What Country Would That Be?

The Supreme Court has deadlocked on immigration, resulting in a sort-of defeat for President Obama. No precedent is set by the ruling, but the lower court is considered upheld.

Obama said Thursday's impasse "takes us further from the country we aspire to be."

What country would that be?

I aspire towards a country in which our Constitution and its traditions are upheld, and one in which the government at least is required to abide by such laws as are properly Constitutional. My sense, governed by the fact that they keep writing books proclaiming that this is in fact the case, is that the move towards unfettered immigration is favored by establishment Democrats precisely because the immigrants favor a different form of government than the one we inherited.

If America is really a philosophical project, they aspire to being a country that is no longer America. I don't have a problem with immigration at any level, provided that the immigrants are devoted to the American project. When the point of favoring high immigration is precisely to make it possible to rewrite the Constitution and change the basic project, of course I am opposed -- no matter where the immigrants might come from originally, or what they might look like. It's their philosophy I care about.

The 2nd Amendment as Palladium of Liberty

Some words from our Founders.

They were serious about this. They were also right about it. We need to figure out how to restore the local, neighbor-and-family militia function as a part of the defense of the common peace and lawful order. We've gone too far to professional police and professional armies as a defense, not that I'm suggesting disbanding the police or the Army. I mean that we'll be freer when we are more actively involved in the defense of our communities, rather than turning things over to secret lists maintained by distant agencies, or secret courts with secret evidence against us.

Guns and Domestic Violence

In general and with some exceptions, I think this author is on to something. The one thing that would have stopped the Orlando shooting, maybe, is if he had been convicted of his domestic abuse. His wife might have come forward, or the FBI might have uncovered it during its two investigations of him. Either would have prohibited him from buying or possessing firearms under Federal law. He might have obtained guns illegally -- criminals usually skip legal gun sales entirely, and obtain guns from friends or family. But it's the only law-oriented suggestion I've seen that might have stopped him.

She's right that domestic violence is often (not always) tied to mass shootings, but even more, that it's often tied to later murder of the person being abused. She's also right that close family, the ones licensed by law to apply for restraining orders, often know well before anyone else that someone is likely to commit irrational violence. That adheres to my principle of thinking of citizens as performing that key militia function in the defense of the common good and lawful order. Just like the Rangers have peer reviews, sometimes citizens' militia members might need to say, "Not this guy, though -- he's going to kill somebody for no good reason." We can't make that a general power of citizens, because some would use it as a backdoor to disarming everyone. But it might make sense to do it in a way restricted to those most vulnerable to domestic violence, who are also therefore in the best place to know when someone is violent in this way.

There's room for something here that I think reasonable people could agree to doing, even if she hasn't got the specifics mapped out yet.

Provincialism

One thing that caught my eye in Grim's post yesterday about what Northerners secretly think was the idea that New Yorkers don't have to go anywhere, because everyone comes to them eventually.  That was probably fairly true for a long time, when New York was still on the make.  After a while, it becomes an attitude of decay; the rest of the world does eventually start building alternatives when you act like you can sit around waiting for them to come acknowledge your awesomeness.

Google links if that's a paywall:  South Carolina boost from Panama Canal expansion;  New York not ready.  Too busy working on those sugary drinks and salty restaurant offerings.

Congress is Protesting Itself

So, following a filibuster, Republicans agreed to votes on four gun bills earlier this week. All four lost, as all four deserved to lose.

Now, bill supporters in the House are staging a sit-in.

Clearly they think they've got a winning issue, even though they keep coming up with ideas like Feinstein's 'Americans must prove their innocence.' On any other subject, these same people would lose their minds if someone suggested policies like this. Feinstein's bill would have a vastly disproportionate effect on Muslims, and a somewhat disproportionate effect on other minorities. It would deny them their civil rights based on mere suspicion. It would continue to deny them their rights for five years after they'd been cleared of suspicion. Why? Because they're so suspicious we can't be too careful. But if they can prove their innocence -- in spite of having no access to the charges against them, nor an opportunity to confront their accuser, nor the power to be heard in the secret courts -- we will restore their rights, presuming they can also stay off our secret lists for five years.

These same people sitting on the floor in protest would be the very ones leading the charge against any other proposal that did those things. It violates every principle of justice that they ordinarily claim.

Russians Firebombing Whole Neighborhoods in Aleppo

Funker530 has the video. It's the sort of thing you probably thought you'd only ever see in movies about WWII, but it's happening right now.

If only someone had enforced his red line like he said he would, Russia wouldn't even be in Syria right now.

Beware the Prius

Things Northerners Think

Every culture has its prejudices, and here are some Yankee ones.

I actually think the South would have fewer hick towns if it had won the Civil War, because it was the war and its aftermath that destroyed the South's wealth. It was a very rich place before the war, with all that implies for education and civilization. It's been the poorest region of the nation ever since.

Thanks for ending slavery, though. Actually, two of my ancestors were in Sherman's army, too.

Foreign Service Officers

We were just discussing, in the comments to the "off the street" post below, the usefulness of the State Department Foreign Service officers (FSOs) and contractors who actually deployed to Iraq. Here is an article I wrote about State Department plans to reform itself to better support such embedded Provincial Reconstruction Teams (ePRTs) based on a conversation we had at Foggy Bottom one afternoon when Jimbo and I dropped in for a visit. (Really, that happened. Under Secretary Clinton, even.)

In addition to that part praising the ePRT model, I also wrote another post sharply critical of the culture at State. The two things should be read together, because they paint what I believe is a fair picture of what is good and what is flawed with the State Department.

As the second, more critical post anticipated, Secretary Clinton's tenure did not result in fixes to the problems identified. Nor has John F. Kerry managed to fix the problems. The Obama administration's political appointees at State have been tremendous embarrassments.

Nevertheless, it's important to remember that core of career FSOs who aren't political appointees and who do take their duty seriously. Think about them when you read this story about the State Department revolt against Obama's foreign policy.

51 dissident State Department Foreign Service Officers (FSOs), the Dissent 51, signed a Dissent Channel cable savaging the Obama Administration’s Syria policy and implicitly attacking the Obama Administration’s inept diplomatic and military strategy for eliminating the anti-Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Usually one FSO (or at most a handful) sign a dissent cable. 51 is an unprecedented number of government line officers signing a dissident document which—Obama Administration denials to the contrary—could put their careers at risk.

Then go read their memo.

Violence and Sympathy

The Washington Post asks why the media hasn't covered the attempted assassination of Donald Trump as a major story. Indeed, it's arguably the second assassination attempt -- that one guy jumped the stage and Secret Service had to stop him.

It may be because we don't worry that much about criminals who are morons. This guy built his plan around stealing a cop's gun, which might have worked if he'd had a plan for dealing with the cop. As it was, he apparently believed that (a) he'd be able to get a cop's gun away from him while the cop was free to fight back, and (b) that he'd be able to do so in such a way that he'd still have time to get some shots off. Clearly, this is not a professional we're talking about. The Post article makes a similar point: perhaps we don't think this guy was a serious threat.

Instapundit suggests it's because some wish the attempt had succeeded. Jazz Shaw at Hot Air points out how obviously different the narrative would be if another politician had been the target.

Can you imagine the coverage we’d be seeing if someone had attempted to shoot Hillary Clinton? The same could be said if it had happened with Barack Obama in the summer of 2008. Questions would be debated on air for weeks on end about the evil lurking in the hearts of men and why someone would be so desperate to prevent the election of the first black or female president. But when someone plots for more than a year to kill Trump, travels across the country to find an opportunity and then launches his attempt, it creates barely a ripple in the media pond.

