Thousands of curious spectators had gathered along the Rue du Rhône in Geneva at 11am, watching in earnest as the Swiss Federal Council and the State Council of the Canton of Geneva marched in slow procession, escorted by a small military contingent.  At their forefront, Swiss President Giuseppe Motta basked in the adoration of the crowd as the parade of Swiss dignitaries entered the giant Salle de la Réformation event center.

Inside, a collection of 241 delegates from 41 member nations (minus Honduras, whose delegation was still traveling), waited for Motta to take his seat as a honorary chairman at the dais.  The Acting President of the Assembly, Belgian politician Paul Hymans, rang a bell at 11:16am and declared the meeting open – the first official meeting of the League of Nations had begun on November 15th, 1920.

It had been a long and circuitous path to get to this day and the League’s first moments in formal existence (technically, the body had been organized in January of 1920 and had met in it’s proto form), exposed the flaws in it’s creation.  As League drafted a message of thanks to American President Woodrow Wilson, stating that they had gathered on this day at the American’s request, the United States was absent from the proceedings, as well as the Soviet Union, Germany and roughly another 44 sovereign nations that had either been excluded or had chosen to bypass the organization.  And the debates of the first day proved how fragile the newfound League could be, as France threatened to withdraw within hours when the subject of Germany’s admission was discussed.

In the air of the combative and disorganized proceedings, the ultimately prophetic words of Woodrow Wilson to the assembly could be heard:  “I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.”

The first meeting of the League of Nations – deep divides on policy could be seen from the literal first minutes of the organization

Depending upon one’s historical perspective, the events of November 15th, 1920 in Geneva either represented the end of a nearly 150 year path of diplomatic and small ‘r’ republican political progress or a revolutionary jump from nation states, to competing alliances, to finally a burgeoning sense of global, collective action.  The difference in historical narrative would eventually define those who chose to participate versus those who didn’t, and color the very notion of the purpose and powers of the League of Nations.  (more…)

SCENE: New York governor Kathy HOCHUL is meeting with members of the state assembly.

HOCHUL: The Supreme Court just said we can’t tire person‘s right to keep in bear arms to a completely subjective evaluation of their reasons to want to carry one.

We need to devise a less subjective and arbitrary system.

We need ideas. Go!

ASSEMBLY: how about we have state bureaucrats browse through applicants social media records?

HOCHUL: that sounds like it will be a slow, completely subjective and arbitrary bureaucratic nightmare that will wind up as yet another losing court case.

I love it!

And SCENE.

The Internet has been won.

Come back tomorrow.

The other day, I joked – sort of – that after the violence in downtown Minneapolis on July 4, the city councilman, Michael Rainville, might look for the sort of help that former city council president Lisa bender once referred to as “privilege”.

Yesterdays joke is today’s policy:

Minneapolis City Council member Michael Rainville says Governor Walz is sending in state troopers, as confirmed by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, to help Minneapolis with policing in the interim. The police department has about 600 officers, down from 800.

The ne’er-do-wells finally found a neighborhood where the sense of entitlement overcame white progressive guilt.

A friend of the blog emails:

I had read a while back that some garbage collectors in Saint Paul were not meeting their obligation to customers and were not collecting trash. Mine was consistently being picked up, so I felt fortunate, especially since I was never a supporter of city wide trash collection, at least not the inefficient way Saint Paul was doing it.

With the heat, I had avoided a great deal of yard work during June, but towards the end of the month, I finally had enough yard waste to put out at the curb.

No collection.

I didn’t worry about it much. I just left it out for the next week.

Still no collection.

I finally contacted my hauler who told me they were contracting with another hauler to collect yard waste and to contact them. Ok. I would guess this wouldn’t be my job, but I did it anyway. That hauler told me they had never heard of me and that is why my yard waste wasn’t collected and they’d investigate more.

So, I reached out to my own hauler again. This time, they told me my yard waste wasn’t out by 7am on collection day. (It’s been out for two weeks.) But, they insisted that this other hauler was ultimately responsible.

I called the other hauler back. This time, I was told that actually, in my part of town, my own hauler is responsible for yard waste collection and that they aren’t contracted to collect yard waste for that part of town.

So, my head is spinning. Yard waste is not important to me. It will break down in the container. I’ll have more space and when they get it figured out, it will get collected one way or another. But, this is very poor practice. As we all know, if we let trash collection happen in a free market, as it should, then the original hauler would be cancelled and I would go with someone who could actually provide the service that I pay for. Since Saint Paul took this control from me, I sit here, with very little option.

