Waymo Driverless Cars

 Yes, it is possible to get around much of the Phoenix area in driverless cars.

Waymo has the details.

This seems to be catching on. I see a lot of their cars around.

Death of an Illusion

But the sense of normality was a dangerous illusion. On October 7, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood that controls the Gaza Strip, burst out of its lair into Israel and began a systematic slaughter of the population there. Hamas rockets crashed into apartment buildings as far north as the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Hamas fighters shot at anything that moved, murdering civilians, carrying an untold number of Israelis back to Gaza as hostages—whole families have been taken captive. In one day of horror, more than 600 Israelis died, more than 2,000 were injured, and at least 100 vanished into Gaza.

Read the rest of Martin Gurri's essay in City Journal.

First Paragraph

 I am often asked if I would change anything about the Electoral College. My answer has changed over time. Perhaps that is unsurprising. I am older and have seen more of life than that third-year law student who started studying the Electoral College in 2001.

- From The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founders' Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule by Tara Ross

October 7 Atrocities

 

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

[Photo by Jonathan Delmares at Unsplash]

The Reading of Men

 Cultural Offering provides some sound advice from Ray Bradbury.

Back By Popular Demand

 

A Nation is a Nation

 A nation is not a community. A community is not a neighborhood. A neighborhood is not a family.

You occasionally encounter companies that claim to be "family." The people there may be close, but they are not a family.

Multiply that distinction many times over when you hear of politicians who speak of the nation as a community or a family. 

That language may signal the beginning of a political attempt to usurp the obligations and love of real communities and real families.

As the Campaigns Progress

"Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves."

- Eric Hoffer

In the Biz

 

Just Arrived

 

October Surprise

 New York magazine's Elie Honig, former federal prosecutor, on "Jack Smith's October Cheap Shot."

An excerpt:

"Yet Smith now uses grand-jury testimony (which ordinarily remains secret at this stage) and drafts up a tidy 165-page document that contains all manner of damaging statements about a criminal defendant, made outside of a trial setting and without being subjected to the rules of evidence or cross-examination, and files it publicly, generating national headlines. You know who'll see those allegations? The voters, sure - and also members of the jury pool."

Danish School: Back to Books and Pens

 

When Oversight Really Isn't Oversight

 CNN on accountability in Minnesota state government.

The pension fund for teachers is another area of interest.

A Must See

 

Free Speech is Not a Minor Item

Reason magazine: One side is clearly far off the mark when it comes to freedom of expression.

The Possessed/The Devils

 Commentary magazine: Gary Saul Morson on the classic tale of woke totalitarianism written in Russia 150 years ago.

An excerpt:

From the meeting’s first moment, young people vie to outdo each other repeating revolutionary clichés taken as scientific fact, including the necessity of abolishing every religion, all traditions, and received morality. At last, an ideologue named Shigalyov insists on explaining his irrefutable “system” for establishing earthly paradise.

Modern Tribes

 

I'm Back

 Yesterday was a computer connection problem. I tried various techniques and finally arranged for a tech to come out today. This morning, however, all is well.

I'm back in the game but, having cleared my desk, the new game is discovering where the stacks went.

A Civilized Debate

We have now survived the vice-presidential debate. 

It turned out to be a civilized event and that's mainly due to the two debaters. The moderators were biased to the point of being humorous. 

I believe that J.D. Vance clearly won, but both men deserve credit for giving us a sense of how political debate can and should be.

Will the Police Go Woke?

 My recent Substack post on police departments has clearly drawn interest. 

That's possibly because so many people have noticed how programs tend to slip in through the HR window.

Trusting the Elites

City Journal: Matthew Lilley on what the elite universities are doing in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision on preferences. An excerpt:

We know that elite universities previously discriminated against white and Asian applicants to benefit black and Hispanic students. So, universities like Yale that signed the amicus brief and have seen little change in their demographics after SFFA are either breaking the law now, or they were misleading the Supreme Court when they declared race-neutral methods insufficient to achieve their diversity goals. Which is it? The answer is probably both.

Looks Promising

 

A Voice from Montana

Palladium magazine in July 2023: Author Walter Kirn on how America lost the plot.

Cultural Revolution in the Police Departments

 My new Substack essay is up. 

[Free to all! Spread the word!]

I'll Stick to Vitamins and Coffee

 

Journalistic Tradition

 I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but . . .  according to various "party lines."

- George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War"

Freedom of Speech vs. The Utopia of Scolding

 Matt Taibbi's speech at the Rescue the Republic rally. An excerpt:

"Everything we found in the Twitter Files fits in a sentence: an alphabet soup of enforcement agencies informally is already doing pretty much the same thing as Europe's draconian new law."

