Just a Coincidence, Of Course
The judge in the Sussman case is married to Lisa Page's attorney. How is it that in a nation of 300,000,000 people the same few names turn up?
Arizona Upcoming
The Arizona Audit is nearly complete, and is planning to release findings in the coming days. In the meantime, Gateway Pundit claims to have data that Arizona has run hundreds of thousands of voter identities past the Social Security Administration in recent months -- with over half finding 'no match.'
The Gateway Pundit post also notes that Maricopa County has its own voter registration system, different from and independent of the ones the rest of the state uses.
Down on the Border
A significant escalation in what was already a crisis prompts the deployment of Texas state police. The Federal police, whose job this actually happens to be, are not stopping the invasion.
Followup on Imperial Pints
Back in May, I had a post that several of you enjoyed on the subject of American versus Imperial pints. Today I learned that the UK government, post-Brexit, is bringing back Imperial pint glasses marked with a crown stamp as assurance of proper measurement. We shall have to keep an eye out to see if those can be ordered for shipment to the United States.
Non-monoculture
My septic drainfield: what we do instead of a lawn. This year's very wet summer made everything especially happy, but the extra moisture from the drainfield is welcome, too.
Jasmine Cain sings Bobby McGee
The song opens with a long bit about how she got from a girl folding t-shirts at biker events to playing them as a headlining rocker. In some ways it's a simple dream: but it's an honest one.
Keep Hauling
I would have posted a trailer for the movie Rat Race with John Cleese and every other living comedian, but they all have too many spoilers. Pretty funny movie.
Instead, here's a trailer for Harry Brown, a very good movie that says a lot of wrong thinks about society.
Happy Saturday, y'all!
Scenes From the DC Entrapment Festival
Apparently there was a demonstration, by someone or other, allegedly in support of J6 detainees. I had to ask a left wing friend for details, because no one I know on the right told me anything about it. Apparently it got big play in the media, though, and the Capitol police put the Wall back up and came in riot gear.
UPDATE: The only person arrested appears to have been an undercover cop.
UPDATE: Another good meme.
UPDATE: And another. One commenter asks, "How out of touch is the FBI if they think this is how we dress?"
LTG(R) Kellogg: Milley Must Go
Retired officers' opinions are worth whatever they're worth, but for whatever it is worth, he served with Milley and respects most of Milley's career. Neverthless, pointing out that Milley has not denied the allegations against him:
Any action on the part of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that gives the impression that he has traveled outside his lane, however slight, should be met with swift and severe recourse. This is not political; this is about the preservation of our democracy....Unauthorized military discussions with a growing adversary about potential action sends a negative signal to an enemy. It conveys confusion, weakness, and calls into question our ability to control our military forces. It also implies that the military, in fact, calls the shots — not the commander in chief. Any undermining of the civilian control of the military is problematic; this was dangerous.
There is more if you'd like to read it.
Where'd I put my magic wand?
A Bloomberg analysis reports the startling fact that wage increases have been outpaced recently by inflation, rendering the new minimum wage an illusory benefit. Who'da thunk? The Bloomberg author bemoans the fact that "the U.S. economy has no system for making sure that wages keep up with inflation."
The fact is, though, that the U.S. economy has a fine way of making sure that wages keep up with inflation: keep increasing productivity and quit trying to control prices. The only way for the real value of wages to increase is for the real value of wage-earners' production to increase. Shutting down workplaces and printing money for stimulus checks isn't the same thing as production.
One Step Away from War... with France?
The French recalled their ambassador to the United States today. Traditionally, this was the step immediately preceding the commencement of hostilities to include acts of war such as blockades. I don't imagine the French intend to attack us, and are merely expressing their anger in the strongest peaceful terms; but it is an amazing place to find ourselves.
You can tell they're angry and want to hurt the Biden administration, because their official public statement is that this reminds them of the sort of thing that Trump would have done. In truth, though, Trump never did anything that caused a major ally to recall its ambassador.
