Bannockburn, Day I: The Death of Henry de Bohun

During the events described in the first post below, an English knight named Sir Henry de Bohun broke away from the English vanguard because he saw the Scottish King, Robert the Bruce, and recognized him. The king had come on a palfrey, not a warhorse, to observe the battle and issue orders rather than armed to partake in the battle. This account describes the palfrey as a "pony," which is not I think accurate; but the Scottish horses were generally substantially smaller than the English horses, making them less capable in a heavy charge but better for extended marches and long raids.

Fully armed, riding upon his great war-horse, the English knight came thundering on. Bruce, on his little pony, could have no chance against him. There was a dreadful moment of suspense. The two armies watched breathlessly. Bruce waited calmly, and when Bohun was almost upon him, he suddenly turned his pony aside. Bohun dashed on. As he passed, the King, rising high in his stirrups, brought his battle-axe crashing down upon the knight's head. The steel helmet was shattered by the mighty blow, Bohun fell to the ground dead, and his frightened horse dashed riderless away.

Cheer after cheer rose from the Scottish ranks, and the generals gathered round their King. They were glad that he was safe, yet vexed that he should so have endangered his life. "Bethink you, sire, the fate of all Scotland rests upon you," they said.

But the King answered them never a word. "I have broken my good axe," was all he said, "I have broken my good axe."

"This Is A Totally Dopey Criticism"

Physicist Sean Carroll explains to his colleagues some misconceptions they have about philosophy.

Liberty and education

I realize most people are never going to homeschool, and I'm not going to claim I never disagree with Rand [correction: Ron] Paul, but he speaks to me on education issues:

“The idea that government ‘experts’ can centrally plan a nation’s educational system is just as flawed as the idea that government can centrally plan the economy."

. . . The Ron Paul Curriculum, launched last fall, is designed to be used by homeschoolers, and takes a unique approach to education that reflects Paul’s libertarian-leaning political values.  The Curriculum includes lessons on Austrian economics and libertarian political theory, and teaches students how to start their own business on the Internet.  It almost totally eschews social studies until students are at the high school level, taking the view that early childhood social studies education mostly promotes statism.  The Curriculum also reflects a Christian worldview, with early history education putting significant focus on the Book of Genesis, Biblical Israel and the Reformation.

Paul’s program is also designed to be relatively cheap, as it uses no textbooks and is mostly self-taught, meaning there is little need for costly teachers.  High school learning builds up to students taking CLEP exams that can provide students with college credit, thereby allowing them to graduate earlier and at a lower cost.

Bannockburn, Day I

Here's how Wikipedia describes the first day of the Bannockburn.

Here is the description from In Freedom's Cause:

On the morning of Sunday, the 23d of June, immediately after sunrise, the Scotch attended mass, and confessed as men who had devoted themselves to death. The king, having surveyed the field, caused a proclamation to be made that whosoever felt himself unequal to take part in the battle was at liberty to withdraw. Then, knowing from his scouts that the enemy had passed the night at Falkirk, six or seven miles off, he sent out Sir James Douglas and Sir Robert Keith with a party of horsemen to reconnoitre the advance.

The knights had not gone far when they saw the great army advancing, with the sun shining bright on innumerable standards and pennons, and glistening from lance head, spear, and armour. So grand and terrible was the appearance of the army that upon receiving the report of Douglas and Keith the king thought it prudent to conceal its full extent, and caused it to be bruited abroad that the enemy, although numerous, was approaching in a disorderly manner.

The experienced generals of King Edward now determined upon making an attempt to relieve Stirling Castle without fighting a pitched battle upon ground chosen by the enemy. Had this attempt been successful, the great army, instead of being obliged to cross a rapid stream and attack an enemy posted behind morasses, would have been free to operate as it chose, to have advanced against the strongholds which had been captured by the Scots, and to force Bruce to give battle upon ground of their choosing. Lord Clifford was therefore despatched with 800 picked men-at-arms to cross the Bannock beyond the left wing of the Scottish army, to make their way across the carse, and so to reach Stirling. The ground was, indeed, impassable for a large army; but the troops took with them faggots and beams, by which they could make a passage across the deeper parts of the swamp and bridge the little streams which meandered through it.

As there was no prospect of an immediate engagement, Randolph, Douglas, and the king had left their respective divisions, and had taken up their positions at the village of St. Ninians, on high ground behind the army, whence they could have a clear view of the approaching English army. Archie Forbes had accompanied Randolph, to whose division he, with his retainers, was attached. Randolph had with him 500 pikemen, whom he had withdrawn from his division in order to carry out his appointed task of seeing that the English did not pass along the low ground at the edge of the carse behind St. Ninians to the relief of Stirling; but so absorbed were knights and men-at-arms in watching the magnificent array advancing against the Scottish position that they forgot to keep a watch over the low ground. Suddenly one of the men, who had straggled away into the village, ran up with the startling news that a large party of English horse had crossed the corner of the carse, and had already reached the low ground beyond the church.

"A rose has fallen from your chaplet, Randolph," the king said angrily.

Without a moment's loss of time Randolph and Archie Forbes set off with the spearmen at a run, and succeeded in heading the horsemen at the hamlet of Newhouse. The mail clad horsemen, confident in their numbers, their armour, and horses, laid their lances in rest, struck spurs into their steeds, and, led by Sir William Daynecourt, charged down upon the Scotch spearmen. Two hundred of these consisted of Archie Forbes' retainers, all veterans in war, and who had more than once, shoulder to shoulder, repelled the onslaught of the mailed chivalry of England. Animated by the voices of their lord and Randolph, these, with Moray's own pikemen, threw themselves into a solid square, and, surrounded by a hedge of spears, steadily received the furious onslaught of the cavalry. Daynecourt and many of his men were at the first onslaught unhorsed and slain, and those who followed were repulsed. Again and again they charged down upon the pikemen, but the dense array of spears was more than a match for the lances of the cavalry, and as the horses were wounded and fell, or their riders were unhorsed, men rushed out from the square, and with axe and dagger completed the work. Still the English pressed them hard, and Douglas, from the distance, seeing how hotly the pikemen were pressed by the cavalry, begged the king to allow him to go to Randolph's assistance. Bruce, however, would suffer no change in his position, and said that Randolph must stand or fall by himself. Douglas, however, urged that he should be allowed to go forward with the small body of retainers which he had with him. The king consented, and Douglas set off with his men.

When the English saw him approach they recoiled somewhat from the square, and Douglas, being now better able to see what was going on, commanded his followers to halt, saying that Randolph would speedily prove victorious without their help, and were they now to take part in the struggle they would only lessen the credit of those who had already all but won the victory. Seeing the enemy in some confusion from the appearance of the reinforcement, Randolph and Archie now gave the word for their men to charge, and these, rushing on with spear and axe, completed the discomfiture of the enemy, killed many, and forced the rest to take flight. Numbers, however, were taken. Randolph is said to have had but two men killed in the struggle.

The greater fight was to come.

To Tame A Horse And Ride It To War

The men emerged over the crest of a ridge and guided their horses along a tree line, skirting a wide meadow. They picked their way along narrow trails, climbing higher into the Sierra until a panorama of snowcapped peaks and a broad green valley unfolded beneath them.

The men, Special Forces soldiers dressed in jeans and other civilian clothes, led their horses into a thick stand of pine trees, where they dismounted and let the horses drink from a clear mountain stream before breaking out their own rations.

At this remote training area high in the Sierra, the U.S. Marine Corps is reviving the horsemanship skills that were once a key part of the nation's armed forces but were cast aside when tanks and armored vehicles replaced them. The need to bring these skills back was driven home in Afghanistan in 2001, when the first Special Forces soldiers to arrive found themselves fighting on horseback alongside tribesmen in rugged terrain without roads. Many had never ridden a horse before.

"We don't want to reinvent anything," said Marine Capt. Seth Miller, the officer in charge of formal schools at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. "These are skills that were lost."