And what of the fact that Sandford is an illegal alien?

I'm going to give another reading. I think it's because seeing Trump as vulnerable to violence might create sympathy for him.

Brexit polling shows that the "Leave" camp suffered a significant hit when a neo-Nazi killed a British politician on the "Remain" side. This is, in point of fact, completely irrational. Whatever your reasons for thinking Britain should stay or go aren't in any way touched by the fact that some psychopath happens to kill an innocent third party: it is the sort of act that shouldn't have any impact at all on your political judgment on this entirely unrelated question.

But humans aren't fully rational beings, and sympathy plays a huge role for some people in deciding what they take to be right and wrong. The thought that you might be on the side of a neo-Nazi, or have been against that nice young woman who was brutally killed, will sway some voters. The fact that the "Leave" camp is really mostly not neo-Nazis, or that the "Remain" camp has some deeply anti-democratic ideas and imperils the future of British common law and self government, is lost at least for a while in the emotional imagery.

In the case of Trump particularly, the narrative building around him is that he's an entirely unsympathetic character. It's not hard to build that narrative, since large parts of it are true. He's disrespectful, heedless of the truth, careless with his language, and apparently shameless. But he is human, and therefore he is vulnerable. If people came to see him that way -- if he actually got shot, for example -- it would pierce that image and make him a more sympathetic character.

If that happens, people might become more inclined to do what Byron York did last week: give Trump's proposals a sympathetic hearing. That can only happen if you are inclined to think well enough of the guy to look past what he actually said (which is often careless and poorly constructed) and try to find the best possible interpretation of his point. Still, when York did it, he found a core to the argument that isn't absurd, and in fact is pretty well-supported by the evidence.

My guess is that the press understands this at some level, and -- being almost exclusively Democrats -- the last thing they want is people giving Trump a sympathetic hearing. Play him as a strongman -- he's happy to play with you -- and he looks unsympathetic in the extreme. Play him as a vulnerable human being, and people might take a second look at what he's saying. If they do so in the spirit of sympathy, they might find what York found. And then he might win.

Lord Patrick Devlin, Call Your Office

An important point buried at the end of a Reason article on why gun control wouldn't work better than Prohibition:

Those defiant gun owners will also be included in the jury pools chosen to sit in judgement of unlucky violators scooped up by law enforcement. That situation will likely replicate the difficulty prosecutors had in getting convictions of Prohibition scofflaws in the 1920s and marijuana law resisters today. "[I]f juries consistently nullify certain types of criminal charges (charges for possession of a small amount of marijuana, for example), this can render an unpopular law ineffective," wrote John Richards at the LegalMatch blog after a jury couldn't even be seated in Montana.

"If you pass laws that people have no respect for and they don't follow them, then you have a real problem," Connecticut Sen. Tony Guglielmo (R-District 35), told the Hartford Courant when large numbers of state residents flipped the bird to lawmakers and defied the new gun law.

Well... yes, you do. And like their restriction-inclined predecessors, gun controllers will have quite a mess on their hands.

This argument is most famously made in Lord Patrick Devlin's The Enforcement of Morals. His point was that, in a country that accepts freedom of conscience where religion is concerned, religion can no longer ground moral laws (because everyone has a right to dissent from any religious view). Rather than do away with legislation that was meant to enforce moral codes, Devlin proposes an alternative justification. He called it 'man in the jury-box' or 'man on the Clapham omnibus' standard. Essentially the idea was that ordinary British citizens could be trusted to know right from wrong, or in any case to work it out over time, and thus that they should be free to pass moral laws grounded on their common sense. The test for whether a moral law was valid or not was whether or not the ordinary British citizen would enforce it if called to serve on a jury. A law they wouldn't enforce had no business being a law anyway.

That's actually a fairly strict standard, since juries require unanimous consent to convict someone. It means that any minority large enough to regularly turn up as even a single member of a jury has to be considered as well. Thus, you could still have laws grounded on nothing more than 'common sense moral disapproval' of a practice. You'd just have to have a very wide consensus about what morality entails on the point.

"Benghazi without the Shame"

It’s a leap year, which means it’s even more important than usual for the Obama administration to deny the threat of Islamic terrorism. In September 2012, it fell to Susan Rice, then ambassador to the U.N., to make the rounds on the Sunday-morning talk shows and peddle the falsehood that the attack at Benghazi, Libya, was just a high-spirited reaction to an amateur video.

Yesterday—a week after the biggest terror attack on American soil since 9/11—the Rice role fell to Attorney General Loretta Lynch. This time, the administration didn’t even bother pretending it was going to tell the truth.

Political Officers

Maybe this is a partial answer to Raven's concern that he's sounding paranoid.

Without denying that a base commander has the right to control his installation, and recognizing that the USAF in particular has had issues with aggressive proselytizing, I still don't understand how this happened. This was a retirement ceremony, so even if he was the most annoying Jehovah's Witness in your command you'd think you'd let him have his party and then just go away forever.

I'm also not sure why the base commander would forbid the use of the word "God" in a retirement ceremony anyway, any more than at a wedding ceremony conducted on base.

Besides, the speech is nondenominational, just the ordinary linking of religion to boilerplate patriotism. "God bless our flag, God bless our troops, God bless America" is not exactly a call to join some particular church.

It'll be interesting to see how the Air Force explains just what happened here.

Hiring Military Officers Off the Street

Raven wrote to ask whether or not I could come up with a better way to subvert the military and introduce politically-preferred persons into it than Ash Carter's new plan. I can't, really, but there's more to be said about this than that.

The idea is controversial, to say the very least. For many in the rank-and-file military, it seems absurd, a bewildering cultural change that threatens to upend many assumptions about military life and traditional career paths....

This is a key piece of Carter’s “Force of the Future” personnel reform. Unveiled June 9, it aims to help the military bring in more top talent, especially for high-tech career fields focused on cyber warfare and space. Advocates say it will help the military fill important manpower shortfalls with highly skilled professionals and, more broadly, create greater “permeability” between the active-duty military and the civilian sector.

At the same time, it suggests eroding the military’s tradition of growing its own leaders and cultivating a force with a distinct culture and tight social fabric, which many believe to be the heart of military effectiveness. Critics worry it will create a new subcaste of military service members who are fundamentally disconnected from the traditional career force.

“They will enter a culture they don’t know, understand or potentially appreciate,” said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine officer and military expert at the Heritage Foundation. “The Marines around them will likely be challenged to appreciate them as they would a fellow Marine.”

The thing is, we almost do this now. What we do now is that we hire civilian contractors and integrate them with existing military commands. The contractors are similarly disconnected from the culture in many cases, and they lack the authority to issue orders. But that doesn't really matter much, since they aren't hired to command military forces, but to bring special skill sets to bear on the kinds of problems that are handled by a commander's staff.

Now, the way this works is that the actual orders don't come from staff officers. They're issued by the Operations officer in the name of the commander. These are usually set out as what are called "Fragmentary Orders" (FRAGOs) that supplement a larger, overarching order governing a whole military operation. So the staff officer puts together a part of the FRAGO that deals with his area of expertise. That draft part of the FRAGO is passed around to all the other relevant staff sections for comment or approval. Once you have buy-in, it's sent to the 3 section (the operations section) to be written up as a part of the FRAGO. Then, the finalized FRAGO is sent out under the commander's authority to subordinate units.

A civilian contractor can write these draft FRAGO parts as well as anyone else, since at no point is he personally ordering the troops to do anything. He's just advising the commander on what to order the troops to do. While working for a couple of brigade commanders in Iraq I wrote many, many orders for military forces deployed at war in just this way. I wrote orders for PSYOP detachments, for infantry and cavalry units who were doing things relevant to my area of expertise, and so forth. None of these orders were violations of the military's culture or chain of command, because they were all staffed around for approval and then sent to the 3 for inclusion in his latest FRAGO. I wrote the orders, but didn't issue them. He issued them in the name of his colonel.

