Another Take on Civility

From an author who called Trump a "fascist" two years ago, a surprisingly sane take.

The presence of armed thugs in service of a political agenda is a key indicator of rising fascism, one that is completely absent today. There are no Brownshirts in America in 2018. Trump has no paramilitary organization. There are no militias that guard his events or beat his opponents. The 2016 election was contentious and hinged on unlikely electoral math and was possibly tainted by foreign meddling, but it was not marred by street violence.

The militias and the gun-rights advocates of 21st-century America are far too libertarian to ever fall into lockstep behind an emerging American tyrant. The neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville last year was troubling but, so far, was a one-off. Left-wing street violence from groups like AntiFa has been more common than from right-wing counterparts.

Also, no Reichstag event:

Emergency decrees, legal changes to the constitutional order, and the abolition of checks and balances among branches of government are key indicators that authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and fascism are taking root.

There has been no large-scale terrorist attack in the United States since Trump took office. The closest would be the truck attack in New York on Halloween last year that killed eight. Trump did not propose and the Republican Congress did not pass any amendment to the U.S. Constitution and made no changes to the balance of power between branches of government before or after that attack. There is no provision for an emergency suspension of the Bill of Rights, which remains in full force.

Conclusion as regards civility:

On balance, the times still call for civility. The trends, while troubling, are developing within a still-functional democracy.... It is important to discern the moment rightly. The left is in danger of creating the very situation they oppose by overreacting. If they jettison all semblance of democratic norms, if they give up on the process and insist on its fundamental illegitimacy, they will only add fuel to the fire. They will give Trump and his successors every pretext they need to go further down the road towards authoritarianism and worse.

This is true even if Trump, or the next nationalist president, really is a fascist.

He isn't, really. The closest things to fascism that Trump attains to are moves like his recent attack on Harley Davidson, which is responding to European tariffs by shifting production overseas. Trump would like the corporation to show a kind of loyalty to the American nation, which is similar to but distinct from the fascist idea that all corporations should be aligned with the goals of the state. Trump wants Harleys built here because he wants jobs for Americans, not because he wants to use American corporations to extend American power. In fact, a far clearer example of an attempt to align corporations with the state occurred under Obama with the NSA's program to enlist social media giants in its international spying agenda.

Most of the things people object to are problems with the Federal government, in other words, not the President. If you think ICE should be abolished, understand that ICE isn't 100% made up of Trump supporters. The same DOJ that is celebrated for investigating Trump is defending ICE's moves in court. The same Health and Human Services that runs all those beloved social programs is running the Office of Refugee Resettlement that's doing things that cause people on the Left anger and fury. These people aren't Trumpists, they're government bureaucrats. Careerists. Your real enemy, those of you who oppose Trump as a fascist, is the Federal bureaucracy. It's a government with too much power, too many overstretched claims to authority, too many police exercising too much control. It isn't the right that put those structures in place.

Indeed, civility might be helpful in identifying some points of commonality. If you do get around to wanting to dismantle much of the Federal government and its power, we could get together on that. I'd be up for a minarchist version of the Federal government, one that did what Jefferson described envisioning as the Federal government's role in his letters: looking out, to relations between nations or in cases of issues that really were between two or more American states. You still have to have borders, and an army and navy to defend them, but we could do without Health and Human Services. Or the IRS. Or the FBI's law enforcement functions, as opposed to its counterintelligence mission. In fact, we could do with a whole lot less government all the way around.

Probably those who oppose Trump don't want that much less government. In fact, I suspect they really want more -- they just want to run it, so they can be the ones using these 'fascist' levers to force compliance with their vision of right and justice and goodness. If so, we aren't going to find common ground. The conclusion that the government is too powerful to be entrusted to your enemies ought to lead you to defang it, rather than simply to trying to ensure that your side always wins. The former conclusion is one we could all live with. The latter is going to force conflict.

Pliny the Elder was Right!

About orcas, anyway.

Some Appropriate Music

Merle Haggard apparently changed his mind about this song when he grew older. There was a long period of peace and prosperity brought on by the victory, which made this seem churlish and combative in retrospect. I suppose. I wonder what he'd think about the people 'preaching about some other way of living' these days. The same way, of course. The old beast, hiding behind new bright and smiling faces.

Roger Scruton on Trump and Conservatism

Scruton is always worth considering, although I have a few thoughts that run counter to some of his points here.

When describing the history of an idea, one naturally looks for its best expression. A history of liberalism will have a lot to say about John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, somewhat less to say about Hillary Clinton. A survey of the conservative idea will dwell at length on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson and devote only a paragraph or two to Margaret Thatcher.

Fair.

On the other hand, Mrs. Thatcher, and to some extent Mrs. Clinton, are known for invoking the great figures of political philosophy and for showing an educated awareness that “ideas have consequences,” as the American conservative Richard Weaver expressed the point. In Mr. Trump we encounter a politician who uses social media to bypass the realm of ideas entirely, addressing the sentiments of his followers without a filter of educated argument and with only a marginal interest in what anyone with a mind might have said.

"Anyone with a mind" is insulting, which is a minor point, and too strong to be accurate, which is a major one. The fact is that all of the Trump voters have minds, and have thoughts. Their thoughts aren't necessarily shaped by a great deal of education, but they are shaped by experience. I obviously value education highly, but experience is often the better teacher. Education frequently teaches things that aren't true, but that captivate the mind -- Marxism, for example, has been enrapturing to many highly educated people. Experience may beat one down, or it may help one learn how to transcend certain kinds of adversity. It is possible to draw the wrong lessons from experience. But at least the experience itself is real, and thus the lessons are grounded directly on reality.

Americans are conscious of their constitutional rights and freedoms. These assets are not guaranteed by human nature and exist only because Americans have fought for them. And they have fought for them as a nation, facing the future together. National identity is the origin of the trust on which political order depends.

This is a fundamental truth that I wish more people grasped. It is also an illustration of my previous counter-point. This is the heart that drives not only Mr. Trump's political fortunes, but many others across the world. It is a truth that apparently has to be learned by experience, since the intellectual world is largely dead-set on denying it because that world wishes this thing was not true.

So too this:

Those first words of the United States Constitution do not refer to all people everywhere. They refer to the people who reside here, in this place and under this rule of law, and who are the guardians and beneficiaries of a shared political inheritance. Grasping that point is the first principle of conservatism.

So there is much to agree with, but also things to dispute. In addition to his hostility to Trump voters, one might point out to Dr. Scruton that he is quite wrong about this part:

But as Edmund Burke pointed out in one of the founding documents of modern conservatism, his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” we must “reform in order to conserve.” Institutions, traditions and allegiances survive by adapting, not by remaining forever in the condition in which a political leader might inherit them.

Here he is guilty of underestimating just how much of a reformer Trump has proven to be. Look first at the scale of his regulatory reform program, which has repealed vast swathes of Federal interference with ordinary economic activity, while pursuing the appointment of justices who are suspicious of the legitimacy of the regulatory state's claims to authority over these matters. That alone is a vast change, and while another President can re-institute repealed regulations, the judges are lifetime appointments.

The Times doubtless would not have published a piece that wasn't insulting and dismissive of Trump and his voters. There is much to criticize in the President -- especially in terms of the chaotic leadership he provides, which has made it difficult to draw many talented people, and difficult to retain the talented people he did draw. There are many things he could be doing better, and some things he does that are insulting and wrong.

