Judicial Review Suffers Self-Inflicted Wound

I don't object in the slightest degree to Trump's executive order coming under judicial review for its constitutionality. I do think the 9th circuit should probably have at least mentioned the law he was citing as granting him the legal authority.

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President

Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

Remarkably, in the entire opinion, the panel did not bother even to cite this statute, which forms the principal statutory basis for the executive order (see Sections 3(c), 5(c), and 5(d) of the order). That’s a pretty big omission over 29 pages, including several pages devoted to determining the government’s likelihood of success on the merits of the case.

This would be roughly like me being brought into court for carrying a firearm in Georgia, presenting my license to do so, and citing the sections of the Official Code of Georgia, Annotated, that specifically permit someone with such a license to carry such a firearm -- and then having the court rule against me without acknowledging the law existed.

Also, its reasoning would have to be that my protected exercise of free speech proved that I was such a bad person that I must be denied what would be legal for anyone else in my position.

Judicial review can be a good thing, but this is a poor example of it.

The Young British Soldier

by Rudyard Kipling

The Perfect Timepiece for the Hall

Cannon Sundial by Victor Chevalier, Paris

Photo by Andres Rueda, CC 2.0

Fresh Meat

Derailing Conversations: A Primer

This satirical site is meant to chide "Privileged People" in the interest of "marginalized groups," but it plays in surprisingly well with our recent conversation about journalists seeing themselves as members of the elite.

If you really want to excel as a privileged person you need to learn to value data, statistics, research studies and empirical evidence above all things, but especially above personal experiences. You can pretend you are oblivious to the fact most studies have been carried out by privileged people and therefore carry inherent biases, and insist that the marginalized person produce “Evidence” of what they‘re claiming.Their experience does not count as evidence, for it is subjective and therefore worthless.
This is very important because it works in two ways: 1) it communicates to the marginalized person that their personal testament is disbelieved and of no value, causing them great hurt; and 2) it once again reinforces your privilege.

You see, the very capacity to conduct studies, collect data and write detached “fact-based” reports on it, is an inherently privileged activity. The ability to widely access this material and research it exhaustively is also inherently privileged. Privileged People® find it easier to pursue these avenues than marginalized people and so once again you are reminding them you possess this privilege and reinforcing that the world at large values a system of analysis that excludes them, and values it over what their actual personal experience has been.

The process of valuing “fact” over “opinion” is one very much rooted in preserving privilege. Through this methodology, the continued pain and othering of millions of people can be ignored because it’s supported by “opinion” (emotion) and not “fact” (rationality).

It is also important because it calls on the marginalized person to do something that is simply impossible, and that is to summarize the entirety of their group’s experiences into a definitive example. It is important that you establish this precedent for the next couple of steps.

Well, fair enough -- blue collar guys are definitely a marginalized group, increasingly these last several years. I wonder if that's what they meant us to discover, though.

An Interesting Question from AVI

In a post about reducing racism, AVI ends on a note that is worth further exploration. I'd like to put it before the Hall, even though there is a lot of overlap in readership. I'll give enough of the setup for context, and then the ending question.

When did we make our biggest gains in reducing racism in America? I think people would point to the 40's-60's.... It is at least co-incident with the period when we had much less immigration, 1927-1964. The common declaration is that all prejudices go together, and reducing prejudice against immigrants is just the same thing as reducing it against blacks, with the requisite accusations of white American disliking "brownness" in general....

What if it's just not true? What if it would be better and more praiseworthy if human nature were that way, especially in aspirational, open-hearted America - but it's just not?...

We sometimes speak of immigrants making it harder for blacks to get ahead in terms of employment and wages - it was one of Bernie Sanders's core values until he gave all those away. We aren't supposed to mention that, but it is likely true for economic gain. What if it is also true in an emotional, associational sense? What if Universal Brotherhood is actually a dead end, and step-by-step changes of becoming a people are all that is possible?

I don't know this to be true. I simply note that it is possibly true but no one says it. Which in turn immediately leads to "Why don't we want this to be true? Why is it not one of the cliches of the discussion, rather than an unmentionable?" There are plenty of untrue cliches out there all over the political spectrum, but this one is not even a Facebook poster.

So why isn't it one of the cliches, do you think?

Less Defensible

The conflict of interest issues around the Trump businesses are not going away, and the Trumps do not seem very interested in even minimizing them. Maybe it doesn't matter today, because the opposition is too weak to do more than squawk about it, but someday that will change -- and indeed, the clear appearance of impropriety may help it change.

Paving the Way for that MB Designation

One of the red headlines on Drudge today is about Hamas sending a team of commandos to train with ISIS bomb-makers. Hamas, as I assume everyone knows, was founded as the Palestinian branch of the nearby Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.

The Trump administration is reportedly mulling a move to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist (or terror-supporting) organization, following a bill introduced last year by Ted Cruz. Needless to say, all the smart people are against this proposal. It will damage academic research, say academics. It will fuel extremism, says a(nother) leaked CIA memo. It will lead to a witch-hunt, says the Council on American-Islamic Relations (which has some reason to fear it will be target #1 of that hunt, given that Ted Cruz's bill mentions them by name). Human Rights Watch tells us that the move would threaten rights to free association for Muslims in the United States.

The most interesting argument is that the designation would actually be illegal.

To qualify for a designation, the organization has to be engaged in terrorism or still has the capability and intent to do so, and it has to pose a threat to U.S. nationals or our national security. The Muslim Brotherhood as a whole obviously doesn’t qualify on either count. McCants and Wittes say that certain individual affiliates might qualify for such a designation, but the entire group cannot be defined as a terrorist organization:

The short answer is that the Brotherhood is not in a meaningful sense a single organization at all; elements of it can be designated and have been designated, and other elements certainly cannot be [bold mine-DL]. As a whole, it is simply too diffuse and diverse to characterize. And it certainly cannot be said as a whole to engage in terrorism that threatens the United States.

The decision by Hamas (which is already designated) to ally with ISIS seems to me to ease the path to designation. ISIS is not just a terrorist organization in the same way that Hezbollah is not. They also intend to run a state, and are organized in part to do so. Yet no one would argue that ISIS should not be designated as a terrorist or terror-supporting organization just because some elements of their organization are aimed at, say, provision of clean water.

My guess is that the new Attorney General will be able to defend the decision if they decide to go forward with it, and this report only makes that defense easier to do.

UPDATE: Apparently Hamas could really use the help.

Having the Wrong Fantasy Again

Slate demands to know why female superheroes take men down with their legs, instead of punching and kicking like male superheroes. "Is this even practical?"

There are two answers to that question, speaking as someone who has trained in and taught several martial arts. The harsh answer is that the impractical thing is the idea that a 120 pound woman is capable of beating the three or four men arrayed against her in hand-to-hand combat under any circumstances. She's going to need a weapon for the scene to be "practical" in any strict sense.

However, we're doing fantasy, aren't we? So if we're fantasizing, why not fantasize that she can do it? She's got 'spider-senses' or whatever.

The less harsh answer is that grappling arts -- which frequently use the lower body -- are much more female-friendly than "hard" striking arts. There are a lot of mechanical reasons for this. One is that female limbs are shorter, and the limb functions as a kind of lever in striking ('the longer the lever, the greater the force'). Another is that female limbs are lighter-weight on average, and with less muscle-to-bone, and force is a function of mass times acceleration. They both have less mass, and less muscle to accelerate it. Females also tend to have smaller bones in the striking surfaces, making them more prone to shattering or cracking on impact.

The leg grapples thus use the strongest part of their body to its greatest effect. Although the silly acrobatics that appear in these movies are not terribly practical -- nor, again, are they meant to be -- showing women fighting with a focus on leg-grappling is the most plausible non-weapon form.

