A Lesson in Loyalty

A Banner Day for Truth

Our would-be cultural overlords are having a field day.

One: "Politico Admits Fabricating A Hit Piece On Ben Carson."

There were at least five major problems with the story:

* The headline was completely false
* The subhed was also completely false
* The opening paragraph was false false false
* The substance of the piece was missing key exonerating information
* The article demonstrated confusion about service academy admissions and benefits

Two: "Student admits creating racist post that sparked Berkeley walkout."

A racist message posted to a computer at Berkeley High School set off a 2,000-student walkout and protest Thursday. A student at the school admitted to posting the message, which referred to the Ku Klux Klan, used derogatory language related to African Americans and threatened a “public lynching” on Dec. 9, officials said.

Three: "In reversal, Obama says he lived with uncle."

President Obama acknowledged Thursday that he lived with his Kenyan uncle for a brief period in the 1980s while preparing to attend Harvard Law School, contradicting a statement more than two years ago that the White House had no record of the two ever meeting.

Their relationship came into question Tuesday at the deportation hearing of the president’s uncle, Onyango Obama, in Boston immigration court. His uncle had lived in the United States illegally since the 1970s and revealed for the first time in testimony that his famous nephew had stayed at his Cambridge apartment for about three weeks. At the time, Onyango Obama was here illegally and fighting deportation.

And more

Another birthday video someone sent me on Facebook--this is the only reasonable purpose of Facebook, by the way:

Happy Birthday to Me

These things have been on the market for at least two years.  How is it possible that I have never heard of them before?

This may be the "COOLEST" Birthday Candle I've ever seen! I found them here on Amazon too: http://amzn.to/1LM0Mbr
Posted by ISave "A 2 Z" on Sunday, September 14, 2014

"Partners for Peace"

So apparently the Pentagon's new concept for the Taliban is still pretty new...

Two days before a devastating U.S. strike on a hospital in Afghanistan, a top aide to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff asked Doctors Without Borders if Taliban militants were “holed up” there or at the charity’s other facilities.

Carter Malkasian, a special advisor to Gen. Joseph Dunford, the highest ranking U.S. military officer, sent the query in an email that also inquired about the safety of the group’s personnel, according to Capt. Greg Hicks, a spokesman for Dunford.

Doctors Without Borders replied that the hospital staffers were “working at full capacity” and that the facility was “full of patients, including wounded Taliban combatants,” the medical aid group said in a report Thursday.

"Our officers make a living trying to stop violence, but surprise is not out of the question."

I mean, he did clarify that the harm they intend to cause is "economic," but that's quite a statement to come out of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Fairness

According to an email I just got, as I seem to be on absolutely everyone's mailing lists these days:

Sen. Warren just announced a plan to fix that and expand Social Security. She's proposing the Seniors And Veterans Emergency (SAVE) Benefits Act, which would give 70 million Americans an emergency benefit increase of about $580 -- that's 3.9% for 2016, the same raise that the big CEOs got last year.

What on earth makes anyone think that we can afford to give 70 million people "the same raise" that "big CEOs" get?

Hillary for Prison 2016

The NDA she signed is now public. As of course it does, it specified her responsibility to include avoiding "negligent handling" and her personal responsibility to know whether or not the information she was handling was classified.

The language of her NDA suggests it was Clinton’s responsibility to ascertain whether information shared through her private email server was, in fact, classified.

“I understand that it is my responsibility to consult with appropriate management authorities in the Department … in order to ensure that I know whether information or material within my knowledge or control that I have reason to believe might be SCI,” the agreement says.

The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the NDA.

According to government security experts, the type of information that receives a TS/SCI designation is sensitive enough that most senior government officials would immediately recognize it as such.

“TS/SCI is very serious and specific information that jumps out at you and screams ‘classified,’” Larry Mrozinski, a former U.S. counterterrorism official, told the New York Post in August. “It’s hard to imagine that in her position she would fail to recognize the obvious.”

Additional emails on Clinton’s server contained information that was “born classified,” according to J. William Leonard, who directed the U.S. Information Security Oversight Office from 2002 to 2008.

Uh, Guys....

The US Department of Defence has said that it’s no longer conducting counter-terrorism operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan because it views the group as an important partner in its efforts for restoring peace in the war-ravaged country....

“We actually view the Taliban as being an important partner in a peaceful Afghan-led reconciliation process. We are not actively targeting the Taliban,” [Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis] added.

