A Moment of Clarity

It's worth celebrating a moment of refreshing honesty, in which pretenses of "common sense" are set aside, and a man speaks his real mind.

Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.

...

The US doesn't just have a gun violence problem because of its lax gun regulation. It has a problem because it has a culture that encourages large-scale gun possession, and other countries do not. That, combined with Australia's experience, makes large-scale confiscation look like easily the most promising approach for bringing US gun homicides down to European rates.

Large-scale confiscation is not going to happen. That's no reason to stop advocating it. (I also want to repeal all immigration laws and give everyone a monthly check from the government with no strings attached, and will argue for those ideas even though they're doomed.) But it does mean that we should be realistic about what gun control with an actual shot of passage can achieve. It can make us safer. It cannot make us Europe.

The main form of "safety" he seems to think Australia and similar countries achieved was a reduction in suicides by gun. As far as I know, you're as safe from suicide right now as you decide to be. Access to guns may make suicide by gun more likely, but there's no reason to believe (as he asserts) that it would "save" thousands of lives a year. It's not that hard to tie a rope, and it's quite easy to take a few extra pain pills if you can get access to them.

Still, just because I disagree with everything about his proposal and a lot about his analysis, let's celebrate his honesty. This is the real goal: large scale confiscation of firearms, as well as completely eliminating immigration restrictions and instituting a universal basic income. Disarm the public to the greatest possible degree, completely eliminate official border security as well, and then tax anyone with property for enough to pay everyone who comes as much as they are said to 'need.'

Clearly he thinks this will lead to a US that looks like Europe. It will, in the sense that it would destroy both American and Europe. America would rapidly absorb multitudes more from the poorest parts of the world, and rapidly lose whatever wealth could fly. Europe would lose the protection the American military has provided it for seventy years, and with it the capacity to sustain public assistance budgets as large as has been common for decades. That isn't what he imagines will happen, but that is what would happen in fact.

Monster

Mike's most recent post began with the confession. I suppose we should pause for a moment to remember that it is universal. Chesterton approaches it at the end of Orthodoxy.

All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall. In Sir Oliver Lodge's interesting new Catechism, the first two questions were: "What are you?" and "What, then, is the meaning of the Fall of Man?" I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers. To the question, "What are you?" I could only answer, "God knows." And to the question, "What is meant by the Fall?" I could answer with complete sincerity, "That whatever I am, I am not myself."

If you are not yourself, what are you? Yourself, plus something else: the orthodox answer being yourself plus original sin. Like a chimera -- or, as Chesterton himself more rightly noted, like a centaur or a mermaid -- you are a human being, and also an animal. You are in the world, but not of it.

The recognition that we are monsters is meant to be liberating. In recognizing that we are not perfect just as we are, we are free to try to cut loose of what is wrong with us. Even if we fail, at least we know in what direction to strive.

Another Dead End

The President ponders the mystery of yesterday's attack.

“At this stage we do not yet know why this terrible event occurred,” he said.

“It is possible that this was terrorist-related but we don’t know. it’s also possible that this was workplace related,” he continued.

It's too bad we can't identify a common theme between this and other organized cells that carry out bomb and gun attacks in major Western cities.

Consciousness vs. "Fissiparous Seething"

A reasonably good summary of the problem that consciousness poses for our physical understanding of reality. It will be familiar to most of you, but it's worth going over again because it remains one of the more interesting problems.

Happier news

The Cameroon army frees 900 Boko Haram hostages, incidentally reducing the carbon footprint of a lot of Boko Haram members while they're at it.

Monsters

Well, the title certainly applies to the San Bernadino shooters, but in this particular case, it doesn't.

You may or may not be surprised to find that it in fact applies to me.  Apparently, I am a "cold-hearted monster" "indifferent to loss of life".  What could I have done to earn these appellation?  I objected to the President's proposal to strip citizens of their Fifth Amendment rights to due process because they're on a "No Fly List".  After asserting what it is that I object to (the arbitrary removal of civil rights on the say so of an unelected bureaucrat), I was told that I must come up with an alternative solution then.  Otherwise I am... I am unsure... wrong?  Bad?  Irresponsible?  It was never made clear to me.  So I gave my response.  "Nothing" would be a better solution than this.  And to borrow from an old joke, "that's when the fight started".*

Pop Culture Metaphors Don't Work For Me

Oddly placed in an article on dark matter:

If dark matter were a pop star, WIMPs would be Beyoncé. “WIMPs are the canonical candidate,” says Manoj Kaplinghat, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

What on earth is that supposed to mean?

Foamy the Squirrel Says...

Solid advice, Foamy.

There. Will. Be. Polka!

To paraphrase Ace, or some moron over there, it's a spectacularly silly time to be alive.

Berdoo Is The Weirdest Thing I've Ever Seen

Initial reports are never right, but today was really strange. Who are these guys?

1) It seems clear that this was a semi-professional team of guys who knew how to work together, and who had either the capacity to make pipe bombs or connections who did. They carried out their plan and managed to exfil successfully before police could arrive. Yet hours later, they're still driving around in the same car, in the same kit, a mile and a half away?

2) The target doesn't make any obvious sense as a terrorist target, except that it was a soft target with lots of people.

It's like you had a team of guys who meticulously planned out how they'd carry out a major attack, but never got further in their planning than how they'd drive away from the scene within a given response time, leaving IEDs to cover their tracks. There was apparently no "then what?" considered. There were major freeways they could have taken, and if you've got three guys you surely have access to more than one car. They could have dumped the SUV and their kit, piled into a white sedan, and been in another state by the time the police caught up to the first vehicle.

Wannabe martyrs? One of whom lost his nerve and fled on foot when the final firefight arrived? But then why bother with the exfil? You could have stayed and killed a few more people, and become martyrs where you were. The police were coming.

It's like they had everything mapped out until a minute after they drove away, and then suddenly realized they had no idea what came next (and no imagination between them that would let them plan up something better than 'drive around the neighborhood in the getaway car').

The one thing that might make sense is if they had been trained by professionals who considered them disposable. They were taught how to do the part they did right, and then... what now?

Or maybe they're just yahoos who thought this out carefully on their own, and weren't bright enough to think beyond it.

Otherwise, conflicting details in all the reports make it hard to know what to think so far.

Final IAEA Report on Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program Released

Two weeks early, too. Iran definitely had one, it lasted formally until 2003, informally continued after, and the IAEA has gotten chiefly stonewalling and obfuscation from Iran about its program since then. Iran's written answers promised under the "road map" in July were so ambiguous that the IAEA provided a list of follow up questions and held a number of technical meetings to try to get answers, but the report rather suspiciously says absolutely nothing about whether any answers were forthcoming.

Too bad we'll all be having another round of talk about how important it is to strip Americans of their weapons today instead. This will probably slide into the ether almost unnoticed.

Quiz: Opening Lines of Medieval Literature

Without making any use to any reference materials whatsoever, including of course search engines, I managed 9 of 10. Oddly enough, I'd read the one I missed many times -- Erec en Enide -- but somehow failed to remember the opening.

Dissent Magazine: "Beyond the Wage System"

A call for a universal basic income to address the exploitative nature of work, "under-work," "over-work," and non-work.

