Ending Discrimination Against Military Men

Scott Faith at the Havok Journal has a solid point buried several paragraphs below some ranting about how women aren't forced to register for the draft.

Men and women are held to two different physical fitness standards–VASTLY different standards— yet we all compete against each other for assignments and promotions. I don’t compete against just the other men in my career field for promotions and career-enhancing jobs, I compete against EVERYONE in my career field. With the doors to combat arms branches and units being flung wide open to admit women, those women have institutionalized, gender-based bias in their favor when it comes to physical fitness standards as they join units that highly value physical fitness. They aren’t any more fit, mind you; they just enjoy a much better score on their physical fitness evaluations.

Because of their gender, and all other things held equal, female troops have an unfair advantage over men because a number on their evaluation will be significantly higher in physical fitness tests for the exact same quantifiable performance. And because the Army is an institution that values easily-quantifiable numbers over substance when it comes to promotions, women have a distinct and unfair advantage.

As just one example, in the 17-21 year old age group, the minimum passing score for men is 42 pushups. What is the maximum score for women in that exact same age group? You guessed it, 42 pushups. So in this age bracket, 60 points for men = 100 points for women. The bare minimum score for a male Soldier is literally the max possible score for a female. This would be the academic equivalent of giving a D-minus to a male student while giving an A+ to a female for getting the exact same answers right on a test.

Promotion points are a big deal, and physical fitness tests definitely influence promotions. You could easily see the opening of the combat arms to women meaning that women are promoted ahead of much more physically fit men, which sets up a dangerous situation in the field. It's already the case that your platoon sergeants, being E-7s, are going to be much older than the young men (and, I suppose, soon women) they are commanding. They're the ones with the experience to know what to do and how to do it, and to bring these young guys back. If we set up those privates with NCOs who are physically fragile by comparison, we are setting them up for failure. Failure means death. It could mean the collapse of the unit, too, which means that the whole infantry structure will be weaker on the "for want of a nail" principle.

Now, the counterargument -- which has heretofore held the day -- is that equality means making sure that women aren't excluded from promotion. If you really held them to the male physical fitness standards, only the women who could max the female PFT would even pass the non-gendered PFT. While being able to do well on the PFT is important for promotion, not being able to pass it on multiple attempts is grounds for dismissal. Accepting genuine equality of standards thus means accepting a lot fewer women in the military.

I don't particularly care about "fairness" standards -- I think men and women are too different for any talk of "same standards" to be sensible in any case. The other examples he gives -- women can have longer hair! Can wear earrings! Are sometimes excused from uniform standards! -- don't strike me as important, and I'm completely opposed to the idea of registering women for the draft. We don't use the draft anyway, and if we ever have a big enough war that we need to, our civilization will need those young women to recover in terms of population. Men are far more disposable on that score. That's not fair either. Life isn't.

The point about a sharply increased fragility in the NCO corps on the field of war, however, is really strong. That's a serious danger: to the soldiers, to the units, to the successful execution of tactics, of strategy, of national security. It's a change with the potential to be genuinely disastrous. At least for the combat arms, maintaining standards can't be done if existing lower standards for women are employed.

UPDATE: OAF Nation weighs in. An excerpt of the argument that I think strongest:

For some odd reason, the anatomical argument receives the least traction (maybe because it’s irrefutable statistics, therefore a buzzkill to the debate). So, I will play the game and abide, and get the anatomical stuff out of the way. It is truly the tip of an ice burg called the Musculoskeletal Injuries in Military Women , but consider these stats: the astronomical difference in reported pelvic stress fractures in male and female recruits (1 per 367 females, compared to 1 per 40,000 males), ACL ruptures in athletes (females range from 2.4 to 9.7 times higher), or trainees discharged from Basic Combat Training for medical reasons (12.7% females, compared with only 5.2% for males). These are only a few of the many findings that should obviously be considered.

Unfortunate choice of words

I hope they mean they captured the whole guy, still breathing:

The head of a Chinese exchange that trades minor metals was captured by angry investors in a dawn raid and turned over to Shanghai police, as the investors attempted to force the authorities to investigate why their funds have been frozen.

The Dow has already bounced back up 500 points, by the way, but things are still looking a bit hectic here and there around the world.  West Texas Intermediate oil slipped below $38/barrel.

Crash!

Dow is down around another 1,000 this morning, a few minutes after opening.

You don't need permission

You don't even need a band.

