The Wanderer's Hávamál: A Brief Review

My copy of Dr. Jackson Crawford's Hávamál arrived recently. Here he is introducing the work and giving an argument for why you should read it.



Crawford accepts that the Hávamál can be fairly critiqued as 'cynical.' Instead of 'cynical,' I would describe it as 'pragmatic.' Pragmatism is a highly defensible philosophical position. Formally, it's also a characteristically American one; the frame of it was only spelled out in the late 19th century.

Rather, this points to a current of American thought that, in the years just after the Civil War, blossomed into a formal school of philosophy. This school is called Pragmatism, and it has always been a characteristically American school of thought. Pragmatism is what the American founding showed that the French one did not. Pragmatism holds to the the maxim that all ideas should be tested against their practical consequences. Ideas that do not work out should be abandoned. Ideas that reliably produce bad consequences are bad ideas; in formal applications of the philosophy, they can even be said to be false ideas.

This current of thought explains why the American project succeeded while the French one fell into tyranny. Even when dealing with direct challenges to America’s founding principles, American thinkers responded to those challenges with a careful eye to the real-world consequences of their decisions. The American principles were realized, slowly: slavery was in fact banished, its replacements in Jim Crow and lynching eventually defeated. For those who favor a more principled response to evils like slavery, note that this insistence on considering the practical consequence is one of the principles of Pragmatism. The question How can this work? has to be considered, and the consequences weighed.

But what about the rights that come from the Creator? It might seem that Pragmatism is a challenge to religion, as it looks to the world instead of to God for the test of its ideas. It is certainly compatible with secular philosophy, but what about the Declaration of Independence? I would argue that Pragmatism makes room for religion as well: if God made the world, then to learn the rules of the world is to learn something about the world’s maker. (This approach to religion is called ‘natural theology.’) The only sort of religion that is ruled out by Pragmatism is the sort whose dogma reliably leads to practical disasters. The same is true of ideas in politics, economics, or other fields. Americans are characteristically interested in what works.

I have argued that Aristotle is already pragmatic, in a way that is rarely recognized. In the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle points out that the lessons of ethics are not certain truths like one finds in the proofs of strict logic. A rich man may be destroyed by his wealth; a brave man may be destroyed just because his courage drives him into places where danger is highest. Nevertheless, for the most part, wealth helps you attain your ends; courage helps you excel in whatever you are trying to do. These things are virtues, in other words, because they work. They work in the world.

It is interesting to find a god who is interested in pragmatics. That's an issue for another day, but it is characteristic of Odin in a way that it is not of almost any other god in any of the many stories that the many nations have told about gods. Zeus or Athena has a role to play in a greater order; the various Hindu gods are just actors in a great script playing out in the dream of the one great God. Odin cares a lot about what works. He has some very good advice to offer.

Ultimately I am not well-fitted to critique Dr. Crawford's translation. My Old Norse is entirely self-taught, as is my Old English and Middle English. His scholarship on this matter passes mine. However, I do have many previous translations of this work to compare against him. In the places where I feared he might give a soft translation in order to appeal to current tastes, he does not. That suggests he is being honest, as I was prepared to believe from having appreciated his scholarship on other questions heretofore.

So if you are interested in some Yule readings, as opposed to specifically Christmas ones, here is one you might consider. Jólnir is one of the names of Odin, with 'Yule' being derived from the antecedent syllable.

You might of course consider it unhealthy to look into the pagan ancestry, but I do not. Tolkien did; and the One who made all things made these things too. That point to the side, I recommend the book to those who are interested in such matters.

Dersh Weighs In

Professor Alan Dershowitz is negatively impressed.

Neither of these proposed articles satisfy the express constitutional criteria for an impeachment, which are limited to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” Neither are high or low crimes or misdemeanors. Neither are mentioned within the Constitution.

Both are so vague and open ended that they could be applied in partisan fashion by a majority of the House against almost any president from the opposing party. Both are precisely what the Framers had rejected at their Constitutional Convention. Both raise the “greatest danger,” in the words of Alexander Hamilton, that the decision to impeach will be based on the “comparative strength of parties,” rather than on “innocence or guilt.”

That danger is now coming to pass, as House Democrats seek for the first time in American history to impeach a president without having at least some bipartisan support in Congress. Nor can they find any support in the words of the Constitution, or in the history of its adoption....

In doing this, they follow the view of Representative Maxine Waters who infamously declared that, when it comes to impeachment, “there is no law.”

Ironically, "rule of law" has been one of the biggest talking points by Democrats supporting impeachment. It is correct to say that there is a basic American principle that "no one is above the law." They apparently forget the principle that no one is beneath it, either.

UPDATE: In fairness, the Progs aren't satisfied either. Then again, when are they ever?

No Politics at the Family Feast

It's bad manners, and Americans by and large didn't put up with it. Good for us.

New Jersey Knows Terrorism

Details are still emerging, but increasingly this shooting today looks like an attack that targeted the Jewish community. They are, of course, disarmed and defenseless under New Jersey law.

UPDATE:  The New York Times story about the following paragraph was apparently entirely wrong on the facts.

Coincidentally, President Trump signed an order today that protects Jews as "a nation" in addition to as a religious minority. There's a bit of upset about that, based on a refusal to recognize that "a nation" is an equivocal term. It does usually refer to one's citizenship, though not always (as e.g. US nationals from American Samoa, who may not be citizens); but in this case it refers to the ancient ambition of a culture that defines a people, rather than to citizenship in a secular polity. Not only here; one may speak of a nation that is not established formally, e.g. Kurdistan, and then refer to 'the Kurdish nation' without referring to either an extant polity or a legally-recognized form of citizenship. One can be both a member of 'the Kurdish nation' and also, by legal citizenship, an American.

There are bad people out there. Not many, and to avoid overreaction it's important to recognize how safe almost all of America is almost all of the time. Still, take care of each other, and be ready if circumstances call you to serve.

Barr: Trump Campaign was "Clearly Spied Upon"

He's extremely clear about how the Carter Page bit ties in to the campaign, even though Page had left the campaign.

He Did What Now?

It's election day in the UK.

Johnson ploughed a British flag-themed digger, marked "Get Brexit done", through a styrofoam wall with "gridlock" written on it, in a bid to ram home his core message in time for Thursday's snap vote.

Now that I've seen the picture I think I understand what that sentence is intended to mean, but the first time through I was a little lost.

Or You Could _Not_ Register It

With respect to Virginians, it's helpful that they're going to be such a powerful good example next year before the 2020 elections.

“In this case, the governor’s assault weapons ban will include a grandfather clause for individuals who already own assault weapons, with the requirement they register their weapons before the end of a designated grace period,” Northam spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky said in a statement Monday evening.

I don't live in Virginia, but I can assure you that I will not be registering any firearms with any governments at any point. Defiance of unconstitutional laws is an important part of the duty of a citizen.

Wings of Gold

Naval aviators refer to their flight wings in this way. Pensacola is the location of Naval aviator flight training. Last week's attack by a Saudi national at Pensacola killed three naval aviators in training. Today, all three were posthumously awarded their wings out of respect for "exceptional heroism and bravery in the face of evil."

I'm confused

An all-girl troop that's part of the Boy Scouts, but they do things completely separate from the boys and no boys are allowed?  As they're saying on my FB feed, "that just sounds like the Girls Scouts with extra steps."

Three perspectives on the IG report

The Inspector General's perspective is that, in pursuing the FISA warrants against Carter Page, the FBI committed 17 significant errors and omissions.  This is in addition to many errors in the "Woods Procedures" that are designed to ensure that a confidential human source's otherwise unverified stories are at least vetted in by specific statements from the source's FBI handler concerning his experience with the source. In this case, the FISA application inexplicably included statements that Steele's handler did not and would not support.

