Another horrific school shooting

The New Neo Posted on by

This time in Texas near Galveston, with 10 people reported dead and the shooter in custody, wounded.

If this incident is like so many others (and my guess is that it is): (1) the actual facts will only come out slowly and laboriously, with many errors; (2) the event will be used to make political points against the right and firearms; and (3) it will emerge that no form of new gun control law being advocated in its wake would have had an effect on this particular shooter, who (4) was probably known or should have been known as a potentially violent person.

RIP to the dead, and comfort to their families.

[NOTE: See also this, about some of the early spin.]

Crossfire Hurricane: the FBI spied on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

In a very long article in the NY Times, the newspaper tries to get ahead of the forthcoming IG report by admitting a couple of things, but burying and/or downplaying them. Par for the course.

Rather than re-invent the wheel and fisk the Times myself, I’ll defer to experts who have already done it. First we have Mollie Hemingway at The Federalisit, who offers ten key takeaways from the Times article, some of which I’ll briefly summarize here (please read the whole thing, however):

Whereas FBI officials and media enablers had previously downplayed claims that the Trump campaign had been surveiled, in this story we learn that it was more widespread than previously acknowledged…

…This is a stunning admission for those Americans worried that federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies might use their powers to surveil, leak against, and target Americans simply for their political views or affiliations.

“Stunning” only to the right; the left considers it a fine way to cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil.

Hemingway also points out that the Times article admits that after two years of this, there is still no evidence of collusion on the part of the Trump campaign. And the extent of the spying by the FBI was broader than previously disclosed:

Now we learn that it wasn’t just Page, but that the government was going after four campaign affiliates including the former campaign manager, the top foreign policy advisor, and a low-level advisor whose drunken claim supposedly launched the investigation into the campaign…

The surveillance didn’t just include wiretaps, but also national security letters and at least one government informant to spy on the campaign.

Hemingway has many other points to make, but I’m going to discuss just one of them, number seven:

One thing that is surprising about the [Times] story is how many errors it contains. The problems begin in the second sentence…

Hemingway lists a whole bunch of egregious errors, things that could easily have been ascertained with simple fact-checking. But I disagree with two points she makes here. The first is that it is surprising how many errors the story contains. It is not surprising; it is the Times’ modus operandi. What’s more, they are not actually errors. IMHO, they are purposefully and knowingly misleading. This is propaganda, not reporting, and the Times is very good at it.

How many people read the Times and/or use it as a reliable source? A great, great many—even though the right doesn’t trust it, many others still do. How many people read Mollie Hemingway in The Federalist? I think everyone should, but I would wager a guess that it’s a lot fewer than are reached by the NY Times. And the Times knows it, and they aim to keep it that way.

Now we turn to Andrew C. McCarthy. As usual, his take is not only clear, but he also gives a learned legal perspective on an element that few others have pointed out, the difference between a criminal investigation and a counterintelligence one (and again, please read the whole thing if you can) [the italics are McCarthy’s, but the passages in bold are my emphasis]:

What the Times story makes explicit, with studious understatement, is that the Obama administration used its counterintelligence powers to investigate the opposition party’s presidential campaign.

That is, there was no criminal predicate to justify an investigation of any Trump-campaign official. So, the FBI did not open a criminal investigation. Instead, the bureau opened a counterintelligence investigation and hoped that evidence of crimes committed by Trump officials would emerge. But it is an abuse of power to use counterintelligence powers, including spying and electronic surveillance, to conduct what is actually a criminal investigation.

The Times barely mentions the word counterintelligence in its saga. That’s not an accident. The paper is crafting the media-Democrat narrative. Here is how things are to be spun: The FBI was very public about the Clinton-emails investigation, even making disclosures about it on the eve of the election. Yet it kept the Trump-Russia investigation tightly under wraps, despite intelligence showing that the Kremlin was sabotaging the election for Trump’s benefit. This effectively destroyed Clinton’s candidacy and handed the presidency to Trump…

It’s also bunk. Just because the two FBI cases are both referred to as “investigations” does not make them the same kind of thing.

The Clinton case was a criminal investigation that was predicated on a mountain of incriminating evidence.

…The scandal here is that Mrs. Clinton was not charged. She likes to blame Comey for her defeat; but she had a chance to win only because the Obama Justice Department and the FBI tanked the case against her ”” in exactly the manner President Obama encouraged them to do in public commentary.

