It's Over. Now Comes Something Else.

I give you a toast: To the United States of America. May God bless her in this hour, and the years to come.

An Extended Civil War Analogy at the Inauguration

Here is the full letter that Chuck Schumer wanted you to read.

The bugle call that comes after the oath is taken is equally old: it's "To the Colors," sometimes called "Honors," four blasts.

Richard and John

I was unaware of the middle names of our (very) soon-to-be President and VP until this ceremony. In a way, it's no surprise to learn that they are named after Norman kings.

UPDATE: No joke, Mad Dog Mattis' middle name actually is "Norman."

One Piece at a Time

Check out the "Trumpmobile." (Note that the owner/builder is an immigrant -- a legal one, from Finland.)

It reminds me of the Johnny Cash tune about the auto worker who 'borrowed' a piece from the factory every day for 20 years, and then tried to build a car out of it. "This is Red Ryder in the pscyhobilly Cadillac."



That's some real Americana.

Jim Webb: "The Promise of President Trump"

I might have titled it "the opportunity for" rather than "the promise of," but my favored candidate for President last year has penned a short piece on some hopes he has for the next few years. First, he hopes to break the hold of the group that thinks of itself as our 'governing class,' in favor of the ideal of Cincinnatus. Second, he would like to see us refocus our affirmative action policies on Americans, rather than using them to 'increase diversity' at the expense of those Americans who are already quite poor.

So far, we have no idea what Trump will actually do as President, but those seem like plausible things to think that he might do. We'll see, soon enough, if they happen.

DB: Obama Touts Legacy of Renaming Wars

When pressed to explain the current military operations against ISIS in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama responded with “I said I ended the wars didn’t I? There’s no more war. What’s going on now is more like ‘kinetic foreign advising.’”

...The Obama administration’s reluctance to call the actions in Iraq against ISIS which have claimed the lives of three US serviceman “combat operations” has angered veterans and the other dozen or so Americans who pay attention to the nation’s continuing wars.

“The third time we took indirect and sniper fire, I asked my squad leader if we’d get our CIBs (Combat Infantryman Badge) yet,” said Army Pvt. Anthony Dunn, “but he just shrugged and said the commander was going to see if we could get a pizza night in the DFAC.”

Taking Up the Colors

Symbolically, the US is broken up into red states and blue states, and if we end up in another Civil War, those may well be the colors of the two major sides.

However, this is very recent, as many of you probably know. Beginning in 1976, red and blue were used on TV broadcasts to differentiate states on election night, but there was no consistency. One network might have the Democrats red and Republicans blue, another the opposite. After the 2000 election, the networks coordinated and began consistently our current color scheme.

I've wondered quite a bit about why the colors sorted out the way they did. Blue is the traditional color for conservative parties,  and red is normal for the left. In fact, blue used to be more common to represent the Republican Party because of its Civil War association with the Union. So how did the Republicans end up red?

Honestly, it could well have been just a random thing. According to the All-Knowing Wikipedia, journalist Tim Russert started using the terms "red state" and "blue state" while covering the 2000 election, and it has stuck. Maybe that's all there is to it.

On the other hand, the conspiracy theorist in me whispers that it could have been an intentional thing. If the Democrats were red, it would be too easy to just call them reds. Maybe journalists anticipated this and protected their own.

In any case, each side now has a permanent color to rally to, the beginnings of a flag, semi-permanent colors marking territories on our maps. This seems to have emerged out of a genuine increase in polarization, but at the same time, I wonder if, now commonplace, it doesn't also support that polarization by making what had been abstract and fleeting designations used only on election nights into permanent or semi-permanent representations.

Compared with economics and ideologies and cultures, this is a very small thing, but it makes it easier to imagine us as separate peoples, maybe even separate nations, and imagination has its own kind of power.

