Dr. Jill Stein on Clinton, Russia, SCOTUS

Charles Krauthammer and she are apparently alumni of the same school. He has a question for her: won't you feel bad if you get Trump elected?

"I will feel terrible if Donald Trump gets elected and I will feel terrible if Hillary Clinton gets elected," Stein said.

"Equally so?" Krauthammer asked.

"Yes," she said. "Hillary Clinton wants to start an air war over Syria with a nuclear-armed power [Russia] with 2,000 nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. Given Hillary Clinton's record not only in Iraq, but in Libya, I think this is as dangerous as it gets."

"Donald Trump wants to bar Muslims from entering into this country, but Hillary Clinton has been very busy bombing Muslims in other countries," she said.

The woman loses me when she starts talking about making Medea Benjamin the Secretary of State. Clearly I don't agree with her on a lot of issues. On the other hand, she's an honest woman -- and she's clearly the outlaw candidate, having a warrant out for her arrest even now.

They asked her about that too: "I think we're in a crisis situation, which I do not take lightly.... bulldozed gravesites... loosed attack dogs... putting at risk the water supply, not just for the Standing Rock Sioux but for 17 million people downstream...."

Assuming she believes all that honesty, and she does seem to be an honest woman, spray-painting a bulldozer is if anything a weak response. Thermite would have been better.

Oh, and DNC / Jeh Johnson and pay to play: "Pay to play is the name of the game these days. We can look at the Clinton Foundation. I think the American people are very uncomfortable with the blurring of the lines between p ublic interest and private interest... to exert that interest behind closed doors... big banks, the power of the health insurance companies that have had a hand in creating Obamacare... the American people are really being thrown under the bus by what they see as a rigged economy and a rigged political system...."

She's no Trump fan, as she goes on to paint clearly. No, she's running on her own. She won't win, of course, but there's a chance she's the best candidate left standing.

Nessie?

Is that you?

A photo appropriately taken by a whisky distillery worker on Loch Ness.

Title X

Apparently attempts to bar Planned Parenthood from receiving funding have just been made illegal.

Birthers

Hillary Clinton is the Queen Birther, the mother hen of the movement. It came out of her campaign's astroturf efforts to smear Barack Obama as un-American, because her campaign manager had decided that was the way to win.

Here's the memo.

The primary astroturf outlet was Hillbuzz, "Founded and edited by Kevin DuJan while working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008."

You can find tons of astroturf rumors there, not just birther stuff: just search for terms like "Obama gay site:hillbuzz.org", or "birth certificate site:hillbuzz.org", or other similar things. The stories are still on the internet.

Now, the Hillary campaign (of 2016) would have you believe that they employed this guy, but that he did all this research and writing on his own time, on a website named after her, without their knowledge or support. None of that time-consuming research and writing happened on the clock, no. And it's just his initiative that caused him to build a website designed to imply that there was grassroots support for her, which was a major part of her approach to not conceding the nomination during a long fight. Oh, and this astroturf site's main thrust -- questioning whether Obama was an American -- happened to be literally in line with the core strategy for discrediting Obama that her top campaign officials came up with.

Yet of course, we are going to be told that the only acceptable position is that Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with this. And that she has pneumonia, and nothing else. And that she was cleared by the FBI in its investigation of her.

UPDATE: Further confirmation from McClatchy's former editor. It's as if they think that none of us were there at the time, or won't remember how it happened -- or, in the case of Hillbuzz, can't just go look it up because it's all still there on the internet.

UPDATE: A second confirmation from a journalist that the story was pushed to them by Clinton operative Sid Blumenthal.

Colin Powell's Leaked Emails

I expressed disappointment with Colin Powell in an earlier post for explaining to HRC how to use email to get around records laws, so I thought I would cover his leaked emails where he defended himself, and provided tasty soundbites, as well.

According to an Intercept story on them, Powell's defense is that he viewed email more like a phone call than a cable machine, so the written record was not important. He used an AOL account for non-classified communication and the State Department computers for classified, so he didn't violate security rules. He also claims he discusses the situation in greater detail in a chapter of his book, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership.

In one of his email, he also added, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.” And then, “I told you about the gig I lost at a University because she so overcharged them they came under heat and couldn’t any fees for awhile. I should send her a bill.”

Update: Richard Wolff's Guardian article on the topic doesn't add much that's new, but he shows a remarkable self-awareness as he writes:

To be clear: hacking personal emails is reprehensible, and those behind the hack are scumbags who are trying to manipulate American voters.

To be doubly clear: the news media (including this column) have no principles and no shame in exploiting the ill-gotten product of those scumbags. Guilty, as charged.

And yet the Powell emails are so insightful and direct, it seems a shame – even if we have no sense of shame to let them pass by without comment.

The Gatlin Brothers

...demur.

My wife found this on YouTube.

Eric Hines

Who's Buying?

I have decided that while "The Deplorables" would be a great name for a Punk Rock band, "The Irredeemables" is a better fit for a Metal band.

A protester against the DNC in Philadelphia
The fact is that this plays in so nicely with Hillary Clinton's rhetoric. Here's NPR annotating her stump speech:

[I]n almost every speech these days, she talks about how Donald Trump's rhetoric about immigrants and Muslims is out of sync with American values. It's a theme that came into full relief at the Democratic convention. There the unstated message was that this wasn't a campaign between Trump and Clinton but between Trump and America, American values. Clinton has always had American flags at her events, but since the convention they have been even more prominent as a backdrop at her events.

It's even more obvious in last Friday's speech, in which not Trump himself but his supporters were said to be "irredeemable" and "not America." Her move is the authoritarian one, appropriate for someone on the verge of taking over not only the Presidency but the Supreme Court: from now on, she and hers will tell us what is America, and what is not. The unfit, by her standards, will be excluded.

A good Metal anthem could be written against that. Maybe one has been already.

What do you mean, "I don't believe in God"?
I talk to him everyday.
What do you mean, "I don't support your system"?
I go to court when I have to
What do you mean, "I can't get to work on time"?
I got nothing better to do.
And, what do you mean, "I don't pay my bills"?
Why do you think I'm broke?...

What do you mean, "I hurt your feelings"?
I didn't know you had any feelings.
What do you mean, "I ain't kind"?
Just not your kind.
What do you mean, "I couldn't be the President
Of the United States of America"?
Tell me something, it's still "We the people, " right?

Speaking of being broke because you pay your bills, don't forget that today is quarterly tax day for those of you who are self-employed, contracting, or otherwise responsible for both halves of your FICA taxes plus also your own health insurance. You may not be America, but you're still on the hook for funding her.

Zeiss Z1 F133 Lenses

Those were some pretty cool sunglasses Clinton was wearing this last weekend, weren't they? Well, she wears designer clothes worth lots of money, so fancy sunglasses aren't too surprising.

Except...

My readers want to know what type of space age eyewear Clinton was wearing when she collapsed. According to an expert on Reddit.com, the sunshades are Zeiss F133 blue protective lenses.

The prescription lenses are designed specifically to help prevent seizures by filtering out light and the color red, the most seizure-provoking color, according to Videgameseizures blog.