But, I suppose, if you're going to fantasize, why not fantasize they can punch like Rocky? Why would you want the more-plausible still-implausible fantasy?

This policing of the fantastic is becoming tiresome.

A Journalist Getting the Facts Right

"How many arrests have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?" Robart asked a Justice Department lawyer in court on Feb. 3. When the lawyer said she didn't know, Robart said, "Let me tell you. The answer to that is none, as best I can tell."

It turns out the judge, and Nadler, and everybody else repeating the talking point had it wrong. Last year the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest released information showing that at least 60 people born in the seven countries had been convicted — not just arrested, but convicted — of terror-related offenses in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. And that number did not include more recent cases like Abdul Artan, a Somali refugee who wounded 11 people during a machete attack on the campus of Ohio State University last November.

I assume Byron York is a journalist, anyway. I gather from recent comments that some of you have very particular standards! I tend to think anyone is a journalist who contributes to these 'journals' (currently as much online or televised as written) of news and opinion, either reportage or punditry. I don't think of it as being very specialized, as those with 'real degrees in journalism' often don't do as good a job as local folks who decide they're interested in something and start going to the meetings about it.

The "S" Stands For "Shut Your Mouth"

Apparently Harry S Truman laid some precedent for our current President's defense of his daughter.

Why Do They Hate Us?

It's a little late, but KSM has an answer for us. His letter to former President Obama is now available to be read by all.

Déclassé

Apparently Trump doesn't spell well, when engaged in midnight "tweets." Journalists, who think of themselves as part of the elite and for whom words are bread and butter, are appalled.

In spite of his wealth and formal education, Donald Trump most reminds me of the ordinary blue-collar guys I know. His approach to politics comes under a similar sort of criticism: he doesn't care very much about facts, and journalists are also all about facts. So they think he's an ignorant ass, as they think the blue collar guys are ignorant asses too. They're wrong on the merits about so many particular facts, demonstrably wrong.

What people miss is that guys like this are principled in a way that is sturdy and reliable. They don't care about the particular facts because they care about the universal principles. They have a principle that manufacturing jobs are what made America great, and therefore they want more of them. All the particular facts about a particular case you can muster aren't going to undermine that principle. ("The Carrier deal was not that great!") Their principles are what they believe in, and they're going to do what their principles tell them is right.

Given that principles are pre-judgments about cases of a certain type, they are in a literal sense prejudices. But when we say that someone is "principled," we don't mean anything negative as we do when we say that someone is "prejudiced." Normally it's taken to be quite a positive thing.

Nevertheless, it does present difficulties. You can't talk them out of doing what they think is right in a given case, even if it's not the ideal solution in that case, because they're not interested in particular facts about particular cases. They're governed by universals that stand above any particulars. Telling them that they're wrong about the particulars won't bother them because they don't care about the particulars at all. They have lasting ideas about the world and what right looks like, and that's where they put their faith.

It's a very different world from the one that journalists live in.

An alternative to cloture

Turns out the Senate rules provide more than one way to terminate debate.

Donaeld the Unready

An inside joke for Viking / Anglo-Saxon history buffs.

And the Right Doesn't Seem to Care Much for My Company Either

Col. Schlichter says the left hates me, but these days, the right isn't looking that friendly, either.

Here's our new Republican president on Bush, lies, and Iraq:

Of course, it turns out we did find WMDs, but whatever. The facts have almost reached the point of irrelevance, it seems. Time for the historians to take over.

Here's Rand Paul, who says a lot of sensible things, and then at 5:50 or so begins a slow slide into the "Dick Cheney pushed the Iraq invasion for Halliburton profits" shuffle.

That was back in 2009, but here's "Spengler" (David P. Goldman) at PJMedia a couple of days ago:

Trump said it best: the Iraq War was one of the dumbest things America ever did in foreign policy, the equivalent of "throwing rocks into a hornet's nest."

Grandiose blunders of this kind are not made out by stupidity, though, but by insanity. The American conservative movement was infected by a cult that eroded the common sense of its victims and instilled a messianic, fanatical commitment to nation-building and democracy promotion. What are broadly (and sometimes inaccurately) referred to as the "neo-conservatives" are a cult that succeeded in persuading the unfortunate George W. Bush to spend trillions in treasure and tens of thousands of casualties for the mirage of democracy in Iraq. Such was their influence that an entire generation of Republican foreign policy officials was vetted for cult loyalty.

Messianic? Yeah, whatever. Apparently he's been doing a whole series on this theme. And I'm seeing more commenters at right-wing sites spouting this kind of stuff.

I don't know what to say about all this. I disagree with all three of them, but I don't know that I'm right, and I don't have time to sort it out right now. Since I don't have time to figure it out, this just leaves me with the taste of being betrayed.

I like a lot of what Trump is doing, but I still don't like Trump. Paul has some very good ideas, but he always seems to end up in conspiracy theories. I'm sure Goldman is a smart, educated guy, but I know a lot of smart, educated guys who are blind when it comes to politics, so I'm not really impressed.

What I do know is, a lot of people apparently hate me, and it increasingly doesn't seem to have much to do with right or left, conservative or liberal.

Mo Ghille Mear (My Gallant Hero)

Don't Forget to America Today

Who's to Blame?

This guy thinks he knows.

President Obama either bombed, sanctioned or sent American soldiers to the seven nations on President Trump’s travel ban. Thus, the precedent for Trump’s stance on refugees correlates directly to policies from the Bush and Obama years. These policies helped create the refugee crisis that Trump has so awkwardly addressed with his draconian executive order.

From Trump’s travel ban of Muslim majority nations to allegedly belligerent phone calls with world leaders, media and Democrats have reacted with outrage and disbelief. It’s as if the Democratic Party and loyal “lesser evil” voters didn’t think cheating Bernie Sanders would lead to such political turmoil. When Debbie Wasserman Shultz resigned from the DNC and friendly journalists covered-up the crime, it was too late; Bernie was forced out of the primary. The only chance for Democrats to defeat a populist Republican nominee, during an anti-establishment year in American politics, was destroyed along with Hillary’s yoga emails and Anthony Weiner’s self-portraits.

The article is titled, "Enjoying President Trump? Then Blame Democrats For Cheating Bernie Sanders." There's a lot more. Some of you, who really are enjoying President Trump to a greater or lesser degree, may find it light reading.

92% of Left-Wing Activists Live with their Parents

These findings are limited to Berlin, please note. I'm sure it's totally different here.

DeVos Confirmed, Opening Path for Sessions

This bit of Senate Kabuki theater really got the hopes up of several left-leaning people I know, who thought they had a chance of beating DeVos just because the Republican leadership chose to protect the maximal number of their Senators from the consequences of voting for her.

Nope. Lucy & the football.

Now that Jeff Session's vote is no longer needed immediately, I guess he'll be confirmed soon too.

ATF White Paper

The second-highest-ranking official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has written a proposal to reduce gun regulations, including examining a possible end to the ban on importing assault weapons into the United States....

“Restriction on imports serves questionable public safety interests, as these rifles are already generally legally available for manufacture and ownership in the United States,” Turk wrote of the ban on imported AR-15s and AK-style weapons.

“This white paper offers a disturbing series of giveaways to the gun industry that would weaken regulatory oversight of the gun industry without adequate consideration of the impact on public safety,” said Chelsea Parsons, vice president of guns and crime policy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank.

Well, repealing the ban on imported rifles is hardly a 'giveaway to the gun industry.' The American gun industry flourishes in part because of the artificial scarcity created by the ban.

Cf.

Right-wing pundit Kurt Schlichter:

They hate you.

