...And Then I Lie To Myself For A While

It's OK, because it's 'meditation.' From a piece on morning routines:

Then I do some meditation, where I might recite some mantras. One of them is "all of my relationships are harmonious and full of love," which is good if you are working with difficult clients.

In the wintertime like it is now, I wake up and go downstairs. I put some coffee on, then I split some wood to rekindle the fire. Then I rekindle the fire.

Then I drink some strong black coffee. I might have a glass of water first, if I'm feeling dry. I go to work usually about the time the wife is starting in on the coffee.

In the summertime, it's just the coffee.

What Does 'Authentic' Mean Anyway?

VDH writes:

One common denominator, however, seems to govern today’s endless search for some sort of authenticity: a careerist effort to separate oneself from the assumed dominate and victimizing majority of white heterosexual and often Christian males.

Even before we got to the present moment, I always wondered what the 'authenticity' debate was really about. It seems to be an attempt to define yourself by adopting someone else's categories. A country music singer who wanted to be successful might well say that he was "an authentic cowboy," or in any case present himself as such, as if Roy Rogers hadn't already mocked that concept way back in 1943.



That song came from "King of the Cowboys," which was a classic example of Roy Rogers' particular approach to the genre. It wasn't an 1880s "Wild West" bit, it was set in its own present day. Are they cowboys? Well, yeah, in a way: "The Old Bar X is a barbecue."

In another way they were quite self-consciously performing an iconic role, for reasons of their own. Roy Rogers was definitely Roy Rogers. He had his own unique style and manner even within the context of the 'cowboy' genre of the 1940s-1960s. How much he was like the cowboy of the open range days was a question that amused even him. How much were any of them "authentic" cowboys?

You might think this is less applicable to whether or not one is 'authentically' a member of an ethnic group or a sexual minority, but I'm not sure. Really people are individuals, like Roy Rogers was. Membership in social groups is to some degree performative, just as playing a cowboy on the screen was. What does it mean to be "black," for example? Barack Obama was from a white family on his mother's side, even a cousin of George Washington's. On his father's side, well, his father was from Kenya in that generation. The whole thing we think of as 'the black experience' -- the Western passage, the heritage of slavery, Jim Crow, the long economic oppression in American cities -- neither side of his family experienced that. His father had some claim on a similar heritage of being oppressed by the British within Africa, and of course he had black skin. But what we normally think of as 'black American' experience had no role in Obama's heritage. Yet he performed as 'the first black American president,' and was accepted as quite authentically so by everyone.

At this point we've started to let people make performative exceptions even to their physical sex, and are treating the performance as more authentic than the genetics. What could authenticity mean in such a context?

It's got to mean that, like Roy Rogers, you're delivering a great performance. Which is to say that the word is a kind of contradiction in terms as we currently use it; to be authentic is to be great at constructing and presenting yourself as something. It's artifice, it's artificial, and yet the word we use for it has exactly the opposite connotation.

Tulsi Gabbard to Run for President

If you don't have anything to do during primary season next year, you might give a thought to supporting Tulsi. She'll be running into the winds, between her support for religious liberty and her tangling with more powerful Democratic leaders. She's not likely to win, but she might force a debate among them that would be helpful; and if she did happen to win, her support for Assad aside, she served honorably in the military and has shown at least some deference to historic American principles.

When it comes to Democrats running for President next year, we could do worse.

What Did You Just Say?

The U.S. approved more than 5,000 requests by men to bring child or adolescent brides into the country over the past decade, enabling forced child marriages....

The requests and their approvals were apparently legal, according to government data obtained by The Associate Press, due to the fact that the Immigration and Nationality Act does not limit the age of spouses. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also approves or denies requests based on whether the marriage is legal in the home country and the state of the applicant.

Yes, the Connection is Obvious

Bristol banning grilled cheese sandwiches in order to fight the formation of motorcycle clubs.

Nationalizing Elections

Under the traditional system, states run elections under state law even if they are for a Federal office. The Democrats would like to change that. Unsurprisingly, this is a wish-list of everything from "mandatory felon voting" to "mandatory registration to vote of everyone on welfare rolls." (Not everyone on welfare rolls is a citizen, but so what?)

Also, mandatory limits on states trying to make sure that voters aren't registered in two states at the same time. Hey, that sounds like an effort to ban checks on voter fraud. (So does 'mandatory same-day registration').

I'd like to see mandatory voter ID, of a sort that requires establishing citizenship -- a passport, or a certified birth certificate, or fully executed immigration and naturalization documentation.

Jorvik Viking Festival, Year 35

You still have more than a month to plan a vacation to York, if you'd like to participate this year. I've always wanted to go, but have never managed it so far.

A History of Assassination

"The trouble with many attempted assassinations is that the subject refuses to die."

Blade Runner Blues

Via Instapundit, a meditation on what 2019 looked like in film versus reality.

Horses Over Mulholland

A Bargain at the Price

The US is currently debating whether or not to spend $5 Billion constructing a partial steel fence along the southern border. The NYT reports that the US has spent $8 Billion on the Afghan Air Force -- which is still "struggling."

Which of these is really more relevant to US national security? Which one is more cost-effective?

Bless Me, What do They Teach Them at These Schools!

Unexpected Finding

Look at the Norway/Sweden split in this poll result.

Now, if I've understood AVI correctly, we should read the Scandinavian results of this poll less as phrased, and more as, 'I believe it is my social duty to answer that our culture is [better/worse].' The very fact that Scandinavians so readily submit to the dictates of their culture proves their faith in it; thus, the honest answer should be similar to the happiness surveys out of Scandinavia, where vast majorities answer that of course they are happy in spite of the long winter darkness.

If that's all correct, Norway's result is the more surprising, because it's only a majority and not a supermajority. Sweden is the expected supermajority, where the people have internalized that they're supposed to proclaim themselves no better than anyone else.

UPDATE: And could it really be true that only 36% of Frenchmen believe their culture is superior to others'? France should look like Greece if people were being honest.

Indian Science Congress: Ancient Demon Kings Had Planes

Surely, in this age of multicultural respect, we should all take these claims just as seriously as any others.

Nageswara Rao, a vice chancellor at Andhra University in South India, said that Ravana, a demon god with 10 heads, had 24 kinds of aircraft of varying sizes and capacities — and that India was making test-tube babies thousands of years ago.

Dinosaurs were created by the Hindu god Brahma, said Ashu Khosla, a scientist with expertise in paleontology at Panjab University in the North Indian city of Chandigarh....

Sadly, some haters have been making noise about this, much to the surprise of the organizers.

The organizers of the conference were taken aback. "This is the 106th edition of the Science Congress," said the group's general secretary Premendu P. Mathur in an interview with NPR. "Since 1914, we've had so many meaningful conversations with children on science. We've hosted Nobel laureates from around the world..."