The author "teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at Duke University. She studies feminist theory, political theory, the critical study of work, and utopian thought."

By coincidence, I also ran across this image from an anarchist cartoonist that seems to capture the argument surprisingly well:

The American People Are Uniquely Bad

Asked about the "mass shooting" where a nut job shot three people at a Colorado abortion clinic, President Obama once again became exasperated with the American people.

"I say this every time we've got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn't happen in other countries."

He actually said this. In Paris.

The author thinks it might be part of a case for his removal from office -- not by impeachment, but for cause of mental impairment according to the 25th Amendment. That of course is merely a rhetorical flourish: the 25th Amendment requires members of his cabinet or the President himself to admit that he cannot perform the functions, and the action can be undone simply by the President sending a letter to the effect that "no such disability exists" unless the Vice President anda majority of executive branch heads insist that he is not able. It was very carefully balanced so as not to be an extra tool for Congress to use against a President it didn't like.

Still it is a strange thing to have said, in Paris.

UPDATE: The Washington Post fact-checks the statement.

Is his statement true?

In one sense, the answer would be “yes.” President Obama’s statement was in the form of: “Every time X happens, I say Y.”

For Your Friend, Tex

You can wait until next Thanksgiving if you want, but let us know how it goes.

The Fruits of Gun Control Talk

This is probably a great time to invest in gun manufacturing stocks, given that the President claims it'll be a major focus of his final year in office. Congratulations to those who already do own such stocks: you'll probably be getting a nice dividend.

Please Refrain From Shooting Your Cab Driver

The fact that your cab driver is a Muslim does not justify the practice. If he took you where you wanted to go without heavily padding the fee by ferrying you along the "scenic route," you should tip him instead.

Unless your cab driver should try to kill you, kidnap you at gunpoint, or something similar, shooting them is always inappropriate.

You Know What Doesn't Matter to Children? Parents.

A rather bold thesis! Let's look at the evidence.

In terms of compelling evidence, let’s start with a study published recently in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics.1 Tinca Polderman and colleagues just completed the Herculean task of reviewing nearly all twin studies published by behavior geneticists over the past 50 years....

Before progressing, I should note that behavioral geneticists make a finer grain distinction than most about the environment, subdividing it into shared and non-shared components.1,2,3,4 Not much is really complicated about this. The shared environment makes children raised together similar to each other.3 The term encompasses the typical parenting effects that we normally envision when we think about environmental variables. Non-shared influences capture the unique experiences of siblings raised in the same home; they make siblings different from one another. Another way of thinking about non-shared environments is that they represent the parts of your life story that are unique from the rest of your family. Importantly, this also includes all of the randomness and pure happenstance that life tends to hurl in our direction from time to time. Returning to the review of twin research, the shared environment just didn’t matter all that much (that’s on average, of course, for some traits it mattered more than others). The non-shared environment mattered consistently.

The pattern of findings mentioned above is nothing new.1,2,3,4,5 The importance of genetics and the non-shared environment (and the relatively minor importance of the shared environment) was already so entrenched in behavior genetics that years before the Polderman study was published it had been enshrined as a set of “laws.”2 The BG laws, though, are based largely (but certainly not completely) on twin studies, the meta-analysis by Polderman et al. was comprised of twin studies, and if you pay attention to this sort of thing you’ve probably heard some nasty things about twin studies lately.3 You’ve read that twin studies contain an insidious flaw that causes them to underestimate shared environmental effects (making it seem like parents matter less than they do). The assumptions of twin research, however, have been meticulously studied. The methods of twin researchers have been around for decades and have been challenged, critiqued, refined, adjusted, and (perhaps most importantly) cross validated with other techniques that rely on different assumptions entirely.3,4 They work, and they work with impressive precision.

Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3

So, good news for those of you who are parents: Junior is a rat because of your rotten genetics, not because of your moral failings.

Well, and his peer group: it turns out that the 'socialization' that really matters is the kind of kids he runs with. "As Harris notes, parents are not to blame for their children’s neuroses (beyond the genes they contribute to the manufacturing of that child), nor can they take much credit for their successful psychological adjustment."

Psychoanalysts hardest hit.

Holiday Lesson Proves Nothing

These guys are good singers, though.

Oh, It's Even Worse Than That

Michael Ledeen writes on the Iran deal:

I dare say very few people realize there is no formal deal. Countless journalists refer to something that was “signed” or “inked” in Vienna, even though no such thing took place. A handful of careful writers, notably Yigal Carmon and Amir Taheri have gotten it right, and last week the State Department admitted that nobody has signed The Deal and it is not legally binding on anybody.

As I wrote in July, Iran has promised to be on good behavior, and we have promised to pay for it. We are indeed paying, as we have for more than two years ($700 million per month), and the Iranians, as is their wont, have done their worst to spread terror and jihadism all over the world, from the Middle East to Asia, Africa and South America.

Such a deal! Carmon thinks Obama will have to admit failure, and return to the negotiating table. As I predicted…

Oh, it's been signed by one person. Thus, it's legally binding on one country.

Guess which one?

I'm Big on Metaphors

Sounds like you're suggesting unions for grad students. Which, frankly, isn't that insane given the tremendous abuses they are suffering under currently: for below-poverty-line pay, you teach most of the courses the university offers. As Federal student loans vastly enrich university budgets, and as the teaching is the real value the university provides, that's the kind of imbalance that leads to people thinking that a union might not be a bad idea. Solidarity, baby! Popcorn!

Grim's Law of Wrench-Turning and Social Media

When looking for practical advice on how to repair mechanical problems with your ride, remember: YouTube is invaluable, Google is helpful, and Facebook is evil.

Don't forget to mix sugar into your gasoline to make sure it doesn't get too thin in the dry winter weather, and be sure to let all the summer air out of your tires and refill them with winter air so they don't burst in the cold.

In Fairness, the Baptists Banned Alcohol Sales Too

America's first majority Muslim city has elected its first majority Muslim city council, and they've passed their first laws.

While the members of the Hamtramck, Michigan city council have denied that they would put religion into politics, their actions show otherwise. They’ve already banned alcohol sales within 500 feet of local mosques, and allowed daily calls to prayer to reverberate through town as early as 6am.

I suppose churches would want to be excepted from public noise ordinances insofar as they had church bells. On the other hand, they wouldn't generally be ringing them at six in the morning.

The Feast of St. Andrew

Saint Andrew is a strange choice to be the national saint of Scotland. Scotland has plenty of its own saints, had they wished to choose a Scot. The Scots nevertheless chose him, but celebrate his feast day with a celebration of traditional Scottish culture. Just as ironically, Romania celebrates the Feast of St. Andrew -- who was a Jew from Galilee in spite of his Greek name -- with a festival descended from the Roman Saturnalia.

In any case, here's an appropriate video.

Yeoman "Farmers"

W. R. Mead is on ground I find very familiar today. He is making a pragmatic argument about why we should shift to a system that prefers small business development, but there's a political philosophical argument for the proposal as well. It's Jefferson's old argument about the increased practical liberty that comes from owning your own means of production. Political liberty is good, but if you are effectively under the thumb of another, you are not really at liberty to speak your mind. This is why James Jackson, that greatest of Georgian political heroes, fought to undo the Yazoo land fraud and ensure a Georgia in which you could own your own land.

