The French socialist Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807-74) is supposed to have seen a protest and said, “I’d better follow them, seeing as I’m their leader.” The story illustrates a truth about democracy that has only become truer with time: Our leaders are creations and creatures of public opinion. They are made and unmade by popular votes—sometimes even polls. They are always chasing the mood, hurrying to the front of the march to claim it as their own.
This Dominic Green fellow just made my list of people to keep an eye on.
Interesting….lefty friends yesterday and today are questioning how Biden’s cancer wasn’t detected sooner. “Darmok, his eyes uncovered.”
Why the bill is a disaster. those holdouts are NOT grandstanding–they are addressing our economic future.
This has been the coldest and rainiest May in upstate NY I can recall in quite some time. I think 1992 was the last time we had a May like this. Evidently there’s a Nor’easter moving through from Wednesday to Friday, which means more rain and more cold over the next few days.
Mike Plaiss, that was a really good essay. I was interested to read how Denmark has solved its immigration problems. Among the remedies was the requirement that immigrants learn Danish to be given welfare benefits. I am amazed at how many Spanish-speaking immigrants here don’t speak English after decades. We shouldn’t allow it. One of my husband’s Croatian grandmothers was still alive when I joined the family. She spoke everyday English, could read newspapers and understand TV news, and could speak to clerks in stores, all this with only a third-grade education. Since English is the consensus language here because people have come from so many different places, we should require legal immigrants to learn the common language.
Terrible spring here in western WA. We’ve creeped up into the low 70s a couple of times but they have been just one offs and the next week to 10 days doesn’t look much better. May and June are the worst months for weather in the NW as we fritter away the long days under cloudy gloom.
@Griffin:Terrible spring here in western WA.
I’ll say this for Western Washington: if you want to know what the weather is, all you need is a calendar. If it’s July, August, or September it’s not raining. Otherwise, it is. And we rarely have storms of any kind, though we do go get frequent earthquakes and the occasional tsunami or volcanic eruption, but every place has something.
And it’s much rainier as you go a short distance west. Olympia has as much annual rainfall as an Atlantic seaboard city. Points farther west get two or three times as much rainfall. In the Olympics it does little but rain, except in the summer.
The cold and rain must be a side effect of global warming somehow …
once upon a time, this was Cuban independence day, but this small isle was cursed by feckless deep staters that handed it over to the
Soviets, rubottom and wieland, as well as the Langley contingent, see Mario Lazo or Earl T Smith, for details,
and no one seems really focused on bringing it back to civilization, unlike Ukrainia Slava, now there is not one single opposition figure even in Exile, there is that difference,
but it occurs to me, there have been demands to send troops all over the world, from bosnia to baghdad, yet there seems to be one glaring exception,
I was interested to read how Denmark has solved its immigration problems. Among the remedies was the requirement that immigrants learn Danish to be given welfare benefits. I am amazed at how many Spanish-speaking immigrants here don’t speak English after decades.
Kate:
That is a clever, out of the box, solution. Almost diabolically Trumpian. 🙂
I too wonder at all the immigrants here who don’t speak English. My father was half-Mexican and he learned English on top of his mother’s Spanish. I’m just sorry he didn’t teach me Spanish when I was young.
My father was part of the melting-pot generation.
Halcyon days.
““Darmok, his eyes uncovered.”
I wonder how many people understand this reference? I, for one, love it.
Learning another language is a big, long project. I certainly underestimated French.
Nonetheless, humans are wired to learn languages. You don’t have to be smart. It just takes thousands of hours.
Children learn languages “easily” because it is Job One and for years they are surrounded by people invested in their learning.
These days when I meet someone who has learned English to live in America, I am impressed. That’s a real accomplishment.
I’m glad I am not learning English!
Star Trek reference? That’s kind of a guess.
from a particularly cryptic episode, about an alien species that spoke in metaphor, which Picard slowly pieces together, using the epic of Gilgamesh of all things,
“Children learn languages “easily” because it is Job One and for years they are surrounded by people invested in their learning.” — Huxley
Also, small children are neurologically primed to learn it in a way that adults are not quite so much.
My father was in the Army in the 1950s and he was stationed in Germany. He never made any specific effort to ‘study German’, but by the time he had spent six years there he had a pretty good comprehension of it by immersion, and he could speak it somewhat, though not so well that he would have fooled a native.
On the other hand, late it life he mentioned that when listening to German being spoken, he could not follow it as well as he once could.
I wonder if a person would begin to lose comprehension of their milk language if they never had occasion to speak it or hear it for decades or centuries? My guess is probably not, I suspect that first childhood language is neurologically different.