Marine instructors are teaching the students, most of them Army Special Forces soldiers, how to control horses, care for them and load packs. The students are taught how to calculate routes and distances for rides and what to look for when purchasing horses from locals. For example, checking teeth is a good way to determine age and avoid getting ripped off by a farmer trying to pass off an ancient mule or horse.

In a throwback to the old Wild West days, instructors are considering training soldiers in how to shoot from a moving horse....

There's quite a bit more at the link. We may see a swelling in our ranks.

More on the IRS Email Backup Firm

So apparently the IRS decided not to renew that company's contract to back up their emails, just weeks after Lerner's hard drive crashed... and just weeks before other crashes of drives of involved parties.

So the first question is, what does Sonasoft have? Were they obligated to destroy, or to retain, the records that the IRS had already paid for them to store?

The second question is, did the IRS decide to go with a different firm -- or to stop backing up its emails?

Public Radio Continues to Shine

This week on NPR: 'Speaking of budgetary concerns, a country doesn't really have to have an army, you know.'

Maleficent and Benghazi

Last night I had a date with my one-and-only, and for reasons I won't discuss we ended up seeing this damnable new take on Sleeping Beauty.

Now I wasn't expecting much. What little I see of current Hollywood doesn't leave me impressed with its imagination; and "reimaginings" without imagination don't do much for me. But I walked out of this one spitting mad. Indulge me a moment while I say why.

If you haven't seen it (lucky souls), the concept is perfectly simple. The king from Sleeping Beauty owed a great debt to the "bad fairy," but instead betrayed her to gain power for himself. (The poor thing didn't understand how greedy men were 'til later...her Green credentials are spotless.) It relates to his desire, and his father's, to steal the peaceful woodlands from the magical creatures who inhabit them -- and if they'd only leave them alone, or make amends and give back what they stole, all would be well. The fairy's curse is a burst of understandable righteous anger at the king's perfidy; but he's able to get a measure of mercy out of her just by begging on his knees, that being the right position to check his privilege. And later on the conscience-ridden Maleficent does everything she can to fix the problem. And in the end "true love" is revealed to be, not a romantic attachment between man and woman (which our female lead denies, and she's never proven wrong), but pity and remorse for a victim.

I expected some genuflections to the prevailing orthodoxies of PC and "Cultural Marxism." I didn't expect them to replace the whole story. If you're a civilized ruler under attack...white male type...well, that settles it, you must have provoked it. In a classic heroic fairy tale (or even a healthy cartoon version), there's evil in the world and it's got to be fought, and kings, princes, knights, and soldiers have an especial duty to do so. In this? There's no evil but what you create yourself; no one's out to attack you unless you provoked it; the "victim card" not only explains but excuses every evil; and those who can play it have all the noblest sentiments. In fact, no one except victims has any noble sentiments, not in this film they don't. The story's been rewritten to include hundreds of soldiers, but they're either villains or faceless dragon fodder, and everyone from king to peasant would be better off without them. The cartoon was truer to life.

It seems to me this new take on the classic tale is the same viewpoint that inspired certain parties' incorrect assertions on the subject of Benghazi. I don't think they invented the "video" story out of whole cloth. I think it was their first instinct. Americans under attack by Muslims? It must be our fault. We must have provoked them. Send in the troops? Get our people out at once? Perish the thought -- that might provoke them some more. Better to show an appeasing image. And when the first instinct turned out to be untrue...it was still the natural story to run with. Teach every child that view; then our future leaders are secured.

Apparently now not only our schools and our press, but our fairytales as well, must teach suicidalism.. This civilization's going to be hard to rebuild. I think all that's left for Hollywood is to retell Aesop's fable of the Wolves and the Sheep to explain how it's all the Sheepdogs' fault. Which, come to that, is just what the wolves were saying.

Harvey Mansfield Decides To Retire

At least, I assume so, given his decision to publish this as an employee of Harvard.

Well, the man was born in 1932. It's no surprise he might be ready to "spend more time with his family."

Who embodied evil before Hitler?

Tyler Cowan muses on what historical or literary figure people referred to before Hitler became everyone's stock idea of a villain?  It turns out that Pharaoh and Judas were favorite choices for millennia.  Commenters chime in with nominations for Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and other barbarian invaders.  Nero, Caligula, and Domitian fell out of favor a while back.

Once Hitler came along, he really enjoyed a consensus.  This is a Western perspective, of course.

"They Are Excommunicated"

This is perhaps less directed to the ‘Ndrangheta themselves than to the priests who serve in their communities. What the Pope said was not that he was excommunicating the mafia, but that they were excommunicating themselves by their choices of associations and actions, their "adoration of evil and contempt for the common good."

So priests in southern Italy should refuse them Communion, or a Catholic burial should they die without reconciliation.

It's a significant move, and I wonder why it has never been done before.

But this is the same Pope who insisted on ditching the bulletproof glass.

"It's true that anything could happen, but let's face it, at my age I don't have much to lose," he told Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia in an interview published Friday and reported on in English by Vatican Radio. "I know that something could happen to me, but it's in the hands of God."

So maybe the answer's as simple as that. He is not afraid.

"Lions Ate Him."

Nick at Ranger Up has a good story about the time he was almost eaten by a lion during a college trip to Africa.

Interestinger and interestinger

How would you like to be the CEO of the company to which the IRS outsourced its data backup?

Well, I'm sure it's all a big misunderstanding.  Or else a lot more people are planning to take the fifth soon, and mostly the latter.

Regulatory failure

I'm reading John Allison's "The Financial Crisis," a free-market take on the collapse that precipitated the Great Recession.  He's been discussing the moral hazard of deposit insurance, a difficult topic for me.  I've known since the S&L crisis in the mid-1980's, which created the wave of bankruptcies on which I cut my teeth as a young lawyer, that deposit insurance threatens a dangerous spiral in interest paid on consumer deposits, followed by riskier bank investments needed to generate the higher interest.  Without deposit insurance, a bank that pays too high an interest rate on consumer deposits will face a corrective mechanism: the difficulty of finding safe borrowers who can pay high interest on loans.  If the bank takes too many wild flyers on its borrowers, it goes broke, and its depositors lose their money.  Depositors who don't want to lose their money won't deposit it in a bank with a reputation for wild-eyed lending.

No one likes this disciplinary mechanism, because it tends to lead to panics and bank runs, especially on the part of small mom-and-pop depositors with all their liquid eggs in one basket.  Politically and practically, we're going to have deposit insurance one way or another.  Allison points out, however, that even with deposit insurance, people with deposits over the insured limit can exert useful pressure on banks to moderate their appetite for making risky loans.  But in the run-up to the 2008/2009 financial crisis, the uninsured-depositor disciplinary mechanism broke down.

In July 2008, regulators shut down IndyMac, with loans (assets) of $32 billion and deposits (liabilities) of $19 billion, without opting to cover any of the $1 billion (5%) of its deposits that were uninsured, (that is, deposits exceeding $100,000 per customer).   It was the largest collapse of an FDIC-insured institution since Continental Illinois in 1984, and it hit the public hard.  Five percent of deposits being uninsured may not seem like a lot, but the public was nervous, and it didn't help that newscasts showed unhappy depositors lined up at windows.

So the stage was set for real jumpiness over the summer.  Regulators had known for most of the year that failure was inevitable at Washington Mutual, the country's largest savings & loan, with assets in mid-2008 of $308 billion and deposits of $188 billion.  Whether because of the IndyMac experience, general jumpiness in the real estate market, or machinations by regulators and their cronies (the last possibility is the subject of litigation that hasn't yet quit, six years later), WaMu suffered a $16 billion bank run in September 2008 just before regulators shut it down and sold its assets to J.P. Morgan for a pittance.   Regulators, in no mood to spark an even more widespread bank run, made a fateful decision to cover all uninsured deposits.

