A Step Closer to Shieldmaidens

A study making the rounds has gotten attention because it has confirmed, again, that Vikings sometimes buried women with what researchers had taken to be "male" grave goods. The study's authors are taking their findings a little further than the evidence suggests, and journalists are of course going even further than that.

The study holds:

Already in the early middle ages, there were narratives about fierce female Vikings fighting alongside men. Although, continuously reoccurring in art as well as in poetry, the women warriors have generally been dismissed as mythological phenomena (Gardeła, 2013; Jesch, 1991; Jochens, 1996).... The existence of female warriors in Viking Age Scandinavia has been debated among scholars (Gardeła, 2013; Jesch, 1991; Jochens, 1996). Though some Viking women buried with weapons are known, a female warrior of this importance has never been determined and Viking scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the agency of women with weapons (Hernæs, 1984; Moen, 2011) (S1). The osteological analysis triggered questions concerning sex, gender and identity among Viking warriors.

The journalists got all the way here:

The remains of a powerful viking — long thought to be a man — was in fact a real-life Xena Warrior Princess, a study released Friday reveals.

So what this study does show is that high-ranking women in Viking society sometimes were buried with swords and other warrior-oriented grave goods. What it does not show, which both the study's authors and the journalists wish to show, is that the women in question fought in medieval battles. Like other later women of Northern extraction -- the Norman Philippa of Hainault, for example -- they may have commanded forces at a distance from the battle, in the manner of nobility or royalty. The Viking sagas and legends certainly seem to show that as well as the shieldmaidens we find sometimes, especially Lagertha from Saxo Grammaticus' mytho-history.

What you would want to show that someone was a fighter is archaological evidence similar to this from the grave of an English knight:

Four of the man's ribs showed healed fractures that may have occurred simultaneously, suggesting a single instance of trauma, researchers wrote in the pathology report. Another four ribs were in the process of healing, indicating that the man was still recovering from the injuries when he died. The other two damaged ribs also show evidence of trauma, and his left lower leg has an unusual twisting break, one that could have been caused by a direct blow or a rolled ankle, according to the report.

“This image of the male warrior in a patriarchal society was reinforced by research traditions and contemporary preconceptions. Hence, the biological sex of the individual was taken for granted,” the study authors wrote. Fair enough; let's not make the equal and opposite mistake by assuming that a person buried in a rich grave with warlike trappings was actually on the battlefield. This grave gives us a woman associated with war, but not necessarily a shieldmaiden.

Marching through Georgia

Macon, yesterday. Notice that both sides of Interstate 75 are now northbound.

You don't have to march all the way through Georgia, though. Georgia has opened its state parks for free camping, no pet fees if you're traveling with animals. NASCAR has opened the Atlanta Speedway and, if you want to press on a little further, Talledegah for the same purpose.

Before and after

You can see our lot before and after the storm here.  Could be worse, obviously; the buildings are fine.  The poor trees!  But they're already leafing out, so although many are now missing, the ones that are left won't be all "Halloweeny," as one neighbor put it to me today.

We continue to organize the relief effort. I put out a request for chainsaw aid on a Texas bankruptcy-lawyer forum earlier this week, and today got an email from a lawyer I worked with long ago, saying his son was now at university in New York and wanted to come with his fraternity to provide a chainsaw crew.  Now that overwhelms me, in part because this lawyer and I had an extremely contentious relationship.  Ditto a fellow who bought the lot across the street and got crosswise with several of our neighbors and us, who showed up with an inexhaustible crew who have cleared I don't know how many lots.  Several months ago he put his lot up for sale and apparently reconsidered building here.  Now I hope he'll change his mind.  He puts me to shame.  Many things are putting me to shame this week.  God puts the right challenges in our path; apparently He knows what He's doing.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others

Waters reeled off a long list of domestic terror, including the Ruby Ridge standoff in 1992, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting 2009, the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting in 2012, the Los Angeles International Airport shooting in 2013, the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting in 2015, the Portland train attack this year and Charlottesville.

One of these things just doesn't belong.

The Horn of Buckland, Blowing

There are four famines in Africa, CSIS notes.

If there were a global siren to signal that a humanitarian crisis has tipped over the threshold to a catastrophic scale, it would be ringing loudly right now. Today, 20.7 million people are starving or at risk of starving in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, and northeastern Nigeria.

The media, particularly U.S. domestic outlets, have not given this situation the attention it so desperately warrants. The world is too distracted and distraught over political drama, (un)natural disasters, and protracted conflicts. Understandably so.

Indeed. We are about to have our second major hurricane in a few weeks, likely followed by a third. The northwest is literally on fire. Our southern neighbor, Mexico, just had an 8.0 earthquake and typhoon, while there is yet another hurricane in the Gulf. North Korea just conducted what may be a fusion bomb test, and is threatening to wipe out America's electrical grid in a move that a Congressional study estimated would kill 90% of Americans.

In spite of all that, the United States will be at the leading edge of whatever sort of response these famines in Africa gets. You may not hear much about it, but AFRICOM and SOCAF will be there, as will USAID and our State Department. We'll also be helping Mexico, and the Caribbean nations afflicted by these storms. North Korea will not be there, nor its allies, but we will.

The Hateful AI?

A new artificial intelligence test shows that it's actually quite easy to pick out who is gay and who is not from facial features; it's just that human brains aren't evolved to do it well. A computer that's told what to look for can do it 91% of the time.

When the software reviewed five images per person, it was even more successful – 91% of the time with men and 83% with women. Broadly, that means “faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived and interpreted by the human brain”, the authors wrote.

The paper suggested that the findings provide “strong support” for the theory that sexual orientation stems from exposure to certain hormones before birth, meaning people are born gay and being queer is not a choice. The machine’s lower success rate for women also could support the notion that female sexual orientation is more fluid.

So that's interesting, but it set off some people worrying quietly about the ramifications.

With billions of facial images of people stored on social media sites and in government databases, the researchers suggested that public data could be used to detect people’s sexual orientation without their consent.

It’s easy to imagine spouses using the technology on partners they suspect are closeted, or teenagers using the algorithm on themselves or their peers. More frighteningly, governments that continue to prosecute LGBT people could hypothetically use the technology to out and target populations.

They don't mention any names, but consider how such technology might be employed by Iran. Or Uganda.

Unfair competition

A hilarious New Yorker article, which I won't link to because it's linked and summarized in this better one, complains that volunteerism causes people to doubt that they need to depend on government.  Funny, that's just why I like volunteerism and strong private institutions.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells conceded that the boatmen were “heroes,” but complained that Texas’s “libertarian” culture, leading to an “insufficiency of Houston’s city planning” and “willful ignorance of climate change” on the part of politicians, had made it necessary to rely on private citizens. “There is a cyclic pattern to the erosion of faith in government, in which politics saps the state’s capacity to protect people, and so people put their trust in other institutions (churches; self-organizing volunteer navies), and are more inclined to support anti-government politics,” Wallace-Wells wrote.

Doesn't seem fair, I admit.  If people had no alternative to government, they might be more afraid to oppose it.  It's similar to the real (if unstated) argument in favor of monopolies.  Choice is so inconvenient.

The End of the Obama Era

Two quite different pieces today arrive at the same conclusion: Trump's promise is to reverse the Obama legacy. One is celebratory; the other argues, quite seriously, that it will potentially bring about the end of the world.

From the first, a WSJ piece subtitled, "President Trump visits Cowboyistan":

Proudly standing in front of the Andeavor Refinery outside Bismarck, he talked about ending restrictions on U.S. oil production, approving pipelines and dominating world markets. Come to think of it, this speech may have annoyed Vladimir Putin almost as much as Mr. Obama.

Also irking Mr. Obama no doubt was a central message of the speech: The U.S. corporate income tax rate has to come down to a competitive level. Just about every legislative leader in Washington of either party has been telling Mr. Trump that it’s not realistic to cut the rate all the way to 15% from its current 35% at the federal level, but there he was in North Dakota mentioning 15% again....

