Angelo Codevilla on the Republic

Dr. Codevilla is one of the more insightful writers on the problems facing us today. I remember his first prominent article on these problems well, and wish it had been better heeded at the time.

Now he warns that we are already past the Republic. This is the unrecognized Empire.

Civics classes used to teach: “Congress makes the laws, the president carries them out, judges decide controversies, and we citizens may be penalized only by a jury of our peers.”

Nobody believes that anymore, because no part of it has been true for a long time. Barack Obama stopped pretending that it is. During the twentieth century’s second half, both parties and all branches of government made a mockery of the Constitution of 1789. Today’s effective constitution is: “The president can do whatever he wants so long as one-third of the Senate will sustain his vetoes and prevent his conviction upon impeachment.”

Obama has been our first emperor.

It's worth revisiting what he had to say in 2010, and comparing it with what he warns of today. Describing the environment that produced the TEA Party as a clash between the pro-American, pro-Christian "country class" and the "ruling class," he warned that what he called the "country class" was not well-positioned for politics.

Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.... Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side....

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats' mirror image.

Six years on, the ruling class rules the Republican party as well.

America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

This class's fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate.

What is interesting to me is that the voters have given the Republicans control of the elected branches throughout: in the vast majority of statehouses, in both houses of Congress, in governors' mansions, in every electable branch the Republican party predominates. Now, having raised them to the pinnacle of democratically-attainable power, the waves of voters are poised to seize the Presidency -- but not for a figure from the ruling class.

Codevilla's piece slams Trump from start to finish, and calls for a return to small-r republicanism and an end to the cycle of revenge against our cultural enemies. I've been calling for the same thing since 2004, without it being highly persuasive to anyone yet. Let us have the Tenth Amendment, and allow the states to diverge on moral and cultural matters. Let us strip the Supreme Court of its extraordinary power, and the Executive of its power to legislate through the bureaucracy.

Return to the Constitution, or dissolve the Union. Living under an Empire operating under the pretense of democratic legitimacy ought to terrify anyone who understands what that would mean. The cycle of cultural violence can only grow worse if we do not find a way to return to our Constitutional principles, and yet remain bound tightly to those who hate and despise us, who scorn and resent us. Power can only protect you for so long.

Super Tuesday

Very short ballot in Georgia today: one question.

I voted in the Democratic primary against Hillary Clinton. I will vote against her again, should she survive to the general. I take this to be the last, most important duty I can perform in this deeply disappointing election cycle: to vote against her every chance I get, and thus for whomever may be running against her. At least this time her opponent is an honest man, whatever you think of his honest opinions.

We shall see what profit, if any, comes of it all. Today is a ZeroHedge kind of day, in a ZeroHedge season, in a ZeroHedge cycle.

UPDATE: With 0.1% of precincts reporting, the media has already called the state for Clinton. She may well win, but that seems wildly premature.

"The Mandrake" (with Changes)

So a couple weeks ago I mentioned that the University of Georgia was doing a highly unusual take on Machiavelli's "The Mandrake":

This being 2016 in America, the opera will not be performed with the original music.

“We’ve made them rap songs with lots of stomps and percussion type beats,” Marotta said.

And this being 2016 on an American college campus, the opera will be cast in order to make a point about gender.

In order to change up the stereotypes and force the audience to ask deeper questions about power play and gender roles, all of the male roles will be played by women and all the women roles are to be played by puppets.

Out of curiosity, I went to see the UGA production yesterday afternoon. I have the following to report:

1) I am forced to conclude that the claim that their intention in selecting an all-female cast was to "force the audience to ask deeper questions about power play and gender roles" was a lie to protect the play from university censorship. The play was 90 minutes of intensely raunchy, bawdy humor. They stole the 'ongoing urination' joke from Austin Powers. They had a scene with disguises in which a priest was carrying walnuts in his mouth 'to disguise his voice,' which they turned into a three-minute long routine about one of the characters desiring 'nuts in my mouth' ("I have some," replied another character, "but they're a little bit salty").

My sense is that you couldn't have run the same play with the same jokes with a male/female cast on the contemporary university campus. Run the same jokes with an all-female cast, under the banner of 'forcing the audience' to do difficult conceptual work, and no censors even cast their eyes in its direction.

2) The "rap" music was a bad idea. Possibly this was because the cast, in addition to being all-female, was all-white-female. In addition to not being very good at writing hip-hop music, their voices lacked the strength and range to be intelligible over the stomping and clapping. Neither I nor my wife could actually understand anything they were saying during these routines.

3) It turns out that Machiavelli gave by far the strongest lines in the whole play to the young wife. The only time in the entire play that anyone stands up for what is right and invokes morality without any shade of self-interest is her monologue. It comes right after she submits to her (bribed) priest's advice that she go along with the plan. In the monologue, she says that she hopes that if his advice (which includes adultery that will lead to the death of an innocent) is coming from any sort of admixture of self-interest or faithlessness, then that she calls on all the demons of Hell to make sure that his soul is planted right beside hers so that she can watch him suffer for all eternity. It's really powerful stuff.

Because of their casting decisions, this speech -- the moral heart of the story -- was delivered by a one-and-a-half-foot tall puppet.

4) There were the expected number of jokes at the expense of Catholics and Republicans written into the play. FOX News and Donald Trump came in for special mention. The priest was supposedly bisexual and dissolute as well as corrupt. Just as you couldn't have run this play with a male/female cast without drawing university censorship, you couldn't have run the same jokes pointed at Islamic clergy without drawing down a university ban. Aimed at Catholic and conservative American targets, though, these jokes are perfectly safe.

5) Two jokes were aimed at the fear of giving offense in sexual matters on the university campus. These were both funny and well-received by the audience. The first involved the question of whether a meeting was properly described as a rendezvous -- no, said one character, 'because that sounds sexual, and you didn't obtain our consent!' The other was delivered when a character, disguised as a pirate, was singing a song that went, 'We say yo-ho-ho, but we don't say 'ho,' because that would be disrespect-ful.'

In spite of everything, it wasn't the worst 90 minutes of my life. I doubt I would take the opportunity to go see it again, but the actresses were clearly enjoying themselves so it was at least somewhat fun to watch. They played to and with the audience -- if you were in the front row of any of the seats, and they had seats on three sides of the stage, you would likely be involved in the play at some point. The performance was packed, too, at the Sunday afternoon matinee that was also its final performance. Clearly they had crafted something that was very popular for their intended audience.

Mad Max? Really?

It was a little startling to hear that Mad Max swept the B-level Academy Awards last night.  Much as I love the series, the last episode was kind of dumb and forgettable.  Well, at least no one was nuts enough to hand it any awards for things like directing, screenplay, or acting, and it's fair enough to say that its costumes and make-up and so on were well crafted.  (But sound editing?  Seriously?  Do they throw darts for that award, simply treat it as a consolation prize, or are there judges who genuinely pay attention to the technical aspects of sound editing?)

On the other hand I have to admit it's the only movie on the entire Oscars roster I've actually seen, so it's not as though I had my finger on the pulse.

Some Suggestions for "Common Ground"

An academic writes that his students -- he has taught at elite universities like Princeton and Georgetown, but currently at Notre Dame -- are "know-nothings." The questions they can't answer are good starts for us.

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their minds are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten it origins and aims, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference about itself....

[A]sk them some basic questions about the civilization they will be inheriting, and be prepared for averted eyes and somewhat panicked looks. Who fought in the Peloponnesian war? What was at stake at the Battle of Salamis? Who taught Plato, and whom did Plato teach? How did Socrates die? Raise your hand if you have read both the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Canterbury Tales? Paradise Lost? The Inferno?

