Young Women are Clueless Followers of What's Popular with Boys Says... Gloria Steinem?!?

It's the best she can come up with, apparently to explain why women under thirty favor Sanders over Clinton by massive percentages.

“Women get more radical as we get older,” she said, explaining that women lose power as they age while men gain it, and feeling oppressed radicalizes you. Steinem did not explain why she felt Clinton was a more radical choice for the nomination than Sanders. Instead, the activist who once declared Sanders an “honorary woman” told Maher, “When you’re young, you’re thinking, ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie?'” Maher immediately realized her statement would be a controversial one — and, indeed, it has already drawn anger from young, female Sanders supporters on social media.

"Steinem did not explain why she felt Clinton was a more radical choice for the nomination than Sanders." Nice.

Clinton really is more radical, though, because she's radically corrupt and criminal. Ideology isn't the whole party.

I really went to watch this video because it was advertised as having her talk about Islam and women with Mahr, who is not a nice guy but is at least a consistent critic of religious extremism in any form. It's there (scroll to 7:10), but along the way you get insights like this one and "home, actually, is the most dangerous place for women." Well, and everyone else: we spend most of our time there. Also: "All monotheism is a problem.... I can't handle any monotheism." Well, OK, but you should probably read Avicenna... and Plotinus... and Plato on Parminides... all of whom reason to it, three of them well before monotheism was a major force in the world. We also learn from Gloria Steinem, by the way, that Mohammed's first wife was a "real estate agent."

Mahr comes out swinging, as much as one honorably can against a lady of her age, and gets her to admit that for everyone who was on the side of civil rights in the '60s, anti-shariah-law should be the cause of the current age. That's huge.

Oscar Live Action Shorts Well Worth Seeing

Last night I went to see the Oscar-nominated short movies. I'm always a bit wary of these things; you never know what you're going to see. But I was pleasantly surprised by all of them. None were objectionable, though some were hard to watch. I have tried to avoid any spoilers in my reviews below.

Ave Maria humorously explores faith and ethnicity through the experience of an observant Jewish man who accidentally wrecks into the statue of Mary at an Arab Catholic convent in the West Bank. He tries to get the help of the nuns to get back into Israeli territory before nightfall.

Day One is a gut-wrenching movie about a female Afghan interpreter working for the US Army in Afghanistan. It focuses on the cultural dimensions of the conflict rather than the fighting itself, and the director, who served there in 2009, says the movie was inspired by the interpreter who worked with his unit.

Everything Will Be Okay was hard to watch, but I think it says something important about the Western world's approach to family and the casualties of that approach. I can't think of much more to say about it that doesn't give something away, and I'm glad I saw it cold. That said, the woman I saw these with did not care for this one at all.

Shok is about two Albanian boys who are close friends and how they react to the Serbian occupation of their town in Kosovo. It is very well done, but it is not a mood-lifting film.

Finally, Stutterer ... Like Everything Will Be Okay, I feel that if I say very much about this movie, it will spoil it. It is about a typographer with a severe stutter, it's good, and I'm glad I saw it.

UPDATE: I've edited my comments on Shok and Stutterer to make them a bit more descriptive. I don't think I've spoiled anything.

It looks like these will be available on the various streaming services on February 23.

Common Ground: Longer Public Domain Works

Continuing my "Common Ground" project, the following are all in the public domain and can be downloaded for free. I've included links to the Wikipedia articles for these documents as a starting point for understanding their context, history, influence, etc. The articles generally offer a summary as well, though it's Wikipedia, so I can't guarantee they're good summaries. I've also linked the Wikipedia pages for the authors.

A Radical and yet Familiar Take on Consent

In his novel Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, Richard Bach argues that by staying in this world, we consent to everything that happens to us, no matter how horrible.

Although expanded to include everything in life, it is a similar argument to the one that, by staying within the territory of a nation, you consent to its government and everything that government does.

Some of the same back-and-forth from that thread would work very well here. When I argued against the claim of consent to government by pointing out there is no better place to go, or that it's quite expensive to move to another nation or might not be legally or physically possible, or that consent doesn't work that way with anything else, the reply was, essentially, "That's your problem."

The reply Bach might make to objections to his idea of consent is the same. If you haven't stepped in front of a fast-moving freight train or eaten a bullet, you have chosen to be here. You know what can happen in this world, you've read the news about cancer, hurricanes, rape, genocide, and all of the other evils that can befall people here, and you've chosen to stay and take those risks. Therefore, you have consented to whatever happens to you.

There is no whining in Mr. Bach's world.

Ouch

Harsh critique of the performances of Clinton and the debate moderator:

. . . it’s not surprising that several other follow-up probes were not attempted.

Probes such as, “Secretary Clinton, if you are the candidate who gets things done, how do you explain your failure to get ClintonCare into law in the 1990s and President Obama’s success in getting HIS plan through the political process? Did you learn anything from that?”

Or, “Secretary Clinton, don’t you really want to get to the same place that Senator Sanders wants to go, but you just can’t figure out how to do it? Or risk arguing for it full-strength before getting elected?”