DB: NATO Called 'Obsolete' by Trump, Anyone Who Saw them in Afghanistan

Remarks from President-elect Donald Trump earlier this week calling NATO allies ‘obsolete’ have been labeled completely unprecedented by everyone except the thousands of American soldiers who have fought alongside them in Afghanistan, sources confirmed today.

The Coalition soldiers in Iraq in 2007/8/9 included some sharp looking guys, but I don't know that they ever left the wire. The Georgians, who weren't in NATO, did so regularly. Admittedly, they wrecked a lot of Hummers because of their sizable liquor ration, but they were willing to go out.

Oh, That's Brutal

As Devos made her way around a crowd and proceeded to shake hands with the senators who questioned her, she extended her hand to Senator Elizabeth Warren, but the progressive icon and 2020 Democratic frontrunner promptly “waved her off” and left the room.

Warren’s apparent snub was widely criticized on social media by pundits on the political right, who called the move classless and another example of the erosion of proper decorum in Washington...

Upon closer examination, Warren appears to be signaling to DeVos in her native Cherokee.

What are they thinking now?

Agriculture

I thought I recalled that Grim didn't think much of ex-Georgia-governor Sonny Perdue.  I was right.  Anyway, Trump has picked him for Secretary of Agriculture.

The Intelligence Community vs. Trump?

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist gives a good history of this conflict from the election until this week. At the beginning, she frames it as the intelligence community taking on Trump, but later on she specifies that she is talking about political appointees within that community. The value of the article is its thoroughness (for an article, mind you), so it isn't worth much to excerpt it here.

In my earlier post, Trump Does Counter-Intelligence against the IC?, I asked a couple of questions that trouble me, and for which I have no answers.

What if we find out the IC in general is partisan? How could a problem like that be solved? These are the folks who have permission to hide information from us and lie to us for our own good, whose job is ideally proper management of information, but who could easily manipulate it for their own purposes, all protected from scrutiny by law.

Hemingway narrows the conflict to Obama's political appointees in those agencies, but I'm not sure that's the case, and what if it isn't? Intelligence services are essential, and they do very valuable work. But the people in them go through the same schools and programs our neo-Marxian radicals do, and it is likely that many of them identify with the same socio-cultural elite Trump just defeated.

The Speed of Rubber

Joerg Sprave of the Slingshot Channel demonstrates and explains his full-auto crossbow.

Ha ha ha ha!

Tombstone: 2nd A City

So says a town proclamation just issued.

I was hoping they'd explain just why the phrase is so aptly applied, but they didn't. So here's an old post of my own:

The phrase "O. K. Corral" has been invoked on the floor of Congress numerous times as an argument in favor of gun control measures that would limit firearms to policemen and officers of the law. If such measures are meant to avoid the O.K. Corral, how to interpret the fact that it was precisely such a law that precipitated it? It was the attempt to enforce Tombstone's gun control law that was the proximate cause of the gunfight. A even worse problem is that the survivors of the losing side got themselves deputized by the Sheriff and went after the town and Federal marshals. A police-officer-only model of gun control would have done nothing to avoid the shootout, or reduce the violence that followed it.

The one thing that did reduce the violence is the very thing that Congress most hates to consider: citizen vigilantes, who informed the participants that any future shootouts had better be conducted outside of town or there would be some hangings. This maneuver was so effective that historians still have trouble deciding exactly what happened in the rest of the war between those factions, as very little of it occurred close enough for nonpartisan witnesses to view.

Stopping Violence Against Women

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the US military is on the job. How? By teaching self-defense.

Offering the classes, utilizing combatives-certified Special Operations personnel, including Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs, will raise awareness of domestic violence and sexual assault and give women the skills they need to defend themselves. The classes also provide an opportunity to demonstrate a softer side of the U.S. military.

I trust that it's "softer" in the same way that jujitsu is considered a "soft" as opposed to "hard" art. Although it looks like there's a lot of punching and kicking going on, so who knows.

More on "Toxic Masculinity"

In discussing the cartoon in Grim's post This Was An Insult?, both there and in his follow-up Another Look at Ideas on Male Physique, I think something missing is the current SJW assault on traditional masculinity, which they are now calling "toxic masculinity."