Killing Children
A long time ago, I wrote an infamous piece at BLACKFIVE called "On the Virtues of Killing Children." The virtue was, specifically, that if you allowed the enemy to use children as human shields they'd keep doing it; whereas if you struck them regardless of their use of children as shields, taking all care you could to avoid killing the children but not letting their presence prevent the strike, you would quickly convince militant groups not to use the children in this way. It would provide them no benefit, and all the difficulties that are entailed by having lots of children around when you're trying to work. That piece was referenced by my friend Marc Danzinger, known in the old days as "Armed Liberal" of the Winds of Change blog, at this discussion of a similar scene in the Iliad.
Today, the United States military announced that it recently killed a lot of children -- and none of its enemies -- in that drone strike following the ISIS-K attack on the airport in Kabul. No disciplinary action is expected, per CDRUSCENTCOM, and the US stands by its intelligence.
General Milley says that this strike featured "the same level of rigor" as our other drone strikes. It is more terrifying to consider that he might be speaking the truth about that than otherwise.
What has become of the fighting force in which I once reposed such faith, and whose cause I so gladly joined in my youth? What has become of the virtuous nation whom I thought, once, could be trusted even to strike under such perilous circumstances as when the enemy was willfully using human shields? Was I blind when I was young, as the young often are? Or is it true, as I would rather believe, that corruption has tainted and destroyed what was once a noble force of honor and purpose?
The end of that infamous piece closes with a prayer for mercy and forgiveness for what we have done. That much, at least, remains right.
Fake News Today
DB: Veggie Omelet MRE Came From Lab, Not Wet Market
BB: White House: 'We Must Continue Admitting Unvaccinated Immigrants To Replace All The Workers Who Got Fired For Being Unvaccinated'
BB: CDC Cautions Against Taking the Red Pill
HT: "I Can Fix Him," Says Woman who is Worse
TO: Taliban Takes Lower Manhattan After Biden Administration Leaves NYC 9/11 Commemoration
If you didn't already know
Durham finally produced an indictment yesterday. The New York Post characterizes it accurately as fresh proof that the Clinton campaign bought and paid for the Russia hoax.
I assume Durham will now try to put pressure on criminal defendant Michael Sussman, a Perkins Coie partner, to implicate others. There will be questions of attorney-client privilege, which crumbles in the context of a criminal conspiracy.
FISA Court: The Government Lied To Us About Everything
This seems like it ought to be a bigger story.
A newly declassified ruling from a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in June demonstrates that the government lied about its legal basis for spying on former Trump campaign official Carter Page.The ruling states that the information produced by the FBI’s unlawful investigation into Page was illegally obtained and that it “found violations of the government’s duty of candor in all four applications.”
So, the government lied in every application, in an unlawful investigation based on illegally obtained information. Great. That's the hat trick, then.
AUKUS
The abandonment of Afghanistan and the surrender of Europe to Russian influence via pipeline diplomacy suggested that the Biden administration was planning to focus all of its foreign policy efforts on China. Today we saw the fruit of such moves.
Partly this new alliance is noteworthy for who it leaves out: Canada and New Zealand, the other two of the 'Five Eyes' system. Partly it's noteworthy because we snaked the submarine fleet building contract out from under France, who will be angry. We may be damaging two different core alliances to set up this new front.
Wretchard notes that it looks like we're drawing lines that will exclude some other allies:
[A]s a practical matter the Philippines, Formosa — as Taiwan was once known — and Korea will be hard to defend in the first onslaught of a Pacific War. They will be defended if possible but not to the end. In the event of such a loss, Australia and Japan will be to the US what Britain was in 1940: the last line.
We could approach China more aggressively, and in a plausibly deniable fashion that would force them to fight wars we could stay out of ourselves. It should be noted that we almost did one of the things suggested there:
At the same time, as we are withdrawing from Afghanistan, the President could order the transfer of large amounts of small arms and ammunition stored there to the Uighur tribes who live in Afghanistan.
Missed it by that much. Maybe the Taliban will take up the jihad for their Islamic brethren under PRC oppression.
Biden HHS Limits Monoclonal Antibodies to the South
Tex has been talking about this treatment and wondering why we don't hear more about it. Well, here's more.
The move to limit shipments of these treatments appears to focus on the South. The HHS spokesperson interviewed describes this as "asking" the states to cut their orders by 30%. The state officials describe it as HHS "allocating" them fewer resources.