Would it have been simpler if I'd been "laterally entered" into the force as a Major or LTC? Would that have been more of an affront to the military culture than having a civilian in a John B. Stetson hat writing orders for the troops?

Frankly, I think the contractor solution works better than the proposed resolution for several reasons.

1) You can readily fire contractors who don't adapt to the culture. Make Mr. Offa de Street into Major Offa de Street and you're stuck with him.

2) The troops aren't asked to think of you as a soldier or Marine just like them. The difference between who you are and who they are is clear.

3) There's no danger that a civilian contractor will someday be promoted to a position of actual authority over the troops. Major de Street might someday get promoted to a green tab position, especially if he's there for the reasons Raven worries about. He shouldn't be. Command of our soldiers or Marines should be entrusted only to those whom they have reason to regard as brothers.

Ultimately while the military regards contractors as pernicious and expensive, they solve this very problem without introducing new and undesirable features. Nor am I convinced that contractors are actually as expensive as they seem, since you only pay for them while they're working for you. The Congress is also working through a painful reassessment of military compensation and retirement, and the VA, and all the rest of it. With contractors, you just don't have that problem: the day they finish the job you hired them to do, you're done paying for them.

So yes, this is a bad idea because of the danger of allowing the insertion of politicized officers into military commands. But it's also a bad idea for several other reasons, and it's completely unnecessary because we have a reasonable workaround for the problem that's already in place.

Ash Carter has not been the most impressive SECDEF ever.

The Summer Solstice

Some appropriate music, although you're probably going to spend the whole thing wondering: "What's he going to do with that lamb?"


Nothing, I assure you, on camera.

Texit

Not the worst idea of all time.

I had a friend decades ago who was a big Texas Independence guy. He was a wonderful human being, but I had to suspect that as wonderful as he showed himself to be on every occasion, he must have some wires crossed internally even if I couldn't see them. I now realize that he was just an early adopter.

Happy Father's Day

Today we honor fathers. Neo-neocon has posted a poem from the poet Robert Hayden:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

That seems a good beginning. Does anyone else have a favorite poem about fathers?

A Genius Idea...

...by apparently a professional economics journalist whose understanding of how capitalism works is staggering.

What would happen if corporations acted on his advice? You'd be pouring money into both the firearms industry and the firearms market. What does that mean? New entrants to the market, of course. Smaller companies like Daniel Defense already exist, serving a niche market within the niche market that is modern sporting rifles. Since you'd be flooding the market with cash and then removing the major competitors, you'd open the floor for a whole new generation of arms makers -- not publicly traded firms but, like Daniel Defense, small businesses owned by people devoted to excellence in firearms production.

They'd have money to spend on setting up shop, too, because you'd have enriched them by purchasing up their products. People who have been in the gun sales business could enter the gun production business with the billions of bucks you'd just dropped in their laps. They'd have every reason to do so, knowing that their customers were being starved of a popular item (and having the reasonable expectation that you 'good guy' tech firms were going to try to buy up all of their production line too).

This is the way to turn the gun industry from what the author calls "a financial pipsqueak" into a powerhouse. Gun tech startups would prosper wildly across the fruited plain.

It's a great idea. Go for it.

The Meme as Political Commentary

As a rule, it's damaging to political discourse. Once in a while, though, they come up with a good one.

Might Want to Practice

What is the Common Factor Here?

One:

Sometimes I check in on this April 4, 2005 piece to see if the Times has gotten around to correcting it. As of today, they have not! Sometimes I hope they never will.

But crozier mistakes are understandable. Less understandable? Saying Jesus is buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, that Easter marks Jesus’ “resurrection into heaven,” that St. Patrick is known for banishing slaves from Ireland, or that William Butler Yeats is the author of the Book of Hebrews.

Two:

The mainstream media lobbies hard for gun control, but it is very, very bad at gun journalism. It might be impossible ever to bridge the divide between the gun-control and gun-rights movements. But it’s impossible to start a dialogue when you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.

Media stories in the wake of mass shootings typically feature a laundry list of mistakes that reflect their writers’ inexperience with guns and gun culture. Some of them are small but telling: conflating automatic and semi-automatic weapons, assault rifle and assault weapon, caliber and gauge—all demonstrating a general lack of familiarity with firearms. Some of them are bigger. Like calling for “common-sense gun control” and “universal background checks” after instances in which a shooter purchased a gun legally and passed background checks. Or focusing on mass shootings involving assault weapons—and thereby ignoring statistics that show that far more people die from handguns.

Considering that a quick online search should provide all the information journalists need to get this right, it’s amazing that journalists don’t know the difference between an assault rifle and an assault weapon. An assault rifle is a fully automatic weapon that can fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger, up to 950 rounds per minute. An assault weapon is a semi-automatic gun that can accept detachable magazines and has a pistol grip and foldable stock (to increase the gun’s length). The term assault weapon itself, of disputed origin, is a thorn in the side of gun enthusiasts, who point out that the differences between “assault weapons” and other semi-automatics are largely cosmetic and don’t increase the gun’s lethality.

DB: National Defense Service Medal for Journalist who Fired Bazooka AR-15

A journalist from the New York Daily News has been awarded the National Defense Service Medal in recognition of his honorable service during a time of crisis, a Pentagon spokesperson announced today. The recipient will also be eligible to receive disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs within the next decade.

Gersh Kuntzman, a veteran journalist of 30 years, put down the pen to take up the sword on Wednesday, traveling from New York to Philadelphia to experience the thrill of firing a military-grade weapon similar to the one used in the Orlando terror attack.

Kuntzman’s battle-weary, critically-acclaimed memoir, “What is it like to fire an AR-15? It’s horrifying, menacing and very, very loud,” quickly gained widespread acclaim, including the notice of many active-duty service members, who lauded his steadfast heroics.

“We here in the Department of Defense are in awe of Mr. Kuntzman’s martial prowess and noble sacrifice to this nation,” said Lt. Col. Patricia Green, a Pentagon spokesperson. “Shooting an AR-15 is exactly the same as being in combat, as evidenced by Mr. Kuntzman’s self-diagnosed PTSD.”

The AR-15 assault bazooka is the civilian counterpart to the military’s M4A1 bazooka. The shoulder-fired weapon is renowned for its crippling recoil and deafening boom, leading many bazooka enthusiasts to train their children from an early age to develop the tolerance required to handle such a mighty instrument of destruction.

The Status of the Infinite

A friend of mine who is a philosopher of mathematics says that the biggest debates his field is having is on the status of the infinite. Here are three introductory problems -- not by far the whole thing, but an introduction to the thing.

Cold Chisel

Not the usual around here, but ya never know what people will like.

"Khe Sanh," the unofficial Aussie anthem, or so I'm told by highly reliable sources¹:

"Shipping Steel," trucking the outback

For breakfast fans

¹My best Aussie drinking buddy, if you must know.

Kevin Drum: The NRA Is Right This Time

There are plenty of gun-control measures I'd support. Banning high-cap magazines, for one. But banning gun sales to anyone who's ever caught the FBI's attention? No thanks. Senate Democrats have finally put me in the position of agreeing with the NRA. Nice work, folks.

It's been a stunning week, watching Democrats declare that due process needs to be permanently suspended for gun sales. It's clear that the right to keep and bear arms isn't even a second-class right in their view: it's a privilege, one they feel the American people have proven they deserve to lose.