The IG calls these “serious performance failures" and found "unsatisfactory" the explanations it received for the lapses. Nevertheless, the IG cannot quite bring himself to conclude that all these inexplicable errors can be attributed to political bias. Nor is he prepared to "speculate" whether the higher-ups who were duped by the errors of subordinates would have approved the FISA applications if they hadn't been misled. It's hard to understand why he would need to speculate. Why not ask the higher-ups directly: would you still have approved the applications, knowing what your subordinates misled you about? Why or why not?

Attorney General Barr and U.S. Attorney Durham already have weighed in with alternative views. Barr stated:

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken. It is also clear that, from its inception, the evidence produced by the investigation was consistently exculpatory. Nevertheless, the investigation and surveillance was pushed forward for the duration of the campaign and deep into President Trump’s administration. In the rush to obtain and maintain FISA surveillance of Trump campaign associates, FBI officials misled the FISA court, omitted critical exculpatory facts from their filings, and suppressed or ignored information negating the reliability of their principal source. The Inspector General found the explanations given for these actions unsatisfactory. While most of the misconduct identified by the Inspector General was committed in 2016 and 2017 by a small group of now-former FBI officials, the malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process.

Durham stated:

[Unlike the IG investigation], our investigation is not limited to developing information from within component parts of the Justice Department. Our investigation has included developing information from other persons and entities, both in the U.S. and outside of the U.S. Based on the evidence collected to date, and while our investigation is ongoing, last month we advised the Inspector General that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.

Up the Militia

A proposal to arm (nearly) all Americans.

Inspector General Report

The Federalist raises some issues, first:

These admissions should outrage Americans: The FBI is intentionally failing to document confidential sources’ credibility and reliability problems so defense attorneys do not learn of them! Or, as the IG report concluded, “by withholding potentially critical information from validation reports, the FBI runs the risks that (1) prosecutors may not have complete and reliable information when a CHS serves as a witness and, thus, may have difficulties complying with their discovery obligations.”

Indeed, you can’t meet your obligations to disclose exculpatory information if there is a systematic avoidance of documenting that information.

Read the rest.

Grinding Bones

What could be better for the hound of the Hall than to grind bones by the fire as the evenings run toward Yule?

Gentlemen, we cannot afford a salt-shaker gap

Business Insider must be angling for a Pulitzer with its new expose on condiment equality in Trump's America.

Down the memory hole

Embedded in this South Carolina article is a video of a CNN video of an interview Friday morning with House Majority Whip Clyburn saying he won't "whip" a vote on impeachment. Oddly enough, CNN has scrubbed both the Clyburn video and its transcript from its website. Links from other sites now show up as broken. A search on the CNN site turns up nothing for any Clyburn interview in the last few days or any article mentioning Clyburn and impeachment this month. The video link embedded above is a "share" from a Washington Examiner article, but I can't embed it because noting I can do will call it up from a YouTube search bar. I'll be interested to see if the link continues working.

Come to think of it, has anyone done a wellness check on Clyburn since Friday?

The interview suggests that Clyburn has recently noticed that impeachment might be divisive. Shoot, if the Ds had known that I'm sure they'd never have pursued it in the first place.

SBR

Congress is nonfunctional so this probably has no chance of passage, but it's definitely correct on the merits.

On Tuesday, Marshall introduced the Home Defense and Competitive Shooting Act of 2019. This would change provisions of the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) that put extra restrictions on the ownership of short-barreled rifles—that is, rifles* with a barrel shorter than 16″ in length or that have a total length of less than 26″.

The NFA requires owners of short-barreled rifles to register them with the federal government; they must also pay a one-time $200 excise tax per gun. If Marshall's bill becomes law, these extra requirements would disappear; short-barreled rifles* would be regulated under the same rules as semiautomatic rifles....

Gun lobbying groups have praised Marshall's bill for, as Gun Owners of America (GOA) puts it, attempting to undo the "egregiously unconstitutional registration, taxation, and regulation of short-barreled rifles." GOA is joined by the National Rifle Association, which supported the NFA back in 1934 but now backs Marshall's bill.

As the article points out, this law affects all sorts of rifles -- break action, lever action, and so on. This bit Steve McQueen at one point in his storied career, when his 'Mare's Leg' prop cost his studio a small fortune in ATF fees. Weirdly, as the Wiki article goes on to explain, it's perfectly legal to manufacture the same rifle as a pistol, rather than making a rifle and then cutting it down.

The NFA is probably unconstitutional front-to-back, of course, but the courts aren't there yet. Getting there, maybe.

Eek part deux

As Glen Reynolds like to say, why is the Democratic primary system such a cesspool of racism and sexism?  Apparently Kamala Harris never had a chance of winning the Democratic party presidential nomination in "Trump's America."  I had no idea Trump had succeeded in co-opting the frantically partisan left wing of the Democratic party.  The man is a legend.  Speaking of which,

Pearl Harbor Day

Few are left now who were there to tell us what they remember. The Navy has people detailed to making sure the rest of us know the story.

Eek

The Mayflower Compact Goes West

A review of a review of one of my favorite movies in one of Tom's favorite outlets, Liberty Island.

There's still worth to be had from another discussion on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Florida naval base shooting

We may never know the motive of this young man, Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani.

Oh, Rampant Dishonesty

Apparently the lady has a history.

Points of Disanalogy

All analogies always break. This is because they are comparisons of things that are not the same, and thus at some point the differences will emerge. This is true of even the best analogy. Nevertheless, analogies remain essential tools for reasoning because in life we generally have to make decisions about things that are not the same. Even standardized industrial products -- blue jeans, say, from a particular manufacturer and in a particular size and style -- will differ in slight ways, and certainly can differ in important properties (e.g., ownership: that one is yours, and this one is mine, and you are not free to dispose of mine as you are your own).

So when we are reasoning analogically, the thing to look for is the place (or places) where the analogy fails to hold. Then we have to see if the conclusion being drawn comes before, or after, the point of disanalogy.

For example, in today's impeachment hearings, Professor Karlan made an analogy to explain why she thought the President's conduct was impeachable.

Imagine living in a part of Louisiana or Texas that’s prone to devastating hurricanes and flooding. What would you think if you lived there and your governor asked for a meeting with the president to discuss getting disaster aid that Congress has provided for? What would you think if that president said, “I would like you to do us a favor? I’ll meet with you, and send the disaster relief, once you brand my opponent a criminal.”

Wouldn’t you know in your gut that such a president has abused his office? That he’d betrayed the national interest, and that he was trying to corrupt the electoral process?

There are three points of disanalogy that leap out at me. Unfortunately for Dr. Karlan, all of the breaking points occur before the analogy could bear the weight she is trying to put on it.

1) She is analogizing to a 'quid pro quo' situation of exactly the kind that the last months of inquiry have not shown to have taken place. The closest we got to that was Amb. Sondland testifying that he had kind of understood that to be the situation, but that no one in the administration -- indeed, not on the whole planet -- had told him that it was the case. This is somewhat like a prosecutor who has failed to prove that a wrongful killing has happened trying to convince the jury with an analogy to a murder. "Wouldn't it be wrong if it had been murder? Wouldn't you know in your gut that was wrong?"

2) A President of the United States has a formal duty to provide disaster relief to Texas or Louisiana that is much stronger than the analog case, treating a foreign country. Even if you want to argue that the President had a particular duty to provide this aid, since Congress had apportioned it, the duty is of a different kind. To refuse to help Americans in need would be a basic betrayal of loyalty in a way that pressuring a foreign government is not.