The Media Begin To Notice The Air Gap

For now, it's just a writer at PJ Media, but this is of course the real story that people do not understand. Most people have never dealt with classified information systems, and don't realize that the air gap exists. If they understood about the air gap, they would realize that there is no chance that these various Hillary defenses could possibly hold water.

I've been reflecting on it more since we last talked about it, and I think maybe the most likely case is that the Hillary State Department -- or at least her clique of advisers and aides, as well as non-DOS personnel from her faction like Sidney Blumenthal -- were just completely careless about classification. It's less likely that they downloaded or wrote down information from the TS system to transfer onto the private email server than that they summarized what they'd read on the TS systems in unclassified emails. Quite possibly she and they believed this was perfectly safe to do, as they controlled the server and were only talking to other members of the trusted in-group. The danger of hackers? We have a top-flight (at least very well-connected) IT firm to prevent that from being an issue. Classification rules? I slept through that briefing -- who cares about rules, rules, rules? We're the powerful.

In that case you wouldn't need a firewalled tie-in, nor a band of flunkies whose job it was to strip classification markings. There were none to strip, since the information was transferred across the air gap in your brain. This seems like the simplest explanation, provided that we discover no examples of actual classified documents in the email. We should expect, if this is right, only to see summaries of classified information in these private, unclassified emails.

From the perspective of the law, this makes no difference. The rule is that a document that contains classified information is classified, and if it was built out of another document or set of documents, the new document inherits the highest level of classification of any of the summarized documents. Thus, if I write an email to you about yoga and your daughter's wedding, and at the very end say: "PS: Did you see the column of tanks moving up on Benghazi this morning?" based on a satellite photo from the high side, the email I have just written now needs to be marked "TS // SI / TK // NOFORN" and cannot be sent on the unclassified system. Indeed, just because the computer will automatically save a draft of that information on the unclassified system while I am typing it up, just by typing it up and not sending it I have already committed the crime that Petraeus went down for (i.e., storing classified information in an unapproved location).

She's in real trouble, and sooner or later the reasons why will seep out into the public debate. Wiping the server will look more and more like destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice, as there's already enough to convict her of several felony counts in what they've found.

Girls and Cigar Box Guitars for Saturday Night

Luke 17:33

Chris Norman, the Briton who participated in the salvation of the French train against a mysterious young man with unknowable motives said this when asked about why he fought back: "I figured, I'm probably going to die anyways, so let's go.... Either you sit down and you die, or you stand up and you die."

But you didn't die. You're the one giving the interview.

This is one of those New Testament passages that comes up over and over and over again. Chesterton said of it:

“He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

It is good, it is encouraging, to see that men are taking this to heart once again. It is a practical as well as a spiritual insight, a hint from the designer at a surprising truth built into the structure of the world. It's an Easter egg in reality, so to speak.

Another Saturday quiz or two

Someone has come out with a list of 99 of the 100 best novels in the English language, presented alongside a ten-question quiz about their authors and circumstances of publication.  I believe I've read 27 of them, though some were so long ago that I may have confused them with something else.  Others seemed familiar, but probably only from movie treatments.  Some I didn't care for, and wouldn't have finished if they hadn't been assigned to me in school, such as "The Great Gatsby."  One of them I happen to be re-reading with pleasure at this very moment.  As for the associated quiz, I totally bombed it:  2 out of 10.

A New Idea For Reparations: Weighted Voting

The author likes the idea of America paying reparations to blacks to repair the damages of slavery, but doesn't want money. He wants a bigger vote. Specifically, he wants to repair the 3/5th compromise by giving black Americans a 5/3rds vote.

It's a more interesting piece than it sounds like from that summary, as he tries to wrestle with some of the complications of the idea.

And then the problem of who exactly is eligible must be addressed. Would a biracial voter qualify? A black immigrant? And what exactly is an election official to do when Rachel Dolezal shows up to claim her five-thirds vote? The government shouldn’t be the sole arbiter of who gets to be black — nor flirt with archaic prescriptions such as the one-drop rule in determining a voter’s race. The most straightforward approach would be to limit access to weighted voting to those American-born citizens who have demonstrated through government documents, such as drivers’ licenses or birth certificates, that they identify, and are identified by others, as black or African American. There are bound to be instances where this approach is challenged, and one answer would be to model guidelines after the general requirements for establishing American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry as outlined by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which involve establishing that a lineal ancestor belongs to a specific tribe and then producing vital records that document a relationship to that ancestor.