After the opening flurry over whether we will get to single-payer full-strength, or on the installment plan, the debate moved over to more of Clinton’s comparative strengths on foreign policy experience (if not demonstrated success). And I appreciated the brief nap time.

A few style points along the way. Clinton worked hard to smile more, be less shrill, and stifle her inner school principal/prison matron. (“Must control fist” should have popped up periodically as a cartoon caption above her head). She usually succeeded at this. Sanders injected noticeably several bows toward African-American voters (looking beyond New Hampshire, toward future primary weaknesses), in comments about the death penalty and a couple of other issues.

The Clintonesque laundry list of government interventions everywhere came out at the very end of the debate (so much to do, so little of everyone else’s money to conscript and so little time for her one-way dialog/lecture to conduct….). One of the great howlers was Clinton’s expression of deep concern for the plight of small business. So different from Hillary, circa 1993. Remember this golden oldie: “I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America.”

I say sign this guy up as a moderator.

In Mother Russia, Disco Goes Clubbing on YOU

In fairness, I saw a very similar scene once in Charlotte, North Carolina. Except instead of 'refugees' harassing women, it was a pack of what are sometimes referred to as 'Yankees.' The most aggressive one got as far as lecturing a woman, "Listen, b****, I'm from the Bronx and..." before an impromptu citizens' committee formed to explain the error of their ways.

There weren't 51 of them, though. There were about five.

"Right to Repair"

Say you buy an appliance, it lasts through the warranty period, but then a little while afterward it breaks. Happens all the time, right? So you call the company you bought it from, and they say, "Of course we'll fix it! But since it's out of warranty, there will be a significant repair charge..." and then name a gigantic figure.

"Feh!" you say. "I'll just fix it myself." So you go to buy parts and... can't, because the manufacturer controls production of repair parts and will only sell to their licensed techs. So you go to a junkyard, find a suitably similar model, strip out the parts you need, and go to repair the appliance -- only to discover, after you've installed the replacement parts, that you can't reset the equipment to operate with the new parts without a password encoded into the electronics by the manufacturer. Will they give it to you? No, but you're still free to bring the appliance in to be serviced -- for the original extravagant quote.

That's what this article is about.

Failing this, I wonder if there would be a sufficient market for manufacturers of goods that didn't do these things. I like being able to fix my own cars, motorcycles, stoves, and things like that. Partially, I just like to maximize my independence as a human being. Increasingly, though, that means sticking to really old objects. My truck is twenty years old, but I can fix most things on it if they break. I can also modify it if I want it to work a little differently.

For a certain percentage of people, that's a major thing we really want from a product. If I buy it, I want to own it. I don't want to lease use of it, with an obligation to return to you for repairs and a prohibition against modifying it. I don't want to find out that it has some secret components in it designed to make sure the seller retains ownership over some core critical function. I want to own the things I buy.

These days, that mostly means buying old stuff that was made before the current craze at retaining hidden control over end-users. I wonder if there's enough demand that there would be a market for manufacturers to cater to us.

Oh, Really?

From tonight's debate, Mrs. Clinton: "If you’ve got something to say, say it directly. You will not find that I have ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation I have received."

That's funny, because I was just reading this article about weapons deals to countries that donated to you:

Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region's fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.

But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for Clinton personally....

Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure -- derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) -- represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The evidence strongly suggests that you traded access to American weapons for large cash donations. I'd be surprised if a little investigation didn't turn up very similar acts of corruption with donors here at home, too.

A Female Muslim Challenges President Obama

Shireen Qudosi did not appreciate the President's chosen symbolism.

Yesterday, at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, the audience for President Obama’s speech reflected an Islamist’s vision of today’s Muslim-American community. That setting, promoted by the media and the White House, was meant to teach the American people—and, certainly, the growing number of Muslims in America—what an authentic Muslim looks like. It was a collection of hijab-clad women and long-bearded, severe-faced men.

The choreographed scene didn’t represent American Muslim immigrants like me—reformers, humanists, and critical thinkers—who find no place in Islamist mosques in this country, and are shunned by similarly Islamist pressure groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

She takes a few paragraphs to note the connection of that particular mosque not only to the Muslim Brotherhood but to al Qaeda. Then, she challenges the President's conception of his agenda here:

Sabah Muktar, the bright young college student who introduced Obama, whom the president applauded for pursuing an education and acceptance in an American community, wouldn’t be seen as an equal within her own mosque nor be given space equal to those granted to men. There would be no opportunity for voicing herself or engaging in dialogue during Friday’s khutbah. The heartfelt speech Muktar gave in front of a diverse audience of men and women wouldn’t exist in that mosque outside the vacuum of a presidential visit. Her voice would never be heard.

Obama speaks of the “threats and harassment of Muslim-American [that] have surged,” but he doesn’t speak of the threats and harassment that come from within our own community that silence the debate within Islam that has been an organic part of the faith up until the last 50 years.

...

As Muslim-Americans, we don’t need our ego stroked; we need our egos challenged. Obama spoke of Muslim excellence and heroism in everyday life, but the greatest act of Muslim heroism today is to tackle a decrepit faith.

