How it plays out

Conservative anti-interventionist Tom Woods has written that "No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain." Which is to say, office seekers love to talk about how they will prioritize American interests and end regime change wars, and then when they actually take office they develop a strange case of amnesia about all these promises. 

So it's happening once again. Sohrab Ahmari:

Second, there’s the role of anti-woke-ism as new skin for old wine. The hawks — not least Weiss, through her outlet The Free Press — championed popular grievances with the inanities of the “peak-woke” moment and successfully married this to the same old agenda. Many of the would-be populists were all too happy to go along, hailing a once-more culturally muscular and unembarrassed America as it pursued the very policies that they’d deplored just a few years earlier. As one online wit remarked somewhere: “Good thing [Secretary of War] Pete [Hegseth] purged the trannies from the military so beefy white guys can do a regime change in Iran.” Based and red-pilled!

Now, I'd be a knave and a fool if I'd ever believed that Bari Weiss's foreign policy priorities were the same as mine. But the anti-woke movement ―and in truth, the anti-lockdown movement as well―did have a lot of people who sounded indifferent to or skeptical about foreign adventurism. Until, that is, it came time to promote a new war.

One of Donald Trump's tragic flaws is that he's incapable of saying "no" to his big money contributors. Of course in the face of that kind of money and those kind of demands, his recent predecessors have only maintained a fig leaf of dignity, and he's just been more blatant. But it's also important to recall that that wasn't the promise.

Plink!

Prepared piano is an interesting method, altering the tone produced by the keyboard by placing objects between the strings. Its modern use has been credited to John Cage, who wrote his piece Bacchanale for percussion ensemble but found it was being performed in a space that didn't have room for one. As the Wikipedia page shows, there were precedents before that.

This performance of a cage piece is a good example. Likely not all good pianists are good at prepared piano. This one gets a lot of mileage out of it.

999

Today I started rereading Pale Fire.

A lot of Nabokov's novels start with author's notes warning the reader not to apply the theories of Freud (identified as "the witch doctor from Vienna" or some such) to the book. This always seemed a little weak to me. If you've written a compelling work, you needn't fear fashionable critical theories. You can wait them out until they're no longer fashionable. 

Pale Fire has no such warning. You could read that as a sign that Nabokov was really in the zone with this one, which he was. What it does have is an epigraph from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which sets the tone and gets you scratching your head. But I repeat myself.

John Shade, the author of the 999-line poem within a novel, does in one stanza provide a list of things he hates: aside from Freud and Marx, there's also jazz. The same things Nabokov hated, in other words. For all that, there's a certain irony between the real author and the fictional one. Charles Kinbote, another fictional author providing commentary on the poem, is a whole kettle of fish in himself.

Cabin fever

Huh. Okay.

Being stuck indoors all day, and apparently limited to maybe a few blocks tomorrow, is certainly not fun. How are the people who lost power making out, I wonder? 

One odd distraction. There's a car parked in front of one of the houses across the street. It's had its taillights blazing all day, and seems like it will have them going all night, too. If the car has the juice to keep them going. No one seems to know what to do about it, or why the owner has left it like that.

Peak experiences

I read a crime story today. It was about a modern day expedition climbing Mt. Everest, a client determined to reach the top, and someone else in the party looking for revenge against that person. It's a good story in itself―the author's name is William Hall―but it also started me thinking about those who climb big mountains like that.

Some Sherpas do climb Everest without bottled oxygen. Ang Rita Sherpa did so ten times. No sane Western climber would attempt that. It's also true that the the Sherpa culture's religion holds that the Himalayas are sacred. 

There's probably a connection between these two things. Sherpas revere the mountains as loci of godly activity. This encourages a certain carefulness. 

Little black and white birds

As has been said elsewhere, they sound somewhat like they're laughing. They seem to be social birds, as well. These little auks are congregating, as they do, in the Norway's Svalbard archipelago. Svalbard didn't really have a population until the 17th century. I wonder what the first human settlers made of these cackling birds.

Impact

Recently confirmed: in the aftermath of a violent event like a random shooting, those immediately effected are traumatized. People on the periphery go through something different. Some are rubberneckers, of course. But a lot are just trying to get through their day and avoid the wreckage. 

For my part, I was on a RIPTA bus, coming back from a light shopping trip to Rumford. The bus driver stopped when we were in sight of downtown Pawtucket. Detour, end of the line. He didn't tell us how to get to our destinations. We were just on our own. The Pawtucket/Central Falls commuter rail station wasn't far off, but any halfway direct route was blocked off by police. I followed a mother and adult daughter who lived near the station and thus were going in the same general direction. They kindly gave me directions when our paths diverged.

When I was on the bus for home, a guy got on a few stops after me. He was already talking about the shooting. I didn't learn anything from listening to him except that the rumor mill was still in good working order.

Only after getting home did I look up any media reports on what happened. It was bad. Every time I read about it, it seems to get worse. Condolences to everyone who was close enough to it to be considered a survivor. Peace to those who didn't make it.