Everything is Racist, Vol. MMMDLXXXVI

Someone suggested to me this weekend that we ought to change Columbus Day to Leif Erickson Day, as Erickson got to America first and didn't engage in slavery or mass plunder. (While strictly true, it is surely the case that the Viking explorers avoided these things more from lack of personnel than from ethical objections to plunder or attractive female slaves.) It turns out that this has been suggested before, and there's an ongoing debate about it.

Being familiar with the charge against Columbus, I knew that the reason to replace him was his unacceptable treatment of Native Americans -- which, in the common parlance of today, is "racist." (I'm not sure that the concept of race as such was very well-established in Columbus' day, though the concept of 'non-Christians subject to intense violence as necessary to control them' was one regularly employed by his patrons and their Spanish Inquisition.) It turns out that the advocates of Leif Erickson are also charged with racism by our contemporaries in journalism.

In 1892, the U.S. celebrated a Columbian centennial: the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s journey to the Americas. At the time, the country’s recognition of him was a source of pride for many Italian Americans and Italian immigrants. But Scandinavian immigrants and Americans of northern European descent wanted to celebrate Erikson instead.

This was a time of fervent anti-immigrant and anti-Italian sentiment in many parts of the U.S., and “the idea that there might be a story where the first Europeans to America are not southern Europeans” was appealing, says JoAnne Mancini, senior history lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth and author of “Discovering Viking America.”

...Erikson’s nationality wasn’t the only thing that made some people favor him over Columbus. Mancini says that in the 19th century, Americans “who were not Catholic were really paranoid about the Catholic Church.” Some Protestants went so far as to suggest that Columbus was part of a Roman Catholic conspiracy to suppress the recognition of earlier Norse explorers.

It’s not clear whether many people bought into this conspiracy, but the rise of Columbus in the late 19th century did motivate anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Americans to argue for the national recognition of Erikson over Columbus.

At some point we are going to have to figure out how to forgive our ancestors, or there will be no living with anyone.

Anyway henceforth I'm in favor of Leif Erickson Day as the standard mid-October holiday in honor of great explorers. Columbus really was terrible, Leif wasn't for whatever reason, and the Viking heritage is beautiful and worth celebrating.

Permanent Coup

Ymar recommended this piece by Matt Taibbi, who has been a reasoned voice these last few years. I think he's got good insights here. One of them is that, as bad as Trump is -- I go back and forth on how bad I think that is, but this week he's not in my good graces -- his opponents are much more dangerous to our liberty and way of life. How much more?

...also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion....

The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

Yes, we are already seeing the spectacle of Congress trying to remove the President based on the secret testimony of unnamed CIA officers. That's not acceptable, no matter in how much regard one holds the CIA, and no matter what kind of louse the President might be. At an absolute minimum, the officer needs to bite the bullet and testify to the American people in his or her own name, and tell us why we should accept the removal of our elected President over intelligence concerns.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Andy McCarthy:

I’d wager that the flames of impeachment were stoked more this week by President Trump’s foreign policy than they have been by any purported impeachable offense his opponents have conjured up over the last three years. By redeploying a few dozen American troops in Syria, the president acceded to a Turkish invasion of territory occupied by the Kurds. Ostensibly, that has nothing to do with the impeachment frenzy over Ukraine, whose government Democrats accuse the president of pressuring to dig up dirt on a political rival. But Turkey’s aggression could crack the president’s impeachment firewall.

There is rage over Trump’s decision. It is rage over a policy choice, not over high crimes and misdemeanors. Only the most blindly angry can doubt the lawfulness of the commander-in-chief’s movement of U.S. soldiers, even though it rendered inevitable the Turks’ rout of the Kurds.... Nor does it matter much that, while excruciating, the president’s decision is defensible and will be applauded by Americans weary of entanglement in the Muslim Middle East’s wars.

More than "defensible," the decision was the only one to be made. The United States had only a few Special Forces in the area's front lines, as well as some trainers and support units further back. Turkey is committing tens of thousands of men, including combined arms conventional forces to include heavy artillery, armor, and air support. We have come to hold our special operations forces in a kind of awe, and they are certainly extremely brave and capable. However, "special operations" isn't a synonym for "better than conventional operations." It's a subset of specific missions that require specialized training and setup. These forces are not optimized for the front lines of a conventional war. They're great soldiers, but they're not the right tools for the task.

Nor is diplomacy an option. Erdogan's remaining forces, apart from the Turkish regulars just mentioned, are 14,000 Syrian irregulars. He brought them over to Turkey and massed them for the invasion. Being both non-Turks and irregulars, they won't stay if they aren't used. Erdogan can't be talked out of this because he knows he will lose the bulk of the infantry component he is employing if he doesn't move now.

We have conventional forces we could deploy -- the 82nd Airborne's 3rd Brigade is locked down in Afghanistan, but the rest of it could be shifted from the training exercises it was going to undergo; there's a MEU/SOC (the 11th, I believe) currently working with NAVCENT. But we haven't set up the logistics to support a large conventional deployment. You could get them there, but from day one they'd be burning supplies and needing new ones. What are the supply lines we'd use? Fly into BIAP and truck across the western desert? If Iraq let us, well, you can't supply a large force for long by air alone. Sail into Basra and drive across all of Iraq? Sail into Israel and drive across Jordan? Maybe we could ask our NATO ally Turkey to let us sail into Istanbul and use the same supply lines they'll be using.

Oh, I guess that won't work, huh? Some ally.

And by the way, there are 5,000 US Airmen in Incirlik guarded by Turkish Air Force members. Also fifty tactical nuclear warheads. So if this did become a hot war with Turkey, they could readily seize five thousand hostages and become a nuclear power. They're not ballistic missiles or anything, but they could use them against the very forces we'd be deploying to fight them -- and their intelligence services have had plenty of time to study how these weapons are stored and to learn how to operate them.

The root of this failure -- which may turn out to be the biggest American strategic loss since Vietnam or Korea -- is the failure of our institutions to come to grip with the drift of Turkey and the failure of NATO. The President, foolishly, is selling this as a choice he made for reasons of his own. The truth is he didn't have any choice. It's ugly, and in the medium to long term we could turn it around if we start putting the pieces in place now. But right now, today, there's not a thing we can do to stop the Turks that doesn't do more harm than good.

None of that cuts against Mr. McCarthy's point, though. Almost none of our elected leadership or class of journalists understands any of that. They all think this is happening because Donald Trump 'greenlit' the invasion. To some degree it's his fault for talking as if that were so. Nevertheless if you understand how this works, you quickly see that there wasn't a choice to be made. There were only orders to be issued, and obeyed, in spite of the massive human tragedy they entail. Donald Trump can't convey that; maybe he can't even feel it, for all he manages to show. I believe he truly hates to write letters to the families of fallen soldiers. I'm not sure how much he cares about the others who are being killed, who lately were friends to many of those soldiers. Perhaps that incapacity really is a disqualification, of a sort; although I'd think it more a 25th Amendment disqualification than an impeachable offense.

In any case, many others besides him bear responsibility for this disaster. It should have been obvious, and steps should have been taken to reinforce the position until we were ready to abandon it on our own terms and at a time of our own choosing. We are being routed, humiliatingly by an ostensible ally. We are leaving friends we fought alongside to be murdered. We should have had another choice, and it is our own fault that we do not. We left ourselves unprepared to do what would have to be done to stop it.