Over at PJ Media, Tom Knighton has an article on this topic, Colleges Ramp Up Assault on Masculinity for Spring Semester. He offers some details and links to attempts at colleges to tear down the old masculinity and build a new one. Here is one such:

Duke University’s “Men’s Project,” meanwhile, is looking for applicants for a “nine-week long discussion group” that will also “examine the ways we present -- or don’t present -- our masculinities, so we can better understand how masculinity exists on our campus -- often in toxic ways -- and begin the work of unlearning violence.”

“We want to explore, dissect, and construct an intersectional understanding of masculinity and maleness, as well as to create destabilized spaces for those with privilege,” a description of the program explains. “Duke is an environment where some are rarely made uncomfortable while others are made to bear the weight of their identities on a daily basis -- we aim to flip that paradigm.”

"destabilized spaces for those with privilege" -- there's an Orwellian euphemism for you. I wonder if it will be held in room 101.

Manning is a Traitor

Manning stole hundreds of thousands of secrets and exposed them to the very same Wikileaks that "Trump is a traitor!" people point to as a known front for Russian intelligence. Manning did it knowing that it would expose our secrets to clear and present enemies -- jihadists who were killing our soldiers and Marines every day. He did this while wearing the uniform, under oath, a soldier deployed at war who was intentionally betraying his brothers in arms.

He should have been shot. He was already treated mercifully by the system by avoiding being tried as the traitor he is.

I will take no talk of "treason" seriously from anyone who celebrates this commutation. They don't understand the concept well enough to discuss it.

This is Sparta

I mean, I guess it's good that we get to be Sparta. For one thing, they won.

Pushing National Pride to the Limits

Vladimir Putin:

[Trump is] a grown man, and secondly he’s someone who has been involved with beauty contests for many years and has met the most beautiful women in the world. I find it hard to believe that he rushed to some hotel to meet girls of loose morals, although ours are undoubtedly the best in the world.

Literature & Capitalism

Arts & Letters Daily has two pieces today on the relationship between writing and making a living. The first notes that the complaint that writers want to be paid for what ought to be a work of love goes as far back as Ancient Greece. The author, a professional writer, is not enamored of this view. "Potlatch, like any gift economy, can never be a one-way process; those who receive gifts are indebted, and they are obligated to return the favor in order to save face. If editors and publishers—appealing to love, not money—ask for the gift of free words, then by the logic of the gift those writers can expect a return, with interest."

The second, by a columnist who writes about books, notes that even authors of best-sellers rarely make any money anyway.

That books still make money at all is something of a miracle. (And to be fair, the vast majority of books don’t make money; publishing, like baseball, is a game predicated on failure.) No market could be less rationalized, or as Strayed puts it, “There’s no other job in the world where you get your master’s degree in that field and you’re like, ‘Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million.’ ”

I'm not sure it's true that there's no other job in the world in which the range goes from zero to five million, or even higher yet. Still, it does make it hard to predict the value of the degree you are pursuing -- although, I wonder how much value a degree in writing has in predicting whether you will even produce good writing.

How to be a Roman Patriarch

An article written in the voice of a man nobly born and of worthy service in the Legions. It's intended only as a teaching tool, to introduce you to the idea of what the Roman family was like as an institution. Some of the advice is a terrible fit for modern America, as you would expect. It is especially pronounced in the Roman disdain for females, both wives and girl children.

All the same, I thought the bit about a father's role in raising and educating sons was surprisingly good.

A Marker

The AP provides a marker against which to test the upcoming inauguration. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson's inauguration was also challenged by a women's march:

The 1913 women's march, timed to get maximum publicity by coinciding with the inauguration, was not without controversy.

According to the Library of Congress' American Memory archives, crowds in town for the inauguration — mostly men — surged into the streets and made it difficult for the marchers to pass, forcing them to go single file at times. Women were jeered, tripped, shoved and spat upon, and police did little to assist them or quell the unrest. Some 100 marchers were taken to the hospital with injuries.