An Irish Customs Agent at Work

 

Law School Faculty Contributions

 Excess of Democracy blog has some very interesting charts.

So much for viewpoint diversity.

Find Something Beautiful Today

[Photo by Colton Jones at Unsplash]

Technology and Change

A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything. In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.

- Neil Postman

The Cost of Equity Policing

 

A Pedant's Progress

 Commentary magazine: Joseph Epstein confesses to being a pedant. An excerpt:

Daily life generally offers this pedant a good workout. He calls his local library, and a robo-voice informs him that it “is now presently open.” Surely you mean “currently open,” he mutters into the phone. The play-by-play announcer for the Chicago Cubs says that “there’s two outs,” and the pedant mentally retorts, “There ‘are’ two outs, Schmuckowitz.” At the supermarket he gets in the express line, where he is greeted by a sign that reads, “Ten Items or Less,” and thinks, whatever happened to the more correct word “fewer?”

Maggie Smith, RIP

 

The Immigration Scandal

 

We Will Dance Again

 

Times of Israel: Before the BBC aired the film in Britain, it insisted that any references to Hamas as terrorists be taken out.

A Certain Way to Ruin

 The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, or preventing all possibility of its continuing as a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

- Theodore Roosevelt

Hot Speech at the United Nations

 

First Paragraph

I did everything the university told me to. I let students choose their books. I conferenced with them one-on-one. I opted for conversations over consequences. I worked closely with an instructional coach to ensure I implemented a workshop model to fidelity. I let students into my room during lunch to build relationships. I communicated with parents and sought out student interests to guide my instruction. My classes wrote and agreed to their behavior codes. I provided alternative seating out of my own pocket. Nonetheless, misbehavior abounded and reading growth stagnated.

- From What is Wrong with Our Schools? The Ideology Impoverishing Education in America - and How We Can Do Better for Our Students by Daniel Buck

When Distance Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

There used to be "front porch campaigns."

Nowadays, some candidates have "basement campaigns."

And for good reason.

Art Film

 

The System Did It!

My latest post is up at Substack.

First Paragraph

 In 2015, a video of students shouting at Yale professor, Nicholas Christakis, went viral on social media. His crime? Being married to a woman who questioned whether Yale diversity administrators should be telling students what to wear on Halloween. This episode was mocked, yet it marked the beginning - not the end - of a cultural revolution that has since swamped the West. Just as political correctness was written off as a fad in the early '90s, we should be skeptical of optimists who assert that woke illiberalism is exiting stage left. When Robert MacNeil declared to a young Dinesh D'Souza on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour in June 1991 that political correctness "has already begun to pass" due to its excesses being ridiculed in the press, D'Souza wisely replied that while it was "somewhat on the defensive," the proponents of PC were "not a handful of radicals" but rather "institutionalized ... [representing the] establishment."

- From The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism by Eric Kaufmann

Hmm

 

They're Aways Out There

 Jonathan Turley on the counter-constitutional movement.

A Very Wide-Ranging and Wise Techie

 Stephen Landry's Blog comes from a CIO and much more.

It makes me want to abandon my Commodore computer.

Absolutely

 Nicholas Bate with sound advice: Do not be ruled by units of time.

[And while you're on his site, check out his numerous books!]

The National Council of Teachers of English

 Cultural Offering's Kurt Harden notes a bizarre shift by the teachers of English.

No wonder reading has declined among youth people.

The coming Reformation is going to improve elementary and high schools as well as colleges and universities.

Highly Recommended

 

Quietly, Quietly

Suppose we did our work

like the snow,

quietly, quietly,

leaving nothing out.

- Wendell Berry

[Photo by Filip Bunkens at Unsplash]

Strategic Anchors

 Many leadership teams struggle with not wanting to walk away from opportunities. Strategic anchors give them the clarity and courage to overcome these distractions and stay on course.

- Patrick Lencioni

On My List

 

From the Wilds of Maine

 Time is always well spent with Sippican Cottage.

Cultural Insight

 Nobody knows anything.

- Screenwriter William Goldman describing Hollywood

If We Had a Press Corps

Washington Examiner: Byron York on the curious lack of curiosity of American journalists during a presidential campaign.

They don't even pretend to be objective. The Particularist thought pattern is alive and well in journalism.

[I wrote about Universalists and Particularists on Substack.]

Why Good Teachers Leave

 Shain Bergan, a spokesperson for the Kansas City school district, said the district's no zeros policy - which has frustrated [teacher Cory] Jarrell - is designed to ensure that a single zero doesn't have an undue effect on students' grades. Instead, students receive a minimum of 40% for each assignment.