Our weather in the Ohio Valley has been kind of weird. April was warm and mild, and sometimes actually hot. May has been alternatively hot and middling, some days are unpleasantly hot and then we’ll get storms and a day or two of weather more typical for April.
“Interesting….lefty friends yesterday and today are questioning how Biden’s cancer wasn’t detected sooner. ” — physicsguy
The Biden coverup has left its mark. A lot of people who just took it for granted that of course the press was honest had their noses rubbed in reality during that debate last year.
“We finally beat Medicare.” — Joe Biden
It just wasn’t possible to hide it any longer, Biden was standing up there and his incapacity was on display to be seen. ‘Women being raped by their sisters’. Confusing abortion and immigration in his answers. Standing there with a blank look on his face, his voice weak and unsteady.
This after months of reporters talking about how ‘sharp’ he was, how forceful he was in meetings, how nobody could keep up with him, how this was ‘the best Biden ever’, etc.
The media/Democratic complex has a real problem.
Star Trek: Next Generation. Good episode with Picard trying to converse with an alien that only speaks in allegory.
On a different subject, the GOP seems determined to hang onto the ‘stupid part’ crown. In Missouri, the GOP controlled legislature just voted to repeal a sick leave provision that the voters passed by 58% in November, on the grounds that it could hurt business interests.
STUPID.
This plays directly into the ‘party of the rich’ stereotype that the GOP has spent years trying to escape. It offers Dems endless opportunities for attack lines that the GOP can’t counter effectively. It has the potential to flip legislative control and lose GOP House seats in Missouri in 2026 and it _might_ be enough to cost the GOP the Missouri electoral votes in 2028.
Even if all that is avoided, it’s a stupid thing to do, it plays to the Dems’ strengths and has a huge blowback potential. That’s true regardless of the merits.
This plays directly into the ‘party of the rich’ stereotype that the GOP has spent years trying to escape.
==
Or they were getting complaints from small business lobbies about legislated increases in employee benefits and the minimum wage.
Based on my experience; if one is reasonably curious and open, after about three months of immersion in a foreign country where the language is similar to one’s native language (not Asia or Africa for me) he or she will be well on her or his way. Should be able to navigate transportation, shopping, dining out… And once one gets over those initial hurdles things just keep coming. One can do a lot of damage with about 50 verbs, 1,000 nouns and some helping words. 20 words a day over 90 days is 1,800 words. How hard is it to learn 20 words in a day if one is living in a foreign country?
Speaking English in America isn’t too rough; no gender, we mainly stick to three verb tenses. Just use “will” for future tense and add an “ed” at the end for past; you’ll be right often enough, and when you’re not people will still understand your intent (“I eated dinner.”) Sentence structure is simple (NV and NVN), tack on a “can,” “may,” “will” at the front or start with “is” to make it a question (“Is cold today?”) And Americans are friendly, patient and relatively used to non-native speakers.
That being said, I know folks who have lived for years in a foreign country and can barely order in a restaurant. Immersion is great, but there is no immersion without participation.
AesopFan,
I know nothing of the Star Trek episode or characters you reference, but do you think the writers of that scene were making an analogy to Saul of Tarsus? That’s where my mind goes when I read, “eyes uncovered” and scales falling from eyes is a common literary device, as is “road to Damascus.” And isn’t Dathon (or is it Dathan) the Old Testament figure who convinces the Israelites to form and worship a golden calf while Moses is away receiving the ten commandments?
Im pretty sure the dathan deference is not biblical*
*played by edward g robinson in the film
@Rufus T. Firefly:do you think the writers of that scene were making an analogy to Saul of Tarsus
I don’t know but Chinese has a huge fund of these allusions (chengyu) that are unintelligible if you don’t know the story behind them. For example “Lord Ye loves dragons” is something like “be careful what you wish for”. “Add feet to the snake” is something like “you ruined it by doing too much”.
But they are more like shibboleths for the educated. You don’t need to know them to communicate.
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Sometimes I want to link to an essay just because it’s so well written.
Why Keir Starmer Became an Immigration Hawk
https://archive.md/4bjek
This Dominic Green fellow just made my list of people to keep an eye on.
Interesting….lefty friends yesterday and today are questioning how Biden’s cancer wasn’t detected sooner. “Darmok, his eyes uncovered.”
Why the bill is a disaster. those holdouts are NOT grandstanding–they are addressing our economic future.
https://alexepstein.substack.com/p/how-republicans-got-roped-into-a
This has been the coldest and rainiest May in upstate NY I can recall in quite some time. I think 1992 was the last time we had a May like this. Evidently there’s a Nor’easter moving through from Wednesday to Friday, which means more rain and more cold over the next few days.
