Mixed Emotions

My workplace is overwhelmingly far left. Wednesday was like working in a funeral home the day after a mass casualty incident. People who suspect my political inclinations would not look me in the eye. Yesterday and today you could see people working through the stages of grief.

I have been trying to be considerate and not look like I'm pleased. I understand what they are going through and I know they need to work this out without having my grin rubbing salt in the wounds.

But I've discovered that at moments I don't feel very patient or kind toward them. In fact, I feel very much like turning at some ridiculously apocalyptic bon mot and saying something like this to them, except I wouldn't and didn't vote Hillary over Trump.

Yes, spittle spewing, arm waving, mansplaining foul language and all.

But there are good reasons not to do so. One, I genuinely like my co-workers and don't want to ruin friendships. Two, they're still Americans, they still get to vote, and we're stuck with them.

Veteran's Day

With thanks to all of you who served, and all of you who supported those who did.

Celebrate as you think best. I'm sure you'll do something appropriate.

Carrying Virtue to Excess

Haidt on "motivated ignorance," "ad hominem albus," the difficulty of persuasion, and a suggested improvement.

By The Way, Happy Birthday

Lest we forget, it's a day for celebration.

I trust you all know the Ranger UP video is not at all safe for work.

UPDATE: Terminal Lance celebrates by singing, as well as they can remember the later verses. "Now I need the oldest and youngest Marine for a blood sacri… Wait…"

Just a Reminder: Bernie Would Have Won

An analysis from the British press suggests that the DNC shot itself in the foot by rigging its process for Clinton instead of Bernie.

If the Caddell hypothesis is correct, as I think it is, the Sanders campaign was much more likely to succeed against Trump than the Clinton campaign. This is because they both were on the same ground on the 80% question of whether the system was about the control and enrichment of a self-serving elite. Since the force of that question would have been disarmed, the attacks on Trump's character would have been far more telling even than they were.

Instead, the contest became one between the living symbol of rigged systems for the well-connected, and an outsider. Trump was still damaged by his bad moral conduct towards the weak -- as he should have been. Refusing to keep to your agreements to pay your contractors, to pick one example of such conduct that happens to be stripped of the sex/race connotations that can make debate difficult, really is the mark of a scoundrel. That is the sort of thing that ought to be damaging if it is true.

It wasn't damaging enough just because of the 80% question. Bernie would have won in a walk, I think, in spite of the very good arguments against socialist solutions to some of these problems. Only Clinton was sufficiently symbolic of the thing many voters wanted to reject to have possibly lost to Donald Trump.

UPDATE: An article in the Washington Post makes an allied point.

UPDATE: Bernie campaign leader: "We have nothing polite to say right now."

We Could Use a Little Chivalry Right Now

It seems like a really good time for a palate cleanser, something to get away from the wailing and lamentations and 'protests'- and we're just one day into this...

I came across these great videos - the C.S. Lewis Doodles.  This one on Chivalry was of great interest, and a reminder that in victory, the gentleman does not gloat.  Also, there were some finer points here that I had not considered in quite the way Lewis does here, and I found it profound, add to that the talent and skill of the doodle artist, and it's quite nice.  Enjoy-

Duh

Paul Krugman writes:

What we do know is that people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in.

Amazing how many pundits on that summary page explain the whole thing as racism and sexism. If this be racism and sexism, make the most of it.

Upset

I give Maureen Dowd credit for being in touch with a brother who could explain the political climate of the country to her. She's still having trouble grasping it; she can describe it accurately enough, without quite being able to imagine anyone who agrees with it:

It is unthinkable to imagine the most overtly racist candidate — and head of the offensive birther movement — driving in the limousine to the inauguration with the first African-American president. What would they discuss? How Trump plans to repeal Obamacare? How Trump will appoint Supreme Court justices that will transform America into a drastically more conservative landscape over the next 20 years? How Trump plans to undo the Iran deal? When will Trump begin deporting Hispanics? When will Attorney General Rudy Giuliani pardon Chris Christie and put Hillary in jail?

Yep, that sounds about right.

Two Things

The two things that I genuinely enjoyed about this election cycle were the end of the Bush dynasty, and the end of the Clinton machine. I don't think badly of the Bushes, but America does not need nor would it benefit from developing an aristocracy or dynastic tradition. Seeing Jeb Bush go down, with no disrespect to the man personally, struck me as a moment of great democratic health for our nation.

Seeing the Clinton machine rejected and run up on the rocks is far sweeter yet. All the 'powers that be' were aligned to set them over us, to rule us by lies and by power, and instead the American people broke them.

For those two things I am deeply grateful. Both of them, I notice, align with Caddell's paradigm. The American people are demanding something other than rule by the few, the connected, the well-born, those sent to the finest schools, or employed at the finest companies. That is deeply, vibrantly healthy. It was something I feared our nation had lost.

The Aftermath of a Tidal Wave

Yesterday I asked for God to Defend the Right, wherever He could find it. Today I must trust that He has done so.

As I reflect on the magnitude of Trump's victory, which victory I did not expect, I think that Patrick Caddell is really the one who got it right. I am sure we will hear from the smart, educated people that this election was all about sexism and racism. I suspect that voters for whom sex and race were the most important factors are why it was so close for Clinton, rather than why Trump won. My evidence is anecdotal, but I know many women for whom Trump's sexist treatment of women was the deciding factor. I know a Latina for whom it would be hard to divide between her opposition to Trump's way of speaking about women, and Trump's apparent opposition to what she thinks of as her race. For my mother, it was both: though as white as it is possible to be white, she was offended on behalf of recent immigrants, as well as offended as a woman. I do not mean to say they were wrong to vote as they did. I just mean to say that, insofar as they were concerned with these things, they were forces holding the election close rather than driving the Trump victory.

I think the reason Trump won was not a counter-reaction in favor of sexism or racism. I think it was what Caddell identified, which now that I reflect on it I realize I've been hearing from both sides of the aisle for a long time. I just didn't see the unity in the position until he pointed it out, and might not have believed in it if he hadn't backed it up with his research.

Let's hear it again.

What we learned in our in-depth research was as astonishing as it was unexpected. It became clear from this really deep public opinion inquiry that American politics has entered an historic paradigm. What is emerging in what had been assumed to be the static political system was about to be reconfigured in ways and that we still do not know fully. But one thing is certain: the old rules of politics are collapsing and a new edifice is emerging.

The conventional wisdom that America is absolutely divided into warring tribes is a tired falsehood. Overall, in the attitude structure of the American people, the elements of this new paradigm are commonly shared by upwards of 80 percent of the population – from the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left to the Tea Parties on the right. The political battleground is no longer over ideology but instead is all about insurgency....

In our research, the current level of alienation that now grips the American electorate is staggering and unprecedented.

