Lots to Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving (VIDEO)

It's Laura Ingraham, still the best opinion commentator on Fox:

Are Store Shortages and Empty Shelves On Purpose?

At Issues & Insights, "As Shortages Persist Under Biden, It’s Time To Ask: Is This On Purpose?"

Did the United States suddenly become a socialist basket case? It’s hard not to come to that conclusion after reading about the endless shortages plaguing the nation. Each of which President Joe Biden either seems clueless to resolve or determined to make worse.

Let’s start with the biggest one: the shortage of diesel fuel. While Biden was busy draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to tamp down gas prices before the midterm elections, the real worry was that supplies of diesel fuel have been running short.

Two years after the short-lived COVID lockdowns ended, diesel inventories continued to trend downward to their lowest levels since 2008. The cost for a gallon of diesel fuel is 46% higher than it was a year ago, according to AAA, and now costs more than $5 a gallon.

That affects every corner of the economy because, while passenger cars mostly use regular gasoline, diesel powers just about everything else that makes the economy move, and many homes, especially in the northeast, rely on heating oil – a related product – to keep their families from freezing to death...

RTWT.

 

Shop Deals for You

Here, Shop Early Black Friday Deals.

BONUS: HYCHIKA 6.2A Electric Mini Circular Saw, 3 Blades (4-1/2”), Max Cutting Depth 1-7/8'' (90°), Rubber Handle, 10 Feet Cord, Ideal for Wood Soft Metal Tile Plastic Cuts.

Early Black Friday Deals

At Amazon, Early Black Friday Deals 2022.

Nakiri Knife - Razor Sharp Meat Cleaver

At Amazon, Nakiri Knife - PAUDIN Razor Sharp Meat Cleaver 7 inch High Carbon Stainless Steel Vegetable Kitchen Knife, Multipurpose Asian Chef Knife for Home and Kitchen with Ergonomic Handle​.

North Face Men's Insulated Jacket

Get ready for the cold.

Here, The North Face Men's Aconcagua Insulated Jacket.

Also, The North Face Men’s Bedford Down Parka.

Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

At Amazon, Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

Beautiful Fourth of July

Really.

On Twitter.

And here and here.

Leftists Push 'Fuck the Fourth'

At AoSHQ, "Leftwingers Push 'F*** the Fourth' Anti-American Campaign for Independence Day; Pima County (Arizona) Democrat Party Retweets, and Adds, 'F*ck the Fourth'."

It’s the 10th Anniversary of San Diego Fireworks Show That Set Them All Off at Once (VIDEO)

Wild.

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "OH, THAT EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: It’s the 10th anniversary of the firework show where San Diego accidentally set off all 7,000 fireworks at once."

Happy 10-year anniversary to the greatest fireworks show in history, when San Diego accidentally shot off 7,000 fireworks at once.

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/qihO4zeXP3

— Chris Vannini (@ChrisVannini) July 4, 2022

James Wesley Rawles, Patriots

At Amazon, James Wesley Rawles, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse.

'Slow motion riders fly the colors of the day...'

Chicago, "Saturday in the Park." 

Mass Shooting at Fourth of July Parade in Highland Park, Illinois

I'm sure most of you have heard the news already.

At the Chicago Tribune, "Highland Park shooting: ‘It was chaotic,’ reports of 6 dead, 2 dozen others likely shot during Fourth of July parade."

And on Twitter:

My first thoughts on word of the news, sadly. #HighlandPark https://t.co/gYRvLSroQW

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) July 4, 2022

James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show (VIDEO)

From the excellent documentary film, "I Am Not Your Negro." 

Happy Juneteenth everybody!

'Afro' Hair Pick Statue to Commemorate Juneteenth Unveiled in Lafayette Square, New Orleans, Louisiana

This is just dumb.

Sorry not sorry. 

Juneteenth is this coming Sunday. 

#Juneteenth #Shaft #IsaacHayes 🎶🎶🎶 https://t.co/AgGSAelnLx

— Donald Douglas 📘 (@AmPowerBlog) June 18, 2022

The First Wave Hits Omaha Beach

On Twitter:

Some units in the first wave that hit Omaha Beach on D-Day suffered a casualty rate north of 90%. We asked young men with their whole lives ahead of them to pay the ultimate price.

Next time you want to complain about how tough you have it, read a history book. #MemorialDay pic.twitter.com/2O5oNPNtZo

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) May 30, 2022

Russia's Easter Offensive

From, Timothy Snyder, on Substack, "Jesus in east European political thought":

Today Easter is celebrated by western Christians; a week from now it will be celebrated by the Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Ukraine, and by the Orthodox in Russia. By then, Russian troops will be engaged in their Easter Offensive, a new Russian attack on Ukraine in the Donbas.

The coincidence of the most important holiday in the Christian tradition with a war of atrocity gives an occasion to think about what Easter means, and how the life and death of Jesus has been interpreted.

One way of thinking about the life and death of Jesus is to connect them. Jesus of Nazareth took risks in life. He had things he needed to say about love and truth, but he did not deliberately provoke the state. That he died for his convictions adds an unforgettable dimension to them.

On such an interpretation of Easter, Jesus would be exemplary as an ethicist and truthteller who understood that commitments involve risks. His example would not be one of seeking death, or seeking meaning in death. The instruction would be to accept that some risk of death follows, in certain circumstances, from commitments to values such as love and truth.