3) Her 'brand him a criminal' is disanalogous to 'open a formal investigation on this apparently corrupt action, working with the Attorney General as is in accord with our formal treaty governing such investigations.' It's not the same thing at all. The one thing is slanderous, perhaps; the other, given the strong appearance of corruption in the Hunter Biden matter, is a perfectly reasonable exercise of constitutional power by the duly elected officer charged with exercising that power.

It's a pretty sad spectacle. I hope she's a better professor about matters where she is less passionate. Passion is the enemy of reason as we all know, and as Professor Turley rightly pointed out in a far better set of testimony.

Judiciary Pseudo-Impeachment

So far--the Nadler show has adjourned for some House votes after the first 45-minute rounds of questionings--this is what I've seen.

Karlan is astounding in her manufactured dudgeon or her hysteria, you pick 'em. That's all she has, even in her  answers to questions.


It seems clear the Nadler lawyer and the three Progressive-Democrat law professors--each of whom have proclaimed the impeachable guilt of Trump for most of his term--coordinated their questions and answers ahead of time. The professors' answers are too rehearsed and glib. Nadler's lawyer also took a Turley remark in an op-ed out of context and refused to let Turley provide that context.

Gerhart asserted that there is no right to go to court to contest a subpoena. King Congress has spoken; kneel and obey (my phrasing in the last clause of the sentence).

Gerhardt says further that there's no need of an actual crime in order to impeach, only an appearance. This is an instantiation of the Ford view of "high crime and misdemeanor:" it's whatever the Congress says it is. And that's what the Nadler TV show is doing. Making up a convenient beef.

The Progressive-Democrats carefully avoided directing questions to Turley, except for a single one wherein Nadler's lawyer asked if Turley had written a single sentence in a WSJ op-ed (the above comment), carefully excising the context--the caveat, in Turley's terms. When Turley tried to supply the clarifying caveat, Nadler's lawyer told him to shut up and just answer the question about the sentence, "Yes, or no."

When Turley was allowed to testify, in response to Collins and Collins' lawyer, he dismantled the Progressive-Democrats' and their law professor witnesses' case virtually point by point.


It's disappointing that actual lawyers could so misunderstand the law.

If the prior was a Schiff show, this is a Nadler burlesque.

Eric Hines

A Plan for 2020

Angelo Codevilla has suggested one.

He had this admonition: Our temptation to focus on fights regarding Trump has obscured the fact that their [the ruling class'] objection is to us.

Indeed.

This bit, Were Donald Trump to be reelected in 2020, as is likely, there is no reason to think his second administration would loosen the ruling class’s tightening grip on our lives any more than the first did, leads me to my own, somewhat more concrete suggestion of what Trump ought to do:

Demand the resignations of all White House staffers including the staffs of every agency and facility in the White House right down to the cooks and janitors, firing those who, like a lawyer in DoJ, refuse to resign. Put in place the heads of those staff agencies the people whom Trump can trust, and have them as their first order of business go through those resignations and retain those whom the new heads deem worthy. Then hire some (not many), if necessary, to flesh out the staffs.

That at least will give the President a measure of control over his White House staff and should hold leaks to a dull roar.

Eric Hines

Coincidences

There are a surprising number of them in the tortuous explanation of the Steele Dossier in a book recently published by GPS Fusion's co-owners.

Going off-script

Not only is the President's "high crime" turning out to refuse to follow the impeachment script, the whole thing started with a President who had the gall to go off-script in a telephone meeting with a foreign leader.  The smart people gave him his talking points, and he acted like he was an elected chief executive with his own ideas.

Burn the witch.

Sentence first, verdict afterwards

When even Slate has given up on impeachment, you know it's dire. This article jams in just about every stale metaphor we have to describe a boring exercise: clown car, muddying the question, summer rerun season, miring in a sloppy fight, confusing mishmash, food fight, circus, boxes checked, hoops jumped through. My favorite line, though, is

Compared with the staid and productive fact-finding work conducted by the House Intelligence Committee over the past few weeks, this hearing will almost certainly be a disaster.

"Staid and productive fact-finding work." The author is being kind, but it's also damning with faint praise.

I take it back. My real favorite is the Republican complaint that Nadler plans to give the jury instructions before the evidence. That one's actually good, like the Red Queen declaring "Sentence first--verdict afterwards."

The article also bemoans Nadler's probable unwillingness to improve matters by simply gaveling Republicans into silence.  And maybe his stated intention of wearing a big red clown nose with a kangaroo suit.

Cutting Off One’s Nose...

...to spite one’s face.

Guidestones

Ymar mentioned the Georgia Guidestones in the comments below. There's a bit of a secret about who put them up, although it's almost certainly a collection of university professors -- most of the guidelines are ordinary parts of the sensus communis of the sort of folk who used to teach at major Southern universities. It's a little bit liberal, a little bit anti-government, a lot of 'peace and love and beauty.'

It's a nice motorcycle ride through flat country from Athens, Georgia. There's nowhere to eat and nothing to do anywhere near them, but if the ride is the point -- as it was for me -- it's not the worst way to spend an afternoon, riding out to see them.

Demographics and Philosophical Intuition

What if it doesn't matter who you are?

Top Tier

This may be the highlight of the 2020 campaign, so it's worth noticing: Kamala Harris is out. Whatever eventuates now, at least we will not have a President who has already proven her eagerness to prosecute people while withholding exculpatory evidence.

Many thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, who helped this moment come about. In spite of all the reasons why I can't in good conscience vote for her, she has done a service to her country in bringing this day about.

Swinging for the Fences

Virginia, home of the NRA, has recently elected a solid blue government. Bills are already being filed that intend to impose heavy restrictions on 2nd Amendment rights; dozens of localities have passed 'sanctuary' laws or resolutions that defy proposed enforcement.

This is going to be an interesting year.

"People are Very Concerned"

I'd never heard of Peloton before yesterday, but apparently people hate it.

There are a lot of benefits to exercise besides weight loss. It's basically the best thing you can do for yourself. If you exercise more-or-less daily, with occasional exceptions to rest and heal, you will be happier and healthier across the board. It's not crazy to think that a woman who did so in a disciplined way for a year would feel like her life had been transformed for the better. This is true even though she's thin or whatever to start with.

How much of this is really projected guilt, I wonder, from people who know they should be exercising but are not?

Maybe not a bad trade-off

From Jim Geraghty:

It’s not hard to find analysts, usually Trump-leaning, scoffing and confidently predicting that the Democrats will not pass a single article of impeachment. That scenario is hard to envision. The House not impeaching Trump after all of this would set off a civil war within the Democratic party. That scenario would require 15 House Democrats to quietly and privately go to Nancy Pelosi and tell her they can’t vote for impeachment. Only two House Democrats voted against starting the inquiry. Recall that about ten years ago, a lot of House Democrats voted for Obamacare, knowing it would probably cost them their seats; back then, support for Obamacare was lower than the current support for impeachment, around 40 percent in most polls. When the Democratic party really wants to pass legislation, its leaders can make legislators take votes that will end their careers in order to get something passed.

Dangerous Virtue

Theodore Dalrymple cites a passage by Chesterton in a piece on the London attack.

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues . . . The vices are indeed let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

That passage is valuable. Another author, reading Chesterton, commented on the idea. "I had never considered virtues as something potentially dangerous, but that is exactly what Chesterton says is happening."

But of course virtues are potentially dangerous, because virtues are strengths. Strength can help you break chains, but strength also helps you forge them. Worse, if not connected to the virtue of practical wisdom, you may not know whether forging or breaking chains is the better course.

Mission Already Accomplished

Bernie says he wants "population control" as part of his climate agenda.