As I suggested below, though, the real agenda of the speech was completely unspoken. The President's remarks were aimed not at the congregation, but at the American people. But the real purpose of the visit was outreach to the Brotherhood itself. It was a foreign policy speech that never mentioned foreign policy.

Shireen Qudosi isn't on that agenda. She has no power to help quell the crises in the Middle East, which President Obama desperately wants to subside. He is looking for partners over there, and he's willing to sacrifice some things over here in order to get them. Qudosi and Muktar's interests are among those things.

The NRA Wins Again

This time in Maryland, where the "assault weapons ban" was ruled to be in violation of the 2nd Amendment.

UPDATE: HuffPo: "People Have a 'Fundamental Right' to Own Assault Weapons, Court Rules."

Clinton for Prison Update

Representative Chris Stewart says of the Clinton emails, "“They do reveal classified methods, they do reveal classified sources, and they do reveal human assets."

Problem Solved!

You know, it's embarrassing that only half of the illegal immigrants ordered to appear for hearings show up. What can we do to stop that from happening?

Undocumented immigrants are no longer given a "notice to appear" order, because they simply ignore them. Judd said that border agents jokingly refer to the NTAs as "notices to disappear."

He said the the new policy "makes mandatory the release, without an NTA, of any person arrested by the Border Patrol for being in the country illegally, as long as they do not have a previous felony arrest conviction and as long as they claim to have been continuously in the United States since January of 2014."

And you thought the Federal government never really solves the problems it takes on.

Sheriff Defends Oregon Occupation

Sheriff David Clarke has a radio show. He recently devoted it to laying out what he thinks is a rational case that the Oregon affair was justified and appropriate. In his opinion, the Federal government was not only overbearing, it was acting well beyond its mandate and in a way that suggests that no rational negotiation was possible. If you remain interested in the case, you can listen to the radio broadcast at the link.

Play Time's Over

Now you know women are in the combat arms for real.

Live long and shoot first

I saw an ad for a t-shirt the other day: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but a hollow point expands on impact."

"Return of Kings" Runs and Hides

Mysteriously, they felt they might not be safe in their gatherings designed to strip the protections against violence from others.

It Depends on What the Meaning of "Islam" Is...

Mr. Obama has elected to visit a mosque with Muslim Brotherhood and known terrorist connections, in order to explain to us -- while ostensibly speaking to the congregation -- that Muslims deserve more respect. It is indeed important to show proper respect to people, and we would be remiss not to notice that there are Muslim Americans who deserve our uttermost.

The problem is that he is quite selective in whom he is prepared to consider a Muslim. As this Power Line article points out, he seems to read the most troublesome actors out of the faith. His Secretary of State, John F. Kerry, has been going so far as to assert that such terrorists are "apostates," meaning that their behavior has actually thrust them outside of the faith from the perspective of the United States government.

On Twitter, Nasser Weddady, a popular online activist who grew up in Syria, mocked Kerry for his comment. Wedaddy and others also jokingly suggested that Kerry was a "takfiri," a word used to describe a Sunni Muslim who accuses others of apostasy.

I'm confused, I thought John Kerry is a roman catholic. Has he converted to Islam without telling us? https://t.co/Rhepido2gU

— weddady (@weddady) February 2, 2016

I wanna know how the US ended up with a takfiri Shaikh running the state department..

— weddady (@weddady) February 2, 2016

ISIS and al Qaeda in Iraq are takfiri, which is one of the things that most outraged the Sunni tribes over there. They did not much like being told that they weren't real Muslims. At least ISIS is headed by an actual Islamic cleric, rather than a jackass like John Kerry... well, OK, I suppose Baghdadi is both a real Islamic cleric and a jackass. To say that he's an apostate is to jump in where other Muslims fear to tread. The Fiqh Council of North America (another Muslim Brotherhood offshoot, although one that is exceedingly polite, no friend of ISIS, and with its own thoughts on Islam's place in America) holds that it is only God's business. This extends not only to groups like ISIS but to even to Christians or atheists.

Rejection of belief in God will surely have consequences in the afterlife. However, it is up to God to determine these consequences. Such future determination has no bearing on the respect of the humanity of every person in this life. After all, the human is a free agent, and as such each is individually responsible before God for his/her belief and moral choices. A person can be held accountable in this life only if such a moral choice infringes on the rights of individual or society such as the commission of crimes or acts of aggression. In other words, no human is entitled to dehumanize or punish another on the sole ground that the later is following a different religion or no religion at all. This value implies that peaceful co-existence among followers of all religions and respecting their humanity is not only possible, but also mandated in the Qur’an.

That sounds great, and it is my sincere hope that they really mean it. The Brotherhood has a history, though. It's not just how they acted following their ascension to power in Egypt after the Arab Spring. They were organizing for revolution before the outbreak of WWII. They fielded battalions during WWII on the Nazi side -- not that they were pro-Nazi so much as anti-British, resenting the British colonial period, but they did share some anti-Jewish opinions with the Germans. They switched to unconventional warfare tactics following Rommel's defeat. They assassinated the Prime Minister and attempted to kill members of the Royalist government after the war. They assisted Nasser in his successful coup. Ten minutes later, they started trying to overthrow Nasser. Every time somebody else is stronger, they talk about culture and sport and the nobility of morals; every time they get a shot at power, it's bombs and mob violence.

