Now you've done it
This forest worker discovers he's got a lifetime job rubbing Bambi's belly:
H/t Ace.
H/t Ace.
Inventory
The Daily Telegraph has a photo story showing reproduction kits for soldiers in English wars from 1066 until the present day. There's a real proliferation of gear starting in the middle of the 20th century.
Reading for the bar
More via Maggie's Farm: It used to be commonplace to "read for the bar"--i.e., apprentice oneself to a practitioner rather than get a J.D.--but in recent decades the practice has all but disappeared. It's a mystery why reading for the bar shouldn't be an excellent alternative. Assuming the bar exam itself has any validity, why would we care how people learn to pass it? Not everyone goes to an elite law school with a high bar pass rate, and yet we're comfortable handing out licenses to people from second-rate or third-rate schools as long as they're in the top portion of their class and can eke out a passing score on the bar exam. It's not as though learning the law required expensive facilities or laboratories. These days it doesn't even require a good law library, considering that absolutely anything a lawyer is likely to need can be found online. I haven't done legal research in a book for decades. There's some value in talking out legal principles in class with a good professor, but less than you might think, and anyway who says you'll have a good professor, outside of a handful of good schools?
This assumption that only an accredited school can disseminate professional knowledge is part of the attitude that denigrates home-schooling. Judge by the results, sez I, not the trappings and the expensive salaries. Clients are free to decide whether they want to hire a lawyer with a fancy degree, or just one who's proved he knows his stuff.
This assumption that only an accredited school can disseminate professional knowledge is part of the attitude that denigrates home-schooling. Judge by the results, sez I, not the trappings and the expensive salaries. Clients are free to decide whether they want to hire a lawyer with a fancy degree, or just one who's proved he knows his stuff.
Moral non-equivalency, part two
Ted Cruz describes two hospitals. One is used by Hamas as a human shield in a deliberate attempt to produce collateral damage to civilians for propaganda purposes. The other:
Meanwhile in Israel, Ziv is a center for pediatric and orthopedic medicine. Given its proximity to Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria, Ziv has seen its share of violence, but despite taking direct rocket fire during the 2006 Lebanon war, it has remained in continuous operation.
During the past three years of the Syrian civil war, Ziv has treated more than 1,000 Syrians injured in that conflict — all free of charge. In a visit to Ziv this spring, I met the social worker whose job it is to explain to the patients who wake up grievously injured and surrounded by Israelis that they are not in hell, but that the people who they have been told from birth are the devil are, in fact, working very hard to heal them.The experience is different for anyone who wakes up grievously injured and surrounded by Hamas. Hamas, by the way, denies possession of the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped and dragged away during Hamas's almost immediate breach of the most recent ceasefire. In fact, Hamas says it has "lost contact" with that unit altogether and assumes the entire unit, along with the Israeli soldier, were killed by Israeli bombardments.
Land of the Free, Home of the Brave
#Facebook is not a Law Enforcement issue, please don't call us about it being down, we don't know when FB will be back up!
— Sgt. Brink (@LASDBrink) August 1, 2014Sigh. H/t: Ranger Up.
Truthy fiction
The USDA shut down a small-town library's "seed library," citing concerns about corruption of the nation's precious bodily food supply. The library would be permitted to keep a seed library (from which residents could withdraw seeds at the beginning of the planting season, and replace them with new seeds at the conclusion) only if it tested each sample for germination. Which brings to mind Jim Gerraghty's well-reviewed new humorous novel, "The Weed Agency."
Senate rules
Yesterday the multi-billion program to keep the border wide open went down in flames in the Senate, for a surprising reason. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) first tried to crack open Harry Reid's no-amendment gambit to permit the Cruz amendment, which would have prohibited the President from carrying out his promise/threat to grant amnesty to 6 million or so illegal immigrants by executive order. That vote failed, 43 yea/52 nay. But Sessions wasn't done: he raised a point of order that the expensive program violated the pay-as-you-go rules, because its cost was balanced by neither spending cuts nor tax increases. The vote to waive Sessions' point of order, which would have required a 60-vote majority to succeed, received only a 50 yea/44 nay vote.
No Surprise: Latest QDR Too Weak For Global Role
It's a feature not a bug, if you want America to decline in global importance and assume a more humble role. Of course, the question is: who will fill the gaps? Iran? ISIS? Or someone else?