Who was Saul of Tarsus? What were the 95 theses, who wrote them, and what was their effect? Why does the Magna Carta matter? How and where did Thomas Becket die? What happened to Charles I? Who was Guy Fawkes, and why is there a day named after him? What happened at Yorktown in 1781? What did Lincoln say in his Second Inaugural? His first Inaugural? How about his third Inaugural? Who can tell me one or two of the arguments that are made in Federalist 10? Who has read Federalist 10? What are the Federalist Papers?

I have to admit that I've never read Paradise Lost. Nor, ah, Lincoln's third inaugural. His second one is really good, though!

How to Engineer a Famine

AEI charted the biggest recent famines.  To get really big numbers, you almost have to institute socialism, but less severe famines can be achieved by bad luck with war or weather, or simply a floundering or chaotic social or political system.  China was hit over and over in its pre-socialist days, then had the one disastrous episode in 1958-1962, after which it's largely kept the problem at bay.  The area of Africa that encompasses the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia are obviously nowhere you'd want to be.

Sometimes I Wish I Lived in an Airstream

A Quick Update on the Common Ground Series

For the last two weeks I have been swamped with work and have not had time to add to the Common Ground series. However, I did update the Books Under Copyright post with suggestions from Grim and Ymar, so that should be good now.

Two more planned posts in the series will cover Daily News and War, and that should catch us up with past discussions.

After I finish covering sources of information and ideas, I would like to begin discussing what we believe are the common problems our nation faces. After that, naturally, I would like to start discussing possible solutions, and finally, how those solutions could be achieved.

That said, I don't foresee having a lot of time to post for the next couple of weeks. Feel free to add sources or discuss any of this in the comments. I'll look back at them when I'm writing future posts, and I plan to try to keep the sources posts updated with new material.

Yeah, That's Not Working Out

In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, the Republican National Committee issued a postmortem that recommended, among other things, a change of tone, “especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters.” That evangelical dentist in South Carolina has become a political liability — unless, of course, he’s willing to keep his mouth shut in public.

The plan was straightforward: turn socially conservative Christians into the African Americans of the Republican Party, a bloc of voters with no place else to go but who can be managed and kept at a distance from the party’s new brand.

You might want to reconsider that strategy, if there's still time.

It must seem unfair to Republican grandees. In spite of her campaign slapping Black Lives Matter advocates around, Clinton apparently is pulling a bigger share of the black vote than Obama (although among a much less enthusiastic Democratic primary electorate). Why can't their unwanted-but-needed base voters be as loyal to the party elite?

Life just isn't fair, I guess.

Primaries

I'm gearing up to run the primary elections here in my precinct, and realized in talking to a brand-new volunteer that I don't at all understand the relationship between the Texas popular vote and the caucuses that are held as soon as the polls close.  Nor did I understand whether Texas was a winner-take-all or a proportional state.  It turns out there was good reason for my confusion:  in an apparent attempt to wire around the Republican National Committee's rules for holding a winner-take-all primary before March 14, the Texas Republican Party put together a complicated mechanism, since modified by an RNC ruling, that . . . does something I can't quite figure out.  Apparently it's mostly proportional by state district popular vote, but some at-large delegates are proportional by statewide popular vote, and there's some kind of mechanism for allocating the delegates that would have gone to anyone who was under 20% of the popular vote, but there's also some kind of special rule depending on whether the top candidate won a majority or only a plurality.  I give up.  Here's a link.  It's Byzantine.

Security

Kuwait: Thank You, America

Via Bob on the FOB.

Don't Ask About Benghazi

Former Marine thrown out of Bill Clinton rally by security as crowd jeers, screams over him.

“To me the story is the crowd,” Fox & Friends host and Army National Guard veteran Pete Hegseth said Saturday. “This guy stands up (and) said ‘I’m a Marine. I’ve done two tours in Iraq’ — You go to a Republican rally, tell it like it is, the crowd erupts in applause for the Marine and says ‘thank you for your service this is fantastic,’ instead silence, crickets (at the Clinton rally).”

“It shows you we’ve got two very different electorates that look very differently towards that service.”

That story was told in the first Democratic debate, when the crowd (and the audience at home) treated a Navy Cross and Silver Star awardee as if he was "creepy" when he made reference to his service at war in the Marines.

UPDATE: Don't ask about BLM, either. In fact, don't even passively display signs that mention it.

Meagan Mwanda and Ashona Husbands never wanted to hold the Hillary Clinton sign in the first place.

Early Friday, the two Georgia State University freshmen walked to Atlanta’s City Hall to hear the Democratic presidential candidate. Last week, they attended a rally by Bernie Sanders at Morehouse College. They wanted a chance to size up Clinton on Friday but say they didn’t get it.

Mwanda and Husbands claim they were kicked out of the rally for writing “Black Lives Matter” on the back of a Clinton sign.

“Why are these three words such a threat to her and her campaign?” Mwanda said.

But I thought Hillary Clinton was inevitable because of her African-American Southern firewall?

We Have the Right People

General James "Mad Dog" Mattis writes on the clarifying effect of combat service.

For the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars—poorly explained and inconclusive wars, the first major wars since our Revolution fought without a draft forcing some men into the ranks—the question of what our service meant may loom large in your minds. You without doubt have put something into the nation’s moral bank.

Rest assured that by your service, you sent a necessary message to the world and especially to those maniacs who thought by hurting us that they could scare us.

No granite monuments, regardless of how grandly built, can take the place of your raw example of courage, when in your youth you answered your country’s call.

We need to do a better job of recruiting these veterans into our politics.

Happy Birthday, Johnny Cash

Apparently he was born on February 26th in 1932. Just two days ago was the anniversary of his singing this song live at San Quentin in 1969. I love most of what Cash did, but this one is my favorite.

What Effect Does Native Tongue Have on Musical Enjoyment?

Before you read the article, decide what you think is most likely. Then let's talk about the results.

CDC, FBI: Bicycles are More Deadly than "Mass Shootings"

Well, that's unexpectedly honest.

[W]hile there were 418 deaths in “mass shootings” from 2000 to 2013, there were 800 deaths by bicycle in 2010 alone.

Moreover, there “were an estimated 515,000 emergency department visits” due to bicycle accidents.

And CDC death statistics for 2010 show there were 26,009 deaths from “falling” for that year alone. That’s right–26,009 deaths in one year from falls from ladders, counters, roofs, mountains, etc.

There were an average of 29.8 deaths a year for 14 years from “mass shootings.”

Round that up to 30, and the US population down to 300,000,000. That makes the math very easy.

It's Not Just Conservatives Getting Banned on Twitter

It's Democrats who object to Hillary, too. And, er, hashtags that oppose her.

In a truly egregious move yesterday, Twitter suspended the account responsible for #WhichHillary, activists @GuerrillaDems. Twitter also removed #WhichHillary from trending status — odd, considering the hashtag received more than 450,000 tweets in less than 24 hours.

Obviously the hashtags were guilty of offensive conduct.

Friday Advertisement

Apparently chewable candies in Scotland have wine in them. Good wine, it looks like:



Via Tartanic, a band that knows a few things about rocking out in a kilt.

In Praise of Congress

The representative branch takes a lot of heat, and much of it rightly, but it is still our best hope in the Federal government. Structurally, for the reasons the Founders identified, it is the one most responsive to the People. Lately, there have been a few signs that Congress is beginning to get some things right.

We saw Congress going after John Kerry in yesterday's post, but they are challenging the State Department's madness on more than one level. A House committee has just approved a bill that would require the State Department to explain why they are not treating the Muslim Brotherhood as a named Foreign Terrorist Organization, expressing the sense of Congress that the Brotherhood has met all of the requirements.

Gowdy's investigations continue to gain access to new information that the Clinton State Department worked to keep hidden from Congress.

And here is a congressman who is also a military pilot, standing up for the ranks of the deployed.



These are just glimmers of hope in a sea of corruption and influence. Nevertheless, they aren't nothing.

Trump Rules

Super Tuesday is around the corner. We can tell we are near, this year, because the Republican debate has descended to the middle-school level.