An audience member asked Sanders about "educating everyone on the need to curb population growth."

"Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years. The planet cannot sustain this growth. I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it's crucial to face," the audience member asked. "Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?"

"The answer is yes," Sanders responded. "And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions."

In fact, we may already be there. Too, it is exactly for the reason Bernie cites as his goal: education, particularly of women. Women are simply deciding to have a lot fewer kids, and medicine has given them the power to control that decision.

In Praise of Censure

Writing in The Hill, a former Republican Congressional staffer offers a proposal: Censure the President rather than impeaching him.

He has a number of arguments in favor of doing this, one of which is important: Nancy Pelosi would get to control the process, rather than turning it all over to the Republican-led Senate. That would allow the Congressional Democrats to escape from the trap they have built for themselves by staging this drama on Ukraine, where not only Joe Biden but Nancy Pelosi herself, along with John Kerry and Mitt Romney, have children with sweetheart deals from energy companies. If this goes to a Senate trial, there's the potential for humiliating blowback once the Republicans are in charge of who gets called as a witness and what they are asked.

He also suggests that a censure might be bipartisan, though he himself wouldn't vote for it. Of course, we have already had a bipartisan vote on this: some Democrats voted against opening the impeachment inquiry, after all.

Jigsaw puzzles

More pieces to fill in:

The Obama holdover heading the Pentagon office reportedly under investigation by the U.S. attorney who is conducting the criminal probe of the Trump–Russia investigation was accused of leaking a classified document, in a recent court filing for retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. The connection hasn't been previously reported.

According to a Nov. 21 report by independent journalist Sara Carter, U.S. Attorney John Durham is questioning personnel in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA). ONA awarded about $1 million in contracts to FBI informant Stefan Halper, who appears to have played a key role in alleged U.S. intelligence agency spying on 2016 Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.

In addition, however, a court filing indicates that ONA's director, James H. Baker, "is believed to be the person who illegally leaked the transcript of Mr. Flynn’s calls" to The Washington Post. Specifically, the filing states, "ONA Director Baker regularly lunched with Washington Post Reporter David Ignatius."

The filing adds that Baker "was Halper's 'handler'" at ONA.

From Epoch Times (possible paywall) via Ace.

Best Coffee Commercial Ever

Surviving a Saga Christmas

Trickier than you might think.

Thanksgiving Retrospective

A graphic showing the passengers of the Mayflower, and those who survived to the first Thanksgiving.

Fighting Terror with a Unicorn's Horn

Today in London, a convicted terrorist who'd been let free (albeit with a tracker on his person) attacked people on London Bridge with a knife. He was battled by a guy with a five-foot Narwhal tusk, which the fellow took off the wall at Fishmonger's Hall. Police later showed up and shot the bad guy, although presumably our hero could have done that himself if he hadn't been disarmed by his own government.

Well, and he found himself a proper tool. The Narwhal tusk was long sold in Europe by the Vikings as unicorn horns that could dispel poison. The story is an amusing one, and touches both Eiríkr Thorvaldsson, better known as 'Erik the Red,' and his son the famous Lief Erikson.

And not a knee taken

Post-Thanksgiving cooking

It's leftovers week!  We're already at work on turkey soup, and I'll insist on our usual turkey tetrazzini tomorrow.  For lunch I'm chewing on turkey wings with dressing, gravy, and smoky greens.

The news yesterday and today about our dangerously ill next-door neighbor is so encouraging that I find myself coming out of a dejected fog and being inspired to cook.  I volunteered to bring a dessert to a public gathering tomorrow.  It seemed a good time to try something I've been tempted by on Facebook:  pecan pie brownies.

Mine didn't come out as self-contained or dignified as this stock photo, being more like a pecan-pie-brownie cobbler, but admirably gooey inside and crunchy outside, like the old joke about the polar bear and the igloo.  Because the Facebook recipe advocated a brownie mix, which is out of the question, I substituted a Julia Child fudge-style brownie base with a Craig Claiborne pecan pie filling for the top.  (You pour the brownie mix in the bottom and the pecan pie filling on the top, then bake at 350 degrees until it's Alton-Brown-style GBD, "golden brown and delicious.")

Presentation-wise, it might work better with a cake-style brownie and a shorter cooking time, so the pecan pie topping would be easier to cut while at the same time the brownie base would set up a little more.  Nevertheless, I'll let people spoon out their servings, and there's certainly nothing wrong with the flavor.  If I make it again, I may cut back on the sugar in the brownies, for contrast.  Barely-sweetened whipped cream wouldn't hurt a thing.

So now it's about the rule of law again?

These dizzying reversals:  when conservatives object that the impeachment farce is ignoring due process, we hear that impeachment is a political process that obeys political rules rather than all those tiresome and legalistic restraints.  That's actually close to my own view:  impeachments, like elections, are a vehicle for political opposition, not law enforcement.  Legal violations affect public opinion indirectly just as they do in elections and other disputes, but the people called upon to make a judgment aren't bound by the same intricate and straitlaced rules that are enforced in a criminal trial.

The prosecuting party in an impeachment, therefore, is technically allowed to throw due process in the trash.  The flip-side, however, is that the defense gets to use political tools of its own to ridicule the essentially free choices of the prosecution, and voters are free to decide what they think about it all.  So far, to the prosecution's horror, voters are bored or hostile about the results.

Predictably, the anti-Trump camp now begins to worry that their sacred ritual of impeachment is being infected by lowdown politics.  Well, if this dumpster fire clears the House and the Senate conducts a trial, they'll get a chance to see how they fare in a more traditional legal setting.  Nevertheless, the political problem won't go away.  If the charges are as spurious in that more formal trial setting as they are in the current kangaroo court, the political problem will only intensify.

A Considerable Irony

The World Socialist, that grand elder of anti-American Communist propaganda outlets, publishes an interview with noted historian Gordon Wood on how unfair the New York Times “1619 Project” is to the Founding.

Q. For our readership, perhaps you could discuss something of the world-historical significance of the Revolution. Of course, we are under no illusion that it represented a socialist transformation. Yet it was a powerful revolution in its time.
A. It was very important that the American colonial crisis, the imperial crisis, occurred right at the height of what we call the Enlightenment, where Western Europe was full of new ideas and was confident that culture—what people believed and thought—was man-made and thus could be changed. The Old World, the Ancién Regime, could be transformed and made anew. It was an age of revolution, and it’s not surprising that the French Revolution and other revolutions occur in in the wake of the American Revolution.
The notion of equality was really crucial. When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth. It is the most powerful statement ever made in our history, and it lies behind almost everything we Americans believe in and attempt to do.

There’s a lot to like here. It’s worth reading to see how much the actual Communists object to the assumptions that the Times is making.

CIA disease

It's not just a disease of the CIA, of course; confirmation bias is always trying to undermine our ability to face facts.  But times of great political hysteria are fertile ground.

People are always trying to persuade me that we are more polarized and generally crazy these days than ever before.  I'm not really seeing it.  I was just reading a biography of William Bowditch, noting that around the turn of the 18th century many public-spirited men were shocked at the damage suffered by old and valued friendships from bitter disagreements over federalism.

Our Thanksgiving dinner was apolitical, though it's true that it was a small gathering of like-minded neighbors that presented no special challenges in that direction.  I wore my "It's beginning to look a lot like Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself" holly-and-berries sweatshirt without fear of giving offense.  It was a slightly somber gathering, though.  Our neighbor, whom we had expected to join us, is gravely ill in an ICU in Houston, the victim of completely unexpected complications from minor surgery.  Life is fleeting.  We are thankful for our health.