How can you square this with the oath you took as a Senator, though? Even if you believe -- as Hillary Clinton has argued -- that Heller was wrongly decided, the Constitution is really firm on due process. 'We have to get rid of due process' is the very next thing to 'We should have the power to make whatever rules we want for the Good of the State.'

Does Anyone at DHS Actually Speak American English?

From a Free Beacon report:

Government agencies should employ “American English instead of religious, legal and cultural terms like ‘jihad,’ ‘sharia,’ ‘takfir’ or ‘umma,’” states the June 2016 report by the Council’s countering violent extremism subcommittee....

The DHS report stated that to avoid a confrontational “us versus them” stance in public efforts to counter Islamic radicalization, government programs should use the term “American Muslim” instead of “Muslim American.”

In that language we call "American English," there's an important distinction between the noun and the adjective. The noun is supposed to refer to what the thing essentially is, and the adjectives usually refer to less important qualities. If the idea is to avoid an 'us versus them' stance, "Muslim American" suggests that these are people who are first and foremost Americans. "American Muslim" suggests that they are essentially Muslims, and only accidentally American.

Likewise, while plain speaking is good, it's difficult to discuss concepts without naming them. I don't see any reason to believe that anyone can become an expert at 'countering violent extremism' today without understanding concepts like sharia or takfiri behaviors. You can say, "It is wrong to try to replace a Constitutional system with a system of religious law," and that's fine. But it doesn't get at why this particular religious law is especially pernicious, or why it's popular in certain regions from which we draw our Islamic immigrants. Just what is driving the conflict disappears behind a veil, as if Catholics might be just as likely to forward a scheme of replacing the Constitutional system with church law.

Rather, it is exactly the fact that sharia can't be changed by human beings that makes it attractive in the lawless regions like Afghanistan or Somalia. In those contexts, sharia is a standard against which you can judge the behavior of the warlords. Otherwise, all you've got is "The law is what I say it is, and the taxes you owe me are what I say they are." The fact that no warlord can change the law is really attractive in those particular contexts.

That same unchangeable quality a real problem in our context. Sharia taken seriously declares that our entire system of government is illegitimate, indeed an offense to God. So too large parts of our way of life. And it can't be changed to accommodate us, not by anyone ever.

That's a huge conflict with the American way that isn't present in other systems of religious law.

This could be fun

From Powerline via Maggie's Farm, a proper response to bureaucrats, Alinsky-style.

That Doesn't Mean Anything! These Guys Were Trained!

Well, except for Christy.

Time for a Convention of the States

Texas Governor Greg Abbot is on point.

Count me in. He's been talking since the spring, but things aren't getting better. More and more, it looks like disaster in the fall -- no matter which way this election goes. We don't have to do this. We can walk.

Can We Stop This?

John McCain is wrong: Barack Obama is at most indirectly responsible for ISIS. Anything inspired by ISIS, he's indirectly indirectly responsible for.

Guilt can be divided without being lessened, it's true. But Orlando wasn't done by Christians, it wasn't done by the NRA, and it wasn't done by Barack Obama either.

Not that Obama is covering himself with glory today, doing his best to blame Orlando apparently on people like me.

A pox on all their houses.

Well, It's Almost Friday ...

Grim introduced us to Mr. Fowler recently. Here's one that seems appropriate after Range 15, and, well, everything else.

Now, a little Tullamore DEW would be perfect.

...

Update: Well, why stop with just one?

Cheers!

Two From Facebook

Both with a Range 15 theme:

Trump was Wrong About the Troops

I went out with some guys distributing bricks of cash myself. The things were plastic wrapped and sealed -- you couldn't have stolen any without stealing the whole brick, or cutting it open in a very obvious way. Accountability was always in force. You personally signed for every brick you took, and you had to get signatures from the Iraqis you turned it over to. If they later claimed not to have gotten it, that would be the end of the gravy train for them. But it also would have resulted in an intense investigation of the last guy who had positive control of the money, and his unit mates.

Of course tons of that money got stolen, once the Iraqis had custody of it. Just like any tribal leader who is "a river to my people," a lot of the river gets routed into his own fields. Plenty of the money got stolen. It just didn't get stolen by us.

Here a special operator tells his own version of the same story.

In 2008, while deployed as a special operator in western Afghanistan, I led a team of fifteen marines and nearly seven hundred Afghan commandos stationed on a remote firebase near the Iranian border. We were almost entirely reliant on an operational fund, something akin to cerp. We used these funds to buy our food and fuel and to hire local Afghan tribesmen to provide base security. Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed through our hands. Our position was in no way unique. Every special-operations team in Afghanistan managed the same kinds of funds. Once, when security in the village just outside our gate became a problem, one of the marines I worked with negotiated a deal with the local village elders to use our operational fund to convert an abandoned Olympic-size, Soviet-era swimming pool into a reservoir to irrigate several acres of parched fields. Within a few weeks, those fields were ready for planting, and the threat to our base had disappeared.

Two and a half million American men and women have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Center for Public Integrity, some hundred and fifteen military personnel since 2005 have been convicted of committing theft, bribery, or contract-rigging crimes, involving a total of fifty-two million dollars. This is a disappointing fact, but it does not cancel out the ingenuity shown by the soldiers, many of them only in their twenties, who have ethically managed budgets equivalent to that of a small town or medium-sized business.

He goes on to talk about what he wished Trump had discussed instead. But Trump can't talk about those things, because he doesn't know anything about them.

Southern Baptists are Done with the Confederate Flag

NPR buries the lede on this one, preferring to talk about the Southern Baptist Convention's support for resettling Syrian refugees. But of course the Southern Baptist Convention supports that: there are massive Federal contracts available for churches who will help settle Syrian refugees. There is just too much money available for any mainstream denomination not to want to play. Even those without the theological justifications that Christianity offers would be inclined to get in on the payday.

No, that's to be expected. What's really surprising is this:

Southern Baptists also weighed in on another emotional issue at the intersection of race, religion and violence. Almost exactly a year after the murder of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., set off a debate over the Confederate battle flag, the Southern Baptist Convention approved a resolution calling on "our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity with the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters."...

During the debate over the wording of the resolution, Pastor James Merritt of Cross Pointe Church in Duluth, Ga., delivered an emotional speech calling for the removal of language stating that for some, the display of the flag serves not as a "symbol of hatred, bigotry and racism, but as a memorial to loved ones who died in the Civil War."

"I am the great-great-grandson of two men who fought in the Confederate army," Merritt told the convention. "I cannot undo what they fought for. But they cannot undo what I wish they had done, and what I pray we will do today."

The language was stricken. Baptist Press reported that the resolution passed by a "wide margin."

The shooting in Charleston last year changed people's hearts. One wonders if the Orlando shooting will have a similar effect. And, if so, on whom.

Thank God for That

From an article headlined "Harry Reid kills assault weapons ban":

Virtually the entire press corps frothed at the mouth when the president, grandstanding at the State of the Union speech, thundered that a list of gun violence victims “deserve” a vote on these sorts of measures... [but] the Senate leader decided he couldn’t prevail upon his members to cast a vote.

Cowardly? Maybe. Or maybe the votes aren’t there and to maximize his chances on other measures he took the assault weapons ban out. That is the nature of the legislative process. But at least we can dispense with the notion that Republicans are standing in the way of assault weapons ban legislation.

There's a huge difference in the 1994 law and a similar law proposed today. In 1994, so-called 'assault weapons' were a minor part of sales, even compiling all the weird things that the Clinton bill coupled together like pump-action shotguns with heat shields over the barrels. You'd go to a gun show, and there'd be like two tables selling anything like that. The rest sold long rifles with wooden stocks, hunting shotguns, or handguns.