The participants included Helen Keller, the deaf and blind political activist and author. She was so unnerved by the disruptions that she was unable to speak later that day at Continental Hall.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson authorized a troop of cavalry to help control the crowd, according to the archives.

Sometimes historical perspective can be helpful.

It Is No Longer the Case that Living Men Have Walked on the Moon

Rest in peace, Eugene Cernan.

Much of John Lewis' District is Pretty Nice, Actually

In the interest of keeping score fairly -- I did my undergraduate work at Georgia State University, smack in the middle of John Lewis' district. I also lived on the eastern part of that district at one time. That part of Atlanta was, at that time, full of drugs and hookers and run-down storefronts. It was a fun place to be at the age I was in those days. There were empty warehouses for parties, and those run down storefronts could be hired cheaply enough that even young people could afford to open a punk-rock-themed coffee shop or whatever. On the other hand, it had a real crime rate. Atlanta was the murder capital of America at points during those days. But I was young enough that this only added to the sense of adventure.

The intervening twenty-plus years have seen an ongoing expansion of Atlanta's wealth, and that district is not the crime-and-violence haven that it used to be. First, the Atlanta police turned an abandoned factory into a major precinct headquarters right at the center of the drug-and-prostitution trade. That dried up very soon afterwards. Then, all that money coming into Atlanta felt safe expanding into the area.

Today the eastern area is full of stores like Whole Foods. A lot of the fun aspects of the place are gone. They were replaced by less crime, more green space, and upscale shopping. There remain some nasty areas, in a kind of ring between the true downtown (where Georgia State is) and the nicer areas in the east and west. The district compares favorably on some measures with Georgia or America as a whole, and unfavorably on others.

Insofar as it's proper to judge John Lewis' performance in Congress by his district, I think it must be said to have improved during his tenure. I'm not sure that it is all that proper to do so: these are mostly state and local duties, not Federal concerns. But if that's the conversation we're going to have, it's poor grounds for criticism of the gentleman from Georgia.

Another Look at Ideas on Male Physique

Since the discussion below turns on what is a reasonable ideal for a male body, here's another cartoon. This was sent to me by the strongman friend of mine some time ago as as defense of his own approach; I'm not sure where it originates.

This kind of conversation is always fraught, as questions about aesthetic ideals for a man (or a woman) touch on a lot of different levels of meaning. So it's worth reposting this cautionary image as well:

MLK Day

One of Dr. King's remarks was addressed against what he called "white moderates," the progressives of his day. This is from the "Letter from the Birmingham Jail."

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a 'more convenient season.'

I have an obvious sympathy for the sentiment. Sometimes it is necessary to do radical things when you find the government, or indeed power of any human kind, resolutely on the side of injustice.

How radical? MLK's niece declares that she voted for Trump. That's a deep cleaving cut from the party of the "white moderates," of whom Hillary Clinton was the most recent and most iconic avatar.

UPDATE: MLK's son meets with Trump at Trump Tower, says good things about both Trump and Lewis. Radical days indeed.

This Was An Insult?

I mean, you know, he could use a bigger beard.

No Snakes in Iceland

Lars Walker's review of this book is quite complementary, and suggests that many of us might enjoy it.

Burning Up the Stage

Apparently our boy Sturgill decided to throw down on SNL this weekend.

Well, won't we all....

These guys are just toooo cute, by half.

The Non-Stick Axe

You will want to get yours today.

The Government as Vandal

Stonehenge is an irreplacable archaeological treasure. One of the known facts about it is that much of its meaning has to do with the things that were underneath it. In addition, of course, over time even structures that were originally on the surface pass underground -- that is why we speak of archaeological "digs."

So why not build a subway under it?

Light pollution at one end of the tunnel will obscure the view of sunset on the winter solstice -- one of the most important dates at Stonehenge -- when thousands gather to celebrate the shortest day of the year.

