Organized Crime?

The Teamsters Union gets set to fight US immigration agents. Mostly this is within the law -- they're training to know their maximal rights in resisting warrants of various kinds -- but these numbers are striking. (Not the Teamsters. The Teamsters are not striking.)

[T]he organization — which covers a variety of fields, including airlines, truckers, dairy farmers and more — also has a sizable share of immigrant workers, roughly a third, 40,000.

After what happened to Garcia — one of many recent forced deportations — worry ran through Teamster shops, Miranda said....

Spinelli paid particular attention because many of his members — immigrants who work at a Long Island dairy farm — were profoundly shaken when federal agents raided nearly 100 7-Eleven stores last month in a search for undocumented workers.

“We deliver all the dairy to all the 7-Eleven stores in the city — you can imagine how scared some of these guys are,” he said.

Surely this is an indication that the third of Teamsters who are immigrants includes a lot of unlawful immigrants? How far can the union go in organized efforts to prevent enforcement of the law before it is a criminal conspiracy to aid and abet the violation of immigration laws? Lawyers among you are invited to reply. I assume that legal rights are legal rights no matter what, but this seems like a clear-cut case of trying to (as they say on the Left) 'obstruct justice.' I suppose it's legal to obstruct justice as long as you do no more than insist upon your rights.

And it sounds as if the law is itself a part of the conspiracy to avoid enforcement: "Employers also have the right to three days’ notice if the feds instigate what’s known as an I-9 probe — basically, a review of employees’ working papers, Cortés said."

More Bad Polling

The sample size is only 900, but these numbers suggest the narrative is slipping through the media's fingertips.

The Nation: "Intelgate"

A serious guy writing at the left-leaning Nation declares that we need a new Church committee to get to the bottom of our intelligence community's election meddling.

Polling not going well

Whoever the PR firm was that was hired to take charge of this Trump-Russia-Election-Hacking story, I think they may owe their clients a refund.  Rasmussen reports that only 42% of likely U.S. voters can be induced to say that Russia interfered in the 2016 election more than the FBI did.  34% think the FBI did more interfering, while the other 24% aren't quite sure and are waiting to see what new admissions are contained in this weekend's data dump of whatever private texts have been forensically rescued from the FBI's records-maintenance procedures after three or four minutes concentrated attention from digital experts with some actual interest in disclosure.

"A Slight Change"

The Marine Corps Times:

In a slight change to the grueling initial stage of the 13-week Infantry Officer Course, Marines will no longer be required to pass the Combat Endurance Test to move on.

The Corps has come under criticism for what some have claimed to be unnecessarily high standards to graduate from the course. To date, only one unnamed female Marine has successfully completed the entire course.

But Marine officials at Training Command contend the changes are not an effort to water down standards.... Previously it was scored as a simple pass or fail, but now the test will no longer be used to weed Marines out. The officers will continue to take a Combat Evaluation Test, but their score will be just one of many components of the course considered for a student’s overall evaluation.

Perhaps they'll introduce a personal essay, as the colleges did when they made the same move to lower their standards on test scores and grades. I imagine there are many who cannot pass the Combat Endurance Test who could write a very moving personal essay showing how much it would mean to them to become an Infantry Officer.

A Small Additional Matter

A long-time informant for both CIA and FBI Counterintelligence testifies on Uranium One.

Campbell said Russian nuclear officials “told me at various times that they expected APCO to apply a portion of the $3 million annual lobbying fee it was receiving from the Russians to provide in-kind support for the Clinton’s Global Initiative.”

“The contract called for four payments of $750,000 over twelve months,” Campbell said in the statement. “APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the US-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement.”

In a statement to Fox News, though, APCO called Campbell's assertion "false and unfounded."

Maybe. Maybe we'll finally get to see what really went on with that particularly scandalous transaction. Team Trump has been called treasonous for allegedly considering dropping sanctions on Russia in order to get help from Russia; Team Clinton stands accused of selling massive quantities of American uranium to the Russians in return for cash bribes. That sounds a little worse than sanctions relief, even if all the accusations against both sides were true.

The Senate has been busy

A Senate report on the need to investigate disturbing revelations in the FBI Obamagate text traffic.  You can click on a link to the 30-page PDF report, but I call your special attention to pages 13-18, which quote extensively from the messages.  There also is an interesting discussion of why the FBI could not locate a large trove of missing messages over a period of several months, but the Senate was able to retrieve them after a couple of weeks of effort once the proper investigators were given access.

A Military Parade?

I have a divided mind on this. On the one hand, as J. R. Salzman rightly points out, the main effect on the military will be having to show up at 0300 having spent a week polishing and detailing their tanks. They aren't going to appreciate the event, so it's an odd way to honor them. They'll do it, of course, because they were ordered to do it. But why impose a time-consuming and expensive detail on them that doesn't add to their war-fighting prowess?

On the other hand, I have an idea that would make it really worth doing. I would love to see the military get together with Rolling Thunder and do a combined current-service parade with veteran riders on either end of it. It would show the way that America's military serves as a thread that ties together generations, and helps to bind together our whole society.

It would still be expensive, but the detail might be counter-balanced by the opportunity to meet veterans from earlier conflicts and learn each other's stories. I think the current service personnel would value that, and would certainly benefit from the ties it would build. At the same time, such a display would make an important point about the real, deep value of military service to American civic life.

UPDATE: Sen. Rand Paul has an alternative suggestion: let's bring the troops home from Afghanistan and hold a victory parade for them.

A Mead Hall

The British National Trust has discovered a Saxon mead hall, conveniently located on property they already own.

A number of items have been found including several Roman coins, three Roman brooches, Roman pottery, a Saxon loom weight and part of a Viking stirrup mount, as well as a probable Anglo Saxon strap tag.

...And Then There Were Seven

Molly Hemingway, yesterday:

For more than year and half, the media have gone all-in on reporting every possible angle of President Donald Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia.... But as the Russian collusion story disintegrates, another interesting story ascends. Investigations by multiple congressional committees as well as an investigation by the inspector general of the Department of Justice have shown irregularities in the handling of the most politically sensitive probes...

These investigations have resulted in the firing, demotion, and reassignment of at least six top officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice. And all of those personnel changes were made before even the first official reports and memoranda from these investigations were made public.

Emphasis added.

Today, in the Washington Post:

A Justice Department official who helped oversee the controversial probes of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and Russian interference in the 2016 election stepped down this week.

David Laufman, an experienced federal prosecutor who in 2014 became chief of the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, said farewell to colleagues Wednesday. He cited personal reasons.

Probably just a meaningless coincidence.

Politics all the way down

Is there any limit to the weaponizing of federal bureaucracies under the Obama administration?  Am I naive to believe this process reached levels not experienced under previous administrations?

Zerohedge has a horrifying summary of evidence in the FBI's possession that inexplicably had no impact on the Uranium One deal or the willingness of someone, anyone, at any time, to look honestly at what the Clinton money machine might be up to.  The story mentions reporter Michael Isakoff at one point. Isakoff is the author of the Yahoo article that, in classic circular disinformation style, was used to burnish the credibility to the Clinton/Steele dossier before the Carter Page FISA court, even though the only source of the Yahoo article was the dossier itself.

Isikoff says he was "stunned" to learn that his article was cited in the FISA warrant. We "believe" him.

The Connaught Rangers

Two songs with the same name, a proud British army song and a defiant mutineers' song.

Formed in 1881 from two older regiments, the Connaught Rangers were one of eight Irish regiments in the British army. The regiment served in the Second Boer War and World War I, and it helped suppress the Easter Uprising.