A decade and a half since 9/11, the AR models are the most popular rifles in America. There are nine million of them in private hands. The US Army is barely a million all told, Reserve and National Guards added in. And 40+% of them are Southerners, since the all-volunteer military came to be. Close to seven in ten are Republicans. You'd be risking a mutiny to ask it, and you ought to be: you'd be running into the teeth of the most plain and obvious reading of the 2nd Amendment, to which all these soldiers took an oath.

I keep hearing that you can't deport 11 million people. Well, maybe, although people have to eat and that means they have to go out in public to find work and buy food. Guns don't have to do anything. If you grandfather 9 million ARs -- and all the other so-called 'assault weapons' -- you might as well not pass the law. But if you pass a law with confiscation, how are you going to find them? Who's going to come and get nine million rifles from families who don't want to give them up?

Thank God the votes aren't there.

I Suddenly Realize This Guy is Very Brave

Milo Yiannopoulos, I mean. He's going to get himself killed speaking his mind like this.

I like that in a man.

I've seen him talk before, and I haven't really been impressed with what I've heard. But I don't care -- he's speaking his mind when it's dangerous. Not just financially, either. There's a litany of secular saints who have gone down before the knives -- and axes, in one famous case -- of Muslim radicals who want to silence speech like this. He's very literally putting his life on the line by talking this way.

So.

Good for him. As I can, I will support him even though I don't always agree with him. As I can, I will defend his right to do this. Literally, if the opportunity presents itself.

Thoughts on Range 15

Don't appear to have been any shootings at Range 15 showing theaters tonight. It wasn't for a lack of guns. I haven't been in a room with that many gun-toting men and women since the last time I went to church in Baghdad.

Well, or the DFAC. Probably it was the DFAC.

There was a lot of laughing out loud at the movie. It was very much military humor, deployment humor. Some of it was black humor, but a lot of it captured the heavily sexual banter that young men deployed without real outlets develop over time.

I completely understand now why there were not able to get the movie rated. It doesn't fit the rating scale. There is no category for it. Normally a movie rated high for violence is an R, and a movie rated higher than that is rated X for sex. This movie was neither more violent than an R movie, nor were the sex scenes particularly explicit at all. The reason it couldn't be rated was that they said and did things that are just forbidden. I would have liked to have seen the faces of any of the raters who may have encountered it.

My guess is that it will become a cult favorite among deploying soldiers and Marines. It will probably be forbidden by General Order, and have to be passed around like other contraband. On the last day before rotating out of country, the commander will elect to go to bed early so his guys can have a screening without him taking official notice. They'll laugh, even though they've seen it many times before. Not because the jokes are funny -- many of them are terrible -- but because they understand them.

After the credits, they showed a nice little 'making of' video that ends with Nick Palmisciano of Ranger UP giving a brief speech about his hopes that this movie will create new lanes of understanding between military members and civilians.

Having seen it, I'm pretty sure it won't. :)

Heh

"Veterans Put Their Own Names on Kill List and Send to ISIS."

By the way, tonight Range 15 is on in hundreds of theaters nationwide. Any bets on whether any ISIS supporters choose one of those for a shooting attack?

Domestic Violence & Female Privilege

A woman runs down her boyfriend after finding out he has HIV. Are you as inclined to convict her as you would be if it were a man running down his wife?

D. C. McAllister points out that domestic violence is not just male-on-female, but we definitely don't take it as seriously when it's female-on-male.

Now, as Hillary has reminded us time and again, women are equal to men and should be treated the same. She’s right, which is why she should be called out for allegedly abusing her husband. If Johnny Depp can be held to account for throwing a cell phone at Amber Heard’s face and bruising her below her eye, then shouldn’t the same media exam be given to Hillary, who is running for president?

An allied point, related to the post below. A domestic violence abuser is forbidden from possessing a firearm, and it is a felony to transfer one to them. Doesn't the logic behind that law make it even more obviously true that we shouldn't transfer command of the US military to a domestic violence abuser?

Of course, like the Orlando shooter, she has not been convicted in a court of law for domestic violence. Like his wife, her husband has reasons not to press charges. If this is a standard we care about, though, does it really make sense to put that much weight on the abused spouse? They may often be too afraid to bring charges. It's also true that abuse creates a twisted and damaged emotional relationship that can cause an abused spouse not to want to bring charges. Or, like Bill Clinton, they could be swayed by material or political interests. Whatever the case, the state often steps in to prosecute these sorts of cases where evidence exists of domestic violence -- for example, a published book giving an account of the evidence in the name of a sworn officer of the law, as in this case.

One might say that Bill Clinton had it coming if anyone did. One might say that about the boyfriend in the video. One might just make a general claim that men often have it coming. Doesn't that come, though, at the sacrifice of the principle of equality before the law? Should we sacrifice that principle because we don't really believe in it? Or should we uphold it even though it means punishing people more harshly than is suggested by what appears to be a common sense that female-on-male violence is not as bad?

The AR-15 is a Weapon of Equality

I suppose I should mention Gersh Kuntzman's instantly famous declaration of fear, which is getting a massive amount of play on social media since he published it yesterday.

It feels like a bazooka — and sounds like a cannon....

The recoil bruised my shoulder. The brass shell casings disoriented me as they flew past my face. The smell of sulfur and destruction made me sick. The explosions — loud like a bomb — gave me a temporary case of PTSD. For at least an hour after firing the gun just a few times, I was anxious and irritable.

Even in semi-automatic mode, it is very simple to squeeze off two dozen rounds before you even know what has happened. In fully automatic mode, it doesn’t take any imagination to see dozens of bodies falling in front of your barrel.

He somehow missed that there isn't a fully automatic mode, but among this collection of emoting that isn't surprising.

The AR-15 wasn't actually the weapon used in Orlando. However, the Armalite Rifle ("AR") is the family that has allowed the military to expand women throughout its ranks without abandoning accuracy at range. The Marines teach women to shoot it accurately over multiple shots to 300 meters, a testament to its low recoil and reliable construction.

Over the last 20 years, the Marines have also made a shift to the Body-Mass Index (BMI) standard that they use today. This has led to far smaller male Marines, too, as powerlifters and body-builders can't hold to the BMI standard. For example, I have a 34 inch waist, but am informed that I need to lose over 50 pounds to attain a "normal" bodyweight according to this standard. If I dropped 50 pounds of muscle, a lot of strength-oriented tasks would become harder or even impossible. But I could still put steel on target with an Armalite.

It's a tool of equality, in other words. Edward Abbey said that was common to rifles:

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

That capacity for human equality is a particularly strong feature of the Armalite rifle. It can weigh as much as four pounds less than the M1 Garand rifle with which we fought World War II. Its recoil is vastly less than the .30-06 round the M1 fired. It is an ideal weapon for the kind of militia use the Founders intended: its operation is immediately familiar to anyone with military training, and it can be conveyed quickly to almost any citizen who might be called up even without military training. Almost any citizen can carry it and use it effectively, quickly, at need.

Of course, those things are also the very reasons it is so dangerous in the hands of a bad person. This particular bad person shouldn't have had access to firearms, under existing law, because of his penchant for domestic violence. The Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968 makes it a felony to transfer a weapon to someone convicted of domestic violence. The only problem is that, somehow, he never got convicted. His wife didn't press charges, just as she seems to have gone to the store to buy the gun and to help him scout out the club (and possibly Disney World). Well, a battered wife has a complex psychological state, and legitimate physical fear, so perhaps we won't press her too closely about all of that. But the FBI also somehow missed any signs of it during their multiple investigations of him.