We should probably take "an expert on Reddit.com" with a grain of salt, but it's a plausible claim that's worth investigating further. It sounds like these lenses aren't hideously expensive, but they are specifically about cutting down on the risk of seizures. Given a fair amount of evidence that Clinton suffers from periodic seizures, if indeed these are sunglasses of that type, it would seem to be a kind of confirmation from Herself that seizures are a problem she's thinking about. That's something her doctor hasn't copped to, not yet.

The DNC Leak and the Health Stories Must Not Be Silenced

The DNC leak reveals a spreadsheet tracking donations from potential ambassadors or other public officials, along with what they've been assigned in return for the money they've brought to the table. There's an email chain in which they themselves call this "pay for play." It also contains details on a plot to gerrymander House districts, bamboozle the Republican party with a series of frivolous lawsuits to prevent them from responding, and a cynical plan to label Republican opposition as racism.

To read the big media, however, you'd think the whole content was ' mean things Colin Powell said about people.' That's the only story they're even trying to tell.

It's not the main story.



Hillary Clinton collapsed last Sunday and has retreated to a concrete-barricaded compound, from which she has not emerged all week. As the New York Post points out, if it weren't for an amateur who happened to video the collapse, we'd know nothing about her health conditions. I haven't seen any outlet in America comment on the barricades -- that's just the UK press.

These stories aren't going to get in front of many American voters unless there's a way to get past this wall of silence.

The DNC Leak

It's massive and brutal. Here are some highlights.

The corruption revealed should be a scandal. Will it?

UPDATE: They actually used the phrase "pay for play" in their own emails. They weren't even slightly kidding themselves about what they were doing.

UPDATE: It's just a constant stream of lies, bribery, and bad news about the state of our government.

DB: 2000 Sailors on USS Eisenhower Request Paternity Leave

In what was an originally exciting, if not unexpected situation, the Eisenhower’s administration department has become “flooded with a deluge of paternity leave requests,” said Master Chief Yeoman Reginald “Reggie” Frank.

“It’s an admin nightmare, but I can’t blame these guys. The mother and baby were airlifted to Bahrain, so... that means two weeks shore leave in Manama, whether or not she’s actually your baby-mama,” Frank added.

According to other sources, the carrier has convened a panel of officers and senior enlisted to sort through the ream of paternity requests, in an attempt to determine the most probable candidate.

Not quite. Paternity leave is ten days in the Navy, not two weeks.

Maternity leave? Four and a half months.

My Guess Is It's the "Prime Directive"

Heat Street asks a question: why don't Social Justice Warriors try to ruin Hip-Hop?

Just look at this 2012 2 Chainz video, “Birthday Song,” with the chorus “All I want for my birthday is a big booty hoe.” The video has enough problematic elements to make a purple-haired Tumblrina’s head explode....

There could be a few reasons for this. First of all, gamers and geek culture in general are seen as easy targets. They are perceived as indoorsy nerds who were bullied in high school. Perfect subjects to put up little resistance to those seeking to browbeat their hobby into submission (of course, the events of Gamergate proved that not to be the case). But compared to the hyper-masculine hip hop culture, geeks are certainly the easier victim.

Another aspect is race. Hip hop is inextricably black, born out of a resistance to authority, namely the police. Many prominent rappers today are staunch advocates of Black Lives Matter and their songs contain lyrics protesting police brutality. So does that give the entire genre a pass? For every “To Pimp a Butterfly” there are still dozens of songs about big booty women.

So, my theory about this is that the young women who make up the feminist arm of the SJW community all grew up in the 1990s. Every one I have ever met is a Sci-Fi fan -- especially Dr. Who -- which means that they cut their teeth on Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG).

Now if you remember, TNG was an insufferable departure from the original Star Trek in its constant fulminating about the Prime Directive and the importance of not interfering in another culture's development. The Prime Directive in the original series was just a plot device: Kirk violated it at will, really, and it never caused bad results to do so. TNG took this idea very seriously, though, and I'd wager that growing up listening to important-sounding lectures from Captain Picard made way more impression on these young women than they are prepared to admit to themselves.

So what does that mean? It means that hip-hop comes from another culture, implicitly a lesser culture, and non-interference is the right response to it. The same is true, I think, of their view of Islam. The reason they view it as racist and xenophobic to criticize Islam's treatment of women is that, in so doing, we're trying to force a (again, implicitly in this view lesser) culture to adapt to our preferences.

White male geeks, however, are very much from these feminists' culture. They like Star Trek and comic books just as much as you do! Of course they have every right to tell you what to think and how to behave.

There's an implicit racism, maybe, in deciding which cultures merit protection from the Prime Directive. In the show, it's something like non-spacefaring cultures if I remember correctly. In this application of the concept to the real world, deciding to "respect" these cultures' right to non-interference is in fact a form of disrespect. I don't think these young women would admit to themselves that they think this, or that they are doing this. The last thing they would want to do, consciously, is 'colonize' these cultures or set up a hierarchy in which some cultures were superior. The mental pose is that they're respecting these cultures by leaving them to develop independently.

I think they probably really believe that "respecting you" is what they are doing, rather than "babying you" or "isolating you" or "looking down on you." They would probably be highly insulted at the suggestion that they had any such intentions.

HMS Terror

Now, there's a name that indicates a Navy that knew what a navy was all about. One of you anonymously mentioned that we should look at this story about the apparent discovery of the Terror, which was found in pristine condition. It can be explored by drones -- video at the link.

“We have successfully entered the mess hall, worked our way into a few cabins and found the food storage room with plates and one can on the shelves,” Adrian Schimnowski, the foundation’s operations director, told the Guardian by email from the research vessel Martin Bergmann.

“We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer.”

The well-preserved wreck matches the Terror in several key aspects, but it lies 60 miles (96km) south of where experts have long believed the ship was crushed by ice, and the discovery may force historians to rewrite a chapter in the history of exploration.

VCDL Are Fighters

The Virginia Citizens' Defense League is one of my favorite gun rights groups. They really impressed me when I lived in Virginia, more than ten years ago now, and they're still going strong. Someone picked the wrong organization to mess around with in her little forgery.

Second Amendment rights advocacy organization the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), along with two of its members, today filed a $12 million defamation lawsuit against Katie Couric, director Stephanie Soechtig, Atlas Films, and Studio 3 Partners LLC d/b/a Epix for false and defamatory footage featured in the 2016 documentary film Under the Gun.

They have a solid case, but making her fight is an end in itself.

The Personal is Political. So Are Team Sports

No more enjoying yourselves without ritual cleansing. Everyone must acknowledge the sins of their nation before the kickoff, and states that have bad politics must not be allowed to host sporting events.

We'll all be much happier when every single space in our lives is brought under the control of the political. Won't we?

"White People Should Stop Doing Yoga"

This guy identifies himself as an "Idea Capital grant recipient," which I suppose means someone is paying him for his thoughts.

The way Westerners have reduced yoga to a trendy form of exercise is just another example of how colonialism continues to plague us. Yoga is a centuries old tradition of mindfulness, with physical practice only one part of the system. Unless you grew up Indian, learning these ancient traditions of your own people, using the sacred objects in their intended manner, you should not be allowed to practice “yoga” as trendy yuppie moms call it....

My soul weeps every time I smell the waft of mall food court Chinese. A noble an ancient culinary practice has been raped by American food engineering to become nothing but a foul simulacrum of Chinese cuisine.

