The Efficacy of "Government Vetting"

We've heard quite a bit from the Obama administration (when it can divert its time and attention from childish taunts and trash talk aimed at U.S. citizens who oppose its policies) about how rigorously they plan to vet migrants and refugees fleeing Syria and other war torn hellholes That Enlightened-and-Uber-Tolerant Paradise Across the Pond. But casual perusal of the daily news offers few grounds to support the requested leap of faith:

...the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms. A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper. This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.

And then there's this:

Health and Human Services delivered over at least six migrant children from Guatemala into the hands of human traffickers without visiting the homes where they would live or verifying any family connection to them, a Senate committee has found. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, a leading crusader fighting to crack down on the trafficking of children in the United States, said the Ohio case is just one of many examples of HHS's systemic lapses in the way it handles the placement of migrant children out of U.S. detention centers for illegal immigrants. The findings derived from a case in Marion, Ohio in which six defendants allegedly lured child victims to the United States with the promise of schooling and a better life and instead enslaved them on an egg farm and forced them to work 12 hours a day in squalid conditions with no pay. A report by the committee found other disturbing examples of HHS delivering minors into the hands of sex traffickers or sexual predators.

The report found widespread evidence of "lax verification standards" and systematic defects, concluding that despite repeated indicators that something fishy was going on with the Marion placements, [wait for it...] "HHS failed to connect any of the dots." None of this is confidence inspiring. If the federal government lacks the ability to vet people who are already here in the U.S. before placing innocent children in their power, how on earth are they going to vet migrants from other countries effectively?

"Do We Know What We Are Doing in Afghanistan This Year?"

A small question from retired Major General Eric T. Olson. (Note that this is the retired Army general and former 25 ID commander, not the retired Admiral and Navy SEAL of almost the same name, Eric Thor Olson).

As the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan mission drew to a close in December 2014, President Obama said:

For more than 13 years, ever since nearly 3,000 innocent lives were taken from us on 9/11, our nation has been at war in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.

More than a year later, in President Obama’s final State of the Union address, concerning the progress of the mission in Afghanistan, he said … nothing.

This is disappointing, but not surprising. The Obama administration often prefers to leave open difficult questions about U.S. failures to meet its goals.

So, he says, we should look elsewhere. However, looking at official military records leaves us confused, as he notes: we have been repeatedly told that the remaining US mission, except for a counterterror element, is 'advise and assist' at the corps-level and above. US forces are not involved in "combat operations." However, the recent attack on US forces in Marjah was not a counterterrorism operation, but was rather an embed at the battalion level who was directly involved in combat. So the top level characterization of our mission is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

Olson puts together a picture of the mission and its likely changes in the next year, and figures we're going to have to up our force structure even if the Afghans are able to take more of the weight of the fighting. Alternatively, we'll have to cut loose some of the restrictions the President has imposed on our fighters in terms of what they're allowed to do. Either way, the looked-for drawdown isn't coming.

It's pretty obvious that the President actually intends to run out the clock on Afghanistan, the war he promised to win, and pass it off to his successor. That may be the best of possible worlds from here. His half-surge-with-an-expiration-date proved capable only of getting a lot more Americans killed than in the Bush years, and is going to leave the Taliban in a stronger position than they were eight years ago. More leadership from this President may not be what we need.

Know What I Like to Kill More Than Anything Else in the Entire World?

"Watermelons. I hate watermelons."

The language is NSFW, but the video is fine. Unless you are offended by exploding watermelons.

UPDATE: He has an alarm clock app!

The Art of the Deal

Or, why sometimes no deal is far better than any deal at all.

If the world were "so riddled with fraud that the auditors have felt unable to sign off its accounts" it would largely explain why authoritarianism is back in style. Tyranny is busting out all over because stopping tyrants is bad for business.  The Wall Street Journal writes that political rights and civil rights have been declining ever year since 2006. The "annual Freedom in the World report [finds that] In all, 110 countries, more than half the world’s total, have suffered some loss in freedom during the past 10 years."...

This decline is no coincidence.  The tolerance of tyranny has been normalized, even in Western democracies. It is more than a little disturbing that president Obama is politically embracing Hillary Clinton just as she expressed delight at the prospect of appointing him to the Supreme Court. But they would understand such quid pro quo in Obama's home town, where according to Chicago Magazine, it has long been custom to buy off gangs in exchange for political support.

Are You Kidding Me?

For more than two years, the Navy’s intelligence chief has been stuck with a major handicap: He’s not allowed to know any secrets.

Vice Adm. Ted “Twig” Branch has been barred from reading, seeing or hearing classified information since November 2013, when the Navy learned from the Justice Department that his name had surfaced in a giant corruption investigation involving a foreign defense contractor and scores of Navy personnel.

Worried that Branch was on the verge of being indicted, Navy leaders suspended his access to classified materials. They did the same to one of his deputies, Rear Adm. Bruce F. Loveless, the Navy’s director of intelligence operations.

More than 800 days later, neither Branch nor Loveless has been charged. But neither has been cleared, either. Their access to classified information remains blocked.

I mean, it's the Navy. Still.

"International Holocaust Remembrance Day"

Like most Americans, I know nothing about international holidays that don't predate the Founding. However, the friends I made in Israel two Decembers ago have pointed out to me that today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. I can see why they would consider it a matter of importance that we know of it.

My only advice about holocausts is that it's ordinary people who have to stop it. Governments are often behind them. If not governments, it's mobs that governments are too weak to stop. The right tools and training for the people are important. In the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, it was mostly machetes that killed all those people. They mostly had machetes to try to stop it. It might have worked, had they trained in how to use machetes together in defensive formations. Rifles would have worked better, even against men with rifles, especially if they had training as well as tools.

We may or may not see another such holiday without a new bloodletting on a similar scale. The pressures of the war in Syria have created millions of refugees. The war in Afghanistan is about to get much worse. The oil war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, made possible by Obama's Iran deal, is likely to destabilize whole regions -- including in Latin America. We've been brought to a dangerous moment by unwise leaders whose eyes are closed to their folly.

Semper paratus. Think on your moral duty, and rather die than yield it.

First Philosophy

For those of you interested in metaphysics, this is a fascinating piece at the Imaginative Conservative. The author is a very famous lady in philosophy, Eva Brann, who must by now be ninety or thereabouts. She writes with the benefit of a full life's scholarship and consideration. It turns out she has a small collection of pieces at this outlet, which I will have to peruse.

Sanders is ahead of Clinton in Iowa polls

By more than the margin of error.  Ok, I really need the Hall to talk me out of this.  South Carolina is an open primary state.  Frankly, none of the down ticket races are of any interest to me, and all of the Republican candidates frankly are rather poor.  I may actually grab a Democratic ballot and vote for Sanders this primary season.  Not because I like him, or want him to be President.  But because I literally cannot stand Hillary Clinton at this point.  Is this wrong?  It certainly doesn't feel right.

What Make Statesmen?

As the time to vote nears, The Art of Manliness republishes an article on the four qualities of a statesman.

Dr. J. Rufus Fears [is] professor of an incredibly manly subject: the history of freedom. One of the things the good professor emphasized to us captivated students was that a politician and a statesman are not the same thing. A statesman, Fears argues, is not a tyrant; he is the free leader of a free people and he must possess four critical qualities:

1. A bedrock of principles
2. A moral compass
3. A vision
4. The ability to build a consensus to achieve that vision

These four qualities are explored in greater depth in the article. Is he right? If so, who among the candidates has these qualities?

Quick thought

Ever notice that when we in the US talk about putting up a wall, it's to keep people out, but every time a socialist country talks about it, it's to keep people in?  Yeah, I wonder why you'd have to keep people from leaving your socialist paradise?  It's a mystery.

Flop Top Beer

The DUI rules have tightened a very great deal since this song was recorded. These days you'd go to jail for a long time just for doing a hundred, if they caught you. If they did.