These seven states, which the official could not immediately name but said are located along the Gulf Coast, are facing some of the U.S.’s most severe Covid-19 outbreaks and have been utilizing about 70% of the nation’s distribution of monoclonal antibodies...
Alabama’s State Health Officer Dr. Scott Harris confirmed that his was one of the health department’s contacted by the HHS, saying he was alerted “Alabama and some other states are going to be on an allocation,” as reported by the Alabama Political Reporter.Though the agency has explicitly outlined cutbacks with the group of seven states, the changes will impact the entire country as the HHS will more thoroughly review order requests and utilization rates, and work with state health departments to optimize the distribution of the treatment.The HHS official highlighted that the seven states asked to reduce their orders can ask for more if they need it, but noted the federal government “probably” wouldn’t be able to fulfill the request.
That last paragraph definitely sounds like "we're asking them" doesn't mean that the reduction is voluntary.
No surprise that a DC-based official can't name the seven Southern states on the Gulf Coast because there are only six five: Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.
UPDATE: Heh. You'd think I'd know Georgia's southern border doesn't reach the Gulf, being cut off by the Florida panhandle; but in fairness, I grew up in the North Georgia mountains, not the swampy southern parts of the state.
Unconstitutional Orders
This report illustrates a clear-cut case of an illegal order that it is the duty of any military officer to refuse.
Two days after the January 6th riot at the United States Capitol, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley secretly took action to keep President Donald Trump from ordering the use of nuclear weapons....“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” Milley said, according to the book.“Got it?” asked Milley.“Yes, sir,” replied his senior staff.
No general has legitimate power to override the orders of the elected commander-in-chief. This is effectively a military coup over control of the nuclear arsenal. Everyone who said 'Yes, sir' violated their oaths and their duty. Milley himself should be arrested if this report is true.
Or if this one is.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People's Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward[,]
"We have seized control of the military assets of the United States and guarantee the elected government will not be allowed to use them against you, Comrade Zuocheng."
Unfortunately the military justice system is helpless here, because Milley doesn't have a chain of command except for the President -- and the current President, to whatever degree he is actually making decisions, approves of the coup to seize power from his political opponent. The elected government will not even fight for the prerogatives of the elected government in our constitutional system. It is now purely about loyalty to political faction.
Hospitalizations are not all unhappy in the same way
I was pleasantly surprised by this Atlantic article about recent attempts to figure out what COVID hospitalization rates are telling us. It avoids hyperbole and rigid black-or-white thinking, instead focusing on a spectrum of results that are influenced by age and immunological status (natural or vaccine-induced). The author notes that case counts are of little use without a way to distinguish asymptomatic cases from symptomatic or serious ones, and that death rates are a lagging indicator besides often failing to distinguish between deaths from or with COVID. Hospitalization rates suffer from some of these same problems, but studies that focus on oxygenation rates can be very helpful.
The studies cited in the article confirm the news from other sources that perhaps half of "COVID admissions" really are admissions for other reasons where a routine COVID test reveals a previously unsuspected infection. By looking at oxygenation rates, the studies provide more insight into how many people are still being hospitalized specifically for COVID complications, how intensively they have to be treated, and how quickly they can be released.
The article quotes a doctor who says he has patients who complain, "Why did I bother with the vaccine if I'm still in the hospital?" to which he answers, "But you're going to leave the hospital alive." A brief supportive stay in the hospital may not be a huge deal, much as we'd like to avoid it. A bad COVID hospital stay can be a real nightmare even if you survive it. The case that spooked me early on was a fellow in his 20s from my county, the son of a co-worker, who came down with a severely unlucky case, hugely complicated for no obvious reason, which kept him in an Austin hospital for months teetering between life and death. He was so young and otherwise healthy that they really pulled out all the stops for him, using convalescent serum and all kinds of treatments that were quite experimental in early 2020. He did survive, but lost some toes to sepsis. Although I know that's an extreme outlier, a sort of auto-immune storm that's almost impossible to predict, it still made me a lot less likely to go out into public unnecessarily until the vaccine came along.