Here are some of our latest results among likely voters from early October 2016:

1. The power of ordinary people to control our country is getting weaker every day, as political leaders on both sides, fight to protect their own power and privilege, at the expense of the nation’s well-being. We need to restore what we really believe in – real democracy by the people and real free-enterprise. AGREE = 87%; DISAGREE = 10%

2. The country is run by an alliance of incumbent politicians, media pundits, lobbyists and other powerful money interests for their own gain at the expense of the American people. AGREE = 87%; DISAGREE = 10%

3. Most politicians really care about people like me. AGREE = 25%; DISAGREE = 69%

4. Powerful interests from Wall Street banks to corporations, unions and political interest groups have used campaign and lobbying money to rig the system for them. They are looting the national treasury of billions of dollars at the expense of every man, woman and child. AGREE = 81%; DISAGREE = 13%

5. The U.S. has a two-track economy where most Americans struggle every day, where good jobs are hard to find, where huge corporations get all the rewards. We need fundamental changes to fix the inequity in our economic system. AGREE = 81%; DISAGREE = 15%

6. Political leaders are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than doing what is right for the American people. AGREE = 86%; DISAGREE = 11%

7. The two main political parties are too beholden to special and corporate interest to create any meaningful change. AGREE = 76%; DISAGREE = 19%

8. The real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but between mainstream American and the ruling political elites. AGREE = 67%; DISAGREE = 24%

I realize Mr. Hines objects to hearing the "conventional wisdom" described as a "falsehood," as if it were a lie. Say, rather, that it was simply false. Surely people did believe it. They taught each other to believe it, by reading and writing pieces analyzing the world in this way. All the wise and well-educated believed it, most likely. I believed it myself, until I heard something better.

This election is thus a historic moment. I don't know if I believe the man it has settled upon is at all the right man for the task ahead of him. Insofar as he takes this particular task seriously, however, we surely ought to help him. The systems of the elite do need to be broken up. The way in which the government has come to serve the elite and not the people is indeed a swamp that needs to be drained. The looting of America by the few needs to end, and the government ought again to serve the common good of the People.

If he instead turns to the exercise of bigotry as if he were some sort of monarch, or if he violates his oath to support and defend the Constitution, I will be steadfast in opposition to him. If he does what I think the American people have chosen him to do, I must have faith that it was the right I asked God to defend. It has a strong claim to be the right: whether the ruling class serves the common good or its own interests is the very criterion that Aristotle set as the test for the health of all forms of government.

Our government is not healthy. Our people are. This was a mass turnout election. We are always told that high turnout favors Democrats, but this year it favored the insurgent candidate. Trump out performed past Republican candidates among minority voters, too. The people are demanding this change, and it is the change that Aristotle -- though cautious of the effect of the mob will on democratic societies -- would likely endorse. America must be for the common good of its people again, and not just for the few and elite.

Georgia Is Not A Swing State

The signs literally pointed to a Trump walkaway here, and so it would seem to be ordained. The rest of the nation may do what it likes, but Georgia is not -- as so breathlessly reported -- in any danger of voting for Hillary Clinton.

Election 2016 Beer

Let me recommend Coop Ale Work's F5 IPA. Weighing in at 6.8% ABV, it will get the post-vote drinking started before it's time to switch to whisky. Meanwhile, it's 100+ IBUs will truly bring out the flavor of the day.

Cheers!

Honor & Altamont

The Rolling Stone verdict is going to punish the magazine badly, but this analysis is off the mark. Not about the importance of honor: that is true. It's just wrong on the facts.

To understand the importance of honor in journalism, it helps to go back to one of the best examples of honest journalism in history. It comes from the former pages of Rolling Stone itself. In 1970 Rolling Stone covered Altamont, a free 1969 Rolling Stones concert in California that ended in violence and death. At the time, Rolling Stone was the bible of the counter-culture; its founder Jann Wenner had created the magazine so he could meet rock stars. Yet here was the biggest rock and roll band in the world, mounting an ill-advised, dangerous (the Hells Angels were the bouncers), and disorganized event that resulted in four deaths and multiple injuries.

The editors and writers of Rolling Stone were absolutely unsparing and brilliant in their coverage of the event.

We've discussed this matter before -- Gringo actually attended Altamont. You can review the video. The Hells Angels were the only ones who did what was asked of them, and did it well. "The young man in question had been thrown out of the concert for trying to climb onto the stage. He went somewhere and obtained a revolver, returned, drew the gun, and charged the stage again. The Angel who saved the Rolling Stones did it without shooting into the crowd, without hurting anyone else, and by charging a gun with a blade."



They were also motivated by honor, in their way. Indeed, in the day, they saw themselves as an honor culture -- a warrior society, if you take their documentary seriously.

We may all be wanting to join a motorcycle club this time tomorrow. That aside, honor is exactly what is lacking in America right now. Not everywhere, of course. But in too much of society, honor is just what is lacking. In politics, in journalism, and in so much of our urban society: the word means nothing to so many, or else it is a joke.

Heavy Metal Election

The name of the song is "Death to Tyrants."

Election Day

Go vote, if you haven't. Vote your conscience, as Ted Cruz said. By now you know what it says. Do what it tells you that you have to do.

I won't hold it against you, however you vote. You're thoughtful people of good heart, at least the ones who join us in conversation. I don't have to agree with you to like you, and you'll all have good reasons for having done whatever you do.

May God Defend the Right, wherever He can find it in this mess.

The Real Issue

The electoral insurgency is a much bigger phenomenon than Trump or Sanders, argues Patrick Caddell:

The conventional wisdom that America is absolutely divided into warring tribes is a tired falsehood. Overall, in the attitude structure of the American people, the elements of this new paradigm are commonly shared by upwards of 80 percent of the population – from the Occupy Wall Street movement on the left to the Tea Parties on the right. The political battleground is no longer over ideology but instead is all about insurgency.

The larger atmosphere is dominated by three overriding beliefs:

First, the American people believe that the country is not only on the wrong track but almost 70 percent say that America is in actual decline. The concept of decline is antithetical to the American experience.

Second, for more than three centuries, the animating moral obligation of America has been the self-imposed obligation that each generation passes on to its children a better America than they themselves inherited. This is what makes us Americans. In Armada’s polling we found that a majority of Americans believe that they are better off than their parents were. But a great majority says that THEIR children will be worse off than they themselves are today. This is the crisis of the American Dream. And it is no surprise that a majority of Americans agree that if we leave the next generation “worse off” that there will still be a place called “the United States” but there will no longer be an “America.”

Third, when asked whether or not everyone in America plays by the same rules to get ahead or are there different rules for well-connected and people with money, a staggering 84 percent of voters picked the latter. Only 10 percent believed that everyone has an equal opportunity.

Read the rest and you'll see a bunch of polling questions that regularly return 80%+ levels of consensus, on all the questions most of you would probably answer the same way.

Yet divided about solutions to the crisis, the insurgents were conquered first in the Democratic Primary and now face a wholly united establishment. Media, government at all levels, wealth, technocratic corporations, all of them are intending to crush this insurgency and keep things going their way.

Well, we'll see how that turns out tomorrow.

Or at least, we'll see where to take the fight next. At some point, though, we're going to have to figure out how to link up with the leftward insurgents -- at least as far as agreeing to postpone the fight over solutions until after we've crushed the establishment.

Joe Biden, Character Assassin, or Typical Politician?

In recently reading about Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing, it was interesting that Senator Joe Biden was part of the smear machine. Sometimes I forget how long some of these people have been around.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry on Robert Bork, although Teddy Kennedy was his most famous character assassin, Sen. Biden was there, too. This makes me want to read Bork's The Tempting of America to see what role Biden played.

Update: Mr. Hines defends Biden's conduct in the Thomas hearings, and I have to say after reading Thomas's account of the hearing I tended to blame anyone involved on the left for the summer of smears that culminated in Anita Hill's accusations. Maybe my original title for this post, "Joe Biden, Character Assassin," was unfair. I would have to go back and re-read Thomas's account, which I don't really have time for right now, so I'll leave it a question.

