Jimbo: The Deep State Exists

Uncle Jimbo of BLACKFIVE fame wrote a piece for the Federalist under his real (and more professional) name, Jim Hanson.

Vindman gave the game away with his prepared testimony. He believes the permanent bureaucracy should reign supreme, and if some elected politician gets crosswise with the solons of the state, then they must act. So he did, as he detailed in his prepared statement and testimony to Congress. From the statement: “In the Spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency. This narrative was harmful to U.S. government policy.”

There is a lot of wrong in those two sentences, which profoundly illustrate the fundamental flaw Vindman and his fellow Deep Staters operate under. The interagency he mentions is a collection of staff from the major agencies like the State Department, Department of Defense, and intelligence agencies, who meet to coordinate and plan implementation of policy. They most certainly are not supposed to decide what policy the United States will follow.... [despite] his belief that they are the ones whose opinions matter and anyone acting outside of that is acting against U.S. interests. Even if that conflicted with the policy of his superiors all the way up to the president, Vindman and the Deep State would decide what “advanced U.S. policy interests.”

Vindman also took action warning Ukrainian officials he spoke to: “I would tell them to not interfere — not get involved in U.S. domestic politics.”

This was after Vindman says he had determined the calls for an investigation into election interference and anything related to Burisma corruption and the Bidens equaled President Trump trying to get Ukraine to interfere in U.S. politics. He was actively undermining what he believes is the president’s chosen policy—not because it is illegal, but because he disagrees with it and doesn’t think it is important.

That is far beyond Vindman’s duties or authority, and in applying his opinion and actions to counter the president’s goals, Vindman may be violating Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers insubordination to the president and other named officials.

This is insubordination and malfeasance, and likely punishable under several sections of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

How they'll howl if he gets prosecuted by a court martial.

How America Ends

An interesting essay, in that it is from the left-leaning perspective, but is trying to grapple with the anger being provoked by intentional changes in American demographics.

"The stakes in this battle on the right are much higher than the next election. If Republican voters can’t be convinced that democratic elections will continue to offer them a viable path to victory, that they can thrive within a diversifying nation, and that even in defeat their basic rights will be protected, then Trumpism will extend long after Trump leaves office—and our democracy will suffer for it."

It would be easier for people on the right to believe that their basic rights will be protected in defeat if the folks on the left would quit running on, inter alia, the following things:

* First Amendment-violating bans on 'hate speech';

* First Amendment-violating use of the courts to sue religious organizations like Little Sisters of the Poor to compel violation of their religion;

* Similar suits and laws aimed to destroy people for living by religious principles that defy sexual liberality;

* The complete elimination of the Second Amendment as a governing principle, without the bother of repealing it;

* Allowing sanctuary cities and states to violate Federal law at will, and dissolving agencies meant to enforce those laws, while at the same time constructing all new laws to bind actual American citizens.

In fairness the author does mention 'the excesses of the left,' but mostly seems to mean Antifa. It's the ordinary establishment left, and for that matter their allies among ordinary establishment Republicans, that are driving the bus.

Impeachment: Over/Under on a Senate Trial?

On the one hand, the movement to impeach the President began the moment he was elected; it is clear that the prior administration put steps into place, and left some stay-behind loyalists, precisely to figure out how to take down the incoming administration. Examples include Sally Yates, the so-called 'whistleblower' whom I won't name mostly because his name is too long to type, the FBI/DOJ lovers, and so forth and so on; the executive order allowing the alleged evidence on Russia to be promulgated much more widely than usual; the ongoing FISA applications to continue to allow spying on the incoming administration. Given the level of commitment, it's hard to imagine they will wave off now.

On the other hand, if this goes to the Senate, they lose control of it. Republicans get to subpoena witnesses and ask whatever they want of them. Ukraine seems to be where many of the bodies are buried: not just Hunter Biden but Nancy Pelosi's son, Mitt Romney's son, John Kerry's son all have similar jobs, and Biden's success at using aid-money as a lever to force them to fire that prosecutor netted the replacement who torpedoed Paul Manafort during the height of the 2016 election, while Manafort was the Republican campaign manager. I wouldn't want to draw attention to Ukraine with the 2020 election just around the corner, not if I was an establishment politician.

So will they pull the trigger? At The Hill, Jonathan Turley wonders.

Slipping new ideas into unwilling minds

This interview with the host of the Legal Insurrection blog starts with a good summary of the Oberlin collage defamation case, but perhaps even more interesting--and heartening--is the blogger's account of how he got some students at Vassar to hear his views on the First Amendment.  He appealed to their natural desire to be free from all kinds of intrusion, as protected by other parts of the Bill of Rights, then drew their attention to the importance of freedom of speech.

"That's Weird"

The most exciting words in science are occurring on Mars.

Feminist Pragmatists

A friend of mine self-describes this way, and is excited about this philosophical conference. I certainly think that pragmatism is the viable way to approach feminism if anything is; a focus on whether or not the theories lead to better practical results makes sense to me. Pragmatism is an essentially American philosophical school, oddly enough (from my perspective) associated with late-19th century progressivism. I'm not sure how well progressivisim has ever worked out, although in fairness in the 19th century it hadn't yet been tried to any degree. The inability to re-evaluate assumptions in the light of subsequent experience suggests to me a basic failure in the ability of people to apply "pragmatism" to ideological preferences.

Still, just because execution is bad doesn't mean the theory is wrong. I'm all for pragmatism for those who can be pragmatic. Or as a different friend of mine used to say, "I believe you should try pragmatism, but if it doesn't work out try something else."

Bee Stings

After the Bee perfectly parodied my internal dialog about Ben Shapiro steamrolling snowflakes, I was hesitant to return to America's paper of record.

But I'm not as bad as this guy ... Man In Critical Condition After Hearing Slightly Differing Viewpoint

There is also the obligatory article, Spare Empty Podium Expected To Win Democratic Debates By Wide Margin. Truth? Satire? Who can tell?

And finally a straight news story: Nation's Gen Xers Announce Plan To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Watching Boomers, Millennials Tear Each Other To Shreds.

Although I should keep my mouth shut, I do have a suggestion about that. I think we've all become familiar with the millenials' retort, "OK, Boomer." The Blogfather has started using "OK, Millenial" in reply. But, really, that just doesn't roll off the tongue very well. Can we call them Millys?

What!? I think that's very helpful!

For Grim

This might be outside your normal wheelhouse, but I can think of at least three things in this video that would appeal to you:

Happy Veterans' Day

All the best to all of you Veterans who keep making America a better place even after honorable service.

