Patrick Politano

[Michael Brasher @2ndMississippi]

Not Yet Two O'Clock: Faulkner Sets the Scene

The finest thing ever written about Pickett's Charge does not appear in a history of the battle. It appears in a novel about a murder in a fictional Mississippi county, published eighty-five years after the guns fell silent, buried mid-paragraph as though its author were half embarrassed to be caught caring so much. William Faulkner set it down in Intruder in the Dust in 1948, and no historian before or since — and I include the best of them — has come closer to explaining what that afternoon became in the Southern mind after the fact of it was done.

Shelby Foote would have been the first to say so. He held Faulkner above every American novelist living or dead — a fellow Mississippian, near enough a neighbor — and as a young man he once drove down to Oxford with Walker Percy to pay the great man a call, Foote marching up to the door at Rowan Oak while Percy, too awed to move, sat waiting in the car. When Foote spent twenty years writing his own three volumes on the war, it was Faulkner's shadow he wrote in, and he knew it, and never pretended otherwise.

What Faulkner understood — what the passage below holds suspended like a fly in amber — is that the charge exists twice. Once in history, where it ran its course in less than an hour on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, and cannot be called back. And once in memory, where the clock stands forever at "not yet two o'clock," the brigades in position, the flags loosened, everything still in the balance — where there is still time, every time, for it not to begin. The boy in Faulkner's conceit gets to stand in that instant whenever he wants it. The men behind the rail fence got it once, and briefly, and then the word came.

Notice, too, who inhabits Faulkner's tableau: Pickett with his oiled ringlets, Garnett, Kemper, Armistead, Wilcox. No Pettigrew. No Trimble. No Davis's Mississippians waiting off to the left with the railroad cut two days behind them, no Brockenbrough, no fences. Faulkner's passage does not merely describe the legend — it demonstrates how the legend was built, and who was left outside it. The boy dreams of Virginians. This series has spent its length among the men he never dreams of.

But read the passage. Read it aloud if you can, the way it was built to be read, one sentence carrying you the whole way down like the slope of Seminary Ridge itself. Then look at the painting, and the men standing ranked and waiting in it, and remember that for them there was no whenever he wants it. There was only the once.

— William Faulkner, "Intruder in the Dust," 1948, follows below.

[Barstool Michigan @BarstoolUofM]

I’m assuming it has been too long since you’ve last watched this video so here you go.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

Here is the first time ever God Bless America was sung
Happy 250 America
Watch and spread
Like and smile

[Americana Aesthetics @AmericanaAesth]

Coke Cola Ad for 1976's Bicentennial

[Pulp Librarian @PulpLibrarian]

Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines (1969). There were only two voice actors in this one: Paul Winchell and Don Messick.

The working title for the show was Stop That Pigeon, hence the title song.

[1976 Live @50YearsAgoLive]

At the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, Nina Simone sings and records a rendition of Janis Ian’s ‘Stars’ that is so moving as to leave the entire room silent and, often, in tears, due to the emotional intensity of her voice.

[Jeff Dye @JeffDye]

Soccer. 😂

[John VanderWal @VandyonTigers]

The Biggest Lie in Baseball Today

The biggest lie in baseball today isn’t that pitchers throw harder.
It’s that people who’ve never played the game at the highest level think they know more than the people who actually did.
I’ve got to laugh at the fucking know-it-alls on here.
Some of us spent 14–15 years in the big leagues. We played 162 games a year. We stood in against 85 mph, 100 mph, 101, 102. We didn’t read about it. We lived it.
Then you’ve got people who never played at that level, never stood in the box against elite velocity, never spent a day in a professional clubhouse, telling the people who actually did that they’re wrong.
That’s fucking hilarious.
Now we’ve got keyboard gurus and pitching-school salesmen acting like they unlocked some secret that’s never existed before.
Give me a fucking break.
Hard throwers have always existed. Triple-digit arms have always existed. Filthy breaking balls have always existed. What changed was the technology used to measure and report pitches—not the fact that freak athletes have been blowing baseballs by hitters for decades.
And here’s what these geniuses never talk about…
Modern hitting instruction has become so obsessed with lifting the ball and launch angle that we’ve created worse hitters. When your swing is built to hit underneath the baseball instead of driving through it, you’re going to struggle more against elite velocity. Pitchers look more dominant in part because the hitters have gotten worse.
But that doesn’t fit the narrative.
Instead, they pretend pitching schools reinvented the human arm.
The funniest part is the absolute confidence. They read numbers off a screen and think they’re qualified to lecture people who spent decades living this game at the highest level.
Here’s a little advice: before you tell someone who’s actually been there what big league velocity looks like, make sure you’ve done more than watch YouTube clips and stare at TrackMan numbers.
Until then, quit pretending you’re the smartest guy in the room.
You’re not baseball people.
You’re fucking dumbasses.
#VandyOnTigers #VandyDandyReport #DetroitTigers #MLB #Baseball