All that said, there is more to the man -- and his voters -- than even the great Roger Scruton apparently can see from his intellectual height. These may be small men and women, but they are not thereby despicable. They have reasons for what they do, even if they are not polished at understanding them or articulating them clearly. Democracy is finally about respect, and especially the respect owed by the great to the small. Dr. Scruton should remember that this, too, is a conservative principle. It is what grounds a nation in not departing on some grand intellectual scheme, as Marxism does, without checking to see if those whose lives are going to be turned upside down by that scheme really approve of the undertaking.

A Pardon for the Hammonds

Trump ends the saga, for now. The tyrannical acts of the Bureau of Land Management will likely go unpunished, but at least the punishment visited on the family -- one of whom is 76 years old -- will halt for a while.

UPDATE: The AP says this move "rais[es] concerns that it will encourage others to actively oppose federal control of public land, which is a sensitive issue in the U.S. West where the federal government owns almost 50 percent of the land."

Concerns, or hopes, as the case may be.

Mob Rules

There are limits to what can be endured civilly, as we were discussing below. This is definitely beyond what ought to be endured.

One protester yelled "turtle head!" at the Senate Majority Leader a few times (a weirdly accurate comparison), along with jeers of "we know where you live, Mitch." According to the DSA, whoever was behind that "turtle head" burn wasn't affiliated with the organization.

"We know where you live" is a threat, not merely an uncivil word. "Turtle Head" is not civil, but it could be ignored. Direct threats cannot be. Yet for some reason, it was the 'turtle head' thing that DSA chose to deny being affiliated with rather than the threat.

Shouldn't They Be Happy About This?

This is not a confirmation; it's not even a denial. But it's being read as a confirmation.

Asked repeatedly if some sort of deal between Trump and Kennedy was struck before Kennedy announced his retirement, Shah dodged, saying things like “I’m not going to read out private conversations that Justice Kennedy had with either members of the White House or the president,” and, “Justice Kennedy can speak for himself.” But what Shah didn’t do is deny that the NBC report is accurate.

If it were true, this would mean that those worried that the new Justice will radically depart from Kennedy's own line of thinking could reassure themselves. Rather than Donald Trump, bomb-thrower, having appointed Kennedy's replacement, Kennedy himself would have chosen someone in whom he had confidence to preserve his legacy.

I'd think this would be pleasing news.

Civility and Its Limits

I came across an interesting piece on the currently hot issue of civility that points out, properly, that civility is not a virtue in itself, but a social contract to make it easier to get along in groups.  It also points out that we have certain obligations in maintaining the social contract:

"When someone targets one of your people over something that turns out to be innocuous, it’s the accuser that needs to be disciplined. Anything less is a betrayal of the good people for whom we are responsible. You cannot conserve civility by constantly acquiescing to the uncivil."

Civility is a tool, not a end in itself, therefore proposing that we are beholden to it is inappropriate.  We are obligated to stand up for one another, though.

It's quite good. Give it a read.

At Least We're All Taking This Seriously

I don't have a fully formed opinion on the Supreme Court nominee to share. But apparently that's not an issue that should slow me down!

How does that work again?

Am I missing something?  If vulnerable Democrat Senators in Red States want to be re-elected in November, they have to consider voters' reaction to their voting to block a Supreme Court candidate.  I can understand that they might hope that voters will agree with them on the litmus-test issue of abortion, so that they might be re-elected if they reject an open proponent of overruling Roe v. Wade.  It's risky but carries an important up-side.

But Dick Durbin appears to be making an argument based on principle, that Red-State Democrat Senators should shoot down a Supreme Court candidate because protecting Roe v. Wade is more important than being re-elected.  Sure, it might be, by their standards, but where does that leave them?  The strategy is based on the assumption that the lost seats are a foregone cost they will willingly pay.  If Durbin is right, they will have delayed confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee only to make the nominee's confirmation more of a cake-walk after the November elections.  It's not as though stopping a particular confirmation strikes a blow for all time.  The same candidate can be proposed again, or another who is basically indistinguishable.

I suppose Durbin might be trying to say that he hopes voters will react in his party's favor, and that it's worth the risk to find out if they will--because if voters will tolerate the destruction of Roe v. Wade, the Democrats might as well give up all hope of controlling the Senate anyway.  If so, abortion truly has become One Issue to Rule Them All.  And yet only something like 1/4 to 1/5 of Americans favor completely unrestricted abortion, while a similar small fraction oppose all abortions.  Everyone else can probably get comfortable with eliminating Roe v. Wade and punting the issue to the state legislatures, most of which will end up allowing at least some abortions.

Almost Heaven

I’m passing through West Virginia this weekend. That song makes more sense when you see the place. The mountains aren’t as high or rugged here as they are elsewhere, but what a beautiful place.

"Things that Happen in Silicon Valley, and also the Soviet Union"

A highly amusing thread, recommended by our old "Winds of Change"-era friend Armed Liberal.

The "Scars" Shown by Full Employment

This piece from the Atlantic hits the high notes from yesterday's piece, but it tries really hard to find a downside. Employers are "desperate," and the ability of workers to demand higher wages 'exposes the scars that even a hot economy is unable to heal.'

Plus, though central Iowa’s low jobless rate has helped workers of color, less-educated workers, younger workers, and others who face discrimination in the labor market, it remains true that it is the best-off that have done the best.

They have to work pretty hard to find that downside, in an economy in which wages are rising faster than ever, and even the convict they interviewed -- who couldn't get hired for years due to his past -- now has a job he loves, making $21/hr plus benefits.

Bores

Z-Man discusses how not to be boring.  It's an engrossing topic for me, not only because I don't like to be bored ("conversation rape," one of his commenters calls it), but because I have just enough self-awareness to know I too can natter on pointlessly when I'm uncomfortable and oblivious.

One commenter described his father:

Once I called him on having told a story many, many times before and he seemed genuinely shocked that this wasn’t the first time I’d heard it – this being a story that he’d told me maybe two or three times a week since I was five years old or so. That was when I realized that he wasn’t talking to communicate to me, but for some internal reason, maybe as a form of talk therapy. Whatever the case, it turned out that he was paying even less attention to what he was saying than I was.

Affordable housing

Manhattan Contrarian:

On Monday, [New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)] housing officials unveiled the staggering price tag to remedy the conditions and restore Nycha’s infrastructure to good working order: $31.8 billion over the next five years. . . .

Now we're closing in on $200,000 per apartment. The Zillow website gives the median value of a home in the U.S. as $216,000. So it looks like, any day now, it will be cheaper for NYCHA to buy each resident family a median home somewhere in the U.S., rather than trying to fix the deteriorated mess they have made for themselves.

Service Guarantees Citizenship

If I were in a position to do so, I would probably support something like a Starship Troopers model of citizenship: not a birthright, nor something easily gained, but something that is won by military or other physically arduous service. Something that demonstrated commitment to the American way, not just an accident of birth one way or the other. After all, as we were recently discussing, some of the best Americans are first-generation immigrants; and, too, some of those who despise America and its traditions most are native born Americans.

So, I believe I oppose this move. One never knows if the media is painting it accurately, but if so it's a problem.

Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.

The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures.

“It was my dream to serve in the military,” said reservist Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who filed a lawsuit against the Army last week. “Since this country has been so good to me, I thought it was the least I could do to give back to my adopted country and serve in the United States military.”

Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them.

Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Army said that, due to the pending litigation, they were unable to explain the discharges or respond to questions about whether there have been policy changes in any of the military branches.

Eligible recruits are required to have legal status in the U.S., such as a student visa, before enlisting. More than 5,000 immigrants were recruited into the program in 2016, and an estimated 10,000 are currently serving. Most go the Army, but some also go to the other military branches.

