Lewis Carroll’s original Alice book
The real Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, created the original “Alice” stories for the young Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day when they were rowing on the Thames. The story was originally spoken extemporaneously, but the girls liked it so much that Alice begged him to write it down. And so he did, which means young Alice Liddell had not just an inspirational role in the great classic but a more direct one.
Dodgson made a handwritten and hand-illustrated copy for Alice and her sisters. The famous editions the rest of us know were illustrated by Tenniel later, but Dodgson’s concepts were different. The work is a labor of love, and Alice herself kept it till 1928 and only sold it to get money after her husband died.
See the care with which the cover is made – it must have taken Dodgson a lot of time. (After the photos load, you can make each one bigger to see the detail.)
Also this:
I love the Alice books. As a child, I really didn’t understand them. But I was drawn to them nevertheless. My very young grandchildren seem to feel the same way. And the Alice books are among those childhood classics that only get better when a person becomes an adult.
Is DeSantis a “failure” for 2024, and if so why?
On today’s open thread we have this question from commenter “Cornflour”:
From the beginning of the campaign season, I thought that nobody stood a chance against Trump, but I preferred DeSantis, and I thought he’d do much better than he has. He’s now regressed to irrelevance.
Does anybody here have a short explanation for his failure?
I’ll oblige, but it won’t be all that short.
First of all, Cornflour provides a not-insignificant part of the answer: “I thought that nobody stood a chance against Trump.” The GOP has a built-in frontrunner, and that’s Trump. He’s a former president, after all. But in the past when a former president has run for a second term it has almost always been as an incumbent. As an incumbent, the president tends not to have any viable challengers; although sometimes someone steps up to challenge him, that person usually doesn’t do very well.
One example of such a person was Ronald Reagan in 1976 when he challenged incumbent president Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination. But Reagan didn’t win that nomination. And how was he doing at this point in the race?:
In polling in June 1975, Ford led Reagan by 41%-20% in a large field, or 61%-33% in a head-to-head matchup.
And Reagan was an exceptionally strong candidate (as later history tells us), plus Ford was an exceptionally weak incumbent. He was the first unelected president, and didn’t really have much of a draw to voters except for the fact that he was the incumbent. And of course we know that he lost to Carter in 1976.
Today we have a somewhat unique situation in the GOP race. We have a former president running who is not an incumbent. But as a former president, he has a very large portion of the GOP vote already locked up. This devotion to Trump of so many primary voters on the right is not just because he was president, it’s because he also was – and remains – extremely popular on the right.
There are NeverTrumpers who supposedly are on the right, of course. And then there are people like me, who thought Trump did well as president and that from the start of his presidency until now he has been unjustly persecuted, but who feel he also has shown poor judgment in the last couple of years, and has been so tainted in the eyes of even moderate voters that the GOP would be better served by choosing a different nominee. In other words, we think Trump would be a poor candidate in the general.
The Trump loyalists disagree, to say the least. They disagree mightily, and they are numerous. They feel that Trump is owed the nomination. They want to show the leftist forces who have tried to destroy Trump that they cannot keep him down. The more charges the left throws at Trump, the more this group is determined to elevate him to the nomination.
How big is that group? I don’t know, but I think it’s a sizable portion of the GOP primary voters. Trump encourages this kind of personal loyalty and this kind of outraged support, as well as the idea that he’s owed something. In terms of justice, he certainly is owed exoneration. But that doesn’t make me feel he’d be a good candidate in the general. But lots of people disagree with me, and they will be voting in the primaries.
So Trump starts out with majority support among GOP voters, and that’s difficult and probably impossible to overcome.
But what of DeSantis himself? From the moment that Trump and his most loyal supporters got a whiff that DeSantis was thinking of running, the anti-DeSantis drumbeat began – on the right. I noticed it immediately in the blogosphere, and I wrote about it – for example, in this comment of mine from December of 2022. That’s a long time ago. Here’s an excerpt:
…[T]he campaign to discredit DeSantis is quite successful so far … considering how early it is in the game. I spend a lot of time looking at comments both here and at other blogs and media websites on the right, and it is amazing how quickly the anti-DeSantis message took off on the right side of the blogosphere. It utterly took over comments at Conservative Treehouse in almost no time at all – and that’s a blog with a huge following on the right, and there were well over a thousand comments on each of sundance’s posts about how awful DeSantis is. I saw a lot of it among Ace’s commenters as well – another huge conservative blog with a big following – as well as at Instapundit. It came to my blog almost instantaneously although certainly not as widespread, and many other blogs I looked at. Of course the left hates DeSantis, but what I’m talking about was and is all on the right and it followed Trump’s attack on DeSantis. I discussed some of the problem in this comment of mine. They were calling DeSantis “The New Jeb,” among other things.
