No One May Discuss This

One of the things discussed in the article cited immediately below was the firing of the Google employee who wrote a memo critical of diversity efforts at Google. Software engineers trending young, he may well have been too young to remember that it cost the President of Harvard his job to raise the same sort of issues even as a theoretical possibility he expressed that he hoped was not the case.

A recent alumnus of Google writes that this sort of thinking has no place in any organization except for purpose-defined hate groups.

What you just did was incredibly stupid and harmful. You just put out a manifesto inside the company arguing that some large fraction of your colleagues are at root not good enough to do their jobs, and that they’re only being kept in their jobs because of some political ideas. And worse than simply thinking these things or saying them in private, you’ve said them in a way that’s tried to legitimize this kind of thing across the company, causing other people to get up and say “wait, is that right?”...

Do you understand that at this point, I could not in good conscience assign anyone to work with you? I certainly couldn’t assign any women to deal with this, a good number of the people you might have to work with may simply punch you in the face, and even if there were a group of like-minded individuals I could put you with, nobody would be able to collaborate with them. You have just created a textbook hostile workplace environment.... Not all ideas are the same, and not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy.

If you feel isolated by this, that your views are basically unwelcome in tech and can’t be spoken about… well, that’s a fair point. These views are fundamentally corrosive to any organization they show up in, drive people out, and I can’t think of any organization not specifically dedicated to those views that they would be welcome in. I’m afraid that’s likely to remain a serious problem for you for a long time to come.

I notice that this last author opens by asserting that the views expressed are wrong, but declines to defend the proposition that they are: that belongs, he says, to someone with a different set of credentials than his own. What credentials would those be, I wonder? It sounds as if this proposition can only be studied from the perspective of disproving it, as it would be "fundamentally corrosive" to any organization to entertain them, such that any organization devoted to serious study would have to reject them outright. Certainly Harvard did.

The views expressed may well be wrong; perhaps it is even very likely that they are wrong. All the same, how much value should we put in the claim that 'all the studies' show X if not-X is a forbidden position that will cost you your career to entertain? Of course all the studies conducted by programs that refuse to consider the possibility of not-X support X. Of course all the people credentialed by programs that insist on X as a prerequisite for remaining in the program will assert X. That's not a significant finding in support of X being really true. Nor does the credential you get from this program, in which the hypothesis is required to be proven by the experiment, likely to inspire much confidence.

So there's a real problem.  Assume for a moment that he's right that you can't even entertain the question -- can't even float the question -- without creating a hostile work environment.  Maybe he is right about that:  certainly both here and in the Harvard case, the reaction to the question was explosive.  (NPR reports that female software engineers at Google skipped work today from upset.)  So it can't be done if it'll create a hostile work environment, not under current American law.  That's just it, then.  It would cause too many problems to ask, and that's the end of it.  We'll just have to assume the truth of the thing that we'd like to believe.

Haven't we tried that model before?  Indeed, isn't that the very model that Progressives like to mock as pre-modern, benighted, backwards, anti-science?

Bad Reputation

Though the original the goal of reputation systems was to issue access tokens to control entry into the groups, they are double edged. Donald Trump proved that the negative of a negative was positive and used his media disapproval ratings as an access token to Red State voters. There is nothing to prevent other candidates from doing the same or stopping groups from flipping the Chinese government reputation index by taking the inverse of the state metric.

A bad rep can be a good rep, depending on who's looking.

That's true about Trump, anyway. The more the media hated him in 2016, the more some people loved him for defying them. It was a kind of credential: you could trust him because the people who despised you hated him too. Maybe that's not the best credential, but it's also not nothing.

There's a Problem With This Metaphor

Hope is a Weapon.

Saw this today. Everybody reading this knows the story, but this is fascinatingly done. I have never seen my wife on the edge of her seat in a movie before. There is not a lot of speaking (despite the trailer). It works. But you must pay attention.



Curiously enough, the following below was shows as a trailer:

A lot more dialogue in any case.

53 Congressmen Call for Mutiny

This is alarming.

“As the respected leaders of our brave armed service members, you have no obligation to implement a hastily considered tweet designed to serve as a ‘wedge’ political issue; but rather you should honor your own independent duty to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” the lawmakers wrote.

“We believe any serious or credible review of the law and the facts in the present case make it clear that the president’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces will weaken, not strengthen our military, and is blatantly unconstitutional.”

If it is blatantly unconstitutional, it is a blatantly unconstitutional policy that then-President Obama maintained for almost his whole tenure -- as did every single President before him. Of course, we have recently learned that the mere fact that a thing has been considered constitutional for the entire history of the nation is no proof against it being declared unconstitutional now.

Still, it's a thin reed to hang a mutiny on. Military orders are to be defied only if they are so obviously illegal as to "shock the conscience," a standard that 'restore the policy we had last year' would rarely satisfy.

There is one military leader on the record as intending to defy the order, which is now a formal policy that will soon be transmitted to DOD. The Commandant of the US Coast Guard says he will defy the order. The Coast Guard is usually a Homeland Security outfit but capable of being transferred to the DOD during war or at the pleasure of the President. The Coast Guard apparently has 13 members who are openly transgender, all of whom he apparently had contacted to express his support.

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that defiance is becoming more standard in nonmilitary Federal agencies.

The growing opposition in the executive branch comes as the White House’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress and Trump turns to his Cabinet agencies to change course in several policy areas. It also is emanating from career staffers or political holdovers whose resistance to Trump has, at times, been rooted in deep opposition to the president’s agenda.

The opposition can take benign forms, such as resigning in protest, which is obviously perfectly fine and even highly appropriate if you decide that you can't do the job for whatever reason. This opposition can also take other forms, such as the dangerous new culture of leaking American secrets to the press.

For members of Congress to openly call for a military mutiny, though, is... well, reckless at least. Insofar as they believe they are defending the Constitution, I suppose their oaths require them to do what they think is necessary. But they're asking for one hell of a crisis, and I hope they know it.

Biker War Movie Review

This week I had occasion to watch two movies that turn, in important ways, on bikers' relationship with the military. The first was 1971's The Hard Ride, a Vietnam-era story about a Marine who comes home with his best friend's body to try to arrange a funeral with his biker friends. The second was 1984's Tank!, where the military aspects are central, but bikers play a pivotal role in the final outcome.

Together with other movies of the era, these sketch an outline of a transformation in American culture. Spoilers below the break line.

What About Conscription?

What do you think conscription's for?

Europe is the continent with the fewest people willing to fight a war for their country. Globally, an average of 61% of respondents in 64 countries said they would. Morocco (94%), Fiji (94%), Pakistan (89%), Vietnam (89%) and Bangladesh (86%) had the highest percentage willing to fight.

The country with the fewest people willing to go to war was Japan, with just 11% of respondents saying they would fight.

Headline reference from this old movie:

Wow

From the NY Sun:

SAS soldiers are trying out “Star Wars”-style bulletproof helmets in the war against terror. The SAS is the UK’s answer to the Navy SEALs.