The 3/5ths compromise didn't give blacks 3/5ths of a vote, though: it gave states representation in the House of Representation based on counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person. (I suppose we all understand that the South wanted to count slaves as whole people, and the North wanted not to count them at all.) If you wanted to do this in a way that mirrors what was done during the slaveholding era, to count blacks as 7/5ths of a person (a more obvious standard than 5/3rds, being 2/5ths off in either case), it would be purely to determine how many representatives in Congress each states get.

Now, that would doubtless increase black representation in Congress somewhat. It wouldn't have the wild swings that are posited in the article, though, because it wouldn't affect the Senate or the Presidential election at all. It would only mean that places like Georgia would have more congressional districts, and because black voters were considered 7/5ths of a person, more of those districts would end up being gerrymandered into black-majority districts than currently is the case.

The author points out that 90% of white Americans are opposed to the idea of reparations. I am not among them: it satisfies my Viking sense of justice, because it is a parallel to the weregeld. That was also inheritable by the family (indeed, it was often paid in cases where the person wrongly offended had been killed). We used to help the tribes in Iraq negotiate diyya payments to settle similar feuds. Assuming we can work out a deal of that kind, I would not be opposed to making the deal. The terms are, though, that the payment resolves the debt in full -- honor is satisfied, and we discuss it no more.

For that reason, the proposed 24-year period of weighting doesn't strike me as the right approach. The payment should be a one-time thing, something everyone agrees to accept as a settlement of the debt, so that we can finally put it behind us forever.

Weekend Quiz

Name these 12 famous people from the Middle Ages. It's tricky, since of course we don't have photographs! My first-time score was 92%.

They'll Find The Trains Are Guarded By...

You know the song, but let's hear it anyway given the news of the day. More, let's hear it a cappella since their brothers apparently didn't need instruments to perform.



UPDATE: Apparently the initial reports were wrong: no Marines were involved. The three Americans were a National Guardsman, an Airman, and a civilian. A Briton and one Frenchman were also involved in taking down the attacker. You can read about them here.

Strong work, gentlemen.

Justice, A Long Time Coming

Way back in 2003, during the initial invasion of Iraq, a soldier named Hasan K. Akbar fragged two of his comrades while deployed at war. A military court has upheld his death sentence.

The decision was not unanimous. Two dissenting judges objected to the fact that his diary was made available to the court martial panel:

“These pages included a running diatribe against Caucasians and the United States dating back 12 years, and included repeated references to (his) desire to kill American soldiers ‘for Allah’ and for ‘jihad,' ” Judge James E. Baker noted.

I don't know: that sounds pretty relevant to me.

OAF on the DOS

A former Blackwater contractor has been writing a short series mocking State Department 'war tourists' in Afghanistan. I sympathize somewhat, although I think I mentioned the other week that the embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team guys were good dudes. Of course, excepting the one Foreign Service team leader, those guys were all contractors too: the DOS couldn't staff them with volunteers. Still, the Foreign Service Officers they did find to lead the teams were fine gentlemen. We never had to deal with the high-level DOS guys, because we were too far down the strategic/tactical chain.

Still, I can easily imagine the scene our Blackwater friend is describing. Nor is he wholly wrong in his punishing description of the pending failure of the whole mission in Afghanistan. The leadership at the elected and appointed civilian levels lost that war as they lost the Iraq we won. In the case of Afghanistan the President himself, by declaring a half-surge with a withdrawal date, decided to lose it in a long and drug-out way that ended up costing us most of the Americans killed in that conflict.

Good Judgment on Display

Ronda Rousey, again:

In a recent interview with CNN, [Trump] spoke about women fighting in facets of the military. For some reason, he lumped Rousey into the conversation, and stated that she was a supporter of his:

"I guess the answer is yes, because they're really into it. Some of them are really, really good. I'll tell you what, I know some woman that are just -- Ronda Rousey is an example, who likes me.

"I'd take her on my side as a fighter."

The only problem with that little statement is that Ronda is not a big fan of The Donald. In a previous interview with the same network, Rousey made it clear (while blinking a lot) that she would not vote for him:

"I mean, I wouldn't vote for him. I just really wouldn't trust the guy with running my country, that's all.

"I'm not really going to get into specifics of it, but, I mean, I don't want a reality TV star to be running my country."

