Allah on Ethics

It is easy to forget, given the fireworks, that the real point of today's presser with Trump was for him to announce his solution to conflicts of interest arising from his business. Allah didn't forget.

If you want to defend this dubious arrangement, your best move is to shrug and say that Americans knew what they were getting when they voted for him. And increasingly, that is the chief argument you hear in his defense. Not that a trust run by his family is ethical, not that it’ll stop special interests from funneling cash to Trump through legal means, but essentially that Americans don’t care anymore if the president is corrupt or not. I mean, the alternative last year was Hillary Clinton. We might as well let lobbyists start dropping off burlap bags filled with cash with dollar signs on the side on the White House doorstep.

He has a good analysis of the weaknesses of this particular approach, which he still says is "better than nothing."

UPDATE: TNR isn't too impressed either, although I'm not sure I buy their argument that it makes things worse. Donating revenue to the Treasury may in some sense represent Trump 'merging his business and the Federal government,' but not more than donating any other foreign gift to the Treasury -- which is a standard practice for US officials receiving foreign gifts.

The Intercept: Deep State at War With Trump

So they claim, and you can read their report and make up your own mind. The Intercept is fairly credible, although it sometimes takes risks with the people it is reporting on. That's a hazard of reporting on secrets, though. This report is by Glenn Greenwald, whom I didn't take to be credible not that long ago -- but he's done good work lately, I have to admit.

A Hidden Bombshell

In the reporting on this Russia business:

...the FBI applied for a warrant from the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court over the summer in order to monitor four members of the Trump team suspected of irregular contacts with Russian officials. The Fisa court turned down the application asking FBI counter-intelligence investigators to narrow its focus.

The FISA court turned them down? As of 2013, the FISA court had denied only 11 requests for surveillance warrants in 33 years -- .03%. Sometimes they do ask for more information first, but even that is unusual.

It makes you wonder whether the request was particularly weak, or if they were particularly sensitive to the potential scandal from spying on a major Presidential candidate.

UPDATE: BBC says it was rejected a second time, only to be approved in much narrowed form in October.

CNN Makes the Enemies List

Their organization is terrible, and they are purveyors of 'fake news.'

How long until the media regrets giving Trump a weapon like 'fake news'? Twenty minutes ago?

My late father-in-law used to call CNN the "Communist News Network" -- he was a veteran, and after his time in the military (an original member of the US Air Force, having started in the Army Air Force) he worked on DOD's aerospace programs for the rest of his career. Sometimes he'd call them the "Clinton News Network," and I'm not sure how much of a distinction he saw between Communists and Clintons in any case.

I wonder how he'd react to Donald Trump, if he were still alive? I imagine he'd be appalled at the man's manner, but not entirely so at the man's sentiments.

DKM: Blood

I suppose it's obvious that this anthem is built around Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire."

Trump Blackmailed by Russia?

So says this report, but there's a few things that draw my eye.

1) The information was provided to Trump. It's not being held as a weapon to use against him in the last few days before he takes office. It's a warning, perhaps, of vulnerabilities he doesn't know he has; or it's a play at leverage from an intelligence community that would like to be closer to their new boss. (Don't think a clandestine service guy wouldn't think of this. If he didn't at least think of it, he's not competent at his trade.)

2) The information was provided to Obama. He's giving a farewell address tonight, not girding his loins up to do something unprecedented. That suggests that the information we're seeing in the press should be interpreted minimally rather than extravagantly.

3) Nevertheless, this is a big deal if true. It's not a crime to be the victim of spying (otherwise, we'd have yet another reason to put Hillary in the dock). There are crimes that can come from how you respond to being blackmailed. Right now, we don't know enough to know if any such things happened. Indeed, Trump may not have been at all blackmailed as yet: he may have been surprised to learn the information existed.

There's a lot to know yet before we can come to any conclusions. It's not even certain if any of this is true. All the same, it's something to keep an eye on. Even if it turns out that Trump just took a bunch of easy money from Russian outlets, it's not too far a walk to bribery -- and bribery is one of the two Constitutionally specified impeachable offenses. If you get as far as treason, well, that's a capital crime.

Strange place to start a new administration, and again, what we have in front of us is a leaked comment about a report that the President has seen in full and isn't taking super-seriously. Still, a citizen's duty is what it is. All partisanship aside, we'll have to keep our eyes open and do what duty and the Constitution commands. It may come to nothing, but we cannot be sure it will.

UPDATE: NBC says the intel agencies didn't show the 'compromising material' stuff to Trump, because they deemed it false. That's odd, though, because Trump sounded at his presser like he thought he had seen it. (Quite a presser, too -- it's going to be an interesting administration.)

Conservatives Are Objectively Better Looking

Some of us, obviously.

No, really, that's a thing the Washington Post is putting forward. So go preen, brothers and sisters.

UPDATE: Maybe this explains how this happens. (Possible content warning -- I haven't read but the headline.)

"Clock Boy" Lawsuit Dismissed With Prejudice

As you may remember, there was a case in Texas of a boy who built a "clock" in a briefcase and brought it to school. A teacher thought it looked like a bomb and called the police. The student was Muslim, a huge mess was made by his father about the incident, and President Obama invited the kid to the White House.

A minor offshoot of this event was that our friend Uncle Jimbo of BLACKFIVE fame was interviewed about the case on television in his capacity as a former Special Forces NCO. He said, on the air, that the so-called clock was the detonation side of a suitcase bomb -- and that he ought to know, having been taught to build the things by the Army. He was later also interviewed on the Glenn Beck program, wherein he pointed out that all this attention and legal action suggested that the whole thing was a setup designed to get publicity. As a result of this, Jim was one of the many people who got wrapped up in the overarching lawsuit filed by the family against anyone who said anything other than that this was a clear-cut case of an innocent youth mistreated by prejudice.

That lawsuit was just dismissed.

During the lengthy hearing, Judge Moore pressed Mohamed’s lawyer, Fort Worth attorney Susan Hutchison, to provide any facts that would suggest that Hanson and the other defendants had said anything false or defamatory about Mohamed or his son during the television broadcasts. After spending a painfully embarrassing 15 minutes flipping through reams of paper, Mohamed’s lawyer was unable to provide any such evidence.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Moore took the matter under advisement but informed the parties that she would rule by the end of the day. Today, the Court published Judge Moore’s ruling dismissing the lawsuit against Hanson and CSP with prejudice.

ATTN Progressives: You'd Have Hated Hillary's Cabinet, Too

Don't take my word for it. The New Republic has it broken down for you.

Descending dove

Czech Gov't: No Limit on Terrorism Hunting License

Not what you expect from Europe, but minds may be changing given the steady drumbeat of attacks.

Now the country's interior ministry is pushing a constitutional change that would let citizens use guns against terrorists. Proponents say this could save lives if an attack occurs and police are delayed or unable to make their way to the scene. To become law, Parliament must approve the proposal; they'll vote in the coming months.

The Czech Republic already has some of the most lenient gun policies in Europe.

They have some of the most lenient gun policies in Europe, but it's unconstitutional to shoot terrorists?

Minds may be changing, but there's a long way to go.

Law Enforcement Spox Feel Much the Same as the Military

It's not a poll like the Military Times piece, but this article does capture the perspective of leaders of police organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the kindest words for Obama came from a former Bush Administration official.

"You can’t in all fairness say that Obama is anti-police,” said Larry Thompson, a former deputy attorney general under George W. Bush. “If you read his statements, they’re not anti-police. But I do think the department and the administration have been too quick to point an accusatory finger at the police when these incidents have happened. Whether that’s accurate, it’s a perception you have to deal with and I think it will change under Sessions.”