No, that is not accurate. The SAS has been around since 1941, and thus is not an "answer to" the SEALs because it predates them. Though the SEALs have predecessor units dating to WWII, they're all younger than the SAS. The SEALs themselves came to be during the Vietnam war, twenty years later than the SAS. The basic concept of the SAS isn't even similar, as it is an army-based commando unit conceived around airborne deployments, rather than sea-based naval commandos.

Cool mask, though.

Tattoo in Edinburgh

They're playing the Black Bear, transitioning to Scotland the Brave towards the end of the video. But you probably knew all that if you spend a lot of time around here.

That's from the end. If you want to see what the first rehersal of the massed bands looked like, here it is.

Happiness, German and American

The orchestral music identification video ended with an honorable mention by Robert Schumann called "The Happy Farmer."



Here's the American version of the same idea, "The Happy Camper." This is written and performed by the Reverend Horton Heat.



Happy Friday.

Democrats: Trump Doesn't Go Far Enough

So says Vox.

“Trade is at the core of our economic agenda,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement ahead of the formal launch. “We’re going to propose a better deal for American workers — one that puts their well-being at the center of our trade laws, not just the bottom line of huge corporations. Our trade laws have shortchanged American workers for far too long, and we Democrats are aiming to change that.”

The most striking proposal is a call for the creation of an “American Jobs Security Council,” a body that would review and potentially bar foreign purchases of American companies if they are deemed to be a major threat to American jobs.

That kind of scrutiny and interference with foreign investment would be unprecedented for the United States, says Edward Alden, a trade expert and senior fellow at the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations.

I wonder what they'll do when they figure out that his immigration policy is even more popular among their blue-collar target voter demographic than his protectionist policies?

A Pleasant Exercise

This video includes evocative samples from one hundred of the great Western masterpieces of orchestral music. It's a great way to brush up on your recognition of famous pieces, and to rediscover ones you may not have thought of in a while that you'd like to listen to in full.



Enjoy!

Round the Mull of Kintyre

A retelling of the story of how the Kings of Norway lost the Hebrides to the Kings of Scotland.

Some appropriate music.

DB: "Trump taps decorated Army General for White House communications post"

My only regret is that I didn't think of this joke myself.

American Muslim Assimilation is Rapid

So reports Cato on its recent findings. The usual caveats about polling data apply, but they speak to some of them towards the end of the piece -- particularly the claim that these results come from lying to pollsters.

A Moment of Clarity

On the left:

A mere half-year ago... there was a shining moment where millions of Americans flooded the streets in cities across the country to register their rage that an unapologetic misogynist had just been made leader of the free world....

What wasn’t to like?

A lot, as it turns out. The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations.

On the right:

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure.... It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

On the left, about the right:

If conservatism emphasizes the importance of national security, how does one understand the indifference to Russian interference in our election process? If conservatism extols the virtues of family and religion, how does one understand the tolerance of — indeed, if polling is accurate, the still overwhelming Republican support for — a person whose moral failings could lead to his being fired from every job except the one he holds? If conservatism defends free speech, where is the outrage over the attacks on a free press?

Those who argue that students need more exposure to conservative thinking to understand our current political dynamic seem to be missing the fact that, when it matters most, conservatives have stopped being conservative.

Viewed dispassionately, the lesson that the most visible conservatives appear to be teaching our students is that power is more important than principle, that winning is more important than adhering to an ethical code, that compromise is failure, and maybe worst of all, that facts don’t matter.

I won't bother to cite something from the right about the left, since I'm sure you've all read plenty of such articles in the past.

From The Week in Pictures

A Female Imam from Denmark

This story is relentlessly negative about her, but there's some potential for progress here. She may be more hopeful than is warranted, and she may be refusing to look at the parts of her faith that are hard. But that's something most people do -- when was the last time you heard a sermon calling us to focus our faith on the Book of Joshua? Christianity doesn't celebrate it, but treats it as a problem to be explained (or, more likely, ignored). Islam could learn to do that too.

I've not heard of Sherin Khankan before, so I don't know if she's truly on the level. But I'll look into her. Her basic idea, that Islam could use a Martin Luther, is not wrong.

Freedom of Attire

A march in Turkey celebrates the right to choose what you wear -- bikini, hijab, whatever you want.

The crack against the hijab, rightly enough, is that it is often not a free choice. Often it isn't, and it's hard to know when it really is. But one reasonable proxy for when it really is comes when the women wearing it are marching in favor of other women having the right to wear bikinis.

Don't We Just?

Correlation and Causation

The one does not equal the other...

Even as activity inside the Beltway bogged down, the markets have been on an almost nonstop rally since the election.

...but sometimes you've got to suspect it.

Understatement

At least half of this statement is certainly true.

"I don't think Donald Trump has figured out that he chained himself to the Apostle Paul," Drollinger laughed.

This is a White House that could use a little more church.

The Universe Doesn't Care About Your "Purpose"

This is the title of an article in the NYT by a philosopher I've met. He's a Marxist, and the conclusion really follows from Marxism's scientific atheism.

Except maybe it doesn't. Perhaps entropy itself is a kind of purpose: one that gives rise to life and intelligence. So argues a new theory from physics on the origin of life. Metaphysically, the physical theory is like Neoplatonism. Instead of the One 'unfolding' or 'unraveling' through creation, there's a unified purpose (seeking entropy) that is spinning out through the whole universe, resulting in the creation of many forms of life to rush along the entropy. Entropy could be said to be a kind of unraveling, and there is a kind of One in the unified purpose. So a unified font of intelligence arising from this single purpose makes sense too.

Then the Universe really does care about your purpose: your purpose is a way of hastening along entropy, which is a part of the single purpose. Your intelligence is a way of hastening entropy. Your life, and all life, arises from and for the purpose of hastening entropy.

There are significant philosophical consequences from redefining the purpose of the universe from the Aristotelian "seeking to emulate the perfect order of the highest things" to "seeking entropy." That means there are significant practical consequences, too, since basic changes in philosophy work themselves out practically in a myriad of hidden ways.

But it's still better than Marxism, if you must be a scientific atheist. At least it offers a ground for a philosophy that values life, too, which so far the Marxist left hasn't managed to do. "It's kind of good because it feels good, but it isn't really important" is no way to go through life. Thus, why go through life at all, especially if it stops feeling good?

The Police Threat to the 2nd Amendment

David French at National Review.

One officer opened fire on the dog, the other officer fired on the man allegedly holding a gun in the doorway, pointing it at the men approaching his home. As the Washington Post reported on July 26, it was only after the smoke cleared that the officers made their “heart-dropping discovery: They were at the wrong home.”

Lopez died that night. Just like Andrew Scott died in his entrance hall, gun in hand, when the police pounded on the wrong door late one night, Scott opened it, saw shadowy figures outside, and started to retreat back into his house. Police opened fire, and he died in seconds.

Angel Mendez was more fortunate. He “only” lost his leg...

