What Do You Mean By 'Entitled To'?

The difference between Joe Biden and Mr. Obama includes this fact: when Joe Biden says he wants to be clear about what hemeans, he usually proceeds to be quite clear about what he really means. This time I'm not sure.

BIDEN: I want to make this clear so there no misunderstanding anybody. I got a daughter, lost a daughter, got four granddaughters, and Barack has two daughters. We are absolutely — this is to our core — my daughter, and my granddaughters and Barack’s daughters are entitled to every single solitary operation! EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY OPERATION!

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a transcript of the remarks, so I'm not sure what he means by "entitled to" in this case. Does he mean that no operation should be unavailable to 'daughters' who want it? It's not clear that this is right: what if 'someone's daughter,' to use Biden's phrasing, wants to amputate her hands for no medical reason, as part of an art project? I would think that a doctor's oath would, or ought to, forbid participation.

Does he mean 'entitled to' in the sense that the operation should be not only available to them, but free to them? That's a highly problematic view, but if you want to endorse single-payer health care, say so. (Is the proposition that only women should have single-payer health care, or are women just the wedge to force it on everyone?)

Or does he mean 'entitled to' in the sense that no one should forbid access to an operation that is common practice? In that case, Hot Air raises a good point about Obamacare's IPAB board, which will in practice deny care to some 'daughters' -- even if their parents are likely to be long dead themselves.

Or is this just about abortion? If so, it's questionable whether it's reasonable to describe that as an "operation." In a sense it is a medical operation, because there are medical personnel involved. But the point of an operation is health, and the point of abortion is the destruction of a human life. An execution is not an "operation," and in that sense an abortion is not one either.

Guess I'll Be Getting Some Phonecalls Soon...

The NRA is loving the last debate. After four years of Democrats being afraid to even pretend to symbolically embrace gun control, good old President Obama went all in. Gives them somewhere to spend their big campaign bucks, and no doubt it's going to give rise to another round of fundraising soon.

Well, you know what? He has it coming. You pay the money, and you take the ride. If there's one thing the folks down Ohio way don't like very much, it's gun control. Georgia gun laws are little looser.

What's the Economy on This?

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS: Is this Aston Martin 77. Santa, are you listening???? I’ve been a good girl, sort of. :)

-Elizabeth Price Foley

That's a two-million dollar automobile. I'd have settled for a new Harley. C'mon, Santa. The best ones are a hundred times cheaper. Surely a bad man is worth 1/100th of a good girl?

Yeah, OK, probably not. Can't blame a man for trying.

Speaking of Vigilantes

You're probably aware of Anonymous, the hacker group. You probably haven't heard much to recommend them to you before now. Here's their argument for vigilantism. It's well worth considering.

So is this.

Terror

It's time to mothball the term "terror" for a while.  It's lost all meaning.  It was being steadily drained of meaning years ago when people started asking, "Isn't it terrorism when someone makes me uncomfortable?  Isn't all force terrorism?"

What the Obama administration has been lying about is not whether the attack and murder of our ambassador and other Americans in Benghazi was an act of terror in some ineffable sense.  It has been lying about whether the attack was a spontaneous mob reaction to a provocative video, or a professional and pre-planned armed assault by an al Qaeda affiliate in a region where the administration had been crowing over the demise of that group.  The fact that the President vaguely alluded to the word "terror" in his remarks the day after the attack is not the point, as even Candy Crowley admitted shortly after the debate concluded.  The important point is that the President and his spokespersons repeatedly insisted that the attack was an unpredictable eruption of crowd hostility sparked by a YouTube video, long after it was crystal clear the attack was heavily armed, carefully coordinated, and took place in the complete absence of any crowd demonstration, video-related or otherwise.

I'm sure the attacks were terrifying.  They would have been equally terrifying whether they resulted from a proto-military assault or a crowd that suddenly lost control of its humanity.  The issue is not whether they inspired fear but whether they were an assault by a previously identified enemy about whom we had solid intelligence, or some kind of bolt-from-the-blue mass hysteria that no one could have planned for.  I fear the distinction is being lost in the endless parade of fuzzy blathering.

If Romney wanted to nail Obama on his prevarications, he'd have done better to focus on when Obama or his surrogates first admitted publicly what he'd known all along, which was that there was no public demonstration of any kind out the Benghazi facility that night, and that the attack was a sudden, coordinated onslaught by men with RPGs, whom we quickly learned were associated with al Qaeda.

Armed Posse Patrols Timber Land in Sheriff's Place

Story from Oregon here, about citizens stepping up to do local police work. One part I do not get -

Policing expert Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, says neighborhood watch efforts can be positive but turn into problems when volunteers "decide that instead of supplementing law enforcement, they are going to replace law enforcement. Then you cross potentially into vigilantism."... Nichols says what his group is doing is "not vigilantism at all."

Okay, I get why an academic might say it, and why the word carries emotional freight that would make someone want to deny it. But I never heard before that was the distinction. Vigilantes at their best, if I remember, could and did work with official law enforcement (when there was any), and hand their prisoners over to the courts for trial (when, again, there were any). The crowd in The Ox-Bow Incident turns evil, not when they decide to apprehend suspects in a murder, but when they follow a leader who decides that they're going to do their hanging on the spot - "because they don't think the courts are fast enough."

What an Unpleasant Debate

Not because I think it didn't go well, although it wasn't the walkaway stomping of the first debate. The tone was what made it unpleasant.

Still, the final arguments were convincing. Romney gave the best answer I've ever heard him give. Obama started off by saying something implausible ('I believe in free enterprise'... 'I don't believe that government creates jobs'), and went on to level a series of negative arguments designed to undermine what his opponent had just said.

Some other observations: Obama didn't answer the question on Libya at all. Apparently Mitt Romney was the only person on the stage or in the audience who knew the difference between an AK-47 and an "assault weapon." I couldn't understand why Romney didn't answer the outsourcing question by coming back to his energy policy -- you can't outsource North American oil production -- but maybe he felt he had landed all the blows he wanted to in the first part of the debate.

Anyway, we'll see what the independents thought soon enough. I imagine they will have been put off by the tone. If I was, surely they were also.

Well, now I feel bad

I know how it feels when the media won't give you a fair shake.   So now I'm full of warm fellow-feeling toward the courageous freedom fighters who shot that 14-year-old Afghan girl for advocating education for girls, only to suffer under a deluge of scorn and contempt locally and abroad.

“The Taliban cannot tolerate biased media.”  The commander, who calls himself Jihad Yar, argues that death threats against the press are justified:  he says “99 percent” of the reporters on the story are only using the shooting as an excuse to attack the Taliban.

You carry out a perfectly justified attempted murder against a dangerous heretic, and then you make death threats against the biased press that cover the story, and suddenly you're the bad guy?

Mullah Yahya agrees with Jihad Yar that the media and the Americans are side by side against the Taliban.  “But I would blame the Taliban as well,” he says.  “If they allowed independent media to visit Taliban-controlled areas, it could have a very positive effect on their coverage.  In fact we have suggested this to their media department, but they’re only interested in kidnapping reporters, not in cooperating with them.

I thought journalists were supposed to be sensitive to other cultures.  If kidnapping is part of their culture, who are we to object?

.

Women setting up men

Hillary Clinton's treatment of the President today puts me in mind of a favorite old song, "The Baron of Brackley" (Child Ballad #203):



From the YouTube poster:

[A] sobering tale of medieval Scottish married life.  It is believed the incident occurred in September 1666, but what the ballad does not tell us is that it is a reprisal raid by John Farquharson of Inverey on John Gordon of Brackley for a cattle raid.