Hidden Voters

The Washington Post asks if there are hidden Hillary Clinton voters as well as hidden Donald Trump voters. The idea is simple and obvious: pollsters may encounter husbands, who will speak for their wives (as men do, 'mansplaining' and what). But if you manage to slip back in and speak to the wife, she will tell you that Trump is unacceptable and that she means to vote for Clinton.

That's a kind of thought that accounts only for one specific kind of polling, which isn't that common now: mostly polls are not conducted by canvassing neighborhoods, but by phone or over the internet. On the other hand, I'm sure pollsters will have missed my mother, who is certainly voting for Clinton on exactly those grounds. It's not that she wants what Clinton represents. It's that Clinton is the devil we know, which is the safer way to vote (as the Gods of the Copybook Headings remind us); and that Trump is unacceptable in his manner towards women.

They won't have missed my mother because my father spoke for her. They'll have missed her because she doesn't answer phone calls from strangers. Still, the sentiment they ascribe to her is exactly correct.

I've been on the road all weekend, and last weekend before. Georgia is supposed to be a swing state this year, according to the polls. You wouldn't know it from the road signs. I haven't seen one Clinton sign anywhere, except for a billboard her campaign must have bought. I've seen Trump signs everywhere. In Athens, which is a university town, some of the Trump signs had been defaced (typically for college kids, they cut out the T and the P, leaving a call for "Rum!"). But there were no Clinton signs at all. If this state is really divided on a razor's edge, you'd think there would be some evidence of it.

The support pollsters are picking up on for her may be illusory, of course. It may be an artifact of their weighting categories, and assumptions about who will show up on election day. We'll know that in due time.

I do believe that there are hidden Trump voters, especially among college educated whites. It is never cool to support the Republican, but it has never been less cool than this year. Still, educated men and women can perhaps best see how disastrous the current course is, if they will see it. But maybe they just refuse: international friends suggest that the image that this is a race between an unjustly demonized woman and a fascist racist man has become the general view. Trump has faced 3 assassination attempts, but he's seen as the candidate of street violence. Clinton had her Filipina maid print out classified emails though non-citizens are not even eligible for a security clearance (and though printers are also supposed to be rated for handling classified information -- off-the-shelf ones keep stored images of what they have recently printed), and engaged in insider trading of classified secrets through her daughter, but she's been "cleared" by the FBI. All those charges were false, you see. Somehow. If you want to believe it enough, it is easy to believe it.

No predictions about the election will you get from me. I have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow.

My Grandfather's Son: Clarence Thomas's Life

I just finished Justice Thomas's autobiography, My Grandfather's Son. It is excellent.

He was raised in Georgia by his grandparents, and as much as anything, the book is a tribute to his grandfather, Myers Anderson. It highlights that possibly the most important thing parents can teach their children is the value of hard work. Despite segregation and other manifestations of racism that limited his opportunities and restricted how he could live his life, Anderson had a deep love of America and a solid faith that hard work could overcome adversity.

In addition to simply telling his life, he discusses race throughout the book. In his early life, Thomas had to balance his grandfather's patriotism, faith in hard work, and faith in God with the anger engendered by racial injustice and the murders of civil rights leaders in the 1960s. Many of the blacks around him tell him that whites will never let him succeed, so he's stupid to work so hard. As he goes through university and then Yale Law School, he is confronted by the hidden racism of the left, a powerful condescension toward blacks. As he grows into an unorthodox thinker and leaves the Democratic Party, many blacks begin to consider him a race traitor. He works for the Reagan administration and there is opposed by many civil rights organizations for the simple reason that he is working for a Republican. He also criticizes the Reagan administration's policies and attitudes toward race, but he defends it against charges of racism. There are a number of good lessons in all of this.

Finally, he relates the harrowing account of Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and how that turned his life upside down. In 2016, it is no longer shocking to see the extent the left will go to, but it is still an object lesson to know the details of how they tried to stop his confirmation.

My only disappointment with the book is that it ends with his being sworn in as an associate justice on the Supreme Court in 1991. That was 25 years ago. It's time for an update.

Walk of Life

There oughta be a Cubs video with this.

And, of course ...

Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting

Prepare to repel boarders! (NB: Although shots are fired in the next couple of videos, there is no blood or gore.)

Once upon a time ... Personally, I'd have picked a .308 for this, like an M-14, but, OK. I guess if you only get one rifle and you might have to get up close and personal ... (Oh, sure. Go with the .50. See if I care.)

[Update from a more sober TD: I don't usually claim to know more about firearms choices than the professionals who do this for a living, but after three or so drinks I become an expert on many things.]

Duck!

Brothers in Arms

Dire Straits

"... and though they did hurt me so bad, in the fear and alarm, you did not desert me, my brothers in arms ..."

Who Are the Bigots?

Valerie asked a good question in a recent thread-

 

"Who are the bigots? The ones over at The Donald subreddit, who give a rowdy welcome to the ladies, hispanics, jews, Muslims, and LGBTers, their candidate, who states his goal as making the country great for all of its citizens, or the political party that insists that people must vote their skin color or biological parts, or sex lives?"

 

I think Ami Horowitz has illustrated the answer to this in a powerful and simple way with this video:

Pretty clear, right?

A Good Argument, in Part

Fellow could use an editor, but he's got something to say if you're willing to dig it out. I'll try to limit the field somewhat.

The real issue is whether in the future we will have open discussion of political issues and free elections. Think about what we have now — a federal bureaucracy that is fiercely partisan. An IRS that tries to regulate speech by denying on a partisan basis tax-exempt status to conservative organizations. A Department of State that hides the fact that its head is not observing the rules to which everyone else is held concerning security of communications and that colludes with a Presidential campaign to prevent the release of embarrassing information. A Department of Justice that ought to be renamed as the Department of Injustice, which does its level best to suppress investigations that might embarrass the likely nominee of the Democratic Party. An assistant attorney general that gives a “heads up” to that lady’s campaign. An Attorney General who meets on the sly with her husband shortly before the decision is made whether she is to be indicted....

Think about what else we have now — a press corps that colludes with a campaign, allowing figures in the Clinton campaign to edit what they publish. Television reporters who send the questions apt to be asked at the presidential debates to one campaign. A media that is totally in the tank for one party, downplaying or suppressing news that might make trouble for that party....

The Democratic members of the Federal Election Commission have pressed for regulating the internet — for treating blogposts as political contributions and restricting them. Members of the Civil Rights Commission have argued that freedom of speech and religious freedom must give way to social justice. There is an almost universal move on our college campuses to shut down dissent — among students, who must be afforded “safe spaces,” and, of course, in the classroom as well. There, academic freedom is a dead letter.... If you do not think that a discussion of [forbidden] matters is off limits, you are, as the Democratic nominee put it not long ago, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” You are “deplorable and irredeemable.” You are, as she said this week, “negative, dark, and divisive with a dangerous vision.” It is a short distance from demonization to suppression. And, let’s face it, the suppression has begun — in our newspapers, on television, on our campuses, on Facebook, on Reddit, in Google searches.

There has been rampant collusion, over the course of years, to bring us to this passage.

A Riddle

Wretchard asks:

Let's suppose I had an array of email stores that were going to be the subject of investigation. I know this because someone in the investigative agency tells me so.