I understand Ireland has repealed DUI laws for the countryside, and only enforces them in the city. They decided it was better, and less of a risk to everyone overall, to let country people drink in pubs together than to make them drink alone at home. Probably less of a risk to let them drive a hundred on country backroads, too, than to chase them down.

Georgia Legislature Update

Since the unceremonious death of any hope for new gun-control bills this year, after the Speaker of the House flatly said he wouldn't schedule any such votes, talk has turned to other things. To a surprising degree, it's turned to marijuana. I have no real opinion on marijuana, just an unreasoned sentiment against it. Still, the pot people have picked their bills very carefully, and have managed to put together a list of cases that are controversial even for people whose instinct is that dope is bad. They all turn on medicinal uses, especially a use of cannabis oil on children with skin diseases or burns. Carefully chosen wedges!

Another issue is the one we talked about when the session opened, which is religious liberty. I note with deep amusement the irony of Al Jazeera's coverage of this question. It's good to know that the folks in Qatar are deeply concerned about Georgia passing 'anti-gay' legislation.

The coalition’s purpose: “to oppose discrimination of any kind,” said Chance, now a spokesman for the group. “In fact, the first thing you think of when you think of the South is racial discrimination."

Is that right? Maybe you should consider moving to a place with better mental associations for you. Qatar, say.

It's amazing how far this has gone in a year. At this point we aren't even talking about a recognition that civilization would simply cease to exist without heterosexual relationships, nor that loving marriage between the parents is the objectively best thing for the children of such unions. At this point, what we're talking about is that we might suffer an economic boycott if we don't force everyone to participate in the celebration. What is the loss of liberty beside the loss of profit?

What was this country for again? It seems like someone wrote something down, way back when, that had to do with the whole reason governments were instituted among men. Maybe it was profit. I forget.

The Candidate of Muscling You Along

An interesting observation from The Intercept: in terms of union nominations, Hillary Clinton wins the union's nomination whenever the leadership of the union decides whom to nominate. If the membership decides, the endorsement goes to Sanders.

I have noticed that seems to apply to left-wing political action organizations like MoveON, too. They set a high bar for endorsement, saying that they'd only endorse a candidate if a three-quarters supermajority sided one of the candidates. Sanders won. Likewise with Howard Dean's PAC, which put the matter to a vote and got a vast supermajority for Sanders.

Even members of the old Clinton administration are starting to break away: yesterday, Robert Reich endorsed Sanders.

For now, before anybody has voted (and before the FBI has made its impact known), Clinton has a narrowing national lead. She's hoping that superdelegates, union leaders, and other power players will pull everyone into line.

Maybe not.

Range 15 Red Band Trailer

What do you get when a bunch of Iraq and Afghanistan vets get together to make a movie, and successfully raise a ton of money? Apparently you get a zombie movie starring a bunch of Medal of Honor recipients, co-starring a bunch of former Rangers and veterans including at least one SEAL -- plus William Shatner and Danny Trejo.

Are We Going to War?

Mitch McConnell appears poised to vote the President powers unlimited in time or space to pursue ISIS. He apparently put this together without telling anyone, even his deputy, and has advanced it using a Senate rule that allows him to bring it to a vote at any time rather than at a time scheduled on the calendar.

Oddly, the Democratic Party are the ones balking at this vast transfer of authority to the President. Senator Murphy of Connecticut described it thus: “It is essentially a declaration of international martial law, a sweeping transfer of military power to the president that will allow him or her to send U.S. troops almost anywhere in the world, for almost any reason, with absolutely no limitations.”

Plausibly much of the world has descended into a situation in which 'martial law' is the only law left, especially in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. None of those three areas are likely to improve soon without major US involvement. On the other hand, this is a big ask to come out of nowhere with no national debate. President Obama has performed very badly as Commander in Chief, but he has now less than a year in office. We don't have any idea to whom we are delegating this authority. This may not be the time. Certainly it's worth thinking about whether or not a largely-unlimited transfer of authority is the right approach.

Is There a Hippocratic Specialist in the House?

Contrary to what I have believed for a couple of decades, "First, do no harm" is not in the Hippocratic Oath, although there is a promise that, "With regard to healing the sick, ... I will take care that they suffer no hurt or damage."

At least, the promise was in the original. It's interesting how the ancient Greek oath has changed in its modern form.

A 'Judgmental Churchgoer' Talks Bikers

Under the heading of honest soul-searching, an unlikely friendship prompts this article:

Fair Disclosure: I'm not part of the biker culture. In actuality, I'm a Middle American, fairly conservative, church girl. And I'll be the first to admit, I'm pretty darn judgmental. Always have been.

Yes, I know it's wrong. And yes, I'm working on it. Really I am. Feel free to check-in later for a progress update.

But I can assure you, I don't need a twelve-step recovery program. I'm already enrolled in the unofficial Sonny Barger, "Get-Over-Yourself-Candy-You're-Not-Better-Than-Anyone-Else," one step program.

How did that happen? Despite our vast differences, I've been close friends with Sonny for over three decades. And if there's one thing I know for sure -- he's a man of integrity.

It's on the misuse of the Patriot act to target bikers under Obama appointee Janet Napolitano, following similar abuses during her term as governor of Arizona.

UPDATE: By the way, in the Waco case, the DA finally gave in and agreed to turn over the evidence against one biker without requiring a mandatory oath from the defense attorney that he wouldn't talk to the press about it. It looks like they managed to get a lot of the other attorneys to sign, and the agreement with the one attorney just prevented a court from ruling that the DA's practice was illegal.

It's Good To See The Regulations Catching Up

The Department of Defense is set to release new security rules later this week, making it clear that consequences for violations don’t apply equally to everyone, sources say. The revisions will make explicit what has until recently been an informal system that occasionally treated powerful people the same as peons, and, more rarely, sometimes failed to bring the wrath of God down on regular people acting out of conscience.

Tex-Men

From Jim Gerraghty's newsletter:

"The Dark History of Liberal Reform"

A review of a new book by Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era. It is not about current politics, and Leonard is apparently a progressive himself. It is about an honest look at the history of the movement.

In a 1915 unsigned editorial at this magazine [The New Republic], the editors ridiculed the Bill of Rights as a joke. “They insist upon invoking abstract principles, instead of trying to determine for concrete cases whether social control should supersede individual initiative…how can we discuss that seriously?” The doctrine of natural rights will “prevent us from imposing a social ideal.”...

“The progressive goal was to improve the electorate,” Leonard writes, “not necessarily to expand it.” Jim Crow laws suppressed turnout in the South, but it fell in the North as well. New York state’s participation went from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920.

It’s impossible to understand early twentieth-century progressives without eugenics. Even worker-friendly reforms like the minimum wage were part of a racial hygiene agenda. The progressives believed male Anglo-Saxons were the most productive workers, but immigrants and women were willing to accept lower wages and displaced white men...

A legal minimum wage, applied to immigrants and those already working in America, ensured that only the productive workers were employed. The economically unproductive, those whose labor was worth less than the legal minimum, would be denied entry, or, if already employed, would be idled. For economic reformers who regarded inferior workers as a threat, the minimum wage provided an invaluable service. It identified inferior workers by idling them. So identified, they could be dealt with. The unemployable would be removed to institutions, or to celibate labor colonies. The inferior immigrant would be removed back to the old country or to retirement. The woman would be removed to the home, where she could meet her obligations to family and race.

If Leonard didn’t have the quotes from prominent progressives to back up his claims, this would read like right-wing paranoia: The state’s most innocuous protections reframed as malevolent and ungodly social engineering. But his citations are genuine.

...

To bring right-wing fears full circle, the progressive Supreme Court of 1927 (including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis) ruled 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that forced sterilization was constitutional. Holmes wrote that, “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

That sounds like an interesting book. Honest soul-searching is rare in any age. The author of the review states that it is very difficult to 'suss out' any lessons from the history, which leaves 'no good guy left standing.' I'm not sure there wasn't one -- the lone dissenter on the Supreme Court -- but it sounds like a book worth reading to see.