Mike Plaiss, that was a really good essay. I was interested to read how Denmark has solved its immigration problems. Among the remedies was the requirement that immigrants learn Danish to be given welfare benefits. I am amazed at how many Spanish-speaking immigrants here don’t speak English after decades. We shouldn’t allow it. One of my husband’s Croatian grandmothers was still alive when I joined the family. She spoke everyday English, could read newspapers and understand TV news, and could speak to clerks in stores, all this with only a third-grade education. Since English is the consensus language here because people have come from so many different places, we should require legal immigrants to learn the common language.
Terrible spring here in western WA. We’ve creeped up into the low 70s a couple of times but they have been just one offs and the next week to 10 days doesn’t look much better. May and June are the worst months for weather in the NW as we fritter away the long days under cloudy gloom.
@Griffin:Terrible spring here in western WA.
I’ll say this for Western Washington: if you want to know what the weather is, all you need is a calendar. If it’s July, August, or September it’s not raining. Otherwise, it is. And we rarely have storms of any kind, though we do go get frequent earthquakes and the occasional tsunami or volcanic eruption, but every place has something.
That said our “rain” is more of a drizzle. Seattle gets just about the same annual rainfall as Pittsburgh, and just about the same number of rainy days. Every major city on the Atlantic seaboard gets more rain than Seattle, though they have about 25% fewer rainy days. About 60% of Washingtonians live within 30 miles of Seattle and get roughly the same weather, though we have a lot of microclimates because of all the mountains and inlets.
And it’s much rainier as you go a short distance west. Olympia has as much annual rainfall as an Atlantic seaboard city. Points farther west get two or three times as much rainfall. In the Olympics it does little but rain, except in the summer.
The cold and rain must be a side effect of global warming somehow …
across the pond
https://substack.com/@mattgoodwin/note/c-118679405
once upon a time, this was Cuban independence day, but this small isle was cursed by feckless deep staters that handed it over to the
Soviets, rubottom and wieland, as well as the Langley contingent, see Mario Lazo or Earl T Smith, for details,
and no one seems really focused on bringing it back to civilization, unlike Ukrainia Slava, now there is not one single opposition figure even in Exile, there is that difference,
but it occurs to me, there have been demands to send troops all over the world, from bosnia to baghdad, yet there seems to be one glaring exception,
I was interested to read how Denmark has solved its immigration problems. Among the remedies was the requirement that immigrants learn Danish to be given welfare benefits. I am amazed at how many Spanish-speaking immigrants here don’t speak English after decades.
Kate:
That is a clever, out of the box, solution. Almost diabolically Trumpian. 🙂
I too wonder at all the immigrants here who don’t speak English. My father was half-Mexican and he learned English on top of his mother’s Spanish. I’m just sorry he didn’t teach me Spanish when I was young.
My father was part of the melting-pot generation.
Halcyon days.
““Darmok, his eyes uncovered.”
I wonder how many people understand this reference? I, for one, love it.
Learning another language is a big, long project. I certainly underestimated French.
Nonetheless, humans are wired to learn languages. You don’t have to be smart. It just takes thousands of hours.
Children learn languages “easily” because it is Job One and for years they are surrounded by people invested in their learning.
These days when I meet someone who has learned English to live in America, I am impressed. That’s a real accomplishment.
I’m glad I am not learning English!
Star Trek reference? That’s kind of a guess.
from a particularly cryptic episode, about an alien species that spoke in metaphor, which Picard slowly pieces together, using the epic of Gilgamesh of all things,
“Children learn languages “easily” because it is Job One and for years they are surrounded by people invested in their learning.” — Huxley
Also, small children are neurologically primed to learn it in a way that adults are not quite so much.
My father was in the Army in the 1950s and he was stationed in Germany. He never made any specific effort to ‘study German’, but by the time he had spent six years there he had a pretty good comprehension of it by immersion, and he could speak it somewhat, though not so well that he would have fooled a native.
On the other hand, late it life he mentioned that when listening to German being spoken, he could not follow it as well as he once could.
I wonder if a person would begin to lose comprehension of their milk language if they never had occasion to speak it or hear it for decades or centuries? My guess is probably not, I suspect that first childhood language is neurologically different.
Our weather in the Ohio Valley has been kind of weird. April was warm and mild, and sometimes actually hot. May has been alternatively hot and middling, some days are unpleasantly hot and then we’ll get storms and a day or two of weather more typical for April.
“Interesting….lefty friends yesterday and today are questioning how Biden’s cancer wasn’t detected sooner. ” — physicsguy
The Biden coverup has left its mark. A lot of people who just took it for granted that of course the press was honest had their noses rubbed in reality during that debate last year.
