Here’s an article on a topic that interests me greatly, having been a sufferer from chronic pain of a moderate to severe nature for many years, particularly from 1990 to around 2004.
So you can bet I have a lot of strong opinions on it. One of these days I’ll write a longer post on the subject, but that day is not today (too busy!). I thought it might be a good topic for discussion in the comments section, so feel free.
This story is so bizarre I don’t know what to make of it—both the original story and the current Trump denial after supposed earlier admissions.
I’m not even going to try to wade through it at the moment, but there are tons of links there if you care to delve into it and come to your own conclusions. Here’s Allahpundit’s in-depth take on the matter.
Fun times, fun times.
And so he—that is, his Departments of Justice and Education—have issued this letter of “guidance.”
I sometimes wonder whether Obama is trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s chances of getting elected. Because I think that this “decree” is the sort of thing likely to anger a lot of people, even many liberal Democrats:
The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.
A letter to school districts will go out Friday, adding to a highly charged debate over transgender rights in the middle of the administration’s legal fight with North Carolina over the issue. The declaration ”” signed by Justice and Education department officials ”” will describe what schools should do to ensure that none of their students are discriminated against.
It does not have the force of law, but it contains an implicit threat: Schools that do not abide by the Obama administration’s interpretation of the law could face lawsuits or a loss of federal aid.
A great many schools have been already allowing transgender students to use the facilities of that person’s self-identified gender, but this has been mainly done through decisions made at the local level. I don’t think there are all that many parents—even liberal ones—who will be very happy at the Obama administration’s letter, and the Times comments section bears this out, with plenty of people saying the equivalent of “I’m a liberal, but this makes me mighty uneasy.”
Obama’s reaction: tough. Your discomfort, or that of your child, is quite irrelevant:
“A school may not require transgender students to use facilities inconsistent with their gender identity or to use individual-user facilities when other students are not required to do so,” according to the letter [from the administration], a copy of which was provided to the New York Times. A school’s obligation under federal law “to ensure nondiscrimination on the basis of sex requires schools to provide transgender students equal access to educational programs and activities even in circumstances in which other students, parents, or community members raise objections or concerns,” the letter states. “As is consistently recognized in civil rights cases, the desire to accommodate others’ discomfort cannot justify a policy that singles out and disadvantages a particular class of students.”
As soon as a child’s parent or legal guardian asserts a gender identity for the student that “differs from previous representations or records,” the letter says, the child is to be treated accordingly ”” without any requirement for a medical diagnosis or birth certificate to be produced.
In this case—as in so many others—the process by which Obama is trying to do this is very problematic. Under what authority is the federal government interfering with school rules about bathrooms? Obama’s argument is that it’s a civil rights issue and therefore not a local issue:
Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, schools receiving federal money may not discriminate based on a student’s sex, including a student’s transgender status. The guidance makes clear that both federal agencies treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of enforcing Title IX.
Would the courts, including the Supreme Court, actually enforce this in the particular way envisioned here? I don’t think it’s at all clear that this comes under the banner of discrimination by sex as it is usually defined, because it applies equally to transgender boys and transgender girls. That wouldn’t stop the highest court from saying it does, however, but the proper way to approach it is to duke it out in the courts. Don’t do this by executive fiat. But executive fiat is the way Obama prefers to do everything he can’t accomplish through Congress or the courts, or that he can’t accomplish fast enough to suit him. We can expect him to keep on pushing his agenda in this manner until his very last moment in office.
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (at least, in one of his comments) have seemed to favor something similar. Trump’s most recent statement, however, is that he thinks it should be a state issue, which is a rare instance of Trump defending federalism (which would be encouraging—that is, if he actually means it). If you want to read much more on the subject of what this means beyond the particular issue of transgendered children in school bathrooms, read this and this.