By contast, the Trump case is a counterintelligence investigation. Unlike criminal cases, counterintelligence matters are classified. If agents had made public disclosures about them, they would have been committing crimes and violating solemn agreements with foreign intelligence services ”” agreements without which those services would not share information that U.S. national-security officials need in order to protect our country.

In the scheme of things, though, the problem is not that the FBI honored its confidentiality obligations in the Trump case while violating them in the Clinton case. The scandal is that the FBI, lacking the incriminating evidence needed to justify opening a criminal investigation of the Trump campaign, decided to open a counterintelligence investigation. With the blessing of the Obama White House, they took the the powers that enable our government to spy on foreign adversaries and used them to spy on Americans ”” Americans who just happened to be their political adversaries.

The Times averts its eyes from this point ”” although if a Republican administration tried this sort of thing on a Democratic candidate, it would be the only point.

There is what happens, and then there is the story, and then there is the story about the story.

[NOTE: Of course, it all conjures up this. It’s interesting to go back and look at that, considering what we know now.]

More racial woes at Starbucks

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought this was some sort of joke at first, mainly because I’d never heard the word “beaner” as a slur against Mexicans:

Nearly two weeks ahead of their day of nationwide racial bias training, coffee chain Starbucks is facing new accusations of racism after a Latino customer discovered a racial slur written on his coffee order.

A Latino man named Peter received a cold coffee drink labeled “BEANER.”

“En espaé±ol es ”˜frijoleros’, ”˜beaner,’ you know, in English,” said the victim’s friend Miguel Acosta.

“He went to Starbucks, and they asked for his name, and his name is ”˜Peter,’ and they wrote this ”˜beaner,’ Acosta told CBS2 News through a coworker who was translating. “And he’s saying that’s not fair.”

But hey, you learn something new every day, and today I learned that “beaner” can indeed be used that way:

Beaner is derogatory slang for Mexicans or people of Mexican descent. The term originates from the prevalence of pinto beans and other beans in Mexican cuisine…

It appears that the term may be going through a phase of melioration, where the negative connotation of an ethnic slur is “reclaimed” by those against whom it is directed and used in a neutral or even positive manner.

It seems that Peter isn’t interested in “reclaiming” beaner, though.

I have three things to say about the incident.

The first is that in any organization as large as Starbucks, with as many employees as it has, of course there are going to be incidents in which an employee does something wrong or behaves badly. Real racism exists. No company is immune, and each incident can be handled on its own merits without making a federal case out of it or needing to boycott the business—although in today’s social media frenzy, that’s exactly what people want to do.

The second is that quite a few of these incidents turn out to be hoaxes. This one may or may not be.

The third is that there is a simple explanation that might even be true. It is connected—strangely enough—to the post I just put up a few minutes ago, before I had ever seen this “beaner” story. If Peter’s friend Acosta is any indication, Peter may have said the name “Peter” with an accent (can I say that without being racist?). The Starbucks employee taking the order may have heard something that sounded to him or her like “beaner,” and thought it was Peter’s name, because the two words really do sound quite a bit alike. In addition, maybe (like me) the employee had never heard the word “beaner” used as a pejorative. The whole thing may have been an innocent mistake.

But we’re not allowed to have innocent mistakes anymore.

So which is it, Yanny or Laurel?

The New Neo Posted on by

The latest internet craze is to listen to the audio and answer the burning question of whether you hear “Yanny” or “Laurel.”

I heard “Yanny”—or rather, just to show you what a weirdo I am, I actually heard “Yammy.” Close enough.

The explanation:

Computer synthesis programs can produce unnatural sounds that fall on the boundaries between the two sounds. The listener will place these chimeric sounds into one category or the other depending on the best match. Because humans have differences in their auditory function and category boundaries, some will hear ”˜Yanny,’ while others will hear ”˜Laurel.’…

“You will never confuse ”˜Yanny’ and ”˜Laurel’ when spoken by actual talkers, because they can only produce natural sounds that fall within the distinct parameter spaces of the two sounds.”…

Tinny speakers, like the ones on TV sets and laptops, tend to emphasize the higher frequencies, which brings out the “Yanny.” Older people, who have begun losing some of the higher frequencies in their hearing, are more likely to hear “laurel.”

And those older people who have begun losing some of the higher frequencies are more likely to be male than female, so my guess is that more of the older men hear “Laurel” than women do.