Nevertheless, the United States executive has a long and interesting relationship with the Brotherhood -- one dating to Eisenhower, but carried on by each successive President until George W. Bush broke it up after the 9/11 attacks. The selection of this particular mosque was not, as Investors Business Daily suggests, a failure of vetting. It was not, as Power Line suggests, willful blindness. It is a message, one of many this President has sent:



UPDATE: Friendly fire from the NYT.

UPDATE: More friendly fire, this time from a Muslim writer who urges his co-religionists to abandon the Muslim Brotherhood's project of 'restoring the caliphate' forever.

Conflict of Interest

Andrew McCarthy writes:

I believe some, if not all, of the communications between Obama and Clinton should be classified. To classify them now, however, would imply wrongdoing on both their parts since they knew they were communicating via private, unsecured e-mail. Essentially, Obama is invoking executive privilege because the effect of doing so — viz., non-disclosure of the e-mails — is the same as the effect of classifying them would be . . . but without the embarrassment that classifying them would entail.

Now we come to the rub: it's not just that the President is protecting his party's nominee. His own gross negligence in allowing her to get away with it might rise to the level of a crime.

An insurance story that isn't a disaster

Much as I despise my new HMO Obamacare policy, which I never, ever wanted, I have to admit they came through for me on cataract surgery this week, even though the surgeon, the facility, and the anesthesiologist were out of network: completely covered. I feel compelled in fairness to acknowledge this success. On the medical front, I dreaded yesterday's operation, but it turned out to be a complete piece of cake. By yesterday evening I already could see better in the new right eye than in the left, after relying almost exclusively on the left eye for some time now and sort of editing out input from the right. I have better distance vision without glasses in the new eye than I have with glasses in the left. I asked the doc to bias my new lens in favor of near vision; he believes that by this evening the swelling will abate and I'll be able to read without glasses, as I almost can already. Medical intervention is getting impressive in many ways.

Concealed Carry Saves a Deputy

Son has a moustache, too.

“I’m alive today because of him,” the deputy, 23-year-old Dylan Dorris said Wednesday, reflecting on the events surrounding a disturbance call outside a Bastrop County gas station Jan. 16. “There are no words to explain it. He’s such an outstanding citizen. He’s here for our country, our community and you really feel the love.”

Ideally, this is how it works.

What if the 2nd Were Repealed?

A thought experiment.

As a legislator and I am always interested in people’s opinions. This is a thought experiment; a hypothetical. There are no right or wrong answers.

* What would you do if all of the requirements of Article V of the Constitution were met and the Second Amendment was repealed?
* What would you do if the Second Amendment was effectively repealed by a US Supreme Court ruling that the right to bear arms does apply to an individual, but only individuals in a militia?
* If the defense of the Second Amendment rests in reference to the Constitution as it stands now, what argument would you use if the Constitution was changed to no longer protect the individual right to bear arms?
* As a law abiding gun owner, would you give up your guns?
* What do you think would happen to violent crime rates, accidental shootings and suicides?
* Would you follow the new law of the land that was legitimately established, just as laws allowing the possession of a firearm have been legitimately established?

I care about the opinions of citizens of America; I would like thoughtful comments in the comment section about what law abiding gun owners would do if the Second Amendment were repealed or if the SCOTUS issued a new ruling reversing the Constitutionality of the individual right to bear arms.

You can read the answers at the link, but it might be better to give your own in the comments.

Wanted: Independent Prosecutor

The current Secretary of State also sent SECRET information over an unclassified account... to the former Secretary of State.

Somebody's got to clean this mess up, and it can't be someone who reports to any administration. The current administration won't do it, and an opposition administration would be accused of partisan punishment. We need an independent prosecutor dedicated to cleaning house.

Failing that, you know, there's good odds you're putting it in front of Ted Cruz next spring. So maybe if you're the administration you'd like an independent prosecutor, all things considered.

24 March is Sine Day

All right, boys, we just have to get from now until then: the Georgia Legislature's both houses have set the 'without a day' adjournment that marks the end of the 40 day term. Keep watch on them until that day, and we'll be free for a year.

Medical marijuana still seems to have a good chance of being passed in some form this year. Casinos, not so much, but they're still alive.

There's a semi-new gun bill, too: campus carry is back for another try. Georgia's universities are pretty set against it, though, and it'll have a tough fight getting through the Leg in the teeth of opposition from the administrations and police departments of all our major colleges. They can't stop a school shooting in a "gun free zone," but those are statistically rare. From day to day, they want the right to run you off campus (or into jail) if they catch you with a gun.

Chris Kyle Day

This is the second annual Chris Kyle Day in Texas, honoring the 'American Sniper' for his courage on the battlefield and his work with injured veterans back home. I don't do a lot of annual memorial posts -- really just one on 9/11, as a rule -- but I missed it last year when the Texas governor first made it real. It's a good idea, and a worthy addition to the calendar.