There are some protective measures that aren't 100% effective but are still worth the effort. Masks may be among them, though I'm not entirely convinced of it, and not at all convinced in the case of casual cloth masks, particularly for asymptomatic people (symptomatic ones should be home anyway). Staying out of public surely helps even though it's not observed rigidly. As I read the data, vaccination is very, very helpful even though it's not a panacea. These are all things I'm happy to see people voluntarily put into practice; I've practiced many of them myself and often recommend them, not counting masks.
The lack of attention to monoclonal antibodies is puzzling and frustrating, so I tout this treatment whenever I get a chance, especially because you have to be ready to move fast once symptoms declare themselves, so you need to have figured out where they're available and what hoops you'll have to jump through to get access to them. If we really want to avoid clogging up hospitals, we should stop downplaying antibody infusion centers, which can administer their treatments in a 2-hour outpatient procedure that needn't even be administered anywhere near a hospital. But I swear I tell people about them all the time and get blank stares: all the oxygen in the room is taken up by fights over whether 2-year-olds need to be forcibly masked and massive numbers of people need to be driven out of their jobs by vaccine mandates.
My society has simply lost its mind. All I can conclude is that we're very bad at assessing and responding to brand new types of risk, so we revert to primitive thinking and superstition.
Woke failure
Via Powerline: "The Charlottesville city council played with fire. It got burned. I hope its response won’t be to set the flame at a lower temperature." I hope the same about the voters in 2022.
Vaccine Mandates
Way back when all this started, I 'went in' and locked down well before the government mandated it. At the time it seemed the appropriate thing to do, and so I did it without needing anyone to tell me. I greatly resented it, however, when the governor followed up with an order telling me to do what I'd already decided to do, and daring to assert legal threats should I stop doing what I'd already begun on my own.
Likewise, I reasoned months ago to the conclusion that my work would eventually require me to be vaccinated. Simply should international travel be required, it was obviously going to be necessary; and working with the military, as I often do, was going to require it because it was clear that the military was going to require the vaccine for all servicemembers. I accept that I have a moral duty to provide for my family, and thus to run the hazards required to do the work I know how to do. My ancestors accepted risks to their lives and health to provide for their wives and children, whether from livestock or from mining, and so too must I. Should I die, I have life insurance; but I cannot live and be useless to those who have a right to depend on me.
Once again, the government is coming behind to threaten and bully, trying to force people like me to do what I already decided to do and did do. They can go hang.
It is commonly remarked that the Supreme Court decided this vaccine issue a long time ago. This history is misunderstood on two levels, but I also think it is irrelevant for an additional reason. First, the Supreme Court decided that states might issue mandates on vaccines, not the Federal government. Second, and more, what they really decided was that states might fine you for refusing a vaccine -- not that you must in fact be required to take one. (The fine, in the famous case, was five dollars.)
Yet more importantly, the whole philosophical understanding of the American people on this issue has undergone a fundamental transformation. In the Progressive Era, the Wise who sit on high courts believed that government and its experts might properly sterilize you if they thought you were unfit to breed. They thought themselves wise enough to order every aspect of your life better than you could, and thus ordering you to accept injections or hysterectomies was aligned with their sense of what right looked like. Buck v. Bell was just such a case; and this mindset led to eugenics, the Tuskegee experiments, numerous secret psychological experiments on the American people, and abroad many of the worst horrors of the 20th century.
Today the American people have adopted a very different moral standard: self-ownership, which is often described as 'my body, my choice.' The abortion debate turns on this understanding, with the two sides either affirming that a woman has an absolute right to abortion because her body is affected, or else that the right might be fettered because in fact there is another human's body that will be affected -- indeed destroyed -- by the procedure. The issue here is the same one; one's refusal of a vaccine might possibly affect others, though (unlike in the abortion case) it is ultimately your own body that is going to be definitively altered by the experience.
Indeed, the differences in the cases are on the side of rejecting the mandates. Abortion always kills a human being; a refusal to take a vaccine may never kill one, and indeed probably will not. You worsen your own odds of serious illness, but even if you were vaccinated you would still be capable of becoming sick and transmitting this to others; thus, you are taking on the extra risks yourself, rather than pushing them off onto another from whose death you hope to benefit in some way.