Another Country Music Documentary

This one was made by the BBC about the time of O Brother, Where Art Thou?. It's a little surprising to find British people interested in American country, although the Chieftains did an excellent album around the similarities between Irish and American Country music once.

Still, interested they were, and they got a lot right. There are a few quibbles, but it's a good piece overall. Being a few years older, these documentarians got to talk to some of the greats who are gone now.



The second part focuses on my favorite parts of the genre.

Unclear on the concept

Sure, free speech is important, says the Chinese TV network, but everything has common-sense limits:

"We believe any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability do not belong to the category of free speech,” the network said.

Thoughts on Ramblin', with Jerry Reed

Atlanta's own Snowman sings a pair of songs on the subject of sowing one's wild oats...



...or not.

Bee Stings

Radical, Far-Right Library Just Has Books, No Drag Queens

The following line alone is worth reading the whole thing for:

... said Xyle Parson while waving a sign that said, "Love Wins and If You Don't Like It You Can Die in a Fire."

Related: 'Love Trumps Hate!' Screams Protester While Beating Republican To Death With A Shovel

Melvin Morris Walks Morris Island

Morris was awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in Vietnam. Morris Island, SC, was where the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment assaulted the Confederate Ft. Wagner, immortalized in the movie Glory.

Is It Still Satire If It Comes True?

The Babylon Bee: "Hillary Clinton Announces She Will Seek Reelection As President Of The United States"

Real life Hillary Clinton: "Maybe there does need to be a rematch. Obviously I could beat him again."

Go away, Hillary. It's already too hard to tell the difference between reality and satire without you adding to it.

Syria, in or out

Jim Carafano makes sense to me:

[B]y the end of Bush’s term, we had put a lot of pressure on al-Qaeda and groups like ISIS. And the threat of transnational terrorism subsided significantly.

President Obama benefited [from that when he] came in office. And about halfway through his first term, he basically kind of decided the war on terror was over. So he pulled the troops out of Iraq. We backed off in a lot of areas, and basically what we saw is, if you think of those scenes where there’s a forest fire and then the fire’s out and everybody leaves and then the sparks flare up and the forest fire kicks in again, that’s exactly what happened.

So we went from a very high level of terror, global terrorist threat, to a low level, to essentially walking away from the problem and see it reignite. And when Trump came back in office, we did a significant job of kind of putting the forest fire out again.

The challenge now is we have to watch the embers. I’m sympathetic of what Sen. Graham says, if we walk away from worrying about transnational terrorism, it’ll definitely come back. Where I would differ is what’s the most efficacious way to do that? …

There’s an argument [of] let’s have American troops everywhere doing everything. There’s a better argument, I think, which the president has made, which is, there are things that we should be doing, there are things that our friends and allies should be doing, and we should all be working at keeping watch to make sure the fire doesn’t come back together.

In the end, that’s more sustainable and will also be more effective. So I’m not sure that Sen. Graham’s right, that the answer is we put American troops everywhere all the time because we’re worried about forest fires.

Crying wolf

There are real dangers out there.  We can't afford to be jumping at shadows instead.

Brothers in Valor Project

The American Battlefield Trust has teamed up with living Medal of Honor recipients to walk Civil War battlefields and discuss their experiences of war. Here are two of the videos.

Punish Your Friends, Help Your Enemies

It's not new that America is an unreliable ally; that's been true forever. America has elections, and sometimes that means that someone with a completely different view becomes head of our foreign policy. Obama viewed Iran as a potential ally, and turned our Middle East policy upside down trying to realize that goal. Trump doesn't think Iran is an ally, and thinks instead that we shouldn't be militarily engaged there on a long-term basis.

So, for at least the third time by my count, he's attempting to withdraw us from Syria.

The decision represents a dramatic reversal for U.S. policy, which in 2015 provided air support for Kurdish militias to retake the critical town of Kobani from Islamic State and has since used Kurdish fighters as ground troops in the campaign to clear Syria of the group.

The shift could cast further doubt on the reliability of the U.S. in the region, in the wake of policy about-faces including walking away from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal that was painstakingly negotiated with allies who remain committed to the agreement.

Trump defended Monday his desire to end America’s so-called “endless wars,” saying his country would fight only in it’s [s.i.c.] own interest. That sentiment has been welcomed by some, while leaving allies who rely on the U.S. security umbrella feeling nervous and exposed. An increasingly detached U.S. has also allowed rivals including Iran and Russia to pursue more aggressive foreign policies and expand their influence across the Middle East.

The whole American establishment is against this move, which doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good one. The likelihood of a new, lingering war in the region is high. On the other hand, such a war will draw in and drain Turkish, Iranian, and probably Russian resources rather than American ones. If it drives up oil prices, well, that's good for us now that we're a net exporter of oil -- and very bad for China.

'Good for us,' at least, on the national level -- higher gas prices won't be much fun for the individual consumer. That sort of mercantalism seems to be part of the President's worldview. The US is done footing the bills for other people's peace and prosperity. Individual Americans may rise or fall, but "the US" is going to make more profits and pay fewer costs. Maybe it'll trickle down.

I've got to remember this one

Old and busted:  "problematic."  New and hot:  "complex legacies."

For a while it was fashionable to rebut any inconvenient argument by saying "that's been debunked."  Now I think it will be easier, and more sophisticated, to observe that the idea has a complex legacy.  Find me something with a simple legacy instead.  Something pure.  Something this week.

Customer Appreciation Day at the Feed & Seed

As chaos reigns online, especially on Twitter, outside of the DC area there's a fair amount of sanity. Today we stopped in at a local farm supply store, because we noticed an unusually large number of vehicles there as we passed it. It's the sort of place you call a 'Feed & Seed' because those are its bread and butter items: feed for livestock, seeds for planting. There's always a friendly cat or two whose job it is to hunt the mice who'd like to delve into both the feed and the seed. Sometimes there are dogs as well. Wrangler jeans are for sale to one side, as well as work boots and overalls. Everybody knows you if it's the one near your home, and they know what you probably are stopping in for today. My wife keeps the ladies who work there supplied with African violets, which the ladies continue to kill off about as fast as the wife can supply them.

Turns out the large number of folks present was because it was 'customer appreciation day,' which meant a cookout and a bluegrass band. I had a free hamburger with chili, and baked beans on the side. The wife got a hot dog with all the fixin's. We listened to the band for a while, which interspersed its songs with jokes about how lucrative bluegrass band work tends to be. "We make tens of dollars," they bragged. "Joe here is independently filthy."

I talked with an old man about how good the food was at the local Senior center, and how outrageous the prices were elsewhere. He was quite passionate on the subject. Then I bought some two-stroke oil and some birdseed, since we were there anyway.

Here's Waylon Jenning's take on one of the songs the band played. They swapped in one of the local towns for "...all the way to Georgia," which threw my wife off as she was singing along. She was deeply amused by being caught out that way.

Toward a Small, Weak State

Civil liberties can only now exist in such a context:

I used to think there might be some way to erect a legal bulwark between the ravenous state and the vast troves of private data. I now think that is a losing battle, primarily thanks to the too-common eagerness of the firms we entrusted with our intimate information to hand it over to law enforcement without even the formality of a warrant.

So we cannot keep our secrets much longer. But there is still hope. A minimal state where civil liberties are expansively interpreted and scrupulously protected offers the best chance to preserve the sphere of individual liberty. It matters much less if the state knows everything about you when it has no cause and no right to act on that information unless a genuinely serious crime has been committed.

