England selects a banner for its Women's World Cup team.
Totally inappropriate content warning, but it's seriously an official banner.
Overturning Revolutions
In keeping with the discussion around Tex's post, a story from Russia:
Vladimir Putin 'wants' to reinstate the Russian royal family and move them into an ancient palace once occupied by the last Tsar Nicholas II.Since this whole 'revolution against royalty' thing is so associated with disaster, I suppose it makes a kind of sense. The Soviet disaster was far worse than any of ours, and from the Russian perspective, that's the high point of subsequent history. Perhaps they'll adopt the old Russian flag, which is better looking than their French-Revolution-inspired tricolor.
The move proposed by Vladimir Petrov, a law maker from Putin's party, has prompted speculation that it has the Russian leader's direct approval.... The legislator has written letters to the heirs of the Romanov dynasty, which ruled the country for two centuries before the abdication of last Tsar Nicholas II ahead of two revolutions in 1917.... Petrov has written to Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna and Prince Dimitri Romanovich urging them to return to Russia to become symbols of national culture in order to "revive the spiritual power of Russian people".
The leaked letter read: "Throughout the history of its reign, the Imperial dynasty of the Romanovs was one of the pillars of Russia's sovereignty."
The country now "goes through a difficult process of restoring the country's greatness and returning its global influence" and "members of the Romanov House cannot stay aloof from the processes taking place in Russia now at such an important historical moment".
Millstones
The worst thing about slavery was, well, slavery. A distant second bad thing was that in the mid-19th century, Americans with deep convictions about dual sovereignty and limitations on federal power picked slavery as the ideal test case. As a result, the lesson generations of Americans took from their struggle was that, if you give some people too much sovereignty, they'll use it to perpetuate horrifying schemes like slavery, thus undermining their supposed allegiance to the concept of freedom. Ergo, maybe this freedom experiment has gone too far.
One of the best ways to lose your freedom is to abuse it. It's never a natural or foregone conclusion. As Walter Hudson said today,
One of the best ways to lose your freedom is to abuse it. It's never a natural or foregone conclusion. As Walter Hudson said today,
Therefore, when I look at the Confederate battle flag as a black libertarian, I see tragedy for all parties concerned. I see the history of racism and human indignity which motivates the current debate. But I also see the loss of state sovereignty which compromised the Founding Fathers vision for republican government. To the extent people choose to fly the Confederate flag in honor of that latter heritage, I can’t fault them.
That said, let’s be clear why state sovereignty was lost. It was lost because the southern states delegitimized it.
No running for the shadows
One of the things I like most about Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is that he doesn't let media cycles spook him off of the stands he's taken on principle. This week he signed two new gunowner-rights bills into law.
Supreme Court upholds Obamacare subsidies
Hijabs
For what it's worth, I heard a version of this argument from a Human Terrain Team social scientist who happened to be female. She put on a hijab to go out and talk to Muslim women in Iraq. What most surprised her, she told me, was the way in which it stopped soldiers from treating her as a sexual being. It's a strange fact, since it's just a piece of cloth, but for whatever reason covering the hair and head somehow disconnected the sex drive even in young soldiers long deployed at war and forbidden other avenues of sexual relief.
So maybe there's something to it. Perhaps a symbol, under the right circumstances, doesn't have to mean what we ordinarily expect it to mean. Perhaps a lot has to do, as she says, with the choice of the person who wields it.
In any case, the social scientist I knew kind of liked the effect. She didn't wear it otherwise, probably because everyone would have thought it a bit weird. But she did like the effect it had on the young soldiers around her.
So maybe there's something to it. Perhaps a symbol, under the right circumstances, doesn't have to mean what we ordinarily expect it to mean. Perhaps a lot has to do, as she says, with the choice of the person who wields it.
In any case, the social scientist I knew kind of liked the effect. She didn't wear it otherwise, probably because everyone would have thought it a bit weird. But she did like the effect it had on the young soldiers around her.
To Speak Like A Man
Jim Webb, though a Southerner and a man whose family has strong Confederate roots, adopted a modest and respectful posture in his comment on the flag matters. William Kristol, himself a Lincoln and Sherman man -- a very decent guy and a serious thinker, whom I met in Jerusalem and who might even have been thinking of our conversation in his limited defense today -- found Webb's comment to be refreshingly adult. He mentions Lincoln's second inaugural: "With malice toward none, with charity for all." I notice Webb did not undertake a vigorous defense of the flag, nor call for it to remain in place. Rather, he calls for calm, reflection, and mutual understanding. Allahpundit says it is enough to disqualify him, should he be serious about running for the Democratic nomination. Hopefully not. It is welcome, sober, and proper. The resolution of the disposition of the flag can be discussed in time, he seems to say: what matters now is to be respectful, to remember our brotherhood.
Perhaps not by accident he also published a short story today, which comes out of his time in Vietnam. It begins with a child asking his grandfather a question on the way to church. It's a question only a child should ask: did you ever kill a man?
Perhaps not by accident he also published a short story today, which comes out of his time in Vietnam. It begins with a child asking his grandfather a question on the way to church. It's a question only a child should ask: did you ever kill a man?
“We’ll talk about it on the lake.” He attempted a joke. “I grew up with Ernest Hemingway. And Hemingway said you aren’t supposed to feel bad about it.”The discussion in the story quickly turns philosophical, which suggests a ground for Webb's -- and Lincoln's -- call for an absence of malice and a focus on charity. It is a seriousness of mind entirely refreshing at the present hour. It reminds me, once again, of why I often wish for veterans of proven valor more often to seek public office.
“Who is Ernest Hemingway?”
“Some writer who never killed anybody. Except himself.”
Liberty By Law
In the run-up to my sister's wedding and the trip around it, I somehow allowed it to slip my mind that we were passing the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta.
But, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum (my italics - I don't think they had 'em back then) gets it the right way round. It was in some respects a happy accident. In 1215, a bunch of chippy barons were getting fed up with King John. In those days, in such circumstances, the malcontents would usually replace the sovereign with a pliable prince who'd be more attentive to their grievances. But, having no such prince to hand, the barons were forced to be more inventive, and so they wound up replacing the King with an idea, and the most important idea of all - that even the King is subject to the law.
On this 800th anniversary, that's a lesson worth re-learning. Restraints on state power are increasingly unfashionable among the heirs to Magna Carta: in America, King Barack decides when he wakes up of a morning what clauses of ObamaCare or US immigration law he's willing to observe or waive according to royal whim; his heir, Queen Hillary, operates on the principle that laws are for the other 300 million Americans, not her. In the birthplace of Magna Carta, a few miles from that meadow at Runnymede, David Cameron's constabulary leans on newsagents to cough up the names and addresses of troublesome citizens who've committed the crime of purchasing Charlie Hebdo.
The symbolism was almost too perfect when Mr Cameron went on TV with David Letterman, and was obliged to admit that he had no idea what the words "Magna Carta" meant. Magna Carta Libertatum: The Great Charter of Liberties.
Taxation Without Representation
Just as the House called a vote on Fast Track authority as the Charleston shooting became the focus of everyone's attention, it cleared the Senate's procedural barriers while no one is looking. We still don't know what it is our elected leaders are giving the President authority to do, but the last real chance to stop it (whatever it is) will be the up or down vote on the treaty. However, because of the Fast Track authority, that will be a simple majority vote -- not the two-thirds majority normally required to approve a major treaty.
This is not unique. On the Iran deal, Congress managed to work the system out so that a mere one-third of either chamber will suffice to approve whatever the President signs. Yet what little we have heard about this deal indicates that it involves a surrender of major sections of American sovereignty to foreign institutions over which voters have no control. It is taxation without representation, in other words: a betrayal of the very last, and very first, principle for which our Revolution was fought.
The last vote will doubtless also occur as a surprise rush during a crisis that attracts Americans' attention elsewhere. We need to spread the word and make sure people's attention is focused on this issue, and that they are ready to deal with it at whatever black midnight it is rushed to the floor. This vote will be the last chance.
This is not unique. On the Iran deal, Congress managed to work the system out so that a mere one-third of either chamber will suffice to approve whatever the President signs. Yet what little we have heard about this deal indicates that it involves a surrender of major sections of American sovereignty to foreign institutions over which voters have no control. It is taxation without representation, in other words: a betrayal of the very last, and very first, principle for which our Revolution was fought.
Everyone wants more ‘global cooperation’ but no one wants to let Big Pharma stamp out generic drugs or let Big Tobacco tell us how they’ll label their products. And no one wants some secretive global tribunal telling a state legislature how to govern. If there’s an easier case to make, I’ve never seen it. You may ask why every Democrat in Congress doesn’t make it, but we’ve gone over that. Whether they’re in thrall to their donors, their consultants, their leaders or their ambitions, whoever or whatever holds them back, they just can’t do it.The Republicans, on the other hand, have been full-throttle in support of this, with the honorable exception of Jeff Sessions from Alabama. 'Whether they're in thrall to their donors, their consultants, their leaders or their ambitions,' the Republican party has worked harder than anyone except the President to betray the Founders and surrender American sovereignty to foreign courts.
The last vote will doubtless also occur as a surprise rush during a crisis that attracts Americans' attention elsewhere. We need to spread the word and make sure people's attention is focused on this issue, and that they are ready to deal with it at whatever black midnight it is rushed to the floor. This vote will be the last chance.
Against the Iran Deal
A surprising unity of opinion, from the right to the left, is that the Iran deal is dangerous. It offers us nothing in return for offering them everything they wanted, including cutting edge nuclear technology.
What a legacy this would leave.
What a legacy this would leave.
Apotheosis
Death to the General Lee.
It's a beautiful sentiment. We'll just kill the whole damn thing.