Whatever is going on with transgender students psychologically and physically (and we can, and have, argued about that on this blog, because it’s not completely clear) the schools they attend face a very difficult dilemma. Various accommodations have been made by states, or by administrators on a district-by-district or a school-by-school basis, and there have been a number of lawsuits from unhappy students, as well. The issue is working its way through the legal system. Until courts rule otherwise, there’s no reason it couldn’t have been allowed to play out that way—except, of course, that Obama and the left didn’t feel like leaving it that way and saw no reason not to use their muscle to make it happen. Yes, they can; after all, who’s going to stop them?
The Bronté« family were all geniuses, probably including brother Branwell who dissipated himself with coke and booze. Why genius ran so rampant in the family has been the subject of countless books, one of which I’m currently reading: Charlotte Bronté«: A Fiery Heart (terrible schmaltzy title, but excellent book) by Claire Harman.
Like many others, I became a Bronté« fan when I was very young and first opened Jane Eyre, which grabbed me from the moment I began to read it and never let go, fostering many subsequent readings. How old was I? Probably around 11 or 12 at the beginning, later on mostly a teenager, and then once again in adulthood. The voice of Jane is one of the most vivid and personal in all of literature, and it’s a bang-up story, too.
Not long after that first reading I plowed through sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights as well, which was much sterner stuff but still hugely fascinating and which bore repeated readings, especially for favorite parts. Later on when I saw the movie starring the achingly young Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, that didn’t hurt, either.
I never read anything by the youngest sister, Anne, but I did read Charlotte’s other novels, although they didn’t hold a candle to the great Jane Eyre, in my humble (and youthful) opinion. I also read a bunch of biographies of the family, including one dedicated to the decline of Branwell. All of the siblings died in their twenties and thirties, several of tuberculosis, leaving father Patrick to soldier wearily on until his death at 84, forty years after the death of his wife and six years after losing the last of his six children, Charlotte (the two oldest daughters had not survived childhood, dying in a manner somewhat similar to the “Helen Burns” character in Jane Eyre).
What a family. If you know anything about them, you also know that as children they were voluminous writers who created the saga of an imaginary world called Angria, an endeavor that continued well into adulthood and consumed (and helped polish) some of their formidable literary powers. But what I learned from the new biography of Charlotte I’m reading was that the Bronté« sagas were written in handwriting so microscopic as to be almost unreadable, in tiny books that might be more suitable for dollhouses.
Here’s a discussion:
Charlotte and Branwell Bronté« wrote many of their stories of Angria on tiny sheets of paper in nearly microscopic handwriting. This particular example consists of four sheets of notepaper folded into sixteen pages. The individual sheets are approximately 4 ½ inches long and 3 5/8 inches wide, and the entire text contains about nineteen thousand words…
It is unknown why the Bronté« children chose to write their stories in such tiny script, but several suggestions have been made. One is that the children may have been trying to hide their imaginative plays from their stern and religious aunt Elizabeth Branwell, their mother’s sister, who did not encourage their literary pursuits. “Aunt Branwell,” as they called her, seems to have been a somewhat forbidding and authoritarian figure for the children. If secrecy was the motivation, Charlotte and Branwell were probably successful ”“ most people cannot read the manuscript without a magnifying glass. Another possible explanation is that the children wrote to the scale of the toy soldiers that played such an important role in their imaginary world. Their fascination with the miniature may have played a material part in the mythos they developed around the world they called Angria…
However, it may have been that Charlotte and Branwell had simply developed a habit of writing in extreme minuscule. It is known that the Bronté«s produced tiny handwritten books and magazines from an early age…Charlotte’s earliest surviving manuscript is a miniature book she made at the age of ten for her sister Anne. One of Charlotte’s school friends recalled that when she asked about her tiny handwriting, Charlotte responded that she and Branwell had learned to print so small “by writing in their magazine. They brought out a ”˜magazine’ once a month, and wished it to look as much like print as possible.”
In the biography of Charlotte, it mentions that one of her Angrian works comes out to be 84 pages when printed in normal fashion and normal type, whereas in its original version (only several inches by several inches) the entire thing amounted to only 24 pages. That is extraordinary.