About 15,000 scientists from India and around the world attend the conference every year, said Ashok Saxena, a zoologist and a former president of the congress, in an interview with NPR. They are a part of the 50,000-strong Indian Science Congress....

Among the famous attendees this year were three Nobel laureates: Hungarian-born Israeli biochemist Avram Hershko, who won the prize for chemistry in 2004; British-born physicist Duncan M. Haldane, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2016; and German-born American Nobel laureate for medicine in 2013, Thomas Christian Südho[.]

Why can't we all be devoted to the norms of inclusivity and acceptance?

Religious Tests

Out in Texas, Republican donors are getting nervous.

Republicans in one of the most populous counties in Texas will decide this week if they should remove a party vice chairman who is Muslim following allegations he has denied that suggest he prefers Islamic over U.S. law and opposes the GOP's pro-Israel stance.... Some have even speculated that the ouster of Shafi could drain fundraising efforts and jeopardize the party's 2020 campaign.... William Busby, a former precinct chairman and leader for the Tarrant County Republican Party [said], "Corporate donors, the big donors, don't want to be associated with a party that's going in the direction of excluding people based upon their religious beliefs."

So that's both parties, then.

Some Analysis of the Green New Deal

I apologize for linking to Twitchy, whose tone and format I neither enjoy, but it's a good single link to a series of posts.

UPDATE: "Growing number" of Dem 2020 hopefuls signing on to Green New Deal.

France to Ban "Unsanctioned Protests"

Guess who makes the decision on whether or not your protest is sanctioned?

All this started over an attempt to impose climate-change policies including new taxes.

Update on Angela Davis Story

The issue, she claims, was her criticism of Israel or, as she puts it, 'the indivisibility of justice.' The facts seem to support this:

In a statement expressing dismay at the controversy, Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham said the decision had come amid “protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”

The institute did say in its statement announcing the revocation that it had begun hearing from “concerned individuals and organizations” in late December, around the time the magazine Southern Jewish Life published a piece about the award by its editor, Larry Brook.

If true, it wasn't the communism or the violence and murder after all.

Russian Tactics Suppress Voter Turnout, May Have Swayed Close Election

Russian tactics, mind you. Democratic operatives.

Originally they used these in the Senate race against Roy Moore, who was admittedly a lousy guy and deserved to lose. That success brought them more funding, apparently, because they pushed this campaign through the 2018 midterms, suppressing Republican turnout and targeting close districts.

I suppose this will be a huge story, right?

Nothing Says "Right Wing Extremist" Like A Nose Ring

A video making the rounds purports to be of a young German lady who was stopped by the police and questioned about her political opinions 'for wearing braids.'



I'm not sure of the truth of the facts, but it's something to watch out for as the elite begins to worry more and more about 'the right.' Ironically for all that he's painted as a fascist/Nazi/Hitler, President Trump is a bulwark against this kind of thing happening in America. It was President Obama's crew who engaged in targeting exercises like the IRS scandal, or Operation Choke Point. No similar things are likely to happen under Trump, whose relations with DOJ are spectacularly bad.

Tulsi Gabbard vs. Anti-Catholic Bigots

For reasons best known to her, Rep. Gabbard -- a veteran of honorable service -- decided to support Syria's tyrant, Bashar al-Assad. I was sorry about that, as it was a significant error in judgment. It's nice to see her getting this one right.

In the process, she's taking on two more powerful Democratic legislators, Sens. Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono, as well as Diane Feinstein by name. I hope it will prove a useful corrective.

Universal Goods

California's new governor promises "Sanctuary to all that shall seek it." New York City promises "comprehensive health care for all."

Leaving apart the problem of building any kind of community with a constantly shifting population who shares neither common values nor history nor even a common tongue, did I sleep through the part where economic scarcity was finally overcome?

Short Selling, Explained

BB: With Gov't Shut Down, Citizens Must Interfere in Own Lives

One of the primary functions of the government is to ignorantly muck around in the business of others, but the shutdown has hampered that. Thus citizens have been forced to try to fill that void themselves. “Today I just suddenly decided large sodas weren’t allowed,” said Morgan. “It was an annoying, pointless obstacle the whole day—it was like the government was still around.”

“I arbitrarily decided I couldn’t use plastic bags in school lunches,” said Arlene Williams, mother of three. “It was really irritating to deal with. It really made me feel like there was still some bureaucrat out there not caring about me.”

I've imposed Prohibition on myself for the month of January, rather than waiting for Lent like usual. So far I haven't started a criminal organization to smuggle booze, but I suppose there's still time.

Broadcasting In the Clear

For a fairly long time now, those of us concerned about criticisms of 'toxic' masculinity have wondered if it wasn't really just a criticism of masculinity. The APA has finally dropped the mask.

APA has issued its first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys. They draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage[.]

More and more I think that psychology/psychiatry is chiefly just bad philosophy -- but dressed up as medicine, so people act as if it were a technologically secure basis for decision-making. Freud did more damage to our society perhaps even than Marx, though we rarely talk about how badly he's damaged us by convincing us that people are largely unconscious machines in need of programming and shaping rather than convincing and persuading. That convinced our governing elites that the people were a dangerous mob in need of systems of control, and our fellow citizens that the half who disagreed with them were monsters persuaded only by the Id.

You can't unring a bell, and bad philosophy can poison a culture as thoroughly as Romans salting the earth of Carthage.

Saudi Arabia More Gender Equal than the USA

And women are the ones who are better off, new study claims.

I'm feeling a little skeptical.

Conservatives Against... Conservatives

The Bulwark is the title of a new online magazine designed to oppose Trump. From the right, allegedly, but 'opposing Trump' is what it's all about.

Going Both Ways

Angela Davis -- heroine of the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panther, once honored by the Rolling Stones while facing murder charges, also a member of the Communist Party USA -- has been denied a high honor by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

She was originally approved, and then the offer was withdrawn after public comment. They didn't explain exactly what it was that caused them to change their mind. I'd be interested to know.

Hymn of the Northmen

Ok, it's advertising, so I apologize for that, but- wow!  It's perhaps the best 'commercial' I've ever watched, and the advertising is of things I'd very much like (though can't afford, alas)- things made with the wisdom of tradition and the care of the fine craftsman.  I actually got led to this through a video on timber framing (and I think my dream vacation just changed because of it).  It happens rarely, but sometimes the algorithms get one or two right.

Shutdown

Belated good luck and prosperity

A neighbor brought this cabbage-slaw-blackeyed-pea dish to a next-door New Year's Eve Party, to fulfill the traditional requirement for greens and peas.  I tried to reproduce it last night from a general description, and it was as good as I remembered, though I see now I left out the green onions.   It doesn't sound like it would be that great, does it?--but it was a big hit at the party.  Just be sure to salt the peas appropriately and don't overcook them.

