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Open thread 8/30/22 — 29 Comments

  1. Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection is reporting this morning that the Ohio Supreme Court has rejected the Oberlin College appeal of the Gibson Bakery case, leaving the appeal in Gibson’s favor standing. Gibson won.

    The court also rejected the Gibson cross-appeal, so the reduced judgement of $36Mil stands.

    Now Gibson has to start squeezing the turnip.

  2. Class…
    Class…
    Thank you..
    Now tell Sgt Stadenko what you think Oberlin College and others have learned…
    No Jimmy, the answer is not on one of the 15 holy cards i handed out last week

  3. The White House sidestepped a question about why it continues to let untested and unvaccinated illegal immigrants into the United States while tennis star Novak Djokovic is not allowed to enter to play in this year’s U.S. Open.

  4. Bank of America released a report on Monday that similarly outlines the energy crisis in Europe. “European energy markets reached a boiling point last week as gas and power prices soared to new levels of unaffordability,” the bank wrote. “No matter how you spin it, all signs point to a genuine energy crunch in Europe.” In the report, the bank notes that greater intervention by European governments is necessary. “Current energy prices are untenable without government aid, but higher consumer prices are coming,” the bank wrote, adding that it expects U.K. utility bills to rise 80%

  5. Masked Antifa members armed with AR-15 rifles and handguns showed up to guard what was billed as a “kid-friendly” drag show at a North Texas distillery. Reports indicate the show contained partial nudity and sexualized minors.

  6. Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office said officers responded to the Red Roof Inn in DeWitt, New York, for a reported sex offense Tuesday morning. The victim told officers she met an adult couple at the motel and during the encounter, she was held against her will, beaten, raped and forced to perform sexual acts on the two in the presence of two children, investigators said. The victim was able to escape and reported the incident to the front desk clerk, who called 911, investigators said.

    Red roof inn has said that they had too many people in the room and that they have to pay a party fee if they are going to have fun while being at the facility. When asked the desk clerk shrugged and said “you ought to check out late Saturdays, thats when things really start shaking”

  7. This is THE best:

    Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office said officers responded to the Red Roof Inn in DeWitt, New York, for a reported sex offense Tuesday morning. The victim told officers she met an adult couple at the motel and during the encounter, she was held against her will, beaten, raped and forced to perform sexual acts on the two in the presence of two children, investigators said. The victim was able to escape and reported the incident to the front desk clerk, who called 911, investigators said.

    He continued, “Second. I believe that if, in fact, that he runs, he is not just going to get the nomination by the Republican party, by the RNC. There are going to be plenty of people that are going to challenge him. And rightfully so.”

    Cohen added, “He does not want to go up against, like, for example, Liz Cheney, she already stated, ‘If he’s running, I’m running too.’ Uh, and then there’s, there’s so many others that you want to — Ron DeSantis, he’s already lost in a poll to Ron DeSantis, who I think is possible — equally or even greater of a threat to this democracy than even Donald, first of all, he’s smarter than Donald, and I think he’s more sinister.”

    —>note that a long time ago i told you to read about Sovereign Democracy (among other things), that way their crowing about the democracy they made makes sense to you… not like you follow soviet stuff… more fun to make up stuff… fun to watch too… very creative…

    on 22 February 2006 in a speech before a gathering of the Russian political party United Russia.[1] According to Surkov, sovereign democracy is:

    A society’s political life where the political powers, their authorities and decisions are decided and controlled by a diverse [Guess] nation for the purpose of reaching material welfare, freedom and fairness by all citizens, social groups and nationalities, by the people that formed it.

    It is the official ideology of the Russian youth movement NASHI, created in support of Vladimir Putin…

    Remember them?

    An illiberal democracy describes a governing system in which, although elections take place, citizens are cut off from knowledge about the activities of those who exercise real power because of the lack of civil liberties

    democracy without constitutional liberalism is producing centralized regimes, the erosion of liberty, ethnic competition, conflict, and war. Recent scholarship has addressed why elections, institutions commonly associated with liberalism and freedom, have led to such negative outcomes in illiberal democracies. Hybrid regimes are political systems in which the mechanism for determining access to state office combines both democratic and autocratic practices. In hybrid regimes, freedoms exist and the opposition is allowed to legally compete in elections, but the system of checks and balances becomes inoperative.

    and ya know their love of the French Revolution (ignoring what came next conveniently)…

    Authoritarian democracy was first developed and used by Bonapartism.

    The Bonapartist conception of authoritarian democracy was based upon Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès’s maxim, “confidence from below, authority from above”, which he claimed must be an enlightened authority that is responsive to the needs and clamour of the people.

    that above below thing sounds like some people from what administration?

    and as in the past..
    the actual fascists, and aracists are hiding behind the people they call fascists and racists… while they themselves

    Authoritarian democracy was promoted by fascists, who presented fascism as a form of authoritarian democracy. It explicitly rejects the conventional concept of democracy as in a majoritarian democracy that assumes equality of citizens.