If past precedent holds, it’s likely that the officers who killed Ismael Lopez will be treated exactly like the officers in the Scott and Mendez cases. They won’t be prosecuted for crimes, and they’ll probably even be immune from civil suit, with the court following precedents holding that the officers didn’t violate Lopez’s “clearly established” constitutional rights when they approached the wrong house. After all, officers have their own rights of self-defense. What, exactly, are they supposed to do when a gun is pointed at their face?

In other words, the law typically allows officers to shoot innocent homeowners who are lawfully exercising their Second Amendment rights and then provides these same innocent victims with no compensation for the deaths and injuries that result. This is unacceptable, it’s unjust, and it undermines the Second Amendment.

He has some suggestions for repairs to both law and practice.

Racism and Thought Police

On the one hand, this guy has a great point -- and he's quite right about Twain's work.

On the other hand, just yesterday I saw a residence here in Georgia openly flying a Ku Klux Klan flag. You may not know what a Ku Klux Klan flag looks like, as it's been decades since anyone openly flew them except while wearing hoods to mask their identity. It looks like this.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the state should enforce laws against such display -- laws that would be unconstitutional, as well as a form of thought policing. I only want to say that I liked it better when Klansmen were ashamed to broadcast their affiliation. We don't need the Klan back. It has nothing to offer us that we're going to want in any conceivable future.

Logistics Testing, 2nd MARDIV Style

Health Care Hurts

Most people who aren’t in the individual market, which is the one most affected by ACA, have no idea what the plans look like. It is a market where the costs of the bill’s mandates are more visible, even when subsidized. When I cite exorbitant deductibles, folks tell me to suck it up and pay $3,000. I laugh at a $3,000 deductible. What in the old system was considered a very high deductible is now among the lower available, and premiums for any kind of deductible are high, even with subsidies. Many families have to hit $12,700, and they’re paying a mortgage-sized premium. For many, the purchase becomes hard to justify or supplants an actual mortgage or similar outlays…

My family may be the trade-off that was worth it for you to implement ACA. And I’m actually fine with you thinking that, as long as you don’t pretend we and the rest of the people like us don’t exist. We’re probably never going to stop arguing about this, but arguing responsibly and empathetically is better.

By coincidence, I just today worked out next year's health care insurance -- since I'm losing last year's plan again this year, and yet again need a new one. This one has premiums of only a thousand dollars a month more than my pre-ACA plan, for roughly similar coverage except that the out of pocket max is now around ten grand a year.

Good times, good times. I love to see these Democratic politicians cheering and celebrating on TV. It lets me know how much people like me matter to them.

Dreaming

John McCain, Statesman

Plato's vision of the statesman was of someone who knew better than the common rabble. He had the virtues to know what was best, such as the expertise to make judgments that the inexpert could never make rightly even though the inexpert might be the 'equal' of the expert before the law. The best thing possible would be for such men to be in the positions of power, Plato argued in the Laws:

The old saying, that "equality makes friendship," is happy and also true; but there is obscurity and confusion as to what sort of equality is meant. For there are two equalities which are called by the same name, but are in reality in many ways almost the opposite of one another; one of them may be introduced without difficulty, by any state or any legislator in the distribution of honours: this is the rule of measure, weight, and number, which regulates and apportions them. But there is another equality, of a better and higher kind, which is not so easily recognized. This is the judgment of Zeus; among men it avails but little; that little, however, is the source of the greatest good to individuals and states. For it gives to the greater more, and to the inferior less and in proportion to the nature of each; and, above all, greater honour always to the greater virtue, and to the less less; and to either in proportion to their respective measure of virtue and education. And this is justice, and is ever the true principle of states, at which we ought to aim....

The problem, of course, is that it can be quite difficult to know if you are an expert in political matters. Everyone knows whether or not he or she is an expert at fluid mechanics; but no one thinks they are inexpert at recognizing justice and injustice. Nevertheless, some are, and it is to be hoped that the experts are to be in positions of power to overrule the many.

That is, I suspect, the story that John McCain believes himself to be in right now. It may even be the true story, perhaps. The American people gave the whole Congress and the Presidency to the Republican Party on constant and many-times-repeated promises to unmake Obamacare. McCain stepped in and saved it, against the wishes of the majority, trusting his own judgment and expertise more than the will of the people. Alternatively, he could look as a member of a detached elite that is refusing to keep the very promises that raised it to power, betraying the people's trust.

I tend to differ with McCain where the Constitution is concerned. From my perspective he is prone to setting his own judgment above it, as in Campaign Finance Reform, and as now. The Constitution is silent on the Federal provision of health care; that being the case, under the 10th Amendment, it should be left to the states or to the people. We would be happier if we did not have to fight so hard about these matters where we Americans differ so greatly on what right looks like. Still, like others I can only make an assumption about my expertise on these matters. Certainly the vast majority of Americans do not care very much about the Constitution being upheld with any sort of exactness. They're happy to have some welfare, some Social Security, some Medicare, some Medicaid, some Federal regulations on what kind of crops you grow in your own yard within a single state, or... well, they have endured many things, and some minority of Americans are devoted to voting for ever more such things.

So did he do right or wrong? It depends on how good his judgment is, and what his virtues are. But if he is the statesman resisting the mob it is odd that the mob's judgment has been so steady. Mobs are supposed to be dangerous because they are swayed by passion, but Republican voters have wanted this law killed for seven full years. It may very well be that the considered and stable judgment of the many means that, in this case at least, the many is not merely a mob in need of correction by the wise.

All the same a man has to act on his judgment and live with his conscience, of course.

We Don't Task By Email

There is some misunderstanding of General Dunford's answers to questions about the transgender policy change. What he said was:

I know there are questions about yesterday’s announcement on the transgender policy by the president. There will be no modifications to the current policy until the president’s direction has been received by the secretary of defense and the secretary has issued implementation guidance.

What that means is that a Twitter announcement is not a formal military order, and so no military units will be taking action until a formal order has been issued.

Once in Iraq the Divison's commanding general had a Kuwaiti CULAD -- 'cultural advisor' -- who wanted to mandate that everyone from Brigade come up to be personally instructed by him in how to deal with Iraqi local leaders. Brigade was not buying it, as they already dealt with those leaders every day and had for months. So they just ignored the instructions to report, until finally the CULAD got the G-7 to call down to the Brigade XO and demand to know why they hadn't reported as instructed.

"I'm sorry," the XO said. "We must have missed that order. What FRAGO was it in?"

Er, um, that is, well... we just sent emails about it.

"You're going to have to put that in an order," the XO replied sweetly.

They never did, and so the "mandatory" cultural classes never happened. That was because they never had gotten the commanding general on board with the idea of pulling one of his subordinate units off the battlefield for touchy-feely training on something they were already doing every day. I expect there will be an order here, since the Commander in Chief has stated openly what he intends the policy to be.

Until then, though, this isn't a refusal to obey orders. It's just an acknowledgement that formal orders will be necessary in order to carry this out.

UPDATE: Apparently this is the day for confusion about whether and how the military follows orders.

Responding to a question on whether he would initiate a nuclear strike against China at President Donald Trump's orders “next week,” the admiral bluntly said: “The answer would be: Yes.”