Rousey is likely to meet Meisha Tate in the Octagon later on this year, while Trump is likely to meet the end of his White House hopes and dreams any day now.

Emphasis added. Given the nature of such shows, it should probably be an informal disqualification.

Rain

Our six-week drought is breaking, with good rains yesterday afternoon, and more early this morning.  When the sun comes up, I bet I'll find my cistern is full again.  In honor of the event, I present this video, showing a "wet microburst" that resembles the effect of a helicopter dumping a load of water on a wildfire.

Related, much worse news:  three firefighters were killed yesterday in Washington state when their vehicle crashed and they were overrun by a wildfire.  The chilling news from officials:  "the crash did not kill them."

The new wild west: deregulated eyebrow-threading

Tim Carney in the Washington Examiner examines new depredations by the unstoppable Reichwing machine in eroding the government's power to curtail the free market and free speech.  Somalia, baby!

How to end-run economic control-freaks

Uber is having a hard time getting a foothold in China:  the regulators keep raiding its offices there.  AirBNB has a different strategy, which takes advantage of its ability to woo Chinese customers first in their incarnation as travelers to other countries.  The idea is to get them used to the idea of an unregulated net-based vacation-lodging service during one of their 109 million trips abroad every year, then count on them to put pressure on the regulators at home to allow a similar service domestically.  As the article notes, China can't raid AirBNB's offices in California.

Welcome, robots

The good news in automation:  as brute-force jobs decline, jobs providing caring and service increase, fulfilling the new demand created by all the wealth produced by automating brute-force jobs.

A Footrace on Immigration

The NYT describes it as a 'race to the bottom,' but it's the one beneficial effect of the Trump Show that the Republican primary race has been for a little while now. The American people have been taken for a ride on immigration: generations of leaders of both parties have simply defied the popular will, and presented ongoing massive waves of immigration as a fait accompli. Democrats since Teddy Kennedy have looked with glee upon the horizon when their imported coalition will come to dominate elections; conservatives long ago began adopting apologetic rhetoric in order to avoid giving offense to their new electoral masters.

So suddenly we're talking about birthright citizenship, whether it's the proper standard for the American Republic, and just how much immigration should be subordinated to the greater cause of maintaining a polity that supports the ongoing American project codified in the Constitution. That's exactly the conversation we should have been having all along, but people were too afraid to have it.

It isn't necessary to adopt unfair rhetoric to have the conversation, and we shouldn't speak unjustly of anyone. It is necessary to have the conversation. America is not a bloodline nation. Birthright citizenship doesn't make much sense here. We're a nation founded on a creed. Adherence to the creed should be what we are looking for in new immigrants, and numbers should be kept small enough over time that assimilation get to work. The creed should never be endangered by demographics. The creed is a vision of human liberty that is what this country was all about. Achieving and sustaining that vision is the whole point of the project.

These levels of immigration are not compatible with that, and therefore we need to address them. We must do this will all seriousness, because the survival of the project is at stake. We are not racing to the bottom, but we are in a race against time.

It's Hard Not To Snicker

Headline: "Hillary's latest defense: What is classified information, anyway?"

"If You Still Support Planned Parenthood, You Are Simply Not A Decent Person."

More likely than this, you just haven't seen the videos. The media has done its best to play them down. The people I know who still support Planned Parenthood are aware they exist, but describe them as 'those doctored videos that tried to show Planned Parenthood was guilty of a crime, which has been debunked.'

The proof that these guys haven't even watched the videos is contained in the headline of that last link, which reads, "Investigations turn up no Planned Parenthood wrongdoing." If you have seen the videos, you know that what is debatable is whether there has been any lawbreaking. "Wrongdoing" is indisputable. That the law supports these practices is a huge part of the problem to be solved.

UPDATE: An analogy featuring baby pandas.

Ranger School: Graduation

The Ranger School says that the President will not be attending graduation.  They also want to dispute a series of additional rumors that have been circulating on Facebook about how the two women managed to pass the final phase of the course.  I've seen all of those rumors in my FB feed.