Spokespeople from the Army may not be able to comment on this to the press due to litigation, but they can answer to Senators. If you're inclined to call yours, you might press them to make an inquiry here and find out whether or not this is as bad as the story implies.

UPDATE: AVI wins the prize for this one. The lawyers behind the story are Perkins Cole, a notorious firm of Clinton-faction Assassins. It looks like the program was suspended as early as 2014, and largely killed in 2016 as it generated a backlog the Army couldn't handle. Which makes it an Obama-era problem, spun up as an anti-Trump story.

That said, I still like the idea of service-guarantees-citizenship. Figuring out how to make it work could be worth doing.

The Declaration of Independence as Hate Speech

It is a document that endorses violent revolution, I guess. And it has some very harsh things to say about King George. And after all, other symbols of America like the Gadsden flag are said to be hateful, even racist.

Vocational Training

The booming economy needs more skilled labor. That means wages are going up.

"Pressure is building for employers, and both hard data and anecdotal reports indicate that wage pressures are building,” Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors, said in a note. “With the economy still humming, employers are able to justify stronger wage increases to retain or attract talent, but it’s becoming a more challenging proposition.”

A 'skills mismatch' is exactly what we have been told to expect for decades as automation changes which jobs do or don't need to be filled with people. So you need to retrain people for the jobs you have now, not the ones they did before. There are a number of ways to address that challenge. Labor unions do a lot of training, in spite of the negative press they tend to get on the right. So one option for companies who need electricians (say) is to go to the IBEW. In return for a collective bargaining agreement, the union can make sure that skilled labor is available as needed. Of course, that means higher wages and benefits -- but from my perspective, higher wages and benefits for US workers is an ideal outcome.

Alternatively, a company may decide it doesn't want to bargain with a union. It can then invest in its own training program. Workers who come to work for such a company won't necessarily receive higher wages or benefits, but they will receive marketable skills. Once they have satisfied whatever contractual obligation the company puts on them in return for their training, they can compete for higher wages and benefits using those skills.

And of course, vocational schools can allow workers who have access to some capital to invest in themselves, recouping their training costs by competing for wages directly. Companies can also ally with such schools, covering the costs for training (and probably bidding for a lower tuition rate in return for regular business) in return for a worker's commitment to work for them for a period of time.

These are all solvable problems. They're good problems to have. All the solutions -- except one -- point to a more skilled, better paid American worker. The only thing to avoid is allowing these companies to import labor at higher rates, so that they can avoid paying higher wages, higher benefits, or for training more skilled American labor. If we can do that, our working men and women will begin to see their lives getting better.

Happy Independence Day

Except for Maduro, I guess

Don Surber notes with amusement that the new President of Mexico's post-election rhetoric is not an exact match for his campaign-trail rhetoric:

AMLO. Kim. Putin. About the only communists who are not willing to negotiate with President Trump are the Democratic Party.

Lamentations

Jill Abramson writes in the UK(!) Guardian, "Justice Clarence Thomas leading the US supreme court? A scary thought."

She winds up her screed, "And a Thomas court is exactly what people who truly value the constitution and human rights must fight to make sure we never see."

I will grant that there is a plausible reading of 'truly valuing human rights' -- e.g., for those who think abortion could somehow be a human right -- for which that makes sense. How can one 'truly value' the Constitution, however, and object to an originalist like Thomas? Why not just admit that you're more attached to your view of 'human rights' than to the Constitution, and want to see the Constitution modified or subordinated accordingly? After all, you're already a citizen of the United States criticizing your government for a foreign newspaper. A British newspaper, even. And the week of Independence Day.

Socialism in the People's Paradise of Venezuela

Stephen Green: "That the world’s most oil-rich nation has to import crude oil, and that a semi-tropical country can run out of water, should tell you everything you need to know about socialism."

Democracy at Work

Allahpundit:

“Abolish ICE” isn’t a solution, argues my colleague Ed Morrissey at the Daily Beast today, it’s a slogan. Indeed, and that’s being generous. It started as a Twitter hashtag, per HuffPost. As the phrase started showing up more online, desperate opportunists like Kirsten Gillibrand who are looking for an angle to shore up their left flank in the 2020 primaries glommed onto it. Just like that, the hashtag #AbolishICE had become the slogan “Abolish ICE,” which had in turn become a semi-serious policy proposed by a semi-serious U.S. senator. And once it did, other supposedly serious 2020 contenders had to keep pace with Gillibrand by proposing it too.

Suddenly Democrats have a problem.

How big a problem? Richard Cohen:

The socialist label, combined with the demand to obliterate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is the nitro and the glycerin of a bomb that Trump can throw at the Democrats. It combines the bugaboo of socialism with the irrational fear of immigrant hordes rampaging through the countryside.

The latter fear is not to be messed with. In Germany, it may yet bring down Angela Merkel’s government and has already made doughty Denmark mad with anti-immigrant regulations that reveal a nation demented by cultural paranoia.

Yeah, you're definitely winning back Rust Belt voters by describing people who share their views as "irrational" and "demented." And this is the sane part of the Left, the part that isn't openly advocating abolishing immigration enforcement and opening the border. They may still want to do it, and consider any opposition to doing it crazy and/or racist. But they're at least sensible enough to know not to say it out loud.

Back to Allah:

Overall, across the total population, “abolish ICE” sits at 21/44 — and that’s the more encouraging of the two recent polls for progressives. The other outfit to poll this question, Harvard-Harris, found trainwreck numbers for liberals when it asked if ICE should be disbanded...

So what should be done instead? The polling on this is pretty clear, too.

“Do you think that people who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home?”

Sixty-four percent -- 83 percent of Republicans, 47 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents -- said they should be sent home. Only 36 percent said they should be allowed to stay.

Penn then asked: “Do you think that parents with children who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home?”

“The presence of children made little difference in the result,” York stated before noting that “61 percent -- 81 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents -- said they should be sent home, while 39 percent said they should be allowed to stay.”

This shouldn't be that surprising, because our actual laws say the same thing as these supermajorities. Crossing the border away from a port of entry is illegal; it's a misdemeanor, but nevertheless a Federal crime. Smuggling a child across the border is a felony. The laws haven't changed, and it is pretty clear based on last week's song and dance in Congress that they aren't going to change. The laws aren't going to change because the laws already say what most Americans want them to say.

In fact, given the strength of the polling numbers, what should be surprising is that we're discussing the issue so hotly. One suspects that there is a coordinated campaign to try to create a controversy where, in fact, the American public has a large degree of consensus. Who would benefit from such a controversy?

NNT on "Fake News"

The piece is over a year old, but it just came across my desk this morning. Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues from his own experience that "The Facts are True, the News is Fake."

In the summer of 2009, I partook of a an hour long discussion with David Cameron, who was in the running for, and later became, the U.K. Prime Minister. The discussion was about how to make society robust, even immune to Black Swans, what structure was needed for both decentralization and accountability, and how the system should be built, that sort of thing. It was an interesting fifty-nine minutes around the topics of the Incerto and I felt great communicating all the points in bulk for the first time. The room in the elegant Royal Society for the Arts was full of journalists. I subsequently went to a Chinese restaurant in (London’s) Soho to celebrate with a few people when I received a phone call by a horrified friend. All London newspapers were calling me a “climate denier”, portraying me as someone part of a large anti-environment conspiracy.

The entire fifty-nine minutes were summarized by the press and reported from a tangential comment that lasted twenty seconds taken in reverse. Someone who didn’t attend the conference would have been under the impression that that was the whole conversation.

It turns out the reporter's understanding of the comment he did make was exactly backwards, but the only thing he heard during the whole hour that grabbed his interest. The news suggested both that Taleb was hotly advancing an agenda he wasn't, and that advancing this agenda was crucial to his argument.

Taleb goes on to make recommendations about how to handle this. Aquinas is involved.

George Washington's Rules for Civility

Washington wasn't so civil that he wouldn't fight a war over a political point -- aye, and win one. But he was a man who aspired to gentility, and he set out to make himself a man of manners as a result. Given the current talk about civility, it might be worth looking over his rules.

The collector notes:

Many of these “rules” are outmoded etiquette, many are baroque in their level of detail, some should never go out of style, and many would be mocked and derided today as “political correctness.” Brookhiser “warns against dismissing the maxims” as mere politeness, noting that they “address moral issues, but they address them indirectly.

The first rule, for example: "Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present." That's an issue of honor, but honor has significant moral consequences.

Street Brawl in Portland

Looks like a fun weekend on the Left Coast. Communists describing themselves as anarchists attacked a march called the Patriot's Prayer march, which is the one carrying all the flags. (What a collection of flags, too: US and UK and Polish flags, plus a host of historic ones including a black-and-white rather than white-and-black variation of the Culpeper rattlesnake flag). As you can see from the progression of the flags once the explosions start going off, the communists were not prepared.



Not that they didn't bring weapons. Here a masked Communist loses his metal baton to one of the guys he wanted to beat up. I note that the masks seem to be worn only by one side here, which might indicate something about which side intended to lawfully protest, and which side came to do unlawful things to the other.



CBS news (top link, above) quotes a radio station interview with the leader of the Patriot's Prayer march, where he claims that -- as has happened in several other marchers in liberal cities -- the police stood down and allowed the attacks to go on unmolested.

Patroit Prayer organizer Joey Gibson told KOIN the clashes "good in terms that we showed that there's a political move right now to have the police stand down in order to impact free speech in some of these big cities."

"Portland's the last city on the West Coast that's doing that, so we just have to keep hitting it -- I don't see what else to do other than that," Gibson said. "We'll make Portland so ugly in terms of how they allow these protesters to charge us when we have a permit. The police stood down, we were told they would not stand down, so we have to challenge it."

It does seem like this is a recipe for disaster. I think that local governments that order their police to allow protesters to be beaten and attacked are asking for a mess of trouble, and they're likely to get it.

Stop Hyperventilating

Worries in the New Yorker about what a "brazen conservative majority" on SCOTUS would produce.

I for one doubt that Donald J. Trump, of all people, is hot to use this opportunity to overturn Roe v. Wade. Donald Trump has affairs with porn stars. If the Left had succeeded in impeaching and removing him from office, and Mike Pence was picking the next Justice, then I'd think that overturning Roe was a priority. But c'mon. Donald Trump is not the guy who is going to impose a chaste sexual morality on the United States.

Trump, also, was openly pro-gay-marriage well before Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were. Like 2005 earlier -- ask the NYT.

Conservatives of all stripes are glad to have Trump rather than Clinton picking the next SCOTUS justice, but not because we expect an activist. I don't even want an activist. I want an originalist, textualist Justice who will attempt to understand what the ratifiers of the Constitution or its amendments intended to enact, rather than attempting to impose a meaning that the Justice might prefer. I want someone who will be very disciplined about that, even though that means there are cases -- 16th Amendment cases, for example -- where the Constitution does not say what I would wish it might say.

The reason I want that is the same reason I always wanted it. We can change the Constitution through Article V processes, but those require a large degree of consensus. Attaining that degree of consensus before altering the basic law of the nation means that the result is stable. Imposing rapid, radical changes on society without that degree of consensus results in the instability and anger that we see in our politics today.

That is not to say that strictly interpreting the Constitution might not produce radical changes in and of itself, especially where the 10th Amendment is concerned. Those changes will push power down to the people in the States, though. That means that liberals will be able to live as they wish in many states, especially the highly populous ones they tend to dominate. It will protect their interests where they tend to live; and those who do not live there now are free to move.

Be at ease, liberals. It won't be that bad.

Stop Feeling Guilty

In point of fact, it would be healthier for our politics if people would stop "feeling" their way to answers all together. I should make bumperstickers: "Stop Feeling, Start Thinking!"

"Disproportionate!"

From the NYT: "Some liberals now say that free speech disproportionately protects the powerful and the status quo."

What do you think regulated speech will do? Who regulates things? The powerful, right? Those in charge right now? Thus, the 'status quo'?

I know these people are not idiots, but they sometimes seem dead set on convincing me otherwise.

Enemies of the people

I yield to no one in my contempt for much of the press, though of course I hesitate slightly in emphasizing it this week, for sadness about the Maryland shootings.  Nevertheless, I enjoyed this National Review piece:  The First Amendment is not the "Be Nice to Journalists Act of 1791":

Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; nor shall any president troll Jim Acosta or describe Katy Tur as “little”; nor shall any president draw undue attention to honest errors committed by the press in their noble pursuit of speaking truth to power; nor shall any president say the New York Times or Washington Post are failing when they totally aren’t; nor shall any president fail to ensure White House briefings are televised to maximize exposure of journalists who have put a lot of work into their hair and makeup; nor shall any mouthpiece of any such president bestow undue prominence in said briefings to reporters from Newsmax or the Daily Caller; nor shall any president be unduly mean to the press in general.

Should we fear Amazon?

The Financial Times straddles the fence:

So: Amazon competes hard and invests heavily, just the things that make capitalism work as it should. Worries that Amazon is a threat to competition — and many people do worry about this — may therefore seem quixotic. The concern is that when the Amazon steamroller has flattened the industrial landscape, it will be free to raise prices and, more importantly, either crush or buy out any innovative rival to its established franchises.

To waive this away on the grounds that one day a new competitor will unseat Amazon, just as Amazon unseated Walmart, seems naive. Amazon has not only a huge edge in physical infrastructure, as Walmart once did. It also enjoys technological network effects to rival Microsoft’s and a trove of consumer data that would make Mark Zuckerberg blush.

Resurrecting other great ideas from the 1930s

Remember the "switch in time that saved nine"?  Why not trot it out again?  It's the Gandhi gambit:  it works only when you're up against an opponent whose principles can be turned against him.  Not, in other words, against the Second Coming of Hitler.

As a corrective, an example of more grown-up ways to resolve disputes:



My Facebook feed (now consisting largely of residents of my county who are involved with me only because of the recent election) is full of zhizzhing and dripping over who started all the incivility, and whether civility has a place in a world where whatever.  Lot's of talk about how we can't win ("any more") by being nice.  One neighbor even complained that people seem to think snowflakes just sit around singing "kum-bah-yah."  I don't think that's anyone's idea of a snowflake:  it's not their niceness that they're famous for but their thin skin, and there aren't many illusions about what's under the thin skin.  What is ever under thin skin but Old Adam?

Everything is Hitler-Eleventy

Feedback mechanisms: some tactics contain the seeds of their own destruction:

Rage is hard enough to direct, rage against everything is impossible to control.

And here's Trump-as-Hitler-Eleventissimo. Any minute now, he'll start murdering political rivals. He's already got ICE, which is just like a fascist militia, right?

Stuff that just has to be true

A blogger called "The Money Illusion" examines five widely held assumptions about important economic events of the last few years, and concludes that we too seldom re-evaluate our assumptions in the light of what later events should be teaching us:

Let’s consider 5 popular hypotheses:

1. The mortgage interest deduction has a major impact on the housing market.

2. The NASDAQ was obviously wildly overvalued in 2000.

3. Switzerland was forced to revalue its currency in January 2015.

4. The US housing market was obviously wildly overvalued in 2006.

5. Brexit would cause a recession in the UK economy.

Powerline week in pix

Fake news

As Mollie Hemingway says, if a poll shows that 53% of D's, 79% of I's, and 92% of R's believe the press lies to us on purpose, and then the press reports only that 92% of Rs don't trust them, that's an example of fake news right there.