Swift, who has led the Pacific Fleet since 2015, explained: “Every member of the US military has sworn an oath to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and to obey the officers and the president of the United States as commander and chief appointed over us.”

He then struck a conciliatory tone, saying: “This is core to the American democracy and any time you have a military that is moving away from a focus and an allegiance to civilian control, then we really have a significant problem.”

No Transgender Military

Another good decision on military matters today. The military's sole purpose is the defense of a space in the world for which America to be realized. Otherwise, all our rights are just ideas -- ideas in the mind of God, perhaps, but still ideas rather than actual rights.

That means that the military's mission has a kind of priority, which is why sometimes rights are curtailed for military necessity -- think of Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus as an example. I don't oppose dignity for transgender individuals, but the President is right about the massive disruption and expense they would entail in the military service. The military's contribution to transgender dignity is that it enables a society to exist in which they can be treated well, as other societies do not always do. That's a very significant contribution, and all that can reasonably be asked.

UPDATE: It wasn't that long ago that I posted on "rethinking gays in the military," opposition to which made one of these two arguments -- the cultural one. Transgenders are similar to gays in that there aren't very many of them, which means that the military may be able to absorb them with a similarly small degree of shock.

Gays in the military didn't hit at the gender fault line, though. It's already a real issue that women in the service have much lower physical standards to meet than men, and are thus promoted more easily insofar as fitness is taken into account in promotions (which it is). Allowing an underperforming man to slide into that easier-to-pass class is not going to go over well at all. You can imagine a Bradley Manning deciding to get himself promoted ahead of his fellow soldiers by transitioning to a Chelsea Manning. The kind of hard-charging combat soldiers you need to actually win wars will be undercut by that, and they'd notice.

So it's not just women-with-penises in the female showers. It's not just the introduction of sexuality into a professional environment characterized by very little privacy and austere conditions.

Uncited by the President, but something Uncle Jimbo is talking about this morning, is that there is also a potential issue with hormone treatments and combat effectiveness. I'm not aware of the research on this, but I'll take his word pending research that it's a concern.

UPDATE: The Duffel Blog is on the case.

UPDATE: A former trans-woman speaks out in favor of this policy.

UPDATE: More DB.

Divisions in Islam

Syrian refugees in Germany don't much go to mosque, because the only Arabic-speaking mosques they can find are too affiliated with Wahhabi and Salafi traditions. Most of the mosques, though, are inaccessible because they only speak Turkish. The Turks don't speak Arabic at all, and would also be too hardline if they did.

It'd be interesting if the Syrian refugees turned out to be a part of the cure for the radical Islamic movements in Europe.

Old Ironsides

The United States's oldest commissioned warship is afloat again after two years of drydock repairs.

Classic Army Bulls***

This comes from a friend who is actually enlisted USAF, but you know how this stuff works.

I'm not sure if my favorite part is the bad punctuation, the GIANT FONT that presents the independent clause as if it were a clearly ridiculous statement of fact, the tiny font trying to hide the subordinate clause, or the fact that even with the subordinate clause this statement is obviously false. Nobody follows "the low risk guidelines" set forth in doctrine. They just handle their business so it doesn't end up on somebody else's desk. Everyone knows this, because everyone is a member of the community you're describing. You're not fooling anybody with this nonsense, but that doesn't stop the bureaucracy from saying it anyway.

Follow these links for more accurate pictures of drinking in the Army and Marine Corps. It's not that there isn't sometimes a problem. It's that you can't solve a problem like this with bulls***.

New Sheriff in Town

Iran plays its usual games with US Navy ships in what is variously called the Persian or the Arabian Gulf. This time, they are met with warning shots.

There are lots of things about Donald Trump I don't care for, but there are definitely some things I'm glad to see too.

Vice: Turkey's Islamic Feminist Cult

The guy is more normal than not, for a cultist.

I saw the video because I was reading this article on a German woman who joined ISIS, and now wants to come back.

Germany Has a New Capital

The decision on the new capital follows a century's debate.

A Moment of Clarity

A Heroic Philosopher

It's not impossible. Unfortunately, it didn't work out for her, but you have to respect her devotion to reasoned moral duty in the face of danger.

Anne Dufourmantelle entered the water at Pampelonne beach near St Tropez on 21 July after the children got into difficulty.

Witnesses say she immediately tried to reach them but was swept away by a strong current. Attempts to resusciate her after she was recovered failed, according to local media reports.

The children were later rescued by lifeguards, unharmed. It was unclear whether Dufourmantelle knew them.

She wrote several essays on the importance of risk-taking, as well as a book titled Praise of Risk, which was published in 2011.

Good for you, ma'am. It's not the worst thing to die for your principles.

Earning that Citizenship Merit Badge

President Donald Trump apparently feels at home among the Boy Scouts of America. But why not? They're future voters, and in an organization whose mandate takes both citizenship and America seriously.

CNN was not amused, but they rarely are where the President is concerned. I mean, he told an assembled crowd of 35-45,000 boys and their parents, "I said, who the hell wants to speak about politics when I'm in front of the Boy Scouts?" Can you imagine the fun the boys had when he said that? See mom??? You know they loved it.

And, along the way, they've got the opportunity to learn a thing.

Prager U on the Southern Strategy

I don't think she's wrong about anything she says, but I would add that 1994 was the turning point because of the Clinton health care grab. Bill Clinton won so many Southern states in 1992 by portraying himself as a new, centrist Democrat with semi-conservative values. He got no less than Zell Miller, the conservative Democrat and former Marine who would later destroy John Kerry's candidacy with a barn-burning speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, to give the keynote address at the 1992 Democratic National Convention. But then in 1993 and 1994, Clinton proved that he intended to govern as a leftist, especially with his (or his wife's) health care power grab.

The South had seen a lot that it liked in Ronald Reagan's vibrant patriotism and a lot they didn't like in Ted Kennedy's anti-patriotism, but they weren't solidly Republican as yet. The 1992 election proved that. They became solidly in support of the Republican Party only after they saw that the Democrats were committed to socialism and New Class values. Bill Clinton lost the South because he lied to them and betrayed their values, as much as for the reasons the good doctor cites in the video.

Dystopian Drama, Criticized by Joe Bob Briggs

Perhaps because they are the only conservatives doing it, and thus are the only ones criticizing the art community from a place of genuine opposition, Joe Bob Briggs and Mark Steyn are really worth reading when they turn their pens to drama and music respectively.

Here's a taste of Joe Bob's latest criticism of all the "dystopia!" drama that is wildly proliferating in the bluer regions of the nation. The whole is worth reading.

First of all, there’s already a concentration camp, and it’s called Guantanamo. Trump inherited it from two prior presidents, one of whom vowed to close it and then decided he kind of liked concentration camps. The only other president who opened concentration camps was the author of the New Deal. George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek, is writing a book about the one he grew up in....