But one picture is worth 1,000 words (or 24 pages). This photo shows you the scale, and it gives the word “manuscript” a whole new meaning:
It would take a very special person to accept the VP position under Donald Trump.
First of all, the person has to be able to stomach Donald Trump.
Secondly, the person should be capable of lending at least the appearance of gravitas and experience to the ticket.
Thirdly, all the other usual attributes for a VP would also operate: that is, the need to balance out some of Trump’s demographic characteristics such as age or gender or race.
Fourth, Trump might throw out all of these considerations because he likes to do unusual things and surprise people.
So with all those caveats (particularly the first one), here are the people I think are in the running (in order of probability): Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Jeff Sessions, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, John Kasich, and a distant Ben Carson and even more distant Sarah Palin. Note that most of those are white men like Trump, and two are even older than Trump (Gingrich and Giuliani), so that balance thing isn’t necessarily going to operate.
The vice presidency usually doesn’t matter all that much. But for Trump as nominee it probably would matter much more than usual, for three reasons. The first is his political and office-holding inexperience. I’m not talking relative inexperience (as with Obama); I’m talking total and complete inexperience. The second is his loose-cannon character; he needs someone to make him appear less unstable. The third is his age. If elected, Trump would be 70 and the oldest president to ever assume office for the first time. His almost-certain opponent Hillary Clinton would have just turned 69 in October, which would make her the second-oldest if she won, slightly younger than Ronald Reagan when he became president for the first time. Bernie Sanders, of course, would be the oldest by several years at 75, and Biden would be 73 on election and 74 by the time of the inauguration.
Everyone’s conferring with Trump. Paul Ryan, for example.
Makes sense. They want to see what he’ll promise, what they’re willing to give, whether it’s a good idea to support him, and probably much more.
But I wonder if they understand that whatever he promises them he will do or say, whatever deal he makes, is completely mutable at his discretion. I cannot imagine why they would believe him. He contradicts himself daily (for example, now it’s that banning Muslims was just a “suggestion” and he’s not releasing his tax returns till after the election—yeah, right!). To even try to determine which is the truth—what he said yesterday, what he says today, what he will say tomorrow, or something else entirely—is a futile waste of time.
Many Trump supporters would no doubt say that’s what’s so clever about Trump—so wily, so unpredictable!
Commenter “J.J.” wonders:
How do you account for this? Hillary is on record as being for closing down the coal industry. Trump is on record as saying he will put the miners back to work. Polls today in West Virginia (a coal mining state) show Hillary beating Trump in the general. Are people listening or using their heads? They want a candidate that’s going to close down one of their major industries?
My answer is that some people are not listening. Some people probably haven’t a clue what one or the other candidate said on the subject. I don’t know what percentage of the whole that group is.
There’s another group that is listening, though, and probably even using their heads. My guess is that these West Virginians who are listening and who support Hillary fall into one of two categories. The first group would be composed of people who live in West Virgina who don’t want to protect the coal industry and just don’t care (leftist environmentalists, for example). But the second group could be composed of people who don’t think Donald Trump will keep his word, and therefore discount what he is saying and believe Hillary would help them in other ways. The don’t believe Trump and don’t trust him, so when he says he’ll put the miners back to work they think he’s pandering to him and will forget about them soon enough. Or, some of them may believe he would like to put the miners back to work but that it can’t be accomplished. But my guess is that more of them have simply come to the conclusion that they can’t trust a word Trump says.
If Trump says whatever comes into his mind at the moment—either through pique, or capriciousness, or strategic calculation—and if everything he says is mutable and changeable, merely the opening gambit of a “deal” and not from any core principles of his, then who cares what he says and who would rely on it? If Trump’s promises have no meaning in the usual sense of the word “promise,” then voters would understandably disregard them.
I have practically reached this extreme point with Trump myself. I have stated before that I do think he loves America, but that’s about it for his principles. And even his love of America is a principle he can interpret in a very flexible manner in terms of how he will act. His love for America does not necessarily lead him in any one particular direction, nor does it mean he will keep his word about anything. And I also believe that his love for himself trumps (pun intended) his love for America.