The "Dee" and the "Spey" are rivers.  When the raiders arrive, Brackley's treacherous wife goads him into a hopeless opposition.

Down Dee side came Inverey whistlin' and playin',
And he is to Brackley's gates ere the day is dawnin'.
Saying, "Are ye there, Brackley, and are ye within?
There are sharp swords at your gates, they'll gar your blood spend."

"Oh, rise up, my Baron, and turn back your kye,
For the lads frae Dunmurray are driving them by."
"Oh, how might I rise up, and turn them again?
For where I have one man I'm sure he has ten."

"If I had a husband, the like I have nane,
He'd no lie upon his bed and watch his kye ta'en."
Then up spake the baron, said, "Gi'e me my sword;
There's nae man in Scotland but I'll brave at a word."

When the baron were buskit to ride o'er the close
A gallanter Gordon ne'er mounted a horse.
Saying, "Kiss me, my Peggy, nor think me tae blame,
For I maun go out, love, and I'll never come hame."

There rode wi' false Inverey full thirty and three,
But along wi' bonny Brackley just his brother and he.
Twa gallanter Gordons did ne'er the sword draw,
But against three and thirty, wae's me, what is twa?

Wi' swords and wi' daggers they did him surround
And they pierced bonny Brackley wi' monys a wound.
Tae the banks o the Dee, tae the sides of the Spey,
The Gordons will mourn him and ban Inverey.

"Oh, came ye from Brackley's yetts, oh, came ye by there?
And saw ye his Peggy a-rivin' her hair?"
"Aye, I came by Brackley's yetts, and I came by there,
And I saw his bonny Peggy:  she was makin' good cheer.

"She was rantin' and dancin', she was singin' wi' joy,
And she swears this very nicht she will feast Inverey.
She laughed wi' him, danced wi' him, welcomed him in,
And lay wi' him till morning he who slew her good man."

There's grief in the kitchen, but there's mirth in the hall,
For the Baron o' Brackley lies dead and awa'.
Then up spake his son on his own nurse's knee:
Saying "Afore I'm a man it's avenged I'll be."

Conservatism for Seculars

An article by Razib Khan at the Council for Secular Humanism, a view I find highly congenial.

On the English Language as Informed by the Battle of Hastings

Dr. Mead is turning out some good pieces lately. Many of you will enjoy this one.

If we hadn’t cleared all this useless rubbish out of the language we would still be spouting nonsense like this: I sit on thi biggi rocki, I throw thum biggum rockum, tho rocko is bigo. Tha girla, however, is biga and I go with thai biggai girlai to thi picturi showi. And so on.

The girla is biga? My guess is that we probably wouldn't have been saying that out loud even if we hadn't simplified the language.

"Loathsome, inhuman edifices"

Or what we generally refer to as "Stalinist architecture."  The Daily Caller puts the spotlight on "U. Gly" -- the university campuses whose design makes them "flawed slices of hell."  They remind me of the stuff my church's architecture firm churns out. 

I'm surprised they didn't include the University of Houston, full of truly hideous examples:

Rice University is another matter entirely.  I still have such fond memories of the old loggias there that they figure prominently in my dreams:

Oratores

There was a long-lived ideal in Medieval society that there ought to be three classes of people: oratores, bellatores, and laboratores, that is, those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. We have lost the first class almost entirely, but here and there they still exist. Here one, a rabbi, speaks to a culturally Jewish comedienne in the way proper only to his class. I will quote a large part of it because the server is having trouble with the strain of so many people wanting to read an open letter from a rabbi to Sarah Silverman.

I wouldn’t be writing these words had your most recent video not been framed in biblical language. Its title held deep significance to me, as I am sure was your intention....

I believe I have your number. You will soon turn 42 and your destiny, as you stated, will not include children. You blame it on your depression, saying you don’t want to pass it on to another generation.

I find that confusing, coming from someone as perceptive as you are in dissecting flawed arguments. Surely you appreciate being alive and surely, if the wonder of your womb were afflicted with your weaknesses and blessed with your strengths, it would be happy to be alive, too.

You said you wouldn’t get married until gay people can. Now they can. And you still haven’t married. I think, Sarah, that marriage and childrearing are not in the cards for you because you can’t focus on building life when you spend your days and nights tearing it down.

You have made a career making public that which is private, making crude that which is intimate, making sensual that which is spiritual. You have experienced what traditional Judaism taught long ago: when you make sex a public thing it loses its potency. When the whisper is replaced with a shout there is no magic to speak about. And, in my opinion, Sarah, that is why you have had trouble forging a permanent relationship – the most basic desire of the feminine soul.

Human beings have many acquaintances and fewer friends, but only one spouse. Judaism celebrates the monogamous, intimate relationship with a spouse as the prototype of the intimate relationship with God. Marriage, in Judaism, is holy. Family, in Judaism, is celebrated. But for you, nothing is holy; in your world, nothing is permanent. Your ideology is secular. Your culture may be Jewish, but your mind is not.

I think you have latched on to politics because you are searching for something to build. There is only so much pulling down one can do without feeling utterly destructive. You want to fight for a value so you take your belief – secularism – and promote it. As an Orthodox rabbi, I disagree with just about everything you say, but respect your right to say it. All I ask, respectfully, is that you not use traditional Jewish terminology in your efforts. Because doing so is a lie.

If it is hard to imagine any other kind of man speaking this way to a woman in public, it ought to be. No other sort of man has the right. As he says, though, she has made it her business to make the private public, and she has mocked that which it is his charge to defend.

A plug for "Cook's Illustrated"

Maggie's Farm linked to a NYT review of the odd-duck "Cook's Illustrated."  It's off the beaten path, certainly -- no advertising, no restaurant or chef reviews, and it features decidedly bizarre editorials that have nothing whatever to do with cooking.  The recipes tend to be on the boring side.  It's worth reading, nevertheless, as the only cooking guide I'm aware of that employs the scientific method.  The test kitchen works on recipes obsessively to determine whether tweaking this or that ingredient, or the cooking time or technique, yields results approved by blind taste-testers.  Common grocery-store or mail-order ingredients get an impartial "Consumer Reports"-style treatment as well.  The NYT article confirms that the magazine's founder, Chris Kimball, isn't out to inspire cutting edge food trends for special occasions, but only to enable workaday cooks to produce reliable results with a minimum of effort, night after night.  I swear by his biscuit recipe.  And though his editorials apparently don't rate highly with his subscribers, I think they're great.

I'm not much of a cook, doing best when I stick to reliable, easy recipes.  In contrast, my husband excels at difficult cooking:  more Thomas Keller than Chris Kimball.  He works at recipes until he can produce them perfectly, all appearing on the table at the right time.  His attention span amazes me.  If I try to cook three things at once, one of them is going to get forgotten at some critical stage, and smoke alarms are not out of the question.

Ace says today that the NYT has become a Democratic Party newsletter with a good crossword puzzle ("Democratic operatives with bylines").  That's fair, except that they still put out the occasional enjoyable Leisure/Style or Science/Health article.

A Difference of Opinion

Father whose son has broken his arm on the monkey bars: "That's a character-building experience, boy. Carry on like this, and in a few short years you'll be fit to join the cavalry."

Father whose daughter has done same: "Why do these monstrous monkey bars still exist in our civilized country?"

Well, maybe they should be marked "Boys Only."

On the other hand, by kindergarten I had my boy on horseback -- and that can break your neck. I haven't had a daughter, and maybe I'd feel differently about it, but I suspect I'd have had her on horseback by that age also. I could be wrong, but girls like horses. I doubt I'd have had the heart to keep her from them. Nor did Rhett Butler, I suppose, who lost a daughter just so.

