A full page add in the New York Times

From June 10, 2020, paid for, apparently, by Tom Blair, the author of "What Would Ben Say?"

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.  — Mark Twain

1. The president must interpret the conscience of America. He must guide his conduct by the idealism of our people.
     — President Herbert Hoover.

2. Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.
     — President Ronald Reagan

3. One cool judgment is worth a thousand counsels. The thing to do is supply light and not heat.
     — President Woodrow Wilson

4. BS narrative that those are mostly peaceful protestors. Mainstream media will do anything to protect Democrats and defend lawlessness. When the looting starts, the shooting starts.
     — President Donald Trump

5. America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.
     — President Harry S. Truman

6. Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel in order to be tough. — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

7. I tread in the footsteps of illustrious men...in receiving from the people the sacred trust confided to my illustrious predecessors.
     — President Martin Van Buren

8. I would give myself and A+ as President. Can I go higher than that? — President Donald Trump

9. This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in if it is not a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.
     — President Theodore Roosevelt

10. We have a tendency to condemn people who are different from us, to define their sins as paramount and our own sinfulness as being insignificant.
     — President Jimmy Carter

11. Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak. 
    — President John Adams

12. It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own. 
    — President Herbert Hoover

13. Fake news is the true enemy of the people.
     — President Donald Trump

14. I think the first duty of society is justice.
     — Alexander Hamilton

15. How can we love our country, and not also love our countrymen. —President Ronald Reagan

16. What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.
     — Congresswoman Barbara Jordan

17. You may give a man an Office, but you cannot give him Discretion. — Benjamin Franklin

18. I've always felt he got away with murder. Why did he leave Congress so quickly. Isn't it obvious?
     — President Donald J. Trump

19. The test of progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough to those who have too little.
     — President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

20. No person connected with me by blood or marriage will be appointed to office. —President Rutherford B. Hayes

21. Ivanka created 14 million jobs. — President Donald J. Trump

22. Leave the matter of religion to the family alter, the church and the private school. Keep the church and the state forever separate.  
    — President Ulysses S. Grant

23. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. — President Dwight D. Eisenhower

24. There is nothing new in the world except the history you do no know. — President Harry S. Truman

25. Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
     — President Thomas Jefferson

26. Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. — Albert Einstein

27. More people attended my inauguration than any other President's. Anyone who wants a test can get one.
     — President Donald J. Trump

28. No person was ever honored for what he earned. Honor has been the reward for what he gave. — President Calvin Coolidge

29. He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. — Benjamin Franklin

30. I look forward to showing my financials because they are huge.
    — President Donald J. Trump

31. People who boast about their I.Q are losers. —Steven Hawking

32. I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.
     — President Woodrow Wilson.

33. Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q is one of the highest. Please don't feel so stupid or insecure. It's not your fault.
     — President Donald J. Trump

34. Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.
     — President George Washington

35. I always wanted a Purple Heart...McCain a hero? I like people who weren't captured. I couldn't serve because of a bone spur.
    — President Donald J. Trump

36. A brave man is a man who dares to look the Devil in the face and tell him he is a devil. — President James A. Garfield

The people are the rightful masters of both congress, and courts—not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.  — Abraham Lincoln

Make Assholes Great Again

Foreign Affairs style is to imply a person or policy is misguided, ignorant, stupid, without ever using those words. It is the refined, privileged way. But sometimes "Fuck Donald Trump" is truer.

Refuting flat earthers: where's your map?

If I had to debate flat earthers, which thankfully I do not, I wouldn't try to "reason" with them. Instead, I would bring in several maps using different kinds of projections and ask these questions:

1. Where's your map?
2. If they are the same as my maps, what happens at the "edges" of my maps?
3. If your flat map is finite, what happens at the edges?
4. If your flat map is infinite, where is the boundary between the known and unknown worlds?

These questions would form the basis of my engagement. Unless flat earthers provide answers to all these questions they aren't actually saying anything at all.

Discussion

The first question disposes of the "moving goal posts" problem. The second refutes attempts to use "real" maps. The last two questions make it impossible for flat earthers to ignore the boundaries that must exist in a flat map.

This strategy avoids getting bogged down in what I call "bozo epistemology". Instead of attempting to prove that facts are facts (which is impossible!), we merely insist that flat earthers be clear about what they would have us believe.