This column has mentioned the abundance of recent research showing how lowering corporate income tax rates drives wages higher. And higher wages could pull more disaffected former workers back into the economy.

This may have something to do with the reception the President received on Wednesday. A headline in the Bismarck Tribune reads, “North Dakota crowd cheers Trump’s call for tax reform, promise of competitive edge.”

The cheers aren’t only in North Dakota.

Remember what they are celebrating about Trump as you consider the second, titled, "The First White President." This piece argues that Trump's election is about nothing other than a move to restore "white supremacism." The only problem is that, as far as I can tell, the author believes that the whole nation is an expression of white supremacism: he laments the Founding, even, in these terms.

With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds....

...[Trumpist rhetoric] aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of “the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history.”

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own.

The author ends the piece, as mentioned, by invoking the literal end of the world.

The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump.... It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense, the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the whole world. There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W. E. B. Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization” or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggeration. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump. The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous president—and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are implicated in it.

It is odd, philosophically speaking, to claim both that slavery is the foundation of modern civilization and also that it represents a singular disaster for modern civilization. If it was, as argued, the necessary precondition for the rise of the modern world, then it cannot also be a disaster for that world; it can be a disaster for James that his mother was an alcoholic, but not that his mother and not someone else was his mother, as without that particular mother James would not be James. Insofar as James is to live with a healthy soul, he must come to terms with the debt he owes his mother for his very existence even as he wishes that she had been better than she was.

Slavery was clearly a disaster in many senses, and for vast numbers of people. The modern world cannot regard slavery as a disaster for it, though, except by disputing that slavery was a necessary part of its coming-to-be. That is one thing the author of this piece would not countenance; it is too central to his worldview and philosophy.

What, then, does this leave for anyone who would be an American except to take James' path? If one would live with a healthy soul, one must love one's mother or one's motherland. One must respect the debt owed her for one's very being. We can regret her past, and her choices, but we must not regret her. To do that is to embrace the root of all the forms of madness that come of it: it's not for no reason that the cliche about psychology is that it begins with the question, "How do you feel about your mother?" To hate her warps you in myriad ways. It is only when you can forgive her that you can forgive the aspects of yourself that are like her: not yielding to them, but forgiving her and yourself for having those human weaknesses.

Our cultural leaders are too focused on the regret, and not enough on the gratitude, forgiveness, and love. So focused, I think, that they cannot move on from the pain of it. They can't see a way past it. No progress is possible for them until they do; and no one can help them to do it until they are ready.

More Cultural Warfare

.@RepGutierrez called #JohnKelly a disgrace over #DACA
Who's the real disgrace?
I say the corrupt, Che'-loving, terrorist-supporting loser pic.twitter.com/SsD7mcxO8z

— Jim Hanson (@Uncle_Jimbo) September 7, 2017

Kelly has sacrificed a great deal for his country, including a son who chose to follow him into the military life and died in Afghanistan.

Vetoing the Most Qualified

Sen. Al Franken is trying to use a traditional Senate prerogative of home-state Senators to veto judicial nominations. His reason?

“I have grown concerned that, if confirmed to the federal bench, Justice Stras would be a deeply conservative jurist in the mold of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, justices who the nominee himself has identified as role models,” Franken said.

So, in other words, he's unfit to be a judge because he's the kind of judge who sometimes becomes a Supreme Court Justice?

It doesn't really get any better. It's a problem for Franken that he works with the Federalist Society, like it's a problem for Feinstein that a nominee is an orthodox member of the Catholic Church. The cultural warfare is moving into a higher gear.

Anyone in Florida?

If any of the regulars of the Hall are making plans to evacuate for the hurricane, shout out in the comments. I have plenty of friends, and some resources, in the state immediately to your north.

"The Dogma Lives Loudly In You"

...and that's a concern rather than kind of a nice compliment where Senator Feinstein comes from, apparently.

I know a few people who would have blushed with pleasure if she'd said that to them: "Aw, shucks, ma'am."

As Allahpundit points out, even raising this as a concern is dubiously constitutional. Making it a test for whether or not you'd vote for someone is certainly unconstitutional. But, of course, there was no danger of this Senator ever voting in favor of the nominee anyway, so it's not as if there was a 'test' she might have passed by having another religion (or a more dubious attachment to her current one).

Viking Women in Scotland

An article from the Scotsman. The archaeologists cited state that Viking women in Scotland enjoyed higher status than elsewhere in the Norse world, based on an analysis of the number of women who received high-status burials. The archaeologist in question is still using the measure of 'gendered' grave goods to determine who is a male or a female, though, which we now know did not apply perfectly: at least some (though probably not the "half" that was reported) high-status women were buried with what our scientists have long taken to be 'male' grave goods. Thus, the real figure may be parity rather than 2-for-3 (and opposed to 1-for-25 on the Isle of Man).

Definitely 'Traditional'

A candidate for mayor in Charlotte, N.C., [wrote] "VOTE FOR ME!" on her Facebook page, the Charlotte Observer reported.

"REPUBLICAN & SMART, WHITE, TRADITIONAL."

I'm not sure about the other qualities she lists, but there certainly is a tradition there to which she can appeal.

SPLC vs. DB

True story: Southern Poverty Law Center's 'hate' list led to a terrorist attack on the Family Research Council.

True story: SPLC decides that FGM-victim-who-fled-Europe-under-death-threats-from-radical-Islamic-assassins Ayaan Hirsi Ali needs to be added to that 'hate' list.

DB headline: "Southern Poverty Law Center classifies VFW and American Legion as hate groups."

In a written statement signed by SPLC President J. Richard Cohen, the organization said both the VFW and Legion were included since many of their members sympathize with radical, extreme-right-wing ideals such as freedom, safety, and family values.

“I hate to criminalize a group of decorated war veterans,” Cohen said... “But these people revere statues of soldiers who have fought in wars where minorities and women weren’t allowed to fight.”

According to the SPLC, members of the Legion and VFW are well-known for inciting extreme hatred against enemies of the United States, and for engaging in violent behavior. VFW members, for example, have been known to carry out shootings, stabbings, and bombings in countries around the world for more than 100 years.

It's all true.

Viking Sword Found in High Norway

This story reminds me of another recent such find, but I can't seem to locate it in the archives and the news stories about this all seem to be in the last few days (even the ones in Norsk). So in case this is a second such find, let me draw your attention to it. It's certainly a very nice looking piece.

Fallen hero

An electrical worker was just killed in a tiny town about halfway between Victoria and the coast, to our northeast.  All these fine young men drove to us from all over the country to restore our grid.  They've been working like dogs.

Right on

Houston did well, considering, and the problem wasn't zoning, racism, or any other kind of balderdash.

Hurricane vids

First one is a flyover.  This starts far south of town.  You can see the damage is extensive but not complete--until you get to the north end of town and the plane starts to circle up around the NW coast of Copano Bay.  Those people got monkey-hammered.  The plane stops there and doesn't cross Copano Bay to my community on the Lamar Peninsula, but I assure you it looks there more like the lightly damaged areas of Rockport.  I've seen houses with roofs off on the water front, but fewer than you'd think, and hardly anything just exploded to pieces like what you see on NW Copano.  Since no one was killed, I have to assume those houses were unoccupied.



This is impressive video from a hotel on the main drag in town.  It was completed only about a year ago, but parts of it really came to pieces.  Everyone inside was OK.  You can see the incredible winds from one direction, then from the other.  We didn't get to see much of that, it being dark and most of our windows being boarded up.  We had only one door on the lee side with accessible windows, and closed even that shutter as we approached the peak.  I had a better video from the same spot with time tags in it, but now I can't find it.



This is a satellite video as the eye nears landfall on us.  The kidney-shaped bay with a narrow neck is us:  we're on the little peninsula on the NE side.  The video stops as the sun sets, a couple of hours before the eyewall struck.

