videos of animals—many of them wild—on Youtube, which usually, I am sure, picture these animals at their best, and not at their worst.
I admittedly like these videos a lot, but I can’t help wondering how many of these often wild animals, caged and confined in artificial environments, and sometimes for many years or even their lifetimes, instead of roaming the wild as they should be–are able to hold onto their sanity, or if some of them haven’t been driven a little nuts by their captivity.
Here is a video of what looks like a female orangutan, reportedly in a “zoo” in Indonesia, who is trying–with all her might–to get at a guy who reportedly jumped the guardrail to get a closer look at her, and who then reportedly kicked her. Notice how, at the end of the video, the orangutan is getting all ready to bite this guy’s foot if she can reach it.
Do you like the high prices for FOOD + everything else?
Well, if Biden is allowed to do his I.R. act, those prices will get worse.
The I.R. Act will put HIGHER government spending, and HIGHER taxation on the US people.
(Biden says he wants to do this I.R. Act, because he says- it will make a better economy, by the act’s focusing on making “equity” for the people in the US.
My words- ask any economist: this act will not make the economy better.
It will make it worse.)
I wasn’t aware that there was any genuine legislative activity in this area. Clearly, the corporate world and our social world are in conflict.
From MarketWatch: Smartphone Addiction …
It’s not only a health issue, Barclays analysts say — it’s a business risk for companies
Young people are at the forefront of a new addiction, and now tech companies are scrambling to avoid being targeted by punitive legislation.
Smartphone addiction has led to more than a dozen bills in the U.S. this year, as demands intensify for technologists to address digital safety, especially appropriate age verification.
“Social media addiction has evolved into more than just a health issue and is now also a business risk to the companies developing these platforms” Barclays Capital analysts said in a note Monday. The effects are likely to fall squarely on the shoulders of Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (META), Snap Inc. (SNAP) and Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOGL)(GOOGL) Google, along with some hardware companies who have designed their products to appeal to youths and gaming developers, the investment bank warns.
Barclays Capital defines smartphone addiction as “excessive dependency or obsession that interferes with daily activities and promotes distress and anxiety upon withdrawal.”
Meanwhile, the irrational fear of being without your mobile phone is being called “nomophobia.”
Children are most vulnerable to smartphone addiction, largely through mobile gaming, social media and videos. Research indicates that overuse of smartphones can affect development in adolescents and increase the risk of loneliness, obesity and depression. Nonetheless, the average age that children get their first smartphone continues to decline, to age 10 in 2016 from age 12 in 2012.
The issue has led to the passage of laws in Arkansas, Texas and Utah, and in the introduction of bipartisan bills in the U.S. Senate, including the Kids Online Safety Act and the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act.
Given the sum of the news since 2020 and the current state of the news, I cannot think of any time in American history when a current poll could possibly be more worthless 16 months before an election. And that’s assuming it were actually possible to conduct an accurate poll.
Anyone who assumes polling in 2023 has any accuracy is smoking some seriously laced, hallucinatory s**t. No one can currently model the electorate. It’s all BS responses which are then crammed into a BS model built with BS assumptions using woefully inadequate samples.
He’s right. When will normals finally realize that the “issue” of the day is never the real issue. It’s all just a pretense to destroy. Codevilla got it. Few seem to.
“They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Which is to say, in their relentless quest to destabilize every society with which they come into contact, “progressives” move seamlessly from one provocation to the next”
I think that most people’s remove from daily contact with nature, combined with what we might call the Disneyfication of wild animals, gives a lot of us a very false understanding of wild animals and what their behaviors are and will be like.
On the subject of taxes, I always felt that a flat tax would be ‘equitable’. Or easy to sell that way. Let’s say 15%. Make $100,000? Pay $15,000. Make $30,000? Pay $4,500. Or something like that. I’m not sure that taxpayers know that Congress can put line items in the tax bill, sometimes exempting individuals from paying their full tax. Ernest and Julio Gallo did this when their father died. They spent $2 million on Congress and saved $20 million in taxes. What a government we have! I actually like it when the Executive Branch and Congress are deadlocked. More of a chance I’ll be left alone.
yes its like a slot machine with special coins,
the poll is of adults, a category as enigmatic as woman or man today, of course the question is that half dozen rotten boroughs that determine the election,
…leaders are urging patience, insisting the main push is yet to come.