In no surprise at all…

The New Neo Posted on by

…most of the people the IDF killed during the March of Return have been members of Hamas—and that’s according to Hamas itself.

But remember:

[A]n emotional Glaude lashed out at Israel: “All of that is important. And all of those babies are dead. All of those people are dead. They’re dead. And we are talking about racehorses. I mean the politics,” he exclaimed sounding as though he were on the verge of tears…

“I mean, there are a lot of folks who are dead today. For what? I’m sorry, this is me being a moralist, I suppose,” he added, serruptitiously patting himself on the back. Host Katy Tur even thanked him for his ridiculousness, saying, “I’m happy you’re always the moralist. You bring it back down to Earth, that’s important.”

If any babies were killed—and we don’t know whether they were—it would be because Hamas cold-bloodedly decided to put them in among a bunch of terrorists in order to create sympathetic martyrs.

And don’t sit on a hot stove waiting for the MSM to retract all the Israel-bashing.

RIP Tom Wolfe

The New Neo Posted on by

Writer Tom Wolfe has died at 88.

Reading a lot of commentary around the web, I notice that Wolfe was a deeply meaningful writer to a great many people, some of whom say he changed their lives. I have to be honest and say that the Tom Wolfe phenomenon passed me right by; I don’t think I’ve ever read a full-length work of his, just some of his articles. I may have to remedy that failing of mine.

So that doesn’t make me the best person to eulogize Wolfe. I have long been aware of him, however, and his influence. Radical chic? Wolfe coined the phrase, and it stuck. The Me Decade, likewise. He had a way with words, Wolfe did.

Here’s an article from 2015 that sheds some light on what made Wolfe Wolfe:

[Wolfe] doesn’t use his new experience of East Coast sophisticates to distance himself from his southern conservative upbringing; instead he uses his upbringing to distance himself from the new experience…

He’d gone to Yale with the thought he would study his country by reading its literature and history and economics. He wound up discovering sociology””and especially Max Weber’s writings about the power of status seeking. The lust for status, it seemed to him, explained why otherwise intelligent American writers lost their minds and competed with one another to see just how devoted to the Communist cause they could be. In a funny way, Yale [where his professors rejected the first version of his dissertation as being too critical of Communist-friendly writers] served him extremely well: it gave him a chance to roam and read and bump into new ideas. But he didn’t immediately see that:

These stupid fucks have turned down namely my dissertation, meaning I will have to stay here about a month longer to delete all the offensive passages and retype the sumitch. They called my brilliant manuscript ”˜journalistic’ and ”˜reactionary,’ which means I must go through with a blue pencil and strike out all the laughs and anti-Red passages and slip in a little liberal merde, so to speak, just to sweeten it. I’ll discuss with you how stupid all these stupid fucks are when I see you. [T.W., aged 26, letter to a friend, June 9, 1956.]

After Yale, Wolfe no longer felt the need to “slip in a little liberal merde.” He’d had enough for a lifetime—a long and productive lifetime, as it turns out.

Another thing that would be almost impossible to miss was Wolfe’s sartorial signature, the white suit. It made him stand out, which I assume was the goal. It gave a fourfold message: here was a person who was unique, Southern, conservative, and bold, all at the same time.

RIP, Tom Wolfe:

[NOTE: Here’s the original “Radical Chic” article by Wolfe, published in New York magazine.]

Now I know why I’m not an endurance athlete

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s because I’m too introspective.

Introspection is a no-no for extreme athletes, according to this article on the subject.

Oh, there are a few other reasons, too. One is that I’m not crazy, and another is that I don’t like pain and when my body says “stop” I’m inclined to say “sure thing.”

Of course, blogging is a sort of marathon, and requires more than a little bit of OCD. But not like this:

Five weeks in [trying to set a new record for traversing the Appalachian Trail], [Jurek] was down more than a dozen pounds, and his ribs were visible. His eyes bulged, feral and unfocused. His body reeked of apple-cider vinegar as his sweat excreted excess ammonia. And his mind was beginning to crack. Late one night, he was mystified by the lights of a house he spotted on top of a mountain. A running partner had to explain that what he saw was the moon…

Just seven days into navigating the rocky, often rain-soaked path , Jurek was already overcome by doubt. In agony, one quadriceps torn and the kneecap on his other leg severely inflamed, he was overtaken by the demon that success had so long shielded him from: “Why was I even out here in the first place?” he asked, hobbling beneath a canopy of oak branches. A mantra favored by one of the many veteran ultra-runners who accompanied Jurek for parts of the trail provided his answer: “This is who I am, and this is what I do.”