Some of the others didn't feel it was at all unfair to suggest that the President was anti-police.

I suppose if I were a left-leaning individual who was afraid that Trump was going to usher in an authoritarian regime, I would be worried by these clear demonstrations of affection for him by police and the military (and especially the military over-represented on the front line, meaning the enlisted, the Army, and the Marine Corps). I suspect I would read this as confirmation that 'my side' was going to be quashed, and that the police would feel that they had a free hand to do some quashing without fear of repercussions from on high.

But, as AVI says, evidence is ambiguous. I think that's similar to the point Tom and I were discussing from Aristotle, the other day:

We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

Of course, 'what is most probable' can look quite different to two different people who bring different assumptions to the table. You aren't going to get a scientific proof that could calm the heart.

I had a similar conversation recently with someone who is genuinely afraid of Trump and what he represents. She was worried that his administration plans to shrink the National Security Council down to around 150 people, from about 400. "But that's the size it used to be," I said, "and the reason President Obama grew it so much is that he likes to run things from the White House, rather than giving the departments more of their own head. Shouldn't you be relieved that the NSC is shrinking, and that career bureaucrats at the departments will thus have more control over the day to day operations of the government?"

She was not relieved. I imagine she would be no more relieved to learn that the police are looking forward so strongly to Jeff Sessions.

What Could Go Wrong?

Down to the most dangerous few left in GitMo, President Obama decides to transfer 18 or 22 to Saudi Arabia.

On the upside, there's always a chance that the Saudis will behead them.

Rand Paul: Time to Kill Obamacare

He's got another answer he likes better.

What should we replace Obamacare with? Perhaps we should try freedom:

1. The freedom to choose inexpensive insurance free of government dictates.

2. The freedom to save unlimited amounts in a health savings account.

3. The freedom to buy insurance across state lines.

4. The freedom for all individuals to join together in voluntary associations to gain the leverage of being part of a large insurance pool.

The biggest problems with Obamacare are, from my perspective, these:

1) It makes my health everyone else's business, which means that everyone else in theory has an interest in telling me how to live.

2) It distorts the market towards worse kinds of jobs, especially at the lower end. The result is to increase poverty and the hardship of life for working Americans.

3) The mandate is unconstitutional, SCOTUS notwithstanding.

It's unclear from the details in the wild whether Rand Paul's plan fixes those three things, although it sounds like he probably is gunning for the mandate.

According to Paul's Twitter account, which I suppose is how we do governance now, Trump is 100% on board with the plan.

Vox: Authoritarian States Aren't So Bad

Actual headline: "Life in authoritarian states is mostly boring and tolerable."

Of course, it's a piece about Trump.

How strange an argument for a parallel with Trump, though: "[Y]ou usually learn that you are no longer living in a democracy not because The Government Is Taking Away Your Rights, or passing laws that you oppose, or because there is a coup or a quisling. You know that you are no longer living in a democracy because the elections in which you are participating no longer can yield political change."

This last election was probably the most momentous in my lifetime, except possibly Reagan v. Carter in 1980. A few votes in a few states and we'd be facing a completely different future. If this is the measure, America must be the least authoritarian place it's easy to find. Brexit was a strike against authoritarianism too. Every nationalist movement in Europe is about telling the EU that the People of Our Nation will no longer be commanded by a distant bureaucracy of which they have no vote.

Of Course

Headline: "NBC New York Has Identified The Real Mass Shooting Threat in America: Veterans"

The article from NBC came up with 11 incidents in nearly 30 years in which an active shooter was either a veteran or active duty military.

Their bit drew a response:

The double standard is particularly glaring here.

Military Times Poll on President Obama

And now, at the last, it can be told.

Not that it's any surprise. A poll of troops finds that they are not fans of the President, 51.5% to 36.4%, a 15 point gap. More than 29% of troops rate him strongly unfavorably. Obama does better, exactly as Clinton did in Military Times polling before the election, with officers, the Navy, and the Air Force. He does worse, exactly as she did, with enlisted, the Army, and especially the Marine Corps.

On specific policies, they rate his handling of Iraq and Afghanistan very badly, as well as his preference for avoiding large-scale overseas missions. However, they rate his increased reliance on special forces positively, even though it is the flipside of the avoidance of large-scale overseas missions. Likewise, they rate positively his use of drones, which is another way he has chosen to project power instead of using large-scale forces.

As for his social engineering, the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell comes out slightly ahead in the poll (6% more thought it helped than that it hurt). The other social engineering programs have not fared as well. Twice as many servicemembers say that gender integration in combat units has hurt than helped. Transgender service loses by almost four-to-one.

Curiously, to me, the poll asked servicemembers to rate dangers facing America, but didn't ask about Russia. It did ask about China and Iran (strangely, perhaps, more are worried about China -- a major trading partner -- than about the revolutionary Islamic Republic that begins and ends the day with chants of "Death to America"). Neither are as big a concern as Islamic terrorism, which occupy the two top spots ("The Islamic State and al-Qaida" and "Domestic Islamic Terrorists").

DB: Troops Sour on Mattis

A large number of active-duty troops once enthusiastic about the choice of James Mattis for Defense Secretary have since soured on the pick after the retired general released a 6000-book reading list he plans to implement for the entire DoD after he is confirmed, Duffel Blog has learned.

Referred to by some as the “Warrior Monk,” the 66-year-old sent his reading list to the military’s entire email distribution list over the weekend. Most service members who received the 200-page email reported they were still in the process of reading it well into Monday morning....

Among the top books chosen, Mattis recommended “No True Glory” by Bing West, “Battle Ready” by Tom Clancy, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War,” ten of the most difficult books to read of all time, and The Bible. Marines, however, were only assigned four coloring books.

Empathy Is Not Good

Not an unalloyed good, to be sure. The classic example is that my empathy for a young woman who has been sexually assaulted -- which is quite legitimate -- can cause me to pursue harsh punishments against the person who is accused of assaulting her, without caring too much about the certainty of proof against him. There are numerous other examples along these lines, which the reader is invited to research at pleasure.

Nevertheless, until now I've not seen an argument that suggested that empathy wasn't at least a little bit good, or potentially good if properly used. Here is one that does that, reducing empathy to a kind of bias.

Unfortunately, it's in a podcast form, so I can't readily give you excerpts. But consider it, if it's a subject that interests you.

Honda's Self-Balancing Motorcycle

The New Normal for Republican Presidential Victories?

I posted this in the comments of a post on Democrats trying to contest electoral college votes earlier, but thought it would do well to make it its own post.

According to this article at the Washington Examiner, they did this with both of Bush's victories, too.

In 2000, 2004 and 2016, Democrats in Congress objected, tried to object, and generally disrupted the process of certifying the Electoral College vote. They did so with no substantive grounds, instead just for the political theater of it.

and

Twelve years ago, Democrats actually delayed the Electoral College certification. They got Sen. Barbara Boxer to object to Ohio's Electoral College vote. George W. Bush beat John Kerry by 120,000 votes in Ohio, but Democrats got their debate and their vote on the electors. House Democrats used the occasion mostly to attack Ken Blackwell, Ohio's secretary of state, who was a rising star in politics and — horror of horrors — a black conservative.

So this is the new normal, it seems.

Was Plato "White"?

Students at "a prestigious London university" are wanting him and Kant stripped out of the philosophy curriculum, which makes about as much sense as structuring a math program without addition or algebra. The claim is that they are "white," but there's no way Plato would have seen the sense of that characterization. Leaving aside that we don't know that much about his pigmentation, it's not a category he would have recognized. He'd have said that he was an Athenian, and if you wanted something broader than that, a Greek.