Tripwires galore…
Time for Ukrainiacs to put their feet where their money is.
Boned Loser:
Newsflash! Mines kill. Mines maim. Mines are effective in warfare. Mines continue to kill and maim long after the war is “over.”
Your man Vlad has had about a year to prepare defensive lines in his newly annexed portions of greater Roosia (aka siezed areas of Ukraine). It will take time to ferret out the invaders, sort of like deadbeat tenants or squatters who are armed and dangerous, but who were sent by their nuke’em big man Daddy, aka, your man Vlad.
It appears as if the Regime’s lawfare is having the dual intended effect of more strongly adhering Trump’s base to him and making him less appealing in the general.
Nonapod:
I believe that’s the plan. It may well work.
Open Thread: Titan Submersible Tragedy – Continued analysis ~ 17 minutes of serious commentary, not YouTube fluff.
Was Titan Certified by the US Coast Guard | USCG & NTSB Launch Marine Board of Investigation – Sal Mercogliano, What’s Going On With Shipping
00:00 Introduction
00:56: Coast Guard announces Major Marine Casualty and Marine Board of Investigation
04:18 Role of Coast Guard and NTSB in Casualties Involving Passenger-Carrying Submersibles
09:29 Whey Did James Cameron Not Warn ANYONE?
12:55 Did the US Coast Guard Inspect Titan and Award a Certificate of Inspection?
14:51 Conclusion…What does all this mean?
Recently I went down the rabbit hole of John Updike’s breakout novel, “Rabbit Run” (1960). Here’s the wiki overview:
____________________________
The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life.
One almost forgets that whole 60s mentality of being dissatisfied with a job and marriage, yearning for something better, then turning one’s life upside-down in the search for better.
That’s a nice problem to have. Today people are focused much more on survival and managing their lives in the midst of ongoing chaos and conflict. We blew through Future Shock a long time ago.
According to wiki, Updike had a religious critique of the Rabbit protagonist as a person separated from God. Sure, why not? I’m simply struck by how strange the Rabbit story is in today’s terms.
I’ve meant to get to Updike, especially the Rabbit books. Updike was a premier novelist in his day, but I’ve not read him, beyond one novel and a few short stories. Now I don’t suppose I will.
Updike sure could write though. Here’s the first paragraph to “Rabbit Run”:
____________________________
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.
For family reasons, I had to watch network news tonight. I hadn’t done so in some time. This is NBC. The ‘news’ show included devoting 10% of the broadcast time to an interview with…Liz Cheney, whom they tracked down at the Aspen Institute. This is the nepot of the Republican nomenklatura who was turned out of office by the theretofore patient voters of Wyoming, receiving all of 29% of the ballots in a Republican primary. The carpetbagging hag hasn’t gotten more honest for having been humiliated in this way. Another segment was devoted to members of Congress with slaveholder ancestors, with a soft focus piece on a some groveling fat slob in the Democratic caucus who’d grown up in Virginia (her name I forget) followed by Gregory Meeks of New York, who professes to be incensed that Republican members of Congress ignore gotcha questions about their great-great grandfathers.
==
Thence to the local news. A municipal councillor in Lynchburg, Va. would like municipal employees to be free of political harangues consequent to their being a captive audience of the DEI staff of the city government. This is framed by the local NBC affiliate as him ‘not wanting them to learn about racism’.
Updike was a force. Perhaps reading “The Maple Stories” would be a more suitable exploration than the Rabbit novels. Hemingway’s short stories have stuck with me better than his novels.
If I may say, I sure can hear Updike in Kesey’s second novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion.”
@ Art Deco > “Another segment was devoted to members of Congress with slaveholder ancestors, with a soft focus piece on a some groveling fat slob in the Democratic caucus who’d grown up in Virginia (her name I forget) followed by Gregory Meeks of New York, who professes to be incensed that Republican members of Congress ignore gotcha questions about their great-great grandfathers.”