Our labrador lightened the atmosphere by eating half a trayful of the white turkey meat while we were distracted out on the porch.  Luckily there was still plenty, but she was a little restless and gaseous all night, the rotten creature.  She hasn't learned a thing and would do it again in a heartbeat.

The Rolled Turkey

It came out pretty well, given that it was my first attempt. Slow-roasted for 14 hours, then finished at a higher temperature for half an hour to crisp the skin.

As promised, three kinds of pie, so lighter on the traditional side dishes than usual. I hope your feast went well also.

Thanksgiving

Nothing is ever as good as it could be, and often I think of the ways in which it could be better; but for all the ways in which it is good, and for the very experience of goodness at all, I give thanks.

Brilliance by Discipline

Instapundit linked this study to explore different ideas among students about male vs. female professors. I want to point out, instead, the good things it says about philosophy professors! They are the most brilliant, above average on funny, and below average on both meanness and rudeness.

Tax The Poor!

It’s good for them.

Carter Page Requests An Audience

Well, now.

Watch Out For The Traumatized, Part II

Exactly as predicted, the government has chosen the easy and wicked route.

A small percentage of teens who are depressed or bullied will respond with violence. After reading a recent report on school violence from the U.S. Secret Service, however, you’d be led to believe that every one of them is a potential mass-murderer.

“Secret Service research findings [indicate that] targeted school violence is preventable,” the U.S. Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) Director James Murray writes in a new NTAC report. All schools have to do is treat any student in any sort of distress as a potential danger to everybody else and respond accordingly....

"This approach is intended to identify students of concern, assess their risk for engaging in violence or other harmful activities, and implement intervention strategies to manage that risk. The threshold for intervention should be low, so that schools can identify students in distress before their behavior escalates to the level of eliciting concerns about safety.... The fact that half of the attackers had received one or more mental health services prior to their attack indicates that mental health evaluations and treatments should be considered a component of a multidisciplinary threat assessment, but not a replacement. Mental health professionals should be included in a collaborative threat assessment process that also involves teachers, administrators, and law enforcement."

Seeking help, then, is a red flag. That should not have any negative unintended consequences whatsoever.

Also, suffering poverty means that you are dangerous:

The Secret Service lists the following household “difficulties” as contributing to the likelihood of a young person one day coming to school with the purpose of murdering his associates:

• Bankruptcy

• Eviction

• Homelessness

• Failure to Pay Child Support

• Foreclosure

• Fraudulent Check(s)

• Lien

• Low Income

• Poverty

Naturally, of course, the remedy for your weakness is that your whole family should be disarmed by government agents.

Most attackers used firearms, and firearms were most often acquired from the home: Many of the attackers were able to access firearms from the home of their parents or another close relative. While many of the firearms were unsecured, in several cases the attackers were able to gain access to firearms that were secured in a locked gun safe or case. It should be further noted, however, that some attackers used knives instead of firearms to perpetrate their attacks. Therefore, a threat assessment should explore if a student has access to any weapons, with a particular focus on weapons access at home. Schools, parents, and law enforcement must work together rapidly to restrict access to weapons in those cases when students pose a risk of harm to themselves or others.

Once again, exactly as predicted. "Since it is the only thing that is really likely to work, though, injustice is the most probable outcome of future government action on this issue. My sense is that we have much more to fear from any government attempts to address mass killings than we have to fear from the tiny number of killers, bad as they are."

Traditional Mongolian Music Vs. The Hu

After being introduced to The Hu here recently, I checked out the original folk style. I don't remember ever hearing Mongolian throat singing before, and I haven't decided what I think about it yet.

Here are two songs about Chinggis Khaan (apparently the Mongolian transliteration for the name), one traditional and one by The Hu.

The lyrics below the second video introduced me to Tengrism, a Central Asian religion which apparently is undergoing a revival since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Interesting stuff.

Great Moments in Journalism

H/t: Bob on the FOB.

The Family that Slays Together, Stays Together

Dateline Florida: "A home invasion was stopped by almost every member of the family. The family awoke to the noise of the burglar trying to break in and everyone grabbed their guns. One member of the family fired a warning shot through the glass to deter the burglar but was unsuccessful. The intruder broke through the door and which point every member fired at him."

Warning shots are never a good idea. Shoot to stop, or don't shoot at all.

PETA vs UGA

The notoriously idiotic vegan activists demand that UGA permanently retire Uga, the beloved bulldog mascot.


That dog has a happier life than most people.

Cultural Revolution

Most of the way through an article on how crazy Progressives are boosting Trump's re-election chances, a Maoist note:

These stories in which doctors lop the breasts off of teenage girls, or peeling the skin off a boy’s penis and inverting it to make a fake vagina, are a long, long way from Yale Stadium or the faculty lounge. But there is a continuum here. Left-wing extremists are controlling institutions, mostly because liberals within those institutions and fields are afraid to say no to whatever the extremists want. And conservative lawmakers are afraid to touch this stuff too.

Many, many people feel powerless to stop these cultural revolutionaries. (By the way, I’ve reached out to the reader who commented here the other day about his wife, a Chinese immigrant who saw people killed during the madness of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, bursting into tears when she saw the raging mob at Berkeley on the TV news the other night; she wept because she fears for her adopted country, and doesn’t understand why Americans can’t see the mounting danger. I am going to have an interview with her in this space soon.)

We do need to figure out how to put the brakes on some of this stuff. Perhaps educating the young about Mao is one way to do it; the "Red Guards" these young activists are emulating didn't end up in a happy place. The reason was the same: even for someone as committed to cultural revolution as Mao, cultural stability turned out to be important enough that his own nurtured movement could not be allowed to continue to exist.

Aristotle Ascends

Via Arts & Letters Daily, scientists are echoing Aristotle -- and have much to learn yet. One example:

Edward Feser, in his contribution to Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives, draws a parallel between this teaching and the idea of the “block universe,” which is based on the theories of Einstein and his teacher Hermann Minkowski. The block-universe concept holds that we must understand time as a fourth dimension tied up with the three dimensions of space, so that the universe is like a four-dimensional block that contains all of space and time — past, present, and future. Minkowski would refer to this four-dimensional block as “world,” because the mathematical formulation suggested that all of time is already established, just like space. Our common-sense notion that space is static, allowing us to move around within it, whereas time “flows,” taking us along with it, is illusory. Just as the universe doesn’t have an “up” or “down,” so likewise there is no past or future, except in the sense that it seems that way to us. Much like for Parmenides there is only the Whole, for Minkowski and Einstein there is only the “world.”

Feser’s critique of the “block universe” borrows key moves from Aristotle’s responses to Parmenides, though because he does not explicitly engage with them, it is unclear to what extent he is aware of the borrowing. In the beginning of the Physics, Aristotle explicitly distinguishes Parmenides and his disciple Melissus from other thinkers whom he calls “students of nature” (physiologoi). Parmenides and Melissus were not students of nature, according to Aristotle, because they denied motion, relegating it to mere appearance: “To investigate whether Being is one and motionless is not a contribution to the science of Nature.” The teaching that change is an illusion is not a teaching on nature, according to Aristotle, because it does not explore the origins or birth of things. Aristotle says he sees no requirement to engage seriously with this teaching in the Physics (remember, physis means both “nature” and “birth”), just as the geometer is not required to engage with those who reject his premises. (As we shall see, Aristotle nonetheless does briefly engage with Parmenides later in the Physics.)