When I say he fought for this I mean literally fought, not "fought for" in the figurative sense preferred by contemporary politicians. First he fought in the Revolutionary War for the principle of political liberty. Then he fought four duels in the course of trying to undo the Yazoo land fraud as his opponents tried to kill him to prevent his success. He was not dissuaded by these multiple attempts on his life, but saw the question through to victory.

So what was the principle for which he fought? It was that the American system of government should work to ensure that Americans had at least the real potential to own their own means of production. Instead of a society structured around a renter/land-lord relationship, it would be a society structured as much as possible to be about individual families owning the things they needed to produce a living. Then they could say what they wanted when it came time to reason politically rather than having to scrape to the opinions of the great or the rich. It would enshrine the political control of the community among the people because the people would be practically as well as formally free.

There is an Aristotelian idea behind this model as well. In the Politics, Aristotle writes that the least dangerous group to own power in any society is the propertied middle class. Because they have land or businesses of their own, they want strong protections for private property, and thus will not (as the poor tended to do in Aristotle's time) vote to 'take from the rich and give to the poor.' Because they are not so rich that they can afford to be long away from tending to their own business, they will not seek to rule any more than is absolutely necessary, ensuring that government remains limited to only those concerns that absolutely require it. Unlike government by the rich or by those who are paid to govern, popular government led by the middle class will not seek to overawe every aspect of life in order to further their own class interests.

Thus they will avoid both the problems associated with government by unregulated democracy, and government by an elite that is rich or that is paid to perform public office.

It remains a good ideal for future reform. Government could do much less, so much less that it was only done part time by those who would want as quickly as possible to get back to literally minding their own business. What is the solution to poverty on this model? Encouraging the poor in coming to develop a productive business of their own.

"Reason" a raison

Little French lingo for a Monday afternoon, since the President is badmouthing us in Paris at the climate change conference. On his other favorite topic, Reason magazine has the sense of it: "Obama Insists 'We Have to Do Something' About Mass Shootings but Can't Say What or Why It Would Work."

The Times describes Obama as increasingly exasperated by Congress's refusal to enact the gun controls he supports. Some of us are increasingly exasperated by Obama's failure to elucidate any logical connection between those measures and the crimes they supposedly would prevent.

It's a faith-based approach, which, actually, is another tie between his two favorite subjects.

UPDATE: It sounds as if the President's spokesman does have a specific plan:

The Obama administration is pressing for gun control, repeating a demand that Congress pass a ban on gun ownership for Americans on the no-fly list.

“If the U.S. Government has determined that it is too dangerous for you to board a plane then you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said during a press conference in Paris today.... “Congress should pass this law before leaving for the Holidays,” Earnest said.

So, your proposal is that Congress should immediately give the executive branch unilateral authority to rescind any individual's Constitutional 2nd Amendment rights based on whatever criteria it likes, without any due process at all? That's a modest proposal.

Knocked That One Out Of The Park

Noah Rothman at Commentary magazine notices that "Problems change, but the remedy doesn't." The old problem was the Soviet critique of Western imperialism. The new problem is how to resolve an alleged crisis with climate change. Those sound like they are different enough problems that they should have nearly wholly different solution sets. But no, the solutions proposed are the very same solutions:

The notion that the American way of life is unsustainable and unfair toward the rest of the world’s population is an old argument, and its remedies are suspiciously familiar. It was once claimed that the prosperity of the first world must be curtailed if there was to be peace.... Replace the scourge of climate change with poverty and “climate-friendly technologies” with advanced military-industrial technologies, and you have a boilerplate Soviet speech aimed at an international audience.

It's not very surprising to find John F. Kerry at the forefront of advocating that America yield to the Communist agenda. He's been at that for a while now.

The Beauty of Nature, Perfected by Art

Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Someday, I think I may need to go and visit that place.

Of Course He Did

'At Paris Conference, Obama says US Partly to Blame for Climate Change.'

We're lucky he didn't assume the whole blame for us.

Fair Enough

The Colorado Fraternal Order of Police would like everyone to know that they don't appreciate the suggestion that they are racists.

"Carelessly Labeled"

A woman named Monica Bauer -- Master of Divinity, playwright, ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ -- wants to accuse the entire Right to Life movement of being accomplices in murder. Exactly whose murder isn't clear, since no one belonging to Planned Parenthood's organization was hurt in the recent incident in Colorado, but let's leave that pesky factual question. I just want to get after the basic assertion.

[T]he religious extremist is most likely a right-wing Christian. And the shooter had help. He had help from an entire movement that has carelessly labeled abortion as "murder" and "baby-killing." Killing abortion providers flows logically from the moment you call abortion "murder" and this labeling has to stop. Now.

Am I a Christian? You bet. Have I read the Bible? Many times, and carefully. Graduated from Yale Divinity School with a Masters in Divinity. Ordained in the ministry in 1982, in the United Church of Christ. Still an active member of the church. Jesus never said a word about abortion, and the only way anti-choice activists twist the Bible to their side is to take a few lines from a Psalm or a few words about "spilling seed" out of context. There are entire books debunking the pro-life movement as resting on shaky theological grounds, so I won't waste time recapping all the arguments here.

There are actually a few more pesky factual matters here -- for example, there's no evidence in any of the recent interviews conducted with family and neighbors to indicate that this guy was a "religious extremist," or even "religious," let alone "right wing" or even a Christian. But we'll leave all that too.

Jesus never said anything about abortion. However, the objection to abortion does not stand on any obscure theology or any strange passages about 'spilling seed.' It's about the killing of a human being.

The appellation "baby-killing" is not some sort of weird locution: it involves killing a human being at a stage of development that, were the child wanted by his or her mother, we would have no problem identifying as a baby. We would say, and do say, "When is the baby due?" or "Have you decided what to name the baby?" It's only when mother has decided to kill her baby that we are told that we can only describe it using clinical language designed to mask the humanity of the creature being killed.

You may object to murder, since murder is defined in different ways by different people. The law doesn't consider this murder as murder is defined by the law -- a rather circular argument made worse given that the law often did treat it as a kind of murder until the Supreme Court overturned the laws of all fifty states. So we might well say that it is not murder in the technical sense of the word given to us on stone tablets from that famous bench in Washington, D.C.

Still, a commonplace definition of the word murder as it might be used by any ordinary person is this: "the intentional killing of an innocent human being." Let's run through the steps.

1) Is it intentional? Yes.

2) Is it a killing? Yes.

3) Is it a living being? Obviously it is, or it couldn't be killed.

4) Is the being to be killed innocent in the usual sense of the word "innocent"? Yes.

5) Is it human? It either is or it isn't. If it isn't, what kind of being would you say it was?

A more extended argument on that last point: to be a thing of a certain kind is to be structured in a certain way. A table is a thing that is structured in such a way as to be capable of holding objects off the floor. Artifacts like tables are structured by makers, who put them into a given order for a given purpose. Living things are different: they structure themselves out of other things they find in the world. They are their own purpose.