Oaths of office

If you want to be a socialist dictator for life, aren't you supposed to have the military in your pocket?  Bolivian president Evo Morales has stepped down after a friendly chat with the nation's "army chief," in which it was suggested that some aspects of the recent election tally didn't look entirely kosher.  And also that Mr. Morales's allies' homes were being burnt down, but mostly that the homes were being burnt down.  Morales took the well-meant advice and resigned.

I admit that this part gave me pause:

However, the Cuban and Venezuelan leaders - who had previously voiced their support for Mr Morales - condemned the events as a "coup".

I guess they'd know one when they see it.  It wasn't a coup earlier, though, when Morales got a friendly court to throw out term limits.

I'd sure rather see political change happen without the intervention of the military.  I'll be watching nervously to see whether Bolivia can get its civil act together.  It will be good to see the military refuse to support a sham election, but this is playing with fire:  undermining faith in elections to the point where violent uprisings seem like the only answer.  Note to future tyrants:  if you can't get the real consent of the people, at least remember to corrupt the military.

Blessings of the day to our own uncorrupted military.  Too often we take their honor for granted.

In other news, progressives cheer as more Americans are taught to cower at the sound of gunfire.  Way to keep those tyrants in check, unarmed protesters!

Happy Birthday, Marines

I was just last night at a charity ball for a MARSOC-focused charity. It was part of what took me to the DC Metroplex. Thankfully it is now over; it was a black-tie event that went from 1700 until nearly midnight. Indeed, Marines present were openly plotting to transition right into Birthday celebrations at the stroke of midnight. The Birthday, though technically almost over, will likely be a going concern well into the AM for many Marines.

Have a happy one.

One of the best mistakes ever

Did Gorbachev really believe people would stay in East Germany after the wall came down, and he told the soldiers not to shoot?

Shouldn’t we have understood the hollowness of the Soviet system from the moment the wall went up in 1961? If the Soviet Empire had been founded on an ideology, a belief, a hope for a better society, it would not have been necessary to build a wall, surrounded by barbed wire and explosive mines, to prevent East Germans from leaving. The wall had no other significance than to evoke and reinforce fear in the subjects of the empire and among Communist leaders themselves; if they had once believed their Marxist vulgate, the wall proved, starting in 1961, that they no longer believed it. Neither did Stalin in the 1930s, since his essential contribution to the Soviet system (and later, by contagion, the Chinese and the Cuban experiments in inhumanity) was to institutionalize fear, with prison camps, phony trials, arbitrary arrests, and the denunciation of everyone by everyone.

* * *

Communism has been an actual belief primarily in free countries.... Communism only works, it seems, where it is not applied.

Thirty years after the wall came down, some believe that the event has not lived up to its promise. Well—explain that to the Poles, the Baltic peoples, and the Ukrainians! Another quarrel also divides historians: did the wall fall, or was it destroyed—and if destroyed, by whom? By heroes seeking freedom, by brave people seeking bananas, by the preaching of Pope John Paul II, by the prescient 1987 speech of Ronald Reagan in Berlin—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”? As often happens in history, major events grow out of multiple influences. But of all these factors, the most improbable was Gorbachev’s instructing his troops, “Don’t shoot.” He thought that he was reinventing socialism with a human face. The Soviet Empire was destroyed by the only one of its leaders who believed that real socialism could exist without fear—a fatal, fortunate error.

Stay Alert, Trust No One, Keep Your Weapon Handy

H/t Raven, we are reminded that this can be an axe.

Cold Mountain

Since Tex posted that trailer, with its atrocious Hollywood attempts at Southern accents, I thought I should point out that I was at Cold Mountain just the other day. Here it is:

North Carolina sent more people to the war than any other state, and on both sides. Important raids and battles happened there, but not near Cold Mountain. It was too remote to fight over.

I don't even know where to start

If your community can't rise to the challenge of some turkeys, maybe it's time to turn the town over to them.

Review: “One Child Nation”

A truly horrifying film, it seems.

The Crazy Years

On outsourcing our brain functions a little more than is strictly necessary:

Independent and dependent variables are not tools for a cloistered elite. The scientific method is not secret knowledge for the clergy. Measurements of temperatures and trace gases, of sunspots and glacial accretion are not mysteries understood only by the privileged. We used to know that education and knowledge were more valuable than gold because any person with either could exploit those who lacked them both. It has never been easier to use an elementary education to understand the world around us, yet never have more people clamored for an intellectual aristocracy to do our thinking for us.

Learning from failure

I'm looking forward to reading a new Powerline-recommended book by John Tamny, "They're Both Wrong," which promises to poke holes in conventional wisdom on both sides of the political aisle.  I had to stop while still in the Foreword to quote from John Tierney, who argues that what distinguishes capitalists from bureaucrats is that they're punished for failure and therefore learn from it:

As Tamny explains, the populist revolts in the United States and other countries are not driven by a disdain for science or learning. The populists don't object to expertise in itself, but rather to the mistakes that conceited experts keep foisting on the public.... Tamny keenly appreciates the original definition of "conventional wisdom," John Kenneth Galbraith's term for beliefs that are popular not because they're correct, but because they're comfortable--and comfortable for the right people in power.

"Cuba without the sun"

Conrad Black is confident that British voters don't really want to make their political and economic life even drearier.

Unless the British voters plumb a new depth in perversity, Mr. Johnson should win a sizable majority, little of the London financial industry will depart, and there will be a thunderous in-rush of capital investment to celebrate Britain’s increasing proximity to the United States and reconfirmation as a low-tax country, especially the rejection of the Labor Party’s outright advocacy of widespread nationalization of industry, sharply higher taxes in upper personal income brackets, increased powers to organized labour, and wild fiscal incontinence.

Welcome Back, Cassandra

I was amused to see her getting away with just slipping back into the comments here, but it's a sufficiently momentous event that it deserves recognition. Our old friend has decided to spend some time with us, much to my great happiness. Give her an appropriate welcome.

The hits keep on coming

Ace of Spades HQ notes that Christopher Steele has a new hoax out.

Pssh... Okay, Boomer.

Just read what this hateful, racist, transphobic jerk dared to say about woke culture!

Honoring Rick Rescorla

I was pleased to see this.

If only

You Owe Us Eight Bucks. We'll Take Your Home Instead.

The state government of Michigan commits a tremendous moral wrong, but not a crime.

The Worst Mistake

If the American Revolution devastated the globe, as per the book reviewed a few days ago, it wasn't the first time: civilization itself was the first, and worst, mistake.

All this cave painting, migrating, and repainting of newly found caves came to an end roughly twelve thousand years ago, with what has been applauded as the “Neolithic Revolution.” Lacking pack animals and perhaps tired of walking, humans began to settle down in villages and eventually walled cities; they invented agriculture and domesticated many of the wild animals whose ancestors had figured so prominently in cave art. They learned to weave, brew beer, smelt ore, and craft ever-sharper blades.