And experts believe major archaeological treasures hidden beneath the surrounding landscape could be lost forever.

"Recent finds show this place is the birthplace of Britain, and its origins go back to the resettlement of this island after the Ice Age," historian and author Tom Holland, who opposes the plan, told CNN....

The government, though, is determined to press ahead with the scheme.

"Therefore your end is on you,
Is on you and your kings,
Not for a fire in Ely fen,
Not that your gods are nine or ten,
But because it is only Christian men
Guard even heathen things."

Launch

SpaceX suffered a disappointing setback with last fall's pad explosion, but yesterday it successfully completed a launch that put 10 new Iridium satellites into orbit.

Comey under fire

Around my neighborhood lately, we've been discussing whether James Comey can be fired as director of the FBI.  I gather this may not be crystal clear, but there's reason to think he can:

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is appointed by the President by and with the advice and consent of the Senate. The statutory basis for the present nomination and confirmation process was developed in 1968 and 1976, and has been used since the death of J. Edgar Hoover in 1972. Over this time, seven nominations have been confirmed and two have been withdrawn by the President before confirmation. The position of FBI Director has a fixed 10-year term, and the officeholder cannot be reappointed, unless Congress acts to allow a second appointment of the incumbent. There are no statutory conditions on the President’s authority to remove the FBI Director. Since 1972, one Director has been removed by the President.

President Clinton fired FBI Director William Sessions, who had been appointed by President Reagan. It seems that the post-J. Edgar Hoover arrangements for a fixed 10-year term were aimed at preventing unreasonably long tenures. Congress must consent, as it did in the case of Director Mueller in 2011, to any extension of a term. There is no equivalent Congressional veto over a presidential firing, nor can Congress get rid of an FBI director other than by impeachment.

Good guy from Samaria

A "Good Samaritan" is one of those back-handed compliments, like saying "He's a good guy for trailer trash."  People from Samaria weren't expected to amount to anything.  Anyway, here's an inspiring Good Samaritan story that sounds like the people involved are all being awfully discrete, um, that is, of course I mean to say "discreet."  A state trooper trying to come to the aid of a woman ejected from a car in a highway accident comes under deadly attack from a guy who may have been behind the wheel.  A passing motorist stops and, hearing confirmation from the trooper that, yes, he sure does need help, shoots and kills the attacker, then promptly and correctly uses the trooper's radio to bring help to an accurate location.  The trooper's boss expresses his appreciation while carefully avoiding the release of any information about the hero, who sounds like a man who's been around the block a few times and is instantly being treated like a real or honorary insider.  Good on him, and on the state troopers, too.

On the Deep, Deep Wrongness of Buzzfeed

You probably think I want to talk about that Trump dossier, but I don't want to talk about that at all. I want to talk about their list of Best Irish Pubs in Each State. An outlet that goes this wrong on such a simple topic can't be trusted to get anything else correct.

“Great food, service and atmosphere. The sausage crack dip and the fish and chips were amazing.”
“We split the fried grouper sandwich, and their version of a club sandwich — and both were incredible.”

In Georgia, they named Shenanigan's Irish Pub in Dahlonega (home of Georgia's military college, the University of North Georgia, as well as the first gold rush in the United States). As it happens, I've eaten at Shenanigan's several times, most recently last night. It's a perfectly fine college bar with a few Irish pub trappings. The food is good. The beer selection is not horrible. Still, there's no dart board. The music is not Irish. The food is almost entirely non-Irish, too, mostly just American pub grub with a couple of 'Irish Pub' standby options.

I mean, it's fine. You can go there, you'll have a good time, you'll enjoy your meal, and there's a dog-friendly area on the patio so you can bring your pup along with you. There's nothing wrong with it.

However.