However, in 1920 nearly 90 soldiers from the regiment mutinied in protest against martial law in Ireland. In 1922, after the establishment of the Irish Free State, the regiment and five others from Ireland were disbanded. Many of the soldiers from these regiments returned to Ireland and joined the new Irish army.

The Senate piles on

No criminal indictments of FBI or DOJ personnel for lying to the FISA court, but the Senate has referred Steele himself for criminal investigation for lying to the U.S. Government.  The Senate's referral implies that Sidney Blumenthal fed the dossier's contents to the Russians in the first place.

What Wrong Looks Like

Apparently it looks like 1984 plus Han Chinese racism.

In Praise of Emotion

A new book argues that we've not been giving our feelings enough credit, or a big enough role in shaping our lives. I find the thesis shocking, but the review is glowing.

Confused? Mission accomplished.

The focus over the last couple of days has become:  did the FISA application for surveillance on Carter Page adequately disclose that the Clinton campaign bought and paid for a phony Steele dossier by mentioning in footnote somewhere that there may have been a political origin of some kind to the dossier?  As an Ace commenter put it:

Without the dossier, the case for spying on Page was "some Russians tried to get close to him and didn't." Which is pretty thin gruel. The dossier spices it up to say Trump and Russia are a thing, so it is no surprise that Page and Russians are close….

Conservative Treehouse adds an argument, based on curiously lined-up background identification facts in court filings, that Carter Page was an FBI informant in Russian spy sting operations until very shortly before he became a surveillance target himself, on the heels of developing a relationship with the Trump campaign.

It stinks to high heaven.  But as another Ace commenter put it, "Confused?  Mission accomplished."

And another, assuming the nod-nod-wink-wink in the infamous footnote was duly heard and received:

FISA Applicant: Judge, Hillary Clinton would like us to open an investigation on her opponenet in the Presidential campaign.

FISA Judge: Well, what evidence of crime do you have?

FISA Applicant: We heard from a guy, who heard from Sydney Blumenethal, who heard from....

FISA Judge: OK, that's enough. Warrant granted.

Young Dubliners

... and some Irish history in the links.

'Twas England bade our Wild Geese fly
that small nations might be free
But their lonely graves are by Suvla's waves
or the fringe of the Great North Sea
Oh, had they died by Pearse's side
or fought with Cathal Brugha
Their names we will keep where the fenians sleep
'neath the shroud of the foggy dew

The Talmadge Bridge

If you ever go to Savannah, you will see arcing across the river a mighty bridge. This bridge, the Talmadge Bridge, is named after former Democratic governor of Georgia Eugene Talmadge.

Since long before the monuments controversy, I've been expecting them to change the name. Talmadge was an important Georgia governor, to be sure. He was a fierce opponent of Franklin D. Roosevelt, these days considered a major saint by Democrats but in those days intensely opposed even by many fellow Democrats. He was a fierce opponent of labor unions, declaring martial law when necessary to break strikes. He was against civil rights for blacks, and deeply disturbed by the idea that whites and blacks might intermarry. Indeed, he ran his 1950 re-election campaign chiefly against miscegenation as a reason to favor segregation.

Yeah, it's been a while now I've been expecting people to look around and notice they have a big bridge named after him.

So anyway, the Girl Scouts of America have decided they'd like the bridge renamed after their founder, Juliette Gordon Lowe, who came from Savannah. Her house is a major tourist attraction.

I see no reason to oppose this change.

Asian Bee-Eating Hornets

Kind of a fun bit of reporting from Out East.

The bees also exploit a unique bit of insect anatomy: The hornet doesn’t have a heart—literally and I suppose kind of figuratively when you think about it....

The bees can't get through the hornet shells with their stingers, so they came up with a pretty nifty alternative.

Man Of The Hour

Rep. Adam Schiff, apparently determined to do every single thing that Trump is accused of having done wrong. Colluding with Russian spies to affect US politics? The only reason he failed is that he got pranked. Exposing sensitive sources and methods to endanger US intelligence collection for partisan purposes? Included for the sole purpose of forcing the President to make redactions.

This guy is making a clear-cut case for restoring the practice of caning Congressmen.

Which campaign deserved surveillance?

This is a good timeline of the sorry affair of the Carter Page surveillance and its background.  This part jumped out at me:

[By October 2016,] the FBI is aware that the Hillary campaign paid lawyers to give money to Fusion GPS, who gave money to a foreign agent (Christopher Steele), who got information from Russian informants. Yet, the FBI counter intelligence effort was being run on the Trump campaign not the Clinton campaign.

More Bagpipes!

The WSJ asks if that's really what bagpipe bands need. "Is there such a thing as too many bagpipes? There’s a nagging suspicion, even among bagpipers, that the answer might be yes."

However, the real answer is, "No."

Tears of joy

Fun?  I'll say.  SpaceX STUCK the landings.  Their people have been shrieking with excited joy non-stop for so many minutes, I'm amazed they have voices left.  Even the East German judge gives it a 10.0.

Falcon Heavy

If you didn't watch the live video, it went well. The landing of the sideboosters is Buck Rogers stuff. Glad to see the private space program doing well, and having fun.

"An Idealist With The Scars To Prove It"

This story has everything. Puerto Rico is struck by a hurricane, and is in desperate need of food aid. FEMA issues a contract for 30 million meals to a contractor with only one person employed there, the 'minority female' owner (who is, under contracting laws, entitled to preference points in terms of contract awards for both of those statuses). She sub-contracts to a completely inadequate set of wedding caterers, who produce 50,000 of the 18.5 million meals needed at the first deadline. These meals also are not properly assembled, lacking a self-heating mechanism like an MRE's chemical heater. These have to be shipped separately.

So naturally, she's suing the government for terminating her contract.

Ms. Brown described herself in an interview as a government contractor — “almost like a broker,” she said — who does not keep employees or specialize in any field but is able to procure subcontracted work as needed, and get a cut of the money along the way. She claims a fashion line and has several self-published books, and describes herself on Twitter as “A Diva, Mogul, Author, Idealist with scars to prove it.”

After Tribute’s failure to provide the meals became clear, FEMA formally terminated the contract for cause, citing Tribute’s late delivery of approved meals. Ms. Brown is disputing the termination. On Dec. 22, she filed an appeal, arguing that the real reason FEMA canceled her contract was because the meals were packed separately from the heating pouches, not because of their late delivery. Ms. Brown claims the agency did not specify that the meals and heaters had to be together.

She is seeking a settlement of at least $70 million.

Planned Parenthood and Fusion GPS

This report comes from a clearly biased outlet, and cites only right-wing sources. On the other hand, I suppose it would be hard to find anyone critical of Planned Parenthood in the mainstream press -- especially given the particular subject of this report. So take it with salt, but see if it fits with other things you've read.

The FBI Faked A Whole Field of Forensics

So claims this article in Slate, based on another article in the Washington Post.

"The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.... Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.”

The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the country’s largest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison."

The article goes on to interview an expert who says that the problem generalizes. "Nor is the problem limited to bad hair cases—much the same type of eyeballed comparison is done on bite marks, ballistics, fibers, and even fingerprints."

I begin to see why they think we should be afraid to cross these folks.

Oh, Well, Is That All?

In an article about how California is likely to race ever-further left, given the absence of hope for Republicans in the state:

That means staking out the most liberal stance on issues such as single-payer health care in California, a highly expensive initiative that failed in the legislature last year. The push is in response to the uncertainty surrounding health-care revisions in Washington, but it is estimated to cost twice the state’s annual budget.