“We finally beat Medicare.” — Joe Biden
It just wasn’t possible to hide it any longer, Biden was standing up there and his incapacity was on display to be seen. ‘Women being raped by their sisters’. Confusing abortion and immigration in his answers. Standing there with a blank look on his face, his voice weak and unsteady.
This after months of reporters talking about how ‘sharp’ he was, how forceful he was in meetings, how nobody could keep up with him, how this was ‘the best Biden ever’, etc.
The media/Democratic complex has a real problem.
Star Trek: Next Generation. Good episode with Picard trying to converse with an alien that only speaks in allegory.
On a different subject, the GOP seems determined to hang onto the ‘stupid part’ crown. In Missouri, the GOP controlled legislature just voted to repeal a sick leave provision that the voters passed by 58% in November, on the grounds that it could hurt business interests.
STUPID.
This plays directly into the ‘party of the rich’ stereotype that the GOP has spent years trying to escape. It offers Dems endless opportunities for attack lines that the GOP can’t counter effectively. It has the potential to flip legislative control and lose GOP House seats in Missouri in 2026 and it _might_ be enough to cost the GOP the Missouri electoral votes in 2028.
Even if all that is avoided, it’s a stupid thing to do, it plays to the Dems’ strengths and has a huge blowback potential. That’s true regardless of the merits.
This plays directly into the ‘party of the rich’ stereotype that the GOP has spent years trying to escape.
==
Or they were getting complaints from small business lobbies about legislated increases in employee benefits and the minimum wage.
Sound familiar?
“Hurricane Ventura Shatters Portuguese Politics”—
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/analysis/hurricane-ventura-shatters-portuguese-politics/
To be compared with:
“Manufacturing Misinformation: How the EU Spends Millions To Smother Free Speech”—
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/mcc-brussels-report-manufacturing-misinformation-eu-millions-to-squash-free-speech/
(The “European Conservative” site has some very pertinent and fascinating stuff…)
Acksually, the Star Trek NG episode is named “Darmok”, and the quote referenced is “Sokath, his eyes uncovered.”
I had to look it up.
But, the point is well taken.
https://quotesanity.com/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagra-quotes/#the-most-iconic-quotes-from-darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagra
“3. “Sokath, his eyes uncovered” – Another metaphorical phrase used by Dathon, this quote represents the moment of understanding and revelation. It symbolizes the joy and enlightenment that can come from overcoming barriers and truly connecting with someone.”
huxley,
Based on my experience; if one is reasonably curious and open, after about three months of immersion in a foreign country where the language is similar to one’s native language (not Asia or Africa for me) he or she will be well on her or his way. Should be able to navigate transportation, shopping, dining out… And once one gets over those initial hurdles things just keep coming. One can do a lot of damage with about 50 verbs, 1,000 nouns and some helping words. 20 words a day over 90 days is 1,800 words. How hard is it to learn 20 words in a day if one is living in a foreign country?
Speaking English in America isn’t too rough; no gender, we mainly stick to three verb tenses. Just use “will” for future tense and add an “ed” at the end for past; you’ll be right often enough, and when you’re not people will still understand your intent (“I eated dinner.”) Sentence structure is simple (NV and NVN), tack on a “can,” “may,” “will” at the front or start with “is” to make it a question (“Is cold today?”) And Americans are friendly, patient and relatively used to non-native speakers.
That being said, I know folks who have lived for years in a foreign country and can barely order in a restaurant. Immersion is great, but there is no immersion without participation.
AesopFan,
I know nothing of the Star Trek episode or characters you reference, but do you think the writers of that scene were making an analogy to Saul of Tarsus? That’s where my mind goes when I read, “eyes uncovered” and scales falling from eyes is a common literary device, as is “road to Damascus.” And isn’t Dathon (or is it Dathan) the Old Testament figure who convinces the Israelites to form and worship a golden calf while Moses is away receiving the ten commandments?
HC68,
I think you’re right about “milk languages.”
Speaking of language
https://t.co/kS0cXLk2ie
Im pretty sure the dathan deference is not biblical*
*played by edward g robinson in the film
@Rufus T. Firefly:do you think the writers of that scene were making an analogy to Saul of Tarsus
I don’t know but Chinese has a huge fund of these allusions (chengyu) that are unintelligible if you don’t know the story behind them. For example “Lord Ye loves dragons” is something like “be careful what you wish for”. “Add feet to the snake” is something like “you ruined it by doing too much”.
But they are more like shibboleths for the educated. You don’t need to know them to communicate.