(2) This was very very very predictable: “Distributed Denial of Secrets, a leak site, claimed it received information about donors to the Canadian Freedom Convoy after activists hacked GiveSendGo.” Doxxing contributors to sites on the right is done to – among other things – discourage people from donating to such causes.
A federal judge on Monday threw out a defamation case brought by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin against The New York Times over an editorial the paper published in 2017…
As the jury was deliberating on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that Palin’s suit should be tossed because her legal team failed to produce substantial evidence that the paper knowingly and recklessly published false information about her.
Despite his ruling, Rakoff told the jury to keep deliberating to a verdict, and noted that an appeal in the case was very likely.
It is nearly impossible to prove defamation of a public figure by the standards set in Sullivan, unless the writers are foolish enough to email each other about their malicious and knowingly fraudulent plans. So it’s not the least bit surprising that it wasn’t proven. But the point of this suit always was to go to SCOTUS, and that may indeed still happen.
A saying that became popularized in relation to Watergate was, “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.” For Watergate, that was apropos. The actual crime of breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters palled compared to the efforts to cover it up – such as Nixon’s wanting the FBI to tamp down its investigation. That, coupled with the full court anti-Nixon press by the press, as well as the fact that many Republicans became in favor of impeaching and convicting Nixon, was what led to his resignation.
The press considered themselves dragonslayers, and several generations of young people went into journalism hoping for a repeat of something similarly big. Taking down a president they considered bad would be nice, but in addition they saw themselves as soldiers in a cause. The cause was liberalism which morphed almost seamlessly into leftism.
Fast forward to the Donald Trump candidacy and then the Donald Trump election. To Democrats and the press he was the enemy, and not just any garden-variety Republican enemy. They saw him as a uniquely dangerous enemy. And so they united in an attempt to bring him down, ruining the careers of some innocent people along the way, and proving that many of our seemingly trustworthy agencies were hopelessly compromised, in a relentless five-year campaign that was built on lies, undermined the country, and succeeded in turning many people against Trump who might otherwise have given him a fair chance and even approved of many of the things he did as president.
And the MSM patted themselves on the back and gave themselves Pulitzers for their great achievement.
I’ve written many times before about the Watergate-to-Russiagate comparison; just do a search for “Watergate” on this blog and you’ll find them. One of those posts (from September 2021) included this:
Two years ago I wrote a post entitled “Is Russiagate worse than Watergate?” It began this way: “Yes, it is. And not just worse; much worse.” I suppose I could now add another “much” or two – or three or four – to that second sentence. At the time I wrote that post, most of what we knew had to do with the co-opting of government agencies into the Russiagate hoax. Now we’re learning more about individuals such as lawyers and “journalists” and their roles, and of course Hillary Clinton and her aides, and how the whole thing fit into the seamless whole of a hugely influential and corrupt power structure.
So in a way I suppose I’ve said everything already. But here’s still another post, because the revelations keep getting worse. Astoundingly enough – because I gave up long ago on the investigation, and still doubt that much will come of it that will change anything – the Durham investigation marches on at a pace that would make a snail’s progress look speedy. Some of the most recent news about the machinations and plots known as Russiagate follow.
Among the reason the media might want to cover the developments in John Durham's criminal probe of the fraudulent Alfa Bank story and the crimes committed to spread it: the Clinton 2016 official at the heart of it is now Biden's National Security Advisor in charge of Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/OpBk4AdDcL
The poll, taken by TechnoMetrica Institute of Policy and Politics in New Jersey last month, asked 1300 people about what they thought about the Durham probe. What was astonishing was that almost 3/4 of those polled who were following the story wanted prosecutors to investigate her and members of her campaign for manufacturing dirt on President Donald Trump. What was most surprising about those numbers was that included 66 percent of Democrats who were following the story, a jump in 20 points from October. Among Republicans, the number was 91 percent. Among independents, it was 65 percent.
Yes, but – what percentage of Americans are following the Durham probe? Since the MSM is hardly covering it, the people who know anything about current developments are either on the right or at least read news sources on the right and are probably simpatico with them to a certain extent. In an admittedly quick perusal, I haven’t yet located a link to the poll itself, so I can’t say what sort of response rate they got.
I would be very surprised if most Democrats have heard about what’s been going on recently in the Durham probe, except perhaps that some low-level players did something-or-other that may have been slightly wrong. But all in a good cause, right?
