Marine Corps' "Gender Integrated Infantry Unit" Finishes Assessment

The latest in the quest to integrate women fully into line infantry units is the United States Marine Corps' nine-month study, just concluded, of a "gender integrated" infantry unit performing simulated combat. As a scientific experiment ought, it ran a standing infantry unit (all male) through the same paces to see how they compared. The results are as predictable as anything could possibly be.

Women in a new Marine Corps unit created to assess how female service members perform in combat were injured twice as often as men, less accurate with infantry weapons and not as good at removing wounded troops from the battlefield, according to the results of a long-awaited study produced by the service....

Infantry squads comprising men only also had better accuracy than squads with women in them, with “a notable difference between genders for every individual weapons system” used by infantry rifleman units. They include the M4 carbine, the M27 infantry automatic rifle (IAR) and the M203, a single-shot grenade launcher mounted to rifles, the study found.

The research also found that male Marines who have not received infantry training were still more accurate using firearms than women who have. And in removing wounded troops from the battlefield, there “were notable differences in execution times between all-male and gender-integrated groups,” with the exception being when a single person—”most often a male Marine” — carried someone away, the study found.

The full study is more than a thousand pages long, Marine officials said....

Researchers hooked men and women alike up to a variety of monitors, and found that the top 25th percentile of women overlapped with the bottom 25th percentile of men when it came to anaerobic power, a measure of strength, Marine officials said....

The gender-integrated unit’s assessment also found that 40.5 percent of women participating suffered some form of musculoskeletal injury, while 18.8 percent of men did. Twenty-one women lost time in the unit due to injuries, 19 of whom suffered injuries to their lower extremities. Of those, 16 women were injured while while carrying heavy loads in an organized movement, like a march, the study found.

Naturally the results were immediately dismissed by the Secretary of the Navy. Some of the Marines involved in the study were so incensed by his refusal to take the results on board that they took the unusual -- and certain to be punished -- step of complaining openly to the press about the appointed civilian leadership.

Marines involved in a controversial experiment evaluating a gender-integrated infantry unit say they feel betrayed by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus after he criticized the results of a nine-month study that found women are injured more frequently and shoot less accurately in simulated combat conditions.

“Our secretary of the Navy completely rolled the Marine Corps and the entire staff that was involved in putting this [experiment] in place under the bus,” said Sgt. Danielle Beck, a female anti-armor gunner with the task force....

To Beck, a 30 year-old who was one of the strongest women in the company, Mabus’s remarks were insulting.

“Everyone that was involved did the job and completed the mission to the best of their abilities,” said Beck, adding that Mabus’s remarks about the type of women in the experiment were a “slap in the face.”

“The caliber of the women in Weapons Company are few and far between in the Marine Corps,” she added. “They are probably some of the most professional women that anybody will ever have chance to work with, and the heart and drive and determination that they had is incomparable to most women in the Marine Corps.”

The thing is, this study lines up perfectly with the results from the United Kingdom's tri-service longitudinal study of women in the military. They also found that, across the services and over time, women were less physically capable, less lethal because the strain on their bodies interfered with weapons accuracy, more likely to be injured, less capable of helping other soldiers who became wounded, and reduced the unit's ability to maneuver under fire.

The Marines haven't found anything new. The real question is whether we can accept the truth, or whether we just cannot. If we can't, in the end, Americans will die in some cornfield or ricefield or desert ditch because of it. Wars may be lost, the course of history may turn away from our vision of human liberty, but that's hard to get your head around. Just think of the kids you're leaving to die, Secretary Mabus. Think about the Marines you are personally condemning to death.

Against Objectifying Objects

In spite of the funny title, I think there's a pretty good argument to be made here. It just isn't the argument being made.

Dr Kathleen Richardson, a robotics expert at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, warns that sex robots could contribute to the systemic dehumanization of women and children....

“Technology is not neutral. It’s informed by class, race and gender. Political power informs the development of technology,” she told the Washington Post. “That’s why we can do something about it. These robots will contribute to more sexual exploitation.”

There is no reason to believe that users of sex robots will lose the distinction between the object they are objectifying and actual women (or children). If anything, this might provide an outlet for people of very strong but antisocial desires to express themselves without hurting real human beings.

The real argument against this is not what it will do to the robots, but what it will do to the users. The problem isn't that they're using an appliance for its designed purpose, but that they're treating their own sexuality as a toy. This isn't a new problem: it applies to all such uses. Here's Kant on the subject, from The Metaphysics of Morals.



Kant can be a little opaque, and there's a lot more that has to be read to appreciate his full argument, but in sketch he is arguing this:

1) All things that happen have a cause.

2) For most things, that cause is something else acting on the thing being changed, e.g., sunlight hits ice, melting it.

3) These actions are not free, because they are caused by something else acting upon you.

4) Human beings, and other rational beings, have a possibility to act freely.

5) This only occurs when we are our own cause.

6) When we act as animals, we are not behaving freely: we are giving in to being acted upon by an outside stimulation.

7) Rather, we are free only when we reason to the right thing to do, and do that.

8) We can reason that the obvious good of sexuality is the preservation of the species.

9) Other uses are mere animal ends, and lack dignity because they lack freedom: we are throwing away our rational freedom and allowing ourselves to be driven like an animal.

10) Thus, dignity is only compatible with rationally electing to use sex for its proper purpose.

This is not a new argument even to Kant, although he frames it in what he would call 'pure practical reason.' You can find the same basic argument in Aquinas or Aristotle. It's an argument that has always struck me as incomplete: it's missing something, though after years of considering it I'm less sure than ever that I can say just what it is missing. Aquinas' version is better -- he distinguishes not one but three goods associated with sex -- but it doesn't avoid the conclusion that only this one mode of sexuality is fully good and worthy of a free and dignified human being.

Whether or not it's quite right, though, it's surely a good part right. Thus, the strong argument against sex robots isn't that they will lead to people imagining exploiting women or children: what is more likely is that those people are already imagining it, and might substitute the appliance for an actual person who would otherwise be exploited and harmed. The strong argument is that this mode of sexuality is itself necessarily harmful even to the user. It cannot be practiced without harm, even if in fact it reduces the actual incidence of harm to innocent third parties.

Kant makes an argument in the quoted passage that we can know this in part because the act is shameful. You're happy to present your spouse to the community, but would presumably hide the fact that you own a blow-up doll (or sexbot). I think he's right that it ought to be shameful, and that a decent society would be ashamed of such things and keep them private. What I wonder, though, is if a society is necessarily ashamed of it. Ours has come to think of free expression of sexuality as a kind of positive good, and might well treat parading your sexbot around as an act of courage. Can't you imagine hearing how "brave" someone was for "being open about his sexuality" in this way?

If that's right, then shame and reason have come apart: we aren't ashamed of what we ought to be, and have begun to praise vices as if they were virtues.

UPDATE: By the way, I've been doing some further reading on this subject, and the concept of "objectification" in sexuality seems to be rooted in feminist readings of Kant. Kant's talking about objectification in his sense, which is importantly different from the way these readings take him, here: the wrongdoer here is turning himself into an object by throwing away his rational capacities in favor of being acted-upon from outside. He gives up rational thought about what is right and wrong, and allows the impact of sensation to provoke desire, and desire to provoke action, as if he were a thoughtless object instead of a thinking subject.

Of course, part of what I think Kant gets wrong is the idea that even animals are "objects" in this way. The analysis may break quite early if, as seems likely to me, at least some animals are engaging in rational evaluation of desires or rationally adapting to ways of life compatible with other beings. There's probably also a basic error in assuming that rationality is divorced from sensuality, as both are emergent qualities from the world: to whatever degree we are actually rational, our ancestors had a potential for rationality that came to be realized in us. It is probably an error to think of reason as standing separate and alone, ordering reality rather than being ordered by it in the way that the Kant Song describes the First Critique. Reason itself is a product of the world, revealed by evolution, and its own function is therefore to be expected to be aligned with the world rather than divorced from it. We should expect to overcome Hume's objections not by Kant's apperception, but by a better understanding of the reality that we encounter with both reason and sensation.

"Things Were A Lot Worse in the Mid-70s" Is Not a Ringing Defense

In which Fortune magazine discovers that Donald Trump is right about something:

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is not predicated on the candidate’s mastery of or allegiance to facts.

His views on things like immigration or international trade are just not supported by any relevant statistics. So when The Donald called into CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday and claimed that Americans are living in a “false economy,” where the unemployment rate is actually 40% rather than the 5.1% as reported by the Labor Department, you’d be forgiven for believing this was just another Trumpian whopper.

But actually, this view can be supported by actual statistics.

The real issue is that things are worse than they have been since Ronald Reagan was turning things around during his first term -- and unlike Reagan's time, the rate of improvement is not sharply inclined. Government policies have been depressing hiring and investment in new business here in America, especially the Obamacare law and its effects but also the general increase in regulation of business.

Guns in Counties

City-Data has a list that purports to be the 101 most well-armed counties in the United States. I'm not at all sure it's accurate, since many gun owners wouldn't report owning a gun out of reasonable concern about government watchlists and attempts at establishing a pre-confiscation registry. Still, it's probably as good a list as can be put together. How many crime-ridden hellholes can you find on it?

Idiocracy

I've been reading up on Athenian democracy, and came across this tidbit on Wikipedia:

A good example of the contempt the first democrats felt for those who did not participate in politics can be found in the modern word 'idiot', which finds its origins in the ancient Greek word ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs, meaning a private person, a person who is not actively interested in politics; such characters were talked about with contempt, and the word eventually acquired its modern meaning. According to Thucydides, Pericles may have declared in a funeral oration:

We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.

A Small Detail

I think this is mostly good advice, except for one thing: Israel has no use for the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. That weapon can only be deployed from a B-2 stealth bomber. Israel does not have any B-2 stealth bombers. We do not plan to sell them any B-2 stealth bombers, and for a pretty good reason: as much as we all love Israel, and I certainly do, it has a history of reverse engineering American military technology and occasionally selling that technology abroad. It's perfectly understandable that they do this, given their position and the threats that they face, but we can't afford to pass them the B-2.

It's not as easy as just handing them a great big bomb, in other words. We'd have to hand them the delivery system as well, and teach them how it works, and doing that once basically means giving up our exclusive understanding of the technology involved. If Israel wants to develop and deploy its own bomber that can handle the MOP, that's fine: there's no real problem with giving them this bomb, which is based around conventional explosives. They could, for that matter, probably develop their own version currently. Still, for now, the best thing is to try to ensure a serious-minded President is in office in 2017: then we can handle the bombing ourselves, if we need to do so. I suspect that an air campaign isn't the right answer in any case. Exactly what I do think is the right solution I won't publish in the clear, but there's a better way to approach this than trying to bomb the sites with gigantic explosives.

Waco Update: Small Town Justice

This sounds pretty familiar to me, having grown up in rural Georgia. Waco, Texas, is a bigger town -- but it's got a small-town justice system.

It's a city where a district judge and district attorney are former law partners, the mayor is the son of a former mayor, the sheriff comes from a long line of lawmen and Waco pioneers and the sheriff's brother was the district attorney's chief investigator....

No formal charges have been made, and it remains unclear whose bullets, including police bullets, struck the dead and injured, or when cases will be presented to a grand jury, which is currently led by a Waco police detective....

Defense attorneys have been critical of how the cases have been processed, accusing District Attorney Abel Reyna of writing 'fill-in-the-blank' arrest affidavits. A police officer testified a justice of the peace approved the affidavits without making any individual determination of probable cause.

In the criminal case of one of the defendants, Reyna's former law partner, District Judge Matt Johnson, issued a gag order as written by Reyna....

Although police and the district attorney described last spring everyone who was taken into custody as criminals, an Associated Press review of a Texas Department of Public Safety database found no convictions listed under the names and birthdates of more than two-thirds of those arrested.

So, the grand jury is headed by a member of the Waco police department. The District Attorney is a former law partner of the District Judge, who apparently trusts his former partner enough that he issues arrest affidavits and gag orders written by his friend the DA. The gag orders prevent anyone arrested -- two thirds of whom had no previous convictions of any kind, though they were described as "criminals" by the government and held on $1 million bond each -- from giving their version of events. No formal charges have been filed against anyone at all.

At the time we contrasted it with shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere, saying, hey: look how we trust that all this massive force was used appropriately, and don't get out in the street and march. The other side of that trust is that we expect some accountability, eventually, for how the force of law was used. Eventually, an accounting must be made to us. Right now, it's not looking good for the Waco justice system.

Trying on a Different Juxtaposition with Microaggressions, Just for Size

Back to George Sachs "10 Ways White Liberals Perpetuate Racism," with a different juxtaposition this time. Let's see how this fits.

Sachs drew his list from The Racism Root Kit: Understanding the Insidiousness of White Privilege, written by "Paul Pendler, Psy.D., of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University Medical School and Phillip Beverly, Ph.D., Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Science at Chicago State University".

Sachs

We [White liberals] are one of the millions of white people willing to make a change for the betterment of our country. We actually live by the words of our Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal." 

At times, though, we feel a distance from our black and Latino friends; a noticeable energetic gulf that separates us from a deeper connection with them. We want to be closer to people of color. Yet somehow, some way, we sense a wall between us. We wonder: Is it me or them?

Maybe years of racism have made it hard for people of color to trust White folks--even Atlantic magazine liberals like you and me. 

Or maybe we're saying or doing something racially insensitive--perpetuating racism and white privilege. And we don't even know it.

1984

'What are you in for?' said Winston.

'Thoughtcrime!' said Parsons, almost blubbering. The tone of his voice implied at once a complete admission of his guilt and a sort of incredulous horror that such a word could be applied to himself. He paused opposite Winston and began eagerly appealing to him: 'You don't think they'll shoot me, do you, old chap? They don't shoot you if you haven't actually done anything -- only thoughts, which you can't help? I know they give you a fair hearing. Oh, I trust them for that! They'll know my record, won't they? You know what kind of chap I was. Not a bad chap in my way. Not brainy, of course, but keen. I tried to do my best for the Party, didn't I? I'll get off with five years, don't you think? Or even ten years? A chap like me could make himself pretty useful in a labour-camp. They wouldn't shoot me for going off the rails just once?'  

And Monday, While We're At It

This was my introduction to Stan Rogers, on the old Dr. Demento Show.

Cohutta Wilderness

Been walkabout for a few days. Back now.

Well Then, Music for Sunday

Music for Saturday

Seasick Steve is another cigar box guitar discovery. John Paul Jones, bassist for Led Zeppelin, joins him for a concert in the UK.

No, we won't

Rehearsal dinner announcement: "We will be using this time to fellowship with one another as well as rehearsing the flow of the wedding day ceremony."

Private space

As exciting as huge public science projects can be, they can also dry up private initiative.   After the great age of royally funded exploration should come the merchants, eager to dream up and build new kinds of ships.  A Texas company, which is plugged into the only commercial space application that yet exists--satellites--has developed a promising "firefly" drive that may prove cheaper and more efficient for today's increasingly miniature satellites.

September 11th

By custom and tradition, there will be only this post today.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Hawg

A short movie about A-10s and their pilots, "the red-headed stepchild of the Air Force."

Dives & Lazarus

We watched the first episode of Ken Burns's Civil war this evening.  Hard to believe it first came out 25 years ago.  I paid more attention to the music this time, especially to a tune that didn't get picked up on the soundtrack album or on any of the many websites devoted to the documentary.  I finally placed the old tune, which is sometimes called "Kingsfold," often now played as arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams and adapted to various hymn lyrics, a common one being "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say":



The tune is also associated with Child Ballad #56, "Dives and Lazarus," as well as with "The Star of the County Down."  Perhaps more to the point re the Civil War connection, it's also known as "The Fighting 69th," a/k/a the Irish Brigade.

Good Lord

From a piece entitled "Expel People Who Demand Trigger Warnings," which sounds like it should be promising enough:

You see, my father had severe PTSD from his time as a Green Beret during the Vietnam War. It is probably at least partially because he refused to seek treatment for it that I ended up suffering the same thing to a lesser degree.

My father’s PTSD transformed him into an erratic, explosive, psychologically abusive man who instilled paranoid fantasies in me about everyone, including my own mother, starting when I was at the tender age of five. To make sure I never questioned these ideas, he punished any signs of critical thinking with almost Maoist tactics of repression. He also sweetened his psychological poison pill by alternating his rages and interrogations with grandiose flattery designed to make me even more dependent on his fantasies. Thankfully, my mother kicked him out when I was seven, but to this day I find it difficult to fully trust many people because of the pure paranoia I was forced to experience and embrace at an early age.

I don’t bring this up for pity.

That's good, because none is forthcoming from this station. That charge is a pretty vicious one to lay down at his father's feet, based on things he could only barely remember: engagements between the ages of five and seven, as subsequently explained to him by the other adult who decided she wanted rid of his father and whatever his challenges might have been.

Well, I wasn't there. Maybe it was as it was painted for him later.

Good Point

Protestants used to protest in just this way, NR reminds. That's why Milady was able to turn one, though, in The Three Musketeers.

It's Not a Joke, It's a Dowry

Althouse ponders a concept by parents to save money for a daughter -- but not sons -- to 'compensate for the wage gap.'

Conservatives tend to argue that the wage gap doesn't exist. At least for the elite of the youngest generation coming of age, it seems to be reversed. In fact, women tend to be better paid than men. But mostly these arguments turn on 'if you look at equal time in grade, experience, etc...' -- in other words, just the things that child-birth and child-rearing tend to disrupt -- 'then things are equal.'

But what if women often want to bear children, and drop time in grade?

The concept of the dowry was to pass wealth on with a daughter that would remain hers in the marriage. Traditionally, it was held in trust and must be returned to her undiminished if the marriage should end for some reason. That strikes me as substantially similar to the concept here. She'll bring the money to the marriage. If the marriage fails -- as marriages do much more often now -- the courts are likely to defend her claim to what she brought in as wealth. It will go with her and the children. And insofar as her time out of the workforce does diminish her 'time in grade' claim to wages, she'll have some wealth to offset that.

I don't think it's foolish at all. Irish, but not foolish.

A Religious Resurgence

Unexpectedly.

In the mid-1990s, when Peter L. Berger declared that a religious resurgence was underway, scholars took notice. Since the 1960s, Berger was renowned as one of the leading proponents of the secularisation thesis. Briefly, secularisation describes three interrelated social processes: first, the differentiation of secular institutions (the state and the free market, for example) from religious institutions (such as the church); second, the decline of religious beliefs; and third, the privatisation of religious belief and practice. In short, secularisation describes a process of social change. It is a hypothesis that attempts to explain what is unique about modernity. For this reason, secularisation is ‘twinned’, as it were, to the process of modernisation. With respect to traditional religion (and traditional ways of life, for that matter), modernisation acts like a solvent. As a society modernises, religion loses its distinctive features—for instance, the public prominence and influence of religious institutions and leaders, the social utility of religion (as, say, a source of moral value), and epistemic claims to revelatory authority. Religion recedes from public life into the private. Its universal claims to truth are transmuted as deeply felt personal convictions.

Turns out, secularization looks like a phase receding in the rear-view mirror. China, aggressively secularized by the Communists, is flourishing with Christianity. Israel, founded by secular Jews who intended to run a modern, secularized state, is growing increasingly religious and Orthodox. The Islamic world is returning to its religious roots as well.

Whether this is good or bad depends chiefly on the effects of the particular religion on society. What we seem to see in the big picture is that religion addresses a key human need. We are coming back to it because we can't do without it. The human soul longs to know the highest things, as Aristotle wrote thousands of years ago. We investigate through science, but also through intuition. We investigate through direct experience, and through engagement with the traditions of those who came before us and investigated for themselves while they lived. Religion is at the core of what a human being is.

The key is to do it well.

On the Importance of the 9th and 10th Amendments

A brief video.

The Duffel Blog Strikes Again

Newly confirmed U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley outlined his vision for the Army’s way forward in a press conference today, his first and last as Chief of Staff.

“We’ve focused a lot on the SHARP program in the last few years, and I’m ready to switch gears back to focusing on fighting and winning America’s wars,” said Milley, 15 minutes before his resignation was announced.

In Fairness, It's Just the New York Times

...which, as havens of disreputable journalism go, is infamous.

A special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account — including one about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program — has endorsed a finding by the inspector general for the intelligence agencies that the emails contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign and the State Department disputed the inspector general’s finding last month and questioned whether the emails, which are being released to the public, had been overclassified by an arbitrary process. But the special review — by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency — concluded that the emails were “Top Secret,” the highest classification of government intelligence, when they were sent to Mrs. Clinton in 2009 and 2011.

"It was allowed," I heard someone say today. Well, in a sense of the words.

Georgian Solidarity

Way back in 2008, as you may remember, the Republic of Georgia was invaded by Russian forces. I was fairly incensed at the time, as the Third Georgian Brigade was deployed with us in Iraq and we did not do anything obvious to stop the Russians from cutting off as much of our friends' territory as they pleased. I wrote:

I met some fine soldiers from the Republic of Georgia in Iraq, where they have heretofore kept a brigade of their fighting men to help the Iraqi people free themselves from the tyrant Saddam, and the petty tyrants who sought in so many places to replace him. The emergence from long tyranny into constitutional liberty is a difficult one, often a painful one, but the Georgian people understand that too well.

As we watch Russia invading their sovereign territory, we should remember that the Georgians have been our friends and allies. They are a good and noble people, though bitterly poor in many places: and we have ties of culture to them as well as our current alliance. The Cross of St. George flies over Georgia as it did over England; one of my friends from Georgia in Iraq was named for the Greek hero Hercules. They are a part of the West, and should enjoy Western liberty and self-determination.

For too long the Soviet Union sought to force Georgia and so many others under the shadow. We should stand by the Georgians at this time and ensure Russia understands that Georgia is not prey to be gobbled up. They have been our friends and our reliable allies, and we have much in common with them.

I suggest that you write to tell your Senators and Representatives today that a strong endorsement of Georgian independence is needed. A wider and more dangerous war may be avoided if Russia is shown that it cannot have an easy victory over a weaker neighbor. They have often stood by us. We should be strong in our support for them now, when they need us.

There is an article in Breitbart right now that suggests that much more was done by then-President "George-ia" W. Bush than was obvious.

[Former Georgian Defense Minister Dmitri] Shashkin reveals:

Many do not know that our peacekeeping brigade returned from Iraq to Tbilisi on American military planes which under the circumstances of war was direct military support by the US.

“Many do not know that Russia could not bomb the Tbilisi airport because American Hercules planes were on the tarmac,” Shishkin continues.”Many do not know that the flagship of the US Fifth Fleet which entered the Black Sea monitored on its radars the airspace in the Tbilisi-Moscow-Volgograd triangle.”

And “many do not know that the August 14 Hercules flights from Jordan were accompanied by (American) fighters. Many do not know that the statement of the commander of these fights that ‘any activity of Russian planes in the Georgian sky will be considered an attack on the United States of America,’ thus effectively closing the Georgian sky to Russian planes.”

It's true: I, at least, did not know any of that. It was well done.

Misbehavior Before the Enemy

It may be rarely used, but it sounds pretty apt.

1) It recognizes the existence of actual enemies.

2) It reinforces that ordinary screwing around isn't acceptable in life-or-death situations.

3) It carries an appropriately stern sentence given the loss of life of people who were sent looking for him.

Now That's Really Weird

A major breakthrough in science is often heralded by these words. This time too? Perhaps.

What's the Standard for "Substance"?

Newsweek, which sounds deep enough in the tank that I'm sure I hear an echo:

Despite the fact that no reputable journalist, including our own Kurt Eichenwald, nor any official government investigator has yet found any substance to the “criminality” charge Republicans level daily, in the hall of mirrors of American politics, she is now a perceived liar.

What would it take for a 'reputable journalist' or 'government investigator' to be taken to have found something of substance? They found Top Secret, SCI, keyword information sent in the clear. She has by her own admission destroyed emails that are, by law, official government records. She sent emails in the clear containing foreign government information, which official standards state clearly must be presumed classified, to a man named Sidney Blumenthal who has no security clearance whatsoever.

All of this is criminal. Indeed, these are all felonies. Some of it we have clear records of her having done, such as the Blumenthal emails that she personally wrote and sent, as well as the TS//SI/TK//NOFORN emails. Some of it we have her admission of having done.

Is it only 'substantial' when the government files charges? When they obtain convictions? When the convictions fail to be overturned on appeal?

"Reputable" journalists are supposed to hold the government to standards. They're not supposed to go along with the willful blindness of the powerful to lawbreaking by important members of their own political party. Shame on Newsweek, and anyone else who defines "reputable" in this way.

UPDATE: Viewed in light of Clinton's statement today, I have to regard this as a coordinated campaign in which Newsweek is only pretending to be an independent journalistic agency. This is the strategy, then: flat denial of any wrongdoing, in the fervent hope that nobody actually prosecutes clear violations of law provable with evidence already in the public sphere. It's astonishing, even for a Clinton.

Oh, Really?

On a piece about countering violent extremism:

"It took us some time," Weilnboeck confesses. "We were blindfolded by our conventions of seeing extremism as a product of male violence. That is not true. Extremism is very much a systemic thing in which women have been involved -- always."

"So do make sure that you also work with women and girls," he continues. "And make sure that you work with the young people on their personal concept of being a male or being a female, because you'll find in these concepts everything that is driving violent extremism itself. There is no violent extremist that is not also a sexist or homophobic."

Emphasis added, because:

I would actually put them all in some kind of camp where they can all drive around in quad bikes, or bicycles, or white vans. I would give them a choice of vehicles to drive around with, give them no porn, they wouldn’t be able to fight – we would have wardens, of course! Women who want to see their sons or male loved ones would be able to go and visit, or take them out like a library book, and then bring them back....

And I am sick of hearing from individual women that their men are all right.

It may just be that successful violent extremism is more likely to come out of communities other than those of radical lesbians. That doesn't mean their hearts aren't just as black.

The Kant Song

A man could be satisfied with himself as a poet if he managed to construct a good rhyme for "innate subjective transcendental ideality."

Is Right-Wing Extremism the Biggest Threat to America?

So asks a writer at the HuffPo, with the following shocking evidence:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, anti-government fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

Forty-eight deaths in 14 years in a nation of more than three hundred million does not even rise to the level of statistical noise. Meanwhile, this charming study ignores the thousands of Americans killed by self-proclaimed jihadists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.

Terrorism in general isn't much threat in America. This is true even if we extend "terrorism" to what would normally be considered random acts by psychopaths rather than part of a coherent terrorist agenda. There have been a few acts directed at police lately, apparently inspired by the BLM movement. If you were reading the news last week, it probably sounded like a crisis -- and each act is certainly a tragedy, especially for the family and the department. All the same, 2015 is shaping up to be among the safest years in a quarter century for police officers. Note that the 36 officers projected is quite close in number to the 48 Americans killed by non-Muslim "extremists," but in a single year. A very safe year.

In the same year, 668 Americans have been killed by police. We can't really say if that's good or bad, because this is the first time anyone's really tried to keep the numbers. Typically, for comparison, there are about 3,500 drownings in a year. Millions of people interact with the water or the police every year, and for the most part neither the water nor the police intend to kill you. However, if you're going to panic about 48 people killed over fourteen years by "radical right wing extremists," police and swimming pools should scare you to death.

UPDATE: Another grave danger: car ownership.

Happy "World Beard Day"

Today, while celebrating the glories of beards around us, we contemplate an immortal question: Who had the better beard?

Odin?

or Zeus?

Turning from gods to wizards:

Gandalf?

Or Merlin?

Turning from wizards to kings:

Arthur?

Or Aragorn?

Hah! That's a trick question -- Aragorn didn't have a beard. If you run his name through Google, though, you'll be pretty sure he did.

Trump Beats Clinton

According to SurveyUSA:

Donald Trump has a clear path to the White House, according to a shocking new poll from SurveyUSA. Trump beats Hillary Clinton 45 percent to 40 percent, with 16 percent of voters undecided. He wins a huge share of the Democrats’ non-white base — 25 percent of African Americans, 31 percent of Hispanics and 41 percent of the relatively small Asian vote. That’s a heart attack for the GOP establishment...

For the GOP establishment? How do you think it plays with the Democratic Party establishment?

SurveyUSA is a pretty good outfit as pollsters go. In 2012 it skewed Republican v. the final results, but only by 0.5%, with an average error of 2.3% -- meaning it erred both ways, but overall it erred on the Republican side slightly more often. Gallup, by contrast, had an average error of 7.2%, all toward the Republican side.

Every other candidate in the race has nowhere to go but up versus Trump because of his strong name recognition. But Clinton is a household name, too. Everyone else can take comfort in the fact that as people come to know who they are, they'll earn support against Trump versus where they are now. Clinton's camp can't believe that to be true.

Always Hire Experienced Help

Headline: "Iran working with North Korea to thwart U.N. nuclear inspections: report."

Who else would you hire? They're the world-beating experts on that.

Their presence in Tehran has been kept secret with the help of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force that serves Iran’s Supreme Leader.

The nuclear experts work in a guarded office building at the Hemmat complex and are transported to and from work in tinted-glass vehicles escorted by members of the terrorist-affiliated Quds force.

In addition, the six-man North Korean team reportedly collaborates with Nouri Industries, which builds warheads for Shabab and Ghadr missiles. Nouri also works closely with a subdivision of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, also known by its Farsi acronym SPND.

Oh, well, it's good that we gave away sanctions on Iran's purchase and testing of ballistic missiles, then.

Life Imitates The... Duffel Blog

Duffel Blog, 2012: "Mob Violence Breaks Out At West Point, 63 Wounded."

Actual Headline, 2015: "30 military cadets hurt in West Point pillow fight."

Merle Haggard Answers Your Questions

Hey, Merle, what do you think of today's country music?

He had very nice things to say about up-and-comer Sturgill Simpson, who is currently opening for Merle on tour. He says, "As far as I'm concerned, he's the only one out there...he comes out and does a great show."

As far as other contemporary country music artists? "The rest of them sound like a bunch of (crap) to me," he says.

I think there are some great acts out there, but they aren't making it to the radio. In any case, here's the one he likes.





You know, he does sound kind of like some of Merle's old friends.

I admired Merle's answer to the question of what he's doing with his declining years.

"I feel fine right now. I don't really have much sign of aging and I've been through cancer, so I ain't scared of that no more. Looks like somebody wants me alive, so I'm gonna do my best to act like I'm alive. i still enjoy playing. The traveling gets a little rougher every year, but maybe they'll fix the roads."

Maybe they will.

A Modest Proposal

A proposal from what I think is probably a young feminist: "We Need to Be Able to Call Out Kim Davis’ Bigotry without Slut-Shaming or Hillbilly-Shaming." The move to try to divorce bigotry from being a hillbilly is new to me: I haven't seen that one before. It's a healthy concept, though.

I'm not sure it's very important to "be able to criticize her bigotry," as mostly a charge of bigotry is used to raise an emotional wall with her on the other side of it. You need not examine her position more closely, because if she's a bigot she's a bad, ugly -- well, not in the physical sense -- person who's obviously nothing like us good people over here. It would be worth seeing if she can be criticized on rational grounds.

And, as it turns out, it's not even hard to do this. She's at fault for being a public official who does not obey the law. For the most part, and with some exceptions, conservatives have no problem admitting to this. Even if you admire her guts for standing up to the Supreme Court, conservatives in general know what the responsible line to take is. So if you want to criticize her on those grounds, you'd find that mostly your opponents on the larger issue (bigots, no doubt) agree with you.

So why not defend the idea that the people whose job it is to enforce the law must obey the law, or be disqualified from holding public office?

When Kim Davis, the Rowan County, KY, clerk was hauled off to jail for refusing to give marriage licenses, a White House spokesman said no official is above the law. Hillary Clinton cheered on Twitter.

Oh, right. That's why.

Apparently Someone Is Jealous That Iran Gets All The Attention

Also known as, 'We could totally take Okinawa.'

Especially nice given the translation of the final lines in Chinese, which CFR gives as:

China is strong, victorious wars require deaths; for all to be strong and safe, [we] face the risks and dangers of war. We wholeheartedly love peace, but must be prepared for the likelihood of war. We respectfully and solemnly commemorate the 70th anniversary of the war against Japan.

Oh yes, very respectful. I'm sure the Japanese will appreciate the sentiment appropriately.

This is what bothers me about knee-jerk neo-feminism

This webcomic posits that "since Disney killed the Expanded Universe [in Star Wars], there is no reason to assume all Stormtroopers were men except Patriarchy" (added emphasis mine).  My objection is that either way I can read that statement, the artist is wrong.  And we're going to get into some Star Wars esoterica here, so if that's not your thing, you may want to skip this one.

A Hilarious Juxtaposition

In reply to the excellent Atlantic article, "The Coddling of the American Mind," by Greg Lukianof, of FIRE, and Jonathan Haidt, a social scientist with a dangerous streak of honesty in him, George Sachs, a clinical psychologist, writes "10 Ways White Liberals Perpetuate Racism."

Lukianof and Haidt argue that the spirit of "vindictive protectiveness" that demands punishment for people who commit alleged microaggressions actually harms the very students it claims to protect. "A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers," they write, "is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically."

Sachs's counter-argument, of course, is that they should just shut up. He writes:

Perhaps you agree with The Atlantic and think that college students are just too uptight and politically correct. Most of The Atlantic readers are liberal White Americans who are doing their part to make the world a better place for all creeds and colors. Like many 40-something White liberals, I too assume I'm relatively open-minded and conscious of my white privilege. "I'm not a racist," I say to myself, when images of police brutality flash on the screen. "I'm not like those white people."

Or am I?

Like me, you probably voted for Barack Obama, were outraged by the verdicts in the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. You even work hard to check your white privilege at the door when going to a #blacklivesmatter protest march.

...

Many of you may stop reading now, thinking, "Here we go with the political correctness." You say to yourself: "I'm not perpetuating racism, and I'm certainly not invalidating people of color. Donald Trump may be, but not me.

That's what I used to think. But, right there, you're committing a microinvalidation. It's called Denial.

Yes, that's right. Denying you are racist is, as we've all suspected for so long now, proof that you are racist. Sachs then lists 10 ways white liberals are racist.

I'll summarize below the fold, but I highly recommend you just go over and read it in all of its awesome absurdity. It's well worth it.

Keep in mind, this is what they're teaching kids at school these days.

Take the Fifth? Like a Fifth of Bourbon?

That was Ace's echo of Hillary Clinton's inimitable "Wipe the disk? Like with a cloth?"

We hear today that Clinton's IT aide will take the Fifth rather than testify before Congress about her email server.  But not to worry, the Clinton campaign has explained that this in no way casts a criminal light on Her Inevitableness:

. . . Bry­an Pagliano, the former State De­part­ment com­puter staffer and aide in her 2008 White House run who helped to set up Clin­ton’s private serv­er in 2009, planned to in­voke his Fifth Amend­ment rights in­stead of ap­pear­ing at a de­pos­ition be­fore the com­mit­tee next week.

Re­pub­lic­ans served him with a sub­poena last month.

Clin­ton’s cam­paign said Pagliano’s de­cision was dis­ap­point­ing but un­der­stand­able. “We had hoped Bry­an would also agree to an­swer any ques­tions from the com­mit­tee, and had re­cently en­cour­aged him to grant the com­mit­tee’s re­quest for an in­ter­view,” an aide said. “Bry­an is an ut­ter pro­fes­sion­al and a won­der­ful young man who does not live in the pub­lic eye and un­der­stand­ably may not wish to be drawn in­to a polit­ic­al spec­tacle. So his de­cision is both un­der­stand­able and yet also dis­ap­point­ing to us, be­cause we be­lieve he has every reas­on to be trans­par­ent about his IT as­sist­ance,” the cam­paign aide said.

 Elijah Cummings has dutifully taken up this refrain.  There's just one problem:  you don't get to take the Fifth because you'd prefer not to be drawn into a political spectacle.  You have to be facing the prospect of incriminating yourself by answering questions.

It Would Certainly Complicate the Agenda

“The idea of natural law superceding this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent indeed,” U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning told Rowan County clerk Kim Davis.

Turns out she's an elected official, which I hadn't realized. The government can't just fire her: she occupies the office by popular mandate. So jail it is, until and unless she submits to the will of the Federal courts.