Here is where Allison argues the biggest mistake was made.   It would have been possible to cover the uninsured deposits with taxpayer money.  That would have been politically poisonous, of course, but infuriated taxpayers could have done little about it in the short run.  Instead, however, regulators dumped the entire hit on WaMu's bondholders:  that is, the capital markets that had provided liquidity to the bank via traditional loans rather than through insured deposits.  Unlike taxpayers, the capital markets could and did retaliate instantly.  Allison, who ran BB&T (a real-estate-oriented Atlanta bank), reports that the capital markets had been tight during that troubled summer, but BB&T had just succeeded in floating a bond issue before WaMu failed.  The day after the feds stiffed the WaMu bondholders, the capital market for banks dried up without a trace.  Allison argues that this event was far more damaging to the liquidity of the financial markets than the failure of Lehman Brothers that same month.  He also argues that it was D.C.'s panic over the dried-up capital markets resulting from the WaMu decision that drove the TARP bank-bailout bill later in the year.

Solstice

O thou who passest thro’ our valleys in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitchedst here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard
Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o’er the deep of heaven: beside our springs
Sit down, and in our mossy valleys, on
Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy
Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:
Our valleys love the Summer in his pride.

Our bards are famed who strike the silver wire:
Our youth are bolder than the southern swains:
Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:
We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,
Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,
Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.

-William Blake

Paying Attention

A friend, veteran, and fellow biker sends:

Today was the date for the publication of my very favorite annual poll, the Gallup Confidence in Institutions Poll. As you know from hearing me talk about this in the past, all of our democratic and political organs have been suffering a long-term decline in public confidence. Congress is now down to seven percent! None of our major political institutions now command "a lot" or "quite a bit" of confidence from a third of Americans.

The police still command a majority (though still behind 'small business' and 'the military'). So clearly my friend's sentiment is not widely shared.

Nevertheless it's an interesting point. The biker's loyalties are unknown, and he has adopted a posture that suggests he is dangerous. On the other hand, the shotgun he's carrying is of limited hazard. The policeman belongs to a unit, with military-grade gear, and has the backing of the government. Obviously the policeman is far, far more dangerous.

But people trust the police, and even more the military, though they don't trust the government that they serve. That's interesting. It seems like there's got to be a kind of very serious tension there: trusting the servant, but not the master. Or do we trust that those in arms are gentlemen, and will at last do the right thing no matter how corrupt their leaders might be?

Friday Night AMV

Bad boys. Yeah. That isn't anything new.

Misunderstanding Evolution

Where do people get the idea that "evolution" is a kind of uplifting arrow?

A star was born this week in Stockton, California: Jeremy Meeks, a 30-year-old convicted felon whose hunky mugshot — featuring dreamy slate-blue eyes and chiseled cheekbones — has turned him into a viral heartthrob....

“This is a really great example of an evolutionary lag — how women still find things attractive that don’t necessarily translate well into the modern world,” Vinita Mehta, a Washington, D.C.–based psychotherapist, tells Yahoo Shine. Because while being muscular and tough enough to thrive in dangerous situations might have been necessary for human survival back in caveman times, “these are not the things that help us survive and reproduce today,” notes Mehta, who is writing a book titled “Paleo Love” about how Stone Age genes can complicate modern relationships.

What on earth are you talking about? Strong sexual attraction to a man with low ethics and little impulse control is a great way for a woman to reproduce. Thus she brings about the survival of the species, who will be physically strong and with that helpful lack of impulse control (unless we get a mutation...).

That's what evolution is about. It doesn't have a moral trajectory.

Oh, well. Here's your bumper sticker.

Virtutis Gloria Merces

A friend writes from the road:

I am in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. A guy who just reminded me a lot of you just helped me reattach my bumper in a gas station parking lot. Thank you, because I know you would've done the same thing for some poor crying girl.

That's just how it should be.

"Colonel" Sinclair to Retire

Apparently the end of the saga of once-Brigade General Sinclair, who fought a more successful PR campaign against his prosecution by the Army than he did an actual campaign as deputy commander of the 82nd Airborne. In spite of confessing to numerous violations of the UCMJ which could have led to a sentence of 20 years in Leavenworth, he will be allowed to serve no time whatsoever and retire with his pension.

However, he will lose two grades, and retire as a lieutenant colonel -- still a field grade officer, but no longer a general officer.

His retirement pay will come in somewhere between $3,000 and $4,200 a month as I understand it. The per capita income in the county where I live is $16,700, so a man could live quite well on what he'll be pulling in.

But if he was a lover of honor, the price at least is high: once a man who was respected for his service and career, he retires in disgrace, a confessed oathbreaker.

Ah, the Patriarchy

A "Feminist Father" wears a T-shirt with the following "Rules for Dating My Daughter":

1. I don’t make the rules
2. You don’t make the rules
3. She makes the rules
4. Her body, her rules

This is, of course, just as accurately a statement of the law. It's exactly what the law says, it's exactly how any American court will rule should a relevant case appear before it.

So, if he's a "Feminist Father" for declaring these rules, do we have a "Feminist System of Law" as well? I thought we were living in some sort of patriarchy -- even a rape culture. How surprising to learn that, instead, the positive laws perfectly adhere to Feminist principles on the subject of greatest interest to them.

Charts!

A newsletter linked me to these WaPo charts, describing any number of U.S. trends by state and by county.  Most of them make Texas look pretty middle-of-the-road.

Cleansing

Starting with "The Washington Racecards," the National Review Online is soliciting our help in coming up with a new and more appropriate name for the sports franchise that dare not speak its name. "The Redtapes" is good, I think.

Songbirds

Dr. Althouse posts a short piece about people reacting very angrily to a woman who posted a picture of a rabbit she was skinning for dinner. "Rabbit ate my parsley," the lady wrote. "I am eating the rabbit."

Well, of course you are. That makes total sense to me. Apparently not to everyone!

The second item in the piece by Althouse has to do with a dog-eating festival in Yulin, China. One of the comments to the post says, "I love to have some dog- and cat-eating Chinese and Koreans as neighbors so as to help reduce the annual 1 billion songbird slaughter."

I assume he means by the dogs and (especially) the cats. But what it brought to my mind was a memory from China, when my wife and I were hiking on Precious Stone Hill near Hangzhou. We heard a beautiful songbird, and I suddenly realized that I couldn't remember having heard one the entire time I'd been in China. Walking forward excitedly, we came around a bend in the trail and found... several men, who had brought birds in cages up to the top of the mountain and were getting them to sing to each other.

I learned after that there is a cultural pride taken in being the top of the food chain, such that animals in general are considered edible. I began to notice that the stalls in the market had a huge variety of eggs for sale, not just chicken or duck but of all sorts of little birds.

To this day I don't know if the men up there were using their caged birds to try to lure more birds for them to catch as food, or if they were just a small society of men who longed to hear a songbird in a wild place.

Whatevering

Matt Walsh has lost patience with single dudes who no longer have the vocabulary to describe whatever it is they are or aren't doing with female dudes. "We're 'talking.'  We're 'hanging out.'  We're 'whatever.'"

Here’s some brutal honesty for you:  if you ‘aren’t ready for something serious,’ then you need to go get yourself ready and leave these ladies alone until you do.  You can’t go out and have sex (I mean, ‘hook up,’ as the middle schoolers at the lunch table might call it) and then claim that you ‘aren’t ready for something serious.’  It’s too late, friend.  Sex is something serious.

Barber Shops

I used to go to barber shops. My favorite one was run out of one end of a tire shop. They'd use a pressurized air line to blow off the back of your neck that was hooked to the same pump that they were airing tires with on the other side of the wall. They'd shave your neck with a straight razor.

These days my hair is too thin to bother a barber about. I just shave it off once every week or so. Testosterone poisoning, you know. Huge beard, no hair.

But I remember them fondly, those barber shops.

Technical Difficulties

Speaking of computer crashes, I've had one recently. I paid a substantial fee to get my hard disk reformatted and my data restored, but now it seems to be crashing again less than a week later. This is one of a half a dozen major mechanical or technical malfunctions that have come up all at once, and the second one to recur after I thought I had it fixed.

It may be that my connectivity will be limited for a while, as some of these things are of more immediate need than my having a working computer.