The figure works out to 72% of everyone put together.  The press couldn't even get the support of a majority of Democrats, for Pete's sake.  CNN's ratings have dropped below those of the Food Channel.  Yet somehow commentators don't conclude that Trump gets support from people disgusted with the press, they conclude people are disgusted with the press because Trump undermined their sterling reputation.

Update:  Sheryl Attkisson's 52 times the press misrepresented the news about President Trump.

Be careful whom you sue

Mueller's PR stunt of filing charges against Russian companies unexpectedly pitted him against flesh-eating lawyers for a client with nothing to lose.  The prosecution is horrified by the prospect of having to turn over Brady material to the defendants.

Candlemakers vs. the Sun

Basquiat poked fun at protectionist trade policies by pretending to petition on behalf of French candlemakers for an end to the importation of below-cost sunlight.  The only flaw I can find in his argument is that we can't see any plausible way one of our trade competitors can cut off our sunlight after we come to depend on it.

Lately, if I understand the President properly, he's taken to saying he'd actually prefer zero tariffs, and is imposing tariffs only to show other countries the cost of the ones they impose on us.  Is this really like saying we should shut out the sun because other countries are doing the same to themselves?

Whether this really is a flaw in the President's economic theory or not, however, it does seem as though the strategy can work.  Trading partners do respond to the threat of tariffs, sometimes, by agreeing to moderate their own.

The Flight 93 Campaign

I missed this Michael Anton essay from shortly before the 2016 election:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon.

The story has a happy ending:

Michael Anton ... was a senior contributing editor of American Greatness from July 2016 until January 2017. He currently serves as deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council.

Wild Irish Rose

Some of you might be celebrating a bit this weekend. Here's a faithful companion for you... well, a companion, in any case.







There's too many of these songs to include them all. Some are old, and some are very sad, but it's a well-known theme.

Another narrative buster

The man early reports were itching to identify as some kind of alt-right NRA nut shooting up the liberal press turns out to be a shotgun-toting guy with a Hispanic surname, no obvious political connection, basically a disturbed young man with a history of scary obsessions.  Here's the lawsuit that started his vendetta against the Annapolis newspaper in 2011.  He believed the newspaper painted him in an unfair light after his guilty plea on an internet harassment charge.  His terrified harassment target has long since moved out of state and sleeps with a gun by her bed.  It's a shame no one at the newspaper office was similarly armed.

As ithers see us

HotAir looks at a poll on how Rs and Ds misperceive each other:

If you replace "Agnositcs or atheists" with "unaffiliated," the Rs are a little less off:  the portion of Ds would be 26%.

Might Be Fun

An alternative reality fiction called Vikingverse. I don’t know anything about it beyond what’s at that page, but it could be of interest to some.

Am I ever out of it

Real Clear listed 19 female characters that "changed TV or movies forever."  I'm kind of into this sort of thing, but I'd never heard of a surprising number of them:

1.  Princess Leia, Star Wars: OK, I at least noticed her as an early attempt at a female who was more than a prize or a McGuffin.

2.  Jane the Virgin: I may have heard of her, not sure.

3.  Clair Huxtable: I've heard of her but never watched The Cosby Show that I can recall.

4.  Mary Richards: I did watch some Mary Tyler Moore show episodes as a kid.  Did they fill me with the conviction that I could make it on my own?  I can't recall.  I guess it's possible.

5.  Sophia Burset, Orange Is the New Black: Heard of it but never watched it, no idea who she is.

6.  Jessica Huang, Fresh Off the Boat: Never heard of it or her.

7.  Katniss Everdeen, The Hunger Games: I think I watched it, but it made so little impression I'm unsure.

8.  Annie Hall, Annie Hall: I certainly remember her.  Perhaps she made an impact as a not-entirely-unfair take-down of a bit of a ditz who was afraid of spiders and ended up the kept woman of some soulless Hollywood mogul.

9.  Letty Ortiz, Fast and Furious:  I'm almost sure I watched this movie, but I retain no memory of her.

10.  Coffy, Coffy:  Never heard of it or her.

11.  Elle Woods, Legally Blonde:  I'll give them this one.

12.  Hermione Granger, Harry Potter:  I at least noticed her, without experiencing much impact.

13.  Annalise Keating, How to Get Away with Murder:  Never heard of it or her.

14.  Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman:  I know the character but not the movie.  Not particularly my thing, even as a kid when the comics were popular.

15.  Olivia Pope, Scandal:  Never heard of it or her.

16.  Mulan, Mulan:  I've heard of her, never saw it, can't remember what it's about.

17.  Rebecca Bunch, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend:  Never heard of it or her.

18.  Minda Lahiri, The Mindy Project:  Never heard of it or her.

19.  Ellen Ripley, Alien:  I'll give them this one.  I genuinely identified with her.

No Sarah Connor?  Emma Peel?  The Geena Davis character in The Long Kiss Goodnight?  Not even, maybe, G.I. Jane?  I was quite taken with the Patricia Arquette character in True Romance, as well as Riff Randell from Rock'n'Roll High School, even Rosalind Franklin in The Race for the Double Helix. I am truly a lost demographic.

Goodnight, Anthony Kennedy

The Justice is retiring at the end of July. If the Republicans in the Senate can get their act together, they should have plenty of time to confirm President Trump's chosen replacement.

Soon we will hear the sound of lamentations.



UPDATE:

Lamentations.

Juxtaposition

Where did the union money go again?

HotAir helps us with the hard math:

If you want a better look at how “balanced” things are in terms of union support for Democrats and Republicans, why don’t we just look at the entity being sued in this Supreme Court case? It’s the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). How well do they spread their money around between the two parties? For that answer, we need look no further than Open Secrets to see what proportions of the more than $10M they spent in the 2015/2016 election cycle they spent where. Let’s take a peek at their outside money spent for or against candidates in those years, shall we?

Independent Expenditures: $8,340,618
For Democrats: $2,661,233
Against Democrats: $0
For Republicans: $0
Against Republicans: $7,562,498
Electioneering Communications: $0
Communication Costs: $1,883,204

Let’s see… the total spent for Democrats or against Republicans adds up to $10,223,731. And the amount spent for Republicans or against Democrats adds up to… hang on. Let me get my calculator out here. (carry the two…. six gozinta 14…) There we go. It adds up to zero. Zilch. Nada. In more technical terms found in post-graduate math classes, that’s known as bupkis.

So would you care to explain to me once more how this is an issue which hits both parties? I’m a bit slow and wasn’t really a math major so you may have to use small words.

Maxine Waters, campaign gold

I really thought Maxine Waters was giving Trump a gift earlier this week.  I keep saying, "Louder, and in front of more cameras!"

When socialism works

Tim Worstall argues that socialism can work as long as it's voluntary.  (I've always said it works great under my roof.)

But the two important words there are voluntary and sometimes.

For example, an employee-owned integrated steel company is going to be a rare beast. It’s unlikely that 10,000 workers are going to have a couple of billion in capital to build one, and if they did, they’d be fools not to diversify.

Employee ownership should, in theory, work well when it is human capital that is the vital ingredient in the recipe, but less so when it is physical such which matters.

The voluntary part should be obvious. If people desire to organize themselves into less and more communal forms of production, then good luck to them.