I Am Bad News

Here's the trailer for the new 'Kill UBL' film.



Nearly the first thirty seconds are built around a monologue by an American torturer. This is kind of shocking, for a film that has been portrayed all along as an Obama re-election venue. It is one thing to accept that torture exists, and another to accept that your nation practices it. It is something else to valorize torture so much that you make it the introductory speech to your re-election video. This is what the man says, as we pass to a video of him standing before prison bars:

"Can I be honest with you? I am bad news. I am not your friend. I am not going to help you. I'm going to break you."

I doubt many Obama voters read this page. If any of you do, though: is this what you wanted when you voted for him four years ago? This is his work. That means it is yours.

Chickamagua

When a gap opens in enemy lines, the timing is always critical. Anybody ready to ride?

"I'm going to leave it at that . . ."

. . . instead of answering your question, says Secy. Clinton.  Joseph Curl outlines the shape-shifting story of the Benghazi attack, strangely reminiscent of the more triumphant, but still shape-shifting, story of the bin Laden raid:

On the eve of a House oversight committee hearing, the State Department called a briefing for the media.  For an hour, over the telephone, top department officials spun a new tale that bore almost no resemblance to the official story they’d been telling for weeks. 

There was no protest, the officials said, no protest that grew out of hand until a spontaneous mob — whipped into a rage over a video — poured into the consulate. In fact, “nothing was out of the ordinary” on the night of the attack, one official said. . . . 

The FBI wouldn’t reach Benghazi for 17 days.  When bureau agents finally did, they took tapes from the closed-circuit security cameras.  More, reports emerged that an unmanned drone also captured the attack on video.  The story was changing fast, and just before administration officials were to testify officially before Congress.  The sudden respinning was reminiscent of the evolving story on the raid to get Osama bin Laden — first he had a gun, there was a firefight, he hid behind one of his wives; then, no gun, no firefight, no wife.

Well, screenplays do get re-written all the time, as we discover what the audience likes.   "The question is whether reporters will follow the trail of lies and deceit or leave off just as the whole mess is imploding," Curl suggests.  But actually, if you're the New York Times, the question is whether reporters will start down the trail in the first place.  As Mark Steyn noted:

Surely, even among Obama’s media sycophants, there must be someone who recognizes that all the cushy court eunuch posts are filled and, rather than being the umpteenth extra in the crowd scene, there’s a reputation, a Pulitzer and maybe a movie deal to be made here.

Death: Two Empirical Perspectives

[T]here is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.... But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead are, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? ... What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? ... Above all, I shall be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in that; I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not.

-Socrates, from Plato's Apology

I once had a professor of philosophy who was very interested in Near Death Experiences. These are the things you hear about where the brain is approaching death, and visions of light or transportation occur. I've had one myself, in fact, when choked out of consciousness for a minute or two by my old master of jujitsu. These things are kind of interesting, in a way, because they are often quite similar in spite of cultural differences or other inputs. They don't, however, speak very much to what it is like to be dead, even "brain dead." This is because we can't be sure that there isn't brain activity of some kind.

Recently, though, I've come across two people who present empirical accounts of long-term "brain death" -- we really mean a coma in both cases -- which were monitored in hospitals. They are really different sorts of accounts.

Gerard at American Digest gives this account: the lights went out, and then flipped back on. For the intervening 13 days, there was nothing at all: not even a darkness, not even sleep, just nothing.

Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon who was comatose for eight days, gives an entirely different account: one of transportation, and beings of light, and a kind of maximum being that is not light but not yet darkness. There is emotional content: love, joy, and not so much forgiveness as the sense that there is, and can be, nothing to forgive.

Which account you find more plausible depends on your own assumptions, but from a scientific perspective it doesn't matter. What we have here are two roughly analogous events, with a surprisingly different phenomenal content. The first one lines up with what is suggested by what we think we know about the brain; the second lines up with numerous other empirical accounts of near-death from around the world.

None of this actually speaks to the real question, which is what it is like to be dead. There also remains enough shadow in our understanding of the brain that even with brain scans you might hope that the brain-only account can yet 'save the phenomena.'

Still, how interesting the difference.

The Wages of Universal Healthcare

This year's statistics from the UK's Daily Telegraph:

* 43 people starved to death while in government-run hospital wards.

* 111 people died of thirst.

* 287 further people, though starvation was not the actual cause of death, were noted as being "severely malnourished" at the time of their deaths.

* Over a hundred died of infections from bedsores.

* Nearly twenty-two thousand were suffering from septicemia when they died.

So the good news is that it won't cost any money to go to the hospital. The bad news is that the strain on resources means that the hospitals lack the capacity to feed you, give you water, change your linens, or perform ordinary basic hygiene.

What Do You Want?

Walter Russell Mead begins an article on how civil society cannot deliver world peace:

Every aspiring beauty-pageant queen knows what to say when asked what she wants most: "World peace." World peace is at least nominally what we all want most. But evidently, we are not very good at making it.

Both economics and epistemology suggest that, this being the case, we may not really want world peace as much as we think we do.

Economics is all about the question of assigning value. It believes in humankind as a collection of rational actors who are willing to trade things they value less for things they value more. This isn't just true at the marketplace, where we are trading money for products. It is also true before we get to the marketplace, when we are accepting opportunity costs in order to pursue a given opportunity (instead of others). If we are regularly willing to trade opportunities to pursue good A for opportunities to pursue good B, we value B more than A.

There is a tradition within epistemology that suggests something similar about belief. If you tell me that you believe that the world will end on Thursday, how can I tell if you are serious or not? One way I can tell is if you are taking steps coherent with the world ending on Thursday -- for example, spending all your money on short-term pleasures instead of investments, or mortgaging your house so you can spend your last hours on a world-wide cruise, or not showing up at work all week so that you can be praying in church. Depending on your value system, one of these mechanisms might be a more rational way to spend your last hours than your usual routine would be. If you carry on going to work and investing in your retirement plan as usual, I might have some reason to doubt that you sincerely believe in the end of the world on Thursday.

These are reasonably good arguments if the human mind is generally rational, and generally not compartmentalized. However, both of those assumptions seem to be false assumptions.

So it turns out we have two possibilities. Maybe we really do want world peace -- as Dr. Mead suggests -- but it is simply the case that human beings are very bad at it. Alternatively, maybe there are things you want more than world peace, so that you will reliably trade opportunities to pursue world peace for opportunities to pursue these things.

Let's try a thought experiment to see which is the case. Imagine a computer algorithm has been designed that can reliably achieve peace if humans obey the computers' instructions. Nothing really wild is asked for -- no one has to sacrifice his son, for example -- but you have to do what you are told whether it makes sense to you or not. This program has been proven by experiment at every level, from tribal disputes in Africa to corporate ones in Europe and Japan, and so far it has generated perfect peace and cooperation wherever it has been tried. There is now a proposal before the Senate to ratify a global treaty requiring all people in the world to obey the computer, at all times, without exception. The President has already signed the treaty, so ratification is the last step to making this treaty the law of the land.

If Dr. Mead is right, and we just are bad at making peace, this should be an enormously attractive proposition. Is it?

Didn't like that LEGO? Try this one

Sleep tight

Bryan Preston of PJ Media reports that the White House had a live feed from an overhead drone as the attack on the Benghazi embassy wound down, when we still did not know the fate of our murdered ambassador.  Technical difficulties involving closed eyelids prevented the President from watching.  Preston wonders:  "Would Obama have gone to bed during a nailbiter of a sports game?"  Well, maybe so, if he had to get up early and fly out to Las Vegas for a fund-raiser.