You know, we did reconciliation in Iraq, too. We didn't reconcile al Qaeda in Iraq with the government. We reconciled former members or allies of al Qaeda in Iraq or the Ba'ath party to the government, as a means of cementing the victory over al Qaeda in Iraq and the Ba'athists. There's a subtle but important difference.

A "Bit" Blunt?

Ran Baratz, who was tapped by Netanyahu as Israel's next "media czar," once criticized Obama for the president's response to the prime minister's planned speech before Congress against the Iran nuclear deal.

"Allow me to be a bit blunt, which is a break from my usual moderation," Baratz wrote. "This is what modern anti-Semitism in a liberal Western country looks like. And, of course, it comes with a great deal of tolerance and understanding for Islamic anti-Semitism. The tolerance and understanding is so great that [Obama] is willing to give it a nuclear bomb."

...

In his column for the Hebrew online outlet MIDA, Baratz wrote: "To Kerry's credit, it should be noted that there is no Miss America around who could say what he said any better. This is the time to wish the secretary of state good luck, and to count down the days with the hope that someone over there at the State Department will wake up and begin to see the world through the eyes of a person whose mental age exceeds 12."

I guess at least we know where he stands.

BLM Affiliates Put Out A Policy Agenda

So, on the one hand I have been critical of the Black Lives Matters movement's essential strategy, to whit, that of breaking the law in order to gain attention for its agenda. I think that strategy is doomed to failure as a means of improving the problem set that it treats, as it obliges the police to take enforcement action against ever more people -- and the more aggressive the lawbreaking, the more aggressive the enforcement action is going to become in turn. You can't get to the place where the police learn to work with you if you're forcing them to either fail to do their duty or else to use force against you.

On the other hand, I'm sympathetic to a large part of their claims. Police militarization of equipment and training is a problem. It puts lives at risk needlessly by adopting a posture in which lethal force is an option early. The loss of the "peace officer" mentality that looks for solutions that regain and strengthen the common peace, in favor of a "law enforcement" mentality that merely acts to enforce the law, has damaged the police as much as it has damaged anyone. The use of the police as revenue collection agents, coupled with the multiplication of (increasingly trivial) offenses for which one can be fined, is harmful to the common peace and lawful order. It undermines public trust in the institution of the police, and that ends up also harming the police as well as the nation as a whole. Likewise, as the Waco situation shows (in a context in which race is a non-factor, as essentially everyone is white), genuinely independent review of police actions can be a helpful control against the impulse not to come clean when you make a serious mistake.

So, while I think they need a completely different strategy -- one of obeying the law scrupulously while pushing their agenda -- I'm open to hearing their policy ideas. An affiliated group has just released an agenda detailing several.

About half of them sound good to me, and the other half I think aren't so good. Broken windows policing is one I'm divided on. On the one hand, I'm not convinced it doesn't work, as demonstrated especially in once-dangerous urban areas in New York. I wonder if we couldn't use more of it in places like the south side of Chicago. On the other hand, it may be that there is a point of diminishing returns past which the policy should be allowed to slide -- a little -- in the interest of greater peace and trust between the police and the community at large.

I'm curious to hear thoughtful responses to it all.

Bill of... "Rights"?

According to the Declaration of Independence, God endowed human beings with certain inalienable rights -- that is, rights that you cannot get rid of even of you should choose to do so. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as also property which was only omitted from the draft after substantial argument about what it meant for slavery. (What did "liberty" mean for slavery?)

According to a bunch of illegal immigrants called United We Stay, they have rights as well to free health care, free school, and free citizenship even though they broke the law in entering the country and remaining here. They also say they have a right to have us stop enforcing our laws by deporting them.

I'm a little fuzzy on the philosophical authority for the claim. I get the claim from God, or from natural rights, or from positive law justified by democratic participation in a polity via citizenship. This is a "human rights" claim, but surely not one anyone can take seriously -- otherwise, we should all have the right to move anywhere we want and be provided for by whoever happens to be there. Not only is that not workable, such a principle would rapidly destroy anywhere nice enough to justify moving to it.

It's what Kant would call a conflict of the will: just because enough of us live by the maxim, the good that maxim seeks to obtain is destroyed. One of his examples, as I recall, is theft: theft as a maxim destroys itself in just this way, as what the maxim to steal hopes to gain is property, but if enough people steal your property becomes worthless as you can't hang onto it long enough to use it. Such a maxim can't be justified simply because of this basic flaw in its internal logic.