We continue to chip away at the neighborhood's needs.  All seems to be going pretty well.

A Social History of Manure

There's actually some interesting stuff in this study of medieval farming practices, but the desire on the part of the authors to turn it into a Marxist social critique is laughable.

These [manure spreading techniques] were not mute, but conveyed messages from the ground... ‘…soil and land texture are important referents for social expression. Particular textures were understood and used not just for their functional attributes of fertility and knowledge but also as a means through which people communicated with each other.’ Critically, they helped to position farmers and their soils within particular and understood frameworks.... Throughout the Middle Ages a growing concern can be perceived at all levels of society with the definition of social space.

The literal b*llsh*t was interesting enough without the addition of academic b*llsh*t.

Propaganda For The People

Our late, lamented Democratic nominee for President has her own propaganda site now. It's called 'Verrit,' and it's structured to be a safe space for former Hillary supporters. There, if you are one of them, your world view will always be comforted, never challenged.

Consider this piece, titled: "Study: Mainstream Media Acted as Trump's Mouthpiece, Clinton's Foe."

That's right: the argument is that the mainstream media was in the tank for Trump.

The study counts mentions of scandals vs. policy for Clinton and Trump. There are a few problems with this method. I'll describe two.

1) Most of the time, the media coverage treated Trump's policies as scandals in themselves. He got a lot of coverage as to his immigration policies, for example: the tone of the coverage was that the policies were racist, and that only racists would vote for such a racist.

2) Clinton's second-biggest scandal according to the study was "the Clinton Foundation." But the Clinton Foundation wasn't supposed to be a scandal: it was her own chosen vehicle for presenting herself to the American public between the end of her tenure as Secretary of State, and the start of her Presidential campaign. She should have wanted the media to discuss the Foundation as often as possible, as it was the way she elected to present herself. If it was a scandal for her, it's because she ran it in a scandalous fashion.

To a lesser degree, the same is true of her biggest scandal: the email investigation. She didn't choose that specifically for the purpose of presenting it to the public as her chosen image, but she did choose that course of action in order to try to control her public image (and in spite of Federal records laws). But in the case of the Foundation, it's completely on her that the vehicle that she designed for presenting herself turned out to look so bad.

We Could Do Worse...

...and probably will.

Long live Mathilda Jones – after finding a huge ‘Excalibur’ sword in the lake from the legend of King Arthur, she is technically the new Queen of England, right?... The Lady of the Lake is said to have held the sword below Dozmary Pool, where Mathilda and her family were visiting, until the next person worthy of the British throne finds it.

It sounded plausible to me at points last year.

A Constitutional Question

Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled a policy this morning on "DACA" that is far, far gentler than I expected. The administration really is going to continue "deferring action" (the "DA" of "DACA") for six months, even issuing new two-year work permits to those whose existing permits expire in that period. I figured they'd hand off the 800,000 names to ICE this morning and tell them to go round them up, but Sessions says that won't happen: nobody will be passed to immigration enforcement unless they individually are deemed to pose a national security threat.

The administration is quite right that the previous administration simply decided to ignore the law for its own reasons, thus effectively creating new executive "law" that violated existing laws passed in accordance with the Constitution. They are likely also correct that the courts would have overturned the practice eventually, although perhaps not: it would hardly be the first time the SCOTUS has made room for an obviously unconstitutional action recently (e.g., the Obamacare rewrite). The conceit that the NRO writers describe is bipartisan, and exists in the judiciary as well.

No credit will be forthcoming, but the Trump administration has chosen to correct a clear Constitutional violation in a very humane and patient way. Congress now has the opportunity to perform its actual role as legislature, but of course it has had that "opportunity" all along. It has neglected to do so because it liked the violation of its laws just fine, again on a bipartisan basis. Now, then, they'll have to rush to pass a law that enacts the bipartisan consensus that they really believe in.

That should be easy for them to do, although for Republicans in Congress it means admitting to another massive lie. They never intended to repeal Obamacare; and they never opposed massive illegal immigration, which enriches their donors by driving down the cost of American labor.

Mass immigration, and especially illegal immigration, also undermines labor unions; you'd have thought the Democratic party would care about that, but they have decided they have more to gain from demographic change than from organized labor. The only defender of American unions left on the scene is, well, Canada. Everyone else is on board with the policy that the Trump administration is supposedly "unraveling" this morning.

Storm

Still no time or adequate internet to do a full post.  We're not sure how high the winds got, but the devastation to the trees is extreme.  Perhaps a third of the live oaks were destroyed outright, while all others are mostly stumps, and there is not a leaf on a tree in the county.  It's eerie to see, as if the live oaks had suddenly become deciduous and it were winter.  The houses, however, mostly are OK.  Homes built to post-Andrew code are largely fine, though some metal roofs started to peel up and you see a lot of shingle damage.  Tile roofs, for some reason, didn't do that well.  Few houses came completely apart, even on the waterfront, which surprises me.  I'm particularly surprised by how many windows held, even if all the storm shutters weren't put up in time.  Really very few windows blew out.

In the height of the storm the house shuddered, but nothing blew in.  A gutter was torn off.  Some water came in that we think was driven sideways through the fascia, as the roof seems OK to visual inspection and no water came in on the far side of the eye.  Yes, the eye went directly overhead.  They're saying something like 106 mph sustained, gusts to (you hear various numbers) 130 mph. Our ears popped.  The water in the toilets dropped way down into the pipes.  Perhaps the worst trouble we had was on the far wall of the eye (we were in the eye a couple of hours), when the wind came around to the front door side, which is a double door opening inward.  I no longer like that arrangement.  Despite the storm shutters, the wind tried to push that door in.  A heavy cypress door flexed visibly.  The copper flashing around the door made a bizarre harmonica-like scream.  I jammed a chair under the double doorknobs and a rake between the chair and the bottom step of the interior stairs.  It still wanted to blow open.  Nevertheless, in the end, there was only superficial damage to the house.  The trees are awful, simply blasted, post-nuclear-looking.  They'll look considerably better when they leaf out.  Many will live and thrive.

Our outbuilding all were fine; only the lightweight chicken coops blew apart.  The chickens were all safe in the garage.

There were about 12 inches of rain, a moderate storm surge, no flooding at all.  The flooding was all east of here, and very bad.  Corpus Christi to the southwest was barely hit, so we were able to drive down there almost immediately for supplies.

An astounding army of volunteer and for-profit tree-clearing crews have poured in and made huge progress.  With no flooding and so few houses breached, the piles of debris along every street and road are almost entirely composed of trees.  I'll get some pictures up when communications improve.

They predict we'll have power back this week:  very impressive.  They're going to bring two 5MW generators to our little rural peninsula on the tail end of the county, so we won't have to wait for the rebuilding of the entire grid from Victoria to here.  Very smart, very appreciated.  A huge fraction of the electrical poles are tilting or frankly broken and flat on the ground.  I've never in my life seen so many man-lift electrical trucks:  there have to be thousands.

We all took the TV images of the President with the Texas flag very kindly, once we got satellite TV back.  I feel a real affection for the man this week.

This is how you do it

Our HEB grocery store was open just six days after the storm hit, with good stocks, too.  As impressed as I was, this article is even more impressive.  Their problem in this area were nothing compared to the widespread flooding to the east.  It's a fine, fine company.

Our regular internet isn't back, but I've discovered what I guess everyone else knew already, that we can run the computer on the personal hotspot on our iPhones.  I'm so out of it.

Against Identity Politics

James Baker III nor Andrew Young are neither of them men whose politics I much feel close to, but I can't disagree about this.

The U.S. finds itself increasingly divided along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual identity. Countless demagogues stand ready to exploit those differences. When a sports reporter of Asian heritage is removed from his assignment because his name is close to that of a Confederate army general, political correctness has gone too far. Identity politics practiced by both major political parties is eroding a core principle that Americans are, first and foremost, Americans....

