Court Orders Are For Little People

Among the ways in which the 'Russia collusion' theory has collapsed is that a Federal judge recently ordered the government to stop claiming it had shown that the Russian government was behind the activities by the cyber firms that ran Facebook ads in 2016. Those firms are private, and the government didn't actually bother to establish a connection in the Mueller report -- nor did it file any indictments against Russian government officials, nor against any American citizens for working with the Russian government.

On July 1, 2019, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich issued an order (to which the government agreed) prohibiting further public statements by the government about the Concord and IRA case, particularly statements alleging that Concord and IRA worked on behalf of the Russian government. A more detailed discussion of this train wreck can be read here.

But Mueller Just Did It Again
This takes us to the Mueller testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees last week. On live television in front of an audience of millions, former special counsel Robert Mueller carefully skirted speculating on the guilt or innocence of Roger Stone due to his ongoing criminal prosecution. But nobody apparently reminded Mueller that Judge Friedrich had ordered Mueller’s team to stop saying Concord and IRA worked for the Russian government.

The government hasn’t alleged that, can’t prove it, and abandoned those allegations in open court. The government had only just barely escaped a criminal contempt citation because Mueller’s report and Barr’s press conference seemed to allege that the Russians (the Russians, as in the Russian government) were behind the troll farms. And that’s not true, according to the government’s own admissions.

It's amazing how weak the Russia case is, given that House Democrats continue to fulminate around impeachment over it. Carter Page, against whom the FISA warrant was issued and renewed multiple times, faces zero charges. The government will have collected all of his communications and those of those with whom he spoke, but he faces no charges -- especially not for being a Russian spy, but actually not for anything whatsoever.

No Americans were indicted, let alone convicted, for working with any Russians -- government or private citizen.

No Russians were indicted who worked for the Russian government. The Federal government has agreed to stop claiming it established any connections to the Russian government even among Russian nationals working on 2016.

The SDNY investigation into the Trump organization is done, and came up empty on Russia.

Even in the case against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is widely believed to be working for Russia, no indictments have been lain against him for anything to do with Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

Some within the government, even Mueller, continue to talk as if they had something. Every time there's an acid test, though, where they might have to provide actual proof of these claims -- every time, they don't put up, and yet they also don't shut up.

Maybe it's all true, and our intelligence agencies are sitting on the proof because they don't want to expose sources and methods to discovery. That's now how our justice system works, though. You cannot use power against an American citizen without the consent of a jury of his or her peers. You've got to put up to us, or else shut up. If it's true, if any of it is true, the cards have been called.

Fairy Tales vs. the Good Witch of the West

Last night's debate featured both, apparently. Ironically the Good Witch is not the one peddling the fairy tales.

The criticism that these things are impossible is of course accurate: we can't pay for the Social Security and Medicare we have now, let alone this ever-growing raft of additional plans we keep hearing about. Adding another plan to the pile just means more taxes, more debt, and less liberty to live the way I might prefer than the way she and hers might prefer I do instead.

At least we can contest 'dark psychic forces' without a spending program.

Viral charm

A little 8-year-old girl and her musical family are having one of those YouTube explosions that happen when nearly everyone who watches a video clip feels an irresistible urge to share it. I first saw it without any explanatory comments and couldn't figure out her accent. At first it seemed it might be European Spanish, not the New World variant I'm more familiar with, but the family looked Indian. But then they were dressed so warmly, and the hint of architecture in the background was European. That made me think the mountains of South America.

It turns out the family are French, with a dad who was born in South Korea, so that explains the Asian look as well as the accent that online Spanish-speaking fans describe as "exotic." She gets going on a trilled R and just doesn't stop. They're appearing at festivals now, under the name "Isaac et Nora," and cutting a CD.

Veinte Años is a Cuban torch song from the 1930s.

What's it matter if I love you
If you don't want me any more
A love that's over
Should be forgotten

If what one wants
Could be won
You'd want me the same
As twenty years ago


 

 Veinte Años

¿Qué te importa que te ame
Si tú no me quieres ya?
El amor que ya ha pasado
No se debe recordar

Fui la ilusión de tu vida
Un día lejano ya
Hoy represento el pasado
No me puedo conformar

Si las cosas que uno quiere
Se pudieran alcanzar
Tú me quisieras lo mismo
Que veinte años atrás

Con qué tristeza miramos
Un amor que se nos va
Es un pedazo del alma
Que se arranca sin piedad

Good for IBM

It's not what I expect a corporation to do, but IBM just made its cancer-fighting AIs open source.

That is deeply humane, although one wonders how you fund continued future AI development without profit.

La Guerre en France

The police are losing control against the mob, by which I mean the citizenry.

See this on the news? Or just nonsense about Trump tweets?

EU: Motorcycles "Most Antisocial" Means of Transportation, Should Probably Be Banned

UPDATE: They don't like your cars, either.

So motorcycles are small, easy to park even in urban conditions, and quite fuel-efficient which is supposedly a virtue in these carbon-sensitive times. 'What's the issue?', you might ask.

Socialism. It's socialism that means you can't ride motorcycles.

Since every European Union country has socialized medicine, it’s clear that the cost of traffic accidents is borne by society, not by individual drivers or riders. In absolute terms, cars are responsible for 10 times the accident costs of motorcycles, €210 billion for cars versus €21 billion for bikes. But, on a passenger-kilometer basis, bikes incur triple the accident costs of cars (€0.127 for motorcycles versus €0.045 for cars).

Seems easy enough to fix: don't pay out if I get hurt riding my bike, leave me to sort that via private insurance. That's what we do here in the good old USA, right?

But no: they will answer that they have a moral duty to care for me if I'm hurt, so they therefore have a corresponding moral duty to prevent me from doing things that might get me hurt. Freedom? That's just another word for not accepting my duty to the state and society.

It's worth watching this old Hells Angels documentary from the early 1980s all the way through. Read it with the post below about how the establishment has moved gangsters from anti-heroes to heroes. That's not completely true, but it's not completely wrong either. At one point their lawyers suggest that they're basically Goldwater Republicans, philosophically. At another, they themselves declare that they're quintessentially American, because America is the only place that would take them. Of course there's plenty of rough edges, which to their credit they don't try to hide.



At some point it's going to be us against the bureaucrats and technocrats who want to govern every inch of our lives. I know which side I'm on.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

I went to see the thing today. If any of you saw it too, and want to discuss it, the comments will be a good place for that.

If you didn't see it, avoid the comments. Definitely go see it, especially if Tarantino's approach has worked for you before.

Gangster Films

I referenced Robert Warshow's essay, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," a few times in the long life of this blog.  Until today, though, I couldn't remember the author or the title.

One of the comments on cinema from 2013 stands out to me now:

It may be the reason gangster 'films' are so pervasive on the new television are the two old reasons: that it as a genre permits a genuine tragedy, and that it permits a clear-eyed critique of the American system. But it may also be that the American system isn't as healthy as it used to be, and the critique is therefore more persuasive. At some point, the tragedy will fall away, and people will simply accept these gangsters as heroes, full stop.

Someone will write a follow-up essay to that soon, I suspect: "Trump as Gangster Hero." But it's already life on YouTube.







There's been an attempt to fit other, less plausible figures into the role too. But in a way I think it explains something about the President's ongoing invulnerability to charges of illegal behavior, racist behavior, hateful behavior, awful behavior. The gangster is against the system, and for a while now we've been rooting for that.