It's a good thing he didn't spend a couple of minutes finishing the story he was reading to some schoolchildren.

Anyway, within a few weeks he'd wrung a full briefing out of all those uncooperative intelligence community and State Department operatives.

Is Hillary Clinton really a wise scapegoat to fix on?  I'm trying to imagine how tempted Bill Clinton is to grab a microphone and update his thoughts on how "any president" would have stacked up in the face of this crisis.

Ve haff vays of making you compassionate

"The Long Arm of Academic Tolerance" explores the fate of teachers who dare to express political opinions --  oops, I mean hate speech -- in what they used to think of as their private lives.  Or not even a political opinion, just a request that a particular issue be exposed to a public vote.  We absolutely cannot have that.

H/t Maggie's Farm

Yuk yuk yuk

Takes on the debate

From Ace and his merry band:

It was like having an argument with your drunk, blowhard, dullwitted uncle at Thanksgiving.  And your drunk blowhard dullwitted uncle, who is superior to you only in age, keeps asserting he's right about everything by shouting "I WAS THERE!!!" 

Came off as a father-son fight about how dad is too senile to drive anymore and the wife/mother just wanting to move on to something the two of them could agree upon. 

If you thought it wasn't the administration, that it was Congress, last night you saw why it wasn't Congress.  The other night you saw a non-communicative president and last night you had attack dog Joe. 

Two debates in a row in which the overriding takeaway was the personality of the incumbent.  Not good. 

Ryan should have looked at Slow Joe and asked him "Does President Obama think all our nations problems are as funny as you seem to?"  Then hit him in the choppers with a right cross.

And my own reaction:   does Biden really believe the easy part of building a nuclear weapon is accumulating the fissile material, and the hard part is the detonation/delivery mechanism?  We managed it in 1945 easily enough, and we were flying blind.

Also:  it was surprising to hear Biden claim the White House didn't know about the threat in Libya because the intelligence community didn't tell them.  Maybe if the President actually attended intelligence briefings . . . ?

Grand Slam

Yesterday I watched a few minutes of the Reds/Giants game. I happened to be watching when Georgia native "Buster" Posey stepped up to the plate, with the bases loaded, and saw a big fat beautiful pitch come to him that he knew exactly what to do with.

My guess is that Mitt Romney has a similar feeling this morning.

The new fight erupted when top President Barack Obama's aide Stephanie Cutter said on CNN that the September 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi only became a "political topic" because it was exploited by Romney....

"I think today we got another indication of how President Obama and his campaign fail to grasp the seriousness of the challenges that we face here in America," Romney said at a rally in North Carolina.

The Republican nominee went on to quote Cutter's remarks, before turning them against the president.

"No, President Obama, it's an issue because this is the first time in thirty-three years that a United States Ambassador has been assassinated.

"Mr President, this is an issue because we were attacked successfully by terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11.

"President Obama, this is an issue because Americans wonder why it was it took so long for you and your administration to admit that this was a terrorist attack," Romney said, demanding "serious answers" for the American people.

Yeah, that's right. That's just how you hit the ball.

King Arthur Pendragon

So, maybe you're depressed about the election season. Maybe you wish there was a really different candidate, one who symbolizes all the things you deeply believe to be important. How about King Arthur?

Well, he's the provisional Arthur, anyway.

"I’ve been Arthur Uther Pendragon since ‘86. I’m generally known as King Arthur. There are three Arthurian ages and I’m the post-Thatcher Arthur. As far as I’m concerned, until another Arthur—bigger, badder and bolder—comes along, I’m it. So handle it."

In fairness, though, the bigger badder Arthur is going to have to compete with his stature as the leader of an outlaw motorcycle club.

"I used to be the president of an outlaw bike club and a lot of my mates thought I was off on one, but 20-odd years later, I’m still doing it. I decided that the Goddess would sustain me if it was true, so I don’t claim any state benefit and—well, hey—something’s working. I’ve been known to have a tipple, but guess what? I speak exactly the same bollocks whether I’m pissed or sober, because I actually believe in it.”

Arthur told me how spiritual places, like Stonehenge, help him access the memories from his past life.

“I remember fightin’ on the Saxon shores against the Saxon armies. I also have a memory of fighting on the western shores against Irish pirates. See, the motorcycle is the modern iron steed, so I’m not doing it a lot different now to what I was doing 1500 years ago.”

I have much the same feeling myself at times, although I've never thought I might actually be Arthur himself. Still, you get on that iron horse, and you take the road, and it takes you places.

By the way, he does have one significant claim to genuine authority. He bears Excalibur.

“Where did you find Excalibur?” I asked him.

“Ah well, therein lies another tale. It was built for the film.”

“The film Excalibur?”

“Yeah, the armourer who built it had it on show in the window. He said 'Look, if the real King Arthur walks in here, he can bloody have it. Otherwise, it’s not for sale.' So I just threw me passport on the desk and walked out with the sword."

Now, you have to admit that's impressive. They didn't agree to sell it to him: they gave it to him, because they agreed it was his by right.

The VP Debate

Biden did better than the President. But that's to be expected. Biden's the better man. We'll have to wait a bit to see how it played with voters, but there's no doubt in my mind he did better than President Obama did.

Of course, we'll also have to see how many people watched it, and how much they like people interrupting and yelling. Maybe that sells. We'll see soon enough.

UPDATE: A CNN undecided voter interview.



The lady is from Virginia, which might explain her good sense.

Parents

Cassandra's post deserves highlighting. I wish I could meet her sons.

Completely False Statements

So the responsible thing -- the American thing! -- is to allow the investigation to proceed to a responsible, careful, detailed conclusion. OK.

One question, though: how long did the administration allow the FBI to be on the ground investigating this incident? My impression is that the answer is "Zero minutes and zero seconds, during which they were able to conduct zero interviews of eye-witnesses."

To describe this as waiting for a full, responsible investigation is the highest level of horse manure. They pulled the investigation before it even got on the ground. This is top-quality stuff, the sort you'd use to fertilize a rose garden.

21 days left . . .

. . . to craft those costumes for defenseless pets and babies.  As always, I'm here to offer inspiration:

Running toward the gunfire

Mitt Romney tells a story about a Navy SEAL he met by accident a couple of year ago when he got mixed up about the address of a neighborhood party:

Then there is [Glen] Doherty, the former Navy SEAL Romney met at a party he wasn't supposed to attend. 

Both were from Massachusetts.  Both enjoyed skiing.  And Doherty, who was 42 at the time of his death [in Benghazi last month], talked about his work in the Middle East for a private security company after he finished his tour of duty as a Navy SEAL. 

"You can imagine how I felt when I found out that he was one of the two former Navy SEALs killed in Benghazi on Sept. 11," Romney said in Iowa, pausing to stay composed.  "It touched me obviously as I recognized this young man that I thought was so impressive had lost his life in his service of his fellow men and women." 

Romney said he learned that Doherty was in another building across town when he and his colleagues found out the consulate was under attack. 

"They went there. They didn't hunker down where they were in safety.  They rushed there to go help," Romney said.  "This is the American way.  We go where there's trouble.  We go where we're needed.  And right now we are needed. Right now the American people need us."

Provocative video causes political disaster

From People's Cube:  sometimes public order is more important than letting a television broadcast get people all riled up.

Update: link fixed.

Unclear on the market concept

Don't Californians ever get tired of being blindsided by market effects that everyone else can see coming a mile away?  I spent almost a decade of my life working on bankruptcies caused by the meltdown of the ridiculous California attempt to build a pretend-market for electricity in the late 1990s. Hey, I wonder what will happen if we refuse to produce any electricity locally, become dependent on neighboring states, squeeze down our interstate supply lines, and then screw with the market so that no one can get clear short-term price signals, while preventing our three major electrical utilities from hedging with long-term contracts?  Who would have dreamed that the whole thing would blow up in our faces?