The country faces a stark choice. Its citizens can continue screaming at each other, sometimes over largely symbolic issues. Or they can again do what the citizens of this country have done best in the past-work together on the real problems that confront everyone....

Floodwaters don't distinguish between Republicans and Democrats. Nor do rotting bridges discriminate between whites and blacks. This is an important and easy area to emphasize common interests. Political leaders should prioritize and provide tangible policies that benefit Americans. They are long overdue....

Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French diplomat who identified strengths in the American experiment, admired the resiliency of the system the Founding Fathers devised. He wrote in the first volume of "Democracy in America" that "the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."...

Americans must, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said during a 1965 commencement address for Oberlin College, learn to live together as brothers and sisters. Or, we will perish together as fools.

The piece is padded out with plenty that I can and do disagree with, but this much of it is quite right.

Spies & Mercenaries

Erik Prince's proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan has several drawbacks, one of which is that I don't think it can possibly bring about a successful conclusion to that war. All the same, this article in Politico is ridiculously unfair to Prince and his efforts. It's fine to be against doing this, but be reasonable.

[Prince] insists contractors should not be stigmatized as “mercenaries,” even though he is proposing armed civilians in conflict zones—the classic definition of a mercenary.

I don't know about 'classic,' but there's an in-practice UN definition of mercenaries that does not include contractors.

Instead, he says they are like the Flying Tigers, the popular name of the 1st American Volunteer Group that flew against the Japanese in 1941–42. Here is where his analogy takes a nosedive: The Flying Tigers were not mercenaries.

Prince: 'Contractors are not mercenaries. They're like the Flying Tigers.'

Proposed rebuttal: 'Nonsense! The Flying Tigers were not mercenaries!'

QED, dude.

In fact, the Flying Tigers were contractors paid by the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company, with kill bonuses from the Chinese government. Thus, Prince is right in his analogy, more or less.

Rather, they were U.S. military pilots who took off their uniforms to fly as civilians, so that FDR did not have to declare war. Once war was declared, they flew as American fighter pilots once again.

That's a war crime, by the way: perfidy. It also made them legally spies that could be shot on sight.

That’s hardly the same thing as contractors being paid, often exorbitantly, to fight a war on our behalf.

Except that they were contractors, paid a fairly decent sum for every kill.

Where will these mercenaries come from? According to Prince, all will be “brave Americans” who are “former Special Operations veterans.” More sales talk. To keep costs down, he will probably have to outsource to the so-called Third World, where military labor is cheap.

So, we're just to assume that he's lying about that? Because that would be a closer parallel to the Flying Tigers than you wanted to allow (some being no longer active duty). Also, the fact that they are citizens of a nation that is a party to the conflict is why they're contractors and not mercenaries under the UN rule.

When I was in the industry, I worked alongside other ex-special forces and ex-paratroopers from places like the Philippines, Colombia and Uganda.

You know who trained those ex-special forces from the Philippines before they were "ex"? American Special Operations forces.

But do we want Filipino, Colombian and Ugandan mercenaries fighting our wars for us, their way?

That is literally why we trained them.

Prince assures us that nothing will go wrong. To avoid Nisour incidents in the future, he wants to place all mercenaries under U.S. military law, known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice. However, this resolves little. Take, for example, jurisdiction: What happens if a Guatemalan mercenary massacres an Afghan family while on an American contract?

That is exactly the sort of issue that a Status of Forces agreement addresses. The government of Afghanistan would have to agree to terms, and those terms would establish these details.

The article closes with a shot at Prince's patriotism for seeking work from the UAE and China, just to ad an ad hominem on the end of a terrible argument.

I still think Prince's approach can't possibly work, but good gracious. Isn't it enough to criticize it on its logistical and practical problems?

Emergency Service

Not that any of you need the reference, but here it is anyway.

What's a Brigade Between Friends?

DOD confesses it's got a few... more... troops than it has previously admitted deployed in the 'Stan.

Legendary Swords that Exist

Some nice pieces among these.

Cobb County Grows a Headache

Cobb County has always been my least favorite part of the Atlanta metropolitan complex. It grew up fast and early, in advance of some better practices for urban sprawl, and became a hideous nest of traffic and multi-lane roads. These roads are barely functional on the best day, and depend for that function on traffic cops. So, of course, it's important to have traffic cops who are widely respected and trusted.

It was a mere traffic stop, but the driver was clearly nervous — telling the police officer that she was worried that if she moved her hands, she would be shot.

Then the cop, Greg Abbott, tried to assure her: “But you’re not black. Remember, we only shoot black people. Yeah, we only kill black people, right?”

My guess is that he meant that as a disarming joke, as his lawyer claims, but man.

An Interesting Letter from World War I

Wandering around the internet recently brought me to Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog, where the author's focus is on such things as books that have been lost to us, forgotten kingdoms, things he can't figure out, rogue researchers, weird wars, and so forth. A recent post includes the text of and discusses a newspaper article from 1915 about a German soldier who asked his sister to write to the family of a dead British soldier he found on the battlefield.

A bit of the letter:

Frankfort-on-Maine. It is a very sad matter I am writing you. My brother sent home a letter from the front and begged me to write you. He stands in the west, and it was in his first letter since the hard fights there. My eldest brother was killed last year at Ypres, so that I know how glad we were to hear any details of his death. I think you have already heard that Lawrence B. Merson, whom I believe to be your son, did not come back from the last fight. We were enemies, but pain and mourning are uniting us. So thought my brother, too, for he wrote everything about your son he could find out. I just will translate to you: 

‘We led the way to our position, and found there a dead Highlander, who had a deep wound above the right eye, probably by a thrust of the bayonet. We found the following objects: book of payment, mark of distinction, a small sketch, and an instrument against the gases. The dead Englishman had his gun with the bayonet at (and there were spots blood on it) his right side. He was Highlander, with a kilt and bare knees.’

Jotunheimsfaerden

AFG (Still?) Hot

Newly published today, a mortar team covers its own position with rifles while sending rounds downrange. Not very far downrange.

UPDATE: Footage is from 2009, only just reposted yesterday. See comments.

Tex Update II

Image from 5 Bravo.

Tex writes this afternoon to say: "Really good here thx, grocery store to open tomorrow." Hopefully we'll have her back soon.

UPDATE: Tex notes in an additional message that internet restoration is not necessarily going to be soon. They don't have cable out where she is, so it depends on the power company. No guarantees that will happen fast given the scale of the disaster.

Transgender Treason

The NYT deserves some credit for publishing this piece. I'll even forgive the use of Manning's preferred pronouns and titles in this case, as it probably makes the message easier for the intended audience to hear. Though I might generally be willing to go along with whatever someone wants to be called, if they ask nicely, in this case I think the only appropriate thing is to show scorn for the traitor. But the audience would reject the whole argument on the basis that it was 'mean,' I guess, though this is someone who deserves scorn and disrespect to the highest degree.

Perhaps the NYT's audience will understand why a bit better after reading these facts.

When Ms. Manning transmitted 750,000 secret military records and State Department cables to WikiLeaks in 2010, she not only jeopardized continuing missions and disrupted American diplomacy. She also put an untold number of innocent people’s lives in danger.

According to The New Yorker, when the United States tried to locate “hundreds” of Afghans named in the documents and move them to safety, “many could not be found, or were in environments too dangerous to reach.” When pressed by a journalist about the possibility of redacting the names of Afghans who cooperated with the United States military, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, reportedly replied: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Meantime, Mr. Assange gave a Russian Holocaust denier 90,000 of the cables. That man, who goes by the pen name Israel Shamir, delivered a trove to the Belarussian dictatorship, which then utilized the material to detain opposition activists. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe used a leaked cable detailing a United States Embassy meeting with opposition figures as pretext for an investigation into “treasonous collusion.”

Yet from the moment United States military prosecutors charged Ms. Manning with violating the Espionage Act in 2010, progressives have hailed her as a folk hero.