“Love and truth.” Once, after a debate in 2009 in Bratislava, I looked over at the notes that the Czech thinker (and by then former president) Václav Havel had been keeping for himself. He had written "love and truth" on a sheet of paper, and then doodled flowers around it.

Havel was the author of a famous secular east European statement about risk in politics. He wrote "Power of the Powerless" in communist Czechoslovakia, three decades before that debate, under the shadow of the death of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who had died after police interrogation. In that essay, Havel maintained that one takes risks for one's own truths, not because punishment brings some meaning, but because risk inheres in truth. To "live in truth" means accepting a measure of existential danger.

The Soviet Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych, who admired Havel, said something similar. The risks that he and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. They were just an inseparable element of what Myronovych called a "normal Ukrainian life." In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.

Both Havel (who was secular) and Marynovych (who experienced an epiphany under interrogation) were part of an international human rights movement that saw its main activity as the chronicle. A prominent form of resistance to communism was the attempt to record arrests, trials, deportations, sentences, and abuses. "Human rights" meant telling the truth about a moment when a life was interrupted. This tradition was continued after the end of the Soviet Union by investigative reporters who took risks to write about post-communist oligarchy and war.

I was reminded of that truthtelling tradition this Easter week when I read Nataliya Gumenyuk's reporting from Ukrainian territories from which Russian troops have withdrawn. Gumenyuk is one of an admirable group of Ukrainian reporters who have taken their share of risks reporting the inequality and conflict of the twenty-first century. (Russian reporters, such as those working for Novaya Gazeta and Ekho Moskvy belong to this tradition as well. These media have been forced to shut down by the Russian government.)

During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror.

I also hear something of an older east European tradition in the way that Volodymyr Zelens'kyi addresses Ukrainian losses. In an interview also published on Good Friday, Zelens'kyi speaks of suffering and death involved in resistance to invasion as a result of a risk that had to be taken to preserve the life of a society. Zelens'kyi does not glamorize combat or death. He gave a speech the other day which recalled Havel: he defined living in a lie as the source of Putin's aggression, and spoke of truth as a form of courage.

That is one broad way of thinking about politics suggested by Easter: the values of life are affirmed by a risk of death. Life is full of values, but attached to each one is risk. The risk is attendant upon the value. If the risk is realized in death, the value is affirmed. But death is not the point.

In a rival interpretation of the death of Jesus, to which Christians are vulnerable, death is the point. It is the suffering and the dying, rather that the acting and the living, that creates the meaning.

In such thinking about Easter, the significance of the dying can crowd out the living message of love and truth. The Polish Romanticism of the nineteenth century veered in this direction. The vision of Poland as a "Christ of Nations" was less about Christian comportment and more about the willingness to die for a cause. A century later, Romanian fascists identified strongly with Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), and had an exuberant cult of death and martyrdom.

A certain kind of focus on the death of Jesus has a way, in politics at least, of dissolving responsibility for action. One convenient interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is that we are innocent. And then the question arises as to who "we" are. Those within our group can be seen as free of sin, regardless of what we do, whereas the others can be seen as sinners, regardless of what they do.

The Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin, a Christian (Orthodox) fascist, advanced such a doctrine of national innocence. Ilyin's view was that Christ's teachings about truth and love were to be understood in a particular way, with respect to a particular nation. The world was broken, and could only be healed by Russians, and in particular by a fascist Russian leader. That was the truth that mattered. Only Russia had the chance to become a Christian nation, and that was by way of a totalitarianism that eliminated the differences between people and ruler. A restored Russia that could lead humanity would be without national minorities and without Ukraine, which Ilyin claimed did not exist. Christ commanded the love of God and the love of neighbor, but this meant for Ilyin the hatred of the Godless, which is to say those who did not understand Russia’s destiny.

On Ilyin's view, anything a Russian leader did to create a fascist, imperial Russia was by definition innocent of sin, since it was a step towards the redemption of the entire world. There is nothing wrong with lying and killing in a flawed world. Indeed, lying and killing are good when done by a Russian leader on a crusade to restore wholeness to the world.

The last time Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014, Putin was in the habit of citing Ilyin to legitimate Russian empire. And to justify that war, a living Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, supplied the image of Russia as a crucified boy (in “news” about an event that never took place).

Putin’s rhetoric about this war make sense within such a framework. In a rally, Putin quoted the Bible to celebrate the death of Russians in battle. He said that their death had made the nation more unified than ever before...

Still more.

 

No Easter Metaphors

It's (the freakin' smart) Ally Beth Stuckey, on Twitter.

The Resurrection is not a metaphor. It’s not a symbol for us overcoming our obstacles or for God doing the unexpected in our lives. It’s Jesus rising from the dead, defeating sin & death forever. That’s powerful & applicable as is. Forgo cleverness & stick with the gospel.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) April 16, 2022

'Vacation'

I'm counting down the days to Easter Vacation, when, counting the weekends, I'll have 10 days off from classes. I'll do some grading, but otherwise I plan to get out and get some sun and exercise. 

Check out this oldie, from the Go-Gos: 

What Is the Oldest Holiday People Still Celebrate Today?

Here's Dennis Prager, on Passover: