The South Must Be Destroyed

At the time that the world went insane over the display of the Confederate flag at a war memorial on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol, I told a friend that I was concerned that this would lead to a much more serious purge against the South. The language being used wasn't always anti-Confederate, but had a strong anti-Southern tendency -- especially the language of the powerful and politically connected, as opposed to the ordinary citizens of South Carolina who have a perfect right to debate how to remember their heritage.

That this is an anti-Southern purge by the cultural elite is clear, now, as the Washington Post leads the charge to destroy the Southern belle. Writing on a decision by the University of Georgia to ban the wearing of hoop skirts as somehow symbolic of slavery, though unlike the Confederate flag the skirt is characteristic of the South both before and after the end of slavery, the Post calls for much more purgery:

If UGA and other Southern schools really want to lead, they will not only ban the hoop; they will also go after the belle. This will be tougher to do. It will mean discontinuing support for still-prevalent campus productions that promote imaginative connection with the Old South. And it will mean instituting new campus productions in their place. For their part, traditionally white Southern sororities serious about anti-racism will scrap the belle aesthetic and corresponding performances designed to measure it. They will develop new yardsticks for evaluating potential members that are less about looks and more about leadership. In short, they will confront the central role their choreography plays in reiterating race and class privilege. They will just say to hell with the belle.

The language is extraordinarily hostile to a group of young women engaged in what, in an earlier era, we might have thought of as "protected acts of free expression." But the campus is no place for free expression these days. These days expressions on campus must be controlled by the Federal Government's Office for Civil Rights. Campuses in the South must be controlled most tightly of all.

I've seen this movie before.



It wasn't the Medieval English kings, as the film has it: it was in 1746 that the kilt was banned, and the pipes, and the symbols of Scotland.

This Story is Starting to Get Interesting

The National Review points out that the missing emails -- whether or not they end up creating a legal issue for Mrs. Clinton -- will probably derail the prosecution of a terrorist associated with the Benghazi attacks. If you felt that we needed to point to actual damage to the national security, now you can.

If Mrs. Clinton thinks FOIA is a headache, wait until she sees what happens when a top government official’s reckless mass deletion of e-mails takes center stage in a terrorism prosecution of intense national interest. Federal criminal court is not the nightly news. There, mass deletion of files is not gently described as “emails a government official chose not to retain”; it is described as “destruction of evidence” and “obstruction of justice.”

The problem is that the indictment tries to stand by the silly story that the attack was a spontaneous protest to an internet video, and the government is required to produce anything it has that "calls into question the prosecution’s version of events, theory of guilt, and credibility." Emails from the day of the attack touching on the attack are, of course, evidence of that kind. I can tell that the author really enjoyed writing this piece.

Now classified information might not be required to be produced in an open court, but it is Mrs. Clinton's stated belief that no classified information was sent on this system. Also, according to Federal law, these were government records that were required to be archived.

Meanwhile, in what may be an even more amazing story, the IT firm Mrs. Clinton used appears to have transferred all the data to another drive -- and then sold it.

Bloomberg reported Thursday night that Barbara Wells, an attorney for Platte River Networks, Inc., confirmed that while the server hardware now controlled by the FBI 'is blank and does not contain any useful data,' its contents could still be safe and sound elsewhere.

That's because the server's messages were 'migrated' to another server that still exists, she said, before ending the Bloomberg interview without specifying where that device is located and who owns it – only that her company no longer has it.

That's some first-rate security this firm provides for their clients' sensitive data!

Wonder who has it now?

Waco Shootout Update

So... it's been three months. Do we know who shot whom?

No, indeed! "Tabo says courts can make exceptions under certain circumstances and in those cases, gag orders don’t violate The First Amendment. '[But] the standard is supposed to be quite high,' she says."

Nine people died at that shootout. Who shot them? An attorney out of Vegas claims, allegedly based on talks with the bikers, that the police killed them all. This would be an easy charge to rebut by releasing physical evidence. For example, were these gunshot wounds from handguns, or were they from rifles? That's very easy to determine in an autopsy.

Also: "All but two of the 177 have been released, and no one has been formally charged." No one? That's kind of amazing. Almost two hundred people were arrested, and no charges have been filed?

"Stands to reason" medicine takes another hit

For many years some doctors refused to treat Jehovah's Witnesses on the ground that they refused blood transfusions, which doctors felt made some procedures too risky.  Someone finally got around to testing the assumption that patients do better with transfusions than without.

Confidence

President Obama having had a "chance" meeting with Bill Clinton on the golf course yesterday, today he's out with the former President for the afternoon. Hillary Clinton will be joining them later when the party moves from the links to a birthday celebration for Vernon Jordan.

Wonder what they'll be talking about?

Poll results show that three percent of Democrats think Hillary is telling the truth about these emails.

That's Four Counts Showing

Passing TS/SCI information to someone not cleared to receive it is a felony each time you do it. We don't know how many recipients were on those two TS/SCI emails in Mrs. Clinton's account, but we do know that she passed them personally at least twice: once to her attorney, and once to an IT firm that was not cleared to handle classified material.

These facts aren't in dispute. That's a maximum penalty of 40 years. She could get less, and indeed I would expect the sentences to run concurrently in any case. Still, at this point we aren't arguing the facts anymore. We're now arguing whether this is a case of "knowingly" doing wrong that should be prosecuted under 1924, of "gross negligence" that should be prosecuted under 793(f), or whether it is merely a case of an unlawful transfer that should be prosecuted under section 793(d) which requires neither knowledge nor intent but merely being guilty of having done it.

The penalty is the same even if intent can't be proven. I understand she's arranged a meeting with the President. Meanwhile, The Observer calls for a special prosecutor.

I Think We Know

Robert Spencer reports on a 12-year-old girl who was kept as a sex slave by an ISIS fighter.

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

Both before and after he raped her, he prostrated himself in Islamic prayer:

“He told me,” the girl recounted, “that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God.”

This was no isolated incident. A fifteen-year-old girl who had been forced into sex slavery recalled:

“He kept telling me this is ibadah” – that is, worship of Allah. “He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal.’”

All this is reminiscent of Hamas’ statement:

“Killing Jews is worship that draws us closer to God.”

What kind of god is this?

The answer is in that piece on ISIS's songs and poetry that I cited this morning.

We sold our soul to Allah
And marched on the road to martyrdom.

Emphasis added.

This Doesn't Strike Me As A Dilemma

Philosophically, at least, there's no two ways about this. The right thing to do is to strike.

Imagine if you were a natsec official and received information that [American hostage Kayla] Mueller was being held at a location that Special Forces couldn’t safely reach, that she was being routinely raped (by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself), and that she was likely to go on being raped indefinitely until she was eventually murdered on film for propaganda. That dilemma is a bit like the dilemma FDR faced in deciding whether to bomb concentration camps: Is the humane option to put the innocents out of their misery and wreck some of the machinery of death in the process or do you hold back and let the suffering go on in the hope/expectation of liberation eventually?

Aquinas would have said that you strike and hope for a miracle to preserve her safety: and that you can hope for a miracle proves the morality of the case. If you were acting immorally -- if killing her were your end or the means to your end -- the miracle would undo your intended end. Because you can fervently hope that the bombs might miraculously avoid harming her, you know that your intention is not the evil but the good.

Clearly it feels like a dilemma to Allahpundit, however, which is interesting to me. To me it seems so clear a case as to require not the slightest hesitation before deciding. It's interesting that the intuitive feeling differs, although I think reason decides the case one way for all.

What do you think? Would you find this a difficult decision, were it to fall on you to make it in this war? Would you make it differently?

Why Not Dance?

