Let’s see, this week, Donald Trump continued his public attacks on the family of a Muslim US Army Captain killed while serving in Iraq.

Trump made it clear that he is uninterested in GOP unity by announcing specifically that he is not supporting Paul Ryan or John McCain.

Airing of the famous Daisy political commercial by Democrats was made redundant when some source within the Trump Campaign leaked to Joe Scarborough the unsettling information that Donald Trump asked an unidentified foreign policy expert engaged in advising him, three times, why the US could not use nuclear weapons. That one made headlines all day yesterday.

The same RNC bigwigs who suppressed opposition and rammed the Trump nomination through the Convention two weeks ago, this week, are reportedly panicking.

Reince Priebus is described as “very frustrated” and “stressed,” because he is “running out of excuses” to offer party bigwigs about Trump’s political incompetence and indifference to basic political norms. Republicans are panicking because Trump is frittering away a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton amid “self inflicted mistakes” and “missed opportunities.”

Trump is sinking in the polls. Even Fox News is giving Hillary a ten-point lead.

And it’s only the beginning of August. The boxcar-loads of opposition research the Dems and their media allies have been saving up are still just sitting there, waiting to be unloaded and fired.

We are faced with two possibilities: either Donald Trump is such a spoiled and totally-deranged sociopathic narcissist that he is out of touch with reality, unadvisable and uncontrollable, and his personal dementia is causing him to self-destruct in the course of the campaign, or the Clinton-Trump Conspiracy Theory, the hypothesis that Trump was put up to all this by Bill Clinton as a diabolically-clever, Hail-Mary-Pass strategy to sabotage the Republican Party’s nominating process and elect the hideously-unpopular Hillary in what-ought-to-have-been a Republican landslide victory year, is really true.

(NYM contemplated the Conspiracy theory as far back as February and found further evidence in May.)

There is no way to know the truth at present, but it’s going to be interesting to watch events unfold.

Either way, whether Donald Trump is simply so nutsy-cuckoo that he can’t help sabotaging himself, or whether he is throwing the election deliberately and intentionally, it is a sad commentary on all those loco-in-the-cabeza Trumpshirts out there that they have been themselves barking mad enough to pin their hopes and lend their support to a totally-unqualified, ethically-challenged, blowhard millionaire, who is dubiously Republican and obviously anything but a principled conservative. Don’t blame National Review or the Conservative Movement for electing Hillary, when it was you who rejected all the decent, rational, conservative, and qualified GOP candidates and went whoring after a Reality-TV Celebrity Clown with a big mouth and a handful of airy promises and crackpot policy positions.

The late Randy Bilyeu and Leo

Last January 5th, 54-year-old Randy Bilyeu launched an $89 inflatable raft and set off down the Rio Grande, accompanied by Leo his nine-year-old poodle-terrier-mix, to find the 12th-century Romanesque chest, reputedly containing 42 pounds of gold coins, rubies, diamonds, sapphires, ancient jade carvings, pre-Columbian bracelets, and gold nuggets, stashed deliberately for the benefit of treasure hunters by the colorful Santa Fe art dealer Forest Fenn in 2010.

His ex-wife filed a missing persons report after not hearing from him for several days, and on January 15th Leo and his raft were found seven miles down river.

Bilyeu’s remains were finally found in the same general area last month.

Robert Sanchez, of Denver’s 5280 Magazine, talked to Forest Fenn:

Fenn seemed perturbed at the thought of Bilyeu and his dog going onto the Rio Grande in a sporting-goods-store raft with no training and in the dead of winter. “I’ve said that people should not search in the winter,” Fenn said. In the past, he also said the treasure isn’t in a dangerous place. He said he made two trips from his vehicle in one afternoon—the first to carry the chest, the second to deliver the contents. “I don’t want anybody searching where an 80-year-old man couldn’t have made two trips,” he said. “Randy’s raft was very far from his car. Randy was going to go down the river, somehow get back, and he was going to do that twice? The chest is 42 pounds. What was his exit plan?”

That, he said, is just the beginning of his disappointment with Bilyeu’s strategy. “The treasure is in the Rocky Mountains, at least eight and a quarter miles north of the north city limits of Santa Fe,” Fenn said. “Frijoles Canyon is not in the Rocky Mountains. Why was he looking in a place that wasn’t in the designated search area?” To Fenn, Bilyeu’s poorly organized plan, and the area he decided to search, “point to the fact that maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he wanted to disappear.”