Among 536 members of the last sitting Congress, Reuters determined at least 100 descend from slaveholders. Of that group, more than a quarter of the Senate – 28 members – can trace their families to at least one slaveholder.
Those lawmakers from the 117th session of Congress are Democrats and Republicans alike. They include some of the most influential politicians in America: Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton and James Lankford, and Democrats Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan.
In addition, President Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president – except Donald Trump – are direct descendants of slaveholders: Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and – through his white mother’s side – Barack Obama. Trump’s ancestors came to America after slavery was abolished.
Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people.
…
Reuters found that at least 8% of Democrats in the last Congress and 28% of Republicans have such ancestors. The preponderance of Republicans reflects the party’s [current] strength in the South, where slavery was concentrated [under Democrats in the past].
…
The Reuters examination reveals how intimately tied America remains to the institution of slavery, including through the “people who make the laws that govern our country,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr, a professor at Harvard University who focuses on African and African American research and hosts the popular television genealogy show Finding Your Roots on PBS.
Gates said identifying those familial connections to slaveholders is “not another chapter in the blame game. We do not inherit guilt for our ancestors’ actions.”
[even though that’s the only reason Reuters published this report]
“It’s just to say: Look at how closely linked we are to the institution of slavery, and how it informed the lives of the ancestors of people who represent us in the United States Congress today,” Gates said. “This is a learning opportunity for each individual. It is also a learning opportunity for their constituency … and for the American people as a whole.”
In addition to the political leaders Reuters identified, “there are millions of Americans who are descendants of enslavers [who included Blacks and Native Americans] as well,” said Tony Burroughs, a genealogist who specializes in helping Black Americans trace their ancestries.
What’s unclear is how the proportion of leaders who descend from slaveholders compares to that of all Americans. Among scholars, there is no agreement on precisely how many Americans today have a forebear who enslaved people.
[thus the inanity of reparations, especially since some had ancestors on both sides of the freedom line; and many today had none on either side]
Perhaps Reuters could do a similar study of the numbers of Americans descended from Union soldiers, who put their lives on the line in the war which ended slavery.
And then another, on the numbers of Americans who neither descended from slaveholders nor from Union soldiers, but from people who arrived here after 1865 and were not involved in any way. Huge numbers of those moved into states above the Mason-Dixon line where there was also not legally-enforced segregation, and many of these immigrants were themselves discriminated against by groups already here.
Perhaps Reuters could do a similar study of the numbers of Americans descended from Union soldiers, who put their lives on the line in the war which ended slavery.
==
I have Union and Confederate veterans in my family tree. I have two slaveholders in my family tree who fought for the Confederacy and one who favored the Union.
they want to tear open an open wound and poor alcohol in it,
twenty two years, they were planning the reparations push at durban, before 9/11 intervened,
Art Deco, I have a Union soldier and also one ancestor who may have owned slaves (although I don’t know for sure). My husband is in the immigrant-since-1865 group. The reparations gang would have to create a complicated algorithm of everyone’s ancestry. And not one of us is responsible for what previous generations did. The whole project is unmanageable and immoral.
the algorithm doesn’t matter as much as the intent, they want to destroy the greatest country on earth, from the inside, if they can’t yet defeat it by force of arms,
True, miguel.
According to my research, I have ancestors who fought for both the Confederacy and for the Union, and one who actually sold and held slaves.
But all that took place around 160 plus years ago, and was certainly not only out of my control but of my ken, until I did a lot of genealogical research.
People and events that my family retained absolutely no knowledge of.
So, should I have to pay reparations?
I’ve found half a dozen ancestors who fought in the Revolution—thankfully on the American side.
After the Revolution some applied for pensions, some applied for land bounties or tax remissions as compensation for their service, some did not.
Should that mean that I should merit, should inherit some sort of payment that was owed them and that they didn’t apply for or collect—with 250 or so years of compounded interest added?