I've been thinking more about the Chesterton post, inspired by AVI's generous gift, and the question of why dancing seems to have dropped away from the repertoire of normal things a man ought to be able to do. I know plenty of men who can dance, of course, but it is no longer one of the basic skills of manhood: my father didn't dance either, and nor did my uncle, and nor did many of the best young men I knew when I was a young man myself.

Here are two videos that I think may explain the shift. The first one is from Fort Apache, starring Henry Fonda and John Wayne. In this scene the fort commander is being asked to dance with the Sergeant Major's wife, having just given grave insult to the Sergeant Major's family. It is a moment in which the formal and ritual come to the rescue of the society when it is endangered by passionate emotions. The commanding officer looks askance at the request, but recognizes his duty and carries it out with vigor. Watch the Sergeant Major, too, dancing with the daughter of his commanding officer (played by Shirley Temple). Look how far apart they dance, but how pleasantly. Though she is a much younger woman, and he a married man, there is no danger of this action being misinterpreted as otherwise than joyous and appropriate. The dancing is, however, quite stiff by our contemporary standards.



The second scene is a really artful piece from A Knight's Tale. What I like about this scene is that it smoothly morphs about halfway through the dance from the Medieval formal dance to a contemporary sort of dancing. The director intends you to see that the formality, which might look alien and weird to a contemporary American, is really carrying the same sort of eroticism and pleasure that we expect from dances today. Yet you can't avoid the contrast, either, between the dance with steps and elaborate forms and the dance without either. The transition is really a transition, even though the director is quite right to say that dancing was also an erotic activity for the young even when it was formalized.



I think there may be something here to do with the loss of the form. Speaking for myself, I was taught to waltz, but none of the young women I knew wanted to waltz. Their favorite dances were more like the second dance of the second video. But the advantage to a formal dance is that you can know you're doing it correctly, which avoids embarrassment and public shame. The same spirited young men who are most interested in honor -- what I called "the best young men I knew" -- are also most driven to avoid shame. The new dances put them at grave risk of having their intentions toward the lady misinterpreted or misrepresented, of physical error and looking a fool, or of banging into someone else and thereby giving offense.

So dancing gets dropped from the repertoire of the young gentleman. There's no point in dancing without the ladies, and the ladies want to do a sort of dancing that he can't do without risking shame. That is too bad because, as the first video shows, it was a form capable both of giving pleasure and easing social interactions. Done correctly, that is -- but that means there has to be a correct way to do it. The informality is the enemy of those goods.

Songs of ISIS

One of the things I have advocated to DOD's Minerva Project is a serious study of radical Islamic poetics as a means of developing more effective counter-radical messaging. All our various disciplines of trying to influence in this area would be stronger if we knew how to speak in the language of poetry, as this carries so much of the weight in terms of how people feel about what is best and most worthy. Young men are especially susceptible to the emotional appeals of poetry and song, just as those same young and romantic men are the most likely to get involved in radical politics.

This week MEMRI gives us a look at the songs that ISIS is using for recruitment and morale.

ISIS's songs belong to a genre of traditional poetry called zajal, whose most prominent formal characteristic is rhyming. Zajal poems display various rhyme schemes.... The authors of ISIS's songs are evidently familiar also with Classical Arabic poetry, especially poems of war.... ISIS's songs are written in Classical Arabic, but the pronunciation is colloquial, reflecting the dialect of the lead singer....

Ours is the cry of truth [Allah Akbar] when the fighting [sides] collide.
We, the proud savage lions,
Carry the steel [swords] with firm determination.
And when war comes, with the music of bullets,
We take the infidels by storm, yearning for revenge.
They are led to perdition, they find no refuge,
We water the soil with the blood of their veins,
And cast off their heads with the blade of our sword.
We heal the souls [of the Muslims] by striking the enemies,
So give the enemy tidings of the evil day [that awaits him].
Ancient glory shall shine across the world.
The jabs of the spearhead are the music of the men.
And in war, honor casts a wide shadow.
So awaken to eternal life, come, my brother,
Leave the path of the slothful and foolish.
When the fire springs up, we are the flame,
Burning the rabble with our sword,
Lifting the dark night from the earth,
And a new dawn breaks over the world.

Chinese blast

The Daily Caller has up a collection of amateur videos of yesterday's huge explosion.  I guess they still don't know what blew up, exactly, but the area of devastation is huge.  So far they've acknowledged about 50 people killed.  It's a good thing it happened at night.

More on Anti-ISIL Militias

US News and World Report reports that about 600 Assyrians are being trained by an unnamed US company for the Nineveh Plain Protection Units (NPU), and the group has 3,000 more volunteers being screened. The NPU is a Christian militia group operating in northern Iraq

Reuters reports on Westerners who have joined Dwekh Nawsha. In addition to a short video interview and a longer article providing context and more about the Western fighters, Reuters answers a question I had about why Westerners aren't joining the Kurdish peshmerga. They are concerned about possible affiliations with the PKK, which is considered a terrorist group.

British Grandfather Joins Christian Militia in Iraq

Despite having no military experience, Jim Atherton, 53, of Tyne and Wear, has sold his car to buy weapons and has already come under mortar and rocket attacks.

The granddad, who before leaving for Iraq cared for rescued daschunds, said Special Branch had tried to persuade him to come home, but he believed his place was fighting jihadists.

...

Mr Atherton said his family had been devastated by his decision to join a Christian militia called Dwekh Nawsha, which means The Sacrificers. He now belongs to a unit which protects the Christian population of Iraqi villages such as al-Qosh.

He raised the £18,000 needed for travel and guns by selling his Sierra Cosworth, two motorbikes and a boat.

Mr Atherton, whose younger brother was killed fighting in Afghanistan, came across Dwekh Nawsha on the internet. 

As a virtue, courage is the golden mean between cowardice and foolhardiness; I don't know if Mr. Atherton is courageous or foolhardy.

Dwekh Nawsha has its own Facebook page, of course, with some interesting photos and video, though it seems to be mostly in Syriac. And a YouTube channel with lots of videos but not much action. If Wikipedia is right:

The Dwekh Nawsha is a military organization created in mid 2014 in order to defend Iraq's Assyrian Christians from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and possibly retake their lands currently controlled by ISIL.

Unlike the NPU which is independent of the KRG and Peshmerga, the Dwekh Nawsha operates in coordination with them.

Despite being led by the Assyrian Patriotic Party, most militiamen are not members of the party. Several foreign fighters have joined the Dwekh Nawsha; they include Americans and Australians.

Interesting times we live in.

Daddy, where does gas come from?

Tom Steyer is shocked to discover that gasoline is unusually expensive in California, and can't figure out how there could be any reasonable explanation except market failure.

Maybe California should take over gas production, or set prices by fiat.  Has that ever been tried before?

In related news, the EPA is deeply concerned about the disparate impact of high energy prices on poor people.

Poking the bear

Project Veritas prankster James O'Keefe has been getting stopped at the border ever since he published his hilariously embarrassing videos of unchallenged border crossings dressed as Osama bin Laden or an ISIS terrorist.  I can't say I blame DHS for that; if they know he habitually stages illegal border crossings, they might reasonably scrutinize him to determine whether he's carrying contraband to make a point.  Yes, it's fairly clear they would be doing so to avoid embarrassment rather than to prevent harm to the U.S., but I can live with it, as can O'Keefe.

The pointed questions about what his next exposé is going to target, though, and the questions about which candidate he's going to support, are just creepy. This time, the border agents thought to ask him if he was filming the interview, which he wasn't, though they didn't ask if he was recording the sound, which he was. I imagine there will be flak over that, too.

All this is annoying and discouraging, but in a way it's good news.  There are countries where, if you pulled this kind of stunt, they'd just quietly kill you.

Things A Man Should Be Able To Do

Many thanks to our friend AVI, who kindly sent me a pair of works by and about Chesterton. One of them, The Man Who Was Chesterton, begins thus:

There are normal things that a normal man ought to do, as he sleeps or wakes or walks. One of them is to sing, to a plain tune with a common chorus, as our fathers did round their supper tables. Another is to dance, however clumsily, at least some of the dances of his native land. Another is to speak with clearness and moderate cogency in any council of his equals or on any not disreputable public occasion. Another is to recite poetry if he likes it; another is to be at ease and tolerably intimate with domestic animals; another is to know, even slightly, the uses of some weapon; another is to know common remedies for quite common maladies. And another is to be able to write down in pen and ink what he really thinks about public questions, and why he thinks it: which is all that I have done here.

Now I can claim a normal man's capacity in all of these things, except possibly to dance however clumsily at least some of the dances of my native land. In fact I was only ever taught one, and have not endeavored to learn more: indeed I have hardly used the waltz save at rare family weddings.

That it deserves to be titled a 'dance of my native land,' however, is beyond question.



What can you do?

That's Nonsense, Howard Dean

Dean, declaring how happy he is for the FBI to have Hillary's server, declares also that he's confident she will be vindicated. There's a good summary of the law at the link.

But it doesn't matter. "I don't think she's going to get the blame for it because she didn't know" is a nonstarter as a defense. Given the security markings the Inspector General assigned to the emails, she had to know. You would not have access to sensitive signals intelligence and top-flight imagery without being read into those compartmentalized programs and trained in their Operational Security requirements.

There is no way she or anyone with that access did not realize that what they were doing was a potential violation of security at the highest levels. Long before they sat down to write an email referencing satellite imagery or sensitive signals intelligence, they had been trained to know that before discussing that information they should check its classification level and releasability, and use only appropriate measures. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance when you've received extensive and specific training is no excuse at all.

We're Cleaning

Steve Reichert points out that Clinton committed a separate offense when she passed these emails, on the thumbdrive server, to her uncleared attorney.

Gentle giants

The plight of the unarmed perp.

An armed protester was shot by police during this week's peaceful anniversary protests in Ferguson, Missouri.  It wasn't his fault, though:

"It was a poor decision to use plain clothes officers in a protest setting because it made it difficult for people to identify police officers, which is essential to the safety of community members,” said Kayla Reed, a field organizer with the Organization of Black Struggle.

TOP SECRET // SI / TK // NOFORN

According to the Inspector General's letter, that is the proper marking for the top level of classification found in Hillary Clinton's unsecured private email. Let's go through that, just to be sure we're all clear on exactly what she's done. All of this information below is available in open sources, but it is not well understood by (say) voters.

TOP SECRET is information whose release could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." No one may access this information who has not been through the very thorough background investigation, and even then you must demonstrate need to know.

SI means "Special Intelligence," and is a subset of SCI, or "Sensitive Compartmentalized Information." This information is tightly controlled, so that not only do you need to have need to know, you must have been properly read into the specific program from which the information comes.

TK is "Talent Keyhole," which governs our best aerial and satellite reconnaissance. It is always SCI information, and is extremely sensitive because it gives enemies a sense of exactly how good our reconnaissance technology has become.

NOFORN means "not releasable to foreign nationals." This caveat is discouraged because "NOFORN" means not the British, not the Canadians, not the Australians, not New Zealand. You can mark the data to be shared with the other Anglosphere powers, our very closest allies, with the caveat "FIVE EYES," or "FVEY". We have a treaty with them that governs the controls of sensitive signals intelligence. If the Inspector General has determined this item was properly marked NOFORN, it means that the information was so sensitive that we shouldn't share it with the British or the Australians in spite of that treaty.

It sounds like the two emails must have included intercepts of the most sensitive sort -- too sensitive to tell our closest allies about -- and possibly satellite imagery as a file attachment (or at least detailed descriptions of same). No one could have mistaken either of those things for unclassified information.

The Hill caves?

HotAir and Ace are both reporting that the FBI finally has gotten its hands on the Clinton thumb drive, held to date by her lawyer, which is supposed to hold a copy of all the emails on her personal server.

Even more shocking, the New York Times, L.A. Times, and Washington Post are carrying the story as well.

Earlier in the evening came reports that the Inspector General had found two top-secret communications among Clinton's emails.

Understanding an Earlier Age

Spengler is pessimistic, although he himself shows that with an effort it is not impossible:

When the West cared about Christianity and its paradoxes, it couldn’t take its eyes off Tirso’s villain. By the time Byron wrote his eponymous epic, Christianity had faded from the culture and with it the public’s interest in Don Juan. Without Mozart, he would be forgotten. My daughter had attended a seminar on Mozart’s opera, and we had discussed Tirso’s theological joke beforehand. She called me crestfallen afterwards: most of the students wanted to know why Don Giovanni’s behavior was a problem in the first place. Wasn’t it a lifestyle choice?

Over coffee before curtain time, I offered that people in the past had different concerns than ours — for example, the Catholics of Spain at the height of the Thirty Years’ War, when Tirso published his play. “What are people concerned about today?” my daughter asked. I took a long time to reply. “I’m not sure they give much thought to big questions any more.” “That’s right,” she said. “This is a thoughtless age.” The lights darkened at the Repertorio Espanol, and the cast appeared onstage to twerk through a Caribbean pop number by way of overture. It was idiotic. We left after the first act. It’s hard to find a rendition of classic theater uncorrupted by postmodern directorial whim. Neither performers nor audience has any idea what the work is about, so it doesn’t much matter.

We can no longer teach Mozart, let alone Tirso, to undergraduates. We cannot place ourselves among the passions of Spain’s Golden Age, when the literary giant Lope de Vega wrote sonnets caricaturing Cervantes as a dirty Jew for lampooning the chivalresque pretensions of the Spanish nobility in Don Quixote. The great artists of the Golden Age were also soldiers and statesmen, important players in the prolonged wars that utterly ruined the Spanish Empire. In a post-Christian world we cannot understand what the Spanish were on about.

MooMetal

Not to be outdone by the cowpunks, here is James Hetfield throwing down on a Waylon Jennings classic.

Cowpunk

Dwight Yoakam gave an interesting interview on his early years in Los Angeles. The music he did was quite different from the Outlaw Country being produced in Nashville and in the East.

Merle Haggard once said to me, when we were doing an interview for the Country Music Hall of Fame, and they were doing an exhibit on Bakersfield, he said that the difference between the country music from Nashville and the country music from the West Coast was that country music in Nashville came from churches, and the country music in the West Coast came from honkytonks and bars. And it really was about that.

Every 10 years, there's a cycle, and the young rockers will rediscover their heritage, if you will: the Okies, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath heritage on the West Coast -- the country music that came out of here during the end of the dustbowl and led to the Bakersfield sound -- in greater Bakersfield, actually. It's around all the San Joaquin Valley, and its labor camps.

He hooked up with punk rockers who were fading out of that scene, and rediscovering the older sound. It became something that sounded a bit like this:

Oath Keepers Interfering with Racial Grievance Narrative

The Oath Keepers are a network of current and former military and police that exists to defend Constitutional rights against government overreach. There are a small number of them -- four or five according to reports -- who have deployed to Ferguson on the anniversary of the riots there. They are going among the protest groups lawfully armed. Police may have a duty that requires them to be in opposition to the protesters in terms of controlling violence and lawlessness, but in this way some of the police can show that off-duty they have an equal concern for the rights of black citizens. Although the police leadership has suggested it would prefer they go away, on the ground officers seem to have worked out an understanding with them that's keeping both sides cooler than they might otherwise be.