You want to put him in a category with a German? Germans were literally barbarians to the ancient Greeks.

Roger Scruton charitably said that the demands suggested "ignorance." Truly: not only are they too ignorant of philosophy to know the value of what they are throwing away, they're too ignorant of history to know why their demands make no sense.

Disliked by all the right people

Two months after the election, I feel I'm still reading the same articles every day, written by "journalists" and commentators who can't get over the fact that "But he's rich, I tell you, rich!" isn't working as an attack.  Nor is "But he's crass!"

Tailor to presidents

Martin Greenfield survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald (though his family did not), and made his way to the U.S. to become a premier tailor.

Soon after the liberation, Greenfield and another teenage survivor set out to kill the wife of the mayor, who had previously had Greenfield beaten for trying to eat food intended for her pet rabbits. When they found her, she was carrying her newborn baby, and Greenfield relented; he has described that moment as when he "became human again".

Years ago I noticed tattooed numbers on the wrist of my Houston tailor. It's not a moment you forget.

Speaking of decay

I can highly recommend Mary Roach's "Stiff," about cadavers.  She's a hilarious geek, sort of a morbid John McPhee.  I've now started on her "Grunt," about all the problems military personnel face other than the obvious.

I believe I'd like to be composted.

Home truths

We are complete suckers for home-buying, house-renovating, small-house-design shows of every stripe.  From "This Old House" to "Tiny House Nation," we watch them all.  Virginia Postrel ably captures part of their appeal:

Although budgets feature prominently, the network’s house-flipping shows aren’t really about money. Rather, they offer the thrill of watching something deteriorated revive. Replacing corroded pipes and shoring up sagging foundations is as important to the drama as ripping out hideous wallpaper or installing new countertops. The makeovers aren’t merely cosmetic. Something deeper than fashion is at stake. On HGTV, decay isn’t a permanent condition, and anything can be repaired. Things get better.

Ditto the car renovation shows. If something isn't working and a part isn't available, they don't just stare at the customer like a fish on ice, they pop into the shop and manufacture what they need. It's "can do" all the way down. Yesterday's "This Old House" had a terrific segment on marble mining. They showed miners cutting out a block of marble weighing many tons, as big as a garage. No one sat around saying, "Oh me, the marble's in the hillside, however will we get it out. Let's have another drink."

Postrel contrasts these popular shows, popular though unhip in their blandness, with "train-wreck TV," which I take to be the endless parade of series about people with horror-show families who are wedded to their dysfunction.

I have minor crushes on the carpenter and plumber from "This Old House."  I want to sit at their feet absorbing their knowledge.  They know how everything works, and can make it work better.

Decay is a permanent condition, but only in the long run.  We live in the short run.

Pondering the End of Christmas, and the Beginning of the Long Winter

The Twelve Days are already over, though by happenstance the Feast of the Epiphany waits for Sunday. We are getting our first real taste of the hard winter tomorrow, with snow expected early and then a plunge in temperatures compared to what is ordinary for Georgia.

Enjoy this reflection on an earlier Christmas, as seen from the Orkney Islands off northernmost Scotland. They make a decent beer up there, Skull Splitter Ale, named for a worthy Viking who appears in the saga that bears the islands' name. He also features in the Heimskringla.

DNC Refused FBI Access to Servers

Here's yet another reason not to feel very bad about the DNC losing its shirt to hackers -- not only did they hang up on the FBI when it called to warn them, it turns out they refused to let the FBI look at their servers when directly asked to do so.

The FBI “repeatedly stressed” the importance of accessing the hacked email server of the Democratic National Committee. But one senior law enforcement official now tells TheBlaze that DNC officials rejected its requests.

The news comes just hours after it was reported the FBI never examined the DNC server, which the bureau and multiple other U.S. intelligence agencies say was hacked by the Russian government...

Clearly, they wanted their secrets kept from law enforcement more than they wanted protection from law enforcement. That's OK. You're entitled to want that, as an American protected by the 4th Amendment.

Just, there's no whining when they tried to help you out and you told them to go take a hike.

Joltin' Joe Biden Rams Trump's Electoral College Certification through Congress

The Vice President, who is called "Mr. President" here because he is ex officio President of the Senate, has no patience for repeated efforts by members of his own party to disrupt the certification.


It would have been different if they had been able to get even one Senator to sign on. Apparently, no one wanted to be that person -- not Bernie Sanders, not Elizabeth Warren, not even Rand Paul.

Barrels of Crackers

More from USA Today, what's the world coming to?  Kirsten Powers gives us the down-home version of Charles Murray's "Coming Apart":

We really are two Americas. But it wasn’t always so. Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report points out that Donald Trump won 76% of counties with a Cracker Barrel but only 22% of counties with a Whole Foods, a 54-point gap. Yet in 1992, when Bill Clinton won the presidency, the gap between those same counties was only 19 points.

There is a sense among many “Cracker Barrel” Americans that they are not only expected to accept rapid cultural changes, but they are obliged to never even express a reservation or ask for more time to adjust. The choice is full-throated embrace or nothing.

I denounce myself. I confess that I'd love to have a Whole Foods here.  Actually, we don't even have a Cracker Barrel.

This is how you get more Trump

USA Today, to my amazement, has begun carrying regular OpEds by Glenn Reynolds.  This one reacted to a recent New Yorker cartoon showing an airline passenger standing up and announcing that he's tired of those smug pilots guiding the plane, and wants to know who's with him in taking the controls.  I know, right?  Next they'll be demanding a say in where the plane flies to, the little vermin.  Sean Davis of the Federalist responded:  "Do you want more Trump?  Because this is how you get more Trump."

Variations on Some Recent Themes Here

Grace and Chicago

The story of the autistic youth kidnapped, beaten, and scalped in Chicago has spread far and wide. It's easy to understand how it fits the current mood. The youth was beaten for being a Trump supporter. The attackers were black, the beaten youth was white.

What I think about, though, is the Charleston, S.C. shootings. None of us are as closely involved in this matter as the congregation of that church was, and so it should be easier for us to show a kind a similar -- lesser -- kind of grace. It would have been very easy for them not to do, but they did, and it touched people's hearts. In return, for example, the Southern Baptist Convention abandoned its longstanding defense of the Confederate flag at its next conference.

Abyssus abyssum invocat. Sometimes, however, the reverse can be true as well.

Ownership

The ownership of real property is something we've discussed from time to time here. If a private citizen goes to own a piece of land, he or she can normally only obtain ownership in "fee simple." This is a form of feudal title, meaning that what we call an owner is really a feudal lord holding land from the sovereign. This is why eminent domain works: the land that the state is taking from you always really belonged to the sovereign state anyway. (Or so the legal fiction goes; this particular concept dates to early Medieval Europe, with the particular instrument of "fee simple" dating to Edward I).

What is harder to explain than eminent domain is this massive land-grab by the Feds. What makes it hard to explain is that the states opposed having their land seized by the central government, and it is not at all clear to me that the states aren't the proper sovereign for this purpose.

Obama unilaterally seized more than 1.3 million acres from Utah to establish the Bears Ears Monument, preserving it at the behest of conservationist groups and Native American tribes who claimed the land was sacred. Utah’s state legislature, however, opposed the unilateral land grab across party lines, with many speculating that Obama’s move is the latest in an attempt to limit efforts from incoming President Donald Trump to expand domestic energy production.