Feser’s essay is constructed as a series of ducks and dodges that allow the Aristotelian idea of change or motion to survive the various challenges of the block universe’s severe determinism, in which the future is already fixed. It isn’t until the end of the essay that Feser hits on the most forceful point, the one that most closely resembles Aristotle: Even if the universe is really a four-dimensional block, “there would be nothing about its nature that requires that a block universe of precisely that sort, or any block universe at all for that matter, exists.” Just as Parmenides’ denial of motion is not an explanation of the origins of things, so the block universe is not an explanation of why we have this universe rather than some other one. The theory that explains the universe as a whole cannot explain the particulars. But note how Aristotle’s original critique is more forceful than Feser’s: Those who do not examine coming-into-being, and thereby fail to explain the world as it is, do not examine nature.

This should be a sobering call to today’s scientists, for Parmenides’ reasoning was sound in many respects, and our thinking today strongly resembles his.

Well worth reading in full, though I dissent from his understanding of Aristotle as offering 'privation' and 'actuality vs. potentiality' as two different ways of overcoming the Parmenides problem. To say that a doctor comes from a non-doctor and to say that a non-doctor realizes their potential to become an actual doctor is just two ways of saying the same thing. As Aristotle also says, in his description of potentiality, 'one cannot make a saw out of wool.' That is to say that wool is even more deprived of the actuality of the saw than is raw iron. The "two" models are just different ways of describing one.

Augustine's interpretation of evil as privation of the good shows how this can work. Can an all-good God make evil, and if not, how can evil come to be? Augustine's answer is that evil is a failure to achieve the fullness of the good inherent in God's creation. Evil is a privation. Notice that this is just another way of saying that evil is a failure to actualize the potential good in something.

Still, discussions of this sort are exactly the kind of 'learning from Aristotle' that we could all stand to do. "Aretê, boys: You've either got it or you don't."

The CIA vs. Donald Trump

A review of Andy McCarthy's new book, by Spengler, that veers into some strange territory toward the end.

DB: PSYOP Authorized to Wear Tin-Foil Berets

The metallic new beret comes as a compromise between the Special Forces community and the Psychological Operations community. While PSYOP argues that it was technically the first SOF organization, tracing its lineage to PSYWAR, Special Forces argues that PSYOP is dumb.

Haters.

Also in satire, the BB has a photo that's worth the price of admission.

Taking the fifth back

In our ordinary lives, we often draw unfavorable inferences from information someone chooses to withhold from us.  The impeachment fiasco, however, reminds us why the Constitution forbids using the accused's silence as a presumption of guilt.

Adam Schiff is reduced from impeachment by hearsay all the way down to impeachment by inference: The fallback position is that President Trump did something "incompatible" with his office: impeachment by irreconcilable differences.

REH was Right, Again

The concept of the world of Conan, by Robert E. Howard, is that civilization rises and falls many more times than history tells us. This, worlds of advanced culture and adventures untold of exist to be explored.

Evidence for that proposition continues to appear.

REH was not alone, of course; not even the first.

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks. But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great cities long builded and lost for us in the original night; colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees; in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples; standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world. The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized. Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.

Missing the point

CNN mysteriously got a sneak peak at IG Horowitz's upcoming Dec. 9 report on the scandal that led to a FISA warrant ostensibly aimed at investigating Carter Page as a clandestine Russian agent. CNN is spinning the story this way:  yes, it's true that a lower-level FBI lawyer falsified a document that supported the FISA warrant, but the FBI has fired him, and anyway any "mistakes" (I love it) fail to "undermine the premise for the FBI’s investigation."  CNN characterizes the premise as the notion “that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.”

What was that premise again?  As Andrew McCarthy explains, CNN evidently is not (yet) trying to deny that the criminally faked supporting document could undermine any credible allegation that Carter Page was complicit in any Russian interference.  The important fudge here is CNN's startling assertion that "the premise for the FBI's investigation" is Russian election interference.  That might be a premise for some kinds of inquiry, but not a FISA warrant.

If an adequate premise for a FISA warrant were a mere suspicion of Russian skullduggery in an election, the Crossfire Hurricane gambit would be golden. That the Russians in fact attempted to interfere is not in controversy.  The problem for Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, et al. (and the Obama White House may be included in that "al."), is that a FISA warrant to eavesdrop on a U.S. citizen requires a lot more than a suspicion that Russia is up to no good. It requires a showing that the citizen targeted for eavesdropping, Carter Page, is knowingly engaged in clandestine activities, potentially in violation of federal criminal law, on Russia's behalf.

Page has never been charged with a crime. Nor did the architects of Crossfire Hurricane inform the FISA court that Page had cooperated with the FBI in the past in successful prosecutions against Russian provocateurs.  What does the basis for fingering Page as a Russian agent look like if you subtract whatever the fake document said, and add in the FBI's long track record of successful reliance on Page's voluntary assistance reporting on illicit Russian overtures?  What's more, might these changes in the FISA presentation have undercut the FBI's and DOJ's showing that intrusive eavesdropping was necessary because other investigative tools were unavailable?

As McCarthy says,

If the narrative taking shape is that there may have been some abuses but it doesn’t change the fact that Russia meddled in the election, that misses the point. The questions are: What was the FBI’s evidence — which it represented as verified information in the warrant application — that the Trump campaign was in a cyberespionage conspiracy with the Kremlin? What evidence led the Bureau and the Justice Department to allege that Carter Page — who as late as spring 2016 was apparently cooperating in a federal prosecution of Russian spies — was a willful agent of the Putin regime engaged in clandestine activities against his own country?

When we find out what the fudged evidence was, we'll be better able to issue comforting assurances that it was extraneous to pinning suspicion on Carter Page.  It won't be enough for the FBI and CNN to conclude airily that the faked document was extraneous to the general idea that the Kremlin was trying to stir up trouble in a U.S. election.

Rolled Turkey

We've eaten a lot of turkey over the years, so much so that it's not an exciting meal even on Thanksgiving. In lean years we'd buy frozen turkeys after Christmas, when the price would hit annual lows, and store twelve or fourteen of them in our big freezer. That works out to about one a month, and turkeys take a while to eat, so at this point I'm not generally fired up to have turkey ever at all.

So I'm going to try something very different this year. Here's a French fellow explaining the concept with a chicken, but it'll work on a turkey too.



With an interesting stuffing and some decent spices, that might make for something a little less dull than another roast turkey.

America, Republic and Empire

Quite a remarkable piece of thought-provoking writing. Dr. Codevilla, for those of you who know his work.

John Soloman Again

Tex mentioned him the other day. He's no longer employed by any reputable journalistic outlet as far as I can tell, and The Hill is 'reviewing' his earlier reports. In these intensely partisan times, that could mean that he's been publishing accurate information that defies the media's preferred narrative and that of their political allies; it could also mean that he's violated standards in a way that should be a serious concern to readers. I'm not sure which is the case, or if it's a mixture of both.

In any case, he has a blog now. If you're interested in his side of the story, that's where you can find it.

The NYT Against Impeachment

Not the NYT itself, not as a corporate body, but they did publish an opinion piece against it. Good for them: it's more than I expected. It's a pretty good piece.

Mr. Trump’s opponents treat norms as if they were laws. But Mr. Trump openly campaigned in 2016 as someone who would rescind the nonlegal norms of American politics. He said he would “drain the swamp.” Washington’s traditional way of doing business, the legal but corrupt trade in money and influence, was something he was elected to attack. He has only contributed to the problem in the eyes of his critics, but for supporters the goal remains the same.

Mr. Trump was also elected to transform America’s foreign relations. The nation’s leadership in both parties and the Civil Service had embroiled the country in endless wars and a string of humiliations. That Mr. Trump considers officials serving in places like Ukraine to be part of the problem he was elected to solve is no secret. The testimony such officials have so far offered during impeachment hearings bears him out: Their view of American objectives is different from his....