In order to protect the organization(s) I first back up the array of email databases and put them on removable media. I can then screen the original databases for inappropriate entries and delete them as private secure in the knowledge that all past deals and correspondence can be referenced by very careful and surreptitious restores from the hidden archive.

I will have lost no data, just put them where it cannot be found. This archive, to have any relevance, must be close at hand and airgapped from the other computers. Could work right?

But suppose the person consulting the archive is observed by a third party, whose is ignorant of the arrangement and is probably ignorant period. Neverthless his sly nature leads him to suspect that data on the removable media is important owing to the secrecy with which it is consulted.

So he watches silently with his curiosity piqued.

At a moment of opportunity said ignorant person copies the contents of the removable media, still oblivious to its important. There it lies, unremarked, until one day it is discovered by a serious of fortuitous events by someone investigating an unrelated matter.

He has the Ring of Power in his possession but to him it is just a bauble.

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees Up, up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?
What Bilbo? What?

AVI has some Lord of the Rings thoughts, too.

Australia: God's Own Horror Show

Pretty much everything in Australia will kill you. Except the huntsman spider. But recently a woman photographed a huge one that looks like it might.

I wouldn't have posted on it, except for this bit:

The bite of a huntsman isn't dangerous to humans – it’s their fearsome appearance that’s the real concern.

The spiders are notorious for popping out of car dashboards at unexpected times, with disastrous consequences.

On Tuesday a man crashed his car into Lake Cathie in NSW after a huntsman fell on his lap, causing him to accidentally slam his foot on the accelerator.

 It probably says nothing good about my character that I can't stop laughing at this.

Do You Hear Yourselves?

Nick Palmisciano: "Lena Dunham Says Extinction of White Men Will Lead to Better Men."

Extinction, is it? Up until now I thought the plan was just to invite so many other kinds into America that "white men" would be a comfortably contained minority.

We can be sophisticated about this, and suggest that it's not the actual men but the concept of "white" men that she (and her father) are arguing ought to be extinguished. I might even have some sympathy on the point, if it were to be conducted as an intellectual exercise in re-examining concepts. I'm not sure that "white" has done us much good, although it was useful as a way of resolving the last American crisis brought on by mass immigration (from Germany, from Ireland, from Italy, and so forth). It was a stopgap solution, but its usefulness may have expired.

That, though, requires us to have a conversation about what we ought to be instead. What's the new ideal to which we would, as a culture, ask immigrants to assimilate? It doesn't have to be "white," but we do have to have some standard or we will cease to be a culture at all.

I like this one:



That seems sufficiently inclusive.

Le Jeux Sont Fait

They Are Apparently Serious About This

Headline: "The Parents Of This Dead Robber Are Really Mad His Victim Had A Gun."

Well, you know, I'm not that sorry for your loss. But the worst argument is this one:

“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.

No, it is not the place of law enforcement to serve as the dedicated killers of American citizens. We all have a duty to uphold the common peace and lawful order. If your son violated it to the degree that it placed others in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm, then any of us has a right to stop him by any means necessary.

The idea that the government should stand over us in this way, like the riflemen over Harambe, is disgusting. If we have a problem, we'll sort it out like free men.

You Don't Say

Headline: "Massachusetts law firm donated $1.6M to Democrats including Hillary Clinton and received bonuses that precisely matched their political donations in massive 'straw-donor scheme.'"

There's just no end to the corruption around her.

Well... possibly, there's an end in sight.

A Call for Unity

It is addressed to Republicans, but I see a lot to like in it anyway. It's the kind of argument that, were the candidate himself able to make it, would be compelling. Perhaps even convincing, if I were sure that he was a man who truly understood the agenda they assert for him and truly believed in it. It would help if he could manage to treat people decently.

I am still divided. I have to vote before Election Day, because I have to travel that day, but I have not yet done so. I will thus have to do it tomorrow or the next day. I am certain that I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, for the very valid reasons lain out so well in that argument. I am not convinced that Donald Trump is fit for the office, or that he will make a good President, or even a decent one. I do not like the idea of giving my assent to his ascension to an overly-powerful office ripe for abuse by a man of appetites, pride, and disdain, and he has shown himself to have all of those qualities.

But so has his opponent, in spades. Even her virtues become vices, for her habits of careful study and hard work are turned toward corruption and self-enrichment, toward maintaining a dense nest of lies, and toward the single-minded grasping for power, for control. Under no circumstances would I like to live under her authority. I have the very real sense that she considers herself the enemy of me and mine, and of everything I hold dear about the Republic and its Constitution.

I could simply write in the candidate of my choice, which was always Jim Webb. (Remember Jim Webb? Imagine if we could substitute one of these two with him, and perhaps my faith in him will become clearer.) I'm told they don't even count the write-in votes, but I wasn't expecting my vote to count anyway. Georgia is said to be close this year, but AVI fields a strong argument that, in fact, neither my vote nor any of yours actually count. They matter, he says, but they won't count for anything in terms of the outcome of the election.

So I am thinking about what matters. In the end, a protest vote in the manner of a write-in would only leave me with the illusion of clean hands. On the other hand, voting for Trump -- should he win -- would leave me with an illusion of dirty ones: after all, he wouldn't have won based on my vote, so I would be no more guilty of his victory than of his defeat.

Why worry over illusions? Because they matter, as AVI says.

We should be grateful for exactly these sorts of decisions that God sends to us. The November election is a practice version of a decision that has real consequences. Jesus is letting us have a sandbox to play in every election, where we can try out the various lessons and build our little castles for practice. Because your answer is going to have no effect on anything. This is a test. Rejoice! Most lessons in the Christian faith are expensive, considered worth it only in retrospect. This one is cheap. Use this opportunity with joy.

Alas, I am not yet wise enough to be joyful. But I suppose I know what I have to do.

The Pope Warns on Refugees

Good advice, Father Francis.

"Racially Conscious" Without Being "Racist"?

I'm not convinced that the concept of "race" refers to anything real. Indeed, I am convinced it is a concept that was created to justify the re-introduction of slavery to Europe following its elimination by Christianity, once Portugal developed new trade routes to a West Africa that was hungry for trade but that had nothing much of value to offer but other human beings.

Still, the New Republic is pretty invested in the idea that race is real at least for some people, and that a connection to others of one's race -- performed at the ballot box -- yields something like social justice. So it's interesting to see them talking this way.

In a study of white Americans’ attitudes and candidate preferences, we found that Trump’s success reflects the rise of “white identity politics”—an attempt to protect the collective interests of white voters via the ballot box. Whereas racial prejudice refers to animosity toward other racial groups, white identity reflects a sense of connection to fellow white Americans.

Fair enough, I guess, but what are those interests? A defense of mores, of home, of culture? Aren't we usually told that having that interest is per se racist, as it suggests that one prefers (or worse, thinks superior) one's own versus another's culture or mores?

Green Party Endorses Trump Over Clinton

It's from Daily Kos, but it does sound like they're right on the facts.

The Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, posted today on Facebook a link to an “Open Letter from the Social Media Director of the Stein/Baraka Campaign,” by someone whose name was given only as “Jillian.” The message reads:

…A Clinton presidency is D A N G E R O U S … If a Trump presidency would mean that we have to fight ignorants in the streets—I’m ready for that. “

Stein commented “I couldn’t have said it better.”