Welcome to America, pal. We have this little thing we used to call "the melting pot." Get used to it, because there's no fixing it. People learn things from rubbing up against each other, and when you bring people from all over the world, they're going to rub up against each other. Not every part of what they encounter will be useful or interesting to them, but they'll take what they want.

That's not racism or violence. It's actually a kind of cooperation and openness to new ideas.

Or maybe this is satire. Who can tell anymore?

A Lesson in Trust

Yesterday, the Daily Mail out of the UK ran a story asking whether Hillary Clinton had brought a personal doctor to the 9/11 memorial. There were lots of photos of this woman with her right before her collapse, and doing things that were plausibly field diagnostic tests such as checking her pulse or having Clinton squeeze her fingers.

Turns out, she was a PR aide (and former State Department employee), so it's not what it looked like.

The New York Post describes this as the Mail "mistakenly" describing her as a nurse, but the Mail headline is explicitly asking whether or not she is a doctor. She apparently looks somewhat like Hillary's actual doctor, the one who later gave the statement about her pneumonia.

In any case, the reason outlets like the Mail are quite right to ask these questions is just that the Clinton campaign has proven it can't be trusted to provide answers. Clinton supporters will want to say, "See? This is how conspiracy theories start!" Well, yes, it is, but not with journalists asking questions. They start with powerful people who hide truths. If you don't want conspiracy theories, try transparency.

Chesterton's Paradox of the Wall

Did you know what it was for, before you wanted to replace it? Here's some folks who did know.

Clinton's Chappaqua Home Barricaded

This is not the expected behavior of someone who claims she might return to the campaign trail any day now. You don't put up concrete barricades around your house if you're planning on being out and about again by the weekend.

Something more is going on than we've been told, as usual. It must be something interesting.

An Extended Tolkien Analogy

Wretchard, noting the fear with which the DNC is waiting for Wikileaks to drop another hammer on the dying Hillary campaign, compares the situation to an earlier Middle Earth:

Now America could beat Bolshevism the Original Recipe, because they fought these master conspirators asymmetrically. The Cold War proved that.

Then a bunch of "activists" bloated with their own pride, thought they could dispense with America, form an imitation Communist Party and go up against the real thing on their own. The EU, the World Order. All they managed to do, like Saruman was to play into Sauron's hands. They turned DC into a kind of Kremlin on the Potomac, complete with its version of Izvestia and Tass.

"A strong place and wonderful was Isengard, and long it had been beautiful [...]. But Saruman had slowly shaped it to his shifting purposes, and made it better, as he thought, being deceived - for all those arts and subtle devices, for which he forsook his former wisdom, and which fondly he imagined were his own, came but from Mordor; so that what he made was naught, only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery, of that vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, which suffered no rival, and laughed at flattery, biding its time, secure in its pride and its immeasurable strength."

The Bolshevists are showing that they may not have been able to beat America, but they can beat Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman. Washington was better before Obama improved it. Now the Dark Lord has come, with his Nazgul Assange.

It's an interesting formulation. I've been thinking about something similar since Hillary Clinton's comments on Friday that half of her opponents were "deplorables," 'racists and xenophobes,' "irredeemable" who were "not America." I think she means people like many of the people who live around here in rural Georgia, many of whom are doubtless racists and xenophobes by her standards and perhaps often even by ordinary standards. These may be deplorable traits, but the people are not: they are probably as good as most people anywhere, as racism and xenophobia are quite common traits among all people worldwide. These traits are to be struggled against, like sins; but they are also very common things, like sins. They may make a man damnable, but not irredeemable.

Yet how odd to say that they are not America, they, who are most obviously America. They're the ones who fly the flag, not just outside their office but outside their homes. They're the ones who would refuse to hyphenate "American" even if asked to do so in order to illuminate their heritage. They're the ones who tear up at the singing of the "Star-Spangled Banner," while Hillary's team debates how vigorously to protest it.

If they're not America, nobody is. To recognize the evils of racism is fair and right, for it has been a terrible evil. To read these people out of America, though, is to render America empty and without content. Without them, there is nothing that is just America, un-hyphenated. America becomes nothing more than a substrate for all the hyphens.

To read them out of America is to make America a blank slate on which anything else might be written. Something new. Something different. But how, then, to avoid the trap that Wretchard identifies? Are they writing something new, like Jefferson and the Founders did? Or are they making a copy of something else? A little copy, a child's model, a slave's flattery?

Standards Change Over Time

This video is making the rounds right now.

Distinctions Lost

An important one here: is the desired end result to also boycott Israel, or to stop boycotting North Carolina?

Could someone explain why it’s noble, enlightened, justifiable, and progressive to boycott an American state, but hateful, bigoted, retrograde, and evil to support a boycott of a foreign country that has been imposing a brutal, discriminatory, and illegal occupation for many decades, a boycott that is led by people with virtually no political rights?

Oh, ok. I see where you're going with this now.

The "fake because"

Scott Adams originally predicted the hamfisted "deplorables" comment would have no real effect on voters.  After Clinton's collapse from "pneumonia," he's less sure:

In our rational minds, we are good people who use data and reason to arrive at our decisions. We need to maintain that untrue self-image to stay happy. Clinton’s collapse at the 9-11 event creates an uncomfortable dissonance in us. On one hand, we don’t think anyone should be penalized for a minor illness. And we don’t wish harm on anyone. Our rational minds want to NOT care that Clinton collapsed on the 9-11 anniversary. That’s who we are. We’re rational people who can put stuff like this in context.

But in our irrational minds – the part that actually makes decisions – we really, really don’t want a commander-in-chief who is so frail that she might sneeze-fart herself to death in the Situation Room. Realistically, and rationally, we know that isn’t a real problem.

But…it…feels…like one.

Minus the implicit moaning about how we're probably being unfair, this strikes me as a fairly realistic assessment.  On the other hand, I suspect a lot of voters may be looking for a more concrete and comprehensible reason to reject, not the sickly old lady, but the steaming eruption of lies that issues continually from Clinton's mouth, so numerous and varied that it's gotten hard to keep track.  Many voters may be deciding that, however they feel about Trump, he's not bad enough to make them swallow Clinton.

Of Course

This is how things are done now, is it not?

A Good Article from Vox

'How do we help veterans re-integrate into American society?' asks Vox. The answer they get: 'Why should they wish to?'

Basically, soldiers in combat experience something that's a pretty close reproduction of our evolutionary past. We evolved to live in groups of 30, 40, 50 people functioning very closely. Sleeping together, eating together, doing everything together. Our survival depended on the group.

That's our evolutionary past. It's also life in combat. It's even life in a platoon at a rear base. Most of the military does not fire their weapons at the enemy, do not get shot, but they do function in these close, tight-knit groups, and those emotional bonds become incredibly important. That's what we're wired for....

Then they come back and they see a country which is racially divided, it's economically divided, it's politically divided. There powerful wealthy people frankly getting away with enormous financial crimes without consequences. It's a country at war with itself, and I think on some level, unconsciously or consciously, it must be quite complicated for soldiers who risked their lives for this country, were wounded maybe, lost friends, to come back and see that the thing they were fighting for is fighting with itself. I think that must be incredibly demoralizing...

[D]o they really want to be re-integrated? The point of my book is that it's a fragmented, alienated society with very high suicide rates. Do we want to help them transition back to something that's psychologically toxic? Is that really doing them a service? The fact that they are psychologically rebelling against the transition home says something very healthy about them, because they're transitioning to something that if you look at rates of mental illness is obviously not doing anyone much good.