In other words, don’t ask why. Breaking through his own limits makes Scott Jurek Scott Jurek, for whom the mantra served to help reaffirm the value of his long-guarded myopia. Damp and miserable in North Carolina, he wrapped athletic tape around his battered legs and limped onward.

He set a new record at 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes, beating the old one by three hours. However, his record has since been broken twice.

To someone like Jurek, it matters very much who holds that record, and he held it for a little while. Plus, he knows he endured, he stayed the course, he accomplished what he set out to do despite enormous obstacles. That’s a personal achievement.

But to the rest of us, do we really care who is the record-holder, Jurek or somebody else?

Mueller: one smart fellow, he felt smart

The New Neo Posted on by

Robert Mueller hasn’t exactly been covering himself with glory lately.

Among other things:

At the arraignment [of the Russian company accused by Mueller of having tried to influence the US election], Concord’s lead counsel, Eric Dubelier, was asked whether he represents Concord Catering, another one of the charged Russian companies. He replied that he did not and added, “I think we’re dealing with the government having indicted the proverbial ham sandwich. That company didn’t exist as a legal entity during the time period alleged by the government.”

Then, hinting at more of the graymail yet to come, he remarked darkly that, “We now know that the special counsel apparently has access to [Concord’s] confidential filings at the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which in and of itself is a disturbing fact.”

Dubelier stated, “Your Honor, we waive formal reading of the indictment. We enter a plea of not guilty. We exercise our right to a speedy trial.”

So, what does all of this mean? Metaphorically speaking, it would appear that the yapping dog [Mueller] chasing the car has sunk its teeth into the spinning tire. There is no way for Rover to escape injury. Even if Mueller and his pit bulls win the discovery battle and the case at trial, what’s the prize? A $500,000 fine or compensation to victims? How will they collect?

This is a no lose situation for Concord and a self-inflicted wound for Mueller. And, as the saying goes, self-inflicted wounds are always the most painful.

As I read those words, I thought “unforced error.” And sure enough, in the next sentence:

More importantly, this unforced prosecutorial error is a victory for 63,000,000 Americans who voted for Donald Trump and strongly oppose having the outcome of the election undone by Mueller’s politically motivated and rigged investigation. It will be a pleasure to see Team Mueller dragged kicking and squealing into an American courtroom where for it the process will be the punishment.

First Comey, now Mueller, are being exposed as a great deal less smart (and certainly less honest) than their previous reps would have had us think. About a year ago when Mueller was first appointed special counsel, I couldn’t remember much about him. I looked him up and wrote the following:

Who is Mueller? He was appointed by President George W. Bush, confirmed unanimously by the Senate, and took office as FBI director just one week before 9/11, serving his 10-year term in that position. He continued in the office for two years beyond that at Obama’s request, and was replaced in 2013 by Comey.

How objective will Mueller be in this role [special counsel]? I cannot predict, but I caution that when Comey first took office he was uniformly praised as incredibly intelligent and fair. We all know how that worked out. But one can hope.

Trump fired Comey, but there’s no real need to fire Mueller, because at the moment he appears to be self-destructing. That doesn’t mean he still can’t be dangerous, because of his unfettered power. But he really does seem to be in the process of hanging himself (metaphorically speaking) with just enough rope.

[NOTE: The title of this post comes, of course, from this:

Charming lady.]

Fourth generation warfare against Israel

The New Neo Posted on by

The media’s collusion with the Palestinians in condemning Israel and distorting and misrepresenting what is happening there has a long history, and this week’s events have given them lots of opportunity to continue that approach. They haven’t been shy about taking it.

For example:

With very little attention given to the fact that the terrorist organization Hamas, which runs Gaza, was directing its people to storm the security fence that lines the Israeli border, CBS anchor Jeff Glor and Foreign correspondent Holly Williams lament the deaths and painted Israel as the oppressive villain killing civilians in a “dance with death” at the border. CBS Evening News effectively doubled down on their network’s obnoxious anti-Israel coverage from earlier Monday morning.