It is still going on at a lot of popular blogs on the right. Just to take one small example, here’s a comment I saw at Instapundit just yesterday:
“DeSantis is the GOPes shitty simulacrum of Trump. He appears Trump like, hits the right notes on garbage wedge issues. When it comes down to the uniparty’s goal of selling out our country to people that want to cede our superpower status to China, he’ll be right there with them. Think of how shitty the GOP has been in practice, and that’s what a DeSantis presidency would be. He’s fully aligned himself with the Bush cabal, and I’ve seen enough pictures of GW hanging out with Obama and Clinton to know what that means.”
It got to the point where certain very popular blog comment sections were completely dominated by “DeSantis is Jeb” commenters. And that has continued, and it has been encouraged by Trump.
Before DeSantis challenged Trump, DeSantis was a hero on the right. Everything I’ve seen about his actions as governor in Florida has been bold, strong, and conservative. But I don’t think anything – and I mean that literally: anything – would change the minds of those GOP voters one might call EverTrumpers. They spread mostly lies or distortions about DeSantis, and the MSM – which wants Trump to be the nominee, as does the left, because they think he will be a weak candidate – gladly ramps up the volume plus adding the left’s own take on DeSantis as an evil villain who wants to drink the blood of everyone other than conservatives.
Then we have DeSantis himself. Simply put, he is not Trump. Nobody is – except Trump, and that has good aspects and bad. Trump is an unusually energetic and humorous candidate, a very entertaining man – that is, if you don’t hate him. He gives his supporters a kind of high, and is a lot of fun, and of course is perceived as a fighter. Neither the more sober DeSantis nor any other GOP candidate can compare in terms of those attributes, even though the traits may count for little in the general. But the GOP base has gotten addicted to Trump’s spark and his unique way of speaking and joking, as well as his obvious feistiness. Everyone else looks dull and wan in comparison.
Then there’s the issue of whether any GOP candidate could win in the general. Whether one believes fraud will prevail, or mere “rigging” of the election, or simply that the voters have moved too far left, the idea that the election is unwinnable by the right has taken hold among many people on the right. It might even be the truth; I don’t know. But that belief system doesn’t mean that voters shouldn’t be strategic when they think about whom to support for the nomination. And yet some use it as an excuse to not really even consider the general.
However, many people think Trump is the most likely of the GOP candidates to win the general, although I heartily disagree. I think they are living in a fantasy world, pumped up by anger at what’s been done to Trump and the need to avenge it. I get it, but I think the enmity against Trump is so vast and so widespread that he hasn’t a chance of winning. These people often say that, not only is Trump the only one who can win, but he’s the only one who can … fill in the blank: the only one who can drain the swamp, the only one who will fight. And yet I don’t think his track record on draining swamps when he was in office was good, and I think he commits a lot of unforced errors.
Finally, there is the fact that the campaign has hardly even begun. The first debate occurs in a month. Most people probably have seen little of DeSantis – or the other GOP candidates besides Trump – yet. But there are forces on both left and right who have made it their business to destroy DeSantis’ candidacy before the public gets to know him, and they are very strongly motivated and active. Obviously, DeSantis would need to counter those forces in order to get the nomination or at least increase his percentage of support. Time will tell whether that will happen, but he really hasn’t had much of a chance yet because it’s so early.
I don’t think that any candidate should be ruled out this early in the game, although lots of people would like people to think it’s already over for DeSantis (or RFK junior, or Vivek, or anyone else for that matter). And yet it’s in the interests of the left, the MSM, and the Trump loyalists to make people believe it’s already happened and they should turn away from DeSantis because he’s a loser. Never underestimate the power of propaganda to taint people’s perceptions.
The whole thing is sad and destructive. The coming election is exceedingly important, and this circular firing squad stuff is not going to help the right at all. But here we are.
The man who wanted to look like a border collie
Border collies are attractive dogs – but there’s a limit. If a person wants to be one, for example, I think we can safely say that a line has been crossed.
I first saw the story at Instapundit, with the following headline: “Man who spent $20K to transform himself into border collie steps out for first-ever walk in public,” and this link to a NY Post article about it.
What was my first thought? That the man had surgically altered himself to look like a collie.
That’s what it’s come to – that I, a logical person quite in touch with reality, assumed that the man had made permanent changes to that effect, and had gotten a surgeon to cooperate. The last few years have made this a plausible thought.
Fortunately, that’s not what the story was about. The money was spent for a very realistic doggie costume.