... What we need is a method of sorting through what works best when—and that’s where the market comes in.

The decision about what is the best form for a specific task is not something to be derived from theory in advance—it’s emergent from market competition.

There's that crazy notion again: finding out what works.

Not Winning in Reality

Five years and change in Federal prison for one Reality Winner.

I hate to see a free person reduced to chains and cages. I wish we had a better system for the few laws we really need to enforce, and fewer laws by far that demand to be enforced. Nevertheless, there are some laws that any nation has to enforce if it is to remain free and sovereign. It has to defend its borders, and it has to punish treason. Five years in prison is not a gentle punishment, but once this would have been seen as a capital crime.

What doesn't kill us

The New York Times is admirably upbeat about how unions will emerge from the destruction of their extortion-and-bribery circular financing system stronger than ever before.  "The more you tighten your grip, Lord Vader . . . ."  According to the Grey Lady,

Still, the more interesting question is whether the unions, whatever the blow to their ranks and finances, will be substantially weaker.

Union leaders insist that they won’t — that the crisis posed by the case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has brought more cohesion and energy to their ranks.

“No one wanted this case,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “But the gestalt around the country has been to turn an existential threat into an opportunity to engage with our members like never before.”

That's the spirit.  It was never about the money!  Now that we can't force you to give us money, can we engage?

Getting Excited About Smaller Government

Democrats everywhere have suddenly gotten the bug! Instead of hearing about what parts of the state they want to expand or deepen, Democrats everywhere are talking about what they want to abolish.

#AbolishSCOTUS
#AbolishDHS
#AbolishICE
#AbolishCBP

They haven't gotten as far as an "Abolish" hashtag yet, but the discussion on #ElectoralCollege is pretty negative too.

The other Loretta Lynch bombshell

I thought the rap against former Attorney General Loretta Lynch was the July 2016 tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton, at which they would like us to think they discussed nail polish and fantasy football rather than how to save the Clinton campaign from the email scandal. Inspector General Horowitz tells us, however, that the Russians ostensibly intercepted a Debbie Wasserman-Schultz email to a Soros operative.  In the email, DWS supposedly quoted Lynch's assurances to the Clinton campaign that the feds would go easy on Hillary Clinton:

What is known, based on press leaks and a letter Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent Lynch, is that in March 2016, the FBI received a batch of hacked documents from U.S. intelligence agencies that had access to stolen emails stored on Russian networks. One of the intercepted documents revealed an alleged email from then-DNC Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz to an operative working for billionaire Democratic fundraiser George Soros. It claimed Lynch had assured the Clinton campaign that investigators and prosecutors would go easy on the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee regarding her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state. Lynch allegedly made the promise directly to Clinton political director Amanda Renteria.

The FBI apparently took the document seriously but never interviewed anyone named in it until Clinton’s case was closed by Comey in July 2016. The next month, the FBI quizzed Lynch informally about the allegations. Comey reportedly also confronted the attorney general with the sensitive document and was told to leave her office after getting a frosty reception. No other parties mentioned in the document have been interviewed by the FBI.

The current theory is that it was this intercepted transmission, rather than the tarmac meeting, that led Comey to go off the reservation and cut Lynch out of the loop in his decision to go public with investigations of Clinton.  He claims to have begun worrying about Lynch in September 2015, when she asked him not to refer publicly to an "investigation" of Clinton but instead to call it a "matter."  Comey presumably didn't know any more than we now know whether the intercepted message was real or a fabricated Russian ruse, but he obviously found it credible enough to support his pre-existing doubts about Lynch.

I don't know quite what to think of Comey.  The man blew his ethical obligations six ways from Sunday, but he does not seem to have been operating as a straightforward Clinton or even Democratic operative.  I wonder if even he knows exactly what he was up to.  My guess is Lynch did, though.

Pelosi's likely successor loses his NY primary

This is a race I haven't followed at all, but the people who have been paying attention seem shocked. Her politics are abhorrent to me, of course, but I always enjoy seeing the outspent candidate come from behind to win, particularly if the incumbent couldn't be bothered to attend two primary debates. And if you're going to be a socialist, just go ahead and be a socialist, enough with the camouflage.

Another Paper on Trygvasson

This site has some entertaining papers.

BREXIT Bill Becomes Law in UK

The UK has recently proven that it has a lot more problems than EU membership, but this is a step forward.

Speaker John Bercow said the EU (Withdrawal) Bill, which repeals the 1972 European Communities Act through which Britain became a member of the bloc, had received royal assent from Queen Elizabeth II.

The bill transfers decades of European law onto British statute books, and also enshrines Brexit day in British law as March 29, 2019 at 11pm (2300 GMT) -- midnight Brussels time.... Eurosceptics celebrated the passing of the bill through parliament last week as proof that, despite continuing uncertainty in the negotiations with Brussels, Brexit was happening.

"Lest anyone is in any doubt, the chances of Britain not leaving the EU are now zero," International Trade Minister Liam Fox said.

I'm fairly Bayesian about probability theory. I'll accept that the probability is zero when the countervailing probability has risen to one, i.e., when it's happened and not before.

Now on to Scotland's next independence referendum. Smaller government isn't always better government, but that's the way to bet.

Even Sweden Questions the Welfare State

It’s depicted as ‘nationalism,’ and maybe; but it’s not expansionist or aggressive. ’Of course we all want to help people, and we realize we are lucky. But keeping Sweden a good place to live means protecting its wealth and culture.’

Wretchard has lately been employing a shipwreck metaphor. He mixes it a bit, but there are good insights there.

Mitch McConnell: "You're welcome"

The Supreme Court, freshly joined by Neil Gorsuch, rules in favor of President Trump's travel ban 5-4.

Fluid messages

Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

This would be nice

Insulin dependence is no picnic.  We may be on the path to an oral insulin-delivery system that solves at least two huge problems:  the resistance to multiple daily injections and injectable insulin's critically short shelf-life even when refrigeration is available.

Showing up in fly-over country

From a North Dakota Rep.:

Nearly one-third of the Democrats now serving in the U.S. House of Representatives come from just two states, California and New York.

Careful what you ask for

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” ...

GEORGE ORWELL

Olav Trygvasson and Violent Conversion

An essay.

Contradictions

The Border Patrol's parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, has stopped referring migrants with children for prosecution. They claim the 'zero tolerance' policy is still in effect, but since they have been ordered not to separate parents and children, and since there is no legal way to hold the children under existing law and jurisprudence for more than 20 days, they simply cannot do everything they've been told to do.

One might think that this is a sort-of mutiny at CBP, but it's really just a basic contradiction in their orders. They're ordered to arrest everyone and hold them for prosecution; they're also ordered not to separate the alleged parents from their children. They can't do both of these things, so they're failing. Failure is what will usually happen when one programs any system to do contradictory things.

I rather liked Dianne Feinstein's bill on this issue, by the way, because it would have built a similar contradiction into nearly all Federal law enforcement. Anywhere within 100 miles of a border or port of entry, such as an international airport, Federal agents would have been barred from separating parents from their children -- "parents," not "illegal immigrant parents" or anything similar. Pretty much all Americans with children would have been liberated from obedience to Federal laws in one fell swoop.

The head of CBP says he's working to 'develop a plan' on this issue, but I'll be surprised if he can come up with one. New orders will need to be written, preferably by the legislature, that redoes this tangle of old laws and court rulings and newer executive orders.

Security vs. Law Enforcement

A surprisingly philosophical account of the distinction, and why the border crises must be solved as a species of the former.

