Archive for 2020

OPEN THREAD: Show your work.

DAVID GOLDMAN: How fragile is Iran’s regime? “Few countries have endured this level of deprivation outside of full war mobilization, and few have seen such a drastic decline in the number of births. The only modern comparison is Venezuela. Governments with a monopoly of economic resources and the willingness to kill significant numbers of their own citizens can stay in power for quite some time, but there seems no question that Iran’s regime is fragile and prone to destabilization.”

LITTLE MIKEY CAN’T DRAW A CROWD: Small showing for Bloomberg rally with Judge Judy despite campaign’s big spending. “Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg claims he is ready to spend more than $1 billion in an effort to oust President Trump, but money may not be bringing supporters to his campaign. Just 45 people showed up to Bloomberg’s latest rally with TV star Judge Judy Sheindlin in Texas on Saturday.”

The worst problem for Bloomberg is that he’s spending huge sums on TV ads, but when he’s on them and talks, he’s such a turnoff. Zero charisma.

I’M (SARAH A. HOYT) IN THIS ANTHOLOGY, AND IT’S ON SALE FOR 99C THIS WEEKEND:  Parallel Worlds: The Heroes Within.

It includes a lot of other “little known” writers, such as Jim Butcher.  Honestly, great buy and I should have linked earlier, but I was struck down by stomach flu and am just now returning to human. So, get it while it’s cheap!

NEO ON SUSAN HENNESSEY: Caught in the Crossfire Crossfire.

Yeah, Susan, sure thing. But when you use “crossfire” to refer to the actual, literal shooting down of an airplane you’re not using the word that way. You’re just not, and the fact that you’re trying to make it seem as though you were only makes it even more clear how disingenuous you are being. This situation involved no firing from two points in which the line of fire crossed, nor one in which the forces of the sides met or clashed, and it most certainly was not the rapid or heated exchange of words.

Read the whole thing.

 

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

ROD DREHER: Sir Roger Scruton Is Dead. Dreher quotes this passage from Scruton:

The witch-hunting hysteria has returned with a vengeance, not in Eastern Europe but here, where open enquiry and the presumption of innocence have been, until this moment, the foundation of moral order and the guarantee of civil peace.

Even the Divinity School at Cambridge, which once bravely helped us in offering degrees to our students, has joined in the witch-hunt, revoking a fellowship offered to the conservative thinker Jordan Peterson in response to a petition littered with the signatures of ignorant snowflakes.

And when, just a few months ago, I was summarily removed as the (unpaid) head of a Government quango – Building Better, Building Beautiful – for things I had neither thought nor said, my Czech colleagues said: ‘Yes, it is starting again.’ And by ‘it’ they really did mean It.

Now in Britain, as then in Czechoslovakia, the true intellectual is a dissident, and if our national memory is to survive, it will be because we have succeeded in building here, as once we built there, an underground university devoted to knowledge.

Read the whole thing.

Related: More from Steve Hayward of Power Line who adds, “I could go on all day about Sir Roger, but for now at least I’ll sign off with perhaps my favorite short quote from him: ‘A writer who says that there are no truths, or