There's Always A Boom Tomorrow

CERN scientists say they've broken the speed of light.

Father Gabriel Tooma

Preserving the Christian legacy by disguising it.

What he is doing, he says, is even more important to the Christian minority's fate in northern Iraq: He is rounding up ancient manuscripts and relics and hiding them in secure locations around Kurdistan, hoping to save them from the iconoclastic fury of the terror insurgency.

"If Daesh burns down a church we can rebuild it, but the manuscripts are our history. They trace back our roots, they are part of our civilization," he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. "If they get destroyed, then we are lost, and our culture will be forgotten."

Not forgotten from the mind of God. Nevertheless, it is good work that he is doing.

The High Water Mark

Here is a sixteen-year-old German girl who has the courage to tell the world, and her government, what she thinks about the migrant policy. Specifically, she is terrified.



Listening to it shortly after reading Mark Steyn's piece (hat tip D29), I have to wonder if she will be the last generation of German girls who feel free to speak in public on this subject.

The German Chancellor cut to the chase and imported in twelve months 1.1 million Muslim "refugees". That doesn't sound an awful lot out of 80 million Germans, but, in fact, the 1.1 million Muslim are overwhelmingly (80 per cent plus) fit, virile, young men. Germany has fewer than ten million people in the same population cohort, among whom Muslims are already over-represented: the median age of Germans as a whole is 46, the median age of German Muslims is 34. But let's keep the numbers simple, and assume that of those ten million young Germans half of them are ethnic German males. Frau Merkel is still planning to bring in another million "refugees" this year. So by the end of 2016 she will have imported a population equivalent to 40 per cent of Germany's existing young male cohort.

This girl may live to see a very different Germany than the one that made her believe that she could express her views about the men who frighten her for the world to see. One wonders what that Germany will do to her.

Common Ground: Sources

We spend a lot of time in the Hall arguing with each other, and that's good. I've learned a lot that way and enjoyed the back and forth. However, occasionally I get into an argument where, by the end of it, I feel like I understand my interlocutor less than when I started.

So, for a few posts, I'd like to focus on finding and establishing some common ground. For this first one, I'd like to talk about the sources of our beliefs. I assume everyone has been influenced by their experiences, but those are not easily shared. Hence, I'd like to focus on books, essays, articles, movies, songs, anything we can link to or directly share in some way.

For me, John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government has been influential, and the basic ideas of natural rights and social contract are very appealing to me. Embarrassingly, I have to admit I've never read the whole thing, only summaries and commentaries. However, it's not terribly long, so I've made reading it one of my goals for the spring. Wikipedia has a decent treatment, I think.

Another important influence has been Frederic Bastiat's The Law. It's a short read, and the bumper sticker summary might be something like "All Government Is Violence: Vote for Less." ("Vote for the minimum necessary" would be more accurate, but that's getting too long to fit on a bumper sticker readable by anyone but the worst tailgater.)

Finally, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which I read a couple of decades ago and should read again. Two much more recent books that have influenced me are Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States (summarized here on Wikipedia) and Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.

Yeah, it's mostly old stuff. I am an ex-Progressive; there came a point now about 15-20 years ago where I decided I was no longer a Progressive, but didn't know what I was. (I still haven't quite worked that out.) I did admire the Declaration of Independence, so I started with the Revolutionary period and started reading. Those ideas still make the most sense to me.

What have been some important sources of your political beliefs?

Swagger

Yo.

Big dad points

I want one.

The perils of pot

It has been known to cause just a trace of paranoia.  The dispatcher kept a straight face.

The late unpleasantness

My sister put this together, so all the references to relatives are the same for me:

 

These are my great-great grandfather (from my mother's Yankee side of the family), Asa Gates White, born 1817, and his third wife, a spinster schoolteacher named Martha Bush Keyes, born 1826.  The Keyes and White families were friends.  Like Asa, Martha was born in Morgan County, Ohio, and later moved to Wabaunsee, Kansas.  Wabaunsee was founded by Congregationalist abolitionists from the East just after the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854.  Its schools, where Martha taught, are noteworthy for having always been integrated, 100 years before Brown vs. Board of Education.  Later, Asa and Martha moved to San Diego, while Asa's children stayed in Kansas.

My grandfather, Harlow Ferguson, was Asa Gates White's grandson.  In 1891, when Harlow was six years old, he and his older sister Bernice were orphaned in Kansas, and their grandfather Asa died a month later in San Diego.  Asa's widow Martha was left responsible for the orphans' care, but whether because she barely knew them or because she lived at such a daunting distance, she did not send for them to California. Instead, Harlow was sent to live with a schoolteacher in Wabaunsee, presumably a family friend of Martha.  In later years he hired out to a number of different families as a farmhand.  He never again saw his sister Bernice or left Kansas.  Bernice, though a protestant, was sent to a Catholic orphanage to live; we have no further news of her.

The White family traces its origins back to Elder John White, a Puritan and one of the founders of Cambridge, Mass.  Asa Gates White served the Union Army in Company K, 6th Iowa Cavalry, from 1862-1865.  My father's family, on the other hand, the Kilpatricks, were completely Southern, having emigrated to Virginia in the 18th century from Ulster, and then spread through the South along with the cotton culture.  All able adult Kilpatrick males (too many to list, but including two great-grandfathers) fought for the Confederacy.  Only when both my parents ended up in graduate school in 1944 at Berkeley did the Northern family join with the Southern.  Eighty years before, their ancestors had been fighting each other, sometimes in the same battle, opposite sides.

Maybe Not

The Marine Corps Times suggests that vets should pursue 'more secure' gun laws.

Maybe. Whose security? What is being secured? What is being secured? Liberty, or something else?

Echoes

How this election is about an argument between Woody Guthrie and Donald Trump's dad.

Jacksonians, or Authoritarians?

In contrast to Walter Russell Mead's ideas about Jacksonians, a fellow named Matthew MacWilliams, Ph.D. student in political science at U. Mass. Amherst and presumably future expert on authoritarianism, has a very different take on Trump's supporters. He claims that he has found one variable that predicts an individual's support for the Donald:

... Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations. And because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate, among Democrats as well as Republicans, it’s very possible that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow....
Authoritarianism is not a new, untested concept in the American electorate. Since the rise of Nazi Germany, it has been one of the most widely studied ideas in social science. While its causes are still debated, the political behavior of authoritarians is not. Authoritarians obey. They rally to and follow strong leaders. And they respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened. From pledging to “make America great again” by building a wall on the border to promising to close mosques and ban Muslims from visiting the United States, Trump is playing directly to authoritarian inclinations.

Not all authoritarians are Republicans by any means; in national surveys since 1992, many authoritarians have also self-identified as independents and Democrats. And in the 2008 Democratic primary, the political scientist Marc Hetherington found that authoritarianism mattered more than income, ideology, gender, age and education in predicting whether voters preferred Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. But Hetherington has also found, based on 14 years of polling, that authoritarians have steadily moved from the Democratic to the Republican Party over time. He hypothesizes that the trend began decades ago, as Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and other political positions valuing freedom and equality. In my poll results, authoritarianism was not a statistically significant factor in the Democratic primary race, at least not so far, but it does appear to be playing an important role on the Republican side. Indeed, 49 percent of likely Republican primary voters I surveyed score in the top quarter of the authoritarian scale—more than twice as many as Democratic voters.

And how does one determine how authoritarian an individual is?

In addition to the typical battery of demographic, horse race, thermometer-scale and policy questions, my poll asked a set of four simple survey questions that political scientists have employed since 1992 to measure inclination toward authoritarianism. These questions pertain to child-rearing: whether it is more important for the voter to have a child who is respectful or independent; obedient or self-reliant; well-behaved or considerate; and well-mannered or curious. Respondents who pick the first option in each of these questions are strongly authoritarian.

Based on these questions, Trump was the only candidate—Republican or Democrat—whose support among authoritarians was statistically significant.