Soccer Editorial Comment

For those of you following the World Cup, this, which my wife ran across:

Interviewer: "Do you think Brazil's 1970 team can beat today's Argentina?"

Pelé: "Yes."

Interviewer: "By how much?"

Pelé: "1-0"

Interviewer: "That's it?"

Pelé: "Well, most of us are over 75 years old now."

https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065

Eric Hines
https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065
https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065

Thinking Things Through

In 2006, I wrote a piece diagnosing what I thought was going wrong with the country. It was called "Time for a Change." It was a very long piece, but it was built around the idea that the Federal institutions were failing and exposing key fault lines in the nation. We got through the rest of the Bush administration and all of Obama's without reaching the point of absolute failure, but the stresses identified mostly kept growing. Now, with even USA Today publishing pieces that openly wonder about civil war, I wonder how much longer before the shear forces tear us apart.

These days, after twelve years' more experience, I would name mostly different solutions than the ones that seemed plausible to me then. One area where I still think the solutions look similar is the problem posed by the Federal judiciary, and its penchant for imposing one-sized-fits-all solutions on a divided America. That's where so much of the tension is coming from. If we could fix that, we could live together in peace on most issues.

Consider a point Gringo made in the comments below, on the issue of Lexington, VA. I pointed out that Lexington is a town with a particularly unwelcoming structure for 'woke' politics. He responded:

Lexington city voted ~2:1 for Hillary, while Rockridge County voted ~2:1 for Trump. Which gives me the impression the restaurant won't lose much business.

If that's true, then even in the reddest parts of America many cities are blue. And that seems right, because the same holds for towns like Birmingham, Alabama; or Athens, Georgia.

There are a few issues, like immigration, where ending one-size-fits-all can't solve our problems. Yet there are very many issues where a solution that allowed rural areas to have different laws from urban ones would greatly reduce the tensions facing the nation.

Of course, that requires a change to the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of states to go along with it. It's a hard pull to get there in a nation so divided and whose divisions are so contemptuous of each other.

Rumbles in the Forest

"Is America headed to a civil war" asks... USA Today. Well, it's the Sage of Knoxville writing in the pages of USA Today, but the editors agreed to publish the piece. That this newspaper of all of them would carry a piece warning about a potentially imminent civil war suggests to me that the idea is now completely mainstream.

Who knows? We might catch up to Mexico in political assassinations sooner than anyone thinks.

UPDATE: Calls for more.

Interesting Point

A former lawyer (J.D. cum laude, according to her bio), writes in defense of the 'separation of parents and kids is bad' thesis -- but without exception.

Indeed, studies show that maternal separation is a major stressor even in newborn infants. And fifty years of social science evidence teach us that, on average, children separated from one or both biological parents fare worse, across virtually every measurable indicator, than children who have not been separated from their own married parents.

Given how crucial intact families are to human flourishing, it is appalling that a purportedly pro-life and pro-family Trump administration would use any measure of its discretion to rip families apart. But I would also note that many of those loudly championing children at the border take an incompatible position when children are separated from their parents under other circumstances.

Children’s need for their parents in cases of intentional single-parenthood, divorce, surrogacy, and abortion, is no different than the needs of the children at the U.S. border. In these cases, though, the same needs of children to be raised by those who are most likely to fully invest, care for, and protect them — their biological parents — are ignored.

This is not to say, such as in the case of most adoptive parents, that there are not heroic individuals out there who have stepped up to give non-biological children the best life possible under what would otherwise be extremely difficult circumstances. This is also not to say that divorce is never warranted — although modern attitudes about the purposes of marriage and the no-fault system have overwhelmingly been a bust for children.

The 1970s models of thinking that “children are resilient” in the face of divorce has given way: “The myth of the good divorce has not stood up well in the face of sustained social scientific inquiry – especially when one considers the welfare of children exposed to their parents’ divorces,” observes University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox.

She goes on to more anecdotal examples, which are not to my thinking as strong. But there's an interesting point there, one that echoes a line of thought that Chesterton advanced. Chesterton is so frequently on the side of the contemporary Right that it is easy to think he isn't going to be very challenging for an intellectual on that side of the fence. Yet he is not always so, and this favoring of the family over capitalism is one of the ways in which he is not:

If it be true that Socialism attacks the Family in theory, it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks it in practice...So the factory is destroying the Family in fact; and need depend on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy.

This is from a piece called "The Superstition of Divorce," written at a time when widespread divorce was more theoretical than actual. The Right has moved on from that ground, for the most part; this one former attorney being a rare exception.

How Are Things South of the Border?

Headline: "Extraordinary moment Mexico arrests town's ENTIRE police force of 28 officers 'over murder of a mayoral candidate' amid country's bloodiest election campaign."

120 candidates have been murdered since September. This one was a rather extraordinary moment -- the assassin just walked up and shot him in the back of the head, and then walked freely away. But it's only one of three such murders in the last week or so.

Fun with neologisms

Zero Hedge introduced me to two new words this morning.  I fell for them briefly, then realized they are both amusing examples of turning the tables in the endless propaganda effort to coin words containing unexamined and unearned insults.

One was "pedophrasty," literally meaning not much more than "verbal expressions involving children," but in context the callous use of children as political cannon fodder, as in "How can we ever arrest adults who have a connection of any kind to children who would not be able to accompany them into a jail cell?"

The other was "bigoteering. " I particularly like that one, because I've long been interested in what happened to the word "profit" when it was transformed into "profiteering."  Originally "eer"was fairly neutral suffix along the lines of "-er" or "-or," meaning "person who engages in."  Some time back, it became a little shady.  If the Royal Navy is honorable but letters of marque are not far removed from piracy, then the suspect "private" easily becomes "privateer."  If profit becomes a filthy enough concept, "profiteering" acquires a sneering veneer.  Soon any word can be similar sullied by adding "-eer," so it seems fair that unscrupulous scandal-mongers (mongeers?) should be pilloried with the term "bigoteering," with its hint of using imaginary bigotry in others for one's own personal gain.  So we might also have "ecologeering" and "equiteering."

Fun with curve-fitting

These are the great results you can get if you look backwards at brief intervals of data and don't check your results by hypothesizing a causal mechanism, making a prediction, and finding out whether your curves match into the future.  For instance, there is an uncanny ten-year correlation between the number of letters in the winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the number of people killed by venomous spiders.

Counterpoint: Needed, More Americans

Bret Stephens thinks we are dangerously underpopulated:

…America is vast, largely empty and often lonely. Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, covering just 3 percent of the overall landmass. We have a population density of 35 people per square kilometer — as opposed to 212 for Switzerland and 271 for the U.K.

We could use some more people. Make that a lot more.

He has some arguments about new immigrants being, on average, better people than Americans. They'll work harder for less money, go to church more often, and -- he claims -- get into less trouble with the law. It's hard to say if that's true or not, actually; drug traffickers who cross international borders make up almost half of Federal prisoners, but that's not representative of populations in state prisons or local jails, where 90% of prisoners are but which are not good about submitting statistics in a fashion that can be readily studied. Clearly 100% of illegal aliens have committed at least a misdemeanor Federal crime; but since the debate is about whether or not to eliminate those very laws, that's not of much interest to the discussion.

Myself, I hold these truths to be self-evident.

1) American cities are too crowded, and the bulk of new immigrants are going to go right to those cities -- just as they cluster in cities in the countries from which they come. (Besides, huge swathes of the unoccupied land in the USA -- especially out West -- is Federal land in national monuments, forests, parks, and wildernesses. The same folks who want to up our population density to UK levels would have a fit if you proposed opening that land to settlement and economic exploitation.)

