I’ve listened to the post-election analysis for two days now, most of it decent, and here is what it keeps walking around. The Republicans didn’t lose because of a bad ground game or a messaging problem. They lost because the president started a war.
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Getting to Australia was never a matter of walking. Even at the lowest sea levels of the ice age, the continent — then joined with New Guinea as a landmass called Sahul — was cut off by open ocean. Whoever got there first had to cross the sea on purpose, in something that floated, with enough people aboard to found a population. For years the textbooks put that crossing at 47,000 to 50,000 years ago, which was impressive enough.
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France largely stopped work today. The country’s trade unions called a nationwide strike and hundreds of demonstrations over wages and the cost of living. The high school and university students who have been protesting their schools since September marched alongside them. And the government put some 70,000 police officers and gendarmes on the streets, determined that today would not become a repeat of October 17, when rioting and looting caught the police unprepared and, by the interior minister’s own later admission, overwhelmed them.
In Part One of this series, “What Clement Actually Says,” I ended with a puzzle. A letter from the Roman church to Corinth, written around AD 95, was read aloud in Corinthian worship, treated as Scripture in church after church, and cited for centuries as an authority — and today it is not in the Bible. How does a book fall out of the Bible?
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As of Sunday evening, November 1, here is what we know — starting with what we don’t. Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal has two rival claims to its own leadership, and no higher authority has ruled on which is lawful. What follows is the record as the wires have established it. Where the most dramatic details are disputed by the people who were in the building, this post says so.
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