Did you receive anything? Did you give those you love anything? Do you consider this day just an excuse for the greeting card, chocolate, and flower industries to coax us in a rather unsubtle way to buy more stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? Do people (mostly women, I’d imagine) get too demanding on this day? Is it a burden rather than a pleasure? Or do you love, love, love it?
I have an odd relationship to Valentine’s Day. It just so happens that, completely through chance and unrelated to the holiday, I’ve had some hard experiences on that day in the past. So I have no particular affection for it for historical reasons. Plus, as those who read here regularly probably know, for the last couple of decades I’ve been unable to eat chocolate without getting a migraine. Waahh! Woe is me!
But there used to be a wonderful Valentine’s Day candy that I’d look forward to all year: smallish sugar-coated red pectin hearts that were bright in color, cherry in flavor, and achingly, meltingly soft although with a slight toothsome resistance at the same time.
In short, they were perfect. And in due time, they stopped making them. Oh, you still can find cherry jelly hearts galore, but no pectin ones without those little nonpareil thingees on each heart, spoiling the delectable softness with their crunch.
[NOTE: This is a slightly-updated version of a previous post.]
This interview – one among many with the Bee Gees on YouTube – was from around 1989. After the Bee Gees’ early ballad success in the 60s and then their enormous disco domination in the late 70s, American DJs turned on them and wouldn’t play their music anymore. So the trio spent the 80s writing huge hits for other people:
For two examples of the hit songs they wrote for others during the 80s, here they are (also in 1989) performing a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick and another they wrote for Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. You may recognize the songs but not realize the Bee Gees wrote them:
[NOTE: This post was inspired by a discussion in the comments in this thread.]
I don’t speak German at all except for a few words. In fact, foreign languages aren’t my forte, although I’m sensitive to sounds.
Until a few years ago I’d always considered German to be an ugly language. It’s got all those gutturals, for example:
In popular consciousness, languages that make extensive use of guttural consonants are often considered to be guttural languages. English-speakers sometimes find such languages strange and even hard on the ear.
But then I had a long talk with a relative who was a linguistics major and who said that German was not really ugly or uglier than other languages, it was the associations it had, both historic and social. We argued about that for a while.
Later I came to agree at least somewhat with him. There’s of course the Nazi connection, but there’s also a tendency to hear the language (in American movies, for example) uttered very harshly even by non-Nazis, and with a barking quality. Was that influencing my perceptions of the sound of the language?
Here’s a person who speaks many languages, and who contends that increased familiarity with a language breeds both contempt and acceptance, tempering the sound of languages originally thought ugly, and uglifying the sound of those originally thought beautiful:
The Italian language isn’t an beautiful art piece being produced by an Italian, it’s the brush used to paint it. The Spanish language isn’t a sculpture presented by Spaniards and Mexicans and Columbians, et al., it’s the chisel being used to form it. It’s a tool.
And the same thing is true in reverse: German and Russian and Polish aren’t the brutal thuggish languages they seem like either. We only assume that because our own attempts to make their sounds feel unnatural. But to the native speaker, these languages are tools. They flow. They glide over those difficult sounds, and in that flow, when you listen, you’ll hear the beauty that you yourself failed to produce in your early attempts to speak it.
Although I still have no idea how to speak German, something of the sort happened to me as I became more familiar with the language through repeated listenings to the opera “Hansel and Gretel,” as well as reading certain German poems. The more I heard German and read the translations, the less ugly it sounded to me and the more neutral (not exactly beautiful, but sometimes bordering on it).
And as my linguistics relation pointed out – look at the list of languages that use gutturals. It contains several languages that many people find rather beautiful or at least charming, such as French (the R sound), Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh. So I really think there’s something about other associations with a language, both good and bad, that make us hear it a certain way.
With “Hansel and Gretel,” at first I much preferred the English version of the opera (there have been many translations over the years). The German sounded alternately harsh, silly, obscure, or almost comical (sometimes it was meant to sound comical).
But as I grew to know the opera better, I began to notice a few things. One was the frequent use of diminutives in the German. I was already familiar with this from Scottish – “wee” this and “wee” that, and in my favorite poem by Robert Burns, “To A Mouse,” it’s really apparent. I challenge you to find any lines in any major poem in any language that are more cutesie-poo than the following by Burns in that poem, and yet I love the poem intensely (including those diminutives which stopped seeming strange and ended up enhancing the effect). The entire poem actually expresses some extremely deep insights into the nature of existence, both human and animal:
Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,.