Just Some Outlaw Tunes, More or Less

"Tom Ames' Prayer," "Pour 'Em Kinda Strong," and "Before the Devil Knows We're Dead."
Seems in keeping with the mood of the Hall lately.

No, Christians Are Not Behind Orlando

Another person who would rather beat up on his fellow Americans than ISIS is ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.

"You know what is gross — your thoughts and prayers and Islamophobia after you created this anti-queer climate," ACLU staff attorney Chase Strangio tweeted on Sunday morning....

"The Christian Right has introduced 200 anti-LGBT bills in the last six months and people blaming Islam for this," Strangio tweeted. "No."

Another ACLU attorney who specializes in religious liberty issues scolded Republican lawmakers who tweeted out their condolences. "Remember when you co-sponsored extreme, anti-LGBT First Amendment Defense Act?" the ACLU's Eunice Rho tweeted at Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and other Republicans,

This is really irritating stuff. How can you even say the phrase "extreme, anti-LGBT First Amendment Defense Act" in the same context as the Orlando killings? Doesn't that context wash the extremism right out of the 'hey, maybe the government shouldn't force people to bake cakes' bill?

Donald Trump sounds sane today compared to these people. He at least is capable of pointing a finger at the actually responsible party. What caused this terrorist act? "Toxic Masculinity!" "Christians!" "Republicans!" "The NRA!"

Stop it. Get a grip on yourselves. I myself strongly support religious freedom legislation, not just for Christians but for Sikhs or Hindus or Native Americans and, yes, even Muslims. All I ask is what Locke asked, which is that their religion remains wholly voluntary. As long as they are doing it because they want to do it, or not doing it because they don't want to do it, that's all fine. I just draw the line at anyone being made to do, or refrain from doing, something for religious reasons they do not share. It makes sense to let religious bakers elect not to bake a cake. It doesn't make sense to kill people for failing to conform to a religion they aren't even part of.

Furthermore, I don't consider myself to be an "extreme, anti-LGBT" person for believing that this is a reasonable principle for sorting out religious differences. In fact, I'm not even thinking of LGBTs when I arrive at the principle. I'm thinking about political philosophy and the rights of man. This is one of those rights. Our country's entire purpose is to guarantee these rights. I don't care if you don't like it.

Nevertheless I will kill or die to prevent any American from being killed by a terrorist. That's another principle I have, and it's another one that I didn't come to while thinking about LGBTs. I came to it for other reasons, but it likewise applies to them just the same. If our enemies come for you, I will fight for you. That you may be gay doesn't matter at all to the operation of this principle. As much as the ACLU (and Amanda Marcotte) seem to have forgotten it, our real enemies are not other Americans.  Remember the rattlesnake.

Ah, Amanda Marcotte

I had largely forgotten that Amanda Marcotte existed. How nice to see that she hasn't changed a bit.

Every time feminists talk about toxic masculinity, there is a chorus of whiny dudes who will immediately assume — or pretend to assume — that feminists are condemning all masculinity, even though the modifier “toxic” inherently suggests that there are forms of masculinity that are not toxic.

So, to be excruciatingly clear, toxic masculinity is a specific model of manhood, geared towards dominance and control. It’s a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to prove one’s self to the world.

For obvious political reasons, conservatives are hustling as fast as they can to make this about “radical Islam,” which is to say they are trying to imply that there’s something inherent to Islam and not Christianity that causes such violence.

Do you see what she did there? She did exactly the thing she just accused her opponents of doing one paragraph earlier. The modifier "radical" and the modifier "toxic" are performing the same function, whatever function that is. Either it's true that the modifier 'inherently suggests' that there are forms that aren't radical or toxic, or it isn't. If it's fair to treat conservatives talking about "radical Islam" as if they were really speaking in a coded way about "Islam," then it's just as fair for your opponents to assume you mean the same thing.

If I called her "whiny" for doing what she just called her opponents "whiny" for doing, she would say that was a sexist remark coming from me but not from her.

The Largest Mass Shooting in American History

It wasn't Orlando, actually.

THE LARGEST MASS SHOOTING IN US HISTORY HAPPENED December 29,1890. When 297 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota were murdered by federal agents & members of the 7th Cavalry who had come to confiscate their firearms “for their own safety and protection”. The slaughter began after the majority of the Sioux had peacefully turned in their firearms.

It was a little less cold blooded than the post makes it sound, but quite brutal all the same. The gunfight broke out when one Lakota man refused to turn in his arms. Twenty-five soldiers were killed in the battle that erupted when they opened fire into the crowd, as not all of the Lakota had yet handed in their guns. At the time it was something the government approved of so much that it awarded twenty Medals of Honor to participants.

Reason Magazine on Creating a Gun Free America

One curse word, for those of you watching at work.

Wretchard on Trump

The most disturbing aspect of recent terror attacks is that despite advance warning the authorities were taken by surprise each time. This serial failure undercuts the administration's claim to competence. This is something the non-expert public understands. Suppose someone came to you claiming he was a brain surgeon. Even if you were not a doctor but had tests only a brain surgeon could answer correctly you could evaluate the "brain surgeon" by giving him one exam and another to the cleaning lady in the hallway. If they scored the same you would begin to suspect the brain surgeon might be fake. In fact if the cleaning lady continued to outscore the "brain surgeon" a rational employer would consider hiring the cleaning lady as head of surgery, which possibly explains the rise of Donald Trump.

Heh.

Jesse James

He was a man, who killed many men.

The song's been done a few times.

Well, maybe he wasn't a hero. But wasn't he a man?

Bang, Bang. Isn't That A Pretty Sound?

Embrace Violence – Two simple words, that when together, build the foundation for all that we know. A minute number of people ever stop to think about the circumstances that surround the very freedoms they spend the majority of their lives enjoying. Not the main stream core freedoms that our country was founded on, rather the diminutive pieces of thread that weave together to form the very fabric that holds our great nation together. Each day passing as the last, each day taken for granted with little to no thought about how fortunate they really are for having in their lives, those that embrace violence.

In our world there lives a relativity small group of guardians who not only stand ready to do violence on the behalf of others, but actually wait anxiously for the opportunity. Men that live outside the illusion of safety built upon walls of ignorance and denial that is our peaceful existence in this world. Men who would rather dance with the devil in the valley of the shadow of death than sit at a Starbucks, sipping a $10 dollar coffee while contemplating whether their skinny jeans are adequately squeezing all available testosterone into their systems in hope of fulfilling their latest desire of obtaining a beard.

For this chosen group, violence is the answer.

These are my people. Does that make me a bad man, or a good man? Or just a man? Maybe, as Edward Abbey said, that's honor enough.

The Smell of Victory

They're smelling it.

And they just don't understand what is going to happen if they follow through.

Orlando & LA

I don't have much to say about this, but somehow I've been talking about it most of the day. Lone Wolf terrorists have two quite distinct profiles. Most of them are white supremacists with criminal histories that built ties to criminal organizations like the Aryan Brotherhood. I'll bet the LA case turns out that way. The rest are Islamic supremacists with ties -- sometimes merely sympathies -- with terrorists. The Orlando shooter was clearly one of these.

These are solvable problems, but only if we square up on what we're dealing with. It's two separate, similar, supremacist problems. Neither "all gun owners" nor "all Muslims" nor "all white people" are the problem. It's a narrow, easily targeted selection of folks who cause almost all of these issues.

C'mon Brexit

These are our brothers overseas. Of course, I was on the side of Scotland separating from Britain too. The bigger governments are always worse, but you have to balance that against the danger of invasion from abroad. Right now, Europe couldn't invade Vanderbilt. Small is the way to go.