“Mr. Trump said our greatest hope is for peace. The reality today was violence especially in Gaza, however,” Glor chided as he was leading into Williams’ report. “Israeli soldiers shot and killed more than 50 Palestinians, more than 1,200 were hurt,” he added. He failed to mention that those numbers were provided by the Palestinian Authority, which has a long and documented history of inflating numbers and even faking deaths. The rest of the media was eager to run with those dubious numbers as well.

More here, which features this quote from a panelist on MSNBC:

…[A]n emotional Glaude lashed out at Israel: “All of that is important. And all of those babies are dead. All of those people are dead. They’re dead. And we are talking about racehorses. I mean the politics,” he exclaimed sounding as though he were on the verge of tears. It’s doubtful that Glaude would say the same thing about Planned Parenthood and abortion.

“I mean, there are a lot of folks who are dead today. For what? I’m sorry, this is me being a moralist, I suppose,” he added, serruptitiously patting himself on the back. Host Katy Tur even thanked him for his ridiculousness, saying, “I’m happy you’re always the moralist. You bring it back down to Earth, that’s important.” That wasn’t even Glaude’s first anti-Israel smears of the show.

You can’t say that the MSM doesn’t know enough to distrust Palestinian statistics. Remember Jenin and/or al-Durah? I certainly do (see also this). Whether the MSM is duped (some probably are) or complicit (that choice gets my vote for most of them) in spreading lies—especially of the blood libel variety—the lies work. I know plenty of people who swallow them hook, line, and sinker, and believe the Israelis are cold-blooded baby killers.

Richard Landes (the man who exposed the al-Durah fraud, and who is a friend of mine) has been explaining this sort of thing for a long, long time. About a month ago he published a piece by Doyle Quiggle on Landes’ blog The Augean Stables, dealing with the “March of Return” that Hamas has staged and which yesterday’s “protests” were part of:

…HAMAS displays a remarkable deftness in defining the March of Return as a peaceful demonstration while surreptitiously waging insurgent warfare. Violating the Geneva Conventions, HAMAS have planted its operatives, armed with explosives and weapons, among the so-called peaceful demonstrators. They have also sent little girls to the frontlines, directly into harm’s way.

By getting the world media, including much of the Israeli media, to define (and thus to perceive) the March as a peaceful demonstration, while using it to wage insurgent warfare, HAMAS have scored a major victory in 4GW [Fourth Generation Warfare]. Anything the IDF does to protect the border or even the lives of its own troops will make the IDF look like they’re using excessive force, never mind the fact that the limited force they’ve applied so far has, in all likelihood, kept the “demonstration” from becoming even bloodier.

Pretending to hold “peaceful” demonstrations and deftly tricking the world media into defining the March (marching is a martial metaphor) as a peaceful demonstration by unarmed civilians, HAMAS have created a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t moral predicament in which anything Israel does short of withdrawing from the area will undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state. By making its defense forces appear “immoral,” HAMAS make Israel itself appear illegitimate.

And Israel understands this only too well. As Yair Lapid, leader of a main opposition group put it:

“Israel’s moral power is part of national security and is also what gives us the qualitative edge over our enemies.”

That is precisely the tactical goal of 4GW insurgency:

“While the three classic levels of war carry over into the Fourth Generation, they are joined there by three new levels which may ultimately be more important. Colonel Boyd identified these three new levels as the physical, the mental, and the moral levels. Furthermore, he argued that the physical level ”“ killing people and breaking things ”“ is the least powerful, the moral level is the most powerful, and the mental level lies between the other two. Colonel Boyd argued that this is especially true in guerrilla warfare, which is more closely related to Fourth Generation war than is formal warfare between state militaries.

“This leads to the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level. It is therefore very easy to win all the tactical engagements in a Fourth Generation conflict yet still lose the war. To the degree you win at the physical level by utilizing firepower that causes casualties and property damage to the local population, every physical victory may move you closer to moral defeat, and the moral level is decisive.” (William S. Lind and Gregory A. Thiel, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook).

As the Gaza situation now stands, Israel is losing both the moral and the mental levels of this 4GW battle. The media depict the narrowest possible view of the situation at the border, which does make the IDF appear to be using excessive force. However, when the entire border situation on the ground is viewed as it is faced by the IDF, including the game-changing fact that HAMAS peppers armed operatives throughout the crowd (thereby violating Geneva Conventions), then the IDF appear to be demonstrating remarkable trigger discipline…

…the IDF and Israel; they are burdened by a moral imperative HAMAS does not share: The duty to protect their own citizens and troops.