Real freedom means letting the right people call the shots

Free speech is killing us.

I would have linked to the NYT version, but I'm allergic to their site.  I thought you might enjoy the Babylon Bee version more, anyway.

Getting a handle on the numbers

A Streiff article at RedState charts the average compensation for outside directors at the world's largest oil and gas companies.

Burisma is not quite 1/4 the size of the smallest company on this list. The group of smallest companies pays between $285-$330,000 per year for a non-employee director. Hunter Biden was paid $600,000 (at least) for being a board member of a company whose language he did not speak, whose home country he’d never lived in, and which was in an industry about which Hunter Biden was pig-ignorant.... [N]on-employee directors were paid in a combination of cash and stock, often as much as 60% stock. Biden was paid in 100% cash. 

Permit this, forbid that

Since what's permitted and what's forbidden shows no persuasive pattern of effects that actually improve anything, I'm assuming it's largely the Leninist game of who/whom.  James Lileks does a scorching job on crazy California approaches to the kind of social calamities we couldn't possibly interfere with lest we become callous tyrants, versus virtue-signaling bans on every kind of peripheral nonsense you can imagine.

[T]he real issue is the lack of “affordable housing,” by which they mean housing that can be secured by someone with no means of support who is incapable of holding a job, or spends all their money on intoxicants. Since they have no homes with flush toilets, they use the streets. Good liberals with “Resist!” bumperstickers sulk over stories about typhus-ridden fecal deposits, and wish the one-party government would Do Something. Otherwise they will vote out the ideologically interchangeable politicians and put in some other ideologically interchangeable politicians.

In a similar vein, "But Panera cares."

Gandalfa

Amazon is working on a new Tolkien-themed show. Naturally, the demands for a female Gandalf have begun to crop up.

Carrying the water, drinking the water

Glen Reynolds writes on the origin and destiny of the Tea Party.

This week's issue in my county is a desalination plant that's going through the state permit process in nearby Corpus Christi.  There are a few genuinely thorny issues about how to site the plant, but much of the public commentary is starting to sound to me like Reynolds's contrast between makers and takers.  People seem to have no idea where the things they consume come from.  The trees that were felled to make a site for their own home years ago mean nothing, but the next guy is a criminal for altering a pristine landscape to build something new on land his hyper-virtuous neighbors couldn't be bother to buy and keep as a preserve on their own nickel.  Their drinking water comes from an RO plant that treats brackish groundwater, but no evil corporation should be able to build a desalination facility to serve a new industry, though it relies on exactly the same RO technology.  Where do these people send their wastewater?  They neither know nor care.  The other guy's waste is always the issue.

Outdoor Life Reviews

A fellow who says he'd like to be called JRS wrote to ask to have his blog linked, which I've done under 'Other Halls.' It's not a traditional blog, actually, but a website that collects his reviews of various things related to outdoor life. I looked over his knife reviews and they seemed well-ordered. Likely the others are as well, but judge for yourselves.

Flashback to the Old Hall

Continuing the recent tradition in which only the satirical news makes any real sense, "Nation Longs For More Civilized Age When Politicians Settled Disputes With Pistols."

That was an issue when Grim's Hall was young, way back in 2004. The Honorable Zell Miller had expressed regret that duels were no longer legal, which the media -- then as now dishonest -- chose to interpret as him having challenged a man to a duel.

There really is something to be said for a return to duelling [s.i.c. -- apparently in 2004 I didn't know how to spell a word I had nevertheless used many times. -Grim]. Even the reminder of the institution, though, is clarifying. Consider the "Go to Hell, Zell," John Kerry Infant creeper, for those who think that American life isn't sufficiently profane for children. This shirt allows those of a particularly cowardly persuasion to express obscenity without fear of retribution. No reasonable person would take the baby to task (the baby would be just as happy if the creeper said "Vote Bush, 2004," or said nothing and was decorated only with carrot stains). No decent man would engage the parent in front of the child, as anyone bent out of shape enough to dress an infant in such garb would surely cause a scene upsetting to the innocent....

The image of the crossed pistols reminds us that men used to take responsibility for their words -- that the things they said were things they would risk death to defend....

How many times have I had to hear people toss around the words "lie!" or "liar!" in this election? It seems to be the very first line of defense, when anyone says anything you'd rather not believe. Not only do these people hide behind children, they sound like children. They spit deadly insults freely, knowing that they can never be called to account.

The end of the duel may have brought some good effects, but it has also ended the culture of responsibility that went with it. No one is called to account for their slander. That John Kerry of the VVAW is a candidate for the highest office in the land says this as truly as anything.

I'm with Zell. It is a shame that duels are no longer legal. Duels were private wars, and like wars they could be just. Like wars, for all the harm they did, they often did more good. In a world fallen from hope of perfection, that may be the best you can ask.

Like all of us, I was 15 years younger when I wrote that. I am sure I was hotter of head in those days, but I believe the younger Grim was right. "Liar! Liar!" has been replaced with "Traitor! Traitor!," and the hiding behind children is as prominent a feature today as then.

We should return to the duel. It would restore some manners around here, and drive the loud-mouthed cowards out of the places of power and authority they have so long now occupied.

BB-Snopes Feud Continues

Headline: "Snopes Rates the Devil's Lies as 'Mostly True.'"

Satan claimed that eating a particular fruit would not cause anyone to die, but would instead grant them an improved understanding of moral issues. According to Snopes’ assessment, while consuming the fruit has been followed by billions and billions of deaths, those casualties were more of an indirect result, while the part about gaining knowledge of good and evil was generally accurate. They also checked all the lies Satan told Jesus while He was being tempted in the desert and pointed out that he did quote Scripture, albeit out of context, earning the Prince of Darkness another "Mostly True" rating.

From the Duffel

US Army to drop ‘US’ from name over past links to slavery

Acting Secretary of Army Ryan McCarthy told reporters that former NFL quarterback and Army historian Colin Kaepernick had recently found countless examples of troubling behavior engaged in by the United States, including racism, slavery, genocide, and inappropriate touching.

“After examining the evidence presented by Mister Kaepernick, we decided we cannot ask our soldiers of color to wear the name of a country which enslaved their ancestors or tell our LGBTTQQIAAP service members to display the flag of the place which enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” McCarthy said.

Kaepernick is currently leading another internal Army investigation over historical links between the United States and a white supremacist group called The Confederate States of America.

Mom Of Four Goes To SERE School, Gets Amazing Sleep

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

The Sage of Knoxville runs some speculation on what's going on with this Ukraine business.

“Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” read the headline on the article by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern. “Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton,” said the subhead of the article, which was published shortly before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The authors reported that Ukrainian government officials “helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers” with the goal of “advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”

With the benefit of hindsight and the results of the Mueller investigation, it’s now clear that there was no evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. What is not clear and what demands further investigation is how this baseless claim managed to consume the first two years of an American presidency.

We need to get to the bottom of this — and the fear that we will is why the Democrats and their press enablers are getting so crazy.

If all the bodies are buried in Ukraine, why would they be impeaching Trump on a Ukraine question? Why not pick anything else, since apparently the facts aren't that important to the question of whether or not to impeach -- after all, Pelosi didn't want to wait one day for the transcript before announcing the launch of her inquiry. Impeach him on emoluments, let everyone argue about whether foreign diplomats electing to stay in his hotel provides some kind of illicit bribery. For goodness sake, don't lead the media's gaze over to Ukraine. Americans are pretty insular, and won't look at faraway nations with foreign languages if you don't make them look.

