Worst Putin stooge ever

Don Surber tries to understand the received wisdom:

Having endured 3 years of this conspiracy theory by the tinfoil-hatted mainstream pundits, I am left with 10 questions.

Why did Putin want to Make America Great Again?

Why did Putin want America to rollback unnecessary regulations?

Why did Putin want Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, and 50 new conservative judges on America's appellate courts?

Why did Putin want our personal income and corporate tax rates cut?

Why did Putin want our unemployment rate dropped to 3.5%?

Why did Putin want us to become a net exporter of oil for the first time in 70 years?

Why did Putin want us to replace our broken fences with a 30-foot wall along the Mexican border?

Why did Putin want us to renegotiate trade deals, and to walk away from TPP and the Paris Climate Thingamabob?

Why did Putin want us to move our embassy to Jerusalem?

And lastly, why did Putin want us to impose more economic sanctions on Russia?

I am beginning to think that President Trump is as big a failure at being a puppet as he is a failure at being Hitler.

Don't call my bluff

I didn't see this tactic coming:

Senate Democrats are quietly talking about asking Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to hold articles of impeachment in the House until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) agrees to a fair rules package for a Senate trial.

Senate Democrats explained that this is their only chance to exert leverage over Mitch McConnell, who has his caucus completely lined up and won't need to get the consent of any intransigent Dems to whatever trial procedure he chooses to jam through on short notice.

Senate Dems to McConnell:  "Why, if you don't promise to make the Senate impeachment trial procedure less of a kangaroo court than we just inflicted on the country in the House, we'll . . . we'll . . . we'll get our House Dem colleagues to refuse to approve the articles of impeachment in the full House vote, that's what we'll do. Then where will you be?"

Situations like this make me think of the old joke about the missionaries being fattened up for the cannibal pot.  Told that their skins will be used to make canoes, one of them grabs a fork, pierces his arms and legs repeatedly, and yells "I'll fix your darn canoe!"

On the other hand, if Pelosi were looking for an excuse for a mercy killing for the articles of impeachment . . . .  But nah.  For all the talk about not whipping the vote, she must know what a disaster a down-vote in the full House would be.  They'd be lining up to use that new 988 number.  At least if this absurd business goes to trial, they can blame their loss on the Republican trial procedure, and in that light, the more rushed and unfair the better.  After all, the Dems' holding the initial investigation in a darkened dungeon did immeasurable good for the President.

Ace

Common Military Terminology Explained

Language warning.

House Judiciary Committee Approves 2 Articles of Impeachment

According to USA Today:

WASHINGTON – For the third time U.S. history, the House of Representatives will vote on the impeachment of a president after the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump on Friday.

The committee voted along party lines to approve both impeachment articles following a marathon hearing that went late into Thursday evening.

The articles – one on President Donald Trump's alleged abuse of power and the other on obstruction of Congress during the impeachment inquiry -- were both approved in separate votes by a 23-17 margin with Democrats for and Republicans against.

What are your predictions? I think the House Democrats will make the vote on the best day for their primaries to make the best political use of something they know will fail in the Senate, and they will impeach on a party-line vote. But I'm sleep-deprived at the moment, so you shouldn't listen to me.

How about you? What do you think will happen next?

Witness protection

Now it's not enough to leave California, you have to change your identity and avoid ever doing business with anyone there again.

Whee

One of the most fun parts of a blowout conservative election is the editorial scrambling and the losers' bitter explanations for their failure.  Yesterday brought us the priceless "We won the argument, if not the election," which has to be up there with "I can't imagine how he got elected, no one I know voted for him."

There's also the 2016 Krugman Pronouncement:  this unexpected trouncing of my allies spells doom for the economy.  We may never recover.  Last week's UK editorials had largely given up on Labor's victory, so they spent a lot of time worrying that the Conservatives wouldn't command a convincing majority.  Maybe they would try and fail to cobble together a coalition.

CNBC worried earlier this week that the pound wouldn't fully recover from damaged inflicted by the recent parliamentary stalemate.  Ink was lavished over the danger that businesses wouldn't invest in an atmosphere of uncertainty over their beloved EU.  Interested readers of that CNBC analysis may glance at the bottom of the page and find today's update:  sterling surges on historic BoJo win.  The author can't help speculating, though, on how this stunning turn of events might still give a little hope that the Brexit stalemate could still drag itself along by its fingernails:

The analyst added that if a big majority over all other parties is realized then Johnson may now have the scope to “ignore the Brexiteers in his party and provide businesses with some certainty by quickly extending the transition period.”