We've been rooting for it in the land of imagination because in the real world we can see that the system is fantastically corrupt, impossible to hold to account, and that all of its pious words are false. They don't believe in the rule of law -- witness sanctuary cities. They don't believe that there's one law for all, powerful and poor: witness the difference between the Comey investigation into Clinton's violation of classification laws, and the Mueller investigation of everyone Donald Trump ever knew. These dramatic moments fit within a context of our everyday lives, when we try to make things work with city hall or the state government.

This weekend the gangster President is feuding with two giants of the Congress, the Speaker of the House and Elijah Cummings, about the run-down conditions their American cities have assumed under the leadership of their party. No one is going to fix Baltimore, and San Francisco is covered over with feces and needles. No one is accountable, and if you try to make someone accountable, they are protected by overlapping fields of power and privilege. It is racist to criticize him, they say. It is sexist to criticize her. In terms of power they hold senior positions in high office. They are deeply rich from their long lives of public service, with all the power wealth brings. Also, the city governments would do anything they ask, because those cities are run fellow Democrats who are getting rich off public service too.

There is going to be a cost, of course, to celebrating gangsters instead of genuinely virtuous men. It's worth remembering, though, that many of the noblest names in history were all but gangsters: William the Conqueror and all his line of kings, for example. Alexander the Great once arrested a pirate and asked him how he dared to molest ships at sea. The pirate is alleged to have demanded, in return, "How dare you molest the whole world?"

Alexander was taught virtue by Aristotle himself, but the pirate hit him fairly and he knew it.

Seams of malice

Peggy Noonan muses on the Terror, then and now. Wouldn't you have to need a job pretty badly to continue working at a professional institution that boasted something called an "Inclusive Communications Task Force," whether or not it was backed up by the guillotine?

If Trump is re-elected, the world will literally end. Literally.

Schroedinger's Bob

From the political machine that brought us "It depends on what the meaning of is, is," language that makes me wonder if journalists and deep state operatives all really aspire to be the more mushy-headed, prevaricating variety of stereotypical corporate lawyer:

But the larger problem with Mueller’s case was neatly summed up in his exchange with Republican Representative Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania. “You made a decision not to prosecute?” Reschenthaler asked.

“No,” Mueller replied, “we made a decision not to decide whether to prosecute or not.”

That one fundamental decision—the decision not to decide, because he believed doing so would be inherently unfair, given Justice Department guidelines barring indictment of a sitting president and Trump’s corresponding inability to have his day in court—ensured that Mueller’s testimony, like his investigation itself, wouldn’t resolve anything. And that’s far more than a matter of mere optics. It’s a built-in flaw in the basic script, one that Charlton Heston as Moses himself couldn’t counter—and one that Mueller would strenuously argue was neither his preference nor of his own making, but one that he, and the rest of us, must to learn to live with. To act on, or not.

See, given his own preferences in a world of his own making, Mueller wouldn't have had to live with a decision not to decide, against the wishes and direction of his superior, AG Barr.  But he courageously decided not to decide and then to live with the consequences or non-consequences, or not.  And then to sort of testify about it, but not.

A Hopeful Story on Immigration

From Quillette.

Bubbles

"They presented aspects of the case that, frankly, we haven't talked much about on CNN."

As usual, we know their argument; they haven't the faintest idea about ours.

Today in Media Gaslighting

The United States, but not Iran, is one of the ten most dangerous countries for women -- as proven by a successful campaign to redress violence against women.

Meanwhile, the United Nations votes to condemn Israel as the world's only violator of women's rights. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Yemen all joined in the condemnation.

Strangely, Israel didn't turn up on the top ten list from the first article, and the United States wasn't condemned by the UN in spite of its inclusion on that list. Must be some sort of wonkiness in the methodology.

While The Circus Was In Town

Apparently there was some sort of hearing in Congress today, got a lot of attention. I was busy splitting firewood for the coming winter, so I missed out on all that.

But Congress did manage to confirm a new Secretary of Defense. I guess it was lucky that the circus was in town in the other chamber, so that actual work could get done in the Senate for a change.

UPDATE: Apparently the circus being in town allowed the Senate to confirm Brian Buescher, without needing to go through the whole screaming jag about him being a member of the Knights of Columbus.

Demographics

So why is this true?

Those in the third group are Democratic primary voters who describe themselves as moderate to conservative. This group has the largest number of minorities; it is 26 percent black, 19 percent Hispanic, 7 percent other nonwhites, and it has the smallest percentage of whites, at 48 percent.

The more progressive parts of the party are also the most white. Why is that true?

AVI raises a variation of the point he's often raised that is relevant on this topic. It's an unexplored area in our public discourse, but it does seem to hold true internationally as well as nationally.

BB: Fake News You Can Trust

This piece doesn't read much like satire, actually.

To be an "Artist, Warrior, Philosopher"- A Good Goal

Somehow in my bouncing around the internet, I came across a rather interesting person- Jason Everman.  He was for a brief time a touring member of Nirvana, and a member of Soundgarden, but in addition to that-

In September 1994, influenced by Renaissance icon Benvenuto Cellini (who stated that a well-rounded man is an artist, warrior and philosopher), he left Mind Funk to join the United States Army, subsequently serving with the Army's 2nd Ranger Battalion and later with the Special Forces, serving tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.^[4] After completing his service, he took a break from the military and lived in New York City where he briefly worked as a bike messenger. He then traveled to Tibet and worked and studied in a Buddhist monastery before returning to the U.S. He reentered the Army when offered the chance to join Special Forces.

Then went on to get a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Columbia, and is currently pursuing a Masters in Military History from Norwich.

Seems like an interesting fellow.  I'm thinking he'd be more than welcome here.

Borderline thinking

Democratic operatives are unhappy to detect a growing view that their border policy amounts to lawlessness. The President's common-sense view is “We’ve got to straighten out our immigration laws.” Pressed to rebut this approach, the Center for American Progress has released a report arguing that Trump

has relied on the administrative discretion built into the immigration system to bypass real reform. That failure to substantially reform the immigration system, the report argues, actually undermines the rule of law—broken systems have cracks, after all, and with numerous immigration-related executive orders and proposed rule changes facing legal challenges in federal court, the president has shown himself willing to exploit them.

I find that passage difficult to parse. There's the opening question of what "real reform" is. Whatever it is, we're asked to believe that Trump is "bypassing" it by relying on "administrative discretion." Then, by bypassing "real reform," Trump is "undermining the rule of law."

Nope, still don't get it.  Let's try again:  how do we know he's undermining the rule of law?  Well, because the immigration system is broken.  It's the nature of broken systems to have cracks.  Trump is exploiting the cracks by issuing executive orders and rule changes, which his opponents are challenging in federal court.  See?

In the meantime, Trump's opponents don't have any public message on how they'd amend the immigration laws, other than to abolish them.  Given a choice between abolishing the border and straightening out (i.e., reforming) our immigration laws, voters do seem likely to go with Trump.  Whatever the opposition view is, it doesn't look like reform.  It looks like lawlessness.

Mighty Thora

I realize that all heroes have to be women now -- and not 'heroines,' either, that word has to be erased from the language. So James Bond and the God of Thunder must, of course, also become women.

Natalie Portman, though? You couldn't find a female Strongman competitor who could act?

Anyway, people still aren't happy.

A number of feminist commenters complained that people were calling Portman’s character “female Thor,” saying she should be addressed simply as “Thor.”

Wait a second now. Are you sure about 'her' pronouns?

And yet they still don't see what the underlying problem is

When your currency holds less value than one which is only usable within a game, do you even actually have a real economy anymore?

And yet, CNN will defend the current crop of Socialists in the House and running for President without batting an eye.

P.S.  From experience, I will tell you a shrewd negotiator can even make World of Warcraft gold even MORE valuable.  All it takes is telling a friend, "Hey, if you buy me lunch, I'll give you 100 gold in game."