9/8

Johnny Cash and Bruce Springsteen both covered this 1996 Sting song, but unaccountably changed its interesting 9/8 time signature to a standard 4/4.  The beat is odd, one-two-THREE-four/one-two-three-FOUR-five with some other variations like ONE-two-three/ONE-two-THREE-four-FIVE-six, and the tune is syncopated on top of that.  The lyrics, in contrast, are a simple old-fashioned cowboy morality play, along the lines of "Long Black Veil."

Now You're Talking

Schumper: Trump threatened to keep government shut down for 'years.'

The jobs numbers are amazing. What better time for former government employees to find work in the productive part of the economy instead? Congress might have to eventually compromise, but even if we could keep it going for six or eight months, a lot of people would be forced by the long furlough to go find a job in the private sector. But we've got two years to play with, minimum.

OK, there are problems with that -- especially an inability to pay people like soldiers and Border Patrol agents. The biggest problem is that we've classified as 'essential' or 'entitlement' all the things that are really dispensable, while things that are actually essential -- protecting the country from invasion, say -- are classified as dispensable. All the same, think about it. Maybe a long, long shutdown is just what we need to get some priorities straight.

Letter of Recommendation: Old English

On the same topic as Pidgin BBC news, here's a letter recommending that you try Old English.

It’s written in a slightly different alphabet to the one we have now, with the extra characters æ (said like the a in “cat”), þ (like the th in “thorn”), ð (interchangeable with þ) and ƿ (which sounds like w). It sounds musical, guttural, dark and rich, the aural equivalent of a peaty Scotch or a towering cumulonimbus cloud.

Old English became my favorite thing about college. The grammar is easy, so it’s not difficult to learn. And enough early medieval words survived into modern English that the vocabulary seems to unlock as you learn it — the Old English word is unlucan — like a long-stuck door to a hidden room in your own house. It feels like receiving a message that has looped around the entire intervening mess of modernity to find you.

If it still seems daunting, Middle English is even easier: if you can read Shakespeare, Middle English will only require a modicum of work. I recommend the Norton Critical Edition of Le Morte Darthur, which provides plenty of footnotes to help you work through the relatively few words that don't have cognates in Modern English. One of the delights, though, is being able to read it just as Malory wrote it with increasing smoothness and ease.

And once you have Middle English, you're almost a thousand years closer to Old English. It's a major change -- the biggest one ever in the English language -- but you'll be as well-placed as possible to leap backwards over the Norman Conquest with its introduction of the French and Latin roots.

Progress!

A new Justice Ministry regulation taking effect Sunday will make it mandatory for women to be notified by text message when a court issues their husbands divorce decrees, Saudi lawyer Nisreen al-Ghamdi said.

Currently, some men register divorce deeds at the courts without even telling their wives, al-Ghamdi said by phone from Jeddah.

"The new measure ensures women get their rights when they’re divorced,” she said, referring to alimony. “It also ensures that any powers of attorney issued before the divorce are not misused."

The Wisdom of the Ancients

Well, pre-Columbians, anyway. They were originally contemporaneous with the Viking Age, but still being practiced as the Renaissance was well under way.

How Long to Live Somewhere?

It's a worthy question, actually. We make foreigners reside in America for at least seven years before pursuing citizenship. Should states be required to grant it at once?

The case touches on liquor laws in Tennessee, but there's a similar issue with pistol permits in North Carolina. If you move to North Carolina from another state, even though you may have had a license to carry firearms in that state that North Carolina would recognize as valid, your permit to carry is immediately invalidated by the move. But your right to purchase a pistol in North Carolina is subject to a year's delay: North Carolina insists on a pistol purchase permit for every such firearm, issued by the sheriff, and these permits may not be issued to someone who has been resident for less than a year.

There's a loophole in the latter case, as you can apply for a NC concealed carry permit and, if granted it, purchase pistols using it instead of having to apply for a permit to purchase a pistol. However, this doesn't obviate the issue, since concealed carry permits take a while to obtain too: they're shall-issue with a mandatory 45 day window, except that NC interprets that as meaning "45 days from the completion of all relevant background checks and paperwork," so it might be 3-4 months. In other words, you lose your rights from your old state citizenship immediately on moving, but you don't obtain new rights (or privileges) pertaining to new citizenship for some time.

I imagine there are a number of similar examples, especially as pertain to goods such as alcohol and firearms that our betters have wanted to ban us from owning. It would be nice to have limits set on the power of government to do that, especially in 2A cases.

Why Not Totalitarianism?

As China rises, with its 'social credit' monitoring of every aspect of human life, we see a new kind of totalitarianism: not one pointed at an ideology, such as Communism, but totalitarianism for its own sake.

It has all the downsides for human expressions of religion as the liberalism ascendant in America, coupled with the state actually inserting agents into your home to monitor religious expression, and sending you to concentration camps for reeducation if they don't like what they see.

Should we believe that this will remain confined to China, or at least to its sphere of influence once it is done with its intended expansion? Perhaps not, since the Chinese have made use of the American tech elite as partners in effecting their totalitarianism. Coincidentally, perhaps, these same giants -- Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube among them -- have all decided to suppress American conservative speech.

Nor is it only China that is interested in this project. The European Union has enlisted these same tech giants to suppress what they call 'extremist' speech. And, of course, our own IRS has admitted to targeting conservative nonprofits for extra scrutiny under the Obama administration, a clear attempt to prevent political organization on the right.

The cultural power being wielded against our traditions is immense. I wonder what limits, if any, our opponents are prepared to accept on their accumulation of power over us?

A Least-Sexist Industry

Would you be surprised to hear that a major American industry is now primarily led by women? Would you be more surprised to learn that it was the military-industrial complex?

From the executive leadership of top weapons-makers, to the senior government officials designing and purchasing the nation’s military arsenal, the United States’ national defense hierarchy is, for the first time, largely run by women.

As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation's five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation's nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation's top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force.

The women interviewed have mostly positive things to say about their experience working in what one might have thought of as the epitome of male-dominated fields, that of weapons and war. So the question the article gets to, which is the most interesting question, is: do women do weapons and war differently? In other words, have we gained or lost anything by the transition?

How is their approach to leadership different than men's? In many ways, both subtle and not so subtle, whether in solving problems or questioning deeply held assumptions, they say.

Panetta, who says she is often asked about the benefits of women in leadership, tells the story of soldiers in the desert using pantyhose to keep sand out of sensitive equipment. “Do you think a guy thought of that?” she asked. “For the longest time, these male-dominated organizations missed half of the population’s perspective on an issue or on an approach.”

McCaffrey also said women are less "wedded to ‘we’ve always done it this way.' Sometimes women are a little more willing to question that.”