No, of course that's not all. That's the estimate. What was the estimate on that train project?

Getting Ahead of Ourselves

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is transforming practically every human activity: the way we make things; the way we use the resources of our planet; the way we communicate and interact with each other as humans; the way we learn; the way we work; the way we govern; and the way we do business. Its scope, speed and reach are unprecedented.

Think of it: Just 10 years ago, there was no such thing as a smartphone. Today, no one leaves home without it.

No one, that is, except that 32% of Americans didn't have smartphones in 2015, the last year for which numbers are available. That creates potential problems for models like Amazon's new checkout-free store, which requires both a smartphone and a checking account. The people who don't are of course the very people who are going to lose out in the new economy that these same companies are rushing to create.

They're aware of that, but so far their minds turn quickly to socialist solutions.

How can we secure the future of those whose jobs will be eliminated by machines? Do we need a guaranteed basic income? Should we impose taxes on software and robots? Do companies that provide global IT platforms have to comply with national rules and regulations? If so, how can they be enforced? What freedoms and rights should individuals have in the digital age?

Do you have any better answers? I'm not liking the way the discussion is shaping up. Even the list of questions sounds like a future I'd rather we could avoid.

Free Beer... Tomorrow (Or the Day After)

Bud Light is planning to offer free beer to everyone in Philadelphia during the celebratory parade on Thursday morning. Three million people are expected to attend that parade. Three million Philadelphia Eagles fans, day drinking for free on a Thursday morning.

No way that will cause problems. Good decision, everybody.

Encounters With Men

Katie Rophie has an important piece on the current moment of (especially liberal) feminine rage, which I am not going to comment on in the detail it deserves. What I am going to wonder about is how much the rage is driven by the kind of men who occupy the circles in which these women travel.

For example, Rophie cites one of the women who invited friends to an Election Night party in 2016:

While I was writing this essay, one of the anonymous emailed me a piece Donegan wrote in The New Inquiry about the devastating night of Trump’s victory. She had hosted an election gathering, and as the results came in, the men were drinking tequila out of a penis-shaped shot glass, and laughing and making jokes as the women cried and clutched one another. Instead of thinking about choosing new friends, she ends with a blanket indictment of men and a blow for the cause:

Here is what the last few days have reminded me: white men, even those on the left, are so safe, so insulated from the policies of a reactionary presidency, that many of them view politics as entertainment, a distraction without consequences, in which they get to indulge their vanity by fantasizing that they are on the side of good. . . . The morning after the election, I found the penis-shaped shot glass in my kitchen and threw it against the wall. I am not proud of this, but it felt good to destroy something a white man loved.

My first reaction to this was incredulity that any men, unless out-and-proud gay men, were drinking anything "out of a penis-shaped shot glass." No way, I thought. But I have no reason to doubt the author, who almost certainly invited people of her own political leanings. These men, 'even those on the left,' must be the sort of people who do things like that. 

I assume they aren't in fact gay, since she would then think of them as threatened by Trump rather than 'safe.'  But they aren't the sort of people who actually voted for Trump: they almost certainly were 'on the left' and voted for Clinton, or she wouldn't have invited them to her party. The point is that they're so far outside of my own culture that I find their behavior unrecognizable.

Another writer produces a piece about an unexpected and unwanted encounter with an actual Trump supporter, a self-described "redneck," for which she is deeply grateful.

"Just ask any redneck like me what you can do with zip ties — well, zip ties and duct tape. You can solve almost any car problem. You’ll get home safe," he said, turning to his teenage son standing nearby. "You can say that again," his son agreed.

The whole interaction lasted 10 minutes, tops. Katherine and I made it home safely.

Our encounter changed the day for me. While I tried to dive back into my liberal podcast, my mind kept being pulled back to the gas station. I couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself a "redneck" who came to our rescue. I sized him up as a Trump voter, just as he likely drew inferences from my Prius and RESIST sticker. But for a moment, we were just two people and the exchange was kindness (his) and gratitude (mine).

As I drove home, I felt the full extent to which Trump has actually diminished my own desire to be kind. He is keeping me so outraged that I hold ill will toward others on a daily basis. Trump is not just ruining our nation, he is ruining me....

[M]aybe if we treat one another with the kindness and gratitude that is so absent from our president and his policies, putting our most loving selves forward, this moment can transform into something more bearable? I want to come away from the march with that simple lesson, but it begs this question: How do we hold onto the fire fueling our resistance to the cruelty Trump unleashes, but also embrace the world with love? I wish I knew.

The second encounter turns out better for everyone. The difference is not in the women, but in the kind of men. That's an important point for those of us who, though we are on the other side of this culturally and in terms of sex, want to ensure better relations between the sexes.

Are you saying you don't trust us any more?

Politico is shocked to discover that the Republican party has conservatives in it who distrust the government, even a formerly sacrosanct entity like the FBI, which previously only Democrats were smart enough to distrust:“

The attacks on the FBI are already working,” said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer. “Regardless of what happens next, the news has now been filled with sordid accusations and stories about corrupt FBI agents, that they will sink into the minds of many Republicans and even Democrats who are paying attention. These Republican attacks can possibly achieve the same kind of effect on law enforcement institutions, as Republican attacks on the social safety net or regulations like OSHA in the eras of Reagan and Bush. In other words, nobody or nothing in government can be trusted.”

If his goal was to deride the grounds for distrust and suspicion of the political weaponization of yet one more previously respectable federal agency, then his concluding paragraph may have gone awry:

But there are profound dangers for the Republicans, too. Unlike some other quarters of the government, intelligence and law enforcement agencies have power to strike back. After all, they know the secrets, and have been known to use them. At this moment, no one knows more about what really did or didn’t happen between the Russians and the Trump campaign than the FBI agents working on Robert Mueller’s investigation. That may make the bureau a tempting target for this White House, but it makes it a formidable adversary as well.

Four Chaplins' Day

I had not heard this story before.

It’s been 75 years since the U.S. Army Transport Dorchester was hit by German submarine U-223 while transporting 902 servicemen, merchant seamen and civilian workers to Greenland. On Feb. 3, 1943. four Army chaplains on board gave their lives to save others....

The ship was hit below the water line with a torpedo, initially killing and wounding many men on board.... When they ran out of life jackets, the four chaplains removed their own and gave them away as well. As the ship sank, the chaplains could be seen, arms linked, on the deck, and heard, singing hymns and offering prayers.

Almost seven hundred men died in that one incident. We think of 'the Long War' as grinding and brutal, but as this Foreign Policy piece points out, we've had there were fewer war deaths in the first decade of the Long War than in any decade of the 20th century.

An antidote to chaos

I am loving Jordan Peterson's "12 Rules for Life:  An Antidote to Chaos," which my lovely husband bought for me.  The summary below is cropped and summarized further from an Amazon reader review  The last three are so short because I got them out of the table of contents, not having gotten that far yet.

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. It’s a deep instinct to size others up when looking at them to see where they fit in the social hierarchy. If you crouch forward you’re inviting more oppression from predator personalities and can get stuck in a loop that's not helping anyone.

Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. People often have self-contempt whether they realize it or not. Imagine someone you love and treat well, then treat yourself with the same respect.

Rule 3: Choose your friends carefully. Eliminate those who are hurting you. It’s not cruel, it’s sending a message that some behaviors are not to be tolerated.

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. You only see a slice of their life, a public facet, and are blind to the problems they conceal.

Rule 5: Don't let children do things that make you dislike them. You aren't as nice as you think, and you will unconsciously take revenge on them.  Brats are like misbehaving dogs:  they never get taken off the leash to enjoy a little freedom, because they can't be trusted.