Funny thing about this particular aspect. The Dukes of Hazzard was never about the issues of race. It did have a tie back to the postwar Southern mythology, though. Boss Hogg was an emblem for those Democrats, especially like Joseph Emerson Brown, who screwed up the war politically and then profited off its aftermath by aligning themselves with the northern banks ("carpetbaggers") who turned the South into a colonial economy. Enforcing a destructive cotton monoculture, they reduced free farmers into sharecroppers or tenet farmers, and extracted wealth to New York in a manner exactly similar to the colonial economics afflicting much of Latin America at the time. It also destroyed the soil, as cotton is a hugely destructive crop if farmed year after year without a break. But you had to farm it, year after year, to get the loans they would otherwise not offer.
It's not for no reason that Alabama is the home to the only statue ever raised in praise of an insect. The boll weevil did what no human could do in sixty years: it broke the back of cotton monoculture and all its allied evils. It was the beginning of a new birth, after sixty years of incredibly punishing descent into poverty at the hands of the colonial masters.
Once that sort of story was important to the left, but they have forgotten.
Anticolonialism is still a major feature of the same left that is driving this particular moment. They don't see the irony here because they don't know enough about the history to see it. Yet the Duke Boys were far more an expression of authentic American anti-colonialism than ever of racism or -- good Lord -- of "treason."
UPDATE: James Taranto, of all people:
"It does feel a bit like the collapse of Eastern European communism in 1989, although one doesn’t want to overstate the analogy."
Indeed, one wouldn't want to do that.
It's a beautiful sentiment. We'll just kill the whole damn thing.
Funny thing about this particular aspect. The Dukes of Hazzard was never about the issues of race. It did have a tie back to the postwar Southern mythology, though. Boss Hogg was an emblem for those Democrats, especially like Joseph Emerson Brown, who screwed up the war politically and then profited off its aftermath by aligning themselves with the northern banks ("carpetbaggers") who turned the South into a colonial economy. Enforcing a destructive cotton monoculture, they reduced free farmers into sharecroppers or tenet farmers, and extracted wealth to New York in a manner exactly similar to the colonial economics afflicting much of Latin America at the time. It also destroyed the soil, as cotton is a hugely destructive crop if farmed year after year without a break. But you had to farm it, year after year, to get the loans they would otherwise not offer.
It's not for no reason that Alabama is the home to the only statue ever raised in praise of an insect. The boll weevil did what no human could do in sixty years: it broke the back of cotton monoculture and all its allied evils. It was the beginning of a new birth, after sixty years of incredibly punishing descent into poverty at the hands of the colonial masters.
Once that sort of story was important to the left, but they have forgotten.
Anticolonialism is still a major feature of the same left that is driving this particular moment. They don't see the irony here because they don't know enough about the history to see it. Yet the Duke Boys were far more an expression of authentic American anti-colonialism than ever of racism or -- good Lord -- of "treason."
UPDATE: James Taranto, of all people:
"It does feel a bit like the collapse of Eastern European communism in 1989, although one doesn’t want to overstate the analogy."
Indeed, one wouldn't want to do that.
The Russian Bear and... Texas??
Politico has a strange story. I suppose it's a trick worthy of an old-school KGB guy like Putin to stoke secessionist feeling in an enemy nation, but it's a little surprising to find that anyone in Texas would go along with it once it was openly Russian support they were receiving.
Nor is Texas the lone region for which Russia has cast secessionist support since the Crimean seizure. Venice, Scotland, Catalonia—the Russian media have voiced fervent support for secession in all these Western allies. (Of course, Moscow’s mantra—secession for thee, but not for me—means you’d be hard-pressed to find any Russian official offering support for Siberian, Tatar, or Chechen independence.) “Since the destabilization of the West is on Russia’s agenda, they may try to reach out to the U.S. separatists,” Anton Shekhovtsov, a researcher on Moscow’s links to far-right movements in Europe, told me. Russia wants a “deepening of social divisions in the American society, destabilizing the internal political life.”Good news! That seems to be right at the top of our own agenda.
Folklorist, Heal Thyself
A fellow named John E. Price -- who describes himself as "a folklorist and doctoral candidate in American Studies," as well as "an award-winning lecturer in American Studies and Communications" -- has penned a contribution to the debate on the Confederate flag with the nuanced title "Yes, You're a Racist -- and a Traitor."
I don't really want to debate the merits of the Confederate flag right now. I think what's really important is showing brotherhood at a time when there have been multiple attacks, not just the infamous one, on black churches in the last week. I'm going to go through the exercise purely in the hope that it will help with that project, by giving reason to believe that most of the ordinary people who like the Confederate flag are not motivated by racism or hatred. That misperception may be alienating. If the proper work of the moment is brotherhood, it might be helpful to increase understanding.
Myself, I don't fly the Confederate flag. This is not because I personally view it as a symbol of racism, but out of respect for black Southerners I might meet for whom it is. I once turned down membership in a local motorcycle club -- a fun, family-oriented group that rides locally -- because their patch featured a Confederate flag (as well as an American flag and an eagle). None of them intended that to be threatening or off-putting to anyone. It was just part of a collection of patriotic symbols, an expression of regional as well as national patriotism. Patriotism, not treason.
It's silly to describe people flying the Confederate flag as "traitors" as if they themselves were waging war on the government. It's a serious question whether the battle flag is even a symbol of treason: the victors in the war prosecuted almost no one on that charge, and not people who fought under that flag but Northerners who took steps against their government without formally joining the rebellion. A thoughtful historian might question whether there's something about the American project itself, begun in rebellion against a sitting government to whose authority the authors had long submitted, that licenses revolution under certain circumstances. To be a traitor to the American project might sometimes better be done by submitting to authority than by resisting it. As historian William C. Davis explores at length, the founders of the Confederacy clearly saw themselves as the immediate heirs of Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers (many also slave-owners, who also wrote special protections for slavery into their constitution). One condemns them at some peril of condemning the American project itself, in which case it is hard to assert a ground on which loyalty to the American government is praiseworthy. This is especially true since the North did not undertake the war with the mission of destroying slavery, even if the South undertook the war to preserve it.
But those are questions for historians and philosophers. A folklorist should be interested in folklore, and what characterizes folklore is the way that symbols and meanings change over time. The original meaning of the symbol is beside the point. The fact that the generation that lost the Civil War rallied around it for honorable reasons after the war is beside the point. Those people have been dead for a hundred years. The question in folklore is: what do people mean by it today?
If you are a white Southerner of 60 or 70 years old, you came of age during the battles over segregation. For you, the flag's meaning is that it was about support for segregation, and you remember a South in which your parents' generation supported that policy so strongly that they drove every government official out of office who wasn't openly and vocally committed to it. But your generation was the first generation that questioned that policy. You went to schools that were being integrated. If you went into government, like the sheriff interviewed by VS Naipaul in his book A Turn in the South, you were the generation that turned things around. Unlike the sheriff at Selma, Sheriff Walraven used his deputies and volunteers to protect the civil rights marchers from the Klan -- and he did it while wearing the 1956 Georgia flag, Confederate battle flag and all, on his uniform's shoulder. That flag is his flag as much as it is anybody else's.
If instead you are 40 years old (and more than half of Americans are 40 or under), you were a child when one of the most popular television shows for children was The Dukes of Hazzard. That's probably your first association with the flag. The battles of segregation were already over before you ever became a schoolchild. If you were born in the South, you grew up with the flags adopted during the segregation battle long after that particular meaning had ceased to be important. The flags were just on the poles, without comment, except that they were the flags of home. So your basic associations as a child were a playful, cheerful television show without any trace of hate or racism, and home. As you grew up, if you grew up in the South, you learned about Lynyrd Skynyrd, who flew the flag as they sang "Sweet Home Alabama." There are references to the struggle over segregation in the song, but they are coded, and if you don't study the history you'll never know they are there.
If instead you are 20 years, even that stuff is ancient history. You might have seen The Dukes of Hazzard in syndication; otherwise, it is a not-very-great movie you probably didn't see. Classic rock stations are on the radio everywhere in America, so you probably know the Skynyrd song. Until you get old enough to encounter the stuff in history classes, you probably don't know anything else about the flag except that there was a war once, and this was the flag people from your home fought under. You see it around sometimes, and if you travel out of the South you don't see it.
What these people mean by the flag has nothing to do with racism, and certainly nothing to do with treason. Far from having waged war against their country, they're disproportionately likely to have fought war for the country: the South provides 40% of the volunteer military.
They're probably guilty of being insensitive. (But so is the guy who labels people 'traitors' on the basis of a protected act of free speech he hasn't bothered to understand.) They may instead be guilty of being ignorant, to the degree that they haven't studied the history and learned to consider the past associations of the symbol. There are a few who are guilty of racism, and who have sought out the flag to try to carry that meaning forward. Yet a committed racist like the Charleston killer could find no one to join him in his program: no skinheads, he wrote mournfully, and no Klan. I myself, living in rural Georgia, haven't seen anyone in a Klan uniform in decades. I assume you could search them out with effort, but they have vanished from the everyday texture of the South.
We haven't yet seen the outcome of the debate in South Carolina and Mississippi on the flag. In Georgia, our debate began with Democratic Governor Zell Miller trying (and failing) to remove the battle flag in the 1990s, and his Republican successor succeeding. The fact that we've elected political leadership that would attempt such a debate -- and conservative leaders, in the South -- ought to encourage even those for whom the flag has powerful and negative associations only. Racism is a very great evil, the worst evil brought by the Modern age, but it has lost a great deal of its strength. People for whom the flag has no negative associations, for whom it is nothing but a flag of home, are willing to consider setting it aside out of respect for the feelings of others. However the debate ends, that alone should be taken as a sign of increasing brotherhood between black and white Southerners. That is surely a good thing.
I don't really want to debate the merits of the Confederate flag right now. I think what's really important is showing brotherhood at a time when there have been multiple attacks, not just the infamous one, on black churches in the last week. I'm going to go through the exercise purely in the hope that it will help with that project, by giving reason to believe that most of the ordinary people who like the Confederate flag are not motivated by racism or hatred. That misperception may be alienating. If the proper work of the moment is brotherhood, it might be helpful to increase understanding.
