A Wednesday Grab-Bag

     I need a day off from ranting and raving – forever having steam coming out of my nostrils does bad things to the mucosa, don't y'know – so today I'm going the "assorted" route. Let's have a few laughs at others expense, shall we?

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     First up, we have friend and longtime colleague Mike Hendrix's citation of Rush Limbaugh:

     “For all the talk of a Civil War in the Republican Party over Donald Trump, 90% of Republicans ended up voting for him.”...

     “Again, Trump is a symptom of widespread disgust, not the head of a carefully crafted ideological movement with a checklist of issues.” Now, some of you may disagree with that. Some of you may say, “No, no! Trump has an agenda, and he announced it every campaign appearance. There’s five or six items. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Everybody knows what his issues were.” What Mr. Hanson is saying here is that he doesn’t have an ideological agenda based on ideological principles and so forth.

     He’s got an agenda, but Trump is a symptom of much more.

     To which Mike adds:

     He damned sure is. I’m coming to believe, though, that, far from failing to grasp why Trump won, the NeverTrump fools, knaves, and blackguards know full well how and why he trounced them…and it scares the establishment shitweasels to death.

     In the end, it still comes back to just the one thing: draining the damned swamp. Nobody ought to be surprised at how the alligators—or swamp rats and mosquitos, more like—feel about that.

     While this isn't news to anyone who's been listening as Establishmentarian commentators wail their chagrin over their minions' unsuccess at "controlling" Trump, it highlights the dynamic of partisanry: no matter what the original objective of a political party might have been, if it lasts long enough its real objective will become to advance the fortunes of its office-holders and office-seekers.

     This is merely a particular case of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics.

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     Laughter really is the best medicine, friends – and articles such as this are surely justification for a belly-laugh:

     Feminist Professor at the University of California-Davis, Sara Giordano, writing for the Catalyst, titled a recent article, Those who can’t, teach critical science literacy as a queer science of failure.

     She argues that “traditional science” relies on a “colonial and radicalized form of power” and must be replaced with an “anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.”

     She plans to “challenge the authority of Science” by “rewriting knowledge” through a feminist lens.

     Perhaps it's cruel of me, but I get a huge kick out of the pretensions of feminist "scholars" who write things such as that. They're probably aware that the problem lies within them – i.e., that they don't have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the sciences or the willpower to work at them until they do – but feminism uber alles, don't y' know. Can't betray the Sisterhood by admitting that most women can't or won't do mathematics. That would be wrong.

     I am reminded of an observation I saw in Roger Kimball's book Tenured Radicals: "One wonders whether feminist airplanes will stay aloft for feminist engineers." Really.

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     It seems that the Deep State goes very deep indeed:

     The National Park Service told the Washington Free Beacon it is no longer providing funding for a controversial project "honoring the legacy" of the Black Panther Party after outrage that the agency would spend taxpayer dollars to memorialize a group that murdered a park ranger in the 1970s.

     The Free Beacon revealed last month that the Park Service gave roughly $100,000 to the University of California, Berkeley for a research project on the Marxist extremist group to "memorialize a history that brought meaning to lives far beyond the San Francisco Bay Area."

     "Committed to truthfully honoring the legacy of [Black Panther Party] BPP activists and the San Francisco Bay Area communities they served, the project seeks to document the lives of activists and elders and the landscapes that shaped the movement," the National Park Service stated in the grant awarded for the project.

     California, the Land of Fruits and Nuts! But more to the point, this is the sort of thing the Deep State has made a specialty: funding grievance groups that will sue the government and produce a rationale for "settling" in a fashion that increases government power and evokes more grievance groups. The EPA is notorious for it, but I hadn't known that the Park Service had been infected. O tempora, o mores!

     (I almost wrote "O tempura." It must be time for breakfast.)

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     I simply must get Duyen's opinion of this:

     Today in big-picture problems: We may be getting a new footwear emoji, because, apparently, the ones we have are sexist.

     The Emoji Unicode Consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee will vote on a proposed ballet flat icon today, reports shopping site Racked.

     Proposal author Florie Hutchinson thinks adding this classic commuter shoe to the emoji keyboard will “help pave the way to a more gender non-sexualized pictorial representation of the footwear category.”

     My little Vietnamese-American sweetie would be in danger of asphyxiation from uncontrollable laughter. She owns one pair of non-high-heeled shoes: a pair of Adidas trainers. All the rest are four or more inches above the common run of Man. She made a point about it to me, some years back: American prosperity makes women's going about in leg and figure-flattering high heels possible, because American women don't need to walk long distances.

     Feminism is just as anti-woman as it is anti-man. In combination with the "gender fluidity" madness, it's plainly certifiable.

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     Next we have some sour grapes from a departing (albeit not soon enough) Republican Senator:

     Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) tore into President Trump in a speech on the Senate floor minutes after announcing he will not run for reelection in 2018.

     Flake began by describing Trump but not naming him, saying that the "reckless provocations" of the executive branch "most often [happen] for the pettiest and most personal reasons."

     Flake said none of President Trump's actions or behavior should be regarded as "normal," saying the president disrespects the "institutions" of America by acting in a "flagrant disregard for truth and decency."

     "Without fear of the consequences and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that degradation of the politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal," Flake continued.

     Not only did Flake not name President Trump, he didn't bother to specify which of Trump's "actions or behavior" display a "flagrant regard for truth and decency." I'll allow that that would be very difficult, as nothing Trump has done is untruthful, indecent, or disrepects American "institutions." For such behavior, Flake should look to Trump's predecessor in the Oval Office, whose deceits and arrogations of extra-Constitutional power were egregious. But Flake's real problem isn't with Trump; it's with American voters, who appear disinclined to return Flake to the Senate for another term.

     Still, one must allow oneself a grin, at least, over a senior federal politico throwing a tantrum on the floor of the Senate. "If you won't give me what I want, I'm going home." Have a pleasant trip, Senator.

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     Finally for this morning, to honor the requests of readers who've asked for a paperback edition of Innocents, yesterday I navigated the minefield of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) to produce one, and you can purchase it here.

     Unfortunately, I seem to have run afoul of something in the KDP system. It doesn't believe that "Francis W. Porretto" is the same as "Francis Porretto." Most disturbing. But perhaps a quick note to Amazon will straighten that out. Tomorrow, that is; today is for other undertakings. Until then, be well.