The only satisfaction that I get—knowing that those whiny Marshall Avenue people who fought for this exact system are also getting the same poor service as me. And it’s only a slight bit of satisfaction because they’ll still support the same city council and mayor that allowed this to happen.

The only results they really care about are getting government to do exactly what they want

Here’s the saddest thing you’ll read today. An anthropology professor at UCLA is retiring early, another casualty of the mob.

The principal driver of the doublethink in my department and so many others at UCLA is fear of the woke faction.

Signs of this fear are omnipresent. Discussing whether to stop requiring the GRE (a standardized test, like the SAT) from applicants to our Ph.D. program, one colleague told a meeting of the biological anthropology subfield that he regarded the GRE as the most informative part of an applicant’s dossier, but that we had no choice but to vote to stop requiring it. Why? Because otherwise we would be regarded as racists. (I was the only person to vote against dropping the GRE requirement).

…

Why am I pessimistic? For a few reasons.

First, the younger faculty tend to be far more woke than their elders. Second, administrators and student protesters perform elaborately choreographed routines that inevitably end with the former enacting policies that they wanted to enact anyway, for which the latter’s public temper tantrums serve as a pretext. Third, now that standardized tests have been dropped from undergraduate application requirements, a growing number of students will be simultaneously unable to handle university level coursework, and predisposed to denounce their professors for heresy, having been chosen for admission on the basis on their leftist activism as high school students. Meanwhile, California’s K-12 schools are increasingly substituting mind-damaging political indoctrination for education.

…

The rise of alternative institutions, like the University of Austin and Ralston College, are very hopeful signs even though the work is slow-going. But until those new schools are built, I can’t bear to spend one more moment in a place that’s morally and intellectually bankrupt.

That’s it: I’m getting out.

Vast swaths of the culture have fallen behind the Woke Curtain. None more so than academia. Not surprising, since it was the incubator for this plague. I believe that eventually the woke madness will burn itself out because it is not a natural human state. But, untold damage will be done before that happens. Communism is a fair example. It is not natural for people to live effectively as prisoners in a police state and it couldn’t last, but it took a generation or two for the Iron Curtain to fall.

The young people whose heads are being filled with this swill are a lost cause. They won’t be reasoned with. They’ll continue to slither into society and infect the HR departments and faculty lounges and press rooms board rooms where they end up. We’ll have to wait till they fade from the scene, and that, sadly, will be a long time.

Deep thoughts from Chris Cillizza, circa 2015:

Joe Biden’s unique trait as a politician is — and always has been — his honesty. Sometimes that honesty gets him into varying degrees of trouble. Sometimes it makes it seem as though he’s the closest thing to a real person you could possibly hope for in politics.

This didn’t age too well, now did it? I can’t prove Cillizza’s childhood nickname wasn’t Corn Pop, or that he wasn’t at some point a classmate of Biden’s at the Naval Academy, but it’s a useful reminder that our betters have been carrying water for Ol’ Joe for a very long time now. There was more:

The Joe Biden on display with Colbert is the person who has inspired remarkable loyalty — over decades — from a tightknit group of staffers who would form the core of his presidential brain trust if he decided to run in 2016. It’s the guy who, for a time in 1987, was one of the front-runners for the Democratic presidential nomination. It’s who Barack Obama saw when he decided to pick Biden as his vice president in 2008.

1987. Do you remember why Biden fell from grace all those years ago? I suppose you could ask Neil Kinnock, whose speech Biden plagiarized. You could ask Barack Obama:

One Democrat who spoke to Obama recalled the former president warning, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

After the last 18 months, no one seriously doubts The Leader of the Free World’s ability in that realm. 

This is Paris, France. Named for the Parisii tribe which lived on the banks of the Seine at the time of the Roman Republic. Paris most likely began as a settlement on the Île de la Cité, the island in the Seine where Notre Dame now sits, a very defensible position. The ubiquitous Romans were there. They knew the place as Lutetia. (Notre Dame probably sits on the sit of a former Roman temple.)

Awhile back we had looked at Colchester and York in England and remarked how the past history of those cities could still be seen in the street patterns, especially where the city walls are or were. Looking at this overhead view though, it’s not as easy to tell where the city walls of Paris were, even though Paris saw several major wall constructions as the city grew outwards on both banks of the river. As the city expanded, the walls needed to expand with it.