Now a given living thing -- say a fox or a dog or a hawk -- is not the stuff of which it is made. All of us have had dogs, I presume, and all of those dogs have grown from puppies, taking on more and more stuff from the world and putting it into the order that is themselves. The physical parts of themselves -- proteins, water -- are all exchanged over the course of their lives, but we recognize that it is still our dog. It's the activity of the ordering principle that is the life of the dog, and it is the order that is the dog. As long as it continues, we say that our dog is alive. When our dog dies, the ordering stops: though it may look like our dog for a while, it is no longer actively being put in order as a living thing.

The living, growing being is ordering the world as it encounters it into itself. Of course it is a human being: it is putting the world into a human order. It will remain a human being as long as this continues, even if she should live to be a hundred and one.

That's what you are killing.

I am no absolutist on this point. I understand that there are cases when the life of the mother will be lost, when there is a sense in which the child is not "innocent" and the killing is therefore not murder -- indeed, it might almost be morally obligatory. But these are a tiny minority of cases, as any honest observer will confess.

The language being used to describe these acts is not careless. It is dangerous because it is accurate. It is the right way to describe what we are allowing to happen all across our nation, using ordinary language as we would ordinarily use it.

There Are Two Americas...

...one urban, one rural.

The big problem is to figure out how to restrict the harms the urban areas cause to those areas. That's where nearly all the problems are coming from, and yet they have just slightly more votes. A proper Federalism using the 50 states might not do it, as the urban areas can overawe the decent parts of their states. But a federalism that treats urban areas as states in themselves -- maybe. It would mean increasing the number of states by a few dozen, in return for having rural states that could really live according to traditional mores without the chaos caused by these urban areas.

Gizmodo: Physicists Say Everyone Is Lying About That Russian Bomber

Interesting, although the Russian claims sound less like fabrications.

We're not done with this one. I think Russia may manage to peel France off of the NATO coalition with it, given America's terrible response to the whole thing. Even if they don't manage to bring France into a coalition with themselves -- and right now, the French President not only sounds like he's open to that, he sounds like he thinks it's his idea -- they could still split NATO by making France a free agent again. They were, for most of the Cold War.

C'mon. The Boy's Name is "Tomahawk."

A Sacramento, California, mom who let her 4-year-old son play outside at a playground 120 feet from her home was arrested. Her neighbors called 911 when they saw the kid outside. While many people might think four is too young for a boy to be outside on his own, the bigger question is: Is this a criminal offense? And doesn't the boy's mother have the right to make that choice?

The boy (whose name is Tomahawk) was in a gated apartment complex and on a playground. He's an outdoorsy kid who loves exploring and sounds like he can take care of himself fairly well.

When a boy's name is Tomahawk, he has probably been raised well enough to handle a playground in a gated community.

Certainty and Uncertainty

When I saw the news of an active shooter in a Planned Parenthood yesterday, I figured there was even money on it being a jealous husband or a domestic terrorist. After reports came in for a while, though, neither of these scenarios sounded very likely:

1) MSNBC -- hardly a conservative outlet -- reported that all the shooting had actually happened at a nearby Chase bank.

2) Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains division put out a statement that they didn't think this had been targeted at them.

3) Planned Parenthood put out a statement a few hours after the shootings that said that none of their staff and also none of their patients had been among the victims.

4) The history of the guy suggested he was barely connected to the world we live in, occupying a cabin with no electricity nor plumbing. He also had a legal history that suggested both domestic violence and cruelty to animals.

So, now it sounded like a bank robbery gone wrong, with the hostage taking at the PP location just by coincidence.

Then, today, we get these anonymous quotes sourced to law enforcement officials:

In one statement, made after the suspect was taken in for questioning, Dear said "no more baby parts" in reference to Planned Parenthood, according to two law enforcement sources with knowledge of the case.

But the sources stressed that Dear said many things to law enforcement and the extent to which the "baby parts" remark played into any decision to target the Planned Parenthood office was not yet clear. He also mentioned President Barack Obama in statements.

So now, who knows? Maybe somehow it was intended as a terrorist act aimed at Planned Parenthood after all, and he was just spectacularly bad at it. He may be too disordered to have had a certain purpose.

Those statements are proving politically very useful to those on the Left, for whom this is not an uncertain but a very certain opportunity. It's an opportunity to tell everyone on the Right to shut up once and for all about Planned Parenthood, and to make any rhetoric about abortion as the killing of babies off limits as hate speech that somehow causes irrational violent types to lash out.

Also, it's a chance to push for gun control, the President's new favorite topic. Funny how we didn't hear anything about Chicago in his speech, a city with the strictest gun control in the nation and also gun violence the likes of which most of the rest of the country never dreams. Or Paris, which has every kind of gun control a progressive heart could desire, and all the same far worse shootings occur.

The President is behind the ball on this one. Even INTERPOL has been suggesting, for a couple of years now, that an armed citizenry may be the only rational response to the threat of terrorism by active shooters. Harden the whole society, and such threats become much less dangerous in scope.

One solid thing can be said from my position: it sounds as if the police officer killed was a really decent guy. My sympathies go to his family and community.

UPDATE: Uncertainty abounds.

UPDATE: Someone thinks of citing the Catechism.

1756 It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it.

It's one of the areas in which I am most inclined to sin, I must confess.

"Oslo is Dead"

The constant international obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian question continues. The last seemed-like-it-might-work protocols are now clearly dead. So what's next, asks Geoffrey Aronson at Al Jazeera.

What has changed is that today there is a growing sense that Israel must set the agenda for the post-Oslo era. Israeli leaders now see an opportunity to make a dramatic Israeli move, to shuffle the cards in a way that responds to domestic political pressures to respond to continuing protests, advances Israel's settlement interests, and exploits Washington's retreat from diplomacy.

"If we do not initiate, someone else will take the initiative for moulding our future," warned a retired Israeli military general Shlomo Yanai.

Jerusalem is the crown jewel of Israel's national and territorial aspirations. And it is the place where the effort to square the circle of challenges posed by annexation is centred.

The contest over Al-Aqsa commands the most attention, but Israeli efforts since the second Intifada have focused on reducing the number and access of Palestinians in the city.

My sense of this conflict has always been that the Israelis should set the agenda and resolve it however they wished. Israel has repeatedly won its right to exist on the field of honor, even if you are not inclined to believe in its Biblical warrant. The decades of constant meddling in these internal affairs has done nothing to bring peace to the land.

More on Medieval Thanksgiving

While looking up something that I was thinking about with regard to Eric's comment on the Ancient Roman use of spices, I learned something that I did not know: the way that we use the term "entree" in North American English is not just different from the way the French use it, it's different from the way everyone else in the world uses it. But it is not different because it's an American innovation. It's different because we retain the Medieval meaning of the word.

The word entrée in French originally denoted the "entry" of the dishes from the kitchens into the dining hall. In the illustration from a French fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Histoire d'Olivier de Castille et d'Artus d'Algarbe, a fanfare from trumpeters in the musicians' gallery announces the processional entrée of a series of dishes....

In traditional French haute cuisine, the entrée preceded a larger dish known as the relevé, which "replaces" or "relieves" it, an obsolete term in modern cooking, but still used as late as 1921 in Escoffier's Le Guide Culinaire.