Naturally, this is unacceptable. It's important to remember that armed white people are scary and unwelcome. Anyone who suggests that the rights being defended first came to be realized because of similar armed citizens -- many of whom happened to be white -- are dangerous history nuts.

I Don't Want A Pickle

You can ride all year in Georgia, but I love to take the long road. The weather's getting better. School has started. The road, ah, the road...

Growing Salads in Extreme Environments

Inspired by James' comment in the second salad post:  How about Iraq?  Here are some photos I took myself back in the day.

A model farm our Civil-Military Ops cell and ePRT were helping the Hamdani tribe set up.  Traditionally Iraqis would irrigate the way the ancients did:  they'd route water from the Euphrates or Tigris to flood a field in great trenches.  The sun evaporated much of it.  We taught them to make small mounds of earth, and lay tubes with holes in them atop each mound.  Evaporation was reduced substantially, meaning that much more land could be irrigated with the same water. 

The guy in the blue shirt and ACU armor was (and is still) a US State Department diplomat.  At that time he was head of the ePRT.  I will withhold his name.  He was a good guy, though.  The guy in the khaki pants is one of his people. I mention this because the State Department gets a lot of the blame for what happened later, and its leadership deserved it.  Not all of them deserve it.  Some of them were right there outside the wire with us. 

A simple pump moved the water from the old irrigation channel to the overhead tank.  Once it was overhead, opening the valve would cause it to gravity feed to conduct the irrigation. 

An American soldier attended by children, name also withheld, in those salad days of 2009 before the precipitous withdrawal plunged the nation back into war.

Traitor!

Chuck Schumer is the latest example of the reflex to label as traitors those who dare to dissent from the President's opinion.

The Israeli flag is a nice touch -- without needing words it gets in a very classic 'dual loyalty' smear against him, and warns other Jews what to expect should they dare to speak up in opposition to the One.

Bio-hacking

Home-grown insulin?

Beset with salads on every side, Part II

Personally I'm all for salads, but I prefer the old-fashioned way of describing them to the sort of style that's de rigueur now:  "According to NASA’s research, fresh vegetables 'could have a positive impact on people’s moods.'"

In most of the science fiction I've ever read, someone was growing veggies somewhere on the spaceship.  It's got to beat MREs.

Just let the detectives do their jobs

Oldie, but worth it:



Via doubleplusundead.

Report from the Red State Gathering

Yours truly, though a lifelong Southern Democrat, is enough of a "Reagan Democrat" to have merited an invitation to the Red State Gathering this weekend. I was there with Uncle Jimbo, and we had an excellent time. The main feature was a set of speeches and Q&A with many of the Republican Presidential candidates. (Jim Webb, the leading Southern Democrat, did not attend and was probably not invited, but it would have been nice if he had been.) I'm going to give you my sense of them.

Donald Trump was going to speak on Saturday evening, but did not appear because Erick Erickson told him he was no longer welcome. This was because of Trump's remarks about a female reporter, which were as rude as they could possibly have been. We don't speak of ladies in that way in Georgia, and Erickson properly told him not to darken the door.

Before that, however, Trump had already made a small splash. What I heard from a sponsor was that the conference had been trying to get him to appear early on the first day, as Trump has his own 757 and could be there before anyone else. Trump's people refused, as they didn't want to have him speak early in the morning. So they the conference tried to schedule him at some other time, but his people put them off until all the slots were filled. Then Trump's people decided they wanted him to come, so the conference tried to help him by allowing him to speak at a separate location from the conference proper (the College Football Hall of Fame) where they were having the closing party. Trump's people accepted, and immediately began to tell reporters that he was the "keynote" speaker, and that Red State 'had to rent a larger hall to accommodate all his crowds.'

Nice.

Of the serious Presidential candidates, Jeb Bush was clearly the media favorite. The press mobbed him like no one else. He had almost no support in the hall, though: I only met one professed Jeb Bush supporter, a guy in a red-white-and-blue suit and tie ensemble who had purchased red, white, and blue custom leather wing-tip dress shoes to go with it.

Fiorina was a crowd favorite, but everyone is worried about her experience problem. She could help herself a lot if she could put together a kitchen cabinet because people would be much readier to support her if they knew she had top, competent people who had committed to being in her corner.

Rick Perry was there without a security detail. But, you know, he carries.

Uncle J was pleased by Walker, long his favored candidate, whom he thought presented himself as competent, experienced, and a proven winner.

For me, the two best speeches were given by Rubio and Cruz. They were quite different speeches. Both of them sounded like Ronald Reagan, but different Reagans.

Rubio's was a solid General Election speech. It was warm, hopeful, moving, filled with references to family and hope and economic progress. It reminded me of the later Reagan, the Reagan of his Farewell address in which he summed up all that America had accomplished in his tenure. You came away feeling like Rubio had a similar Morning-in-America vision, and honestly believes he could turn things around and make the place shine again.

Cruz did not give a speech of that kind. Cruz is out for blood.

His speech was a Reagan Insurgency speech, the kind of speech Reagan might have given before he won the nomination in 1980. Cruz is as angry at the Republican leadership in the Senate as he is at the Democrats. He outright accused them, in exactly these words, of "playing for the other team." He is furious about the direction of the country, and is committed to overthrowing the Republican leadership, gaining the Presidency, and overturning everything Obama ever did.

The crowd was really feeling it. They reacted to that speech like no other thing I saw. These people are out for blood too.

Good.

Categories

Ambiverts.

Due to Budget Cuts, Army Moves to New Weaponry

Soldiers to be issued kits and build their own ...

Speaking well

The Earl of Chesterfield's account of a bill he introduced in the House of Lords in 1751 to reform the Julian Calendar:

I acquainted you in a former letter that I had brought in a bill into the House of Lords, for correcting and reforming our present calendar, which is the Julian, and for adopting the Gregorian. . . . It was notorious, that the Julian calendar was erroneous, and had overcharged the solar year with eleven days. Pope Gregory XIII. corrected this error [in 1582]; . . .  It was not, in my opinion, very honourable for England to remain in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company; the inconvenience of it was likewise felt by all those who had foreign correspondences whether political or mercantile. I determined, therefore, to attempt the reformation; I consulted the best lawyers, and the most skilful astronomers, and we cooked up a bill for that purpose. But then my difficulty began; I was to bring in this bill, which was necessarily composed of law jargon and astronomical calculations, to both of which I am an utter stranger. However, it was absolutely necessary to make the House of Lords think that I knew something of the matter, and also to make them believe that they knew something of it themselves, which they do not. For my own part, I could just as soon have talked Celtic or Sclavonian to them as astronomy, and they would have understood me full as well; so I resolved to do better than speak to the purpose, and to please instead of informing them. I gave them, therefore, only an historical account of calendars, from the Egyptian down to the Gregorian, amusing them now and then with little episodes; but I was particularly attentive to the choice of my words, to the harmony and roundness of my periods, to my eloquence, to my action. This succeeded, and ever will succeed; they thought I informed, because I pleased them; and many of them said, that I had made the whole very clear to them, when, God knows, I had not even attempted it. Lord Macclesfield, who had the greatest share in forming the bill and who is one of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers in Europe, spoke afterwards with infinite knowledge, and all the clearness that so intricate a matter would admit of; but as his words, his periods and his utterance were not near so good as mine, the preference was most unanimously, though most unjustly, given to me....

Salad

From The Holy State, by Thomas Fuller (1642):

[A]t our yeoman's table you shall have as many joints as dishes. No meat disguised with strange sauces, no straggling joint of a sheep in the midst of a pasture of grass, beset with salads on every side, but solid substantial food . . . .

From Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (1962):

I am a strict vegetarian...The usual questions were fired at me about eggnogs and milkshakes being or not being acceptable to one of my persuasion. Shade said that with him it was the other way around: he must make a definite effort to partake of a vegetable. Beginning a salad, was to him like stepping into sea water on a chilly day, and he had always to brace himself in order to attack the fortress of an apple.

Choking shale

The Democratic Party may yet succeed in choking the life out of the shale-oil industry, but if that's what the Saudis were trying to do, it's back-fired:

Khalid Alsweilem, a former official at the Saudi central bank and now at Harvard University, . . . wrote in a Harvard report that Saudi Arabia would have an extra trillion of assets by now if it had adopted the Norwegian model of a sovereign wealth fund to recyle the money instead of treating it as a piggy bank for the finance ministry. The report has caused [a] storm in Riyadh.

"We were lucky before because the oil price recovered in time. But we can't count on that again," he said.

OPEC have left matters too late, though perhaps there is little they could have done to combat the advances of American technology.

In hindsight, it was a strategic error to hold prices so high, for so long, allowing shale frackers - and the solar industry - to come of age. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

That's a funny aside about allowing solar to "come of age," though. I'm afraid that genie has only begun to think of peeking over the edge of the bottle.

This Is Alarming

I can't recall any time in years in which the US has had no aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf -- which, by the way, we call "the Arabian Gulf" in order to side with the Gulf States against Iran's claim to the waters. Just a coincidence that this first "gap" in years is going to coincide with Congress' Iran vote, but it does make it easier for Iran to be provocative if it decides to be. Maybe they'll be on good behavior in the hope of not provoking a no vote, but maybe not, and in any case hope is not a plan.

Apparently a Serious Concern in Sydney, Australia

"Dungeons and Dragons: sinister craze or good night in?"

You're a little late to the party. We did this like thirty years ago in America. Turns out, it's just good fun. Kids benefit from trying on various roles, exploring what it means to be heroic.

Some of them even go on to try out the lessons they learned in real life. Imagine.

Criminal

The NY Post is reporting that the FBI inquiry into Clinton's emails is a criminal probe. But the claim is qualified.

“My guess is they’re looking to see if there’s been either any breach of that data that’s gone into the wrong hands [in Clinton’s case], through their counter-intelligence group, or they are looking to see if a crime has been committed,” said Makin Delrahim, former chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, who served as a deputy assistant secretary in the Bush DOJ.

“They’re not in the business of providing advisory security services,” Delrahim said of the FBI. “This is real.”

The problem is that their CI branch and their criminal branches are separate. We could still be looking at merely a counterintelligence assessment, somehow separate from a questioning of her security clearance. But keep an eye on it. There's an outside chance that the Department of Justice might be interested, for a moment, in justice.

MONKROCK

From a Real Clear Religion article I recently ran across:

There are obvious similarities between punk rock and religious monasticism.

Both are cultures that deviate from the mainstream. Both eschew high fashion in favor of simplicity. Both believe in a Do It Yourself (DIY) ethic. (Corporate label won't sell your record? Produce and distribute it yourself. The secular world is obsessed with fame and toys? Wear a robe and shave your head.)

Punks and monks are about a stripped-down opposition to a sinful world that can [b]e sermonized into making sense.

Enter MONKROCK. The all-caps official name of the company is the brainchild of Kevin Clay, a musician and artist who lives in Tennessee. Clay, who is a "lay monastic," believes that the most authentic expression of punk in 2015 is traditional Catholic monasticism.

...

And they have their own coffee, as well at t-shirts, art, etc.

It's True What They Say...

You know you've really got trouble when the soldiers stop complaining about the food.

OPSEC: Pull Her Clearance

I've never heard of this group of "former special operations forces and intelligence community members," but they do sound like they know what they're talking about.

As we discussed here recently I think it's the obvious thing to do, and so obvious that in any other case it would have been done the same afternoon. Whatever you think about whether or not charges should be filed, there's simply no reason this shouldn't have been done at the first sign of clear evidence of document mishandling, even pending the investigation. You don't wait until someone is convicted to pull their clearance: they don't have a right to it, so there's no due process concern about life or liberty being taken from them, and you can always restore it later if they are vindicated. It's what we'd do with absolutely anyone else.

I know: she's above the law. She's above the rules. And that's why she needs to be President.

Journalistic Standards of Writing

Business Insider wants you to know that while the FBI is investigating Hillary Clinton's server, they aren't investigating Clinton herself.

The Post reports that the unusual system was originally set up by a staffer during Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, replacing a server used by her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Where they wrote "unusual" I might have said "illegal," since at minimum Clinton was violating the Federal Records Act. I suppose journalists usually say "allegedly illegal," as well they might here since there are apparent violations not only of that act but of the acts governing the care of classified material. Still, no one in authority has dared to allege illegality. Those concerns have been raised only by other journalists, and who are journalists to challenge the powerful?

When Your Father Sends You A "Thug Life" Video

I think the song is "You Are My Sunshine," sung in Austrian German. From a former, long-time captain of the Volunteer Fire Department.

I Don't Know Why

But this came to mind today:

And this is apropos as well, in the broader cultural context we find ourselves in:

The FOX Cut

So, my guy in this election is Jim Webb, who though he has been a Republican in other years is running as a Democrat this time. He may yet have a moment, if the Hillary collapse continues, and I think it's right to be prepared for it should it come. On the other hand, this is the right time to be keeping an eye on the primary in general. If I've learned anything about American politics, it's that only those who are interested early have any hope of affecting the outcome. For that reason, these early stories can really matter. Here's one that does: FOX News has picked its debate partners.

It's a shame about Santorum, since he is a Knight of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and for the same reasons the most socially conservative figure in the race. He did very well in 2012, holding off the establishment machine longer than anyone. I realize some among you thought he was a faker about his moral convictions, and he has not polled well this year. Being a frontrunner four years ago doesn't make you a contender today. If he is to come back from this he'll have to earn it.

Otherwise, it seems like the best candidates -- Cruz, Walker -- and the worst ones -- Bush, Trump -- will all be there. Should be a good brawl.

"1332"

A Strange Definition of Hypocrisy

An author named Damon Linker has an article in which he claims that pro-life advocates are hypocrites. It starts reasonably:

I'm never more dumbfounded by my fellow liberals than when they profess not to be in the least bit morally troubled by abortion. Which means that I've been dumbfounded a lot over the past few weeks.

Come on, admit it — you've heard variations on it, too:

Those videos of Planned Parenthood employees nonchalantly discussing killing unborn human babies, dismembering them, and selling the parts for medical research — how could anyone object to that? What should really make us angry is that these pro-life activists filmed the videos in the first place. And if you want to see something truly despicable — a genuine moral outrage — there's this dentist who hunted down and shot a lion in Africa...

I have indeed heard exactly these variations lately. Somehow the real moral problem exposed by the videos is... that someone made the videos. That should be punished!

So, OK, I'm open to his argument. He comes down to a moderate pro-choice position at least to viability, which is not my position but one I'm prepared to see as reasonable. He's got thoughtful arguments. So what's this about hypocrisy?

[T]he pro-life movement, which consists largely of conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants, doesn't just want to lower the abortion rate. It also wants to win a culture war in the name of "traditional values" — and encouraging the widespread use of birth control doesn't fit with its conception of tradition, which holds that women are first and foremost meant to be mothers, children are a gift from God, pre-marital sex should be strongly discouraged, both husband and wife should be "open to life" during sexual intercourse, abortion should never be considered an acceptable choice, and the government should enforce all of this by outlawing the procedure.