Not even the “we have to fight ignorants in the street” part, Jill? Is that a call to a gang fight or a misspelling?

Literary criticism aside, I consider this sufficiently official. Journalists have been pushing Stein to answer this question throughout the campaign; it has now been answered.

Stein has been increasingly preparing her followers and the public for this idea over the last few weeks. She tweeted on Oct. 14:

Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy is much scarier than Donald Trump’s, who does not want to go to war with Russia. #PeaceOffensive

She retweeted an article by her running mate Ajamu Baraka on Oct 15 titled “Why Hillary Clinton Is More Dangerous Than Donald Trump,” which states:

The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton.

and on Oct. 16 retweeted Baraka’s tweet:

Expecting people of color to fear Donald Trump after all we’ve been through the last 200 years, is absurd.

On Oct. 21 she posted on Facebook an article titled:

What’s scarier than Donald Trump? Hillary Clinton’s plans to gut Social Security

Greens have been spreading this message heavily on social media and in articles like this that state “Donald Trump as president will do ‘less damage‘.”

The Greens are pretty radical -- I spent a lot of time with them up in Philadelphia during the DNC. Fun folks, to be sure. A lot of them were willing to come on board the Democrats for Bernie, but have the (quite accurate) sense that the DNC was rigging its process to make sure he never had a chance. A Trump protest vote would be natural for them, in a way.

And it really is the protest vote, this year. There is no one more establishment than the Clintons at this point. The whole establishment has bowed down to them, and rendered them all possible service.

Lin Carter on Conan the Barbarian

Lin Carter was most famously a writer of science fiction and sword & sorcery, but he was also a US Army infantry veteran of the Korean war. I happened across an introduction he wrote for a book building out the Conan mythology with L. Sprague de Camp. The introduction was authored in 1971, long enough ago that the book could be dedicated to "the greatest living creator of swordsplay-and-sorcery, J. R. R. Tolkien."

Even then, it seems, Carter felt it was necessary to justify the project. The justification sounds shockingly familiar.

These days, many people, including (alas!) many of my fellow science-fiction writers, seem to feel it is somehow vaguely immoral to read purely for pleasure. A story, say these wise men, should really come to grips with something critical and important, like the oil slick on Laguna Beach, or the vanishing Yellowcrested Sandpiper. At very least, such persons advise, the hero should be a Negro striving to free his people, a homosexual gaily battling for social recognition, a concerned college youth protesting the iniquities of the Pentagon by blowing up his English Lit class, or an Amerindian getting back at the paleskins by seizing control of Alcatraz.

He goes on to say that he doesn't think this is necessary, and that in any case he doubts that his generation or the next one will solve any of the social problems afflicting society. I suspect his contemporaries, looking back on recent history, would say that they are justified by the subsequent progress on social recognition for gays at least; perhaps in other ways.

Still, I transmit his words because they go to show just how long this conversation has lasted. It's not at all new: 1971 is now 45 years ago, and the fight over making sure that all the heroes are this-or-that minority resisting this-or-that oppression is still going strong.

In any case, it perhaps explains some of the attraction of barbarism. 45 years is a long time to be lectured -- longer, indeed, than most of the American population has been alive.

The Feast of All Saints

On this day, how appropriate that we can read about a very recent excavation of Jesus' tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I was there in 2014, and it is quite a site. As with the archaeologists who followed up on the legends of Troy, or the similar ones who were amazed to discover how precisely the Beowulf preserved descriptions of war-gear that would have been ancient when the poem was written, scientists who followed up were surprised by the accuracy of the tradition:

Researchers have continued their investigation into the site where the body of Jesus Christ is traditionally believed to have been buried, and their preliminary findings appear to confirm that portions of the tomb are still present today, having survived centuries of damage, destruction, and reconstruction of the surrounding Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem's Old City....

When the marble cladding was first removed on the night of October 26, an initial inspection by the conservation team from the National Technical University of Athens showed only a layer of fill material underneath. However, as researchers continued their nonstop work over the course of 60 hours, another marble slab with a cross carved into its surface was exposed. By the night of October 28, just hours before the tomb was to be resealed, the original limestone burial bed was revealed intact.

"I'm absolutely amazed. My knees are shaking a little bit because I wasn't expecting this,” said Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic's archaeologist-in-residence. "We can't say 100 percent, but it appears to be visible proof that the location of the tomb has not shifted through time, something that scientists and historians have wondered for decades."

Fixing the Culture

The author of Hillbilly Elegy offers his thoughts at the end of a longer interview.

This is a problem that government can help with, but it can’t be the only solution to a number of these issues. So where I would like to think it leaves us is that each individual actor in a community is going to have a different view on how to address some of these problems.

An individual parent should pick up the book and think maybe the way I’m interacting with my kid is causing a lot of problems down the road and maybe I should try to do it a little bit better. Maybe a social worker picks up the book and says, this is the reality of how these folks are living, maybe this changes how I approach my work. Maybe a church pastor picks up the book and says look, it’s really problematic that there are so few poor kids in our churches, but there are a ton of upper- and middle-income kids in our churches — maybe I need to go out and minister to the least of these as Christ said.

There's also a diagnosis of what he thinks the left, and the right, get wrong about culture.

"Clinton Voters are Naive"

So says Molly Ball, who nevertheless seems sympathetic in a way. Not blindly so, however.

Everything that came out seemed to confirm the worst suspicions.

Her paranoid opponents said she was a part of the elite globalist cabal secretly plotting to impose one-world government by surrendering national sovereignty. And there she was, according to emails between her advisers hacked and released by Wikileaks, telling a Brazilian bank in 2013, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.” She was paid $225,000 for the speech. (The campaign has not confirmed that the emails from the account of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta are authentic, but many of them have been corroborated by third parties.)

Her critics had long charged that she said whatever people wanted to hear, and there she was saying behind closed doors that when it comes to policymaking, “You need both a public and a private position.” They said she was a member of the out-of-touch elite, and there she was saying she was “kind of far removed” from regular people’s struggles. They said she was too cozy with wealthy donors, and there she was telling the CEO of Goldman Sachs that she feels sorry for rich people, because “there is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives.”

In a Democratic debate in April, Bernie Sanders charged that while he was introducing legislation to break up the banks that caused the financial crisis, “Secretary Clinton was busy giving speeches to Goldman Sachs for $225,000 a speech.” And sure enough, the hacked emails showed...

This goes on for quite a while. There's a very long list of ways in which her critics have been proven right about everything.

Still, she says: "The people who believe in Clinton are naive enough to think she might actually make things better."

But why would she use her power against these things, when these things are the very source of her power?

The Scandal at the Heart of the Campaign

It is the existence of a ruling class, writes Thomas Frank:

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves....

In one now-famous email chain, for example, the reader can watch current US trade representative Michael Froman, writing from a Citibank email address in 2008, appear to name President Obama’s cabinet even before the great hope-and-change election was decided (incidentally, an important clue to understanding why that greatest of zombie banks was never put out of its misery)....

Then there is the apparent nepotism, the dozens if not hundreds of mundane emails in which petitioners for this or that plum Washington job or high-profile academic appointment politely appeal to Podesta – the ward-heeler of the meritocratic elite – for a solicitous word whispered in the ear of a powerful crony.