The panel’s report said the past several years of budget cuts and mandated reduction in personnel and weapons have stirred deep unease among allies who would count on the U.S. in a crisis.Exactly! Nobody else could defeat us, so if America was to be defeated on the world stage, we had to do it ourselves.
“Not only have they caused significant investment shortfalls in U.S. military readiness and both present and future capabilities, they have prompted our current and potential allies and adversaries to question our commitment and resolve,” the report said. “Unless reversed, these shortfalls will lead to a high-risk force in the near future. That in turn will lead to an America that is not only less secure but also far less prosperous. In this sense, these cuts are ultimately self-defeating.”
The Sentimental Answer May Not Be the Truthful One
This morning on the way to work, I heard an ABC News report out of Gaza. The reporter was listening to a couple of Palestinian women rant about the war, one saying "we should kill Israeli women and children" (she thinks they haven't been?), and another claiming to be tired of it all...In an effort to seem even-handed and humane, no doubt, the reporter ended by saying the real question was "how to explain war to bewildered children." (Paraphrasing from memory.) She didn't back that statement up with any witnesses. If she'd investigated, she'd've found that explaining war to children is easy...especially if those children are boys. Simply have schools and a community that teach them the national myth, the dominant religion, or both...just as the Palestinians do (and Israelis too). Then a ready explanation will come to them.
(Is that a good explanation or a truthful understanding? Separate question, and the answer differs from myth to myth. But neither Palestinians nor most peoples in the world...outside of modern-day Americans...are at a loss for an answer, the way that reporter was.)
(Is that a good explanation or a truthful understanding? Separate question, and the answer differs from myth to myth. But neither Palestinians nor most peoples in the world...outside of modern-day Americans...are at a loss for an answer, the way that reporter was.)
Justice
The man who killed my neighbors' grandson appeared in court yesterday, almost a year after the fatal accident, to accept a plea. The sentence is sixteen years on two or more counts. Because the sentences will run concurrently, he is likely to serve 90% of the sentence.
The family were told that normally two or three people show up at a plea-bargain hearing. Yesterday thirty people appeared for the victims, including police officers from the scene, marshals who retrieved the defendant from Arkansas after he jumped bail, and the family of the two people he killed and the half dozen (including five children) that he injured very seriously. No one appeared for the defendant, who was hauled off to Huntsville prison at the conclusion of the hearing.
Several people gave victim impact statements. My neighbor said that the judge frequently brought out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes. I have never seen a judge in tears. There is something oddly touching about this official, but human, acknowledgement of the family's pain.
Certainly the last parole did not work out well. This was no freak accident resulting from bad luck or a split-second loss of attention. Several cars had called in reports of a dangerous, weaving driver in the minutes before the wreck. There were reports that he had been up all night on meth while on a "fishing trip" with his girlfriend, her child, and his own two children; on the return trip he furiously refused to relinquish the wheel. Despite his criminal record, he had a good job and a real chance of turning his life around. Instead it all went up in smoke.
The family were told that normally two or three people show up at a plea-bargain hearing. Yesterday thirty people appeared for the victims, including police officers from the scene, marshals who retrieved the defendant from Arkansas after he jumped bail, and the family of the two people he killed and the half dozen (including five children) that he injured very seriously. No one appeared for the defendant, who was hauled off to Huntsville prison at the conclusion of the hearing.
Several people gave victim impact statements. My neighbor said that the judge frequently brought out his handkerchief to wipe his eyes. I have never seen a judge in tears. There is something oddly touching about this official, but human, acknowledgement of the family's pain.
Competition and innovation
Mark Perry is an Uber fan. He loves to chronicle the desperate fight of the taxi cartels to protect themselves from competition, and the innovations that Uber keeps introducing to delight its growing customer base. In a local fight, the taxi cartels often seem to have the upper hand, with their crony-capitalist lock on protectionism. What happens when Uber ignores all that and exploits two big advantages: the willingness to innovate in the areas that are important to their customers, rather than to the entrenched taxi/city power bases, and the ability to coordinate over large geographical areas rather than to tighten their maniacal grip on a local monopoly?
Update: an oddly absorbing site that shows a New York taxi's typical workday, mostly centered on Manhattan trips.
Update: an oddly absorbing site that shows a New York taxi's typical workday, mostly centered on Manhattan trips.