UPDATE: On reflection, if that is the judge's reasoning, this is a case that really deserves appeal. There's an argument that natural law absolutely must supersede the court's authority because it is the source of the court's authority. The argument goes like this:

1) The Declaration of Independence states that breaking away from the British was justified by a decision to assume the separate and equal status to which "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

2) The Declaration of Independence further states that the justification for the forming of this or any government is to protect rights from the "Creator," and that any government that becomes destructive of this defense of natural rights may be altered or abolished -- that is, superseded.

3) The US Constitution is only one such government, and indeed the second iteration of the project declared by the Declaration of Independence. It does not have authority separate from the appeal to the Laws of Nature and Nature's God cited in the Declaration.

4) Therefore, the Laws of Nature and Nature's God very much do supersede the decisions of this or any Federal court. Not only the court but the Federal government exist only to guard the rights that also are rooted in the Creator's laws.

5) Since the Constitution is justified as an iteration of this claim, the antiestablishment clause of the First Amendment must be read as not in conflict with the claim. No government can have a just power to violate the Laws of Nature and Nature's God under the terms of the Declaration, and this government is only the second iteration of the Declaration's project.

The Federal courts need to show not that they are independent of, let alone superior to, natural law -- they cannot be. They need to show that this project is in accord with natural law.

See also this paper, which inspired my line of thinking, and which is subtitled, "Why the Constitution is a Suicide Pact." By similarly deriving all Constitutional powers from the claims of the Declaration, he finds that there are some things that the Constitution cannot allow us to agree to even if it means our national destruction -- for example, abrogation of natural rights. If that argument is right, so is this one.

It's the little things they get wrong...

From the Washington Post: "Thousands of e-mails that have been released by the State Department as part of a public records lawsuit show Clinton herself writing at least six e-mails containing information that has since been deemed classified."

No, that information was always classified, she just violated the law by failing to mark (and treat) it as such. Classified information is classified because of what it is, not how it is marked. And I expect much of her defense will revolve around "well I didn't KNOW it was classified since it wasn't marked" (which is a pathetic excuse and immaterial to the crime itself anyway).They have not been deemed classified now, they have merely been exposed as containing classified information.  They were classified when she wrote them.

"In response to questions . . . Mr. Pagliano’s legal counsel told the committee yesterday that he would plead the Fifth to any and all questions if he were compelled to testify,"

To me, the solution seems simple. Offer him total immunity to any charges relating to the actions he took in that timeframe (but NOT to lying to Congress). He then cannot plead the Fifth as he cannot incriminate himself with his testimony. We shouldn't really care about prosecuting this guy, we should care about nailing his lawbreaking boss to the wall.

Nothing to See Here

The President has advised us to ignore Iran's Supreme Leader, so all that 'Death to America' stuff and the Ayatollah's 416-page book detailing his plans to "outwit the US and destroy Israel" can be safely set aside.

Are we also supposed to ignore the Revolutionary Guards' top commander when he explains that "(the US and the Zionists) should know that the Islamic Revolution will continue enhancing its preparedness until it overthrows Israel and liberates Palestine”?

Probably, since his orders come from that "Supreme Leader" guy. We've already been told that nothing he says really matters.

An Odd Thing To Be A Felony

As Ricochet’s Tom Meyer points out, the third-degree charges—which constitute a majority of the total charges—actually stem from the pictures Copening had of himself. The implication is clear: Copening does not own himself, from the standpoint of the law, and is not free to keep sexually-provocative pictures, even if they depict his own body.

But consider this: North Carolina is one of two states in the country (the other is progressive New York) that considers 16 to be the age of adulthood for criminal purposes. This mean, of course, that Copening can be tried as an adult for exploiting a minor—himself.

None of the charges really make a lot of sense, since the other pictures were of his girlfriend and she willingly took them herself and sent them to him, in return for the pictures of himself he sent her. This business of transmitting naked photos of yourself to potential suitors is an odd practice, and I would advise against it if we have any teenage readers. It is not a great idea for a host of reasons, even where you won't face felony charges for doing it. And I would certainly advise you that if a young lady does send you naked photos of herself, you should immediately remove them from your phone and under no circumstances ever transmit them to anyone else nor allow them to fall into anyone else's hands. A gentleman's discretion is never better exercised than where a lady is concerned.

Still, as inadvisable as the practice certainly is, it is also rather clearly different from the child pornography that I assume was the real point of the NC law. In any case, the 16 year old girl also faced charges for taking a photo of herself, and plead guilty to them. The charges the young man is facing, however, are felony charges that could send him to prison for up to a decade.

Killing Tunisia

An incredibly sad piece on Tunisia after the terrorist attack on the beach:

Look at Tunisia’s resort city of Sousse on the Mediterranean. Two months ago, an ISIS-inspired nutcase named Seifeddine Rezgui strolled up the beach with a Kalashnikov in his hand and murdered 38 people, most of them tourists from Britain.

The police shot him, of course. There was never going to be any other ending than that one. And before the police arrived, local Tunisians formed a protective human shield around Rezgui’s would-be foreign victims. “Kill us! Kill us, not these people!” shouted Mohamed Amine. According to survivor John Yeoman, hotel staff members charged the gunman and said, “We won’t let you through. You’ll have to go through us.”

Tunisia’s hospitality and customer service are deservedly legendary, but that was truly above and beyond. It’s how Tunisia rolls, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Tourists are not going back.

The loss of the tourism trade is badly hurting the city, but they have a treasure in their people and their culture. I hope they can find a way to recover.

I love puns

This is mostly for Ms. Cass, but I'm sure the Hall will appreciate it as well.

Taylor Swift: A Socratic Dialogue

In spite of my best efforts, I do occasionally find myself exposed to popular culture. As a result, this is amusing.

Flat curves

Trump is confusing me on the tax front:

As with many of Mr. Trump’s policy ideas, confusion seems to be keeping interested parties from knowing exactly how to respond. In an interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Trump said a flat tax would be a viable improvement to America’s tax system. Moments later, he suggested that a flat tax would be unfair because the rich would be taxed at the same rate as the poor.

“The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind.”

Does this man understand that a flat tax means one that's not progressive? That a tax code can't be both at the same time?  The most charitable construction I can put on this is that he'd like the code to be pretty flat until you get to the super-rich, then do a hockey-stick.  Unfortunately, top-heavy tax structures  are notoriously unstable, yielding high revenues in good times and dropping sharply in bad times, as California is discovering.  Sometimes sticking it to rich people, no matter how satisfying, doesn't yield economic prosperity for the rest of us.

More discouraging political news: poll respondents' answers vary considerably depending on whether a question reads "Public Figure X supports policy ABC, do you agree?" or "Public Figure Y supports policy ABC, do you agree?" In particular, you can get quite different results on issues like affirmative action and the Iran deal depending on whether you insert "President Obama" or "Donald Trump." Sadly, you can get different results even if you insert a fictitious "policy ABC," such as "Should we repeal the Public Affairs Act of 1975?"  You can get a good chunk of people to guess what's in such an Act, which doesn't exist.

Maybe I'm weird: I decide whether I can stomach someone like Donald Trump on the basis of what policies I think he'll support, not vice versa. His tax views aren't helping. He sure can get attention, though, which is something. He went on Twitter the other day to call Anthony Wiener a "purve sleazeball," which makes up in vivid accuracy what it lacks in propriety. Along those lines, I find a sneaking admiration for Sidney Blumenthal's powers of expression in calling John Boehner "louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle." Like RedState, I had to look up louche, a word I've been hearing all my life without attaching any very specific meaning to it: it means discreditable, disgraceful, dishonorable, ignominious, infamous, disreputable, notorious, opprobrious, shady, shameful, shoddy, shy, or unrespectable, though literally "cross-eyed" or "squinty."