Almost 15 years later, California's rulers (and voters) still fondly imagine that they can have stable, comprehensible gas-pump prices while constantly jacking around with special-snowflake gas recipes that prevent any reasonable emergency backup supplies from kicking in when there's even a minor emergency at those few refineries that are allowed to stay in business.  Now we have people complaining that, yes, of course there was a market perturbation, but it couldn't possibly have caused that kind of spike!  It must be evil traders manipulating the market.  Collusion!  Gouging!  Greed!

The market's being manipulated, all right, but it ain't traders doing it.  The law of supply and demand works even when it's politically inconvenient.  Now watch them "fix" the problem by freezing prices.  That way you can get cheap gas -- there just won't be any of it.  Thanks, wise, beneficent rulers!

Trust

Chuck Todd is upset that Americans don't trust their government any more.

It's not a good thing for society when its citizens become hardened in cynicism and susceptible to every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike.  But Mr. Todd misidentifies the root of the problem.  The problem isn't that citizens should put their rose-colored glasses back on and rally around the powers that be.  The problem is him:

When Chuck Todd laments the corrosion of “trust in government,” what he is really lamenting is that the American people have caught on to the way the game is played and the public now realizes just how complicit the media is.

Wanna fix that, Mr. Todd?  You're a member of the media.  Try doing your job honestly for a change, see if that helps.   Not only might you get a more honest government out of it, but people might quit laughing at your profession.

When ya lose Big Bird . . . .

Coming on the heels of a betrayal by Bill Maher, this has got to sting.

Why Our Enemies in Afghanistan are Evil Men

Cowards, too. They are so afraid of the words of a girl that they have to kill her, lest others speak.

Yet this valley is a stronghold for them. We controlled it once, and have already withdrawn from it because the population prefers them to the central government enough to let them -- even to help them -- command. That speaks to the poverty of our allies, such as they are, as well as the depth of the ethnic division.

We may hope that these particular men might yet have the opportunity to meet with an appropriate answer. In the end, though, this is the world we are leaving behind.

Nobel

Because Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously, they sometimes miss an extraordinary achievement that won't bear fruit until later, particularly if the discoverer dies young.  Rosalind Franklin, for instance, might have shared the 1962 prize that went to Watson and Crick for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, but she died of cancer at age 37 in 1958.

Albert Einstein received his Nobel Prize not for the theory of relativity (special 1905, general 1911) or the mass-energy equivalence (1905) but for his 1905 work on the photo-electric effect.  I was not aware of the ugly political machinations behind this delayed and arguably misdirected award.  By the time the Nobel committee worked out its resentment of Einstein's Jewish heritage and pacifist tendencies, not to mention the controversy over whether the 1919 Eddington experiment had truly confirmed his work, Einstein had suffered the fate of Achilles:  the honor had been robbed of its value by the arbitrary partisanship of its awarders.

He that fights fares no better than he that does not; coward and hero are held in equal honour, and death deals like measure to him who works and him who is idle.

Einstein didn't return from his trip to the Far East to attend the 1922 ceremony in Stockholm.  In 1933, he renounced his German citizenship and moved to the U.S., where in 1939 he was instrumental in persuading President Roosevelt to make this country the world's first nuclear power.

Nobel Prizes are being awarded this week, so far without controversy.  The medicine award went to two stem cell researchers, one British and one Japanese, whose work involved not embryonic stem cells but the reprogramming of adult cells into induced pluripotent stem cells.  The physics award went to two men, one from Colorado and the other from Paris, whose work with observing quantum particles may lead to advances in supercomputers.

Romney on foreign policy

From WaPo:

I believe that if America does not lead, others will—others who do not share our interests and our values—and the world will grow darker, for our friends and for us.

A few more specific proposals, not that any foreign policy speech is ever very specific:

Restore cuts to military spending; specifically, build 15 ships per year, including three submarines.

"I will implement effective missile defenses to protect against threats.  And on this, there will be no flexibility with Vladimir Putin.  And I will call on our NATO allies to keep the greatest military alliance in history strong by honoring their commitment to each devote 2 percent of their GDP to security spending. Today, only 3 of the 28 NATO nations meet this benchmark."

Organize all assistance efforts in the greater Middle East under one official with responsibility and accountability to prioritize efforts and produce results, by stipulating conditions to aid.

Reverse the President's four-year failure to sign any new free trade agreements.

Support the many Syrians who would oppose Iran.

More support for Israel.

Other than that, though, what's wrong with Venezuela?

From the WaPo:

According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, even media not directly controlled by the government have been reluctant to report critically on Mr. Chavez.  Many voters, too, are intimidated by high-tech polling machines that read their fingerprints; polls show that they suspect their votes will not be secret.  Those not motivated by fright might be lured by greed:  The government has amassed a list of 3 million people it has promised new homes. There are about 12 million likely voters. 

That Mr. Chavez is in danger of losing in spite of all this is testimony to the havoc he has wreaked in what was once Latin America’s richest country.  At more than 20 percent, inflation is the highest in the region and is accompanied by chronic shortages of food, basic consumer goods and power.  The country’s infrastructure is crumbling:  Within the last two months an explosion at a state oil refinery killed 50 people, and a major highway bridge collapsed.  Perhaps worst of all for average citizens, violent crime has become epidemic under Mr. Chavez.  The murder rate, which has more than tripled, is one of the five highest in the world.  Drug traffickers have made Venezuela a hub for shipments to the United States and Europe with the help of senior government officials, including the current defense minister.

Chavez won his re-election campaign.  Here's a giddy socialist take on the news:

The accomplishments of the Chavez regime over the past 13 years are undeniable.  When he entered office, Chavez took command of an economy that had been ravaged by IMF structural adjustment plans that had devastated most of the welfare subsidies and social guarantees that had been built up by the progressive nationalist regimes of the 1970s.  . . .  [S]ince Chavez was elected President in 1999, unemployment has been cut in half – declining from 14% to 7%.  Increased access to medical care, particularly through community clinics staffed by Cuban physicians, has led to a decline in infant mortality from 20 deaths per 1,000 live births to 13 deaths per 1,000.   Per capita GDP has increased from $4,000 in 1999 to $10,000 today.  And extreme poverty has declined from 23% of the population when Chavez entered office in 1999 to 8.5% today. . . . The election of right wing opposition candidate Henrique Capriles would have meant an immediate end to this process of social transformation. . . .

I guess we'll see.  Chavez is facing another contest that I doubt he'll win.  Whatever path Venezuela takes will have to be without him, one way or another.

A Pithy Commentary on the History of...shall we call it Canaan?

may be found here. Abstracting it to every other part of the human-occupied earth is left as an exercise for the reader. h/t Gene Expression.

Things That Never Cease to Amaze

American society is very strange about its food:

Speaking of eggs, balut is a soft-boiled duck egg, where the embryo is almost fully formed--feathers, bones, and all. The egg is cracked open, the soupy liquid drunk, and the fetus dug out to eat. It's popular in the Philippines, Laos, and other Southeast Asian countries.

What's being done: Thanks to domestic foodie demand, this "snack" is available in the U.S. too. Dekalb Market in Brooklyn hosted its first ever balut-eating contest this summer--and the winner downed 18 embryos in 5 minutes.

What to eat instead: Regular eggs (organic, cage-free, preferably my-farmer-sold-them-to-me eggs, that is) will give you a protein fix without the feathered fetus.