Read the whole thing.

Hong-Kong based photojournalist Palani Mohan recently delivered a TED Talk in Sydney describing his personal project photographing the last surviving Eagle Hunters in the Altai Mountains in Western Mongolia.

His photographs were featured in Mother Jones last December.

Everett Garrison, 1893-1975

Everett Garrison was an exceptionally-admired maker of custom split cane fly rods. Trained as an engineer, Garrison designed his rods using rigorous mathematical stress formulae. He produced relatively few rods. His total lifetime production is estimated as around 650. But his strikingly simple aesthetics and their superior function made Garrison’s rods popular with the angling community centered around Wall Street and the Anglers Club of New York City. Garrison rods are much in demand and fetch extraordinary prices, these days ranging close to five figures for the most desirable and perfect examples.

The Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum has a collection of letters to Garrison, which have recent been edited into book form by Kathy Scott. There is an introduction by Hoagy Carmichael.

The book is not currently on Amazon, and the Center does not have a functioning book sale web-page. I guess the only thing one can do is send them an email to ask the price.

UPDATE:

I tried phoning again: (845) 439-4810, and got through. It’s only $20 with shipping, and they do take credit cards.

The Truth About Knives:

Operation Choke-point is the scandal-ridden Department of Justice’s initiative aimed at punishing making business difficult for those industries they don’t like. Payday lenders (ok, these can be dicey but are still better than loan-sharks), coin dealers (precious metals throw a wrench in their fiat currency scam), and firearms manufacturers and dealers (because…guns are icky and stuff) have all been targeted by the Obama’s highly-politicized DOJ. Since the Administration’s frontal assaults on the Second Amendment have not yielded the results they want, they have resorted to Executive Branch action to try to move the ball. In this they are pressuring financial institutions to deny banking services to the targeted industries.

While Congress is trying to put an end this abuse, Operation Choke Point is expanding into new realms. This past Friday Hogue Inc. announced that Wells Fargo has refused to do business with them, because they ostensibly manufacture “weapons”.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

I didn’t even know that Hogue Inc. made knives. They are best known for high quality handgun grips.

This is the sort of thing that really does lend credence to charges that Republicans in Congress do nothing with majorities. Operation Choke Point is an outrageous Obama Administration Executive Order overreach inflicting radical left-wing ideology on all sorts of legal American businesses. It started in 2013 and there has obviously been plenty of time to investigate it, denounce it, and abolish it by legislative action. The very idea that a presidential administration can attempt to put businesses it does not like out of business by denying them access to banking services is totally appalling.

From Artemis Gallery:

Lot 0023B:

Northern India, Naga, mid to late 19th CE. An early leather headhunter’s bag dramatically decorated with four monkey skulls, the two at each end framed by pairs of animal (perhaps boar) tusks, with a rectangular lid attached to the overall rectangular form via woven fibers, a leather loop at the lower end, a strand of knotted natural fibers across the front, plaited wicker lining the back of the lid, and a strap of twisted wire attached to wicker loops for suspension. This bag was most likely used to carry human heads as headhunting was a traditional practice among the Naga tribes of northern India and Myanmar. A rare find indeed! Size: 7″ deep x 11″ W x 9.5″ H (17.8 cm x 27.9 cm x 24.1 cm)

Ending tomorrow, currently at $6000.

St. Paul’s

What with the rebellion of the low-information voter and the ascent of Donald Trump, the white working class is in the news a lot these days and everyone is reading J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (previously mentioned here), a personal eulogy from an upwardly-mobile ex-Marine to his rust-bucket hometown and left-behind family and friends.

The perfect counterpoint book to read, I think, is Shamus Rahman Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School.

J.D. Vance describes how History and Culture have failed our society’s losers.

Shamus Rahman Khan describes, with a mixture of astonishment and congratulatory applause, just how one of the absolutely snobbiest and most expensive secondary boarding schools in America (the place that educated John Kerry and Doonesbury’s Gary Trudeau) educates future winners in a combination of graceful personal ease, the ability to fake your way through anything you don’t actually know, and a nihilistic belief in the complete equality of all things (excluding only your own special elite status).