I have heard one rumor that isn't denied here, which is that the women were involved in a fratricide incident on patrol and were passed anyway (as they should not have been). The source for this is a Regiment guy who claims he has it from one of the trainers directly. There are so many false rumors circulating, though, I don't know whether to believe this one or not. The rumor about the President attending was similarly sourced by Havok Journal. Of course, it may have been true: even if the President wasn't coming, the instructors may have been told to prepare for him to come; or, he may have in fact been planning to come and sent initial warning, and later been talked out of it by someone giving him good advice. In any case, the information in that case was as good as the information in this case, and I can't say whether or not you ought to believe it. At the very least, you can believe that there is a great deal of bitterness among the Rangers about this business -- otherwise, such hostile rumors would not be being passed around, nor so readily believed. The effect on unit cohesion is at least temporarily ugly, though perhaps that will pass in time.

What I do know is that the two women have been passed through the final phase and will graduate tomorrow, becoming the only women in history entitled to wear the Ranger tab. They certainly deserve congratulations for surviving the course -- not everyone does, and they were at a severe disadvantage. Even if they did receive extra help, as they are confirmed to have received second and third chances, it's really appropriate given that they had to undergo the school with a body type that carries less muscle and more fat, a strength and aerobic capacity approximately 20-40% lower than mens', structural disadvantages in their hips and knees, and in coming to Ranger school from outside the Combat Arms, which means they had to learn the skills on the fly rather than honing skills they already had. Any of these would have been a potentially crippling disadvantage. They managed the course while carrying all of them together.  That's a tremendous accomplishment whether they got extra help or not.

It happens that I had a long talk about all this with my friend, who happens also to be Uncle Jimbo's fiancee, and goes by the online nickname "Airborne Girl." She had wanted to get into Ranger school when she was in the military (and did, as the nickname suggests, successfully complete Airborne school). Indeed, she tells me that she applied for Ranger school like seventeen times. Her opinion is that it ought to be opened to women who are in positions that may require them to lead soldiers in combat, as it is the Army's best leadership course. As a signals officer, she wasn't likely to be called upon to do it, but it was far from impossible that she could find herself in the situation.

I respect that opinion. I still think the course should probably remain closed to women, as a 10% pass rate (ordinarily the pass rate is 42%) and only after the third try appears to confirm the results of previous studies involving the USMC IOC and the United Kingdom's tri-service longitudinal study of women in combat. Even if you get them through the course, they're not a good fit for the units the course is designed to support -- which is not necessarily the Ranger Regiment, but it is generally the Combat Arms. A separate leadership course for officers who may be called upon to lead soldiers in combat, but only accidentally and not for extended periods, would better support officers of the kind Airborne Girl is talking about.

What the military has actually decided to do is open BUD/S to women in an attempt to produce female Navy SEALs. That course runs for six months instead of the roughly two months of the Ranger course. Now the SEALs -- excepting DEVGRU, or "Seal Team Six" as it used to be called -- are a much larger group that we often realize, more or less the size of the 75th Ranger Regiment all told. Still, BUD/S is famously punishing, and it is very long. The risk of injury over time strikes me as the main reason to disfavor women in the combat arms: getting them through a two month school is one thing, but a six month or year long deployment in Afghanistan is something else again. Further, the Rangers and SEALs both deploy at a very high tempo, over and over again. A longer course will provide a sterner test of that capability, and it looks like we're going to see how that plays out.

All seriousness aside, the Department of the Navy is about to have a field day with the Army in the playful blood sport of inter-service rivalry jokes. I expect to see Marines mocking the Army for having a Ranger course that is easier than the USMC Infantry Officers Course (as it "must be" if women can do it) any minute now. If women pass BUD/S too the whole of the Marine Corps will become insufferable for years. If they don't, meanwhile, imagine how much fun the Navy is going to have mocking the ease of life in the Army. They've been taking constant mockery on that score from the Army for decades, and I'm sure they will take intense personal pleasure in the opportunity to give it back.

Fun with public schools.

XKCD.

Ashley Madison & dot-govs

From the Washington Times:

The list says there are 44 emails registered on the Ashley Madison site with a "WhiteHouse.gov" address.

The largest non-military user of Ashley Madison appears to be the Department of Veterans Affairs. The leaked summary shows 104 emails from "va.gov."

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is close behind, with 88 emails. The U.S. Postal Service shows 52 emails, and the Department of Homeland Security has 45.

The cheating website also has 42 emails registered from the Social Security Administration, 33 from the State Department, and six from the IRS.

The Federal Aviation Administration has 17 emails on the list, and the Labor Department has 15.