In France, the modern restaurant menu meaning of "entrée" is the course that precedes the main course in a three-course meal, i.e. the course which in British usage is often called the "starter" and in American usage the "appetizer."

For us as for 15th century diners the entree is the showily-presented main course, which in terms of Thanksgiving would be when the Turkey is brought to the table on a big platter and carved for everyone.

Thanksgiving Follow-Up

On reflection, this was a tougher year than most for ruining Thanksgiving.

Chivalry and "Non-New-Agey Spirituality"

This site looks at first glance like the least likely place you'd expect to find an essay on the glories of chivalry and masculinity, and yet...

The gallantry of a fully expressed man is without compare, and that fully expressed masculinity becomes attractive rather than threatening when a woman knows that her man would not only lay his coat over a puddle for her, or raise his voice to defend her, but that he’d put his body in front of hers to protect her.

Indeed.

*Snicker*

Google's algorithm has determined that your economic plan is a phishing scam.

He's still better than Clinton.

Riding Weather

Everyone listens to "Alice's Restaurant" on Thanksgiving, and this year is the 50th anniversary -- yeah, really -- of that 18-22 year old song of revolt against being drafted. It's a great song in its way. But it wasn't the only great song to come out of that album.

How Medieval is Thanksgiving?

Not entirely, to be sure!  Turkey is a new world bird:  indeed, I was just talking to a professor last week who was telling me that Syrian refugees in Europe have been turning up their noses at processed turkey sandwiches because the meat is unfamiliar to them, and they can't be sure it is halal.  Chicken is known in the Middle East, and well known, but turkey is still unfamiliar.

All the same, it turns out that the answer is "somewhat."

In other words, the Englishmen who landed in Massachusetts didn’t eat turkey because it was the only local food available. Rather, they’d been quite familiar with it back in England, where it was even common to remove the skin and feathers, cook it and serve it with the feathers replaced, as if it were still living – a standard medieval trick.

The side dishes also date back to Europe, with flavor profiles that are actually medieval in origin.

Take cranberry sauce. In medieval Europe, sour fruit sauce with wild fowl was a popular combination, one that balanced a cold and moist condiment with a hot, dry meat. In the mid-17th century, for example, the famous French chef La Varenne served turkey with raspberries.

But the real connection between Thanksgiving and the medieval feast is in the spices. Although today we use the blanket term “pumpkin spice” to characterize variations of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove and ginger (and they show up practically everywhere in cheap artificial form), these flavors were the backbone of medieval cuisine, appearing in a wide array of sweet and savory dishes, from chicken to pasta.

Back then, it simply wasn’t a lavish meal without a riot of spices (which, because they needed to be imported from Asia, were wildly expensive). Today the only one of these spices that stays on the table year-round is pepper. But their pivotal role in Thanksgiving again is a reminder of the tradition’s remote origins.

This Should Be A Fun Holiday

Are you ready to be a horrible pain in everyone's neck this Thanksgiving? If not, don't worry! People are here to help you annoy everyone with whom you were planning to share this moment of family togetherness.

Time's Up in California

Los Angeles passed a measure banning all "high capacity" (i.e., normal capacity) detachable magazines and required citizens to turn them in to police. The sixty day "grace period" during which you would "graciously" be allowed to surrender your private property to the government without compensation has now closed, and the total number of magazines received by police is:

Zero.

Advice Pour Les Francois

"What's zee best?"

They Are Breaking The Law, Though, Right?

Headline: "Clinton promises never to say ‘illegal immigrants’ again."

Against Shooting Parachutists

Yeah, No.

Rich Lowry: "Donald Trump’s appeal is as American as Andrew Jackson."

I missed the part where Donald Trump won a major battle, or a series of small wars, or defended his wife's honor, or indeed showed respect for anyone's honor besides his own. Trump may have some of Jackson's flaws, but I see no sign that he has any of Jackson's substantial virtues.

Drink More Whiskey

At least, that's the advice I glean for America from this review:

Cheever describes local taverns as “the cradle of the revolution.” And through the 18th century, she explains, a steady stream of beer and rum helped to unleash the bravado and defiance necessary to inch toward independence. The patriots who tossed tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773 hadn’t planned on doing so, but they were blasted after hours of drunken scheming. “Perhaps if they had been sober,” Cheever writes, “the night would have been different; they were not sober. They were drunk enough to change history.”

As the American Revolution ignited, “drinking seems to have gone hand in hand with heroism.”

We could use some more of that. You might try Leadslinger's.

Duffel Blog Strikes Again

Veteran student center turned into a "safe space."

“The Veterans Center was a place where they could go where they wouldn’t feel marginalized,” Northeastern President Joseph Aoun said. “It was a state of the art building with padded walls, straightjackets, and doors that locked from the outside. Veterans could attend class online to keep them away from the student body. This would allow veterans to have a safe space and keep them contained for campus safety. Unfortunately, something went wrong.”

Just days after the Veteran Center opened, construction workers were seen entering the building with metal poles and hot tubs. An audit revealed the Northeastern Student Veteran’s Association spent their entire budget sponsoring work visas for Thai women.

“We had several reports of odd purchases,” Northeastern University Police Chief Paddy O’Shea Finnegan said. “Huntington Wine and Spirits reported they were sold out. Clerks at Wollaston’s said guys with short haircuts were buying bananas but warning each other not to eat them.”

Members of the ROTC battalion attempted to enter but were only allowed access if they brought cookies from Stetson East. The cadets left the building wide eyed, with an understanding why officers are taught to be scared of enlisted soldiers.

Police were called to the Veteran Center after shirtless men were seen shooting fireworks off the top of the building.

That sounds about right.

Inshallah We Will Not Be Destroyed

The ISIS intern team opens a Twitter account.

"cultural issues of implication involved in the practice"

Yeah, I don't know what that means, either.  Here's a link to the whole thing, but you're not going to be any more enlightened once you've read it.  The gist of it is that the University of Ottawa decided that yoga classes for disabled students were triggering colonialist cultural appropriation cooties or something. The yoga instructor was trying to be sensitive, so she suggested:

“What do you think about having a class that is just stretching for mental health?” she wrote. “We don’t have to call it yoga (because that’s not really what we are doing, we are just stretching). I think that will work because it would literally change nothing about the class. … I know some people are offended but I am sure we can change it so that everyone feels included.... Now that I am aware that this is a sensitivity, I can just leave all yoga-ness out.”

Not so fast, running dog colonialist person of uncolor. The purge must go deeper than that.

“The higher-ups at the student federation got involved, finally we got an e-mail routed through the student federation basically saying they couldn’t get a French name and nobody wants to do it, so we’re going to cancel it for now....”

This Was Bound To Happen

Turkey has reportedly shot down a Russian jet.

The state of play in the air war over this region has been as follows: Russia dispatched substantial air forces, including their "supermaneuverable" Su-30 air superiority fighters. Now, these are plausibly multi-role fighters, so it wasn't totally odd that they would deploy them against an enemy that had no air force. Still, they were clearly testing Turkish airspace, reportedly locking onto Turkish planes and violating Turkish territory. The Pentagon decided to move a bunch of F-15Cs over to Turkey as a guarantor, since Turkey's aging F-16s are probably overmatched by the Russian jets. These are upgraded F-15s specifically structured for air-to-air combat.