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Likewise, in the “Hansel and Gretel” opera, the libretto is chock full of the suffix “chen,” which isn’t usually translated at all in the English librettos. For example, take the famous “Brother, Come and Dance With Me” song the siblings sing towards the beginning of the opera. In German we have:
Brüderchen, komm, tanz’ mit mir,
beide Händchen reich’ ich Dir;
It’s usually translated into the English version of the song as something like “Brother, come and dance with me, both my hands I offer thee” (that’s what I learned in grade school anyway). Instead, you should have something like “Little brother (or “wee brother”?), come and dance with me, both my little hands (or handsies?) I offer thee…”
Then later in the song we have:
Mit den Füsschen tapp tapp tapp,
mit den Händchen klapp klapp klapp,
That’s usually rendered as “with your foot you tap tap tap/With your hands you clap clap clap” (sung with suitable accompanying gestures). But – and I bet now you’ve got the idea – it’s really something like “With your little foot (your footsie!) you tap tap tap, with your little hands (handsies) you clap clap clap.” In a later verse we get your “Köpfchen” going “nick nick nick,” and your “Fingerchen” going tick tick tick.
Lest you feel that’s so cloying you might just barf this very instant, let me reiterate that it’s not translated into English because English isn’t that sort of language, but German apparently is (like Burns’ Scottish vernacular). Or was. After all, kitsch is a German word (as is schadenfreude, but that’s a very different story). I’ll add that, for whatever reason, all those “chens” are a perfect fit for Hansel and Gretel, and only highlight the contrast between the little children and the evil they encounter – and triumph over – later on.
But “chen” was hardly diminutive enough for the librettist (who was composer Humperdincks’s sister, by the way). And it certainly isn’t enough for German, because when we get tired of “chen” we still have “lein.” Same deal: a “suffix used to create a diminutive form; e.g. Kind ? Kindlein…”
And kindlein it is for “Hansel and Gretel,” a suffix that appears often in the opera (such as, of course, to make Hanselein and Gretelein, nicknames the children call each other but which are never transferred to the English versions, as far as I know). Apparently in modern-day Germany “lein” is considered a bit archaic and poetic, and “chen” is more popular, but back when the opera was composed, “lein” must have been more common.
I’m not making this stuff up. Here’s an article called “How To Make Words Cute in German” that explains it for you:
By adding “chen” to the end of any word, it will automatically become the German Diminutive (meaning, a tiny version of itself) — and always carry the article “das”…
Even though Germans may applaud your grammatical accuracy, if you speak like this too much they will question your sanity and wonder what kind of adorable miniature wonderland you take this place for.
But it’s hardly just cutesiness that made me grow fond of the German used in the opera. There’s a certain gravity to it, as well, for the scary parts. For example, when the children are lost in the forest, and Gretel is getting especially scared – as is Hansel, but although he tries to cover it up – he sings:
Horch, wie rauscht es in den Bäumen! —
Weisst Du, was der Wald jetzt spricht?
„Kindlein!“ sagt er, „fürchtet ihr euch nicht?“
Hark, what a noise in the bushes!
Know you what the forest says?
“Children, children,” it says,
“Are you not afraid?”
The English translation leaves out the diminutive, as usual, but I find it more moving if the forest says “Little children, are you not afraid?” in German. The accompanying music sends a shiver down my spine, being both gentle and ominous. It’s followed by one of the most frightening transitional lines in the opera, the moment when the children go from the world of childhood and home and playing lightheartedly in the forest, to the whiff of very real danger. Hansel sings, very simply:
Gretel! Ich weiss den Weg nicht mehr!
The stage directions in English go like this: “Hänsel spies all around uneasily, at last he turns in despair to Gretel” and makes this terrible admission: “Gretel, I cannot find the way!” (no diminutives, no cutesy stuff at all) as the music slows down and gets rather quiet, and the pitch lowers in a series of steps.
Once I learned what the characters were saying in German – having read the translation – I found the original lyrics more powerful and meaningful than any translation. The German ceased to sound strange and began sounding expressive – and authentic; after all, this is based on a German folktale.