- "More Teachers Burn Out on the Job" by Matt Barnum, The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2024, Page A10.

Joke from the Soviet Union

 Three men are in a hotel room in Soviet Russia.

The first two men open a bottle of vodka, while the third is tired and goes straight to bed. He is unable to sleep, however, as his increasingly drunk friends tell political jokes loudly.
After a while, the tired man gets frustrated and walks downstairs for a smoke. He stops in the lounge and asks the receptionist to bring tea to their room in five minutes.
The man walks back into the room, joins the table, leans towards a power outlet and speaks into it:
"Comrade major, we want some tea to room 62 please."
His friends laugh at the joke, until there is a knock on the door. The receptionist brings a teapot. His friends fall silent and pale, horrified of what they just witnessed. The party is dead, and the man goes to sleep.
After a good night's rest, the man wakes up and notices his friends are gone. Surprised, he walks downstairs and asks the receptionist where they went.
The nervous receptionist whispers that the KGB came and took them before dawn.
The man is horrified. He wonders why he was spared.
"Well," Whispered the receptionist, "comrade major quite liked your tea joke."

Dash. Dash. Dot. Dot.

 

How Lord of the Flies Was Rescued from the Reject Pile

 

Fleming. Ian Fleming.

Claremont Review of Books: Christopher Flannery has written a fascinating review of the new biography of Ian Fleming.

Update: I was stunned on the number of films that have been made from his James Bond novels.]

Special Report

If the quality of our medical care resembled the quality of our news media, we'd all would be using "eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting, lizard's leg, and owlet's wing."

[HT: "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare]

Listen to This Every Morning

 

How Will You Invest Your Time Today?

 Doing nothing is harmless, but being busy doing nothing is not. 

- Eric Hoffer

Vows?

 

The day The FutureLawyer left the monastery.

First, Seal the Border

 Center for Immigration Studies in February 2024: Elizabeth Jacobs analyzes the Senate's Border Security Bill.

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

[Photo by Joshua Woroniecki at Unsplash]

Your Organization Needs Truth-Tellers

 

My Substack column on Truth-Tellers is up.

The Carnival of the Animals

 

A Singular "They" Pronoun?

 City Journal: A report on the Chicago Manual of Style.

Mark Zuckerberg Reads the Room

 Sometimes I almost feel sorry for Mark Zuckerberg. I know, I know. He’s the fourth-richest person in the world, and the social-media platforms he controls have blighted the childhoods of millions of teenage girls and helped turn the rest of us into phone-addicted zombies. Despite all that, I occasionally I feel a faint—okay, very faint—twinge of sympathy over the way the tech mogul’s life has devolved into an endless apology tour. In his latest mea culpa, issued just before Labor Day weekend, Zuckerberg expressed regret for how his company had caved to government demands to censor certain types of content flowing through its channels. His contrition sounds authentic, but I’m withholding judgement.

Read the rest of the essay by James B. Meigs in Commentary magazine.

Chaplin

 

Fending Off Barbarians and Robots

 To note the obvious, we live in strange times.

We live amid devices that both simplify and complicate the world. They free us from chores that, although tiresome, rewarded us with a sense of achievement. Our sense of balance is thrown off by the speed of completion and travel. We are forgetting old skills, such as cursive writing, that gave us a subtle but better connection to thought and to others.

And, of course, there are the barbarians who do not share our values. They regard the nation as a vending machine instead of a garden worthy of respect, protection, and cultivation. 

Either group can sink us.

[Photo by Possessed Photography at Unsplash]

And That Was Back Then

 It was once an American tradition to pay off the mortgage and leave the children the farm. Now we seem to be selling the farm and leaving our children the mortgage. By 1997, we will pay more for interest on the debt than for the national defense. That's right, more of our tax money will be spent to pay interest on government bonds than we'll pay for the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the intelligence agencies and the defense bureaucracy combined.

- From a speech by Newt Gingrich in 1995

Oui

 

Patrick Bet-David

The Spectator World: Inside the Unlikely Success of Patrick Bet-David. 

An excerpt:

Bet-David’s biography makes his story even more improbable: he’s a refugee from Iran who spent his adolescence as a hard-partying club rat (and briefly bodyguard to a drug dealer) who turned his life around after signing up for the Army, the 101st Airborne to be precise, and finding God.

The Potential Revolutionaries

 Were the world to treat us the way we treat ourselves we would turn into firebrand revolutionaries.