Invisible antlers
I've always been a little confused by the "male display" explanation for elaborate feathers and antlers and so on. What have they got to do with real survival capability? Why is it a winning evolutionary strategy for females to be impressed? But for whatever reason, they seem to work, unless there's another explanation for their natural selection. Anyway, it's fascinating to see that male beaked whales may have internal antlers that are invisible except to echo-locating females of the species:
These inner structures don’t wreck the whales’ streamlined bodies, as horns or external ornaments surely would. That’s important given how frequently they dive. With internal antlers, they could get the advertising space of a bus and the profile of a Ferrari at the same time.
Market-based medicine
Oklahoma public employees have saved a boatload of money by using a surgery center devoted to price transparency and consumer choice:
Unlike most other medical providers, the Surgery Center of Oklahoma actually posts transparent pricing and offers deeply-discounted, payable-in-advance, cash-only medical procedures. The center does accept private insurance, but it does not accept Medicaid or Medicare — government regulations won’t allow them to post transparent prices online.
Sometimes the Guns Come Out
Mark Steyn links us to a reminder of the nature of government.
Man Shot, Paralyzed Over 31 Unpaid Parking Tickets.
A matter we were discussing at Cassandra's a couple of weeks back: Statists love to pretend that government isn't force, doesn't work through force, and oughtn't to be morally analyzed as force. The first political speech I remember a line from...I mean, I remember hearing it at the time...was Bruce Babbitt addressing a group of schoolkids in the 1988 primaries. I paraphrase: "The Republicans will tell you to be afraid of government. Don't be. Government is us." Or there's the even more repulsive formulation of Barney Frank: "Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." (Go do 'em to yourself, Barney, thanks very much.)
If the city government wants a tax for parking, or to control where you park...and you don't obey, and pretend the taxes don't apply to you...sooner or later, there's a man with a gun to enforce it. Most of the time we obey and the guns don't come out. But sometimes they do and they're always there. If it oughtn't to be done with guns -- government oughtn't to be doing it at all.
Is it worth pointing a gun to collect city tax and control city parking? I think so...though the traffic cops of Hanoi, if they exist, may not agree[1]. No police force, cars parked wherever urban barbarians want them...this would be less safe yet than having the Pennsylvania State Constables on the prowl. I have a hard time accepting the moral order of the dueling culture, when people pointed guns to enforce simple good manners. (But Grim might talk me around on that one before it's all through.) Wherever we draw that line, though, let's never forget what it really is, and the moral angle of government security, government charity, government culture, or government anything.
[1] Michael Totten's first dispatch from Vietnam is excellent reading and heartwarming, and says some fine things about what humans can do after being crushed by tyranny. You should be reading that instead of me.
Man Shot, Paralyzed Over 31 Unpaid Parking Tickets.
A matter we were discussing at Cassandra's a couple of weeks back: Statists love to pretend that government isn't force, doesn't work through force, and oughtn't to be morally analyzed as force. The first political speech I remember a line from...I mean, I remember hearing it at the time...was Bruce Babbitt addressing a group of schoolkids in the 1988 primaries. I paraphrase: "The Republicans will tell you to be afraid of government. Don't be. Government is us." Or there's the even more repulsive formulation of Barney Frank: "Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together." (Go do 'em to yourself, Barney, thanks very much.)
If the city government wants a tax for parking, or to control where you park...and you don't obey, and pretend the taxes don't apply to you...sooner or later, there's a man with a gun to enforce it. Most of the time we obey and the guns don't come out. But sometimes they do and they're always there. If it oughtn't to be done with guns -- government oughtn't to be doing it at all.
Is it worth pointing a gun to collect city tax and control city parking? I think so...though the traffic cops of Hanoi, if they exist, may not agree[1]. No police force, cars parked wherever urban barbarians want them...this would be less safe yet than having the Pennsylvania State Constables on the prowl. I have a hard time accepting the moral order of the dueling culture, when people pointed guns to enforce simple good manners. (But Grim might talk me around on that one before it's all through.) Wherever we draw that line, though, let's never forget what it really is, and the moral angle of government security, government charity, government culture, or government anything.
[1] Michael Totten's first dispatch from Vietnam is excellent reading and heartwarming, and says some fine things about what humans can do after being crushed by tyranny. You should be reading that instead of me.
Theodore VanKirk
...the last survivor of the Enola Gay's crew, has died. I was glad to read he lived a full life after his service ended, went on to a long career as a chemical engineer, kept his mind sharp, and died peacefully.