Elections are about a lot of things, and character is one of them.
None of this means I am sure I won’t vote for Trump. I may do so, but if I do so it will be one of the most execrable—perhaps the most execrable—acts of my life. If I do vote for him, it will only be because I have decided that not voting for him would be even worse.
Famous Russian dissident Vladimir Bukovsky is in big trouble.
It isn’t the first time. But what’s going on now is very disturbing, both in human terms and for what it says about the current Russian government (much of which we already knew):
Vladimir Bukovsky’s name, like that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, is synonymous with almost unimaginable bravery and resilience in the face of Soviet totalitarianism…For his efforts, he was rewarded with twelve years in the USSR’s prisons, labor camps, and psikhushkas ”” political psychiatric hospitals.
…In 1971, Bukovsky succeeded in smuggling to the West more than 150 pages documenting the Soviet Union’s abuse of psychiatric institutions to silence its opponents. Because of this, the West learned that the KGB routinely declared dissenters mentally ill to avoid embarrassing publiÑ trials and to discredit any regime opposition as the product of a diseased mind. In 1976, after months of negotiation between the Soviet and American governments, Bukovsky was exchanged for Luis Corvalé¡n, the general secretary of the Communist Party of Chile. He has lived in Cambridge, England, ever since.
It didn’t end his opposition to the excesses of the system in Russia; Bukovsky was and is not one to rest on his activist laurels. But now he has run afoul of a combination of Russian government cunning and British law:
On March 17, 2015, Bukovsky offered his sworn testimony at the much-delayed inquiry into the 2006 murder, in London, of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko…
Litvinenko also accused Putin of ordering the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya and claimed that he had been ordered to kill the Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky, who had likewise turned sharply critical of Putin’s regime…
[Having later accused Putin of having been a pedophile] Litvinenko was poisoned in November 2006 with a lethal dose of radioactive polonium-210, placed by Russian FSB operatives in his afternoon tea in a London hotel. He died 23 days later…
Bukovsky is gravely ill, and now he’s been charged (in Britain) with “five charges of making indecent images of children, five charges of possession of indecent images of children and one charge of possession of a prohibited image” (in this case, “making” can mean as little as merely downloading onto a computer) [emphasis mine]:
Bukovsky believes that Putin’s operatives planted what he says are some 20,000 indecent images of children on his computer and then tipped off the British police using Europol, the EU’s law-enforcement agency…
Shortly after he was charged, Bukovsky sued the Crown Prosecution Services for libel. His writ accuses the service of “falsely and maliciously” damaging his reputation and abusing its powers. The CPS, he claims, went well beyond its statutory duty by making defamatory claims unsupported by any evidence…
If the images were, as Bukovsky charges, planted by the Kremlin, it is clear that the object of the exercise was not to kill him. Nature was obviously well on the way to taking care of that. It was to prove to anyone tempted to follow Bukovsky’s path that the punishment for challenging the Kremlin is worse than death.
Bukovsky wants his name to be cleared before he dies. He has now gone on a hunger strike in order to get that to happen. He has stated his aims this way:
In August he took the unusual step of suing the Crown Prosecution Service for libel: he is seeking £100,000 in damages and claims the CPS has “falsely and maliciously” hurt his reputation…
Speaking at his home in Cambridge, Bukovsky said: “I’m on hunger strike not because of trying to prove anything to the FSB [Russia’s security agency]. We’ve known each other for half a century. There’s nothing new they can tell me or I can tell them. I’m doing it for the British public.”…
Bukovsky wants his libel action against the CPS to be heard before the criminal case begins. He is due to go on trial in May, with his libel case pencilled in for the summer following three postponements. “I’m denied justice, quite openly and blatantly,” he said.