[A]ll the censorship and surveillance stuff in 1984 sounds like Putin’s Russia and Central Asian countries like Turkmenistan where the secret police are likely to walk into the internet café and start handcuffing people. All the puritanical authoritarianism in The Handmaid’s Tale sounds a lot more like Iran, where women aren’t allowed to divorce their husbands, and Saudi Arabia, where you can get a prison sentence for wearing a miniskirt. There are several dozen countries where they should be staging 1984 and watching The Handmaid’s Tale, but this is not one of them. (Clitoridectomies, anyone? Wrong continent!)

That's an easy point, but a good one. There is some pretty sophisticated critical work as you get deeper.

No, No, Negative

The Johnsons were going to take custody of their grandson to keep him from going into foster care. When they went to pick up their grandson, William, a retired, disabled Marine with a Concealed Pistol License (CPL), was searched for a firearm. He was not carrying a firearm at the time. At that point, agency officials told the Johnsons that they would be required to provide all firearms’ serial numbers to the agency as part of a registry. When Johnson questioned agency workers, he was given a surprising response.

“If you want to care for your grandson you will have to give up some of your constitutional rights,” a MDHHS worker retorted.

When the Johnsons appeared before a Gogebic County Court judge, the judge reiterated the agency worker’s statement.

“We know we are violating numerous constitutional rights here, but if you do not comply, we will remove the boy from your home,” the judge said.

There's a judge who needs to be removed from his bench and placed in a prison instead. Those "Family Service" workers should go with him. Conspiracy to violate any constitutional rights, let alone numerous ones, should be a Federal offense with serious prison time for any government official.

"Nudity Isn't Sexual"

I'm willing to grant the equality claim, but "Nudity isn't sexual"? What exactly would qualify as sexual, then?

There seems to be a lot of basic denial of reality going on these days.

UPDATE:

It's fine.  It's just a professional environment, you know.



This video is actually about breast cancer in men, believe it or not. You have to watch it for a while to get that.

Res Ipsa Loquitur

The Simpsons on the Reformation

The Yellow Tape of Disapproval

In Canada, an object lesson in how to do things better has been taped off as 'unsafe' and will likely be demolished.

A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards.

Retired mechanic Adi Astl says he took it upon himself to build the stairs after several neighbours fell down the steep path to a community garden in Tom Riley Park, in Etobicoke, Ont. Astl says his neighbours chipped in on the project, which only ended up costing $550 – a far cry from the $65,000-$150,000 price tag the city had estimated for the job....

Astl says he hired a homeless person to help him and built the eight steps in a matter of hours.

"Regulation standards" apparently means "we need to get paid bigtime."

Give a homeless guy a job, do the job at 1.3% of the minimum estimated cost, and all it gets you is your stairs torn down at taxpayer expense so they can build the expensive stairs they wanted. I guess he's lucky he's not being thrown in jail for interfering with an exercise of government power.

Different Types of Veterans

Language warning, as usual with the vet videos. That last one is a sympathetic character.

In the Senate, Disasters Follow Disasters

The Republicans' health care bill had few good points, but it would have broken us free from the idea that Democrats had to save Obamacare. Whatever problems it created could be fixed because we wouldn't have this great white elephant to protect.

The far better plan, to repeal and not replace Obamacare with anything whatsoever, died because of three Senators -- both Vox and Vice think it's very amusing that they're all women -- who simply refused to consider that an option. Every single Republican ran on repealing Obamacare, but when it comes time to do it, these three have decided that it can only be done if we have some other form of Federalized control of the market to offer instead.

If Republican Senators have internalized the idea that we must force coverage of pre-existing conditions at non-market rates, there's no possibility of a better solution on health care. We will have only worse solutions.

One Jane Orient, M.D., wants you to know that this is really just about control. The more the government controls your health care, the more it can force you to live the way it wants.

She's right.

In Britain, home of the highest rated health care service in the world -- rated, of course, by advocates of socialized medicine -- the NHS announced last September that it would deny routine surgery to the obese and smokers in "almost all cases." That plan was put on hold, but appears to be back this year.

Obesity is a pre-existing condition, isn't it? But there are shortages, you see, because everyone's entitled and there isn't enough to go around. Since the market can't be allowed to settle that -- pre-existing conditions shouldn't cost more! -- instead the solution will be rationing by government bureaucrats who judge your worth as a person based on how much they agree with your lifestyle and fitness choices.

These people aren't going to solve the problem that not all care can be afforded. They're just going to take control over who gets care. That will be used to punish, of course.

The Net Neutrality Campaign

I thought I might write about this, but Robert Tracinski has saved me the trouble.

Mozilla and a bunch of other internet-dependent companies like Netflix and Amazon have been campaigning to get the FCC to keep the "net neutrality" regulations implemented under Obama, warning that without it big companies may restrict "free speech" on the internet. (This from the company that burned Brendan Eich at the stake for having the "wrong" views on marriage.)

Wikipedia explains the basic claim of these companies:

Proponents of net neutrality, in particular those in favor of reclassification of broadband to "common carrier", have many concerns about the potential for discriminatory service on the part of providers such as Comcast. Common-carriage principles require network operators to serve the public regardless of geographical location, district income levels, or usage. Telecommunications companies are required to provide services, such as phone access, to all consumers on the premise that it is a necessity that should be available to all people equally. If the FCC's ability to regulate this aspect is removed, providers could cease to offer services to low income neighborhoods or rural environments. Those in favor of net neutrality often cite that the internet is now an educational necessity, and as such should not be doled out at the discrimination of private companies, whose profit-oriented models cause a conflict of interest.

Tracinski explains what he believes is the real conflict over "net neutrality":

... The Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to turn Internet service providers into regulated utilities ... was never about stopping them from controlling content. It’s actually about money. It’s about who pays for all of that bandwidth we’re using. To be more specific, it’s about trying to make certain unpopular companies (like Comcast) pay for it, so that other, more popular companies (like Netflix) don’t have to.

The signature case cited as the reason we need net neutrality was the accusation that several big service providers were slowing down people’s Netflix downloads. And you don’t mess with the Netflix download speeds of this nation’s cultural elite.

But if they did this, the ISPs didn’t do it to show their disapproval of “House of Cards.” The real issue was a dispute between Netflix’s service provider, Cogent, and bigger ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, whom Cogent accused of “refus[ing] to upgrade the equipment that handles ISP traffic across the country.” Translation: everyone suddenly wanting to download all their television viewing off the Internet means the ISPs need to spend a lot of money on upgrades, and the big ISPs were asking Cogent and Netflix to foot part of the bill. This is a dispute over who should bear the cost of the Web’s considerable infrastructure, and net neutrality was the government coming in to put a thumb on the scales and dictate the winners and losers.

NYT: Germany's Newest Intellectual Anti-Hero

According to Christopher Caldwell in the New York Times, Rolf Peter Sieferle was a highly respected German historian before his death last September. After his death, a collection of his observations on Germany called "Finis Germania" was published and he seems to have become a pariah in intellectual circles. However, his book has become a best-seller in Germany.