"I don't repeat myself." "You repeated yourself five seconds ago."

This is being widely commended today as what it takes to stand up against Trump. You've got to show, they say, that you're the Alpha.

Alphas don't yip like puppies, boys.

UPDATE: Governor Chris Christie endorses Donald Trump.

UPDATE: Right-leaning journalists are not happy about it, either. Although I don't think Spencer Ackerman ("Attackerman!") qualifies. I met him once -- and he's a solid journalist, the kind of guy who does the legwork that journalism used to be about. He's just not right-leaning.

Philosophy Major? Fries With That?

Well, that's not impossible, but philosophy tops the humanities in expected salaries according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. So in addition to the real project -- learning to think and understand -- your kids might actually get a decent job, too.

Libertarians for Bernie

Since some of you ascribe to that philosophy, in all or part, Reason has a one-sentence argument in favor of Sanders:

[H]e is the candidate least likely to order a ground invasion of Syria.

True.

The Magisterial John F. Kerry

"Well, Senator, he's not supposed to be doing that."

You don't say?

"The fact is we've got people who've been held without charges for 13 years, 14 years in some cases. That's not American... that's not how we operate."

So we have heard, Secretary Kerry. I believe you prefer to kill people without charges, or trial, or evidence beyond metadata. I notice you forgot to mention the facts about how you do indeed operate, but that's understandable: there must be a dizzying lack of oxygen on your High Moral Ground.

Second Marine Attacked, Left for Dead in DC

Not one but two Marines were brutally attacked on February 12 in two unrelated incidents.

One attack happened at a McDonald's when two teenagers assaulted and robbed a veteran Marine.

A second Marine, 35-year-old Michael Schroeder, was left for dead after a being attacked in Northwest D.C. that same day, according to his family.

Temperatures had dropped down to the teens in weather reports. Laying in the cold, dragged between two cars, face-down, head bashed-in and cash missing is how Schroeder’s family says police found him in the Glover Park neighborhood. Thankfully a dad and son driving by in a taxi saw Schroeder and called the authorities.

"We Cannot Trust Our Government, so We Must Trust the Technology"

The Guardian (UK) hosts an American meditation on the breakdown of trust in our governing institutions.

The debate is being publicly framed on both sides as a deep conflict between security and freedom; between the civil rights of users to maintain their privacy, and the legitimate needs of law enforcement and national security. Yet this is the wrong way to think about it.

The fundamental problem is the breakdown of trust in institutions and organizations. In particular, the loss of confidence in oversight of the American national security establishment.

I think of Raven's comments, just yesterday, that he couldn't help but think when a Census-taker took a GPS reading on his house how useful it would be for a bomb. Nor his remark -- which I have made myself, from time to time -- that Facebook is just what you'd want to roll up networks of enemies of the state. It's exactly the kind of database we used to build in Iraq, identifying family and connections and physical locations and precise relationships, except you fill it out for the state willingly. It would sound paranoid except for the Snowden revelations, which showed that the government was in cooperation with all these technology firms to do spying of exactly that sort. We would dismiss it, in other words, if it were not demonstrably true.

The FBI's move on Apple reminds us all of their coordination with Lois Lerner at the IRS -- it's six years now that the Albuquerque TEA Party has been waiting on its 501(c)3 status. The FBI, having had agents coordinate with Lerner's section, was then assigned to investigate the case. "Surprisingly," after a two-year investigation, no one was charged. Members of Congress are making noises the the effect that they will not accept a repeat of that in the case of former Secretary Clinton, but of course they cannot force the FBI or the DOJ to take action. The President of the United States has repeatedly said that he doesn't think she did anything wrong, and rather than being hustled off to court for her glaringly obvious violations of national security classification law, she is the frontrunner in the Democratic primary to become his replacement in the highest office in the land.

The government has repeatedly failed to hold wrongdoers accountable. More than that, it has protected them. It has enabled corruption in the highest offices, and is currently doing its best to enable its continuance.

If the government wants our trust back, and the legitimacy that comes from having the faith of the American people, it needs to earn it. It needs to start proving that it will prosecute and punish those in power who abuse authority, those in power who break laws, those in power who betray trusts.

If it will not, the Federal government of the United States will begin a long fall. It cannot survive in its current form if it is mistrusted by the American people. Right now, such mistrust is rational. If that is to change, the institutions need to start performing. Anyone in the Federal bureaucracy -- political appointees or not -- who wants Americans to trust and have faith in government needs to take up this charge. Any individuals who want an America that heavily involves government solutions to practical problems needs to devote themselves to pushing for accountability and punishment for the wicked or corrupt.

Otherwise, as this case of technology shows, we the People shall begin finding ways to do without the government of the United States.

Sorities at Sea

Former SECNAV Sean O'Keefe says the Navy should stop worrying about having 300 ships:

"The resignation of one of my predecessors, Jim Webb, was prompted at what he thought was the outrage of falling below the 600-ship Navy," O'Keefe said. "You look back on it as if it was the seminal moment of some strategic shift and it wasn't. It was less a statement of capability and more of just a marker on the wall of what's a measure of merit."

Webb wasn't immediately available for comment.

Will it still be a navy with 271 ships instead of 300? Sure, I suppose. Could it theoretically be as capable with 271 ships as 300? Sure, or even more, depending on the exact mix of ships.

However, is the ~300 ship navy as capable as a 600 ship navy? We'd have to say that increases in ISR and telecommunications and other technologies have improved the capacities of our ships versus the Reagan administration, and that's a big deal for the Navy. Probably one ship can control more sea than it used to do.

Nevertheless, it's not an idle question. 300 ships is just not 600 ships. 250 ships is not 300.

Hillary for Prison 2016 Update: Gee, These Emails Are Worded A Lot Like Top Secret Documents

This is what the Clinton campaign likes to refer to as "overclassification":

U.S. spy agencies have told Congress that Hillary Clinton’s home computer server contained some emails that should have been treated as “top secret” because their wording matched sections of some of the government’s most highly classified documents, four sources familiar with the agency reports said.

The two reports are the first formal declarations by U.S. spy agencies detailing how they believe Clinton violated government rules when highly classified information in at least 22 email messages passed through her unsecured home server…

Under the law and government rules, U.S. officials and contractors may not transmit any classified information – not only documents – outside secure, government-controlled channels. Such information should not be sent even through the government’s .gov email network.

Readers of the Hall understand that this last is a remarkable understatement. Not only must you not transmit Top Secret information through a .gov email, you may not transmit it through a .sgov email -- the secured, air-gapped system for merely Secret information. Top Secret information has an even more tightly controlled system where physical access to the computers is restricted by lock and key, as well as by additional information controls should you manage to physically reach such a computer.

But no, let's just retype the same information into unencrypted, unsecure private email and transmit it via a server kept in some Mom and Pop's bathroom in an industrial park. That's just as good, right? Who'd think to look there?

Why Not Add an Impeachment to the 2016 Election Season?

With the fate of the Supreme Court already hanging in the balance, and one frontrunner promising to prosecute the other if elected, who'll notice a little more drama?

[Speaker of the House Paul] Ryan reminded reporters that Congress voted overwhelmingly for the National Defense Authorization Act, which contains a provision saying the president may not move Guantanamo inmates to U.S. soil.

"We are making legal preparations if the president tries to break the law," Ryan said. "And what boggles my mind, is that the president is contemplating directing the military to knowingly break the law."

No dodging that fight, if he does. Military officers will have to refuse clearly illegal orders, and he'll have to try to prosecute them for insubordination. Think he's got the guts for that?

Sturgill Simpson

Merle Haggard is a fan. I wasn't too impressed the first time around, but tonight I ran into this Outlaw Country jam.

There's a little NSFW language, so don't blast it in the office. Well, unless you have a particularly cool office.



Here's a Gospel piece you can listen to at work just fine.

Trump v. Clinton

A hypothetical monologue.