But whatever comforts sedentism brought came at a terrible price: property, in the form of stored grain and edible herds, segmented societies into classes—a process anthropologists prudently term “social stratification”—and seduced humans into warfare. War led to the institution of slavery, especially for the women of the defeated side (defeated males were usually slaughtered) and stamped the entire female gender with the stigma attached to concubines and domestic servants. Men did better, at least a few of them, with the most outstanding commanders rising to the status of kings and eventually emperors. Wherever sedentism and agriculture took hold, from China to South and Central America, coercion by the powerful replaced cooperation among equals. In Jared Diamond’s blunt assessment, the Neolithic Revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

Her thesis about the cave paintings, by the way, is that they were admirations of beings much more powerful than humans were at that time. Humans posed no threats to bison and lions, so they adored them from afar, effacing themselves but drawing the megafauna with loving attention. It was the attitude of 'meat that knows it is meat,' a kind of humility to which she would like humanity to return.

Ranger Up: "If Not Us, Who?"

Good boy

The Sonoran murders were unspeakable, but this story deserves our attention.

The Life Of An Agent (Az ügynök élete)

Grim's post with a link to a piece about a KGB training manual reminded me to share with you all something I came across in Budapest this past Summer at Memento Park, where many of the Soviet era statues and monuments were moved for display.  They also have a recreated barrack from an internment camp (which was in August, appropriately unbearably hot), within which they have exhibited a brief history of the Communist era in Hungary, along with the history of the park itself, and a small theater room running the movie "The Life of an Agent" on a loop.  It's an interesting film.  It seems to be a compilation of training film clips from various periods in the communist era, for the AVH (Pre 1956) and the Interior Ministry (After the '56 revolution).  It's kind of a fun, yet sobering reminder of how a totalitarian society operates.  Of course, today there's no need for such an apparatus. We have social media and digital traces for governments to surveil us, if they like.  Enjoy.

Feasting Abroad

Our friend and Chicago Boyz blogger David Foster joined me today at Hill Country Barbecue, D.C. This is my favorite restaurant in the city. Bands traveling from the Austin area up to New York City to perform often stop in and play on the way up or the way back, so there are great live music performances in the evenings on a regular basis. The meat is fantastic, and when there isn't live music there's still pretty good music on the sound system.

Plus, it's one of the few places in D.C. that has made a point of refusing to unseat people for their political views, so it's an authentically American joint.

We had a good meal and conversation. I don't think he'll contradict me in recommending the place to any of you who pass through town.

Bee Stung ...

I think I've heard it said in a movie that every con has a mark, and if you don't know who the mark is, it's you. Or maybe it was the sucker in a poker game. Either way.

I read the article "Libs Triggered After Ben Shapiro LITERALLY STEAMROLLS A Bunch Of SNOWFLAKE College Students" at the nation's paper of record and, though I laughed, couldn't figure out who the target of their parody was. Remembering those sage words of advice from a movie I think I saw once, I've decided it has to be me.

Graphs like this:

"Often, [Shapiro] philosophically steamrolls them, crushing them with facts and logic. But this time, he literally steamrolled them with a 15,000-pound road roller. That's right: Shapiro rented a giant steamroller and went to town!

"Go Shappy! Go Shappy!"

could have been stolen right from my mind! I would absolutely cheer like that if Shapiro went after a triggered snowflake with a steamroller. There are more examples, but it would be too creepy to quote them all.

The only question now is -- Is the Babylon Bee reading my mind or planting the thoughts there?

The USSR Leads the World in Steel Production

... and other ways Lies Don't Work, otherwise known as "it's really not a good idea to silence the feedback signal," from Sarah Hoyt:

Well, now I think about it, most feedback is annoying.

Economics is full of it — as are other economic systems — and humans find it so annoying they have devised various means of shutting it down, and then become puzzled and do crazy stuff when the system goes out of control.

People Learned About Her Record as a Prosecutor?

Politico ponders a question: How did Kamala Harris go from 'the female Obama' to fifth place?

I mean, for me it was her record as a prosecutor. You want to take a former prosecutor who held back exculpatory information even in death row cases, and put her in charge of the secret police? Thanks but no thanks.

Harris undermined her national introduction with costly flubs on health care, feeding a critique that she lacks a strong ideological core and plays to opinion polls and the desires of rich donors. She was vague or noncommittal on question after question from voters at campaign stops. She leaned on verbal crutches instead of hammering her main points in high-profile TV moments. The deliberate, evidence-intensive way she arrives at decisions—one of her potential strengths in a matchup with Trump—often made her look wobbly and unprepared.

Harris today has another explanation for her inability to get voters to see her as the next president: what she’s calling the “donkey in the room.” Before a few hundred people on a chilly October night in the Des Moines suburb of Ankeny, surrounded by hay bales and framed by the Iowa flag, she wondered aloud: “Is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be president?

So nothing about "she proved to be a tyrant who couldn't be trusted with power"? I'm pretty sure she got explicitly dinged for that in the debates by Tulsi Gabbard. Not even a mention? (When the piece gets to her prosecutorial record, it describes her as "cautious," and accuses Tulsi of 'lacking context' or being 'misleading.')

"Go East! Go East!"

I'm still ruminating about the level of panic I detected in an old friend when we caught up with each other at a reunion of four former colleagues a couple of weeks ago.  She was genuinely distressed to hear I could possibly be a Trump supporter, and obviously also quite seriously alarmed by talk of the end of the world from climate change.  This is an intelligent, well-educated, strong-minded woman.  My own distress stems from how easy it seems to be for our own friends, neighbors, and relatives to go so far off the deep end.

For a tale of irrational panic, it's hard to beat James Thurber's account in "My Life and Hard Times" of the Great Easter Flood of 1913, in which the residents of Columbus, Ohio, somehow got the idea an upstream dam had failed, releasing floodwaters that were about to engulf them.  Thousands of people hit the streets and stampeded.  We're only superficially rational in a pinch.

I ran across this reference in the comments section to an Althouse piece about anti-Trumpers who find the prospect of his second term "literally unthinkable."  "Who are these people," some of them wondered, "who support Trump?"  One commenter mused, "Oh, I don't know, a bunch of deplorables, about 60M, give or take."  He thought it was odd so many anti-Trumpers never seemed to have met one, there being, you know, quite a few around.  Another commenter suggested that the right response on the morning after Election Day 2020 would be to run outside shouting "Go East! Go East!" in the manner of the terrified residents of 1913 Columbus.