In the city of Savannah stands Kevin Barry's Pub. Kevin Barry was a teenager executed by the British in 1920 for Republican activities. There's a picture of him on the second floor in Liberty Hall, along with other major figures of the Irish revolution. The rest of the second floor is taken up with the Hall of Heroes, dedicated to the United States military to which Irish families have contributed so much, where portraits of fallen servicemen (and at least one woman) line the walls along with flags and unit memorabilia. By the portraits of the fallen are wire hooks designed to hold glasses of whiskey, which their comrades often buy for them and hang there until they evaporate.

On the first floor is a large music hall, in which one of the best Irish musicians in the American South plays every night. My favorite of them, Harry O'Donoghue, will be there next on 20 February.

One of these places is the real thing. The other got some nice reviews on Yelp. Buzzfeed can't tell the difference, and that's a huge problem with the kind of journalism that they represent.

Tab Dump Before Pizza

Interesting tabs I have open but don't have time to write much about ... and pizza is calling.

This is long, so I'll put most of this below the fold. Here's a preview:

Michael Wolff's "The Trump Establishment's Cultural Significance, Explained"

Kurt Schlichter's "Sorry but Our Fight against Liberal Fascism Has Only Just Begun"

Robert McReynolds, "Empire, American Style,"

Plus, Princess Leia, vintage air travel maps, and a huge trove of declassified CIA maps.

ESR on Soviet Ideological Warfare against the US

In 2006, Eric S. Raymond discussed "ideological warfare" used against the United States by her enemies. I ran across this recently and it's an interesting article.

I disagree with his claim that Americans don't expect ideas to matter because what really matters is material prosperity. That is, we think crime, terrorism, etc., are the effects of economic problems, not ideology. That probably is the view of secularists, who became increasingly numerous from the late 19th century on, but not of all Americans. However, his point is to debunk the view that ideology and ideas don't have consequences, so I am happy he's on my side (ideas have consequences) overall.

The interesting part begins with:

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.


...

On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so that the US’s public spaces would become arid and ugly.

Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

And they've been very successful. Below are some of the ideas Raymond identifies as promoted by Soviet disinformation programs.

Fight Like a 6-Year-Old Girl

A lesson from a Marine.

I think Ace or someone said this was relevant to Trump's treatment of the media recently. I forget. But good advice. I've probably avoided some butt-kickings by aggressive displays of excessive optimism myself.

What Happened to Civics Education?

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, recently had an article in Minding the Campus which explains in some detail how civics classes have been hijacked to undermine American-style democracy. Going under names like "the New Civics" and "service learning," it makes civics classes in particular and, wherever the SJWs can, any and every class from K-Ph.D. into courses in progressive propaganda and activism.

I've seen this myself, and agree that it is ubiquitous, though the power the SJWs have varies greatly from school to school and department to department. Schools of education are eaten up with it.

I highly recommend the whole article if you are interested in American education today. If you do, remember the name Paulo Freire; I'll come back to him in a future post.

Here's an excerpt from the report Wood discusses:

National Findings: Traditional civic literacy is in deep decay in America. The New Civics, a movement devoted to progressive activism, has taken over civics education. “Service-learning” and “civic engagement” are the most common labels this movement uses, but it also calls itself global civics, deliberative democracy, and intercultural learning. The New Civics movement is national, and it extends far beyond the universities. The New Civics redefines “civic activity” as “progressive activism.” The New Civics redefines “civic activity” as channeling government funds toward progressive nonprofits. The New Civics has worked to divert government funds to progressive causes since its founding in the 1960s.

The New Civics redefines “volunteerism” as labor for progressive organizations and administration of the welfare state. The new measures to require “civic engagement” will make this volunteerism compulsory.  The New Civics replaces traditional liberal arts education with vocational training for community activists. The New Civics shifts authority within the university from the faculty to administrators, especially in offices of civic engagement, diversity, and sustainability, as well as among student affairs professionals. The New Civics also shifts the emphasis of a university education from curricula, drafted by faculty, to “co-curricular activities,” run by non-academic administrators. The New Civics movement aims to take over the entire university. The New Civics advocates want to make “civic engagement” part of every class, every tenure decision, and every extracurricular activity.