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Depuis 50 ans, la gauche a réussi le plus grand hold-up intellectuel de l'histoire moderne.

Pas avec des armes. Pas avec des lois. Avec des mots.

Et honnêtement ? Chapeau. C'est génial. C'est diabolique. C'est du grand art.

Ils ont compris une chose qu'Orwell avait écrite noir sur blanc dans 1984 : celui qui contrôle le langage contrôle la pensée. Change les mots, et tu changes ce que les gens sont capables de penser. Rétrécis le vocabulaire, et tu rétrécis le champ du possible.

Dans 1984, ce n'est pas un détail. C'est le cœur du réacteur. Le ministère de la Vérité fabrique les mensonges. Le ministère de l'Amour torture. Le ministère de la Paix fait la guerre. « La guerre c'est la paix, la liberté c'est l'esclavage. » La novlangue ne décrit pas le monde — elle le remplace.

Et c'est exactement ce qui s'est passé. Regardez la mécanique :

Le « progressisme » ? C'est l'anti-progrès. Ceux qui bloquent le nucléaire, qui freinent la tech, qui diabolisent la croissance, qui rêvent de décroissance et veulent punir ceux qui construisent. Le mot dit « avant ». Le projet dit « arrière ».

L'« antiracisme » ? Il a réinjecté la race partout. Il assigne les gens à leur couleur, les enferme dans des cases, dresse les groupes les uns contre les autres. Un mouvement censé effacer la race l'a remise au centre de tout. Il a fabriqué le racisme qu'il prétend combattre.

Les croisades « contre l'homophobie » ? Elles crispent, elles clivent, elles imposent — et fabriquent en retour une partie du rejet qu'elles disaient vouloir éteindre.

La « protection » façon Union européenne ? C'est du flicage. On te surveille « pour ton bien », on te censure « pour te protéger », on te contrôle « pour ta sécurité ». Chaque mot est une inversion. Le vocabulaire de la bienveillance au service d'un projet orwellien.

Et le plus beau dans l'arnaque, c'est le verrou. Le piège parfait.

Aujourd'hui, des millions de gens lucides, qui voient parfaitement le problème… se taisent. Pourquoi ? Parce qu'ils refusent d'être traités de « racistes ». Sauf qu'être « antiraciste » au sens où le mot a été retourné, c'est précisément devenir raciste. Ils ont piégé les gens avec leur propre morale. Échec et mat.

Voilà le chef-d'œuvre : ils n'ont pas eu besoin de vous convaincre. Ils ont juste rendu le désaccord impensable, en confisquant les mots pour le formuler.

Alors oui — respect. Bonne guerre. Ils ont joué une manche, et ils l'ont gagnée.

Mais il y a un truc que la novlangue n'avait pas prévu.

Tout le monde a compris.

Le voile est tombé. Les mots reprennent leur poids. Et une inversion sémantique ne survit pas à l'instant précis où les gens la voient à l'œil nu. Ça, c'est terminé.

On reprend les mots. On reprend le réel. On reprend la partie.

[Yinzer G @yinzer_g]

The 5 reasons soccer won't increase in popularity after the world cup is over.