Russia took note of the deployment, which wasn't even plausibly aimed at ISIS but at their own jets, and deployed S-300 missiles in Syria. These are thought capable of taking down anything we've got short of true stealth planes such as the F-22 and F-35. So far we haven't sent any, but it's the next logical phase in the escalation.

So today the Russians lost a bomber, an Su 24 according to their defense ministry. Exactly who shot it down -- ground fire or a Turkish F-16 -- is in dispute, as is the Turks' claim that it violated their airspace.

UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that the Russian pilots survived, but were shot dead by Turkish militia.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Poll: "Majority of Americans Support Sending Congress to Syria."

Whatever Happened to those "Little Platoons"?

A leftist worries aloud that America may be falling into fascism. If only we had those 'little platoons' -- whatever happened to them?

This problem goes far deeper than better techniques for getting out the vote. It reflects a massive decay of civil society, a deep disinterest and contempt for government and politics, one that often seems richly earned.

This is also the soil in which fascism grows. As political scientists have demonstrated for more than a century, it is mass society, in which people are disconnected from the "little platoons" beloved of Edmund Burke and the local associations celebrated by Tocqueville, where a strongman can suddenly seem the solution to people's inchoate frustrations with their own lives and the irrelevance of politics.

The irony of this remark is biting until you get just a little deeper into the piece, and he explains his version of this idea.

There was a time in America when poor and working class people did have representative institutions that connected them to civic and political life. They were called labor unions.

Oh, I see. If only we could assign all these people to a labor union that would help organize them 'in their own interest' and align them with correct politics. Mao did that. It wasn't exactly Burke's idea, though.

Quelle Suprise

The fruits begin to come in.

[E]ven some secular French journalists have started writing about a phenomenon that’s become difficult to ignore: an increasingly self-confident Catholicism that combines what might be called a dynamic orthodoxy with a determination to shape French society in ways that contest the status quo—both inside and outside the Church.

On October 30, readers of France’s main center-right newspaper, Le Figaro, woke up to the headline “La révolution silencieuse des catholiques de France.” What followed was a description of how those whom Le Figaro calls France’s néocatholiques have come to the forefront of the nation’s political, cultural, and economic debates. Significantly, the new Catholics’ idea of dialogue isn’t about listening to secular intellectuals and responding by nodding sagely and not saying anything that might offend others. Instead, younger observant Catholics have moved beyond—way, way beyond—what was called the “Catholicism of openness” that dominated post-Vatican II French Catholic life. While the néocatholiques are happy to listen, they also want to debate and even critique reigning secular orthodoxies. For them, discussion isn’t a one-way street. This is a generation of French Catholics who are, as Le Figaro put it, “afraid of nothing.”

Secularism was just a phase.

Good Heavens, No

This headline: "After Paris Attacks, a Political Leader Wants to Bring Back This Medieval Execution for Jihadists."

No, no, no.

The guillotine is not medieval. While there were some predecessor devices that were, the guillotine came to be during a debate of the parliament that produced the French Revolution. Its association with that revolution, and especially its frequent use during the Terror, made it a symbol of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

As a member of the assembly Guillotin mainly directed his attention towards medical reform, and it was on 10 October 1789, during a debate on capital punishment, that he proposed that "the criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism." The "mechanism" was defined as "a machine that beheads painlessly". His proposal appeared in the Royalist periodical, Les Actes des Apôtres.

At that time, beheading in France was typically done by axe or sword, which did not always cause immediate death. Additionally, beheading was reserved for the nobility, while commoners were typically hanged. Dr. Guillotin assumed that if a fair system was established where the only method of capital punishment was death by mechanical decapitation, then the public would feel far more appreciative of their rights.

Despite this proposal, Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty and hoped that a more humane and less painful method of execution would be the first step toward a total abolition of the death penalty. He also hoped that fewer families and children would witness executions, and vowed to make them more private and individualized. It was also his belief that a standard death penalty by decapitation would prevent the cruel and unjust system of the day.

So it was all about reforming the law to eliminate distinctions between classes, about bringing reason and science to bear on social problems, and about reducing the pain and cruelty of the death penalty (with an eye towards its eventual abolition, as France did in 1981). It would be ironically appropriate for the Enlightenment's foremost weapon to be brought to bear against ISIS.

Blowing Up My Insurance Was One Thing...

...but this time you've gone too far, Obamacare.

"We Heard There Was Jihad Going On Without No Union Cards..."

"Say it ain't so."

Federalism: Still A Long Way To Go

If you are a lover of the Constitution, and especially if you are the kind of Constitutionalist who takes originalism and/or the 10th Amendment seriously, this Pew poll contains a little good news and a lot of bad news. The good news is that Americans have a very low opinion of the Federal government, and are open to stripping it of some of the powers it currently exercises. The bad news is that majorities still think the Federal government should have "a major role" in tons of things that the Constitution intended to leave to the states.

Fully 80% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they prefer a smaller government with fewer services, compared with just 31% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Yet both Republicans and Democrats favor significant government involvement on an array of specific issues. Among the public overall, majorities say the federal government should have a major role in dealing with 12 of 13 issues included in the survey, all except advancing space exploration.

Oddly, not even a third of Republicans and Republican leaners say they are angry with the Federal government, which they certainly have cause to be. Only half of this group thinks the Federal government runs its programs poorly, which may be even stranger for the party of Reagan in the wake of the VA scandal, the complete failure to enforce immigration laws, the Obamacare debacles -- think how much fun it must be to be one of those millions who have lost their health care plan twice due to Obamacare and its collapsing "marketplaces" -- the foreign policy embarrassments, the Justice Department's failure to prosecute crimes for politically favored individuals, the Fast & Furious scandal, the IRS-stalking-conservatives scandal, the....

You have to assume people just aren't paying attention.

A Slight Miscalculation

These airstrikes were launched not because U.S. officials were prescient. They came after the Obama administration found and quietly fixed a colossal miscalculation. U.S. intelligence had grossly overestimated the damage they’d inflicted during airstrikes on the militants’ oil production apparatus last year, while underestimating Islamic State’s oil revenue by $400 million.

That's four times as much as the administration had previously believed they were getting, and doesn't count income from the slave trade, general crime and extortion in its area of operation, etc.

Political Suicide

There are many ways in which the Democratic Party is pursuing an agenda that is bad for ordinary Americans, but for the most part the public hasn't grasped just how and why it is bad for them. There are two areas, however, where the public has clearly and substantially rejected the current agenda of the Democrats in Washington:

1) Gun Control,

2) Increasing immigration -- especially immigration of refugees from the civil war in Syria, but also generally.

The polling on these is clear, but if you don't trust polls practical behavior by Americans shows the degree to which these positions are rejected. On the one hand you have the record gun sales across the country, lasting for years. On the other you have the sustained popularity of Donald Trump, whose major virtue in the eyes of the public is intense, loud opposition to immigration. You've got the fact that a majority of state governors felt that it was good politics to formally reject new refugees last week.

What if we could combine both of these into a single symbolic effort to tie the Democratic party to the two things Americans have most clearly rejected?