This genre of Podesta email, in which people try to arrange jobs for themselves or their kids, points us toward the most fundamental thing we know about the people at the top of this class: their loyalty to one another and the way it overrides everything else. Of course Hillary Clinton staffed her state department with investment bankers and then did speaking engagements for investment banks as soon as she was done at the state department. Of course she appears to think that any kind of bank reform should “come from the industry itself”. And of course no elite bankers were ever prosecuted by the Obama administration. Read these emails and you understand, with a start, that the people at the top tier of American life all know each other. They are all engaged in promoting one another’s careers, constantly.

Emphasis added.

John Yoo Makes a Quick Comment on Comey

He says Comey was wrong on his reading of the statutes, wrong to make the announcement he did last summer, and wrong again to violate DOJ internal guidelines and historical practice now by announcing a re-opening of the investigation.

His reasoning is at the link, but I respect Yoo as a lawyer.

Um, admittedly, part of that respect came from watching him tie John Stewart in knots on Stewart's own show, but still.

Samhain

Always like a good bonfire on Halloween. Watch out: the fairy mounds will be open until dawn.

Ever Held A Security Clearance, Professor Lakoff?

I ask the question rhetorically, because I think the answer is apparent.

'It's not about emails; it's about public communication by a woman’

Well, sort of: it's about the communication of classified secrets in a way that was entirely too public. People have given their lives to protect classified information, and for good reason: other lives frequently depend on it.

FBI Chief James Comey has shown himself to be another bully of the same kind. He has repeatedly talked down to Clinton, admonishing her as a bad parent would a 5-year-old. He has accused her of “poor judgment” and called her use of a private email server “extremely careless.”

With all due respect, she was delighted to receive that scolding in place of the prosecution she deserved. Far from an act of bullying, this was an act of intense protection of her interests by a man whose duty pointed in the other direction. If you've misunderstood the context that badly, I'm not sure why anyone thought it was a good idea to publish an article from you on the subject of this case.

And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something. We will invoke the terminology of criminal law to account for our feelings. She’s getting away with treason! Put her in jail! We can’t quite put our fingers on it, but the words sure do make a lot of people feel better, so they must be right.

I'm pretty sure we can put our fingers on it. She treated classified information in a way that violated the law, endangered America's national interests and the lives of Americans charged with protecting it, and she did so for no better reason than that it was convenient for her. That's the kind and generous reading of why she did it. The more likely reason is that she was trying to dodge public records laws, which is a separate crime, in order to conceal the degree to which she was treating her office as a source of income through influence peddling.

It would not be difficult to prove that case to a jury, if we were allowed to go to a jury with it. All we ask is the chance to try.

Saudi Arabia and Feminism

Two articles:

1) A female Saudi scholar comes under fire for what some are calling feminist views, views that question whether Islamic societies protect the rights of women to a correct degree. Some who feel that societies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia most fully realize God's plan on earth find her questions to be an insult to Islam and, indeed, even to God.

2) A Saudi court has assented to a woman's request to watch her husband's judicially-ordered flogging, as it is being administered to punish him (and to recompense her) for his wife-beating. For some reason, many men are objecting to her watching as inappropriately humiliating -- but not to the beating itself, which would strike me (pun intended) as the real humiliation being inflicted.

Still, it's a move to press a woman's right to be free from domestic violence in a way not permitted in the West. I suppose in the spirit of free inquiry, it's worth asking: is this a way in which Islamic law really is stronger on women's rights, even if only in this discrete matter?

Discuss, if you like.

NYC Kills Free Speech

Excerpts from Eugene Volokh:

We can’t be required to even display a license plate that says “Live Free or Die” on our car, if we object to the message; that’s what the court held in Wooley v. Maynard (1978). But New York is requiring people to actually say words that convey a message of approval of the view that gender is a matter of self-perception rather than anatomy, and that, as to “ze,” were deliberately created to convey that a message.

What’s more, according to the City, “refusal to use a transgender employee’s preferred name, pronoun, or title may constitute unlawful gender-based harassment.” The label “harassment” is important here because harassment law requires employers and businesses to prevent harassment by co-workers and patrons and not just by themselves or their own employees ...

And this isn’t just the government as employer, requiring its employees to say things that keep government patrons happy with government services. This is the government as sovereign, threatening “civil penalties up to $125,000 for violations, and up to $250,000 for violations that are the result of willful, wanton, or malicious conduct” if people don’t speak the way the government tells them to speak. Nor is this likely to stay in New York City ... the federal government is taking the view that existing federal bans on sex discrimination also in effect ban gender identity discrimination, and the New York analysis would equally apply to that view; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has already taken the view that it is illegal under federal law to persistently call employees by pronouns that correspond to their anatomical sex but not their gender identity, though it has not yet had occasion to opine about “ze.”

A Good Weekend

That's Tennessee in the distance, looking north out of Cloudland Canyon. It's on the west side of Lookout Mountain, an impregnable fortress if -- like the Confederate army -- you put artillery on the long ridge, and the two ridges behind it. Armies would break like water on the central rock. The Northern forces were wise enough to wait until they could take Lookout Mountain, and then go around to the east.

I rode up there and hiked yesterday, rode back today. I stopped by my father's house on the way. He had bought a box of .22 for that revolver I mentioned. I brought it home and shot it out of my Ruger Single Six instead. Tonight I'm grilling marinated steak over a charcoal and hickory fire, while drinking a bit of pilsner.

Mountains, motorcycles, guns, and beer. Maybe it gets better than that. Maybe not.

Ricochet?

Their tagline is: "Ricochet.com is the leading place for civil discussion of the center-right and beyond."

However, they ask $5 a month or $39.99 a year to be a member with full privileges.

From time to time I read the free articles, and generally I like the tone of the place, but that's about the extent of my experience with them so far.

Does anyone have any comments on Ricochet? Is it worth it? Has anyone here tried it out?

The Empire vs. the Republic

James Pethokoukis, AEI fellow and CNBC contributor, argues that America right now looks like the Roman empire at the height of its power rather than Rome about to fall.

If you listen to America’s pessimistic populists, America is so over. We are all in the position of Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths come over the seventh hill as the sack of Rome begins. (Guess who the Visigoths are in this analogy. Some, I assume, were good people.)

Or to update things a bit, this is the “Flight 93” election, at least according to a recent viral essay. This argument, as I recently described it, posits America’s doom “unless those who value an isolationist, protectionist, and perhaps paler America ‘charge the cockpit’ in Washington and seize control from the open borders–loving, free trading, perpetually warfighting ‘Davoisie oligarchy.’”

That’s not how I see things. My views are more in sync with this notion put forward recently in by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times:

So for all its failings and warnings that the US is “over”, in reality, it is not just the new Roman empire, but a reincarnation of the Roman empire at the height of its power, perhaps around 117AD — 170 years before it began to fall apart.

But he misses the point. The pessimists are not arguing that America is the Roman empire ready to fall. We are arguing that America is the Roman republic about to be destroyed and replaced by the empire. It's not the Visigoths we worry about, it is Julius Caeser and his army. The consuls and senate are about to be replaced by an emperor, or maybe already have been.

He links an article he wrote at Vox which argues more in depth that, since America's economy is still strong, America is OK. His entire argument is economic.

I don't care how well the economy is doing if I am not free. If the republic is dying, the state of the economy is irrelevant. After all the ink and pixels that have been used to get that point across, to not understand that the populist argument is fundamentally about political freedom and the culture of freedom is a form of self-imposed intellectual blindness.

