Not all kamikaze attacks succeed.

Kudos to Mitch McConnell for a good job of Senate leadership. Note that he precisely and economically corralled just the 51-49 vote needed to end the nonsense not as a tie or requiring Chief Justice Roberts to vote. Mitt Romney was permitted to thumb his nose at Trump to avenge previous Trump insults, and Susan Collins also got to vote wrong in order to propitiate all those members of her Down East constituency who threaten to burn her farm and strew her fields with salt if she should fail to vote like a democrat in crunch situations.

John Bolton is a Yale classmate of mine, with whom I used to be mildly acquainted. I tend to suspect that what happened was: some liberal hack at the NY Slimes was reading through the advance copy of Bolton’s book and pounced with avidity on some crumb that appeared to support democrat fantasies of Trump pressuring Ukraine President Zelensky. I run into liberals leaping wildly to self-gratifying conclusions and misreading texts all the time.

I think it would have served them right, if McConnell had agreed to subpoena old John Bolton for them, because I suspect JB detests those democrats about as much as I do, and my own theory is that Bolton would, however he may feel about Donald Trump, take great pleasure in delivering testimony completely adverse to everything the democrats wanted. There’d be Adam Schiff and Jerome Nadler with egg all over their faces.

Fun as that particular denoument might have been, I will concede that Mitch McConnell did the country a favor by moving more quickly to bring all this disgraceful nonsense to a quicker conclusion.

Make no mistake. This episode represents an unseemly, utterly irresponsible, completely reprehensible piece of pure political theater. The charges brought against Donald Trump were nothing but subjective nonsense. There was never the slightest iota of possibility that this impeachment would succeed in removing Trump from office. There was never going to be a two-thirds vote to remove this president in a Republican-majority Senate with a good economy and an absence of strong public support.

The whole thing was nothing but an exercise in fantasy and spite, undertaken without decent regard for due process, or the precedent they were setting, or the injury to the Constitution, simply to feed raw meat to their deranged and radical left-wing base. The democrats even proceeded in this utterly unethical and destructive course despite the massive and disastrous self-harm it inevitably entailed.

The democrat party was already in the unhappy position of having to try to defeat a successful, popular incumbent without any strong viable candidate. The current democrat field is a professional political operative’s nightmare: superannuated, crazy radical, personally repulsive, and/or amateurish and preposterously under-qualified. Why not distract the public from the presidential campaign with an impeachment circus to focus on instead? That’s bound to help. Especially when the impeachment fails, the whole thing blows up in the democrat House majority’s faces, and the public is irritated and made angry.

A famous passage from Sophocles’ Antigone is commonly rendered in English as: Those whom God would destroy, He first makes mad.

Science Magazine:

On a clear, windy autumn afternoon last October, Willy van Wingerden spent a few free hours before work walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, in 2013, the cheerful nurse found her first woolly mammoth tooth. She has since plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or “sand engine.” She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. Once, she plucked a tar-covered Neanderthal tool from the water’s edge, earning a co-author credit in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a few months ago.

“Sun, wind, rain, snow—I’m here 5 or 6 days a week,” she says. “I find something every day, almost.”

Van Wingerden’s favorite beachcombing spot is no ordinary stretch of sand. Nearly half a kilometer wide, the beach is made of material dredged from the sea bottom 13 kilometers offshore and dumped on the existing beach in 2012. It’s a €70 million experimental coastal protection measure, its sands designed to spread over time to shield the Dutch coast from sea-level rise. And the endeavor has made 21 million cubic meters of Stone Age soil accessible to archaeologists.

That soil preserves traces of a lost world. During the last ice age, sea levels were 70 meters lower, and what is now the North Sea between Great Britain and the Netherlands was a rich lowland, home to modern humans, Neanderthals, and even earlier hominins. It all disappeared when glaciers melted and sea level rose about 8500 years ago.

RTWT

HT: Bird Dog.