Trump will capitalize on his reputation as a truth-teller, and be vicious about both Clinton’s sudden changes of position (e.g. the switch on gay marriage, plus the affected economic populism of her run against Sanders) and her perceived dishonesty. One can already imagine the monologue:

“She lies so much. Everything she says is a lie. I’ve never seen someone who lies so much in my life. Let me tell you three lies she’s told. She made up a story about how she was ducking sniper fire! There was no sniper fire. She made it up! How do you forget a thing like that? She said she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the guy who climbed Mount Everest. He hadn’t even climbed it when she was born! Total lie! She lied about the emails, of course, as we all know, and is probably going to be indicted. You know she said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! It was a lie! Thousands of American soldiers are dead because of her. Not only does she lie, her lies kill people. That’s four lies, I said I’d give you three. You can’t even count them. You want to go on PolitiFact, see how many lies she has? It takes you an hour to read them all! In fact, they ask her, she doesn’t even say she hasn’t lied. They asked her straight up, she says she usually tries to tell the truth! Ooooh, she tries! Come on! This is a person, every single word out of her mouth is a lie. Nobody trusts her. Check the polls, nobody trusts her. Yuge liar.”

The article goes on to say that some of this is fair and some of it isn't. The only one that isn't fair is the hit on Iraqi WMD. She really did say it, but there really were WMD. That won't save her, though, because her own party's partisans have spent so long convincing the American people that there never were.

UPDATE: An encyclopedia against Clinton from the Daily KOS. The only issue on which she looks better to them than Bernie is guns -- where Bernie looks better to me.

Fast Times in Venezuela

A lonely blogger reports:

Throughout last night, panicked people told their stories of state-sponsored paramilitaries on motorcycles roaming middle class neighborhoods, shooting at people and storming into apartment buildings, shooting at anyone who seemed like he might be protesting....

Online media is next, a city of 645,000 inhabitants has been taken off the internet amid mounting repression, and this blog itself has been the object of a Facebook “block” campaign.

What we saw were not “street clashes”, what we saw is a state-hatched offensive to suppress and terrorize its opponents.

Is it true? Hard to say, because so much is going on that nobody might even notice paramilitary gangs. Caracas has in recent week seen outages of drinking water, a trial of its mayor, hijackings of food trucks, power rationing, a spike in gasoline prices, a Zika outbreak, a plague of frogs... OK, not the last one, but still.

And Now For Something Completely Different

USAJOBS is Bogus

The American Legion reports. This certainly matches my experience.

Killing You on Metadata

Wretchard:

[F]ormer Director of the CIA and NSA, General Michael Hayden, explained that the administration's drone kill list, contrary to the narrative, was not a masterpiece of judicial and Solomonic judgment by president Obama but simply the result of a computer program. “We kill people based on metadata,” Hayden said.

He then qualified that stark assertion by reassuring the audience that the US government doesn’t kill American citizens on the basis of their metadata. They only kill foreigners.

Pakistanis, specifically. It turns out that the NSA hoovers up all the metadata of 55m mobile phone users in Pakistan and then feeds them into a machine-learning algorithm which supposedly identifies likely couriers working to shuttle messages and information between terrorists.

A program prints it out. Obama reads it and signs it. In a very real sense occupant of the Oval Office has been partially replaced by a hit-list generator actually called Skynet, as Ars Technica explains.

Foreign Policy reports on an independent review of the White House's drone program that uses a report-card rating system. On not selling drones recklessly to foreign states, they get a C. Overall, they get an F.

The number of civilians killed or wounded in the strikes has also generated controversy and raised concerns that the operations foment more violent extremism directed at the United States. The Obama administration has insisted only a small number of civilians have been inadvertently killed in the strikes. Independent estimates from the New America Foundation and the Long War Journal, which are based mainly on local media reports, have put the number in the hundreds, ranging from about 300 to more than 900 between 2004 and 2014. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates several thousand civilians have died in the drone bombing raids.

This comes to mind in part because of the President's self-congratulatory speech on closing GitMo. The reason he can consider closing that facility's prison is that he does not take prisoners. He kills everyone a computer program thinks even might be associated with terrorism, based on opaque metadata that is not subject to an independent review based on other evidence, nor is this killing subject to due process of any kind.

Nevertheless, the GitMo speech was delivered as yet another lecture from the High Moral Ground.

Apple and the FBI

So I've not seen the debate reach the Hall yet, so I figured this was a good time to put in my $0.02 about it.  And I don't suppose my opinion on the matter will surprise anyone.  That said, let's first explain exactly what the situation is.

Campus Carry Update (and a Floor Debate on the Klan)

The Campus Carry bill has been assigned to the Georgia Senate's Judiciary Committee, chaired by one Joshua McKoon. McKoon is a fairly reliable friend of the NRA, but he is in the news most recently for taking the floor to condemn a fellow Republican -- a state senator from Jefferson, Georgia -- for making a remark that appeared supportive of the original Ku Klux Klan.



It is a little strange that we'd be having that discussion in 2016, when I thought the Klan's place in Georgia history was well understood. Obviously they were a terrorist organization, as McKoon says, carrying on the war by other means. There is a distinction worth making between the Klan that existed immediately after the war and the one that was 'reborn' around the time of the movie Birth of a Nation. There is a distinction worth making between that second Klan and the one(s) that exist now. Those distinctions are for clarity among historians, though: none of them were any good.

This is Legislative Day 26, if you're counting. 14 more working days until they have to go away and leave us in peace.

Introduction to Statistical Mechanics

Via Armed Liberal:

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

I'm Pretty Sure That's Not True

Headline: "Hillary Clinton: The Leader You Want When The World Ends."

So, when the world ends, I'll want our enemies read in on all our classified material?

"Authoritarians" Again

How do you take this seriously enough even to rebut it?

[N]ationally, only authoritarian attitudes and fear of terrorism — not income, age, education, or even race — predict with statistical significance whether someone will support Trump....

Individuals with a disposition to authoritarianism demonstrate a fear of "the other" as well as a readiness to follow and obey strong leaders. They tend to see the world in black-and-white terms. They are by definition attitudinally inflexible and rigid. And once they have identified friend from foe, they hold tight to their conclusions.

If a right wing author were describing the Left, particularly in its campus incarnation or its more emphatic activist groups, he could just copy and paste the second paragraph verbatim. But those people are Trump's most devoted opponents, not his supporters. Mote, beam.

As usual when reading the dicta of social psychology, I'm left wondering by their results if there can possibly be any validity to the field at all. If they are blind to flaws as obvious as this, such that repeated studies by practicing professionals replicate these results and publish them as if they were to be taken seriously, how can we trust any aspect of what they are doing?

Religious Groups and Political Leanings

No real surprises here. The Democrats have a mild advantage with all US adults, including those who lean to one party with that party. Catholics are the only religious group that breaks out exactly as the population as a whole does.

Democrats have a huge advantage with non-Christian faiths, and the largest advantage on the charts with Historically Black churches and Unitarians. Republicans have a significant advantage with Anglicans and United Methodists, a significant-to-huge advantage with Evangelicals, and an especially huge advantage with Mormons.

Asatruar didn't make the list. I wonder how they'd break out.

"I Fought Off A Burglar With A Sword"

Technically I think that makes him a "robber," but that's a minor point. Home alone with his ten-year-old daughter in bed, he is confronted by a man bashing in his door even though the house is clearly occupied.

The "burglar" attacked him in spite of him having a sword in his hand, and retreated and then came back multiple times. Being a Briton of the current generation, our hero was doing his best not to hurt the criminal:

I was using the sword to block the blows, while also feigning attack. I was terrified, but I was also very aware that I probably shouldn’t really hit him with the sword; that I should act proportionately. The problem was, I didn’t know how far he was going to go – I don’t think he knew, either.... I started thinking that any moment he would realise I was not trying to hurt him. Then what was I going to do? I was exhausted.

