Viola:
Orsino! I have heard my father name him.
He was a bachelor then.
Captain:
And is so now, or was so very late;
For but a month ago I went from hence,
And then t'was fresh in murmur - as, you know,
What great ones do the less will prattle of -
That he did seek the love of fair Olivia.
I, 2, ll 28-34.
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
Orsino:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence.
That instant was I turned into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.
Act I, Scene 1, lines 18-22.
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare
So many passages in this play have become Bartlett's, figuratively if not literally.
That this book was still recommended in my high school years by English teachers so utterly dates my youth to the pre-computer, pre-Internet years.
I remind myself that monarchies survive astonishingly incompetent kings.
Well, sometimes.
But nations almost always.
Blizzard Warnings As Winter Storm Forecast Over Central U.S.
All of North Dakota and the northern half of South Dakota together form a region more beset with blizzards than any other in the US, said the Weather Channel yesterday.
My brother and his family and my mother live in North Dakota, she in Minot and he in a nearby small town (Minot is too small to have suburbs) called "Plaza".
They all knew this was coming so they all got together Friday to celebrate Christmas.
Today, nobody moves.
A dramatization of the career of Pablo Escobar.
If you've read or even heard of Killing Pablo, you may recall who he was and why, as the years and bloodshed went on, the mission changed from arresting and punishing the man in accordance with due process to killing him and his henchmen.
He did as much harm as Osama bin Laden and his cartel was as much a threat to Columbia as the FARC, and far more than M-19.
President Obama did not seek to arrest and try OBL.
All the same, you may say there is war and there are war crimes, and the methods of Colonel Carrillo, as portrayed by the TV series, were well over the line.
But war, after all, is just sending our killers after theirs, anyway.
And atrocity for atrocity, crime for crime, Carrillo was always going to be miles, oceans behind Escobar.
And then Pablo had him killed.
Remember the skits on Steve Allen?
"I love winter because of the holidays. Just wonderful."
OK, that takes care of the first eleven days.
And the next eighty?
Hillary had five faithless Electors.
She sucked up to racial and sexual minorities and five lefty Electors betrayed her, most notably including some asshole redskin.
Trump had two.
He kicked the Republicans in the teeth and scorned their ideology and agenda both in the primaries and the general and the party Electors stayed with him.
Drove home to Mt Lebanon, PA from Pasadena, MD on Sunday.
Weatherbug said there would be along the way rain in Frederick, an inch of sleet and snow in Breezewood, 1 to 3 inches of snow in Somerset, and an inch of sleet and snow waiting for us in our driveway.
Almost scared us into waiting another day, since the forecast for Monday said clear and dry, all the way.
But we had things to do, so we braved it.
Good thing, too.
We'd have lost a day for nothing.
It rained in Frederick and there was freezing drizzle without accumulation the rest of the way.
Wholly uneventful.
- Above all, believe the scriptures. They alone have authority for Christian belief.
- But what are the scriptures?
- Tradition and the Catholic Church have hitherto claimed authority to define the scriptures and thus, indirectly, the Faith. But I tell you they lie. The scriptures are what I say they are. And I tell you again, believe the scriptures and only the scriptures.
Martin Luther
Petty and personal, not political motivation.
And Podesta says the FBI sucks.
Not a surprise, really.
Trump nominates an ambassador to Israel.
That will be interesting in the Senate.
Zionism offends contemporary liberalism both as colonialism and as ethno-nationalism.
It's straight up culture war against Christian beliefs of any kind, but especially moral beliefs concerning sex.
More broadly, any cultural or moral beliefs, or indeed any Weltanschaungen or philosophical views, that seriously oppose the convictions of the liberal elites, their PC morality or their incoherent, secularist, half-atheist half-scientism, are the enemy.
Since the mid-20th Century, federal courts and federal bureaucracies have nationalized our 50 state systems of public education, converting them into increasingly homogenized machines for raising kids with liberal-approved attitudes, habits, customs, ambitions, and beliefs.
Parents have since that same time sought the ability to send their kids to private and especially church-affiliated schools escaping liberal secularist/atheist ideological control as well as liberal racial/ethnic mixing and balancing with at least public aid if not complete public finance.
Just as they used separationism and the federal courts to secularize the public schools, liberals have attempted to use them to disallow school voucher plans, but the courts have so far held that vouchers, like the GI Bill, are assistance to parents or students and not constitutionally impermissible payments to religious organizations.
At the same time, however, liberals have sought to get the courts to impose a degree of compliance with liberal PC ideology on schools getting public funds, specifically regarding science education (global warming and evolution) and racial, ethnic, and moral (LGBT) nondiscrimination in staffing and admissions, as well as in the manner and content of their teachings (forcing homosexuality off the sin list, as Frank Bruni describes it).