[UPDATE: A commenter helpfully points out that the costume isn’t a border collie, it’s a rough collie. True. But that NY Post URL still has “border” in it. Weird.]
Open thread 7/29/23
They don’t make ’em like they used to:
Another demonstration of two-tiered justice: more charges against Trump and a Trump employee
The two-tiered system is crystal clear at this point – and actually has been for quite some time. Here’s the latest example:
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who turned a blind eye to Biden family corruption as head of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) public integrity section during the Obama administration, slapped three additional charges on former President Donald Trump on Thursday for his alleged mishandling of classified documents. The department has also added a Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker to the original indictment.
I don’t think they really even care about maintaining a pretense of objectivity or fairness. It’s way beyond that.
Trump’s response:
“This is nothing more than a continued desperate and flailing attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their Department of Justice to harass President Trump and those around him,” the Trump campaign wrote in a statement. “Deranged Jack Smith knows that they have no case and is casting about for any way to salvage their illegal witch hunt and to get someone other than Donald Trump to run against Crooked Joe Biden.”
Correction: it’s neither desperate nor flailing, unfortunately. It’s a raw exercise of partisan power. Another correction: they want to run against Trump, because they think he will be a very weak candidate, and these prosecutions are both a way for him to rally his base and gain more sympathy on the right, and a way for him to lose even more Independents.
And I think it may work to just that effect. Trump certainly plays right along, although I believe he is sincere in thinking he would be the best candidate for the GOP to nominate.
Recently a friend of mine spontaneously declared to me that she (a) doesn’t understand why Trump would even be “allowed” to run; and (b) she thinks he should already be in prison for a long long time. I take it that this is a common mindset on the left. This prosecution is extremely popular with that group.
I’ve got a question for all you experts out there
As most of you probably know, I’ve been busy editing Gerard’s book. Quite a task, and one of my activities has been to find appropriate photos that are not copyrighted. In line with one of the essays, I’ve looked for a non-copyrighted photo of Marine basic training, and I came up with a lot of Army stuff instead. But this one seemed as though it might be of Marines, and my question is: is it Marines?
Thanks.
And speaking of changers … meet Hussein Aboubakr Mansour
As part of yesterday’s roundup, I linked to this lengthy piece on Robert Malley, negotiator with Iran for Obama and then Biden. Afterwards, I noticed the name of the author of the Malley article: Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. I became curious what his story might be, and I found this:
[Mansour] was born in Cairo and raised in a traditional Arab Muslim family. But by the age of 11, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour became radicalized and aspired to jihadism. Hear the unusual story of one man’s journey from innocence to hate to political prisoner and ultimately, to life in America and steadfast support for Israel.
Now, that seemed to be a change story worth telling. And here it is. I found his tale absolutely riveting. The interview is at the site, and I strongly suggest you listen. An excerpt:
[The process of change] was slow and painful because everything I thought about reality was being uprooted, including my own identity structure … I realized that I knew nothing, which is a terrifying idea. What was even more terrifying was that I realized that the adults around me – they also knew nothing.
There’s something that was happening [to me] that I could not stop … It’s kind of discovering that … I don’t know anything; I have to find out.”
A really intelligent and fascinating man.
Mansour has also written a memoir, which you can find here.
Detransitioner testimony in the House
Their stories are powerful stuff. You can easily see why the left, and some activist doctors and transitioners, want to silence and harass these people and others like them.
Because I’ve been following YouTube videos made by de-transitioners for a long, long time, I’m familiar with both of the people whose testimony is described in these two articles: this one as well as this. But you would do well to follow the links and read them, as well as watch this short video:
The lawsuits began a while ago, and they just might be the thing that stops this in its tracks. Here’s an article describing one of those suits:
Soren Aldaco, 21, filed the medical negligence and malpractice lawsuit (pdf) on July 21 in Tarrant County, Fort Worth, against five medical providers and their employees.
The lawsuit named Del Scott Perry with Texas Health Physicians Group, Sreenath Nekkalapu with Mesa Springs, Barbara Rose Wood with Three Oaks Counseling Group, and Richard Santucci and Ashley DeLeon with Crane Clinic as defendants.
The medical providers allegedly pressured or encouraged Ms. Aldaco to receive “treatments” that included cross-sex hormones when she was 17 years old in 2020 and the removal of both of her breasts in 2021, according to the lawsuit.
Ms. Aldaco claimed that doctors “recklessly, if not intentionally, overlooked or ignored” her history of depression, anxiety, and autism.
Chloe Cole – the woman in the video I posted – is suing, too. Here’s an article about her lawsuit. These people are just the tip of a very large iceberg.