Myself, I don't fly the Confederate flag. This is not because I personally view it as a symbol of racism, but out of respect for black Southerners I might meet for whom it is. I once turned down membership in a local motorcycle club -- a fun, family-oriented group that rides locally -- because their patch featured a Confederate flag (as well as an American flag and an eagle). None of them intended that to be threatening or off-putting to anyone. It was just part of a collection of patriotic symbols, an expression of regional as well as national patriotism. Patriotism, not treason.
It's silly to describe people flying the Confederate flag as "traitors" as if they themselves were waging war on the government. It's a serious question whether the battle flag is even a symbol of treason: the victors in the war prosecuted almost no one on that charge, and not people who fought under that flag but Northerners who took steps against their government without formally joining the rebellion. A thoughtful historian might question whether there's something about the American project itself, begun in rebellion against a sitting government to whose authority the authors had long submitted, that licenses revolution under certain circumstances. To be a traitor to the American project might sometimes better be done by submitting to authority than by resisting it. As historian William C. Davis explores at length, the founders of the Confederacy clearly saw themselves as the immediate heirs of Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers (many also slave-owners, who also wrote special protections for slavery into their constitution). One condemns them at some peril of condemning the American project itself, in which case it is hard to assert a ground on which loyalty to the American government is praiseworthy. This is especially true since the North did not undertake the war with the mission of destroying slavery, even if the South undertook the war to preserve it.
But those are questions for historians and philosophers. A folklorist should be interested in folklore, and what characterizes folklore is the way that symbols and meanings change over time. The original meaning of the symbol is beside the point. The fact that the generation that lost the Civil War rallied around it for honorable reasons after the war is beside the point. Those people have been dead for a hundred years. The question in folklore is: what do people mean by it today?
If you are a white Southerner of 60 or 70 years old, you came of age during the battles over segregation. For you, the flag's meaning is that it was about support for segregation, and you remember a South in which your parents' generation supported that policy so strongly that they drove every government official out of office who wasn't openly and vocally committed to it. But your generation was the first generation that questioned that policy. You went to schools that were being integrated. If you went into government, like the sheriff interviewed by VS Naipaul in his book A Turn in the South, you were the generation that turned things around. Unlike the sheriff at Selma, Sheriff Walraven used his deputies and volunteers to protect the civil rights marchers from the Klan -- and he did it while wearing the 1956 Georgia flag, Confederate battle flag and all, on his uniform's shoulder. That flag is his flag as much as it is anybody else's.
If instead you are 40 years old (and more than half of Americans are 40 or under), you were a child when one of the most popular television shows for children was The Dukes of Hazzard. That's probably your first association with the flag. The battles of segregation were already over before you ever became a schoolchild. If you were born in the South, you grew up with the flags adopted during the segregation battle long after that particular meaning had ceased to be important. The flags were just on the poles, without comment, except that they were the flags of home. So your basic associations as a child were a playful, cheerful television show without any trace of hate or racism, and home. As you grew up, if you grew up in the South, you learned about Lynyrd Skynyrd, who flew the flag as they sang "Sweet Home Alabama." There are references to the struggle over segregation in the song, but they are coded, and if you don't study the history you'll never know they are there.
If instead you are 20 years, even that stuff is ancient history. You might have seen The Dukes of Hazzard in syndication; otherwise, it is a not-very-great movie you probably didn't see. Classic rock stations are on the radio everywhere in America, so you probably know the Skynyrd song. Until you get old enough to encounter the stuff in history classes, you probably don't know anything else about the flag except that there was a war once, and this was the flag people from your home fought under. You see it around sometimes, and if you travel out of the South you don't see it.
What these people mean by the flag has nothing to do with racism, and certainly nothing to do with treason. Far from having waged war against their country, they're disproportionately likely to have fought war for the country: the South provides 40% of the volunteer military.
They're probably guilty of being insensitive. (But so is the guy who labels people 'traitors' on the basis of a protected act of free speech he hasn't bothered to understand.) They may instead be guilty of being ignorant, to the degree that they haven't studied the history and learned to consider the past associations of the symbol. There are a few who are guilty of racism, and who have sought out the flag to try to carry that meaning forward. Yet a committed racist like the Charleston killer could find no one to join him in his program: no skinheads, he wrote mournfully, and no Klan. I myself, living in rural Georgia, haven't seen anyone in a Klan uniform in decades. I assume you could search them out with effort, but they have vanished from the everyday texture of the South.
We haven't yet seen the outcome of the debate in South Carolina and Mississippi on the flag. In Georgia, our debate began with Democratic Governor Zell Miller trying (and failing) to remove the battle flag in the 1990s, and his Republican successor succeeding. The fact that we've elected political leadership that would attempt such a debate -- and conservative leaders, in the South -- ought to encourage even those for whom the flag has powerful and negative associations only. Racism is a very great evil, the worst evil brought by the Modern age, but it has lost a great deal of its strength. People for whom the flag has no negative associations, for whom it is nothing but a flag of home, are willing to consider setting it aside out of respect for the feelings of others. However the debate ends, that alone should be taken as a sign of increasing brotherhood between black and white Southerners. That is surely a good thing.
The Bandidos' Attorney Speaks
According to RUMINT, there were very few Bandidos at the shootout in Waco. They were the victims, strictly speaking, just because they were so few and were therefore set upon. Their attorney has put out a statement.
[T}he Bandidos demand that all video evidence and autopsy reports be released immediately to clear up the damaging misinformation that is running wild.This last bit counters RUMINT, which has suggested heretofore that the Cossacks fired some rounds, and the police fired the rest. The Bandidos seem to be confessing to firing at least some rounds, albeit in self-defense.
The following is true and correct:
1) The Bandidos were at the Twin Peaks restaurant to attend an organized political meeting and nothing else. A regional meeting for the Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents (a bona fide political organization centered on Constitutional rights) was scheduled, and a prominent member of the Bandidos was the key-note speaker at the meeting. This Bandido key-note speaker was to report on the National Coalition of Motorcyclist event that occurred weeks earlier. Because COCI members from across the state were expected to attend this special meeting, it was purposefully scheduled in Waco, TX, a central city between Austin and Dallas.
2) The Bandidos have no knowledge of any other meeting. The Bandidos are aware that members of other motorcycle clubs are claiming that there were plans to meet with the Bandidos in Waco, TX on May 17, 2015. This claim is not true.
3) All weapons in possession of members the Bandidos were legally owned and carried.
4) Members of the Bandidos were not aggressors, did not start the altercation, did not strike first, were not the first to pull weapons, and were not the first to use weapons. The majority of the Bandidos took cover, and all involvement in the altercation by members of the Bandidos was in self-defense. Texas law allows people to defend themselves with the same amount of force that is exerted against them, and a few members of the Bandidos acted in accordance with these laws. In fact, members of the Bandidos involved in the incident did not even have time or opportunity to get off of their motorcycles before police came in.
"Reality Seems Determined to Put the Onion out of Business"
So says Sarah Hoyt, also due a hat tip for the last post. She's right. It's been a very bad year for reality.
Don Qwhotie?
Never could get into the book myself. It's about mocking the best thing in the world, although I'm told that if you stick with it it gets better: the fools brought on board in the early part become increasingly attached to the thing worth upholding at any cost, though the Don who held it so high finally loses heart. Stories about losing heart in such men break mine, for they are so easy to believe. It is the worst danger of the world, that you might cease to believe in the things worth dying for.
Riding It Out
Randy Howard was the name of a country singer who sang about the glories of the "American Redneck."
Following a failure to appear before a court on charges of DUI, driving on a revoked license, and various other things, the court's bail bondsman sent a bounty hunter to track him down and bring him back. He opened fire on the bounty hunter, and that man killed him.
It's a very fitting end, all things considered.
Following a failure to appear before a court on charges of DUI, driving on a revoked license, and various other things, the court's bail bondsman sent a bounty hunter to track him down and bring him back. He opened fire on the bounty hunter, and that man killed him.
It's a very fitting end, all things considered.
James Horner, RIP
Remembered here mostly for his soundtrack for Braveheart, that least historically-faithful but nevertheless well-intentioned movie about Sir William Wallace: one of Scotland's greatest heroes, and the world's.
The soundtrack had strong moments.
The gentleman died piloting a single-engine aircraft, which is an honorable passtime just because of the danger and glory of flying on one's own.
The soundtrack had strong moments.
The gentleman died piloting a single-engine aircraft, which is an honorable passtime just because of the danger and glory of flying on one's own.
Agents Provocateur
What if the former Secretary of State is working behind the scenes to destabilize Asia in order to provoke a crisis between the United States and China? So argues one China hand:
Now, of course, the DoD has a new boss—Secretary of Defense Ash Carter; and PACCOM has a new commander—Admiral Harry Harris, and the general consensus is that the muscular defense sector has wrestled China policy away from the milquetoastian White House. Interestingly, Admiral Harris was previously the Pentagon’s liaison to to the State Department under Hillary Clinton as well as John Kerry, which reinforces my impression that Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy advisors have pre-loaded China policy with her supporters, and I expect things to get ugly quickly so that the nasty and awkward business of starting the confrontation can be done under Obama before Clinton enters office.
As I put it elsewhere: Hillary wants to inherit her China crisis from Obama, not foment it herself.
Another One Down
A key Army commander in the U.S. war against the Islamic State has been reprimanded by the Pentagon for steering a defense contract to a firm run by two of his former classmates at West Point, becoming the latest high-ranking officer to land in trouble for personal misconduct. Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, who as the Army’s deputy commander for operations in the Middle East oversaw the training of Iraqi forces, was formally reprimanded in February.... An Army review board is considering whether to strip him of his rank as a two-star general before he is allowed to retire this year.One wonders how you maintain a standard of discipline when, say, the previous Secretary of State was running the shop as a vehicle for just this kind of 'steering.' The Army holds itself and its own to a higher, better standard. Yet officially, the State Department is in the lead: to head the State Department is to be in the position of greater honor.