Rolling Stone: Democrats Will Learn All The Wrong Lessons from Sanders

They have no choice, because they never understood him to start with.

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power... [T]he theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.

But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.

Petraeus to Launch Gun Control Group

Well, of course. Nobody's more intense about gun control than the Armed Forces.

Veterans Coalition for Common Sense to encourage elected leaders to "do more to prevent gun tragedies." The group will feature veterans from every branch of the military who are urging lawmakers to toughen gun laws, the organization said in a news release.

This group won't accomplish more than giving false narratives to the media for propaganda use. Nevertheless, that's still harmful. Sort of like "only" revealing classified information to your mistress. It's not as bad as putting it on an easily-hacked private server with no proper encryption protocols. But your country won't thank you for it, all the same.

Thunderbolt Iron, Redux

King Tut isn't alone. Here's some American thunderbolt iron.

Ranger UP Addresses Male Body Image

Archaeology Confirms Viking Saga

Archaeologists working in Trondheim in Norway are amazed by the discovery of a human skeleton in the bottom of an abandoned castle well. The skeleton provides evidence that confirms dramatic historical events mentioned in the Sagas....

In 1197 King Sverre Sigurdsson and his Birkebeiner-mercenaries were attacked and defeated in his castle stronghold, Sverresborg, by his rivals, the Baglers. According to the Saga, the Baglers burned down buildings and destroyed the castle’s fresh water supply by throwing one of King Sverre’s dead men into the well, and then filling it with stones.

Now, following a trial excavation in the well, archaeologists can confirm this dramatic story. Archaeologists managed to retrieve part of the skeleton they found in the well in 2014. A fragment of bone produced a radiocarbon date that confirmed that the individual lived and died at the end of the 12th century, the same time as the incident described in the Saga.

Reducing Sexual Assaults: Self Defense Works Best

In a study surprising only in that it comes from Canada, researchers found that women taught to defend themselves suffer fewer sexual assaults.

The four-year study tracked nearly 900 women at three Canadian universities, randomly selecting half to take the 12-hour “resistance” program, and compared them to a second group who received only brochures, similar to those available at a health clinic. One year later, the incidence of reported rape among women who took the program was 5.2 per cent, compared to 9.8 per cent in the control group; the gap in incidents of attempted rape was even wider.

The discomfiting part: Potential victims are still shouldering the burden for their own safety.

I don't see why that should be "discomfiting." I've spent a great deal of my life learning to defend myself, my family, and those around me. I make it a point to always be armed, though often only with a knife, to help ensure that I am always capable of rendering an effective defense. I regard it as a source of pride that I am strong and capable in these areas, and that those I love are safer with me around.

I would regard it as shameful to depend entirely on others for my defense. I would regard it as slavish to accept that my only proper defense was to trust that others wouldn't hurt me.

Far from being discomfited by the thought that I should have a hand in my own defense, I think that taking charge of your own defense is virtuous and ennobling. If I had a daughter, I would hope that I could teach her to do the same.

National Reconnaissance Office Patches are Awesome

Take a look at these mythic beauties.

Not Some Fairytale

Picture this. A Muslim leader reaches out to a group of Christians and invites them to his country. The Christians happily accept the invitation, while the Muslim leader prepares his people for their arrival. This is the first time the two communities have met in an official delegation. Matters of state, politics and religion are the topics of discussion. The two groups see eye-to-eye on most issues, but also agree to disagree on theological issues. If one phrase can best describe their meeting, it is “mutual respect”.

At the end of their talks, the Christians tell the Muslims, “It is time for us to pray”. The problem for the Christians is that there is no church nearby to worship. Instead of letting the Christians pray on the dirty street, the Muslim leader tells the Christians, “You are followers of the one true God, so please come pray inside my mosque. We are all brothers in humanity.” The Christians agree to use the “Islamic space” as their own. A bridge between these religious communities is made in the name of peace and goodwill.

This story is not some fairytale. It is a historical fact (I did, however, make-up quotes based on how the interaction might have played out). The Muslim leader of the story is Prophet Muhammad and the Christians are from Najran, or modern-day Yemen. The event happened in Medina in 631 AD. This moment in time represents one of the first examples of Muslim-Christian dialogue, but more importantly, one of the first acts of religious pluralism in Islamic history.

Now fast forward to 2016 in Damascus, Syria. The city – and much of the Middle East - has plunged into darkness. Pastor Edward Awabdeh leads a prayer in a Church despite threats on his life by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) militant group. Pastor Awabdeh maintains the Christian faith, although many of his religion have fled a country which is now ranked the fifth most dangerous country in the world to be a Christian.

The militant group regularly persecutes religious minorities in the large swathes of Syrian territory it has taken, and its ultimate aim is to destroy all traces of Christianity in the Middle East.

But to put it bluntly, the daily abductions, murders, beheadings and destruction perpetrated by IS fanatics on the vulnerable Christians of the Middle East directly contradict Prophet Muhammad’s vision of an Islamic state.

It doesn't fix everything wrong with Islam's vision of how it relates to Christianity, but this understanding would mark a significant change for the better.

Law and Order

I've written a number of times about my thoughts on the rule of law. Where ordinary people are concerned, the law ought to be a tool for creating a peaceful and harmonious order. That means it should be well considered, and it should be enforced if it has to be. On the other hand, enforcing the law is not an end in itself. Officers of the law should be focused on the peace and harmony, rather than on ensuring that every documented violation of the law is paid for in court.

However, I have also written, I think that those entrusted with the power to enforce the law should be held to the law exactly. The extra power over the lives of others that they are granted should be matched with a stricter standard of personal adherence to the rules they enforce.

Instead one often sees the opposite. No one drives faster than police do, and not just when responding to a call. No one parks illegally more cheerfully than the government vehicle whose driver assumes there is no danger of a ticket. No one abuses the power of their office more readily than an ally of President Obama's, whether her name is Lois Lerner or Hillary Clinton.

It would be one thing to excuse a momentary lapse of judgment from a career official with an otherwise stellar record. It is another when one is excusing a pattern of behavior that was intentional, illegal, and immoral.

In the case of Clinton, as her history proves, there is always another abuse.

My Favorite Part About This is the "Tradition" Argument

The 9th Circuit says there's no Constitutional right to carry a concealed weapon.

OK. Open carry is fine with me.

But my favorite part is the argument:

“The historical materials bearing on the adoption of the Second and Fourteenth Amendments are remarkably consistent,” wrote Judge William Fletcher, going back to 16th century English law to find instances of restrictions on concealed weapons.

Mrs. Clinton made this argument during her recent failure to identify a right to keep and bear arms in the Constitution. She also spoke of "our history from the very beginning of the republic" in terms of identifying restrictions on the carrying of firearms. Nathan Deal said something similar in his veto of campus carry this year.

OK. We had a tradition about what constituted "marriage" too. It lasted from about a thousand years ago until last summer. You remember what you had to say about "tradition" as an argument then?

Not that I'm unwilling to accept such arguments now. I just would like an agreement that we'll accept them across the board.

Hey Boss, You Know You're An Idiot?

Yeah, I know.

I could almost bend my thumb normally today, although it's still bruised as hell, so of course I decided to finish laying in this new gate. Naturally that involved chainsawing the posts, pouring the concrete, stretching the wire, hooking it up to the posts, and hammering the staples.

Cuts off a section of the property that was otherwise enclosed, so as to effectively create a new pasture. Avalon was impressed with her new range, as it was full of grass we've been letting grow with this project in mind.

Also my apple trees. Hopefully her little herd won't steal too much, but as little rain as we've had this year I wasn't going to get much out of them anyway.