MacWilliams points out other demographics Trump could appeal to and then states:

So, those who say a Trump presidency “can’t happen here” should check their conventional wisdom at the door. The candidate has confounded conventional expectations this primary season because those expectations are based on an oversimplified caricature of the electorate in general and his supporters in particular. Conditions are ripe for an authoritarian leader to emerge. Trump is seizing the opportunity. And the institutions—from the Republican Party to the press—that are supposed to guard against what James Madison called “the infection of violent passions” among the people have either been cowed by Trump’s bluster or are asleep on the job.

So the question of why Trump is doing so well is a hot one, it seems. MacWilliams is obviously excited about his discovery, and it is interesting. Still, the social sciences are overwhelmingly neo-Marxists of one flavor or another, I hear, and I wonder if this 4-question test doesn't indicate something besides what they claim.

For example, looking at the questions, instead of authoritarians, might we call them rule-abiding citizens? They believe not only that they should abide by the laws, but that their politicians should as well. Maybe instead of moving to the Republican Party "as Democrats embraced civil rights, gay rights, employment protections and other political positions valuing freedom and equality," they moved because the Democrats increasingly embraced a lawless, anti-democratic, authoritarian, even elitist, ruling style.

I don't know, really. It's just a very interesting contrast with Mead's analysis.

Searcy fix

Now that "Justified" is over, I'm missing Nick Searcy:

Said @jaketapper to @HillaryClinton, "Will you see '13Hours'?" Hillary: "Nah, I already slept through it once."

The Nature of Representation

How should we choose a particular representative to vote for, and how should representatives do their jobs?

For the first time in my life there is a candidate that I closely identify with as a human being, and that makes me ask, what is the proper way to think of representation? If I voted for someone just because he would best represent me as an individual, it would be Ben Carson. But I know he probably isn't the best candidate for the nation.

So how should we vote? Should we choose the best representative for us as individuals, or the best representative for the nation?

On a related note, Eric Hines and I got into the question of how representatives should do their jobs in a discussion about Cruz. He pointed out that senators represent states, and the representatives of one state are not beholden to the voters in another. However, this brought up another question for me: Should a senator do what is best for his state or, if there is a conflict, what is best for the nation?

A Canadian Jacksonian

The Party Pulls Together

DWS: Hey, I've been thinking, and maybe we do need one more debate right before Iowa -- and prime time, too!

Biden: Hey, I've been thinking, and you know socialism is a real problem.

They're getting nervous.

Nobody Really Disagrees With This, Right?

Former New York City Mayor and U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani said Wednesday he doesn't think there is any way Hillary Clinton should be able to avoid facing an indictment for the "secretive and highly classified" government information found on the private email server she used while secretary of state.

"[There are] 13 violations of federal law that she arguably committed," Giuliani [said]... "They treated it — in the case of Petraeus — as a major crime, and his actions are a hundredth of hers," said Giuliani. "She misrepresented about it. She's lied about it. She said she had no top secret material. It's absurd."

And as Clinton "destroyed 34,000 emails," Giuliani said that he would have argued, as a prosecutor, "that's evidence of a guilty knowledge . . . the destruction is evidence of guilty knowledge, evidentiary principle that you can use against someone when they're in a situation where who knows what's on those 34,000 e-mails."

If you have been following the story at all, surely you can't dispute any of that. Her survival as a viable political candidate depends on the fact that so few really believe that our system of law can work to hold her to account. If she rides that long enough to get elected, it'll be another four years of Attorneys General who won't enforce the law on her, or her allies.

What would that do to the country? Can anyone be so unpatriotic as to consider electing her given that?

A Giant in Pakistan

A chemistry lecturer known as 'The Protector' died saving his students by firing back at Taliban militants during a deadly attack on their university that left 30 dead and dozens injured today. Gunmen stormed the Bacha Khan University in Pakistan in an assault that echoed a horrifying Taliban massacre on a nearby army-run school and previous attacks against girls' education, notably the failed assassination attempt of Malala Yusufzai in 2012 in the same province....

The father-of-two opened fire, giving them time to flee before he was cut down by gunfire as male and female students ran for their lives. He was known to his pupils as 'The Protector' because he was a keen hunter and kept a 9mm pistol at school, possibly in light of previous militant attacks.

The Purge Continues

Oxford Students Union votes to remove statue of Cecil Rhodes in order to shame him and itself over the colonial past.

Winter Storm State of Emergency

I assume Grim's Hall readers are quite adequate to the task, but for what it's worth, Governor Deal has just declared a state of emergency.

What About Subversion?

Michael Rubin at Commentary asks why we allow immigrants (especially, in this case, from Iran) to remain in the United States if they betray their new citizenship by acting as subversives for Iran? It's not a new problem. During the Cold War the Communists had a very active program to infiltrate the United States with subversives. Much subversion is protected First Amendment activity. You can say what you want, print what you want, organize for the purpose of effecting political change, and in the case of Iran's revolution, your freedom of religion entitles you to adhere to revolutionary Shi'a Islam if you want. You can advocate for the non-violent transition of the United States to a Communist country, or to an Islamic one.

We don't have a good answer, and I doubt we're going to develop one given that we never did before. Protecting our liberties is generally accepted as more important than protecting ourselves from subversive acts by immigrants. Besides, why get worked up about native Iranians who advocate for Iran when you have Vox and the New York Times?

UPDATE: None of the freed Iranians in the 'prisoner swap' elected to go home to Iran.

No More Ethanol!

Them's fighting words, Trump.

I am tired of losing small engines to E10 gasoline, and E15 gasoline can't even be run in motorcycle engines safely. I am also tired of having to drive out of my way and pay a premium for non-ethanol gasolines, when every station in America could just as readily stock them.

With the Iran-Saudi oil war ongoing, oil prices are going to collapse to levels that could be destabilizing, especially in Latin America. Let's go back to pure gasoline. No more corn in my tank.

Maybe He Was A Lumberjack In His Spare Time

Mexican drug lord 'El Chapo' had one of those scary .50 caliber rifles -- one he obtained through President Obama's "Fast and Furious" program.

Via Instapundit, a reminder that the ATF wanted to use their avoidance of American gun control regulations in "Fast and Furious" as a pretext to push for more gun control regulations. Criminals don't obey the law, and it appears Federal agencies don't either.

Nobody's 'Too Big To Jail,' You Know

The headlines describing this as 'Beyond TOP SECRET' are not quite right -- Special Access Programs are technically "TOP SECRET" programs, but there are then further restrictions on access. That's actually not unusual for military programs: we already knew she had TS/SCI data in her emails, and SCI represents a TOP SECRET level of information that is further compartmentalized. In fact, the disagreements about whether SCIs are SAPs is sufficient that I'm not clear on whether this is even new information: the IG report may simply be acknowledging the two TS/SCI emails we already knew about, although FOX News says that is not the case.

In any case, it's big money. If it's additional to the two emails we already knew about, it's huge. If it's a confirmation that the IG considers those two emails to be TS/SAP, it's still really big because it confirms she violated security with incredible recklessness. Violated it for, let us remember, mere personal convenience and to shield herself from being subject to the ordinary public scrutiny that American officials lawfully owe to American citizens.

Radio Derb on "Spree Killings"

John Derbyshire, who has occasionally published books on math in addition to becoming a social pariah, works out the numbers.

Spree killings are anyway only a tiny proportion of gun deaths. There are about 30,000 gun deaths a year in the U.S.A., two-thirds of them suicides. Of the ten thousand or so that aren't suicides, spree killings are a fraction of one percent. If you add up the spree killings for 2015, for example, there were 3 in Chapel Hill in February, 9 in Charleston in June, 2 in Lafayette in July, and 14 in San Bernadino in December; total 28. Out of 30,000.

Round it to thirty, and you've got an easy figure: one in a thousand.

W. R. Mead on Jacksonians

This is a powerful essay.