Watchdog Group: She Used Option One

A former US Army counterintelligence officer who now works for a watchdog group says he believes that Secretary Clinton used what I described as "option (1)" to get around the air gap:

Farrell said his investigation of the matter indicates that Clinton aides likely read classified documents and then digested and excerpted the material into the unclassified email system. Clinton has said she never sent any classified information on the email server and did not receive any classified information that was marked as such. “So she’s relying on the idea that somehow her deputies, Huma Abedin and Jay Sullivan, would excerpt the pertinent points out of a classified cable,” Farrell said. “They would pull those nuggets out of the classified version and restate it in an regular, unclassified conventional email on her server. And that’s what we’ve come across now.”

...

Said Farrell: “Here’s the bottom line: The secretary of state in an extraordinary and unprecedented move, set up a private email server to circumvent the conventional government classified and unclassified networks. Her aides and assistants excerpted code-word material from various classified message traffic and then took those excerpts and then sent them to her over an unclassified email server.”

Perhaps the biggest news in the story is that Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills disregarded the Federal judge's order that they give sworn statements in this matter. That is going to have consequences.

It takes a hurricane

From Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, a disturbing analysis of Katrina's forcible relocation of many of the residents of the worst bomb-crater neighborhoods in New Orleans. The removal improved not only the lives of those who moved away but also the lives of those who stayed behind.  I don't know of any way to look at these results than to conclude that there is a poor black culture that can be improved--and can be prevented from dragging down the cultures it touches--only if it remains a locally diluted minority.  If you belonged to that culture, what could be a harder message to accept?

Irony and the State Department

Classified military intelligence on Libya? Send it in an email. Details about the Iran 'secret deals'? Sorry, man, it can't leave the SCIF.

The Obama administration delivered 18 documents to Congress on July 19, in accordance with legislation requiring a congressional review of the nuclear deal. Only one of these documents is classified, while the remaining 17 are unclassified.

Yet many of these unclassified documents cannot be shared with the public or discussed openly with the press. The protocol for handling these documents, set by the State Department and carried out by Congress, is that these unreleased documents can only be reviewed ‘in camera’—a Latin term that means only those with special clearance can read them—and must be held in various congressional SCIFs.

Most staffers were hesitant to discuss—let alone share—a number of these documents, even though they’re not classified, because they require security clearances to view. By mixing a classified document with unclassified documents, critics of this arrangement contend, important facts are being kept from the public just as Congress is deciding whether to support or oppose the Iran deal.

On the upside, it's good to hear that they're suddenly taking seriously questions of proper handling procedures.

Way better than the actual debate

Bad Lip Reading

What "Secret Deal"? This is a "Confidential Agreement," Morons.

Secretary Kerry explains it all, starting at 4:45.

This is just an ordinary secret confidential deal, um, arrangement that is perfectly ordinary and standard practice in these matters. We've been doing all this for a long time. Nothing to see here. Move on.

Schlock Mercenary

Joe W. introduced me to this strip years ago, and I continue to follow it. Minor quibbles aside, it's remained impressive year after year. If you haven't read it before, you can start at the beginning and enjoy weeks of binge reading pleasure.

Well, Why Not?

Iran was already going to get to limit the citizenship of inspectors to countries with which it has normal relations. It was going to get to sign off on each individual inspector via a background check by its spy agency. So why not just let them use their own experts to inspect their military facilities?

[T]he agreement diverges from normal inspection procedures between the IAEA and a member country by essentially ceding the agency's investigative authority to Iran. It allows Tehran to employ its own experts and equipment in the search for evidence for activities that it has consistently denied - trying to develop nuclear weapons....

The White House has denied claims by critics that a secret "side deal" favorable to Tehran exists. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said the Parchin document is like other routine arrangements between the agency and individual IAEA member nations, while IAEA chief Yukiya Amano told Republican senators last week that he is obligated to keep the document confidential.

But Republican critics are bound to harshly criticize any document that cedes to Iran the right to look for the very nuclear wrongdoing that it has denied committing.

Kerry says he's been briefed on this and is OK with it. Clearly our real goal cannot be to stop their nuclear program. It makes me wonder if our real goal to raise their self-esteem. Iran's got a space program too, you know -- at least, they claim that's why they want advanced ballistic missiles capable of hitting precise targets.

Stones or Speeding Tickets?

As radar gun technology improved, and later laser speed detectors, my father used to tell me that someday it just wouldn't be possible to speed any more. You'd have to drive the speed limit all the time, because the instant you violated it a ticket would get mailed to your house. These days it might get texted to your phone, or just automatically debited from your account.