Here’s one version, showing the part where the children get frightened and realize they are lost and at the mercy of the forces of the dark forest. I’ve chosen this one because it’s in German but has handy English subtitles, not because it’s necessarily my favorite version:
[NOTE: I’m not at all sure I’m finished with this topic, but I’ll stop for now. I think I may do another post on translation, particularly in this opera but not limited to it.]
I wish I had something more intelligent to say about the imminent crisis in Ukraine than “I don’t know what will happen.” I’ve read quite a bit about it and can’t get enough clarity on it to write an analytical post. There’s no source I especially trust on this, although I suppose someone‘s prediction will end up being right.
And so I decided to just put up this thread, with links (I like the title of this one, at least: “Only Putin Knows What Happens Next”; see also this and this).
This video has been making the rounds. It shows Las Vegas schoolchildren’s wild glee at being told that starting tomorrow they can ditch their masks.
They’ve certainly suffered more than enough with this, but one of the things I find so interesting about the video is how their reactions differ depending on the personality of each child. For some, the response is a wild physical outburst, jumping for joy over and over or spinning and screaming. But one boy towards the front, seated at a laptop, lets out one scream and then goes back to his computer, and a girl in the back merely claps sedately. Some kids even seem maskless from the start, and others rip off their masks, twirling them around and around in jubilation:
By William Blake, “The School Boy,” circa 1789:
I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me:
O what sweet company!
But to go to school in a summer morn, –
O it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.
Ah then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning’s bower,
Worn through with the dreary shower.
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!
O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay, –
How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?
The Canadian authorities have moved in on the truckers, who have mostly dispersed:
A lot of the people who were there last night went home and haven’t come back yet. It’s not clear if they will ultimately leave, although some did…The protesters are now talking with the police and chastising them for not supporting freedom. The protesters are saying that the government is concerned about the blockage at the bridge being bad for the economy, but they didn’t seem to mind how the restrictions and mandates in Canada have truly harmed the economy, the country, and people’s lives.
Police have moved to push them out. But so far, they have not arrested anyone yet; they just seem to be standing there right now.
That was written this morning. This article indicates that the dispersal may be complete, but it’s not totally clear whether that is the case. If so, though, I’m not surprised. They may regroup elsewhere. I doubt this is over, and of course it has spread to other countries.
But the bottom line with these things is always this: how far each side is willing to go. The ironic thing is that the truckers – who have been so vilified by the government – are so nice. They don’t want to hurt anyone or be hurt, and they don’t want to lose their jobs.
Above all, they don’t want to go to prison and be locked away like the January 6 demonstrators in the US, about whom they’ve probably heard. Our government’s coming down so hard on the 1/6ers (as opposed to on the Antifa/BLM rioters) was extremely purposeful and sent a message that this will be your fate if you defy the government, even peacefully (as all of those charged with trespassing demonstrate) – if you’re on the right or even in the middle, that is.
A turning point would be if the police refused to cooperate in clearing the demonstrators away. That turning point has not been reached, and I don’t know whether it ever will.
When I was a child, Lincoln had a birthday all his own. Nowadays he’s lumped in with other presidents. And who knows where he’ll be in the future?
When I was a child, Lincoln also fascinated me more than any other president. One reason was a superficial one: he was just about the strangest-looking president ever (see this). Another was his eloquence, and a third was his sense of humor.
Which brings us to a series of Lincoln quotes. This first one seems especially apropos today:
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
More:
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
It’s not me who can’t keep a secret. It’s the people I tell that can’t.
I hope this prediction is correct:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
And of course, one of the most famous:
If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
A CNN poll for Jan/Feb of 2022 has revealed that only 17% strongly approve of Biden and 27% moderately approve, whereas 41% strongly disapprove and 17% moderately disapprove.
What’s more, 56% of respondents could find nothing whatsoever that Biden has ever done that has earned their approval. And among those who could manage to find a thing or two that he’s done to their liking, the percentages were incredibly small for each one, mostly in single digits and low single digits at that.
If you look at the changes over time for each element asked about, you can see how Biden’s approval has dropped. Even for COVID handling, which was probably his strongest point of approval – although I can’t imagine why – he is now significantly underwater.