1. The flopping. This goes against the soul of every American. We value grit, toughness and basically not being a pussy.
2. The clock. No one wants to get to the end of a game and have no clue when it's over. Just stop & start the clock when you need to, like sane people.
3. Offsides. Just put a line out there like everyone else. This floating line you have makes the game unwatchable. It's like a built in, anti-excitement glitch you manufactured for your game.
4. Red cards. What a stupid rule that you automatically get kicked out for the next game for getting one. I can understand suspending someone after a league review of something you did that was horrible. But to automatically get suspended because of what a ref saw at full speed is stupid.
5. Ties. In America we call it kissing your sister, cause that's the same feeling you get after a tie. Pure disgust. In soccer, it seems like the result you prefer most. Play til you have a winner.

[Spencer A. Klavan @SpencerKlavan]

It gets worse and worse in retrospect the longer I think about it. Guy lays out a trove of footage showing aliens inscrutably Doing Stuff and suffering unspeakable things. How they got into this position is a mystery because they possess glowing power sticks that do literally anything the user wants to have happen in that moment, no one has any concern or any information about how they work they’re just magic and can do mind control but also de-particlization and probably also extreme acts of hideous violence, however the aliens were not able to use this ability to avoid getting cattle prodded in a cell or crashing their space ships about every fifteen minutes apparently. Not a single person is like, “tell me please in detail what is going on in this footage” or “how can we be sure these images have not been doctored by AI or otherwise,” they just jump directly to wooden seminar dialogue about HOW can we beLIEVE in GOD NOW and ARE you SURE the people are READY for this knowledge. WHAT knowledge???? Literally what is happening in this movie except that Emily Blunt speaks Korean and smirkingly appears on camera to explain everything right before lights out. Which is actually a perfect metaphor, when you think about it, for this Boomerslop mentality in which Spielberg constantly shakes his head and tut-tuts at “the state of things,” to which he gestures vaguely throughout the movie in scenes that invite us to fill in the blank with our approved social justice concern (did the people do a populism? Is war happening? Probably they elected Trump. Definitely they made global warming happen, which is bad), all of which comes with the implicit premise that Spielberg is a Good and Wise person who has The Answer to these Bad Things, and it turns out to be…nothing. Blackout. Unearned self-righteousness from a director scolding us for problems he does not understand and cannot accurately diagnose, on the basis of imagined wisdom he does not possess and cannot articulate because it amounts to nothing more than an unshakable felt sense of personal superiority. Literally the one thing this movie promised, which was a disclosure of just what these aliens are or what they have to say, fades into maundering platitudes about loving and welcoming the other. An aggressively bad movie.

[Stirrups Now! @uniformcritic]

At 12:31 am on this day in 1963 the greatest game ever pitched ends in the 16th inning on a Willie Mays HR. The Giants win 1-0 over the Braves. Juan Marichal defeats a 42 year old Warren Spahn & both pitchers go the distance. Spahn threw 201 pitches, Marichal 227. Remarkable!

[Willis Eschenbach @WEschenbach]

Happy 96th birthday to Professor Thomas Sowell, one of the greatest thinkers of our time and the undisputed king of the epigram! In his honor, here are twenty of his most famous quotes:

1. “Nearly a hundred years of the supposed ‘legacy of slavery’ found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent. The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law enforcement policies.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)

2. “Public housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)

3. “The blacks in the West Indies had all sorts of experiences growing their food, selling the surplus in the market, and being responsible for budgeting what they had. Black slaves in the United States were deliberately kept from having that. Dependence was seen as the key to holding the slaves down. Ironically, that same principle comes up in the welfare state 100 years later.”

4. “If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.” (A Legacy of Liberalism)

5. “What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money. In so far as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.” (Free to Choose, 1980)

6. “The way the [welfare] programs are organized, poor people are only paid to do things that are counter-productive, such as breaking up their families, such as not earning above a certain level of income.”

7. “The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.”

8. “Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.”

9. “The more people who are dependent on government handouts, the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state. Although the big word on the left is ‘compassion,’ the big agenda on the left is dependency.”

10. “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area, crime, education, housing, race relations, the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” (Is Reality Optional?)

11. “The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”

12. “Socialism is a wonderful idea. It is only as a reality that it has been disastrous. Among people of every race, color, and creed, all around the world, socialism has led to hunger in countries that used to have surplus food to export.”