Ammon Bundy's Lawyer Facing Charges?

In the article that Grim posted on this earlier, it was shocking that US Marshals had tackled and used a stun gun on Ammon Bundy's lawyer, Marcus Mumford.

A new report suggests Mumford may be facing charges. In this news article, it seems that when US Marshals moved to take Bundy into custody, Mumford confronted them.

Mumford got into a heated argument that ultimately led to the attorney being led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. Our reporters say Mumford started repeatedly yelling to Judge Brown that his client was free to go.

"When you get acquitted, you get released. That's how I understand it," said Mumford.

He said he asked the U.S. Marshals to see their paperwork that gave them authority to keep his client in custody.

It seems the marshals didn't just rush him without warning or provocation, but it is still shocking.

Happy Birthday, Royal Marines

 

The Royal Marines were formed in 1755 as the Royal Navy's infantry troops. However, the marines can trace their origins back to the formation of the English Army's "Duke of York and Albany's maritime regiment of Foot" at the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company on 28 October 1664.

Update: 352 years, to be exact.

Today's Lesson in Mythology

As appropriate for the afternoon, let me introduce you to the goddess Nemisis, whose purview is "fair distribution of rewards." She is particularly tasked with pursuing those guilty of hubris, and making sure that whatever those guilty of hubris grasped at through the sin was paid for in fair measure.

She is associated with Tyche, better known -- and beloved -- as "Lady Luck."

DB: WWI Vets Overwhelmingly Support Clinton

Some 98 percent of ballots cast from the demographic have been from veterans who are registered Democrats.

“This is tremendous news for the Hillary Clinton campaign and for the Democratic Party,” said Donna Brazile, interim chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. “We knew that if we could get a strong turnout among the doughboy demographic, we could win this election.”

Nullification

A huge win in Oregon.

A Little Clarity about the Target Audience and Methods

In previous posts on persuasion, I've been sloppy with language and that's led to some confusion. I've also changed my mind on some things based on comments to my posts. I plan to continue writing about this, so I'm going to try to clarify a couple of things. I'll do that by answering these two questions:

When I post on persuasion, who am I talking about persuading? What do I mean by "persuasion"?

Some Non-Presidential Polls

Not all of the propaganda works all of the time. Two polls show that the American people have rejected two of the Left's beloved causes, gun control and BLM.

Note that the spike in people reporting "a great deal of respect for police" is highest among... liberals (+21) and Millennials (+19). But it's greater among non-white Americans (+14) than among whites (+11, although there's not much ceiling left there).

I still think that BLM had some valid complaints, although it was clear from the beginning that their chosen method of protest was certain to fail. You can't improve relations between a given community and the police by driving that community into lawbreaking confrontations that force the police to arrest them. It's unsurprising that things have turned out this way, except that it's surprising to see the swing so strong in exactly the demographics BLM targeted for its efforts.

I Endorse This Heartily

Scientists have recreated an ancient mead from 2,500 years ago

Dogfish head brewery in Delaware has done something like this with residues found in King Midas' (well, actually his father's) tomb and in 4000 year old Chinese pots.

Mankind. Brewing. You don't get one without the other.

There's Something You Don't Hear Everyday

"Everything conservatives predicted about Obamacare is coming true."

Well, and it has been for a while now. But you don't usually hear that admitted. Obama said we could keep our doctors and our plans if we liked them. That was not true. Obama said it would bring down costs thousands of dollars per family. Not only was that not true, costs are up substantially.

We also said it would destroy the health insurance industry and leave us subject to a government takeover -- a takeover that would be used to ram Nanny State social agendas down our throats. No smoking! No drinking! No motorcycle-riding! No gun ownership! All those things are too dangerous, and raise your prospective cost to the system too much. And since we are all paying for your health care now, we "all" have a right to demand that you live exactly as we prescribe that you should.

The Telos of a University

Jonathan Haidt's video on this topic, which I mentioned in a previous post, turns out to be excellent. It's 66 minutes long; I've watched it twice and plan on watching it at least one more time. Why should you?

He seems to assume he's talking to a Progressive audience, so his arguments are made to persuade them. That in and of itself is worthwhile if you plan to try to discuss issues with Progressives.

And he argues that:

• gender is biological and real
• "safe spaces" are damaging to the students they are supposed to protect
• arguing sexism or racism solely from disparate outcomes is irrational
• some goals of social justice are unjust
• the telos of seeking truth and the telos of seeking social justice are incompatible for a university and, if both are sought equally, harmful to both truth and social justice

In the end, while he wants universities to publicly declare one or the other, he champions truth-seeking as the proper telos of the university.

More about Haidt below the fold.

Well, Obviously

Headline: "Aetna CEO Says Young People Pick Weekend Beer Over Obamacare."

So would I.

Power and Liberty: Separation versus Tension

The Declaration of Independence says:

[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., the securing of unalienable rights], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

When it comes time to do that, I hope that whoever has the charge of doing it will remember this lesson: separation of powers is not enough to guarantee liberty. What guarantees a space for liberty is not merely the separation of power, but a tension between the powers.

Consider, for example, AT&T's spying on the American people. "Hemisphere is a secretive program run by AT&T that searches trillions of call records and analyzes cellular data to determine where a target is located, with whom he speaks, and potentially why."

There is a clear separation of powers between AT&T and the police. If you contract with AT&T, it has a certain power over your life because it gains access to a lot of information about you. Still, AT&T has no police powers.

The police, meanwhile, have no right to demand access to AT&T's proprietary information without a warrant.

Does this protect you? No, it does not: AT&T is happy to provide the police with everything it knows, secretly, in return for a cash payment (one that you are contributing to yourself as a taxpayer).

If the government were to nationalize the telecoms, it would lose access to this kind of spying. A nationalized telecom would have to justify its spying by warrant. By outsourcing this spying to a non-government agency, the government actually increases its powers.

So too with the "death panels," below. A nationalized single payer system would presumably have to respect the claim that you could not be denied life (or liberty or property) without due process. It might not be much better -- the VA's system simply delays the due process so long that you die anyway -- but the corporate/government alignment provides them with immediate access to a power that they could never get through Congress.

For now, the hope lies in an intensification of the tension between the states and the Federal government. There, where the powers have competing interests, there is a chance that some space for liberty will come to be between them. Tension between powers is the thing that really works.

Merely separating the powers, without a competitive tension between the powers, aggregates them just as certainly as a failure to separate them at all. Indeed, in these two examples of corporate/government collusion, the power of the state increases beyond what it could ever legitimately do should it seize the private body and run it as a formal arm of the state.

Death Panels

Remind me how stupid this idea was.

About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law....

Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead.

At some point, we're going to have to grapple with the idea that the government -- or, to be more sophisticated, this alliance of government and for-profit companies -- is evil by all traditional measures. Do we go along with the new ideas, redefining the good as if it were a matter of convention? Or do we deal with the government as harshly as we would with a genuine evil?

It's a serious philosophical question, one going back to Protagoras and Socrates. Is man the measure of all things, or is there some god whose opinion rules? Even if the god is "Nature," you still get a kind of telos in which pursuit of life is the good: after all, all things that can pursue their own survival, and their own furtherance through reproduction. So, even if we reason from the squirrels and the trees of the forest, we get to this idea that life is the good.

The opposite of good is evil, is it not?