Thus, the principle governing our contemporary understanding -- self-ownership -- makes this act an affront. The attempt to launder it through the private sector rather than taking responsibility for doing it does not make it better but worse. The attempt to evade Constitutional restrictions on Federal power by using corporate power as the state's agent is fascist in the literal and proper sense of the word.
Therefore, though I have already done the thing they wanted done and these mandates affect me not at all, I utterly reject them. They are improper, unacceptable, and a violation of our moral order. Anyone who wishes to defy them ought to do so, and we should support their defiance as we are able.
A Rally on the Reservation
It was sedate as such things go.
Here's a 1927 Indian on the Wall of Death.
This next one is just for fun with one bike, and becomes a challenge with two or more. At one point we had a Marine on leave before his next duty station volunteer to stand inside it while they rode around him. I didn't video that to protect him from his chain of command, who would have had a fit if they'd learned of it.
These are just games, of course. The real dangers are on the highway. We rode to the rally Friday, camped in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, rode the Park on Saturday with lunch in Gatlinburg, and then back home via the Blue Ridge Parkway on Sunday.
I saw some magnificent elk, including late at night and also including a magnificent bull with 14 points we counted. Sadly I was moving too fast to get a picture of him. Here’s a smaller fellow who wasn’t with the main herd, probably having been chased off by the big bull.
The event was called the Blue Ridge Run, and in addition to games and the like there was music. The closing bands on Friday and Saturday were both notable. The Friday night band was billed as a Black Sabbath tribute band, called Sabbath, which proved to secretly be a Dio tribute band in disguise. They were serviceable on the Sabbath covers, but at some point the singer said, "To give you the full experience we should do some Dio, as they toured together so often over the years." Those songs proved to be the heart of their set.
The headline band was led by Jasmine Cain, a female rocker out of Nashville who was absolutely delightful. Her band has played this rally every year it's ever been held, but always as opening act. This year she was asked to headline the show, and you could tell it meant the world to her. She has a lot of spirit and a good little three-piece band. You may hear of her again.
You'll be happy to know, Mike, that I never set foot in the casino.
Without firing a shot
You could have knocked me over with a feather when, first, the pro-abortion movement barely made a peep when the Texas "heartbeat" law was passed last spring and, second, the Texas abortion clinics all spontaneously ceased all post-six-weeks abortions on the day the law took effect. It turns out, however, that neither development was a complete surprise to the anti-abortion movement in Texas. This National Review article describes the jurisprudence and legal strategy that went into crafting and passing the bill.
Texas passed so many other hot-button bills this session that leftists were significantly distracted and nearly failed to make the heartbeat bill a priority. Meanwhile, the controversial private-enforcement mechanisms that renders the heartbeat bill immune to injunction was a technique that already had survived test-runs in small Texas jurisdictions.
Enid & Geraint
By custom and tradition of the Hall, there will be only one post today. I think this will be the last time we observe this tradition. We are now able to see the end of the war that began when Geraint drew his sword, beholding a bandit realm. We have glutted the ravens, but in the end the bandit realm remains; and our own has fallen into darkness, not because of the war but at least in spite of it.
The story begun on 9/11 has ended. Now it is time for another story.
Enid & Geraint
Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.
And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.
They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.
At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.
And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.
By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.
Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.
Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.
Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.
And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.
And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.
His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.
And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.
To the Wild
I am going to the Cherokee reservation and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for the weekend. I have set up the 9/11 memorial post on a timer.
Be well. We can talk next week about other things.
Lawless Judiciary
Here in NC, Democratic justices are preparing to force Republicans off the bench to try to rule voter ID unconstitutional. The terms of the suit would facially appear to disqualify every other law ever passed in NC, and the state constitution.
This one is worth reading in full.
All Powers Turn
Every power granted to fight terrorism after 9/11 was turned against American citizens, reminds Reason.
Good News
The Biden administration has been forced to pull their nominee to head the ATF, David Chipman, more properly known as the Butcher of the Branch Davidians. Dozens including 25 children were killed in that event, and then the compound was bulldozed before any investigations could be conducted. Janet Reno offered to resign, but Bill Clinton told her not to worry about it; and Chipman, a case agent at Waco, continued his career up until this moment.