Why the negative vibes, man?

On Wednesday Mueller is set to testify before television, I mean Congress. "Not everybody is reading the book, but people will watch the movie."  If only the movie had trailers, they might include shots of Trump surrogates adopting Oman-like defenses of "these questions are demeaning" and "I refuse to be distracted by the negative energy."

What happens if you can't get the president:

Standards

Glenn Reynolds:

THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: And what about Ilhan Omar’s bigotry? The left seems to think racist prejudice is okay if it comes from a cool Muslim. “Yes, if you try to draw attention to Omar’s promotion of anti-Semitic tropes and her feverish, disproportionate obsession with Zionists, you will be denounced as the racist. Taking Orwellian contortionism to new levels, we’re now told it is racist to speak of Omar’s racism.”

Remember, the left doesn’t have standards, only slogans.

Where's Cassandra When You Need Her?

That woman should not have given up blogging. She'd be having a field day with this.

The life of Armstrong stands in such fascinating tension with the way people have imagined the moon in the past. The moon was feminine, overwhelmingly powerful, and a vast imaginary expanse where anything might be possible—he trod on it.

We lost a lot when she decided to pursue a more private life.

"National Conservatism"

A recent conference has a YouTube channel featuring its lectures. A piece in the WSJ lays out why it seems plausible to so many right now:

In America, the nationalist claim is that the federal government has abdicated basic responsibilities and broken trust with large numbers of citizens:

• It has failed to secure the national borders and provide regular procedures for immigration and assimilation.

• It has delegated lawmaking to foreign and international bodies, and domestic bureaucracies, that have scant regard for the interests and values of many of our fellow citizens.

• It has acquiesced in, or actively promoted, the splintering of the nation into contending racial, religious and other groups and has favored some at the expense of others.

• It has neglected core American principles and traditions—separation of powers, due process, the presumption of innocence, local prerogative, freedom of association—allowing them to atrophy or be subjected to political conditions.

...

The illusion of unlimited optionality has been especially damaging in government and politics. A dramatic recent instance came in the Democrats’ presidential primary debates, where many candidates favored both open borders and free health care for everyone who shows up. This would plainly amount to the abolition of the United States. Still, the proponents would say in all earnestness that they have ingenious plans to make it work.

That is an extreme instance of the phenomenon that every social problem or inconvenience summons forth costly new spending or regulatory solutions, with hardly a care to where the resources will come from or what other problems will be slighted. It is a bipartisan phenomenon, and it has left us with a massively indebted government that spends trillions of borrowed dollars on our immediate needs, with the bills kited to future generations.

The American nation-state is rich, powerful and less constrained than any other, yet it is much more constrained than we have led ourselves to believe. Thinking of ourselves as a nation-state is, as Peter Thiel has observed, a means of unromantic self-knowledge.

That all sounds basically correct to me.

A Small Roundup

The President does tend to the insult as a form of rhetoric, doesn't he? Once in a while I really wish he wouldn't; but a lot of the time, I think that justice is served by the insulting of many of his targets. Most of these folks are politicians from a particularly bad crop. We could do with fewer of them, and instead they're showered with honors and treated as if they merit high dignity.

A Protestant Heresy

Joshua Mitchell argues that identity politics is a species of heresy:

The categories of transgression and innocence, purity and stain, have now effectively migrated from the mainline churches into the universities and from thence into the Democratic Party, which is now the political wing of the universities. To say the same thing in a different manner, the universities are now the theological wing of the Democratic Party. Together, they disseminate the political theology of identity politics....

Christian realism, however, is not enough. Identity politics understands the original sin of the white heterosexual male to implicate all that he has touched, not least of which is the nation, which is taken to be a construction of his that is responsible for the great wars of the twentieth century; colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, South America, and South Asia; and slavery in America....

Identity politics recognizes irredeemable sin, but seeks an immanent resolution to the problem, namely, purging all that the white heterosexual male has constructed—including the nation. Not by the sacrifice of Jesus do we achieve redemption, but rather through the renunciation of the nation and its irredeemable stain. That is why citizens in Europe and in America are clamoring for the EU or for global governance. In the world identity politics constructs, there is no other way for their stain to be removed.

Christian realism has nothing to say about this now ascendant frame of mind.... God’s salvific plan of the world of nations is his to disclose, in a providential history that man cannot grasp in advance. Identity politics finds this to be a filthy delusion. The Christian God, the nations he authorizes, and his so-called providential history are the invention of the white heterosexual male who himself and all that he has invented must be purged so that the world may be made pure.

He has some theological recommendations. Perhaps it is right to say that only God can forgive such sins, and thus that eliminating a God who can forgive also eliminates the possibility of forgiveness. Then what? Romans 12:19 (like Deut. 32) assigned vengeance to the Lord God alone. Without the God to own it, vengeance flies free; and without the God to forgive and to instruct us to forgive each other, vengeance is all that's left.

The Iron Horse

Pesky strings on that money

The University of Missouri faces a moral dilemma.

In 2002, the university received a $5 million bequest . . . to fund six professorships at the Trulaske College of Business to be filled by devotees of free market economics.

[The will included] a unique enforcement provision. Mizzou would be required to certify every four years to the satisfaction of Hillsdale College that each professorship had been filled by “a dedicated and articulate disciple of the Ludwig von Mises (Austrian) School of Economics.” The remaining funds would revert to Hillsdale in the event that this requirement was not met.

But the university obviously doesn't approve of Austrian economics. You might suppose, therefore, that its moral dilemma was whether it was justified in taking the money. Just kidding. Of course they took the money. The moral dilemma was their concern that "acceding to [the donor's] request would consign the school to being 'held hostage by a particular ideology.'" Ideology is wrong, at least when it's the wrong ideology. The university stands foursquare against it.

Unfortunately, the university was dumb enough to generate internal memoranda admitting that it was trying to circumvent the donor's intent, explaining that “the Austrian School of Economics is quite controversial ... [w]e didn’t want to wade into that controversy, so we focused on some Austrian tenets that are compatible with what we do in our business school.”  That's pretty close to “a dedicated and articulate disciple of the Ludwig von Mises (Austrian) School of Economics,” right?  Presumably they scrounged up a few guys who at least agreed with the Austrians on one or two basic economic principles on a good day when no pressing social justice issues intervened.

Somehow, this didn't satisfy Hillsdale College, which recently lost patience and filed a lawsuit arguing that no “disciple” of Austrian economics was ever hired, let alone a dedicated or articulate one.  No doubt the university will give up now and hand the donation over to Hillsdale. Again, just kidding.

Racism problem worse than I dreamed

Until today I had no idea front-door cams were racist:

Critics complain that the systems turn neighborhoods into places of constant surveillance and create suspicion that falls heavier on minorities. . . . Critics also say Ring, a subsidiary of Amazon, appears to be marketing its cameras by stirring up fear of crime at a time when it’s decreasing. . . . “Amazon is profiting off of fear,” said Chris Gilliard, an English professor at Michigan’s Macomb Community College and a prominent critic of Ring and other technology that he says can reinforce race barriers. Part of the strategy seems to be selling the cameras “where the fear of crime is more real than the actual existence of crime.”

Thanks, Prof. Gillard, but I think I'll make up my own mind how secure my front door is.  Do front-door lock manufacturers profit off fear?  If so, bully for them.  Ditto vaccine and airbag manufacturers.

I notice the linked AP article didn't even try to explain the race-barrier angle, because frankly that line of reasoning won't bear close scrutiny.

Son of Scalia

Here's some good news:  With Acosta out as Labor Secretary, his second-in-command, a workmanlike conservative with a good reputation, will be acting secretary.  In the meantime, President Trump has nominated Eugene Scalia, son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to take the helm.

Scalia runs the labor/employment law department at Gibson Dunn, one of the few law firms with a national reputation, and the only top-shelf D.C. law firm I know of, that includes a number of serious and credible conservative partners.  Scalia worked for Attorney General Barr during that gentleman's first stint at the Department of Justice, and must have gotten a thumbs-up from him.

A Heroic Cleric

Another good story from CNN.

The US government is honoring an 83-year-old Muslim cleric who hid 262 Christians in his home and mosque during an attack in central Nigeria.

Imam Abubakar Abdullahi, along with four religious leaders from Sudan, Iraq, Brazil and Cyprus, were awarded the 2019 the International Religious Freedom Award, which is given to advocates of religious freedom.

Abdullahi was recognized for providing shelter for hundreds of Christians fleeing attacks from Muslim herdsmen who had launched coordinated attacks on Christian farmers in 10 villages in the Barkin Ladi area of Plateau State on June 23, 2018, the award organizers said in a statement.

"How the Soviets Won the Space Race for Equality"

I swear, these people are beyond parody.

Happy 50th landing anniversary to a real hero of humanity, Buzz Aldrin, whose mission flew in the face of all godless Communists. "In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements."

UPDATE:

A self-described 'maths geek' has been answering the NYT piece for two days. She has quite a few good stories to tell.

Norse American History News

A new layer for archaeologists to explore has been discovered at L’Anse aux Meadows.

The colony was thought to be short-lived, but a new find may extend the length of its occupancy.

While taking sediment cores from a nearby peat bog to help study the ancient environment, archaeologist Paul Ledger and his colleagues discovered a previously unknown chapter in the story of L’Anse aux Meadows. Buried about 35cm (14 inches) beneath the modern surface, they found signs of an ancient occupancy: a layer of trampled mud littered with woodworking debris, charcoal, and the remains of plants and insects.

Based on its depth and the insect species present, the layer looks like similar surfaces from the edges of Viking Age Norse settlements in Greenland and Iceland. But organic material from the layer radiocarbon dated to the late 1100s or early 1200s, long after the Norse were thought to have left Newfoundland for good.

Artifacts like a bronze cloak pin, a soapstone spindle piece, iron nails, and rivets make it clear who lived in the eight Icelandic-style turf shelters at L’Anse aux Meadows. Stone tools at the site suggest that indigenous North Americans, probably ancestors of the Beothuk and Dorset people, also lived or visited here. L’Anse aux Meadows may be the first place where Europeans and indigenous Americans interacted, and those interactions may have happened off and on for as long as 195 years.

There's more.

The USS Boxer at Sea

For CNN, this is a good piece on the USS Boxer.

A Surprising Senator in Arizona

I had concerns about Senator Sinema, compared with the fighter pilot she was running against. But she's representing the interests of her state fairly well, all things considered.

War of Words

Almost all Democrats, but also a majority of Republicans, think heated rhetoric in our politics may provoke violence. Empirical evidence supports this. There was a terrorist attack last week in Tacoma in which a prominent American politician's heated language was cited verbatim by the attacker. As Instapundit's site points out regularly, that wasn't the first time.

So far the rhetoric hasn't cooled, but perhaps it will.

Greenwashing

Vodkapundit defines "greenwashing" as sweeping your environmental impacts under someone else's rug.

Are you tired of paying too little for clean-burning energy that reduces carbon emissions? Then has Berkeley got a deal for you!

On Tuesday, the City Council approved a new ordinance forbidding any new low-rise residences from using natural gas: It's all-electric or nothin', baby. Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who sponsored the measure, told the Chronicle that "It’s an enormous issue" and "When we think about pollution and climate-change issues, we tend to think about factories and cars, but all buildings are producing greenhouse gas."

And more than a few local politicians, too.

Discerning readers already were aware that gas heat is much more efficient than electric heat, but California now imports 33% of its electricity, so there's less need to think about what has to be burned (Nevada coal) or killed (Oregon salmon) to produce it out there in non-Cali-land.

Decades ago during the first PG&E bankruptcy, you may recall some fantastic spikes in California power prices and widespread brownouts.  The spikes were widely attributed to shady Enron behavior but actually resulted, I believe, from California's insistence on squeezing down its paltry collection of interstate transmission corridors, while undermining domestic power production, until it was practically begging for a supply-demand crisis.  The California PUC helped things along by refusing PG&E's increasingly urgent requests to be allowed to buy long-term price-hedging contracts to smooth over the confidently predicted price spikes.  That would be unfair to consumers, if power prices declined, as the PUC apparently expected in the brave new world.

As you might imagine, California has not in the interim been taken over by bureaucrats with a firmer grasp of market principles.  Time to tee the system up for a bigger and better replay!

Is he really that hard to understand?

This Inside Hook article sums up Trump's style as "don't start no *$^%, won't be no *$^%."

Weird numbers

Sometimes I wonder if people who answer polls are rolling dice or making up answers at random. I'm slightly encouraged that more people are discounting the "Trump is a racist" story that blares out of nearly every mainstream media outlet several times a day. It's more dispiriting to find such a stark partisan divide on the issue, but I'm getting used to that.

What's more bizarre is that as many as 16% of self-avowed Republicans could be brought to say that any criticism by a white politician of the political views of a politician "of color" is per se racist. As Glenn Reynolds says, it leads one to assume that 16% of Republican respondents simply didn't understand the question.  For 16% of self-described independents and 32% of Democrats to answer that way could be chalked up to muddle-headedness or partisan mania, but what kind of Republican subscribes to such a theory?  Not just that some criticism of a person of one race by a person of another might turn out, on closer inspection, to be racist, but that "all" of it is?  What part of the Republican platform would appeal to someone with such a mindset?

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 47% of all ‘Likely U.S. Voters’ think Trump is a racist, down slightly from 50% in January 2018. Slightly more (49%) disagree and say his opponents are accusing him of racism only for political gain, up from 43% in the earlier survey,” said a pre-release analysis of the poll posted at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Other features in the analysis:

The partisan division of opinion couldn’t be any clearer. While 80% of Democrats believe the president is a racist, 85% of Republicans think the racism charges by his opponents are politically motivated. Voters not affiliated with either major party are evenly divided on the question. Thirty-two percent (32%) of Democrats, however, say it’s racist for any white politician to criticize the political views of a politician of color. That’s a view shared by just 16% of both GOP and unaffiliated voters.

Aristotle's Ethics: What Is a Happy Life?

I had not intended to take this long in posting, but family is visiting and we're catching up and seeing the sights.

Lesson 3 in the series is about happiness, but not the emotional, fleeting sort. Rather, Aristotle discusses what it means to have a happy lifetime, from beginning to end.

I have never given a great deal of thought to what makes a happy lifetime -- not just this moment, day, month, year, decade, but lifetime.

What makes a full, happy life of seven or eight decades? And are there general principles to achieve this that apply to everyone?

Aristotle claims there are. Prof. Arnn claims that it has only been in the last couple of centuries that people have started thinking that there aren't, that a happy life can be a completely individual thing and that the principles that create a happy life for one may create a miserable life for another.

What do you think? Are there general principles for a happy lifetime that apply to everyone? If so, what are they?

"Muscle Dysmorphia"

There are two responses to this, one more humorous than the other.

The idealised male body has become bigger, bulkier and harder to achieve. So what drives a generation of young men to the all-consuming, often dangerous pursuit of perfection?

What do you think?