Sieferle sounds like an interesting man:

A socialist in his youth like most German intellectuals of the 1968 generation, Mr. Sieferle was drifting out of sync with that tradition by the 1990s. He came increasingly to aim his sarcasm at naïve idealists. At the height of Germany’s refugee crisis two summers ago, he wrote, “A society that can no longer distinguish between itself and the forces that would dissolve it is living morally beyond its means.” The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described him as “embittered, humorless, ever more isolated.” 

... 

On the other hand, “Finis Germaniae” (“the end of Germany”) is a familiar and resonant phrase. (Why Mr. Sieferle chose to drop the final “e” in his title has been much discussed.) The phrase captures a fear, or paranoia, about national decline that has been widespread in German history — and explains much about that history. Prosperous though Germany is, one can see reasons such fears might be reviving. Germany is senescent, with a median age of about 46. It is helping construct a European Union meant to supplant the German government in many of its traditional competencies. Germans appear to want to disappear. This, in fact, is the thesis that drives Mr. Sieferle’s passionate book on migration. 

... 

After World War II, the Allied occupiers, as Mr. Sieferle sees it, saddled Germans with a false idea of their own history — the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, a fundamental difference between it and the West. That may describe Russia, but not Germany, and Germany’s modernity is painful for Westerners to face. “If Germany belonged to the most progressive, civilized, cultivated countries,” he writes, “then ‘Auschwitz’ means that, at any moment, the human ‘progress’ of modernity can go into reverse.” 

Mr. Sieferle neither denies nor minimizes the Holocaust. ... But Mr. Sieferle is critical of Germany’s postwar culture of Holocaust memory, which he argues has taken on the traits of a religion. The country’s sins are held to be unique and absolute, beyond either redemption or comparison. “The First Commandment,” he writes, “is ‘Thou shalt have no Holocausts before me.’ ” Hitler, in retrospect, turns out to have done a paradoxical thing: He bound Germans and Jews together in a narrative for all time. In an otherwise relativistic and disenchanted world, Mr. Sieferle writes, Germans appear in this narrative as the absolute enemies of our common humanity, as a scapegoat people. The role is hereditary. There are Germans whose grandparents were not born when the war ended, yet they, too, must take on the role. 

... 

Mr. Sieferle’s is a complex argument. It is linked to his concern, in “Das Migrationsproblem,” with the challenges of mass migration. He believed that Germany’s self-demonization had left it unable to say anything but yes to a million or so migrants seeking entry to Europe in 2015 and that such a welcome was unsustainable. Whether he was right or wrong, this was a concern shared by many Germans, and not necessarily an idle expression of animus.

I am always wary of commenting on intellectual works from other cultures published in languages I can't read, so please take my comments as tentative.

First, I had not heard the idea that there was something premodern about Germany, but it would make sense that Progressives would claim that. But Germany was instrumental in shaping modernity; if anything, it has been one of the most modern of nations.

I think Japan, too, suffers from the way it handles the memory and history of WWII, and they, too, seem to have a desire to disappear. Japan and Germany both seem to have developed a sense that their nations have done uniquely evil things. However, that seems to be SOP for Progressives: I feel they want us to believe that about the US as well. I think it's part of destroying the soul of the nation so they can take over the body.

I think it would be healthy for both Germany and Japan to develop a new sense of patriotism. I can't say nationalism, because for both nationalism is tied to a "blood and soil" idea of the nation that I believe leads to racism. But a love and appreciation for all of the good things their nation has done would be a good thing, I think, along with a desire to see their nations continue. That's healthy, whereas ongoing, generations-long self-flagellation is not.

Snopes: The Lies of Donald Trump's Critics

Snopes has an article up examining the issue of anti-Trump lies headlined "The Lies of Donald Trump, and How They Shape His Many Personas: An in-depth analysis of the false allegations and misleading claims made against the 45th president since his inauguration."

The article begins:

Broadly speaking, most of the falsehoods levelled against Trump fall into one or more of four categories, each of them drawing from and feeding into four public personas inhabited by the President.
They are:

• Donald Trump: International Embarrassment

• Trump the Tyrant

• Donald Trump: Bully baby

• Trump the Buffoon.

Some of these claims are downright fake, entirely fabricated by unreliable or dubious web sites and presented as satire, or otherwise blatantly false. But the rest — some of which have gained significant traction and credibility from otherwise serious people and organizations — provide a fascinating insight into the tactics and preoccupations of the broad anti-Trump movement known as “the Resistance,” whether they were created by critics of the President or merely shared by them.
Generally speaking, we discovered that they are characterized and driven by four types of errors of thought:

• Alarmism

• A lack of historical context or awareness

• Cherry-picking of evidence (especially visual evidence)

• A failure to adhere to Occam’s Razor — the common-sense understanding that the simplest explanation for an event or behavior is the most likely.

Infused throughout almost all these claims, behind their successful dissemination, is confirmation bias: the fuel that drives the spread of all propaganda and false or misleading claims among otherwise sensible and skeptical people. Confirmation bias is the tendency to look for, find, remember and share information that confirms the beliefs we already have, and the tendency to dismiss, ignore and forget information that contradicts those beliefs. It is one of the keys to why clever people, on all sides of every disagreement, sometimes believe stupid things that aren’t true.

The analysis is organized by the four "personas" Trump's enemies have created for him and seems good to me.

You Don't Say

Headline, Washington Post: "A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news for liberals."

Time for "Acid Control"

The British decided to ban guns, so people began stabbing each other. So the British decided to ban knives. Now, people are carrying around acid and throwing it in each other's faces.

The reason acid has become such a popular weapon is because it’s easier to carry than a knife — which has a higher chance of being found by law enforcement — and it’s cheap and accessible.

Last month one London acid attack victim told VICE News: “These scars are not going to disappear. I’m going to have to live with what those two individuals done, whenever I look in the mirror. Whenever I have a happy moment in my life, it’s going to be sort of scarred.”

The 'control' model doesn't get rid of the real source of the evil. It just makes evil look for another tool.

"Safe"

What exactly does it mean for a 'man to be safe'? Is that really something a man ought to be?

Cf. this old post on the virtue of at least older men being dangerous.

The author never defines her terms, although in the last usage she specifies that she doesn't feel "emotionally safe" with sons who take offense at the way she talks and writes about them. I presume she does feel physically safe with her children, even though she has offended them. If you can offend someone and embarrass them publicly and still be physically safe with them, that's pretty safe. I'm not sure it's plausible to suggest that even a son, let alone a "man" of any other sort, has a duty to protect your emotions -- especially not while they feel like you are mistreating them. That quality is known as "standing up for one's self," and it used to be thought a quality worthy of a man.

Indeed many years ago, I read a book called Iron John that interpreted an old Germanic myth as a set of lessons on how to become a man. One part of that book that struck me as funny was a part where Iron John has to steal a key from his mother in order to attain manhood. I thought it was odd because stealing is wrong, and how could it be a necessary part of attaining manhood to engage in something like theft? But over time I came to see what the author meant: to become a man and not a boy, it is necessary to take back something that your mother has long regarded as properly her own, an authority she has laid claim to and exercised for a long time for what she believes is your own good. The boy, as a youth becoming a man, has to lay claim to that whether she likes it or not. He has to take the key, and if she will not give it, then he must steal it or rob her of it. But it turns out that this is not wrong, because the key is his by right. She has held it in trust, and sometimes some mothers will try to hold it too long.