The charge itself was a gift from the Obama-era DOD. It should have been treason, with a side order of responsibility for recklessly endangering hundreds of lives -- an untold number of which may have been lost.

A Word on The Convention of the States

Tom Coburn writes:

The states created the federal government. They gave it a sphere of jurisdiction, over which it is supreme. That jurisdiction, however, is limited to the specific, enumerated powers contained in the text of the Constitution. All other powers—every single power not expressly delegated to the national government—remain vested in the states, or the people....

Don’t fall for the lie that the Convention of States Project is some conservative plot to impose their policies on the American people. The real agenda is exactly the opposite: to restore the power of the American people to decide public policies for themselves.

His kind words for the 14th Amendment, though doubtless unavoidable given the rhetorical project, strike me as at odds with the idea of restraining an overweening Federal government. The 14th's delegation of power to the Federal courts is one of the things most in need of restraint by any new amendments. The idea that the Federal courts would prevent states from violating basic rights was nice, and probably even needed at the time the amendment was proposed, but it became the vehicle for forcing state submission to every Federal whim in every single kind of case. Outright repeal of the 14th might not be appropriate or necessary, but some sort of adjustment certainly is necessary if Coburn's vision is going to be realized.

DB: Navy Collides with Building in Downtown Houston

"The ship was identified as an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer belonging to the Navy’s 7th Fleet."

Those do seem to be having some trouble lately.

Nor is this the worst water-borne event to come out of Harvey.

Smaller Government

Congress may not deserve its low ratings for a change.

An analysis by the Pew Research Center that looked at every piece of legislation that received final approval from Congress found this Congress tied for fifth most productive in the past 30 years.

Doing what, you ask?

...overturning Obama-era rules, using a little-known law call the Congressional Review Act.

The 1996 law gives this Congress a shortcut to overturn any rules submitted after mid-June of 2016. Before now, the Act had only been used once.... This Republican-led Congress, however, has shown no qualms about using the act to chip away at Barack Obama’s legacy. While Congress hasn’t been able to repeal and replace Obamacare, which Republicans have been promising for the seven years since it was passed, they have gotten rid of regulations around mountaintop removal for coal mining, a rule that kept internet service providers from using selling customers data to advertisers without their permission, and a Securities and Exchange Commission regulation that requires corporations to disclose payments to foreign governments.... President Trump promised repeatedly during his campaign to slash regulations, and Congress has delivered: While congressional “productivity” is high, regulatory activity is at an all-time low.

That's under-selling it. The regulations are an undisputed bright-spot in the Trump administration: for every new regulation they have proposed, they've killed sixteen existing ones. They have focused especially on Obama-era regulations intended to 'fundamentally transform America.' The economic benefits are real.

In a statement, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney boasted about how much the administration has been able to cut down on regulatory red tape and improve American prosperity.

“Government is using muscles it hasn’t used in a really long time, exposing and removing redundant and unnecessary regulation,” he said.

“In the first five months of this administration alone the net cost of our regulatory agenda has been less than zero dollars. Contrast that with the last five months of Fiscal Year 2016 when the Obama administration imposed almost $7 billion in costs on our economy through regulation."

Smaller-government efforts like this would never have been considered under the second Clinton administration. That's a fact worth keeping in mind as a partial counterweight to the criticisms, though many of those are valid.

Deforestation in Haiti: A Big Lie

Turns out one of the most commonly-told stories of environmental degradation simply doesn't check out. The actual forestation in Haiti is more than an order of magnitude higher than the 2% reported in the disaster stories: 30%, similar to the US or Germany.

"The Rise of a Moral Panic"

A good piece by a doctor of geography (to include culture and politics, he notes in his bio) on the irrationality attending our current debate.

The classic example of a moral panic involves a society losing its mind over witchcraft, as when more than twenty innocent people, mostly women, were hanged or otherwise killed following the Salem witch trials of 1692. In general, a moral panic concerns something that would be bad, perhaps horrific, if real, but whose reality is imagined or exaggerated to the point of social hysteria, and the popular reaction to which leads individuals and institutions to abandon reason, evidence, and common sense....

It should be obvious from history that uninformed or illiterate attacks on odious people like Gorka or Lord lead inevitably to uninformed or illiterate attacks on good people. Perhaps CNN dismissed Lord on a pretext, or perhaps it finally just no longer thought he was worth the trouble. And the Vitézi Rend is an obscure bit of knowledge, easy for dilettantes to posture over because so few others are equipped to challenge their “expertise.” The okay sign is a different matter. It is familiar, common, mundane. What does it say that so many repeat the myth of the “white power” sign? One possibility is that people have no confidence in their own understanding of the sign; another is that they acknowledge that it used to mean “okay,” but are willing to surrender such a common expression to extremists instantly when challenged. Both possibilities are disturbing, because they suggest that we lack the mental tools and strength to respond to this phenomenon. When pressed, we will sacrifice our culture and our way of life. Charlottesville demonstrated, at least for the moment, that we are not willing to cede control of our streets to white nationalism. But if we cede control of our rhetoric, of our intellectual spaces, and even of our ordinary language, the real battle will be lost.

Lord is a TV personality, and I don't watch television. I don't know that Gorka is an "odious" person, though; I've never met the guy, but I know a guy who knows him and who tells me that Gorka's been badly mistreated. The press hates Trump so much that they're looking to hate anyone associated with Trump, and if there are things they can misrepresent in a way that makes that guy look even worse than Trump, well, then that guy becomes a weapon against Trump.

That's a part of the irrationality that the author is rightly describing. Just this week, I noticed that the press was describing the transcript of the President's remarks as being that of his "rant." In addition, they left out a very significant piece of evidence contradicting the "moral panic" picture: the benediction by Alveda King, which was attended by a very warm reception from the crowd. The benediction itself is an appeal for unity and brotherhood not divided by things like race; the crowd's embrace of King and her message would seem to suggest -- at minimum -- reconsidering the panic that these are all 'racists' or even 'Nazis.' It is unclear to me if they simply cannot see the evidence that is right in front of their eyes, or if they are actively rejecting that it could be true or real, or if -- I should not like to believe, but it is possible -- they are actively suppressing exculpatory information in order to further the moral panic.

There is cause for concern about a rising confidence among true white supremacists. As noted here recently, I've seen a Klan flag being flown openly when I had never seen one in decades. It is right and proper to oppose such things, in a rational but committed fashion.

Nevertheless, one must avoid the irrational excesses that are becoming all too common. I meet Trump voters every day when I go out in the world around me. I buy gas from them, I have other sorts of businesslike exchanges, I overhear their conversations in line at the grocery store. This panic is out of order. The harm it is causing is worse than any potential harm from the handfuls of genuine Klansmen and Nazis scattered here and there across a vast nation.

Tex Updates

UPDATE: Elise reports hearing from Tex. She & house are ok.

Friday 1728 Romeo: Tex reports internet down, power and other comms still up. Wind moderate.

Friday 2100 Romeo: Tex wrote to say that the worst of the storm would make landfall just west of her, which is of course the worst case. As of 1930 she was still receiving messages, but has since gone quiet. It may be that the atmospheric disturbance is too great right now.

"" 2200 R: Radar shows she was right. The red wall of the eye is lashing them now, with landfall just west. No comms still, but that is to be expected under the circumstances.

Saturday 1244 R: Still nothing from Tex. My phone still says that the last message delivered/read was yesterday at 1930, so probably cell networks are just down. Local firefighters were holding at the station because it was too dangerous to move, but the station stayed up. There are reports of buildings that didn't, or didn't quite, but they sound institutional so far. A well constructed house had a better chance.

Babylonian Trig

Mathematicians have finally figured out an ancient set of carvings. Turns out, the Babylonians were very solid on their trigonometry.

The true meaning of the tablet has eluded experts until now but new research by the University of New South Wales, Australia, has shown it is the world’s oldest and most accurate trigonometric table, which was probably used by ancient architects to construct temples, palaces and canals.