I'm sure that's what the surging sterling tells us about what business investors--and voters--want to see: a further extended "transition" period.  The whole thing has simply been too rushed and abrupt.  On the other hand, from Johnson's victory speech this morning:

"And with this mandate and this majority we will at last be able to do what?" (Crowd shouts "Get Brexit done".)

By the way, all 18 Brexit defectors lost their seats. There's a convincing mandate for delay for you.

Meanwhile, the execrable anti-semite Communist Corbyn says he will resign, but not right away.  Certainly before the next election, but he's taking some time for "reflection."  Not to be outdone, everyone's favorite spybuster, Christopher Steele, announces that BoJo is a Russian asset.  As Sarah Hoyt says, in the future we'll all be Russian spies for 15 minutes.

BREXIT At Last

The voters have reinforced the government’s clarity over in the UK. Good for them — the chaos will be over, at least. The Resistance was firmly defeated.

Scotland may go independent, and Ireland may unify at long last. A general victory for many good causes.

Just for Fun: A British Vocal Coach Reacts to the Hu

It has the Hu, Tolkein comparisons, and a bubbly young London voice coach reacting to hearing Mongolian throat singing for the first time. Enjoy!

Or, you know, skip it if you're not in to bubbly.

Update: I think English translations have been added to all of the Hu's official videos. Interesting stuff.

A Lot Hangs

Virginia’s New Democratic government will be a lesson to the nation. Which lesson they choose to teach will be one of the major determinants of how 2020 breaks in purple states.

Imponderables

Andy McCarthy on the unwillingness to draw obvious conclusions:  We may never know the motive of those people in the FBI.

A followup from another Powerline post:

Consider one example of the misconduct Horowitz identified. An FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, obtained information that Carter Page, the subject of a FISA order, had gathered intelligence about Russia for that agency and was reliable — a fact that would cut against the notion that Page was working for the Russians. Clinesmith doctored the email conveying this information. He inserted the words “not a source,” even though he had been told that Page was a source.

Clinesmith then passed the doctored email on to the FBI agent who was assigned to affirm under oath the FBI’s allegations to the FISA court. That agent had told Clinesmith that he wanted “a definitive answer to whether Page had ever been a source for another U.S. government agency before he signed the final renewal application.” By doctoring the email, Clinesmith definitively gave the agent an answer he knew was wrong.

We know from direct evidence that Clinesmith was aligned with the resistance to Trump. However, even without that direct evidence, one should conclude, absent a satisfactory explanation for the doctoring, that Clinesmith doctored it intentionally and for a bad motive. Even without direct evidence of bias, one should conclude that Clinesmith was out to get Trump.

These are good points, highlighting the problem of how to address the shocking failures in the FBI and DOJ in the FISA warrant abuse uncovered in Crossfire Hurricane. Were the failures incompetent, or corrupt? That determination makes a difference in how you might craft reform measures.

Incompetence is something fairly easily addressed in performance reviews involving a record of success and a record of violations of policies that have been demonstrated to result in success without injustice or scandal in past investigations. Corruption might instead entail discovering whether someone's otherwise inexplicable mix of failures and successes in achieving law enforcement goals that held up on appeal corresponded with a pattern of various illicit motives. Was the agent taking bribes? Was he a victim of extortion? Was he a political operative? Was he an agent of a foreign power?  Was he merely ambitious, unprincipled, and willing to do whatever his superiors wanted?--in which case the inquiry shifts to the motives of the superiors.  Right up the chain of command.

We can't always roll our eyes and say we can never look into another person's soul and determine a motives with certainty.  A glaring pattern of failures may be exactly what points us to criminal violations.

They've never heard of it either

The Bee:  Trump's popularity surges as nation discovers he obstructed Congress.

The Interdependence of Nature and Nurture

This topic comes up regularly at the Hall, so I've been looking into it. As far as I can tell, the common view among geneticists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists, etc., seems to be that nature and nurture are interdependent.

In fact, what you do or what happens to you can change your genes or change how they influence you. Smoking damages your genes, for example. Children who grow up in isolation, denied any socialization, will effectively have very low IQs, for another.

The following "Lost Lectures" discussion by Emeritus Professor of Human Genetics Steve Jones explains this reasonably well, I think.

We also know that which groups of genes become active can depend entirely on the environment the organism exists in, including the social environment.

Here's a TED Talk by neuroscientist Gene Robinson about his research on bees, genetics, and social environment that discusses this.