13. “As long as human beings are imperfect, there will always be arguments for extending the power of government to deal with these imperfections. The only logical stopping place is totalitarianism, unless we realize that tolerating imperfections is the price of freedom.” (Ever Wonder Why?)

14. “The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.”

15. “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”

16. “Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.”

17. “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication, and a government bureaucracy to administer it.” (Knowledge and Decisions)

18. “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”

19. “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support, kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists.’”

20. “The old adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish has been updated by a reader: Give a man a fish, and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries! Moreover, some politician who wants his vote will declare all these things to be among his ‘basic rights.’”

[Pincher Martin @PincherMartin8]

That isn't how the Americans of that time viewed it. Nor how Americans over the next two generations viewed it.

If it was going so fine, then why did the country overwhelmingly support immigration restrictionism? And by "overwhelmingly," I mean with super majorities in both parties and with majorities of each congressional delegation broken down by every major region of the country. The one exception was New England, which was close (48%).

[Dan Burmawi @DanBurmawy]

https://t.co/O73Vv0VgKZ

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

“Weekend Update”

SNL (1979)

74 Candles 🎂 today for the wonderful DAN AYKROYD

[Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en]

When the Hart-Celler Act passed, its proponents swore up and down that it would not change the demographic makeup of the country. So "the Matt Walshes of 80 years ago"...were right.

When the Reagan amnesty-for-enforcement deal was struck, critics to Reagan's right said we'd get the amnesty but not the enforcement. So "the Matt Walshes of 40 years ago"...were right.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

I want to convince you to read a book with a scary cover.

Everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, not because it is the last word on Nazis, but because it remains one of the most powerful demonstrations ever written of how civilization can fail while still believing itself to be civilized.

That is the terrifying genius of Shirer’s book.

It does not present the Third Reich as some meteor that struck Europe from outer space, nor does it comfort us with the childish notion that Germany was magically populated by millions of uniquely evil people.

It shows something far more useful, and therefore far more disturbing: a modern, educated, technically sophisticated nation can be captured by lies, grievance, bureaucracy, fear, opportunism, and the small daily surrender of moral judgment.

The machinery of barbarism does not require a population of monsters. It requires enough believers, enough cowards, enough careerists, enough cynics, and enough ordinary people who decide that keeping their heads down is safer than saying no.

One argument I’ve heard is that all humans contain engrams that encode for certain group behaviors. When a local resource or abundance runs out, you invade a neighbor and take theirs. Or worse, you identify a group within your own population as the source of the problem and attack yourself, like an autoimmune disease. But it happens repeatedly throughout history.

And the most important lesson is not that Hitler won Germany in a landslide. He did not.

The Nazis became the largest party, but they never won a free majority mandate. In July 1932 they won 37.3% of the vote; in November 1932 they fell to 33.1%; and even in March 1933, after Hitler was already chancellor and political violence had warped the field, they reached 43.9%, still short of a majority. That is the chilling part. A country does not need 90% of its people to vote for madness in order for madness to govern it. It needs a militant minority, a fractured opposition, institutional weakness, elite miscalculation, and a public exhausted enough to mistake brutality for order.

Shirer makes you understand that dictatorship doesn’t happen when people vote to abolish freedom. More often, it arrives wrapped in emergency powers, procedural legality, patriotic language, porous constitutions, and the promise that the unpleasant parts are “temporary”.

People do not wake up one morning and decide to live in a police state.

They accept one exception, then another. They tolerate one class of people being degraded because it is not yet them. They watch one newspaper silenced, one judge intimidated, one civil servant replaced, one neighbor denounced, and each time the mind performs its little act of self-preservation: surely this is not the REAL turning point; surely someone ELSE will stop it; surely it is better NOT to get involved.

That is why the book is not merely history. It is a “systems manual” for democratic collapse.

Shirer shows the inputs and outputs. Economic humiliation goes in. Conspiracy thinking comes out. Parliamentary paralysis goes in. The hunger for a strongman comes out. Propaganda goes in. Moral permission comes out. Career incentives go in. Obedience comes out. The horrifying thing is how much of it looks less like a thunderclap than like an old programming flowchart. Forms are stamped. Orders are routed. Promotions are granted. The trains run on time. Men like Asperger who would never personally murder a child learn to serve a system that does.
And that is the second great reason to read it: it destroys the comfortable distance between “them” and “us.”