However unlike today’s trigonometry, Babylonian mathematics used a base 60, or sexagesimal system, rather than the 10 which is used today. Because 60 is far easier to divide by three, experts studying the tablet, found that the calculations are far more accurate.

“Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles,” said Dr Daniel Mansfield of the School of Mathematics and Statistics in the UNSW Faculty of Science.

“It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius. The tablet not only contains the world’s oldest trigonometric table; it is also the only completely accurate trigonometric table, because of the very different Babylonian approach to arithmetic and geometry.

The ancients in general were better at math than we understand them to have been. We have forms of math they didn't have, but they had forms we have lost or abandoned, and sometimes they end up enabling pretty sophisticated mental work. In this case, it looks like the ancient Babylonians invented a form that was actually better than anything that has replaced it.

Of course, invention in Iraq did not end with ancient Babylon.

A Confederate Without Monuments

An interesting counterexample: a favored deputy of Robert E. Lee's who is largely uncelebrated in statuary. Why?

Senator William Mahone was one of the most maligned political leaders in post-Civil War America. He was also one of the most capable. Compared to the Roman traitor Cataline (by Virginia Democrats), to Moses (by African American congressman John Mercer Langston), and to Napoleon (by himself), Mahone organized and led the most successful interracial political alliance in the post-emancipation South. Mahone’s Readjuster Party, an independent coalition of black and white Republicans and white Democrats that was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt, governed the state from 1879 to 1883.

During this period, a Readjuster governor occupied the statehouse, two Readjusters represented Virginia in the United States Senate, and Readjusters represented six of Virginia’s ten congressional districts. Under Mahone’s leadership, his coalition controlled the state legislature and the courts, and held and distributed the state’s many coveted federal offices. A black-majority party, the Readjusters legitimated and promoted African American citizenship and political power by supporting black suffrage, office-holding, and jury service. To a degree previously unseen in Virginia, and unmatched anywhere else in the nineteenth-century South, the Readjusters became an institutional force for the protection and advancement of black rights and interests....

The Readjusters lost power in 1883 through a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity. While Democrats suppressed progressive politics in the state, other groups of elite white Virginians worked fast to eradicate the memory of Virginia’s experiment in interracial democracy.

Like the United Irishmen's union of Protestant and Catholic in 1798, it's one of history's tragic missed opportunities.

Fellow Southerners, Rejoice!

New York City's Saturday Night Live has deigned to allow us to feel pride in some features of our heritage. The following are authorized:

They got rocking chairs on big porches. They got the friedest food you ever tasted. They got cheap cigarettes. They got cute nicknames like Scooter, June Bug, Colonel Poopy Conner,” she said. “They got big fat guys in tiny little ties, and got drive-though liquor stores.

Be sure to conform to these offensive stereotypes regional norms in order to secure that crucial approval from our Northern neighbors.

It's on

红卫兵

On the return of the Red Guards.

The end of drought

If you start to hear "Rockport" or the "Lamar Peninsula" on the national weather, think of us.  We're just north of Corpus Christi and looking to be in the direct path of whatever Harvey develops into.

The storm having strengthened overnight, we bit the bullet and decided to put up the storm shutters.  We'd waited so late that I almost didn't bother calling our window guys and asking if they could fit us into their schedule to help us with installation, but to my undying amazement, the owner answered the phone right away and in response to my tentative question hesitated, then said, "Well, I don't know.  We couldn't get out there before this afternoon."  This afternoon?  Yeah, that would be . . . fine.  (I picture Goldie Hawn's character in Overboard sniffing, "I almost had to wait.")

Having become so much more fit in the last two years, I'm not having any trouble carrying the dozens and dozens of heavy aluminum interlocking corrugated panels up from the garage to the porch on the main living floor, but it's a much trickier business getting the panels installed on the third-floor bedroom windows, which can worked on only from the shed roof over the porch 20 feet in the air.  There are also approximately one million little butterfly nuts to screw in even for the windows that are easily accessible from the porch on the main living floor, so I'll be very glad of the help when they arrive.

I don't know if we're looking at a bit of a blow or a big one, or whether it will be a bit of rain or 20+ inches.   For my own sake, I hope for 20 inches, but I know that will create a hardship for others in this area.  For me, it would just fill up my poor pond for the first time in a couple of years.

We've nearly finished putting everything in the garage that would be likely to become a projectile:  a clean sweep fore and aft.  If there are high winds, we have only tree limbs to worry about, and that's as it may be.  Our propane tank is full; we've tested the generator.  We have 20,000 gallons of fresh water in the cistern.  Despite the worsening forecasts, I expect this to be a small to medium storm, not a big monster.  Nevertheless, it's starting to look like Allison, which drifted over Houston in about 2000 and wandered around for a week without major steering currents, dropping truly amazing amounts of rain. Being flat as a pancake, this area holds up well under huge rainfalls, so although some houses will inevitably take on water, at least it won't be a dangerous current.

How To Thank a Firefighter

A farmer in England knows how.

Firefighters in Wiltshire, England rescued 18 piglets and two sows from a barn that was going up in flames in February, according to the BBC. The fire ended up consuming 60 tons of hay. Six months later, the farm gave the firefighters sausage made from the pigs to thank them.

“I’m sure vegetarians will hate this,” said Rachel Rivers, the manager of the farm where the pigs were saved.

Rivers and farm owner Canon Gerald Osbourne defended the gift, saying raising and slaughtering livestock is their livelihood.

“I gave those animals the best quality of life I could ever give until the time they go to slaughter and they go into the food chain,” Rivers said, adding that “you do feel sad at the end of it.”

The firefighters, who barbequed the sausage, didn’t seem to mind. They called the meat “fantastic.”

I imagine it was. There's a great butcher shop not far from here where we get fresh sausage on a regular basis. It never disappoints.

This Day A.D. 1305

"I can not be a traitor, for I owe him no allegiance. He is not my Sovereign; he never received my homage; and whilst life is in this persecuted body, he never shall receive it. To the other points whereof I am accused, I freely confess them all. As Governor of my country I have been an enemy to its enemies; I have slain the English; I have mortally opposed the English King; I have stormed and taken the towns and castles which he unjustly claimed as his own. If I or my soldiers have plundered or done injury to the houses or ministers of religion, I repent me of my sin; but it is not of Edward of England I shall ask pardon."

Requiescat in pace Sir William Wallace.

Think "Bruce," not "E"

ESPN is getting a lot of well-deserved flack after pulling a reporter of Asian heritage from a UVA football game. His name, as I'm sure you've heard, was Robert Lee.

S. E. Cupp says this should be taken to settle the monuments debate.

Or maybe it's just getting going.

Ghana has said it will remove a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus in the nation’s capital where it had sparked protests over the leader’s allegedly racist attitudes....

The petition, which had more than 1,700 supporters on Thursday, cited letters Gandhi wrote during his time in South Africa as evidence that he advocated for the superiority of Indians over black Africans. It also took issue with his use of the derogatory term kaffir to refer to native Africans and criticized the lack of statues of African heroes and heroines on campus.

It's ironic to see a Hindu guru from India roped up for using a slur that originates from Muslim criticisms of those who reject Islam. But of course there are plenty of reasons to criticize Gandhi; it's just that he's a kind of secular saint (who wasn't, himself, at all secular) to the very sort of American who wants to pull down other monuments.

Still, whether it's winding down or just getting started remains to be seen.

The Hate Goes To Eleven

As longtime readers know, I always prefer to read transcripts of speeches instead of listening to them. Many rhetorical tricks don't work as well in print as in voice, and you can get a better feel for the strength of the argument by reading it instead. It was tough to find one today! There are lots of articles about how bad the speech was, about how crowds were light and drifted away during the speech, about how James Clapper questioned the President's fitness to serve after hearing it, but transcripts are thin on the ground.

I finally did locate one. Normally these things are simply titled, "Transcript of [Whoever's] Remarks." This time, the transcript was titled: "President Trump Ranted For 77 Minutes in Phoenix. Here’s What He Said."