Of course, all things done by young men are chiefly about attaining the attention of young women, gay men excepted but with a similar substitute motivation. They strive for the ideal because that's how you attain the attentions when you're young, before your blood cools and you learn to really appreciate the other aspects of human love. If this is what you present to them, it's what they'll go for -- provided, that is, that it's a plausible thing that young women really do seem to like. If you try to convince them that the real ideal male body is squishy and flabby and fat, they'll notice quickly enough that you're full of it when the girls don't take notice of their physique.

But ask any young man who has begun lifting for a while if the girls have started to notice him. He'll blush behind his downy mustache, nod, and perhaps say a few shy words to affirm it.

So that's why young men are doing it. But the bigger response is: What's wrong with it?

Ok, illegal supplements, dangerous drugs, damage to the body, granted. Those things work in terms of attaining size and 'cut,' but they make it so easy that you fail at developing the real virtues that come from the hard work to get there. They substitute ease of success for both virtue and health. So don't do those things.

All the same, a man can go a long way on this road -- enough to enter the top 1% of human strength -- without reference to such things. If you get focused on having the perfectly sculpted body, you'll make some basic errors that will lead you away from what it takes to have the strongest body. To whit:

That's accurate. Bodybuilding will make you look (somewhat) like Arnold; but if you want to be strong, you'll want to look more like Halfthor. So, in terms of attaining the maximum virtue of functional human strength, Bodybuilding is less effective than Powerlifting, and Powerlifting is less effective than Strongman. (Which has a thriving women's division, by the way.)

By all means get strong. Why not?

Strong Enough for a Man, But Made for a Woman

This is all very clever, but what's going to stop him from sitting in the woman's seat? Not the block in the middle, if he should merely sit with his legs even further apart over the edges of the stool.

Actually, both stools look entirely uncomfortable -- but making people uncomfortable is, I gather, the telos of high feminist architecture.

You Can't Have the Gadsden Flag, Commies

Nor the Culpeper Flag, nor the Navy Jack, and especially you may not have the Flag of the Veterans Exempt. Nor the Betsy Ross flag.

The Confederate flag, fine. The rest of them you're just going to have to learn to live with.

water rug

A friend hand-loomed this rug made of home-dyed worn-out bed sheets.

A Debacle in the House

So, last week the tension in the Democratic Party was that Nancy Pelosi stood accused of being a kind-of racist because she was always putting down what has come to be called "the Squad," or, as Squad-leader AOC puts it, 'freshmen women of color.' Speaker Pelosi pulled out all the stops in self-defense against this career-destroying claim, up to and including the Congressional Black Caucus and Maureen Dowd in the Sunday New York Times.

As of yesterday, it appeared that President Trump had decided to rescue Speaker Pelosi by giving her an ample chance to turn the charge around against him, and show staunch support for 'the Squad.' Yesterday afternoon, however, 'the Squad' called for the President to be impeached (for an ill-considered exercise of his First Amendment rights, I suppose, which is apparently either a high crime or a misdemeanor these days; although one of them mentioned Russia Collusion, as if that were still a live issue that might lead to impeachment somehow). Speaker Pelosi risked another split with the four by insisting on a toothless resolution instead, arguing that impeachment would fail in the Senate and the President would claim vindication.

The idea was this was the safe bet, and she could peel off some Republicans and have a symbolic victory at no cost -- assuming 'the Squad' didn't keep raising a fuss about how she didn't impeach.

Instead, what happened was that she used language that violated rules going back to Thomas Jefferson; the Parliamentarian sided with a challenge to that language from Rep. Doug Collins (my old representative, actually, from Georgia's Mighty 9th Congressional District); Pelosi then left the floor in violation of the rules; the chairman abandoned the chair rather than accept the ruling that she was guilty; the next chairman did accept it, so the House voted to reject applying the rule and keep her remarks on the record; and then the House voted to exempt her from any punishment for breaking the rule, even though the punishment was purely symbolic.

So now, not only did they not get the show of Republicans joining them to shame the President, they damaged the cause of impeachment. Now, if they ever do impeach, the Senate Republicans can simply point to this as a clear precedent for how things are done these days. If they'd made Pelosi accept the token symbol of a punishment, they could have claimed the high ground for applying the rules to their own elected party leader. Now, they've set a clear standard that those with the power to do so shall set the rules aside to protect their party leader (even when there's really nothing at stake in applying the rules). They've deprived themselves of a huge rhetorical advantage, making a successful impeachment and removal of the President far less likely than it already was.

The floor of the House is a smoking ruin this afternoon.

Hate Speech Banned

The banned content:

“Let us never assume that if we live good lives we will be without sin; our lives should be praised only when we continue to beg for pardon. But men are hopeless creatures, and the less they concentrate on their own sins, the more interested they become in the sins of others. They seek to criticize, not to correct. Unable to excuse themselves, they are ready to accuse others.”

The author of this hate-filled content was a little-known writer named Augustine of Hippo.

Where Have I Heard This Before?

Headline: "Joe Biden, Echoing Obama, Pledges to Shore Up the Affordable Care Act."

But don't worry, he says:

“If you like your health care plan, your employer-based plan, you can keep it,” Mr. Biden told an AARP forum on Monday. “If you like your private insurance, you can keep it.”

Well, gosh, that makes me feel so much better.

Privileged People Are The Ones Who May Not Speak

A follow-on to Tex's post. It's always struck me as ironic that the dialogue works this way: you can spend literal years using the phrases "Traitor!" and "Nazi!" without being charged with being divisive or with questioning someone's loyalty to America if you are on one side. If you are on the other side, raising a question about someone's loyalty to the American project is itself proof of your own racism or xenophobia or whatever -- even if they have themselves said very nasty things that might lead an unbiased observer to think that maybe they weren't very fond or very proud of the United States of America.

If you asked why, the answer would be that the ones being silenced were the privileged who had to be held to a higher standard for the good of us all. It was all very well for oppressed minorities to make reference to racial solidarity as a means of resisting their oppression, for example, but it could never do for the majority; that would lead to further and increased oppression. Because of the fact of privilege, then, the unprivileged deserved extra privileges that counterbalanced the privileges of the majority.

That rhetorical move (rooted in Rawls, I think) was persuasive to the majority for a long time, but it couldn't go on forever. For one thing, since 1965, the demographics have been shifting rapidly. The old assumptions about privilege were eventually going to have to be tested as majorities collapsed, and newcomers proved in many cases to do better than the native-born. Who, then, deserves the countervailing privileges? Perhaps the double-standards are obsolete?

The late Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard used to talk occasionally about migrants from the northern United States who moved South to escape oppressive weather, high cost of living, and massive taxation, only to complain about how 'backwards' they found the South. "If you don't like Dixie," he would say, "Delta is ready when you are." I hear similar sentiments from Texans today dealing with "California refugees." I hear similar sentiments from people in Brooklyn or Austin, for that matter, about richer people moving into the poorer neighborhoods and making them unaffordable for those who used to live there. It's no wonder that people get mad about folks moving here from Mexico and then raising the Mexican flag over American facilities. You can be from Mexico or Somalia, or you can be from New York or New Jersey or San Francisco; you can be born of whatever parentage. If you move somewhere and then gripe about how badly it compares to your earlier homeland, or go about trying to change it into your former homeland, someone is eventually going to ask you why you don't just go back if you liked it their way so much more.