From a philosophical perspective, I want to add to this picture. Aristotle says that the goal of ethics is eudaimonia, a state of happy flourishing that you find when all of your vital powers are aligned in rational activity. More, he says, to fully experience this state you need a community that is set up to support it. The military deployed comes much closer to attaining Aristotle's ideal than anything else I've seen in the world. Everyone is working together towards some strategic good. They all have different jobs, but those jobs must align. Thus, there is constant rational communication and consideration of how to align different fires on a target, or different staff sections on a mission. This 'small, close knit' community is also a community that works together toward some goods that they pursue together through rational activity.

War being war, as Clausewitz says, 'everything is simple, and the simplest things are hard.' Thus, one needs all of one's vital powers in alignment to accomplish these goals. It is a very engaging sort of life.

It may well be that the broader society lacks a number of things that these smaller, close-knit and rationally ordered communities offer. Are these goods we can replicate? Certainly: any number of organizations could be set up to pursue goods in this way, although they will not all be as fully engaging of all of one's vital powers absent the extremes of war.

Are they goods that we do replicate? No, not really, not for the most part. Indeed, in the current economy, large numbers of Americans are simply left idle. They can pursue their own goods, of course, but without a community or the resources one provides toward enabling that pursuit. They can set up their own communities, but then these are perceived as a danger by the broader society.

What's the Prognosis?

So, if this is ordinary best-case-scenario pneumonia -- as they would like us to believe -- what's the prognosis?

Older, sicker people usually have more severe cases. And their cases of pneumonia are more likely to cause complications, such as bacteria in the bloodstream (bacteremia) or throughout the body (septicemia).... Viral pneumonia usually is less severe than bacterial pneumonia.... In healthy people, pneumonia can be a mild illness that is hardly noticed and clears up in 2 to 3 weeks. In older adults and in people with other health problems, recovery may take 6 to 8 weeks or longer.... About one-third of people with community-based pneumonia are age 65 or older. Older adults are treated in the hospital more often and stay longer for the condition than younger people. Pneumonia is more serious in this group, because they often have and may develop other medical problems.

1) She's 68 and not in the very best of health even before this episode.

2) Assuming we are being told the truth, she has the more-severe bacterial version because she's on antibiotics.

So, figure multiple weeks off the campaign trail? Best case, and if they're on the level?

UPDATE:

Tim Kaine is not helping her cause.

Tim Kaine tells reporters after today's Dayton speech that Hillary Clinton was "responsive" right away when he talked to her Sunday.

"Responsive"? That's something you say about someone on their deathbed.

Sailor at War Gives Birth to Baby Girl

She's on a carrier, apparently, which is pretty far removed from the front lines. Still and all.

“As the baby was born at sea aboard an operational unit, the main focus for the U.S. Navy, the ship and its crew is the safety and well-being of the baby and the mother," Urban said in an email.

The main focus of the US Navy and a ship deployed at war is the safety of the baby and mother. A serving Naval officer wrote that.

"Nervously Whispering About Her Stepping Aside"

Are they nervous, or are they excited?

No Way, Doc

There isn't actually an international law that would permit you to have tried Bin Laden.

"I think assassinations ... they're against international law to start with and to that effect, I think I would not have assassinated Osama bin laden but would have captured him and brought him to trial," Stein said while campaigning in Iowa over the weekend.

So, the way this works is that the whole SEAL Team raid was illegal -- that's why the SEALs were inducted into the CIA for the length of time they performed the raid. Breaking the laws of other nations is the CIA's job. So the whole raid to get him was a violation of both Pakistan's laws and this 'international law' that you seem to believe exists.

Now, you could have asked Pakistan to arrest him -- but since the Paks were the ones hiding him, that would have meant that he would have mysteriously vanished. "Oops, we raided that house you told us about but he wasn't there!" Something like that.

If you wanted to be scrupulous about obeying 'international law,' then, you'd never have gotten to Bin Laden at all.

Had you, though, who would have tried him? Pakistan? A US Federal court? He was a foreign national on foreign soil throughout the planning cycle of the 9/11 attacks. Where would US courts get the authority, under 'international law,' to try him even if you could drag him before a court?

The Hague, then, I suppose.



Lex talionis is the only real international law.

Two More Celtic Swords

Not nearly so old, circa 100 BC. The date puts them about the time of the birth of Julius Caesar, who brought an end to the legendary era in Britain for a while with his reconnaissance in force.

It would be wrong to say that this begins the historical era in Britain, however. The historical era ended again a few hundred years later, and the legendary era returned for a space. There dwells Arthur.

Censorship, British and American

The Brits can be as snide as they want about the "prissy American censorship" practiced by Facebook, which certainly is deplorable (although the deplorables are the ones on whom it is practiced, in current parlance). But their government practices real, live censorship -- with criminal penalties, and on an increasing range of subjects.

"We've all agreed for a long time that it's not okay for someone to shout homophobic or Islamophobic abuse at someone. So why is it okay to shout misogynistic abuse at a woman or behave towards her in a way that makes her feel threatened and impacts upon her ability to lead a normal life?"

Perhaps because I can't control your feelings, and thus I'd be subject to criminal penalties for something I can't control? As the article goes on to admit, many of the things she wants to criminalize as 'hate crimes' are already illegal -- such as sexual assault. There's no need for a law to criminalize what is already criminal, and it is wrong to criminalize an outcome that the 'criminal' cannot control.

Stirling Bridge

Yesterday was also the anniversary of the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297. If you are mostly familiar with the history via Braveheart, you may not be aware that there was a bridge. Or why, exactly, it was important to fight the battle. Actually, there's a lot you won't know.

So It Turns Out There Was Something There After All

Now she has two problems: First, the appearance of extreme physical weakness, which is not a quality voters look for in a President. That's the small problem.

The big problem is that she's just spent a year teaching Americans that they can't trust what she says about things like this. "She got overheated" is the new "there was never any classified information in my email, and I turned over everything work-related." We know, from recent experience, that she and her people only tell as much of the truth as they are absolutely forced to, and give up more truth only when there is no choice whatsoever.

The 'overheated' story was so implausible, in sub-80 degree weather without humidity, that we've already seen the first modification: 'she has pneumonia.' OK. Even if that's true, pneumonia is not terribly likely in the summer without some additional illness suppressing the immune system. What illness is that? She's been coughing for a long time.

The only thing we can be sure of is that she's not going to level with us about whatever it is. That's true for this, as it was true in the classified information scandal, and as it will be true with regard to everything ever if she's elected President. It's who she is.

The Democratic Party, were it wise, would take this opportunity to force her to stand down for anyone else. They could only improve their electoral prospects by doing so, and would in the meantime do the nation a significant favor.

UPDATE: Two questions I've seen asked and not answered: if she has contagious pneumonia, how could her campaign justify sending the little girl out to hug her in the "all is well!" photo-op? If she has contagious pneumonia, why would they take her to Chelsea's home, where there are babies who could be at risk from such a move?

There are a range of possible answers to those questions, but none of them make her look good.

4,000 Year Old Sword Discovered in Scotland

With hilt of gold, a beautiful weapon from the age of Conan -- or in any case, in the time of legends before the beginning of the mists of history.