There's two things to say about that.

1) It's not true that pro-lifers in general oppose birth control, or strive to keep it from being available. In fact, the last I heard there was a faction on the Republican pro-life side that was advocating making birth control over the counter. So not only would you not have to ask your priest if you could use it, you wouldn't have to ask a doctor or a pharmacist either. You could just go grab a bottle of the stuff like you would Tylenol. So there's a pro-life position in accord with his stated views.

By the same token, there are people who hold firmly to all the traditional values but don't necessarily want the government to be the enforcer. For a long time that was my position: pro-choice only in the limited sense of not being willing to actually outlaw and prosecute people over abortion, but pro-life in the strong sense of believing that abortion was obviously immoral. A good person ought not to do it except in a very limited set of cases involving the death of the mother. Other solutions ought to be chosen. That doesn't mean that prison is the answer for those who make what I think is the immoral choice, any more than I would want to see people imprisoned for divorcing or even adultery. So there's a vigorous pro-life option available without force.

2) For the subset that remains, it's hardly hypocrisy to hold to a set of non-conflicting religious doctrines. For Catholics, yes, abortion is a grave sin in addition to a moral crime. Birth control is also forbidden, but not by a conflicting argument, by the same argument about God's purpose for human sexuality. It's the same argument that leads to both conclusions. How can this be hypocrisy?

As I've mentioned here a number of times, to the eternal boredom of everyone, Kant comes to the same position from an argument he believed based on pure practical reason. Whatever Kant was, he wasn't a hypocrite!

On sexual matters especially, there's a danger of hypocrisy in the usual sense of the term: we often really believe in the truth of doctrine, but fall away from practicing it due to temptation. It may well be that the doctrine is so strict that few are able to fully practice it perfectly all the time. Human weakness is not a good argument for abandoning a doctrine soundly based on reason, though, and it's an even worse argument for those who believe the position is derived from divine purpose.

For those who actually live the doctrine, the charge of hypocrisy is wholly unwarranted. They're being honest about what they think is best, and trying to pursue a society in which it is the norm. That's just what they ought to do.

Insurgent Action Report

Charles Koch has struck up a partnership with the United Negro College Fund.

He and [UNCF President Michael] Lomax have found common ground over the issue of criminal justice reform, a cause that Koch Industries has taken up. And Koch expressed concern about the recent spate of high-profile incidents in which black men have died at the hands of police officers.

I think we missed an opportunity to reach out to the Occupy Wall Street crowd when that was going on. I think we're also missing an opportunity with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. With OWS, we have a shared concern with crony capitalism, and with BLM, it's legal reform.

We don't have to agree with everything they want, and we don't even have to like them. But building relationships and working with the left's own protest movements to achieve our goals would be a twofer in every case.

A Conservative Insurgency

Kurt Schlichter's book Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back 2009-2041 presents a battle plan for conservatives willing to fight for reform. It is written as a novel and told as a graduate student oral history project of how conservatives retook American institutions from the universities to Hollywood to, of course, the state and federal governments. In a way, it is the antidote to Dan Simmons's Flashback where everything has gone wrong.

The book assumes Hilary won in 2016 and 2020 and that conservatives lost power in the federal government through the end of her time as president. But, by then, the conservative insurgents, the Tea Party and many like-minded folk, liberals mugged by the reality of what the liberal agenda does, etc., are prepared to fight back and they begin winning in very interesting, and plausible, ways.

Schlichter is a retired infantry colonel, trial lawyer, and, only naturally given the previous, a stand-up comedian. He worked for Andrew Breitbart and has apparently been around the talk radio and Fox channels. He brings all of these perspectives to this book.

It's a quick read and only 280 pages, and it sounds like a good plan to me.

Christina Hoff Sommers on how Feminism Went Wrong

It's an interesting conversation between two low-key, nuanced thinkers from the right. I don't necessarily agree, but her account is well-informed by decades of involvement.

A Good Head On Her Shoulders

I don't know how many of you saw Ronda Rousey's 34-second fight this weekend, but I did, and she has been very well taught. The most important thing she's got going for her from my perspective is that she's got her mind right. She understands what she's there to do, and she doesn't get distracted from doing it. That's more complicated than it sounds, as MMA is more complicated than boxing and it's fairly complex even in boxing. In brief, she's come to understand how the human body can be destroyed, and she's very good at recognizing opportunities to apply the right kind of force to the first opening she comes by that has that destructive potential. That's a mental game as much as a physical one, although you have to do the physical work to train your body to react to the openings in the right way.

So it's not too surprising -- especially since she tends to win very quickly, and therefore limits the number of shots to the head that she takes -- that she's got a good mind to go with her strong jab. Asked about whether she'd like to fight a man, since she's dominating among women, she looked outside of herself and her own situation and recognized something important about the message such a fight would send.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a man hitting a woman on television,” Rousey told The Daily Beast on Wednesday. “I’ll never say that I’ll lose, but you could have a girl getting totally beat up on TV by a guy — which is a bad image to put across. With all the football [domestic violence] stuff that’s been happening, not a good idea. It’s fun to theorize about and talk about, but it’s something that’s much better in theory than fact.”

Today, I came across an interview in which a female reporter tried to get her on board with the 'gender disparity in pay' line. Rousey was not buying it. "If I got to the point that I had like 50 fights," she said, she'd be making the kind of money the top male boxers make at the height of their careers. "But at this point, I have eleven."

Pornography as Anti-Islamist Weapon

Vice magazine reports on a feature length pornographic film featuring Islamic symbolism. The accompanying photos are R-rated, not X-rated, though of course they are images from the promotional materials for a pornographic film. If you go to read the article, set your expectations accordingly.

What is interesting is the psychological claim that the filmmaker is claiming:

First and foremost, I want to make sure that everyone knows I'm not trying to incite another Charlie Hebdo incident. But [our four scenes] basically represent different women from different regions in the Middle East, different kinds of ideas. [We're] trying to be a little titillating, obviously, with the different kids of traditional dress. But I started the video by [thinking]: For Middle Eastern women, veiling is not just a way to suppress her sexual freedom, it's a symbol for all the human rights violations against these women like rape and domestic violence.

[It's about] taking the veil off.

Vice wasn't very impressed with the effect. "At its core," the judge, "the film is a prime example of banal ignorance fueling bigoted imagery."

I obviously haven't seen the film, and don't intend to. However, it strikes me that Vice isn't well placed to judge the impact of the film. Clearly the filmmaker is right about the effect of the veil as it is experienced by women in the region. Some may experience the veil as Islam claims to intend it to be experienced, as a liberation from the tyranny of continual male sexual attention. For others, her reading has to be close to right. What that means is that not only is this symbolism going to be powerful for those women, it's also going to be powerful symbolism for men from the cultures where veiling is tied to issues of sex. It may end up being more effective than they expect, in spite of its banality, because it touches on symbols that are deeply-felt for the Middle Eastern audience in a way they are not here.

So, there's an ethical question: would that be good, to have a beneficial effect achieved through the method of pornography? If you were trying to disrupt Islamist systems and found this was effective, is it a method you'd endorse? Or is the harm done too great to apologize for the good? You might want to include a brief discussion of whether you think pornography is in fact harmful, and if so just how, as philosophical opinions on that differ sharply.

Pressure Mounts on Clinton Emails

Not against Hillary herself, of course, but the water has risen high enough that Huma Abedin now has to tread it.

Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, cracked down on the delay tactics exercised in the effort to build a moat around her e-mails. He ordered Clinton and two of her closest aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.” He also ordered them to confirm that that “they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.” And if “all such information has not yet been produced,” they are ordered to produce it “forthwith.”