At least this one thing has gone right lately. He is a man whose heavy handed tactics have already killed many innocent Americans; he is the last person you should put in charge of an agency like the ATF, which would be better disbanded anyway.
Speaking of Waco, where the Branch Davidian event took place, Constitutional Carry just went into effect there. The police chief urges you to get training anyway if you elect to carry a gun, which is honestly good advice. You should seek training if you're going to carry.
Doc Watson on Funerary Humor
Perhaps when a man reaches a certain age, his mind turns to funerals. Here is the legendary Doc Watson with a couple of jokes on the subject.
Afterwards they play some good mountain music for a while. Doc's gone to his own reward these days; this recording is from 2004.
Year Zero
David Reaboi on the destruction of statues.
I feel like I should say something about this, but what's left to say? They intend to destroy all of it. They are actively doing so. We cannot stop them through legal means, because for the moment they have captured the government and all its power. The statues themselves aren't worth the blood that would likely result from resorting to extra-legal means; and so we don't.
They're still wrong, though, to destroy the art of our ancestors and the peace that was built around it. They don't care, and they intend to continue until all of it is wrack.
Not Sure About This One
These folks are technically good, and I often find value in efforts like this. It seems very strange to me to do "Danny Boy" as an up-tempo number, though. Mixing it with "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" forces it into a strange place.
See what you think.
A little medical judgment
I found this article about Ivermectin a welcome relief. As far as I can tell, the jury's still out on whether Ivermectin does any good in treating COVID, but the jury's equally out whether it does any harm. It certainly is no ground for the extraordinary paroxysms of hysteria and vilification we've been witnessing.
The problem with a disease that all but a tiny fraction of people survive is that almost anything you can think of can be administered to patients, the vast majority of whom will recover. Does Ivermectin work better than chocolate ice cream or, for that matter, an amulet worn around the neck? I have no idea, and I don't much care, because unless you take absurd doses it's pretty cheap and extremely unlikely to hurt you. It's no nuttier than many medical fads wholeheartedly embraced not only by the journalistic-industrial establishment but frankly by the AMA and rank-and-file doctors. A low-fat, high-carb diet probably will turn out to be infinitely more dangerous than popping the occasional heartworm pill pilfered from your pup.
This nonsense is no way to conduct public health policy. We've squandered more credibility than I thought possible in the last couple of years--and I would have said we'd done a pretty horrible job already for the couple of decades before that. We've devolved into superstition and ad hominem attacks when we aren't sunk deep into outright fraud.
Entertaining an Alternative View
Jan-Werner Müller, writing in the New Statesman ,would like you to consider that the elite/populist division is actually, secretly a means for the elite to retain power by dividing the working class. This is a standard Marxist way of understanding many conflicts -- and it sometimes proves true. For example, the intense encouragement of racist views and actions in the Jim Crow South really was at least partly about hiding from poorer white Southerners the fact that the richer Southerners and Northern banks were the real oppressors in their lives; in fact, they shared intense common interests with poorer black Southerners. The mythology they were offered, which they often bought, really was about keeping the elite in power by hiding the commonality of class interests.
Nevertheless, this has not been my view of the populist rejection of things like Hillary Clinton or Remain in Europe. They begin with a noteworthy observation:
Half a decade on, “Brexit and Trump” remain shorthand for the rise of right-wing populism and a profound unsettling of liberal democracies. One curious fact is rarely mentioned: the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Remain in 2016 had similar-sounding slogans, which spectacularly failed to resonate with large parts of the electorate: “Stronger Together” and “Stronger in Europe”. Evidently, a significant number of citizens felt that they might actually be stronger, or in some other sense better off, by separating. What does that tell us about the fault lines of politics today?
That similarity was not accidental; it is of a piece with how "Build Back Better" became a slogan on the tongue of every Western leader. Observe this montage of, well, all of them saying exactly this phrase.
This strongly suggests that in fact there is an international class who think alike, and find the same language persuasive -- who are learning from each other, at least, if not in fact designing together a common program to govern all of our various societies from a stratum above us (and separated from us). The NS piece is going to talk a lot about the ability to build such strata within societies, but still wants to assert that this is really about wealth and not culture.