Enid & Geraint

By custom and tradition of the Hall, today there are no posts except this poem.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Greetings, Fellow Irredeemables

Ironically, in a year in which revolt against the establishment has been the theme for voter enthusiasm, Hillary Clinton has managed to assign her worst enemies a pair of names that would both befit a punk rock band.

In fact, I had to check to be sure that neither "The Deplorables" nor "The Irredeemables" was taken.

Bagpipe Swing

Here's something you don't see every day:

Dang -- We Just Missed the World Nomad Games

According to a Guardian writer:

The Rio Olympics might have had Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps and the Copacabana beach, but for fans of stick wrestling and horseback battles over a dead goat the shores of Lake Issyk Kul is the place to be this week, as Kyrgyzstan hosts the second World Nomad Games from 3 to 8 September.

The games, designed to celebrate the nomadic heritage of the Central Asian nations, kicked off with a lavish opening ceremony on Saturday night

Forty countries are participating, some of which have long nomadic histories. Others are mainly there for the fun of the games. Sports include eagle hunting, bone throwing and mas-wrestling, a mesmerising game involving two competitors attempting to wrest control of a small stick.

...

Creed Garnick of Wyoming, the US captain, was the only one of the eight-man team to have even played [kok-boru] before, having spent two years living in Central Asia.

“It’s going to be quite a challenge but we’re going to enjoy it,” he said the evening before the game, as his team-mates looked on with expressions of mild alarm.

Jill Stein to Address Her Arrest Warrant

I've met Dr. Stein several times now, and I don't find this at all surprising. It's important to realize that the American hard Left has created a whole array of "crimes" for which one can be arrested symbolically, in a way that is viewed not as criminal in their context but as proof of personal commitment and virtue. One of the protest groups I met up in Philly had coordinated the process with the police, even, with both the police and the protest leadership having designated, armband-wearing 'liaison officers' to smooth the process of getting people arrested without actually disrupting the DNC in any important way. In return for playing along with your own arrest, you could be pretty sure of facing only administrative charges and a fine that would probably be dropped due to "incomplete" paperwork.

It's a sham, in other words.

Or at least it usually is, in Democrat-controlled cities. It sounds like the sheriff in North Dakota may not be aware that this is just a game people play to signal virtue. The Green Party says that the North Dakota police plan to file charges against her "for participating in civil disobedience against the Dakota Access Pipeline Tuesday morning." What she is actually charged with is "misdemeanor counts of criminal trespass and criminal mischief." That could land her in jail for more than a couple of hours in the afternoon: up to 30 days for a Class B misdemeanor, or up to a year if she was convicted of a Class A misdemeanor.

From a little more research, it looks as if the claims that this pipeline will endanger the water supply are not persuading many people to worry too much about it. However, the Feds are concerned about claims that the pipeline company is razing sacred burial sites and other cultural landmarks. It sounds as if at least some of these sacred sites have been rather hastily identified, to be sure, but on the other hand I'm also persuaded by the counterargument I heard this morning: how ready would we be to see a pipeline cut through Arlington? Arlington isn't even a fully sacred site, given its dedication to a secular state not devoted to any particular faith. It's only sacred in a sense, insofar as 'sacred' and 'sacrifice' are so closely linked. Arlington is sacred in the sense that it is where we honor those who have given their lives for our common good, as expressed in the defense of our nation.

UPDATE: "A judge on Friday denied the Standing Rock Sioux tribe's attempt to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline near its North Dakota reservation, but three federal agencies asked the pipeline company to 'voluntarily pause' work on a segment that tribal officials say holds sacred sites and artifacts."

In-Born Genius

It turns out that practice isn't what makes perfect, at least for those who are most likely to have significant accomplishments. But it isn't being born to the right parents, either -- at least, not 'right' in the sense of 'rich.'

Many of the innovators who are advancing science, technology and culture are those whose unique cognitive abilities were identified and supported in their early years through enrichment programmes such as Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth — which Stanley began in the 1980s as an adjunct to SMPY. At the start, both the study and the centre were open to young adolescents who scored in the top 1% on university entrance exams....

“Whether we like it or not, these people really do control our society,” says Jonathan Wai, a psychologist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program in Durham, North Carolina, which collaborates with the Hopkins centre. Wai combined data from 11 prospective and retrospective longitudinal studies2, including SMPY, to demonstrate the correlation between early cognitive ability and adult achievement. “The kids who test in the top 1% tend to become our eminent scientists and academics, our Fortune 500 CEOs and federal judges, senators and billionaires,” he says.

Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice — that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind. SMPY, by contrast, suggests that early cognitive ability has more effect on achievement than either deliberate practice or environmental factors such as socio-economic status.

I happen to know several friends who have taught at the Center for Talented Youth (CTY), a number of years running. If anything, their commentary reinforces the idea that practice isn't what makes these kids succeed: they have all openly expressed skepticism that CTY does any good at all for these kids. The fact of being smart enough to be admitted is the real thing guaranteeing lifetime success, not what goes on in these enrichment programs.

The other thing they tell me is that CTY is very heavily Asian. I wonder how much of that is because of the alleged disparity in favor of Asians in IQ, and how much is because of the discrimination against Asians in university admissions. If you know your kid is going to suffer in the college admissions process, you're probably more inclined to pay CTY's rates to get them what amounts to a favorable recommendation. The smart kid from any other background is more likely to be able to coast on their test scores.

Silence, Peasants!

For the second time in a week, the Washington Post explains to its comrades in journalism that a damaging story about Hillary Clinton must just stop. This time, it's the full editorial board.

Chris Cillizza has a follow up to his earlier piece about how questions about her health should be off limits, one written after it was pointed out that he had made McCain's health an issue in 2008.

People need to stop talking and writing and thinking about these stories. It's imperiling the coronation of our rightful leader.

Alarm and Disappointment in the Surveillance-for-Thee-But-Not-for-Me-State

James Bamford in Foreign Policy wrote a rather lengthy article that details our current "surveillance state": "Every Move You Make: Over eight years, President Barack Obama has created the most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world. To what end?"

Here's just one anecdote in the story:

For the Obama administration, the next frontier in spying was being able to eavesdrop on every single person in a country by obtaining “full-take audio” of all cell-phone conversations. For this new program, code-named SOMALGET, it needed a testing ground. The Bahamas — small, contained, peaceful, 50 miles from the Florida coast — fit the bill.

In 2009, not long after Obama had taken office, the NSA gained access to Bahamian communications networks by subterfuge. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration got legal permission to plant monitoring equipment in the nation’s telecom systems by convincing the islands’ government that the operation would help catch drug dealers. Really, though, it opened a backdoor for the NSA so that it could tap, record, and store cellular data. “[O]ur covert mission is the provision of SIGINT [signals intelligence],” a document leaked by Snowden stated. The host country was “not aware.”

Within two years, SOMALGET would achieve its goal of 100 percent surveillance in the Bahamas — all without legal warrants. This included spying on the cell phones of some 6 million U.S. citizens who visit or reside in the country each year; notable celebrities with homes there are Bill Gates, John Travolta, and Tiger Woods.

I always liked Colin Powell through the Bush administration years, so the Daily Mail's report that he really did advise Hillary about how to avoid State Department servers and open records laws is disappointing.

Update: I just noticed that Grim had already posted on the FP article.