While we're waiting for the collapse of civilization, here are two enchanting images.  First, Kurt Suzuki in a MAGA hat at the prow of the Titanic shouting "I'm King of the World!" with the Racist-Homophobe-in-Chief embracing him fondly.

I assume Mr. Suzuki is looking to be traded to a team in flyover country.  Speaking of which, here is a gem from Twitter:  a small storm of derision triggered by some poor schmuck who posted a snapshot aerial view of farmland, with the puzzled comment that it was pretty, but he had no idea why it looked all patchworky and rectangular like that--thus demonstrating once and for all why we have the Electoral College.  One commenter suggested the strange look was because flyover country doesn't get broadband reception and is permanently pixilated.  Another mourned the necessity to chop up the ground like that just to grow food, instead of producing it in grocery stores the way they did in her blue-model city.

A Field Guide to Prospective Traitors

Via Wretchard, a KGB manual for identifying those likely to turn. Disaffected officials are the big target: "losers who think they are winners because they hang on to important positions."

"The Evil Repercussions of the American Revolution"

The NYT reviews a book subtitled How the American Revolution Devastated the Globe. Although the reviewer calls the piece "enthralling," he does admit that there is a reliance on a kind of 'butterfly effect' that readers might find unconvincing. By the conclusion there is simply not a conviction in the case. The reviewer writes:

This is a pity. Having proposed such an audacious thesis, and collected a lot of interesting but not self-evidently cohesive or decisive information, the book needs to draw its ideas together and make its case that the American Revolution devastated the globe. As it is, though much of the material here is lively, enjoyable and compelling, the thesis is not persuasive.

Well, maybe the next time. We'll keep trying the case until we get the right result. That's how things are done, right?

If property is theft, theft is woke

The Atlantic takes a story about neighbors collaborating with surveillance devices, a "Nextdoor" neighborhood website, and cooperation with the police to stop a string of petty doorstep thefts, and turns it into an exposé of plutocratic racism in San Franscisco.  The "porch pirate" is amazed that society got it together to stop her, as frankly am I.  The writer clearly thinks we should concentrate on large financial frauds and let the minor stuff go, because the offender doesn't have a nice life, what with the drug addiction and all, so what's she supposed to do but steal?  Society has left her few options.  "Who is she supposed to steal from, if not from us?"

We used to own the Mammoth Megaphone!

Robert Reich is in anguish over how somebody ejected his beloved media from its gatekeeper seat.  While you weren't paying attention, Facebook and Twitter became uncontested conduits for Trump's lies to 65 million people.  Stop laughing.  It's serious business!  Even the evil Fox News reaches only a few million daily.  I blame myself.  I had no idea Facebook and Twitter were in the bag for conservatives.

Antitrust should be used against Facebook and Twitter. They should be broken up.

So instead of two mammoth megaphones trumpeting Trump’s lies, or those of any similarly truth-challenged successor, the public will have more diverse sources of information, some of which will expose the lies.

Now, this isn't a bad idea in itself. It's just a couple of decades late, and backwards. No doubt some self-knowledge will creep into Reich's psyche soon.  Any day now he could remember both the text and the rationale of the First Amendment.

Who does he think he is?

Vindman is a little concerned. WaPo reports somberly that

he was deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy....

What's next? An attempt by the guy in the Oval Office to exercise the veto power? When will the Resistance wake up to this cancer on the Republic?

Nacho candidate

From the Bee:

U.S.—Presidential candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke has announced he is dropping out of the presidential race so that he can spend more time taking guns away from his family. “I’ve been so focused on grabbing the guns of strangers,” O’Rourke told the press, “that I’ve neglected taking away the guns of those closest to me.”

New scandal

I have irrefutable proof that the White House photoshopped this publicity shot.

Never mind

HotAir reports that the "anonymous" whistleblower no longer wants to testify in the House's secret Star Chamber proceedings. It also points out, however, that the Schiff Show won't always be in charge of all the decisions about who gets to testify:

If Democrats vote to impeach Trump, a trial must begin in the Senate, where Republicans will control all of the processes that Schiff currently controls. It’s all but certain that Senate Republicans will take a very keen interest in just how this all started, and might start issuing subpoenas to House attorneys to testify as to their contacts with this whistleblower. They could also subpoena the whistleblower himself, although certain safeguards would still apply, but it might be sufficient to force transparency on House committee staffers in establishing who participated in this whistleblowing, at what time, and for what purpose.

At any rate, the fact that Democrats no longer want the whistleblower to participate in this process is not going to deter Republicans from pursuing this issue. In fact, it might just raise a big red flag for Lindsey Graham when — or if — he gets the case.

Maybe the plan is never actually to vote to impeach, but only to spend the entire time between now and November 2020 calling witnesses in secret and selectively releasing portions of their testimony. That's going to form an interesting counterpoint to the long-awaited Horowitz IG report and whatever indictments John Durham plans to hand down.

Can this marriage be saved?

From Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media:

Face it, we don't like each other much anymore, the Right and Left in America. We've been heading toward this for a while. I blame Hillary Clinton, partially because she's so adept at being unlikeable, but mostly because I believe she is more than likely Satan's latest incarnation on Earth.

Never never never never

On a recommendation from Maggie's Farm, I've been reading the recently deceased Vladimir Bukosvky's "To Build a Castle," about the astonishing success of resistance against Soviet totalitarianism even in the grimmest of prisons and work camps.

“The implacable force of one man’s refusal to submit” could, Bukovsky wrote, weaken the force of the leviathan, which rested “not [on] rifles … tanks, [nor] atom bombs [but] on public obedience.”

With such a thought, maybe he was crazy, you might say. But, having won his freedom, he outlived the Soviet Union by 30 years — not nearly enough for those of us privileged to know him or the millions of others forever in his debt.

Bukovsky and his fellow political prisoners resisted all day, every day, in the tiny ways they had available. They never rested.

The old jailers used to sigh, "You're hopelessly spoiled. Now, twenty years ago...." But we too were nothing like the rabbits who died without a murmur. We had grasped the great truth that it was not rifles, not tanks and not atom bombs that created power, nor upon them that power rested. Power depended upon public obedience, upon a willingness to submit. Therefore each individual who refused to submit to force reduced that force by one 250-millionth of its sum. We had been schooled by our participation in the civil rights movement, we had received an excellent education in the camps, and we knew of the implacable force of one man's refusal to submit. The authorities knew it too. They had long since abandoned any idea of basing their calculations on Communist dogma. They no longer demanded of people a belief in the radian future--all they needed was submission.

As Churchill said,

[S]urely from this period of ten months this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never-in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished.... But instead our country stood in the gap.