Leftists don’t merely disagree with you. They don’t merely feel you are misguided. They don’t think you are merely wrong. They hate you.

Tucker FitzGerald, self-described as "deeply curious about justice and equality":

Universities aren’t bereft of conservatives and Evangelicals because of a vast left-wing conspiracy. They’re bereft of those people because people committed to those world views so rarely have anything to offer to an open-minded, inquiring, growing community. Universities are lacking in conservatives and fundamentalist Christians because the amount of education that it takes to become a professor is likely to expose Evangelicals and conservatives to enough good ideas that they’re no longer fundamentalist or conservative.

Ah, yes. If only I'd been exposed to more left-wing -- I mean, "good" -- ideas in my education. That's probably what's holding me back. Lack of exposure.

Morons

Republican hawks took to Twitter and the Sunday political shows to attack President Donald Trump for his latest comments defending Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal regime.

Pressed by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly about how Trump could respect a “killer” like Putin, Trump said, “We got a lot of killers [too]. What, you think our country is so innocent?”

“I don’t know of any government leaders that are killers in America,” O’Reilly retorted.

This O'Reilly guy is talking to a man who ordered a hit on al Qaeda just days earlier. He sent a team of highly-trained commandos who killed 14 Qaeda fighters on purpose. They also apparently killed at least one little girl not on purpose, and she was the sister of a 16-year-old American citizen Barack Obama killed with a drone strike. Obama also killed their father, an al Qaeda honcho with ties to terrorist attacks inside the United States, in the same way.

Both Presidents are killers in a sense, the same sense in which the President of Russia is a killer: they order killing done. The SEALs are killers in a more direct sense. The separation from the gun doesn't make the Presidents better people than the SEALs -- I would wager any sum, based on the SEALs I've known, that the opposite would prove true if the SEALs' identities were known for comparison.

Do these media jockeys think their world would survive without killers? Are they so blind that they can sit down and talk with one and not even know it?

Manifestly.

Building Jerusalem

My kind of hymn.

For Readers in Washington State

I can't remember if Raven is currently living in Washington state or not, and it may be that others of you are. Your legislature is considering a bill, HB 1553, that could make life a little bit easier for bikers.

The law is supported on a bipartisan basis. It simply forbids using the wearing of "motorcycle-related" clothing and gear as part of a profiling decision by police. Thus, while engaging in unlawful activity would still make you subject to being stopped, questioned, and so forth, merely wearing a biker shirt or a club vest (or something that could be mistaken for a club vest) would not.

If you're a Washington state resident, you can consider the text of the bill and inform your representatives of your opinion on it.

The Dubliners' Guide to Dublin

Ran across this this evening. Haven't watched it all, but it seems interesting.

So, Atlanta Had A Good First Half

Brother-in-law is a huge Pats fan, so I'm enjoying the affair more than usual.

So far.

UPDATE:

Turns out that scoring 21 unanswered points in the first half won't save you if you give up 31 unanswered points in the second half plus Sudden Death overtime.

Problems with Statistics on Refugees

Matt Y. over at Ricochet makes the argument that American Christians should welcome the refugees from the Middle East instead of opposing their resettlement here. He does make some good points, but he also uses the following statistic, which seems irrelevant to this argument:

The likelihood of being killed by a terrorist attack from a refugee in the United States has been calculated at 1 in 3.6 billion.

I think there are three problems here, and this is the second article I've seen these same three problems show up in, so I'd like to address it.

First, there is no real opposition to "refugees," but rather "Muslim refugees from nations with Muslim terror problems." In fact, among Americans who oppose taking in more Muslim refugees, I suspect there would be a strong willingness to take in Christian and Yazidi refugees from these same regions. The conflation of terms here implies a general xenophobia rather than specific concerns about a specific population, and although I don't think it is intentional, it is insulting.

Second, limiting the geographical area to the United States is also problematic because most of the Muslim refugees from nations with Muslim terror problems have gone to other places, such as Europe. So, to be relevant, one should include all nations that have accepted these refugees.

Third, the fear of taking large numbers of these particular refugees is not limited to terrorism. When Europe began taking in large numbers of these refugees, there were immediate problems with  sexual assault and other crimes.

Because of these factors, it seems to me that the only really meaningful statistic would cover the particular refugee populations in question regardless of geographic area of resettlement and it would include all crimes, not just terrorism. If that statistic were used, I suspect the argument would look very different.

All that said, I have yet to see anyone arguing for bringing in 100,000 Muslim refugees from nations with Muslim terror problems address some of the deeper concerns of their opponents, including issues of long-term assimilation and the radicalization of second and third generation Muslims in Western nations. These are also important issues, and if someone wanted to change my mind about bringing in tens of thousands of Muslim refugees from nations with Muslim terror problems, they would have to address them as well.

Frog spit

Frog tongues are incredibly soft, which helps them glom onto prey. Apparently, though, the saliva is even more ingenious:

A mixture of cornstarch and water becomes solid if you hit it. Ketchup becomes runnier if you shake the bottle. Saliva is like ketchup: Forces makes it less viscous. But while human saliva becomes around ten times less viscous if you apply force to it, frog saliva becomes a hundred times less viscous.

So when a frog tongue strikes an insect, its saliva flows freely and readily seeps into every crack and gap. When the tongue slows down and starts retracting, the saliva thickens again into a paste, the equivalent of a closed fist grasping the insect for the journey back.

“The analysis helps to explain many bizarre observations, like why frogs use the backs of their eyeballs to push prey down their throats,” says Kiisa Nishikawa from Northern Arizona University. When the insect’s in the frog’s mouth, the frog has to get it off its tongue. Fortunately, all of its adhesive tricks work best in the perpendicular direction—it may be really hard to pull the insect off, but it’s comparably easy to slide it off. The frog just needs something to push against the insect—so it uses its eyeballs. Twelve years ago, Robert Levine used X-ray videos to show that a frog swallows, it retracts its eyeballs inwards, and uses these to push victims off its tongue.

Cat tongues are another kettle of fish.

MS treatment advance

A new treatment for multiple sclerosis, using the patient's own stem cells from the bone marrow, shows surprising promise.

Gunsmoke Blues

Ran into this while listening to a bunch of old blues on YouTube:

During a production hiatus of the popular TV Show "Gunsmoke", the film crew decided to take off and film a barnstorming blues revue making it’s way across the country and they ended up in Eugene, OR, with cameras rolling to film Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Big Joe Turner and George "Harmonica" Smith as they performed in a music hall. Date: October 20, 1971.

Big Mama Thornton was the first to record "Hound Dog," made famous by Elvis, and we get to hear her sing it in this video somewhere a bit after the 50-minute mark.

Opening Up the White House Press Briefings to Local News Reporters

Saw this on Ricochet. A recent White House press briefing was set up for Skype and four local newsfolk* who were not in DC were able to ask questions.

This was great. First, it further breaks the monopoly of the national media on the president. Second, it allowed the news people to ask questions about how national policy might influence their local situations. Third, it brought in points of view not often seen in the national media, such as a pro-coal publisher who framed his question in terms of the damage being done to the Kentucky economy by anti-coal regulations.

Wiley at Ricochet has videos set up so you can watch while the questions are asked and answered.

###

*Technically, one was the publisher of a local paper, not a reporter.

Friday Night AMV

Rockets. Rockets, planes, tanks!

That "Netherlands Second" Video

Apparently there are now a bunch more, as European nations jump on the bandwagon.

They are strangely self-critical, these videos. They seem to be mocking their own patriots almost as much as Trump. At some point, the series becomes a mocking of the idea of patriotism itself.