Why should this be a problem? Don't we know from our political debate that there is absolutely no distinction between an egg at day one of fertilization, and an egg about to hatch?

Besides, you'd eat the adult duck, and you'd eat the egg in an earlier state. Why so queasy about eating the almost-hatched fetus? What makes it the one phase that's worthy of protection -- or that makes it the one phase that it is revolting to kill and eat?

Fun with balls

As a way to move balls around to no evident purpose, this struck me as a lot more entertaining than football.

Hey, Shut Up!

This was at Sam Houston State University. I'll bet old Sam would have some choice words to say about that.

We Lost, You Must Have Cheated

One hears this line from little boys who don't like to lose, but it's a little surprising to hear it in the context of a Presidential debate. Still, GWB was also accused of "cheating," so I suppose it's always the default assumption when a conservative whips up on a liberal in a battle of ideas. (After all, we're supposed to be disarmed.)

What strikes me about the charge, though, is that it is flatly incompatible with the other excuse for the Obama loss: that Mitt Romney lied, lied, lied with every thing he said. You don't need to smuggle in a day planner full of facts if you're just going to make stuff up. The only purpose a "cheat sheet" would serve is making sure that you accurately remembered the facts you wanted to cite, so you wouldn't give your opponent an easy out by misquoting something you had mis-remembered.

So which was it? Did he cheat, or did he lie?

America from the Road

Ed Driscoll wants to write something punishing about the 'death of middlebrow culture,' comparing the fall from Lawrence of Arabia to Easy Rider. It's true that the two films don't really compare. Lawrence is a masterpiece, something we often watched in Iraq and when preparing for Iraq -- although Lawrence was leading an insurgency, not a counterinsurgency. Still, in the high days of the Surge, we were almost doing the same thing: leading a counterinsurgency that was really an insurgency, turning the Sunni tribes against al Qaeda and its fellow travelers, because it was their pleasure.





Easy Rider is another kind of story. It has nothing to do with glory. It does have something to do with America, though. John Wayne spoke of America, and why he loved her. His reasons were simple. They had to do with what America was.



It happens that the full version of Easy Rider happens to be available online right now. You'll find a lot of harmony between what John Wayne said, and what you see in the movie. It is about Monument Valley, and the sun shining through the trees along a desert highway, about New Orleans at Mardi Gras and the good life, as it is lived in a little place, where a man draws his living from the ground.



There's something more to be said for this movie than has been said for it. It is true that it is not Lawrence of Arabia, but it never intended to be. It explores the poison of drugs, which is a topic new to the era. But there is still something about the appreciation of the place, of America as it is a place to be ridden through and enjoyed and seen. It's the place that is worth loving, worth defending, worth sacrifice.

Maybe, even after that, the hippies in the movie wouldn't have fought for it. In that way they are wrong just where Lawrence and Wayne were right.

An Outstanding Metaphor

“You may want to move on to another topic,” Obama implored Lehrer, a bit like a motorcycle thief begging a cop to take him into custody rather than let him stay with the surly biker gang that caught him.

No, no. Leave him here. We'd like a few more words.

Strandhögg

You've read the written report, but here's the video of Lars Walker capturing himself a young bride in plain combat:

Funny, That's Not How I Remember It...

Apparently a teacher up in Philly demanded a Romney/Ryan shirt be removed from the body of a girl attending her class, on the grounds that it was like wearing a KKK shirt.

We actually had the Klan show up on the county courthouse square from time to time when I was a boy, so I can see how you'd hate to be reminded of them. Still, as I recall it, the county was a Democratic monolith in those days. Don't remember them being Mormons or Catholics, either.

UPDATE: On the other hand, there's this:

@ZekeJMiller
Romney motorcade just passed a hill flying a large confederate flag in rural SW VA

Clearly, that's demonstrative. I mean, any decent human being would have stopped, turned the motorcade around, and driven however far out of the way was necessary to avoid passing a hill with a Confederate flag on it. (H/t: Instapundit.)

"My name is Khamenei, and I'm building a nuclear weapon. . . ."

He's signing on to a 9-step program to treat his addiction.   The problem?   Steps one through eight consist of the West's reversing the economic sanctions that have led to a currency crisis and riots in Teheran.   Step nine is "a 'suspension' of the medium-enriched uranium production at the deep underground site called Fordow."

We should jump on that deal.

Presidential empathy

From the National Review, an excerpt from Mitt Romney's book "No Apology":

During my campaign for governor, I decided to spend a day every few weeks doing the jobs of other people in Massachusetts.  Among other jobs, I cooked sausages at Fenway Park, worked on an asphalt paving crew, stacked bales of hay on a farm, volunteered in an emergency room, served food at a nursing home, and worked as a child-care assistant.  I’m often asked which was the hardest job – it’s child care, by a mile. 

One day I gathered trash as a garbage collector.  I stood on that little platform at the back of the truck, holding on as the driver navigated his way through the narrow streets of Boston.  As we pulled up to traffic lights, I noticed that the shoppers and businesspeople who were standing only a few feet from me didn’t even see me.  It was as if I was invisible.  Perhaps it was because a lot of us don’t think garbage men are worthy of notice; I disagree – anyone who works that hard deserves our respect.  – I wasn’t a particularly good garbage collector:  at one point, after filling the trough at the back of the truck, I pulled the wrong hydraulic lever.  Instead of pushing the load into the truck, I dumped it onto the street.  Maybe the suits didn’t notice me, but the guys at the construction site sure did:  “Nice job, Mitt,” they called.  “Why don’t you find an easier job?”  And then they good-naturedly came down and helped me pick up my mess.

"Dreams of My Father" it's not.  Was Romney just slumming for effect, after living a silver-spoon existence?   There's no doubt his wealthy father helped him get a start in life.  On the other hand, by the time his father died, Romney already had become quite successful himself, so he donated his inheritance to BYU.

Quit giving them ideas

Admiring a Paris bike-sharing program that positively encourages people to ride around without a trace of helmet protection, on the theory that more lives will be endangered by sedentary obesity than by head trauma, New York Times correspondent Elisabeth Rosenthal quotes/muses:

[I]f we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.”  The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

Or we could adopt the California approach:

In the United States, cities are struggling to overcome the significant practical problems of melding helmet use with bike-sharing programs — such as providing sanitized helmet dispensers at bike docking stations, says Susan Shaheen, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Right next to the condom dispensers. Helmets are health care too, you know!   We ought to think about mandating them for pedestrians, ladder-climbers, and bathers.  But that bomb-throwing anarchist Rosenthal, she probably ate non-pasteurized cheese while she was in Paris.

H/t Maggie's Farm.

I know what he means

From a 2002 speech by Barack Obama at a Martin Luther King Day memorial service:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence.  Why wouldn’t they be?  They’ve got what they want.

Yep, whenever I decide whether to indulge in violence, my first order of business is to think through whether I have everything I want yet.  If not, all bets are off.

Another viewpoint

Just to keep things fair, Bryan Preston's alternative explanation for the President's abysmal debate performance:  "Obama wasn't just tired or off his game.  He was incoherent because his ideas stink."  Obama issued his usual complaint that he inherited a big deficit, including "two wars that were paid for on a credit card."  Then he suggested "that we take some of the money that we’re saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America and that we reduce our deficit."  Hey, wait a minute, Preston objects:

If the two wars are paid for on a “credit card” as the president says, how then are we going to reduce the deficit by taking that money and just spending it on something else?  Wouldn’t it make more sense just to not spend that money at all?  Since, you know, we don’t have it in the first place?