It would also be reasonable to take a globe, and demand that flat earthers explain where it is in error. The globe represents distances, directions and areas. It is up to flat earthers to "falsify" the globe.

Summary

The question, "where's your map, and what does it mean?", poses an impossible problem for flat earthers.

The "Where's your map" challenge might apply to other bogus ideas and the crackpots and liars who espouse them. Alas, it's much easier to assert that the earth is flat than it is to refute it. In other words, the ideas presented here have little or no practical value.

Edward

Response to George Will, part 2

Let's step back and look at the overall effect of Will's opinion piece.

Does any knowledgeable historian seriously doubt the following facts?

1. That slavery existed in the American colonies from 1619 and continued until the end of the Civil War.

2. That non-plantation slavery started during reconstruction and continued in various forms into the 20th century.

From the Wikipedia: "[The book, Slavery by Another Name] explores the forced labor, of prisoners, overwhelmingly African American men, through the convict lease system used by states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States."

3 That the 1619 project accurately describes the effects of both forms of slavery. These effects continue to this day:

- Innocent non-whites such as Ahmaud Arbery continue to be murdered on a regular basis.

- The rights of non-whites to vote are under continual attack, as illustrated by the debacle of the recent elections in Wisconsin.

These are the inconvenient truths Will seeks to discredit. He does so in the usual way:

An accurate title would be, "Some statements of the 1619 project are debatable." Instead, Will smears the entire project. 

Alas, those who want to discredit the 1619 project can now just say, "George Will, writing in the Washington Post, demonstrates that the 1619 project has an ax to grind". The actual content of this article hardly matters. The smear will make the usual rounds, reinforced by those who never read the original. In the process, it will likely morph into "Everyone knows the 1619 project fake news."

In short, it is regrettable that the editors of the Washington Post have chosen to publish this piece. It would be more appropriate in the New York Post :-)

Response to George Will re the 1619 project

 In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, George Will professes to have a problem with The 1619 project. Here is my response to his nonsense, first published as a comment:

The 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary cited Nikole Hanna-Jones of the New York Times as follows:

"For a sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America's story, prompting public conversation about the nation's founding and evolution."

When I first read the articles of the 1619 project, I kept exclaiming, "Wow." I consider myself an educated person, but I simply had no idea that the effects of slavery are still so widespread and pernicious.

Here are some titles from the 1619 project:

- If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

- Myths about physical and racial differences were used to justify slavery—and are still believed by doctors today.

- America holds onto an undemocratic assumption, that some people deserve more power than others.

- Why doesn't the United States have universal health care? The answer has to do with policies enacted after the Civil War.

- Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our prison system.

- The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'black gold' that fueled slavery.

- A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining and evictions and exclusions, separates black and white America.

- Most Americans still don't know the full story of slavery.

And there's more, including poetry and photography.

Against all this, Will desperately tries to change the subject, objecting to quotations out of context. He simply ignores the respected historians who consulted on the project.

Indeed, when I first read Will's "critique," my first reaction was "Huh?" Is he talking about the same nuanced, graceful, powerful history that won the Pulitzer Prize?

In short, Mr. Will's essay is itself ideological, slovenly, and dishonest.

Letters to the NYT re American Conservatism

These letters pretty much sum up my view of the world.

Leo 6.2 and 6.2.1 released

Leo 6.2/6.2.1, http://leoeditor.com, are now available on GitHub.

Leo 6.2.1 adds the manifest needed to do pip install leo. Otherwise 6.2.1 is identical to 6.2.

Leo is an IDE, outliner and PIM.

The highlights of Leo 6.2

• Added the fstringify-files and diff-fstringify-files commands.
• Improved the beautify-files command. Added the diff-beautify-files commands.
• Added the TokenOrderGenerator and TokenOrderTraverser classes in leoAst.py.
  Leo's fstringify and beautify commands use these classes.
• Added importers for the rust language and todo.txt files.
• Added the viewrendered3 plugin.
• Leo's legacy layout is now the default.
• Fixed all known bugs, including some notable, long-standing bugs.
• Fixed several "fit and finish" issues.
• Removed unused settings from leoSettings.leo.

Links

• Leo's home page: http://leoeditor.com
• Documentation
• Tutorials
• Video tutorials
• Forum
• Download
• Leo on GitHub
• LeoVue
• What people are saying about Leo
• A web page that displays .leo files
• More links