A Bit of John Lee Hooker to Start the Weekend

Knife Rights in Georgia

The Georgia Legislature is in session. Our friends at Knife Rights are seeking support for a Senate Bill that would alter the definition of a "knife" in Georgia. I'm not sure it's a good idea, though I completely support the right to carry knives of any kind.

SB 49 would change the definition of a knife, for the purposes of a carry permit, from "a cutting instrument designed for the purposes of offense and defense consisting of a blade that is greater than five inches" to "a pointed or sharp-edged instrument consisting of a blade that is greater than 12 inches," with both of them specifying that such a blade has to be attached to a handle. (Is a hatchet now a "knife"? Only if its blade is greater than 12 inches, I suppose. Perhaps an axe is.) There are no laws restricting the carrying of a "knife" per se; rather, a further definition is that a "weapon" means a "knife or handgun," and the law restricts the carrying of a "weapon."

Now, read the code section where this definition would apply.

(a) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun may have or carry on his or her person a weapon or long gun on his or her property or inside his or her home, motor vehicle, or place of business without a valid weapons carry license.

(b) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun may have or carry on his or her person a long gun without a valid weapons carry license, provided that if the long gun is loaded, it shall only be carried in an open and fully exposed manner.

(c) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun may have or carry any handgun provided that it is enclosed in a case and unloaded.

(d) Any person who is not prohibited by law from possessing a handgun or long gun who is eligible for a weapons carry license may transport a handgun or long gun in any private passenger motor vehicle; provided, however, that private property owners or persons in legal control of private property through a lease, rental agreement, licensing agreement, contract, or any other agreement to control access to such private property shall have the right to exclude or eject a person who is in possession of a weapon or long gun on their private property in accordance with paragraph (3) of subsection (b) of Code Section 16-7-21, except as provided in Code Section 16-11-135.

(e) Any person licensed to carry a handgun or weapon in any other state whose laws recognize and give effect to a license issued pursuant to this part shall be authorized to carry a weapon in this state, but only while the licensee is not a resident of this state; provided, however, that such licensee shall carry the weapon in compliance with the laws of this state.

(f) Any person with a valid hunting or fishing license on his or her person, or any person not required by law to have a hunting or fishing license, who is engaged in legal hunting, fishing, or sport shooting when the person has the permission of the owner of the land on which the activities are being conducted may have or carry on his or her person a handgun or long gun without a valid weapons carry license while hunting, fishing, or engaging in sport shooting.

(g) Notwithstanding Code Sections 12-3-10, 27-3-1.1, 27-3-6, and 16-12-122 through 16-12-127, any person with a valid weapons carry license may carry a weapon in all parks, historic sites, or recreational areas, as such term is defined in Code Section 12-3-10, including all publicly owned buildings located in such parks, historic sites, and recreational areas, in wildlife management areas, and on public transportation; provided, however, that a person shall not carry a handgun into a place where it is prohibited by federal law.

(h) (1) No person shall carry a weapon without a valid weapons carry license unless he or she meets one of the exceptions to having such license as provided in subsections (a) through (g) of this Code section.

(2) A person commits the offense of carrying a weapon without a license when he or she violates the provisions of paragraph (1) of this subsection.

It sounds to me as if the Senate Bill in question narrows the protections of the weapons carry license rather than expands them. As the law stands, with my weapons carry license I can carry a Kabar (8" blade) and it's covered. Under the proposed revision, a Kabar wouldn't be considered a knife. While that is (a) absurd in itself, (b) that means my carry license no longer explicitly licenses me to carry it.

I think the argument is that this would simply eliminate any standard by which knives shorter than 12 inches are barred from being carried. However, it seems to me it would also remove the clarity that the knife I am carrying is specifically authorized by our laws.

I do hope so

I read somewhere last week that Scott Walker was meeting with President Trump to discuss union-busting. Mike Gecan opines in the New York Daily News that the President's opponents are making the same mistakes that Walker's did:

The Trump team is following the Walker playbook, with some variations. Like Walker, it is running aggressive plays right from the start. It doesn’t have to feel out the opponents’ soft spots and tendencies. It knows them.

The difference is that it isn’t just running one play. It’s running a series of them, one right after the other, to keep the defense confused and on its heels.

Second, it’s counting on the opposition to fall into the same trap that the Wisconsin opposition did — to rely on massive demonstrations and to ignore the need to do hard, local, person-by-person organizing back in the local towns, villages and counties.

Trump doesn't seem like a guy who loses sight of the difference between showy and effective actions. If he's showy, it's because he expects to achievable an effect. I supported Walker in the primaries because he'd mastered tactics to achieve his goals, and I was so tired of D.C. Republicans who couldn't seem to navigate their way out of a closet, if indeed they genuinely cared about the goals they claimed to be pursuing. Trump turns out to share a lot of my goals, to my enormous surprise, and I look forward to his implementing them systematically, while his opponents mistake squawking and violence for persuasion and the pursuit of concrete influence.

Fake News

NYT:

President Trump, after promising a radical break with the foreign policy of Barack Obama, is embracing some key pillars of the former administration’s strategy, including warning Israel to curb construction of settlements, demanding that Russia withdraw from Crimea and threatening Iran with sanctions for ballistic missile tests.

I'm sorry, was I supposed to believe that new sanctions on Iran was a "pillar" of the Obama administration's foreign policy? I would have described them as 'something they did their very best to fend off, but finally recognized was going to happen whether they liked it or not.' The Obama administration opposed new sanctions on Iran throughout its second term as it sought its so-called 'deal' with Iran. Iran engaged in multiple ballistic missile tests after the so-called deal, which even the UN viewed as violating the terms of the arrangement.

Nor was this the only way in which Iran violated the so-called 'deal.'

I'm not sure the whole Obama administration had a "pillar" among them. This certainly wasn't one.

The Ship May Have Sailed on That, Sarah

I'm guessing a certain NSW unit is getting chewed today, not that they will probably care all that much.

Rethinking the Probabilities on Harley-Davidson

President Trump meets with Harley-Davidson officials at White House
So, in light of today's very public meeting, I'd have to say the probability of the CNN story being true has declined substantially. It's not impossible that the visit to Harley's factory or museum was in some planning stage and then dropped because of fear of protests. However, this is a very public visit that took some trouble to visually associate their products with the President.

The man had something to say about bikers, by the way.

He greeted the five bikers warmly, saying, “Made in America, Harley-Davidson.”

Mr. Trump added that during the campaign, bikers “were with me all the way.”

But he did not hop on for a ride. Pres. Trump joked to the journalists gathered to watch the welcome: “Boy, would you like to see me fall off one of these!”

Apparently there remains a background issue in that Harley-Davidson has recently outsourced some of its IT work. President Trump didn't make a big deal of it in the photo-op, but there is some reason to think they might have discussed it inside.

About 125 positions were eliminated at Harley-Davidson in the process — and workers who lost their job are now suing, claiming they were discriminated against in favor of South Asian employees.

According to the complaint, most of the workers Infosys brought on had H-1B visas, which are intended for highly skilled fields in which there are a shortage of American workers. But the suit argues that there were plenty of qualified workers available: the ones who just lost their jobs at Harley-Davidson.

"Made in America" is not just about manufacturing jobs. I wonder if it came up. Likely we will know soon.

Up Helly Aa

The Shetlands held a Viking festival. The pictures are amazing.

Quasi-markets in education

I thought Thomas might appreciate this article about the difference between regulating a market and regulating a monopoly.  One of his arguments is that we can use some market tools even in a heavily regulated area, and that the likelihood of a tool's usefulness will alter depending on who exercises the choices and with what degree of freedom.  He makes the interesting suggestion, for instance, that most ventures fail, and that it makes more sense to employ a strict standard on the back-end, in deciding what failed ventures to withdraw public support from, than to regulate strictly what sorts of ventures can be started in the first place.