Hate speech

In order to protect children from hate speech, a Connecticut high school blocks internet access to the National Rifle Association, the Connecticut GOP, and right-to-life groups, the Vatican, and Christianity.com, but allows access to Moms Demand Action, Newtown Action Alliance, Planned Parenthood, Pro-Choice America, the state Democratic party, and Islam-guide.com.

Taking lessons from the IRS, no doubt.

Today's News, Yesterday

June 17, 2014, 1:21 PM, Allahpundit:

I’ll spare you a click and Voxsplain this one right here: Clearly the answer is to increase the IRS’s budget, so that they can afford more reliable PCs.

June 18, 2014, 12:10 PM, Vox:

Headline: The IRS scandal shows the IRS needs a bigger budget

Wow. Good call, AP.

Two ways to water

California's, and Dean Kamen's.

IRS Emails

So, that IRS email story is pretty unbelievable, huh?

What would it take to cause the executive branch to tell such an obvious lie to Congress?

Two theories:

1) Not much, because the Justice Department is so corrupt that, even if a special prosecutor were appointed, they know the appointment will be so in the tank that there's no danger in outright lies.

2) Something huge, because the price -- even without a special prosecutor -- is convincing the American people that the civil service, and not merely the elected executive branch, is wholly corrupt and in need of replacement.

Opinions?

GySgt Johns

Gunnery Sergeant Johns, a veteran of several Iraq campaigns and a former drill instructor, was killed as a contractor. I'm not sure how well linking to a Facebook post works, but I think we should pay particular attention to these American contractors who are doing the fighting in Iraq. They are America's face on the ground, and likely the only Americans who are going to be contesting ISIS's advance in direct combat.

Post by Dakota Meyer.

Rest in peace.

A Tomb Fit For A King

What does one look like? Here's the design chosen for the tomb of the recently-recovered body of Richard III:



Here's the tomb of another, not quite a king but a truly great figure in English royalty: Edward "The Black Prince" of Wales.

A Man Could Get Killed Doing That

Secretary of State John Kerry “should be on a plane right now for Baghdad,” former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said Tuesday.

“The focus has been on the conflict, that is indeed serious, but, you know, diplomacy is what is crucial right now,” Crocker said on “CBS This Morning.” “We need to work with the Iraqis at the highest level,” which, he said, entails having Kerry urge Iraq’s leaders to pursue a national unity government.

Further down the report, Hot Air draws the wrong conclusion from a report that 44 detainees were killed in a gunfight near Baqubah. They say that ISIS killed them; the report says that they died in a jail being defended by Shi'ite militia. More likely the Shi'ite militia killed the detainees to prevent them being rescued and released by the ISIS. They were, after all, enemies of the government, and the militia couldn't be sure they could hold the jail. If the militia thought they would pick up arms for ISIS if released, it very likely summarily executed them.

This is no place for John Kerry. We should send someone serious, if we have anyone left.

Fireflies

June is the best month for fireflies. Once, long ago, I walked down by the Rappahannock river in a field of trees cut down by beavers, whitened spears in the early dark, with hundreds of fireflies flashing against the trees.

Tonight there were fewer, but still many, past dusk but not quite full dark. The thunderheads of early evening had moved off west, still flickering with lightning from cloud to cloud. We caught one, put it in a jar with holes in the lid for a while, then let it go. The horses came down to see what we were about. The air smelled of rain.

We call them "lightning bugs" here in Georgia, more often than "fireflies." They're among my favorite things.

Battle of the Presidents

An interesting contrast!

Uh-oh

Russia just carried out its threat to cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine.  Europe had better get fracking.

Abortion vs. contraception

Melinda Gates announced that the $40 billion Gates Foundation will no longer fund abortions.  While she declines to discuss her own views on abortion, she explained that her first allegiance is to providing parents--especially women--support for contraception, prenatal care, and newborn care.  She finds that her preferred policies enjoy a broad and deep consensus, while abortion is a lightning rod for controversy.  Conflating abortion with family planning complicates her primary task, so she's opting out.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood, in contrast, seem to go out of their way to conflate abortion with family planning, for at least two purposes:  to permit them to accuse any opponents of interfering with both, and to stymie efforts to sort out what portion of their funding pays for abortions.

More On Defections

The captured were mostly these Iraqi Air Force we've been talking about:

Most of those captured were air force cadets, the employee said. Those who were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were marched and trucked off to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in Tikrit, where they reportedly were executed.

Lots of caveats about how reliable the images are, and the reports themselves. That's good -- the journalists may have learned a thing since the American part of the war, where they tended to take insurgent claims of massacres at face value. Often if we sent an infantry unit out there to see if there really were heads piled up like the newspapers said, there was nothing of the sort. But the report, in the international press, multiplied the effect of their propaganda.

For Tom, Who Asked

'Why did the Iraqi Army melt away?,' Tom asked recently. We went through a few reasons at the time. Here's an interview that confirms some of them, for a Shi'a soldier from a distant (and safe) city, with officers and fellow soldiers he didn't trust to do their duty.

On Day Four of clashes in Mosul between encroaching jihadists and Iraqi security forces, two officers visited an outpost of the Iraqi 2nd Division’s logistics battalion with bad news: they said that all senior commanders had fled.

Stunned and confused, the men called headquarters and received the same information, that all officers colonel and above had abandoned their posts....

Had the Iraqi military brass in Mosul been chosen because of competency rather than cronyism, Nasseri suggested, perhaps the Islamic State’s march toward Baghdad could’ve been halted, or at least stalled.

“I know what I need to know about fighting in a city,” Nasseri said. “I fought side by side with Americans. Their military has leaders that tell the soldiers what the plan is, and fight. We don’t. There were many more terrorists in Fallujah and the fight was over in a month. (Mosul) wouldn’t have been a big problem if we had leaders.”

Compare and contrast with the story about the American contractors, who were able to pick up the rifles dropped by the fleeing soldiers and hold off the ISIS until they could be extracted.

Ritual

A few months ago I began helping in the church service as a lay reader.  The Episcopalians being a bit on the high-church side, this calls for learning a lot of ritual.  There's candle-lighting in a particular pattern and order to start with, then a procession (with hymn), with various people carrying various things in a particular order.  Next there are readings by a couple of different laymen interspersed with the priest's parts in the Book of Common Prayer, now and then joined by the choir and the congregation, as we sing together the Gloria, the Sanctus, and the Lord's Prayer.  Then the sermon, more speaking parts by laymen, a complicated hand-off of offering plates and the elements of the Eucharist among the ushers, the acolytes, the lay readers, and the priest.  Then the serving of the wine and bread, which in itself is an intricate minuet involving three people (plus the communicants at the rail) and lots of spoken parts.  Finally, announcements, special blessings for birthdays and anniversaries, extinguishing the candles in reverse order, and the recession (with hymn).

Today was complete discombobulation.  Our rector had been called suddenly out of town and replaced by a sweet old visiting priest who does things rather differently--lots of things are optional--in addition to being just a bit forgetful today.  He forgot the Gospel lesson altogether, together with perhaps half of the order of communion, and started the announcements early in the service when the ushers were standing near the front door, ready to bring up the elements and trade them for the offering plates.  (An old hand suggested tactfully from his pew, "Maybe now would be a good time for the Offertory."  The priest gratefully agreed.)  Our young acolyte suffered a bout of stomach upset in the middle of the service and left the altar, returning quickly, but still distracted enough by her physical distress that she never quite got back into her groove.

I'm still new enough to have trouble remembering my lines and my paces at various points.  Reading the lessons is easy, but there are stock phrases at the beginning and end that aren't on the hand-out, as well as times when I need to stand here and do this, or stand there and do that, which is particularly challenging when the visiting priest is used to something different--will he pour the wine or does he want us to?--and doesn't offer quite the cues I'm used to.  In the end we all more or less flubbed everything, but the important thing is that communion got served and we all tried not do anything too distracting or irreverent, so I don't think anyone's worship was hampered.  I try to concentrate on not fidgeting or drifting, and on thinking about what needs to happen next, in case somebody gets shot out of the saddle and another of us needs to pick up the slack seamlessly.