For President Barack Obama and his political allies in particular, Jacksonian America is the father of all evils. Jacksonians are who the then Senator had in mind when, in the campaign of 2008, he spoke of the ‘bitter clingers’ holding on to their guns and their Bibles. They are the source of the foreign policy instincts he most deplores, supporting Israel almost reflexively, demanding overwhelming response to terror attacks, agitating for tight immigration controls, resisting diplomacy with Iran and North Korea, supporting Guantanamo, cynical about the UN, skeptical of climate change, and willing to use ‘enhanced interrogation’ against terrorists in arms against the United States.

He hates their instincts at home, too. It is Jacksonians who, as I wrote in Special Providence back in 2001, see the Second Amendment as the foundation of and security for American freedom. It is Jacksonians who most resent illegal immigration, don’t want to subsidize the urban poor, support aggressive policing and long prison sentences for violent offenders and who are the slowest to ‘evolve’ on issues like gay marriage and transgender rights.

The hate and the disdain don’t spring from anything as trivial as pique. Historically, Jacksonian America has been the enemy of many of what President Obama, rightly, sees as some of America’s most important advances. Jacksonian sentiment embraces a concept of the United States as a folk community and, over time, that folk community was generally construed as whites only. Lynch law and Jim Crow were manifestations of Jacksonian communalism, and there are few examples of race, religious or ethnic prejudice in which Jacksonian America hasn’t indulged. Jacksonians have come a long way on race, but they will never move far enough and fast enough for liberal opinion; liberals are moving too, and are becoming angrier and more exacting regardless of Jacksonian progress.

Just as bad, in the view of the President and his allies, Jacksonians don’t have much respect for the educated and the credentialed. Like William F. Buckley, they would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the phonebook than by the Harvard faculty. They loathe the interfering busybodies of the progressive state, believe that government (except for the police and the military) is a necessary evil, think most ‘experts’ and university professors are no smarter or wiser than other people. and feel only contempt for the gender theorists and the social justice warriors of the contemporary classroom.

Virtually everything about progressive politics today is about liquidating the Jacksonian influence in American life. From immigration policy, touted as ending the era when American whites were the population of the United States, to gun policy and to regulatory policy, President Obama and his coalition aim to crush what Jacksonians love, empower what they fear, and exalt what they hate....

There’s another obstacle in the face of a Jacksonian rising: Jacksonians have been hard hit by the changes in the American economy. The secure working class wages that underpinned two generations of rising affluence for the white (and minority) industrial working class have disappeared. That isn’t just about money; the coherence of Jacksonian communities and family life has been seriously impaired. These are the points Charles Murray makes in his harrowing Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010; they have been recently reinforced by studies documenting a holocaust of lower and lower middle class whites.

These devastating changes, utterly ignored by an upper middle class intellectual and cultural establishment that not so secretly hopes for a demographic change in America that will finally marginalize uncredentialed white people once and for all, make Jacksonians angry and frustrated, but they also make it harder to develop an organized political strategy in response to some of the worst and most dangerous conditions faced by any major American demographic group today....

Jacksonian America is rousing itself to fight for its identity, its culture and its primacy in a country that it believes it should own. Its cultural values have been traduced, its economic interests disregarded, and its future as the center of gravity of American political life is under attack. Overseas, it sees traditional rivals like Russia, China, North Korea and Iran making headway against a President that it distrusts; more troubling still, in ISIS and jihadi terror it sees the rapid spread of a movement aiming at the mass murder of Americans. Jacksonian America has lost all confidence in the will or the ability of the political establishment to fight the threats it sees abroad and at home. It wants what it has always wanted: to take its future into its own hands.

Working out how to make that happen is the real problem. The Trump candidacy is at best a mask. Donald Trump is not really a Jacksonian: he is a Trumpist. Jim Webb was a Jacksonian. I am, apparently. Trump is not, and offers no actual hope of making real the promise of genuine self-government.

The governor of Texas has a program that sounds as if it might work, by limiting Federal power and thus empowering the states in a way that, where majorities do exist, the people can 'take their future into their own hands.' If not that, still stronger medicine seems the only answer.

Nemesis Approaches

Nemesis... was the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods). Another name was Adrasteia, meaning "the inescapable".

Can you feel her coming through the chilling winter air?

The declaration came as an add-on to anti-Wall Street rhetoric she deployed in response to attacks on her acceptance of vast monies from Wall Street:

"There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail."

Even worse, her campaign tweeted the aphorism...

"There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail." —Hillary #DemDebate

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 18, 2016

Thoughts on the US Navy/IRGC debacle

Note: these are my thoughts alone and reflect no one else's opinion outside of the voices that live in my head.

It Is An Important Question

"Will Hillary Clinton get prosecuted?" is most searched question on Google ahead of the Democratic debate on Sunday night. "Will Hillary Clinton win the nomination?" is second and "What did Hillary Clinton do that is illegal?" is the third.

Good Point

[T]he problem with this assumption [that Muslims are inferior] is contained in this Polish joke my cousin Tony Zbrowskis told me 50 years ago. But first, do you speak Polish?

No?

How does it feel to be dumber than a Pollack?

And so it goes with Arab Muslims and the Muslims. They speak our language, we do not speak theirs. They have their own alphabet and unlike the Cyrillic alphabet, it is not easily translated into the Western alphabet. Arab Muslims come here not as poor people looking for an opportunity to reach the upper class through hard work, but as students and the like from upper crust families. They study us. They know us. They speak our language and know are culture. They study our government. They do not seek to assimilate. Why would they? We are decadent.

The author goes on to state that liberals think they can use Muslims to further the liberal agenda, but that Muslims will use them instead. I'm not sure he rightly captures the spirit of the thing. The Marxist binary continues to animate the Left in our society, but it is now several binaries of oppression and domination: rich/worker, male/female, white/black, colonialist/oppressed. The last one in particular was a late addition to Marxism -- Lenin wrote a book about it, decades after Marx was in the grave -- but it is wholly out of date now. Colonialism started dying as soon as WWII ended. At least people keep being born male or female, for the most part. The colonial/oppressed model is vastly out of date.

Having these categories of thought blinds you to what is going on. You think you are doing your duty, for being a friend to the weak is 'the duty of a true knight, at least.' But the people designated as 'the weak' aren't so weak anymore: have you seen Dubai?

Yet the categories do not change. They cannot.

The oppressed cannot be the oppressor: that would be a logical contradiction. But human beings are not logical objects. We can oppress here, and be oppressed there: and that my father was oppressed does not mean his son is. Nor vice versa.

The logic of the arguments seems so convincing. The only question is whether the logic applies to the real world.

UPDATE: No kidding from Australia -- "anti-terror laws could prevent teaching from Koran," say Muslim clerics.

What Are "New York Values"?

On 9/11, I discovered much to my surprise that I was very angry about an attack on New York City. It wasn't obvious that I ought to be. My entire life had, after all, been marked by the New York Times remarking on my home and everything I loved in tones most suitable for 19th century anthropologists describing weird savages who practiced cannibalism and head-shrinking on their tribal enemies. I always had the sense that New York had settled itself in judgment against Georgia and the South. Why should I love or defend anyone who hated and despised all I cared about? And yet I did, for reasons that were hard to identify.

Equally hard to identify is exactly what this phrase means, "New York values." I have no idea what the Senator from Texas means by that.

It's a strange place. I've only been there twice, at very different times. The first time was in the 1980s, when it was dangerous and weird. The last time was just a few years ago, when it was gentrified and not very weird at all. It means a lot of things to a lot of people.

As for me, I enjoyed the Cloisters, and then I left. It's not for me. Is that because its values are not mine? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know how to tell you what it values, or if it values anything. People value things, and there are too many people there. How could you name a coherent vision from such a multitude? America is e pluribus unum, but not New York: it remains many, and if you come back in a decade or two it will be another many, different from before.

UPDATE: Stephen L. Miller proclaims himself a proud New Yorker, and tries to explain what he thinks New York is all about.

