Thomas More

Husband, father, patriot, blessed in so many ways, aspiring to be a man for all seasons. A watch implies a watchmaker.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

@robkhenderson Well, it’s still a good thing to be in the first world, not so good to be in the Ivies. Also, the British army would lose to the Cornell football team these days.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

@johnkonrad Red Jihad.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

@charlesmurray Saved Britain for a time, maybe the key time. We forget today how close much of Europe came to electing Communists right before Thatcher came along. She and Reagan bought critical years before the USSR implosion.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

There’s a term more than a century old, a “Boston marriage.” It describes two women who live together indefinitely and do not seek male suitors. The term deserves a comeback. On the male side, there was always “confirmed bachelor.” Two men living together long term may fairly be called two confirmed bachelors, even if they use different wording for themselves.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

All true. A word, if I may, about the perverse incentives for cabinet ministers and others in Israel's parliamentary system. Netanyahu has an unusually strong coalition government, but his own party still does not have a majority in the Knesset. There is a long tradition in Israel that coalition members get cabinet seats as part of the price of their cooperation. Even as they are part of the government, they are campaigning and positioning themselves for media attention to try to obtain a few extra points in the next election so they can be a slightly larger minority. It's a feature, not a bug, when these politicians stake out the "20" position when the electorate is 80/20 on the other side. Even though Trump and his policies are overwhelmingly popular in Israel, the system rewards parties that cater to the relatively fringe minority. I should add that it's not a crazy minority. The Israelis have done a lot of fighting and dying for almost a century now, and it's understandable (though I disagree with them) that there's a group that wants desperately to deliver the final knock-out blow now that has always eluded their vaunted military. The U.S. system, for all its faults, is actually much better at driving politicians to the center.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

"Twenty months have elapsed, but the rebellion is not crushed out; its military power has not been broken; the insurgents have not dispersed. The Union is not restored; nor the Constitution maintained; nor the laws enforced . . . after nearly two years of more vigorous prosecution of war than ever recorded in history; you have utterly, signally, disastrously—I will not say ignominiously—failed to subdue ten millions of ‘rebels,’ whom you had taught the people of the North and West not only to hate, but to despise. … You have not conquered the South. You never will. It is not in the nature of things possible; much less under your auspices. But money you have expended without limit, and blood poured out like water. Defeat, debt, taxation, sepulchres, these are your trophies . . . The war for the Union is, in your hands, a most bloody and costly failure."

Democrat Senator Clement L. Vallandigham said this on January 14, 1863 about President Abraham Lincoln.

Some things never change.

[Jennifer Van Laar @jenvanlaar]

https://t.co/LCQfoXSejn

[C3 @C_3C_3]

Those calling for censorship are never the good guys.

Never.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

Classic @KurtSchlichter

[Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter]

Good people respect success; bad ones get mad about it. @townhallcom

Only Jealous Pinko Losers Begrudge Elon Musk His Well-Deserved Success https://t.co/xkqnGcu5wm

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

It’s quite a skill to write on or two of these delightful sketches. Mr. Nobunaga does one after another, and somehow keeps each one fresh.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A woman named Brittany whispered that she was going to "release my tension," and I prepared, in that moment, to tell her nothing.

I had heard of a place where, for a price, a person will press upon your body until you break. I did not know why a man would pay for this. But a warrior does not refuse a trial simply because he does not understand it. So I went. To learn what I was made of.

The room was dark. Too dark. There was smoke, but it smelled of flowers, not fire. Somewhere, a whale was singing. A single whale, very sad, very far away. I did not ask about the whale. A man does not question another house's music.

Brittany entered, soft-voiced, calm as still water, and said the words that began everything.

"Go ahead and undress to your comfort level, and lie face down under the sheet. I'll knock before I come in."

She would knock. She was giving me time to prepare my spirit. I undressed to my comfort level, which for a warrior is fully armored, but I had no armor, so I lay down as I was. Then I saw it. The table had a hole. A single round hole, where the face goes.

I understood immediately. This was so that, when the pain became unbearable, I could scream directly into the floor, and no one would hear, and my honor would remain intact. A merciful design. I placed my face into the hole of screaming and waited.