I assume they will have a lot of trouble recalling, though there is a point at which you can risk charges of contempt going down that road. I suppose they might try the lane cleared for them by Ms. Lois Learner: 'I have done nothing wrong, and plead the Fifth to avoid self-incrimination.'

UPDATE: The NY Daily News reminds us of a precedent: Bill Clinton's CIA director, whom he pardoned for a very similar offense.

The law is plain. Under the Espionage Act of 1917, “gross negligence” in the handling of national defense information is a punishable offense. If such information is “removed from its proper place of custody,” the responsible government official faces a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment....

Only after a year of spinning wheels did CIA managers finally refer the matter to the Justice Department. Attorney General Janet Reno responded initially with the most minimal conceivable action, suggesting that Deutch’s security clearance be reviewed. But after the CIA’s critical report became public in 2000, igniting a firestorm on Capitol Hill, prosecutors swung into high gear.

Yet just as Deutch was ready to agree to a plea bargain, the matter came to an abrupt end. On Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, President Clinton issued a surprise pardon to his wayward CIA director.

The Arian heresy

Much blood has been spilled over the vexing question of how to consider Christ's dual human and divine nature.  I've been proofing a book about Mennonite or Anabaptist martyrs in the 16th century and came across this account of the interrogation and torture of a woman who refused to go along with the orthodox line on this and many other matters:

In the sixth place she was asked whether she did not believe that Christ had assumed his flesh from Mary. But she confessed that he was from above, and had come down from the Father; that the Word had become flesh, even as John says: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life." And as he himself says, that he is the bread which came down from heaven. That he was also the only reconciler, redeemer and advocate. To investigate further, was not necessary to her salvation. John 8:23; 1:14; 1 John 1:1; John 6:31; Rom. 5:10; 1 John 2:1.

That's a good response, I think: "To investigate further, was not necessary to her salvation." I can't believe it was necessary to anyone else's care for her salvation, either, particularly if the investigation was backed up by torture and death by burning (the sentence routinely handed down for unrepentant Anabaptists).  There are some detailed explanations of spiritual mysteries that we are not privy to.  Nor have we been encouraged to believe we are either authorized or obligated to ferret out the explanation by exhaustive analysis, and certainly not that we need to kill each other over our diverse results.

These Anabaptists got into deadly trouble for two other persistent errors.  First, they denied infant baptisms, going so far as to renounce their own, if they had occurred, and insisting on a new baptism as reasoning, consenting, and believing adults.  Often the main focus of their tortured interrogations was to get them to name the parties who had been present at their adult baptisms; it was their primary glory to refuse to answer.  Second, they declined to receive the Catholic eucharist, considering the doctrine of transubstantiation to be a superstition or idolatry.  These were the two heresies that most worked up their inquisitors, to judge by the summaries of their trials and sentences.

For their own part, the shock troops of the Reformation had a bad habit of killing people who persisted in holding or attending Masses, on the ground that it was a deadly heresy to engage in this idolatry.  It was a very bad time, and hard to imagine in these days.  It would be nice to think that's because we now understand that our duty lies more in examining our own conscience than that of others.  More likely, though, it's hardly anyone takes the form of worship seriously enough to imagine killing or dying for it.

The definition of insanity

If inflation has missed the Fed's 2% target for 38 straight months, my husband wonders, "Could it be that there's little or no correlation between the Fed's tool and its intended result?  But no, that's crazy talk."

"Governing"

Is Mitch McConnell essentially a sell-out, or is he so desperate to look like he can govern better than Harry Reid that he's forced to pass every crony capitalist measure that crosses his desk as the compromise price-tag for his own ostensible priorities?

A Ring-Whorled Prow Rode in the Harbour, Iceclad, Outbound...

...a craft for a prince.

Sweet Mental Revenge

I've never cared for the lyrics of the Waylon Jennings classic. I've always liked the music of the song.

Rebels and Rhetoric

What do we do with the Confederate battle flag?

Hoyt Axton

vs. Alfonzo Rachel

This goes back to Grim's post expressing some doubt about whether the Democrats were actually responsible for all of history's horrors. That may be debatable. After all, I don't believe the Black Death was a Democratic policy, though I'm not sure. It does bear some resemblance to the ACA ...

However that may be, the Democrats were the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, and Bull Connor. I think we should use that in our rhetoric against progressives again and again and again. We need to destroy the lie that conservatives are racists, and pointing out this history is one important avenue of attack. EDIT: As Grim points out in the comments, I know the history is much more complicated than Rachel paints it, but my point here is about how rhetoric about the flag can help or hurt us. Right now it's hurting us, and we can change that.

But what would that do to us? A lot of Southern conservatives feel a real connection to some aspects of the old Confederacy, and if we take up Rachel's rhetoric, does that start a conservative civil war?

10,000 Posts, Home Defense Artillery, and a Modern Order of Knighthood

Grim's last post last night was the 10,000th for the blog, apparently.

Backyard Ballistics arrived this week. Heh Heh. You'll have to imagine the evil grin.

Have any of you heard of the International Order of St. Hubertus? I ran across their website while looking for information on St. Hubertus (also St. Hubert), patron saint of hunters, and thought the order looked interesting. From their website:

The International Order of St. Hubertus is a worldwide organization of hunters who are also wildlife conservationists and are respectful of traditional hunting ethics and practices.  Founded in 1695, the motto of the Order is “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes” or “Honoring God by Honoring His Creatures.” 

Purpose of the Order

• To promote sportsmanlike conduct in hunting and fishing
• To foster good fellowship among sportsmen from all over the world
• To teach and preserve sound traditional hunting and fishing customs
• To encourage wildlife conservation and to help protect endangered species from extinction
• To promote the concept of hunting and fishing as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity
• To endeavor to ensure that the economic benefits derived from sports hunting and fishing support the regions where these activities are carried out
• To strive to enhance respect for responsible hunters and fishermen

The International Order of St. Hubertus is a true knightly order in the historical tradition. The Order is under the Royal Protection of His Majesty Juan Carlos of Spain, the Grand Master Emeritus His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Andreas Salvator of Austria and our Grand Master is His Imperial and Royal Highness Istvan von Habsburg Lothringen, Archduke of Austria, Prince of Hungary.

Well, That's Embarrassing...

Apparently one of the Islamist shooters in Texas may have come to the party with a Fast and Furious gun.

Of Course

REPORT: Navy to Charge Officer Who Fired on Islamist During Chattanooga Terror Attack.

A friend of mine at CENTCOM told me, before it was public knowledge that the two had exchanged fire with the terrorist, that there was talk about whether they could be eligible for Purple Hearts or even valor awards. Their actual chain of command has come up with the more obvious response. Joseph Heller, call your office.

UPDATE: Jim Webb says he'd set the Navy straight if he were President. I doubt ours will, but I expect we'll hear from Tennessee's Senators about this before too long.

UPDATE: The Chattanoogan gets a statement from the Navy to the effect that no one has been charged, though the matter is still under review. PJ Media considers that confirmation that charges are being considered; The Chattanoogan reads it the other way.

My sense is this: of course the Navy was, and perhaps still is, considering charges. It had regulations that were broken. That's why the title of this post was "Of Course." That process had gotten far enough along that LCDR White was given a heads up that he should prepare himself to face possible charges, and he prepared himself by contacting retired LTC Allen West. West had faced very serious charges himself under what White might consider similar circumstances, i.e., he violated regulations in a manner his conscience told him was right and necessary. In both cases, significant good came out of it (LTC West saved his men from falling into a waiting ambush, and LCDR White was able to assist in the evacuation of the recruiting station under hostile fire). West would be a natural person to reach out to for advice on how to handle a situation like this.