The sequence will allow Russia’s state media to gleefully repeat the criminal allegations, he said, while ignoring the verdict should he be acquitted…
An online petition has been launched and more than 150 former Soviet political prisoners and their descendants have signed a letter of support, describing Bukovsky as “a man of gigantic moral stature”…
Of death, he said: “I’m not afraid of it. How can you be afraid of something inevitable? It isn’t a senseless death. It’s a purposeful death. I’m an old man anyway.” …
Of Putin, he said: “I think he’s evil.” And asked when a democratic Russia might emerge, he said: “That would be not very soon.”
That’s certainly an understatement. And I’m not at all sure that the rest of the west isn’t going in the Russian direction, too.
It’s long puzzled me why it is that so many conservatives seem to think that conservatism’s superiority to liberalism ought to be obvious, and that people would gravitate towards conservatism once they understood what it was and the logic behind it. All the country needed was an articulate, grounded conservative who could explain it in lucid terms and relate conservatism to people’s lives.
As a conservative, I came to think it would certainly be a good idea to give it a try. But I never thought it would be the least bit easy. I believe that conservatism is inherently difficult for people to accept (far more difficult than liberalism), a sort of “tough-love” approach that is counter-intuitive and seems—for want of a better word—cold.
This campaign season has revealed a number of things to me, and one of them is that a lot of people who kept clamoring for that articulate, grounded conservative didn’t really want one when they got him. He wasn’t the right one. Or they had tired of the idea. They wanted something quite different—a populist progressive with a loud mouth who spoke to their anger and frustration rather than to their conservatism.
Thus proving, once again, that conservatism is a tough sell.
In February I wrote this:
It strikes me, and not for the first time, that the Trump candidacy may represent the death knell of conservatism, probably for a long time in this country, maybe forever. Conservatism has long been a hard sell, swimming against the tide of so many cultural influences and against the gimme-ism inherent in human beings. But I don’t count it out yet.
And in April I wrote this:
…[I]t’s not at all easy to combine conservatism with winning on a national level, unfortunately. And although that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it may take someone with conservative principles plus a charismatic personality to do it (Trump lacks the former and IMHO also the latter, and Cruz lacks the latter).
The flaw is in people as a whole, not some special flaw of the Republican establishment. People like politicians who offer them pie-in-the-sky, not tough-love. Liberals and big government people sell the idea of helping and caring to the voters. Conservatives sell liberty, yes, but at what cost? Teach people to fish instead of giving them fish, yada yada yada.
So all elected officials””or people who would like to be elected””will naturally tend to drift in the direction of big government even if they didn’t start out that way. It’s not an evil design to thwart the Republican “base.” The base just hasn’t always been big enough and strong enough to counter it.
Conservatism swims against a powerful tide, the tide of people’s desire to be taken care of, and to think of themselves as compassionate and kindly. It does have one tremendous strength, though, which is to swim with the tide of people’s desire for liberty. But I wonder whether the people who value the former don’t outnumber the people who value the latter.
I’ll leave the rest to Robert Frost, in this excerpt from a talk he gave in 1960:
Naturally there’s a constant natural conflict between justice and mercy. The big joke is that somebody on earth ought to balance them up. Probably God does. It could be assumed. That is the most Godlike thing: to balance them””mercy for justice or a just mercy. But there’s something there that’s almost too hard for a mortal man to get.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are having quite a time about it right now. They both want to sound merciful enough, and they both want to sound just enough. They’re going to outdo each other in getting that right. The nice way is to choose the Democrats for being too merciful. Somebody calculated that the mercies that they promised the world were going to cost us about fifty billion dollars a year””if they did all they had in their program. The Republicans have got to sort of match that somewhere if they don’t get broke.
Human nature hasn’t changed much.
I do believe that Chopin just might be my favorite composer. I fixed on him when I was still a very young child, because he was the most-played composer to accompany my ballet classes. I didn’t even know his name at the time, but after so much repetition I knew many of his pieces inside out. Much later, I bought a multiple-record set of his entire works. And the other day I discovered that you can get a similar digital collection from Amazon for ninety-nine cents.
Yes, you can. Ninety-nine cents, total.