From Ernest:

The breath of the clam-monsters

In Japan, shinkiro (mirage) was attributed to the breath of giant sea molluscs. When this purple mist bubbled up from the deep, it hung above the water in the form of a spectral island called Horai, complete with palaces and temples. In China, the island was known as Penglai, and 8th-century poet Ch’ien Ch’i declared that any dignitary making the crossing to Japan would spot “the high houses of the clam-monsters bannered with rainbows”.

HT: Vanderleun.

Watch collectors are clearly quite mad. I have a Rolex myself. Years ago, I ran into people in business who wore expensive watches and who checked out your wrist as a form of credentialing. If you didn’t wear a status watch, they figured you never made enough real money to blow some on a watch. I also got tired of lesser watches breaking and batteries wearing out, so I said: “By gosh, I’ll buy a Rolex, a permanent watch!” What I didn’t know is that every 5-6 years, you’ve got to send that Rolex somewhere to be cleaned and serviced. If you send it to Rolex proper, they’ll nail you about a thousand. I use other watch services.

Younger people often don’t even wear watches. If they need the time, they just look on their phone.

Personally, I kind of enjoy reading about ridiculously expensive watches. I do collect lots of stuff, and here’s an area of recherché expensive collecting that I can read up on, completely immune to any temptation to participate and collect.

And that Paul Newman Oyster Cosmograph, $500,000-$700,000 and it isn’t even self-winding!

Spengler delivers a Shakespearian sermon.

Here is the plot of Hamlet in a nutshell: The soldiers who meet the Ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father on the ramparts of Elsinore Castle were not posted there by accident: As they explain in the play’s opening lines, the King of Norway, young Fortinbras, will invade Denmark soon, and they are set as lookouts. The Ghost comes along and distracts them and young Hamlet, and the dramatis personae engage in various machinations until, at the end, all of them lay dead on the stage. Just as Hamlet expires, who should enter but Fortinbras, who asks: “Who’s in charge here? Uh, everybody’s dead. I guess I am.”

Shakespeare’s audience doubtless rolled in the aisles. Fortinbras, the play’s shadow protagonist, typically is cut from modern productions (for example, the 1948 Laurence Olivier film version), which makes the rest of the action meaningless. Such is the atrophy of the modern sense of humor.

In our present version of Hamlet, the role of Fortinbras is played by Xi Jinping. China wants dominant position in what it calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution – the transformation of economic life by ubiquitous high-speed communications and artificial intelligence. Industrial robots that talk to each other and work out industrial processes without human input, mining robots operated via 5G by technicians with virtual reality visors, a global medical system powered by real-time uploads of the vital signs of a billion smartphone users and digitized health records, autonomous vehicles, e-commerce and e-finance links easing the retail transactions of billions of people will become standard over the next two decades.

Meanwhile, the United States has invested virtually nothing in the driver of this revolution, namely high-speed, infinite-capacity and zero-latency broadband. Less than 1% of all venture capital investments are now devoted to hardware. The American tech giants are content to invest in high-return, infinitely-scalable software and leave the physics to Asia. In 2015 America shipped about 30% of semiconductors worldwide, but barely 10% today.

No American company offers 5G manufacturing equipment, which has become a Chinese monopoly. Huawei dominates the market with a 30% market share, but its two largest competitors, Ericsson and Nokia, depend on a Chinese supply chain, offering equipment with the same components, but a Scandinavian label and a higher price. …

Fortinbras invaded Hamlet’s Denmark. His modern avatar Xi Jinping doesn’t covet Cleveland, but aims for a controlling position in the decisive technologies of the 21st century. The United States is busy with the twists and turns of a macabre political plot that serves as a distraction from the main thread of the plot. As I wrote on January 26, the Pentagon last week abandoned attempts to further restrict US component sales to Huawei, arguing (correctly) that they would hurt American tech companies more than they would hurt China. And now the United Kingdom has asked Washington, “What have you done for us lately?”

