Motus Mentis

…around here, anyway. I’ve been offline, mostly, for the past few days, and paying little attention to the news.

I did see that there was a brouhaha of some sort between Antifa and Gavin McInness’s “Proud Boys” in New York City today, but I don’t know more than that, and can’t really be bothered to pay much attention. (The pot is coming slowly to a boil, which is a thing we already knew.)

I saw also that NBC did some tendentious editing of Donald Trump’s remarks at a political rally in Ohio; Mr. Trump had said something to the effect that when Abraham Lincoln needed someone to beat the great general Robert E. Lee, he turned to a native Ohioan, Ulysses Grant. It was just the usual “hello, Cleveland!” stuff that politicians always do on the road — but the video, as cut, only had Mr. Trump saying that Robert E. Lee was a great general. This obvious manipulation of the record to score a few points spun up the usual indignation in the usual quarters, and rightly so — but what bothered me more than the network’s editing of the clip to make Mr. Trump look like a fan of the Confederacy was that everybody on the right side of the aisle made such haste to reassure everyone that the President’s point was only to praise Grant, and of course it was not to say anything nice about Lee.

This bothers me — quite a lot, actually — because Robert E. Lee was a great general. One ought to be able to say so; it is merely a fact. Everybody in America knew it, and freely acknowledged it, until just a few years ago. We’ve all gone mad.

Following on my recent post “Wolf!!“, which was about the IPCC’s latest end-of-the-world hysterics, I have for you a related post from a blog called Reference Frame (which I think is run by some sort of physicist). Read it here.

Here’s a nifty infographic of the “Spygate” spook-web.

Finally, I’ll let Steve Sailer introduce you to Professor Victoria Bissell Brown. (Related: the etymology of the word “hysteria”.)

Back soon, when I have anything to say. Thanks as always for coming by, and do feel free to browse our voluminous archives, or to try the “View a random post” link at upper right.