When I first started this blog, I used to write about that sort of thing over and over. That was more than ten years ago, and the situation has not changed, which is depressing. But I take issue with that sentence in the article: “Israel is losing both the moral and the mental levels of this 4GW battle.” This is certainly true in Europe. It is certainly true in our MSM. But no matter what Israel does, no matter how many times the truth has been demonstrated to both Europe and our own MSM, they are not going to change their minds. I base this on the simple fact that there is more than enough evidence already, and if evidence were enough to change the equation than it would already have been changed.

No, as I wrote earlier, the media is complicit. They are dedicated to this “narrative,” and they perceive things through that lens and write their reports through that lens.

However, the American people as a whole have not succumbed to the propaganda: American voters are pro-Israel, particularly Republicans [see *NOTE below]. So I don’t think that the Palestinians are winning the FGW battle in this country, at least not yet, despite the Herculean efforts of the MSM to change that point of view.

[*NOTE: The results of the poll show a stark split between the parties:

Democrats are almost as likely to sympathize with the Palestinians as they are with Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian peace conflict, while support for the Jewish state among Republicans is nearly three times higher than Democrats, according to a poll released Tuesday.

Twenty-seven percent of Democrats told the Pew Research Center they sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians, compared to 25% who said their sympathies lie with the Palestinians.

Among Republicans, those numbers were 79% and 6%, respectively…

The survey said the partisan divide in support for Israel was “wider than at any point since 1978,” when 49% of Republicans and 44% of Democrats sympathized with Israel over the Palestinians.

Although the percentage gap in support for Israel remained fairly steady between the parties in the two decades after 1978, the parties’ views on Israel began to diverge in 2001, since when support among Democrats has fallen from 38% to 27% today, while among Republicans it has risen from 50% to 79%.

That’s quite a shift.]

Top 10 mosquito cities

The New Neo Posted on by

The top 10 mosquito cities tend to be in the South, with Atlanta the perennial number one and various Texas cities not far behind. But I figured that New York City had to be among them, from the evidence of my youth. When I was a little kid, every summer I was just covered with bites.

And yep, New York is on the list, just as I thought. Number three!

When I was a slightly-older child at summer camp in the Berkshires, the DDT trucks used to come and spray the whole place. No more (see also this).

Funes and sudden genius

The New Neo Posted on by

This article about how head injuries sometimes (although very very rarely) lead to savant powers made me think (once again) of the Jorge Luis Borges story “Funes, the Memorious.” Fortunately, the work appears in its entirety online, so if you haven’t read it before I highly recommend doing so now.

Borges is somewhat of an acquired taste, perhaps. But I acquired the taste the first time I ever read anything he wrote, which was the collection of stories (although the word “story” doesn’t begin do them justice; they are far stranger than that) in his book Ficciones.

“Funes, the Memorious” tells of a man thrown by a horse who becomes a savant of memory. But it’s really about memory itself, and the paradoxical limitations of having an unlimited memory, which would function as a handicap of sorts if it were to operate without the memory filter most of us possess.

Here’s a lengthy except, which also gives you an idea of Borges as literary stylist:

…I was told that [Ireneo Funes] had been thrown by a wild horse at the Francisco ranch, and that he had been hopelessly crippled. I remember the impression of uneasy magic which the news provoked in me…They told me that Ireneo did not move now from his cot, but remained with his eyes fixed on the backyard fig tree, or on a cobweb. At sunset he allowed himself to be brought to the window. He carried pride to the extreme of pretending that the blow which had befallen him was a good thing. . . . Twice I saw him behind the iron grate which sternly delineated his eternal imprisonment: unmoving, once, his eyes closed; unmoving also, another time, absorbed in the contemplation of a sweet-smelling sprig of lavender cotton…

[He told me that on] falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible.

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table; Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine. He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.

A circumference on a blackboard, a rectangular triangle, a rhomb, are forms which we can fully intuit; the same held true with Ireneo for the tempestuous mane of a stallion, a herd of cattle in a pass, the ever-changing flame or the innumerable ash, the many faces of a dead man during the course of a protracted wake. He could perceive I do not know how many stars in the sky…

…In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless.

[NOTE: There are people with memories that are at least something like Funes’, although not quite as extreme. I wrote about that phenomenon here.]