What kind of conservative is Gorsuch?

AEI is on fire today.  Here is a careful analysis of where Gorsuch is and is not in line with traditional conservative judicial trends.  The bottom line:  "If Gorsuch is confirmed, he is likely to be a vote for deference to state governments and to Congress but not to government agencies." He may be skeptical of the "dormant Commerce Clause" doctrine, as Scalia was; in other words, he may be inclined to support federal control over arguably interstate commerce only where Congress has explicitly occupied the field, not in every area where Congress might conceivably opt to occupy the field someday. Also like Scalia, he is skeptical of government agencies' attempts to usurp the legislative function and might be inclined not to grant them the usual deference when they do so. In these areas he is in line with the most recent developments in conservative judicial theory.

He may be a bit of an outlier, however, in his principled refusal to override state or federal legislative authority in any other areas. That may make him a bit like Justice Roberts: not inclined to rescue voters from the bad effects of their decisions where there is any doubt at all about the Constitutional issue implicated.

Nuts and bolts of deregulation

Here is a fine, detailed article about how federal regulations are made and how they can be unmade.  Not everything achieved by the stroke of a Presidential pen can be instantly undone the same way.  Nevertheless, there are well-understood pathways for clearing out bad regulations, and there are signs that Congress and the White House are well started on their task.

The right way to dissent

Paul Wolfowitz opined in the New York Times (but this link is to AEI) on the delicate problem of disagreeing with your boss in federal service.  He's talking about the State Department, not the DOJ, but it's still interesting.  I wasn't aware of any of his examples of private and public dissent.

Significantly, when a draft of the dissent channel cable objecting to President Obama’s Syria policy leaked to The New York Times last summer, William Harrop, a distinguished career ambassador who strongly believes in the dissent channel, condemned the leak, saying that the Foreign Service officers’ “oath of office is to protect and defend the Constitution, but they are not free to debate publicly with their president.” He added, “If they wanted to go public they should have resigned.”

Another diplomat, Chas Freeman, said at the time that “the channel can only work if it is ‘internal use only,’ i.e., it does not become part of the political diatribe or embarrass the administration.”

Diplomats confronted with an immigration policy that they believe is harmful to national interests should not abuse their government positions to undermine or sabotage the policy, no matter how strongly they feel about it. They do have three courses they can follow in good conscience:

They can seek reassignment to a position that is not affected by the policy, as John Negroponte did in leaving the White House and accepting reassignment to Ecuador after objecting to what he considered a betrayal of South Vietnam; they can continue working to mitigate the effects of a policy they object to, as Ryan Crocker did with extraordinary effectiveness in Iraq; or they can resign and go public with their objections as the Bosnia dissenters did and as Ann Wright did over Iraq and Ambassador Robert Ford did over Syria.

Whether they also have a First Amendment right to go public with their opposition while still serving in official positions is a question that lawyers can no doubt debate for a very long time.

Of Course He Did

Headline: "Trump's Supreme Court pick founded and led club called 'Fascism Forever' at his elite all-boys Washington prep school."

Well, I guess we can stop worrying about that Anthony Kennedy drift.

What Does Reuters Imagine the President Does?

What to make of this silliness?

U.S. military officials told Reuters that Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support or adequate backup preparations.

As a result, three officials said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

I'm sorry, but what does Reuters imagine the President does in reviewing a proposal for action? Do they think he reads the CONOP? Do they think he personally reviews the ISR for evidence of landmines?

Brigade commanders don't do that. These guys have no idea how this stuff works.

I Am Not a Doors Fan, But

I'll listen to anything John Lee Hooker sings.

Dig it?

Joe McCarthy as an Object Lesson for Trump

Mona Charen over at Ricochet points out that, although it turned out that Joe McCarthy was correct about communists having infiltrated high levels of the US government, the way he went about trying to fix the problem actually discredited his cause. She then argues that Trump should consider that when it comes to how we handle immigration from the Muslim world.

She has some other things to say as well:

The parallel to our times is the Islamist threat. President Trump is right that we face a threat from Islamists. He is right that careful vetting of immigrants, including refugees, is necessary in light of that danger. The worry is that his ham-fisted approach to a delicate problem may wind up discrediting the effort to vet immigrants, alienate our friends in the Muslim world, and empower the self-righteous left.

...

Alas, instead of stressing that our goal is to separate extremist Muslims from the majority of peaceable Muslims, President Trump’s slapdash executive order showed complete indifference to the distinction. Even green card holders, who have already been vetted and granted the right to live in the United States, were to be stopped at the airport with no notice. Why the rush? Would 48 hours notice have been too much to ask? Translators and military leaders from Iraq and Afghanistan, who had worked with U.S. forces at risk to themselves (and who were badly treated by the Obama administration), were originally offered no dispensation from the blanket order. That’s dishonorable and unwise, as it alienates all Muslims who might be inclined to side with us in a future struggle.

I have to agree with that. I think foreigners who have put their lives on the line for the US deserve to be treated well by us, and I have the sense that they often have not been. In the "no better friend, no worse enemy" formulation, we don't seem to be doing well at either. I hope Trump will correct both sides of the formula.

Solid Point

One problem with hyperbolically calling it a "Muslim ban": you end up with headlines like "Most Americans support Muslim ban."

We had a similar thing happen with the waterboarding and stress-position debate in the Bush administration. Opponents insisted it was "torture." So, that close to 9/11, of course the headlines: "Most Americans support torture."

A Contradiction

A Turkish friend of mine argues, sometimes, that Americans just can't understand that the same Islam we encounter as a persecuted minority in our country is a very different animal in her homeland where it is the majority. For her, and she is far more anti-Islam than any American conservative I know, Ataturk's mistake lay in not finishing the job. The Turkey she grew up in, as a member of the educated and secular elite, has been washed away by the current regime.

This failure of imagination creates a kind of contradiction in the contemporary progressive movement. They have come to see themselves as the heroes of a story about America in which the forces of oppression of minorities have been resisted by a few brave people of good will. As heirs to these few brave people of good will, they inherit a project of moving America away from irrational prejudice against those who are different, and toward a future in which all are treated as genuine equals. This is what they mean when they speak of 'the arc of history,' citing Dr. King, and for many of them it is not a poetic metaphor. It's an article of faith that history really is moving this way, and they are really its heroes.

So, the contradiction my friend is trying to draw: On the one hand, Muslims (here) are a minority exposed to at least sometimes irrational prejudices. On the other hand, Muslims in places like Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and so forth are the major violators of minority rights. To support Islam is, my friend believes, to lay the groundwork for future violations here too as Muslims become stronger and more numerous. Thus, in defending minorities they strengthen the chief enemy of minorities, because it is -- here, for now -- also a minority.

I would like to believe that this is an overstatement, although she has drawn out the contradiction nicely. Certainly I am ready to support any Muslims who are interested in reforming their faith so that this future conflict might be avoided. There are a few different ways in which this might happen, and none of them are at all easy. I'm not under any illusions about how difficult that will be. The theology and history are all against them, as well as what have so far been the best minds of the whole history of their faith. Their task must appear as impossible to us as the task of winning freedom of conscience must have appeared in Christian nations before the 30 Years War. Yet that happened, of course.

In any case, here's another author who makes a very similar argument. She is an atheist, pro-choice, and apparently feminist. She's trying to frame roughly the same point.

It's a good point.

No Grandmothers Died Because of Trump's Order

A woman died, to be sure: but she died before the order was issued, and the pathetic story concocted by her son was a lie.

Philosophically speaking, it hardly matters. Trump's order made possible such a scenario, even if it didn't play out. It's one of the hard problems you take on with that kind of authority: your decisions have unintended consequences, and sometimes they can be awful. You have to bear responsibility for them even though you may never have imagined them.