Our altar guild director has been urging me to read more slowly.  Today my first lesson was quite long, the whole opening section of Genesis, all seven days of creation.  I felt I'd be at the lectern reading all morning, but I concentrated on slowing down.  After the service, a parishioner congratulated me on reading quickly.  "It was such a long passage," she said, "we'd still be in there if you hadn't picked up the pace."  "Cap'n," I wanted to say, "I canna rrread any more slowly than that!"

When I was participating as a member of the congregation, I scarcely noticed all the choreographed movement in the sanctuary.  It's almost like putting on a short musical.  I look forward to getting so comfortable with all the parts that the whole team can respond flexibly and serenely to the unexpected, whether that's a lay reader who forgets to show up or a blessing inserted into the "Prayers of the People" that includes a reference to a perfectly unpronounceable church and pastor in Myanmar (as happened this morning).  Luckily, no one in the congregation knows how to pronounce Burmese, either.  Just sound confident and move on.

Some years ago, when life seemed quite unbearable, I concluded that what I needed in my life was more music, more ritual, and more animals.  It's been just what the doctor ordered.

Father's Day Activities

Today I've refreshed someone on how to build a fire to soften beans for Father's Day chili. After that, fly-sprayed the horses and put Vaseline in the ears to keep flies out of them. The beasts are much happier now.

Then we got out the grindstone and repaired a knife that had gotten blunted due to being used by an inexperienced hand. While we were at it, resharpened axe, hatchet, machete.

Perhaps a game of chess later. Beer on ice for the appropriate hour.

Pretty good day, so far.

Father's Day: Don't Forget About "Poor White Trash"

Fatherhood is always important, but perhaps it is of most moment for the poorest and most vulnerable families. Our culture tends to look down on them, sometimes with cause, but we need them. We need them even as they are.

David Allan Coe wrote a song about a poor Texas family, and especially about "the old man." It shows a lot that is bad about the poorer kind of family, but some things that are good about a family that manages to hang together in spite of a life made of very rough times. And somehow, though he speaks of his father as a violent drunk, 'mean as a rattlesnake,' you can hear the respect come through.



By contemporary standards, the language is extremely offensive. Probably it was offensive when he wrote it.

And when he wrote it, families like this were common. Now we see fewer of them, and more single mothers on welfare. We often talk as though a child is better off without a father like the one portrayed here. But the sons learned to work on automobiles, and to work hard -- cutting firewood, chopping tobacco, working all summer because they were planning ahead for the winter. Those are lessons you don't learn in a house supported by a welfare check.

Well, it's a harsh picture all the same. If you don't like that one, try this one. Daddy is a god-fearing man in this one.



Better? But the first song was about David Allan Coe, who pushed out of that kind of poverty to success and glory. The second father raised a son who intended only that "someday, when I'm grown, I'll be the same."

US Army Birthday & Flag Day

The "Betsy Ross" Flag

Flag of the US Army

Happy Birthday.

Say, What is the Purpose of Education?

A strong article, with several parts too good to excerpt. What is that education supposed to accomplish? What is it for?

Finding Lois' Emails

Dr. Althouse agrees with the National Journal that a special prosecutor is wholly warranted by the IRS' claim that it has lost two years of Lois Lerner's official email traffic. She has a good point: after decades of noting that 'it's the cover-up that kills you, not the crime,' it's worth asking how bad the crime has to be to justify such a blatant, obvious cover-up.

Or maybe you'd want us to believe that there was no crime. Fine. A special prosecutor can look into that too. I expect we'll all of us feel better about accepting that conclusion at the end of an independent and thoroughgoing investigation.

"Your father is passing"

Firedog Lake ran this clip from "To Kill a Mockingbird" and invited readers to pick a favorite fictional father.  Atticus Finch is a popular favorite in the general population, and deservedly so, but what struck me about the reaction on this particular site was the tepid response.  A few commenters picked ineffectual dads from comedies, but most seemed uncomfortable with the very idea of fathers and changed the subject as quickly as they could.

I couldn't find the exact clip from Firedog Lake, which included Atticus shooting the mad dog, but here is a good one:



I've always had a soft spot for the dad in "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel."

Bidding Wars

So, there's nothing surprising in this, except that the mechanism is laid out in easy-to-grasp terms.

Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notices a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, “Look at that beautiful bird outside!” He’s not just commenting on the bird here: he’s requesting a response from his wife—a sign of interest or support—hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird.

The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either “turning toward” or “turning away” from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.

People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. Those who didn’t—those who turned away—would not respond or respond minimally and continue doing whatever they were doing, like watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes they would respond with overt hostility, saying something like, “Stop interrupting me, I’m reading.”

These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. Couples who had divorced after a six-year follow up had “turn-toward bids” 33 percent of the time. Only three in ten of their bids for emotional connection were met with intimacy. The couples who were still together after six years had “turn-toward bids” 87 percent of the time.

Anabasis

American contractors in Iraq held off an ISIS siege until they could be evacuated by the Iraqi Air Force.

The attacking ISIS forces approached the base in trucks Wednesday and called through loudspeakers for all private security forces and Iraqi special military to leave immediately or die.

The U.S. private contractors in touch with WND reported that after hearing the broadcast, the private security forces and the Iraqi military defending the base dropped their weapons and ran.

The American contractors collected the weapons left behind and were able to hold off further immediate advances.

The report suggests that there may still be a hundred Americans to be evacuated, but the report is 21 hours old at this writing. The contractors were there to help the Iraqi Air Force prepare to receive the F-16s we promised to the Iraqi government, which suggests they are mostly USAF veterans.

A Momentous Week For Deaths

The American Legion's "Burn Pit" has a feature called 'Famous Deaths for the Week.' Last week's deaths include Alexander the Great, Hardicanute, Robert E. Howard, Andrew Jackson, and others.

Friday Night AMV

Yeah. Just burn it to the ground.

Nuts in Congress

David Brat is so eccentric, he thinks the State has a monopoly on violence.  Wait, never mind, almost everyone thinks that, going back to Max Weber.  Well, he's so crazy he thinks there's an essential tension between libertarianism and conservatism, which can be resolved only if we think humbly and honestly about which issues we're willing to license the State to enforce by violence:

Let me add one more definition to the picture to heighten this tension. In economics and political science, it is common to define the government as the entity that holds a monopoly on violence. This definition goes back to Max Weber, but it is used by recent Nobel laureates in economics as well. It does not mean that the State alone uses violence, but it does mean that when push comes to shove, the State will win in a battle of wills. If you refuse to pay your taxes, you will lose. You will go to jail, and if you fight, you will lose. The government holds a monopoly on violence. Any law that we vote for is ultimately backed by the full force of our government and military. Do we trust institutions of the government to ensure justice? Is that what history teaches us about the State? Or do we live in particularly lucky and fortunate times where the State can be trusted to do minimal justice? The State's budget is currently about $3 trillion a year. Do you trust that power to the political Right? Do you trust it to the Left? If you answered "no" to either question, you may have a major problem in the future. See Plato on the regime that follows democracy. 

So now, I hope you are feeling even a bit more ill-at-ease. The logic above is inescapable for a Christian. If we Christians vote for what we consider to be good policies, we are ultimately voting to ensure that our will is carried out by the most powerful force on earth, aside from God. The U.S. government has a monopoly on violence, and that force underlies the law of the land. 

Do we have the right to coerce our fellow citizens to act in ways that follow our Christian ethical beliefs?

Darn Tea Party crackpot partisan ignoramus.

Reason #1,186 for home-schooling

1,186.  Home-schooling may decrease your chances of having your parental rights terminated when your kid twirls a pencil and someone thinks it looks like a fancy gun move from an old Western, and then school officials notify DCS, which demands a psych evaluation, and then a second psych evaluation when the first one comes back "What are you, kidding me?"