St. Paul’s often touts its academic program as the best in the nation. In its advertising literature, the school boasts that it has “the highest level of scholarship” and that its “students stand at the top of their peer group in terms of academic preparation.” And according to eager administrators and lackadaisical adolescents alike, the centerpiece of St. Paul’s academic program is undoubtedly the humanities. The humanities program introduces students to the history, literature, and thoughts of different moments in world history. The humanities division describes in some project is an interdisciplinary, multi-vocal investigation of “great questions.” …

This program, significantly, does not teach students to know “things.” The emphasis is not on memorizing historical events, for example. Instead it is on cultivating “habits of mind,” which encourage a particular way of relating both to the world and to each other. …

The enormity of this program is both thrilling and terrifying. The thought of knowing all of that, being swept up and carried through the tide of history, is tantalizing. It is also the product of St. Paul’s hubris. How can any one person possibly teach everything..? As I prepared to teach my own class at the school, I soon found out that I was asking the wrong question. Of course the expectations were ridiculous. No high schooler could ever learn all that the course offers. The more important question, I eventually realized, is much harder to answer: what this mean to present material in this way to teenagers?

Perhaps the point is not really to know anything. The advantage the St. Paul’s installs instills in its students is not a hierarchy of knowledge. As we have seen, knowledge is no longer the exclusive domain of the elite. And these days, information flows so freely that to use it to exclude others is increasingly challenging. By contrast, the important decisions required for those who lead are not based on knowing more but instead are founded in habits of mind. St. Paul’s teaches that everything can be accomplished through these habits, even while still in high school. What strikes me as presumptuous, even shocking, about this vision of the world is taken for granted by pretty much every teenager at St. Paul’s.

Though I marveled at how impossible it seemed to teach students all these things, the school itself seems largely unconcerned about this. Indeed, St. Paul’s approach seems closer to Plato’s outline of education in Republic. Building upon his famous cave metaphor, Plato tells us, “Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely putting knowledge of the souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes …” ..In short, education is not teaching students things they don’t know. Rather it is teaching them to think their way through the world. …

“I don’t actually know much,” an alumnus told me after he finished his freshman year at Harvard. “I mean, well, I don’t know how to put it. When I’m in classes all these kids next to me know a lot more than I do. Like about what actually happened in the Civil War. Or what France did in World War II. I don’t know any of that stuff. But I know something they don’t. It’s not facts or anything. It’s how to think. That’s what I learned in humanities.”

“What do you mean how to think?” I asked.

“I mean I learned how to think bigger. Like everyone else at Harvard knew about the Civil War. I didn’t. But I knew how to make sense of what they knew about the Civil War and apply it. So they knew a lot about particular things. I knew how to think about everything.”

The emphasis of the St. Paul’s curriculum is not on “what you know” but on “how you know it.” Teaching ways of knowing rather than teaching the facts themselves, St. Paul’s is able to endow its students with marks of the elite –ways of thinking or relating to the world– that ultimately help make up privilege. As the exclusionary practices of old the become unsustainable, something new has emerged from within the elite. …

[S]tudents learn to consume from an enormous variety of sources. They learn to work and “interact” with art, literature, history, from the popular to the scholarly, and have a huge range of materials their disposal. For example, one of the major assignments in Humanities III is to compare “Beowulf” to Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Students are asked to think about the ways in which Beowulf is a monster [Beowulf is the hero. Grendel is the monster. –JDZ] that man must confront, just as “Jaws”‘s monster prowls the waters of humanity (and perhaps even our own internal waters [And the BS keeps on flowing. –JDZ]). The goal is not to endow the students with a kind of highbrow elite knowledge. Rather, they are taught to move with ease to the broad range of culture, to move with felicity from the elite to the popular. They learn to be cultural egalitarians. The lesson to students is that you can talk about “Jaws” in the same way you can talk about “Beowulf.” Both become cultural resources to draw upon. And most important, the world is available to you –from high literature to horror films. They’re not things that are “off-limits” –limits are not structured by the relations of the world around you; they are in you. Students are not to stand above the mundane, perhaps lowbrow horror flick. Instead they are taught the importance of engaging with all aspects of culture, of treating the high and low with respect and serious engagement. As our future elite, the students are taught not to create fences and moats but instead to relentlessly engage with the varied world around them.

The consequences of St. Paul’s philosophy can be seen all over campus, evident even in how students carry themselves. Students have the sense that they could do it. The world is a space to be navigated and renegotiated, not a set of arrangements or a list of rules that are imposed upon you. The students are taught that they are special, and they begin to realize this specialness. This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy –thinking everything is possible just might make it so.