Another interesting read this week:  James E. Mitchell's "Enhanced Interrogation."  Diane Feinstein doesn't come off well, but the author has good things to say about John Durham.  Mitchell is the man you've probably seen quoted as reporting KSM's astonishment that the "cowboy" George Bush didn't treat 9/11 as a law-enforcement matter, but instead took decisive action to disrupt al Qaeda's follow-up plans.

"The signal is coming from inside the house"

... As Glen Reynolds like to say. Californians naturally blame Republican policies for the collapse of their public systems, and even gloat that the Reagan Library, threatened by wildfire, is about to get its comeuppance. In case you're wondering, though, that's totally not hate speech. Everything is either woke or hate, and this obviously is woke.

DC Metropolitan Axis

Here I am once again. I’ll be in town until 10 November, if any of you are looking to meet up.

Katie, We Hardly Knew Ya

I actually only first heard of her when the story broke about her having multiple affairs with both sexes, while naked bong-smoking and nude hair brushing.  And now she’s already gone, just as she promised to be the most entertaining Congressperson since I can’t say when.

Nice of her to blame misogyny for her downfall, though. It was the affair with the female staffer by a female Congressperson that got noted female Nancy Pelosi to demand her resignation. I didn’t ask her to leave. I’d have rather she stayed. You can’t pay for entertainment like that, and it’s not like her district is apt to send anyone better.

Oh well.

ISIS to Review Institutional Culture Following Baghdadi Suicide

Via Tex, a post from the DB.

Also on topic, the BB offers an updated style guide for news organizations.

The Roots of California's Energy Problems Go Back Decades

Tex presented a couple of theories she'd come across about California's utility problems that have led to blackouts in much of Northern California.  One not so good, and the other started to get at the real issues- but it goes back much further than that.  I came across this thread of tweets by Mike Shellenberger, who is an interesting fellow- He's a lauded environmentalist (Time Magazine Hero of the Environment 2008), and now runs "Environmental Progress", an organization that promotes Nuclear power as a major force in clean energy.

"And so @JerryBrownGov @GavinNewsom et al used renewables as public relations cover in order to kill the only technology, nuclear, that can replace fossil fuels, in large measure to protect their own family's oil monopoly, in addition to fear-mongering about nuclear for 40+ years."

There's too much in the thread for me to put it here, but it gets into Jerry Brown's first term, and the relationship of personal and oil interests in killing nuclear power, and promoting unreliable and impotent renewables instead.

He's coming out with a book next year that will go in depth, but the thread should give you a sense of what it's about.

The Great Cattle Raid of Eastern Lakes

Apparently a common and ongoing practice in South Sudan.

In South Sudan, brideprices may be anything from 30 to 300 cows. “For young men, the acquisition of so many cattle through legitimate means is nearly impossible,” write Ms Hudson and Ms Matfess. The alternative is to steal a herd from the tribe next door. In a country awash with arms, such cattle raids are as bloody as they are frequent. “7 killed, 10 others wounded in cattle raid in Eastern Lakes,” reads a typical headline in This Day, a South Sudanese paper. The article describes how “armed youths from neighbouring communities” stole 58 cows, leaving seven people—and 38 cows—shot dead “in tragic crossfire”.

Thousands of South Sudanese are killed in cattle raids every year. “When you have cows, the first thing you must do is get a gun. If you don’t have a gun, people will take your cows,” says Jok, a 30-year-old cattle herder in Wau, a South Sudanese city. He is only carrying a machete, but he says his brothers have guns.

Jok loves cows. “They give you milk, and you can marry with them,” he smiles.

It sounded cooler when Cúchulainn was doing it.

Is It Behind the Guillotine?

Marxist financial advice.

Operation Kayla Mueller

According to the New York Post:

The military operation targeting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named for Kayla Mueller, the humanitarian aid worker the terrorist leader captured and tortured until her death in 2015.

...
Mueller, of Prescott, Ariz., was 25 when she was taken captive by ISIS in August 2013 after crossing the Turkish border into Syria to visit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo. She was held for 18 months before her death was announced in 2015.

An appropriate name for such an operation.

Ranger Up marks the occasion as well.

Update: USA Today has an interview with Mueller's parents, a sad but satisfying exchange.

Disturbing news regarding the "hero dog" of the al-Baghdadi raid.

Courtesy of the Babylon Bee

Riding Report

Saw another bear today, smaller than the last one. Classic shape and colors, black with a tan muzzle. I'd estimate 225-250 pounds, whereas I think the fellow from the Mexican restaurant was north of 350.

The light and the color of the leaves today was as fine as I've ever seen it. You get a real sense of verticality riding up and down these mountain roads, as you see ridges that you then descend in amongst, or rise back out of again. The weather was warm enough to ride without gloves, though as the afternoon lengthened I added a long-sleeved shirt.

Good day.

Wolf Lake.

Two great theories

We're all wondering how California could have painted itself into such a lurid corner on a lot of subjects, the most recently obvious one being a dramatic failure of the power grid.  USA Today helpfully quotes two citizens--one famous and one not--who are floating explanations that surely will catch on.  First,

For San Francisco resident and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, the blame lies at the doorstep of the White House. He says, "We can't solve this within the Golden State. We are in a fight for our lives, and the president isn't doing anything to help us. In fact, he's making things worse."

Mr. Steyer offers no explanation for his theory, which perhaps needs none. Second,

Susan Smith, [a] resident of Shasta County, where 40,000 PG+E customers had their power turned off, has lived through tornadoes and hurricanes but has never dealt with as many outages as she has since moving from Texas [clue alert].... "If PG+E doesn't have faith in themselves that they can't withstand a wind storm, then they need to go out of business," Smith says Sunday while charging her phone at a community resource center set up in her hometown of Anderson.

Well, PG+E is in its second bankruptcy of the last two decades, so we'll see, but the special thing about state-regulated monopolies is that they generally don't go out of business no matter how fantastically they fail. It's kind of why people go for the monopoly gig in the first place.  In any case, while PG+E can expect limited sympathy considering whom it's in bed with, it is now and ever has been the truth that when a heavily state-regulated monopoly does a bad job, it might be a good idea to consider the barking-mad regulatory system it lives under. It's freaking California, after all, and when you untether a company from market forces by granting it monopoly status, all you have left for protection is the gummint.  That's the state gummint, by the way, the one answerable to California voters, not the Bad Orange Man in Washington.

Major Gabbard Worries the Democratic Establishment

She's only polling around three percent for now, but her attacks on Hillary Clinton -- and her heresy on abortion as well as foreign wars -- seem to have scared the party into backing her primary opponent.