- Eric Hoffer

Quick Look

 

To Read about Reading

 

For perspectives on reading, writers, and literature, I recommend the essays of Clive James and Joseph Epstein.

Beautifully written, very bright, and a lot of fun.

The Story Behind the Recent Immigration Story

 My latest essay is up at Substack.

Please check it out and spread the word.

A Classic a Week

When you go to the Nicholas Bate site, be sure to check out his books. 

After years of writing non-fiction, he has shifted to novels.

The man never sleeps.

Hmm

 

The Debate: ABC Makes a Quasi-Denial

 

Megyn Kelly is correct. All ABC did was to raise further questions. 

Truly a mind-boggling response because it increases suspicion of just what was shared with the Harris campaign.

Some Family History: My Great Uncle Isaac Imes's 5th Regiment of the Marines Citation

 

They knew how to do citations in those days.

The Old Folks

The other day, I was remembering talks with my relatives who were old enough to have lived in Arizona before it became a state in 1912. No air conditioning. The ice man would drop off blocks of ice for the ice box.

The usual old people stuff.

But one of the surprising items was how much they traveled. Travel, of course, was far from the conveniences of today, but they went up into Colorado and Utah, over to California, down into Mexico, and throughout Arizona. The roads were often little better than paths and there was a lot of camping. Sometimes they took trains but most of the journeys were by automobile. My grandfather used a horse and wagon for hunting trips.

They had a sizable amount of patience in those days as well as an ability to get as much joy as possible out of the journey.

They were mature people.

Travel Writer/Novelist Paul Theroux on Self-Discovery

 

Enlarged But Enslaved

 City Journal: Andrey Mir on "The Platform Paradox." An excerpt:

Exposing yourself and your content for both the network effect and the platform’s own business is, in a sense, your platform fee. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, humans are the sex facilitators to the machine world, the same as bees are to plants. The metaphor might also imply that, yes, humans make the honey for themselves, but the fruits of their labor ultimately belong to the beekeeper.

Looking into the Abyss

 Commentary magazine: John Podhoretz on "The Assassination Wish Fulfillment."

Note: The article has been updated.

The World War I Memorial

 

In the Pipeline

 

The Search for Nothing

 I am serious about my study. I am a distinguished professor of mathematics at Brown University, though I have not for decades concerned myself with arithmetic, calculus, matrices, theorems, Hausdorff spaces, finite lattices representations, or anything else that involves values or numbers or presentations of values or numbers or any such somethings, whether they have substance or not. I have spent my career in my little office on George Street in Providence contemplating and searching for nothing. I have not found it. It is sad for me that the mere introduction to my subject of interest necessarily ruins my study. I work very hard and wish I could say that I have nothing to show for it.

- From Dr. No: A Novel by Percival Everett

Nicole Shanahan's TDS Ad

 

Moon Dogs

 

Our Stumbling Secret Service

 The argument that President Trump did not receive full Secret Service protection because he is not a sitting president is simply pathetic. 

Donald Trump is a former president who is the presidential nominee of a major party. He also is the survivor of a previous assassination attempt.

A very close assassination attempt.

Given all of the above, it is the height of bureaucratic short-sightedness to withhold full protection.

It makes sense to err on the side of protection. He should get full protection. 

Harris, Walz, and Vance should get it too. There is no guarantee that assassins wouldn't try to wipe out an entire ticket.

Promising

 

"America's political parties no longer exist"

 UnHerd magazine: Michael Lind examines the changes with the political parties. An excerpt:

"...Both Democratic and Republican primary voters are more likely than voters in general to have college degrees and to have completed postgraduate study; they also have considerably higher household incomes."

Find Something Beautiful Today

[Photo by quentin at Unsplash]

McQueen

 

Creativity

 Jim Rockford's trailer in Matchbox scale.

On the Subject of "Fire the Jerks"

 My new Substack post is up. 

The "Fire the Jerks" subject will strike a nerve with anyone in the workplace.

We May Need This

 

The Lost Art of Waiting

 

Americans are more impatient than ever.

See Christine Rosen's essay in The Free Press. 

It's from her book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.

First Paragraph

 Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass. The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night. Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson's kitchen door, rocked a loose step board with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow. I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of corn bread that she had made with my Sadie's recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave's life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all.

- From James: A Novel by Percival Everett

Very Interesting!

 

Published in 1993. Still Worth Reading.

On My List

 

Shared History and Collective Purpose

 First Things: Ronen Shoval on "The Broken Promise of America." An excerpt:

This transformation is not limited to the churches; it reflects a broader void in American life where the role of moral institutions has diminished. Into this void, “woke” ideology steps confidently, offering a new set of rituals and a new pantheon of virtues. It seeks to replace the cohesive moral vision that once unified communities with a fractured collection of identities and causes. This isn't merely a new expression of values—it's an attempt to rebuild the sacred around the self, often at the expense of shared history and collective purpose.