A commenter chips in:

The way to fix my household budget deficit is to take the money I have already spent on the security system and somehow get it back from the ether and plunge it directly into the toilet.  This doesn’t help keep my family safe and destroys the plumbing.  And, if two wars were costing so much money . . . why enter a third in Libya, then fail to protect the people you sent there to clean up the mess.

Was that a good jobs report or a bad one?

It may have been naive to expected an un-jimmied jobs report this close to the election, but even by the loose standards we've learned to apply, this one is a doozy.  Somehow, we added fewer jobs than are needed to keep pace with a growing population, but the unemployment rate took a dive to 7.8%, the first time in 43 months it's been below 8%.  OK, you can get there by driving a phenomenal number of people out of the workforce, I guess, but the numbers still don't add up.  We added 114,000 non-farm jobs but lost 456,000 unemployed people, while the household survey showed that the number of people with jobs rose by 873,000 (seasonally adjusted) -- the highest one-month increase in 29 years.  It seems that the latter number includes 582,000 part-time jobs accepted by workers who were seeking part-time work but taking what they could get.  Total "multiple jobs holders" rose by 183,000.

Zero Hedge is having some trouble with the numbers.  Here's an interesting coincidence, for instance:  the household survey figure is 873,000 jobs, of which 582,000 are part-time, which is precisely 2/3.  Sound a bit like a plugged number?

I'm totally confused, but I take it that the unemployment number uses the household-survey jobs (873,000) instead of what Zero Hedge calls the "establishment" jobs number, which was the 114,000 figure.  Also, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has unexpectedly revised upward the disappointing jobs figures for the last three months.

Well, I just hope the jobs picture is turning around, and these aren't simply numbers that will be quietly revised downwards later, per the usual practice.

A tale of two ads

It was the RNC perspective, it was the DNC perspective.  Erika Johnsen at Hot Air shows the first two ads to run clips from this week's presidential debate.  The RNC ad splices shots of Romney explaining what he thinks has to change and why, while the President, on split-screen, grimaces.  The DNC ad cuts rapidly among Romney, a pundit, and Jim Lehrer, as Romney tries to keep the floor, Lehrer interjects "Just a moment," and the pundit says, "He just kept going.  He just kept going.  He just kept going."  The President doesn't even appear in this little drama.

Explanations for the President's lackluster performance include altitude sickness, or distraction by his secret national security duties, or spiritual exhaustion from the strain of being forced to conduct wars.  These theories are difficult to take seriously.  A more telling consensus is that the President dislikes personal confrontation, and was at an unfair advantage because Romney lied.  (See here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for a sampling from the nearly 9 million search engine hits on that theme.  You would be hard-pressed to find a comments thread on the subject that omits this favorite theory.)  What did he lie about?  That's not so clear, but a central argument is that Romney misrepresented his own platform.

The latter two explanations -- a distaste for personal confrontation and an inability to confront "lies" -- are more related than they might seem at first.  Nothing in the President's background or career has equipped him to grapple with his opponents' different worldviews.  He and his set dismiss them without really trying to understand them.  Unlike Reagan, for instance, he did not start out on one end of the political spectrum and change to another over time.  He spent his life and career among like-minded political activists in academia, in community work, and in public office.  It's even possible he gets no more accurate information about Romney's platform than the average voter gets from a hostile media.  He seemed genuinely stunned by Romney's assertion that he did not propose to cut taxes by $5 trillion.  Strange!  Every time I heard Romney on that subject, he stressed that, although he wanted to lower rates, no taxpayer should get excited about the prospect of a lower bill, because the idea was to get rid of a lot of deductions in order to make the changes revenue-neutral.  That is, he proposes a flatter and simpler tax structure rather than lower taxes overall.  But unless the President is a phenomenal actor, he was surprised when Romney corrected him about his platform.  In preparation with his sparring partner, John Kerry, the President may have spent all his time preparing to respond to a caricature.

Is it really possible that the President assumed Romney would get up on the debate stage and advocate the parody of his own platform that is all anyone had been allowed to see on network TV or in the New York Times?  Maybe so.  Maybe the President really is that unused to arguing with anyone outside his bubble.  He doesn't get a charge out of meeting people on their own intellectual ground and trying to bring them around to his point of view; he's more at ease with a captive, silent audience.  As Cassandra so memorably put it, he's like a prize fighter who's used to fixed fights:  shocked and helpless the first time his handlers put him in the ring with someone ready, willing, and able to land a punch.

Interesting analogy

"The rich are hoarding all the toys," laments the New York Times:

Imagine a kindergarten with 100 students, lavishly supplied with books, crayons and toys. 

Yet you gasp: one avaricious little boy is jealously guarding a mountain of toys for himself.  A handful of other children are quietly playing with a few toys each, while 90 of the children are looking on forlornly — empty-handed.

Shouldn't the grownups step in and force the mean little boy to share?  Wait a minute -- if the American people are a bunch of babies, who's the grownup in this analogy?

We're from the government . . . .

John Stossel recounts the experiences of his intern looking for a job by way of government-funded jobs programs, which turn out to be centers for signing up for unemployment benefits.  Unjob programs, except for the public employees drawing checks for running the programs.

Has anyone here ever gotten a job through a government jobs program?  Or known anyone who did?

The Gas War

I know people are pretty happy with the debate last night, but this picture from Drudge is pretty powerful too:

It's hard to remember prices that low. What's not hard to remember is the President's commitment to higher energy costs for Americans. He has always been clear that he wants to restrain our consumption by pursuing higher prices for the American consumer.



He didn't get 'cap and trade,' and we aren't quite to Europe's gas price levels, but he has a partial success to chalk up here. Energy prices are much higher than they used to be: as the sign shows, gas prices have doubled.

SCOAMFOTUS blows the debate

The really deadly point of the debate:  from professional commentators to man-in-the-street focus-group members, everyone noticed that the President fell apart the first time he was hit with difficult questions he actually had to answer.  The press has never let him be exposed like this before.

"I Like Firing People"

Maybe it's the meeting I sat through yesterday with State Park employees, who were working on an Emergency Response Study addressing a small upcoming community event, at which perhaps a few dozen people will eat home-made cookies under a locally famous tree, while listening to a handful of politicians make remarks about a BP-oil-spill-guilt-financed acquisition of whooping crane habitat for the local state park.  (The study will detail their plans for a "First Amendment Corral" to be set aside for potential protesters.)  ("State Park Unfair to Non-Whooping Crane Species.")  Or maybe it's persistent recent reports of a Fish & Wildlife officer who's suddenly made it his life's work to harass locals who drive completely unregulated golf carts on our tiny, untrafficked, low-speed streets in this unincorporated rural coastal community.  Maybe it's the upcoming presidential debates.  For whatever reason, I got a kick out of this Wizbang post:  "If You Work for the Government, You Deserve to Be Fired."  He's not a true firebreather, of course; he makes an exception for teachers and first responders.

3 questions

The Pirate's Cove quotes three questions that should be deployed in a climatesomething debate:

What would it take to convince you that you are wrong? 

What happens if you are wrong? 

What makes you hate the future so much?

Actually, those are questions recommended by a Warmist to discomfit an evil denier, but they seem like pretty good questions in reverse as well.

An American Tragedy

The total number of American dead in all our nation's armed conflicts going back to the Revolutionary War is estimated at 1.3 million.... Yet those numbers are dwarfed by another scourge. It’s one we don’t talk about very much in presidential politics, an oversight I’d like to do my part to change.... In the ensuing 113 years [since the first automobile fatality], vehicular traffic on the highways and byways of this country has taken a toll in human suffering that can be accurately described as a holocaust. The total number of dead from that September day in 1899 to this October day in 2012 is approximately 3,573,384.