Ought Implies Can

What do you mean, one ought not to be a corrupt official?

“It’s impossible, absolutely impossible,” argued defense lawyer Steven Molo, “for a member of the Assembly to . . . do the job that a person in the Assembly does and not have some sort of conflict of interest.

“That may make you uncomfortable,” he added, “but that is the system New York has chosen, and it is not a crime.”

The Post is not impressed with the defense. Well, actually, they are -- they're impressed with the gall it takes to forward it as a defense.

A Eulogy for a Hated Man

Ahmad Chalabi died this week of a heart attack. He is one of the most agreed-upon villains in DC circles. Democrats hate him for having fooled Clinton. Republicans hate him for having suckered W. In spite of his reputation as a con-man extraordinaire, however, Chalabi is a very plausible hero to millions of Shi'ite Iraqis: his tireless campaign to convince Washington of Saddam's WMD program is what brought the US to Iraq, and removed Saddam from their throats.

One of those writes in his memory.

Chalabi’s most revealing, and most cited, soliloquy from February 2004 goes: “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants.” He improvised the “heroes in error” bit on the fly. The rest of the scripting was mine. He probably shouldn’t have read out a 27 year-old’s snarky comeback to drive the plot....

I broke with him in September 2004. I have never discussed the reasons for that break, neither in person nor in print. Chalabi’s very human and personal foibles put stress on our saint-disciple relationship. When I caught him lying to me, because he didn’t want to see himself through my newly-opened eyes (another very human thing), the break became inevitable. He often cited a line from the Quran, in the words of immortal saint al-Khidhir (Elijah, I guess) to Moses, which paraphrased into English goes something like, “Didn’t I tell you that you wouldn’t have the stomach for me?"

The rest of the eulogy is worth reading, if only better to understand what has passed before our eyes.

Commenting on Your Co-Workers' Appearance

You may have been misinformed that making a big deal about your co-workers' appearance is inappropriate. It turns out, it's absolutely key to your success at work.

At least, if your boss is Hillary Clinton. And you're unfailingly flattering.

Solutions for non-believers

The cool thing about markets is that they can solve problems even for people who are deeply suspicious of markets' supposedly cold indifference to altruism.

13 Hours, Trailer 2

Gun Control Test Vote: VA Senate

Strike one.

You think they'll figure this out before it's too late?

Related news: gun sales back at record highs, six months running.

A Winner in Relativity v. Quanta?

An article describes the ongoing debate among physicists.

Shotgun Boogie

So, Ted Cruz went hunting, as candidates do in election years, and...

Staunch gun rights advocate Ted Cruz is here seen holding a shotgun while being interviewed by CNN. Can you see what he’s doing wrong? That’s right, he’s violating the first two rules of gun safety.

When you learn to shoot, apply for a hunting or carry license and any time you’re at a gun range, there’s four basic rules of gun safety that — and this is impressed on you very strongly — must be observed at all times:

1) Treat all guns as if they are loaded.
2) Never point a firearm at something you’re not willing to destroy.
3) Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
4) Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

Properly observed, these rules are almost entirely capable of preventing accidental shootings.

Those four rules are good, but the first one is properly "Treat all guns as if they are loaded, until you have personally checked it right now to be sure it is unloaded." After all, you couldn't disassemble a firearm to clean it if you could never treat it as if it were unloaded. Cruz personally knows his firearm is unloaded because the breech is open and empty, as we can all plainly see in real time.

Likewise, the muzzle rule applies to firearms except when you have personally checked them right now to ensure they are unloaded. Otherwise, how could you transport one to wherever you were going to hunt? You couldn't drive your car with the thing stored in the trunk without the muzzle becoming pointed at things it shouldn't were it loaded.

Fortunately, in addition to the four rules of gun safety, there is another method that is "almost entirely capable of preventing accidental shootings," which is to ensure the firearm is not loaded. Without ammunition in it, a firearm is quite inert.

The most amusing thing about this to me is that the same story ran in 2008 about then-Governor Palin, who was photographed holding a shotgun with the breech open (in this case, not over her shoulder but under her arm). "Is that even the right way to hold a rifle?" demanded critics. "Can't you shoot your foot off like that?"

Turns out that you really can't. But hey, let's have a song.