The United States should cancel an aircraft carrier or two and announce a whatever-it-takes, Manhattan Project-style program to build out its own 5G capacity. Short of that, it has no choice but to reconcile itself to the mediocrity of its circumstances.

RTWT

After 25 years of fighting for independence, this is my final contribution in the European Parliament.

We were told to leave with our British flags, and that's exactly what we did. pic.twitter.com/cBfycWfsN7

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) January 29, 2020

The Irish VP of the European Parliament, Mairead McGuiness, spitefully shuts down Nigel Farage’s microphone as he delivers his triumphant Farewell-to-the-EU speech on the eve of Brexit. Typical bad sportsmanship of Globalist elite types. And Farage and the rest of the British delegation gleefully walk out.

“We were told to leave with our British flags and that’s exactly what we did.”

HT: Glenn Reynolds.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Destruction, 1833-1836, New York Historical Society.

James Panero tells us that Yale imported a Cambridge bolshie to “decolonize” the History of Art Department.

Are we in our own revolutionary moment? Many of our leading institutions clearly believe so. Yale University has been working overtime to prove it is on the right side of history. ‘Problematic’ colleges have been renamed. ‘Offensive’ stained-glass windows have been knocked out. Only the leadership of an Ivy League school could spread such a poisonous rash. Heading the charge against the Dead White Male has been a progressive Yale bureaucracy that is, for the most part, pale and stale.

Now the task of dismantling Yale’s famous art history survey course has fallen to a scholar I respect, Tim Barringer. British-born, Barringer is the Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University and has been a leading curator at the Metropolitan Museum. He even mounted the Met’s exceptional 2018 exhibition on Thomas Cole.

Following a 2017 mandate to ‘decolonize’ Yale’s Department of English, Barringer is giving over the keys of Yale’s famous art survey course to the identity vandals. According to the Yale Daily News, instead of one class that will tell the story of art from ‘Renaissance to the Present’, new courses will, Barringer says, be devised to consider art in relation to a five-step history lesson, ‘questions of gender, class and race’, with further discussion of art’s ‘involvement with Western capitalism’. Of course, ‘climate change’ will also be a ‘key theme’.

Art doesn’t fare well in revolutionary times. Likewise, revolutionary sentiments are often revealed in the treatment of art. If only Professor Barringer had looked more carefully at another five-step history lesson, Thomas Cole’s ‘Course of Empire’ tableau (1833-36), he might have seen how civilizations burn down from decadence as well as assault.

RTWT

That whirring sound you hear in the background is grand old Yale Art History professors, men like Sumner Crosby who taught the Gothic Cathedral course and Charles Seymour who taught the Italian Renaissance Art course, who fished for salmon together every summer on the Upsalquitch, spinning in their graves at 78 RPM.

link

Mark Goldblatt quotes himself from an NR article from 2002:

Elitism, to be sure, is as old as human society. But never in recorded history has a less cerebrally, morally, or spiritually elite Elite looked down their noses at the majority of their countrymen. The minimum requirement for membership in the intelligentsia used to be, well, intelligence. This is no longer the case. Rather, what is now required is the mere sense of your own superiority, the smirky confidence that flows from an undergraduate grasp of history, philosophy, and literature, and which can only be sustained by a maniacal deafness to counterarguments.”

HT: John Hinderaker.

Biho Takashi, Two crows fly in the snow falling sky, 1890s.

Belacqui:

Every retail store in Japan, from supermarkets and electronics stores to 100yen shops and secondhand thriftstores, have their own theme song and jingle which they play on repeat in their stores, and sometimes supermarkets have jingles for specific seasonal dinner plates in attempt to brainwash customers.

There is also a truck which circles through Shibuya and nearby areas blasting an annoying recording of women singing high pitched and off-key, advertising a website for female sex industry jobs, and they are unfortunately very effective in catching attention and memory.

The other day while the train was stopped I heard crows cawing nearby. It startled me because they sounded like tortured young Japanese men screaming in intense agony or pleasure.