By sad coincidence we have a real life example of that in the other story about the new President today. He left the White House with no destination announced, apparently shocking lots of people. It turns out he was flying out to meet the body of the Navy SEAL who died in the raid in Yemen, the first military action Trump has ordered. The family requested no publicity, which is hard to make coincide with a Presidential visit, but he somehow made it happen.

So this other thing didn't happen, but it might have; he avoided the guilt of it, but only by accident. This is one reason I've never sought power over the lives of others, only the power to hold my own. It's an awful responsibility.

Dat brier patch

No, please!  Anything but that!

As Ed Morrissey says, this is a proposal that can unite Americans across the political spectrum.

How Big An Influence was SCOTUS on the Last Election?

Vox:

The Supreme Court was one reason for wavering conservatives to back Trump in November. More Republicans than Democrats said the Supreme Court was a major factor in their vote. Trump has pleased them with this choice.

He has also given himself a rare breath of normalcy in a turbulent first two weeks on the job. Amid continuing chaos over the refugee ban and increased resistance from Democrats to Trump’s Cabinet nominees, picking a well-respected jurist with a solid conservative reputation might be the most traditionally presidential thing Trump has done in office.

The election was close enough that a lot of things might have swung it. Certainly I spoke to people who said that they were single-issue voters this last time around, and that single issue was the Supreme Court. I suspect many people who had serious concerns about Trump nevertheless saw in Clinton's potential election the end of the Constitution as they understood it. If Scalia had still been alive and on the court as a guardian of that Constitution, would it have been enough to swing enough votes to the other side?

By following through on his pledge here, I expect Trump has won himself some ground with any voters who did choose him to protect the Supreme Court. Keeping your word builds credibility, and credibility is the currency. If he keeps doing this, the next time he seeks their vote he might get it on his own account. Of course, he'll have to keep it up.

The Feast of St. Brigid

The stories about St. Brigid as a girl sound surprisingly familiar. She gave her father's stuff away without asking, so he tried to sell her to the king. While he was there negotiating the sale, she appropriated the king's sword and gave it away without his permission.

Brigid died before the founding of the Catholic Church in Ireland, and in fact it's unclear how much of her story can be separated from pre-Christian myths. The story about the cloak, for example, is a commonplace one. Sometimes it's an ox-hide, and the way it gets bigger is by being cut into strips that can then surround a much larger portion of land.

Gjallarhorn

Sounds more like bagpipes than a horn to me, but Heimdallr works in mysterious ways.

Habemus Scotam

He didn't make Trump's list from last summer, but it does look like the President has kept his word to give us a nomination in the mold of Scalia.

UPDATE: Apparently he made the cut in later lists -- see the comments.

Harley Davidson Wimps Out?

It's hard to think of anything more contrary to the brand they've tried to build than not doing what you wanted to do because you're afraid of protests. It'll be fun trying to salvage their reputation after this.

UPDATE: There is some debate about the facts. See the comments.

UPDATE: Due to the events of a few days later, it looks as if the CNN story was 'fake news.'

A Former Operator Writes on Yemen

During a recent raid on an al Qaeda compound in Yemen, a Navy SEAL was killed. The linked post is in memoriam.

Stop Having Unacceptable Fantasies!

Those modest and moderate souls at PeTA have come up with another winner: ban fur in a fantasy game, in which of course all of the fur is make-believe anyway.

Not that I'm too surprised to discover such an interest in regulating fantasy. Not after Tex's post about "expectant mothers," I'm not. It's pretty clear that they intend for us to live full-time in fantasy worlds, so naturally it is important that they be in charge of regulating such things.

Just An Idle Thought

Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter): Notice that not one leftist panicking over a "coup" or "fascism" has said "Gosh, maybe we should decrease the power of the govt"?

"Betrayed the Department of Justice"?

It's one thing for a President to fire someone who serves at his pleasure but refuses to back his play. It's another thing to use the language of treason in describing her conduct.

Of course, it's easier for me to make this point than for many on the left, given how readily they've resorted to the language of treason aimed at Trump himself. That doesn't make it less wrong in this case.

Or Maybe Not So Divided

If you believe Rasmussen's poll instead of the last one, a solid 57% support Trump on his temporary visa order. Rasmussen reminds us that "These findings have changed little from August when 59% of voters agreed with Trump’s call for a temporary ban on immigration into the United States from 'the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism' until the federal government improves its ability to screen out potential terrorists."

This is nifty

At Science Alert, report of some interesting materials science advances.  We already knew that metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2) switches from a visually transparent insulator to an electrically conductive metal at 152 degrees F. Between 86 and 140F, it also reflects infrared light while remaining visually transparent.

Now we have learned that, when VO2 reaches the temperature at which it switches over to electrical conduction, it remains an unexpectedly bad conductor of heat. Apparently this is because its free electrons move in unison instead of primarily bouncing back and forth. Also, mixing VO2 with other materials adjusts the amount of both electricity and heat that it conducts. These characteristics together suggest that VO2 mixtures can be devised to do things like coat windows, so that they conduct heat in hot weather but insulate it in cold weather; VO2 might also begin to conduct heat away from electric motors after they have been operating long enough to build up heat.

I may have gotten this summary mixed up, particularly which parts follow from the new discoveries and which are old hat.  The linked article is short but worth reading.

Donald "Lizzie" Trump

This from Don Surber:

Donald Trump took an axe
He gave D.C. forty whacks.
When he saw what he had done
He gave another forty-one.
Donald Trump smiled away
Then he chopped off EPA.

Eric Hines

De-tribalization

Sebastian Junger, via Steve Sailer, argues that we see so much PTSD now, not because war culture is hard on the psyche, but because American civilian culture is notably lacking in the tribal cohesion and intimacy necessary to mental health.

In Junger’s rather sketchy description, tribal life sounds rather like being in the Army, although with less hierarchy, less marching, and even more gossip. Hunter-gatherers, the most intense form of tribal life, are strikingly egalitarian, constantly forming backbiting coalitions to undermine the confidence of superior hunters to keep the strongest men from monopolizing all the women.

Similarly, Junger notes, humans living under seemingly catastrophic conditions, such as London during the Blitz, his father’s hometown of Dresden under RAF raids, and the besieged Sarajevo he visited as a young reporter, seem to enjoy better overall mental health than peacetime Americans.

I recognize something like this pattern in my own life, as well as in the literature that most appeals to me, but it makes me a bit impatient. Whether people are shooting at you or not, we've been given all the opportunities to band together passionately against misfortune that any creatures could well wish for. We have only to seek the opportunities out, something we're not always so eager to do when an easy, comfortable life is within our grasp. We have no excuse to let our lives become meaningless or empty merely because we're well fed and unusually safe in the context of human history.

Saudis Back Trump's Refugee Plan

Not the immigration part, but the part where the Saudis and the Gulf States pay for Trump's proposed alternative to importing refugees: "safe zones" in Syria and Yemen. (Which, in classic Trump style, he claims the Saudis will pay for.)

How the Government Wrecked the Gas Can

I'm pretty sure we've discussed this exact issue in the past. This article is from 2012, but things have gotten worse since then.

Who Speaks for America? No One.

A significant thrust of the argumentation against Trump's immigration order is that it is in some sense un-American. Oddly the people asserting this are the same people who would tell you, accurately enough, that America has in the past responded exactly the same way to sharp spikes in immigration. This has been true from the Alien and Sedition Acts, to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, to FDR's ban on Germans and Japanese immigration (coupled with internment camps), one would think that this would properly be described as classically American. What they mean to say is that this isn't in accord with the America they want, even if it's an America that has never existed yet, but is hoped for maybe someday. This is mirrored by the occasional longing -- inherent in the cry to 'Make America Great Again' -- for an America that used to exist, but never really did.