At its best, New York is a real, functioning, unglamorous, unforgiving machine. And it’s all of that despite what the balance in your account says. It’s not Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It’s the hidden neighborhoods, tucked out of the reach of the sightseers. It’s the concrete canyons filled with natives hunkering down in hooded jackets and earplugs, not the European visitors searching for Mad Men or the Kardashians. New York is the person on the subway with an overstuffed bag and unfashionable walking shoes, just trying to get to and from work or home. It’s the wind-bitten locals rolling their eyes at the throngs of out-of-towners....

And you have to be able to love it. All of it.

That's New York at its best, according to someone who says he does love it!

I'm glad you're happy, really. I'm just even more glad that I can stay a very long way away from any place like that.

There's No Substitute for a .50 Cal

Apparently Mythbusters got to this 'can you fell a tree with a machine gun?' thing a while ago. They determined that yes, you could, in 45 seconds.



So that's 2,250 rounds, which at $0.50 a round is $1,125 for the tree.

Looks to me like it takes about three .50 BMG hits to knock down that tree in the clip below. Now, BMG is a little more expensive -- about $3 a round -- but that still works out to $9 for the takedown. If it takes four or five hits, it's affordable.

Sounds to me like there's no choice but to prefer the .50 BMG rifle for lumberjack work.

A Local Monument

Cauliflower emerges from the shadows

It must be the paleo craze.  My bad luck:  just when I discovered that I really enjoy cauliflower cooked in some surprising new ways, the demand soars and the supply crashes.  What we need is price controls.

And That's That

The VPC-written assault weapons ban in Georgia is officially dead.

House Speaker David Ralston said Friday that legislation to ban assault weapons in Georgia will not become law on his watch.

“As long as I am speaker of this House, I will not use any of our valuable time taking away the constitutional rights of our citizens,” Ralston told reporters at an impromptu news conference, making the end of the first five days of the 40-day legislative session.

"Hillary Clinton Doesn't Trust You"

That is true in so many ways. Why did she ever decide to put up a personal email system? Because she didn't want her emails to become public records, which would allow the American public to judge her performance. Why did she invent the weird story that the Benghazi attacks were a spontaneous response to an internet video -- in an area where internet access is extremely spotty? Why did she work so hard to cover up her husband's sexual improprieties? Why, finally, is she apparently incapable of expressing herself to American voters without seeming like she's putting on a calibrated, artificial act?

Set all that aside. For now, let's talk about health care.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has spent the past few days indulging its worst instincts. It blundered into a dumb attack on Bernie Sanders, but rather than back down it raised the stakes. The result has been a reminder, to liberals, of what they like about Sanders and mistrust about Clinton.

This is the beginning, by the way, of a strongly pro-Clinton article. This is as good as it gets for her: an article headlined "Hillary Clinton Doesn't Trust You." You're supposed to realize by the end that you're the problem, and that you should do more to earn her trust. Maybe then she will quit lying to you, and start taking you in to her confidence about how she is going to organize your life.

Point, Counterpoint

It is true that by this definition, young people today are mostly not very cool. On the other hand, it may be that 'being cool' is something that a certain earlier generation or two significantly overvalued.

I mean, I don't think so. But maybe I'm just too old to appreciate the joy of singing along to whatever the current corporate-generated pop songs are, in a large crowd of people who are just like you in nearly every way (but "diverse!"). I never meet anyone who is just like me, and rarely meet anyone who is approximately like me. Maybe there's something to be said for the experience.

For Eric Blair

Best Insults from Ancient Rome.

I think the "still broke" one is the best, or at least the one for which I can think of the most applications today.

Um, Mr. Boot...

Max Boot offers a rather tendentious description of the choice facing Republican voters in foreign policy:

This, then, is the choice confronting Republican primary voters in 2016: Whether to continue the traditional, Reaganesque foreign policy that has been championed by every Republican presidential nominee for decades or to opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as crude and ugly as it is beguiling....

[L]ong experience shows that America has been most successful in achieving its objectives in precisely those places—such as Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo—where it has kept troops for decades and fostered new regimes to replace the old. Occasionally, as in Grenada or Panama, the U.S. can achieve its objectives and pull out. But in numerous other instances, such as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, an overly hasty pullout has sacrificed whatever gains U.S. troops have sought to achieve.

Of the successes, Grenada is not 'Reaganesque' but actually Reagan's policy.

The close second of the successes is Panama, which his former Vice President did. So the two examples of 'occasional' successes of the Jacksonian type are the two most Reaganesque successful policies.

The commitment to long stays are all someone else's, whether successes or failures. Germany and Japan are Trumanesque, and were already long solidified by the time Reagan got there. South Korea is much the same. Bosnia and Kosovo are Bill Clinton's projects, well after Reagan had retired from the stage.

Among the failures, Clinton's were Haiti and Somalia. The Iraq pullout was Obama's decision.

Lebanon is the only one of the failures that can be laid at Reagan's door, and that mission was a United Nations force. Reagan withdrew at the same time as the French, who made up a strong component without which we'd have had to have committed forces much more heavily to a conflict in which our local allies were collapsing. If the argument is that we should have made an Iraq out of it, OK, but there's no reason to suggest that such a policy would have been "Reaganesque." What Reagan himself chose to do was the opposite.

Reagan himself took a Jacksonian approach in Grenada and won; his VP later became President and did the same thing in Panama, and won. Reagan took the internationalist approach favored by Bill Clinton in Lebanon and lost. Perhaps he could have won if he'd doubled down, but that isn't what he himself chose to do.

So the most obviously "Reaganesque" policy really is the Jacksonian policy. Reagan kept his Long, Twilight conflict cold, and used hot war only when victory could be had quickly or when there was a large international coalition backing the play. George H. W. Bush did the same thing -- Panama, but also the Gulf War with its huge international coalition. The other policies may be wise or foolish, but they aren't "Reaganesque."

Why Would Anyone Need a .50 Caliber Incendiary?

One of the weirder features of the Georgia bill -- the one that convinces me it was probably written by the VPC, and is just being farmed out to legislators around the country -- is its focus on '.50 caliber incendiary' rifles. That's a strange thing to be concerned about, given that the things have been used in almost no crimes. VPC has an extensive list of cases "involving" .50 cal rifles, but they're almost all cases in which the involvement is limited to the police having seized one pursuant to another investigation. There are only four cases in twenty years in which one may have been fired in a crime, and some of those are dodgy (e.g., the Branch Davidian case, in which suspiciously little evidence survived -- here's a Democratic Underground forum in which DU gun control advocates are convinced by the evidence that the rifles may not have existed).

Still, you can -- as they might well like to do -- turn the question around. OK, so maybe they're not a pressing threat in our city streets, but they are very powerful and could conceivably be used to do harm. Why would you need one?

FPS Russia is here to help you out.



That's a machinegun, of course, but a rifle would work better -- you could place your shots with care, so that very little of the firewood was destroyed. I suddenly realize how much this would streamline my firewood production cycle.  Too, it would allow me to drop the tree from an adequate distance that I could eliminate the risk of death from having the tree fall on me.  It's a lifesaving implement!

I've dropped trees that hung up while falling with a .30-30 before, but this is a whole new concept!

BLM & Reckless Burning

A video from the protesters out West showing BLM agents burning fires that destroyed summer feed, cattle, and the homes of ranchers. Now, this is taken from the perspective of the protest movement, so of course it shows what things look like from their side. Still, you can see them burning a family's house down through reckless fire-setting. You can see the burns on the cattle.

It may be that there's more to this case than the charges against an individual family -- or the questionable tactics of the group that is protesting in Oregon. This starts to look like a much bigger deal that needs attention.

UPDATE:  Local Fire Chief resigns, supports the armed protest.

The Harney County fire chief resigned Wednesday because he says he no longer trusts the local government. Chris Briels stood next Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed group that has taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, and announced he had turned in his resignation to county Judge Steve Grasty.

Briels accused the Bureau of Land Management of land grabbing and supports the effort to hand over the land to ranchers, but he also feels betrayed by Grasty and other members of the county government, a first sign of fracture among local leaders.