Trump Does Counter-Intelligence against the IC?

From And Still I Persist:

After Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, he began to interview many different individuals for possible Cabinet and Administration positions. Immediately, there were nearly daily leaks as to whom was being considered for what position, and whether a given individual’s stock was rising or falling. After this had gone on for a few weeks — with sometimes wildly differing information coming out of Trump Tower and its environs — I talked with my close friend and co-blogger, Bruce Henderson, and wondered if Trump was carrying out a classic information security exercise: giving specific bits of information to specific individuals and then seeing if that information showed up in the press the next day or so. If it did, then the source of that leak was unmistakable identified. Henderson thought it plausible, but there was no way to prove that this was going on.

However, a recent letter (reproduced at the post above) from the Director of National Intelligence suggests Trump actually did this and showed a leak within the Intelligence Community.

Something we may find out during Trump's administration is the extent of partisanship in each part of the bureaucracy. What if we find out the IC in general is partisan? How could a problem like that be solved? These are the folks who have permission to hide information from us and lie to us for our own good, whose job is ideally proper management of information, but who could easily manipulate it for their own purposes, all protected from scrutiny by law.

Some time ago we talked about Trump requesting private security guards. Maybe he needs them. Maybe he also needs his own private intelligence team. And now that I'm thinking about this, didn't some people in the Bush administration feel they needed a team that went around the normal IC channels?

Obama DOD Just Trolling Us Now

Headline: "US Army Wants Biodegradable Bullets That Sprout Plants."

Of course we'd need to make different bullets for every conflict in order to avoid the environmental hazard of invasive species.

Universal Surveillance in 2 Easy Steps!

Step one was just taken by the Obama administration.

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

Step two is just to get your corporate allies in the telecoms to make sure that all information bounces off at least one satellite and/or 'network switch abroad' so that the NSA can legally collect on them.

Actually, you know what? I'll bet that was step one.

This sounds like one of Glenn Reynolds' regular riffs: "They said if we elected Trump, the government would dodge search warrant requirements in order to spy on us like never before.... and they were right!"

Fusion GPS

A report from the Weekly Standard -- I wonder whether or not they're on the enemies list, but if they are this is a good way to start working to get off of it -- on the firm behind the disinformation about Trump. These aren't Russians, they're hired gunslingers for outfits like Planned Parenthood.

Shame is Good for You, Isn't It?

So argues Plato, a new article explains.

Shame presupposes that we ought to know better but flout the rules regardless. This is precisely Plato’s point about moral knowledge: we already possess it, we already know the right way to live a just and fulfilling life, but are constantly diverted from that noble aim. For Plato, then, shame is a force that helps us resist the urge to conform when we know it’s wrong to do so. Shame helps us be true to ourselves, to endure Socrates’ needling, and to heed the moral knowledge within. A man without shame, Plato says, is a slave to desire – for material goods, power, fame, respect. Such desire is tyrannical because, by its nature, it cannot be satisfied.

That isn't the end of it, the author argues, as an apparently shameless society -- he is thinking of our own -- is really wrapped up in self-censorship instead.

Visibility is a trap,’ wrote the French philosopher Michel Foucault... What he meant was that allowing oneself to be watched, and learning to watch others, is both seductive and dangerous. He drew upon Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century plans for a ‘Panopticon’, a prison in which inmates are observed from a central tower manned by an invisible occupant, his watchful eye seeing but unseen. The idea was that the prisoners would internalise the presence of the spectral watchman, whether or not anyone was actually inside, and behave of their own accord. ‘Morals reformed – health preserved – industry invigorated – instruction diffused – public burthens lightened,’ Bentham enthused.

According to Foucault, the dynamics of the Panopticon bore an uncanny resemblance to how people self-monitor in society at large. In the presence of ever-watchful witnesses, he said, physical coercion is no longer necessary. People police themselves. They do not know what the observers are registering at any given moment, what they are looking for, exactly, or what the punishments are for disobedience. But the imagination keeps them pliant....