So far, that hasn't worked, either.
Too, liberals are unhappy church-affiliated schools can require ideological and moral acceptance of and compliance with church doctrine from staff, though they expect public schools to impose analogous, liberal requirements on their staff.
Trump and the religious coalition.
None of this is necessarily connected to class politics, and both popular Protestantism and Catholicism were allied with progressivism from the beginning until the merger of the latter with social and cultural liberalism, and the attacks of the latter on American clericalism from about the 1950s.
Venezuela is the world's best current example how not to do progressive government.
It is not an example how not to do socialism because it has not instituted socialism, though its ideological commitment to Leninism and Castro makes the lies of the American right plausible to the many.
Tillerson to be nominated for Secretary of State
You have to wonder how much mileage Vlad will get from his man in the White House.
Meanwhile, O has ordered a fuller investigation of Russian hacking in the election to aid the Trump campaign.
I have often thought that if you were so desperate to get here you would cross a desert on foot to do it, or swim shark infested waters, then despite the law you should be allowed to stay.
Only one of oh so many reasons I could not be an honest law enforcement official.
There are way too many laws I would not want to enforce, and way too many times I would want to play vigilante.
Why do conservatives insist we must all be proud of the entire history of the United States?
Why not use Thanksgiving and Memorial Day and even Columbus Day to celebrate who we are, the America and Americans we are, rather than a past that is, for most of us, not ours in any event and, for none of us, the kind of America we want to be?
As well expect a mestizo child from Mexico, or a Muslim child from Iraq, to look upon the pilgrims of Plymouth or Boston as their ancestors, as an Algerian child from some banlieu to say that without a balk.
Or Sarko's kids.
Or Walls's.
A professor said that in a graduate seminar on Husserl, in an offhand criticism of Heidegger, at Duquesne University, some time around 1976, or so.
Though I suppose it might as well have been a Kant seminar.
But it wasn't.
A few years later, I had a graduate seminar on Kant at Pitt with Wilfie Sellars.
Of course, his was rather a different view.
I never had the least idea he was an alcoholic.
Apparently, he died of the effects, somehow.
Everybody dies of something.
I knew his disciple, Hoagland, drank a hell of a lot.
But not him.
See this for some good points.
And yet this is the litmus test that Trump must pass, according to some.
He has to build the wall and deport the illegals, and only an idiot doesn't think that's about keeping America a white man's country.
Is political action aimed at preserving majority status, and with it commensurate political clout, in America for American eurowhites "white supremacist"?
The answer to that question is exactly the bone of contention, here.
Although, in truth, the whites who support Trump and this particular key part of the Trumpist agenda very likely find the entire dispute a revolting concession to an ethic of political correctness that is blatantly stacked against them and with which they are sooooo totally through.
Given how much minorities whine about the horrors of minority status, it would be best for my grandchildren, other things equal, if whites retained majority status throughout their lives.
But other things will not be equal, and issues of class are more immediate and more important than race.
Such as, will the GOP get away with such changes to Social Security that the wife and I die of starvation or exposure, freezing in the darkness under a bridge?
Or perhaps will she die before then of medical problems resulting from diabetes, uncontrolled because of what the GOP has done and will yet do to Medicare, especially prescription drug coverage?
The Heavy Water War, on Netflix.
Did I say this was excellent?
It is.
If the script is accurate, Werner Heisenberg did everything but break a leg to ensure Hitler got the bomb before the allies.
He was offered a position at Columbia when he could have gotten out of Germany, his wife was Jewish, he was arrested and was going to be sent to a camp for being non-Nazi and gay (was he?), and still he chose to stay in Germany and work like mad to give Hitler the bomb.
Partly this was in his mind a race between competing teams for the prestige of a colossal scientific breakthrough, actually making fission happen.
And partly he feared the allies, if they got the bomb first, would use it against Germany.
He worked on a team dedicated to just that one thing, the Uranium Club, and when the German army authorities more than once tried to replace him as team leader he fought to make them understand, as might well have been true, that with anyone else in charge the team would fail.
He, and only he, could and would give Hitler the Bomb, understanding full well the Germany military would certainly use it.
After the war, his prestigious career continued in Germany, apparently paying no penalty whatsoever for his sincere and tireless efforts to give Hitler the Bomb and victory in The Second World War.
I fear Trump in the White House will be picked clean by the Republican, Congressional radical right, and that America will suffer serious foreign policy losses to Russia, China, and anybody who wants to take the trouble.
His incompetence and vacuity are frightening.
He thinks he is an American Mussolini.
But he is not even Al Capone.
He seems to be a spineless bluffer as clueless as Chauncey Gardiner.