From "Avilion," by Sallie Bridges

Written in 1864, this poem pictures a visit to the island of Avalon, given in an alternative spelling, to visit Arthur and -- surprisingly -- Guinevere. I don't know enough about the author, one Sallie Bridges, to do her justice. She wrote a lot of Arthurian poetry, and was apparently inspired by Tennyson. Here is an excerpt describing what she thought it might be like to approach the island:

I turn'd towards the glories of the sky.
The slanting rays shot up the azure arch
In silver streaks that waned in motes away,
Tinging the fleecy clouds with rainbow hues;
We sail'd on golden ripples, whose light foam
Died on th' horizon's verge, where, half in heaven,
A purple island hung with rosy shores;
While stretching off on either side there shone
White lustrous mountains edged with peaks of fire.
We came anear at last. Delicious airs
Play'd o'er my brow, that brought a faint, rare sound
Of distant harmony; while through my limbs
New vigor ran, that sent the dancing blood
Tingling in languid veins, as each heart-throb
More quick and eager with expectance grew.
In buoyant feelings I had long forgot,
My youth and hope came back to me once more;
And, like the slow uprising of a mist,
There roll'd away the darkness that was laid
Between my mind and things I strove to solve;
Deep, secret meanings dawn'd upon my brain,
That had been dull'd with dust, but in this clime
Saw clear the hidden truth. Sorrow and pain,
That woke such wild, blind prayers, look'd only now
As ministers to purify desire;
And e'en the earth's great riddle that we beat
Rebellious will 'gainst, -- ah! I may not show
What grand significance e'en evil took!

I'm All For Learning Experiences

A pro-rape activist -- no, really -- is organizing events in 43 countries.

Valizadeh argued on his blog last year that rape should be legal on private property.

“By attempting to teach men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions,” he wrote at the time. “I thought about this problem and am sure I have the solution: make rape legal if done on private property.”

“I propose that we make the violent taking of a woman not punishable by law when done off public grounds,” Valizadeh said.

I don't agree, but I do have a modest counter-offer. How about if we make it legal to beat people who advocate for legalized rape, provided that it's done on private property? I think it could be a real learning experience that would teach an important lesson about the underlying principle at work in anti-rape laws. I suspect they would discover a new appreciation for that principle from the experience, one that could settle this debate once and for all.

Coin-Toss in Iowa

Apparently an important part of the process of apportioning delegates. Clinton won a... surprising number of them.

I guess tossing a coin, if it is an honest coin, is as good a way of picking a President as anything. We just need a more random process for determining among whom the coin is choosing to go with it.

UPDATE: C-SPAN reports Clinton fraud in Polk County (which, by the way, is a huge county).

Russian Propaganda Says Hillary Clinton Emails to be Used in Court Trial

Putin's government gets to use the weekend's news both to rub her face in the security lapse, and to advance its own agenda against Ukrainian forces. Here's the intro:

A very intriguing Federal Security Services (FSB) report prepared for The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation (SLEDKOM) relating to the trial of Ukrainian “spy/terrorist” Nadiya (Nadezhda) Savchenko states that “beyond top secret” emails obtained from a “private computer storage device” belonging to former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “should/must” be allowed into the sentencing phase of this case due not only to their “critical relevance”, but, also, because the “apprehension” of them falls outside the purview of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR).

Naturally you should understand that this is all a pack of lies. There's no reason to believe the emails in question had anything to do with Ukraine, nor that legitimate copies of Clinton's emails will be used in a Russian court. The statement comes only a day or two after the State Department admitted to the existence of these emails. While it is likely that Russian intelligence obtained them, this story is just Putin's propaganda people using the story for advancing the ball.

On the other hand, the 22 emails are 'too damaging to release, even redacted.' So Russia's free to say whatever they want, and to generate any "emails" it wants, and enter them into the court record without fear of contradiction. We might get a denial from Clinton that the emails are genuine, but what's a Clinton denial worth even in America?

It's a very neat trick. Any Russians wondering if the story is true will find ample confirmation that these SAP emails existed in the international press, and that State has refused to release them because they are so damaging. They will find US officials confirming that it is virtually certain that Russian intelligence obtained these emails. Why not believe the story, given all that?

UPDATE: This story, on the other hand, might really be true -- and if so, prison is too good for her.

Feature/Bug

I doubt the survey, but it would be funny if true: Large percentages of federal workers claim they would leave their jobs if Trump were elected. He ought to make a campaign spot out of it.

From Your Lips to God's Ears, Senator!

Elizabeth Warren: "The next president can honor the simple notion that nobody is above the law, but it will happen only if voters demand it."

A Patriot's Take on Oregon

I've posted this guy's videos before: if Arab immigrants were all like him, we couldn't have too many. We might not even be able to have enough. Some of the language is strong, but only a bit.