“We never know what’s percolating in the minds of children,” Vernon Schools Superintendent Charles Maranzano said in an interview, defending the principal’s actions. “And when they demonstrate behaviors that raise red flags, we must do our duty.”

Government is the thing we all do together.

Fingernails on blackboards

Hillary Clinton has a peculiarly unpleasant style.  Here she is sparring, and finally quarreling, with an NPR interviewer who's trying to pin her down on whether she always supported gay marriage, but didn't think she could afford to admit it until recently, or instead was a gay-basher who only recently came around.  Clinton tries to argue that the whole country was against gay marriage until recently, so you can't blame her for being a johnny-come-lately, which the NPR interviewer isn't buying for one minute.  In the last two minutes, Clinton's snide side comes out loud and clear.

For what it's worth, my views on gay marriage were fully formed in the 1970s, so I guess I was several decades ahead of Her Inevitableness, even though I'm a bitter clinger and actually carry a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" card in my wallet.

Probably Because the MPs Have Already Fled the Capital

"Iraq parliament fails to reach quorum for emergency session."

So if you can't rely on the Iraqi Army, which is abandoning its posts and uniforms, and you can't rely on the parliament, on whom do you rely? The answer for the Kurds is the Peshmerga, whom they've deployed to secure Erbil and halt the ISIS. What's the obvious answer for Maliki? The US has already turned him down for airstrikes, though our government may be reconsidering. But he may make another, rather obvious choice.

You guys in the Interagency who were 'caught off guard' but are now trying to plan a response: what are the consequences of that choice? What can you do -- will you do -- to stop it from being made? What will you do if he makes it?

Some of These are Good Lessons

25 skills dad should teach, which of course means that dad better know them himself.

On the topic, Cass has a video today.

Honorable professions

In Venezuela, the government is completely cool with you if you're a prostitute, but not if you moonlight as a currency trader.

Understatement

Regarding tonight's defeat of Cantor, who will not be missed, InstaPundit quotes and comments thus:

He was also free of rancor toward Cantor, whom he judged a good man in a way that appeared authentic. This impressed me even more. Did we have an actual citizen politician here – and, incredibly, an intelligent one? Skeptical old me began to think of Frank Capra movies. Brat even had the diffident, bespectacled look of Jimmy Stewart.

Well, Stewart was actually kind of a tough guy. We’ll see.

Kind of?

Memories

John Derbyshire writes about the problems of memory:

My family moved from cramped rented rooms to a spacious new house a few days before my third birthday. I remember the move in some detail; and I have half a dozen memories of the rented rooms.

At least I think I have. One of Fernyhough’s themes is the unreliability of memory. There are true things we remember; there are stories we were told that somehow end up among our memories; there are dreams and imaginative flights we take for true memories; and there are second-order memories—memories of having remembered one of the preceding.

I am not sure what my earliest memory is, nor even when they came to be, but I do remember things that I can block out as being before five: the horrid shag carpet (of which I have recently discovered photographic evidence), swimming lessons at a very early age in a very public pool, a brown home with a hex sign on it that I was later told was in the old neighborhood.

I have a few early memories, and some later memories, but increasingly I find I have few or no memories at all of my early life. Even as a teenager -- a period I gather imprints carefully on most people -- it's hard for me to recall how things were, except for particular moments that were impressive. Even at the age of twenty, which Derbyshire's piece suggests is all-important, I can't readily remember anything: I'd have to chase it down, map it out, and see if anything occurred based on the data I could pull together.

And yet I have broad stories that aren't really memories, but must have been built out of them at some point: stories about how things were or what they meant.

Theories of Theories

So apparently according to my 20-something associates this article is a huge anti-gay slur, which is surprising because it's an article about how straight women suffer less relationship violence if they engage in stable marriages to men vice a series of boyfriends.

I'm not sure I understand what the connection is supposed to be, really, but apparently it's really offensive. You shouldn't consider it at all, even if you limit marriage to a "straight" context, which obviously would be totally wrong and immoral (you are expected to dispense with essentially all human history here).

So, you know, don't read it. Or if you do, don't think about it.

The Tea Party is de--. . . oh, wait.

Eric Cantor, Republican House majority leader, outspent his little-known opponent in the primary for his Virginia congressional district by 15 or 20 to 1, and lost his race today by about 45%-55%.  Virginia has a "sore loser" law that will prevent Cantor from running against the primary winner, David Brat, as an independent.

Brat is a thorough-going economic conservative of the Cato Institute stripe.  The Republican Party leadership is going bats.

Against Scientism

Apparently this Tyson person is important in some context, because his face has been popping up on my screen a lot. I assume at least some of you know who he is. I gather he is reputed to be an intelligent fool, for reasons this article lays out.

A Reasonable Question

When national security adviser Susan Rice claimed that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction,” members of his unit felt compelled to speak out, because the word “honor” actually means something to them. So did others who joined a dangerous manhunt in a warzone. The rest of us have no reason to prejudge the facts in this case, but those who served with Bergdahl have every right to present their version of events.

The Bergdahl case reveals a disturbing gap between the White House and military culture. After Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers corrected the administration’s false narrative, anonymous White House aides accused them of engaging in “Swift-boating.” Consider that a moment. While the White House (still) claims that Bergdahl served with “honor,” aides now impugn the motives of those who served beside him — and who stayed at their posts. Particularly in a time of war, why are these attacks not a firing offense?

The Jungle

California has adopted what are sometimes called "jungle primaries":  open to all comers of any party, and the top two face off against each other.  Here's a result I wouldn't have expected.  This Brookings article argues that incumbents are far more likely to face a challenge in a jungle primary:

This might be the biggest change we’ve seen so far this year as the result of the top two system.  In a traditional primary system a distant second place finish is an outright loss.  No wonder that the expectation of coming in second in a primary against an incumbent is usually deemed to be not worth the trouble.  Many potential challengers fail to take on incumbents.  But in the new system even a distant second place finisher gets his or her name on the ballot in November which gives them the opportunity to draw votes from an electorate with higher turnout.  This means a primary run is more viable and in the general election the incumbent might be more vulnerable.

Aussies to the rescue

Antipodean trends:  Australia seeks global allies to combat President Obama carbon-tax initiative:

[Australian Prime Minister Tony] Abbott’s conservative Liberal-National coalition won a landslide victory in Australia's elections last year, on a limited government platform that included repealing the country’s carbon tax and cutting green energy and global warming spending.

Abbott’s government is set to slash global warming spending by 90 percent over the next four years. Efforts to repeal the country’s carbon tax have also moved forward as Labor Party Senators have begun to buckle under pressure to get rid of the tax.

“The carbon tax is an act of economic vandalism,” Abbott said in March. “You can’t trust [Labor] anywhere near an economy.”

A study from last year by Dr. Alex Robson, an economist at Griffith University found that after just one year, the carbon tax increased taxes on 2.2 million Australians while doing nothing to decrease the country’s carbon emissions.

Robson’s study also found the carbon tax raised electricity prices 15 percent while the country’s unemployment rate shot up by 10 percent after the carbon tax was implemented.

"The day I left my son in the car"

Like many Americans my age, I read this story with a sense of awe at the difference between my own childhood and the norm today.  Are things really more dangerous now?  Neighborhoods are more anonymous, for the most part, but then statistics say the real danger is from family and friends rather than from strangers.  One thing of which there can be little doubt is that our culture feels more entitled to intervene in decisions between parents and children.

I'm curious whether the parents in the Hall will think the mother was in the wrong.  The comments in Salon are a tall drink of crazy.  "So what if your child isn't suffocated or abducted!  He could be maimed by the power window mechanism!"  What do I know?  I'm over-anxious even about my dogs.  Who am I to think I'd have been brave about children?  Still, I'm glad I grew up when kids were still allowed to go into the woods alone.

Balance of power

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany abandoned most of its nuclear power generation.  At the same time, the U.S. ramped up its natural gas production from the shale revolution.  Now German plants find themselves at a disadvantage in competing against U.S. manufacture.