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Start by ceasing to do one thing, anything, that you know to be wrong.

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Meaning is how you protect yourself against the suffering that life entails. Meaning lets you know when you’re in the right place, midway between chaos and order. If you stay firmly ensconced within order, things you understand, then you can’t grow. If you stay within chaos, then you’re lost. Expediency is what you do to get yourself out of trouble here and now, but you're sacrificing the future for the present.

Rule 8: Tell the truth—or, at least, don't lie. Telling the truth can be hard in the sense that it’s often difficult to know the truth. However, we can know when we’re lying. Telling lies makes you weak. You can feel it, and others can sense it too. Meaning is associated with truth, and lying is the antithesis of meaning.

Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. A good conversation consists of you coming out wiser than you went into it. Listen even to your enemies. They will lie about you, but they will also say true things about yourself that your friends won’t.

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech.  Don't cover things in a fog.  Face up to the real horrors of the world.

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.  You're not supposed to remove all dangers from your kids' lives, you're supposed to be helping them become stronger.

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. It can't hurt, and it might make you feel better.

For another perspective on the same rules, try this.  I don't think he liked the book.

What I bin sayin

Kevin Williamson on how to tell what people want, not what they wish they wanted:

People make a moral case for free markets — that people have a moral right to be left free to pursue their own interests as they see fit — and there’s something to that, but it’s easy to make too much of the moral case, too. The case for free markets is mostly instrumental: The possibility of profit causes people to self-organize in such a way as to focus the maximum human attention on solving the problems that people care the most about. Notice there is no should in that sentence: People in the communication business wryly observe that every major advance in communication technology in the past hundred years has been driven at least in part by pornography. That’s a joke, but it isn’t just a joke. There’s what people want, and what you or I think or Senator Snout thinks people should want. They aren’t the same thing. If you want to figure out what people think they should want, give them a survey. If you want to figure out what people actually do want, try selling them something. Vast amounts of capital — including human intelligence, the most valuable of all resources — have gone into making food plentiful, automobiles safer and more reliable, housing more affordable and more comfortable . . . and reality-television shows, artificial-intelligence–enabled face-swapping porn, the Super Bowl, and any number of things that do not strike me as obviously valuable. People value what they value.

Return of the Monstrous Water Maids

The British museum was overturned by the city council, which took the side of the public outcry against the curator's preferences.

Since I'm doing Ballad of the White Horse quotes today, here's his passage on the 'monstrous water maids' of the Rhine. Their magic has won the day in Manchester, even if it was not adequate at Ethandune.

Then from the yelling Northmen
Driven splintering on him ran
Full seven spears, and the seventh
Was never made by man.

Seven spears, and the seventh
Was wrought as the faerie blades,
And given to Elf the minstrel
By the monstrous water-maids;

By them that dwell where luridly
Lost waters of the Rhine
Move among roots of nations,
Being sunken for a sign.

Under all graves they murmur,
They murmur and rebel,
Down to the buried kingdoms creep,
And like a lost rain roar and weep
O’er the red heavens of hell.

Thrice drowned was Elf the minstrel,
And washed as dead on sand;
And the third time men found him
The spear was in his hand.

Seven spears went about Eldred,
Like stays about a mast;
But there was sorrow by the sea
For the driving of the last.

YIkes

The FISA memo was released.

The Steele dossier formed an essential part of the initial and all three renewal FISA applications against Carter Page.

Andrew McCabe confirmed that no FISA warrant would have been sought from the FISA Court without the Steele dossier information.

The political origins of the Steele dossier were known to senior DOJ and FBI officials, but excluded from the FISA applications.

DOJ official Bruce Ohr met with Steele beginning in the summer of 2016 and relayed to DOJ information about Steele's bias. Steele told Ohr that he, Steele, was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected president and was passionate about him not becoming president.

The FBI and Justice Department mounted a monthslong effort to keep the information outlined in the memo out of the House Intelligence Committee's hands. Only the threat of contempt charges and other forms of pressure forced the FBI and Justice to give up the material.

Once Intelligence Committee leaders and staff compiled some of that information into the memo, the FBI and Justice Department, supported by Capitol Hill Democrats, mounted a ferocious campaign of opposition, saying release of the memo would endanger national security and the rule of law.

But Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes never wavered in his determination to make the information available to the public. President Trump agreed, and, as required by House rules, gave his approval for release.

Finally, the memo released today does not represent the sum total of what House investigators have learned in their review of the FBI and Justice Department Trump-Russia investigation. That means the fight over the memo could be replayed in the future when the Intelligence Committee decides to release more information.

Full copy of the FISA memo here.

Dating the Great Heathen Army

A new paper uses radiocarbon dating to confirm authorship of a mass grave associated with the large Viking armies in late 9th century Britain. There's a more layman-friendly article about it from Popular Archaeology.

Sometimes called the Great Heathen Army, or The Viking Great Army, in fact it was several armies that appear to have linked up or fanned out at the decision of their several leaders. Many of these were the sons of Ragnar Lodbrok, about whom the History Channel has been making its famous series. One of them was not, but was instead Guthrum the Old, who became a Christian after his defeat by Alfred the Great. This is the subject of Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse. Guthrum, christened Athelstan, went on to found the Danelaw in Northumbria.

Far out to the winding river
The blood ran down for days,
When we put the cross on Guthrum
In the parting of the ways.

Harsh But Fair

Mary Katherine Ham, a University of Georgia alumna, discusses her parenting.

Alexa for Southerners

It's just a joke. Southerners don't voluntarily wiretap their homes.

The Pope Bows to "Scientific Atheism"

This is being portrayed as an attempt by the Church to gain legitimacy within China; but the regime is officially hostile to the idea of a transcendent God whose morals might override the dictates of Party and State. Bowing to that sort of thing does little to secure the legitimacy of the Church. Rather, such a move threatens to cast away any such legitimacy.

Nor is this in response to Chinese overtures of friendship. "The pope’s conciliatory approach stands out at a moment when China is tightening its grip on religious practice under the more assertive leadership of President Xi Jinping."

Giant: The Bible of Texas

So claims Joe Bob Briggs, in this review of a new book. He makes the film sound titanic.

It’s a great movie and has many themes, but the whole arc of the story can be understood as “The Reeducation of Bick Benedict” (the Rock Hudson character). Rock doesn’t choose to stop being a bigot; he gets the bigotry beaten out of him by his wife and son and a Texas that simply can’t keep pushing back against the legacy of the Spanish missions. In 1956, three years after Brown v. Board of Education, that was a message that, in the South, you would think might rustle up some hackles. The fact that it didn’t—and the fact that, to this day, Texas politicians are a moderating influence on the hard-liners who want to close the Mexican border—indicates more than anything that sometimes films can change minds. Nobody watches the 1960 depiction of [The Alamo] anymore. Everybody knows Giant....

[The director] understood Texas. He understood the old-school ranching part, the new-money oil part, and the synthesis of the two that would emerge decades later in the form of distinctive cities like Austin and San Antonio that still make Texas a world of its own. The famous false front of Reata, the Benedict mansion on the prairie, has long since fallen into ruins, and the frenzy surrounding the Giant filming has been all but forgotten, but the land around Marfa is known worldwide today as the domain of Donald Judd and other postmodern sculptors, and Texas remains the only state that has adopted bilingualism so thoroughly that some cities have Spanish media and use Spanish at public meetings. The cattleman’s code, the rebel spirit, and multiculturalism found their center in a region many would consider least likely to succeed, and George Stevens saw that long before anyone else.