Yet they clearly chose to do so, and went to some trouble to do it.

Youths who need to turn their lives around

Minneapolis's city council openly blames police for any street violence that might be said to discourage taxpayers from coming downtown to spend money.

Even in the wake of the most recent homicides and other violent incidents, City Council members are clinging to their leftist illusions. Thus, one Council member says the Council is trying to do “a better job with our youth violence intervention strategies to support the youth who are in the downtown area between 9:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m.” I don’t think most residents believe the problem is that criminals who are wandering the streets in the middle of the night lack “support.”

And they'll probably want federal tax money support when their downtown sports arenas fail because all those terrible racists refuses to drive in from the suburbs any more.

I worked with a woman who was sexually abused in youth by her brother.  Years later she summoned up the courage to upbraid her mother for turning a blind eye.  "Oh, that's awful," her mother agreed.  "I wish I had known about it at the time.  I could have gotten help for your brother."

No room for you in me

Gary Saul Morson is at it again, elucidating the peculiar evil that is Leninism. In a new essay, he notes that terrorist totalitarianism were not necessary evils to Lenin but laudable goals in their own right. He often punished underlings for coming up short in the article of ruthlessness. He held that all morals qualms must be eliminated in favor of effective force in aid of universal compliance. Though his soviet empire was toppled, the habit of thought endures:

The same logic applied to rights. On paper, the Soviet Constitution of 1936 guaranteed more rights than any other state in the world. I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the ussr had absolute freedom of speech—so long as they did not lie. I recalled this curious concept of freedom when a student defended complete freedom of speech except for hate speech—and hate speech included anything he disagreed with. Whatever did not seem hateful was actually a “dog-whistle.”

I'm proofing a collection of arguments between Roger Williams and Cotton Mather from the early 17th century. Williams asserts that it's wrong to force a man's conscience. Mather replies serenely that he agrees, unless the erring citizen persists in error after repeated expostulations, at which point he is sinning against his own conscience and is fair game for torture and murder.

The eternal task of civilization is to find a way to honor other people's freedom without signing one's own death warrant. Lenin wasn't interested in any of that. As Maxim Gorky quipped, "Lenin 'in general' loved people but . . . his love looked far ahead, through the mists of hatred." He much preferred dead people to free ones, not just because they were safer but because they weren't entirely under his thumb:  because they were not himself. It's as if he were literally Milton's Satan. And he, of course, is what lies ahead for us whenever we can't bear making room in the world for anything but ourselves.

Recently Attorney General William Barr asked how his critics would have reacted had the FBI secretly interfered with the Obama campaign: “What if the shoe were on the other foot?” From a Leninist perspective, this question demonstrates befuddlement. In his book Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky imagines “the high priests of liberalism” asking how Bolshevik use of arbitrary power differs from tsarist practices. Trotsky sneers:

You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain it to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. . . . Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals . . . . Do you grasp this—distinction? For us Communists it is quite sufficient.

What is reprehensible for them is proper for us, and that’s all there is to it. For a Leninist, the shoe is never on the other foot because he has no other foot.

Common People

Accurate

Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Chip Roy (R-TX) spoke against gun control Wednesday on Capitol Hill and stressed that gun rights are God-given for the purpose of not simply defending self, but defending liberty.

Biggs said, “The Founders of this country…recognized the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights.” He described their intention by saying, “You have a right to defend yourself against wrongdoers and also against a tyrannical government.”

He added, “That’s what the Second Amendment is about.”

Good to see someone in Congress knows that.

Gone Rogue

The Speaker of the House is a constitutional officer, as is the President. The Attorney General is not one; although the Attorney General is appointed under the Appointments Clause, there's no mention of this particular office in the Constitution. Nevertheless, it is one of the oldest offices, having been created in 1789. Every President has had an Attorney General, all the way back to George Washington. When the Speaker of the House accuses the Attorney General of having "gone rogue," we have a potentially serious problem.

“I do think the attorney general has gone rogue,” Ms. Pelosi said on CNN. “He has for a long time now. And since he was mentioned in all of this, it’s curious that he would be making decisions about how the complaint would be handled.”

One thing that we've seen a lot of is this move to force recusal by the Attorney General, who is a political appointee. Jeff Sessions recused during the whole RussiaRussiaRussia thing because he was 'named,' so that the matter ended up being handled by lesser officials (especially Deputy AG Rosenstein). Barr is refusing to play that game. His name came up because it ought to come up, and it ought to come up because he's the appropriate and lawful official to have handled a joint investigation with Ukraine under treaty law.

In a way this represents a weakening of norms, because the best case is one in which no one would serve as a judge in his own case. Recusals like Session's, where he was plainly in the clear but nevertheless was mentioned, represent a kind of extravagant adherence to this best case. To do that, of course, one has to trust that one's case will be handled fairly -- as the example of Mike Flynn suggests you no longer can do.

We are in a destabilizing political situation, in which constitutional officers are no longer even trying to prop up the legitimacy of inferior officers. I wonder if this can remain rhetorical, or if we aren't watching the beginning of a collapse.

By the way, I can't help but notice that this Ukraine thing is following a familiar script in other ways, too -- today we got the 'X number of former officials say this is awful' news story, which has become a standard feature of left-leaning attacks on Republican officials. It makes me wonder if this isn't going to turn out to be a Fusion GPS production, exactly like RussiaRussiaRussia only faster because they don't have a lot of time now.

Don't send children to college

Better yet, don't raise kids so that they're still infants at 18.

“Well, we had to get Kyle moved into to his dorm, register for classes, pick his schedule, tour the campus, find out where his classes are, get him linens and a dorm fridge, meet his roommate, and go to parent orientation.” Post after post making moving into a dorm and registering for classes sound like a Homeric poem. “Well first we had to get Kyle on a ship that would not be crushed on the rocks by the songs of the sirens and then we had to get him a sword and a shield so he could kill a cyclops. I read where this one guy used his shield as a mirror to cut off Medusa’s head, so we’re going to Costco later to see if they carry that one...”

My folks didn't do this kind of thing, to put it mildly. Even so, I was a child and a mess when I went off to college, putting myself in needless peril. It would have been a lot worse if I'd never earned any money or learned how to spend it.

Not that it was a time to act like a conservative 50-year-old:  I'm glad I got the chance to experiment before I was calcified. I was lucky that college was still a protected space where I could concentrate on learning and didn't have to worry much about room and board, let alone about supporting a family. The summers were a time to get a job and pay for an apartment, learn how to shop for groceries and cook, how to stretch a dollar.

By the time I graduated, I was still a child and a mess, but at least I could keep body and soul together using my own paycheck. There was no serious danger of my going back to live in my parents' basement until I was 35, nor did I know anyone caught in that trap. While we sorted ourselves out, we'd rent hovels together and share the expenses. The economy was rotten, but we never had that much trouble making it work.

Solomon on BIden

John Solomon at The Hill continues to publish some of the best investigative reporting out there. Suing for documents under the Freedom of Information Act has become an indispensable tool.

Is the Social Contract Dead?

Came across a pretty interesting argument on Twitter that I thought would make for rather interesting discussion in these parts.  I present it with no further commentary:

The social contract is dead.

Impeachment over a non-impeachable offense would have sealed that deal. But even worse a fake "inquiry" in name only that skirts the law. This isn't two-tiers. This is making it up as you go.

You have no obligation to this system. None at all.