Obama also claimed 300,000 acres in Clark County, Nevada, as the Gold Butte National Monument, effectively closing the area off to future development for uranium mining, oil drilling or natural gas production.

While it's certainly nothing new, Obama's habit of unilaterally confiscating land has ramped up heading into the final stretch of his presidency. In the eight years he’s been in office, President Obama has seized more than 553 million acres of land and water (roughly 865,000 square miles) and placed it under federal ownership and control – enough square mileage to cover the entire state of Texas more than three times over.

This act defied a resolution by the state legislature in Utah opposing any new Federal land-grabs in their state. Utah's legislature doubtless feels a particular urgency about this, as 80% of the state has already been seized by the Federal government.

Among the constitutional re-thinking associated with the recent election has been a call to abolish the states, and run everything from the central government. This is (of course) exactly the opposite of what I think is the wise course. Nevertheless, I wonder if this isn't a functional means of doing it without the bother of a Constitutional amendment.

Self-government by the citizens of Utah now applies to only 20% of the land that is notionally within their borders. Why not 1%? Just as it has become common to set up "free speech zones" near political events (or on college campuses), why not restrict self-government to a couple of small towns or some other designated area? The few who care about living free could move, and the rest could continue to have their lives ordered by a friendly, distant Big Brother.

Perhaps we could call those last remaining free areas "Reservations." That would create a nice symmetry.

Pick 'em up trucks

Someone set a cat among the pigeons this week inviting America's elite to admit whether they knew anyone with a pick-up truck.  Around here, a more cogent question would be whether you know anyone without one.

Kevin Williamson leaped into the question by analyzing pick-up-truck ownership patterns in Houston, where apparently the usage is not authentically farm- or ranch-oriented.  Neither is ours, of course; we just like having a tow vehicle you can cart stuff around in.  I don't like driving it, and much prefer my SUV, which doesn't tow but works great for carting stuff around in.  We all keep track of who owns a trailer around here who will loan it to us to haul anything really big.

Williamson's piece ends on a nice note, though, which I thought I'd quote here:

Our politics is less and less about using the clumsy machinery of the state to try to mitigate the effects of this or that problem, and more and more about what kind of people we are, what kind of people we aspire to be, and — not least, never least — what kind of people we hate: effete Santa Monica liberals who don’t know where their food comes from, small-minded prairie bigots who shop at Walmart and have never visited Europe. We have a keen understanding for the vices of those who are unlike us. Their virtues, less so.

But the farmers and the bankers need each other. It is a big country, and there is room for both. A few years ago, there was a controversial Republican political figure who spoke to this under rather more intense circumstances: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

The election of 2016 was divisive, to be sure. It wasn’t Appomattox. The Real America has been through worse.

For Grim

I don't know if you hadn't seen this, or had seen it but didn't care for it, but it seems pretty in your general wheelhouse.

Free Leonard Peltier

Here's an interesting headline: Leonard Peltier's prosecutor has written a letter asking for him to be granted clemency.

Peltier has been in jail for decades, following his conviction for killing FBI agents during the Pine Ridge shootout. The incident occurred during the American Indian Movement's heyday, when Vietnam veterans from the reservations came home and build up a movement to resist government authority where they found it corrupt and unjust. Naturally, this is the sort of movement that appeals to me -- unlike the Left, I like it just as well when the Bundy family did it as when the Lakota did it in 1975.

It is worth noticing that in both cases the fight was over what the government claimed as Federal land, but to which the other party also had a competing claim. The government would prefer you submit your competing claims to adjudication in its own courts, but the Oglala Lakota's claim on Wounded Knee is one that is bound up in a history that does not suggest reliance on Federal good faith.

Peltier's defenders maintain that he is innocent and never received a fair trial. There is something to be said for this, given that he was assigned two life sentences based on no proof that he ever shot anyone at all.

[The] prosecutor eventually admitted in court that the US attorney’s office “can’t prove who shot [the agents]” and claimed that Peltier was guilty of “aiding and abetting” in the shooting.

Reynolds was appointed US attorney in 1976 and oversaw the case’s appeal when much of the evidence that raised serious doubts about the government’s case were revealed.

The former prosecutor’s letter to Obama does not address the underlying conviction, and in an interview, he declined to say whether he believed Peltier is innocent. But Reynolds said it was wrong for Peltier to remain behind bars after 40 years, particularly considering that prosecutors ultimately considered him an accomplice in the crime. “You’re not really participating in the crime yourself. Just because you’re there, you’re going to get nailed.”

Even 20 years ago, it seemed like a bit much to me given that no one has proven he had anything to do with the actual killings. Nor, really, do the deaths strike me as properly-speaking murders in any case: it was a skirmish, in which the Federal agents were taking aggressive action and got caught in a crossfire.

It would be a shame for Barack Obama, to whom the petition was addressed, to have made friends with the Weathermen but to refuse clemency to Peltier. The Weathermen were actual terrorists. Peltier has paid a high price for a crime no one ever proved he committed. If the point was for him to serve as an example, surely forty years is example enough.

Taco Bell Gets Healthy

Business Insider apparently stopped in one recently, and noticed that it wasn't quite as they remembered it.

Unless you’re a hardcore follower of the chain, you may not have noticed the change, so we’re going to fill you in: Taco Bell has started to become one of the country’s healthiest fast-food chains.

It seems a little weird that a restaurant that offers a Doritos-shell taco would warrant that title, but it’s the gospel truth.

In the past year or so, Taco Bell has been restructuring menu choices from top to bottom, especially on the company website and mobile platform. The goal? To give consumers a choice. They can pig out on Crunch Wrap Supremes if they want, or they can go for a healthier option that’s still quick service and delicious.

The high-protein chicken "Power" burritos are not a bad choice if you have to eat fast food for some reason. When I travel I sometimes eat them. You can get a reasonably healthy dose of protein for around four bucks, even at an airport or a train station.

Showing Off That New Technology

Amazon's new "Alexa" has a lot in common with Mack.



I wouldn't have one in my house for other reasons, in any case.

Tough love

Everyone knows by now that you can sometimes hurt by helping too much.  So it should come as little surprise that some of the nation's non-profits, horrified by the Trump election, have doubts about helping too much.  Not that they're worried about helping the needy too much; the real problem is that, by ramping up private charity, they might be encouraging conservatives to think their preference for keeping government out of the charity business is a model that works:

Caleb Gayle, a former program officer at the George Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote an op-ed last week for the Chronicle arguing that the philanthropic sector shouldn’t spend more to make up for gaps in government funding.

“It should instead exercise strategic restraint,” he wrote.

Gayle is unabashed about his plan to put partisanship above helping people. “To many foundations, it might seem cruel to resist calls to spend more . . . But if grant makers start to far exceed the 5 percent annual minimum, they will validate the conservative desire to strip money from government antipoverty measures.”

Small gov

Let's make even the name smaller!  I'm just barely old enough to remember Goldwater's presidential campaign.  We thought the height of clever humor was to say his name stood for "urine."  Here he is on his political goals:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

A natural act

From an AEI article by Frederick Hess on the education wars:

At root, teaching and learning are intuitive acts. Kids are naturally curious; they’re natural learners. The human mind is hard-wired to ask questions and seek out knowledge. And adults are predisposed to share knowledge, interests, and skills. When one feels confounded or overwhelmed by the challenges of educational improvement, it’s worth keeping in mind that teaching and learning aren’t the product of some mysterious alchemy—they’re deeply natural acts. Systems, structures, and bureaucratic rules designed to support and promote learning need to be scrutinized with an eye to whether they respect that truth.