Then, to my relief, he just took off. I was walking slowly back into the house when I heard him behind me. I turned to see him running at full tilt with his arm raised, ready to strike. This was the only time I used the sword as a weapon, swinging at his chest while raising my other arm to block his blow. I got a cut arm and he was injured in the chest – not seriously, because the sword was blunt. Then he was gone again.

It worked, which satisfies the dictum that 'if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid.' The non-sharpness of the sword and the excessive defensiveness of the combat kept him out of trouble with the law, too, which is a real concern in Britain today.

The 'aggravated burglary' charge got the crazed assailant a whole three years, which under British law only half of which can be served behind bars and the rest on some version of parole.

The Death of Twitter

Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say. I never used the "service" to quit it -- they lost me the minute they decided that the proper way to refer to having posted there was to say that you had "tweeted." There is no room in my life for something as ugly as that.

Jayne Cobb apparently used it, but we all knew where his aesthetics were.

Anyway, he's out too. "Trust and Safety Council," heh.

Second Look at Trump

Headline: 'Trump: As president, I would prosecute Clinton.'

Have we ever had a Presidential election where one candidate was promising to put the other behind bars if elected? It's Clinton's own fault that we're having it now, as she's the one who violated national security law with such casual, regular familiarity. If she had simply obeyed the law, we wouldn't be here.

Still, what an election Clinton v. Trump would be. The one side is promising to ban guns and appoint a progressive Supreme Court that will rewrite the Constitution to outlaw conservatives forever. The other side is promising to send the other candidate's party to prison, build a giant wall on the Mexican border and make Mexico pay for it, bomb our enemies to the stone age, and then steal their oil.

Just small potatoes at stake, then.

Campus Carry Passes Georgia House

The Georgia General Assembly has come one step closer to resolving the strange confusion it created last year by passing two different laws on so-called "campus carry." The House passed its bill to allow those who have undergone the appropriate background check to obtain a Georgia weapons-carry license to carry on campus as most anywhere else.

I found out recently that an old friend I grew up with is now a state representative. I suppose this marks the first time I've ever had a friend in 'high' places.

I'm Not Sure You Understood Arendt

A Washington Post writer worries about Trump.

To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the German-Jewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as “just doing their job,” yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine. Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called “Men in Dark Times.” In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler’s rise was a terrible thing but chose “internal exile,” or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness.

One can see both of these phenomena unfolding now. The first shows itself, for instance, when journalists cover every crude and cruel thing that comes out of Trump’s mouth and thereby help acculturate all of us to what we are hearing. Are they not just doing their jobs, they will ask, in covering the Republican front-runner? Have we not already been acculturated by 30 years of popular culture to offensive and inciting comments? Yes, both of these things are true. But that doesn’t mean journalists ought to be Trump’s megaphone. Perhaps we should just shut the lights out on offensiveness; turn off the mic when someone tries to shout down others; reestablish standards for what counts as a worthwhile contribution to the public debate.

Arendt's answer to the dangers of totalitarianism was not speech control. Attempting to shut up the ideas of people who believe as Trump claims to believe is how you got here. I think it's accurately said to be the major source of his power: to hear someone speaking the forbidden thoughts shows him to be strong, because he stands in defiance to all the collected power of media and state, intelligentsia and 'decent society.' Clamping down on his ability to put out his message is only going to make that message stronger where it does get out.

What Arendt suggests as an answer to totalitarianism is two things: thought and community. She was worried that the loneliness and collapse of traditional communities associated with modern life were what made us peculiarly vulnerable to the totalitarian draw. It was common sense, by which she meant the way in which we improve our individual views of the world by comparing them with each others', that was robust enough to stand against propaganda and power.

If you want to beat Trump, the way to do it is to make common cause. If left and right agree that Trump is not the answer, they can defeat him if and only if they can come to an answer they can agree upon. If you're on the Left and you want to beat Trump, what are you willing to compromise on in order to make common cause with those on the right who agree? Will you support Ted Cruz in preference to Trump? Rubio? Would you be willing to allow conservatives to reclaim Scalia's seat on the Supreme Court if that were the price of avoiding a Trump presidency?

Those on the right have to decide if they would be willing to accept Sanders or Clinton. For myself, I think Clinton is demonstrably worse. I would dare a Trump presidency gladly rather than vote for someone so corrupt, deceptive, and disdainful of those whose lives she would hold in her hands as Commander in Chief. Sanders has an ideology I don't care for, but I respect him as an honest man. Others may disagree even on Sanders, especially with the Supreme Court hanging in the balance.

If there are no ways in which we can come together in 'common sense' and community, Trump may well win over the objections of both left and right. In a sense, his victory will be deserved -- I mean that the country will deserve him. I speak chiefly to the left, though. You have to defy what Arendt calls 'loneliness.' I mean that you have to rediscover community with the hated right. You have to break out of the bubbles that keep you only with those ideologically aligned with you. It is your 'safe spaces' that are enabling him. Trying to strengthen the walls of those spaces will only allow him to grow stronger in the world without them.

DB: Military Adopts Gender-Neutral Hair Standards

Following the conclusion of a lengthy period of focused testing and evaluation, the Department of Defense is poised to mandate full gender neutral integration of hair standards across the US military.... “For far too long, the US military has propagated an environment of double standards, lowered expectations, and lame-ass haircuts,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, running his fingers through his luscious mane, working carefully to wrap the flowing locks into a compact, gender nonconforming “War Bun” atop his head.

Love Itself

Love went on and on.

Donald Trump Comes to Georgia

And what a speech.

‘Our country does not win any more. We don’t win against ISIS. We don’t win with health care….We don’t win at the border with Mexico. We don’t win anywhere. But we’re gonna win. Oh, are we gonna win. You’ll get so tired of winning, you’re gonna get so tired, you’re going to say, ‘Please, please, Mr. President, we can’t stand it anymore. We don’t want to keep winning. We can’t stand it.’ And I’m going to say, ‘I don’t care, we’re going to keep winning, we’re going to make America great again.’”

Bring Back Dueling!

David Harsanyi, senior editor at The Federalist, argues:

The great Democrat, Andrew Jackson, supposedly participated in six duels with much success. No less an American hero, young Abraham Lincoln was almost involved in a duel before honor was restored.

Is Donald Trump a more honorable man than Abraham Lincoln? I think not. Right now, the leading candidate in the GOP race is celebrated by his fans for his vulgarity and eagerness to attack the dignity of others. People confuse this incivility — and he’s not alone — as a statement against political correctness. It isn’t. That would entail using ideological or cultural rhetoric that others have deemed morally unacceptable. Not calling a rival candidate a “pussy.”

Yet, the more personal and boorish his invective gets, the more Trump fans are awestricken. The belief that tough-guy Trump is a “fighter” propels his candidacy, even though pampered scions of wealth rarely have to fight for anything. And his success will only produce others who’ll ape this strategy.

I think we can all agree dueling would be a much-needed corrective.

As part of his argument, Harsanyi offers a brief discussion of dueling history in the US and links to sites with more, including a duel between women, two famous dueling grounds, the Code Duello and the Project Gutenberg text for “The Code of Honor; Or Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Duelling," written by a South Carolina governor.

Whatever you think of this suggestion, I am greatly amused by the thought of Cruz and Trump squaring off with rapiers at Weehawken.

Doubtless an EEO/SHARP Violation

Doctrine and the perils of staff officer romance. A parody, I think.

Georgia Legislature Update: Religious Liberty Advances

The Georgia Senate created a combined bill out of two different pieces of religious liberty legislation, which can now be advanced for a floor vote whenever the Rules Committee says so. The combined bill is fairly tame: it's no threat to "gay marriage" being the law of the land. However, if you own your own business, you can life your life according to sincerely held religious beliefs.