Ah, the United Nations

In the comments to Tom's post, I was offering super-national organizations as a counterexample on issues of governance. They worked in that one case, but that's not to be misread as a general endorsement by me of them. They are potentially a serious affront to sovereignty, and they can become badly misguided.

For example, just this week the United Nations has had one of its working groups declare that the United States should pay reparations to black Americans, and also 'affirmed abortion as a human right.'

Now, in the past I've defended the plausibility of reparations, but conditioned on the ideal of compensation as settling the matter once and for all. That's not where the working group was headed. They want "reparatory justice" to be accompanied by "monuments and memorials" to make sure, I suppose, that future generations never forget the offense. The whole concept of a weregeld is that the blood money should settle the blood feud. You don't keep bringing it up. It's settled.

As for abortion being a "human right," what about the human's rights whom you are killing? I can accept the necessity of abortion in cases where the mother's life will be lost as well as the child's due to complications in the pregnancy. In that case, though, we're not talking about the exercise of a right but the performance of something akin to a duty. It shouldn't be a choice for which someone should feel guilty, but rather a tragic but necessary action taken to save life.

Internationalism has its place in dispute resolution, but the nice thing about it is that they aren't capable of forcing you to comply. They can make suggestions, but they are just suggestions unless you consent as a nation to be bound.

Why Real-World Democracies Don't Have the Consent of the Governed

Ilya Somin has an interesting article which argues that "the authority of actually existing democratic governments is not based on any meaningful consent. In a genuinely consensual political regime , 'no' means 'no.' But actual governments generally treat 'no' as just another form of 'yes'".

He contrasts our common idea of consensual, e.g., I order something from Amazon and Amazon sends it to me, with the government. One example he uses is that I may vote against a particular law, or a politician who promises to impose that law, and yet if more people vote the other way, the law will be imposed upon me against my will, the exact opposite of what we mean by "consent" in other matters.

He points out that we have no reasonable way to opt out of government control. Moving to another country simply doesn't solve the problem.

Additionally, he points out, the government has no enforceable duty to us. The USSC has repeatedly ruled that the police have no duty to protect you; if they ignore your 911 call and you die because of that, too bad.

So, in short, this is rather like Amazon simply deciding to charge you for things, never sending them, and you having no recourse. If it were not government, backed by overwhelming force, we would never stand for it.

He covers a number of other reasons why current democratic governments are non-consensual and then moves on to why that is important.

... the nonconsensual nature of most government power does not prove that government is necessarily illegitimate, or that democracy has no benefits. Government power might often be justified on consequential grounds, such as its ability to increase social welfare, provide public goods, or curb injustice. ... And democracy still has a variety of advantages over dictatorship or oligarchy. Among other things, those types of regimes are usually even less consensual than democracy is.

But the lack of consent does undercut arguments that we have a duty to obey the government because we have somehow agreed to it or because it represents the “will of the people.” When the government makes unjust laws, it cannot so readily claim we have an automatic duty to obey them, regardless of their content.

Moreover, if government power must be legitimized by its consequences rather than by its supposedly consensual origins, that strengthens the case for imposing tight limits on the state in areas where the consequences are negative, or even ambiguous. ...

And this is pretty much where he leaves it. I wish he would have explored what a consensual government would look like, or even if such a thing is possible. One of his sources, Georgetown Professsor Jason Brennan, argues that it is not.

Brennan, according to his bio, is currently writing two books with the titles Against Democracy and Global Justice as Global Freedom. I can guess where he goes already.

So what about consent and the justification for democracy? What about those consequential justifications? What about the idea of the "social compact / contract" for those who were born into the system and had no say in writing that compact or contract?

Somin is a libertarian, and I also think that's where this leads us: All government is violence: vote for less.

But. I also question the idea of consent as applied only to particulars. Instead of this particular law or that particular tax, consent could be to the system. In this case, democracy looks more like a team sport. I don't consent to the other team scoring a goal -- in fact I do my best to make sure they don't. But I do consent to play the game and abide by the rules and the referees' calls.

That is weak, though. In a sport, if I decide I no longer want to play or abide by the rules, I can quit and do something else with my time. Not so with government. This is a sport we are forced to play. Again, I think the coercive nature of the relationship argues for the minimum government necessary. The less the government impacts my life, the more I can live it in consensual relationships outside of government control. It isn't perfect, but it seems a lot better than the alternatives.

Woah.

Carly Fiorina rings some bells on why Mrs. Clinton cannot be President.

An Interview With the Woman in Charge of the T-TIP

Do you have concerns about the damage to national sovereignty from the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership? Have you noticed the intense popular opposition to it, and how it steamrollers on without taking much notice? A reporter from the United Kingdom's Independent got a word with the boss, who explains.

When put to her, Malmström acknowledged that a trade deal has never inspired such passionate and widespread opposition. Yet when I asked the trade commissioner how she could continue her persistent promotion of the deal in the face of such massive public opposition, her response came back icy cold: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

So who does Cecilia Malmström take her mandate from? Officially, EU commissioners are supposed to follow the elected governments of Europe. Yet the European Commission is carrying on the TTIP negotiations behind closed doors without the proper involvement European governments, let alone MPs or members of the public. British civil servants have admitted to us that they have been kept in the dark throughout the TTIP talks, and that this makes their job impossible.