She ticked off several other ways defense companies and national security agencies can operate more effectively with women leading the way.

For one, women are shrewd negotiators. “I’ve known women who were good negotiators because they were underestimated,” McCaffrey said. “The key to negotiating is making sure you know what other peoples’ priorities are. Women tend to do that really, really well.”

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson — the third woman to hold the job since the 1990s — told lawmakers last year she believes it's perfectly natural for women to play a greater role in defending the country.

“If I ask everyone in this room to think about the most protective person you know in your life, someone who would do anything to keep you safe, half the people in this room would think about their moms,” she told the House Armed Services Committee. “We are the protectors; that’s what the military does. We serve to protect the rest of you, and that’s a very natural place for a woman to be.”

That's a pretty unimpressive set of arguments, I think, but perhaps that's to the good. It indicates that there hasn't been radical change in how things are done, because the clearest paradigm isn't 'We decided this-or-that category of weapons was inhumane and stopped building them' but 'we started using pantyhose as a filter, which shows how radically different our perspective is.' Maybe women are better at understanding people's priorities, but maybe that's just another stereotype. Certainly being underestimated can be an advantage in negotiations, but not necessarily so; if a committee is united in underestimating you, they may simply steamroller your objections because they don't take you seriously. (Nor, for that matter, is it true that women are universally underestimated anyway: some of them are overestimated, and others are quite forceful enough to prevent underestimation.)

The interview does end on a sour note.

“I think this is great," added McCaffrey, "but not if 10 years from now, these women are gone and we’re back to having all white men in these positions."

That's disappointing, as it undercuts all the earlier talk about how 'finding the best person for the job' was what this was all about. The sex and class resentments, which white men must have been at the forefront of yielding up since they're the ones who had all the power not long ago, are roadblocks to attaining the goal of promotion by merit alone. I don't know if that goal is attainable, but the persistence of the resentments is not encouraging.

Virtue Ethics vs. Character?

Mitt Romney published an editorial claiming that Donald Trump lacks the character to be President. Will Chamberlain offers a kind of opposing argument, although one based on far too few examples to be decisive, that "character" in Romney's sense is at least unrelated to successful performance as a President.

The two most decent, polite, cooperative, and empathetic Presidents I can think of (from the last fifty years) are George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter.

They were also arguably the worst two presidents of that time period.

No - who were the Presidents with the worst "character" of that time period?

I'd say - Kennedy, LBJ, Clinton.

All three were adulterers, liars, narcissists. Kennedy and Clinton were more well-liked, while LBJ was just a raging narcissistic asshole.

Did that translate into making their presidencies "failures"? Hardly.

Kennedy and Clinton are both lauded - and LBJ is a Dem hero for his legislative accomplishments. They all had relatively successful presidencies compared to Carter and

At a minimum, it's pretty clear that "character," in the "are you a polite, decent, empathetic human" sense is just not that useful a way to predict the success of.a President.

What is, then?

A few years back Jack Donovan wrote a fascinating book - The Way of Men.

In it, he outlined what he called the "tactical virtues" - strength, courage, mastery, and honor. He argued that these virtues made one "good at being a man."

Trump isn't strong, and his mastery is somewhat open to question. I would have argued, however, that his most significant problem was with "honor." However, this is one of those occasions when the issue turns out to be that the writer has stipulated a definition of the term that is at variance from the usual one.

Donovan used honor in a narrower sense than you might anticipate - it loosely translates to "in-group loyalty," as the context for all these virtues is the ethos of the gang.

Trump had an advantage on every GOP politician by aligning himself HARD with the base.

So really, what is meant by honor here is 'can we count on you?' It isn't the issue of understanding what is worthy of respect, and acting so as to show proper amounts of respect to the worthy and to the unworthy.

That, I think, is what Trump tends to get wrong: he shows respect or disrespect transactionally rather than out of a grasp of what is worthy of respect. If you show the President respect, he responds with respect. If you show him disrespect, he reflexively shows disrespect back. There's a kind of game theory justice to that, especially since he offers occasional forgiveness if you come back: 'tit for tat plus forgiveness' is one of the best game theory strategies.

However, it's how he gets sideways in cases like McChrystal and Mattis, and even the Khan family back during the campaign. Once you understand what is worthy of respect per se, it is unjust to assign disrespect in those cases. The negative reactions he gets from the broad American culture when he does this are healthy rejections of this basic injustice. Of great interest to me is that this shows an American sense of honor that is broad and deep, and crosses party lines: for the most part, even committed Republicans hate when Trump speaks disrespectfully in these cases.

This understanding of what is worthy of honor, and the actions to show proper honor in proper cases, is fundamental to Aristotle's capstone virtue of magnanimity. Ultimately the magnanimous does what is most worthy of honor in every case, to include showing proper honor to others according to their virtues. Getting it right gets everything right, Aristotle argues. But it requires complete virtue to do this, as virtue is what is most worthy of honor and you must have it to 'know' it well enough to recognize it. Note that this adequately solves for 'polite, decent' qualities -- those are both about showing respect. The only one it doesn't solve for is 'empathetic,' which I suspect is not really a virtue; that kind of emotional attachment warps one's fairness of mind in the manner that Aristotle describes as 'distorting the ruler before you use it to measure.' It makes it harder to understand what is justly worthy of honor, in favor of honoring that which or those to whom one is emotionally attached.

Magnanimity and honor, then, are where I think Donald Trump goes wrong, but the point about LBJ or Clinton stands. There are effective approaches that are not respectful and not honorable. Sometimes you can get a long way with low cunning and a two-by-four approach to disagreements.

"Conservative Democracy"

I found this argument at First Things fairly persuasive. It may be slightly too strong on the Biblical aspects -- Jefferson would have thought so, certainly -- but it's not too strong in most respects.

I find it difficult not to see the Western nations disintegrating ­before our eyes. The most significant institutions that have characterized America and Britain for the last five centuries, giving these countries their internal ­coherence and stability—the Bible, public religion, the independent national state, and the traditional family—are not merely under assault. They have been, at least since World War II, in precipitous ­decline.

In the United States, for example, some 40 percent of children are today born outside of marriage. The overall fertility rate has fallen to 1.76 children per woman. American children for the most part receive twelve years of public schooling that is scrubbed clean of God and Scripture. And it is now possible to lose one’s livelihood or even to be prosecuted for maintaining traditional Christian or Jewish views on various subjects.

Add to this the fact that the principal project of European and American political elites for decades now has been the establishment of a “liberal international order” whose aim is to export American norms and values to other nations, and you have a stunning picture of what the United States has become—a picture that in certain respects resembles that of Napoleonic France: an ideologically anti-religious, anti-traditionalist universalist power seeking to bring its version of the Enlightenment to the nations of the world, if necessary by force.