My own sense is that America was always and is still the most immigrant-friendly nation on earth, a place where you can really become an American if you want to do so. The reason that there are periodic attempts to put the brakes on is not that America has shifted its core, but that assimilating new members of the society is an organic process that is governed by organic reactions.

You might say that, as a society, we get hungry, we gorge, and then we need to digest. It's a natural reaction by human beings to the introduction of a large amount of change and large number of strangers suddenly showing up in their lives. But it's not about ending immigration, even if that's the way people talk. It's a natural part of the process of handling immigration on the American scale. It may not be aesthetically pleasing to watch, but neither is digestion. Nevertheless, this is why America has been able to absorb all those waves of immigrants in the past, all of whose descendants are simply "Americans."

In any case, I would like to caution against either side presuming to speak for "America" on this point. Mr. Hines linked to a news story about this poll in a comments section below. A slight plurality favors Trump's order, 48/42. The recent election also went slightly for Trump, but only thanks to the Electoral College. Any Trump supporter has to take on board the fact that right at half of the country opposes him. Any Trump opponent has to take on board that right at half of the country supports him. The numbers may even be in flux, so that we can't say that it's a bit more than half for or a bit more than half against: it may be more one day than the next.

These visions of what America ought to look like, versus what it really does look like, are sharply divided. We should be cautious about painting as "un-American" the views of right at half the nation, whichever side we are on.

Otherly gendered pregnancy

Another winner from . . . wait, this isn't from The Onion, either.  The Guardian is seriously quoting the British Medical Association's serious advice about not insulting intersex men and transmen by calling pregnant women "expectant mothers."

Step (1) Men and women are so different from birth that they must inhabit rigidly segregated public spheres, without our checking first to see what any individual is good at or prefers doing.

Step (2) ???

Step (3) Men and women are so identical in every important way that we have to do backflips to avoid assuming that a pregnant human is female, while skipping the step where we ever simply observe which individuals are good at what.

Any excuse, in other words, to keep ordering people around, so people will know we're nice.

Rednecks: A Brief History

The legendary Joe Bob Briggs writes the kind of piece that you can only get away with when you are a self-identified member of the group, who also loves the group you're criticizing.

The history is a little off in places, but just go with it: he's rolling, and he doesn't mean it to be taken completely seriously. Just mostly seriously.

Who Bought 19.5% of a Russian Oil Giant?

An international mystery, so far tracked to Cayman Islands shell companies. A curious business for a number of reasons, as the article explains.

Strangling with the pursestrings

This critique of the punitive or coercive withdrawal of federal funds from cities who refuse to implement federal immigration policy might actually hold water.  If so, I look forward to the reversal of a whole swath of punitive and coercive withdrawals of federal funds from local and state entities who decline to implement federal policy on the subjects of women's football teams, transgendered bathrooms, health insurance, climate youknowwhatwemean, etc.  In fact, let's just eliminate most of the federal funds, lower the tax rates, and let the local and state authorities handle most of the crazy issues that have been vaulted onto center stage during the Silly Season that began several years back.  You know the Silly Season I mean:  the one that spawned the now popular question, "You want more Trump?  Because this is how you get more Trump."

Minorities hardest hit

Oh, no, the threats to Obamacare take on new urgency in the age of climate stuff.  The article's appearance in "The Hill" instead of "The Onion" suggests to me that's not a parody.  If it were, it would lose points for not figuring out how women, ambiguously gendered activists, and peaceful jihadist refugees suffered uniquely from rising sea levels, the spread of Zika virus, or just cognitive strain from dealing with extreme weather events.  Come on, guys, put some effort into it.

A new hope

If food scientists unlock the secret of getting tomatoes back on the market that travel reasonably well and still taste recognizably like tomatoes, I will have renewed faith in America culture (for the first time in my adult life).  I've already had my faith renewed in the ability of a free people to demand and receive commercially distributed bread that's worth eating, though I was raised to believe this was a lost cause.

The scientist in the linked article has forsworn GMO techniques in the interest of avoiding fantastic levels of controversy and therefore expense and delay, which is too bad, but it appears to be possible to achieve the same good results by old-fashioned breeding within a reasonable timeframe.  In the meantime, I rarely bother with large fresh supermarket tomatoes, but I do eat a double handful of "TreeSweet" cherry tomatoes every day, and I've been surprised to find somewhat edible hydroponic large tomatoes for sale as well.  We usually rely on canned tomatoes for cooking.

More on Immigration

Hot Air takes the anti-Trump side of the question, arguing that the Immigration Act of 1965 makes it illegal to use national origin (the Trump order doesn't, in fact, use religion) as a criterion.

However, 8 U.S. Code § 1182 -- current by an act of 2015 -- holds:

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

This is the sort of thing that courts ordinarily sort out, and I suspect the courts will chew on this one for a while. It may well be that the Congress has passed incompatible laws, which means sorting out which one overrules the other. Still, I expect a vigorous Article II defense from the Trump administration, and even the Supreme Court is only co-equal to the Presidency.

We may be living with this for a while. Good to see that the green card issue, at least, has been sorted out. General Kelly came down on the matter today, and I doubt Trump will buck one of his Marines.

UPDATE: Looks like Trump's base is in no way shocked by this move, as you'd expect given that he campaigned on this for like nine months. One expects that the Quebec mosque shooting will underline the point of wanting to check immigrants carefully -- at least one shooter was from Morocco, which isn't even on Trump's list.

With that plus the pending SCOTUS nomination, the politics of this may settle down. The courts can then do their work in peace.

UPDATE: The Intercept says that the widespread reports that the shooter was Moroccan are false.

UPDATE: The Quebec police now believe the one shooter acted alone, with what news reports are describing as 'two rifles and an AK-47.' I assume they don't know why that's a strange thing to say. Apparently he is a nationalist, which in Quebec means having an intensely French identity.

Oh No, Retaliation

Who Armed ISIS?

Obama and Clinton, says Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. She's an Iraq War vet, by the way.

Legal, But Wise?

I don't doubt that Andrew C. McCarthy is right when he says that Trump's exclusion order for terror-involved countries is legal. There is plenty of precedent, even among liberal icons like Obama (who closed the Iraqi refugee program for six months in 2011), Carter (who barred Iranians during the hostage crisis), and FDR (who used an EO to bar Japanese and German immigration to the United States). Trump is clearly within well-established Constitutional norms even for modern Democratic presidents.

On the other hand, it's striking to me that the order permits Saudis but not Lebanese. Yes, Hezbollah is from Lebanon, but al Qaeda is from Saudi Arabia if it's from anywhere. I have read that the list of countries was put together by the Obama administration, but clearly the two biggest sources of terror -- if we're honest -- are Iran and Saudi Arabia, with radicals in Iraq and Syria being largely proxies of these actors.

The opposite side of the order is that it bars people from certain countries even if they are green card holders, Kurds who have been fighting ISIS, people who have demonstrated a commitment to the United States by working with us as interpreters, and so forth.

I get that the order is quite temporary, pending better vetting methods for the most part. It's also much less radical than its opponents are suggesting. It certainly isn't a "Muslim ban," and indeed doesn't even target a number of Islamic countries with large Islamist terrorism problems (e.g., Pakistan and Turkey). Countries like Egypt and Indonesia, which have large Muslim populations and terrorist groups but also governments that are pretty committed to managing them, are also untouched.

Some of the criticism is therefore unwarranted. Still, the order is both too wide and too narrow in different respects. What is the right course of action for us as citizens at this juncture? Should we urge our representatives and Senators to push for an alteration in the policy?