The T-TIP's mirror image is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which is also being negotiated in secrecy. Congress wasn't allowed to look at the text except in a secured room from which they were not allowed to take notes, and they were sworn not to talk about what they saw. When the Obama administration was asked about opposition, they had the audacity to say that their opponents couldn't name anything specifically wrong with it. Well, indeed they could not: they were forbidden by law.

Both of these treaties need to be shot down or, failing that, abrogated immediately by the first better administration we get.

Babylonian integral calculus?

This article claims the Babylonians knew that the area under a curve showing velocity as a function of time equaled the distance traveled.

When we're not watching

Sheriff's office's got moves.

Common Ground: What about Daily News?

Where do the folks at the Hall get their daily news?

For me, I tend to go to aggregators first:

Real Clear Politics (and its associated sites) does a great job, I think. I particularly like that they'll put opposing articles on top of each other. E.g., from today's RCP:

Clinton Harmed Our Country & Helped Our Adversaries - John Schindler, NY Observer
Hillary Clinton Is the Change America Needs - John Stoehr, The Week

The Drudge Report

Then, I like to follow USA Today, because I like to think it's what the average American who is not totally consumed by politics would see every day instead of all the stuff I read.

I'm afraid I only read a few blogs on a daily or near daily basis. In addition to the Hall:

Instapundit
Ace of Spades

There are a couple of conservative / conservativish sites I check daily:

The Federalist -- One of my favorite places, these days.
PJ Media

I have to confess that I think I should be reading a broader range of stuff. For example, I do little to keep up with what Progressives are saying, or defense news, or international news sources.

So what do you read on a regular basis?

Common Ground: Short Reads

There's a good list of sources which have influenced various members of the Hall at the Common Ground: Sources post. Here, I thought it might be useful to link the shorter ones that could be read relatively quickly. The longest is "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a novella that might take a couple of sittings. I have included links to the Wikipedia articles on these documents as a starting point for understanding their context, history, etc.

Feel free to add more short sources in the comments, or to give related sources and links (e.g., websites or books that explain or interpret these sources).

The Magna Carta (This is the National Archives page on the document. Here is the text.) (Wikipedia article)

The Declaration of Arbroath (This is the National Archives of Scotland page on it. They offer a PDF with the original Latin and translation in English.) (Wikipedia article)

The Declaration of Independence (Wikipedia article)

The Constitution and Bill of Rights (Wikipedia article)

NB: The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights pages are part of the National Archives's Charters of Freedom website, which has a number of pages which explore the history and impact of these documents.

"Harrison Bergeron", Kurt Vonnegut's short story about the push for complete equality (or, depending on your interpretation, his sarcastic attack on those worried about the push for complete equality) (Wikipedia article)

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella about life in the Soviet gulags (Wikipedia article)

OK, So Maybe This "Shariah" Thing Has Gone Too Far

The Parliament of the United Kingdom may be forced -- in a country they allegedly rule, without 'branches of government' or 'separation of powers' -- to forgo having a bar in their building because it is governed by shariah law.

In June 2014 George Osborne announced that Britain was launching the first Islamic bond scheme in the non-Muslim world. Three Government buildings in Whitehall were transferred to Islamic bonds, switching the ownership from British taxpayers to wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks. The issue of bonds raised £200million and was the first carried out by a Western country and Osborne said it would turn the UK into 'the western hub of Islamic finance' and the 'undisputed centre of the global financial system.'

But critics say the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain's financial and legal systems by imposing Sharia law onto government premises. The bonds – known as Sukuk – are only available for purchase by Islamic investors. The money raised will be repayable from 2019.

But instead of interest, bond-buyers will earn rental income from the three Government offices as interest payments are banned in Sharia law. The Treasury agreed to make the sukuk fully compliant with Sharia law to ensure investors were not put off investing in the scheme, meaning each of the buildings used to finance the products must meet the terms of Sharia law, including the ban on alcohol.

How does a Western government agree to a scheme in which only Muslims can buy bonds? Is there a similar scheme for Anglicans?

Parliament is a thirsty bunch, by the way -- check the sidebar on how much liquid their house bar moves every year.

State Department Cuts Sling Load

I'm sure you all saw the story that State won't be releasing some of Clinton's emails, even redacted, because no amount of redaction would make it safe to release the information. That's a big, bad-sounding story, but it's not the worst story for her today.

The worst story for her today is that the State Department itself declared 22 of her email threads to be Top Secret.

The reason it's much worse is that the determination that her emails couldn't be released redacted came from the intelligence community, and the IC has already given a sworn statement to its Inspector General that her emails contained Top Secret and Special Access Program information. Until today, though, State has held that there was no genuinely Top Secret information included. State's position has been that the IC was overclassifying the information it found in her emails, and that the worst she was guilty of exposing was Secret information.

The Clinton camp could thus claim that this was all a bureaucratic, interagency dispute. One determination is just as valid as another! The IC must be pursuing a vendetta against her, some vast-right-wing-conspiracy type of thing.