The 'gentrification' complaint is allowed, though, with no one thinking it is really about race rather than wealth even when race plays a big factor in the complaints. Other complaints are not as freely permitted; some are painted as outright racist or as hate-speech. But it is the same complaint in all cases: it's about people of different cultures moving into an area and bringing changes the original inhabitants don't like, and may not be able to afford. It's about communities that exist being disrupted or destroyed or driven under by migration. Some of it's internal to the United States; some of it, the races of both migrants and the extant community are the same. Sometimes they're different, and when that happens race seems to be a bigger factor than it really is. The concerns are severable: even where the races and nationalities are the same, people raise the same objections.

Not everyone is allowed to do so without being demonized, though. That's a cultural double-standard that probably can't survive any longer than it has. For a long time it made sense to people in a larger, stronger majority as an article of justice. These days, there's not so much patience among the smaller, weaker, vanishing majority for being told they must swallow their concerns. Nor will those who long enjoyed a monopoly on the counterbalancing privilege surrender their own privileges lightly. These ugly fights are likely to be with us for a while.

Shuttuppism

From Instapundit:

A few, a very few, have begun to realize that Podesta and Hillary’s polarization game (“Deplorables!”) has contaminated — and possibly rendered toothless — Democratic politics for years to come. It was only a matter of time until they began to use this tactic on each other.

Once Upon a Time

Sergio Leone, over a storied career, made two movies that began with the words "Once Upon a Time." The one he had actually wanted to make most is the one he made last, a piece about Jewish gangsters during Prohibition starring Robert De Niro. The earlier one, of 1968 vintage, was called "Once Upon a Time in the West." It is one of the great Westerns, with a closing sequence that summarizes the criticism of Modernism perfectly. The whole film celebrates and inverts the symbols of the Western, as Clint Eastwood -- Leone's most famous alumni -- later would do with his own "Unforgiven."

Now Quentin Tarantino is coming out with a movie called "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," the soundtrack of which has been released. It features De Niro, actually, though it does not star him.. It contains tracks from both of the Sergio Leone films, in case the homage was not obvious enough. The film is set in the same era in which the earlier Leone film was made, 1969. It's built around Charles Manson, but I think it will doubtless be interesting if the soundtrack is any clue.





Tarantino is the only director whose films I always watch. The closest to that besides himself is Ridley Scott, but he sometimes turns out a production I'm not interested in seeing. Tarantino regularly produces films I don't think I'll be interested in watching, but find worthy when I get time for them.

Pulp Fiction is of course the greatest of his works, though. It was like "Once Upon a Time in the West" in that it has a closing sequence that is surprising and unexpected even given all the groundwork that was laid for it, and transformative to watch. The Bible verse isn't even real, but the idea of building a better and more virtuous life around scripture is taken so seriously that it is unlike anything else I've ever seen in a contemporary Hollywood film. I can't think how far you would have to go back in Hollywood's history to find so clear and unalloyed and expression of respect for the power of Christian faith to transform a soul in majestic ways.

The centrality of music remains the same in all of these films. The first time I saw Pulp Fiction, I walked out of the theater and went straight to a record store to buy the soundtrack. Tarantino has an ear for music. This time he includes some songs written and performed by Charles Manson himself. One of them was apparently recorded by the Beach Boys, about whom AVI has recently been writing. (They were a big favorite of my father's, as was the Kingston Trio. As a kid I always assumed that was Kingston, TN, since Dad was from Knoxville. So, as it happens, is Tarantino; that's why Knoxville turns up in his work sometimes.)

I'll be interested to see what becomes of this film. If you're interested in movies with strong musical selections set in 1969, by the way, let me re-up my recommendation for Bad Times at the El Royale. I've managed to get a couple of people to watch it with me, and all of them have been extremely impressed with it. If you see a copy, think about picking it up. It's worth your time.

Freedom and prosperity

An amateur tries to sum up history using trends in five metrics for human well-being:

Basically, if I help myself to the common (but certainly debatable) assumption that “the industrial revolution” is the primary cause of the dramatic trajectory change in human welfare around 1800-1870, then my one-sentence summary of recorded human history is this:

Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened.

Chapter and Book

One should be careful when challenging a man on the ground where he made his life's work.

RIP H. Ross Perot

Rick Perry tells a story about his good works.

Tunisian Marriage

There's a push to liberalize the Islamic laws on marriage and inheritance in Tunisia.

The announcement has drawn criticism from the region’s religious scholars. In a public statement, Abbas Shuman, deputy of grand imam Ahmad Al-Tayyib of the Egyptian religious authority Al-Azhar, the highest religious authorities in Sunni Islam, wrote that the potential reform to inheritance was, “unjust for women and is not in line with Islamic Sharia”.

In regard to inter-faith unions, he said: “Such a marriage would obstruct the stability of marriage.”

Inter-faith unions are already legal, as long as the man is a Muslim. The new laws would permit Muslim women to marry non-Muslims as well.

Millennial Nuns

I'm going to follow AVI in linking to this piece on the sudden, unexpected rise of vocation-seeking among America's youth. It probably shouldn't be surprising; there's a kind of cyclical flow to these things, with periods of disenchantment reliably followed by periods of intense faith. Philosophers wrongly talk about the Enlightenment as one long disenchantment, forgetting the Great Awakening of the 19th century that brought the end of slavery in the West among the heartfelt singing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. For that matter, they tend to forget -- as do most -- that the craze for burning witches was not a feature of the High Middle Ages, when faith was triumphant. It was the age of science that brought witch-burning.

Still, it is good to see young hearts full of faith. It gives me joy to look upon it.

Just Black Men?

The article is by a black woman and for black men, but I think there may be a wider lesson or two to be learned. Mind you, there's plenty that are unique and particular concerns of that community as well. But there are a few general lessons hidden in this angry analysis.

It’s also interesting that the very people who created the laws to ensure [black mens'] incarceration, now want to give their right to vote back to them so that they can in turn vote for them.... [N]o one ever discusses how black men are never lauded unless they can be used when murdered or attacked by police. The democrats push policies for every group with the exception of black men, unless you count mass incarceration. White women, white working class (white men), LGBTQRST…, Jews, Immigrants, black women etc., but never anything that speaks to the plight of black men. White liberals love ranting about the pay inequality for black women by comparing them to the pay rates of white men, but cleverly leaves out the fact that black women and black men make less than white women. This clever game of pretending to lift up black women, is nothing more than a rouse to use black women for votes on issues that place white women in elevated positions of power.

Yes, it seems some people are catching on to the way the identity politics game is played.

Related

"No country can survive being ruled by people who hate it."

Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Patriotism

Looking back at the old Patriotism and Extremism post cited in the piece below, I realize that it barely said something I thought I had more fully explored. Perhaps I did elsewhere, but it's worth doing again even if so.

The idea is certainly mentioned in that piece: "It is necessary, in other words, to learn to forgive your ancestors: to recognize their flaws, their failings, and even their crimes, but to love them anyway.... in the end, patriotism proves to be a kind of health. As with other loves that forgive, it sets you free: free to honor the past, and to work for better in the future."

It is not for no reason that the root of 'patriotism' is 'patria,' meaning 'fatherland' in the Latin. It could be 'motherland' just as easily; in some languages the concept is captured that way (e.g., 'Mother Russia'). There is a strong analogy between the family and the state, as well as a clear relationship between the family you happen to come from and the coming-to-be of the particular state you are likely to inhabit. A few true immigrants leave family and culture behind, but more bring it with them; and even the assimilated descendants of 19th-century Italians or Irishmen belong now to a country that has learned from their culture as they have learned from it, and which has integrated their norms and patterns into its own.

Thus the question of how you feel about your country is rather like the question the Freudians used to ask about how you feel about your mother. You may have some very good reasons for animosity towards your mother. All the same, the existence of such animosity reliably predicts the presence of larger and more dangerous mental health issues. If you hate or despise your mother or father, you hate something of the root of your own being. This is going to manifest itself in many terrible ways, things that will cause you immense suffering.