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I’m liking Ron Johnson more and more. https://twitter.com/DowdEdward/status/1673584746310569984?s=20
What’s going on at NPR? I was dreading hearing a constant regurgitation of the Trump recording this morning. Not a peep about it, but rather a regurgitation of the Russian mutiny! After three days, they seem to be finding nothing new, but they just love talking about how Putin is damaged goods.
Of course not a peep about the damaged goods problem at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, either!
“Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.”
— Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
A recent NBC poll has Trump losing to Biden in swing states but DeSantis beating Biden in those same states fairly handily. In fact, “generic Republican” beats Biden.
Of course Trump currently has an absolutely commanding lead over DeSantis of almost 30 points in the primary. It appears as if the Regime’s lawfare is having the dual intended effect of more strongly adhering Trump’s base to him and making him less appealing in the general.
Here’s a truly heartwarming story (once you get over the initial schock and inhumanity of the background to it…)
“Vanilla the chimp, caged for entire life, sees sky for first time in heartwarming video”—
https://nypost.com/2023/06/26/vanilla-the-chimp-caged-entire-life-sees-sky-for-first-time-in-heartwarming-video/
Always an outsider…
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/every-living-former-u-s-president-except-trump/
Kinda cool (as natural convergences go)…in Yosemite (where else?)…
Trigger warning, though (on a number of planes), so you may want to strap yerselves in…
https://instapundit.com/591874/
Excellent movie w/Greer Garson & Gregory Peck, ‘Valley of Decision’, about a Pittsburgh steel mill and the family that owns it, will be on TCM Thursday…based on an even better book. I reviewed both:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/69595.html
Do people actually pay attention to NBC polls? Or any news media polls? Or any polls 16 months before an election?
Nonapod – It amazes me that the Republican base is so bound and determined to put a Democrat back in the White House next year. I’m hoping that Trump starts to fade once GOP voters begin to realize that.
Stan – I’m not sure the “16-months before an election thing” has as much salience this cycle. These polls are between two current/former presidents. There’s really not much more for the electorate to learn about them between now and then. I also find 46% to be very believable for Trump. He’s won 46% in every election he’s run.
Barry Meislin–
“Animal lovers” are frequently putting up “heartwarming” videos of animals—many of them wild—on Youtube, which usually, I am sure, picture these animals at their best, and not at their worst.
I admittedly like these videos a lot, but I can’t help wondering how many of these often wild animals, caged and confined in artificial environments, and sometimes for many years or even their lifetimes, instead of roaming the wild as they should be–are able to hold onto their sanity, or if some of them haven’t been driven a little nuts by their captivity.
Here is a video of what looks like a female orangutan, reportedly in a “zoo” in Indonesia, who is trying–with all her might–to get at a guy who reportedly jumped the guardrail to get a closer look at her, and who then reportedly kicked her. Notice how, at the end of the video, the orangutan is getting all ready to bite this guy’s foot if she can reach it.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdB-FWZfd-w
And HERE it comes:
BIden’s new plan to help the US economy,
The Inflation Reduction Act.
Do you like the high prices for FOOD + everything else?
Well, if Biden is allowed to do his I.R. act, those prices will get worse.
The I.R. Act will put HIGHER government spending, and HIGHER taxation on the US people.
(Biden says he wants to do this I.R. Act, because he says- it will make a better economy, by the act’s focusing on making “equity” for the people in the US.
My words- ask any economist: this act will not make the economy better.
It will make it worse.)
Here’s a link to this news story:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/karine-jean-pierre-says-biden-admin-rebuilding-economy-equity-center
I wasn’t aware that there was any genuine legislative activity in this area. Clearly, the corporate world and our social world are in conflict.
From MarketWatch: Smartphone Addiction …
Given the sum of the news since 2020 and the current state of the news, I cannot think of any time in American history when a current poll could possibly be more worthless 16 months before an election. And that’s assuming it were actually possible to conduct an accurate poll.
Anyone who assumes polling in 2023 has any accuracy is smoking some seriously laced, hallucinatory s**t. No one can currently model the electorate. It’s all BS responses which are then crammed into a BS model built with BS assumptions using woefully inadequate samples.