John Kerry is Secretary of State. There is no right wing conspiracy vast enough to include him. If his office is saying she passed Top Secret information in the clear, then she can't attribute the charge to partisanship.

Furthermore, this eliminates the dispute between the IC and State on whether or not she insisted on a system in which Top Secret information was passed on an unsecure server. The Federal government now has a unified position: she did.

Now the only question that matters is what they are going to do about it.

From Jonah Goldberg's newsletter:

Speaking of Sanders, some wag on Twitter noted that the best thing about the run on the grocery stores in blizzard-besieged D.C. is that it gave the Beltway crowd a sense of what it will be like under a Sanders administration. I don’t want to live under a socialist president, but a silver lining would be seeing all those MSNBC hosts waiting in line for toilet paper.

Against Multiple Regression Analyses

I mean, really against them.

A huge range of science projects are done with multiple regression analysis. The results are often somewhere between meaningless and quite damaging.... I hope that in the future, if I’m successful in communicating with people about this, there’ll be a kind of upfront warning in New York Times articles: These data are based on multiple regression analysis. This would be a sign that you probably shouldn’t read the article because you’re quite likely to get non-information or misinformation.

Journalism is hard hit, but -- as the article shows -- the biggest damage is to psychology.

Now You're Talking

A house done right: a photo essay.

A Comprehensive Answer to which Elite College is Best

You've probably heard alumni of Harvard and Yale sneering at each other, while wondering whether either of them really know as much as they think they do. A better question may be whether they know the right things. Thanks to the Open Syllabus project, we can now say which of these universities offers the best education. The answer is: the University of Chicago, with the University of Pennsylvania in second place.

I make this judgment based on the most-read books in their courses; obviously it doesn't measure how well the books are taught. Still, in any university much depends on the student. The University of Chicago list is short on Plato and Homer, but is overall the strongest list. The Princeton list, by contrast, contains only three books of lasting value: Thucydides, Schumpeter, and Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy. (I suppose some people would argue for Weber.) Harvard's list is likewise mostly fashionable noise, although it has a few highlights: Dr. King's letter, Machiavelli, and Rawls (though reading Rawls without Aristotle is like making a stew out of a rich marrow bone, and then just eating the bone).

Yale's list has both works of Homer's, which is good, and I thought Ralph Ellison's book was very insightful (but of interest probably chiefly to Americans). They also read Tocqueville (also especially of interest to Americans). Amazingly, you have to go all the way down the list to Columbia to get Kant; but it is to their credit that the work you then encounter is the later Metaphysics of Morals, and not the earlier and more-often read Groundwork. The latter is much more famous because it is where he lays out the overarching moral theory, including three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. But the later work offers a much richer picture of his actual moral vision. He anticipated JS Mill's harm principle, although he isn't usually credited for doing so, in his division between cases where state coercion is acceptable, and cases that are moral questions but matters for individual virtue. And it is only in the late work that you learn how completely he believed his Groundwork concepts would recreate Christian morality from the ground of pure practical reason.

The University of Chicago, however, gives first place to Aristotle -- the top two places are for Aristotle's Ethics, most likely always the Nicomachean Ethics but possibly occasionally the less-read Eudemian Ethics. They also read Kant's late work, St. Augustine, and both famous works of Machiavelli. (His Art of War is of no interest except for students of period warfare, as he has largely dramatized Vegetius with very few updates, none of which turn out to be of universal or lasting value).

The University of Pennsylvania is not as philosophically strong, but does include several excellent dramatic approaches to understanding life. Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Sophocles, and Benjamin Franklin join Plato there, not rising to inclusion on the most read lists anywhere else. It's a good list, and marks a different approach but a valid one.

NOVA and Virginia

Governor McAuliffe surrendered on his repeal of handgun carry reciprocity between Virginia and many other states. Republicans in the state apparently agreed, in return, to prevent people subject to "permanent" protective orders for domestic violence from carrying guns for the two years during which the order is valid. (Yes, two years is "permanent" in Virginia.) That seems like a very worthy trade to me, as so-called 'permanent' orders involve a real court hearing in which both sides are allowed to present their side -- they're not issued just for the asking, or on one person's unchallenged testimony. Violence against women over domestic issues remains a serious matter. Two years is probably long enough in most cases for the tortured romantic feelings to pass away, after which it's not an issue on the same scale.

So, well done. And a compromise of a sort, which should make Cassandra feel good about her southern neighbors.

A Good Point

John R. Schindler in the Observer:

All this angers Americans with experience in our military and intelligence services who understand what Ms. Clinton and her staff did—and that they would be held to far harsher standards for attempting anything similar. They know that brave Americans have given their lives protecting Top Secret Codeword information. They know that in every American embassy around the world, our diplomatic outposts that worked for Hillary Clinton, Marine guards have standing orders to fight to the death to protect the classified information that’s inside those embassies.

He goes on to say that she needs to explain herself if she expects to be Commander in Chief. I would say that no explanation for this behavior could possibly be sufficient to permit her to assume that office.

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.