Texan readers, what say you? Is this film as central to your understanding of your home as he thinks it is? Did it shape the culture as much as he says?

Water Maids

The Manchester Art Gallery has removed a famous painting.

[The museum removed] John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, one of the most recognisable of the pre-Raphaelite paintings, from its walls. Postcards of the painting will be removed from sale in the shop....

The work usually hangs in a room titled In Pursuit of Beauty, which contains late 19th century paintings showing lots of female flesh.

Why have mildly erotic nymphs been removed from a Manchester gallery? Is Picasso next?

Gannaway said the title was a bad one, as it was male artists pursuing women’s bodies, and paintings that presented the female body as a passive decorative art form or a femme fatale.

“For me personally, there is a sense of embarrassment that we haven’t dealt with it sooner. Our attention has been elsewhere ... we’ve collectively forgotten to look at this space and think about it properly. We want to do something about it now because we have forgotten about it for so long.”

Gannaway said the debates around Time’s Up and #MeToo had fed into the decision.

British high society is now officially more repulsed by sex than the actual Victorians. The Victorians at least used to say that it was the capacity of the erotic to produce high art that redeemed an otherwise troubling emotion. Now we are told that male desire cannot be justified even if it produces high art; rather, the high art is condemned for being an expression of such desire.

A painting like this transcends mere carnal attraction by aiming at something universal to the human experience, or at least more universal than the particular attraction of one man to one woman. It captures something about the awe that men feel in contemplating the beauty of women; the tie to mythology captures the way in which the experience of beauty sacralizes the world. Of course this particular myth warns about the dangers of being swept away by the pursuit of such beauty -- Hylas' capture by the water nymphs removes him from the service of Hercules. Some versions of the story suggest that Hylas ended up happier as a result, but that Hercules was distraught by his loss.

Waterhouse is not the only artist to have treated the question, as the last link suggests: rather, it has been a popular subject of artists of all sorts since Ancient Greece. It is a cultural tie across generations and civilizations, in addition to having that universal quality.

Ultimately people are going to have to rediscover what it means to be an adult. One of the things it usually means is having to deal with the presence of the erotic in one's life: unprompted feelings in the self, but also unprompted and perhaps unwanted attentions from others. Another thing that it means is dealing with the attendant dangers of one's erotic feelings, which can and do cause both men and women to be swept away from existing lives and responsibilities. Sometimes this is to their destruction; sometimes they find a new happiness, but not often without forcing a cost upon others. Spouses are abandoned, like Hercules not understanding how a beloved other was swept away.

The myths are better teachers than almost any. Contemplate this on the tree of woe.

Vive la résistance!

Given current political trends, I find this Call of Duty trailer deeply amusing.

Faint praise

CNN's poll concluded that 70% of the SOTU audience had a "very or somewhat positive" reaction.  CNN was quick to point out, however, that that's what you can expect from the kind of people who would watch a Trump SOTU.

Ordered liberty

A good Andrew McCarthy piece on what's going wrong with a lot of crazy investigations.

Stop Giving Up Symbols

Norway is having a moral panic over the use of runes by their Olympic team.

There is little evidence that the rune originally had any symbolic significance beyond its sound value, but the letter shares the name of a Norse deity popularly understood as the god of war, Tyr. Nowadays, most runologists consider it a letter no more mysterious than the letter T.

Even so, the presence of the Tyr rune on the team’s sweater design was enough to raise alarms. Norway’s security police have warned of the rise of a small but politically extreme and potentially violent group called the Nordic Resistance Movement, which uses the Tyr rune in its branding.

The last thing anyone should want to do is to give up a powerful symbol to a hate group. Declaring an ambiguous symbol to be 'a symbol of hate' surrenders it to the worst sorts of people. No one should go along with this foolishness.

Fact-checking the SOTU

Not bad, though the Daily Signal may be cherry-picking a bit.

The State of the Union

I realized where this speech was going early in the night, during the section on economics and tax cuts. Donald Trump said that Americans were going to be seeing more take-home pay as a result of Congress' having passed tax cuts. Democrats sat on their hands rather than applaud Americans having more take home pay.

There are a lot of summaries of all the things that Democrats refused to applaud going around this morning. Some of them are things you'd have thought they'd applaud even if it meant giving a moment of credit or sunshine to a President they'd prefer wasn't there. Black and Hispanic unemployment being at record lows, for example: that seems like a good thing no matter who gets the credit for it.

Other things are more damning admissions. Some of these continue this morning. You can see, in the moment, a representative storming out of the chamber to protest a chant of "USA! USA!", even though you'd think such a display of patriotism unsurprising at a political event discussing the state of the American union. Still, passions run high in the moment. What is harder to understand is a considered statement by the American Civil Liberties Union, which says that the repeated use of the word America is 'exclusionary.'

Vox, which is tasked with making the speech look as bad as possible, can be forgiven for trying to paint the speech as 'lacking solutions for America's problems.' In fact a good part of the speech was about celebrating solutions for America's problems that have already been achieved, such as robust economic growth and the end to stagnation caused by over-regulation and high taxes. But it's their job to write that piece, and anyway by 'solutions' they mean 'government programs' (of which I thought there were actually far too many in last night's speech, but community standards differ). But how to explain them deciding to paint the story of a North Korean's defiant search for freedom and dignity as 'scary'?

In this speech as in any speech, there's plenty of room for disagreement on policy. It is surprising to see the opposition decide instead to oppose prosperity, the defiance of tyranny, or the celebration of America itself.

Individuality and opportunity: Japan v. U.S.

Another AEI article this mornings looks at national differences in survey responses to questions about attitudes toward risk and reward.  Among smaller differences on subjects like overall happiness, hard work, and competition, the author notes:

the data shows that 79% of Americans believe that they have some control over their lives — this over twice the 37% rate among those in Japan.

* * *

[R]espondents were prompted with “Adventure and taking risks are important to this person; to have an exciting life.” Only 9% of Japanese agreed with this idea compared to 35% of Americans — a huge difference and one which suggests that the Japanese are deeply risk averse. Similarly, respondents were asked about the idea, “It is important to this person to think up new ideas and be creative; to do things one’s own way.” This is another variant on the question of one’s proclivity to focus on the collective or the individual. Once again, a substantial difference emerged with 40% of Japanese believing in individuality and creativity compared to a far greater 67% of Americans.

When economic migration stops

An American Enterprise article discusses what makes Americans stay in economically declining areas instead of seeking a better life in booming areas.  The author focuses on barriers to entry and barriers to exit.  Among the barriers to entry are occupational licensing:

The kind of heroic work of Morris Kleiner and others has shown that more than a quarter of all workers need licenses to work. People don’t move across state lines at the same rate as you’d expect, so moves in-state are much higher than moves across state in licensed industries compared to comparable unlicensed industries. And this makes it harder to move. If you want to be a lawyer in California, it’s hard to move there. You have to take a whole new bar again. It’s costly.

We also put limits on leaving. So if you’re a public worker, that’s 13% of the US economy, moving your pension is very difficult. You’re locked in until it vests. Moving public benefits can be really difficult. So if you’re a worker in Michigan and you want to move to Texas, there’s a law that you may lose your Medicaid. And you may lose your Medicaid because it is less generous in Texas, but you also may lose your Medicaid because just the paperwork is really difficult.

The fact that we subsidize homeownership so much limits mobility because you have to sell your house and there can be lock in. There are a whole variety of other policies that have the effect of making it costly to move.

Shooting With Your White Friends

It's good to have friends. I guess what we think of as 'the gun culture' does look a little intense from the outside, though.

