Namely, he uses the methods of the Left, and the Left hates him for it.  Read CBS News’s explainer on the issue at hand:

Presidents do have sweeping authority to declassify records, but there is a process that is normally followed.

Generally, a president’s instructions to declassify documents are first written down in a memo, typically drafted by White House lawyers, which the president would then sign. Relevant agencies are usually then consulted and when a final decision is made, the document would be marked, with its old classification level crossed out, and stamped, “Declassified on X date” by the agency in question.

“Generally,” there is a process “that is normally followed,” but legions of hostile journalists and talking-head lawyers cannot point to documentation of that rule.  (Presumably it exists even if they think it does!)

Should Trump have followed the traditional process?  Certainly, but progressives do this sort of thing all the time:  When it is convenient, they throw away the process that everybody had previously agreed existed in order to do what they want.

As much as I’d prefer adherence to expectations, the overarching principle that the rules have to apply equally is true on the higher plane, as well.

… is how true believers come to the conclusion that the way to advocate for the environment is to cause an event that leads to thousands of people sitting in idling cars.

Social media is pretty humorous, today.  After the Cranston library’s lawyers prevented it from cancelling the Independent Women’s Forum event last night (although it appears to have decided never to rent out rooms to any outside groups again) and police prevented disruption, the progressives are congratulating themselves on not censoring or disrupting the event.  By their own spin, they can never lose.

Is anybody falling for it besides them?

If people have to bring in the police to protect themselves from you as you advocate to deprive them of their Constitutional rights, maybe they aren’t the hateful ones.

(These progressives will not only applaud persecution of people with whom they disagree; they’ll feel self-righteous while doing it.)

Remember when nobody cared that the Biden administration was dropping off illegal immigrants across the country in the middle of the night, including in Rhode Island?

You don’t have to look very hard to see that the Democrats and mainstream media are playing you.

Today the most prominent themes among the flotsam on RI Twitter are hagiographic tweets about labor unions and reports about failing infrastructure in the Providence area with respect to water management.  Folks, thank the unions for the flooding, because the expense they’ve imposed on infrastructure in Rhode Island is largely to blame.  Ignoring this reality is among the central missions of our government and news media.

… if you see people citing the strange flash flooding in the Providence area and Rt. 95 as evidence of “climate change,” ask them whether the blame mightn’t more reasonably land on government officials’ poor management of the infrastructure under their authority.

As local media sources have started to track instances of monkeypox in our area, I’ve wondered how many Rhode Islanders know that it is mostly (although not entirely) a venereal disease spreading mostly among gay men.  Except, as Rod Dreher points out, that’s not a fact to which we’re permitted to react:

Scott Gottlieb, former FDA commissioner, writes in the NYT that monkeypox is about to become another huge public health failure. His reasons for that grim conclusion are sound, but not once does he mention that the authorities could easily and effectively respond in part by shutting down gay sex clubs. Gay men cannot fail; they can only be failed by public agencies.

The contrast with our still-recent experience with COVID is striking.  Dreher makes it concrete in the person of Luisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, who oversaw a tremendous shutdown of economic activity for COVID but won’t impose limits on the Southern Decadence Festival in light of monkeypox.

Of course, the two epidemics may be pointing to the same problem.  A major reason the COVID response was so invasive is that we didn’t allow ourselves to distinguish between groups of people whose demographics put them in different risk categories.  Either we all must suffer or no precautions may be taken.

This imperative may backfire on progressives in the long run.  After all, if we’re all going to be restricted and freed without distinction, the boundary for acceptable behavior for everybody will constrict.

Something about this story feels profoundly discouraging to me:

Forty Rhode Island business owners traveled to Washington D.C. last week as part of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit to meet with hundreds of officials to discuss how to boost access to capital, child care and government contracting.

Katie Schibler Conn, owner of KSA Marketing in Warwick, was one of those participants that made the trek to D.C. and spoke with Rhode Island’s U.S. Senator Jack Reed and U.S. Rep. David Cicilline.

“Small business owner” should connote a sense of independence — of providing for one’s self, one’s family, and one’s employees.  It’s “yes, I built that!”  Running to government for cash and subsidized family services is rent seeking, which is very much like working for the government.

Rhode Island provides an excellent case study in how corruption works.  Elections aren’t stolen at the ballot box (except as a last resort).  Rather, corruption rigs the game at every opportunity — buying and coercing votes so that they don’t have to be stolen or manufactured.  The only way to stop this is to get the money out of politics, and the only way to do that is to get as much power out of politics as feasible.

The reminder for these thoughts was the Providence Journal’s searchable tool for legislative grants, which House and Senate leaders hand out to legislators if they behave so they can buy good will (i.e., votes) in their districts.  It looks like the Projo duplicated the data while setting up the tool, so check it against the House and Senate lists, but it’s instructive to look through the grants in your community.

More data on COVID immunity over the long-term is not actually that surprising to people who looked at the data honestly a year or more ago:

“Effectiveness of primary infection against severe, critical, or fatal COVID-19 reinfection was 97.3 percent … irrespective of the variant of primary infection or reinfection, and with no evidence for waning. Similar results were found in sub-group analyses for those ≥50 years of age,” Dr. Laith Abu-Raddad of Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar and colleagues said after studying long-term natural immunity in unvaccinated people.

