Author: J. Arthur Bloom

J. Arthur Bloom is the blog's editor, opinion editor of the Daily Caller, and an occasional contributor to the Umlaut. He was formerly associate editor of the American Conservative and a music reviewer at Tiny Mix Tapes, and graduated from William and Mary in 2011. He lives in Washington, DC, and can be found, far too often, on Twitter.

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How smoking became as cool and subversive as 1960s ad men always said it was

In a bit of news that should be much more outrageous than the Darren Wilson decision, a grand jury has declined to indict the cops who put Eric Garner in a chokehold, during which he died.

This story is less useful to the media and Democratic Party than the one in Ferguson, so it’s likely the protests, if there are any, will be fewer between and less well-covered. There is also the inconvenient fact that Garner was purveying a substance only bad people smoke, tobacco, at the time of his death. Since only bad people smoke, politicians are fine with driving up the price on these largely poor individuals. This regressive tax then creates black markets, which are usually filled by lower-class people like Garner, who are then preyed upon by authorities. The chain of causation here is far too clear to make a vague point about institutional oppression, and focusing on this story risks people reaching the dangerous conclusion that supporters of higher tobacco taxes want to see more Staten Island loosie hucksters strangled to death.

The highest-level authority currently pushing tobacco taxes is the World Health Organization. It met in Moscow this October to confront what it calls an “epidemic” of smoking and hammer out the details for a global tobacco tax, but conducted the meeting in secret, banning the public, then reporters, actions they blamed on “mounting pressure from [the] tobacco industry.”

If a global tobacco tax sounds like a great idea to you, consider that more than 50 percent of cigarettes sold in major Northeastern cities are bootleg. They just don’t raise the money authorities think they will, and a global cigarette tax would obviously exacerbate that problem. What the World Health Organization is really saying is they’d like to see Eric Garners planetwide. To the WHO, smoking must be ended, and that is a small price to pay for a smoke-free world. You know what they say about breaking a few eggs.

This is also an instructive lie from the WHO brought up during the proceedings:

Another milestone in tobacco control was adoption of the decision on electronic nicotine (and non-nicotine) delivery systems, also known as electronic cigarettes. This rather novel product was first launched by independent companies, but many of them are now being controlled by multinational tobacco companies. The decision acknowledges the need for regulations along the lines of policies concerning other tobacco products, including banning or restricting promotion, advertising and sponsorship of ENDS.

We’re supposed to find it reassuring that global health authorities are just as wary of “multinationals” as Adbusters Magazine. But by most estimates, that isn’t true at all. The U.S. market for e-cigarettes is 70 percent small independent manufacturers.

Even if it were the case, regulations and taxes of this kind usually work in favor of big tobacco. For example, Altria boasts on its website that it was alone in supporting Barack Obama’s ban on flavored cigarettes: “Altria Group and its tobacco companies stood alone within the tobacco industry in support of the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act.” Isn’t that interesting? (more…)

‘Une bouffée de mitraille’

Isegoria explains:

As a young Brigadier General, Napoleon once dispersed a mob of Royalists with “a whiff of grapeshot” — although it’s not quite clear how to translate that very Anglo-Saxon phrase back into French. Une bouffée de mitraille?

The phrase likely sounds so Anglo-Saxon because it was coined by Scottish essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle, in The French Revolution: A History.

Mitraille is the French word for grapeshot, and it is also the root of the French word for machine gun, mitrailleuse, because the original French proto-machine gun was a multi-barrel affair meant to deliver a volley of rifle rounds, as a new and improved form of grapeshot, and the term stuck, even as true machine guns arrived on the scene.

More on that unusual phrase here. And more from Carlyle here:

`It is false,` says Napoleon, `that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.` Most false: the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbets and plinths of Saint-Roch Church show splintered by it, to this hour.–Singular: in old Broglie`s time, six years ago, this Whiff of Grapeshot was promised; but it could not be given then, could not have profited then. Now, however, the time is come for it, and the man; and behold, you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it, and become a thing that was!– …

On the whole, therefore, has it not been fulfilled what was prophesied, ex- postfacto indeed, by the Archquack Cagliostro, or another? He, as he looked in rapt vision and amazement into these things, thus spake: (Diamond Necklace, p. 35.) `Ha! What is this? Angels, Uriel, Anachiel, and the other Five; Pentagon of Rejuvenescence; Power that destroyed Original Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer Limbo, which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE Of IMPOSTURE waver? Burst there, in starry sheen updarting, Light-rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travail-throes, but in death-throes? Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the Heavens,–lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red Hellfire!