He’s right. When will normals finally realize that the “issue” of the day is never the real issue. It’s all just a pretense to destroy. Codevilla got it. Few seem to.
“They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Which is to say, in their relentless quest to destabilize every society with which they come into contact, “progressives” move seamlessly from one provocation to the next”
https://the-pipeline.org/the-column-tent-meet-camel/
Barry Meislin—
I think that most people’s remove from daily contact with nature, combined with what we might call the Disneyfication of wild animals, gives a lot of us a very false understanding of wild animals and what their behaviors are and will be like.
On the subject of taxes, I always felt that a flat tax would be ‘equitable’. Or easy to sell that way. Let’s say 15%. Make $100,000? Pay $15,000. Make $30,000? Pay $4,500. Or something like that. I’m not sure that taxpayers know that Congress can put line items in the tax bill, sometimes exempting individuals from paying their full tax. Ernest and Julio Gallo did this when their father died. They spent $2 million on Congress and saved $20 million in taxes. What a government we have! I actually like it when the Executive Branch and Congress are deadlocked. More of a chance I’ll be left alone.
yes its like a slot machine with special coins,
the poll is of adults, a category as enigmatic as woman or man today, of course the question is that half dozen rotten boroughs that determine the election,
More U.S. volunteers needed – a lot more:
Minefields and Menace: Why Ukraine’s Pushback Is Off to a Halting Start
…leaders are urging patience, insisting the main push is yet to come.
Tripwires galore…
Time for Ukrainiacs to put their feet where their money is.
Boned Loser:
Newsflash! Mines kill. Mines maim. Mines are effective in warfare. Mines continue to kill and maim long after the war is “over.”
Your man Vlad has had about a year to prepare defensive lines in his newly annexed portions of greater Roosia (aka siezed areas of Ukraine). It will take time to ferret out the invaders, sort of like deadbeat tenants or squatters who are armed and dangerous, but who were sent by their nuke’em big man Daddy, aka, your man Vlad.
It appears as if the Regime’s lawfare is having the dual intended effect of more strongly adhering Trump’s base to him and making him less appealing in the general.
Nonapod:
I believe that’s the plan. It may well work.
Open Thread: Titan Submersible Tragedy – Continued analysis ~ 17 minutes of serious commentary, not YouTube fluff.
Was Titan Certified by the US Coast Guard | USCG & NTSB Launch Marine Board of Investigation – Sal Mercogliano, What’s Going On With Shipping
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5JTjYZQbsQ
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:56: Coast Guard announces Major Marine Casualty and Marine Board of Investigation
04:18 Role of Coast Guard and NTSB in Casualties Involving Passenger-Carrying Submersibles
09:29 Whey Did James Cameron Not Warn ANYONE?
12:55 Did the US Coast Guard Inspect Titan and Award a Certificate of Inspection?
14:51 Conclusion…What does all this mean?
Recently I went down the rabbit hole of John Updike’s breakout novel, “Rabbit Run” (1960). Here’s the wiki overview:
____________________________
The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player named Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit,_Run
____________________________
One almost forgets that whole 60s mentality of being dissatisfied with a job and marriage, yearning for something better, then turning one’s life upside-down in the search for better.
That’s a nice problem to have. Today people are focused much more on survival and managing their lives in the midst of ongoing chaos and conflict. We blew through Future Shock a long time ago.
According to wiki, Updike had a religious critique of the Rabbit protagonist as a person separated from God. Sure, why not? I’m simply struck by how strange the Rabbit story is in today’s terms.
I’ve meant to get to Updike, especially the Rabbit books. Updike was a premier novelist in his day, but I’ve not read him, beyond one novel and a few short stories. Now I don’t suppose I will.
Updike sure could write though. Here’s the first paragraph to “Rabbit Run”:
____________________________
Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he’s twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.
