Author: Crowhill Report

Hunter had access to them. As much as I dislike Hillary Clinton, and as much as I would like Donald Trump to go away, I don’t believe either of them had any intention of sharing America’s secrets with foreign powers. That doesn’t excuse them for mishandling classified documents, but … it’s something.

I do expect a crack-head like Hunter Biden to do almost anything, and for Joe to put classified documents in a place where Hunter had access is incredibly damning.

“Hey Dad, can I borrow the corvette that’s out in the garage? (wink wink). I have a hot date with this Chinese woman.”

You can’t use ChatGPT in person. College kids will soon be writing term papers using ChatGPT, which raises some interesting challenges for professors. How do they know if the student knows the subject or is simply using artificial intelligence to fulfill a requirement?

How about this? Talk to the students!

Pictures of documents on the carpet. Remember how the FBI released photos of the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago? I wonder why they haven’t done that with the Biden documents? (Actually, I don’t.)

As I discussed in the post about bossy women, the problem with saying “if ___ had done this it would be different” is that no two situations are identical. If you compare the Clinton, Trump, and Biden stories about the mishandling of classified documents, each case has its own peculiarities, so it’s not quite fair to say “they did this with A, they should do it with B.” It doesn’t work that way.

On the other hand, when you have steady, persistent examples of bias, and they all seem to go in one direction, it’s hard not to make conclusions.

On the benefit of discussing literature. With at least two books that we’ve read for “shortcut to the classics” (on the “Beer and Conversation Podcast”), I changed my initial judgment of the book after discussing it with Pigweed and Longinus. The two that come to mind are Metamorphosis and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

I was underwhelmed with both of them, but after reviewing them I realized there was more to the stories than I had perceived at first.

But when a man does it … There’s no shortage of content on LinkedIn about how unfair the world is to women. A typical complaint is the “bossy” thing. E.g., “When men do it, it’s leadership. When women do it, it’s bossy.”

There may be some truth to some of these claims, but from my perspective, it sounds more like a combination of self-justification and being a martyr.

Consider this. I used to live in a house with a guy who spoke Arabic. I asked him to teach me a few things, and sometimes he would say a word, and then I’d say it, and he’d say I had it wrong, and he’d say the word again. I was (then) a good musician, and had a good ear, but I couldn’t hear the difference between what he said and what I said.

It would have been childish of me to say, “I’m saying it exactly like you! You’re only saying I have it wrong because I’m an American.” The truth was that my ear wasn’t trained to hear what he was hearing. There are subtleties in language that non-native speakers don’t get.

When a woman is called bossy when she does (she thinks) “exactly what a man would do,” I have no reason to accept the premise that she did “exactly what a man would do.”

Actually, maybe she did. Maybe she did exactly what a bossy man would do! (Men can also be bossy.)

If a man were to say, “But I did exactly what Frank did, and you don’t call him bossy”? the response would be on the order of “you’re not as good as Frank.”

There are a lot of things to consider when you distinguish “leader” from “bossy” — like experience, knowledge, tone, style, and body language. It’s not some binary “men are leaders, women are bossy.” There isn’t any reason to assume that when a woman’s attempt is judged “bossy” it’s only because she’s a woman. Maybe she just doesn’t have the right style for delivering that sort of message.

Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, and they learn different skills. Maybe boys are more likely to learn the nuances of leadership than girls, just as girls are more likely to learn the nuances of some social settings than boys. Or maybe women who are called bossy really are bossy, and they’re grasping at a cheap excuse.

Bottom line: the “bossy women are leaders” meme is not very persuasive.

Should we conquer Mexico? I know that doesn’t sound very 21st century. We like to think we’re beyond things like conquering other countries. But we have to face such questions like adults. If a neighboring state becomes a threat, you have to at least consider the idea of military intervention.

It seems that Mexico is run by the cartels, and that violence is a threat to us and will get worse. There’s also the drug problem. We should destroy the drug factories in Mexico.

If the Mexican government can’t get these criminals under control, we might have to do it.

Try putting molasses in your hot chocolate. I’m a big fan of hot chocolate. Sometimes I add cinnamon and cayenne to make it spicy. But I just tried adding molasses, and it adds an interesting flavor.

Listening to Stephen Fry’s Mythos. Fry is a very educated and talented man, and it shows in his retelling of Greek myths. I’m only part of the way through but enjoying it thoroughly.

Are the Covid vaccines to blame for Hamlin’s collapse? I hear that’s a theory that’s making the rounds on the right. I don’t have any knowledge about it one way or another, and suspect it’s a crackpot theory born out of ignorance, but I am 97.6% certain of this: if there were valid medical reasons for suspecting the vaccines, that information would be hushed up, and you’d be censored for sharing it.

Google is unbelievably frustrating! My brother had a Google Home device. In order to get it to do something, you have to say “Hey Google,” or “Hello Google.” You can’t customize that — as I could on my old Android (non-Google) phone. So if there are two Google devices in a room — for example, his Google Home and my Pixel — they both respond.

Didn’t anybody at Google consider this possibility?

I hate modern light bulbs. Depending on what kind you get, they (1) don’t turn on right away, (2) flicker, (3) don’t last 1/10 the time they claim to last, and (4) contain dangerous chemicals. In addition to all that, they’re more expensive.

Every time I use one of these stupid things I curse Congress for requiring them.

Is football too violent? The Damar Hamlin story has drawn attention to the violence of football, although it shouldn’t. There was nothing particularly violent about the play, and we don’t know whether the play had anything to do with his health issues. Even if it was (a “blow-induced arrhythmia,” some say) it wasn’t all that shocking of a blow, and those circumstances are very rare.

However, we should not have “a conversation” about this. Because “a conversation” means that the liberals get to lecture and everybody else has to shut up. That’s what the word seems to mean these days.

It would be nice to have a rational discussion, if that’s possible.

First, football is violent, and that’s a good thing. We need violent sports. Young men need relatively safe and controlled ways to be violent. A country with no violent sports is a country ripe for being conquered.

Second, yes, football may be too violent. They’ve made it safer over the years, and I hope they can make it safer still without turning it into a sissy game.

Football will always have risks. You can’t have large bodies running around on a field without some risk of injury. And that’s okay. Injuries are unfortunate, but they’re not the end of the world, and it’s not as if the rest of life is safe either. People get injured taking showers, driving, walking, etc.

We have an epidemic of fatherlessness. The Daily Signal podcast has a good show on fatherlessness. Look up “Kris Vallotton on Devastating ‘Pandemic of Fatherlessness.'” He’s a little hard to listen to, but he has a lot of interesting things to say. And he doesn’t propose an easy solution — elect this candidate, pass this law, etc. It took decades to get into this mess, and it’s going to take time to get out of it. If we can.

I am more and more convinced that nothing short of a religious revival is going to save this country.

The Biden classified document story is deliciously funny.

I have my doubts about Bryan Kohberger’s guilt. I’m not a “true crime” fan, and I haven’t followed this case closely, but it seems to me that the murderer made mistakes that a criminology student would not make.

Does anybody like this Harry guy? I don’t follow the royals, but this guy seems intolerable, even without his harpy of a wife.