"Normal"

It's not much of an endorsement to say that someone is normal, and even less of one to say that they are a normal politician, unless that someone is Hillary Clinton. Then it is apparently the most important thing to convey of all. Witness:


New York Magazine, Headline: "Hillary Clinton Is a Flawed But Normal Politician. Why Can't America See That?"

The Atlantic, opening sentence of another article: "Except for her gender, Hillary Clinton is a highly conventional presidential candidate."

You know, I've sat through a lot of presidential campaigns at this point. Let me point out a few more headlines, just from today only, that undercut this thesis.

The Daily Mail: "‘Read the reports’: Hillary Clinton refuses to explain what she told the FBI about how a concussion impaired her memory"

PR Newswire: "Hillary's Health Concerns Serious, Say Most Doctors Polled by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)"

The Hill: "Clinton campaign warns media to tread carefully"

Hot Air: "When lies collide: New Hillary email spin directly contradicted by own previous claim"

National Review, one of two: "What Did Clinton’s Lawyers Say to Her Tech Guy a Few Days Before He Destroyed Her E-Mails?"

National Review, two of two: "Obstruction of Justice Haunts Hillary’s Future"

This is normal and conventional? A secretive candidate who can get away with threatening the media not to report on her potentially serious health issues, while dodging criminal prosecution on clear national security violations and obstruction of justice charges?

Maybe it's not the American people whose eyes are a bit foggy here, ladies and gentlemen of the press.

It's As If Trump Wanted to Make Joel's Head Explode

Although, as usual, what he said wasn't as stupid as what he is reported to have said.

The issue came up when an audience member asked Trump: "As president, what specifically would you do to support all victims of sexual assault in the military?"

Trump had agreed it's "a massive problem," and something should be done.

"The numbers are staggering, hard to believe it even -- but we're gonna have to run it very tight. I, at the same time, want to keep the court system within the military. I don't think it should be outside of the military," Trump said.

There is an existing military court system, with judges, prosecutors and courts martial, but lawmakers have sought to change the current system to better address sexual assault.

I think every headline version of this I've seen has claimed that Trump said he wanted to 'set up' a court system in the military. What he really said was that he wanted to keep the court system for these charges within the military. Given that some in Congress are talking about what can be done to further stem sexual assault in the military, this sounds less like the blathering of a moron who doesn't know anything and more like a kind of left limit to the sorts of reforms he'd entertain.

I'm not sure that the press didn't really hear him say he wanted to 'set up' a court system in the military, rather than that he wanted to 'keep' these cases there. They seem to want to have heard it very badly.

A Poor Strategy for a Sailor

Showing disrespect to the flag during Colors is not going to go over well with her chain of command. It's protected free speech when a football player does it. It's a violation of regulations for her.

I'm Beginning to Think There Might Be Something Here

I thought the 'she's so sick' rumors were largely just ordinary getting-older stuff until her team started pushing back so hard against reporters asking about it.

Now I wonder what's got her team so worried. She could just go get a physical and publish the results if this were a serious but unfounded concern.

FP: Hey, What's Obama Want With This Giant Surveillance State?

Foreign Policy points out that the United States of America is now the largest surveillance state the world has ever known and asks -- why?

I want one of these

I need to get right to work organizing one on nearby St. Charles Bay.

So What About this Business in North Dakota?

If I lived closer to North Dakota, I think I'd probably go out to these protests.

I'm not a big fan of the NPR spin, where this is somehow part of some overarching American nastiness toward minority groups (especially Native Americans). Oh, they're using dogs, just like in Selma! Whatever.

But I would still go, just because I get not liking having people steamroller your home in the name of 'progress,' oil-related or not. I don't have a problem with oil. I just have a problem with the use of wealth and force to override a community's will about the place where it lives and eats.

Apparently Jill Stein got arrested out there for tagging a bulldozer with spraypaint. My sense of what ought to be done with unwanted bulldozers is somewhat more severe.

XKCD on Geese

Clanadonia & Albannach

Some good Scottish music to go with Beer Lover's Day.





Notice that there is one set of Great Highland Bagpipes among all those big drums, and you can hear it perfectly plainly.

Abolish the Family!

It's a source of inequality, argues.... er, a philosopher.

So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families.

I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.

The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment.

Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.

‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’

Once he got thinking, Swift could see that the issue stretches well beyond the fact that some families can afford private schooling, nannies, tutors, and houses in good suburbs. Functional family interactions—from going to the cricket to reading bedtime stories—form a largely unseen but palpable fault line between families. The consequence is a gap in social mobility and equality that can last for generations.

So, what to do?

According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’

They give a history lesson about this argument, which you can read if you want to do. Here's my version of it:

Plato argued in favor of abolishing the family in the Republic, though it's not clear how much that was just a thought experiment. Aristotle rejected the idea outright in the Politics II.2, on the grounds that abolishing the family means abolishing the state. The argument he gives is an early form of the principle of division of labor: the family is more diverse and also more self-sustaining than an individual, and a city more than a family. By eliminating the family in order to give the state greater unity (of which 'less inequality' is a kind), you would end up decreasing the ability to sustain the state.

And indeed that is true. The state is capable of surviving even major disruptions in large part because people can rely upon their families for so much. If the family fails, the state has to pick up a lot more weight -- and, in taking on a vast multiplicity of tasks for which it is unsuited, it becomes far more fragile.

Swift doesn't concede the value of the family to the stability of the state, arguing instead only from Aristotle's formulation of the tragedy of the commons. Rather, he decides that "it is in the interest of the child to be parented, and be parented well." He ends up concluding from this that there may be a higher value than equality (heaven forfend!), and that we shouldn't force parents not to read to their children even though being read to as a child confers advantages later in life.

There's an additional point, which is that a state that tried to abolish the family would become unstable for another reason: parents would unite in destroying it. That doesn't seem to occur to him, but he's an Australian. The value of revolution to the moral health of society is more classically an American point.

Jimbo on Hillary Clinton

Uncle J, guest hosting on the Secure Freedom Radio Show, tees off a full-length monologue against Hillary Clinton. Corruption? Quid pro quo? Lawlessness? It's all there.

Today is Beer Lover's Day?

I didn't realize Scotland had a national holiday for that. Or just one, for that matter.

Lazy Americans

If you were to call any subset of Americans "lazy," you'd be described as engaging in stereotyping or even hate speech.

Republicans for Centralized Government

Trump's friend Peter Thiel suggests that the Republicans have been enabled to move toward a new era in which they push for government that works.

Probably Americans would like government that worked better than the rampant incompetence and wastefulness we see today. However, I still think that central government itself is the problem because it imposes one-size-fits-all solutions on a nation that doesn't agree about what the proper mission of government is.

I don't want a government that will efficiently do the very things I think it ought not to do. Thank you, but no.

Lying to the FBI is Also a Federal Crime

No wonder they want us to swear not to use hacked documents against them.

"Hillary Clinton says that she can’t remember what a 'C' in brackets stands for. Everyone in positions of government and in WikiLeaks knows it stands for classified, confidential. And in fact, we have already released thousands of cables by Hillary Clinton…with a 'C' in brackets right there," said Assange while producing one of the documents. "Thousands of examples, where she herself has used a 'C' in brackets, and signed it off, and more than 22,000 times that she has received cables from others with this 'C' in brackets. So, it’s absolutely incredible for Clinton to lie. She is lying about not knowing what that is, but it’s a bit disturbing that James Comey goes along with that game.”