To claim the young men are not safe because they stole the key is to fail to understand. It is to fail to understand that they had the right, and it is to fail to understand that 'safe' is not what men are meant to be. Men, like ships, are meant for something else.

UPDATE: Valerie's comment reminded me of a thing I'd seen recently. To ask if men should be safe implies asking if women should be. I doubt that anyone has ever suggested it, not in the same sense of "safe." Indeed, there are many who value women in part because they are dangerous.

The Regulatory Instinct

Hunters attained a small victory in avoiding having sound-boosting aids classified as medical devices and made prescription-only.

The Democrats’ pieces of legislation would force hearing amplifying devices created for hunters or recreational bird watchers, for example, to be regulated by the federal government, so sound amplification products (PSAP) for recreational purposes would have to be regulated like present medically prescribed hearing devices.

Understand that what these things are is nothing more than a microphone, a set of protective earmuffs, and a speaker wired to the microphone through a rheostat that allows you to boost sound to levels you find helpful. The headset typically already controls maximum volume because these things double as hearing protection for hunters. Thus, there's no danger of hearing loss -- certainly less from a stereo system for music. The high-decibel gunshot will be tamped down to the same levels as everything else.

There is no reason why the government or any doctor needs to be in between you and your ability to buy any of this technology. It's just part of that impulse to regulate everything we do.

There's way too much of this that goes on. People with sleep apnea have to pay thousands of dollars to get a diagnosis so that they can buy breathing machines that are nothing more than a plastic tube/mask assembly, a fan, a filter, and a control board. In the old days you might have built one out of parts from Radio Shack plus a medical supply store. Now it's Rx-only, which means it's expensive and unavailable to many who could benefit from it.

And then we hear that "health care is too expensive!", so we need -- of course -- more government regulation!

No more of this nonsense.

"If P Then Q" does not imply "If Not P Then Not Q"

Just because bad politics can drive you to drink does not mean that you can fix politics by stopping the drinking.

Over 73 percent of Democrats would give up alcohol for the rest of their life if it meant President Trump would be impeached tomorrow, according to a survey released on Thursday by a drug and alcohol rehabilitation group.

Only 17 percent of Republicans would give up alcohol for Trump’s impeachment. The poll also found that nearly 31 percent of Republicans would give up drinking if it meant the media stopped writing negative things about President Trump.

Sorry. You can give up drinking if you want, and it might improve your health outcomes -- or it might not. But it's not going to do anything to change your political environment.

UPDATE: By the way, if you're trying to understand health outcomes from drinking, this article is quite helpful.

So at what level does alcohol consumption become equally as dangerous as alcohol abstinence? It appears that the cut off point is somewhere between 20 and 40 US standard drinks per week. We will split the difference and say that it probably lies at around 30 US standard drinks (420 grams of ethanol) per week, a far cry from the puritanical US government limits of 7 for women and 14 for men. Current government limits may have far more to do with the politics of the addiction treatment lobby than any relation to scientific evidence.

That recommendation happens to line up with an earlier study out of Australia, which occasioned a poem.

Opioids and the Government

Even Vox has noticed -- those opioids are coming from the government's plans.

We've talked about this before. The Federal Government could largely end the opioid crisis by refusing to continue paying for it.

I'm Sure This Will Work Out Great

When we talk about morality, we talk about reason, about the experience of pleasure or pain, and about the virtues. People who make robots appear to think that that morality comes down to a combination of culture and guilt.

Rosa views AI as a child, a blank slate onto which basic values can be inscribed, and which will, in time, be able to apply those principles in unforeseen scenarios. The logic is sound. Humans acquire an intuitive sense of what’s ethically acceptable by watching how others behave (albeit with the danger that we may learn bad behaviour when presented with the wrong role models).

GoodAI polices the acquisition of values by providing a digital mentor, and then slowly ramps up the complexity of situations in which the AI must make decisions. Parents don’t just let their children wander into a road, Rosa argues. Instead they introduce them to traffic slowly. “In the same way we expose the AI to increasingly complex environments where it can build upon previously learned knowledge and receive feedback from our team.”...

To help robots and their creators navigate such questions on the battlefield, Arkin has been working on a model that differs from that of GoodAI. The “ethical adapter”, as it’s known, seeks to simulate human emotions, rather than emulate human behaviour, in order to help robots to learn from their mistakes. His system allows a robot to experience something similar to human guilt. “Guilt is a mechanism that discourages us from repeating a particular behaviour,” he explains. It is, therefore, a useful learning tool, not only in humans, but also in robots.

“Imagine an agent is in the field and conducts a battle damage assessment both before and after firing a weapon,” explains Arkin. “If the battle damage has been exceeded by a significant proportion, the agent experiences something analogous to guilt.” The sense of guilt increases each time, for example, there’s more collateral damage than was expected. “At a certain threshold the agent will stop using a particular weapon system. Then, beyond that, it will stop using weapons systems altogether.”

I'm sure you'll have a lot of success getting that military contract you're after with a robot that will teach itself to stop using its weapons systems in the middle of combat.

There seems to be a complete lack of awareness that morality isn't just what you're taught, plus what you feel. The closest thing they get to admitting that moral principles exist is to run them down as a source of moral norms, because they don't change with the culture. Moral relativity isn't just the assumption, it's assumed to be morally good.

If that's true, of course, then there's at least one thing that is good in and of itself. What makes it good? When you AI makers start to grapple with that question, you'll begin to figure out why the games you're playing are not adequate.

David Brooks Gets One Right

...and in the process, of course, he comes in for ruthless mockery from those who want to defend the barriers he is trying to break down.

Taken out of context, his remarks about the discomfort of a high-school-educated friend with European sandwiches sound pretentious. But in context, it should be obvious that he's trying to solve the problem represented by this kind of pretentiousness. He's trying to open a road for ordinary Americans to cross those social barriers. I quote at length to give that context.

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.” ...

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality....

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible.

That's all correct. This comes after the earlier parts of the column on breaking down regulatory burdens in zoning laws (to make it easier for poorer Americans to live in better school districts), and on breaking down barriers in higher education that make it harder for poorer Americans to attain success there. Normally, when a left-leaning guy like Brooks calls attention to a problem, it's to propose a government program. Here, he's gone as far as suggesting the heresy of stripping layers of government away.

He's also right that many Americans -- I think of my father, who was college educated in East Tennessee -- would be totally uncomfortable in that restaurant, and would find the offer to go for Mexican a huge relief. And yet Mexican food is just as loaded with foreign terminology as French or Italian food. The word "capicollo" is no more impenetrable than the word "chimichanga." The point isn't that folks are xenophobic or incapable of appreciating foreign foods.