She knocked. I called out that I was ready. I was ready to die.

She began at the shoulders. And here is where I must be honest. It did not hurt. It felt... good. This was the trap. The enemy begins gently, to lull you, before the true assault. I braced for the moment it would turn. I waited for the pain. I welcomed it in advance.

"Wow, you are holding so much tension up here," she said, pressing into my shoulder.

She had found something. A weakness. My tension, hidden in my shoulder, where I had stored it for eight hundred years. And she had found it in ninety seconds. This was no ordinary woman. This was an interrogator of the highest rank, and my tension was the secret she had come to extract.

I resolved to give her nothing. Let her press. Let her search. The location of my tension would die with me.

"You can just relax," she said. "Let it go."

A trick, obviously. "Let it go" — let down my guard, release the secret, surrender the very tension she sought. The oldest move in the book. I would not fall for it. I relaxed nothing. I held my tension with the grip of a man holding a rope over a cliff. She pressed harder. I held harder. We were locked in silent combat, she and I, and the whale sang on, mourning, perhaps, for one of us.

Twenty minutes passed this way. Her, searching. Me, defending. The whale, grieving.

Then she pressed one spot beside my spine, and without my permission, my body made a sound. A long, low, shameful sound of pure relief. The secret had escaped. My tension, released, into her hands.

I had broken. After eight hundred years, a woman named Brittany broke me in twenty-two minutes, with her thumbs, beside a singing whale.

"There it goes," she said, gently. "Good."

She was not gloating. She said it kindly. The mark of a true master is that she does not celebrate the defeat of a worthy foe. She simply notes it, and moves to the next shoulder.

At the end she said, "take your time getting up, drink lots of water," and left me alone in the dark with the whale. I lay there, hollow, defeated, and more relaxed than I have been in my entire life. The two feelings, it turns out, are the same feeling.

So tell me, America. When a soft-voiced woman lays you over a hole in a table, finds the secret you have guarded for centuries, and presses it out of you with her thumbs while a whale weeps... did I lose? Or is being defeated, sometimes, the prize you paid for?

I tipped her everything. You do not haggle with the one who found your tension.
I return next week. I intend to lose again.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

Senator, that’s an odd choice to make your petulant complaint (Horrors! A hearing postponed!) in public rather than quietly to the administration. I’m one of many people, I suspect, who have a generally favorable impression of you without knowing much in the way of specifics. I’d sure like to stay on your side.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

@Handre “You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong.” Please consider that much of the answer may be that he was evil and leftism destroys souls. Thank you for the post. I didn’t expect to think about Mao and Sartre this morning.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

@YanPeronn I thought this was a clever parody and am only slowly giving in to the idea that it’s factual.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

Another one that had me laughing out loud. “The cactus stands guard over a generous hall.” Brilliant.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A restaurant on my birthday week. The waiter set down a dessert I had not ordered and said four words that stopped my chopsticks.

"It's on the house."

On the house. I asked him: WHICH house?

He smiled like I had made a joke. I had not made a joke. Someone was paying for this dessert and I needed to know whom to honor. He gestured vaguely at the walls. "The house. The restaurant. It's free, man."

Nothing is free. Someone always pays. Tonight, the BUILDING itself was paying.

So I stood. I bowed to the restaurant. To the beams. To the kitchen door. To the neon sign of a cactus wearing a hat. The waiter watched me complete the full circuit, holding his tray, and said:

"...I'll tell the owner."

TELL HIM. Tell the lord of this house his hospitality has been received and recorded by the house of Nobunaga.

The dessert was fried ice cream. Fried. Ice cream. You people fried the one thing fire should not defeat, and the house gave it to me FREE, on a day that was not even my birthday, because I had mentioned my birthday was Saturday.

In Japan, a gift this miscalculated would require three apologies and a committee. Here it required only a spoon.

A man does not ask a building why it gives. He bows to the beams, and he eats what burns. There is no other protocol. I checked.

I left a review of five stars, addressed directly: "To the House: you honored a stranger with defeated fire. The cactus stands guard over a generous hall. — NOBUNAGA."