A well-known case in England has had a rocky road, with detransitioner Keira Bell’s team losing the case on appeal (see this) because the doctors and minors’ parents were said to have the last word on the subject. Nevertheless, the Tavistock Clinic, which was the centralized gender treatment center in London, has been closed for about a year:
In July 2022, the NHS decided to close GIDS (the Tavistock Clinic) and replace it with regional healthcare centres in 2023, following the release of an interim report on the provision of gender identity services for children and adolescents conducted by paediatrician Hilary Cass.
Whether the clinic’s replacements will be any better remains to be seen.
Open thread 7/28/23
Roundup
Hey, why not do a roundup?
(1) Jill Biden’s ex-husband speaks, and let’s just say he’s not a fan of the Biden family and says they’ve been using their power against him for years.
(2) The Biden administration’s get-out-the-vote plans for the election:
… [T]he president’s 2021 directive orders every federal agency, more than 600 in all, to register and mobilize voters – particularly “people of color” and others the White House says face “challenges to exercise their fundamental right to vote.” It further orders the agencies to collaborate with ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits.
Since issuing the order, critics claim, the Biden administration has stonewalled efforts to scrutinize its implementation by often ignoring document requests and litigating to shield relevant records. The critics, including members of Congress, state officials, and government watchdog groups, say the executive branch is attempting to federalize elections with an end-run around constitutionally prescribed state control over voting – in many cases using the resources of agencies with missions unrelated to registering voters.
Some have labeled the president’s order “Bidenbucks,” evoking “Zuckbucks” …
(3) Mick Jagger turns 80. Must be all that clean living.
(4) About the transcript of the foiled plea agreement hearing for Hunter Biden. Interesting but a bit technical. More also here.
(5) Here’s another lengthy and yet very interesting article on Iran negotiator Robert Malley (who’s been temporarily removed from that post).
Julie Kelly: on the J6 “celebrity cop” versus the video
Julie Kelly has been one of the best – and most dogged – writers about January 6th and all related issues. She’s still going strong with this post. Here’s an excerpt:
For nearly two years, Capitol police officer Aquilino Gonell was off the job or on partial duty, insisting the severe physical and mental injuries he sustained on January 6, 2021 prevented him from doing his job as a federal law enforcement officer.
In news interviews and on social media, Gonell has told his sob story about how violent rioters inflicted debilitating foot, shoulder, and head injuries that day. He routinely posts images of those alleged injuries, including several photos of a foot with stitches and surgical tape and pictures of his ongoing shoulder therapy…
But new video published by reporter Joe Hanneman at The Epoch Times this week contradicts Gonell’s claims. For more than seven minutes, Gonell, highlighted in the video below, is seen moving and walking with no sign of pain…
Both shoulders appear to have full mobility; he is seen at one point kicking a medical kit and walking around without any indication either foot is injured. His hands look unscathed.
More at the link, including the video. I have to say that I’d never heard of Gonell before, hadn’t followed his story, and don’t know quite know what to make of this analysis of his veracity. For example, have any medical authorities ever corroborated his complaints right after January 6th? But at any rate, it’s certainly interesting. If he’s faking it, it wouldn’t be surprising, either. So much of what has been said about January 6th has turned out to be untrue.
There’s also this from Kelly:
A common theme in the official January 6 narrative is that police acted heroically that day and suffered violent, unprovoked attacks by Trump supporters for hours. While some officers undoubtedly displayed courage in attempting to protect the building and lawmakers as a handful of violent protesters assaulted them, officers in many instances were the instigators, prompting unnecessary physical clashes with peaceful Americans assembled in a public building.
Security camera footage shows how Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers ambushed nonviolent protesters assembled in the Rotunda of the Capitol building shortly after 3:00 p.m. on January 6, 2021.
Much more at the link, plus many videos.
Kelly concludes:
It is clear that police, on numerous occasions, did not follow proper protocol on January 6. The use of physical force and nonlethal munitions on protesters assembled outside who posed no threat of violence provoked many clashes on January 6. Not only was the aggressive behavior of D.C. and Capitol police inside the Rotunda unwarranted—completely catching people by surprise—but the building had been evacuated at 2:20 p.m. The individuals inside the Rotunda did not pose a threat to lawmakers or staff; officers should have guided people outside to clear the premises and allow Congress to restart proceedings.
It is unclear whether D.C. police officials conducted any use-of-force investigations related to the events of January 6.
I haven’t watched the videos yet – I’m in a hurry today – but Kelly has been reliable in the past, and that’s why I’m linking to her articles. You can watch and decide for yourself.