As strongly worded as that is on first face, I think it's appropriate. When I reflect on the 'bake the cake' court cases, or the lawsuits brought against groups like The Little Sisters of the Poor, or the Senate confirmation hearings in which membership in the Knights of Columbus is treated as a problem -- well, "anti-religious, anti-traditionalist, universalist" sounds more or less correct.

Given the strenuous objections I feel myself, too, how much stronger must those objections be among those against whom force has been used to effect this agenda. These people are completely convinced of the rightness of their cause, and that their opponents are motivated by simple racism or xenophobia or hatred of some similar sort. They do not see, and do not understand, how their project is experienced by those who are experiencing this project as finding their faith, traditions, and nations under assault.

Hogmanay and the End of Yule

Happy New Year!

The Torch parade in Edinburgh.

An Exception to AVI's Title Rule

AVI has stated a general principle that the titles of satirical articles generally are much funnier than the actual articles. Not so this time: the title is simply, "Opinion: We were winning when we left."

Pope To Tear Down Vatican City Wall

Well, no. Not really. Just everyone else's, if he can.

Pope Francis urged political leaders on Monday to defend migrants, saying their safety should take precedence over national security concerns and that they should not be subjected to collective deportations....

Calling for “broader options for migrants and refugees to enter destination countries safely and legally,” he said the human rights and dignity of all migrants had to be respected regardless of their legal status.

“The principle of the centrality of the human person ... obliges us to always prioritize personal safety over national security,” he said.

That's a principled argument against armies, too: nobody should put themselves in a position of being personally harmed to protect an unfeeling thing like 'a nation.' Right?

Well, no. It turns out that national security implies a greater degree of personal security than otherwise. The reason to have a nation is that it protects -- it protects citizens and their rights. If the nation fails, the rights are endangered and the citizens are in danger. They might be oppressed by anyone who comes over the horizon with a strong force and/or bigger guns.

The nation provides this security, and in it a kind of human flourishing becomes possible that is not possible without that security. That's why, Aristotle argues, the state has a kind of priority even over the family (let alone the individual). It is why nations were long thought, and in many places are still thought, to have a right to draft citizens to serve or even die in defense of the whole if necessary.

A more sophisticated solution is needed here. The principle of the centrality of the human person isn't a bad principle; it really is individuals who suffer, not collectives. But the other problems don't go away just because we recognize that fact; and a lot more individuals may end up suffering, for that matter, if their nations are allowed to fail.

Government Somewhat Less Unconstitutional Than Previously

Thanks, against everything you'd expect from the normal news sources, to the Trump administration.

Perspective

As the year draws to a close, and with the new year looming before us, it's a time to try to gain a little perspective on ourselves and our place in the world.  I've always been interested in issues of scale and how to better understand (and communicate) these ideas.  Things like the classic Charles and Ray Eames movie "Powers of Ten" which portrayed the sense of scale from human to the universe and then back down to the microscopic in jumps of powers of ten (at 10 to the 24th meters- 100 million light years across- "this emptiness is normal, the richness of our own neighborhood is the exception"), and "The Paper Clips Project" which was a middle school project which sought to collect six million paper clips to give a sense of the scale of what it meant when one said the abstract words "six million Jews died in the Holocaust", have fascinated me.  Of course, I was one of those kids who believed that when you rode "Adventure Through Inner Space" in Tomorrowland at Disneyland, you really shrank! - well, at least until my brother reached out and touched the giant "snowflake" and said "It's not even cold!".

I found a couple of things more recently that give some interesting bases for scale that might offer some slightly different perspectives than we usually consider around this time.

"If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel" is a fascinating webpage that has the solar system to a "tediously accurate scale" with the Moon being = 1 pixel.  Worth remembering that our solar system is actually a fairly dense space relative to interstellar space (which is the majority of the universe).  Don't cheat and use the planet shortcut at the top of the page- scroll manually or you'll miss some amusing commentary and more importantly, the fuller experience of scrolling your way through the vast spaces between the brief encounters with something in our solar system.

"10,000 Year Clock" is the website for an interesting Earth art project that has set out to reframe time a bit to something outside the normal human scale.  I think this project is fascinating, and not least because I think if we had a better feel for the length of time it really takes for things to change, we'd learn to not worry so much about radical change in the short term, and focus on the smaller changes we can more effectively do ourselves in the time and space local to our lives.

So here's to a year past, hopefully one of growth- and to a year ahead- one of promise and opportunity.  May we see our place and make the most of it while we are there.

Songs for New Year's Eve

May God keep you for the next year to come. Not that there are any guarantees on this night, or any night.

But if you're a good drinking man, well, it's a fine night. Let's have some music from when I was... well, very young indeed.



It was 1973 when Waylon Jennings grew his beard; he'd been clean-shaven before that. Everyone was, who was of any account. 1973 was when it started to shift from the consensus. There still hasn't been a President with a beard, not since Benjamin Harrison.

From the same year, Johnny Cash sang a piece about the family coming together after death is transgressed:



AVI's recent post on a song of a similar age reminded me of how much better -- demonstrably, positively better -- the old music used to be. Even the stuff I don't especially like is head and shoulders above what is popular today. Not as a matter of opinion, but one of fact: for the people who did things I don't like in the 1970s nevertheless knew how to do them. They didn't just show up at a studio without talent or skill, trusting the computers and the engineers to clean up their ignorance.

Old Willie Nelson, for example:



The recently deceased Roy Clark:



But a completely different song, on the same thing, from the noble Clancy Brothers:



Drinc Hael. Waes Hael. Happy New Year, brothers and sisters.

BBC Pidgin

Did you know that the BBC has a pidgin-language website? It turns out that this year's Miss Africa pageant was quite exciting.

Miss Africa 2018: Miss Congo hair catch fire plus oda tins wey happun for dis year event

...Di event almost turn sometin else wen di new queen her hair catch fire as she bin dey do her celebration waka but some organizers behind di scene don come out say na wig she bin dey wear.

Di fire start afta fire works wey dem no do well fall for her hair.

I always love it when I realize I can read another language. They are of course close variants of languages I know: I can read English, so with some practice at sounding it out I realized I could read Middle English with very little work. I can read French, so it wasn't too hard to learn to get the sense of Spanish -- but I was really pleased to realize that I could kind of work out some Romanian, which is a Romance language in spite of the relatively large distance. (Portuguese was harder than Spanish, easier than Romanian. Of course idiomatic expressions will catch you in all of these cases.)

So add Pidgin to the list. It's fun.

Chess art

I was supposed to be looking for something else, but these chessmen caught my eye, along with dozens of other insanely beautiful sets featured in the lengthy article.

Shutdown day 3

Don't get in their way

These dogs seem into it.

From a site called "Design You Trust."  Lots of interesting things there.