Now, excuse me if I have a drink. My hand kind of hurts. Because I'm an idiot.

Congress Must Move to Appoint a Special Prosecutor

The President of the United States just endorsed a woman under investigation by the FBI for corruption and violating national security law. It was bad enough when the prosecutorial decision was going to be made by an office that had donated $75,000 her campaign this year.

Nothing could make clearer that the legitimacy of the law is being thrust aside for political reasons. Nothing could more clearly underline the need for a special prosecutor in this case.

Aware

A neuro-scientist proposes a partial theory of consciousness. It doesn't get at the Hard Problem, but it does offer a suggestion for how consciousness might have come to be, and a predictive model for what sorts of other animals might have it.

The Twelfth of Never

When the State Department was asked when they would turn over to the public Clinton's emails related to her negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they actually said "November 31st."

D29 points out that this is exactly equivalent to 'the Twelfth of Never,' or at any rate not until after it's of any use to you.

Want to read her aides' emails? How does 75 years from now sound?

Poor Whites Are The Future of Poor Blacks

For now the Clinton campaign is sticking to the rhetorically strong but intellectually weak argument that 'Make America Great Again' means something like 'Restore Racism as a Guiding Principle.' Sooner or later, however, the machine Democrats backing Clinton over Sanders are going to have to grapple with a reality they are refusing to accept. The Washington Post touches the point without recognizing it.

Gallup asks people to rate their current lives on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the worst possible life they could be living and 10 is the best. Crucially, they also ask people to imagine what their lives will look like five years in the future.

Among the poor, whites are the demographic group least likely to imagine a better future for themselves, Graham found. Poor Hispanics were about 30 percent more likely to imagine a better future than poor whites. The difference for poor blacks was even larger: They were nearly three times as likely to imagine a better future than poor whites.

The difference in optimism between poor blacks and poor whites is nearly as big as the difference between the poor and the middle class overall: "The average score of poor blacks is large enough to eliminate the difference in optimism about the future between being poor and being middle class (e.g. removing the large negative effect of poverty)," Graham found....

The past 30 or 40 years have seen striking economic and health gains for non-white families -- in part, this is a result of the rolling back of discriminatory policies that kept minorities locked out of middle-class life. But working-class whites may look back and see no similar pattern of gains, in part because they weren't as broadly discriminated against in the first place.

Part of the optimism gap is indeed because of "a shrinking pie of good jobs for low-skill/blue collar workers," Graham said in an email. "Whites used to have real advantages (some via discrimination) that they no longer have ... they are looking at downward mobility or threats of it, while poor blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to parents who were worse off than they."

Here's the problem the Post doesn't see. If you look at discrimination in the workplace '30 or 40 years ago' -- that is, reaching all the way back to the mid-70s -- you can see that almost all of the good for poor minorities to be had from ending workplace discrimination has been had. Forty years ago the blue-collar economy was strong enough that it was willing to pay a premium for its racism. Today, it's quite common here in Georgia for me to see 'help wanted' signs printed only in Spanish. Corporations have learned to compete with each other through globalization, importing foreign workers, and yes, through hiring American minorities who live in poorer neighborhoods (and who thus have lower income requirements, and can take lower wages).

This 'ending of racism' is something corporations have congratulated themselves about quite loudly, preferring to see it as a kind of personal enlightenment. Some of it was that: Coca-Cola markets its role in making Atlanta 'the City too Busy to Hate' back in the Civil Rights era, and they deserve the credit. But much of what has happened since the mid-70s has been done not for moral reasons but because the end of corporate racism meant the opening of whole new fields of action for depressing blue-collar wages.

For now it looks like poor blacks and poor Latinos are on the way up, but the truth is that workers of their class are on the way down. It used to be a worker could raise a family. Then it was true that a married couple could raise families if they both worked. Then it was true that probably only one of them could find work, so it was better if it was the mother raising the kids alone -- then she could at least draw welfare. Now it's lucky, in much of what used to be blue-collar American communities, if either of them can find work.

What all that means is that the despair in poor white communities today is the despair of poor black, Latino, and Asian communities tomorrow. For now it looks rosy only because the last 40 years have been a wealth transfer from poor whites to poor minorities. But the game is grinding to a close: poor whites don't have much left to lose. Over time, the same forces that have been spiritually crushing the poor white community will destroy the hopes of other American poor as well.

This is something that Trump and Sanders both seem to grasp, although they have very different plans for approaching it. Maybe neither plan was much good, or was much of a plan, but they were both at least aware of the problem. The Clinton camp denies that the problem exists.

And no wonder. As proven by her actions while Secretary of State with regard to donations to her foundation, the Clinton camp is government for the highest bidder. The highest bidder can be Russian as readily as American. She is the favorite of the Davos crowd, not just the candidate of Wall Street. She personally negotiated the TPP that she now pretends to oppose, just as her husband is the #1 name associated with NAFTA.

For now, the Democratic machine's racially coded language is masking this reality. The coming pain is the dashing of the rising hopes of American minorities. They will be leveled with poor white Americans in a way they didn't expect: by seeing their hopes and dreams equally diminished.

Clinton gave a speech about the inequality between rich and poor the other day, while wearing a twelve-thousand dollar jacket.

This last week, I've read tons about how big a racist Donald Trump is. Maybe he is. But he's not the one profiting from racism. These racially coded appeals are helping a band of thieves swipe an election, so they can sell the power of their office to the highest bidders.

Good for Bernie

Going to take it to the convention. Sanders supporters are allegedly a non-specific risk to AP reporters for its blatant attempt to depress turnout in the CA elections, but the anger is pretty justified. The media is throwing themselves into Clinton's tank this year.

Meanwhile, California's alienation from Republicans is now so severe that it is sending two Democratic candidates to the general election for US Senate.

Two Young Men Doing Right

The story of two Swedes in America who stopped a rapist and held him for police. The case has gotten some fame for the injustice of the sentence. It's good to reflect on the positive aspect of the young men who stepped up to stop a crime, and to see that the villain did not simply escape.

Trump and the Press: A Metaphor

Kind of an insightful point buried here.

For every ugly or threatening thing Trump has ever said about press, he’s gotten back ten-fold from reporters. If this is war, it’s surely been an asymmetrical one, with Trump tossing stones as the press lofts cruise missiles. Carl Bernstein, the New Republic’s Jamil Smith, and Robert Kagan have called him a fascist. David Remnick, Jill Abramson and Andrew Sullivan have likened him to a demagogue. Dana Milbank, BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith and the Huffington Post have labeled him a racist....

It sounds alarming enough, but the anthropologist in me views the Trump-press contretemps as the endemic and persistent warfare associated with the stylized combat sometimes observed between tribes in the Papua New Guinea Highlands: The two sides pair off, shouting insults and derision at one another, claiming the other side started it. Much noise and many insults are traded, grudges are captured and preserved. Skirmishes break out here and there, followed by temporary truces until the cycle begins anew.

A lot of people pay attention. Only rarely does anybody die.

In Iraq we used to say that "Violence is a form of negotiation." That was to remind us that actual violence, like rockets being shot in our laps or bombs being placed outside our gates or a machinegunning in the night, shouldn't be taken as a commitment to war-to-the-knife. Much more often in that tribal environment, it was an expression of displeasure at something we'd done or were expected to do. With the right negotiating tactics -- which could also include some violence -- we could restore a working relationship.

The metaphor here isn't to war like in Iraq, which was already better than war like in Stalingrad. It's to a stylized form of war in which the consequences have almost completely been replaced by demonstrations. And this is less violent than that: it's a metaphor of what is already just a metaphor of war.