Horrifying. Yet those numbers are dwarfed by another scourge. Of the 62,947,714 alive in that 1890 census, it is widely believed that all of them are dead. Nor are they alone. Tens of millions more Americans have also lost their lives.

I write today to say that the author of the piece does not do enough in calling for the Presidential debate to include a question about how they will deal with automobile accidents. No, any would-be President must be asked to provide his solution for death!

Striking Coincidences in Foreign Policy

Quite possibly the decision to abandon Benghazi was done for any number of reasons that had nothing to do with derailing the FBI investigation into what happened there. That effect just happens to be an unfortunate coincidence of what was surely done for other, pressing and legitimate, reasons.

Likewise, the sudden deployment of a member of the National Security Staff to Iraq is explicable in terms of the difficulties that nation is experiencing just now. It is merely a coincidence that this particular NSS member happened to be one who corresponded closely on Operation Fast and Furious with an ATF agent who just testified to Congress about that program. The fact that this member of the White House will not be available to answer Congressional questions about the role of the administration in that operation is just a coincidence.

It would be improper to suggest that such significant matters of foreign policy were being subordinated to political considerations. No one would believe the suggestion anyway: it's impossible to imagine the administration acting that way.

More on the Late Maurice Keen

The Guardian has penned an informative obituary regarding the gentleman historian, for those of you who wanted to read more about his life and work.

Airbrush

Wow.

Sometimes Tex and I talk about the dangers of the market. Things sometimes prove to be for sale that ought not to be. Not at any price.

Katrina blues

Did any of you notice that a bunch of Katrina-flooded New Orleans plaintiffs won a huge judgment against the Corps of Engineers in federal court in 2009?  I never heard a peep about it.  Anyway, it went up on appeal to the 5th Circuit, where a 3-judge panel initially affirmed the judgment last March.  This month, however, the same 3-judge panel reversed itself, ruling that the "discretionary function exemption" insulated the federal government from all liability, even assuming the Corps's error rose to the level of abuse of discretion.  Apparently the decision turns on whether the Corps's handling of the levee system turned primarily on public policy discretion or objective engineering judgment; if the former, the Federal Tort Claims Act prevents any liability.  It's unclear why the panel decided to reverse itself, an unusual move, but it may have been persuaded by arguments made by the government in seeking a re-hearing from the full 5th Circuit.  Is it possible the effect of the "discretionary function exemption" simply wasn't stressed in earlier arguments?   If so, then whoever wrote the most recent set of pleadings for the Corps deserves a lot of credit for turning around his client's fortunes.

There is also a 1928 Flood Control Act that shields the Corps from the consequences of the failure of flood protection projects, even if caused by negligent and wrongful acts of federal employees. The lower court had found that the Flood Control Act exemption applied only to a limited part of the Katrina flooding, while other flood damages resulted from the operation and maintenance of the "MR-GO" or Mississippi River Gulf Outlet levee system, which concerns navigation rather than flood control. Under the new 5th Circuit ruling, the Corps is insulated from liability regardless of whether its projects concerned flood control or navigation.

I can't say I disagree with the decision, or that I have any real understanding of the various liability exemptions involved.  I will say that the following is a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of the Corps's judgment:

The corps's actual reasons for the delay (in armoring the banks and levee) are varied and sometimes unknown, but there can be little dispute that the decisions here were susceptible to policy consideration.

I hate it when this happens

Cassandra posted a piece this week on one of my favorite topics, which is the grave danger of letting people vote for bigger government on other people's nickel.  It's always seemed obvious to me that you'll get not only too much government that way, but runaway deficit spending.

So I was a bit taken aback to read her original source, which tries to establish a causal relationship between the percentage of non-taxpayers and the growth of government spending.  Statistically, it seems the case is not easy to make.

It doesn't change my feeling of impending doom.  I can't see how this can be a good direction to push in.  If nothing else, it just chaps me to have to pay for intrusive government for the benefit of people who claim to support it, but not enough to pay for it themselves.

Eric Hobsbawn Passes

The last of the great Marxists has gone to wherever Marxists go when they die.

As the article points out, he also was a great historian. His bias was front and center on the page, so that you could easily filter for it; but his depth of knowledge, and his dogged adherence to the Marxist theory, always made him interesting to read. It is striking to reflect that a man of his obvious intelligence and historical awareness could remain a committed Communist after everything. He was born in the year of the Russian revolution, and grew up during a time when Communism was in its fullest flower as a movement that serious people took seriously: no longer the radical fringe that it had been in Marx's day, nor the small but committed revolutionary internationalists of Lenin's, but a powerful nation engaged in the experiment of trying to move a giant and sprawling nation several centuries' forward in a few short five-year plans.

Even granting the hour of his youth and young manhood, though, it's striking that he remained committed. Past Stalin; past Mao; past the collapse of the USSR, and the revelations of the Stasi. Even if you were to wave all of those off as somehow accidental rather than essential to the Communist process -- and it is not at all clear that you possibly can, for remaking Man and Society whether they like it or not lies right at the core of that process -- it is hard to believe that an intellect could adhere to the clear demonstration of economic inferiority. Marxism was an economic theory first, and Marx was just wrong. The facts bear this out, but if (like a good academic) you aren't satisfied with the facts, the theory bears it out as well.

Feeding the Snake

So we're trying to get Ratbane up to size, in the hope that he can go down and be a good basement dragon. For that reason we've been feeding him baby mice from the pet store. These (I have recently learned) come in several sizes, from "pinkies" who don't yet have hair, to older mice named "fuzzies" and then "jumpers."

The wife got tired of riding all the way to the pet store, so instead of buying just one mouse to feed him live, she bought several and froze them to death. (I would feel bad about freezing baby mice to death, if it weren't for the merciless war I have raged on their kind for the last two years.) Today it came time to feed the snake one of the pre-killed mice, which is more of a problem than it sounds like it ought to be.

Naturally the wife had somewhere to be today, so on her way out the door she asked me to microwave a dead frozen mouse and see if I could get the snake to eat it. "He might not," she said, "because he's never encountered a dead mouse before. But give it a try."

Well, so I did. I warmed up the dead mouse, and dropped him into the tank by the snake. The snake ignored him entirely, and when I came back later the snake was still paying the mouse no mind at all.

"OK," I thought, "clearly I need to get the snake's attention."

So I went and got one of those bamboo skewers you use for making kabobs, and I skewered the mouse through its side. Then, I used the skewer to bring the mouse over to the snake, and slapped him across the face with it.

He didn't seem to like that, so I smacked him with the mouse several more times until he curled up into a little ball. Then I dropped the mouse on him, and went away.

After a while, I got to thinking to myself, "That probably wasn't very mouse-like behavior. Perhaps it would have been more effective if...."

Apparently I'm not very good at simulating a prey animal.

However, when I went to check, the snake was eating the mouse, so I guess it all worked out.

We Get Your Point, Dr. Mead:

Reports that this chimerical Al-Qaeda group sent operatives to work with Boko Haram and enabled it to operate at a higher level of effectiveness should be ignored by all serious people.

The President of Yemen, meanwhile, is thanking the United States for its support for his efforts in his country’s ongoing anti-crime effort against randomly motivated groups of violent criminals in developments that have nothing in common with superficially similar movements anywhere in the world. In what was obviously a slip of the tongue he linked the criminals with “Al-Qaeda” and implied that some sort of international network was engaged in the violence in his country but such crazy talk by a man under a great deal of stress is best ignored. Only rampant paranoia with perhaps a touch of Islamophobia could link events in Yemen to anything warlike or global.

In another completely unrelated and random development, the governments of the United Kingdom and Australia....