— Jared A. Chambers 🇺🇸 (@C4CEO) September 24, 2019

(more below the fold)

Read It For Yourselves

If you somehow missed the transcript that is apparently going to lead to an impeachment inquiry, read it here.

For my money, the important thing is that every single reference to any sort of investigation he asks to be run through the Attorney General. Initial reports that he tried to have 'his private lawyer' handling the investigation from the US side were wrong; actually, a lot of the early reports were wrong as usual. Rudy is mentioned because he's brought up by the Ukrainian side. Trump says some nice things about him, but then brings it back around to the need to work also with the Attorney General. He's not asking for assistance with his campaign, but for law enforcement cooperation on some scandals involving highly placed American public officials. He's not going to run it out of the White House, but is passing it off to the appropriate authorities.

Other people clearly read it differently.

Reblogging Satire is the Only Thing that Makes Sense Now

The Bee.

Bee Stings

Tex inspired me to check out the Bee again today, so, here y'all are:

L, G, T, Q and + Publicly Execute B for Implying There Are Only Two Genders

Man Outed As Dark Lord Of The Sith After Revealing He Believes In Absolute Truth

Swarm Of Locusts In Book Of Revelation Revealed To Be Twitter

Tragically, the following might qualify as "real news" instead of satire:

Republicans Excited To Have Supreme Court Majority Like They Had When 'Roe V. Wade' Decided

Media slowly heal themselves

The Babylon Bee is inspiring similar sites. Some good headlines from The Derringer:

NYT Accused of Whipping Out New Kavanaugh Allegation, Thrusting It in Nation’s Face

Experts Agree Restructuring World Economy Best Way to Treat Child’s Anxiety

Whether or Not Trump Committed a Crime, Can’t We All Agree That He is Guilty of It?

To Be At All Times Armed

An essay on the right of revolution at Human Events, which begins happily with a story from the Heimskringla's account of Sweden's abortive war against Norway's St. Olav.

Ukraine Shuffle

So, the latest thing that is definitely going to lead to impeachment according to Twitter is this story that Trump asked Ukraine to investigate Biden’s son. I am pretty sure the real corruption is the way Biden used his position and US money to derail the investigation in the first place. Am I missing something? It’s wrong to try to undo a corrupt act of a prior administration if it might benefit you politically?

Stripping Words

The Oxford English Dictionary, compiled in part by Tolkien, is asked to strip out offensive words. Offensive to whom? Guess.

Probably Wasn't Going to Vote for Her Anyway

Elizabeth Warren doesn't like men?

Elizabeth Warren made the political calculation this week that she doesn’t need men to win the presidency.

“We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” she told a rally in Washington Square Park Monday night.

“In fact, we’re not here because of men at all,” she said, emphasizing the “m” word like an expletive....

Immediately before saying “we’re not here because of men,” she dissed George Washington and the beautiful Tuckahoe marble arch that bears his name.

“I wanted to give this speech right here and not because of the arch behind me or the president that this square is named for — nope.”

I mean, I can half get why she thinks it's fine to run down Washington, him having been a slave-owner and all. It's dumb, running for the office he dignified and for which he set the terms. Still, in the current moment, it makes a kind of perverse sense.

Why expand the complaint from 'slave-owner' to 'man,' though? That's alienating to a lot of your potential voters.

Perfect

Three faces of fracking

Per Glenn Reynolds:  Because of fracking, (1) the U.S. is suffering only a moderate fuel price shock from the Saudi oil-field strike, (2) China is losing $97 million a day from the same, and (3) while "the U.S. Navy used to have to keep the straits of Hormuz open. Now it only has to be able to close them."

A Few Small Matters Have My Attention

I’m a little behind this week. Tex is doing a great job running the place, with an assist from Tom. I’ll get back with you soon.

Jim Webb: Soldiers without a Country

Sen. Webb tells the story of the burial of 81 ARVN paratroopers in California:

On Friday, a U.S. Air Force aircraft will carry the commingled remains of 81 airborne soldiers of the former South Vietnamese Army from Hawaii, where they have been stored in a military facility for more than 33 years, to California. On Oct. 26, there will be a full military ceremony honoring their service in Westminster, often known as Little Saigon, where tens of thousands of Vietnamese Americans now live. 

This will be a unique occurrence because their names might never be known and because they were soldiers of an allied army. Following the ceremony, these forgotten soldiers will be laid to rest under a commemorative marker in the largest Vietnamese-American cemetery in our country. 

Hanoi declined to take them.

One of the best speeches I ever heard in person was from a former ARVN infantry colonel when the Traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall came to OKC. That city has a large Vietnamese American community established by refugees from the war.

By the end of that speech, I think half the men in the crowd were ready to go back over and try again.

I'm glad these paratroopers will finally be laid to rest on free soil, even if it isn't in their own country.

What's this "we" jazz, paleface?

Related:

Counter drone world

This isn't going to get any prettier.

Mate selection

No one knows how long DNA has been around, but a confident guess would be some billions of years.  In all that time, it's been trying, in the anthropomorphic sense that leads us to inject purpose into the process of natural selection, to perfect ways of projecting itself from one cell or organism to another, the definition of evolutionary "success."  In the case of sexually reproducing species that go to some trouble finding suitable mates, that has led to a bewildering variety of mating displays and strategies for selecting genetically suitable partners.  In humans, that sometimes includes what we call courtship and marriage.

So what could go wrong with a social trend toward pairs of infertile parents choosing to reproduce with sperm donated by strangers?  Maybe a gay couple, fertile individually but obviously not with each other--with apologies for my ableist bias.  Maybe a gay couple who prefer to buy anonymous sperm from a respectable laboratory with the latest in foolproof genetic screening protocols.  Who says you should get to know anything about the father of your child that can't be read off a medical chart that included the results of a scientific personal interview?

And if the resulting babies have financially crippling special needs, and your union isn't strong enough to hold up under the pressure, who says stuffy old principles about lifelong marital fidelity and loyalty to children are any more workable when couples have a reproductive sexual bond and a genetic relationship to their own children?  Just sue the sperm bank for not giving your reproductive choices the attention they deserved.

Range

David Epstein is out with a book countering Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000," arguing that starting early and practicing endlessly in a narrow range is not the path to all excellence:

David Epstein examined the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.

Robert Heinlein famously said that specialization was for insects, but we also know that dabbling is for dilettantes.  Epstein and Gladwell are lining up on either side of the long-running dispute over the purpose of education:  should our children be drilled in facts and techniques, or should be we planting 1,000 seeds in virgin soil and confidently awaiting decades of creative flowering?

"Complex and unpredictable fields" are just what most people aren't going to master. The students who will master them may need a completely different kind of education from what an aggressively leveling public school is equipped to provide, particularly if it's staffed by administrators and teachers who have never mastered a complex or unpredictable field themselves, relying instead on legislated job security and a monopolist's command of the public funding teat.

Schools need to provide a fair shot for all young comers, but the good they can do for some students won't be much like what they can do for others.  Epstein's generalists are probably soaking up basic facts and techniques so easily that teachers barely had a role in the process.  The teachers won't do their average students any favors by skipping the ABCs and hoping for a brilliant synthesist to emerge after years of impoverished job-hopping.

This means war for someone

Best tank up. Iranian-backed Yemeni Houthi rebels claim credit for taking out half of Saudi Arabia's oil production (5% of world production) in a drone strike this weekend. Good thing U.S. energy production has soared in the last couple of years.