For family reasons, I had to watch network news tonight. I hadn’t done so in some time. This is NBC. The ‘news’ show included devoting 10% of the broadcast time to an interview with…Liz Cheney, whom they tracked down at the Aspen Institute. This is the nepot of the Republican nomenklatura who was turned out of office by the theretofore patient voters of Wyoming, receiving all of 29% of the ballots in a Republican primary. The carpetbagging hag hasn’t gotten more honest for having been humiliated in this way. Another segment was devoted to members of Congress with slaveholder ancestors, with a soft focus piece on a some groveling fat slob in the Democratic caucus who’d grown up in Virginia (her name I forget) followed by Gregory Meeks of New York, who professes to be incensed that Republican members of Congress ignore gotcha questions about their great-great grandfathers.
==
Thence to the local news. A municipal councillor in Lynchburg, Va. would like municipal employees to be free of political harangues consequent to their being a captive audience of the DEI staff of the city government. This is framed by the local NBC affiliate as him ‘not wanting them to learn about racism’.
huxley:
On Updike: see this and this.
Interesting if true:
https://archive.fo/uSuze
neo:
Good posts and discussions therein…
Updike was a force. Perhaps reading “The Maple Stories” would be a more suitable exploration than the Rabbit novels. Hemingway’s short stories have stuck with me better than his novels.
If I may say, I sure can hear Updike in Kesey’s second novel, “Sometimes a Great Notion.”
@ Art Deco > “Another segment was devoted to members of Congress with slaveholder ancestors, with a soft focus piece on a some groveling fat slob in the Democratic caucus who’d grown up in Virginia (her name I forget) followed by Gregory Meeks of New York, who professes to be incensed that Republican members of Congress ignore gotcha questions about their great-great grandfathers.”
https://notthebee.com/article/reuters-investigates-discovers-every-single-living-us-president-descended-from-slaveholders-except-for-one-bad-orange-man
That’s Biden, Obama, Bush II, Clinton, and Carter.
Go ahead with the gotcha questions, Mr Meeks.
And notice how FAST Reuters skips over that part, in order to get to the GOP.
I’ve embedded a few “context” [notes], ala Twitter.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-slavery-lawmakers/
[thus the inanity of reparations, especially since some had ancestors on both sides of the freedom line; and many today had none on either side]
Perhaps Reuters could do a similar study of the numbers of Americans descended from Union soldiers, who put their lives on the line in the war which ended slavery.
And then another, on the numbers of Americans who neither descended from slaveholders nor from Union soldiers, but from people who arrived here after 1865 and were not involved in any way. Huge numbers of those moved into states above the Mason-Dixon line where there was also not legally-enforced segregation, and many of these immigrants were themselves discriminated against by groups already here.
Perhaps Reuters could do a similar study of the numbers of Americans descended from Union soldiers, who put their lives on the line in the war which ended slavery.
==
I have Union and Confederate veterans in my family tree. I have two slaveholders in my family tree who fought for the Confederacy and one who favored the Union.
they want to tear open an open wound and poor alcohol in it,
twenty two years, they were planning the reparations push at durban, before 9/11 intervened,
Art Deco, I have a Union soldier and also one ancestor who may have owned slaves (although I don’t know for sure). My husband is in the immigrant-since-1865 group. The reparations gang would have to create a complicated algorithm of everyone’s ancestry. And not one of us is responsible for what previous generations did. The whole project is unmanageable and immoral.
the algorithm doesn’t matter as much as the intent, they want to destroy the greatest country on earth, from the inside, if they can’t yet defeat it by force of arms,
True, miguel.
According to my research, I have ancestors who fought for both the Confederacy and for the Union, and one who actually sold and held slaves.
But all that took place around 160 plus years ago, and was certainly not only out of my control but of my ken, until I did a lot of genealogical research.
People and events that my family retained absolutely no knowledge of.
So, should I have to pay reparations?
I’ve found half a dozen ancestors who fought in the Revolution—thankfully on the American side.
After the Revolution some applied for pensions, some applied for land bounties or tax remissions as compensation for their service, some did not.
Should that mean that I should merit, should inherit some sort of payment that was owed them and that they didn’t apply for or collect—with 250 or so years of compounded interest added?