H/t my morning's email from Jim Geraghty, which I don't know how to link.

'Stands to Reason' Economics Takes A Hit

Noah Smith says that economists are "a rogue branch of applied math."

Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed if they don’t make sense in the context of leading theories. This isn’t a problem with math -- it was just as true back when economics theories were written out in long literary volumes. Econ developed as a form of philosophy and then added math later, becoming basically a form of mathematical philosophy.

In other words, econ is now a rogue branch of applied math. Developed without access to good data, it evolved different scientific values and conventions. But this is changing fast, as information technology and the computer revolution have furnished economists with mountains of data.

His proposed solution is to turn the thinking over to machines instead of people. I wonder how well that will work? Economic activity is based on decisions made by people for fairly complex reasons that machines don't experience. On the other hand, they'll be considering the data at a level of abstraction that will mask the actual causes of the decisions, and treat the decisions themselves as the data. Does losing the causality hurt anything? We'll find out.

My concern, of course, is that if it does work well the people literally drop out of the equation. We'll make policy as if the decisions were what counted, and not the people who make those decisions -- and especially not what they hoped to achieve by making the decisions. But the purpose of economic activity is that very thing we'll be dropping out of our system for thinking about the activity. The real question by which you should judge economic activity is how well it helps the many, many people involved achieve what they'd hoped to achieve by undertaking an economic action. If you get a job, does it help you flourish, or does it lock you into a company store? Are you blocked from making economic decisions about selling your milk or pumpkins because of oppressive government regulation, and your inactivity doesn't show up in the data because it never rises to the level of a decision that can be counted?

Just the things I think we ought to care about are the things that will drop out of consideration.

Clever polio

Life fights back, as Michael Crichton would say. Our immunization campaign against polio has been remarkably effective, but there are chinks in the armor.

A little refresher on polio vaccines: There are two, the original injectable that uses killed virus (Jonas Salk’s original vaccine) and the oral drop version that contains a weakened live virus (Albert Sabin’s formula). The oral vaccine was the first one used in the international eradication campaign, because it is inexpensive to make and can be administered by anyone. It is still used in the developing world, though industrialized countries have gone back to the original injectable.

For all its benefits, the oral version has a known issue, a combination of bug and feature. Once it is given, the vaccine virus replicates in the gut. The feature part is that, when the vaccine virus passes out of the body, it can spread through the environment of places with poor sanitation, conferring a kind of passive secondary immunization on others nearby. The bug part is that, in the few weeks it is replicating, the vaccine virus mutates, and sometimes mutates back past the artificial weakening to the original disease-causing form.

British health authorities are aware of a man of about 30 who has been shedding live polio virus in his waste since he was a small child. It's a rare problem, requiring bad luck in the mutation of the live virus in the man's childhood oral vaccine combined with a immune system disorder just bad enough to let the polio virus live and not bad enough to kill him quickly. Occasional short-term vaccine-induced polio outbreaks have been known to happen on several dozen occasions since the polio-eradication program began in the 1950s. They're a terrible problem, not only because any unvaccinated or immuno-compromised locals are at risk of an awful disease, but because vaccination programs are controversial enough in the some areas of the world without having to make suspicious communities even more suspicious of outsiders' plot to sicken and kill them with mysterious medical technology.

Who's War Against Whom?

The new JSOC book gets a writeup at the Daily Beast, with the very strange title "Inside U.S. Commandos' War Against Iran." As becomes evident immediately, it's really that Iran's been waging war on us.

I Knew Blumenthal Would Be in the Clique

Last Saturday:

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.

Yep.

Hillary’s classified missives weren’t sent to just State Department personnel. She also disseminated highly classified information to private citizens who did not have security clearances. In this 2009 e-mail exchange, for example, Clinton sent confidential classified national security information to Sidney Blumenthal, a shady former Clinton White House operative who the Obama White House banned from federal employment... The bulk of Hillary Clinton’s message to Blumenthal was redacted, under codes 1.4(D) and 1.4(B) because classification authorities determined it contained classified information “which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security[.]”

An Unlikely Reading of Plato

A philosopher writes:

Imagine, for a moment, if, during the tense final hours of the recently concluded negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 world powers, Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif decided to set aside their remaining differences regarding the inspections regime and stockpiles of enriched uranium and turn for a moment to the fundamental questions that divide the two nations. Not differences in policy but in first principles.

Imagine Secretary Kerry explaining to his Iranian counterpart the philosophical roots and anthropological assumptions of American liberalism. And imagine Foreign Minister Zarif similarly providing an account of the Islamic republic. Imagine this debate continuing, fueled by endless cups of tea, long into the night, as Kerry discusses, say, John Locke and James Madison and the American founding, and Zarif discourses on Mulla Sadra and the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, as they argue about the nature of the human being, the purpose of the political community, the origin of law, and the meaning of justice.

And imagine that, as the morning sun finally rises over the city of Vienna, the two exhausted statesmen slump back to the negotiating table, now with a more sophisticated understanding of and respect for one another, and, over strong coffee, hammer out the final niggling details of the agreement in an amiable and conciliatory manner.

I can imagine everything except that last part. Fully understanding that you are negotiating with someone who has a vastly different idea about justice is not going to encourage you to negotiate in a "conciliatory manner." It's going to completely undermine your confidence that your partner is negotiating in a manner you would recognize as just. How can you take a huge risk like this on someone whose view of justice is so different from yours?

Plato gives us a picture of something quite like this in his Protagoras. Socrates shows up at a house where several other thinkers are gathered. He is accompanying a friend of his who wants to study with one of these thinkers, Protagoras. Socrates tests the quality of Protagoras' teaching by engaging him in a philosophical debate of just the kind the fellow here is proposing. It does not end in agreement, friendship, or anything good: in the end, they are exhausted with each other and firmly set in their disagreement. Both positions, though, have been proven untenable: Socrates argues that virtue is knowledge but that it can't be taught, whereas Protagoras argues that it isn't knowledge but that it is his business to teach it. Neither position even makes sense, yet they have both given their reasons and are committed to them. Socrates is the better man, the dialogue implies, because he is at least willing to admit that his position can't be true. The discussion, though, doesn't increase their friendship or mutual understanding. It only increases their desire to be rid of each other.

Eventually almost the whole of Athens felt that way about Socrates. It's why they killed him.

Should the Senate go nuclear on the Iran deal?

Interesting poll results on the public's view of the Iran deal.  If you're white, black, hispanic, young, old, male, or female, the chances are you think it will make the world less safe.  The only demographic that slips over the 50-yard line toward support is Democrats.

