URLs du Jour

2020-11-12

  • Our Eye Candy du Jour is from an article tossed up from our Google LFOD News Alert: Artists in 'limbo' share their feelings of frustration and hope in new works.

    [LFOD]

    Yes, the painting is entitled "Live Free or Die". And it is an accurate picture of downtown Rollinsford, NH.

    Just kidding! That fire escape skeleton was standing, not sitting!

    The artist is Nicolas Holiber, and this painting and others will be on display this month at the Everyday Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium. The theme of the exhibition will be to show the "collective feelings" of the group: "Distress, anger, frustration, but also hope".

    (I believe that's Hope on the ground behind the school bus.)


  • Also on the LFOD alert, from the (honest) Irish Examiner, interviewing Oprah's life coach: 'The world will fry if we don't do something different'. That's Martha Beck, and LFOD is part of this quote:

    “If there is anyone who doesn’t need a life coach; it’s Oprah Winfrey but I guess you could say I’m in her stable,” Martha laughs.

    “I’ve talked to her many times and she’s always been lovely, the first article I wrote, the whole thing was about, is your life a prison, will you live free or die and she wrote me a really kind letter and said it was very much the way she thinks. The thing that I treasure about the friends that I have who are better known is they don’t compare themselves to other people, it’s more about the path, they’re all kind of on a mission, to move towards awakening.”

    I, for one, don't see how you can't read Martha without feeling your IQ decay. I looked around and found on her website: Becoming a Samurai Sword in 2020. A samurai sword? Why not a SIG Sauer P226? Or a W54 nuclear warhead?

    Anyway, Martha's essay begins:

    Arnold Toynbee famously defined history as “one damned thing after another.”

    Well, stop right there. Another one of those not-quite quotes that are too good to check.

    It's just one of those things you type when you want to sound smart.


  • Jacob Sullum does the math for Reason and comes up Republican Lawsuits Cannot Deliver the Evidence Trump Needs To Prove He Actually Won the Election.

    After last week's election, Donald Trump supporters in Nevada claimed that 10,000 people had voted illegally in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas. Even assuming that all 10,000 voted for Joe Biden, that would not have been enough for Trump to win Nevada, where the former vice president beat him by nearly 37,000 votes. Still, such a large number of illegal ballots would have counted as serious and substantial voting fraud. But by the time Republicans filed a lawsuit challenging the results in Clark County, The Washington Post notes, the claim of 10,000 fraudulent votes "had been whittled down drastically" to a single case involving a woman who said her mail-in ballot had been stolen, although the signature on it matched hers.

    That incident illustrates a broader pattern. While the president insists the election was "stolen" through large-scale, orchestrated fraud, the post-election lawsuits fall notably short of making that case. With the exception of the dubious argument that the longstanding practice of voting by mail is inherently unconstitutional, the claims in the lawsuits, even if accepted as true, are weak tea compared to the strong brew cooked up by the president, who alleges a vast anti-Trump conspiracy that denied him his rightful victory.

    Song du Jour is from Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks: "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away". Maybe Pence could sneak a boombox into the Oval Office and play it for Trump.

    Or maybe some fat lady singing. Trump would probably get that.


  • For some reason, I'm hooked on these post-election "Blame Libertarians" articles. Instapundit links to Roger L. Simon at the Epoch Times as another example. (The Epoch Times seems to demand you hand over your e-mail address before they let you look at a whole article. So never mind that, we'll just look at the excerpt Glenn provides.)

    As of this writing, the votes separating Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are less than the numbers gained by Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen who garnered close to 1.7 percent of the popular vote.

    As Joel Pollak wrote on breitbart.com, “If Jorgensen’s votes went to Trump, instead of allowing Biden to win these states, the president would win re-election, with 289 Electoral College votes.”

    Whether this is absolutely true is, of course, unknowable, but given the current leftward-lurching Democratic Party that seems about as libertarian as Chairman Mao, if push came to the proverbial shove, the majority of Ms. Jorgensen’s voters likely would have gone to Trump.

    She seems like a decent person but Jorgensen […] is a textbook example of what I termed a “moral narcissist” in my 2016 book “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already. “

    What the moral narcissist claims she believes (in this case Jorgensen, but there are many similar self-described liberals and progressives as well)—not the actual results of those beliefs—is what defines her as a person and makes her good.

    Links removed, they mostly go to the Epoch Times. But I'm more than amused when Roger implies I should have voted for Trump as a brave stand against narcissism.


  • Counterpoint from Tiana Lowe in the Washington Examiner: Maybe the libertarians weren't so irrelevant after all.

    All of this has led to a bit of meltdown on both sides of the aisle, complete with the ever-inane debate over whether third parties "steal" votes from major parties. But the important fact is that a crucial segment of the public does not buy into the "binary choice" theory of elections. Does this really come as a surprise when the two main parties keep producing unacceptable candidates as their nominees?

    No party or candidate is entitled to your vote, or anyone else's for that matter. If you want the votes that straddle between Biden's key state margins, you have to earn them. And further, maybe the reluctant persistence of the Libertarian Party is a sign that Republicans really do need to cater to that vote. On foreign policy and criminal justice reform, Trump is likely the most libertarian candidate of my lifetime, but he embraced blowing out the national debt even when the economy was thriving, rejected the entitlement reforms required to curb an incoming debt crisis, and refuses to dismantle the surveillance state that spied on his campaign.

    No president in a post-coronavirus world will be able to immediately reclaim the Tea Party mantle, but perhaps there does have to be a discussion of the millions of Americans who might vote for Republicans if they actually kept their promises. Jorgensen voters likely did cost Trump the election, and that's no one's fault other than the Republicans'.

    It's arguable whether Trump would have won in the alternate universe where Jorgenson was kept off the ballot. And I won't point the finger of blame for losing at anyone but Trump.


Last Modified 2024-02-02 4:54 AM EDT