Mike's got the principled argument against all this right in his post below. Even if you rejected the principles, though, politically this is irrational. It's as if they were trying to throw the 2016 elections.

Froggy Used To Call These "Security Rounds"

On stopping active shooters.

A reasonable person might well expect a suicide vest from someone engaged in an essentially terrorist act. We haven't seen them deployed in active shooting situations in America usually, but they're commonly deployed overseas. There's no reason it shouldn't become common here, really.

Why are they allowed to have guns?

We get this piece of silliness from ABC News:
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/667080923561766913/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It notes that individuals on the FBI terrorist watch list can legally purchase firearms.  What an outrage!  Why should people, arrested and charged with no crime whatsoever be allowed to exercise their Constitutional rights!  They're on a watch list!!!  Isn't that like, super important?

Well, As noted over at Ace of Spades, Charles C. W. Cooke breaks down how it's not just the NRA that opposes restricting firearm purchases by those on the terrorist watch list, but that infamous right-wing group the ACLU does as well.  Why?  Well, there's this little thing called the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution that says that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".  And one of those liberties that no person shall be deprived of is the right to bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Because there is no due process involved with getting on a terrorist watch list.  One is placed on that list by whim of the FBI, not by a court of law, or a jury of one's peers.  If all it took was an unelected official to declare that the NRA was a terrorist group to forbid its membership from purchasing firearms legally, well then you don't actually believe some future administration wouldn't be a bit tempted to do so, do you?  Listen to the rhetoric of people like Michael Bloomberg or Gavin Newsome.  I guarantee you if they had their way, anyone who owns a firearm would be thrown onto such a watch list.

And this brings me to the last point.  Legal points of sale are not what the terrorists have ever previously shown an interest in.  For the Paris attack (in a country with strict gun control... sorry "common sense" gun control), they did not get their weapons from the US, or another lax gun control law nation.  They got them illegally in Belgium which, if anything, has even stricter ("more sensible") gun control laws than France.  Restricting the ability of citizens to purchase weapons legally does not stop those who wish to purchase them illegally.

In the spirit of the season

Graceland

Continuing our African fusion theme, here's a song from my favorite Paul Simon album.

Ouch!

My neighbor just posted this on Facebook. I love watching these things just to see the old dancers, and it's fun to have it set to a modern funky song. But even if you don't enjoy that, the final few seconds are not to be missed. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to survive a dance move like that.

 

Also, I do love me some Fred Astaire, from head to toe.

More Friday Night Music

Continuing with the African theme, I wore out the cassette tape of this album in college. One hoped to see more of the fusion going on here.

Some Very Different Music For a Friday Night

Not sure if this is more diverse or more vibrant, but it's kind of cool.

Zero Hedge: Most of the Country Peaked in the Late 1990s

...and the labor force participation rate hasn't been this low since Carter.

Why Is It So Hard To Speak The Truth?

Someone must have seen that Iraqi comedian making fun of us for not being able to call ISIS "Islamic," and decided they needed to push back really hard.

Really hard.



So now George W. Bush is the spokesman for the Democratic Party? On the right attitude towards the war?

People can't seem to distinguish between the following claims:

1) "ISIS is essentially Islamic."

2) "Islam is essentially like ISIS."

Claim 1 is demonstrably, empirically true. ISIS -- like a number of other Islamic organizations to include Hizb-ut Tahrir and of course al Qaeda -- is founded for no other reason than to realize a particular vision of Islamic law on earth. They have put a tremendous amount of work into developing their visions. Many of their leaders are lifelong religious students. ISIS leader Baghdadi was a cleric before he became a revolutionary. These organizations have published decades' worth of material explaining exactly how their vision aligns with sha'riah law and the life of the Prophet and his companions.

Furthermore -- whether you like it or not -- their interpretations of sha'riah law are not absurd. They are often the most obvious readings of those laws.

Claim 2 is not obviously true.

For one thing, there are a lot of different schools of sha'riah law. Most of the Islamic world doesn't live under any interpretation similar to this, however obvious these interpretations may be, and haven't historically. That makes perfect sense. Catholics have the Bible, and we also have the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas -- a huge series of densely-argued Aristotelian philosophy about how to interpret the Bible, as well as a long history of earlier Catholic philosophers. The results they come up with are not always the most obvious readings of the Bible. Some Protestant schools prefer more obvious and literal readings. That doesn't make Protestants un-Christian, nor Catholics either.

Jews, by the same token, have on the one hand the Torah; and on the other, a vast collection of Rabbinical scholarship that tries to interpret and understand. Islam, for its own sake, has a similar tradition in its history. One of Thomas Aquinas' chief sources was Averroes, also known as Ibn Rushd, who was an Islamic law judge as well as a philosopher and whose reading of Islamic law was fairly humane (especially in his treatment of women).

So, are we at war with Islam? No. Are we at war with a radical Islamic group? Yes. Are they Muslims? Yes. Are all Muslims them? No. Is ISIS Islamic? Yes, essentially so. Is Islam like ISIS? Not all of it, not by far. Does Islam have anything to do with ISIS? Yes, obviously.

Speak the truth.

Safety in Numbers

One:

“This has been an absurdity from the beginning,” Keane said in response to questions from Royce. “The president personally made a statement that has driven air power from the inception.”

“When we agreed we were going to do airpower and the military said, this is how it would work, he [Obama] said, ‘No, I do not want any civilian casualties,’” Keane explained. “And the response was, ‘But there’s always some civilian casualties. We have the best capability in the world to protect from civilians casualties.’”

However, Obama’s response was, “No, you don’t understand. I want no civilian casualties. Zero,’” Keane continued. “So that has driven our so-called rules of engagement to a degree we have never had in any previous air campaign from desert storm to the present.”

This is likely the reason that U.S. pilots are being told to back down when Islamic State targets are in site, Keane said, citing statistics published earlier this year by U.S. Central Command showing that pilots return from sorties in Iraq with about 75 percent of their ordnance unexpended.

Two:

President Obama’s marquee deportation amnesty has been stalled by the courts, but the rest of his executive actions on immigration, announced exactly a year ago, are moving forward — including his move protecting more than 80 percent of illegal immigrants from any danger of deportation....

“There are 7 or 8 or 9 million people who are now safe under the current policy. That is a victory to celebrate while we wait for the Supreme Court,” said Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who was among the chief cheerleaders pushing Mr. Obama to go around Congress and take unilateral steps last year.

Vibrant diverse youths

The AP staff must have a macro that generates these phrases:

Saint-Denis is one of France's most historic places. French kings were crowned and buried through the centuries in its famed basilica, a majestic Gothic church that towers over the area. Today the district is home to a vibrant and very ethnically diverse population and sees sporadic tension between police and violent youths.

The Flowers of Bermuda

The chorus carries a haunting juxtaposition:

He was the Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal

Jacksonians Forever

W. R. Mead is not pleased with the defiance of the old tradition.

To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?

Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time.

Moreover, many of those “benighted” people were willing to sign up for the U.S. military and go to fight ISIS in Syria to protect the refugees....

The “why are Jacksonians such xenophobes?” conversation, given the way so much of the country’s media works, is the conversation we are having. It is not the conversation the country, or even the President, needs.... Things can and will get worse as long as American policy continues to flounder; instead of arguing about how to shelter a few thousand refugees we need to look hard at how we are failing to address the disaster that has created millions, and that continues to grow.