A negative answer to that question of how you feel about the ground of your being also points out the treatment. The treatment is forgiveness and gratitude. It is not the adoption of ignorance about what they did wrong, which you likely did not deserve and which may have been the source of legitimate pain. Rather, the treatment is to forgive them for it. One needs to forgive them for one's self, because it is only in forgiveness -- easiest in the context of the recognition of one's own flaws -- that one can at last be liberated of the weight of carrying the anger.

This enables one to reflect anew on the good things one has gotten, also often undeserved, even from bad parents or nations. This does not require you to maintain ties to them; you can cut an abusive parent out of your life, and we are free as citizens ultimately even to dissolve a nation if we decide that is the right way to proceed. Even in doing so, though, it is helpful to one's self to recognize the goods they bestowed upon you: existence, some degree of protection and nurturing even in the worst relationships, education (even when learning from their mistakes or abuses). One becomes free in forgiving the faults without forgetting them, while being grateful for the goods they gave you in spite of their faults.

It is my sense that countries that cannot forgive their national ancestors wither away, as individuals do who cannot forgive their parents. I begin to think the same is true for individuals who cannot forgive their national ancestors. Aristotle says that we are social animals, and that the polis in a sense completes the work that the family can only begin.

Sometimes it is right to begin anew, but even then forgiveness and gratitude are appropriate. The United States separated from the United Kingdom, but for generations it looked back with honor upon Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Malory, Sir Walter Scott and Magna Carta. That sense of having grown from a fertile and happy ground was ultimately itself fecund, even though we had chosen the path of political separatism and independence.

Quite So

Responding to an assertion that the Women's Soccer team had "Nothing given, everything earned," a writer notes that most everything is unearned -- existence itself is, for example, as are any advantages that come from your particular genetics -- but that 'privilege theory' masks what is really owed behind a cartoon idea of who has (or hasn't) got 'privilege.'

In this case I am reminded of the brief discussion with LR1 in which a comment teased out a very privileged relationship at work here:

Almost no country in the world funds women's soccer to any serious degree. Our team is so great because it is drawn from feeder teams that are drawn from college programs that are hugely funded because -- via Title IX -- the colleges have to fund women's sports programs in order to justify their expenditures on their money-making college football teams.

It's doubly ironic, then, that the women's team is piggybacking off the greater popularity of another sport twice over. The college teams underlying their success wouldn't mostly exist except for government mandates for 'equal' spending, which they are now trying to replicate at the professional level.

They're privileged because they live in a country that values women's equality to such a degree that it mandates colleges spend vast resources on female athletics, even though those colleges often lose money doing it. But they do it anyway, in order to be able to make money off college football. That process is what gives the WNT the talent pool that sets it above the rest of the world, which lacks such processes on anything like that scale.

A lot was given. It was given explicitly to favor these women and develop their talents. They've been carefully taught not to see it, nor to express any gratitude to their society and culture for having nurtured them in this way.

In this way they are the opposites of Socrates:

Soc. "Tell us what complaint you have to make against us which justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the State? In the first place did we not bring you into existence? Your father married your mother by our aid and begat you. Say whether you have any objection to urge against those of us who regulate marriage?" None, I should reply. "Or against those of us who regulate the system of nurture and education of children in which you were trained? Were not the laws, who have the charge of this, right in commanding your father to train you in music and gymnastic?"

Socrates goes on to posit that this creates a master/slave relationship between the polis and the citizen, which any true American would reject. We would say that we created the state to do these things, and if it does them well, it is only doing a servant's work; if it does not, it is the state that can be fired and replaced, or 'destroyed' on Socrates' terms.

Still, some sense of gratitude for what was given is wise and appropriate. A lot of people worked hard to create the system that made it possible for these particular individuals to excel. They were then sent forward as representatives of that system, and they might be expected to show by their conduct love and gratitude for the help they received in attaining their particular excellences. We might once have called such gratitude "patriotism," but whatever you call it, it is surely a duty of justice. The failure to be grateful is injustice, then; and like all vices, injustice (and ingratitude) harms the self as well as the others. It is a kind of poison.

Politicians Need Chaperones

Male ones, at least, if meeting with unaccompanied female reporters.

Actually, a chaperone for politicians is a plausible idea. Instead of being there to prevent sexual harassment allegations, however, how about making them keep an ordinary American around to smack them every time they try to implement socialism?

Up the Militia

Col. Kurt hits some material that will be very familiar to the Hall.

Varmints

"Putting up a sign saying his farm is a coyote or feral hog free zone should do the trick, huh?"

Those are two species that aren't in much danger of extinction. Someday we'll regret killing off the red and gray wolves who might have helped us out with that project.

An Age of Revolution Beckons

France's government rivals Britain's in its worthiness for a revolution.

Quadriplegic man reportedly ‘cried’ when told France has ordered him to be starved to death

...The Court of Cassation’s final ruling means that Lambert, who is not otherwise ill or at the end of his life, would be removed from food and water and left to die slowly, which can take 14 days or more. The decision cannot be appealed in France, but his parents are fighting the order and have threatened to press charges for murder if his food is removed.... On Monday, Viviane renewed her plea for her son’s life. “He sleeps at night, wakes up during the day, and looks at me when I talk,” she said, according to Reuters. “He only needs to be fed through a special device and his doctor wants to deprive him of this so that he can die, while legal experts have have shown that this is not necessary.” She also emphasized that he has reacted to their voices, stating, “In May, when learning about his planned death, he cried.”

From a utilitarian perspective, starving one quadripelgic man to death against his wishes does less harm than, say, hanging a few thousand politicians from the oak trees or lampposts most convenient to their places of business. However, the adoption of utilitarian ethics is exactly the problem with these cases. There are other ethical systems, and in some of the better ones a revolutionary movement is approaching the morally obligatory.

Science that cures

So much medical news seems to chronicle the many ways the health industry can make us miserable, but here is a medical advance I'd classify in the genuine miracle-cure category:  surgical techniques to reattach nerves and tendons so that people with paralyzed arms and hands can regain function there.  It's not like walking again, but what a difference use of one's hands makes.

Barbarians at the gate of the administrative state

The Chevron Doctrine is up for review at the Supreme Court this fall. Powerline has a good take on the dispute.

I recall the first line of Gary Lawson’s famous 1994 article on the Administrative State published in the Harvard Law Review that begins: “The post-New Deal administrative state is unconstitutional, and its validation by the legal system amounts to nothing less than a bloodless constitutional revolution.”

"Pathway to Citizenship"

Bill Barr is merciless in his choice of words.

Speaking of choice of words, Sec. Pompeo has decided to give "unalienable" a spin.

Presidential Primary Updates

Arguably the worst candidate, Swalwell, bowed out today. So that's good. He will not be missed.

However, there's at least as good an argument that Kamala Harris is really the worst one -- and certainly she is the worst one remaining. It's not just people on the right who think so. Truthout has a big piece on her and her "record of injustice" today.

Tulsi Gabbard hit back at Harris for her deceptive practices today. That's good too.

Round up the Usual Suspects

Venezuela has it down.

Venezuelan special forces have carried out thousands of extrajudicial killings in the past 18 months and then manipulated crime scenes to make it look as if the victims had been resisting arrest, the United Nations said Thursday in a report detailing wide-ranging government abuses targeting political opponents.

Special Action Forces described by witnesses as “death squads” killed 5,287 people in 2018 and another 1,569 by mid-May of this year, in what are officially termed by the Venezuelan government “Operations for the Liberation of the People,” U.N. investigators reported.