The combined legislation under HB 757 would enable faith-based organizations and individuals to opt out of serving couples — gay or straight — or follow anti-discrimination requirements if they cite a sincerely held religious belief or moral conviction regarding marriage.

The bill would bar state and local governments from taking any “discriminatory action” to punish those beliefs, specifically over convictions that marriage should be between a man and a woman or that sexual relations between two people are properly reserved to such a marriage.

It would protect government grants and contracts, among other things, held by faith-based organizations such as those that receive money to aid in adoption. Those organizations would also not be required to register as a nonprofit, although they would have to state a religious belief or purpose in their governing documents or mission statements.

Additionally, the bill states clergy could not be forced to perform a same-sex wedding ceremony.

The bill would not, however, allow public employees or elected officials such as Georgia probate court employees to refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses if that offends their faith.

Not sure if it will pass. It's already got some corporate opposition, which normally spells doom even for carefully-crafted compromise bills in the Georgia legislature. Corporate opponents say they believe the law might prevent them from firing people whose religious views are against company policy.

UPDATE: The Senate passed the bill on Friday, having just approved it out of the Rules Committee on Tuesday. No word yet on next steps, or if the governor is willing to sign it if it gets to him.

Dear Trouble

Given the hand that feeds you
Are you really hungry at all?

Superdelegates

Here's a fun project: this site lists all the superdelegates in the Democratic primary, by state and whether or not they've committed to backing Clinton. Those with Twitter or Facebook pages have links given, but mostly they are political officials who won't be hard to find.

It's probably worth your time to ping the ones from your state, and tell them that you won't thank them for backing Clinton if Sanders wins the local primary. Whatever we can do to undermine her last bastion of support is worth doing, as she is by far the worst choice in this election. We cannot afford to turn national security over to someone for whom the lives of its defenders are so small a concern next to her own convenience. Nor is her relationship to the truth, in general, apparently a wholesome one.

Farewell to the Rose

The author, and noted philosopher, was 84.

Roughhouse

Some of the best advice I ever got as a parent was this: A baby boy is like a lion cub. You need to play with him that way.

When Someone Asks You If You Are A God, You Say "Yes!"

Pelley began by asking Clinton, “You know in ’76, Jimmy Carter famously said, ‘I will not lie to you.’”

“Well, I will tell you, I have tried in every way I know how, literally from my years as a young lawyer, all the way through my time as Secretary of State to level with the American people,” Clinton claimed.

Pelley replied, “You talk about leveling with the American people. Have you always told the truth?”

“I’ve have always tried to, always, always,” Clinton suggested.

These sound more like the ramblings of a suspect in an interrogation room with their hands cuffed to the table than a presidential candidate. How on Earth is the question, are you going to lie to us a tough one? Even if you’re talking out the side of your mouth, the answer is no. There’s some panic setting in at Clinton HQ as much as her many surrogates insist that they always knew it was going to be a long, hard slog.

Against Philistines

Tennessee moves to protect its statues from destruction. Seems like there's a wave of destroying art that symbolizes history we'd rather forget, these last few years. The Taliban dynamited Buddhas. ISIS wrecks even mosques they don't like, as well as any remaining Classical civilization they can lay hands upon. Iran visits Italy, and Renaissance sculptures are hidden away so they don't disturb. Cartoons that offend must not be republished, or hung even in an art gallery where people might see them. The Merlin sculpture hardly got up before people were arguing it was "vandalism" to put it there.

Whatever this is, it is not liberal tolerance for diversity. Even the dead must conform to current opinions.

Who Wants to be a "Protected Class"?

Washington state is considering a bill to add bikers to its list of classes protected under civil rights law.

The Washington State Senate and House, at the request of the Washington State Council of Clubs and the Motorcycle Profiling Project, have both proposed identical legislation, SB 6624/ HB 2950, that would add individuals wearing motorcycle or motorcycle club related paraphernalia to the Washington State Civil Rights Act (RCW 49.60.030) as a protected class. Additionally, SB 6624/HB 2950 adds the right to be free from law enforcement profiling to the list of explicated civil rights protections for all protected classes.

The Washington State Council of Clubs, the Motorcycle Profiling Project, and BOLT of Washington drafted the language for the identical proposals. ABATE of Washington also supported the effort.

The addition of individuals wearing motorcycle or motorcycle club related paraphernalia would provide unprecedented protection against many forms of discrimination if these bills pass. It would be a violation of civil rights to deny an individual employment, public accommodations, or profile them based on their expression or associations with a motorcycle club.... Individuals in motorcycle clubs have a fundamental right of association that should not be infringed upon based on generalized suspicion. Absent proof of the intent to commit criminal activity an individual should not be subjected to government regulation or law enforcement actions.

I have two questions about this, understanding that ABATE is a good organization that normally means well.

1) Is it really necessary to seek protected status to obtain what sound like ordinary Constitutional rights -- free association, and the right to be free of unreasonable harassment by police?

2) Doesn't this bill protect free association in one case only by limiting it in another? Your freedom to associate with your club is protected, but at the cost of telling (say) employers that they can't choose whether or not to associate with you because of it. What makes it right to use the government to place our rights above the rights of others? It's the same right, and we are both of us citizens of the United States in the same way.

All in all, I don't think I want to be a member of a 'protected class' anyway. I'm one of the last Americans who isn't, and there's a certain glory to that.

Sea Story

One I hadn't heard before:

Baggett’s [B-24] was badly hit, and the crew were ordered to bail out. The Japanese pilots then attacked U.S. airmen as they parachuted to earth.

Two of Baggett’s crew members were killed, and Baggett, though wounded, played dead, hoping the Japanese would ignore him. One Zero approaching within several feet of Baggett, then nose-up and in an almost-stall, the pilot opened his canopy. Baggett shot at the pilot with his .45 calibre pistol. The plane stalled and plunged to the earth, with Baggett becoming legendary as the only person to down a Japanese airplane with a M1911 pistol.

Field & Stream called it one of the greatest feats ever accomplished with a .45. As for Baggett, he apparently survived the war and lived to a prosperous ripe old age.

The 'Hurt Feelings Report' Goes Live

No way.

A school in Delaware apologized on Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2016, after a staff member accidentally sent a snarky "Hurt Feelings Report" to parents.

It looks like the one we've been passing around for years as a joke. I wonder if the parents got the joke?

The Pope Is Making News Today

I have a lot of respect for Pope Francis, but he should probably not opine on American politics without taking more care to understand the situation. When Donald Trump can make you look like you haven't really thought through your position, you're having a bad day.

Of more interest may be his remarks on an exception to the Church's ordinary prohibition of birth control, which draws a bright line between birth control and abortion. This is the sort of thing he's better placed to talk about. I suspect there's a danger, if that's the right word, that most American Catholics would be only too happy to take that distinction and run with it. Almost no Americans of any stripe are opposed to birth control on moral grounds. If the Church intends to maintain that prohibition as a usual thing, exceptions will need to be very carefully drawn.

A Crucial Demographic in Nevada Speaks

Up until now, I thought Bernie was winning women in this age bracket, but I suppose there are interested exceptions.

The Hearing Protection Act

Speaking of gun rights legislation, HR 3799 is in committee in Congress. It would remove suppressors and "silencers" from the National Firearms Act, making them readily available for use by individuals. As someone who both shoots guns and rides motorcycles, all I have to say is -- what did you say? I couldn't quite hear you.

Altamont South

A sold out concert in Tampa, Florida may lack the usual police protection.

In the wake of Beyonce’s controversial Super Bowl halftime performance of her new song “Formation” — which critics say contains an anti-cop message — police and politicians around the country have been speaking out against it.

But the criticism could be manifesting itself in practical ways, given what’s happened since police in Tampa, Florida, got a request to work her April 29 concert in town.

Usually off-duty officers sign up to work concerts and sporting events for extra cash, but to date no officers have signed up for the show, WTVT-TV reported. And given it’s expected to sell out, that could be a security issue.