The owner replied: "Thanks Nobunaga!! Come back soon!!"

Two exclamation points. Twice.

That house and I are bound now, America. The dessert was free. My loyalty was not. It was purchased with ice cream they set on fire, and it has no expiration date.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

@engineers_feed “We are running out”? Love your work, but we’ve never “run out” of anything. The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones.

[SimpleTim @SnoopyLover4547]

I firmly believe that every single good thing happening in the world politically is downstream of Trump. It’s crazy how much worse off we’d be if he didn’t come down the golden escalator. I’m never turning my back on this man

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

Your last line is a splendid update of an old quote from Donald Rumsfeld: "there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know." You are correct and poetic in describing another category, containing things people know but "they do not even know they know it." Love your work!

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Television viewership has been falling for years.
British. American. Japanese.

The official story is streaming. Entertainment. Shorter attention spans.

But look at what people are actually spending that time on.
They are on X.
Watching people say things television decided not to say.

That is not an attention span problem.
That is an audience that stopped trusting the source.

You cannot solve a trust deficit with better production values.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

This is the one that got me hooked.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A diner. The waitress asked me how I want my eggs, and my mind went completely blank.

"How do you want your eggs, hon?"

Want. How do I WANT them. No one has ever asked me this. In my land, the egg arrives as the cook decrees, and you thank the egg, the cook, and your ancestors, in that order.

"Scrambled? Over easy? Sunny side up?" she offered, gently, the way one talks a man down from a roof.

The terms did not help. Over easy — over WHAT, easily? Easy for whom? Sunny side up — these people have named an egg after the dawn. Who does that. I needed time.

I have chosen battlefields faster than I chose those eggs.

She refilled my coffee and said she'd come back. It was the second refill. I had been deciding for nine minutes.

The man on the next stool leaned over. "Just say over easy, man. You can't go wrong."

"And if I CAN go wrong?"

"...it's eggs, buddy."

It's eggs. Eight hundred years of my family training itself to want nothing, and this man dismissed all of it with a fork in his hand. He was right. I will never tell him.

"Sunny side up," I declared, with the weight of a man choosing a path for life. "I will face the sun."

"You got it, hon."

The eggs came. Two small suns on a white plate, looking up at me. Golden. Ridiculous. Exactly what I wanted.

So THAT is what wanting feels like. I had to cross an ocean and hold up a breakfast line to learn it.

The man on the next stool got his check and left. "Good choice," he said.

I have never been more proud of anything.

A man does not ask the eggs to be simple. He only becomes a man who knows what he wants.

Tomorrow: over easy. I am almost ready.

[Thomas More @Thomas_More2017]

This guy is good.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A supermarket register. The man ahead of me handed me a small plastic bar, and I believe we signed a treaty.

You know this bar. It lies on the conveyor belt between his groceries and mine. Two ounces of plastic. No lock. No blade. No authority of any kind.

And it prevents ALL war.

His ground beef ends. The bar stands. My vegetables begin. There has never been a dispute at this border. There will never be a dispute. In Japan, we would accomplish this with careful spacing and profound mutual anxiety. Here, a stick does it.

My country needed four hundred years and three shogunates to draw borders this stable. America draws them at every register, every few seconds, with a stick, and nobody even looks down.

When he placed it for me — placed it FOR me, an act of pure statesmanship — I thanked him with the depth the moment deserved. I may have bowed.

He said: "Yep."

Yep. The sound of a man who does not know he is a diplomat. The best ones never do.

But here is what shook me. At the end, the cashier picked up our sacred border and TOSSED it into a little slot. Casually. Like trash. The treaty, concluded, simply ends. No archive. No ceremony. The border rests, and waits to serve the next two nations.

Two ounces. No army. Undefeated since the invention of the conveyor belt.

A border does not ask to be feared. It lies down, and is obeyed.

I hand the bar to the person behind me now. Every visit. Personally. Before they can reach for it. The response is always a small, surprised "oh — thanks," and then peace between our houses.

Yesterday a man received my bar, paused, and handed THE NEXT one to the woman behind him.

It spreads, America. Statecraft is contagious, and your registers are the academy.

Yep.