We can all do a lot better to steer clear of words that have been stripped of meaning. School reform is filled with such words: “consensus,” “best practices,” “differentiation,” “21st century skills,” “rigor,” “effective teaching,” “accountability,” “empowerment,” and so on. Most of the time, it’s not clear what any of these placeholders really mean. They’re often just a way to skip past complicated questions. The problem is that mushy language leads to fuzzy thinking. When I use these words, I frequently realize that even I don’t know exactly what I’m saying.

I was lucky to have many first-rate teachers. One thing they avoided was buzzwords and empty process. They knew how to keep order (and were not undermined in this by their institutions), they knew their subjects, and they cared about nothing but making the intellectual contact necessary to get their knowledge and skills across. Some did this warmly and personably, others with a cool, demanding style. Some were didactic, others collaborative. They gave and demanded respect. They believed that what they had to teach was valuable and showed that they cared whether I got it.

The bad teachers were checking off boxes, warming benches, picking up paychecks, perpetuating fads, using their desks as a soapbox. If they knew their fields at all, they didn't get much of a charge out of communicating its content.

I honestly don't know what's supposed to be going on in education colleges.  There must be some training going on there that circumvents the thick fog of buzzwords; I'm sure some of my good teachers--the ones from public schools--had made it through without being ruined.  At worst they had some of their time wasted.

Scots-Irish Music in America

A documentary.

Falsification

My neighbor who lurks here reports that her niece can't hear arguments against man-made climate catastrophe; she fends them all off with the assumption that they're funded by the Koch brothers.  If she could listen, this would be a good place to start:  a fair-minded fellow who tries to make basic, non-threatening points to a group of nice college kids.  The Q-and-A session afterwards suggests that not much got through, but you never know.  For every well-meaning question posed with a confused lack of rigor, there may have been several kids quietly wondering if the whole thing makes as much sense as everyone's been telling them it does all these years.

It's very discouraging to me that it's so difficult to concentrate anyone's attention on the failure of our climate models to make verifiable predictions, let alone on more difficult questions like "Even assuming you're correct about the probable severity of the problem, is the policy you're proposing to cure it actually likely to cure it?" and "If so, at what cost, and how does that cost compare to the benefit?"

ERB: Teddy versus Churchill

It's worth comparing this with the recent Tolkien vs. Martin post by Thomas, if you're interested in the format. (Language warning.) They both feature an English legend against what is presented as a blowhard American. The effect, however, is quite different.



I'm curious as to why, given the political leanings of ERB, they treated the Spanish American War as kind-of glorious, and outright ignored Churchill's contributions to Britain's colonial wars.

I think they think that Churchill won this one as convincingly as they set up Tolkien to win over Martin (which of course he should have done, were the thing real). I'm pretty sure that's not true. The Bull Moose looks to me like he came out well on top, given the way that Churchill presents his argument.

Bierdna

Aristotle Generally Has A Point

Glenn Reynolds responds to an article in the Washington Post in a way I find is not uncommon, but is ill-advised. The article cites a passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which I'll give in full in a minute. Reynolds responds:

Given the change in military technology and the state since Aristotle, I’m not sure the quotes are apposite.

That is doing Aristotle poor justice. He is not talking about military technology or the state here. He's talking about persuasion, and in particular in persuasion by example. So here's the citation:

The “example” has already been described as one kind of induction; and the special nature of the subject-matter that distinguishes it from the other kinds has also been stated above. Its relation to the proposition it supports is not that of part to whole, nor whole to part, nor whole to whole, but of part to part, or like to like. When two statements are of the same order, but one is more familiar than the other, the former is an “example.”

The argument may, for instance, be that Dionysius, in asking as he does for a bodyguard, is scheming to make himself a despot. For in the past Peisistratus kept asking for a bodyguard in order to carry out such a scheme, and did make himself a despot as soon as he got it; and so did Theagenes at Megara; and in the same way all other instances known to the speaker are made into examples, in order to show what is not yet known, that Dionysius has the same purpose in making the same request: all these being instances of the one general principle, that a man who asks for a bodyguard is scheming to make himself a despot.

A position I've long defended in this space is that this kind of reasoning is analogical. It would be easy to read this as a kind of logical reasoning instead. "Instances of one general principle" sounds like there is a single thing of which this is an instance; a type of which this is a token, to put it in the way contemporary philosophers prefer.

But that isn't Aristotle's point. Here's what he says next:

There is an important distinction between two sorts of enthymemes that has been wholly overlooked by almost everybody-one that also subsists between the syllogisms treated of in dialectic. One sort of enthymeme really belongs to rhetoric, as one sort of syllogism really belongs to dialectic; but the other sort really belongs to other arts and faculties, whether to those we already exercise or to those we have not yet acquired. Missing this distinction, people fail to notice that the more correctly they handle their particular subject the further they are getting away from pure rhetoric or dialectic.

As a point of pure rhetoric -- which is what he was talking about -- the charge by example that a bodyguard implies tyranny is an effective tool. As a point of understanding the real world, that is not the case. The more correctly you understand your subject, the less you're doing rhetoric, and the more you're doing arts and science, certainly to include military and political science (which are more properly sciences on Aristotle's terms than on the contemporary understanding of what a "science" is).

The thing about analogies is that they always break. The question about analogical reasoning -- which includes all forms of the example -- is whether the breaking point comes before or after the thing you're talking about. If you're using rhetoric to try to understand the world, that's the thing to keep in mind.

If you're just trying to persuade someone of a point you'd like them to adopt, well, this is a perfectly good rhetorical argument. It's not that Aristotle didn't understand enough to give you good guidance. It's that even the people who read him rarely read him closely enough to understand what he was talking about. Here he's just talking about persuasion, creating the impression that a single real principle is governing disparate events. In fact, that is never the case: analogies always break. It is my contention that Aristotle knew this perfectly well, and defends it as a governing principle of ethics and politics in the early Nicomachean Ethics. (1094b12-28, for those who are serious about following along.)

Gratitude for 2016

Though it is quite common to view 2016 as a particularly bad year, I found that it contained a number of very high moments. Of course, my list of what was good about it matches other people's list of what was bad about it in part. Still, overall there are some things about the year that were unexpected and good.

I'll list them in chronological order, where the chronology is 'as I remember it' rather than me looking it up to confirm I have the dates right.

1) The end of the Bush family dynasty in Republican politics: nothing against the Bush family, but everything against family dynasties in our Republic.

2) Brexit, which offers many reasons for hope.

3) The discovery that the Republican party was not really controlled by the elite that tried to run it, but that it was a genuinely small-d democratic party that would live with the will of its voters. That was quite surprising and unexpected.

4) The absence of violence at the RNC in spite of predictions.

5) The revelation of the corruption of the DNC, not because it was good that it was corrupt, but in the hope that it might be a corrective in the future. There is a minority element of the party, centered around Bernie Sanders' supporters, that is committed to such reforms because they are still young enough to genuinely believe in democracy. Maybe they'll win. Even if they don't, maybe they'll break some of their chains. Their naivety may finally fail, and their starry-eyed leaders become corrupted by power -- but on the other hand there's little power left, outside California, so there's a chance that their idealism may succeed. Who would want to corrupt them, outside California, where they have nothing to offer in return?

6) The end of the Clinton family dynasty, which is an unalloyed good for America.

7) The survival of the United States Constitution as a document that might possibly limit government powers, rather than as a document that licenses the government 'to do good things.' The conservative view of the Constitution would have passed away forever with a 5th progressive vote on the Supreme Court.

8) Suddenly it became important to be concerned about the health of our democratic forms, and limits on executive power, and other things that some of us have been talking about this whole time.