Sounds like the Fire Chief has some beefs of his own with the BLM.

UPDATE: Fire chief says he caught FBI agents masquerading as militia and harassing locals to make the militia look bad.

UPDATE: The Pacific Patriots Network, an organization of III% and militia in the northwest, sent a team a while ago to try to negotiate a settlement between the Oregon protesters and the Feds. They've made a proposal that would be hard for the NYT wing to sneeze at:

Carrying guns, they presented a resolution to the FBI and local law enforcement calling for the return of land to the people of Harney County—and surprisingly, recommended co-management with the Burns Paiute Tribe.

Burns Paiute tribal chairperson Charlotte Roderique has stated to the media her irritation with Bundy and his “militia” supporters goal of “giving back the land to ranchers.” “It’s been validated we’ve been here since 15,000 years ago,” she told ICTMN. “These people are ignorant of the history and that they don’t think about the statements they are making. They are misinformed.”... In light of this [proposal], Roderique says, “we are not adverse to a land transfer however, it’s not something that you would just do. There would have to be financial arrangements made. Accommodations for people who work there. We’d be interested in co-managing the refuge to protect our sites out there.”

So, that's a "yes," plus an opening position for further negotiations.

Swinging For The Fences

Six female Democrats from urban districts here in Georgia have introduced a new gun control bill, as expected. What I didn't expect was that they'd go whole hog to this degree: the bill would, I estimate, convert something like a majority of Georgia families into felons.

This is because the define their terms in such a way as to make felonies out of the possession of the most commonly owned rifles, and magazines of the standard size that come with the most commonly owned handguns. Indeed, even magazines that 'can be converted' to hold more than ten rounds are felonies to possess. Not every family in Georgia owns firearms, but I'd guess that half or so do, and most of them will fall under the proposed ban. Which, by the way, would forbid you from selling the guns you own -- you'd have to surrender them, if I read it correctly, or be a felon.

(But the President isn't trying to take your guns! That's just paranoia talking!)

I'll keep an eye on it, but frankly, I don't think it'll even get a vote before a single house. It's totally out of order with the state of Georgia.

DuffelBlog: Navy Downgraded to "Regional Force For Good"

[T]he contentious “catch and release” of 10 Navy sailors in Iranian waters prompted a rapid decision on it.... “We thought about playing it off as a stunt raising awareness for the ‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’ initiative,” a Navy public affairs official admitted, “but ultimately we decided to just pull a Blackwater and re-brand instead.”

...

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus revealed another spin during a press conference, remarking that “this historic event with Iran proves that women can be prisoners of war just as well as men can. I look to the Marine Corps to emulate this shining example.”

The administration and its allies have been particularly disgraceful in the last 24 hours.

By the way, it's not quite true that there's no difference in how men and women were treated as prisoners of war. You can easily spot the female American sailor in these pictures because she was forced to cover her hair.

The Hell You Say

State of the Union:

In today’s world, we’re threatened less by evil empires and more by failing states. The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.

No way! I heard Vox say just yesterday that George W. Bush caused all that Sunni/Shia stuff.

By the way, the site hosting the transcript of tonight's SOTU? Vox.

I don't really care what the man has to say after seven years. Facta non verba, or, if you like, 'Your actions speak so loudly I can't hear what you are trying to say.'

Music For The Wasteland

The current hit video game Fallout 4 carries forward its series' conceit of a future post-nuclear America that longs for its civilizational apogee. One of the ways in which this is displayed is an affection for mid-century American music, which are broadcast on wasteland radio stations (an innovation in Fallout 3, but the affection was there from the very beginning: the introductory music to the original, way back in the 1990s, set the tone).

Two of the songs chosen for this version are of interest given the "Game Gate" event that was ongoing while Fallout 4 was in construction. The designers were burned a little bit by the "Gamer Gate" flame wars, as when they released their trailer they took some flak for having defaulted to a male character. In fact, as with all of their recent stuff, you can play male or female characters without any difference -- both are not only equally capable, they are treated as exactly the same in terms of the way their stats work. The series makes no distinction between straight and gay relationships, either: all characters who are 'romanceable' are just as willing to go with a guy as a girl. Both of these conceits are extremely unrealistic, but you'd have thought they'd have satisfied the radicals that Bethesda was on their side. Not quite!

In any case, of the many songs they pulled from America's musical history for their wasteland radio, two deal with women's frustrations against men. Both of them happen to represent a significant improvement over the way male/female frustrations often express themselves today.



I like this one even better:



Maybe a subtle comment from the game designers: none of this stuff is new, but we used to be able to recognize that members of the opposite sex are both occasionally infuriating and also wonderful. You can't expect to fix the underlying tensions, and sometimes you may need to shout about it, but in the end we go together.

News blackout officially over

When it was Muslim refugees terrorizing Germans on the street, it took days for the story to come out, and then only when the social media buzz got too loud to ignore.  That problem's all fixed, now, since "right-wingers" are now loose in public.  Reuters is all over it now, with Tuesday-morning reports of Monday-night outrages.

Forty Days and Forty Nights

The Georgia Legislature is back in session. An attractive feature of our system is that it can only convene for 40 days a year. They can run 24 hours a day if they want, or they can convene for one hour in the afternoon, but they can only convene on forty days a year. The rest of the time, they have to leave us alone.

This is the second of a two-year session, so bills that didn't make it during the last 40 days can be brought up again this year. Of these, the most important is Georgia's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Its importance can be seen in the fact that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution insists on referring to "religious liberty" in scare quotes, not just in editorials but in its news stories as well.

The bill is of course opposed by all right-thinking people, including the Republican Governor, the Republican speaker of the house, major Georgia corporations such as Coca-Cola, the newspaper, the entire Democratic party as far as I can tell, and a large swathe of the Republican party that is aligned with Atlanta instead of the rest of the state. It is just for that reason it is needed: the current environment is hostile to traditional religious liberty exercises by a large plurality, perhaps even a majority, of Georgia's citizens. They're unfashionable Christians it's true, including many evangelicals. Their expressions of these liberties are often though ugly by those right-thinking folks. Still, their rights are their rights, and the courts are plainly in need of instruction on how important those rights happen to be. The fact that there's such a unity of opinion among the powerful that is dismissive of their traditional rights is a very good reason to toughen legal protections for those rights.

The rest of the big-ticket items are shockingly libertine for Georgia: medical marijuana, alcohol brewery liberalization, legalizing casinos, clarifying online gambling laws to make it easier to engage in Fantasy Football, and of course efforts to increase social spending on transportation and public health care.

It's not the state I grew up in, to be sure. No gun control bills on the horizon so far, although that's sure to change.

Get Out, Vox

I was reading Vox's "explainer" on the Saudi-Iran feud. It's only half bad for the first part, and much of my disagreements with it for that first part are about the interpretation of the facts rather than the facts themselves. Then they get to this:

There is indeed a religious division between Sunni and Shia Islam, going back to the first generations of the religion's founding in the seventh century. You can read about those ancient religious differences and how they opened here, but the truth is that this is not terribly relevant to today's violence.

Sunni and Shia have gotten along fine for much of the Middle East's history, and the Sunni-Shia divide was just not so important for the region's politics. In the 1980s, for example, the biggest conflict in the Middle East was between two Shia-majority countries — Iran and Iraq — with Sunni powers backing Iraq.

That changed in 2003, when the United States led the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.

You're trying to blame the Sunni/Shia feud on George W. Bush? Are you kidding me with this nonsense?

That throwaway line about Iraq being a 'Shia-majority country' in the 1980s is intended to suggest that maybe Iraq was some sort of Shi'a democracy. In fact the whole power structure was based on Sunni domination of the Shi'ites. Saddam represented a minority that ruled over a majority it feared. The intense brutality of Saddam's regime is all about the Sunni/Shia feud. His war against Iran is explicable in part because of Iran's attempts to establish and promote radical Shi'a groups that would back its own sectarian revolution. Saddam had a feud with Iran for the same reason Saudi Arabia does: because Iran is trying to export its revolution across the Middle East, using this very Sunni/Shia divide as a rallying cry.