The first major medieval wall was built from 1190 to 1215 during the reign of Philip II. Philip was the first to be called “King of France.” At the time this wall was being built, Notre Dame was in its reasonably early years of construction, begun in the 1160s by Bishop Maurice de Sully under the reign of Philip’s father, Louis VII.

Why isn’t it as easy as some other places to detect where the walls were? It’s because in the 19th century Paris undertook several major urban renewal projects which altered the old medieval street plans.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Nut with a gun shoots crowd at parade in affluent Chicago suburb. Once again, every Liberal gun-control nostrum failed:

AR-15 style rifles have been banned in Highland Park for a decade (buyer purchased in a different city). Gun ban didn’t work.

The rifle was factory-made, not a ‘ghost gun’ built in the garage. Ghost gun ban didn’t work.

The buyer needed a reference to obtain his Permit to Purchase (his father lol signed). Requiring references didn’t work.

The buyer was over 18 at time of purchase. Raising the minimum age didn’t work.

The buyer passed the background check. Background checks didn’t work.

The buyer planned farther in advance than any ‘cooling off’ period. Waiting period didn’t work.

The buyer threatened to kill his family but his family refused to press charges or commit him to a mental institution (it was handled by a mental health worker). Outpatient mental health treatment didn’t work.

Firearms ownership is a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, but not everyone is entitled to enjoy that right. Historically, criminals, children, and the insane were prohibited. This guy falls into the third category but Liberals have so badly messed up civil commitment law that we can’t stop crazies from buying guns.

We don’t need to take the rifles off the streets, we need to take the crazies off the streets. Time for another look at how mental health treatment is failing in America.

Joe Doakes

There are two different supplies of shooters in this country; crazies, and habitual criminals.

The solution for one has nothing to do with dealing with the other.

And none of them will be solved by disarming the law abiding citizen.

David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter, is among my favorite writers. (My other favorite to pull off that particular daily double is Tom Stoppard.)

In 2008, Mamet wrote a piece at the Village Voice entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’.” In it, he described the beginning of his journey away from conventional liberal beliefs.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

Today, of course, to view America as a pretty darn good place to live, and boy howdy aren’t we lucky that we do, is to the Left heresy.

In 2011, Mamet wrote a book entitled The Secret Knowledge in which he shared in his inimitable way where his intellectual journey had taken him in the intervening three years. The book was a collection of essays and in them Mamet summed up his effort to reconcile what, as Leftists do, had been assumed to be default and correct political views with what he observed.

This is the essence of Leftist thought. It is a devolution from reason to “belief”, in an effort to stave off a feeling of powerlessness. And if government is Good, it is a logical elaboration that more government power is Better. But the opposite is apparent both to anyone who has ever had to deal with Government, and, I think, to any dispassionate observer.

It is in sympathy with the first and in the hope of enlarging the second group that I have written this book.

This year Mamet published Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. Like The Secret Knowledge. It too is a collection of essays, many of which had appeared in the National Review. Many were written during the times when Covid policies ravaged what the disease had left untouched. Mamet recalls observing “a family of four, on mountain bikes, at five thousand feet, climbing an empty road in northern Nevada, all wearing masks.”

Here are a couple examples of his insights.

But the question occurs to me again: Why are Jews liberals? And I have come to a new answer. I used to think we voted for Democrats out of a millennial biblical occupation with justice, compassion and generosity. I no longer think so.

J.S. Mill wrote that give a man a choice of two tasks, one that will bring him renumeration if he works at it and the other that will pay him regardless of his effort, he will choose the second, take the free money, and employ his energy seeking additional benefits. We see Mill’s observation at work in welfare, unemployment, and other government subsidies. No amount of oversight will keep a recipient from taking the stipend and then finding a way to improve his lot off the books

Similarly, we Jews have two political choices: conservatism, counseling individual initiative; and liberalism, promoting statism, which is to say passivity and government support. But we Jews do not need help or direction in embracing self-reliance; it’s been all we’ve had for two thousand years. It’s our party trick. We’ve always been on our own.

Liberalism was attractive because it offered Jews something we did not have and for which we’ve always longed: the promise of inclusion, which is to say anonymity.

And this sister thought,

Observe that every conservative who employs the preface “This may not be politically correct but” is not only acknowledging but aiding the forces of thought control. These forces do not need to be acknowledged, and whether or not they are opposed, they must not be strengthened.