Topics for My Substack Column

 I have an extensive list of various topics for my Substack column. Most pertain to leadership, management, ethics, history, literature, and government.

Those of you who have been following this blog for some time will have a sense of my areas of interest. If there are any topics that you'd like me to explore, don't hesitate to list them. I can't guarantee that I'll write about them, but who knoweth?

I'm very flexible. Part of this week has been spent in a review of U.S Department of Labor programs.

You know, exciting stuff.

When Nostalgia Is Charming

 

Expansive, Not Exclusive

 Reading is expansive, not exclusive. If Caribbean, African, Arab, and Indian writers get more attention today, if the Booker prize is won by Ben Okri from Nigeria or Peter Carey from Sydney, if readers approach the work of women and blacks without prejudice and without the sense of tiptoeing up on a special case, our shared culture grows and rejoices. We learn how other kinds of cultural consciousness can occupy the speaking center of literary forms. But how could this conceivably be a reason for not reading Eugene Onegin or Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington?

- From Culture of Complaint: A Passionate Look into the Ailing Heart of America by Robert Hughes (published in 1993)

First Paragraph

 I can't remember at what point I realized that I would probably go two years without a hug. Nobody knew how much worse the pandemic would get, but I knew I would be stuck in place for the duration. My friends felt a world away. Phone calls with my family had become strained. I couldn't tell how they were really doing or articulate how I was handling the stress. The fact is I had stopped showering altogether, and I was watching the Lord of the Rings movies repeatedly.

[NOTE: The author was a Peace Corps volunteer in Central Asia during the bird flu pandemic in 2004.]

- From The Loneliness Epidemic: Why So Many of Us Feel Alone and How Leaders Can Respond by Susan Mettes

DEI is Finished

 

Good Time to Re-Read This Classic

 

The Successor Caste

 The expansion of corporationist, bureaucratic, and etatist trends that we have noted on the political side can also be seen, indeed scarcely are to be avoided, in the arts. Cyril Connolly once wrote, "better a state which can't read or write than one which begins to take a positive interest in literature." But it is not only a matter of the state. There is also a proliferation, well past the reasonable, of what we might call cultural nongovernmental organizations, especially in the United States. These last are, usually, Foundations, often created by millionaires but after a transition period end up promoting various social and other agendas alien to the intentions of their founders. In the case of the arts, many of the successor caste succumb to fashions emanating from art activists (and not affecting the economic or economic-social attitudes of millionairedom).

- Robert Conquest in The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History

From the John Barry Soundtrack to "Mary, Queen of Scots"

 

Marvelous.

Post-Debate

Last night's presidential debate was both interesting and predictable.

Kamala Harris wisely stayed on script. 

Donald Trump unwisely wandered from it but returned for a strong finish. 

All in all, the win has to go to Harris, but her victory was tainted by ABC's moderating which was stunningly biased in her favor.

They didn't even pretend to be objective. That is disappointing because regardless of one's political views, we need a reasonably objective media in this country.

Remember 9/11

[Photo by Jesse Mills at Unsplash]

Gotcha!

 

My new Substack post is up on the hypersensitivity of the Gotchas.

True

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness. 

— Christopher Hitchens

The Home Buying Crisis

 Political Calculations on the new home affordability crisis.

Back By Popular Demand

 

First Paragraph

 Our ancestors have been human for a very long time. If a normal baby girl born forty thousand years ago were kidnapped by a time traveler and raised in a normal family in New York, she would be ready for college in eighteen years. She would learn English (along with - who knows? - Spanish or Chinese), understand trigonometry, follow baseball and pop music; she would probably want a pierced tongue and a couple of tattoos. And she would be unrecognizably different from the brothers and sisters she left behind. For most of human history, we were born into small societies of a few score people, bands of hunters and gatherers, and would see, on a typical day, only people we had known most of our lives. Everything our long-ago ancestors ate or wore, every tool they used, every shrine at which they worshipped, was made within that group. Their knowledge came from their ancestors or from their own experiences. That is the world that shaped us, the world in which our nature was formed.

- From Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Looks Fascinating

My copy arrived yesterday.  

The reviews have been extraordinary. The research is very impressive.

Famous Baseball Film Song

 

American Foreign Policy

 The Free Press: H.R. McMaster on America's weakness. An excerpt:

"Never have I been more concerned about the fate of my nation - and of the free world."