You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Seriously, no commentary. Just roll the tape.

Aspiring United States Air Force pilots can skip the fitness test if they are transgender and in the process of transitioning, according to new protocol determined by military officials and made public last week.

Transgender pilots who are in the middle of hormone treatment won’t have to retake the exam, which includes pull-ups, pushups, and running, if they have already failed it — so long as the Air Force commander sees that the individual “tried to the best of their ability” to meet the standards associated with their preferred gender.

R.I.P.

Steven DenBeste has died.

I didn't always agree with him (imagine that), but he was an important early voice in blogging that I read regularly when he ran the site at USS Clueless.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Good Point

Of 1,000 voters polled by Rasmussen Reports on October 18 and 19; 65% believe that Clinton broke the law with her use of a private server — and 53% believe that the FBI should have filed criminal charges.

Meanwhile, according to Sunday’s daily IBD/TIPP tracking poll, only 43% of voters support Clinton for president.

H/t Gateway Pundit, who points out that this means that more Americans want Hillary Clinton in prison than as President.

Nothing to See Here

Clinton ally donated half a million bucks to a political campaign... led by the wife of an FBI agent who was subsequently promoted and placed in charge of the Clinton investigation.

If it were the only such "little surprise," I suppose we could write it off as a coincidence. It is not, of course. Not hardly.

Final Military Times Poll: Trump Support Grows

Trump leads overall and with enlisted, among whom Clinton doesn't break 1 in 5 and finishes in a distant third place. Trump is narrowly in third place among officers, but Clinton isn't even a half percentage point ahead of Gary Johnson in that subset. Johnson is in second place among enlisted as well.

Female servicemembers look a lot like officers in their voting preferences: Trump is in third, but Johnson is the overall winner. Men prefer Trump.

As has been true in previous polls, support for Trump is strongest and for Clinton weakest among the Marines and the Army. She does better among the Navy and Air Force, but she is still behind Trump (who always wins) and, in the Air Force, also behind Johnson. She leads Johnson narrowly in the Navy, but remains a good distance behind Trump.

Both major parties remain largely unliked by the military. Nearly 83 percent of those surveyed said they are dissatisfied with Clinton as the Democratic Party’s pick to be president, and more than 65 percent said the same of Trump as the Republican nominee.

Only 4 percent of troops polled said they have abundant confidence that Clinton can lead the military as commander in chief. About 9 percent said the same for Trump. More than 60 percent of troops said they had little confidence either could.

One Marine corporal who responded to the survey wrote back, "No one seems to care that Hillary Clinton is directly responsible for leaking classified information. It's an embarrassment that she is on the verge of becoming president.”

Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice

Jonathan Haidt has a very interesting article up at Heterodox Academy by this title.

The article itself is really just the bare outline of a talk he has given on this topic. You can watch a video of the whole talk, all 66 minutes of it, there if you like. I'm going to make time soon to do that.

Here is the introduction:

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?

The most obvious answer is “truth” –- the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable.  Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.

He follows this with an 8-point argument showing why universities must choose one telos.

UPDATE: The video is excellent. He is giving a talk at Duke University and argues that a university having more than one telos is harmful to everyone at the university, including those who are focused on social justice. I don't think I have ever seen a better presentation of conservative arguments to a progressive audience.

Also, if you are interested in recent changes at our universities or their future, I highly recommend it.

Healthy Dieting, Medieval Style

It was a lot harder to start a fad diet before the printing press, but there was a trade in ideas. One was the Regimen Sanitatus Salernitanum.

The Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum was created, allegedly, by famous doctors for English royalty and disseminated in the form of a poem. It recommends, very specifically, red wine, fresh eggs, figs and grapes. It has little to say about vegetables. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of today’s health fads—it celebrates wheat, emphasizes meat, and involves two significant meals, with no mention of snacking. Water is looked on with suspicion, and juice is nowhere to be found.

But from the 1200s through the 1800s, the Regimen was one of the most well known guides to health in Europe, at a time when the stakes of staying healthy were much higher than they are now. Getting sick could be a death sentence; this regimen promised to keep people well.

The author tried it out to see how it worked. The wine, in the ancient way, was diluted -- drinking raw water made it more likely you would get sick from things in the water, but diluting wine with it meant that the harmful effects of the wine were largely eliminated, while the beneficial effects remained.

There are some aesthetic differences:

One giant difference between diet advice of 1200s and diet advice now is that Salerno never mentions losing weight or keeping skinny. In fact, all the foods Salerno smiles on, the poem describes as “fattening.” When you’re liable as not to face a famine, or at least a food shortage, at basically any time, fattening is good.

In the end, the author consulted a modern specialist for advice.

How did it stack up from a modern point of view? I asked Andrea Grandson, a nutritional therapist who specializes in metabolic health, to go over the Salerno prescriptions with me. “It sounds very healthy, with eggs, wine, and broth,” she says. Eggs are a complete protein and one of the easiest to digest. Red wine is valuable for its resveratrol and antioxidants. Broths and stews extract the nutrients from the bones and organs of animals. “They were on the right track in terms of looking for nutrient density,” she says.

But, most importantly, she said, how did I feel? Was I sleeping ok? Did I feel an afternoon slump?

The truth is, I felt great eating this food. It was simple, hearty, and filling, but I never stuffed myself.

Apparently This Is For Real?

This image is part of a whole series of newspeak lessons in political correctness from a university I'd never heard of before. I gather that they intend them completely seriously and non-ironically, even the ones about "Shemales" and how "Just Kill Me" is insensitive because of suicide. (If you 'just kill me,' how is that a suicide?)

But get a load of this one:

Two things to notice here:

1) There is apparently no such thing as an objective judgment permitted: all judgments of a person's moral qualities are illegitimate applications of someone else's standards to another individual. I believe the academic way of saying this is: "To apply someone else's standards to an individual is to treat the judger as the subject whose experience and standards matter, while the judged is a mere object against which someone else's standards are applied." To treat someone else as an object is taken to be a kind of moral affront to that person, even though it's actually impossible to understand the world without the grammatical categories of subject and object. "No one must ever be treated as an object" is another way of saying "we must give up on describing the world."

2) Since there is no objective judgment, and all judgments must be subjective, there can be no judgment at all. Everyone is entitled to live life on his or her (or whatever's) own terms, without any moral weight being imposed on them from outside of whatever feels right to them.

I expect it is completely impossible to field a winning sports team on this model as you will not win if you cannot assert that players ought to push themselves and train harder and face whatever fears they have. That fact suggests that the Chico State administration are hypocrites. Presumably they don't adhere to this practice to the slightest degree when it comes to training their student athletes for competition, nor should they.

However, the suggestion of hypocrisy isn't needed to prove the case against them. The fact is that this whole set of posters is about teaching students to judge others. You can't apply someone else's standards to anyone? What about the guy who says "retarded"?

Hypocrites and fools are these. They not only don't believe in the standards they're advocating, they don't even know that they don't believe in them.

Dogs from Above

According to the article at Science Alert, this is part of an anti-poaching program in South Africa's Kruger National Park. I liked this bit:

And even though the school isn’t sure if dogs experience adrenaline rushes like human skydivers, they say their tails start to wag when they hear the helicopter.

"The dogs are exceptionally comfortable with skydiving," Eric Ichikowitz from the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, who helped start the program, told National Geographic. "They know they’re going to work."

Looks like fun.