My current hypothesis is that the free will vs. determinism debate will play out the same way. To paraphrase Forrest Gump's conclusion on this matter, maybe it's both, happening at the same time. But, I would shape that a little by saying, maybe it's both, interacting with each other continuously.

If you're interested, here's another TED Talk by human evolutionary biologist Irene Gallego Romero. She has further interesting examples, but this is mostly a reiteration of the two above.

A Small Matter

Rep. Mark Meadows -- my Congressman, as it happens -- notes an interesting exchange in the Horowitz hearing:

Cruz: “A lawyer at the FBI creates fraudulent evidence, alters an email that is in turn used as the basis for a sworn statement to the court that the court relies on. Am I stating that accurately?"

Horowitz: "That's correct. That's what occurred"

That's kind of a problem.

NAS Pilots: Arm Us

You're planning to trust them with F-18s, why not a 9mm?

Realization dawns

I'm starting to conclude that Adam Schiff has been lying about, well, everything, all along.  As in practically every word out of his mouth, for years now.  Not just judgment calls, but bright-line facts.

Not Everyone Has Classification Authority

As PJ Media helpfully points out -- Schiff is claiming to have classified some House Intelligence memoranda. Under what authority would he be doing that? There's a complete list of people with original classification authority here. They're all Executive Branch. Who delegated authority to a Congressman?

Did anyone?

A Reason(able) Assumption

On the Horowitz findings:

The FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign's possible collusion with Russia was not politically motivated, but agents involved in the probe made significant and appalling mistakes.

These mistakes should terrify all Americans....

The IG report is a wakeup call: for Republicans who foolishly claimed the FBI's secretive spying process was necessary and unthreatening, for anti-Trump media pundits who uncritically parroted the talking points of top officials, and for any Americans who still think it is worth trading away their liberties. If government agents were this sloppy during a politically charged investigation that they knew would put their entire apparatus under the spotlight, it's safe to assume their normal conduct is even worse.

"Mistakes" is a bit generous, I think. We may see the actions otherwise characterized when the criminal investigation into them comes due.

Fatal Eruption Without Warning in NZ

Five are confirmed dead and several more are missing after a sudden volcanic eruption at a tourist destination on White Island, New Zealand.

Tell Me Another One

Headline: “ Judge Discovers Gun Safety Groups Don’t Offer Gun Safety Classes.”

It’s the “War Games” school of gun safety: the only winning move is not to play.

The stuff I predicted just hasn't happened yet

Hey, it works for climatistas.  The Manhattan Contrarian, noting with dismay the Democrat assumption that government spending is economically expansionary, takes on an economist whose career was marked by nothing more strongly than the failure of every prediction he ever made.  But his equations were great.

"When this war [World War II] comes to an end, more than one out of every two workers will depend directly or indirectly upon military orders. We shall have some 10 million service men to throw on the labor market. We shall have to face a difficult reconversion period during which current goods cannot be produced and layoffs may be great. Nor will the technical necessity for reconversion necessarily generate much investment outlay in the critical period under discussion whatever its later potentialities. The final conclusion to be drawn from our experience at the end of the last war is inescapable--were the war to end suddenly within the next 6 months, were we again planning to wind up our war effort in the greatest haste, to demobilize our armed forces, to liquidate price controls, to shift from astronomical deficits to even the large deficits of the thirties--then there would be ushered in the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”

In fact, after the war, government spending fell 61%, and the result was an economic boom. Economist David Henderson calls Samuelson’s prediction of a post-war depression the single most disastrously wrong economic prediction ever.

FISA Courts and Judicial Deference

I'm far from the only one who objects to these Star Chamber FISA Courts. So does Angelo Codevilla, of whom some of you have heard.  His piece also provides an interesting bit of history regarding FISA.

Repealing FISA will not fix the problems it has caused, but it would stop making them worse.

Certainly, but it also doesn't go far enough.

Repealing FISA needs to repeal, explicitly, and in its own section of the Act of Repeal, the FISA Courts, if only for the sake of public psychology and assurance.

But that's not enough, either; there needs to be a precedential correction, and that will require a cultural change in the society of personnel populating our Article III judicial system.

Judicial deference--that system wherein judges meekly surrender their Constitutional position as a coequal branch of our Federal government and explicitly subordinate themselves to another coequal branch, and worse, to the several subordinate formations of that coequal branch--must come to an end.  (Judicial deference, by that abrogation of coequality, is itself unconstitutional, but that's for a separate writing.)  Travesties like Chevron Deference and all of its several variations--every single one of them--need to be reversed. Not tweaked, like Brown did with Plessy, but reversed. Done away with. Bluntly and pithily; only a sentence or two would be necessary.  Reversal of those precedents are the beginnings of the necessary precedential correction.  The act of reversal, with the necessary plain language, would be the beginning of the necessary cultural change.  This may be beginning in other matters regarding other liberties, but the move needs to broaden and the pace quicken.