2) New immigrants can in fact be better Americans than native-born Americans, but only if they come loving the American way of limited government and maximum freedom. Some do: likely you've known them, as I have. One of the best Americans I ever knew was a Korean-born Korean who fought the Communists in the 1950s, and then came here. He loved America with all his heart, and did his best to impress his love of the American ideal on all of his students once he became a professor of Political Science. I'll take all the guys like him you can find.

But that's my marker for whether or not America would benefit from any given immigrant. America is in a key sense a philosophy. If they share the philosophy, well and good: we can use all the Americans we can find. Otherwise, there are already plenty of folks on the highway.

In Lexington, Virginia?

I've been hearing people mockingly say, 'Get woke, go broke' fairly often lately. This guy, though, really might. It's one thing to refuse to serve a prominent member of the Trump administration at a restaurant in DC, or in New York City. Lexington, Virginia, is not the right town for that.

It's been purged from the English-language Wikipedia article, but if you check the German-language one it still refers to Lexington as "The Shrine of the South." This is the site of Robert E. Lee's grave in the chapel named after him, at the University named after him, where also is the grave of his horse, Traveller. Stonewall Jackson was born here, and Sam Houston nearby. Currently it is the site of the Virginia Military Institute, producer of the kind of hardcore second lieutenants that come out of these Southern military academies -- the Citadel in Charleston, SC, produces their like as well. It seems like every other highway in the surrounding countryside is called "Lee Highway." Confederate flags abound.

There's a reasonable argument for freedom of association allowing a business owner to refuse to serve guests of whom he morally disapproves. There's a countering argument, also reasonable, that public accommodations should not discriminate for moral reasons to include religious beliefs. Those discussions are worthy and interesting, but here I'm merely struck by the practicalities of this decision. It's not like you can up and move your cozy bed-and-breakfast to another town, the way you could close a franchise of a chain. There's an irreplaceable investment that's been made in a particular location, which has a particular environment around it. People don't come to Lexington, VA, on tour because they are interested in woke politics. They come to see their kids at VMI or Washington & Lee -- both on the list of "Most Conservative Colleges in Virginia" -- or to tour the shrines of the South.

I guess he deserves some respect for having the courage of his convictions. If you're willing to pay the freight, you can do what you want.

Randomness beats faulty prediction

I've signed up for an Aeon feed and so far am finding the occasional interesting article.  Here's one that examines how seemingly meaningless augury techniques might be a good way to break people of the habit of using affirmatively harmful predictors.  As I see it, though, the real trick is the double-blind study:  one group uses the proposed predictors while the other relies on a random draw, then you figure out which produced better results.  Randomness for the sake of randomness doesn't have the appeal for me that it seems to have for the author.  But as a way of deciding whether that herb supplement is worth the money and risk, sure.

How's that Warming Going?

A thirty-year report.

Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios... Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago....

These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?

Well, because the payments aren't evenly assessed world-wide, thus allowing nations like China and Russia to 'catch up' with the West.

Support Group for the Woke

A parody from the BBC.

A Pictish Fort Destroyed by Vikings

AS the Vikings sailed away, they probably thought they'd done a good day's work.

The Pictish fort behind them was ruined and ablaze, its defenders put to the sword and anything worth looting had been thoroughly pillaged.

But now archaeologists examining the remains of the 10th-century settlement at Burghead on the Moray coast say the attack by the Northmen has actually helped preserve the site and ensure it could be studied by future generations.

Somewhat like a volcano, I suppose.

In other Viking science, a close examination of relics has produced a sense of what color paints were commonly used to decorate in the Viking Age.

I've got to remember this line

Useful filler next time you need to say nothing:

Even some Democrats, including warriors of press and tube, are beginning to take note that separating the children was first an Obama idea. A CNN interlocutor braced Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin with a loaded reminder that many critics of Donald Trump, who are now critical of bunking the children on mattresses within enclosures of wire and steel, made no criticism when Mr. Obama did it.

“You know,” Sen. Baldwin replied, in a voice as bland as a bowl of Cream of Wheat, “on this issue that we get into a moment where we’re making progress and then when it stalls we turn around. I think we all need to continue to be focused on it and press it through.”

Aren’t There Enough People In America?

Another Anton piece.

I don’t want to oversell Anton. I’ve met Anton a couple of times. We haven’t talked, because he’s the kind who talks so much that I don’t bother to try to talk with them. He’s a foppish dresser, proudly so. I don’t know how much we have in common. But look at this, where he gets the working man exactly right:

“After at least two decades of wage stagnation and even decline, now that we’ve finally reached the nirvana of full employment (and who knows how long it will last), why not take advantage of this tight labor market to raise wages across the board? Especially for the working and middle classes that got nowhere or even lost ground during the housing, finance and tech booms of recent years?”

Boy is right about that. He’s got a few other strong points too.

The other half of the motive

And if a hope of currying favor with the expected new president isn't enough, now there's the fear of suffering reprisals from the possible new Congress:

The Justice Department’s tepid OIG report, with its risible assertion that there was no political bias in the FBI’s Clinton email probe, suggests that it was written by people afraid to tell the unvarnished truth about the conduct of the federal government’s police apparatus, an agency that openly defies congressional oversight and has participated in a vendetta against a sitting president. The FBI’s leadership clearly hopes that the Democrats will win majorities in Congress and put a halt to the investigations into its multifarious abuses of power. The OIG is loath to face the ruthless reprisals that would inevitably follow such a disaster.

In other words, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is filled with people who fear the FBI. Think about that for a minute. What is the usual term for a government whose members live in fear of its police arm? Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” The OIG report suggests that its demise may be only one election away.

"Future Pres HRC"

Speaking of grand unifying theories, I believe Victor Davis Hanson has cracked the code that explains a lot of head-scratching deep-state decisions in 2016.

Karen Veith: Closing the Door on the Madison Metropolitan School District

A teacher with 16 years in the system explains in detail why she quit, primarily because the administration's policies and lack of leadership led to chaos in the school. There are a lot of stories out there like this one.

It's worth reading the whole thing if you want to understand public schools today.

Incrementalism vs. absolutism

I don't understand the particle physics, of course, but I'm interested in this discussion about the approach to research:

The bottom-up method is much less ambitious than the top-down kind, but it has two advantages: it makes fewer assumptions about theory, and it’s tightly tethered to data. This doesn’t mean we need to give up on the old unification paradigm, it just suggests that we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to think we can unify physics right now, in a single step. It means incrementalism is to be preferred to absolutism – and that we should use empirical data to check and steer us at each instance, rather than making grand claims that come crashing down when they’re finally confronted with experiment.

This gets me where I live. We can't make much sense of data unless we have theoretical structures, but it can be hard to improve our theories if we let them blind us to new data. I love the image of "bunging in" a new hypothesized particle.

On second thought . . . .

. . . Let's don't try it again after all.  Even Columbia's poorest citizens are seeing through the bright promises of socialism.  Nicaragua is not looking satisfied either.

Pope Francis Denounces Abortion

Nazi comparisons are everywhere these days.

...the SIR agency of the Italian bishops’ conference quoted him as denouncing the pre-natal tests that can result in parents choosing to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus is malformed or suffering other problems.

“Last century, the whole world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to purify the race. Today, we do the same thing but with white gloves,” the agencies quoted Francis as saying.

The pope urged families to accept children “as God gives them to us.”

On this point, at least, he is solidly within the norm of Papal remarks. Unfortunately, I don't think our age is primed to listen to him. It's also worth remembering that eugenics weren't just a Nazi thing; they were beloved by the elite here in America, too.