Not to worry, I said: what will really happen is that, once we're all obliged to stop pretending that we ever obey the speed limits, we'll revise them upwards according to what we really think they ought to be. The lies aren't setting us free, they're the things that are posting speed traps all over the roads. It's the truth that will really set us free.

I'm thinking about this again as the Ashley Madison hack becomes dumped on the internet. Tens of millions of people are about to have to account for their behavior. Will they be stoned to death, metaphorically, as people fear? Or will the society simply revise its standards to more honestly account for the fact that this behavior is apparently widely practiced -- the database is the size of fully ten percent of the US population, apparently.

Adultery is much more serious than speeding, of course. It's a moral offense, and not merely a formal violation of the motor vehicle code. However, our moral laws and moral standards on sexuality have rapidly eroded these last few years. Instead of the fearful punishment commentators seem to expect, I wonder if we won't see the remaining taboo against adultery collapse in the face of this exposure. That would be a grave matter for the survival of marriage -- I mean real, traditional marriage aimed at a stable family to raise and pass on a heritage for children, not celebrity-style serial marriage. Yet it seems to me a likely outcome.

None of us have any personal stake in this leak, I assume, but I'm curious as to what you think will happen as a result of it. Will we preserve the taboo by metaphorically stoning the adulterers? Or will we, as a society, elect to 'set ourselves free' of the taboo? Excepting the military, we've already removed adultery from the list of crimes punishable at law. Will we see the social follow the legal, as it so often has of late?

Well, That Is Sort Of Like A Faraday Cage...

Clinton's server was kept in bathroom closet of that first rate IT firm she trusted with national security.

That's Not A Sword...

My favorite part about this story is that the store owner also had a gun, and didn't even feel the need to make reference to it.

Bad Day on the Campaign Trail

Throwing the ball to the small child, it's Marco Rubio!

We all have bad days now and then.

The "taint of experience"

Jim Gerraghty's newsletter this morning pointed me toward a RedState piece about the current wave of Republican/Independent enthusiasm for a presidential candidate who's never been involved in politics:

Basically everyone who’s in office right now at one point was a political outsider. No one was born into elected office. At some point, all the people who have frustrated you (the voters) and pissed you off ran for office in their first campaign trying to tell you how they were different. They hadn’t been to Washington. They had success in business that would translate well to political office. They were wealthy and didn’t need help from special interests. And so on and so on. And, one by one, we elected those people and sent them to Washington or the Governor’s Mansion or wherever in the hopes that maybe they would be different.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT)–at one point, these guys were all oustiders. Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) himself was at one time not too long ago a guy with a compelling story of having risen through poverty as one of 12 kids to become President of the company he had worked for for 13 years. He ran successfully as an outsider and won.

The problem is, almost none of them actually were, after they got to office. Easily 95% of these political neophytes, once they got to office, were lured by the trappings of power and corrupted. And then they became the people you hated and the reason to send new political neophytes to power.

Here is the salient fact that many people are missing in this particular logical chain. It’s easy to say and do all the right things and to be non-corrupted when you are a political neophyte. Literally everyone who has ever run for office their first time has done it. What’s hard (apparently, at least based on the evidence) is to remain true to your principles after you win your election and actually get to power.

So what we ought to be looking for isn’t really someone who’s never been tested by the allure of power. History tells us that almost all people fail that test. What we ought to instead be looking for is people who have already been tested, to determine which ones have passed the test with the most success.

This is why I support Walker.

A Very Lucky Outcome

In Brazil, a female MMA fighter won a match that went the distance. It was a contested fight:

The fight three months ago, in the Noxii championship against Renata Baldan, lasted the full five minutes and three rounds - with Novaes eventually winning by a unanimous judge's decision. Video footage shows Novaes receiving several vicious knees to her stomach during the fight, as well as being body-slammed on to the ground.

Turns out, she was pregnant and didn't know it until after the victory.  Luckily, the child will apparently be fine.

What About The "Air Gap"?

So I've been asking around to confirm whether State uses the same "air gap" technique that the military uses to protect classified information, and it appears that it does. What is an air gap?

HOW DO YOU remotely hack a computer that is not connected to the internet? Most of the time you can’t, which is why so-called air-gapped computers are considered more secure than others.