Hogmanay Rising

The fire festival is close at hand. Someday I hope to go to Scotland for it, but thus far it has not worked out.

In Shetland, where the Viking influence remains strongest, New Year is still called Yules, deriving from the Scandinavian word for the midwinter festival of Yule.

It may surprise many people to note that Christmas was not celebrated as a festival and virtually banned in Scotland for around 400 years, from the end of the 17th century to the 1950s. The reason for this dates back to the years of Protestant Reformation, when the straight-laced Kirk proclaimed Christmas as a Popish or Catholic feast, and as such needed banning.

And so it was, right up until the 1950s that many Scots worked over Christmas and celebrated their winter solstice holiday at New Year when family and friends would gather for a party and to exchange presents which came to be known as hogmanays.

There are several traditions and superstitions that should be taken care of before midnight on the 31st December: these include cleaning the house and taking out the ashes from the fire, there is also the requirement to clear all your debts before “the bells” sound midnight, the underlying message being to clear out the remains of the old year, have a clean break and welcome in a young, New Year on a happy note.

I wonder if the lack of Christmas is less compatible with America, or the idea of annually clearing all one's debts. The latter, I suppose.

Holiday Travels

I have just returned from the ancestral homeland in east Tennessee, where I visited with both my father's and mother's people. The Newfound Gap was open on the way over, and we stopped to have a snowball fight. However, the park service decided to close it before my return trip, which added a very substantial detour in the pouring rain. I was grateful to finally return home late last night.

Visiting family more-or-less annually over decades, you begin to think you notice patterns in lives that begin in the same place but show marked divergence. I think religious observance must be quite important to holding one's life together, as even the more annoyingly evangelical of my relatives have flourished markedly over the less-religious ones. The most intellectually sophisticated have not flourished, not even relatively speaking; but the ones who go to church do, for whatever reason or set of reasons. Education correlates with success only somewhat. Hard work does not; laziness is often rewarded by luck, or simply by the virtue of being happy with less. Although I should add that those who have pursued higher education and self-disciplined hard work to the greatest degree of success are also religiously observant, so perhaps I don't have a large enough set to tease out the details.

Perhaps you have similar observations, or divergent ones.

White papers with teeth

Why do right-wing intellectuals hate Trump, and by extension capitalism?

In the case of the anti-Trump right-wing intellectual, however, the genealogy of their disgust is slightly different. Rather than being possessed of the silly notion that the world will be just like school, they are possessed of a different, but no less silly, notion: that politics is just their insular conferences played out in public and backed by law, or their white papers given teeth—but that, in the final analysis, there’s no substantive difference between statesmanship and academia.

On the Feast of Stephen

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas!

The Wren Song: With Liza Minnelli

Poor lass, she's hardly mentioned. But she's there, featured a moment among minor deities of the Celtic pantheon.

There's some bad songs woven in there, for those who know the history.

"As I was goin' to kill, and all..."

Happy St. Steven's Day.

UPDATE: If you're wanting a start on the bad songs, you can begin here.

Scenes of Christmas

Pastries, Croissant and Danish.

Closeup of the Danish pastries.

The hound of the hall sleeping near the fire.

The Feast of Christmas

Old comrade Joseph W. once said this was the carol he most associated with the Hall. It's a fine one.



But I like this song too, though it is perhaps more festive than observant.



And a couple more, one by Bach:



And another by the Baltimore Consort, this last done a few years ago at Trinity Church, London.



The peace of the Hall to all people of good will. Merry Christmas to you all.

Holiday mania tightens its steely grip

If I'd been getting some of this clickbait email a few weeks ago, I might be in even more crafty trouble than I already am.  This morning I am completely lost in ideas for dyeing plain paper in tea baths and producing cunning paper bows with sprigs of this and that from the back yard. (Also, fringe scissors.  But I already have some of those.)  Luckily, I have no more presents to wrap and only two days remain before Christmas.  But oh, my goodness, who could resist trying to make these woven stars?  Especially, who could resist who actually has vast great quantities of long paper strips in stock just at the moment?

Last night neighbors joined us for a holiday dinner of oysters Rockefeller, standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, pureed peas with mint and cilantro, and a salad with grapefruit, pomegranate seeds, and Stilton cheese.  Our guests arrived with a fresh loaf of sourdough bread, a grapefruit pie, and killer wines.  I was particularly taken with my husband's Yorkshire pudding, which is something like a croissant and dangerously easy to make, judging as a spectator:

I see this as a future breakfast food, a worthy competitor to biscuits.

We're bang on trend this year with "foraged" holiday decor.  (To be truly on-trend, we'd have to work "bespoke" in there.)  I found last week that greenbriar makes a good wreath or garland late in the season after its leaves have turned red, but its stems are still flexible:

The Extremist Knights of Columbus

Two of our least respectable Senators, Harris and Hirono, ask a Federal judicial candidate if his membership in the Knights of Columbus isn’t disqualifying.

Given that the Knights’ positions are mere Catholicism, that sounds suspiciously like a religious test for office. Such tests are forbidden by the Constitution that these Senators have taken an oath to defend and protect. I wonder if either of them know what it means to take an oath?

The Knights of Columbus do.

Merry Christmath

Yuletide

Tonight's solstice combines with a full moon and a meteor shower. I had planned to hike up to the top of the ridge and camp, in spite of the cold, in order to observe these wonders. Unfortunately, a snowstorm has blown in, and visibility is negligible.

So instead I shall sit by the fire indoors. I hope you have a good winter and a warm.

BB: 'Braveheart' to get All-Female Reboot

Lena Dunham will play the starring role of Willow Wallace, a "fierce Scottish she-warrior who don't need no man."

Co-stars include Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, and Beyonce. The band of female fighters will go on a brave quest to topple the patriarchy in 14th-century England... The majority of [their] army is, of course, slaughtered.

...

Paramount is hoping the film can make at least $10 at the box office, according to insiders.

The holly she bears a berry

Where I send thee

Every quartet needs a guy with a low growl.

When Joseph was an old man

When Joseph was an old man, an old man was he,
He married Virgin Mary, the Queen of Galilee.

And one day as they went walking, all in the garden green,
There were berries and cherries as thick as may be seen.

Then Mary said to Joseph, so meek and so mild:
"Joseph, gather me some cherries for I am with child."

The Joseph flew in anger, in anger flew he:
"Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee."

Then up spoke baby Jesus, from out Mary's womb:
"Bow down ye tallest tree, that my mother might have some."

So bent down the tallest tree to touch Mary's hand.
Said she, "Oh look now Joseph, I have cherries at command."

Ezekiel 1:1-28

Or, Christmas dragons.

It's kind of a stretch, but I can see it.