That percentage is higher than the protection from COVID-19 vaccines, according to other studies and real-world data.

Swedish researchers, for instance, found in May that two doses of a vaccine were just 54 percent effective against the Omicron variant of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes COVID-19.

As time goes on, the whole thing looks more and more like a moral panic stoked in the service of political advantage and to promote a cultural and ideological shift.  Did it work?  Well, that data may take longer to develop.

My pace of writing for these essays is much slower than my usual.  In part, the reason is that my 2022 has simply been busier than I expected, and I haven’t been able to manage my Dust in the Light allotment of time every week.  In bigger part, however, the reason is that, as clear as the concepts are to me, putting them into words so as to be explanatory is difficult.  Such writing is very easy when the writer is simply proclaiming beliefs with the a priori assumption that readers have necessary knowledge and agreement.  It’s much more difficult if the intent is to make the case for original ideas to people who will probably think the writer is crazy.

Be my sanity whatever it may be, exploring these ideas feels like the capstone project of my life, so I’ll keep trudging along.  (I think the next three will flow more smoothly, but we’ll see!)

This time around, I move from my proposed model for reality, which carried through to the Multiverse, and describe how beings emerge conceptually, down to the level of human beings.

… on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison has to be one of the greatest tracks ever recorded

I listened to so much Billy Joel as a tween and teen that one could almost say he was something of a father figure for me (hey, don’t judge).  One of his songs just came up on my shuffle, inspiring me to check in BillyJoel.com, which I haven’t visited in years.  With a few exceptions, the photos reinforce an impression I’ve had since first watching the video of his millennium concert decades ago: he just never seems happy.  With some exceptions, the smile never seems to reach his eyes, as the saying goes.

I say this believing myself still to be in tune with his professional persona.  In interviews from the ’80s and ’90s, I completely got his somewhat cynical and sarcastic Tri-State Area sense of humor.  But somewhere around the year 2000, the down-to-Earth-getting-what-a-lark-this-all-is star thing shifted to a guy-who-reached-the-top-and-didn’t-find-something thing.

Maybe that’s why he hasn’t really done any original work since his classical album in 2001.

What did they change?

Well, there was a rule that said mommies had to be allowed to kill their babies before they were born everywhere in the country, and the court said states could decide whether or not to keep that rule.

Why would mommies want to kill their babies?

Naturally, the mainstream media is choosing to share video of Joe Biden falling on his bicycle in which you can’t see what actually happened.  Barstool Sports has the good clip:

DOWN GOES BIDEN pic.twitter.com/yxHhRWOJyC

— Barstool Sports (@barstoolsports) June 18, 2022

It wasn’t even one of those stumbles that happens from time to time. The White House occupant just forgot how to get off the bicycle.

The people who installed this man have put the planet in cataclysmic danger.

This is probably a strange question to pose, but nonetheless, one wonders.  As the state government moves toward spending big money on suicide barriers that will inevitably change the aesthetic character of the bridges on which they’re installed, what is the belief system underlying our local culture?  Where do supporters for such things stand on, say, physician-assisted suicide?

I ask only because my sense is that our society is deeply confused exactly in the way that would spend money to stop people from killing themselves by jumping off bridges while also spending money for doctors to pull the fatal chemical trigger upon request.

The political commentary crew on CNN pretty uniformly believes Democrats will experience a “trouncing” come November.  Well, look.  That’s what happens when you install a senile old man through questionable means, selling him (to the extent you bother to make the case at all) as a reasonable centrist even though the people who make decisions on his behalf are hardcore Marxists.  The truth is that a “trouncing” is too soft.  If we had a healthy civic society, the Democrat Party would be utterly wiped from the face of American politics… and quickly replaced by a new opposition to Republicans.

To live in the shoreline suburbs of Rhode Island is periodically to encounter raw evidence that progressivism has gained its purchase here, at least in part, as a way for some of the most privileged people in human history to feel themselves even more superior while assuaging their own guilt by accusing those who are slightly (or even significantly) less privileged of holding the incorrect views, all in the name of “tolerance” and support for the disadvantaged.

I just came across listings of the top 10 students from three Rhode Island high schools’ graduating classes.  At two of them, nine out of 10 of the students are girls.

Being generally against inferring bias based on disproportionate outcomes, I’m certainly open to the possibility that two nearby schools both having only a single boy on a top 10 list just happened to happen.  Take enough random samplings of any binary population, and you may get some that are this out of whack.

But, still… given everything we know about education and culture these days, the dismissive conclusion is hard to credit.  At the very least, we would do well to devote some thought to whether anything is contributing to these imbalanced results, particularly given the unusual events of the past few years.  For the third district, boys had the majority of the top 10 (seven versus three), and the fact that it’s the wealthiest of the three may provide useful information, as well.

You may have seen this image on social media offered as evidence that Fox News is just propaganda:

In combination with other similar observations, this is why I’ve been feeling down today. People are actually insisting that the single television news outlet not promoting the same content as all the others is the one spreading propaganda. My goodness!  That is the opposite of how propaganda works and the opposite of why it’s dangerous!

We’ve reached the point that many people think a refusal to goosestep is fascism, which is a sure sign that fascism is making gains.