Robert Burns

And now for a break from ranting:

Fleeting moments of clarity

The New Neo reports on George Packer's description of the moral dilemmas of parents trying to run their kids through public wokeschool.  Packer wants to stay in the fold, but now and then a bit of cognitive rigor intrudes:

Adults who draft young children into their cause might think they’re empowering them and shaping them into virtuous people (a friend calls the Instagram photos parents post of their woke kids “selflessies”). In reality the adults are making themselves feel more righteous, indulging another form of narcissistic pride, expiating their guilt, and shifting the load of their own anxious battles onto children who can’t carry the burden, because they lack the intellectual apparatus and political power. Our goal shouldn’t be to tell children what to think. The point is to teach them how to think so they can grow up to find their own answers.

I wished that our son’s school would teach him civics.

Then he goes back to Trump-bashing.

Packer is sad and he’s bewildered. He doesn’t really know how this all came up, doesn’t connect the dots, and he doesn’t know what to do. The idea that the right has some answers never really occurs to him. I sympathize with him in his struggle, and wonder where it may ultimately lead. At the moment, the cognitive dissonance is fierce.

Destroying humanity to save it

This kind of nonsense would be chilling even if it were not based on a transparent attempt to use ignorant pseudo-science as an excuse to flog one's cultural enemies into submission:

I’m talking, of course, about climate change ... every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy ... overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting. They must accept the reality of climate change and have faith in the extreme measures taken to combat it ... Every day, instead of thinking about breakfast, they have to think about death.

I don't need to accept anything of the sort without revolting.

 

Blow this case wide open

Andrew McCabe reportedly has threatened to take them all down with him.  Go for it, Andy.

Loss of accustomed impunity

It's a loss that leaves people sputtering.

Hot, smoking conscience

From "How the Great Truth Dawned":

Many, including Solzhenitsyn, took the next step and accepted God. Why not remain an atheist who believes in an absolute moral law? Here again we must understand the thought-shaping power of Russian literature, particularly Russia’s specialty, the great realist fiction of ideas. Great novels test ideas not by their logical coherence, as in academic philosophy, but by the consequences of believing them.

* * *

Thinking novelistically, Solzhenitsyn asks: how well does morality without God pass the test of Soviet experience? Every camp prisoner sooner or later faced a choice: whether or not to resolve to survive at any price. Do you take the food or shoes of a weaker prisoner? “This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. . . . If you go to the right—you lose your life; and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.” Memoirist after memoirist, including atheists like Evgeniya Ginzburg, report that those who denied anything beyond the material world were the first to choose survival. They may have insisted that high moral ideals do not require belief in God, but when it came down to it, morals grounded in nothing but one’s own conviction and reasoning, however cogent, proved woefully inadequate under experiential, rather than logical, pressure.

Don't Cuss the Fiddle

Ovid Remains Provocative

This is an interesting interview that makes some good points about the timidity (to the point of dishonesty) of 19th century translations. Along the way, though, it provokes an astonishing admission from one of the interviewees.

And also [Ovid's Metamorphoses is] about the only real subject—it’s about power, and it’s about how power transforms, and that is almost the only interesting thing in the world, you know?

Well. I wish the young lady the opportunity to discover some of the other interesting things in the world, but ultimately that will be up to her to decide to pursue or not. Still, how sad -- how shocking -- how impoverished! It is sorrowful to think that someone might say that and mean it.

Still and all, it is an interesting interview. There's a lot of ground it doesn't explore, but exposes for those who might be more interested in it. Ovid remains worth reading, in part because he challenges us to consider a sexual morality so very different from our own. These are, after all, gods engaged in all this sexual violence; and humans, especially women, are expected by the moral order of the universe to suffer it. Yet the people, even the women, are not at all innocents, also engaged in brutal and extractive power, and the Victorians hid that too.

...Let’s talk about Leucothoe. You wrote about that so beautifully; let’s get into the specifics, word by word. That’s another story that stuck with me and flared back to life again when all the Weinstein stuff happened. The sun god comes in while everyone’s weaving; she’s with her friends.

SM: She’s spinning with her slaves, in fact—

JT: Oh f***. God. [Laughs]

They don't discuss Medusa, one of the most famous of the metamorphoses, but it's just as strange to our eyes. Ovid has Perseus recount the story of how she became a Gorgon.

They say that Neptune, lord of the seas, violated [Medusa] in the temple of Minerva. Jupiter’s daughter [i.e., Minerva/Athena] turned away, and hid her chaste eyes behind her aegis. So that it might not go unpunished, she changed the Gorgon’s hair to foul snakes.

Athena is one of the virgin goddesses. Somehow Medusa being raped in her temple violates her, Athena's, sense of modesty or chastity. Medusa is punished for this violation of Athena's sensibilities, even though it was a god who was acting on her against her will. Neptune, of course, is not punished; he is immortal, as beyond human morality as he is beyond human mortality. Medusa is horribly transformed to punish her for offending the gods, but there was no way for her not to offend.

In a way this is worth exploring less in terms of raw power, or even in terms of male and female archetypes, than in terms of the relationship between the human and the divine that the Romans experienced. The divine are not human in a surprising way, given that we often think of the Greco-Roman gods as being anthropomorphic. The Judaeo-Christian God, though ultimately all-powerful to a degree that makes even ordinary language inapplicable except equivocally, turns out to have a more direct relationship to human morality. As we see in Sodom and Gormorrah, Abraham can argue with him and prevail. As Jesus, there is a capacity for perfectly human pity and engagement. The God Neptune, the Sea, is not human but only looks human. The Sea does with humans whatever it wishes, on whatever inscrutable whim, and they alone suffer for it.

But the sea is one of the beautiful things, and one of the interesting ones. It is not only its power that makes it so, though its power can be awesome to behold.

Westerns

Someone asked me to name the two best Western movies ever made. That's an impossible task. There are so many outstanding Westerns, a list of a hundred would leave out some very worthy nominees. Among the very best ones, it is probably not possible to fairly rank them.

Nevertheless, I complied, naming one Western that is for my money the perfect true Western; and one that is of the revisionist mode that has been more popular since the later 1960s.

1) Hondo.

2) Once Upon a Time in the West.

Here follows a defense of these choices, as well as a laying out of what I take to be several plausible alternatives.

Classic Westerns:

Probably most people, asked to pick a single exemplar of the genre, would have named either Shane or High Noon. Both are excellent films, although if you are going to watch High Noon, you should really also watch Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, which was made as a direct response to it; Hawks thought High Noon was flatly unAmerican. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is another that could be named as a kind of summary of all that has gone before, introducing a criticism but still honoring the past. There are plenty of other plausible entries, such as The Oxbow Incident.

There has also been a small but worthy group of more contemporary Westerns in the classic mode, especially Tombstone and Open Range. They deserve to be mentioned, even though I would tend to select something from the classic era as the pinnacle of the form.

For me, though, Hondo is the perfect Western. It stars John Wayne, as the quintessential American Western ought to do. (So does Rio Bravo, and after a fashion Valance). It was based on a story by Louis L'amour, as the quintessential American Western ought to be. The character is perfect: virtuous and autonomous, he stands on his own two feet and respects the autonomy of others even when he strongly disagrees with them. He is quick to offer a hand, but never does for another to such a degree that they cease to be independent themselves. Though it is a 'cowboy and Indians' movie, Hondo makes enemies among both kinds of folks, and friends among both kinds of folks, and it shows the Apache fairly and indeed positively. Hondo is a perfect statement of what the Western, in its classic era, did best.