    The concept of authoritarian democracy in fascism was developed by Italian fascist political theorist Giovanni Gentile and used by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. The Nazis supported the concept of authoritarian democracy.

    Francisco Franco’s quasi-fascist Falange in Nationalist Spain promoted the concept, but named it “organic democracy” that was based upon national plebiscites issued from the Spanish government to the Spanish people

    and Francisco Franco is still dead – Chevy Chase

  8. Stan yesterday recommended an article “The Psychology of Totalitarianism” as it related to COVID, but I was intrigued about the mechanisms of Mass Formation. The pathologies that contributed to totalitarianism, came about because of the Enlightenment, according to the author.

    The Psychology of Totalitarianism
    Dr. Mattias Desmet
    “…A narrative that ignores the psychological, spiritual, and ethical dimensions of human beings and thereby has a devastating effect at the level of human relationships. Something in this narrative causes man to become isolated from his fellow man, and from nature. Something in it causes man to stop resonating with the world around him. Something in it turns human beings into atomized subjects. It is precisely this atomized subject that, according to Hannah Arendt, is the elementary building block of the totalitarian state.”
    “We have to consider the current fear and psychological discomfort to be a problem in itself, a problem that cannot be reduced to a virus or any other “object of threat.” Our fear originates on a completely different level—that of the failure of the Grand Narrative of our society. This is the narrative of mechanistic science, in which man is reduced to a biological organism. At the level of the population, the mechanist ideology created the conditions that make people vulnerable for mass formation. It disconnected people from their {God} natural and social environment, created experiences of radical absence of meaning and purpose in life, and it led to extremely high levels of so-called “free-floating” anxiety, frustration, and aggression, meaning anxiety, frustration, and aggression that is not connected with a mental representation; anxiety, frustration, and aggression in which people don’t know what they feel anxious, frustrated, and aggressive about. It is in this state that people become vulnerable to mass formation.”

    I changed his observation to mine. It seems that many of the problems that plague society can be traced to the societal abandonment of God.
    Dr. Desmet considers the Enlightenment the seminal event that began the change in human relationships leading to our current condition, when we cast off the authority of nobility and religion. What we were left with is a system where authority had to seek its power. Since power couldn’t force compliance, people had to be manipulated.
    A society that establishes a hierarchy of authority as God at the head by its nature is stable as there is no higher authority to seek. That doesn’t mean that everyone believes God is the ultimate authority, but do conform to the standards since there is no higher appeal.
    As Man has replaced God as our final authority, the vacuum has been filled by a variety of authoritarian answers, for that is the nature of man. The ultimate despotic authoritarianism of Stalin or HItler, and the more subtle versions we are now moving towards- the benevolet dictator, a kinder, gentler version.
    The version of the Enlightenment our Founders followed came not from the Enlightment as it played out in France, but in the English tradition.

    According to Gary North,“The two wings of the Enlightenment can best be summarized in terms of European geography: France and Scotland.
    The French version offered a theory of top-down, centralized society. I call it the left-wing Enlightenment. The Scottish version offered a theory of bottom-up, decentralized society. I call it the right-wing Enlightenment.
    If you want to identify the systems by their intellectual spokesmen, choose Jean Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith. Politically, they were Robespierre and George Washington.”

    It’s this confusion that has moved us to the more authoritarian version.

    In the article, Desmet goes on to say, “Totalitarianism is not a historical coincidence. It is the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality. As such, totalitarianism is a defining feature of the Enlightenment tradition.”

    Without God, we’re casting about to the solution to our predicament.

    Desmet concludes, “The real task facing us as individuals and as a society is to envision a new view of humankind and the world, to find a new foundation for our identity, to formulate new principles for living together with others, and to reclaim a timely human capacity—Truth Speech.”

    The problem of liberals– magical thinking.

    https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/the-psychology-of-totalitarianism

    https://www.garynorth.com/public/2282.cfm

  9. I was taking the long view on the intellectuals thread, in the end who won the European war, Germany did, on the Pacific Japan did to a degree, there was
    a tiny clique that were tried at nurenberg, but most of the big players got away so did the money men, like schacht, and abs, and we see the result with the ouroboros reaction of the EU leaders, literally consuming the people (they think they will be safe) that incident in indiana, where dutch commandoes were training, what do you think they are going to do, fight islamic state, naw more like farmers trying to save their crop,

  10. meanwhile anything you sell over $600.00 is considered tax, for the IRS, our native pirate class

  11. fwiwhttps://brownstone.org/articles/social-distancing-was-supposed-to-be-forever/

  12. going further, how many intellectuals really understood humanity, rousseau didn’t locke did, kant and hegel, and their spawn marx, were fundamentally wrong, the existentialists, offer a dead end, kierkegard through sartre, the deconstructionists tear the rest of the foundation down,