The event calls for reflection, of just the kind you've been doing, and that Grim's done before. For World War II was the last U.S. war that ended before the Geneva Conventions of 1948 (the centerpiece of the modern jus in bello) and the U.N. Charter (the centerpiece of the modern jus ad bellum) went into effect. And with it the radical new idea that civilians..."persons taking no active part in the hostilities...no matter what kind of war it was, or between whom...were simply immune as targets. (Jean Pictet's commentary on Common Article 3, which you can get here, describes it as an "almost unhoped-for" extension of common article 2...designed to apply even to civil wars or insurrections, to the savage as well as the civilized.
Islamic radicals sometimes defend 9/11 with a tu quoque...."What about Hiroshima?" There are several answers, but one of them is: "The law changed after that. We wouldn't be allowed to do that now; and by agreement and by custom, neither can anyone else." If you're much younger than VanKirk, older wars feel wrong...punitive expeditions, attacking villages, sacking towns, the jubilation at Marchin' Through Georgia...it feels like something that doesn't belong in war. Yet that is an ancient norm, and it is the modern standard that's in its experimental stage.
Problem is, the experiment may be failing.
Unsurprisingly, John Derbyshire's over a decade ahead of me on that, on the attitude adjustment that a violent people can show when they're well and truly crushed...in this column he takes it further, looking at the different ways a nation can view military defeat, from "total denial" through dolchstosslegende all the way to "full repentance." And then noticing that the more the civilian population suffered in the war, the closer they came to "full repentance"...and, more importantly, to fighting no more wars. It's a decently robust if not perfect model. He notes many examples from the 19th and 20th centuries. I notice it broadly fits the Jewish Wars of the Roman Empire. After the third one was mercilessly crushed, says this, "Jewish messianism was abstracted and spiritualized" -- as well it might be; eternal spiritual truths do have a way of bending to fit the facts on the ground -- and the Jewish leader was vilified in the Talmud. The Scottish suppression was brutal in a lesser way...but also effective. There really was peace tho' Jamie never came hame.
I don't think this comes through a cold calculation (as in the reasoning of Grim's excellent Blackfive post), but more likely through evolved instinct. Every man can talk about fighting to the last...but we're not descended from the men who did. Neither are we descended from the men who caved at the first attack. Thus: a little violence inspires revenge; a lot of it brings submission and peace. It's been made a joke and a funny one...because of the grim truth behind it. Their hands tied by the modern law of war, the Israelis get the worst of all worlds. They get the reputation of Genghis Khan or Tamurlane, and draw as much hatred as they did if not more...but they don't get the security that real brutality might've brought them long ago (and Genghis Khan is a national hero in Mongolia, and got respectful treatment in my elementary school history books; and Tamurlane is still admired at least in some parts of Afghanistan). Israel itself is just as old as the Geneva regime; a citadel of advanced civilization born in the year war was to be civilized, and has suffered ever since from that very fact.
Terrorism lives in that safe space created by the modern order. Terrorism isn't new, as you all know well. The Sicarii were practicing a version in Palestine not too long after Jesus. But the Romans of that era were quite capable of treating a city the way a strategic bombing raid could, only up close and personal, with sword and spear. Hiding behind children only works while the enemy's not willing to target them. And that wasn't a good assumption back then.
Supposing Palestinians continue as a UN-welfare population full of frustrated young men, and the Israelis remain addicted to life, so that the attacks never cease...will Israelis forever hold their hands, if it means dying for their principles?
I don't know. But as I said -- they're not descended from men who did.
The event calls for reflection, of just the kind you've been doing, and that Grim's done before. For World War II was the last U.S. war that ended before the Geneva Conventions of 1948 (the centerpiece of the modern jus in bello) and the U.N. Charter (the centerpiece of the modern jus ad bellum) went into effect. And with it the radical new idea that civilians..."persons taking no active part in the hostilities...no matter what kind of war it was, or between whom...were simply immune as targets. (Jean Pictet's commentary on Common Article 3, which you can get here, describes it as an "almost unhoped-for" extension of common article 2...designed to apply even to civil wars or insurrections, to the savage as well as the civilized.
Islamic radicals sometimes defend 9/11 with a tu quoque...."What about Hiroshima?" There are several answers, but one of them is: "The law changed after that. We wouldn't be allowed to do that now; and by agreement and by custom, neither can anyone else." If you're much younger than VanKirk, older wars feel wrong...punitive expeditions, attacking villages, sacking towns, the jubilation at Marchin' Through Georgia...it feels like something that doesn't belong in war. Yet that is an ancient norm, and it is the modern standard that's in its experimental stage.