West has since become a Congressman, and after that a professional commentator, and decided to conduct a fire mission in support of White. That's appropriate in my view: one reason we sometimes advise servicemembers to "call your Senator" is that the bureaucracy often errs in favor of the hard application of the rule over the wise application of judgment. In a case where the rule is obviously wrong and the judgment was obviously well-considered and properly applied, it's good to provide a counterweight. As a former Congressman himself, West knew what could be done if he could garner Congressional support for White's case.

So, all of you who contacted your Senators or other Congressmen, thank you. You've probably helped to save a good man.

What's that party again?

Chris Matthews amused many of us by asking Debbie Wasserman-Schultz innocently, "What's the difference, really, between Socialists and Democrats?"  Kevin Williamson tries to sort out the socialist-vel-non beliefs of Bernie Sanders supporters by mingling with the crowd:

Aside from Grandma Stalin there, there’s not a lot of overtly Soviet iconography on display around the Bernieverse, but the word “socialism” is on a great many lips. Not Bernie’s lips, for heaven’s sake: The guy’s running for president. But Tara Monson, a young mother who has come out to the UAW hall to support her candidate, is pretty straightforward about her issues: “Socialism,” she says. “My husband’s been trying to get me to move to a socialist country for years — but now, maybe, we’ll get it here.” The socialist country she has in mind is Norway, which of course isn’t a socialist country at all: It’s an oil emirate. Monson is a classic American radical, which is to say, a wounded teenager in an adult’s body: Asked what drew her to socialism and Bernie, she says that she is “very atheist,” and that her Catholic parents were not accepting of this. She goes on to cite her “social views,” and by the time she gets around to the economic questions, she’s not Helle Thorning-Schmidt — she’s Pat Buchanan, complaining about “sending our jobs overseas.”

L’Internationale, my patootie. This is national socialism.

Williamson talks to another fan:

He goes on a good-humored tirade about how one can identify conservatives’ and progressives’ homes simply by walking down the street and observing the landscaping. Conservatives, he insists, “torture” the flowers and shrubbery, imposing strict order and conformity on their yards, whereas progressives just let things bloom as nature directs. I am tempted to ask him which other areas in life he thinks might benefit from that kind of unregulated, spontaneous order, but I think better of it.

Doesn't everyone?

A BBC article reports on people who experience music as an almost sexual pleasure.

The article also observes how idiosyncratic the response is.  The author uses an Adele song (whoever she is) as an example of particularly evocative dissonances, but when I eagerly went to listen to it, I found it didn't do a thing for me.  Then, something like "Women of Ireland" that tears my heart out of my chest leaves someone else cold.  And there's the enduring mystery of why I've been completely indifferent to every Mozart piece I've ever heard, when there may be no other composer so universally beloved.  Why can't I hear it?  The reaction either happens or it doesn't; there's no explaining it.

Good Rx news

A new Ebola vaccine appears to work like a charm.

Songs of Brokenness from "Horse Soldiers! Horse Soldiers!"

The Iran-Contra scandal always gave me doubts about both Reagan and Col. North. Of course, back then I was a very different person, one who mostly believed the New York Times and other MSM outlets. Maybe I should revisit the issue with my now-more-wary eyes.

Corb has a number of songs I would really like to know if there's a real story behind. This one reminds me a litte bit of the old Kirk Douglas movie Paths of Glory, although there the soldiers' crime was to refuse to attack. The similarity is in the commander's insistence on taking responsibility.

Building Beauty

A Distant, Sideways Reply From Frost

"You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me

Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something

I should have done by daylight, and indeed,

After the ground is frozen, I should have done

Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful

Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney

To make fun of my way of doing things,

Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.

Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights

These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"

So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk

Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,

Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

And spent the proceeds on a telescope

To satisfy a lifelong curiosity

About our place among the infinities. 

 

(and the rest, here)

Internet performance art.

The recipe is actually pretty good. I was surprised by the Tahini. I like his kitchen.

A Boy Named Sue

I trust you all know the song, and that the poem was written by Shel Silverstein. When I was in Jerusalem last year, the Israelis didn't know either, and were surprised to learn that Johnny Cash -- of whom they had heard -- had sung songs written by a Jew. Not just did he, but this is one of Cash's best.



May God defend such partnerships, and truth-speaking of this degree.

Reply to Frost

A reply to "Revelation," in a similar form.

If you're going to tell me where you are
There is something I will want to know:
Can you navigate by a star,
Or is your guess by to-and-fro?

For those who can speak the stars
Are wondrous fellows to engage,
But most speak of the near and far
Like minor guests upon the stage.

Where is your heart? Where your mind?
That is what I hoped to hear from thee:
How fearsome that we speak so blind,
Like ancient echoes on the sea.

Ranger School Update

Of those three women who were permitted to try a third time at Ranger School, two have made it through the mountain phase at Camp Frank D. Merrill. There remains only the swamp phase between them and graduation. If they both succeed, that will set the female pass rate at 10%, assuming three tries, with the male pass rate standing at 45%.

Though I think this experiment has roundly proven that women should continue to be excluded from Ranger School, and indeed the infantry in general, these two women are extraordinarily worthy of praise. I have nothing but the deepest respect for them and their glorious accomplishment.

Clinton: A Literary Analogy

The appearance of malfeasance that burdens Clinton’s political ambition as did Jacob Marley’s chains has lost much of its shock value if only because new revelations about her alleged misconduct are a near daily occurrence.

The latest one is about a dodgy Swiss bank with which she has a massive financial relationship.

Does anyone think she will really be elected? She's the worst candidate ever. I've yet to speak with any American who actually wants her as President, and I travel in fairly wide ideological circles.

Progress? A Political Cartoon

I am generally disinclined to accept arguments that "Democrats" are responsible for every horror in human history. Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, I understand, but he was also a brilliant man whose political work has mostly laid the ground for centuries of human flourishing. So for me, the partisan angle rings hollow.

The bigger question, though, has to do with the changing of human beings into salable property. The key difference is that the human beings are dead, and so do not have to consciously suffer the indignity of being treated as property. But we wouldn't accept that it was right to kill people in order to treat them as property: if these were any other sort of person it would be no defense at all to say that you'd killed them before you sold their body parts for someone else's proprietary use. Neither do we generally allow organ sales from even elderly persons who have died, though they like others may donate their organs, precisely to avoid the moral dangers of creating a market in human organs that might encourage profit-seekers to hasten the death of human beings in order to harvest organs.

The matter should be troubling. There are a lot of philosophical angles from which to approach it. As a society, we have not given any of them adequate thought.

11 thoughts about Cecil the Lion

Including:

8) Some activists (who I respect) associated with completely unrelated causes (which I support) have been complaining about the relative attention that Cecil the lion is receiving, which is not helpful. It’d be super great if everyone could knock off the “lots of people care about a dead lion but I haven’t personally observed them caring about a completely unrelated issue that I personally think is more important” nonsense. People are allowed to care about multiple things. People are allowed to care about different things than you. Threatened species conservation is an important thing. There are also other important things. And no one has ever won anyone over to their side by saying “you’re dumb for caring about the thing you care about, care about the thing I care about instead.”

9) It is possible to be concerned about many aspects of trophy hunting while acknowledging that it can help conservation in some contexts. It is possible to think that what this dentist did to Cecil the lion was bad, but still think that threatening to kill the dentist is bad. It is possible to think that threatening to kill the dentist is bad, but still think that folks saying that “any criticism of hunting is silly and extremist because some critics threatened to kill a dentist” is bad. This is called nuance. More people on the internet should learn about it.