An air-gapped computer is one that is neither connected to the internet nor connected to other systems that are connected to the internet.... A true air gap means the machine or network is physically isolated from the internet, and data can only pass to it via a USB flash drive, other removable media, or a firewire connecting two computers directly. But many companies insist that a network or system is sufficiently air-gapped even if it is only separated from other computers or networks by a software firewall. Such firewalls, however, can be breached if the code has security holes or if the firewalls are configured insecurely.

The military actually uses several different systems for different levels and types of classification. By far the biggest one is the SIPRnet, which handles information rated SECRET and below. The SIPRnet is huge, comprising thousands of computers across the globe, but it is connected at no point to the commercial internet. Because of the dangers of removable media like thumbdrives, those are forbidden to be connected to the SIPRnet. The computers themselves have to be physically secured, usually by being kept on a military base.

If you want to move data from the internet into the SIPRnet, or vice-versa, it used to be possible by writing the data to a writable CD, transferring the data, and then breaking the CD to ensure that copy was destroyed. You could only do this legally with unclassified information. I don't know that CDs are even still allowed, meaning that data has to be physically re-typed from one system to the other (which is what we usually did when porting unclassified information, such as news reports relevant to our operations, into the SIPRnet). Then there is no danger of transferring any hidden malware.

Smaller and more secure systems handle Top Secret information, such as JWICS. Being kept on a base isn't good enough for a JWICS computer: it has to be kept locked in a proper SCIF. In addition, of course, it's password protected and requires a physical card identifying the user that is itself coded with information about your security clearance.

So how did this classified information get out of the classified, air-gapped networks and onto Clinton's server in the first place? There are really only two possibilities.

1) Someone, or a team of someones, illegally downloaded the material onto removable media, stripped it of its classification markings, and transmitted it onto the public internet.

2) Clinton arranged to have her private server networked with SECRET and TOP SECRET systems, compromising the security of all the information kept on those systems. If you could hack into her system, which was secured by a truly first-rate organization that made copies of the data and then sold the server on which they resided, you could bypass the air gap and get into nearly all of America's most classified data.

Option (1) is a clear felony, one that would have required numerous man-hours of labor given the number of classified records now turning up. It would have been fairly tedious, too, which means that the work would be passed down to flunkies who probably don't want to go to prison forever -- but their records of accessing the data just before the emails were sent on Clinton's private server will be recorded, because they had to log in and be physically present with their ID cards to do it. It should be possible to find these people and apply pressure to them until they crack and cooperate in return for reduced sentences.

Option (2) is a disaster of unimaginable proportions. However, it would have made it very easy for Clinton to access the information and move data back and forth between her private system and the systems used to communicate with her diplomats in the field. For that reason, I suspect it will prove to be the one she actually employed.

Sign Bill Clinton's Birthday Card

We've been invited. I mean, be polite. Be courteous. We're all gentlemen here, excepting the ladies.

Making a Cigar Box Guitar

Grim's 1332 post got me watching a bunch of cigar box guitar videos. Here's a good, time-condensed video of making an electric cigar box guitar from scratch. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the craftsmanship, though the background music gets a bit repetitive.

Update: If anyone's interested in a much, much simpler and easier way to do this, here are three different plans.

Art of Manliness: How to Make a Cigar Box Guitar

Make: Hand-Rolled Music

Cigar Box Nation plans

Glenn Watt has a bunch of useful videos on it as well, and there is a lot more out there.

Ranger School Update: The Fix Is In

So claims Havok Journal, at least, based on the President's sudden desire to attend graduation.

Now, I’m no fortuneteller, but when the travel agent of the Commander-in-Chief contacts your organization, travel plans probably isn’t the message trying to be delivered. “Undue command influence” is something JAG officers warn leaders about, especially during election cycles and sensitive topics that can get young NCOs and company commanders in trouble.

Call it what you will, but when the President says he’s attending graduation for Ranger School, something he’s never shown interest in prior to this class, there’s obviously a reason, and I’m sure there’s at least one or two Ranger candidates that will make the cut. Unfortunately, the premier leadership school in the Army is falling victim to an agenda and will soon find itself in a swelter of media madness like its never experienced, even up to this point.

So disconnected from the military is he that he does not realize that, rather than honoring the women by his presence, he will have undermined them in the eyes of everyone by doing this. Few will now believe that their passage through the school was fair and free from political pressure. I wonder if he can even imagine the damage he's doing to these two women, who have done gloriously to come this far, by making himself a part of this?

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.