Problem is, the experiment may be failing.
Unsurprisingly, John Derbyshire's over a decade ahead of me on that, on the attitude adjustment that a violent people can show when they're well and truly crushed...in this column he takes it further, looking at the different ways a nation can view military defeat, from "total denial" through dolchstosslegende all the way to "full repentance." And then noticing that the more the civilian population suffered in the war, the closer they came to "full repentance"...and, more importantly, to fighting no more wars. It's a decently robust if not perfect model. He notes many examples from the 19th and 20th centuries. I notice it broadly fits the Jewish Wars of the Roman Empire. After the third one was mercilessly crushed, says this, "Jewish messianism was abstracted and spiritualized" -- as well it might be; eternal spiritual truths do have a way of bending to fit the facts on the ground -- and the Jewish leader was vilified in the Talmud. The Scottish suppression was brutal in a lesser way...but also effective. There really was peace tho' Jamie never came hame.
I don't think this comes through a cold calculation (as in the reasoning of Grim's excellent Blackfive post), but more likely through evolved instinct. Every man can talk about fighting to the last...but we're not descended from the men who did. Neither are we descended from the men who caved at the first attack. Thus: a little violence inspires revenge; a lot of it brings submission and peace. It's been made a joke and a funny one...because of the grim truth behind it. Their hands tied by the modern law of war, the Israelis get the worst of all worlds. They get the reputation of Genghis Khan or Tamurlane, and draw as much hatred as they did if not more...but they don't get the security that real brutality might've brought them long ago (and Genghis Khan is a national hero in Mongolia, and got respectful treatment in my elementary school history books; and Tamurlane is still admired at least in some parts of Afghanistan). Israel itself is just as old as the Geneva regime; a citadel of advanced civilization born in the year war was to be civilized, and has suffered ever since from that very fact.
Terrorism lives in that safe space created by the modern order. Terrorism isn't new, as you all know well. The Sicarii were practicing a version in Palestine not too long after Jesus. But the Romans of that era were quite capable of treating a city the way a strategic bombing raid could, only up close and personal, with sword and spear. Hiding behind children only works while the enemy's not willing to target them. And that wasn't a good assumption back then.
Supposing Palestinians continue as a UN-welfare population full of frustrated young men, and the Israelis remain addicted to life, so that the attacks never cease...will Israelis forever hold their hands, if it means dying for their principles?
I don't know. But as I said -- they're not descended from men who did.
The Wonders of the Internet
Allapundit at Hot Air tagged his recent collection of quotes on a resurgent Anti-Semitism "the socialism of fools," and I had not heard the expression (although it was easy to guess the antecedent, not only from the context but because the two movements made such similar arguments in the 19th century). I searched to see who had said it originally, and from there was drawn to read about Königstein Fortress, where the original socialist was imprisoned for a time. Along the way I discovered that it had held not only state prisoners, but the greatest wine barrel in human history:
From 1722 to 1725, at the behest of August the Strong, coopers under Böttger built the enormous Königstein Wine Barrel (Königsteiner Weinfass), the greatest wine barrel in the world, in the cellar of the Magdalenenburg which had a capacity of 249,838 litres. It cost 8,230 thalers, 18 groschen and 9 pfennigs. The butt, which was once completely filled with country wine from the Meißen vineyards, had to be removed again in 1818 due to its poor condition.That's just over 66,000 gallons, which at a quart per person per day would last a family of four for 180 years -- longer than the barrel itself lasted.
Moral non-relativism
From Sam Harris via Bookworm Room:
Consider the moral difference between using human shields and being deterred by them. . . . The Muslims are acting on the assumption—the knowledge, in fact—that the infidels with whom they fight, the very people whom their religion does nothing but vilify, will be deterred by their use of Muslim human shields. They consider the Jews the spawn of apes and pigs—and yet they rely on the fact that they don’t want to kill Muslim noncombatants.Hamas is not just a rogue terrorist organization. It was elected.
Keep it simple
Gavin McInnes advises hewing to tradition unless you've got a much better idea. In marriage, we're allowed to alter the gender-role rules slightly to take reality into account, as long as we don't go too crazy:
If a woman is conservative in some duties, she should be liberal in others. To the non-married much of this talk will sound like rape. There is no such thing in marriage. It’s more like if your sibling was a vampire. If things got really bad, you’d cut yourself so he could eat.
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