Also Not How This Works

What is the legally binding force of a bill that is approved by one committee in one house of Congress, never by the rest of the Congress, and never signed by the President?

The House Judiciary Committee passed a bill on Jan. 18 that asked the Department of Homeland Security to review Othman Adi’s case, placing a six-month stay on his deportation. ICE defied the legislation.

That sounds like a request. A request can be ignored or denied, but not 'defied.'

And what is this all about?

Facing a deport order since 2009, he was spared under President Barack Obama’s administration, thanks to a private bill passed in the House of Representatives. President Donald Trump did away with that provision...

"A private bill"? What on earth is a private bill? What does the author imagine its legal force to be?

Things are not unconstitutional just because you disapprove of them, and they aren't necessarily illegal either. Those words mean things.

UPDATE: On 'private bills,' see discussion in comments.

And Now for Something Compeltely Different

So. I have ended up following the big Japanese Sumo tournaments--my cable company offers the English language version of the NHK, the Japanese National Broadcasting company, and the NHK runs a half-hour show of highlights from each tournament's day. You can easily google the details if you wish, Sumo is a simple sport, really. Anyway, This tournament, or Basho, was won by a wrestler from Georgia. (Georgia in Caucasuses, not the other Georgia), Of the 40 or so 'Top Division' wrestlers, less than 10 come from out of Japan, and most of them are from Mongolia. I know of one from Bulgaria, one from Brazil, and this guy, who goes by the name Tochinoshin. He suffered a bad knee injury in 2013 that nearly ended his career, but he came back from the lowest ranking back up to the top Division and this tournament he triumphed. Match starts about the 5 minute mark, but its worth watching the whole thing. The guy talking at the start is in Japan and is a serious Sumo fan, so his commentary is enlightening.

So long, McCabe

Some perspective on the FBI bigshot the president was mean enough to fire today, just before he qualifies for full retirement.  Per Mollie Hemingway, McCabe approached White House chief of staff Reince Priebus in February 2017 to tell him "everything" in an explosive NYT piece was "BS."  The story, which alleged that Trump campaign operatives had had multiple contacts with Russian intelligence, was being aired nonstop on nearby TV sets.  Priebus gestured toward them and asked whether the FBI would repeat publicly McCabe's private denial.  McCade answered that he would have to check.  Comey called later to confirm, suggesting he might be able to clear it up in upcoming Senate Intelligence Committee briefings.  Shortly thereafter, CNN reported that

the FBI rejected a White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to U.S. intelligence.

Why the long face?

I guess these posters aren't popular.

"Obstruction"

I am trying to decide how seriously to take the obstruction of justice narrative that is being prepared on the left. I keep trying to think, 'How would I feel about this story if Barack Obama were the President who wanted his Attorney General to prevent prosecutions of crimes by his cronies?' I don't have to use my imagination very much here because, of course, that was exactly what happened with Barack Obama, his attorneys general, and his cronies.

Ultimately I think this has to be a Congressional responsibility to investigate and pursue, because the AG isn't independent enough -- and probably shouldn't be independent of the elected official over him. On the other hand, it really was maddening to see the IRS used to target conservatives, watch them destroy evidence and lie to Congress, and never face any consequences.

What's to be done about this issue? Destroying Trump doesn't fix it. Electing another Clinton sure wouldn't fix it either. It's a structural issue that I don't know that I see much way around if the Congress won't assert itself.

Where is the FBI in the Constitution?

This argument comes from a well-educated and experienced woman; nevertheless, it's very odd.

Where is my Congress? This is the urgent question posed by these outrageous attempts by the president to subvert the constitution.... Congressional Republicans who stick by Trump and protect him will be remembered as the villains of Washington’s unfolding drama. They are the ones enabling an epic White House end run around the constitution.

What does the Constitution say about the relationship between the FBI and the President? Nothing, since the Founders would never have contemplated establishing an organization like the FBI. The Constitution doesn't even mention the Attorney General, although that office is nearly contemporaneous: George Washington signed the law into effect creating the office. That law says that the President shall choose the Attorney General, provided that the Senate confirms him; it does not give the Attorney General independence from the Executive branch, nor divide his office between the Executive and the Legislature.

The FBI works for the Attorney General, who works for the President. It's an executive department, and what the Constitution actually does say about the Executive Branch is that its power is invested in a President. Though by law Presidents have to run certain appointments by the legislature, usually the Senate, that does not mean that those appointees draw their power from Article I. They're Article II officials, exercising delegated authority.

So what, exactly, is the subversion of the Constitution that is supposed to be taking place? If the legislature wants to investigate and/or impeach the President, they have Article I authority to do that. It's not obviously a power that is wisely invested in an Article II bureaucracy in any case. Nor would I want the Constitution to set up an 'independent' police agency that could not be constrained by elected officials; especially not a secret police.

The author seems to want exactly that.

As the Republicans continue their campaign to discredit the FBI, it’s important to remember a piece of history. Without Deep Throat, the Washington Post’s secret source, the Watergate scandal might never have been exposed. Deep Throat, we learned in 2012, was Mark Felt, the No2 official at the FBI.

This is meant to be the model of what right looks like? Oath-breaking leaks from the secret police, protected from accountability by un-elected journalists? Even if it happened to work out well one time, it's hardly a model I'd invest much faith in.

The budget is broke

An unusually thoughtful article about the Congressional budget process from some months back.

There's also an amusing discussion in McArdle's comment session in this week's article about the furious effort by Blue States to find a way around the tax bill's impact on their SALT deductions.  After the crowd discussed the inability of a state (unlike a city or county) to file for bankruptcy, and how you can default all you like but there's no bankruptcy court to issue an order discharging all your public and pension debt, a reader pointed out that debt arising out of an insurgency need not be honored.  That led to a discussion of the practical value of ginning up an insurgency for the purpose of obtaining debt relief.

Too Good to Check

Conservatives lean right because they're so much prettier than liberals.

The scholars said hot people lean towards the right because they grow to develop a blind spot that leads them to not see the need for more government support or aid in society - a core liberal value.

They add that attractive people don’t face the same hurdles as others as their attractiveness gains them more attention and they are more successful in social situations. Their lives are generally “easier,” the pair claim.

I mean, possibly. But I'll wager that if you study the development of conservative/liberal attitudes, a lot of it depends on personality traits that are set before attractiveness becomes a big deal -- by childhood, I mean, rather than later in life when one becomes physically mature. That's not to say that ideas don't change. We all know people who become liberal in college under the academic and social pressure; we all know people who trend conservative once they get out in the world and see how badly liberal ideas work out in practical terms. Others double down because they become attached to structures that reinforce liberal or conservative ideas.

Still, a lot of the basics are there from the beginning.

Also, I note that the researchers have a clear cognitive bias that is evident in their description of conservatives as having a 'blind spot that leads them not to see the need for more government.' That treats the need for more government as a fact, rather than an opinion. Conservatives are thus supposed to be flawed, even mentally disabled, because they cannot see a thing that is really there. They've just had it so easy that it's crippled their minds.

Is it true that the easier one's life, the more likely one is to be a conservative? Not obviously. Justice Clarence Thomas grew up in a shack insulated with newspaper, his family's sanitation being an outhouse shared with neighbors. It's not hard to name others whose conservatism arose in difficult circumstances; nor is it hard to name celebrities with easy lives who are lefties. Celebrities tend to be attractive, too; not always, but it correlates strongly.

So, my sense is that this study is probably not very valuable. It's still fun, though.