I suppose we will learn how this works a fortiori if we elect that same Secretary of State to the Presidency.
How to choose a lawyer
From "Emotional Vampires" by Albert Bernstein, good advice about how to hire a lawyer, in this case, a divorce lawyer:
Good lawyers should:
* Return calls promptly. I'm surprised at how many lawyers don't. I'm talking about calls during office hours. Never accept an attorney who doesn't get back to you for days, unless someone from the office contacts you to explain why. Even then, be skeptical. How long does a phone call take?
* Be more decisive than you are. Good lawyers should be polite, but not necessarily nice. The last thing you want is a lawyer who is too conflict-avoidant to deal effectively with the [a-hole] that your ex will hire. You want your lawyer to be stronger and more decisive than you are, not less.
* Be proactive. You do not want a lawyer who counsels you to wait to see what someone else does. The battle goes to whoever gets there first with the most. This is particularly true is matters of custody and visitation. Always ask an attorney what the overall plan is. If there is no overall plan, you don't have an attorney.
"Interstate Commerce" doesn't mean "You're a Sharecropper"
Though Court-watchers were disappointed not to see a ruling on the two hottest pending cases this morning, they were pleased to receive one on a "takings clause" case that has gotten less attention. Small-government types scored a win with Horne v. Dept. of Agriculture, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the seizure of part of a farmer's raisin crop (nearly half in at least one year) constituted a "taking" that required due process as well as just compensation. In Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that they weren't really seizing the crop, because they permitted the farmer to retain a contingent interest in the proceeds of its later sale, at a time and price of the DOA's choosing. The Court sorted out that pretzel by observing that, once the crop is seized, any later payments come under the heading of "just compensation"--but the seizure itself still requires due process.
In further Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that the privilege of participating in interstate commerce is a benefit that the federal government may withhold unless the citizen waives constitutional rights. Of the nine Justices, only Sotomayor went for this one.
The ruling is interesting for the further reason that it clears up a controversy over whether "takings" jurisprudence is limited to real property; the Court held that it applies to personal property as well.
The raisin-confiscation program dated from the Depression and, like so many DOA plans, was intended to support prices. Justice Scalia noted, "Central planning was thought to work very well in 1937, and Russia tried it for a long time."
In further Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that the privilege of participating in interstate commerce is a benefit that the federal government may withhold unless the citizen waives constitutional rights. Of the nine Justices, only Sotomayor went for this one.
The ruling is interesting for the further reason that it clears up a controversy over whether "takings" jurisprudence is limited to real property; the Court held that it applies to personal property as well.
The raisin-confiscation program dated from the Depression and, like so many DOA plans, was intended to support prices. Justice Scalia noted, "Central planning was thought to work very well in 1937, and Russia tried it for a long time."
No Obamacare or same-sex marriage rulings today
Per Scotus blog a few minutes ago:
For those of you who have just logged in, there was no ruling today (and will not be any ruling today) on same-sex marriage or ACA subsidies. The Court has finished for the day.So you can ignore all the teasers on the TV and the net. UPDATE: But more decisions will be announced on Thursday, June 25, and perhaps again on the 29th.
Solstice
Someday, I want to go to one of this guy's parties.
Thousands of people have congregated at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice....He reminds me of a late friend of mine, greatly missed since he passed on a few years ago.
Arthur Uther Pendragon, who claims to be a reincarnation of King Arthur, was there to knight new followers to his druidic order – the Loyal Arthurian Warband – which he described as the political wing of the religion.
"We're the ones who get into trees to stop roadbuilding and take on people like English Heritage over access to the stones. We're sworn to fight for truth, for honour and for justice," he told The Guardian.
Is it terrorism?
That's not going to be an easy question to answer until we figure out what we mean by terrorism. The term used to refer to violence perpetrated against non-combatants by groups not obviously associated with an identifiable army, for the purpose of persuading the populace that it will be too dangerous to give their political support to a particular regime. Lately the definition has mushed into something more like "deplorable and scary public violence by relatively crazy people who may have had a somewhat coherent political or social axe to grind."
Kareem Abdul Jabbar stuck to a fairly workable definition in his Times oped today:
Allahpundit analyzes the New York Times's take, which is that the dictionary definition of terrorism is "the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy." The "especially" leaves enough wiggle room to make this definition so all-inclusive as to be useless. When there is clear evidence of scary force as a political weapon or policy, I'm comfortable calling it terrorism; without that qualifier, we'd have to include a very large chunk of all violence, from domestic abuse to gang warfare to drug cartels to the Mafia. Those are all bad things, but why insist that they're all exactly the same bad thing? But then Allahpundit goes too far, I think, in differentiating the Charlie Hebdo murders from Dylan Roof's rampage on the ground that "When that jihadi animal killed four French Jews at a kosher deli in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo, no one thought that was a 'hate crime' because they were targeted first and foremost for their religion. It was terrorism." When you target people for their religion, I'm inclined to call it a hate crime, unless there's something else going on that makes it looks like organized political action. In the Charlie Hebdo case, the red flag wasn't the anti-semitism, it was the organization of the gang and its explicit ties to a political group. Not that it's necessarily any great linguistic advance to distinguish terrorism from hate crimes. The term "hate crimes" is nowhere near as useful as it's cracked up to be.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar stuck to a fairly workable definition in his Times oped today:
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not this was a terrorist act. Terrorism is a political tool that has a specific goal. Terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan want to drive Americans out of their countries. Terrorists in other countries do it for the same reason: to gain political power. After an hour at the prayer meeting, Dylann Roof stood up and proclaimed that he was there “to shoot black people.” His rambling manifesto during the shootings was: “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” In his mind he was a terrorist, but in reality this was nothing more than hate crime using terrorist tactics to enact his racist fantasy. Roof had no hope of driving African Americans out of the country, starting a race war or engendering any political or social change at all. We shouldn’t use it as an excuse to discuss terrorism because that diverts us from the actual problem.Unfortunately he then returned to the useless "terrorism is whenever people do bad stuff" definition in urging us not to "allow this incident to be used as a political football by those who hope to leverage it to their gain, which is a more subtle form of terrorism: media terrorism." Granted that human beings often use incidents as political football for their own gain, calling such use terrorism is only silly. Jabbar was on a more promising track when he implied that the hallmark of terrorism was the hope of using violent tactics against ordinary (typically unarmed) citizens to engender a political or social change. Roof didn't look like a guy who hoped that the public murder of a number of black people would cause a mass exodus of black people from the United States, or even that fellow travelers would rise up and murder all the black people he couldn't get to personally. He was just a nut who thought the evils of the United States could be pinned on a particular ethnic group, who were therefore proper targets of his personal extermination program. Jabbar had another good point, I thought, in disparaging any attempt to view Roof's rampage as targeting Christians. If Roof had been completely silent, I might buy that as a plausible alternative, but his own words make it pretty clear that his problem with the prayer meeting wasn't the prayer but the race of the praying people.
Allahpundit analyzes the New York Times's take, which is that the dictionary definition of terrorism is "the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy." The "especially" leaves enough wiggle room to make this definition so all-inclusive as to be useless. When there is clear evidence of scary force as a political weapon or policy, I'm comfortable calling it terrorism; without that qualifier, we'd have to include a very large chunk of all violence, from domestic abuse to gang warfare to drug cartels to the Mafia. Those are all bad things, but why insist that they're all exactly the same bad thing? But then Allahpundit goes too far, I think, in differentiating the Charlie Hebdo murders from Dylan Roof's rampage on the ground that "When that jihadi animal killed four French Jews at a kosher deli in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo, no one thought that was a 'hate crime' because they were targeted first and foremost for their religion. It was terrorism." When you target people for their religion, I'm inclined to call it a hate crime, unless there's something else going on that makes it looks like organized political action. In the Charlie Hebdo case, the red flag wasn't the anti-semitism, it was the organization of the gang and its explicit ties to a political group. Not that it's necessarily any great linguistic advance to distinguish terrorism from hate crimes. The term "hate crimes" is nowhere near as useful as it's cracked up to be.
Strong Differences
Tex is having a historically low ebb in her trust of pollsters, so perhaps this is an artifact of bad methodology. Still...
All of these things are immoral according to traditional Christian theology. What I find interesting is that (with one exception within the margin of error) majorities of men agree that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral only where far larger majorities of women say they are moral. When minorities of men want to say that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral, women are less likely than men to agree.
I wonder if this means that the traditional authority on this issue has been sustained in spite of the changing attitudes. What our ancestors used to refer to as 'the civilizing influence of the fairer sex' seems to be intact, perhaps: but it turns out it can be a de-civilizing influence too, where women decide to abandon traditional moral standards for whatever reason.
All of these things are immoral according to traditional Christian theology. What I find interesting is that (with one exception within the margin of error) majorities of men agree that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral only where far larger majorities of women say they are moral. When minorities of men want to say that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral, women are less likely than men to agree.
I wonder if this means that the traditional authority on this issue has been sustained in spite of the changing attitudes. What our ancestors used to refer to as 'the civilizing influence of the fairer sex' seems to be intact, perhaps: but it turns out it can be a de-civilizing influence too, where women decide to abandon traditional moral standards for whatever reason.
The new Lysenkoism
Via Maggie's Farm, Matt Ridley:
The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.
What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).
But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.
Forgetting The Whole Thing
From 1965, a film about that wise advice. You should all watch it, especially if you have not seen it before. It so nicely ties together so many of our recent discussions.
English is a Difficult Language
It's really hard, I know.
Don't feel bad. A similar error is behind a very common misreading of the Second Amendment.
