America Gone Mad

Argosy cover: America At Bay in a World Gone Mad

I wonder if we are victims of  statistics. Not that the numbers are pushing us to do things, but that we even have numbers. If we didn't have numbers about what was going across the country and we just looked at our own sorry / not sorry situation, we might not think whatever it was was such a big deal. Still, I keep skimming the blog-o-sphere. Most of it I disregard (yes, the government is lying, yes inflation is ramping up, yes, everyone's supply chains are constricted, yes, everyone is an idiot except me), but sometimes you just got to wade into the swamp and let the hot slimy water wash over your body.

Intro from Commentary: America Gone Mad by Conrad Black:

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

He goes on at some length. I might have got as far as Flummoxed by Biden.

Conrad Black (author of this piece) is someone to be reckoned with:

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Via  Knuckledraggin My Life Away

P.S. I much prefer boldface to quote marks. I want to say it's easier, but is it? Putting quote marks around a phrase (assuming after the fact) means typing a quote mark and then typing Ctrl-< (left arrow) as many times as there are words in the phrase you are trying to quote, and then typing another quote mark. Emboldening a phrase (geesh, that emboldening is a long word for such a short root) just requires Ctrl-Shift-< (left arrow) as many times . . . and then typing Ctrl-B. So you save one keystroke, but your movement requires pressing three keys, not just two, so I guess it's a wash. Unless you are using double quotes. Then you have to use the shift key, twice, so you lose.

Plus bold faced text is easier to identify when you are looking at a whole page. Look at whole page for a phrase and bold faced text will jump out at you.

I don't know that I have any hard and fast rules about using bold face type. Titles of articles from other places get it, as do company names and, shoot, pretty much anything nameable. People don't usually get it, I'm not sure why. So I've been formulating rules about this for a while because I think it makes it easier for the ready to comprehend what I'm talking about. But maybe it doesn't help at all. Maybe no one even notices. That's okay, in that case I am just doing it for me. Huh. Imagine that.