Well, they do have Chinese advisers.

Hating the Market

I have not heard a living person voice the word "soccer" in the last year, so I think this is another one of those issues that's huge on Twitter and not in real America. Still, it does illustrate. People who understand economics point out that, in fact, women's soccer players in FIFA receive equitable pay even if they don't receive equal pay: they're paid disproportionately more than the men are, given their contribution to the economic game.

In 2015, when the U.S. Women's National Team beat Japan to take the World Cup in Vancouver, the Women's World Cup brought in almost $73 million in revenue, of which the players got 13 percent — $10 million. In 2010, the men's World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9 percent — $348 million — went to the players.

The men simply make more money for FIFA — boatloads more money. The men's World Cup in Russia generated over $6 billion in revenue, with the participating teams sharing $400 million, less than 7 percent of the revenue. Meanwhile, the Women's World Cup was expected to earn $131 million for the 2019-2022 cycle and give out $30 million to participating teams. That's a whopping 22.9 percent!

In other words, the male players take home a smaller percentage of the money they earn for FIFA, even though they take home more money overall. The problem isn't FIFA being sexist against women — in fact, the percentage gap suggests a preference for women or at least an effort to make sure women make more money.

What the activists want is not equitable pay, but equal pay -- even though there's nothing like an equal contribution to the pot. They act as if pay were an expression of their moral value as human beings, rather than their contribution to the economics.

I don't think they fail to understand the economic argument. My sense is that this truly is a rejection of capitalism as a mode of social organization. Of course the men make boatloads more for the sport; of course it is already the men who are disproportionately underpaid compared with the women. That's not the point. The point is that pay should reflect moral, social values -- not economic ones.

That is of course how you get to a place like Venezuela, where enormous amounts of natural wealth still can't support a functional economic system. As someone pointed out this weekend, our socialists will tell you that they're aiming for Sweden or Norway, not Venezuela. What they forget is that Venezuelans were trying to be Sweden or Norway, too. (Also, they forget that Sweden and Norway largely abandoned socialist models; but that's a conversation more readily had at AVI's place, where he discusses it occasionally.)

Numbers

This is a Harvard-Harris poll. It's not finding what they'd like to find, so there's some reason to think it might be accurate; it's an argument against interests.

Some of these numbers are big. Some are titanic.

Let Me Tell You of the Days of High Adventure

Our own LTC Joel Leggett, USMC, has penned an essay on R. E. Howard's Conan as American mythology. The Abbeville Institute, of which I had not heard before Joel mentioned it to me, has published it under the headline "Conan the Southerner?" Well, Howard was a Southerner, but I took Joel's point to be that the Conan stories were explicitly American and not particular to a subculture.

Indeed, he has an interesting parallel with Tolkien:

[M]ost people accept the observation that America lacks its own mythology. To the extent the observation has any weight the same could be said of England. In fact, the lack of an indigenous English mythology is what motivated J.R.R. Tolkien to write the Lord of the Rings. Whether or not he accomplished that goal, he created stories that are loved all over the world.

However, an American author writing at about the same time as Tolkien did create an American mythology that continues to expand and thrive to the current day. The author was Robert E. Howard and the mythology he created centered on his most famous character, Conan.

I think Joel is quite right; we've discussed Howard's works in this space fairly frequently over the years. My view of the Conan books has changed over time. Once I thought that Howard's race-realism defied evolution, since races like the Picts and the blacks and the Stygians retain recognizable characteristics across millennia. In more recent years I've rediscovered the central role that evolution plays in Howard's works: evolution and natural selection really are at the core of his vision of humanity, and even the race that becomes the Cimmerians is described as having fallen all the way back to animality at one point, only to evolve into men (and barbarians) again. Joel touches on that later in his essay. I would say that the centrality of race -- and its inescapable qualities -- are good evidence for his proposition that the Conan stories are the (or at least an) American mythology. America is also trapped in its racial categories.

Nevertheless, for the most part Joel's essay is not about the issue of race, but about the American virtues, and how they are expressed in Conan stories.

Walter Russell Mead, in his book “Special Providence,” identified five core values that formed the basis of Jacksonian culture created by the Scot-Irish settlers. These values were self-reliance, equality, individualism, financial adventurism, and courage. Unsurprisingly, Howard used these same values to flesh out the personal code of the mythological Conan.

Virtue ethics is of course the correct ethics. Naturally, then, I strongly recommend that you read the essay in full, and that we should discuss it here.

They've already attacked Mom and apple pie

Glen Reynolds quotes a friend: "Trump maneuvered his opponents into attacking the Fourth of July."

You Can't Fight Betsy Ross

In the movie Fight Club, there's an extended sequence in which the guys explore who they'd choose to fight from historical periods.  Lincoln is named:  "Big guy, big reach. Skinny guys fight till they’re burger." Respect for the man who won the Civil War and gave his stunningly magnanimous Second Inaugural address is absent; the only measure of respect is how well he can fist-fight.

The current period has a similar feeling, except the once-honored dead are not present to fight back. Nevertheless, some few of them are strong enough to defend their reputations even from beyond the grave. Betsy Ross is likely one of these. For one thing, as a Quaker, she enjoys original abolitionist status. More than that, though, she occupies a particularly powerful archetype: she is America's Mother, as George Washington is America's Father. You cannot reject her without rejecting the whole, which is a road most Americans are unwilling to take.

Many years ago I read an article by a retiring professor of history, who for his whole career had surveyed incoming students about what they already knew about American history. He attested that, throughout his time, students had reliably volunteered the names of George Washington and Betsy Ross. Washington made sense, he said, because of the magnificence of his role; but Ross was unmentioned in the state curriculum except in very early primary education. Nevertheless, students who couldn't remember Cornwallis or Sam Adams would come up with Betsy Ross quite on their own. The human mind being what it is, a mother fits into a primal spot. America can't just have a father, or two fathers, or ten; like anything else, if it comes to be and flourishes, it must have had a mother too.

The President was prescient in his warning that allowing the Confederate statues to fall would call the whole into question. Thomas Jefferson may fall with the other secessionist slaveholders. But Washington won't, and Betsy Ross won't. America cannot let them go, and will not as long as she clings to life. Their enemies are fools, for they have chosen a foe too strong for themselves.

Americana

Some collected 'memes' on Independence Day.  But definitely follow the flag link to the "Spirit of Rebellion" essay, which is the proper reading for today.

I am on the road again for family business. Click the flag on the sidebar for the Independence Day post. 

Don't Tempt Me

'Making fun of members of Congress should be prosecuted,' says Congresswoman. She actually seems to believe that it might already be against the law to do so.

The CBP and AOC

Well, yesterday was quite a day for agent provocateur and Congresswoman Alexandria Occasio-Cortez.

After the Abu Ghraib incident, I don't think anyone can rightly just outright refuse to believe it is possible that guards at an American detention facility could be engaged in brutal and humiliating acts against foreign detainees. For that matter, American prisons don't always treat actual American citizens very well either. Still, the CBP denies her basic claims about detainee treatment; and while there's no reason to doubt that a Border Patrol-celebrating secret Facebook group might contain some pretty nasty memes, at this point it's too early to suggest that CBP membership in the group is widespread. That could be true; it was true for the Marine Corps in similar circumstances.

At this point it's unclear how the facts will shake out. Treacher is right that we must have answers. However, it should be clear that the best thing to do is to close these camps -- by returning everyone to where they came from, as quickly as possible, accepting no new persons. If they come claiming to be a family unit, by all means return them as a family unit. We can avoid the danger of mistreatment of detainees by detaining no one.