The rules are simple. Every time a Republican who is a Catholic is asked for an opinion on the encyclical, place him into one of two categories: the Catholic Republicans or the Republican Catholics.You've got it exactly backwards. The "term doing the modifying" is the adjective, not the noun. So in "Republican Catholic," you're talking about a Catholic who happens to be Republican. They're the ones who will put their Catholicism first, and their Republicanism will only modify that essential Catholicism. Vice versa for your other category.
The difference between the categories depends on which term is doing the modifying. A Catholic Republican is a Republican whose Catholicism comes first, whose faith and devotion to the teaching authority of the Magisterium of the church takes precedence when a conflict or tension arises between it and loyalty to the party's ideology, policy platform, and electoral prospects. A Republican Catholic, on the other hand, is a Republican who puts his devotion to the party ahead of his faith...
Don't feel bad. A similar error is behind a very common misreading of the Second Amendment.
Mirror neurons
From SlateStarCodex, a thoughtful article about trying to look at things from both sides, sometimes irritating but worth reading if only for the following:
Microagressions. Nanoagressions. Picoagressions. The Planck Hostility.And perhaps for this conclusion: "If we can get to a point where we don’t feel like requests are part of a giant conspiracy to discredit and silence us, people are sometimes willing to listen." But if you take my advice you'll stay away from the comments.
Orders of Magnitude
Of course, 99 percent of southern whites will never go into a church, sit down with people and then massacre them. But that 99 percent is responsible for the one who does. We white southerners — those of us who left, the others who stayed, and even those millions who have migrated to the Sun Belt — are all Dylann Roof. We are all responsible. We cannot shirk it.The white population of South Carolina in the last census was 3,253,700 (total population * 68.88 (percent white) / 100). If 99% of them never go into a church and massacre everyone, that means that 32,537 of them do -- for which massive wave of violence the culture is certainly responsible.
No? Well, perhaps it's 3,253 massacres.
No? 325?
32?
Three?
I'm prepared to turn the other cheek at the anti-Southern rhetoric today, because I understand people are angry and afraid. But come on. Just because you hate your homeland, and therefore part of yourself, don't try to put that on me or mine. We aren't the source of your problem. We're the kind of men who stand ready to kill or die to stop such things. You may hate us, but we aren't your enemy.
Confidence in Institutions
Gallup's annual "Confidence in Institutions" poll is out.
No Federal institution polls above a third of Americans being confident in it. Congress remains near its record low at 8%.
From a broad perspective, Americans' confidence in all institutions over the last two years has been the lowest since Gallup began systematic updates of a larger set of institutions in 1993. The average confidence rating of the 14 institutions asked about annually since 1993 -- excluding small business, asked annually since 2007 -- is 32% this year. This is one percentage point above the all-institution average of 31% last year. Americans were generally more confident in all institutions in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the country enjoyed a strong economy and a rally in support for U.S. institutions after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.The biggest collapse in public confidence is with the police as an institution. The obvious reason why that might be true is heavy media coverage of controversial police shootings and militarized police responses to protests in Ferguson and elsewhere. But the media has been relentlessly positive about Pope Francis, and the Catholic Church remains at its historic low point in spite of the glowing attention. (Besides, confidence in the media is pretty low too!)
No Federal institution polls above a third of Americans being confident in it. Congress remains near its record low at 8%.
United States Marine Corps Raiders
The Marines will rename several special operations units as Marine Raiders at a ceremony Friday, resurrecting a moniker made famous by World War II units that carried out risky amphibious and guerrilla operations....It's good to have a historical legacy against which to measure yourself.
During World War II, the Raiders were organized in response to President Franklin Roosevelt's desire to have a commando-style force that could conduct amphibious raids and operate behind enemy lines. Raider commanders studied unconventional warfare tactics, including Chinese guerrillas, and were given their pick of men and equipment, according to Marine historians.
Raider units were credited with beating larger Japanese forces on difficult terrain in the Pacific and they participated in key battles including Guadalcanal and Bougainville. They were disbanded toward the end of the war and the Raider name hasn't been used in an official capacity since, said Capt. Barry Morris, a U.S. Marines spokesman.
"What the name 'Raider' does, it harkens back to the legacy that the Marine Corps has latched onto and has drawn a lot from, both in an esoteric and practical sense," Connable said. "It is a remarkable legacy."
A Heroine of Charleston
Cassandra points us to a story about a central figure in the capture of the Charleston killer: a florist and minister named Debbie Dills.
Winning Irregular Wars
A long read, but iconoclastic for something published by Leavenworth. Normally when I see a publication from there with a length over six hundred pages, I expect it will be produced-by-committee garbage that managed to 'staff out' every useful thing contributed. This work is not like that. It has a clear, strong voice.
Christian Brotherhood
While these acts are probably not related, the Charleston shooting occurred alongside another shooting at a historically black church in Memphis. Meanwhile, a third church in Ferguson, MO, with ties to the explosive police shooting last year was burned to the ground. The KKK is suspected.
It would be good to take a moment, if the opportunity presents itself, to express a sense of brotherhood to our fellow Christians. The talk in the media focuses so much on what divides us, but this far more important thing connects us. American politics, the questions of race, these are passing matters. The eternal truth is brotherhood. It is important to make that clear in an hour in which many must be feeling fear.
It would be good to take a moment, if the opportunity presents itself, to express a sense of brotherhood to our fellow Christians. The talk in the media focuses so much on what divides us, but this far more important thing connects us. American politics, the questions of race, these are passing matters. The eternal truth is brotherhood. It is important to make that clear in an hour in which many must be feeling fear.
Too Late For Uncle Mike
Not that the rule would cover him anyway. He was a Marine, and encountered the stuff more by having it dropped on him in reconnaissance than otherwise.
Ending years of wait, the government agreed Thursday to provide millions of dollars in disability benefits to as many as 2,100 Air Force reservists and active-duty forces exposed to Agent Orange residue on airplanes used in the Vietnam War.After he went blind, he lost heart. I remember him fondly.
The Spirit of the Age
Mollie Hemingway:
[I]f Lew is right that our currency is supposed to express our values and capture the spirit of our age, a man as good as Hamilton has absolutely no business being on the currency. George Washington definitely doesn’t. Heck, we should replace them all.She has some suggestions, but they're mostly for effect. Her basic point is made there -- and perhaps she's right. With quantitative easing, the money isn't worth anything anymore. We are just trading on the fact that international markets haven't worked out a solid alternative yet. The people aren't virtuous, as a republic needed them to be. Why shouldn't the paper reflect the people, or for that matter, why shouldn't the symbols on the face of the currency better reflect its true value?
Security!
Like thousands and thousands of Americans, I've filled out an SF-86, the Questionnaire for National Security Positions. In order to let the government determine if it can trust me, I trusted them with vast quantities of private personal information. This included not only responses to 127 pages of questions, but personal interviews with security officers, not only for me and my wife but for many people I've known everywhere I'd lived to the date of the adjudication of the clearance. The file, in other words, is as complete a set of information about me as you could hope to procure, given that it was created with my complete cooperation and with a very thorough background investigation.
How nice to know that the government took such good care with my trust.
How nice to know that the government took such good care with my trust.
The Fix
A surprise vote on that TPP fast track bill was called last night, just after news of the Charleston shooting began to flood TV news and social media networks. Fast track was approved by the House while no one was watching.
The Charleston Matter
It is a great sorrow to learn that decent people, brother and sister Christians engaged in Bible study, were murdered by a strange and paranoid figure while at their peaceful and religious work. At times like these, I prefer to look for those who behaved well in the face of danger. During the Sikh temple murders it was Satwant Singh Kaleka, a 65-year-old hero who charged the gunman with the only weapon the law permitted him: a butter knife that reduced his kirpan to a symbol rather than a practical tool for fighting evil. During the Aurora shooting, it was the gallant men who lay down their lives to protect their wives and girlfriends. Such men must be welcomed to heaven by heralding angels.
Today there are no such good stories, except for the work of the policemen who tracked down and captured the murderer. It is being remarked, unfairly, that the fact that they took him alive is proof that cops are racists. Rather, it is their duty when it is reasonably possible. They should be praised for doing their duty against a young man of proven danger.
Today there are no such good stories, except for the work of the policemen who tracked down and captured the murderer. It is being remarked, unfairly, that the fact that they took him alive is proof that cops are racists. Rather, it is their duty when it is reasonably possible. They should be praised for doing their duty against a young man of proven danger.
SCOTUS, Texas, and the Confederate Flag
This ruling makes sense to me. The Confederate Flag is, inter alia, a symbol of rebellion against Federal power. Even as a heritage symbol, which is how the Sons of Confederate Veterans want to use it, displaying it aligns one with the historical cause of rejecting the Federal government outright where it overstepped the community's understanding of its constitutional bounds. The Federal courts' extraordinary power over every aspect of American life follows directly from the defeat of that cause and the consequent Reconstruction's 14th Amendment.
So when the SoCV went forward with a lawsuit claiming the right to force the government to accept the symbol, of course the courts are bound to reject that. The liberal wing of the court was united here, joined by Justice Thomas. The article mentions that he is 'the court's only African-American' in a way that suggests this was a causal factor, but Thomas is surely correct as an originalist. The purpose of the Reconstruction amendments was to suppress just this particular political expression. For, as von Clausewitz reminds us, war is only politics by other means.
So when the SoCV went forward with a lawsuit claiming the right to force the government to accept the symbol, of course the courts are bound to reject that. The liberal wing of the court was united here, joined by Justice Thomas. The article mentions that he is 'the court's only African-American' in a way that suggests this was a causal factor, but Thomas is surely correct as an originalist. The purpose of the Reconstruction amendments was to suppress just this particular political expression. For, as von Clausewitz reminds us, war is only politics by other means.
Where Are The Ice Giants?
A forester in Denmark uncovers the weapons of giants among his pine trees.