9) A revival of interest in Federalism, although nascent, as a means of controlling a Federal power that is suddenly frightening to the American left.

10) Some of these potential cabinet appointments look good -- especially Mattis, but not only Mattis.

11) A chance to revisit and reform numerous Federal policies and agencies. So far it's just a chance, and it may be squandered or it may fail in spite of diligent effort. Nevertheless, there would have been no chance at all otherwise.

There's a lot to do now, but these things were good things from my perspective.

Civil Rights and Terror

A historical parallel:

Thousands attend their rallies, claiming widespread discrimination. They wrap themselves in displays of “interfaith” cooperation. National, state, and local officials pay them heed. Words that “offend” them are removed from movies, newscasts, and even official government reports. All the while, the men who lead this organization have appeared extensively on FBI wiretaps and are known to federal law enforcement to be involved in a national criminal conspiracy.

You could be forgiven for thinking this describes the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)... But no. The year is 1971, and the pressure group is the Italian American Civil Rights League (IACRL). Its founder, Joe Colombo, is known to federal law enforcement as the head of New York’s Colombo crime family...

It may seem like a punch line now but, in the 1970s, the effort by gangsters to don the mantle of activists and wrap themselves the flag of “civil rights” was taken semi-seriously. Many prominent Italian-American elites (prominenti in Italian) endorsed the call, throwing their influence behind the grievance-mongering.

There's a line to walk here, as groups that legitimately exist to protect civil rights are often co-opted into going along with groups like these. That provides an additional complication, as it is necessary to disaggregate the legitimate groups from the ones that exist to provide cover for dangerous organizations. It wouldn't do to run the Anti-Defamation League out of business along with CAIR, even though they frequently end up going along with CAIR. That makes it more difficult, but still necessary, to criticize effectively.

A lengthy aside, that may serve as an example: ADL has other conceptual problems, too, such as listing the Celtic Cross as a "hate symbol," along with Anglo-Saxon and Norse runic writing. The Celtic Cross is one of the most common expressions of Christianity in much of the United States, as well as of course in Ireland. Runic writing is of great interest not only to neopagans, but to lovers of J. R. R. Tolkien and medieval history in general. The fact that somebody somewhere used a symbol in a hateful way does not make the symbol itself a form of hate.

In fairness, ADL does clarify a few cases in which "interpretation" is important. I would say they understate the case, and that such a symbol should only be taken as an expression of hate if no interpretation is required to see that it is intended as one -- it's not as if the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood are shy about what they think. The attempt to ban or constrict speech and expression is not desirable, nor is it wise to yield up powerful symbols to the hateful. Far wiser would be an effort to reclaim those symbols, by contesting that the legitimate use of them is the one fully proper use. I raise that criticism of the approach, however, without wishing to undermine the cause of rejecting Anti-Semitism.

To return to the main point, it can be difficult to disentangle the group you want to expose as a front group -- CAIR -- while not undermining the legitimate group that has adopted exactly similar rhetoric, and that appears at some of the front group's events. Likewise, when prominent people are suckered into playing along, you can't help but frame your criticism of them in a way that is going to make them look foolish (at best). The alternative is to let bad actors get away with disabling necessary security work.

Our outgoing administration has erred significantly in the one direction. It remains to be seen if the incoming administration will get the balance right, or if it will err in the other direction. At the moment we've gone so far down the one road that even an error in the other direction would be corrective. Still, it would be best by far to get the balance right.

"DID YOU REMEMBER TO VOTE?!?"

A Deadly Few Weeks

We are entering into a dangerous passage, a period of great uncertainty that will last several weeks. You're doubtless aware of the transitional period between administrations with very different world views, which is one problem. But another problem is that, for the first time since World War II, we will have no carriers deployed at sea anywhere in the world.

As former President Bill Clinton said, one of the first questions that comes up in a crisis, from a tsunami to an invasion, is "Where is the nearest carrier?" The answer for a little while is going to be: "There isn't one."

Auld Lang Syne

Performed by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.

UPDATE: Congratulations on surviving 2016, those of you on the East Coast. Now for 2017.

Iceland Ends the Year with No Government

REYKJAVIK (AFP) - 
 
Iceland is ending an eventful year in a political quagmire, left without a government for two months after the Panama Papers scandal and a snap election reflecting deep divisions in the island nation.

"In recent years we thought we were seeing the craziest, but we were proven wrong every time -- Iceland found ways to be even crazier," a parliamentary assistant from the Icelandic opposition said on April 6, seeing a government in tatters hesitate on its next move.

Iceland, getting even crazier. Finland has some work to do.

Apparently, the Pirate Party made a run at it, but ultimately failed to take the ship of state.

Update: The AFP article doesn't tell us this, but according to the Wikipedia article linked above, the Pirates actually won 23.9% of the vote and are the largest party in Iceland right now.

But it's not all bad:

Its economy is flourishing with growth expected to reach five percent, after 4.2 percent in 2015. Unemployment has virtually disappeared. Incomes are rising fast. Construction is booming.

Iceland has become a hot spot for tourists from Britain, the US, Asia or Germany, at almost any time of the year, fuelling the creation of thousands of jobs and generous spending.

Cause? Effect?

Hogmanay

One of these years, I have to get out to Edinburgh for this festival.

The Chronicles of the Black Company (and More Rogue One)

In the Rogue One thread (where, BTW, douglas has now weighed in) I brought up a series of military fantasy novels that I think many at the Hall would enjoy, Glen Cook's The Chronicles of the Black Company. (Ignore the cover art on that edition. Please.)

Cook himself, I believe, was a corpsman for a Marine Recon unit and fought in Vietnam, and the books read that way, although the Black Company is a medieval-style free company and instead of all the high-tech support Marine Recon gets the Company has their own section of sorcerers.

If you've ever wondered what a Vietnam-style counter-insurgency would look like in a sword & sorcery world, here it is. In the first novel, the Company is hired by the sorceress queen of an empire to root out and destroy a troublesome insurgency that seems to keep growing despite her own army's victories. Prophesies of the White Rose, a messianic figure, give many of the queen's subjects a religious fervor for the insurgency, and so the Company is tasked not only with fighting the insurgents but disproving the prophesies. There is some good military cloak-and-dagger work in that. Of course, the queen's own generals grow to hate the Company as she increasingly relies on it to do the job her  native regiments don't seem to be able to accomplish, so the Company is always watching its back as well. It's a great story.

Epic Rap Battle: J. R. R. Tolkien vs. George R. R. Martin

Pretty funny, though there's some foul language.

I Mean, I Suppose Illiteracy Is A Problem

[The former head of Obama's faith-based outreach] once drafted a faith-outreach fact sheet describing Obama’s views on poverty, titling it “Economic Fairness and the Least of These,” a reference to a famous teaching from Jesus in the Bible. Another staffer repeatedly deleted “the least of these,” commenting, “Is this a typo? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Who/what are ‘these’?”

Possibly the staffer was from another religious tradition, of course. Still, that points out another problem. The American literary tradition is awash in Biblical references -- just consider Moby Dick. Even granting that Jefferson et al were followers of a Deist line of thought that is closer to secularism than Americans often appreciate today, drifting completely out of the Christian tradition means drifting away from much of the founding thought of the American ideal. And the best thought, too: Jefferson spoke of a separation of Church and state, but also of the rights granted by a Creator inalienably. The nation was founded in a tense relationship with the institution of slavery that it inherited, but the Abolitionists were also the most intensely Evangelical Christians of their age. Dr. King's oratory doesn't make sense outside of the Biblical tradition.