UPDATE: Here is the full text of the order, for the lawyers among us.

UPDATE: Priebus walked back the green card ban today, which is the most obviously wrong part of the ban.

FedEx Declines To Shoot Own Foot

Federal Express has made a decision in the case of a driver who stopped a flag-burning. They claim that the driver in question "remains a FedEx employee" and that this will not change.

Now, among the many jobs I have held in my long life was one contract gig pressure-washing FedEx trucks, which are required to be clean and presentable in order to maintain the corporate image. As at that time, and I have not heard that this has changed, FedEx drivers were also contractors rather than employees. My guess is that the 'employee' in question probably owns his own truck, and is properly speaking a small businessman in his own right. Yeoman farmers, more or less.

"Does 'Armed' Equal Dangerous?"

Of course it does, in answer to Hot Air's question. The whole point of carrying arms is to be more dangerous.

’Dangerous?,’ cried Gandalf. ‘And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet. . .And Aragon is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers. . .for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion.’

Anyone carrying a weapon is dangerous. Some of us are dangerous even if you should happen to catch us without a weapon. The police cannot be chided for handling them as such. There is a reasonable question about how, in a free society that respects the right to bear arms, police should handle a dangerous but not aggressive or anti-social interaction. But of course "armed" means "dangerous." Specifically, it is a subset of the category "dangerous."

California Leavin'

A bit from a Wall Street Journal article raises a couple of rude questions in my pea brain, and a rude notice.  California is beginning a more-or-less serious effort to secede from the union. The bit is this: the US would have to approve a constitutional amendment to allow a secession.

The questions are these: what would Californians think if the required amendment passed unanimously--or perhaps only with New York, Illinois, Washington demurring?  What would Californians think if those States approving the amendment did so with enormous majorities?

The rude notice is this: California secession dreamers can begin collecting signatures to place a  nationhood proposal on the November 2018 ballot, after language for the measure was approved this week by the state’s attorney general.  Notice that: in California, the citizens are allowed to have only those referendum ballots whose political speech is approved by the California government; they don't get to vote on the things they think are important without Government oversight.  What must California citizens think of that?  Oh, wait....

Eric Hines

Hotcoldwetdry

If I'm reading this New Yorker article correctly, the same shadowy forces that once undermined a scientific consensus for nuclear winter then turned their attention to undermining a scientific consensus for global warming.  They were equally nefarious both times, either because they're very bad people or because their money comes from very bad people, or both.  The conclusion seems to acknowledge grudgingly that science is corrupted when it's in service of the nation-state's political objectives, but the lesson we're to draw is that we're not entitled to be skeptical of global warming unless we're also skeptical of claims that nuclear war would be just peachy keen for the  environment.  Well, okay then.

Honestly, I remember when The New Yorker had smarter authors and lots better editors.

DB: Grief-stricken Navy mourns the departure of beloved Secretary Ray Mabus

"In news that has every sailor and Marine in the Department of the Navy literally wailing with inconsolable grief..."

SNL ... Enters the Twilight Zone?

I don't know if I can handle SNL being funny again, and making non-progressive points. That shakes my worldview.

Anyway, the skit I'm referring to now is on Hulu, which I'm not sure how to embed here, so here's the link to SNL's Susan B. Anthony skit.

And after that, if you want more, Acculturated has an article about SNL doing a skit pointing out that our feminist foremothers did not support abortion.

Should Have Opened Fire Earlier

NSFRPOW (Not Safe for Rational People ... or Work)

Country Heroes, More or Less ...

I swear, if I ever make it to a Corb Lund concert, I'm going to wear a "Free Lester Cousins" t-shirt.

Sounds Like a Good BASIS for Education

From Naomi Schaefer Riley at the New York Post:

...

While America is falling behind globally — we were ranked 24th in the world on the most recent Program for International Student Assessment scores — BASIS is soaring. In math, reading and science three BASIS schools ranked above Shanghai, Korea, Finland and Singapore. If BASIS schools formed a country it would be ranked top in the world. Even compared to students whose families are in the same income brackets, BASIS is still performing 18 percent better on average.

But there’s a catch. If you’re looking for a place that will coddle your kids, you’ve come to the wrong school. As headmaster Hadley Ruggles tells me, “Brooklyn is a progressive place, and it looks like we have rolled back the clock.”

The students are taught grammar. Math in the early grades involves drilling. Students are required to take three years of Latin. Writing is focused on analytical work, not “journaling.”

... Students as young as eighth grade are taking APs and scoring well. Plus, middle-schoolers take biology, chemistry and physics classes three days a week each.

The teachers have come from top college and graduate programs, and many have left their own fields to teach.

...

The fearless regulation killer

I had vaguely heard of the Congressional Review Act, which permits Congress to nix a regulation within 60 legislative days.  A bright young feller showed up at this week's Republican retreat and pointed out that the deadline isn't 60 days after the regulation is issued, it's 60 days after the later of the date it's issued or the date the agency issues a report on it.  In most cases during the recently concluded administration, the agencies didn't bother.  That means Congress can vote down a whole slew of regulations with a majority vote--no filibuster.

“If they haven’t reported it to Congress, it can now be challenged,” says Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Larkin, also at Wednesday’s meeting, told me challenges could be leveled against any rule or guidance back to 1996, when the CRA was passed.

The best part? Once Congress overrides a rule, agencies cannot reissue it in “substantially the same form” unless specifically authorized by future legislation. The CRA can keep bad regs and guidance off the books even in future Democratic administrations—a far safer approach than if the Mr. Trump simply rescinded them.

Republicans in both chambers—particularly in the Senate—worry that a great use of the CRA could eat up valuable floor time, as Democrats drag out the review process. But Mr. Gaziano points out another hidden gem: The law allows a simple majority to limit debate time. Republicans could easily whip through a regulation an hour.

March for Life

Here is a healthier take on a recent political slogan.

A Renaissance for Truth

In all sorts of information operations or psychological warfare, credibility is the currency and truth is a force multiplier. The common theory is that powerful regimes want to disrupt our ability to know the truth so they can create their own reality. In fact, this is what weak regimes do. Powerful regimes tell the truth, and then make the things they want to be true happen.

At some point, the parties that be are going to remember that. Somebody is going to decide to stop the hyperventilating, stop the shutting-off of debate, stop with the name-calling and social bullying, and just tell the truth. Whoever does it first, and builds the reputation for speaking the truth no matter what, is going to win this political exercise. Then they'll have the power to make true many of the things that they wish were true.

UPDATE: Via Anarchyball.

Ceaușescu's America

I'm reading this collection of interviews with women who voted for Trump. At least one of them has something quite interesting to say.

I defected from Ceaușescu's Romania. You don’t grow up in a regime like that and not think about state control over human lives. Today I’m a libertarian. I believe in small government. I’m pro-choice. What I find most threatening in a democracy is extremism. She’s an ideologist and would’ve appointed Supreme Court justices with extreme positions. My vote was more an anti-Hillary vote.

I’ve lived here since 1993 but I’m still a European at heart and read the European papers. Let me tell you, Benghazi was covered with graphic detail. Reading the news in Europe I understood how censored the news in the U.S. has become, giving me flashbacks of a Commie regime. I also resented that when I opened the October issues of my fashion magazines, the editors all endorsed Clinton for president.

I've read lots of people talking about Trump in totalitarian terms, but here's the voice of a woman who really lived under a totalitarian system. Hillary Clinton was the one she recognized as reflective of it. Of course, the uniformity of expressed opinion -- and the media censorship -- is consensual here, where it was enforced by secret police there. How much does that matter? At least some, and perhaps a lot.