In 2003, I attended a briefing by Physicians for Human Rights, which had accompanied British forces in the south of Iraq during and after the invasion. They had interviewed families in these heavily Shi'a regions to learn about the human rights abuses Saddam used in those areas. They reported that one in three of the households they met with had a family member who had been disappeared by the regime. This repression of Shi'ites was intense and ongoing, and in fact had gotten worse in the years running up to the war.

I think Saudi Arabia is winning, currently. Partially I think Foreign Policy is right that the oil war they're starting is going to play to their strengths against Iran's weakness. They've also managed to bring Pakistan -- the only current Islamic nuclear power -- in on their side diplomatically. Iran will have to weigh that carefully in terms of further escalations, whereas Saudi Arabia wins if it can de-escalate the crisis into a cold war fought with oil prices.

Nevertheless, the Kingdom is playing a weaker-than-expected position because the United States has suddenly changed sides. Maintaining the illusion of the "Iran deal" is so important to the Obama administration that it's ignoring Saudi Arabia's explicit call for the United States to help de-escalate the situation. The Pakistanis got asked after we ignored the invitation to play the role of big dog.

The solution to North Korea

According to Theodore Dalrymple:

The North Korean regime is all-or-nothing. You can’t worship Kim Il Sung (President for Eternity) just a little. The leaders are either in power or they are dead. Neither of its immediate neighbors wants the regime to collapse, fearing a flood of starving refugees more than they fear an all-out attack. It is difficult to know what the best policy toward such a state should be, Seoul being only an artillery barrage away from it.

Perhaps we should offer the 1,000 highest people in the hierarchy (and their families) a golden asylum in Estoril, Rome, and France in general—the resorts of deposed European monarchs such as King Zog of Albania—and promise China and South Korea to share out evenly whatever refugees the collapse of the regime would result in. The Koreans are just the kind of immigrants Europe needs: hardworking, docile, intelligent, capable, and probably immunized against ideology by their long experience of it. They would be bewildered at first, but would soon find their feet and become an asset to their new countries.

And Who's Going to Enforce This Curfew?

“What real impact would a curfew have?” you might ask. Certainly it would send the message that we are taking men’s behaviour seriously and that it is no longer acceptable. Certainly it would allow women to move about more safely at night — on campus, in their homes, at bars, at the bus stop. Certainly it would name the problem. It would say, unequivocally, “The problem is you, men. You are the problem, and therefore, it is you who must be stopped.”

Think of it as a mass grounding for men. After a designated period of time, we’ll allow them back on the streets after dark to see how it goes. If the sexual assaults and harassment continue, well, it’s back to the curfew.

I mean, really, they asked for it.

The writer is from Canada, where perhaps men might accept 'being grounded' without complaint (or even, it being Canada, with apology).  Good luck enforcing such a curfew on American men.

Also, by the way, what happens if the men who refuse the curfew in Canada are the same demographic who caused the problems in Germany? Canada has just made a big deal about accepting a bunch of them. They allegedly sang them a song that was sung to Mohammad right before he killed a bunch of Jews in the town that accepted him.

The idea of the song is that it is being sung to welcome Mohammed to Medina after he fled Mecca. So it is a song about migration. Except that after Medina welcomed Mohammed -- the first Muslim refugee, you might say -- he killed all the Jewish men and enslaved the women.

Well, then, I guess the song is on point! But instead of directing concern in that direction, let's 'ground' Canadian men, so they won't be around to help when the issue of this policy comes to the fore.  Who else might be there to help, if the Canadian men did accept the curfew?  Who would be there to enforce the curfew on those non-Canadian men who refuse it?

It's the virus in the wild. They really can't see it.

The Twelve Battles of Arthur

Cattle raids, a historian suggests.

King Arthur’s legendary battles were fought over food for his people - not land or gold - after a volcanic eruption caused a global famine 1,500 years ago, a Celtic history expert has claimed. Andrew Breeze said a massive volcano eruption in El Salvador in 535 AD spread ash into the atmosphere, obscured the sun and ruined harvests - meaning that Britons were left starving. The British academic claims Arthur’s mission was actually to rustle cattle from neighbouring tribes in Scotland, and he became a hero for helping the people of Strathclyde survive a famine.

There's a small problem with this hypothesis as a complete explanation, which has to do with the reality of the Saxon migration. Evidence from graves shows that there was one, and that it reversed during a specific period around the time associated with any historical Arthur.

Still, it might be a partial explanation for some of what went on.

Prison '16 Update: No Obama Endorsement for Hillary Clinton

Not in the primary, at least.

UPDATE:  FBI expands its inquiry into Clinton Foundation corruption.

One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be “screaming” if a prosecution is not pursued because “many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation.”...

[I]n the Clinton case, the number of classified emails has risen to at least 1,340. A 2015 appeal by the State Department to challenge the “Top Secret” classification of at least two emails failed and, as Fox News first reported, is now considered a settled matter.

...

Fox News is told that about 100 special agents assigned to the investigations also were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, with as many as 50 additional agents on “temporary duty assignment,” or TDY. The request to sign a new NDA could reflect that agents are handling the highly classified material in the emails[.]

Oh, Come Off It

I understand that the rhetorical point here is that American conservatives are all horrid racists, but this is nonsense.

Seven years into the Obama presidency the right feels the same way about President Obama as I would if I woke up tomorrow and a talking horse were president. I'd be like, "Seriously? This horse is the president? Well, that just doesn't make any sense. Lemme see that horse's papers. I know I saw them before, but I just want to see them one more time."

The big difference between me and the right is that after seven years of the Mr. Ed presidency I think I would start to settle in and believe it was true. But to the loudest members of the GOP, something still doesn't feel right about this Obama character being President. So they can't trust anything that comes out of his mouth.

You know what else the President said? He said that if you liked your plan, you could keep it.

The President also said that he did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.

The President also said "Read my lips, no new taxes."

Treating Barack Obama's word as suspect isn't to treat Obama as a suspicious figure somehow holding the noble office of the Presidency. It's to treat him exactly as Presidents have shown for decades that they ought to be treated. To question whether he's lying to you is to treat him exactly as you would treat a President if you are a free citizen and want to remain one.

And let me be clear about something else, gun owners. I want President Obama to want to take your guns away. I don't trust you with your guns.

Duly noted.

A Little Winter Fell on My Patch of Wilderness

I don't own any wilderness to speak of, but wherever I am I find some to befriend. Here it was today.

A Former KGB Officer on Ideological Subversion

Note the date on this is fully thirty years ago, at which time he felt that the first stage -- demoralization -- was complete. Consider how far we've come since then in running down America, its Founders and its Constitution, as an aspirational ideal.



This was the official plan of the KGB, and one that they used effectively in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. (Also in Asia.) Why didn't it work here? Possibly because the Soviet Union collapsed, and so the professionals behind the program weren't there to leverage and guide the moment of crisis when it finally came. The Marxist-influenced intellectuals actually became in charge, rather than being shot against the wall and replaced with professionals.

But also possibly because the crisis was never great enough to overcome the American capacity for force. You couldn't roll tanks into America like you did in Czechoslovakia, and the country was always too big, too spread out, and too well armed to rule with a secret police. We can't even manage to get people to stop selling each other drugs, let alone effect totalitarianism.

In any case, this was the plan, and it failed. We still have to deal with the effects of the demoralization, however. It remains a huge problem for our country that the young have -- for what is now four generations -- been half-educated to despise its ideals and their own history. Recovering a natural patriotism and a proper admiration for the ideals of human liberty remains a major part of the work to be done.

There's a much longer interview with the same man here, for those who want to learn more.

The Seventh Century Lives

A genetic study of Britain shows that Britons still live in the same places as their ancient kingdoms of 600 AD.

In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.

Interesting. That does not hold for the United States.