You can and should watch more than just one of these movies; watch as many as you can. If I had to name one classic era Western as the pinnacle, though, it would be Hondo.

Revisionist Westerns:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance might actually fit here as much as in the classic genre. It definitely begins the revision and re-examination of the genre that is more completely done elsewhere. Some other great names, which some might think of first, include Peckinpaw's The Wild Bunch, Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Eastwood's Unforgiven. All of these are worthy choices.

I picked Once Upon a Time in the West for two reasons. The first is that Sergio Leone took everything he learned from The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly and applied it more seriously here. The second but more important reason is that Once Upon a Time comes to a deep metaphysical insight into the human condition that plays out over the course of the film. It is made explicit by the dialogue right before the final gunfight. I think the conclusion is true; and if so, the golden age we have been living in was always going to end. Maybe it isn't true; but if it isn't, there won't be room for men in the golden world to follow.

Revisionist pictures are at their best when they learn the lessons of the old form, and draw deep conclusions that advance our understanding. Of the others I named, Eastwood's Unforgiven does this best; but the conclusion is not that different from Leone's. Indeed, if anything, Leone sets it out in starker terms.

SSGT David G. Belavia

A good speech by the Medal of Honor recipient after his induction into the Hall of Heroes.

Appropriate for 9/12, I think.

Enid & Geraint

By custom and tradition, Grim's Hall will have no posts on September 11th except a republication of this poem.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Obstruction of Injustice

If this is true, well, the "Obstruction!" thing was built around Trump's allegedly attempting to protect Michael Flynn on 'the Russia thing.'

A bombshell revelation was barely noticed at National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s hearing Tuesday, when his counsel revealed in court the existence of a Justice Department memo from Jan. 30, 2017 exonerating Flynn of any collusion with Russia.... the existence of such a memo calls into question Comey’s actions both when he met with Trump privately and when he wrote his personal memos recanting the meetings. If the Jan. 30, 2017 DOJ Flynn memo does exonerate Flynn, then it will call into question Comey’s actions when he had the private meetings with Trump. Why didn’t Comey reveal to Trump that DOJ found no evidence that Flynn was an ‘agent of Russia’ when he met Trump at the White House on Feb. 14 meeting? Why were the stories about Flynn, along with classified information regarding his phone conversations with the former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, leaked to the Washington Post in January, with a followup in early February? Remember, the information was leaked by senior government officials, according to the author and columnist David Ignatius. Ignatius said that senior officials accused Flynn of violating the Logan Act, even worse conspiring with Russia.

Further, new information that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe advised that there was no Logan Act violation, along with the DOJ internal memo of Jan. 30 that Flynn ‘was not an agent of Russia,’ was enough information for Comey to advise the President that Flynn had been cleared of any wrongdoing. Instead, Comey claimed obstruction of justice by the President.

Obstruction of injustice is surely not wrong, although I suppose it might be a crime even if it is morally correct. Flynn is looking to be owed a huge apology by this nation, and the FBI and DOJ need to be disbanded if this level of corruption proves true. We might have to replace the DOJ with something, but I think we can just learn to do without a secret police.

Fake News Today

MS: "List: More Honest Latin Mottoes for your Overrated University."

DB: "Islamic State Joins UN Human Rights Council."

BB: "Insane Guy Shouting He'll Buy Back Your Stuff With Your Own Money Becomes Popular Democratic Candidate."

Family History

Robert Mitchum sings a version of "Thunder Road," a movie he starred in as the outlaw driver.



It's a song that always makes me think of home. My family was not tightly involved in the moonshine trade, but my grandfather -- who was a welder -- did make moonshine stills during Prohibition, as it coincided with the Great Depression and still-welding work was the sort of thing people would pay for when there wasn't much other work to be had. He and my father also worked on the Tennessee muscle cars, and all other sorts of automobiles, that might have transported the stuff.

Mostly, though, it's the geography of the song: Asheville, the Cumberland Gap, Knoxville's Kingston Pike, and the mountains in between them. On the other side of the family, my mother is from Bearden. I get over there from time to time to see my favorite cousin. They're definitely not moonshiners, mom's folk: I think they're all teetotaling Baptists. But it's a connection in the song, all the same.

A Campaign Slogan

I'm not endorsing Trump, although the alternatives at this point are pretty ugly (excepting Major Gabbard, who is becoming more appealing by the day, although also not gaining in the polls as much as she deserves to do). If I were to advise him or his campaign, though, this is the slogan I would recommend he adopt:

"Trump 2020: Peace and Prosperity."

Then see if you can live up to it.

"The Capitalists Are Afraid"

Common Dreams is dreaming again. It may be a nightmare, actually.

The capitalists are determined to protect their wealth. They are determined, and probably able, to block left-leaning candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders from obtaining the Democratic nomination for president. But they are also aware that politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden who have spent their careers serving corporate power are harder and harder to sell to the electorate. The mendacity and hypocrisy of the Democratic Party are evident in the presidency of Barack Obama, who ran as an outsider and reformer in the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown. Obama—whom Cornel West called “a black mascot for Wall Street”—callously betrayed the party’s base.

The piece ends with a prediction of 'monstrosities worse than Donald Trump,' which makes me think it must be the author who is afraid.

A Robert A. Heinlein Sort of Day

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly."

I didn't do all those things just today, but it was a day filled with a wide variety of actions. None of them were especially enjoyable, and some were strenuous, but all in all I do feel as if I have expressed a wide range of human action. I did butcher a top sirloin, and made a pretty tasty meal out of one part of it, paid quarterly taxes and dealt with bank accounts, hoisted felled trees, bucked them into logs with a chainsaw, and then split and stacked those logs under shelter against the winter. I finished a professional paper and brokered a deal, one in which I have none but a patriotic interest. I taught a young person a thing or two that will be of use as they move on through life, and comforted a friend whose family is putting itself through unnecessary stress.

I also drove a stick shift, and I made my wife smile, but I do those things most every day.

There's a First Time for Everything

Apparently to include "belonging to a government-designated domestic terrorist organization."

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed a resolution on Tuesday declaring the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorism organization” due to its opposition to more stringent gun-control legislation.... The resolution accuses the NRA of not only resisting legislative reforms that its drafters believe would help curtail the country’s “epidemic of gun violence,” but also of “incit[ing] gun owners to acts of violence.”... The resolution also declares the Board’s intent to “limit those entities who do business with the City and County of San Francisco from doing business with this domestic terrorist organization.”

'Greetings, fellow terrorists!'

It's bad enough that the SPLC has been designating fairly mainstream organizations and individuals as 'extremists' or 'hate groups.' Now it's actual government entities, albeit so far not very powerful ones. The penalty for being a 'domestic terrorist' is so far limited to San Francisco businesses being encouraged not to do business with you -- which I suppose means encouragement not to employ members of the NRA. That's a violation of freedom of association that is probably incapable of surviving a court challenge even in the 9th circuit.

Still: what a day for American political rhetoric!

Bee Stings

Biden Claims He Was There 3,000 Years Ago When Isildur Took The Ring And The Strength Of Men Failed

Catholic School Cures Harry Potter Fans By Forcing Them To Read JK Rowling's Twitter Feed

Antifa Unveils New Pumpkin Spice Molotov Cocktails For Fall Protests

Cthulhu Releases Tell-All Book From Time Within Trump Administration

Common sense gun solutions

Never Go Full "1984"

Drudge is leading with some reports today that suggest the administration is considering some radical moves. One of the links is to Infowars, so this may be over the top reporting; but it's worth underlining just how bad an idea it is.