While police spokesman Steve Hegarty couldn’t tell the station if zero sign-ups means local cops are angry with Beyonce, he did say the show would have security.

I didn't see the Superbowl, but I did see a lot of mockery of her for having demanded a police escort that closed off an entire highway for her motorcade -- in order to sing a song about the evils of cops. That's par for the course with these celebrities, though. I may field occasional criticisms of police, but I don't ask them to bow and scrape to me while I do it. In fact, I try to leave them alone, and if I do have to call them for some reason -- usually a neighbor's escaped livestock, out here -- I always treat them with the courtesy and respect due to someone who shows up when called to do a hard job.

Probably this lady will get her way again, as the sense of duty toward securing the concert-goers overwhelms the bad taste in the mouths of off-duty police.

But hey -- if the police thing doesn't work out, she can always try the Outlaws.

Georgia Legislature Update: Campus Carry Passes House Committee

House Bill 859 has made it out of its initial committee, and can now proceed to the House Rules Committee. You can write the members of that committee to urge its passage here. However, I expect it will pass out of this committee whether or not you write anyone: the chairman is a co-sponsor.

Georgia is in a weird position on campus carry because it passed two laws with different language recently. Students for Concealed Carry explain after the jump.  This law would clarify the situation legislatively, rather than waiting for a court to do it -- which could result in someone who thought they were obeying the law going to jail, if the court decides against them.

Oddly, HB 859 seems to undo a feature of Georgia's weapons carry laws I normally tout as a highly desirable feature:  it severs handguns from knives.  I often prefer to carry a knife instead of a handgun, as it is useful in far more situations and eliminates the dangers of overpenetration, ricochet, and similar risks in highly populated areas.  (Obviously, it does this at the cost of limiting your effective range, and knives require much more training and practice to be effective.)  HB 859 would allow people who have undergone background checks and obtained the weapons carry permit to carry handguns only on school property (and not to sporting events).

Turkish Fascism

The piece I mentioned below deserves a longer consideration. No one knows what to do about Turkey, which is a NATO ally that is -- to quote what I wrote earlier this week -- "openly Islamist, deceitful, and murderous, [and that] does not deserve our support." Nevertheless, the treaty obligation requires us to fight in their defense should the war they and Russia are playing at starting break out into full scale.

I suspect Russia believes we would not, especially under Obama, actually come to their aid with more than symbolic force. There is some reason to doubt they are right about this supposition. We moved F-15C fighters to Turkey following the movement of Russian air superiority fighters to Syria earlier this fall. In response, probably, came Russia's deployment of S-400 missiles in Syria. The older F-15C is not thought capable of defeating this system. Of the fighters we have, only the F-22 and F-35 incorporate stealth technology completely enough that we think them safe against the S-400 system. We deployed four(!) F-22s to Germany in August on an operational basis.

Does that mean we're getting ready to fight the Russians? Perhaps -- these are two of several shifts that suggest we are at least bluffing our readiness to do so. A bluff is rational, since the best outcome would be avoiding a Russian test of our treaty commitments entirely. Unfortunately, bluffs by this administration are likely to be called because they have been called in the past and have proven to be empty. Syria itself is the leading example, thanks to the President's so-called "red line" on chemical weapons use. Putin probably doubts that there is anything behind these moves besides bluster.

He's probably right to probably think that.



All of that leaves us with a quandary about Turkey. It's a major problem.

American democracy could survive as a liberal democracy despite the heavy repression of socialists and radical labour. However, in much of Europe, these forces were so strong [in the 1930s] that the state’s repressive apparatuses expanded indefinitely. When they were not sufficient, civilians were mobilized, and fascism was born.

What is clear, in light of the Turkish case, is that liberalisation and democratisation cannot go hand-in-hand for an extended period of time in structurally weaker societies. While the spoils of a semi-productive model could satisfy many social groups, the downturn of the world economy after 2008 gradually dynamited the cash basis of the AKP’s consent. In this new global scene, the party had to incorporate more and more Islamist cadres to retain a mobilised base, but these very cadres pushed the regime into a collision with Israel, the liberal intelligentsia, and various (local and foreign) capitalist interests.

Under increasing pressures from the emboldened cadres (and the opening granted by the Arab Spring), the party’s hardly contained imperial ambitions were bolstered further and eventually ran out of control. Becoming more Islamist first seemed to be a wonderful resolution to the problems created by slowing economic growth, but this political choice backfired.

What sense does it make to have a major alliance with a fascist, Islamist power? Is it worth defending should the Russians decide to smack it around, at the cost of war with Russia? Certainly not. If the NATO alliance is fractured by our failure, though, can it be saved for the more plausible cases? What if Russia moves to reconquer the Baltic states it ruled as the Soviet Union? Are they worth fighting for, at the cost of war with Russia? What about Norway?

Further, if liberalization and democratization of Turkey is the very reason they are turning Islamist, what policy choices do we have in front of us for improving that alliance should it survive? Endorsing the fascism? But the fascism is now part of the Islamist problem. Endorsing more democracy? That's how we got the fascist Islamists. Endorsing a liberal but anti-democratic coup? Overthrowing, in other words, a NATO ally?

The conclusion that the administration does not have any idea what to do with Turkey is warranted. The best choice might be to preemptively expel them from NATO for their genocidal policy against the Kurds. Then the Russians could do what they liked to Turkey without endangering NATO, which would be reserved for its more obvious and plausible function of defending liberal democracy in Europe. That would concede the Middle East to the Russian/Iranian alliance, however.

Twitter Diplomacy

A sharp criticism of Samantha Power, but by extension of the Obama foreign policy regime.

Power’s tweets are a legitimate response to a horror that is unfolding daily. What’s so odd about them is the Twitter account they come from belongs to the American Ambassador to the United Nations, who has been a member of Obama’s inner circle since before he hit the campaign trail in 2007. Hence, Ambassador Power’s doe-eyed outrage against the policies that she helped to shape in her time in the White House and whose current public face is literally Samantha Power leaves a casual observer a bit slack-jawed. Is the real Samantha Power being held prisoner in the U.N. basement with access to Twitter, while a Davos-friendly version of Arya Stark from Game of Thrones impersonates Power in policy meetings?

John Kerry is involved in the Twitter diplomacy, too, as OpenDemocracy notes:

“Humanitarian aid to [civilians] must be allowed immediately. ‘Surrender or starve’ tactics are directly contrary to the law of war.”

Any western leader might easily use these words to scold the Turkish state, and its starvation of Kurdish towns to the south-east of the country. But it would be highly unlikely. In fact, John Kerry’s tweet was aimed at the Syrian regime, not the Turkish one.

Why do American leaders describe Assad’s strategy of ‘surrender or starve’ as a war crime, while they ignore Erdoğan’s?

Because, they decide after a lengthy analysis, nobody in the administration knows what to do about Turkey.

The Texas Plan, Part III

The third of Abbott's proposed amendments would restore the balance of legislative and executive power that existed before the New Deal, and specifically before Roosevelt's Supreme Court-packing scheme intimidated the Court into letting him do what they had repeatedly held to be unconstitutional.

III. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law.

At this point, this would make a massive change in the way the Federal government does business. Administrative rules now make up the bulk of Federal law, including the bulk of Federal felonies for which you can be sent to prison for years. This is another one of those issues that readers of the Hall have read about for years.  Here's a longer piece from 2007 that talks about administrative regulation as well as the explosiveness of SCOTUS picks.  (Here is a post from the same year on the problems of over-regulation for government itself, from the perspective of trying to be sympathetic and helpful to the State Department.)

Looking back over my work in assembling that quite incomplete list, I see that Abbott's solution is the very one I was endorsing eight years ago: not just this shift, but a constitutional convention to restrain the SCOTUS and the regulatory agencies. It would be a huge change. The argument against it has to do with the complexity of the economy and society: a Congress that had to pass all the laws would be unable to come up with nearly so many laws and regulations and standards. We would have a much less managed society and economy.