Thanks in large part to Germany's decision to phase out nuclear power and push into green energy, companies there now pay some of the highest prices in the world for power.  On average, German industrial companies with large power appetites paid about 0.15 euros ($0.21) per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity last year, according to Eurostat, the European Union's statistics agency.

In the United States, electricity prices are falling thanks to natural gas derived from fracking - the hydraulic fracturing of rock.  Louisiana now boasts industrial electricity prices of just $0.055 per kWh, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data.

German companies are responding by shifting production to the U.S.  It seems unfair, but with any luck the new U.S. energy policies will fix all that.

An Interview with M. Le Pen

SPIEGEL: Do you want to destroy Europe?

Le Pen: I want to destroy the EU, not Europe! I believe in a Europe of nation-states. I believe in Airbus and Ariane, in a Europe based on cooperation. But I don't want this European Soviet Union.

SPIEGEL: The EU is a vast project for peace. It has helped ensure 70 years without war on the Continent.

Le Pen: No. Europe is war. Economic war. It is the increase of hostilities between the countries. Germans are denigrated as being cruel, the Greeks as fraudsters, the French as lazy. Ms. Merkel can't travel to any European country without being protected by hundreds of police. That is not brotherhood.

SPIEGEL: You now intend to head to Brussels only to fight the system.

Le Pen: And why not?

She is the daughter of the more famous (at least in America) Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Pentecost

You will of course hear from Acts 2 today, as is proper.

But for me, I always think of Sir Thomas Malory's work this day.

“The king stablished all his knights, and gave them that were of lands not rich, he gave them lands, and charged them never to do outrageousity nor murder, and always to flee treason; also, by no mean to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh mercy, upon pain of forfeiture of their worship and lordship of King Arthur for evermore; and always to do ladies, damosels, and gentlewomen succor upon pain of death. Also, that no man take no battles in a wrongful quarrel for no law, ne for no world’s goods. Unto this were all the knights sworn of the Table Round, both old and young. And every year were they sworn at the high feast of Pentecost.” (Le Morte d'Arthur, pp 115-116)

Great moments in marketing

Chobani yogurt's ingredients list includes "evaporated cane juice."  (So does my sugar bowl.)

Tunnel vision

Martin Bromiley's wife went into the hospital for minor surgery, but suffered catastrophic brain damage from being deprived of oxygen.  The surgical team experienced difficulty in ventilating the anesthetized patient, then in intubating her.  Instead of shifting focus to an emergency tracheotomy--a priority so obvious that even Bromiley immediately wondered why it had been overlooked--they seemingly lost track of time and spent 25 minutes intensely focused on repeating a failed procedure.

But when Bromiley was given the terrible news, his internal response was not furious rejection but recognition.  An airline pilot, he was reminded of United Airlines Flight 173, whose pilots ran it out of gas and crashed while fixating on a malfunctioning landing gear light.

Perhaps because of Bromiley's deep empathy for the surgical team's shocking and deadly error, he found a way not only to spur a useful investigation of his wife's death but to put the experience to good use in the medical field.  Medical workers respond well to his parallel experience with error fixation and other human foibles common to highly trained professional teams that face life-or-death emergencies.  Teams of this kind need charismatic, self-confident leaders, but they also need trusting communication and a disaster routine that kicks in when priorities get lost, the brain fixates, and the internal time clock stops working:  "Get that blood oxygenated one way or another within ten minutes" or "Fly the plane."

The hammock begins

The 7/32-inch rope arrived yesterday afternoon.  I spent most of the evening cutting it into 50-foot lengths, hooking them onto a dowel in doubled lengths of 25 feet, and tying up the long ends into bobbins.  Now I've tied knots in the first foot or so.  The triangle pattern is a little subtle.  I hope I was right about multiplying the feeder cord by three to get the finished length, because I seem to be using up the bobbins alarmingly fast.  I may have to bone up on those splicing techniques.

Having discovered how to make my laptop read aloud to me, I've spent the day so far knotting while listening to the articles I'd otherwise have sat and read.  Unfortunately, the program can't read a Kindle download, because I can't highlight the text in that format.  The artificial voice is mildly annoying but comprehensible.  You have to make allowances for its inability to distinguish between noun/verb pairs like PRO-ject and pro-JECT.  If it gets too confused by a name, it reverts to spelling.

Rightward shift

If you want to sneak up on someone who's getting drowsy, approach him from the left.  Even if he hears you, his brain may interpret the sound as coming from the right.

I'm sure this should help us win elections, too.

CWCID:  As always, when I start talking this way on a Saturday, I'm responding to a variety of excellent links from Not Exactly Rocket Science.  Some weeks, it's unremitting PC nonsense, but the pickings are good this week.

Scientific corruption

It looks a lot like corruption everywhere else.  The danger signs are almost always pretty much the same, the biggest red flag being a hostile and defensive response to questions.  When you get that creepy feeling, it's time to check your parachute or gird for total war:

The day to day operation of the lab was conducted under a severe information embargo. . . . Information flowed one way, which was up, and conversation between working groups was generally discouraged and often forbidden.

Raw data left one’s hands, went to the immediate superior (one of the three named above) and the next time it was seen would be in a manuscript or grant.  What happened to that data in the intervening period is unclear.

. . . [T]here was a pervasive feeling of fear in the laboratory.  Although individually-tailored stated and unstated threats were present for lab members, the plight of many of us who were international fellows was especially harrowing.  Many were technically and educationally underqualified compared to what might be considered average research fellows in the United States. . . .

This combination of being undesirable to many other labs should they leave their position due to lack of experience/training, dependent upon employment for U.S. visa status, and under constant threat of career suicide in your home country should you leave, was enough to make many people play along.

Even so, I witnessed several people question the findings during their time in the lab.  These people and working groups were subsequently fired or resigned.  I would like to note that this lab is not unique in this type of exploitative practice, but that does not make it ethically sound and certainly does not create an environment for creative, collaborative, or honest science.

Core nuttiness

Reading a series of articles trying to explain the controversy over Common Core leaves me feeling like a math-challenged second-grader trying to understand an opaque lesson on long division. This shouldn't be a complicated question: does a national standard for achievement give schools an accurate benchmark from which to judge the progress of each grade level and, if so, is that helpful? But then one reads the articles and falls immediately into a pit of murk. The whole concept of testing is flawed because it ignores the wonder of the educational accomplishments of each special snowflake. All academic standards are tools of the patriarchy. A rigid, uniform federal standard squelches individual state innovation and improvement. Tests are unfair, because teachers of poorly testing students are penalized for the crimes of parents or society. Curricula imposed from on high invariably lose sight of their educational purpose in favor of institutionalizing propaganda. Teachers will "teach to the test" instead of developing critical thinking skills in their students. The only way to develop critical thinking skills is to switch from a traditional set of standards or tests to Common Core. Common Core is a benign set of national standards based on an enlightened preference for critical thinking over rote memorization. Common Core is a cookie-cutter set of lesson plans that stifle creativity and prevent teachers from focussing on the needs of real students. Common Core saves money; Common Core imposes unfair costs on cash-strapped budgets. Only a Tea Partier would hate Common Core. Only a corrupt teacher's union would hate it. Parents hate Common Core because it removes control over their children's education to a more and more remote central authority. Parents hate Common Core because it exposes their children's so-called educational attainments to the harsh light of reality.

I recently finished reading Amanda Ripley's "The Smartest Kids in the World, and How They Got That Way." She examines schools in the U.S., South Korea, Finland, and Poland, as judged by the standards imposed by the International Baccalaureate Program, and concludes that a few straightforward reforms can make a huge difference in a nation's schools over a surprisingly short period. First, choose your teachers from the top 1/3 or 1/4 of their graduating classes, then give them the pay that's required to attract such a cohort. Second, combine rigorous standards for achievement with a wide latitude in methods. These two approaches are intimately linked, in that academically excellent teachers can be afforded the professional courtesy of autonomy, as long as you check frequently to ensure that the kids really are learning the curriculum. Finland converted itself from an educational backwater to the world's highest-performing system in just a few years with these limited techniques.