The Syria Withdrawal

Without taking a position on the wisdom of the Syria withdrawal -- commentary is running strongly opposed, I notice -- I do think it poses an interesting challenge to the Republic. It's a common one with Donald Trump, the same one we've seen elsewhere. It is this: can an elected President defy the deep-set preference of the bureaucracy? If yes, however unwise a given decision, at least we still live in a Republic in which the people can alter the course of the government through elections. If no, well, the elected government may have become a kind of decoration (or, really, a decoy) for the real government.

So far the answer has been "no," but perhaps with repeated efforts this is changing. I hear the State Department has begun withdrawal efforts. The Pentagon seems to be dragging its feet so far.

Towards Feminine Strength

And against dependency. The author is a scholar of Shakespeare, so perhaps she has thereby learned something of human nature.

Speaking for the Nameless Dead

I'm not very pleased with the President's statement of today, in which he presumed to speak for the fallen. I think that speaking for the honored dead was once the place of the Dux Bellorum, the War-Leader, which was Arthur's original title before we deemed him a King. But this is no warrior, but a man who fled war with every stratagem he could devise. He has no right to speak for our dead, whatever office he may hold.

Well. At least he meant to honor them, for whatever that is worth. He did, after all, point up when referring to them. And I don't doubt his sorrow and dismay at having to call the families of those who have died in our service. It surely must be his hardest duty.

All the same, I am angry.

Fear of Evolution

Christians sorted it out by deciding that evolution and natural selection were mere mechanisms of God's will. What will the left do?

Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public.... The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as a sort of “universal acid” that “eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” Fearing this corrosive idea, opposition in the US to evolution mainly came from Right-wing evangelical Christians who believed God created life in its present form, as described in Genesis....

At first, left-wing pushback to evolution appeared largely in response to the field of human evolutionary psychology. Since Darwin, scientists have successfully applied evolutionary principles to understand the behavior of animals, often with regard to sex differences. However, when scientists began applying their knowledge of the evolutionary underpinnings of animal behavior to humans, the advancing universal acid began to threaten beliefs held sacrosanct by the Left. The group that most fervently opposed, and still opposes, evolutionary explanations for behavioral sex differences in humans were/are social justice activists. Evolutionary explanations for human behavior challenge their a priori commitment to “Blank Slate” psychology—the belief that male and female brains in humans start out identical and that all behavior, sex-linked or otherwise, is entirely the result of differences in socialization.

I'll leave the rest of it to those of you who are grabbed by the problem.

Voter ID in NC

North Carolina passed a voter ID law once before; Federal courts struck it down. So the legislature came up with a proposal designed to avoid the courts' problems with the idea, and passed it again for a voter referendum. Voters approved it by a 55% count. The governor, a Democrat, vetoed the bill anyway.

Now, both houses of the North Carolina legislature have overridden the veto. Voter ID is once again the law of the state.

Naturally, within minutes of the veto override, a new lawsuit was filed against the new law.

Why are people so dead-set against the idea of proving that you're really the citizen who is entitled to cast a particular vote? I'd have to prove that I was really the guy called up for jury duty, or to serve if I were drafted, or for any other citizenship duty. The most obvious answer is fraud; we keep being told that it's not about fraud, but access. Yet the people who supposedly can't access the ID-obtaining mechanisms of state bureaucracy are disproportionately likely to successfully access the welfare-obtaining mechanisms of state and Federal bureaucracy. I'd think they could manage the one additional process.

In which case, I'm inclined to think it really is chiefly about enabling fraud. Lots of fraud. Lots more than they'd like to admit, and indeed lots more than they'd like us to imagine.

The Flynn Hearing

I don't know if you followed the Flynn sentencing hearing yesterday, but it was weird. Some analysts think Flynn was being handled by a vindictive judge; I'm not all sure. Judge Sullivan pushed Flynn hard on whether or not he really wanted to stick by his guilty plea in the light of the misconduct by the FBI, Comey, and Mueller's team that had been uncovered. Flynn flatly insisted in spite of several chances, so Sullivan took him at his word that he was guilty.

Then, he said something very surprising.

"You were an unregistered agent of a foreign country will serving as the National Security Adviser to the president of the United States!"

"Arguably this undermines everything this flag over here stands for!"

The judge went on to ask if this wasn't, arguably, treason.

It was not, the Special Counsel's own lawyers rushed to say. First, Flynn wasn't suspected of working for any foreign entity while at the White House. He had worked for Turkey before the election, while he was not employed by the government in any capacity. The issue was not one of being an 'agent' in the spy business sense, but an agent in the way that a lawyer is one's agent: he was a lobbyist.

In other words, the judge got the Special Counsel's office to clarify that the real offense has nothing to do with betraying the republic. It's just a matter of some paperwork Flynn didn't file, as required by law if you're going to lobby the government for a foreign interest.

The judge then apologized profusely for the accusation, saying he 'felt terrible' about it, and urging everyone to discount the question.

Jake Tapper notes, "Special Counsel Prosecutor Van Grack says Mueller's team has "no concern" or no reason to think Flynn committed treason."

Even Vox got out there clarifying that it is "baseless" to suggest Flynn guilty of treason. "He's not."

Ultimately Sullivan has done Flynn a huge favor, and maybe the whole Trump team as well. The whole "Russia" narrative has frequently been punctuated by cries of "Treason!"

Now we know there was no treason. The central figure in this, the guy without whom there'd be no Russia investigation and no Special Counsel, has been cleared of any such concerns by the Special Counsel's own statements in court.

The Downfall of Venezuela

Here is a study in the collapse of Caracas, a once flourishing city in a once flourishing nation. It is amazing that you could provoke an economic collapse in a place like Venezuela, where fertile soil and abundant rain are matched with equatorial sun; and where, on top of that, there is also a strong supply of oil wealth.

All the same, it happened.

A generation ago, Venezuela’s capital was one of Latin America’s most thriving, glamorous cities; an oil-fuelled, tree-lined cauldron of culture that guidebooks hailed as a mecca for foodies, night owls and art fans. Its French-built metro – like its restaurants, galleries and museums – was the envy of the region. “Caracas was such a vibrant city … You truly felt, as we used to say around here, in the first world,” says Ana Teresa Torres, a Caraqueña author whose latest book is a diary of her home’s demise....

[Today a]n economic cataclysm experts blame on ill-conceived socialist policies, staggering corruption and the post-2014 slump in oil prices has given Caracas the air of a sinking ship....

“Every day food is more expensive. Prices change from week to week. The expected inflation for next year is a million per cent,” Newton added, in fact underestimating official projections. “Just imagine that. A lot of people are going to simply die of hunger.”

A crucial part of the shift from wealth to starving to death was the banning of guns by the government. Then, having banned the guns, the government set up criminal gangs to beat the unarmed population into submission.

“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”

The “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens” was enacted by the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012, under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez. The law ended legal sale of firearms to all but government entities...