Chopin’s sound is sui generis. To me, he’s instantly recognizable, never predictable, always beautiful. I hadn’t known till I looked him up that he was also a virtuoso pianist and a child prodigy.
Here’s one of my many many favorite works of Chopin. How old do you think he was when he composed it? (don’t read the blurb at YouTube or scroll down here yet, because it reveals the answer):
The answer: Chopin wrote that little number at the age of seven. It’s not just that it’s beautiful, it’s that it’s remarkably sophisticated. I don’t know about you, but I think that even in the realm of the child prodigy, that achievement is prodigious. And the piece already has that signature Chopin sound.
Here is a performance that, fittingly, is by an eight-year-old. It’s not as good as the one above, but it’s pretty extraordinary. Prodigies are remarkable:
There’s a lot of talk lately about how everyone was predicting Trump would go nowhere—except, of course, his fervent supporters, who believed almost from the start that he could win the nomination.
Looking back, my recollection was that at the very beginning of Trump’s candidacy (he declared on June 16, 2015), I didn’t think he’d win, but that very quickly I understood it to be possible and didn’t ridicule the notion at all (for example, if you search for the word “clown” on this blog, you won’t ever find it used in relation to Trump). In fact, I remembered becoming fearful some time during the summer of 2015 about the possibility of a Trump nomination . As time went on, my focus was on hoping/encouraging/urging enough of the remaining candidates to drop out so that the non-Trump voters could solidify support around one or two alternatives and might manage to stop Trump’s momentum.
Unfortunately, that seemed to take forever, and by the time it happened the primaries were practically finished and Trump had amassed a nearly insurmountable lead. A bandwagon effect also seemed to take over at the very end.
Whether the whole thing was a case of the Tragedy of the Commons or a game of Chicken, or some combination of the two, it was one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever had to watch.
I don’t think the candidates themselves took Trump quite seriously enough for a long long time. Certainly not enough to get together and unite behind one or two of the strongest. Self-interest plus denial did them in. And of course some of them (in particular Christie and Carson) now seem perfectly happy to have Trump as the nominee. I also don’t think the GOP leadership took him seriously, either, because they have seemed like a herd of deer in the headlights as the car bore down on them. Their animus toward Cruz didn’t do them much good, either, once he became the main possible alternative.
For a while I’ve been wondering if my memory of my own history about Trump was correct—that is, did I really take him seriously as early as I remember doing? And then I found this, which settled the question. It was published on August 22, 2015, about two months into the Trump campaign:
From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.
If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.
So yes, I took Trump seriously, and in August I was already perturbed that his prospects seemed good and getting better. What’s more, I seemed to have been saying back then that I had already thought that way for a long time, and he’d only declared two months earlier.
I’m bringing this up not to blow my own horn (well, maybe a little), but because I’m puzzled about why so few people seemed to take Trump’s prospects seriously early on. After all, it shouldn’t have been hard to see. To perceive it, I wasn’t needing to do something esoteric like casting tea leaves or looking at Tarot cards. I was merely observing and drawing what I think was an obvious conclusion: Trump was a serious threat to win the whole thing.
My current theory about why so many people wrote him off is that they were imagining that whatever they and their buddies were feeling about him was what nearly everyone had to be feeling about him. Turned out not to be true.
The Chicago Tribune states an idea I’ve thought about quite a bit lately:
…[T]the odds are very good that the next president will be someone most voters actively dislike or even detest.
I don’t think there’s ever been a situation like that before in this country, and in some ways it’s the saddest and most outrageous thing about this election.
The Trib goes on to add:
The stark reality is that barring a political earthquake, an independent or third-party candidate has almost no chance of becoming president. Ask Ross Perot, who at one point in the 1992 campaign led George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton by double-digit margins. Despite his initial appeal and despite spending $63 million of his own money, the Texas billionaire ended up with just 19 percent of the vote ”” and didn’t carry a single state.
I ordinarily would agree that third parties have no chance. I don’t really think a third candidate has much of a chance this year, either. Except…except…note that phrase “barring a political earthquake.” Have we not already had the equivalent of one?