On American Men

Some ladies on Facebook I know were sharing this, which I appreciate.

“Let this sink in for a minute.....Hundreds and hundreds of small boats pulled by countless pickups and SUVs from across the South are headed for Florida.

Almost all of them driven by men. They're using their own property, sacrificing their own time, spending their own money, and risking their own lives for one reason: to help total strangers in desperate need.

Most of them are by themselves. Most are dressed like the redneck duck hunters and bass fisherman they are. Many are veterans. Most are wearing well-used gimme-hats, t-shirts, and jeans; and there's a preponderance of camo....

...they'll spend the next several days wading in cold, dirty water; dodging gators and water moccasins and fire ants; eating whatever meager rations are available; and sleeping wherever they can in dirty, damp clothes. Their reward is the tears and the hugs and the smiles from the terrified people they help. They'll deliver one boatload, and then go back for more.

When disaster strikes, it's what men do. Real men. Heroic men. American men. And then they'll knock back a few shots, or a few beers with like-minded men they've never met before, and talk about fish or ten-point bucks.

And the next time they hear someone talk about "the patriarchy", or "male privilege", they'll snort, turn off the TV and go to bed.

In the meantime, they'll likely be up again before dawn. To do it again. Until the helpless are rescued. And the work's done.

They're unlikely to be reimbursed. There won't be medals. They won't care. They're heroes. And it's what they do.

Mind Your Business

Yet another thing about which Justice Sotomayor and I disagree.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said that the seed for what has become her latest children’s book was planted the day a woman called her a drug addict.

Sotomayor , who was diagnosed with diabetes at age 7, had gone to the bathroom of an upscale New York restaurant to give herself an insulin shot. She was in her 30s but hiding her diabetes. Another diner came in and saw her and later, as Sotomayor was leaving the restaurant, she heard the woman tell a companion: “She’s a drug addict.”

Outraged, Sotomayor confronted her, explaining that the shot was medicine, not drugs: “If you don’t know something, ask, don’t assume,” Sotomayor said.

I would have thought that the problem wasn't the making of assumptions, but the injecting yourself into someone else's business. Most people would find it intolerably rude for someone to 'just ask' about private issues, which medical ones tend to be; they also object, reasonably, to people gossiping about them. The right thing to do is to be aware that there can be other-than-bad explanations for things you observe, and to let people be. 'Don't ask, don't tell,' to borrow another phrase that the Left generated.

A relevant musical interlude:

Paglia Again

She's always interesting and usually fun as well. The WSJ has an interview.

Stratospheric Warming

Apparently the Antarctic is a whole lot warmer than usual this year -- at least, way, way up.

So does that mean hotter weather lower down? Apparently not.

These events are significant, as the warming and the disruption of the polar vortex eventually makes its way down to the troposphere and can cause a change in weather patterns. It can bring colder weather and snow into lower latitudes, for example, Australia and New Zealand....

These events will also influence the annual growth of the ozone hole over Antarctica. Warming of the stratosphere should limit its growth, and we might see a smaller ozone hole this year. It will depend on the longevity of these events.

So, colder weather and a smaller ozone hole?

Not a fish storm

Dorian turned out to be a real monster, still sitting on top of the Bahamas with inconceivably high winds, barely moving.

The pictures from yesterday evening before it got dark reminded me of the awful vistas here from two years ago, with all the blasted trees.  The trees do come back, though, given time.  Ours are still funny-looking and will be for a few more years, but this is the difference two years can make, September 1, 2017, to September 1, 2019.  The first picture is after the tree-removal crew was here for a day and a half clearing the driveway with chainsaws and tracked vehicles.

Bouncing off highs

With any luck, Dorian could turn out to be a fish storm: those tracks keep drifting east.  Even my neighbors with a nervous eye out on their upcoming trip to D.C. may luck out.  As my husband says, get ready for a lot of frantic TV anchormen urging everyone to watch out for rip currents, the last refuge of a disappointed weather program producer.

There's still that interesting green model that wants the storm to do a loop-de-loop over Okeefenokee, and the standard "what if it just never turns again" reality-check model, with Biloxi in its sights.

This time of year the relentless bright sunny hot days get a little old, but I'll say one thing for them:  if you have a high-pressure area parked over you, you're not getting a hurricane.

Wretchard: China's Communists vs. Western Elites

It's closer than it ought to be.

As Gilder notes "In a just system of growth, business must be open to bankruptcy as well as to profit. When government puts its thumb on the scales of justice, manipulating money through guarantees and other exercises of power designed to stimulate economic growth or protect assets, it stultifies this learning process." He says that like it's a bad thing -- which it is -- but politicians are falling all over themselves to do it.

Such a system can determine who gets a bailout from the Fed and who gets a diploma from de Blasio's diversity schools but generates little information about who can turn a profit and which students will be the next Einstein. By destroying the measuring stick, defining money as a function of government decisions and competence as a consequence of political correctness, the Western elites have created an artificial, gradually shrinking world.

Wretchard is always worth reading.

Ranger School

It was all true, and then some.

...she lost a member of the platoon. In fact, the missing soldier was so thoroughly separated from the rest of his platoon that the RIs had to shut down the entire mission, telling the platoon to go to sleep where they were while the RIs searched for the missing candidate. The platoon never had the chance even to attempt its assigned mission. But the candidate who had served as platoon sergeant, despite a failure in her performance that ended the mission, received a passing grade.

...

Ranger Instructor 1: Female got a “go” last night. I was out there. She shouldn’t have. But it happened and [redacted]

Ranger Instructor 2: Why did she get a go then?

Ranger Instructor 1: I was out there until actions on [that is, the raid or ambush the platoon was supposed to conduct]. Never happened because they missed their hit time. 1SG recocked them [that is, reset the mission conditions and gave them the chance to start over]. That never happened because she gave abad head count three times. We finally realized their [sic] was a missing student.

Ranger Instructor 1: Had to lock the [platoon] down and find this kid.

Ranger Instructor 3: That’s a definite go haha

...

Ranger Instructor B: It’s all [b*******]. On 8-35 [the mission they were on], they walk [sic] the road back into camp under RI control [that is, RIs took over from the candidate leadership and led the platoon to its destination on an open road rather than through the woods]

Ranger Instructor B: And lost a Ranger

...

An RI with firsthand knowledge of the candidate’s evaluation explains, “During clearance of the [objective], she lost control of her squad, leading to fratricide” (i.e. leading to what would have been a friendly-fire incident if live rounds were being used in a non-training environment.) Understandably, this normally earns a failing grade (an “immediate no-go”). But it didn’t here.

This was, remember, the third attempt for these three would-be Rangers; they'd already failed out twice before. On the third go-round, word came down that they were to be passed even in spite of massive and potentially fatal errors.

The author adds, "It is important to emphasize that those whom I interviewed expressed admiration for the graduating females’ grit and perseverance and were not critical of the female candidates’ character or commitment. The officers and enlisted soldiers I spoke to uniformly respected the female candidates’ efforts and willingness to put themselves through the rigors of Ranger training."

That said, standards were suppressed -- and critics were silenced -- in order to obtain politically correct results. This will have deadly results eventually, which is why the training is so severe. As you will recall, the Marine Corps' study was similarly ignroed, and they were forced to proceed in spite of the clear findings.