Common Core apparently is a bundled deal; if you want the rigorous, uniform standards, you have to accept a loss of autonomy and innovation, not to mention a hefty dose of propaganda and unintelligible nattering about "critical thinking skills" (however those are defined, they seem to be completely absent from Common Core's promotional materials as well as from most of the debate). We already have a pretty good set of tests in the International Baccalaureate system--why not use those, let teachers make up their own lesson plans, and let principals hire or fire them according to whether they make any useful progress with the kids?

Suddenly It All Makes Sense

Been mystified about the bone-headed decisions that have been rolling off the administration's foreign policy efforts these last few years? Turns out there's a good reason Team Obama has gotten worse rather than improving with experience.

...the [National Security Council] has been by procedure and fierce tradition a rare apolitical forum, a place for the president to hear hard reality. NSC staff are foreign-policy grownups, and its meetings are barred to political henchmen.

Or that was the case, until the Obama White House. By early March 2009, two months into this presidency, the New York Times had run a profile of David Axelrod, noting that Mr. Obama's top campaign guru and "political protector" was now "often" to be found "in the late afternoons" walking "to the Situation Room to attend some meetings of the National Security Council." President Obama's first national security adviser, former Marine General and NATO Commander Jim Jones, left after only two years following clashes with Mr. Obama's inner circle.

He was replaced by Democratic political operative and former Fannie Mae lobbyist Tom Donilon. Mr. Donilon joined Ben Rhodes, the Obama campaign speechwriter, who in 2009 had been elevated to deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. Also present was Tommy Vietor, whose entire career prior to NSC spokesman was as an Obama spinmeister—as a press aide in the 2004 Senate run, and campaign flack for the 2008 Iowa caucuses, and assistant White House press secretary. In fairness, his credentials also included getting caught on camera in 2010 pounding beers, shirtless, at a Georgetown bar. America's foreign-policy experts at work.

Well, now, shirtless beer drinking after work is not to be held against a man! Being a successful press aide might be; it's not a career often distinguished by men or women of high honor and personal integrity. There are exceptions who are worthy individuals, to be sure.

In any case, Americans are WEIRD. It's strange to find a foreign policy team that is built around those who have learned how to do American politics for American audiences. You shouldn't expect that to work out well; and, indeed, it hasn't.

Thanks to Ms. Strassel for an interesting report.

Cure it or kill it?

Old and busted: repealing and/or replacing Obamacare. New hotness: "fixing" it . . . by repealing it and maybe replacing it with stuff. As Ramesh Ponnuru argues at Bloomberg View, Obamacare was an attempt to solve the terrible problems caused by forcing insurers not to take the riskiness of their new customers into account. Ordinarily, such a policy would cause healthy people to delay paying for expensive insurance until they got sick. Solution: force everyone to buy expensive insurance right now, a/k/a the individual mandate. Get rid of the individual mandate, and you score lots of points with voters, but then what do you do about the fact that you've just destroyed the insurance market? It's nice to call a repeal of the individual mandate a "fix," but it doesn't fix much unless we kill the whole bill.

Strawy, strawy men

Some stupid arguments about Bergdahl that just won't quit.

For the children

I'm not sure it's safe to let the little darlings go to school at all.  Maybe they should all be home-schooled:

Riggs said her 10-year-old daughter went on a school field trip recently and came back sun-burned. Riggs said district policy didn't allow her daughter to bring sunscreen to reapply.

But, NEISD spokeswoman Aubrey Chancellor said sunscreen is considered a medication, something children need a doctor's note to have at school.

"Typically, sunscreen is a toxic substance, and we can't allow toxic things in to be in our schools," Chancellor said.

GINI coefficients

Via Maggie's Farm:

Somebody really should start calling it “Income Diversity”.  How could progressives be against it then?

Friday Night OVA

See if you catch the Tolkien reference...

Off Message

Pope Francis:

This culture of wellbeing convinced us it is better not to have children! It’s better! You can go explore the world, go on holiday, you can have a villa in the countryside, you can be carefree [...]

It might be more comfortable to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog. Then in the end this marriage comes to old age in solitude, with the bitterness of loneliness. It is not fruitful, it does not do what Jesus does with his Church: He makes His Church fruitful.

What? Marriage has something to do with being fruitful and multiplying? That could have all kinds of consequences!

70 Years Ago

The landings at Normandy are part of one of two major campaigns we will commemorate this month on major anniversaries. This one, far better known to Americans, is of much more recent importance.

Nothing I could say is worthy of the occasion. Remember it, study it, consider what it cost, and honor those who paid the price.

The premature post-presidency

Matthew Continetti on a day in the life of a president who's given up and now only wants to spend time with like-minded people thinking great thoughts.

I guess if he gets too disillusioned he could always desert.

Income inequality

Mark Perry argues that individual income inequality in America has been flat for fifty years; what's changed is household inequality, largely driven by the upsurge in single-parent families.

What if income-redistribution problems only increase the prevalence of single-parent families?

Not To Speculate, But...

...maybe his entire leadership chain was full of psychopaths.

I mean, it could be true.

Or maybe it's that 4/25 is an Airborne brigade, and like all paratroopers they volunteered three times for positions of increasing danger -- once for the Army, once for the Infantry, and once for Airborne. Perhaps a group that has self-selected for the honor of a life of danger has a particularly strong disdain for someone who deserts his post.

No, it surely has to be the psychopath thing.

"Suck it up and salute"

James Taranto is having some trouble with the White House's policy regarding the ideal level of military cooperation with civilian authority.  As you've all no doubt read already, the Bergdahl negotiations (as well as rescue initiatives) had stalled for a couple of years in the face of doubts and concerns over the circumstances of Bergdahl's leaving his unit five years ago, but the White House views last week's trade a triumph of the principle that the military should "suck it up and salute."  The controversy exposes huge rifts in middle America's views of the military.  Taranto quotes a progressive young writer at Salon:

The left's blinkered view of military culture is perhaps best summarized by Elias Isquith, a young writer for Salon.com, who yesterday explained the backlash against the Bergdahl deal as follows:  "When a member of the military fails to adhere to the far right's rigid formula of what a soldier should be (nationalistic, religious, obedient; conservative) right-wingers . . . come down on them [sic] like a ton of bricks." He cited one example in addition to Bergdahl:  John Kerry.

What a revealing comment.  This Salon writer appears to think that only a nationalistic, religious, obedient, and conservative serviceman would understand why it's wrong to desert in the face of the enemy, perhaps even to give aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime.

As Taranto notes, Bergdahl failed notably in his duty to suck it up and salute.  He also alludes to the failure of our current Secretary of State to do the same while he was in uniform.  The progressives have an idea of what makes for an ideal soldier, and it's not much like that of an ordinary American.

Taranto also contrasts the White House's limp ineffectuality in the face of bureaucratic intransigence and incompetence at the HHS or the VA with his ability to cut through red tape and achieve his goals in the Bergdahl trade.  It's all about whether he really cares.

Hammock practice

I've learned a couple of macrame netting knots, one denser than the other, and am practicing with yarn while I wait for my larger hammock rope supplies to arrive.  The two contrasting knots will let me make a pattern on a square grid; something simple and geometrical should stand out well.

The smaller pattern on the bottom right is more of the Clones lace I've been working on for years.  It's all about the size of the pixels.

Doubling down

I guess the White House can't afford another scandal in which Susan Rice is revealed as a shameless liar every time she hits the talk-show circuit, so instead of apologizing for her "honor and distinction" boilerplate they're trying to go on the offensive against critics.  White House aides, for instance, are complaining they never expected Bergdahl to be "swift-boated" by his own unit.  Are we about to be treated to a spectacle in which the military tries to court-martial him and the White House has his back?

This isn't going to end well.  They let the story get out before they started trying to cover it up.  Also, I'm not sure that digging up the whole story of swift-boating in 2004 is a good thing for Kerry and his buddies--though admittedly he'll look pretty good compared to Bergdahl.