That's right, first to last.

Challenge Accepted

Instapundit suggests putting this map of states that refused refugees and plugging it into the Electoral College.

Here's what I got, giving the D's all the states that haven't taken the step of formally refusing.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

(Updated with new information this afternoon.)

What is Education For?

Maggie's Farm provides a link to two different conceptions. The latter is from a venture capitalist who often found that education was not a good predictor for who would be good at innovation:

I gravitated toward those with exceptional academic backgrounds, which seemed like the right priority. They had stellar resumes, early career success (often in consulting, investment banking, or corporate America), and were driven to succeed. Yet such patently qualified people often proved hopeless in the world of innovation, and I couldn’t quite figure out why....

When my son was in third grade, his science class was studying simple machines. With twenty bucks and a quick trip to Home Depot, we got everything needed to set up shop in the basement, and started playing around with boards, screws, and pulleys. One evening, we set out to design something that would let him lift a cinder block with his little finger. We came up with an approach that, I remarked in passing, he could use to lift his 250 lb. basketball coach. We laughed.

The next week, he came home from school discouraged: “I guess I’m not good at science.” He showed me his simple-machine test, which had blobs of red ink over the question “What simple machine would you use to lift a grown man?” His response was “a six-pulley system,” and included a sketch with pulleys, rope, and stick figures of a man and a child. While the design looked sound, there was a big red X across his answer with the terse note: “ -17. LEVER ! ! ”

After putting my Tiger Dad response behind me, I approached the teacher with a constructive suggestion: “Instead of asking which simple machine to use, why not ask students to come up with as many designs as possible?” The answer floored me. “Throughout school, these kids will need to take standardized tests. We need to prepare them properly. Open-ended questions can confuse them.”

So, there's your answer: education is to prepare you to excel at standardized tests. Unfortunately, or fortunately, life stops throwing standardized tests at you the minute you leave the schoolhouse.

If you want to learn to innovate, two excellent fields are history and philosophy, especially the history of philosophy. That's probably counter-intuitive: innovation is about the future, not what people did or thought in the past. However, while studying Medieval waterworks won't help you to innovate in the field of plumbing, it might be that you'll find there a concept they brought to bear that will prove to have an analogous application in the field in which you are innovating.

Likewise in the history of ideas generally, problems harmonize even when they are not strictly the same problem. As we were just discussing in the comments to this post about physics, one of the exciting new theories is really just an application of an ancient Greek concept -- atomism -- that was applied first to classical physics, and then to early Medieval theories about time.

They cite Aristotle as the origin point for his opponent's view, but Hogan’s instinct here is actually quite as old. He's arguing the atomist position, which comes up when you try to get a handle on the problems of how motion is possible in a continuum. This is Zeno stuff: if space is really infinitely divisible, then how can you traverse any distance given that you must first traverse an infinite series of divisions of that distance? It is impossible to get through an infinite sequence, so...

The atomist's position falls out of that naturally enough: well, what if there's not a continuum, but a structure made up of smallest-possible units? Then we just do them one at a time, and it's not an infinite number.

Aristotle's answer to Zeno wasn't that different, actually: he ends up arguing that there are no actual infinities, just potential ones. So, yes, theoretically (or even just conceptually) one could make all those divisions -- but they aren't actually made, so you don't have to traverse an infinite series.

The same thing came up years later when the Neoplatonists were trying to get a handle on the nature of time. It seems that time is also infinitely divisible, and it's most obvious unit -- now -- seems to be infinitely small. So one of the Neoplatonists -- Proclus, I think -- came up with the idea of 'time atoms' just as the earlier ancient Greek physicists had come up with the idea of atoms for space. It's a natural enough thing to think of, but that doesn't mean it's true.

This new atomism is really new, but it harmonizes with concepts that were deployed by both the Medievals and Ancients. It's an innovation, but a natural way to find it would be to read some very old thought. The problems aren't quite the same, but they're similar enough that the possible solutions align.

Is education for that? So you can innovate better?

Well, no. Education finally isn't for anything. It's not instrumental: it's a realization of your basic nature as a human being. All men, Aristotle says at the opening of the Metaphysics, desire to know. We don't educate ourselves to pursue some goal. Education is the goal. We want to understand. We want it by nature.

I may pursue instrumental goals on the way toward that ultimate goal, but to learn and to understand is itself the goal. That's what education is, not what it's for. There are a few things in life that are the true ends: love, friendship, honor, and wisdom. Everything else is for them.

Twenty-Five Russian Heavy Bombers attack Syria

There were rumors since the downing of the Russian jetliner that Putin was in talks with the West about using nuclear weapons against ISIS, but wanted to make sure that his deployment of nuclear assets wouldn't cause an accidental world war. It looks as if the truth behind those rumors was that Russia was planning to deploy not nukes themselves, but nuclear-capable heavy bombers in large numbers.

Launching 25 bombers on one mission is an impressive undertaking.... America’s bombers often sortie alone or in pairs, only rarely coming together in large numbers. Seven B-52s flew together to launch cruise missiles at Iraq in the early hours of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and a group of eight of the giant warplanes repeated the feat on the first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.

The comparison is a little off, since there were 504 sorties during the opening phase of OIF 1. Even if only eight flew together at one time, we fielded dozens of heavy bombers in that campaign in a sustained manner.

Nevertheless, it clearly shows that Russia wants to make a point -- and not just with ISIS, which couldn't take down far less capable aircraft than they deployed. They're wanting to make a point about the improvement of Russian military capabilities, which they have also been doing in Syria, where their naval gunnery has been far better than we knew they could manage. Putin's investments have been paying off, and so the real message is for us: if he's capable of this, what other cards does he have that he isn't showing?

The lesson we're meant to draw is that we're better off working with him than against him. Accepting clear Russian (and Iranian and Chinese) zones of hegemony is the deal he wants in return for this cooperation against terrorists like ISIS: give up on the idea of humanity living according to what President Obama calls "our universal values," and accept that large sections of humanity are going to live under the domination of very different systems.

It's a deal I suspect the world will prove only too eager to accept. We'll help put the Iron Curtain back up, as long as they promise to keep a heavy hand on those living on their side of it.

It's Not An Argument

An Iraqi humorist describes Western reaction to the Paris attacks.

It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:

“We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Wait, what? Yes we did…”

“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”

“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”

“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”

“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”

“Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”

“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!”

“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”

“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”

“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”

“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?”

Wakey Wakey, Lash Up and Stow!

Wikipedia informs:

The first lines of the British Cavalry "Reveille" were for many years rendered as:

Soldiers arise!
Scrub the bloody muck out of your eyes...

The infantry and general "Reveille" ran:

Get out of bed,
Get out of bed,
You lazy bastards! (repeat)
I feel sorry for you, I do!

In the Royal Navy, "Reveille" was usually verbalised as:

Wakey Wakey, Lash up and Stow!

To the U.S. tune:

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up this morning;

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up at all!

The corporal's worse than the privates,

The sergeant's worse than the corporals,

Lieutenant's worse than the sergeants,

And the captain's worst of all!

< repeat top six lines >