It was only by reading the transcript that I discovered, left out of all of the media coverage, that Alveda King was there. With a little more research, I discovered that she wasn't just there present, but had a speaking role in the form of providing a long opening prayer.



That's the sort of thing I'd have thought highly relevant, given the recent weeks of concern about whether or not the President supports white supremacists. I'd have expected to have seen it mentioned more prominently in coverage of the speech.

Our Secretary of Defense

Reagan made the same point, without the language that some are objecting to in Mattis' statement. I suppose it's fair enough to say that it's possible to make the point without the language; but maybe America needs to hear that kind of language from a guy like Jim Mattis more than we used to do.

Bad Day for BLM

Not guilty on almost all charges for the Bundy crew, with a few that the jury refused to decide one way or the other.

Beer Muscles

A strongman competition that looks like a good time. I understand there will be beer for drinking, too.

The Anti-Free Speech Strategy

It's all part of a grand design, writes an academic in the pages of the Washington Post:

Here’s the dilemma college presidents face in the fall: Either uphold free speech on campus and risk violent counterprotests, or ban conservative provocateurs and confirm the “freedom of speech” crisis on campuses. Either way their institution’s legitimacy is undermined.

This impossible dilemma is no accident. It has been part of a strategy, deployed first by conservatives and perfected by the alt-right.

Brilliant! How did they ensure the risk of violent counterprotests?

The whole thing urges a rethinking of "free speech absolutism." If I were the editor of the Washington Post, I would have declined to print it. Ordinarily, I would have explained, my paper was so committed to free speech that we would publish the ideas even of those hostile to the most basic American values. But in this case, the dangers associated with her point might be best illustrated by example.

The Feminization of Christianity

That is the title of a longer essay at The Art of Manliness, the essay being written by Brett & Kate McKay. There's no problem (I would think) with there being feminine forms of Christianity, as half of humanity is female and the faith is not only for men. The problem, the authors suggest, is that Christianity has become so feminine that it is no longer attractive to men -- which means that men don't go to church, and that the culture as a whole shifts away from Christianity.

They say the seeds for this transformation lay in the High Middle Ages:

[I]n the Middle Ages, female mystics, following the lead of Catholic thinkers like Bernard of Clairvaux, began developing an interpretation of the bridegroom/bride relationship as representing that which existed not only between Christ and the collective church, but Christ and the individual soul. Jesus became not only a global savior, but a personal lover, whose union with believers was described by Christian mystics with erotic imagery. Drawing on the Old Testament’s Song of Songs, but again, using it as an allegory to describe God’s relationship with an individual, rather than with his entire people (as it had traditionally been interpreted), they developed a new way for the Christian to relate to Christ – one marked by intimate longing.

For example, the German nun Margareta Ebna (1291-1351) described Jesus as piercing her “with a swift shot from His spear of love” and exulted in feeling his “wondrous powerful thrusts against my heart,” though she complained that “[s]ometimes I could not endure it when the strong thrusts came against me for they harmed my insides so that I became greatly swollen like a woman great with child.”

The idea of Christian-as-Bride-of-Christ would migrate from Catholicism to Protestantism, and be picked up even by the dour Puritans who journeyed to American shores. Mather himself declared that “Our SAVIOR does Marry Himself unto the Church in general, But He does also Marry Himself to every Individual Believer.” Mather’s fellow Puritan leader, Thomas Hooker, preached that:

“Every true believer . . . is so joined unto the Lord, that he becomes one spirit; as the adulterer and the adultresse is one flesh. . . . That which makes the love of a husband increase toward his wife is this, Hee is satisfied with her breasts at all times, and then hee comes to be ravished with her love . . . so the will chuseth Christ, and it is fully satisfied with him. . . . I say this is a total union, the whole nature of the Saviour, and the whole nature of a believer are knit together; the bond of matrimony knits these two together, . . . we feed upon Christ, and grow upon Christ, and are married to Christ.”

That which was present at the founding of the country, grew to become part and parcel of American Christianity, especially its evangelical strain, and continues to play a significant role in influencing the language and ethos of the faith today.

In Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow points to examples of how the bridal imagery born in the Middle Ages continues into the modern age, citing books with titles like Falling in Love With Jesus: Abandoning Yourself to the Greatest Romance of Your Life, and authors who “vigorously encourage women to imagine Jesus as their personal lover”:

“One tells her readers to ‘develop an affair with the one and only Lover who will truly satisfy your innermost desires: Jesus Christ.’

Another offers this breathless description of God’s love: ‘This Someone entered your world and revealed to you that He is your true Husband. Then He dressed you in a wedding gown whiter than the whitest linen. You felt virginal again. And alive! He kissed you with grace and vowed never to leave you or forsake you. And you longed to go and be with Him.’”

While much of what Murrow calls “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend imagery” is directed at women, Murrow believes it has become suffused throughout the entire faith, and “migrate[d] to men as well.” “These days,” he writes, “it’s fairly common for pastors to describe a devout male as being ‘totally in love with Jesus.’ I’ve heard more than one men’s minister imploring a crowd of guys to fall deeply in love with the Savior.’”

I know quite a bit about the expressions of Christianity in the High Middle Ages, and I'd have to say that this was at that time very much an undercurrent of the faith. The roots may lay there, but that isn't how you see the faith being portrayed in either the scholarly writing of churchmen, or else the popular songs and tales of the era. It could be that they are right that this undercurrent informed a major shift in later periods, of course.

Still, in the Middle Ages, the eroticism of the faith is as likely to provide an erotic attraction for men as well as for women. As late as The Faerie Queene, the church-as-bride metaphor was being employed in a kind of dual way: Una symbolizes the church that is the bride of Christ, but Una herself weds to St. George as his reward for his dragonslaying virtue. The Grail Maiden, daughter of King Pelles, ends up seducing Lancelot (right after he too slays a dragon; Elaine only later marries him) and being the mother of Galahad (who fulfills the Grail quest through chastity, not eroticism). Lancelot is chosen by God to father Galahad on Elaine, according to the story, because he (like St. George) is a living flower of valorous knighthood. Service to God and erotic success are linked for men in these stories. Living out the noble virtues honored by the faith makes one worthy of love and beauty, which will be put by God to further service through the stability of one's marriage and the fates of one's children.

Thus, if the Bride of Christ narrative was as important for female mystics as the authors imply, that only creates parity, not a "feminization" of Christianity in the High Middle Ages. One might, of course, question whether or not eroticism is really even appropriate as a religious motivation; but whether it is or is not, it certainly was not an exclusively female (let alone 'feminizing') one. It was a regular justification for the most manly of the virtues (though note that, in The Faerie Queene, there is a female knight exercising these mostly-manly virtues; and there is at least one in the older Arthurian corpus as well).

As for their later periods, I am less well placed to provide a useful critique.

Eclipse Glasses

I rode up into the totality footprint yesterday. It was really something. I'm glad that America had a moment of something special that we could all do together, even if for most of the country it was only a partial eclipse.

In the aftermath, you may have some of these special sunglasses people bought to watch the thing. Instead of throwing them away, send them to this group that wants to stockpile them for kids in South America next year. Why not? It won't cost but a postage stamp, and you probably won't need them again.

Is the Field of Medieval Studies Adequately Diverse?

There has been a raft of articles and petitions on the topic recently.

What I don't find in any of them are statistics to back up the assertion. That's odd: there's a similar debate in philosophy, and I know that the numbers there are roughly 70/30 male/female. "Medieval Studies" as such doesn't exist in a lot of places; it's often a subset of the language studies (e.g., readings of Middle English are done in the English department; the languages of Oc and Oui in the French department, etc). Language studies are dominated by women, and have been for decades. (Link is to the graph for English studies, but the trend holds in general for language departments.) It could be that women are more inclined to study contemporary literature instead of dead versions of the language, of course; I don't have statistics on that, but it's a possibility.