Pre-authorize surveillance by the Executive Branch? We already have that mechanism: the 4th Amendment. Within that, our Article III courts already have mechanisms for keeping Warrants and subpoenas secret until the police powers are ready to execute them--right down to no-knock warrants (of some practical utility but questionable constitutionality). Our Article III courts already have mechanisms for conducting secret hearings and sealing records so long, and for as long, as all parties to a case agree to the secrecy.

Eric Hines

The news we hear

Can you remember the stories that most caught your attention throughout 2019?  Looking at this list, I'm drawing some blanks.  I had to Google it to remind myself how upset everyone got over Trump's suggestion that the Squad might want to consider living in some other country they don't hate as much as this one.

Progressives and conservatives both reliably paid attention to Dorian's devastating landfall in the Bahamas, and (to my surprise) they both put the "national emergency at the Mexican border" in second place in their remembered attention.  I couldn't even remember which national emergency that was.

After that, the Jussie Smollett "fake news" story captured a lot of attention on both sides of the aisle, as did the somewhat related "you can't believe anything the powers-that-be tell you" story of Epstein's death.

Right-leaning Americans remember a lot about a state-of-the-union address that left-leaners tuned out completely, focussing instead on various shootings and Trump's attacks on John McCain.  The right noticed the shootings, but less urgently, and tuned out the McCain furor completely.

Both sides noticed the Varsity Blues controversy; I remembered it, too, but had forgotten that the college-admission fraud cases were popularly called that after a TV show of the same name, which I had never heard of before this happened.

Below all these stories in the attention cascade on both sides came the scintillating impeachment story. Kind of amazing, considering it's not even over yet, and already a yawner.  Yeah, yeah, you're finally impeaching him, let us know when Nancy Pelosi puts on an orange robe and lights herself on fire on the capital steps.

There was a government shutdown in there somewhere. I'd already forgotten about it, but partisans on both sides noticed it about equally, more or less at the same rate that they noticed state abortion restrictions, which I did remember.

After that, on the left, people noticed that Biden was in the race, while people on the right noticed that Biden was always sniffing women and children's hair. There were some Mexican tariff threats. Michael Cohen testified before someone or other and said something.

Somewhere in this middle-lower tier, people on the right noticed that Mueller issued a report, but it fell off the radar on the left.  For comparison, in my husband's and my life, the Mueller report probably tops the list, followed by the attempted use of the Ukraine phone call to defibrillate the clinically dead Russia hoax story, perhaps followed by the outstanding economic news.

When you've lost Rolling Stone

Rolling Stone has demonstrated its willingness to print nearly anything, but even Matt Taibbi can't swallow this week's raft of relieved MSM pronouncements that the IG report validated their worldviews:

No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this [Russia hoax] nonsense in print should be embarrassed.

The wrong kind of why

Don't get me wrong, I like scientists to go around asking "why."  But if they're to be successful scientists, they have to development an instinct for the most productive why-questions.  This isn't one:

To provide an example of the role that white empiricism plays in physics, I discuss the current debate in string theory about postempiricism, motivated in part by a question: why are string theorists calling for an end to empiricism rather than an end to racial hegemony?

As Powerline says, it's hard to see this as anything but an embarrassing excuse for an unsuccessful career.

Is This a Blow to Determinism?

This is a story that's interesting enough in itself, but the ramifications philosophically are quite profound. A man who had a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia now carries *only* the DNA of his donor within his sperm cells.  Recent decades since the discovery of DNA has seen an understanding of it grow up that it contains the plans for making us who we are- a pretty deterministic model if taken at face value.  But how much of us is determined (or at least influenced) by DNA and how much goes beyond that- either as 'nurture' or something metaphysical?  It would have really gotten interesting if he'd had children after treatment, but that's no longer possible as he's had a vasectomy after his second child.  This case will certainly create more questions than it answers.

A Gun Measure I Might Be Able to Get Behind

In light of some recent posts, I thought I'd share this idea I ran across on Twitter.  It has merits.

pic.twitter.com/or9b4RN6Sg

— Ghost of Xmas Shipwreck (@markthesnark) December 6, 2019

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.