To keep the citizens in line, government-backed motorcycle gangs, known as s “collectivos,” were created. So while the citizens were unarmed, the Chavez-created “collectivos” were legally armed by the powers that be, sowing violence wherever a protest might break out. The gangs were able to “brutally subjugate opposition groups” according to the Fox News report, but they also allowed fro some plausible deniability, as they weren’t officially government forces.

“They were set up by the government to act as proxies and exert community control. They're the guys on the motorcycles in the poor neighborhoods, who killed any protesters,” said Vanessa Neumann, the Venezuelan-American president and founder of Asymmetrica, a Washington, D.C.-based political risk research and consulting firm told Fox News.

“The gun reform policy of the government was about social control. As the citizenry got more desperate and hungry and angry with the political situation, they did not want them to be able to defend themselves. It was not about security; it was about a monopoly on violence and social control.”

Never surrender your arms. At the worst you'll die free and fighting, and in doing so you might save freedom for others as well.

Scapegoating and projection

In a Quillette article, the pseudonymous writer Lester Berg describes his bewilderment with leftist friends who attribute every personal disappointment to systemic abuse in general and Bad Orange Man in particular. I think he's describing the usefulness that makes scapegoating so popular as a political and psychological tool:

Here, at last, was somebody we could freely hate more that we hate each other or ourselves.

Isn't the same for hating the anonymous Jews who poisoned your well? Before they go completely around the bend and start shoving real individuals into gas chambers, most people find it hard to sustain that kind of venom about anyone with whom they are in personal contact. It's necessary to fix on some distant enemy who can be characterized as irretrievably evil, beyond the pale, outside all human norms of charity or civility.

If your life is awful and enough and you are too dishonest or cowardly to face what's wrong, then even if you don't have a Donald Trump in your life, it is essential to find one.  Otherwise you might have to talk to your lover, or your mother, or your boss about why you object, what price you will or won't pay to sustain the relationship, and what you're willing to do to fix it.  Sometimes we'll do anything to avoid telling someone face-to-face that we're angry and disappointed.  "I'm not mad at you!  I'm mad at Trump!"

Ice

If I lived somewhere that wouldn't instantly melt them, I'd definitely try these.

   

Bear Arms and Bare Arms

A Time To Go Home

Denmark declares at least parts of Somalia fit for refugees to return.

Following a review of the situation in Somalia, which began in 2017, residence permits will therefore be withdrawn for no less than 1,000 Somalis. “It is time for them to go home now,” Denmark states.

“If you no longer need our protection and your life and your health are no longer at risk in your homeland, you must of course return home and build up your country of origin”, says Minister for Migration Inger Støjberg, according to DR.

For those of you who can read Dansk, the original is here.

Seven Medieval Christmas Traditions

Medievalists.net wants to help if you'd like to do something very traditional. Your feast doesn't have to be fit for a king to be quite elaborate:

Even at a slightly lower level of wealth the Christmas meal was still elaborate. Richard of Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, invited 41 guests to his Christmas feast in 1289. Over the three meals that were held that day, the guests ate two carcasses and three-quarters of beef, two calves, four does, four pigs, sixty fowls, eight partridges, two geese, along with bread and cheese. No one kept track of how much beer was drank, but the guests managed to consume 40 gallons of red wine and another four gallons of white.

There's quite a lot more, including Yule Goats and Icelandic Christmas Trolls.

Edward Abbey Was Right

I always liked Edward Abbey, and his anarchist tendencies aren't the thing I liked least about his work. In this piece, public lands advocate Amy Irvine writes a letter to the late author.

I think that we both understand the “other side” of this public-lands debate — by which I mean the self-proclaimed old-timers, the rural folk. Which is, of course, not the other side at all — not even the likes of Cliven Bundy and the guys who took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Most of today’s environmental groups won’t agree, but you might, when I say that sometimes I vote libertarian to help break up the country’s two-party gridlock, but also because I love the idea of what those guys did; I love the active resistance, the sticking it to institutions too large and lethargic to be effective. After all, the folks who have defied federal authority believe as you believed, that we might need the wild woolliness of the West “as a refuge from authoritarian government,” and “as bases for guerilla warfare against tyranny.”

The anti-federalist, Mormon part of me agrees with your words, their actions. But, for Bundy’s kind, the land’s not the thing either.... For me, it’s a matter of degrees. My grandfather, the other ranchers I’ve moved cows for — none of them sits on the extreme and hostile end of the spectrum. Besides, there are so few independent ranch outfits remaining they are hardly the main problem. But I’ll tell you what is:

I'll bet you won't guess what she comes up with.

Marines Testify Against Antifa

I guess their haircuts made them look like 'fascists' to some.

According to the Marines’ testimony, they were touring historical landmarks near Front and Chestnut streets when suspect Thomas Keenan approached them. Godinez testified that Keenan asked them “Are you proud?,” to which Godinez remembers responding “We are Marines.” Torres said that he remembers Keenan asking “Are you Proud Boys?,” an allusion to one of the alt-right groups behind the rally, and one that Torres said he didn’t understand. “I didn’t know what Proud Boys meant,” he said.

Whatever Keenan said, both Marines testified that Keenan, Massey, and approximately ten other people — men and women, some masked and some unmasked — then began attacking them with mace, punches, and kicks, and calling them “nazis” and “white supremacists.”

On the stand, Godinez said that he was “bewildered” by being called a white supremacist and immediately cried out, “I’m Mexican!” After that, as the attack continued, both men said that members of the group, including Keenan, repeatedly used ethnic slurs, including “spic” and “wetback,” against the Marines. (There was no testimony that Massey used any such language).

Relevant to yesterday's post about tools and equality, these Marines were at a substantial disadvantage because Marines today are small. Marines today are small because they adopted the Body Mass Index (BMI) standard some years ago, requiring Marines to maintain an "ideal" body weight even though professional athletes who engage in substantial strength training are often rated "overweight" or "obese" according to BMI. The Pentagon has been revising that policy, but its effects have been lasting, with only 2% of Marines qualifiying as 'overweight' under BMI. (Current policy allows high performers to be exempt from the fat/weight standards.)

Torres testified that Massey punched him “full force” repeatedly while he held his hands up above his face to protect himself, and the prosecutor used the opportunity to make it clear that while both Torres and Godinez are Marines, the suspects are significantly larger in both height and weight than the two of them.

Some of the Marines I knew back in the 1990s, before they went to the BMI standard, a small gang of no more than 10 or 12 would have hesitated to mess with those guys. Maybe we can get back to that.

15 Principles Against Economics

These are briefly stated objections to classical economic theory, which can be a powerful mode of criticism. Somewhat like the '95 Theses,' they intend to point out some glaring flaws in the way we think about markets. You may find some of them more successful than others.