She responded by declaring she wouldn't seek re-election to her House seat at all, but would focus on becoming President. That's shaken them up a bit.

So she's now a right-winger! A Russian Spy!

They're sounding a little bit crazy these days. I wonder if they're aware of the tinge of hysteria that is creeping into their collective voice.

Double-plus un-education

I know this has been going on for a while, but don't we detect a kind of end-stage frantic spiraling climax? If I understand correctly--however unlikely that be in light of my pathetic loyalty to stale intellectual customs that are destroying the world and literally (srsly you guyz) killing otherkin students of all otherilks--this seems to be the plan:

(1) “redesigning assessment ecologies,” and quite a few “dimension-based rubrics."

(2) ???

(3) righteous emancipation and “inclusive excellence.”

So allrighty then.

The Flynn case keeps making me angrier

Flynn's new counsel is tearing the prosecutors up with demands for copies of exculpatory documents.  They should be terrified of this woman.

They live for this

Give a dog something to do that he's all in for.  You can get amazing photos.

Nakba!

The Durham inquiry into the Russiagate conspiracy turns into a formal criminal investigation -- of the investigators of the Russiagate conspiracy.

My faith in the Department of Justice is not so very great that I have high hopes here, but I certainly long to see justice done in this matter. Good hunting, but be transparent and open with the people, and let the chips fall where they may.

Toto Reference from the DB

Headline: "U.S. General blessed the rains down in AFRICOM."

Ironically, the actual AFRICOM headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany. They probably have rain there too.

Betting against mistakes

I'm liking this guy Matt Levine, who writes for Bloomberg:

Neumann, the founder of WeWork, will walk away from this corporate bonfire with a billion dollars and a bunch of fancy houses. His great-grandchildren will be prominent philanthropists with their names on museums and universities, the strange origin of their fortunes long forgotten. Neumann did a certain sort of capitalism—one with some cachet at HBS!—as well as anyone has ever done it. It is one thing to build a successful company that creates a lot of value and take some of that value for yourself; Neumann created a company that destroyed value at a blistering pace and nonetheless extracted a billion dollars for himself. He lit $10 billion of SoftBank’s money on fire and then went back to them and demanded a 10% commission. What an absolute legend.

As a friend I spent time with last week at a small reunion used to say, "Hey, when did I fall off the fast track?"

The Codevilla Tapes

Some of you will be interested in this.

Mountain Dining

Stopped for dinner at a little Mexican place last night. Apparently I wasn’t the only “Beorn” to think of it.

I’m guessing he’s been a regular visitor. Big sleek fellow with a very glossy coat. Not unfriendly.

Impeachment Replays

William Mattox, of the James Madison Institute, has an interesting idea.

An acquittal should allow a president to run for a third term.

Not a bad one, either.

Eric Hines

Remind me again what these cities have in common?

Again, h/t Instapundit:  top honors for rat infestation go to Chicago, then L.A., with New York, San Francisco, etc., bringing up the rear.

Alliances as a means, not an end

Loyalty and faithfulness to commitments are good things, but nations aren't people. George Washington warned us that

“habitual hatred or a habitual fondness” turns a nation into “a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

That's not to say that a nation should lead other nations on, then disappoint them, only that it should think carefully about what it commits to.  In other words, exhibit a little impulse control.

But what did you MEAN by that?

And they say BoJo is rash:

Which brings me back to Alexander and his knot. For the plan of Boris Johnson is not just the bold one. It is the only answer that can stop the courts, MPs, and others from doing for the rest of our natural lives what they would very happily do. Which is to continue to stand before the 2016 result and insist either that it cannot be acted upon or that it should not be acted upon. The media version of this is to pretend that it is not clear what the British people meant when they voted to leave the EU. Somehow it would have been completely plain if we had asked to remain.

Two good ones from Instapundit

Ad Hominem as a Cognitive Bias

Ad hominem is one of the more common informal fallacies, but I have decided that it is also a significant cognitive bias. A cognitive bias is a mode of thought that speeds analysis but tends to lead to errors. A famous one is the availability heuristic, the tendency to make judgments on available information rather than seeking fuller information. For example, I might decide to adopt a new diet because I've seen it depicted favorably in television shows and news programs. Those positive depictions are available without further work. However, further study might show that the new diet was much more questionably beneficial, or even harmful.

Another famous one is the confirmation bias, in which I am inclined to approve information that supports what I already believe to be the case (and to discount evidence that suggests I might be wrong). This one is a very powerful bias that affects everyone, no matter how careful a thinker they may be. It is very difficult to correct for it.

The ad hominem bias, another heuristic bias, which I am proposing works like this: it is easier to understand a known individual's bad qualities than to understand a complex situation in which they are involved. If a bad quality attributed to the known individual can reasonably be inferred to be the cause of a bad but complex situation, the ad hominem heuristic occurs when you make that easy move.

The ad hominem cognitive bias is similar to the availability heuristic in that it works on information that is already available, partly in order to avoid the difficulty of understanding the complex situation. However, it is also similar to confirmation bias in that you believe the bad attribution you yourself are making just because you already believe the person is bad. It is more complicated than the other two, however, in that -- because this is your own attribution, and you therefore believe it -- the new, probably false belief gets filed as further evidence of the bad quality of the person you dislike or hate. The ad hominem heuristic thus contains a feedback loop in which it strengthens itself the more often it occurs; and since it is a cognitive bias and thus likely to lead to error, that means you tend to drift further and further away from what is really true.

In extreme cases, all the problems in your world can end up seeming to be the fault of this one pernicious individual. If only he (or she) could be removed, the improvement would be systemic and massive. This kind of belief can justify many sorts of extreme conclusions, or even violence against the hated individual.

Perhaps it has a name already.

Poor Target Selection

Granted that this man wasn't carrying either his machine-gun or his sniper rifle at the time, but what thief looks at this guy and thinks to himself, "Oh, yeah, of all the people in the city today this is the one I'm going to pick out to rob"?

Mexico Loses a Gun Battle to a Cartel

Speaking of wars and rumors of wars, there's a conflict closer to home that may become a pressing problem.

The eight-hour battle ended when government forces, outgunned and surrounded, without reinforcements or a way to retreat, received an order directly from Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to release their prisoner and surrender.

"Ordered to lay down arms and surrender" is never good, but ordered to surrender to a criminal organization noted for mutilation and beheading?

Bill McRaven Calls For a New President

Retired Admiral Bill McRaven, formerly commander of JSOC and later SOCOM, has penned a piece calling for the replacement of President Trump "the sooner, the better." I'm one of the kind of people he's trying to motivate, and he's speaking in language I understand. The argument has an unusual structure, one rarely seen in American politics.