The compensation would come in the legitimacy of the rules we did pass. Now, most of Federal law is created without you or your representatives being involved in the process, or even knowing about it. That's not obviously legitimate in a representative democracy, or a democratic Republic. If "No taxation without Representation" is a founding principle, well, every regulation is a kind of tax: compliance takes time and, yes, money. Regulations of such complexity that you cannot be sure you are following them all -- and we are very far past that threshold -- destroy the legitimacy of the whole scheme. They also create a great danger of partisan tyranny through prosecutorial discretion: if we are all guilty of transgressing these hidden laws, the government can punish its enemies and reward its favorites simply by choosing where and on whom it enforces the law.

The amendment suggests a course that will not be easy, but I think the hardships are necessary to the legitimacy, and stability, of our government. I have thought so for a long time.

Honor and Monuments- Now that's a knife!

Grim's post below about the Merlin cave and it's monument to Merlin- the carving in the rock of the wizards face, brought to mind another monument I'd seen recently, alas not in person but perhaps someday- Sverd i Fjell.  It's near Stavenger, Norway and memorializes the battle most symbolic of the unification of Norway, the Battle of Hafrsfjord, where King Harald Hårfagre (Fairhair) united most of Norway under one crown, effectively marking the origins of the modern Norway.

The largest sword represents that of the victorious King Harald, with the two smaller swords representing those of the two defeated petty kings.  The swords are about ten meters tall, making them rather impressive in scale.  Similarly to Merlin's Cave, it's a beautiful natural location of historic significance, where a memorial has been placed, and in my opinion, in an effective and powerful way, boldly marking the place and presenting some information and raising one's curiosity to learn more about that which is here memorialized, I would think.  It also makes it quite clear what it took to give birth to a nation.

While I'm at it- here's another monument in natural stone like Merlin's Cave-
the Löwendenkmal, or Lion of Lucerne.

It's a memorial to Swiss Guards massacred in the French Revolution in 1792 at the Tuileries Palace.
This one I have had the honor of seeing in person.  As I recall, having seen it in photographs prior to going there, I was rather surprised at the scale of it.  Because of the pool of water in the foreground, photos never really give a true sense of it's scale.  The sculpture is about 33 feet long and 18 feet high, not the 1:1 scale I had always assumed in seeing the photos.

Partly because of the sculpture itself, and partly because of the setting, it's quite moving.  Mark Twain describes it better than I ever could (from "A Tramp Abroad"):

"The most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world."

"The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff — for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.

Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion — and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is."

I think these two monuments are quite powerful, each in their own way.  Maybe if I'm lucky, some day I'll win a commission to design a memorial for some event or person of significance.  I'd think it a great honor.  I would only hope I could do so well as these.

Lincoln on the Supremacy of the Courts

Dad29 reminds us that Lincoln was not a fan of conceding moral questions to the Supreme Court. Indeed, it was opposition to one such decision that brought him into politics -- and the Republican party into being.

...Perhaps the most famous opponent of judicial supremacy in our nation’s history was Abraham Lincoln, who as President directly defied the abominable and inhuman monstrosity that was Chief Justice Taney’s ruling in 1857’s Dred Scott v. Sandford.

"...the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."

Far from the Supreme Court being the obvious answer to the problem of state slavery, for a time it was slavery's most prominent defender.

Two from Arts & Letters Daily

One on Thoreau and his view of life:

Thoreau is less an ecologist than a thinker obsessed with the problem of life in a properly ontological sense. By this I mean not only that everything in his world—from stones to humans—is alive, but also that in his philosophy life is afforded the status of a force that precedes and generates all individuations and into which individual forms dissolve. Consequently, death is considered a process of deformation but not of cessation. Differently put, in Thoreau’s world death does not have the power to interrupt life but instead functions as the force of its transformation, enabling us to experience finitude while ushering us into what remains animated.

And one on Shakespeare and his evolution as a writer, as seen through a (disputed) earlier edition of Hamlet:

[T]he Bad Quarto moves more swiftly to its bloody climax, so that it could be said to lose — or never have had — the very quality that gave birth to the phrase "Hamlet-like."

Most people don’t realize the Hamlets they read are not the Hamlets Shakespeare wrote. They’re, more often than not, a cut-and-paste, conflated version that mixes and matches some of the best bits from the Good Quarto and the Folio. "The pales and forts of reason," "the mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye," and "nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" are each in either the Quarto or the Folio but not in both.

This Guy

Draft-dodger Donald Trump once said that the danger he faced from getting sexually transmitted diseases was his own “personal Vietnam.”

In a 1997 interview with shock jock Howard Stern, Trump talked about how he had been “lucky” not to have contracted diseases when he was sleeping around.

“I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world. It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era,” Trump said in a video that resurfaced Tuesday on Buzzfeed, “It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”

All right, let's add a complete incapacity to distinguish virtue from vice to your list of qualifications.

Merlin's Cave

Below Tintagel Castle lies a sea cave that has long been associated with Merlin. Lately the British government has decided that this national heritage site should boast art as well as natural beauty. They hired a sculptor to work the rock into Merlin's face.

The decision has not pleased everyone. I expect that is probably always true. Mt. Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument both have their critics, though they are far larger works to be sure. There is always some question about whether we can really improve upon the beauty of nature, as well as some reason to object to the politics: whenever you honor someone or something, even a myth, you do so by raising it above the things you didn't choose to honor. Rarely will there be no one to object.

When Uther in Tintagil past away
Moaning and wailing for an heir, the two
Left the still King, and passing forth to breathe,
Then from the castle gateway by the chasm
Descending through the dismal night—a night
In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost—
Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps
It seemed in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof
A dragon winged, and all from stern to stern
Bright with a shining people on the decks,
And gone as soon as seen. And then the two
Dropt to the cove, and watched the great sea fall,
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:
And down the wave and in the flame was borne
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet,
Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried "The King!
Here is an heir for Uther!" And the fringe
Of that great breaker, sweeping up the strand,
Lashed at the wizard as he spake the word,
And all at once all round him rose in fire,
So that the child and he were clothed in fire.

The Texas Plan, Part II

The second proposed amendment is one that has been hugely popular with states as a proposal -- there are almost enough states demanding it to force the Constitutional convention on this point alone.

II. Require Congress to balance its budget.

The only thing that I can think to say against this is that the amendment might need a waiver for high emergencies such as wars. Of course, any waiver can be abused, and is likely to be. Still, you can't always fight a war on a budget, and some wars are necessary for the survival of the nation. Those of you who are Keynesians may wish to see this extended to business cycle events, although the evidence of the last decade should probably cause us to re-examine the validity of Lord Keynes' theories on that point.

Someone You Know

A former Marine who participated in one of the most iconic moments of the Iraq War was knocked unconscious and robbed by Black Lives Matter activists in D.C.

A Marine vet who served in Iraq and Afghanistan became the target of an assault while eating at a McDonald’s Friday night in northwest DC. Metro PD is now investigating the incident and looking for five suspects between the ages of 16 and 21.

According to the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), the group of teens started harassing Christopher Marquez while he was eating — surrounding his table and asking him: ‘Do you believe black lives matter.’ They also started calling him a racist....

[T]he manager at the fast food chain reviewed surveillance video and informed Marquez that after he walked out of the restaurant, one of the teens struck him on the side of the head knocking him unconscious. The others robbed him, taking off with his wallet, which contained $400 in cash, all his ID’s and three credit cards.

It being D.C. he was completely defenseless against mob violence, as the law requires.

BLM can't be held responsible for everybody who claims to be acting in its name, and it has some reasonable points worth considering. They had better get a handle on this kind of thing quick, though, or it will destroy any momentum the movement has. People will be rooting for more police violence if this kind of thing becomes normal.