If that's true, then what she said was an obvious lie. I mean, it was extremely implausible before. At the point that you can show that she used the notation herself, though, then there's no possibility she didn't know what it meant. Her claims to the contrary are false statements, which is a Federal crime in this case.

King Sockpuppet Has A Point

Glen Greenwald writes:

Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former first lady, two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and current establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.... Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats, nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of Hillary Clinton.

Try setting up a 501(c)3 with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in the name, though, and see what happens.

Or, you know, try giving money to an existing one.

(I suppose it's been long enough that we might consider letting Greenwald walk from the sockpuppet thing, but it's still what I think of every time I see his name.)

What Wrong Looks Like

Nick Palmisciano finds his picture used by the Army as a bad example:

I think they've got you fair and square on this one, Nick.



(Not entirely safe for work.)

Enemy of the State

The odyssey of a cake baker.

Appreciating the Effort

A "liberal sociologist," also known as a "sociologist," spent 5 years in what the article describes as "Trump's America." She was actually trying to find the Tea Party's America, but this was back before the Obama IRS did its best to prevent any actual grassroots Tea Party groups from forming. As a consequence, the Tea Party groups that formed were just fronts for establishment Republicans like Karl Rove, and the popular movement became even more hostile to Washington.

Thus, Trump, the only figure in either party's race who was clearly not a part of anyone's establishment. Whatever bad things can be said about him, that much at least is true.

Here are some of her conclusions. On overall motivation:

They feel their cultural beliefs are denigrated by the culture at large. They feel that they’re seen as rednecks, that they live in a region that’s being discredited. Many of them are deeply devout, but they see the culture at large becoming more secular. And then they see economically that this trapdoor that used to only affect black people and people one class below them is now opening and gobbling up them and their children too. So altogether it makes them feel like a forgotten tribe. “Strangers in their own land” is a phrase that kept recurring to me as I spent time there.

And the main point is that they feel the government, the federal government, has been an instrument of their marginalization. If you give it an arm, it’ll take a leg....

On what she calls "deep story":

Think of people waiting in a long line that stretches up a hill. And at the top of that is the American dream. And the people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their best, and were waiting for something they deserved. And this line is increasingly not moving, or moving more slowly [i.e., as the economy stalls].

Then they see people cutting ahead of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public-sector workers. And even an oil-drenched brown pelican getting priority. In their view, people are cutting ahead unfairly. And then in this narrative, there is Barack Obama, to the side, the line supervisor who seems to be waving these people (and the pelican) ahead. So the government seemed to be on the side of the people who were cutting in line and pushing the people in line back.

On hard work and social class:

Another thing, a lot of the people I talked to were doing really well now — but they had grown up in poverty, or their parents had, they’d struggled hard, and they’d worked hard. They were also white men, and they felt that there was no cultural sympathy for them, in fact there was a tendency to blame the categories of whiteness and maleness. I came to realize that there is a whole sector of society in which the privilege of whiteness and maleness didn’t really trickle down. And I think we have grown highly insensitive to that fact.

I think she puts too much emphasis on race, but she says that someone like me would think that. In any case, it's nice that she actually wanted to know what people like us think about things.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a less generous take on her book.

Firm Founded by Clinton Chair Reps Corrupt Serbian Oligarch’s Business Interests

Here is the second big Free Beacon story:

A lobbying firm founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and run by one of her top fundraisers represents the business interests of a Serbian oligarch accused by U.S. and Serbian authorities of widespread corruption, public records show.

Since 2013, the Podesta Group has represented two companies run by Miroslav Miskovic, a Serbian billionaire recently convicted of tax evasion charges stemming from a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme....

A diplomatic cable sent to the State Department by the U.S. ambassador to Serbia in 2007 recommended that Miskovic be denied entry to the United States due to his involvement in corrupt business practices.... “We now have solid [evidence] that Miskovic was the beneficiary of egregious political corruption, which has had a serious adverse effect on U.S. national interests, … namely the stability of democratic institutions and U.S. foreign assistance goals,” according to the cable, which was posted online by the group WikiLeaks.

It recommended employing a presidential proclamation designed to combat corruption to preemptively deny Miskovic a U.S. visa “so that he does not derive the further benefit of access to the U.S. from his pillaging of Serbia.”

Read the rest.

How Much Did Beijing Give the Clinton Foundation?

The Washington Free Beacon is on a roll. Story #1: Clinton turned in a Chinese defector to aid Beijing. The case was known, but apparently her story about it was -- as usual -- false.

Earlier, Clinton said during remarks to Chatham House, a British think tank, that Wang “did not fit any of the categories for the United States giving him asylum.” She said he “had a record of corruption, of thuggishness, brutality” and was “an enforcer for Bo Xilai.”

But a State Department document from 2010 contradicts her assertion. The document, labeled “secret,” outlines in detail how officials at U.S. diplomatic outposts should handle foreign nationals who seek to defect. The foreign nationals are called “walk-ins” and can provide valuable intelligence.

“Walk-ins (1) may be sources of invaluable intelligence; (2) pose numerous security challenges; and (3) may need protection,”states the cable, made public by Wikileaks. “Improper handling of walk-ins can put them and post personnel at risk and result in the loss of important intelligence.”

The document lists all categories of potential defectors expected as walk-ins, including “members of the national police and the military,” as well as “political party officials.”

Wang held several senior positions in Chongqing, including deputy Communist Party chief; deputy chief, party chief, and head of Chongqing police, and vice mayor.

Instead of asylum, Clinton could have helped Wang by authorizing “temporary refuge” at the consulate, but that option also was rejected.

He Did Say He Was Going to Pivot to Asia

Having lost America's position in the northern Middle East to Russia and Iran, the Obama administration appears to be losing the Philippines to China.

Obama's framing of Duterte's drug war as a human rights problem, which it doubtless is, missed a key dimension. The drug war is the symptom of a national security problem: the narco invasion of the Philippines. The killings are a result and not the cause in themselves of the problem. And now that the diplomatic breach has opened the door to Chinese subversion on an unprecedented scale with incalculable consequences to regional security it is likely to get worse.

The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide. If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars, preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China would you have believed it? If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain would you not have laughed?

He has been very consistent.

I Doubt the Quality of This Advice

When the New York Times is willing to publish an op-ed partially entitled, "Save the Republican Party," you can guess what the second part of the headline is.

Editorial Understatement Award

The IBT conveys a judgment:

"ISIS has a poor record when it comes to women's rights, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report."

Nessie

It's unclear whether the Loch Ness Monster still exists, but once upon a time it did. Scotland is finally devoting some resources to researching its native sea monster, some fifty years after its discovery.

The Perfect Story for the Hall

Combining several recent themes, goose hunters in Iceland recovered a 9th century Viking sword.

We can all take the rest of the day off.

Diversity is Good, Right?

War History: "The American WWII Ace Who Shot Down 7 German, 1 Italian, 1 Japanese, And 1 American Plane!"

What I love about the story is that, instead of courtmartialing him and stripping him of flight status, they just put an American flag kill mark on his plane next to all the others.