The piece is fifteen paragraphs long. The first ten paragraphs are purely about honor, as are his last three. He lays out numerous examples framed around two specific recent events of men and women of honor showing honor to and for each other. Honor is indispensable to society and to politics, so this kind of argument is not out of place. Without honor, there is only power, and the direct exercise of power is expensive. Showing respect for each other and each other's interests lowers the cost of running a political system, and indeed a society. It allows us to accept that others may assume positions of power and authority, because we believe they will respect us enough not to use that power irresponsibly; and because a concern with being seen as worthy of honor by us will mean they behave honorably and respectably. They are and ought to be motivated by 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind,' as the Declaration of Independence puts it. It is not for no reason that the Founders, who were concerned not only with 'lives and fortunes' but also 'sacred honor' built so successful a system of governance.

It is also unsurprising that a man whose life is built around honor would find Donald Trump especially objectionable. Trump is not concerned with the proprieties of honor at all. He uses the language and forms of honor to reward and punish, but without regard to whether the rewards or especially the punishments are merited. It is proper to regard him as ridiculous in this way -- just last week Jim Mattis drew a connection between the insults Trump had directed at him and those directed as Meryl Streep to declare himself 'the Meryl Streep of generals' -- but it is not completely our of line to feel this misuse of honor represents a dagger at the throat of basic social connections. McRaven's closing argument, in his last three paragraphs, suggest that our ability to maintain the military power that holds the order of the world together is fundamentally threatened by Donald Trump. His arguments as to why a disdain for promises and alliances and respect for the interests of allies are perfectly reasonable.

So thirteen of the fifteen paragraphs are places where McRaven and I share a basic worldview about the role of honor and its place in the world. It's really only parts of two paragraphs where we come apart, but those two are enough to call the whole thrust of his argument into question for me. They are these:

It is easy to destroy an organization if you have no appreciation for what makes that organization great. We are not the most powerful nation in the world because of our aircraft carriers, our economy, or our seat at the United Nations Security Council. We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the protectors of the less fortunate.

But, if we don’t care about our values, if we don’t care about duty and honor, if we don’t help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice — what will happen to the Kurds, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Syrians, the Rohingyas, the South Sudanese and the millions of people under the boot of tyranny or left abandoned by their failing states?

The problem with the first paragraph is the assumption that our power comes from "ideals of universal freedom and equality." It is true that many Americans believe that these are universal ideals. But ideals like 'equality' are not universally held, and the appeal to these things as if they were universals is a category error, as this essay explains in detail.

Category errors are very serious philosophical mistakes. McRaven is not a philosopher, and as the essay notes this error is extremely common among those we tend to name as our 'foreign policy elites.' Nevertheless this is an error of thought with severe consequences. It is one that has drawn us into wars, and could again, to fight for values that aren't even held by the people we think we are defending. The most prominent of the Kurdish fighting organizations, for example, are Communists. Communists don't believe in 'universal freedom,' and while they profess a view of 'equality,' they don't mean anything like what Americans do by the term. The idea is not that everyone is endowed equally with basic liberties, but that society should control everything in order to ensure something like an equal distribution of goods (or at least an equitable one, since those with greater needs might receive more; though in practice, the 'equities' somehow always align with closeness to the political elite). Such a state is in most respects aims at the opposite of our traditional notion of 'equality,' and is completely opposed to our ideal of freedom.

Which brings us to the second paragraph. The problem here is not an opposition to oppression, which is noble. It is the list of conflicts. American honor might compel us to do something to defend allies like the Kurds, but it cannot compel us to fight in South Sudan. Most Americans could probably identify that Sudan is a nation in Africa, but I'll bet you that the percentage who can tell you where the Rohingyas live is vanishingly small. Honor bonds are mutual relationships, not one-way duties of provision. The Kurds have one with us because they fought with us against a common enemy, and bore a lot of the burden of the fighting while we mostly provided fire and air support. Where no deep relationship with us exists, honor does not and cannot compel us to fight someone else's war. We might choose to do it, and think it worthy of honor that we chose to bear a burden we did not have to bear. Honor cannot compel us to do it. If they want an honor bond of the sort that would compel us to do it, well, formal alliances are negotiated formally, and usually between nations rather than between a nation and disfavored ethnic groups.

Meanwhile McRaven has omitted a significant honor concern that touches on this project of removing the president 'the sooner, the better.' The class of public servants, to include military servicemembers, is honor-bound to uphold the will of the American people. This will is expressed formally and permanently in the Constitution, and less formally and permanently in the elected government of the day. The current impeachment hearing (if it is that) was kicked off by a letter to Congress from an unnamed intelligence officer who has chosen to remain in the shadows rather than testify even incognito. The intelligence community has no constitutional standing even to exist, but it is legally bound to the Executive Branch, whose elected leader is a President of the United States. The State Department, similarly, is now a merely statuatory authority that is in open revolt against the Constitutional authority. The New York Times just ran an article openly praising "the deep state" for its attempt to resist and remove the elected leader of their branch of government.

McRaven must know that having military officials throw their weight behind the removal of the Constitutionally-named Commander in Chief would set an alarming precedent with echoes to ancient Rome. There is no guarantee that allowing the unelected bureaucracy or military replace the elected and Constitutional leadership would happen only once. It certainly cannot be said to be consistent with the honor owed to the Constitution or the constitutional structure to advocate for the bureaucrats to be allowed to override the election.

Now Congress has constitutional authority to remove the President if it chooses to do so, but it is supposed to be for 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' not because the President lacks honor. He does, I agree. That is a big problem, I agree. But the cost of removing a President outside the constitutional norms, at the behest of an unelected bureaucracy and even unnamed intelligence officers, is too high to be borne. There will be an election in a year and a week. If the American people want rid of him, they will have the chance to do it themselves.

A Better Riposte for Gabbard

When Hilary! accused her of being a Russian asset would have been: "That's just what a Chinese asset would say."

I don't really believe Hilary is a Chinese asset, of course. She's always worked for herself.

Home Again

Back from the road. There were three of the most beautiful days I can recall. The sunset of the last one looked like this, no filters nor edits.

That’s Stone Mountain in the background. All my life I’ve heard the old rhyme, “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.” Well, not this time brothers and sisters. That cloud formation indicates a weather change, and by Saturday Tex’s storm had blown in with a soaking like I’ve only rarely seen. Fortunately some old biker comrades had met me there, and we holed up with a bottle of Drambuie. It passed and Sunday was beautiful again.

I’m only home for a week or so, then I’ll be headed to DC in early November. Should see the best of the mountain color by then.

Fight Club 20th Anniversary Rules Addenda

Some additional rules now that we're all 20 years older.