Philippines' deadly drug war praised by Donald Trump, says Rodrigo Duterte
He seems to be a coward impersonating a thug.
And he is also a clown.
The numbskull, kitchy sentimentality of the Thanksgiving show was nauseating.
Scorpion.
Reading Murder at the Savoy, Sjowall and Wahloo, for perhaps the fourth time.
In a brilliant polar by two Cold War Swedish communists, the Swedish state security services are depicted as fascist clowns far more worried about communists than the CIA.
And it is cause for anger, contempt, or dismay that the Swedish government is in some measure deferential to the American government.
The US state of Absurdia has 1 million voters and comprises 5 US Congressional Districts.
The state government is in course of settling district lines for the US Congress, the state senate, and the state chamber of deputies.
Two plans are under consideration under which the districts of each type will contain, as nearly as mathematically possible, equal numbers of voters (in thousands).
Under both plans, each US Congressional district will be subdivided into 10 state senatorial districts, each in turn divided into 10 state house districts.
Both plans are such that all state senate and chamber districts preserve the ratios of party representation among voters that would exist, under that plan, in the US Congressional Districts within which they are located.
There are two political parties that together encompass all the voters of Absurdia, the Blues and the Greens.
475 thousand of the state's voters are Blues.
525 thousand are Greens.
The two plans under consideration were prepared by the two parties, one being the Blue Plan and the other the Green Plan.
The Blue Plan draws lines so that voters, by party, are located in the US Congressional Districts as follows (in thousands).
Districts
1 2 3 4 5
Green Voters 200 81 81 81 82
Blue Voters 0 119 119 119 118
Results of this plan, assuming straight party ticket voting.
In the US senate, the Blues would have no seats and the Greens 2.
In the federal Congress, the Blues would have 4 seats and the Greens would have 1.
In the Electoral College, the Blues would have 0 Electors and the Greens 7 or, under the Maine rule, the Blues would have 4 Electors and the Greens 3.
In the state senate, the Blues would have 40 seats and the Greens would have 10.
In the state chamber, the Blues 400 seats and the Greens would have 100.
The Green Plan, as follows, is quite otherwise.
Districts
1 2 3 4 5
Green Voters 105 105 105 105 105
Blue Voters 95 95 95 95 95
Results of this plan, assuming straight party ticket voting.
In the US senate, the Blues would have 0 seats and the Greens 2.
In the federal Congress, the Blues would have 0 seats and the Greens would have 5.
In the Electoral College, the Blues would have 0 Electors and the Greens 7 or, under the Maine rule, the Blues would have 0 Electors and the Greens 7.
In the state senate, the Blues would have 0 seats and the Greens would have 50.
In the state chamber, the Blues would have 0 seats and the Greens would have 500.
One might want to sneak in some sort of proportional representation.
Note that the US Constitution does not require that representatives in the House be chosen by districts.
They could, like federal senators, be chosen in state-wide elections, under such rules that seats would be awarded to parties proportionate to their statewide votes, as nearly as mathematically possible.
In that event, there would be no US Congressional Districts in Absurdia, and its US House Delegation would comprise 2 Blues (47.5% of voters) and 3 Greens (52.5%).
If US senate seats were also allotted proportionately, both senators in each state running always in the same year, then in Absurdia each party would have one seat.
Buchananites of all countries seem to be unanimous on wanting to destroy, and not merely remove their own countries from, the EU.
Even in America, they want to destroy the EU.
Why?
Thursday, just the wife and I.
A 12 pound Turkey roasted with a bag of very lightly seasoned stuffing inside it, the stuffing prepared beforehand with a little water and a quarter pound of butter melted in.
Gravy out of a jar.
24 ozs of canned yams prepared with nearly a quarter pound of butter and 2/3 cup of brown sugar and cinnamon to taste, sprinkled with crushed pecans.
Tasty.
Leftovers packed for the fridge, white and dark meat, and also stuffing, in separate baking dishes, moistened with stock made fresh from the neck and giblets (not the liver), covered with aluminum foil.
Leftover yams packed in a sealed plastic container.
Friday, again just we two.
Leftovers nuked.
Saturday, the big meal with the kids and grandchildren.
Meat and stuffing heated in the oven in those baking dishes.
Another can of yams prepared as above, to go with the leftovers, all of it heated in a big orange frying pan.
Hawaiian rolls and butter.
Instant mashed potatoes prepared with light mayonnaise, and nuked frozen niblets.
Shiraz and Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc.
Giant Eagle pumpkin and apple pies.
Redi-Whip and crushed pecans applied.
The chardonnay was great with the meal.
The shiraz was splendid with the pies, and after.
Making good memories to enjoy when things are not so good, as Epicurus recommends.
Or any time.