Most people contain the engrams necessary to fall in line under the right pressure. That does not mean everyone is secretly a Nazi. It means human beings are exquisitely vulnerable to belonging, fear, status, obedience, resentment, and the narcotic-like relief of not having to think too hard when a leader offers a complete explanation for every pain or problem. Shirer forces the reader to confront evil not as a rare substance found only in supervillains, but as a set of ordinary human capacities intentionally reorganized by ideology and power.

The book also matters because Shirer wrote with the eye of a witness. He was nor a historian, he was a journalist. As someone with ASD, I don’t fall prey to books like “A People’s History of the United States” because they are, at their core, emotional tracts. Shirer’s book is not. It’s journalism. It’s like reading a newspaper of events written by someone who was there and who had time to think about them.

That’s because he had lived in Germany as a correspondent and watched the Nazi state harden around him. His great advantage is not academic distance but proximity. You feel the sequence of events as something unfolding in real time, not as a museum exhibit safely sealed behind glass. That gives the book its momentum. It reads less like a textbook than like a slow-motion systems crash, where every warning light is blinking and the operators keep insisting the reactor is fine.

Yes, modern historians have refined, corrected, and complicated parts of Shirer’s interpretation. They should. No serious reader should stop with one book, especially one first published before I was even born. But that is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to start there and then keep going. Shirer gives the reader the great brutal architecture of the thing: the rise, the consolidation, the war, the crimes, the delusions, the collapse. Later scholarship can add wiring, plumbing, and better load-bearing analysis.

Shirer gives you the building. And just when you start to feel comfortable there, he sets it on fire while you are still inside.

What makes the book indispensable is that it turns “never again” from a slogan into a diagnostic skill. After reading it, you become less impressed by uniforms, slogans, rallies, and certainty. You become more suspicious of people who explain every problem by pointing at a hated internal enemy. You recognize the danger of elites who think they can harness extremists for their own purposes. You notice when law becomes a weapon instead of a restraint. You understand that institutions do not defend themselves; PEOPLE defend them, or they become scenery.

And perhaps most importantly, you learn that moral catastrophe is usually incrementalbefore it is total.

The abyss does not always announce itself.

Sometimes it is approached by reasonable men making “practical compromises”, by citizens tired of chaos, by newspapers chasing access, by judges respecting technicalities, by businessmen preferring stability, by soldiers obeying oaths, and by neighbors deciding that silence is not approval exactly, just prudence.

That’s the part that scared me the most – wondering where the “pragmatic me” would yield to the “moral me”, and just how sure I was that it would.

That is why everyone should read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Not to congratulate themselves again for being unlike the people in it, but to understand how much like them we might become if the incentives, fears, and pressures were arranged badly enough. The book is essentially a warning against human weakness under industrialized conditions.

It teaches that civilization is not a possession. It is a behavior. It must be renewed, defended, and practiced, especially when doing so is extremely inconvenient. And if a thousand pages of Shirer leaves you with anything, it is this: the machine is built by people, staffed by people, obeyed by people, and stopped, when it is stopped at all, by people who finally decide not to fall in line.

One final “pragmatic” note – there’s a chapter or two on the elections that go through the returns in a lot of detail. That part is a bit of a slog – you have my permission to fast-forward. But the rest of it is incredible.

PS: I would have just written this as an episode if YouTube were amenable to creators working outside of their channel's comfort zone, but alas... no.

Amazon: https://t.co/ODNWm2U8s5

[Gray Connolly @GrayConnolly]

Sirhan Sirhan murdered Robert Kennedy in 1968 because of Kennedy’s public support for Israel - his son is entirely right here esp on the exodus of not just Jews but Christians also from their ancient lands

[Ed McCray @Real_Ed_McCray]

I'm told Elizabeth Shue, Lea Thompson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Molly Ringwald are all in this 1982 Burger King ad. Can anyone out there confirm?