The axe heads measure 12 inches (30 centimeters) in length and each one weighs two pounds. Dating revealed they were made sometime during the 16th century BC, making them one of the oldest weapons of their kind discovered in Denmark. They are twice as heavy as axe heads usually are, suggesting that the men who wielded them must have been giant in stature.A good reminder, as we approach 2016, of what we ought to look for in a leader.
Why teach Shakespeare?
Micro-Aggression
I prefer aggression per se, myself, but apparently this is a big deal:
Well, why shouldn't it be? It's private money, after all. I'm sure we're all OK with the idea of private actors -- corporations and their hiring managers, for example -- acting on their preference for supporting the advancement of the right sex. Or if we are not, why not? It's their money, after all, whether paid out as scholarships or salaries.
My favorite is “gender plays no part in who we hire,” a policy feminists have spent decades demanding from American businesses only to dismiss it now as aggressively sexist, a self-delusion promoted by the corporate world to disguise their bias against women.By coincidence I received in my email while off on vacation an advertisement for this scholarship. "This scholarship is available only to women," the tenured (and female) faculty member wrote to the email list without any apparent sense of discomfort.
Well, why shouldn't it be? It's private money, after all. I'm sure we're all OK with the idea of private actors -- corporations and their hiring managers, for example -- acting on their preference for supporting the advancement of the right sex. Or if we are not, why not? It's their money, after all, whether paid out as scholarships or salaries.
God and Gold
A meditation on St. Augustine's wrestling with a problem most modern Christian and Jewish thinkers prefer to avoid. Can you trade earthly gold for heavenly? What does it take to do so?
The Judgment of Grim
So this week I saw a grizzly in Yellowstone. People said he was around, so I searched out the track -- grizzly bears often leave a clear track where they walk back and forth between their favorite feeding areas -- and followed it. He was sleeping on top of his kill, an American Bison, by a small pond. I'm pretty sure this was a reasonable thing to do, in spite of the fact that everyone I've discussed it with thinks it was crazy. The land lay in such a way that there were only a few places he could be that were out of sight, and I approached with what I think was sufficient caution to make sure I didn't get close enough to those places to provoke an encounter. I wouldn't want to hurt a bear, and if it went the other way and he killed me the Rangers would shoot him. Thus, while I really wanted to see him, I approached it in a way that would ensure his safety.
I also crossed a glacier at 10,400 feet and free climbed some rock chimneys without rope or safety gear. This, I learned later, is strongly not recommended by the park rangers. Once again, though, I think I knew what I was doing, and it was awesome.
Thought about Sly when we crossed into Montana. That was really beautiful, but the Grand Tetons are my new favorite place in the world. More, it surprises me to say, even than Georgia.
Crowd-sourcing jobs
Amazon is considering adopting the Uber model, by signing up local workers to deliver packages they volunteer for via smartphone.
Named storms
Something's coming on shore now that's been dignified with the name "Bill." If you look at this Wind Map, it suggests a dramatic event over our heads (we're just about directly south of the left-hand edge of the "H" in "Houston"), but actually so far it's a bust even as far as rain goes. The west side of a tropical pattern is usually the dry side, but maybe it will dump something more on us later as it pulls northwest through Texas. It seems that North Texas and Oklahoma are in for another drenching, and it will be quite wet all the way up the Gulf Coast to the east of us.
Much as we would love to see another hard rain fill the pond all the rest of the way up, we can't complain about this year's extraordinary rainfall total to date, which is as much as we might expect in an entire ordinary year, around 30 inches. Our rainwater cistern has been topped off for months; lakes and aquifers are being replenished all over the state. But it's a good time to take rising rivers very seriously.
Update: OK, not that much yesterday, but we've had 5.5 inches of rain today with power outages. Now that's more like it!
Much as we would love to see another hard rain fill the pond all the rest of the way up, we can't complain about this year's extraordinary rainfall total to date, which is as much as we might expect in an entire ordinary year, around 30 inches. Our rainwater cistern has been topped off for months; lakes and aquifers are being replenished all over the state. But it's a good time to take rising rivers very seriously.
Update: OK, not that much yesterday, but we've had 5.5 inches of rain today with power outages. Now that's more like it!
Popcorn
This stuff doesn't need any comment.
Well, maybe it does. Here's a good one:
To say that a particularly psychology is abnormal or disordered does not imply it should be an object of hatred or hostility. I believe we need more tolerance for the abnormal and for those outside the mainstream—call it freak lib—and I would note that part of the reason the left has to insist so stridently that Jenner is normal, and demand that everyone agree, is because they are the ones who have no real concept of freedom for those outside the social consensus.
Hope in Detroit
I was wondering the other day how NRA approval sorted out by race. Today HotAir reports that "54 percent of blacks now see gun ownership as a good thing, something more likely to protect than harm. That’s up from 29 percent just two years ago."
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Books & Overstatement
I realize I have just said that I will be gone for a week, but I see a comment from Tex that deserves a moment's attention. I had said that the influence of Gutenberg is somewhat overstated. Tex replied:
Now Malory's work is right there at the beginning, but as we see the printing press didn't change the world over night -- or in the first hundred years, or hundred and fifty. It was the kickoff of the industrial revolution that made the printed book the main game. Even long after Gutenberg's death around 1465 (if I recall correctly) printed books were not the majority of books being produced.
For the most part right through the Renaissance books were made as they were made throughout the Middle Ages. And this was a substantial business!
A gentleman named Peter Yu, though a lawyer rather than historian by training, composed a fairly careful brief history of books in response to a comment by Justice Breyer that is called "Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen." Michigan St. Law Review 1 (2006)
I don't think that Tex is at all wrong about the way the general history is presented, however. It's just that here as so often with the Middle Ages, the Modern age has gotten the truth completely backwards.
Grim, before I accept the proposition that "the difficulty of acquiring books before the printing press is overstated" I would need to see some sources. Every history of the period I have ever consulted has emphasized the seismic impact of the sudden availability of a vastly greater body of printed material, along with an explosion of literacy and an accompanying market for books. What do you think is overstated about that picture?I think it's overstated in both directions. For one thing, the idea that Gutenberg produced a 'sudden availability' of 'a vastly greater body' of material is not borne out. Here's a chart of "the number of separately printed items in Britain and by English abroad," from James Raven's The Business of Books, p. 8.
Now Malory's work is right there at the beginning, but as we see the printing press didn't change the world over night -- or in the first hundred years, or hundred and fifty. It was the kickoff of the industrial revolution that made the printed book the main game. Even long after Gutenberg's death around 1465 (if I recall correctly) printed books were not the majority of books being produced.
For the most part right through the Renaissance books were made as they were made throughout the Middle Ages. And this was a substantial business!
Moreover, the universities were the earliest centres of the book trade as we understand it, and the provisions for the multiplication, sale, and rent of standard works helped these at least to travel by their own momentum. In these respects the university life of the later Middle Ages reached a comparatively close approximation to early modern conditions; the chief difference, to use Shaw's phrase, lay in the iconography.That's from Charles Homer Haskins, "The Spread of Ideas in the Middle Ages," Speculum 1 no. 1 (January 1926). He goes on to point out that there are records of 'vast stores of books' returning from the Fourth Crusade as a favored item of plunder; in fact, the Crusaders had learned early in Spain that there was almost nothing of greater value than the books of Greek learning, and Arabic commentaries or expansions on the same, that they were able to take from the Saracen lands.
A gentleman named Peter Yu, though a lawyer rather than historian by training, composed a fairly careful brief history of books in response to a comment by Justice Breyer that is called "Of Monks, Medieval Scribes, and Middlemen." Michigan St. Law Review 1 (2006)
By the twelfth century, towns emerged, and communities grew in size and wealth. As a result of the spread of literacy, the demand for books increased dramatically, and a large number of new texts appeared. "Monastic libraries soon found it more and more difficult to keep their collections up to date, and they began employing secular scribes and illuminators to collaborate in book production." Meanwhile, schools became independent from cathedrals, to which they were originally attached, and guilds of lecturers and students gathered to form universities. With the changing lifestyle and the emergence of new educational institutions, it became more and more common for people to want to own books themselves, whether students seeking textbooks or noble women desiring to own beautifully illuminated Psalters. By 1200 there is quite good evidence of secular workshops writing and decorating manuscripts for sale to the laity. By 1250 there were certainly bookshops in the big university and commercial towns, arranging the writing out of new manuscripts and trading in second-hand copies. By 1300 it must have been exceptional for a monastery to make its own manuscripts: usually, monks bought their books from shops like anyone else, although this is not quite true of the Carthusians or of some religious communities in the Netherlands....He goes on to note that the 'challenge' to traditional manuscripts by printed works was generational, as the traditionally produced works did not drop off in popularity, and printed works were actually more expensive than hand-made works in the first generation. The technology to produce them was new and not an industrial technology; there were very few people who knew how to make or use it, and it still required a very substantial amount of labor. The works were certainly popular, which demand increased their price given the limited supply, but they did not replace the Medieval method for generations -- only supplemented it.
Ordinances, therefore, were developed "to regulate the work of the copyists, to lay down the minimum requirements of formal presentation and substantial correctness, and to prescribe the selling price of duly certified copies." A notable example of these regulations was the ordinance of Bologna University of 1259, which provided what commentators have considered to be the earliest regulations of sales, loans, and production of books used by the university. Similar regulations were also enacted by the University of Paris in 1275 and by Alphonso X of Castile in Spain sometime between 1252 and 1285. Although England had similar regulations concerning the stationers, "the English book trade . . . developed not around the universities, as on the Continent, but in London, where the stationers formed a guild as early as 1403." This guild was known famously as the Stationers' Company...
As the book trade grew in volume, the number of scribes increased dramatically, and a scribal industry began to emerge as a profession.... [t]he book trade continued to flourish in major European cities, and the number of scribes and illuminators increased substantially as a result. "By the late thirteenth century in Paris (a century later in England), ateliers of scribes and illuminators were known by the name of their master artists," and "the names of scribes, illuminators, parchment-makers and binders . . . [can be found] in tax records, though few names can be linked with surviving books."