Jim Geraghty threw out the idea last week that the Senate should defeat the deal on a majority vote.  Allahpundit picks it up and runs with it:

The question is, what do you do once the filibuster’s been nuked? If the GOP decides to pass a resolution declaring the Iran deal a treaty that requires two-thirds of the Senate to approve it, Obama will veto that resolution. That shouldn’t matter — since when is Article II contingent upon the president’s assent? — but you’re looking at a court battle at least, and the public will be bewildered after weeks of “does Obama have the Senate votes to protect his Iran deal?” headlines suddenly switch to “GOP changes rules on voting to block Iran deal.” They should have pounded the table about the treaty requirements from the beginning. Since they didn’t, though, maybe Geraghty’s plan could operate as a compromise solution, one that wouldn’t stop the deal but might embarrass Obama. If they nuked the filibuster, they’d at least get their resolution of disapproval to Obama’s desk, something Democrats are nervous about right now because of the message of no confidence it would send internationally in Obama generally and the Iran deal specifically. Iran may lose confidence that the deal will survive and look to back out. At a bare minimum, forcing a veto would be a political humiliation and a way for Republicans to wash their hands publicly of the outcome of this charade once it’s implemented. It’s a way to lay the whole thing in Obama’s lap. Having squandered all of their leverage, it’s probably the best play Republicans have left.

I'm trying to apply Cassandra's test to this approach: do we really want to sink to the level of some tactics just because we face them? Cassandra would make an excellent appellate judge, by the way: scrupulously fair, able to think through complicated ramifications, and determined to find rules that will serve equally well no matter whom they are applied to.  I don't want to see the filibuster undermined; on the other hand, it's been undermined, and I'll like to keep some balance in where it still applies.

Denali

"In your face, Republicans!"

Apparently this is yet another example of John Stewart driving the national agenda. If you don't watch television, you probably didn't know there was an issue with the name of a mountain in Alaska. You almost certainly didn't care about the issue you probably didn't know about. But now you're being mocked for losing a debate you didn't know we were having, about an issue you didn't care about. It's really important, the mockery.

That Kentucky Clerk

You have to admire the guts of a woman who tells the Supreme Court that it can go jump. Dad29 wonders if the US Marshals will be sent to forcibly remove her from her office, while pointing out that the Obama administration has ignored SCOTUS rulings on several points lately. Ed Morrissey takes the responsible conservative line and points out that the government must obey the rule of law, and that someone who works for the government ought therefore obey the law or else resign. Of course, that's true for the President and the EPA, too.

Agreement and dispute

From a C.S. Lewis essay, "On the Reading of Old Books," to which AVI drew our attention at Maggie's Farm:

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth.

Bricks

Excellent clickbait site.  Most of the images have nothing to do with bricks, but these were two good ones:

Carbon-testing the Iranian side deal

Powerline's Scott Johnson summarizes the investigation into the secret side deal allowing Iran to control its own nuclear inspections, as reported by Fred Fleitz in IBD/NRO:

When the AP’s George Jahn first broke the story of the secret side deal with Iran on Parchin, the side deal was viewed as so absurd that it was attacked by the left-wing media as a forgery. In the spirit of President Obama, the forgery was imputed in some precincts to Israeli intelligence. The side deal, with its self-inspection provisions — text here — is indeed absurd but, unfortunately, it is the real deal.

Johnson concludes:

[I]t’s hard to see how anyone in Congress can vote for it in light of this deliberate attempt by the Obama administration to conceal from Congress its effort to drop a crucial benchmark needed to verify Iran’s compliance with the agreement.

Is it hard?  Do we really think the Senators who are planning to vote for it are struggling with their decision?

Volk und Land/Raza y Tierra

From Victor Davis Hansen, "How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off the Public":

Sometime in the last five years, the public woke up and grasped that Latino elite activists were not so much interested in illegal immigration per se, but only to the degree that the issue affected other Latinos. Were 3,000 Chinese illegally entering California per day by ship on the Northern California coast, Latino activists and politicians would probably be the first to call for enforcement of federal immigration law.

Alright, Let's Tie This Together

The main theme there is "Scotland the Brave." 'Land of the flowing river / land of my high endeavor! Land of my heart forever, Scotland, the Brave.'

Steve 'N' Seagulls vs. the Finland Women's National Ice Hockey Team

I'm kind of off in the academic version of a cage match at the moment, but randomly ran into this and had to share. I think we've seen the Steve 'N' Seagulls before, so here the Finnish bluegrass metal cover band is again. The real fun starts about halfway in.

And "Itchy Fingers," because -- flaming bagpipes.

Let's Have a Song

It's September, after all.

Not a Professor

That was fast.

On Monday, West Point law professor William C. Bradford resigned after The Guardian reported that he had allegedly inflated his academic credentials. Bradford made headlines last week, when the editors of the National Security Law Journal denounced a controversial article by him in their own summer issue:

As the incoming Editorial Board, we want to address concerns regarding Mr. Bradford’s contention that some scholars in legal academia could be considered as constituting a fifth column in the war against terror; his interpretation is that those scholars could be targeted as unlawful combatants. The substance of Mr. Bradford’s article cannot fairly be considered apart from the egregious breach of professional decorum that it exhibits. We cannot “unpublish” it, of course, but we can and do acknowledge that the article was not presentable for publication when we published it, and that we therefore repudiate it with sincere apologies to our readers.

That's A Good Question

I assume someone fed her these questions, but they must have talked her through the concepts so that she could understand the answers. Well, had she gotten many answers!

The Hell You Say

Headline: "Green Berets have growing doubts of duties with skittish political leadership."

Why read?

In Commentary Magazine, Gary Saul Morson explains how he thinks many young students are chased away from studying literature.  The whole essay was good, but I particularly like this discursion into empathy.  It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis remarked about the insistently inward-looking habit of the ill.  It's also a good warning about the perils of victim status.  Not that I am often victimized, having a comfortable life, but on the rare occasions that it happens I recognize these same results in myself:

Chekhov’s story “Enemies” describes a doctor named Kirillov, whose son has just died, comforting his grieving wife as his face displays “that subtle, almost elusive beauty of human sorrow.” We empathize with him, not only for his grief over his son, but also because of his empathy for his wife. It’s a chain of empathy, and we are its last link.

Then the wealthy Abogin arrives to beg the doctor to visit his dying wife, and the doctor, with extreme reluctance, at last recognizes he has no choice. When they finally arrive, it turns out Abogin’s wife has only feigned illness to get rid of her husband long enough to escape with her lover. As Abogin cries and opens his heart to the doctor “with perfect sincerity,” Kirillov notices the luxurious surroundings, the violoncello case that bespeaks higher cultural status, and reacts wrathfully. He shouts that he is the victim who deserves sympathy because the sacred moment of his own mourning has been ruined for nothing.

Nothing makes us less capable of empathy than consciousness of victimhood. Self-conscious victimhood leads to cruelty that calls itself righteousness and thereby generates more victims. Students who encounter this idea experience a thrill of recognition. Kirillov experiences “that profound and somewhat cynical, ugly contempt only to be found in the eyes of sorrow and indigence” when confronted with “well-nourished comfort,” and he surrenders to righteous rage.

In this story, each man feels, justly, that he has been wronged by the other. And so neither receives the understanding he deserves. We empathize with both but also feel that they could have chosen instead to empathize with each other. But, as the author explains: “The egoism of the unhappy was conspicuous in both. The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart.” That is still more the case when unhappiness makes us feel morally superior.

This was good, too:

Many years ago, when Northwestern student course evaluations appeared in book form, I came across a response to a course on Dickens: “Don’t take this course unless you want to read a lot of Dickens!”

And this:

Students will acquire the skill to inhabit the author’s world. Her perspective becomes one with which they are intimate, and which, when their own way of thinking leads them to a dead end, they can temporarily adopt to see if it might help. Novelistic empathy gives them a diversity of ways of thinking and feeling. They can escape from the prison house of self.

H/t Maggie's Farm.