  13. the fact that deman and heidegger were part of the nazi machine, proves the point, in literature courses, this troublesome trend proliferated like kudzu,

  14. One of the top FBI guys was (probably) forced to resign supposedly due to the Hunter Biden laptop (non)invesitagtion and suppression. Given that when it comes to the FBI, it’s not possible to be too cynical, my question is: why are they removing this guy now? There seems to be some notion that it was because of accusations from Chuck Grassley about the Hunter Biden Laptop affair. But time and again the FBI has ignored such accusations and continued to behave politically and lawlessly, so what has changed? Are the FBI actually worried that there might somehow be consequences for their various illegitimate actions over the past few years? I find that difficult to believe.

  15. According to Russian news media, Mikhail Gorbachev has died at the age of 91. According to the Moscow hospital where he died earlier today, the cause of death was “a severe and prolonged illness.”

  16. “Alternatively, the Fed could just let inflation rip as it continues to pour gasoline on the fire. At this point, the latter scenario appears more likely as the Fed engages in half-hearted symbolic inflation-fighting measures. Not surprisingly, the inflation numbers get scarier and scarier. At some point, runaway inflation will force the Fed to take real action. One thing is certain: the longer it waits, the more it will hurt.”

    It certainly looks like this might play out. The Biden Administration/Democrats are certainly making the Feds job harder. I don’t think there is any courage to do what needs to be done– since the pain will still be fresh in voter’s minds in 2024.

    https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/23/the-economic-doom-loop-has-begun/

  17. OBloodyHell,

    I just saw your comment on yesterday’s Open thread about using US3’s “Cantaloop, Flip Fantasia” as a pallet cleanser for crappy, repetitive pop music. What an odd, near coincidence. I use a different Herbie Hancock song for my pallet cleanser, but I really like that US3 number. I like Hancock’s original, “Cantaloupe Island” much more, but Hancock is a freakin’ genius! US3’s reimagining of his song is very well done and clever. I really like it, but I personally wouldn’t use it as a pallet cleanser because it is too catchy and repetitive (Biddy biddy bop/Biddy biddy bop, funky, funky). It would create another earworm. A very good earworm, but an earworm, nonetheless.

    I pretty much always have a song in my head. Even when I wake up I’ll notice that a song had been in my head as I dreamed. I literally have music playing in my mind all day. (I assume many others experience this?) (As I type this US3’s “Cantaloop” is now playing.) Which makes me very susceptible to earworms and it drives me crazy when a crappy song gets stuck in my internal play loop. Sometimes the same song will stay for days and when they are lousy songs it can infuriate me. About 15 years ago I had a particularly annoying song stuck on my internal playlist for a few days and thought, “I need to think of a better song to fixate on to eliminate this one,” and started thinking about different songs to find a replacement that would work. I thought one of Hancock’s less repetitious, richer, layered works would be good and popped, “Maiden Voyage” into my internal music thoughts. Voila! Worked like a charm! And has continued to work ever since.

    The reason I prefer “Maiden Voyage” to something like “Cantaloop” is it starts out slow, is very lush and layered, doesn’t get too fast, and really doesn’t repeat. There is a main theme, but the various solos on Hancock’s original recording (which is what I think of) are varied and dreamy. It’s a great, great song but the opposite of simple and repetitive.

    Anyway, weird we’d both independently discover Hancock as a great tool for eliminating annoying earworms.

  18. RTF–

    Sorry to be a bit of a homonym nag, but I think you mean “palate” cleanser, i.e. something to refresh the mouth before enjoying a new food. A pallet, OTOH, is a flat wooden skid that supports goods for storage or transportation. (The third word that people sometimes confuse with “palate” or “pallet” is “palette,” the board with a hole for the thumb that an artist uses for mixing paints.)

    I expect Neo will come up some day with a video on words like this for one of her open threads. English is a messy language!

  19. Fascinating pictures.
    Perhaps someone will do a YouTube on “How to dress for an 1840s Photograph.”

  20. Those daguerreotypes really do take you back. I almost feel like I could walk into one of them, or the people in them could walk out of them into our world. We’ve probably all seen pictures from the Civil War, but I didn’t realize just how international photography was in the early days.

    James Forten was a wealthy and prominent Black abolitionist. Eugene Delacroix, if it’s the famous painter, looks very different from his self-portrait as a dashing young man. The Flandrins were also painters, active from the 19th into the 20th century. Carter Stevenson and Kendall Warren both became civil engineers, after fighting on different sides in the Civil War. Warren’s sister was also something of an engineer. She married into the Roebling family and helped build the Brooklyn bridge after her husband became bedridden.

    I hope things worked out alright for Sarah, Sophia, and Susannah. They were in Australia, so at least they didn’t die in the Civil War.

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