I wonder what they think the answer to that problem is, or if they recognize it to be a problem?

Top ten top tens from 2016

From ChrisTheBarker:

That link was via Jonah Goldberg's newsletter, whence also these:

The Year in Memes:  I got through the first ten and discovered I'd never heard of any of them.

2016 Internet Slang:  No, never heard of these, either.  Was I even present during 2016?

The Year in Space:  OK, a few of these.

Top Ten Top Ten Lists:  A complete bomb on all of them, even the books, which I had some tiny prayer of recognizing in principle.

I'm going to stop now.  This is too alienating.

How Not To Be Wrong and other book reviews

I have discovered the pleasures of "Audible," which is an Amazon-related service that allows you to download audiobooks.  It's a great thing for beadworking, gardening, jogging, and driving.  If you hate the book, you can even return it and download a replacement for free.  I wasn't tempted to return "How Not To Be Wrong," by Jordan Ellenberg, a book about probability, statistics, and generally reliable analysis written by a guy with an engaging style and a good sense of anecdote.  I wish I could quote from it, but that's the disadvantage of an audiobook.  This L.A. Times interview gives you a good flavor.  The anecdote that deserves quoting at length concerned a spoofed research article about detecting emotional responses to photographs by scanning the brain activity of deceased fish.  The deadpan introductory sections of that paper are priceless, setting out the relatively little difficulty the researchers had in ensuring that the fish did not alter their positions while in the scanning machines.  There is also an explanation of the pitfalls of "regression to the mean" analysis that I found very helpful as a layman lacking any systematic training in statistics.

I hated Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind"--too snide and preachy--so I exchanged it for Sean Carroll's "The Big Picture," which I'm still on the fence about.  It's interesting, but I have almost no patience for extended philosophical discussions in the "what if it's all just an illusion" vein.  He does have a nice exposition of what he calls "poetic naturalism," which tries to bridge the gap between fine-grained mechanistic explanations of scientific processes and humanistic treatments of concepts like personality and duty, which he groups in the "emergent order" category.  It's a good shot at avoiding absurd reductionism.

Nick Lane's newest book, "The Vital Question," was as terrific as Nick Lane books always are; they call for re-reading.  Because "The Vital Question" is about the origin of life, I hoped it would address my favorite mystery, the origin of the DNA code.  Sadly, it did not, but the treatment of the origin of metabolism, eukaryotes (that's everything from yeast to us), and multicellular life is nevertheless mind-blowing for a non-specialist like me.  It's remarkable what people have figured out since I was in school.

"The Crash Detectives" by Christine Negroni was OK as far as it went, but read like a well-constructed brief magazine article that didn't quite get expanded to book length and trailed off towards the end instead.  Michael Foley's "The Age of Absurdity" was not bad but a trifle forgettable.  Tim Harford's "Messy" was quite good in many spots, an entertaining listen for times when you can't concentrate your full attention.  The anecdote I remember best from this book concerned a traffic circle in the Netherlands, which an oddball thinker made safer by removing a lot of traffic signs and making the segregation between foot and auto traffic more ambiguous; this had the paradoxical effect of causing slightly confused drivers to slow down and pay more attention, with the result that traffic accidents decreased.  After reading "How Not To Be Wrong," I'm skeptical whether this story holds water, but it's entertaining nevertheless.

I get a new download every month on my subscription plan, but my next new one isn't available until January 17, and I haven't found a new title irresistible enough to inspire me to fork over another $20 yet.  When I find a good one, I really look forward to quiet times when I can listen, like running errands in the car.  These downloads would be terrific for long solo car trips, if I had any of those planned, but I have no sick relatives in distant cities at present.

I call this a good sign

Yes, the press makes no real effort to hide its bias, and it's troubling to think how many people get their information from it.  Nevertheless, when the press goes full-tilt bat-nuts on a subject that, for once, people care about and can check on fairly easily, I can't help thinking the result is going to be that a big new group of voters will have learned what's up.  To the minor degree that I can claim to understand the recent election, it seems to have been about a turning point of sorts in the PC machine I previously feared might be unstoppable.  The press has revealed itself as ridiculous and may now find it difficult to recover much of its position as arbiter of the truth.

Letter to the Editor

Something I published locally:

Last spring, Aransas County voters defeated a proposal to create a county Groundwater Commission by a vote of 8 to 1. The proposed Commission's directors continued to hold public meetings, which a number of citizens dutifully attended, continuing to express concerns and reservations though they seemed to be falling on deaf ears; the directors held out the hope of submitting their issue to yet another public election. More than half a year later, the Commission's directors finally listened to their public and have tendered their resignations to the County Commissioners.

This is the right result, but I want to make a point about how it happened. Lots of us showed up at tedious meetings and read tedious documents to try to understand what the County Commissioners were proposing for us and why. We got the word out to voters before the election at a time when there was practically no other information circulating publicly about what the proposed Commission was about and what kinds of powers it might have. While we were doing it, we complained among ourselves that our elected leaders weren't telling us what we needed to know and weren't listening to us. We all agreed it was no fun spending our evenings in public meetings. We certainly didn't feel like running for office ourselves!

Most of us won't ever run for public office. There is one thing we can do, though, as responsible voters. We can set our voting default switch to "no." Does that sound negative? Well, it is, but in a good way. If our elected leaders have to submit something to a public vote before they have the power to enact, we should be thinking, "There's a good reason for that." If it were routine and unimportant, they wouldn't have to ask us. If we don't know exactly what they're proposing and why it's a good idea, we shouldn't be writing a blank check just so we won't have to feel "negative."

Nor is it the voter's job to track down a county official, back him up against a wall, and interrogate him. If a proposal is important enough to hold an election for, there should have been lots of public discussion about it. Not just a couple of articles in the newspaper, but real discussion that got real people invested in the notion, so they'd talk to their neighbors and get them on board, too. Meetings, letters to the editor, social media, the whole nine yards.

We should all be thinking about this the next time the County puts a bond proposal out for our vote. Do you know why they need to borrow more money? Do you understand what they want to spend it on? If not, that's a good time to vote "no." Maybe the next time a County Commissioner wants to hold an election to get you to sign off on something, he'll know he has a lot of preliminary work to do first, getting the public to make an informed decision about it. Elections are a lot of trouble and expense. They shouldn't be called if they're not important enough to get our support for them. But no one's going to bother to convince you of much if you've made it clear you'll instinctively vote "yes." That's called being taken for granted, and it's no way to keep your government limited.

People who don't govern themselves get governed. You can't count on government just to "leave you alone" if you don't consistently stand up for yourself.

The chairman of the proposed commission's chairman's letter of resignation was a real piece of work: a petulant screed about the unwillingness of the public to be educated about his unimpeachable mission. These guys hid behind the Open Meetings Act to argue that they couldn't discuss anything with us at public meetings, because it wasn't on the agenda. And it wouldn't be on the next agenda, either, or the one after that, but they never gave up on the excuse.  I was gratified to see the depth of the public revulsion over these tactics, but I still thought I should publish my letter, because the voters of this county tend to rubber-stamp every bond proposal the County Commissioners or the school board throws out there.  It's such a dangerous habit of complaisance.

The odd thing is, a Groundwater Commission is something it wouldn't normally be that hard to get me to support.  Despite my skepticism of central-government solutions, protecting an aquifer is one of those areas that seems tailor-made for an exception.  In this case, though, the facts just didn't add up.  Our aquifer is a belt of below-sea-level sand in a coastal county.  To the extent its borders can be defined at all, they don't extend beyond our county boundaries.  The state environmental commission considers our risk of groundwater contamination, overharvesting, and subsidence minimal.  The water is so meager and brackish that it takes quite a stretch of the imagination to fear a water company's plan to sink a huge, thirsty well to sell our water to the distant city of Lubbock and run all the neighbors' wells dry in the process.