I certainly don't

Mea culpa.  I never make this connection at all:

“Few white people make the connection between their attraction to yoga and the cultural loss their ancestors and relatives experienced when they bought into white dominant culture in order to access resources,” they write.

I can't even sort the sentence out. One of the things I like best about white dominant culture is its persistent nagging to watch your pronoun precedents.

With enemies like these, who lacks friends?

The man the academic left loves to hate:

"[I]nstinctively, I knew I would like to find out about anybody described as dangerous by the trade paper of American higher education...."

Listen to the Mouse

Headline #1: "'America No Longer Matters.' Davos Isn't Worried About President Trump."

Headline #2: "Here’s How and Why Trump’s Going to Blow Up the Foundations of Davos."

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it."
-Paul-Muad'Dib
UPDATE: Headline, NYT: "Trump Arrived in Davos as a Party Wrecker. He Leaves Praised as a Pragmatist."

Good Article on the FBI

At the Hill, Sharyl Attkisson argues that it's time for some sunlight.

[T]he Department of Justice has officially warned the House Intelligence Committee not to release its memo. It's like the possible defendant in a criminal trial threatening prosecutors for having the audacity to reveal alleged evidence to the judge and jury.

This is the first time I can recall open government groups and many reporters joining in the argument to keep the information secret. They are strangely uncurious about alleged improprieties with implications of the worst kind: Stasi-like tactics used against Americans. “Don’t be irresponsible and reveal sources and methods,” they plead.

As for me? I don’t care what political stripes the alleged offenders wear or whose side they’re on.

I think they actually view a secret police targeting conservatives as highly desirable, rather than it merely being that they lack curiosity.

Finexit

A young populist candidate running for "Finland First" is worrying members of the EU.

She claims the EU has turned “Finland into its province” and has railed against the country’s political elite, who she argues do not represent the working class.

Huhtasaari has also demanded more immigration controls and has campaigned in favour of a burka ban – a far cry from Finland’s traditionally subdued politics.

I had a good friend in Finland at one time. They had, and I believe still have, mandatory military service and I knew him during his stint in their army. Their proximity to Russia makes it a wise policy to have a fully-trained militia that can be readily armed as needed.

Eight Illustrated Philosophical Thoughts

Colorful illustrations of several thought experiments. These are mostly presented for fun, with their meanings sketched rather than argued over tooth-and-knife (as is more customary among philosophers).

Friday Safety Briefing

Tell Us How You Really Feel, Mr. Sykes

[Missouri Republican U.S. Senate primary candidate Courtland Sykes] said he doesn't want his daughters to grow up to be "career obsessed banshees who forego home life ... to become nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings."

The article goes on to note that he 'faces an uphill battle' for the nomination. I'll wager.

McCarthy: Release the Memo

His argument is here.

I think this story has gone far enough that releasing the memo can't possibly be enough to resolve the deadly questions raised. We're going to need to see a lot more than that to make a judgment about whether these charges are true, or whether Republicans in Congress have been raising such explosive questions without basis. One way or the other, we need to know.

"Gang Life"

Looks like an easy win on DACA just got harder. Rubio may have internalized the message that he won't be winning any future Presidential nominations until he gets right with the base on immigration.

I wonder if the Republicans will stand firm on all the things they've now tied to a DACA fix? The wall, e-verify, an end to chain migration and also an end to the visa lottery program -- that's a lot of weight to pull. It could just be the Trump technique of making a 'big ask,' and then settling for less. I won't be surprised if e-verify is discarded, as that would be the part that would actually make it hard for corporations to hire illegals. That would drive up their labor costs, and they can't be happy about the idea.

Star Wars Fan Films

After the recent discussion of The Last Jedi, I saw that movie and then started looking for Star Wars stuff on YouTube. Something I discovered is that there are a lot of short fan-made videos out there, and some of them are fairly good, all things considered.

Of course, the classic Troops has been out for 20 years now.

But there's a lot of more recent stuff that's well-made, at least for amateurs. I kinda wish I could make something along these lines.

Here's one that's a little dark ...

Mathematics and the Battle of Clontarf

"The Brian Battle," as it was also called, was a turning point in Irish history. However, historians have long debated the exact nature of that turning point. Those with a patriotic Irish heart liked to portray it as a cleansing of Ireland by a native Irish hero, Brian Boru, who led his Irish armies to defeat the invading Vikings. That romantic reading fed the hearts of those who, likewise, wanted to cleanse Ireland of another bunch of invading Germanics.

More sober historians pointed to a lot of factionalism within the Ireland of the day, and suggested that it was probably more of a civil war in which the Vikings backed the losing side.

Now, a mathematical model suggests that the romantics were right, or at least more right than not.

To perform the study, the academics examined Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (“The War of the Irish with the Foreigners”), a chronicle from the early twelfth-century that reported on events in Ireland between 967 and 1014. They wanted to know how all the Irish and Viking characters in the text fit together in a network, monitoring whether the interactions between them were benign or hostile. They developed a mathematical measure to quantify whether hostility in the network mainly connected Irish to Irish or Irish to Vikings.

They then calculated the difference between the measure of hostilities between each type of character (Irish and Viking) and what would have been hostile interactions in the network, indiscriminate of whether characters were Irish or Viking.

A positive value of the resulting measure would signal Irish civil war and a negative number would reflect an Irish versus Viking conflict. The results gave an overall negative value suggesting that the text mainly describes an Irish against Viking conflict.

However, because the negative value was moderate (-0.32 on a scale from -088 to 1) they suggest the text does not describe a fully “clear-cut” Irish versus Viking conflict. Instead, the network portrays a complex picture of relationships and social networks of the time.

We tend to be inclined to doubt romantic opinions, but sometimes romance wins one.

Burned at Burns Night

In which Theresa May decides that Robert Burns should be treated as a symbol of enduring Union, and then mangles all the Scottish aspects.

Actually, I imagine that really did capture the spirit of the 'enduring Union' from the Scottish perspective.

An Argument on Abortion

Patrick S. Tomlinson has what he thinks is a knock-down argument in favor of abortion. In fact, it's not a particularly difficult argument to answer if you are equipped with a little Aristotle.

It's a simple scenario with two outcomes. No one ever wants to pick one, because the correct answer destroys their argument. And there IS a correct answer, which is why the pro-life crowd hates the question.

Here it is. You're in a fertility clinic. Why isn't important. The fire alarm goes off. You run for the exit. As you run down this hallway, you hear a child screaming from behind a door. You throw open the door and find a five-year-old child crying for help. They're in one corner of the room. In the other corner, you spot a frozen container labeled "1000 Viable Human Embryos." The smoke is rising. You start to choke. You know you can grab one or the other, but not both before you succumb to smoke inhalation and die, saving no one.

Do you A) save the child, or B) save the thousand embryos? There is no "C." "C" means you all die.

In a decade of arguing with anti-abortion people about the definition of human life, I have never gotten a single straight A or B answer to this question. And I never will.

Nonsense. "A" is the correct answer; but understanding why it is the correct answer shows that this argument actually tells us nothing much about abortion.

The reason "A" is the correct answer depends on the actual/potential distinction. As Aristotle explains in the Physics, potential is a kind of actuality -- he calls it 'first actuality.' A forest is potentially many houses in a way that a sand-filled desert is not, in that one could make houses out of the trees but not out of the sand. Yet you would not be surprised if someone valued one actual house, especially if it were well-made, over a forest of potential houses. The well-made house will keep him from freezing to death in a way that the potential house will not.