Vox on 'the Clinton rules' that cause the media to treat Hillary Clinton so unfairly:

[T]he more power a person wants in our republic, the more voters should know about her or him. But it's also an essential frame for thinking about the long-toxic relationship between the Clintons and the media, why the coverage of Hillary Clinton differs from coverage of other candidates for the presidency, and whether that difference encourages distortions that will ultimately affect the presidential race.

RCP, on the media having a rare interaction with Clinton:

Clinton, under pressure for not holding a press conference for nearly 280 days, was peppered with questions like, "How was your Labor Day weekend?" Another question: "Are you ready?"

"Do you have a Labor Day message?" one reporter asked.

"I do, you'll hear it," Clinton answered. "I definitely, I definitely do. If you want more happy Labor Days, you know who to vote for."

"Thanks, I'll come back later," Clinton said as she exited the cabin that holds the press.

Later, you know, like maybe in mid-November.

The Alt-Right at Chicago Boyz

They have a post wrestling with the term, and what they think the evidence behind the movement looks like.

There is a predictably long comments section, featuring some names you'll recognize.

G20 in Hangzhou

I spent a lot of time in Hangzhou around the turn of the century. This report from the Guardian sounds perfectly plausible to me. China of course has no real property rights, and if they want to show up and bulldoze your building to expand a road (or otherwise for 'the common good'), well, you're just out of luck. You can live in the rubble until you find something better, maybe. So, yes, I'm completely prepared to believe that the Communist Party forced a third of the city's residents to leave for the week.

The article's pictures don't show the pretty parts of Hangzhou, though, just the post-Commie industrial architecture. Hangzhou was a capital during the Southern Song dyansty, and is full of temples and statuary around the beautiful West Lake (Xi Hu). We used to climb Precious Stone Hill and overlook the lake frequently, or take hikes in the tea country near the Dragon Well.

Unfortunately, the massive air pollution from the coal plants that power the city have done a great deal to harm the city's beauty (as well as the health of anyone living there). Still, you can get the sense that it was once very lovely, and almost is still.

Google has many better images of the place. If anything, this collection errs in the other direction. I noticed when I lived there that I had carefully cropped out all the huge piles of trash and rubble from my pictures, all the ugly stuff of Communism, to try to capture just the beautiful things. I went around and took a bunch of photos of that awful stuff as well, so that I wouldn't forget what the city was really like. It is beautiful, almost, in places. But that beauty exists beside incredible ugliness and damage. Parts of Hangzhou looked worse than Baghdad, as even a war in a merely socialist state cannot do damage like peace in a fully Communist one. Such a government destroys merely by its ordinary existence, both directly and indirectly. Unfree to hold any part of it as their own, the people finally give up caring about it.

Trump Supporters

Salena Zito spent some time in Pennsylvania to learn about Trump supporters first hand.

It's a good piece. Here are some excerpts:

In interview after interview in all corners of the state, I've found that Trump's support across the ideological spectrum remains strong. Democrats, Republicans, independents, people who have not voted in presidential elections for years — they have not wavered in their support.

Two components of these voters' answers and profiles remain consistent: They are middle-class, and they do not live in a big city....

While Trump supporters here are overwhelmingly white, their support has little to do with race (yes, you'll always find one or two who make race the issue) but has a lot to do with a perceived loss of power.

Not power in the way that Washington or Wall Street board rooms view power, but power in the sense that these people see a diminishing respect for them and their ways of life, their work ethic, their tendency to not be mobile ...

These are voters who are intellectually offended watching the Affordable Care Act crumble because they warned six years ago that it was an unworkable government overreach. They are the same people who wonder why President Obama has not taken a break from a week of golfing to address the devastating floods in Louisiana. (As one woman told me, “It appears as if he only makes statements during tragedies if there is political gain attached.”)

Voice such a remark, and you risk being labeled a racist in many parts of America. ...

It is no surprise that white identity politics is, if not rising, as least more visible today. The Progressives, especially the culture warriors, have been using identity politics as a political arsenal for decades. At some point, it was probably inevitable that some whites would surrender to the Progressive agenda and embrace identity politics themselves.

That said, I think the vast majority of Trump supporters are not thinking about "white identity" themselves, but are concerned about the racism that's been used against them for the last couple of generations, and which seems to be getting worse. That's a legitimate concern, and no one needs to adopt white identity politics to address that.

Zito's claims make sense to me: Trump support is in large part about being on the losing-but-right side in the culture wars, and it's about the unjust economic consequences of that for the future. She notes that Trump supporters themselves are more likely to be employed and solidly middle class; it is their children and grandchildren they fear for.

The Power of Innocence

The 2012 movie Snow White and the Huntsman unexpectedly asserted many ancient themes, and first among them was the power of innocence. Within the film, innocence brings with it faith, hope, and charity. Two other Christian themes include the power of evil coming from subversion of good and the redemption of the fallen. Although there is almost no visual Christian presence in the movie, no crosses or other symbols, Snow White does recite the Lord's Prayer early on, which I think shows the writer and / or director were aware of some or all of these themes.

Medieval themes include birds as messengers, the power of blood, the dark and dangerous forest, the importance of a virtuous ruler for the natural phenomenon of a kingdom, and chaste love. That last is also a Christian theme, but here it seemed more medieval in expression to me.

And, of course, the story of Snow White is about the nature of Beauty.

The images of Snow White-as-war-leader in the movie are reminiscent of Joan of Arc. With a quick search, this was the best I could find of Snow White:

Here are two images of Joan of Arc from the website Catholic Saint Medals.

 

 

Another aspect of the movie is that, while she does wear armor and fight, she is not shown as a great warrior. Rather, she is portrayed as a natural leader: Broken, hopeless warriors who have turned to drunkenness, outlawry, or despair, are redeemed by her innocence and her sense of the mission of redeeming their land and people. With her, they are given new hope and faith. She leads, and with the tremendous power of hope and faithfulness she brings, they fight and die to restore their land and themselves.

A New Rallying Point for the Nation: End Geese

Rich Cromwell over at the Federalist claims that "Geese are the worst animals on the planet and we should end them." Here's a taste of the rest:

Winged Sky Trash

Geese, [compared with venomous snakes who serve a purpose], are actually horrible and deserving of hatred and scorn. They’re big, nasty beasts. They serve no purpose, they’re disgusting, and they definitely do not prefer to leave you alone. You don’t even have to pick them up or accidentally step on them to experience their wrath. Yet some people inexplicably like them.

Can a new War on Geese unite Americans?

Cool

Here's a new nanomaterial that blocks visible light, so you don't have to walk around looking naked, but lets infrared radiation pass through, so you stay cooler.  It even wicks moisture.  Next challenge, making it feel nice so someone might actually wear it.  I wish I had some right now: as soon as it gets light I'm about to head out into the breathable soup to take the black dog on a jog.

The end of summer is just coming into sight.  Although it's not what you would call comfortable to run in this, it's no longer asking for heatstroke.  We've even begun planting salad greens for the fall crop.  Fall is right around the corner, marking the beginning of our six-month glorious season.

Nearly 90 lbs. lost, in the neighborhood of 35 to go.  I was really, really fat.  ("Not circus fat, but she gettin' there.")  Now I'm just a bit fat, very close to the high end of medically normal.  It truly is a new life.  Last year at this time I could not have dreamed of jogging.

Okay, the sun is just about riz.  I'm off.