Testimony at this week’s impeachment hearings from Gordon Sondland and other witnesses only underscores the point: President Trump believed it was right to call for Ukraine’s new president, elected on an anti-corruption agenda, to dig into and make public the links between his country, its government, its oligarchs and oil companies, and American political figures like the Bidens. The questions he was pursuing were bigger than the 2020 election.

If the investigations he was pursuing were reasonably indicated by the facts, it's not wrong to have asked for them even if it also benefits him politically (and then only in theory, contingent on the increasingly-unlikely success of Joe Biden in becoming his opponent). All of the witnesses this week agreed that the Hunter Biden matter created at least an appearance of conflict of interest; given Joe Biden's position as a high public official, and the direct relationship between himself and firing the man prosecuting his son's company, that seems correct. If there is a clear appearance of a conflict of interest, what could be more proper than to ask for it to be investigated to clear up whether there was wrongdoing? We have a treaty with Ukraine governing just that kind of investigation, one that was signed by Bill Clinton and that Joe Biden himself voted to ratify.

I hear Fiona Hill loud and clear when she says she was angry when she discovered that the President had set up a parallel process to her own integrated, complex interagency process -- one that was operating without coordinating with them and pursuing goals she and others in the interagency thought unwise and even against American interests. I can understand how that would make you angry. In Iraq once we found out accidentally that Division had sent a guy who reported directly to the Commanding General to meddle in a matter likely to produce violence in our AO, without anyone telling us or warning us. Of course we were understandably angry about that, and the complaint is a rational one -- in our case, it put our lives and our people's lives at risk, just through a lack of coordination. Anger is a reasonable response in such a case.

Nobody thought, though, that the Commanding General should be relieved over it. Clearly he had authority to do it. Clearly here, too, the President has authority to override the interagency, or even just to ignore the interagency. The chain of command does not place the consensus of the bureaucracies over the elected president. As the author of this piece says, too, this particular president was elected precisely on the argument that the bureaucracies needed to be drained of influence. That's what he said he was going to do if elected, and he was -- like it or not, and many of us would have preferred someone else, in my case Jim Webb. Our preferred candidates made arguments too, and they didn't win.

UPDATE: The Nation also publishes an article against.

The Mysterious Case of Carter Page

One of the shoes we've been waiting to see drop in the "Russia Russia Russia!" case was that of Carter Page, the guy against whom the FISA warrant was actually issued. What's been quite mysterious about his case is the complete lack of charges brought against him for anything at all. The government convinced the FISC that he was dangerous enough to require a robust intelligence collection effort, which allowed them to intercept every communication he had with anyone, and all of their communications as well. The Mueller team prosecuted crimes aggressively, whether or not they were actually related to Russia -- indeed, the folks who went to jail all went down for something else.

So why was Carter Page never charged with anything? Surely, in collecting all of his communications, they must have found something? Surely they'd charge him with anything at all to justify the collection effort, rather than leave it looking as if the very collection effort hadn't proven justified by the facts?

Now we get some evidence for the first time about what's been going on with him.

Horowitz reportedly found that the FBI employee who modified the FISA document falsely stated that he had "documentation to back up a claim he had made in discussions with the Justice Department about the factual basis" for the FISA warrant application, the Post reported. Then, the FBI employee allegedly "altered an email" to substantiate his inaccurate version of events. The employee has since been forced out of the bureau.

In its initial 2016 FISA warrant application, the FBI flatly called Page "an agent of a foreign power."

Sources told Fox News last month that U.S. Attorney John Durham's separate, ongoing probe into potential FBI and Justice Department misconduct in the run-up to the 2016 election through the spring of 2017 has transitioned into a full-fledged criminal investigation -- and that Horowitz's report will shed light on why Durham's probe has become a criminal inquiry.

This will be interesting.

Boys Need Fathers

Two pieces on the same subject, both by women. One of them is by Shireen Qudosi, who works on counter-extremism projects and thus naturally connects the issue to that of the mass killing problem. Some of you mentioned lack of fathers in the comments to that post, so here's some additional support for your ideas. (Here's more.)

The second is from Belinda Brown in the UK. I'm not very convinced by some of her evidence about the difference between boys and girls -- if girls 'don't want any conflict' and 'try to be equals' and 'forget who won' in conflicts between themselves, I've never noticed it, but I have noticed girls forming intense friendships that fall apart and never recover over internal conflicts. I've also noticed girls forming larger cliques with rigid hierarchies. Although actually her structure is ambiguous enough that I'm not sure if she means 'girls' or 'female chimpanzees' in that section, so perhaps it holds for chimps. In any case, her real topic is boys, and what she says there is more interesting.

Both of the pieces reference mythic-language books about the meaning of manhood, both of which have the word "Warrior" in the title. My sense is that it is society's attempts to get rid of the warrior aspects that is causing a lot of the problems for boys and men; perhaps it lies at the back of the whole of the problem.

"Crying Fowl"

The headline's terrible pun is not the worst thing about this story.

Raising Standards

The Army has introduced an "Expert Soldier's Badge." At first the idea received a lot of mockery from infantrymen of my acquaintance because they expected it to be analogous to the "Combat Action Badge," which allowed non-infantry soldiers to obtain something like the "Combat Infantryman Badge," the analog in this case being the "Expert Infantryman Badge."

However, the new badge is proving to be a genuinely good idea, as shown by the fact that soldiers are failing to earn it.

Once a season when those not assigned to the infantry branch could sit back and watch their 11-series counterparts slog around with rucksacks and face paint as they performed a (mandatory) evaluation of their skills- the dreaded EIB.

No more, however. With the introduction of the Expert Soldier Badge (the Combat Action Badge’s equivalent to the Expert Infantry Badge and Expert Field Medical Badge), troops of all MOSs will now how to suffer through trials and field problems in order to prove their worth.

So far, it seems, that is a pretty tall order.

According to Military.com, of the 95 soldiers who began Expert Soldier Badge testing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, VA, on Sunday, only three remained by Thursday.

Between the fitness test and land navigation (day and night) it appears that well over half the participants were either physically unfit or unable to read a map, with 59 participants being cut on the first day of testing.

“Either you meet the standard or you do not meet the standard … and that is the way it should be,” Command Sgt. Major Edward Mitchell, CSM for the Army’s Center for Initial Military Training.

Of the three Soldiers who remain, none are ranked below sergeant- an E-5, an E-6 and an O-3 remain.

I'm a fan of the new Army Combat Fitness Test for similar reasons. The high failure rate is a good sign, not a bad sign.

I believe the same thing about the failure rates at universities; a university whose four-year graduation rate is much above 50% is probably not in fact a very good school, no matter how highly it is rated or how glorious its reputation. True challenge is what produces the virtues that allow people to rise to the top. The more certain success in a task, the less virtue likely developed in its pursuit.

So good for the Army. Now keep it up.

An Eventful, Uneventful Day

It's amazing to watch reactions to today's impeachment hearings; both sides are sure the game is over, and their side won. Neither side won, or really even moved the ball today. We did get more confirmation that the government isn't really under the control of elected officials anymore, and that's the central problem this whole affair has underlined.

Anyway I spent the day in beautiful Western North Carolina, where the people are friendly and no one ever mentions politics. I met a guy called "Swagnar" who decorates his wine shop with runes, and his very nice assistant Liz who was fascinated to hear about the process of making mead. My wife discussed art with various people, that being her thing. We began laying in supplies for a pie-heavy Thanksgiving, which by request of the eaters is likely to be slim on traditional elements in favor of many desserts.

Hey, we're the adults now. We can do whatever we want.

I guess there was another Democratic debate, but I can't be bothered with it. There's already no candidate I want to be the next President; in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't want another President at all. At some point I'll have to take an interest in trying to limit the damage, but there's no good to be had from this process any longer. It's all about trying to limit the harm it does.