If you study the answers to questions 8a and 8b (page 11), which asked people what the government’s top priority and next top priority should be, you’ll see that the top issues respondents want addressed are all ones that conservatives are pushing: reducing inflation, protecting voting rights in the U.S. (that could go either way, I guess, because each party defines it very differently), ensuring that U.S. borders are secure, and reducing the rate of violent crime. COVID is way way down on the lists, and climate change issues aren’t very high, either.
I’m never quite sure what Biden’s high disapproval numbers truly signify, though, because it seems to me that a number of people disapprove because he hasn’t been able to accomplish their leftist dream goals in the first year of his administration. But seeing the list of topics on which he has so little approval makes me think it’s more than that.
Of course, we have to add the usual caveat on polls and their validity or lack thereof. But I can’t imagine why CNN would want Biden’s numbers to be so low, unless their goal is to warn the administration that it’s time to retire good old Joe before more people turn away from the Democratic Party in general. Of course, Biden’s not really the main source of the problem and getting rid of him won’t change that. But they would like someone in there who’s a better pretender at competence and even-handedness.
Our Founders set up our republic in a certain way because they were students of history, and also because they were extremely thoughtful and smart. They had studied the history of governmental rise and decline and fall, tried to learn the lessons it conveyed, and were going to make a valiant effort to create something different and better. They anticipated as many pitfalls as they could, although they also realized that such problems could not all be avoided over time. The Founders understood that this republic might not last forever, but they wanted to build in all the safeguards they could think of in order to help it last as long as possible and protect liberty as much as possible while avoiding anarchy.
The majority of them therefore wished to limit the power of government and of the federal government in particular. That wasn’t just because they were curmudgeons who didn’t want government to do all sorts of wonderful things for people. It was because they knew that such power inevitably would be abused and liberty would die. Power is simply too tempting.
Which brings us to Justin Trudeau. He has yielded to such temptation, and although he’s certainly not the only one, he’s especially visible right now in a way that Canadian prime ministers usually aren’t.
Does Trudeau not realize that history tells us that thwarting a huge populist movement and insulting its participants might not be a good move? But what does Trudeau know about history, anyway?
That’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.
I realize, of course, that Trudeau is a leftist, and as such he may believe that he’s exempt from the lessons and errors of the past even if he knows about them. But I wonder if he does know them. For example, did Trudeau ever study history in any depth? Looking at his Wiki profile, I see no evidence of any such study, except for whatever might have been required in grade school and college. His college major was literature and then he got another degree in education. He went on to teach math and French, and later to study engineering and environmental geography without getting degrees. He entered politics instead.
Of course, one needn’t study history formally to be interested in it and read a great deal about it. But I see no indication of that, although I can’t say I’m expert on what Trudeau does in his spare time.
But perhaps even more importantly, Justin Trudeau had a most usual upbringing, having been born when his father, Pierre Trudeau, was the prime minister of Canada. Until shortly before his eighth birthday, he resided in the prime minister’s official residence with his father (his parents divorced when he was five). Less than a year after his father’s brief time out of office, his father was re-elected and they moved back into that residence for another four years.
It would not have been surprising if Justin Trudeau had considered the prime minister’s residence his childhood home, and even that it was his birthright to live in it once again. After all – and this is a very odd detail indeed:
On April 14, 1972 [when Justin was only about 10 months old], Trudeau’s father and mother hosted a gala at the National Arts Centre, at which visiting U.S. president Richard Nixon said, “I’d like to toast the future prime minister of Canada, to Justin Pierre Trudeau” to which Pierre Elliott Trudeau responded that should his son ever assume the role, he hoped he would have “the grace and skill of the president”. Earlier that same day U.S. first lady Pat Nixon had come to see him in his nursery to deliver a gift, a stuffed toy Snoopy. Nixon’s White House audio tapes later revealed Nixon referred to that visit as “wasting three days up there. That trip we needed like a hole in the head.”
I realize that Justin was way too young at the time to have known what Nixon said about him. But he probably heard the story later on, plus many more in the same vein. So did he consider himself the heir apparent? The prince ascending to the throne?
[NOTE: In related news, the Ontario government tries to stop the truckers’ GoFundMe replacement, GiveSendGo, from helping the truckers:
BREAKING: The Ontario government says it has effectively frozen all donations made to the trucker convoy through GiveSendGo. It is now a criminal offence to have any "dealing" with money from donations through this platform. pic.twitter.com/EhWWqe1V6J