Alternatively, it can be done in the History department, where women are rapidly approaching the majority but are still not quite there. Nevertheless, women don't have to be in an absolute majority for the field to be adequately diverse: if women earned 45% of doctorates in the field rather than 51%, that would simply counterbalance the language fields where women earn north of 60% of doctroates.

So I'd be a little surprised to learn that there is a significant lack of diversity on the male/female axis. What about ethnicity?

Again, philosophy is said to have a diversity problem because under 25% of degrees are earned by ethnic or racial minorities of any kind. It's about the same for English literature degrees. You might think that people are most likely to study their own language's literature than to learn a foreign language well enough to appreciate its literature in the original. But actually whites are more likely to pursue a degree in other languages, too. Partly this may be because language degrees are chiefly valuable economically to translators, so that if you want to be a translator and you aren't bilingual, you'd be the sort to seek a degree; someone who already speaks a foreign language plus English would be more likely to pursue an actual degree in some other field. Those aren't the people we're interested in, though; we want to know who studies the medieval version of the language, not the contemporary one.

History degrees are even lower: only 18% of such degrees are awarded to minorities of any kind that is measured. Of course, again, we don't have figures on medieval history particularly.

If there is a disparity, what would likely explain it? The articles suggest it is a kind of prejudice for a world that is more Christian and whiter. But there are other factors that could be at play:

1) A Medieval Studies degree is a luxury good, and a medieval language degree even moreso. Unlike philosophy degrees, the training for which has very wide application in terms of problem solving, a degree in Middle English trains you to teach Chaucer and Malory, and a few other less-well-known figures. Electing to invest in such a rarefied education may not seem like a good option to a larger percentage of people from ethnic minority groups, who may be more likely to be struggling to find a place for themselves and their families than secure enough to chase after that one job in a million teaching Chaucer.

2) People tend to be interested in history insofar as they feel connected to it. If you are of Scottish extraction, you may be more interested in Scottish history than someone who is Chinese. Medieval history is chiefly European, and thus it wouldn't be too surprising if people of European extraction were the ones most often drawn to it. But that only means "white people" in the American sense; in Europe, where I would expect Medieval History and Language to be much larger fields given the direct access to the primary sources, there would be plenty of diversity in the sense of "white people" breaking down into Germans, French, Spaniards, etc.

3) A lot of the love of the medieval period comes from literature: Tolkien, the stories of King Arthur and his noble knights, Ivanhoe. Who reads this stuff? Maybe that's a clue to who develops a love for the field. These things have been taken off the curricula of high schools, just because the literature field is seeking diversity in what they expose kids to. That means that people have to seek these things out on their own, and who does that? As above, "people tend to be interested... insofar as they feel connected to it."

My guess is that there might well be a lack of ethnic diversity in the various American fields that get roped together as Medieval Studies; there probably is perfectly adequate sexual diversity, and in Europe diversity is what I would expect to be the case unless we insist on reading all the Germans and French and so forth as simply "white." If it's a problem, I doubt it can be solved by conferences, however. You're going to have to change the economic incentives, plus get more people to read the literature that causes you to love the period. That means altering high school curricula again. Are people seeking greater diversity likely to want to make that trade? It would mean exposing a very large number of Americans to less diverse readings in high school, in the hope of attaining a larger still-very-small number of American Ph.D.s in Medieval History from non-white backgrounds. If diversity is the goal, I'm not at all sure that's a good trade.

Johnny Cash's Legacy

Rosanne Cash wrote an open letter condemning supremacism in any form. It was in reference to someone wearing a shirt with Johnny Cash's image on it, and a desire to make clear that he wasn't associated with their movement.

Billboard magazine elected to reprint a 1964 letter by Johnny Cash himself, one that was aimed at standing up for Native Americans. I assume everyone here knows the Ballad of Ira Hayes, who was one of the Marines at Iwo Jima as well as a member of the Pima people. Cash was a good guy for standing up for anyone who'd had a hard shake.

He also sang songs about the Civil War, including a version of the one Raven posted in the comments the other day.

It's a pretty good example of what "Heritage, not Hate" looks like when it's true.

A Memorial's Story

Posted without comment.

Dulce et decorum est

"Let me tell you a story. Once, there were two brothers, Milton and Calvin. Milton was eighteen and Calvin was sixteen, and they lived with their parents on a small farm in red clay country, a few acres of bottomland. War came. Important men in fine clothes made fancy speeches, and of course they were right because they had university degrees and they were important and anyway war was a grand adventure, so Milton joined up. He joined the Guilford Greys and he had a fine uniform and a great hat. Calvin wanted to come too. He begged and pleaded and threatened to run away until it was decided that Calvin would come with Milton, and Milton would keep him safe. And so the boys went to war.

"It wasn't fun and it wasn't shiny. It wasn't glorious and it wasn't neat. It was horrible and dark and scary and the brothers stuck together, and Milton took care of Calvin. And then there was a terrible losing battle called The Wilderness, a running awful messy battle in deep forest with enemies and friends strung out all over the place, and Calvin was shot. The enemy was moving in, and Calvin was shot, and figures with bayonets were moving through the powdersmoke, and they were retreating. The lieutenant ordered Milton to retreat but he wouldn't. His brother was wounded on the field, and he wouldn't leave him. And so he stayed with his brother's unconscious body, and put his hands in the air when they saw him.

"Milton and Calvin were captured, and they were taken to a POW camp at a place called Elmira. 12,100 men were sent to Elmira, and 2,970 of them died there in the next twelve months, 24.5%, a rate comparable with Andersonville and British held by the Japanese in World War II. (For comparison, the death rate of Germans held by Americans in World War II was 0.15%.) Calvin was one of the ones who died. He was buried in a mass grave in a long burial trench at Woodlawn Cemetery.

"Milton was one of the ones who lived. When the war ended, some of the POWs were given train tickets home. Not Milton. He started walking. He walked eight hundred miles. He got home. He explained to his mother and father that he had failed. Calvin wasn't safe. He was rotting in a trench. He died when he was eighteen years old. Milton hadn't taken care of him.

"But Milton lived. He was now his family's breadwinner. He got a job on the railroad as a brakeman. He moved into town. Eventually he married and built a little house with four rooms right near the railroad track. He had two sons, Calvin and Luther. And he told them the story, he told them about Calvin. His sons did ok. Calvin became a fireman, and eventually fire chief. Luther became a master plumber and pipefitter, and he installed lots of new flush commodes in houses in town.

"My father remembered as a child when his grandfather Luther contributed to build the Confederate Memorial in Woodlawn Cemetery. It's a bronze stele of a young man in uniform mounted on granite with an inscription that reads "In memory of the confederate soldiers of the war between the states who died in Elmira Prison and lie buried here." It stands over the old mass grave amid rows of white crosses, one for each of the 2,970 men. Milton was dead by the time it was erected, in 1937, but Luther contributed in honor of the uncle he'd never known. Calvin left no works of art, no good work, not even fine installed toilets or trains that reached the station safely. He left no children, no genes to pass down the ages. He left nothing but a brother's love.

"Now the Nazis have claimed our story, have claimed our statues, and protesters march with banners and shout to tear down these memorials, these horrific symbols of evil people which were raised in hate to intimidate and frighten. They've taken our story, and we will lose the statues too. We will lose Calvin, and all the young men like him. We can't even tell the story for fear of being reviled. I can't post this out of friendslock for fear of destroying my life. If I do, I'll be called a Nazi and a racist and an evil person who should be killed. They've taken our story.

"Maybe, when enough time has passed, when these Nazis too are gone, we can tell it again. Or maybe it will be lost forever, like so many stories have been. Or maybe someone who isn't American can tell it, someone who is free from this particular constellation of issues. But right now all I can do is grieve -- for what the Nazis have taken from us, and from my friends who are posting that only evil people would defend these memorials. These memorials don't belong to them. They belong to Milton and Calvin. Maybe one day, if I live long enough, I can say that."