So you can set up a perfectly analogous story about a fire department that shows up to a fire that threatens both a well-made house, and also a nearby forest. They can stop the fire from spreading in only one direction. Does the owner prefer to protect his house, or his forest? It's going to be the same answer. What that shows is that abortion is actually irrelevant to the problem; you get the same story even if all the human lives are removed from the problem.

Tomlinson goes wrong in thinking that this means that destroying the embryos is not morally problematic. That's like arguing that it would be morally fine to set fire to the guy's forest since he cares so much more about his house.

“If they’re allowed to bully they just bully more.”

If you can believe it, that's a quotation from Samantha Power.

Kyle Smith doesn't much care for a new movie about the "Final Year" of Obama diplomacy.

Actual events don’t align with the Rhodes-Obama rhetoric. Vladimir Putin, frustratingly, keeps failing to be bent by the Arc of History (™) and doing whatever he wants, seizing Crimea and abetting Bashar al-Assad. Perhaps he notices the nonstop signaling from the White House that there’s a new sheriff in town, and said sheriff thinks crime-fighters have been way too tough on outlaws. “The error that we may have made is Putin doesn’t seem to pursue Russia’s national interests. He pursues Putin’s interests,” Rhodes says. In other words, surprise! — Putin doesn’t share a liberal American Democrat’s vision about what’s best for Russia. Only liberal American Democrats would need seven and a half years to figure this out. Power, riding in the back of a car, marvels at Russia’s naughtiness: “If they’re allowed to bully they just bully more.” Funny how that works. Kerry, after Russia breaks the ceasefire in Aleppo in 2016: “It’s just so frustrating because we really had an agreement that could have worked. And unfortunately we have some people who didn’t want to cooperate.”

So The Final Year is about the Obama Doctrine, also known as hashtag diplomacy, also known as leading from behind, also known as voting “present” — also known as hands-off. That a lot of people can get killed while you’re wringing them is the movie’s unintended lesson. Summing up, I give you none other than Samantha “Soft” Power herself, who near the end of the doc says in a moment of sudden clarity: “My world is a world where you have 65 million displaced. Yemen and Syria and Iraq, Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad, Central African Republic, Burundi, South Sudan, Darfur, you know, the list, Afghanistan, of course, Venezuela imploding . . . There are concerns about terrorism and there is a fear of the other and . . . all the trendlines — on democracy, right now, at least — are going in the wrong direction.”

If only she or her friends had held positions of authority, maybe they could have done something about some of that.

That's Why You Wear A Suit And Tie

A new workplace prejudice is identified: 'lookism.'

It’s called “Lookism.” That’s the name for what happens in the job interview process when the way a candidate looks and presents themselves significantly affects whether they get the job. It can be the way they are dressed, the makeup on their face, the handbag at their feet or the style of their hair.

It can be a myriad of tiny little aesthetic details, all of which subtly affect discrimination in the hiring process. In 2006, a study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that 73 percent of employers admitted that grooming has “a lot of influence” on whether they would hire a candidate.... This is what Ursula McGeown, CEO of Dress for Success Sydney, wants to end.

Ursula McGeown's approach is remarkably sensible, actually: rather than trying to convince employers that they shouldn't favor candidates who can groom themselves appropriately, she's started a charity to help poorer women dress and groom well.

"We were going to decide what mattered"

I was led to this from http://ace.mu.nu and rather than post Truth Revolt's editorialization of the original, I decided to go to the source itself, to make sure some context or additional verbiage was not being left out so as to color what the original actual said.  It did not.

Agreeableness in arguments and success

Another good video clip from Maggie's Farm this morning.  I always enjoy Jordan Peterson, but this exchange is especially revealing, not only about the startling unfamiliarity of his interlocutor with ideas outside of her echo chamber, but about Peterson's ability to remain calm and focused in an increasingly irrational argument.  There's a lovely moment around minute 23 when the interviewer nearly admits that she has completely lost the ability to deny the reasonableness of his approach--but she recovers quickly and goes back on the attack.



It's really a shame she can't listen to him instead of trying to drown him out.  He could do a lot more to advance her ostensibly feminist goals than most of the people she's been listening to so far.

Crimes before the FISA court

From Maggie's farm:



This is a clearer exposition than most, but I still find myself swimming in a story that's hard to keep track of.  One part that caught my attention was the late November 2016 visit to Trump Tower by Admiral Rogers, which ex-federal prosecutor Joe di Genova describes as the hidden hero's story in this ugly sage.

Rogers's visit was portrayed by the progressive media at the time as a breach of professional ethics.  Di Genova sees it as a principled whistle-blowing, followed immediately by Trump's charges that Obama wire-tapped him, as well as a general decampment from Trump Tower to temporary New Jersey offices until the Trump Tower could be swept and debugged.

So, it's working?

My husband warned me that many aspects of this long article were silly, but recommended it for the schadenfreude.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez of Columbia, and Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution examined the long-term political consequences of anti-union legislation by comparing counties straddling a state line where one state is right-to-work and another is not. Their findings should strike terror into the hearts of Democratic Party strategists: Right-to-work laws decreased Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5 percent. . . . The authors estimate that Democrats control 5 to 10 percent fewer seats in state legislatures (in both chambers) after a right-to-work law is enacted.

I enjoyed reading how unfair it was for workers to benefit from unions without paying dues, without any mention of what it was like for workers to have union dues extorted from their paychecks without getting anything back in services that they were interested in.

This leads to a vicious cycle wherein the GOP can use that power to further suppress votes, gut union rights, and gerrymander legislatures—in other words, embark on a fundamental retooling of American political mechanics.

The devil you say! That hasn't been done since Democrats used their power to establish public employee unions. Speaking of that,

Right-to-work will decimate private-sector unions, while the five Republican justices on the bench may be poised implement the equivalent of right-to-work nationally for all public-sector unions in the upcoming Janus decision.

A Bit of Intersectionality

Holding Your Own Hostage

To my sorrow, the government shutdown looks likely to end. I was really hoping it would drag on long enough for Americans to realize that there are at least 800,000 Federal employees whom we don't really need. The average Federal salary in 2014 was $84,153 -- half again higher than the average non-Federal worker. Assuming the average holds for workers classified as non-essential, we could save north of $67 billion a year by firing them all.

With all these companies repatriating money thanks to the new tax cuts, they'd even likely find work. Maybe not quite at their old salary, of course, but work all the same. The kind of work that contributes to economic growth instead of taxing it, even.

Federal workers know this, which is why their donations point very heavily to Democrats. It's easy to see why the Democrats in Congress folded. They took their own core constituency hostage.

Gentlemen

Peggy Noonan wants to revive the concept.

There was a time when I wrote about all this quite a lot. I don't think I have anything to say that I didn't say back then about what the concept is, or how it applies; my sense is that the gentleness falls out of the fact that our old norms for gentlemen were invented by men who were essentially a cavalry class. An important part of taming a horse and riding it to war is learning the self-control necessary to control the horse. That's why gentlemen are gentle. Moreover, what makes a gentleman isn't a commitment to be nice to people, but the moral seriousness that comes from taking up the sword in earnest.

Once those ideas were suffused through our society; even Robert E. Howard's Conan, mentioned recently, is frequently described as having 'a rude chivalry' about him because otherwise he would have behaved in despicable ways (and thus not been a suitable hero for 1930s Americans). Actually, I think of Howard as mirroring Tacitus, whose Germania describes the northern barbarians as having similar qualities, and likewise attributes the nobility of those qualities to the very barbarism of the men. “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split," Conan says in The Tower of the Elephant.

The collapse of morals attends the collapse of consequences. Men aren't gentlemen any more because there is so little danger of having their skulls split, or of splitting another's.