`IMPOSTURE is burnt up: one Red-sea of Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue, licks at the very Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and– ha! what see I?–all the Gigs of Creation; all, all! Wo is me! Never since Pharaoh`s Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of Wheel-vehicles like this in the Sea of Fire. Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind. Higher, higher yet flames the Fire-Sea; crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing with leather and prunella. The metal Images are molten; the marble Images become mortar-lime; the stone Mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the earth: not to return save under new Avatar. Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up; for a time. The World is black ashes; which, ah, when will they grow green? The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead: it is an empty World! Wo to them that shall be born then!–A King, a Queen (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll. Iscariot Egalite was hurled in; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Bastille; whole kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men. For it is the End of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp); and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth.` This Prophecy, we say, has it not been fulfilled, is it not fulfilling?

The other famous usage is attributed to the Duke of Wellington: “Pour la canaille: Faut la mitraille.” For the mob, use grapeshot.

Interview with Pax Dickinson on corruption in journalism and how he’s gonna fix it

It’s over here at TheDC. Check it out:

TheDC: What is ExposeCorruption.org, and what convinced you to the media needed to be taken on?

Dickinson: After what happened to me, I saw the same keep happening. Over the past year media behavior seems to have been getting progressively worse. The Brendan Eich incident, him being fired from Mozilla. The Matt Taylor incident, him being forced to give a tearful apology for wearing a shirt. And also GamerGate. It just seemed like a lot of threads were coming together and that the battlefield might be ready for something like this project to succeed.

TheDC: Aren’t there already media watchdogs, like Media Matters or the Media Research Center?

Dickinson: We’re different from those other groups because we aren’t politically partisan. We don’t represent team red or team blue, we’re with Team Grey. We are partisan to the internet generation and that libertarian-inflected free-speech-valuing culture. I think a lot of people out there are especially furious with the media right now, and this latest NYT outrage will only deepen the feeling. I woke up to the NYT’s Julie Bosman’s dox in my inbox this morning. She was one of the writers of that article doxxing Darren Wilson.

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Secession lagniappe

Starting to dig into the books that someone has very kindly bought me off my Amazon wish list. I’m a couple of chapters into Felix Morley’s only novel, Gumption Island, which is modeled — the map on the inside of the cover is almost identical to — Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, where he lived and wrote. It’s very charming for an allegorical book; I’ll probably post an excerpt here at some point. Also, I’m a few chapters into Eugene McCarraher’s Christian Critics, about which more will be said here, but I first wanted to take note of something he mentions right in the beginning, that Ralph Adams Cram, the architect, was an early proponent of the Benedict Option — as in, 1909:

The manifold evils that canker the civilization of our own time are explicitly those that monasticism is best fitted to cure, and as a matter of fact, has cured again and again in the past Within this era are no powers of regeneration: atheism, secularism, materialism, intellectual pride and defiance of law are ill tools for building anew the ramparts of the City of God. The impulse must come from without, from God, not from the world; even as it came in such varying degrees and different ways through Benedictines, Cluniacs and Jesuits. When the abandoned insolence of man, mad in his pride of life, has dashed itself to the stars and, falling again, crumbles away in [35/36] impotent deliquescence, then perhaps will come the new prophet, son of S. Benedict (though perhaps in a new habit and with an amended rule), who as in 500 and 1000 and 1500, will release the souls of men from their captivity, and strive again to make all things new in Christ.

There have been a number of smart dissents on the Benedict Option recently, from Jonathan Rauch and Samuel Goldman that are worth reading.

Speaking of cultural disengagement, here’s First Things’ new marriage pledge:

To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.

Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign government-provided marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings.

ACNA’s new archbishop has advised against signing it. He cites Doug Wilson’s commentary. Ephraim Radner responds to some objections here. Schmitz, Reno have more.

Canadian Anglicans discover the medicine wheel. USCCB endorses beatification of Fr. Paul Wattson

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Almost funny Alaskan secession satire

Montana’s Confederate history

Food prices and Hawaiian independence

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs broke an open-meetings law. This is getting interesting.

Sherman as counterinsurgent

The new solid south

Texas secessionists say Obama’s immigration executive order should prompt a secession vote

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Sacred Harp 146: ‘Hallelujah’

Someone posted a version of this song from Seoul about a week ago.

And let this feeble body fail,
And let it faint or die;
My soul shall quit this mournful vale,
And soar to worlds on high,

And I’ll sing hallelujah,
And you’ll sing hallelujah,
And we’ll all sing hallelujah,
When we arrive at home.

Shall join the disembodied saints,
And find its long-sought rest,
The only bliss for which it pants,
In my Redeemer’s breast.

Oh what are all my suff’rings here,
If, Lord, Thou count me meet
With that enraptured host t’appear,
And worship at Thy feet.

Give joy or grief, give ease or pain,
Take life or friends away,
But let me find them all again,
In that eternal day.