Napoleon said that if we want to know our opponent’s fears, we need merely observe that with which he seeks to terrify us. Leftists are terrified of exclusion from the mob and see, everywhere, the exclusion’s cost. Imprisonment, vituperation, bankruptcy of conservative opponents, the severity of their punishments fit not to the degree of their deviation (to the Left there are no degrees) but to their persistence, having been threatened and warned, in any deviation.

He recognizes the ugly face of Leftism because he lived it. There could be no better prophet. (For a typical reaction to Mamet’s apostasy, see here. Someone needs to change their sheets.)

And so, like King Lear, the liberal Left “decided” to grant “some” of the power they supposedly had to more “worthy” recipients – that is, those from whom it had been supposedly stolen.

But, again as with Lear, we see that the generous assignment of some of one’s power inevitably inspires its recipients to usurp the rest. Hitler ran a bluff on France in 1940, and the Bolsheviks could’ve been stopped in the suburbs of Moscow by a squad of police (see Minneapolis). King Lear thought himself generous and was beggared by those to whom he bequeathed his power.

Now our country is being eviscerated by the Marxist Left. Each battle they win emboldens them to escalate their activities: shaming becomes blacklisting; picketing becomes destruction; demonstrations become riots. Just as with taxes, all they want is all we got, and who could stop them? Enter Donald Trump.

He looked at the Left and informed us that he knew them of old: they were the same thugs, thieves, cheats and whores with whom he’d been doing business all his life. He was formed by the construction industry.

The Left wet the bed.

Medieval Europe saw the world as divided into three orders. Those who pray, those who fight, and those who work.

The first, those who pray, consisted of the clergy. The second, those who fight, consisted of the nobility. The third, those who work, consisted of the serfs, peasants and others who worked the land.

The orders were complementary, and each contributed to society as a whole. The workers were the economic engine and put food on the table. The Church certainly played a role in civic life, but faith was also an integral part of life and seeking God’s favor was both a Christian’s duty and desire. The nobility and the knights that came from it fought to preserve it all.

In France, these orders became known as Estates, and these Estates made up the Ancien Régime which lasted until the French Revolution.

In the 18th century, following from these institions, the Press became known as the Fourth Estate.

The appellation may have started as a witticism, but journalists, convinced of their own priesthood, eventually took it seriously.

While our national media at one time may have functioned as a watchdog, speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, our Fourth Estate has become PR flacks and gatekeepers for the side they have chosen.

Rather than complementing other sectors of society, and contributing to the whole, our Fourth Estate works against those it disagrees with, and that is not a recipe for a healthy society.

“If I don’t get to go to the all ages show with my friends tonight, I’m going to die. Dieeeeee, I tell you!”

Versus:

One is a remark by a spoiled, entitled little person who knows no rhetorical trick other than going full on dramatic.

The other is a teenager.

When Suleiman the Magnificent died in Hungary in 1566, the Grand Vizier at the time, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, had the witnesses to the death killed in order to keep the Sultan’s passing a secret so that the successor, Selim II, would have time to take over. Many times I’ve wondered if Nixon ever secretly wished he had such extreme powers, for the Nixon Administration’s undoing ultimately came from internal witnesses.

Within a week of the break-in, the Nixon Administration had decided to hinder the FBI’s investigation into the break-in, not just to cover up the Administration’s involvement in the wiretapping of the DNC, but also to conceal the questionable uses to which campaign funds had been put.

The summer of 1972 was relatively uneventful, on the surface. Behind the headlines, John Dean was meeting with Acting FBI Directory Gray ostensibly to “cooperate”, but actually to keep abreast and ahead of the investigation. And, hush money was paid to Howard Hunt.

The Watergate burglars were indicated in September. The next day, Bob Woodward got in touch with his source, Deep Throat. This source was in fact Mark Felt at the FBI, and Felt was seeing everything the FBI had in the investigation. Felt told Woodward that campaign money had financed the Watergate operation and “other intelligence-gathering activities.” The resulting Washington Post story increased the pressure on the White House, but the firewall still held. In November, Nixon defeated George McGovern with 60% of the popular vote and a landslide in the Electoral College, 520 to 17.

The trial of the Watergate burglars began in early January. Guilty verdicts were returned January 30 1973. Sentencing was scheduled for March 23. The judge in the trial, John Sirica, wrote in his book To Set the Record Straight about his belief that the trial had not revealed everything about the break-ins.