Oklahoma Drivers

Kids these days -- can't even drive a wagon properly. What DO they teach them in school?

Well, thankfully, it seems no one was hurt.

Civic health, the sequel

It may not surprise any of you to learn that there is a strong current of paranoia in public life.  I'm not really referring to the run-of-the-mill concern that people are exercising power in shady ways and not being straight with us, since I call that more of a universal concern than a current, and in any event if it's a flaw I'm among the most flawed of citizens.

Posting late at night in discussions with my local fellow citizens, however--I'm still getting used to calling them my "constituents"--is sure to reveal some startling assumptions and suspicions.  Last night a fellow was arguing with me in a reasonably friendly tone, but exposing some pointed differences between us.  Suddenly he posted an inexplicable GIF showing someone high-fiving someone else.  Then he posted in some agitation that he hadn't meant to post that GIF, didn't understand why it was under his name, and couldn't delete it.  No problem, I said, I can delete it for you, and I think it's an example of something I've often seen happen before.  Facebook has little icons at the bottom of comment boxes, including a GIF button, and it's easy to swipe it by accident; it's equally easy to swipe one of the default options it brings up, and presto, you've posted a random GIF.  But there's also a little "..." icon you should be able to press and get an "edit or delete" button.

No, he said, you didn't delete it.  I can still see it on my screen.  (I suppose it just hadn't refreshed yet or something.)  And I can't delete it.  And besides, I didn't post it in the first place.  And I think you know what happened.  Clever.  (He repeated "clever" a few times in subsequent agitated posts.)

Hee-wacketa-wacketa.  Even if I were that much of a jerk, I said, posting something under someone else's name is beyond my technical expertise.  At this point I started disengaging, because there's no percentage in arguing with that kind of thing.  Half an hour later he was still thinking up nightmare scenarios about how I had a hacker troll on my payroll.  I wonder where you get one of those?  I can barely get my iCloud password to work from one week to the next.

As midnight approached, I was engaging with another, more stable neighbor who wanted to know why I thought sewage plants and non-point-source stormwater polluted with fertilizer, etc., were of more concern than the brine discharge from a desalination plant.  I looked up some stuff on the internet and tried to quantify some of the wastewater and stormwater volumes from the nearby city we were discussing, adding some explanation of how relatively clean brine discharge is compared to what I considered rather inadequately treated municipal discharges.  Well, the first guy interjected, that response is "supercharged with facts," but fallacious, as he planned to demonstrate at a later date.  That's me, Texan ("Supercharged with Facts") 99.  I'm thinking of making it my campaign slogan if I'm ever crazy enough to run for re-election.  My interlocutor said he was sure I hadn't written that response myself and wanted to know who my advisor was.

Don't we all wish we had an omniscient advisor we could get to craft an answer to a moderately technical argument at midnight on the internet?  I guess I do, but it's called my head, my education, and Google.  It's not dark magic.  I suppose this guy thinks I have minions to do my nefarious bidding at all hours of the night, write up little white papers for me.

In the end I complimented him on his public engagement and asked him to consider coming to Commissioners Court meetings.  I really hope he will.  If he keeps a lid on the paranoid stuff, he'll at least liven things up with some data.

More stings

Say "rip current," I dare you

Weather psychics predicted 14 named tropical systems this year. They just slipped in under the wire with "Nestor," which exceeded 39 mph winds for about a nanosecond. Now it's making "landfall" in Florida and hailed on weather.com as "post-tropical system Nestor," i.e., not even a tropical storm any more, but by golly we're still treating it as a named storm, because climate science. There's an anchorman standing bravely on the beach with the wind whipping his t-shirt and his gimme cap just barely staying on his head.

Justin Johnson

Happy Friday!

Civic health

Last night I got a chance to meet our small town's new police chief, who is retiring from a mid-sized Texas department where he supervised 600 employees to take on our little 30-man department here on the warm coast, where his family has liked to vacation. I was delighted with him. He seems like one of those salt-of-the-earth, God-and-country, solid family men, besides being fanatically devoted to the Bill of RIghts: a great mix of determination to find a way not to let criminals ruin the lives of others, without losing sight of his obligation to respect all our rights. He told a revealing story about once messing up the chain of custody of evidence on a good drug bust and being furious that the bad guy was getting off on a technicality. His mentor settled him down saying, "You know this isn't the defense counsel's fault, right? It was your mistake. And it's not a fatal mistake. The guy's not going to say, 'Whew, that was a close call, I'm going to go get a job and turn my life around.' You'll get him next time." He made some good remarks about how the system does favor the defendant, but it's supposed to, because the Bill of Rights was written by outlaws who were tired of seeing the rich guy sic the police on the poor guy without due process. A solid constitutionalist. He married his wife about a month before 9/11, when he had just taken a job as a police officer and they had just bought a house. He worried about whether the new marriage could bear up under his sudden deployment (Navy reserves). When he drove up to the new house his wife had just moved into, he saw a U.S. flag flying from one porch column and from the other, a Navy flag with a yellow ribbon on it. He got himself a keeper.

Bee Stings

Survey Finds More People Would Support Impeachment If They Knew What Crime Trump Was Supposed To Have Committed

Nation's Murderous Psychopaths Undecided On Whether They’ll Follow New Gun Laws

Study: AC/DC's 'Highway To Hell' More Theologically Accurate Than 96% Of Modern Worship Songs

RIP Harold Bloom

Critic, writer, professor

In the 50s, he opposed the rigid classicism of Eliot. But over the following decades, Bloom condemned Afrocentrism, feminism, Marxism and other movements he placed in the “school of resentment”. A proud elitist, he disliked the Harry Potter books and slam poetry and was angered by Stephen King’s receiving an honorary National Book Award. He dismissed as “pure political correctness” the awarding of the Nobel prize for literature to Doris Lessing, author of the feminist classic The Golden Notebook.

“I am your true Marxist critic,” he once wrote, “following Groucho rather than Karl, and take as my motto Groucho’s grand admonition, ‘Whatever it is, I’m against it.’”

Walkabout

I am going walkabout for a few days. Should be back Monday.

Showtunes

What is She Talking About?

I'm a little unclear on how even a joint resolution from Congress could "overturn" a military decision by the Commander in Chief. This is not a veto, which Congress has the power to override. It's an exercise of Article II powers that Congress does not share. Does she intend to declare war? I suppose that would create a duty for the Commander in Chief to fight the war, although he still would have a free hand as to strategy and tactics.

By the way, I'm pretty sure Congress didn't even authorize the mission in Syria. It's odd that Congress would raise so strenuous an objection to ending what they never authorized beginning.

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.