On the other hand, many of us could quite easily imagine how unpleasant a little board of self-righteous, thin-skinned tinpot dictators could be once they got the power to tax us, hire a bunch of consultants, start metering our wells, and dream up new groundwater extraction rules for our own good.  They did say they planned to protect household wells with grandfathering provisions, but frankly they lost all credibility after the first meeting or two.  Then, after they were ground into the dirt in last spring's election, they sealed their fate by announcing superciliously that they planned to hold another election in a year or so instead of packing up and going home.  At this point, you'd be hard-pressed to find a citizen of this county who supports their proposal to regulate the groundwater.  I'm pretty sure the one voter out of nine who supported them last spring amounted to themselves, their families, and their office staff.

Studying the Iliad

A military officer from the Australian Defence Forces encourages junior officers and NCOs to learn from Homer.

There's a lot to learn from Homer, and the Greeks generally. But that's preaching to the choir here.

Feast of the Holy Family

A bit of history on the long series of feasts:

The Second Council of Tours of 567 noted that, in the area for which its bishops were responsible, the days between Christmas and Epiphany were, like the month of August, taken up entirely with saints' days. Monks were therefore in principle not bound to fast on those days. However, the first three days of the year were to be days of prayer and penance so that faithful Christians would refrain from participating in the idolatrous practices and debauchery associated with the new year celebrations.

The Feast of Thomas Beckett

The root of evil

How bad does an anti-capitalist country's crisis have to get before even the Washington Post deplores it?--even if they continue to exhibit no understanding of what's gone wrong down there.  Obviously it's not Obama's fault Venezuela is a basket case, how churlish, but otherwise something or other is happening that we'd rather not get into.

My husband's comment:  "'Autocratic populist government'? 'Economically illiterate'? But we can't write 'socialism', because true socialism hasn't been tried yet." Well, far be it from me to get into another tired debate about the technical definition of socialism. What's clear enough is that a system that erases price signals, nationalizes industry it can't run on its own, and uses governmental power to redistribute goods instead of enforcing enough order and protection for property rights to create an incentive for economic production will produce . . . poverty and collapse. Welcome to paradise, where money isn't important!

Inedible fish

Back to pale, iridescent colors now:  I'm working on a dove.

The Feast of Holy Innocents

A sober feast during the 12 days of Christmas.

The Irish Rovers' "Songs of Christmas"

Grim posting one of their songs led me to a 45-minute album of Christmas music the Irish Rovers made.

Also, for anyone who wants to argue about Rogue One, I saw it last night and have commented on Grim's post about it. What? That's a perfectly Christmas thing to do!

The Feast of St. John the Divine

The Gospel According to John is thought to have been composed late, and incorporates an understanding of Greek philosophy not found in the other Gospels. There are also echoes of later history reflected in the text, or so scholars think.

Critical analysis makes it difficult to accept the idea that the gospel as it now stands was written by one person.... To solve these problems, scholars have proposed various rearrangements that would produce a smoother order. However, most have come to the conclusion that the inconsistencies were probably produced by subsequent editing in which homogeneous materials were added to a shorter original....

The polemic between synagogue and church produced bitter and harsh invective, especially regarding the hostility toward Jesus of the authorities—Pharisees and Sadducees—who are combined and referred to frequently as “the Jews” (see note on Jn 1:19). These opponents are even described in Jn 8:44 as springing from their father the devil, whose conduct they imitate in opposing God by rejecting Jesus, whom God has sent. On the other hand, the author of this gospel seems to take pains to show that women are not inferior to men in the Christian community: the woman at the well in Samaria (Jn 4) is presented as a prototype of a missionary (Jn 4:4–42), and the first witness of the resurrection is a woman (Jn 20:11–18).

Whatever the truth about the authorship, John was a man of courage, said to have sought out a robber among mountain fastnesses even when very old in order to redeem the young man. Had he done nothing else, that would have been worthy of honor. He did many other things.

Edible fish

Our neighbor's daughter and son-in-law are visiting, which makes for a big redfish limit.  His indifferent fillet technique (just grabbing the chunks suitable for tonight's fish-fry) makes in turn for excellent fishframes in our own kitchen.  We've harvested the rest of the useful meat and dropped about eight big frames into a large stockpot, heads and all.  There's a heroic batch of fish soup or gumbo on the way soon.

St. Stephen's Day

The Feast of Christmas

The steaks are ribeyes, some two inches thick, served medium rare. The croissants are filled with many things, from chocolate to ginger to orange marmalade.

I also made cheesecake, and my sister brought sugar cookies, and my mother made Christmas fudge. The wife made these sausage and cheese balls that she only does this one time every year, as otherwise we might eat nothing else.

Victorian Parlor Games

Since so many of our Christmas stories are rough-speaking Victorian, especially A Christmas Carol, you might enjoy some appropriate games for family and friends.

Traditionally played on Christmas Eve, players of Snapdragon must find themselves a broad, shallow bowl, and then prepare to risk their health. Into this bowl should be poured two dozen raisins. If raisins are hard to come by, almonds, grapes or plums will suffice. You should then pour a bottle of brandy into the bowl so that the raisins bob up and down like drowning flies. Place the bowl on a sturdy table, turn the lights down low, and then, with appropriate panache, ignite the brandy.

To play Snapdragon, arrange your family and friends around the blazing bowl so that their faces are lit in a demonic fashion and then, one by one, take turns plunging your hands into the flames in order to try and grab a raisin. If you can accomplish this, promptly extinguish the flaming raisin by popping it into your mouth and eating it.

Christmas Day

Christmas Eve

This is worth a second viewing, if you watched it here last year.

Happy Holidays With Bing and Frank (Classic) from Dill Bates on Vimeo.

All the family has shown up now, and some early light feasting is happening. There is plenty of cheer, including the Christmas mead I made for last year -- which we did not drink, at that time, because my sister announced she was pregnant. Now I have a beautiful niece, and the mead is all the finer for a year's extra aging.

Trumpocalype

Grim mentioned that he got a bunch of post-election inquiries from left-leaning friends with a sudden interest in arming themselves.  Apparently it's generally a thing.

A Medieval Christmas Delicacy

NPR on bread sauce, which was thickened with day-old bread or toasted crumbs instead of flour.

Ground almonds and other nuts were also used as thickeners, as were eggs and animal fat, but the availability — and versatility — of leftover bread made it a medieval kitchen staple. It offered a good tempered and flexible way to create a variety of consistencies. And in the Middle Ages, being able to whip up a wide variety of soups and sauces was an essential part of the culinary skill set. Want a hearty stew? How about the recipe for Beef Soup (Beef- y-Stywyd ), written in 1420. It gives instructions to soak a loaf of bread in broth and vinegar, push it through a strainer, and then use this sourdough slurry to thicken a pot of simmering beef.

For something a little more piquant for the venison, the 14th century cook could make a batch of cinnamon sauce according to directions in the Forme of Cury, a manuscript roll of recipes attributed to the Master Cooks of King Richard II. The recipe required grinding up cardamom, clove, nutmeg, pepper and ginger with five times as much cinnamon, twice as much toasted bread as everything else, and stirring the lot into some vinegar. Stored in a cask, this made "a lordly sauce" that was "good for half a year."

Sounds pretty good, really.