I don't think that Tex is at all wrong about the way the general history is presented, however. It's just that here as so often with the Middle Ages, the Modern age has gotten the truth completely backwards.
Literature and pure motives
An author I quite admire and enjoy, Ursula Le Guin, shares the widespread conviction that the book industry has been corrupted by financial motives. Publishers--those lousy Philistines--don't care about the inherent value of a book, only about their ability to sell it at a profit. Well, I suppose there may be publishers out there who only care about the inherent value of a book, but after they spend all their savings putting the books out, they go out of business, leaving only their filthy-lucre competitors behind.
It's only been in the last few centuries, though, that anyone even tried to make money off of publishing. Back when each book was a painstaking labor of handmade love, if the author wasn't pretty determined to write it for its inherent value, well, it just didn't get written. Not many people ever got to read these supremely disinterested works, but that kept the unwashed masses from driving down the tone. Then some bright guy figured out a way to automate the printing process, and suddenly books weren't just something that a few scholars shared with each other as fast as some poor scribe could copy them by hand. The growing literate public started agitating for more and faster copies, and next thing you know people are saying, "Well, OK, I'll devote my professional life to churning out copies for you, but only if you're willing to pay for them. All this paper and ink isn't free, you know." Publishers got used to making a living and found that they might have to pay the authors who turned out stuff people were willing to buy.
It's still possible to write for the sheer inherent value of writing, if you don't want a zillion people to read it, and if you don't quit your day job. But it seems a little odd to demand the right to make a living at writing, while complaining that other people don't value it for its own sake.
It's only been in the last few centuries, though, that anyone even tried to make money off of publishing. Back when each book was a painstaking labor of handmade love, if the author wasn't pretty determined to write it for its inherent value, well, it just didn't get written. Not many people ever got to read these supremely disinterested works, but that kept the unwashed masses from driving down the tone. Then some bright guy figured out a way to automate the printing process, and suddenly books weren't just something that a few scholars shared with each other as fast as some poor scribe could copy them by hand. The growing literate public started agitating for more and faster copies, and next thing you know people are saying, "Well, OK, I'll devote my professional life to churning out copies for you, but only if you're willing to pay for them. All this paper and ink isn't free, you know." Publishers got used to making a living and found that they might have to pay the authors who turned out stuff people were willing to buy.
It's still possible to write for the sheer inherent value of writing, if you don't want a zillion people to read it, and if you don't quit your day job. But it seems a little odd to demand the right to make a living at writing, while complaining that other people don't value it for its own sake.
Today in Clueless Youth-hood...
...a young progressive decides Jerry Seinfeld needs a lecture on the recent history of comedy. 'Let me tell you about this guy called George Carlin...'
The upshot of the lecture is that it's great if comedy is offensive, as long as it offends only the right people.
The upshot of the lecture is that it's great if comedy is offensive, as long as it offends only the right people.
Safety first
Always wanted to work in the porn industry? You probably hesitated, knowing that the industry didn't require suitable protective eyewear. Now California has your back.
Then Again, Sometimes It's Hard to Judge What's Madness...
Human intuition has some limits. If this piece points to something true about the world, those limits are much greater than we think they are.
We had a luxury yacht once
At least, we had an offshore fishing boat. It wasn't a luxury boat like Marco Rubio's though; it was used, and I think it was a foot or two shorter than his opulent 24. We couldn't have dinner parties on it like he can, or shelter our guests in private cabins. We didn't even have a helicopter landing pad like his.
Another thing that shows he can't identify with ordinary voters like me is his luxury mansion. I've never lived in a home with 2,700 square feet, except for one period when I shared it with eight other commune-types, like a good member of the proletariat. I never had an in-ground pool. At the ancestral Texan99 manor, if we wanted to splash we had to fill up the little plastic pool. Where does Rubio get off?
Best to stick with the Clinton/Kerry ticket.
Another thing that shows he can't identify with ordinary voters like me is his luxury mansion. I've never lived in a home with 2,700 square feet, except for one period when I shared it with eight other commune-types, like a good member of the proletariat. I never had an in-ground pool. At the ancestral Texan99 manor, if we wanted to splash we had to fill up the little plastic pool. Where does Rubio get off?
Best to stick with the Clinton/Kerry ticket.
'Madman Comes Up With BS Theory' Would Have Been Less Compelling
Headline: "Is Ancient History Completely Made Up By 'The Man'?"
Short answer: No.
Slightly longer answer: Nevertheless, some of the problems he raises are interesting, even though his conclusions are barking mad.
Short answer: No.
Slightly longer answer: Nevertheless, some of the problems he raises are interesting, even though his conclusions are barking mad.
Further Evidence of the Intelligence of Chimpanzees
We've long known about their construction and use of primitive tools. Who knew, though, that they put them to such a divine and civilized purpose?
High Stakes Poker
In the old days in Dodge City, they didn't play much harder than this:
The law declares that if the supreme court strikes down the administrative law, the entire state judiciary will lose its funding. Brownback and the legislature are essentially bullying the judiciary: Uphold our law or cease to exist.Well, court-packing worked for Roosevelt. Even though he didn't get his packed court, he spooked the Justices into giving way on his preferred 'reforms,' such as letting the Executive's bureaucracy write the laws by having Congress delegate them the authority.
"I chose life."
"I chose life. I defaulted on my student loans."
Oh, if you want a dose of precious snowflake, try this guy's paean to his own highmindedness.
Oh, if you want a dose of precious snowflake, try this guy's paean to his own highmindedness.
Left-Leaning Academics: "Were We Wrong?"
What happens when postmodern cultural and literary criticisms fall into the wrong hands?
It would be a terrible mistake for the right to adopt the 'winning strategy' of refusing to recognize truth based on objective facts, however. Play stupid games, as they say, and you'll win stupid prizes.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the fault lines of academic debate for the past 20 years already knows that the "science wars" were fought by natural scientists (and their defenders in the philosophy of science) on the one side and literary critics and cultural-studies folks on the other. The latter argued that even in the natural realm, truth is relative, and there is no such thing as objectivity. The skirmishes blew up in the well-known "Sokal affair" in 1996, in which a prominent physicist created a scientifically absurd postmodernist paper and was able to get it published in a leading cultural-studies journal. The ridicule that followed may have seemed to settle the matter once and for all.The reason it burns is that there is a whole lot invested in the idea that we can't simply reason from observations of the facts of nature to objective conclusions that should guide our actions.
But then a funny thing happened: While many natural scientists declared the battle won and headed back to their labs, some left-wing postmodernist criticisms of truth began to be picked up by right-wing ideologues who were looking for respectable cover for their denial of climate change, evolution, and other scientifically accepted conclusions. Alan Sokal said he had hoped to shake up academic progressives, but suddenly one found hard-right conservatives sounding like Continental intellectuals. And that caused discombobulation on the left.
"Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies?," Bruno Latour, one of the founders of the field that contextualizes science, famously asked. "Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?"
It would be a terrible mistake for the right to adopt the 'winning strategy' of refusing to recognize truth based on objective facts, however. Play stupid games, as they say, and you'll win stupid prizes.
Shooting for E-Zero
This Google link will take you to a non-firewalled WSJ article about the supreme post-modern condition now reached by our ethanol fuel policy: from now on, we're going to subsidize corn production for ethanol, not because we can better achieve our environmental goals that way, but because subsidies are a goal in their own right. My husband's view: we'd probably do less damage if we just started sending the checks with no strings attached.
Reading Lists
Went by the local used bookstore tonight, and picked up a few things to read this summer.
Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. This was my introduction to economic theory many years ago, but I haven't re-read it since I was a teenager.
Wippel and Wotler, O.F.M. Medieval Philosophy. I don't expect surprises in this volume, but it'll be interesting to read another perspective of the topic in summary.
Lupack, Alan and Barbara, eds. Arthurian Literature by Women. I bought this one because it was mostly Medieval and 19th century, but there is a substantial section of 20th century contributions.
Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. This was my introduction to economic theory many years ago, but I haven't re-read it since I was a teenager.
Wippel and Wotler, O.F.M. Medieval Philosophy. I don't expect surprises in this volume, but it'll be interesting to read another perspective of the topic in summary.
Lupack, Alan and Barbara, eds. Arthurian Literature by Women. I bought this one because it was mostly Medieval and 19th century, but there is a substantial section of 20th century contributions.
Waco RUMINT
This guy is an attorney in Las Vegas who has been contacted, he claims, by many of the bikers arrested in the Waco shootout. Easyriders magazine found him credible enough to pass the clip, given what they're hearing from their own connections.
The way he tells the story, most of the bikers inside were there for a meeting of a community of non-outlaw clubs considering bills before the state assembly that deal with motorcycle issues. The Scimitars and Cossacks showed up uninvited to this meeting. A handful of Bandidos showed up later, and the Cossacks/Scimitars decided to press their substantial numerical advantage to force the Bandidos to a loss of face. This escalated, so that one Bandido was shot, and one-two more shots were fired without issue.
Then the police, who had their SWAT team on site, opened fire into the crowd with rifles. He estimates they killed all 9 dead, and injured 26 of the 27. Then they arrested everyone, and got a justice of the peace rather than a proper judge to slap that $1 million dollar bond on everyone.
Now of course this is in no way official, and is just the word of people arrested at the time. The police have all the forensics and video, mostly unreleased to the public so far. Perhaps a FOIA request from a Texas media outlet will generate more information. Perhaps the police will choose to release more. Presumably there are some official procedures of inquiry in process as well.
We'll just have to see how the facts shake out in time.
The way he tells the story, most of the bikers inside were there for a meeting of a community of non-outlaw clubs considering bills before the state assembly that deal with motorcycle issues. The Scimitars and Cossacks showed up uninvited to this meeting. A handful of Bandidos showed up later, and the Cossacks/Scimitars decided to press their substantial numerical advantage to force the Bandidos to a loss of face. This escalated, so that one Bandido was shot, and one-two more shots were fired without issue.