I was far from alone in my skepticism about the facts brought out at the trial. The Senate of the United States had voted to investigate the Republican campaign tactics. The press was full of caustic comments about the trial itself and the government’s handling of it. I had been practicing law for thirty years. I had handled cased involving political scandals. I knew the Watergate case was not what the trial in January had made it seem. But by late March, with the trial over, there didn’t seem to be a lot more I could do about it.

On March 20, John Dean received word that Howard Hunt was demanding more money. Dean wrote in Blind Ambition:

O’Brien gave me a helpless look. “I don’t know, John. I asked him the same question and he [Hunt] just said ‘You tell Dean I need the money by the close of business Wednesday. And if I don’t get it, I’m going to have to reconsider my options. And I’ll have some seamy things to say about what I did for John Ehrlichman while I was at the White House.'”

The next day, March 21, Dean met with Nixon about this new threat. Dean described the growing threat with the memorable phrase, “We have a cancer within – close to the Presidency – that’s growing.” In that meeting Nixon asked how much money the indicated burglars would need. Dean tossed out a figure of a million dollars over the next two years. And according to Dean, Nixon said “We could get that.” And with that, Watergate moved into the cover-up of the cover-up phase, and ultimately to its ugly conclusion.

On March 23, Judge Sirica made public a letter he had received from James McCord a few days earlier. In the letter, McCord, the leader of the burglary team, said that political pressure had been applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent, that perjury had occurred, that others had been involved with the operation who had not been identified in the trial, and that the operation was not a CIA operation. Sirica wrote about revealing the letter in open court to make it part of the trial record,

As I worked through them, an excruciating pain began to build directly in the center of my chest. It was nearly more than I could bear, but I couldn’t quit before the end of the letter. I finally finished the letter and quickly called for a recess. As I hurried off the bench, the reporters flooded toward the double swinging doors at the back of the courtroom. The dam had broken.

Indeed it had, and everything that followed was the just the system grinding towards its inevitable conclusion.

Don’t you dare say Democrats are unpatriotic:

Mind you, that’s not a BLM or “Anti”-Fa Group. This is a Democratic party unit.

UPDATE: But wait! Some of them do have some standards!

A “Democratic Socialists of America” group apologized for a planned flag burning.

They apologized to the environmentalists, anyway:

Here’s the National Review piece on the very good SCOTUS session that just ended.

And here’s today’s music list:

On the one hand, last week‘s Bruen ruling at the Supreme Court wasn’t the “Jericho bringing down the walls of Canaan” moment that a lot of us gun owners have been hoping for all these years.

On the other hand, if you’re not a lawyer, some of the effects seem a little inscrutable; slapping New York California, Massachusetts and a few other “may issue” states on the wrist seems like aiming just a little low.

But there is a lot more to it than that:

Moreover, gun carry is only the beginning. The Supreme Court’s ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen is going to influence many more gun laws throughout the nation and could even bring about the downfall of the most contentious ones, because it sets up a new standard for deciding gun cases at all levels of the federal court system.

“When the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the Court. “The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Only then may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.’”

In other words: “hell, yeah, The founding fathers were referring to putting muskets in the hands of individual people. And those muskets were the “assault rifles“ and “military weapons“ of their day.“

A series of cases already pending before the Court will give insight into the effect of Bruen in other areas of gun law. Bianchi v. Frosh, for example, is a case involving Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban. It has been upheld by the Fourth Circuit using the now-defunct two-step standard. In Duncan v. Bonta, a California magazine limit was upheld by the Ninth Circuit under the same two-step standard. ANJRPC v. Bruck deals with the same magazine question and was similarly upheld in New Jersey. Young v. Hawaii deals with what amounts to a total ban on gun carry in Hawaii, which is likely the most vulnerable state law in the wake of Bruen.

Watching DC, California and New York State after the upcoming successive series of legal beat downs is going to be a little like Sylvester Stallone looked in the last five minutes of the first Rocky.

It’s a good thing we’ve got our major media superiors…

…to keep us safe from “misinformation“.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Modern Monetary Theory says the government can borrow and spend as much as it likes without consequences. If we can afford a gas tax holiday, why not an income tax holiday, a social security tax holiday, a liquor tax holiday?

Or is MMT a lie and the gas tax holiday simply at attempt at buying votes with taxpayer money?

Joe Doakes

It is, of course, a purely academic exercise, like so much of the policy big left has been foisting on this country for the past hundred years and change.