The point is about raising barriers designed to keep ordinary people out. Once the ordinary guy learns to order a "croque-monsieur" instead of a "grilled ham and cheese sandwich," they'll change the game and start offering only something else. And you'll learn about this code change if you listen to all the right radio programs on NPR, or the right podcasts, or have the right social groups to walk you through them. The barrier stays up, and the unwelcome remain not welcome.

I Have Read That This Works Wonders

Saying the strategy was certain to attract the most eligible men of the highest repute, relationship experts recommended Friday that single women frustrated with their current romantic options try bathing in an open stream until the ideal suitor glimpses them through the trees.... [P]rofessional dating coach Priscilla Adams [added] that women should choose a location with a small waterfall cascading lightly into a natural bathing pool, where a man out riding his horse or returning from a distant war might catch sight of them from the stream’s wooded banks.

Will Trump Kill the Bourbon Boom?

From the NYT:

If President Trump follows through on his threat to impose tariffs on steel imports, expect to see an immediate response from the European Union — including retaliatory tariffs on, of all things, bourbon. 

... 

Still, why bourbon? Trade officials aren’t stupid; when they retaliate, they hit where it hurts — which is not always obvious. 

Consider a recent trade battle between the United States and the European Union. In 2009 Washington imposed a 300 percent tariff on Roquefort cheese to force Brussels to lift a ban on American beef. Roquefort cheese may not be a strategic European industry, but it’s the lifeblood of many French villages, and the tariff was among the reasons the union eased the ban. 

Kentucky and Tennessee face similar financial burdens if trade talks go south and countries target American distilled spirits. Thanks to the $1 billion in spirits that America now exports, over the next six years Kentucky distilleries will invest more than $1 billion in expansions and new facilities.

... 

It’s not just about tariffs. When you’re selling “America” abroad, you need deals in place to make sure no one else is copying the brand. But absent trade agreements, other countries are free to sell their own versions of American products. Like Champagne and cognac, bourbon’s name protection relies largely on trade deals that set standards and definitions; without them, foreign distillers are surely tempted to slap “bourbon” on anything they want.

Clearly, Trump is a threat to the republic that must be taken seriously. (Yes, sarcasm.)

This article is interesting because it highlights some of the intricacies of international trade today. On the other hand, there is a faint whiff of "Trump supporters are voting against their own interests" here as well, though maybe not. The author is Fred Minnick, author of “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey,” so its in his wheelhouse, I suppose.

In Praise of Sir Gawain

An Arthurian discussion.

Chief Justice Roberts: I Wish You Injustice

And just to make sure we got his wish, he rewrote Obamacare to save it -- twice!

Oh, maybe that isn't what he meant.

"Now, the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you," Roberts said. "I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty."

Well, wish fulfilled, either way.

Hardship can build virtue, but it doesn't necessarily do so. Suffering injustice might make you more likely to value justice, or it might make you more likely to decide that a rigged game is meant to be cheated.

CNN: TRUMP RIPS MARINE'S HAT OFF AFTER ASSAULTING HIM

H/t: Vid.me.

The Righteous Judgment Of....

Richard Fernandez:

Within its bubble the Left's control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it's about them....

The search is on for the regicide.

The only thing one can be sure of is that the Republican Party didn't cause it; nor did their tame and feeble publications. In fact, not even publications like Breitbart, valiant though their efforts were, can claim credit. Trump couldn't have done it either, since the proud tower that Gerlenter describes would have been impervious to the mere touch of the orange-hued real estate mogul without some other factor in play.

Yet most of us know who did it, though we hesitate to name the obvious suspect. The Left, even in its downfall, has stilled our tongues. The word comes to the edge of our lips before we choke it back, fearful even now of the ridicule and abuse we will get should we blurt it. That word is God. God killed the Left. Of course one could legitimately use some other term. "Reality," "consequences," the "laws of nature," "economics," even "truth" will do.

Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The thesis was "liberalism," by which I mean the classical liberalism that was America's founding. The antithesis was communism. The synthesis was what Walter Mead calls "the Blue Model," which dominated for so long as Fernandez notes.

But the synthesis is just a new thesis; a new antithesis arises. Even for the Marxist, Hegel is hiding in the background. There is never an end of history.

But it's really the next synthesis that we're looking for.

Dúnadan

"I thought you knew enough Elvish at least to know dún-adan: Man of the West, Númenórean."

― Bilbo Baggins

"The West" is hardly a new term in need of explanation. It applies to that part of civilization -- or, if you like, to that civilization --- which is philosophically rooted both in Athens and Jerusalem. Contra the author, 'race' has nothing to do with it. Aristotle would have considered the Germans and the Jews as much barbarians as he did the Celts; nor did the Jews of Jesus' day see any 'racial' kinship with Greeks or any of the others. However, the author is correct to suggest that religious heritage is important to the West. Much of the West may now be post-Christian, and not Jewish either, but even that part of the West owes an unfathomable debt to Jerusalem. Excluding India from the West is not a sneer at Hindus, but a recognition that they are simply not indebted in the same way.

I cannot believe that this term, constantly in use throughout my lifetime, is in need of explanation to audiences today. I must regard the attempt to redefine the term as hostile to the truth, a truth known (and well known) to everyone who will now be involved in the debate over the proper domain of "the West." Much will be revealed by where one chooses to fall on the question of whether or not to redefine the term as a sort of racism or religious chauvinism.

One thing that Trump's team is certainly right about is that the West needs, and merits, a defense. I count myself among its defenders.

Linda Sarsour Would Like Your Attention to Her Full Remarks

I'm sure you've heard of Ms. Sarsour, if not before today than following her speech at the Islamic Society of North America. She would like you to watch the whole thing before making up your mind about it. It's about 24 minutes long, if you're inclined to do so; follow the link above.

I've lately been revisiting my opinion of Ms. Sarsour's reputation. What I had always heard about her from right-wingers and reform-minded Muslims was that she was an American Islamist who hated Jews and Israel; and I would have gone on believing that if I hadn't lately read a profile of her from a left-wing site claiming that she is an unprincipled politician who has no grasp of Islamism (which they approve of, this group) and who loves Jews and Israel -- or at least is willing to play very nice with them in order to advance her political career in NYC.

That reminded me enough of Chesterton's approach to criticism of Jesus and Christianity -- 'Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who are growing thin might feel he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance' -- as to be inclined to give her a look and see where she really stands. This is the speech she wants to stand on, by her own remarks; see what you think of it.

Revel in the Smell of Cordite

After a pleasant evening of shooting off fireworks and other explosives -- the highlight of the evening was some for-entertainment-only mortars, which came complete with a cardboard launching tube -- it's nice to crack a beer and see everyone else enjoying themselves too.

Reuters:

The Associated Press:

As many in the United States celebrate the Fourth of July holiday, some minorities have mixed feelings about the revelry of fireworks and parades in an atmosphere of tension on several fronts.

How do you celebrate during what some people of color consider troubling times?

There are no good answers forthcoming, but there is some advice from U.S. News (and World Reports?) on how not to celebrate during what 'some people of color' consider troubling times.

Request denied. Enjoy your freedom.

Happy Independence Day

Remember what we celebrate.