Then the police, who had their SWAT team on site, opened fire into the crowd with rifles. He estimates they killed all 9 dead, and injured 26 of the 27. Then they arrested everyone, and got a justice of the peace rather than a proper judge to slap that $1 million dollar bond on everyone.
Now of course this is in no way official, and is just the word of people arrested at the time. The police have all the forensics and video, mostly unreleased to the public so far. Perhaps a FOIA request from a Texas media outlet will generate more information. Perhaps the police will choose to release more. Presumably there are some official procedures of inquiry in process as well.
We'll just have to see how the facts shake out in time.
Five Medieval Tales
Via Medievalists, a set of charming (or not) stories from the Middle Ages.
The first story may strike a contemporary reader as grotesque, not merely for the cannibalism but for the prospect of having your actual heart cut out and sent to someone you love. Yet this practice was regarded not as grotesque but rather intensely romantic, in the old sense of the word, in the High Middle Ages. Robert the Bruce had his heart removed after his death and sent on Crusade, as his heart had always longed to go, but his duty to Scotland kept him from it. His greatest friend carried the heart, and died crusading against the Moors in Spain.
Story number four may or may not be practical, but it is a common story. The Icelandic Heimskringla has Harald Hardrada, the Thunderbolt of the North, carrying out a similar plan to destroy a city in Sicily while campaigning in the mercenary service of the lords of Byzantium. In that case they supposedly gathered up flying birds and set them ablaze, causing them to fly home in a panic to their nests within the walls of the city.
As for the third tale, just last night I finished the chapter of Barnaby Rogerson's The Last Crusaders that deals with the Portuguese kings. This sort of deep love attachment and flamboyance sounds very much in character for the family. That, by the way, is proving to be an entertaining history. I recommend it.
The first story may strike a contemporary reader as grotesque, not merely for the cannibalism but for the prospect of having your actual heart cut out and sent to someone you love. Yet this practice was regarded not as grotesque but rather intensely romantic, in the old sense of the word, in the High Middle Ages. Robert the Bruce had his heart removed after his death and sent on Crusade, as his heart had always longed to go, but his duty to Scotland kept him from it. His greatest friend carried the heart, and died crusading against the Moors in Spain.
Story number four may or may not be practical, but it is a common story. The Icelandic Heimskringla has Harald Hardrada, the Thunderbolt of the North, carrying out a similar plan to destroy a city in Sicily while campaigning in the mercenary service of the lords of Byzantium. In that case they supposedly gathered up flying birds and set them ablaze, causing them to fly home in a panic to their nests within the walls of the city.
As for the third tale, just last night I finished the chapter of Barnaby Rogerson's The Last Crusaders that deals with the Portuguese kings. This sort of deep love attachment and flamboyance sounds very much in character for the family. That, by the way, is proving to be an entertaining history. I recommend it.
Another from D29
The May jobs report was strong... from a certain point of view.
Economist Tyler Cowen suggests that maybe it just isn't going to get better. I think we can all think of ways that would make it better -- a vast deregulation, starting with repealing Obamacare, would be my first suggestion -- so I don't accept the idea that we would be powerless were we able to form a unified political will as a polity and act upon it. Still, I do agree that there are some problems that won't just smooth out and get better, because they were allowed to fester for so long.
Speaking of which, how's that national debt problem?
...in May's far stronger than expected report, the two for the first time were almost identical: the Establishment Survey reported an increase of 280K jobs, while according to the Household survey 272K jobs were added. ...the biggest surprise came from Table 7, where the BLS reveals the number of "foreign born workers" used in the Household survey. In May, this number increased [by a] monthly jump of 279K...So, the number of new jobs and the number of new immigrant workers is just about identical? Normally you'd only expect to see that if we had reached structural unemployment levels, so that the only way you could grow the workforce was by bringing new people in from outside the country. Instead, we have a U-6 unemployment rate of 10.8%.
Economist Tyler Cowen suggests that maybe it just isn't going to get better. I think we can all think of ways that would make it better -- a vast deregulation, starting with repealing Obamacare, would be my first suggestion -- so I don't accept the idea that we would be powerless were we able to form a unified political will as a polity and act upon it. Still, I do agree that there are some problems that won't just smooth out and get better, because they were allowed to fester for so long.
Speaking of which, how's that national debt problem?
The Case of the 11 AM Beer
The Drudge Report picked up a Daily Telegraph story asking, "Why is Barack Obama drinking beer at 11 AM?"
I was prepared to defend the President on this one. It's a local custom for Sunday mornings.
Until the last line of the article, I was convinced of this position. But:
I was prepared to defend the President on this one. It's a local custom for Sunday mornings.
Eleven in the morning might be considered a little early for a beer in some parts of the world, but in Bavaria breakfast is not complete without a weissbier, as the local wheat beer is called. It’s not quite as hard-drinking as it sounds: Bavarians don’t down a quick pint before heading to the office every morning. It originates in Frühschoppen - a local tradition of meeting for a drink late in the morning on Sundays and holidays.Besides, if he just flew in from D.C., it's not 11 AM in any meaningful sense for him anyway. So I was going to say that he should be given full pardon for this alleged offense.
According to Bavarian custom, the sausages cannot be eaten after 12 noon, because no preservatives are used and they are made fresh every day. Therefore those who wish to wash their sausages down with a beer must get supping before that time. The local saying is that the sausages must not be allowed to hear the church bells chime noon.
Until the last line of the article, I was convinced of this position. But:
A local farmer told reporters Mr Obama had in fact drunk non-alcoholic beer at the breakfast.Non-alcoholic beer in Germany? There's simply no excuse for that.
The Case of the Casbah and the Offensive American Dancer
A group in Morocco is suing American dancer Jennifer Lopez for "tarnishing women's honor and respect" with her racy performance in country. I have little doubt that the charges are fully justified by the local community standards, but the group is probably out of luck. Morocco has no extradition treaty with the United States, so the potential jail time will certainly never be served.
Last week I related The Tale of Scott Rothstein and His Golden Toilets, and mentioned among other things that Rothstein had "fled to Morocco" along with 16 million of his closest friends when it looked like the proverbial jig was up for him and his Ponzi scheme....That works both ways. They get our Ponzi scheme artists, but they don't get our... er, "artists."
Not coincidentally, Morocco is one of the countries that has no extradition treaty with the United States, something that Rothstein knew because -- and this is possibly my favorite detail of the whole story, short of the golden toilets -- he made somebody in his firm research that issue for him. The project was supposedly on behalf of a "client," but he was in fact having someone research the question of where he should flee to avoid prosecution.
I was sort of hoping he called in an associate and just made that person do it, but it turns out he sent an email, apparently to everyone in the firm, saying he had a rush project for an important client. "We have a client that was a United States citizen until about 6 months ago," Rothstein wrote in the email, probably able to resist making air quotes around "client" only because he was busy typing the word. "He became a citizen of Israel and renounced his United States citizenship. He is likely to be charged with a multitude of crimes in the United States including fraud, money laundering and embezzlement." (I'm trying to imagine what people at the firm were thinking upon reading this.) Rothstein wanted them to research whether the client could be extradited from Israel, or could be prosecuted for the crimes in Israel. "This client is related to a very powerful client of ours," Rothstein continued, "and so time is of the essence. Lets [sic] rock and roll....there is a very large fee attached to this case. Thanks Love ya Scott," he concluded.
Who Talked?
Almost everything about SEAL Team 6, a classified Special Operations unit, is shrouded in secrecy — the Pentagon does not even publicly acknowledge that name — though some of its exploits have emerged in largely admiring accounts in recent years. But an examination of Team 6’s evolution, drawn from dozens of interviews with current and former team members, other military officials and reviews of government documents, reveals a far more complex, provocative tale.Loose lips, boys.
Catholic Social Teaching, For Catholics
H/t D29:
The Church has long taught that defrauding a worker of his wages is one of the four sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance (CCC 1867). In his landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII echoed the words of St. James:OK, so that's a lot of backstory. We know the Church believes this. So what?
Doubtless, before deciding whether wages are fair, many things have to be considered; but wealthy owners and all masters of labor should be mindful of this – that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. “Behold, the hire of the laborers… which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” Lastly, the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings, whether by force, by fraud, or by usurious dealing; and with all the greater reason because the laboring man is, as a rule, weak and unprotected, and because his slender means should in proportion to their scantiness be accounted sacred. Were these precepts carefully obeyed and followed out, would they not be sufficient of themselves to keep under all strife and all its causes?
Again, Pope Pius XI took up the cause in Quadragesimo Anno. He made an important distinction, however, when it came to those businesses which themselves were deprived of enough revenue to pay their workers justly:
[I]f the business in question is not making enough money to pay the workers an equitable wage because it is being crushed by unjust burdens or forced to sell its product at less than a just price, those who are thus the cause of the injury are guilty of grave wrong, for they deprive workers of their just wage and force them under the pinch of necessity to accept a wage less than fair.
First, there is the problem of working for the Church herself. There is no surer path to financial insolvency than for a hard worker to direct their energies towards some form of full-time Catholic apostolate, or to slave away for long hours as a Director of Religious Education, or to teach at a Catholic school.... This becomes a particular problem if they embody the Catholic ethos of “oppenness to life” and have a large family.Emphasis added. This is a good point. Some religious orders require a vow of poverty, but a large part of the work is done by people who do not labor under such vows. How much stronger the moral argument would be if it were joined to practical example.
I suspect few individuals have ever had aspirations of becoming wealthy while working for the Church, but by the Church’s own teaching, the worker in a Catholic apostolate or school should expect to “be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family.” (QA 71) It is inexcusably hypocritical that the same clergy who wield the Church’s social teaching as a weapon against the titans of industry — often claiming that this is a non-negotiable moral imperative — often fail so completely when it comes to applying this standard to those under their own employ.
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