So what would Foucault make of the current digital media landscape? In many ways, the modern surveillance state – enabled and expanded thanks to new technologies – is a shining example of the Panopticon.... Foucault’s central claim is that such monitoring is worrisome, not just because of what corporations and states might do with our data, but because the act of watching is itself a devastating exercise of power. It has the capacity to influence behaviour and compel conformity and complicity, without our fully realising it.

If that is right, it's noteworthy that the self-censorship tends to run exactly counter to what Bentham thought would happen (which is generally true with Bentham). People participating on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere certainly do try to present a prettier version of their lives than they really live. But they don't try to hide their sexual longings, say, or their unpopular political opinions.

But perhaps -- the author suggests -- they are engaged in confession. By confessing themselves of the things they would once have been ashamed of, they find online a community of people who endorse their views and desires. Shame is a social process, and discovering that there is a community that will approve of the things you were ashamed of really is liberating in the sense that it destroys the reason for feeling ashamed. The desires will be endorsed, they will be approved, if not by everyone by a large enough community that you can feel like you've found 'your people.'

That leaves one genuinely shameless. Does it also, then, leave one a slave to desire -- as Plato feared? Liberation from one thing means slavery to another, is that it? Or is there a road of genuine freedom to be found here?

"Fantasy Island" in the PRC

Personal Tailor is a richly satirical movie with hints of hilarity and decadence. I suggest a dark red wine with it.

A favorite line, possibly mis-remembered: "We all hate it, so it can't be tasteless."

Update: It's free on Amazon Prime right now.

Rathkeltair

Named for a city in ancient Ireland, here's a band that combines modern sounds -- and songs -- with the traditional pipes.



They're regulars at the Stone Games, so they're a band I know well. Here they are performing in Ohio. I've never actually liked their rock bits all that much, but they're devoted to them. Their best bits are their take on traditional songs, though: advance to 20:25, and watch them throw down on "Atholl Highlanders," an impressive song in its traditional form. It belongs to a non-government military unit in the employ of the Duke of Atholl, a private army long maintained within Great Britain. It has an interesting history, one that includes Queen Victoria and Prince Faisal of "Lawrence of Arabia" fame.



That must have been a fine visit. I imagine that the Arabs with Faisal understood the Scots of those days more or less perfectly.

Don't Miss This One

The "Barnacaster," a four string guitar made with a barn wood slab.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

The Hill published a piece from an Assistant Professor of Political Science, calling for "a new election" given the accusations against Trump.

First of all, how could such a thing even be possible given the complete absence of Constitutional warrant for it? He gets around to that at the end.

If it is determined that Russian efforts did indeed put Trump over the top in an incredibly close election, then the next step would be to pass a constitutional amendment requiring a one-time special election to be held as soon as possible.

This would be far from easy, but it is possible with the support of a two-thirds majority in each chamber of Congress, followed with ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures.

Oh, is that all? Presuming Congress and 3/4ths of the states were up for it, we'd be ready to start this new election in a year or two, then? Just to give one little roadblock, Georgia's legislature only meets 40 days a year, and you aren't on their agenda -- nor could you be, until you get Congress to pass that proposed amendment, by which time the 40 days will be up. Maybe the Republican governor will call them back for a special session? If not, you'll have to wait for next year.

Who runs the place in the meantime?

He doesn't give an answer to that, but it's kind of an important question. This has to be done in eight days to avoid a magnificent Constitutional crisis. Who'd be President while we wait on the Congress and the states to work out this special warrant for a one-time election. Not President Obama -- his terms are up. The Constitution clearly says to seat President Trump, but that's the one thing you want to avoid. So we need some other solution.

Maybe we could appoint a warlord Ceasar, um, declare martial law, without a sitting civilian Commander in Chief -- you didn't think this through at all, did you, Prof?

All the same, The Hill published it.

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.