On which subject, I have to change health care plans again. None of the plans available are remotely affordable, not now that the government has taken it all over. Does anyone know of a good alternative, maybe a co-op? Some of you have said you liked those things in the past, and if there's a good one that might serve my part of the country, I'm ready to stop paying the price of a new car every year for coverage with a deductible that's the size of a good used motorcycle. Nothing's been so devastating to our family's wealth than these attempts to make health care 'affordable.' I haven't seen a doctor since 2014, but I've paid many tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of being able to pay only several more thousand dollars a year if I need to do.

That's moxie

It can't be easy explaining to people why they'd want to move to South Dakota, but one advertising company grasped the nettle:

Enter the state's new advertising campaign. It starts about as far from the target market of South Dakota as possible — on Mars.

"Mars," the commercial begins. "The air: not breathable. The surface: cold and barren. But thousands are lining up for a chance to go and never come back."

Cut to images of South Dakota as the narrator continues:

"South Dakota. Progressive. Productive. And abundant in oxygen. Why die on Mars when you can live in South Dakota?"

The final graphic reads: "South Dakota. Plenty of jobs. Plenty of air."

This is all background to more current messaging efforts, in which the South Dakota governor reassures citizens, "Meth.  We're on it."

Grave Concerns

Politico worries that the Supreme may dump the task of legislating onto Congress.

Watch Out for the Traumatized

Vice News reports on a study on mass shooters.

A new Department of Justice-funded study of all mass shootings — killings of four or more people in a public place — since 1966 found that the shooters typically have an experience with childhood trauma, a personal crisis or specific grievance, and a “script” or examples that validate their feelings or provide a roadmap. And then there’s the fourth thing: access to a firearm.

That last one is an example of what philosophers call "trivially true," i.e., a truth easily arrived at because of the definition of the class. Obviously, in a study of mass shooters, access to a firearm is going to prove to be one of the things they had. I've often argued that we're rather lucky that our mass killers use firearms as opposed to bombs, which are easily made (in Iraq, 'home made explosive' was readily mixed by children using common household chemicals) and often kill vastly more people than a shooter can manage. This decision to focus on the class of 'shooters' rather than the class of 'killers' tends to lead people to believe that if you could eliminate guns, the problem could be solved 'as it has been in civilized countries,' but Denmark recently closed its border with Sweden over the mass bombing problem.

The problem generalizes. Richard Fernandez recently pointed out that the biggest mass killings used fire, which is quite simply deployed by anyone. Trucks, as were used in the Nice attack in France, are also both more deadly than guns and nearly impossible to ban from cities: without trucks to carry in the food every day, the city could not exist. You could go back to horses, I suppose: have the truckers stage up in yards outside the city center, transfer their goods to carts, and have the horses pull them into town for distribution. That's a pretty costly solution for the problem of mass killings, which are statistically tiny even though they are emotionally disturbing to observe.

So if technology is not the right place to focus, that brings us to the other three factors:

1) Childhood trauma,

2) A 'personal crisis or specific grievance,' and,

3) A validating script.

The third factor is probably intractable in the age of the Internet, and at least in America it has to be balanced against protected liberties. For example, the 'jihadist' ideology taught by the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS) can be contested, but it has to be conceptually severed from the protected freedom of religion, including the practice of Islam. Yet the conceptual roots of 'jihadism' are in the faith, and will come to be known to anyone who studies it closely; and anyone who studies the great scholars of Islam will find much support for the idea. Avicenna, that great philosopher, describes jihad as a kind of double good in his Metaphysics of the Healing, because it brings one closer to God's will while also providing you access to practical goods like slaves captured in the war. The philosopher Averroes, in a reflection on Plato's Republic, agrees with Plato that the best kind of women should be admitted to a kind of equality with the best kind of men, and that this equality means that they should be allowed to join in jihad and the taking of slaves and wealth. The Reliance of the Traveler, one of the great medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence, is a favorite example of Andy McCarthy's (who came to know it while prosecuting the World Trade Center bomber, an earlier example of mass killings by bomb).

Apart from not suppressing Islam, you can't suppress (and ought to encourage) the study of Avicenna, especially. In any case, the 'road map' certainly can't be suppressed without trying to drive Islam out of the world. The best you can do is to acknowledge it, and work with those within the community of Muslims who oppose people pursuing violent jihad to try to convince as many people as possible that it's not a legitimate path. Ultimately, though, some will be convinced, and in part because the other side probably has a better case to make about what Muhammad and his companions really meant; certainly about what the great philosophers of his tradition meant. The case is easier when the other side doesn't have a better argument, as is true for example of Klan-type movements that are based on nonsensical readings of science and demonstrably bad readings of history. But then, too, the road to success doesn't lie through suppressing the 'road map,' but in engaging it to illuminate its problems.

Attempts to suppress the 'road map,' meanwhile, run into First Amendment free speech protections. New Zealand made it a criminal offense to share recordings and videos and manifestos from the Christchurch shooter; that's an affront to basic liberty that cannot be tolerated. In Europe, meanwhile, they've apparently decided that the bigger threat is that people will draw conclusions hostile to Islam, and end up trying to suppress not the road map that's causing the bombings, but the one that could potentially cause anti-Muslim violence. All of these things are out of order with human liberty, and to be rejected. Even if you didn't reject them, though, you would find them ineffective without a more general abandonment of the ideals of self-government: you will have to suppress the press talking about these things (and so convince the press that it is unethical to do their actual job as journalists, and then suppress those members of the press who continue to do it). But the courts are going to end up trying some of these mass killing cases, so you'll end up having to suppress citizen knowledge of the facts of cases in open court. That ends up damaging the rights of the accused, who cannot rely on a secret court to also be a fair court; and it destroys our ability to keep tabs on the government, which destroys self-government as a basic idea.

So Factor Three is probably not going to be where we make much progress. You can try to educate people out of these road maps, but you can't eliminate them.

Factor Two is a universal human experience. You can look for people who are undergoing a personal crisis, and potentially make some progress by making help available to people in getting through such crises as they occur. You can't eliminate crises, though, nor grievances either.

So that leads us to Factor One: childhood trauma. Here we readily identify a specific class of people who could be subject to greater scrutiny as potential mass killers. That is to say that, recognizing them as having been victimized once, we shall be sure to continue to victimize them by treating them as dangerous hazards who can't be trusted as much as other people. Even if that conclusion were true (and these killers are so small a percentage of society that it probably isn't even true), it would be fundamentally unjust to punish people for having been traumatized.

Since it is the only thing that is really likely to work, though, injustice is the most probable outcome of future government action on this issue. My sense is that we have much more to fear from any government attempts to address mass killings than we have to fear from the tiny number of killers, bad as they are.

Another Good Guy with a Gun

According to USAToday:

DUNCAN, Oklahoma – Three people were killed Monday in a shooting outside a Walmart that ended when a bystander pointed a gun at the shooter, police and a witness said.

...

Duncan resident Aaron Helton, an Army veteran, said he was at the Walmart at about 9:45 a.m. local time when he heard nine shots and saw the gunman, gun in hand. Another man walked up, put a pistol to the gunman’s head and told him to stop shooting, Helton said.

Helton said he saw the gunman was turning the gun on himself and looked away. Police did not immediately confirm reports that the shooter took his own life.

But the shooter is dead.

This will be chalked up by many (such as OK State Rep. Forrest Bennett (D)) as another example of gun violence, which it is, but it will not be chalked up by many of the same people as another example of armed citizens stopping murderers.

The Birth of Dragons

It came earlier than history believes, but what else would you expect about dragons than that they are ancient?