So let's consider that, after the jump.
The Sins of GKC
A new book, here reviewed.
[Chesterton] was content to have Frances manage his life.... His subservience to Frances may be seen as evidence of his gentle decency or alternatively as a weakness. Ingrams, I think, inclines to the latter view.But what of the ‘sins’ of the title? Here too it may be a question of weakness. Ingrams has Chesterton led astray, like a medieval king, by evil counsellors. There were two: his adored younger brother, Cecil, and his admired mentor Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton had a better mind and sharper intellect than either of them, as well as a kinder and more generous, if weaker, character.
It's mostly anti-Semitism, although anyone who has ever seen a picture of GKC might have thought of gluttony. In his defense, GKC lived before the depths of anti-Semitism were exposed; and the introductory version he bought on to is a form that masks a valid complaint that is severable from the Jews. "He felt that Jewish finance was corrupting Catholic Europe" is often described as a predecessor to the view that "loyalty to internationally-financed corporations undermines loyalty to one's own nation." You don't need any Jews to be involved to worry, for example, that Apple's or Nike's commitments to Communist China have worrying effects on our political culture here at home. You only even need 'the Chinese' accidentally; it could be any authoritarian nation with communistic values.
The reviewer continues:
I still read Belloc and Chesterton with pleasure. Few others seem to. Ingrams opines that only Chesterton’s Father Brown detective stories remain popular. This is probably true, though The Flying Inn, a fantastic novel about an Islamic takeover of England, has considerable vitality. (It’s not much use, I would add, to modern-day Islamophobes, Chesterton’s Islam being very different from theirs.) His book on Thomas Aquinas has been judged one of the best popular accounts of his philosophy. Chesterton is still admired in American Catholic universities, and a few years ago I was sent a copy of a French intellectual journal devoted entirely to Chesterton. All the same, today’s Catholic Church is very different from the one Belloc and Chesterton defended.
That last is certainly true, at least among the living. The Church believes in a metaphysical self, though, in which Chesterton himself is still a member -- and, hopefully, still praying for his beloved Ecclesia.
A Collegiate Theory
"Men appear to be giving up on college," Hot Air worries, citing WSJ data.
U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found.This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man...All of this makes me worry about the future. Having CRT enter public classrooms and emphasize the idea of white supremacy and male privilege at a point where white males are already struggling with education seems like a perfect storm of bad ideas. Based on the data above, we don’t need to be telling boys that they need to check their privilege from the time they can first read and write, we need to be helping them do as well as girls.
Alternatively, it may be that college is objectively less valuable than it was, and men are on the forefront of figuring this out. Just as an initial baseline, college costs have skyrocketed over the last decades due to government making student loans easily available. Colleges responded by raising tuition to the limits the government would support. Thus, college costs a lot more now for whatever value you are going to get out of it.
There's less value to get out of it, too. Feminists sometimes complain that any field that women succeed in entering immediately begins to lose pay, although they read this as 'sexism' rather than as 'supply and demand'; if you add many more workers to the field, the supply increase naturally means that pay can be lessened. Women now are successfully dominating the office jobs that require a bachelors degree, and that means that office jobs are not as prestigious or well-remunerated as once. These environments were always unattractive to men, but the pay made up for the depressing need to be inside all day long. Now there's less pay, too.
Meanwhile, a lot of college degrees are now education degrees or lower-level medical degrees -- nursing, say. In addition to being inside-all-day fields, these are also areas where there is social pressure to keep men out. Men are essentially unwelcome to be elementary school teachers, and barely welcome in secondary schools; and nursing is a traditionally female field, though of course men do become nurses. These are classic fields that offer security in return for no real chance of making a fortune, which are less attractive to men even absent the social pressures that keep men out of them.
Outsourcing and offshoring are also an issue. It first affected factory workers, but at this point a lot of white collar jobs can be offshored. What can't be offshored is skilled trade work. Your plumber or electrician is going to have to be there where you are physically. Those are jobs that require certifications and practical experience rather than college degrees.
I have obviously spent a lot of time in school, and don't mean to run down education's value. Yet an actual education is hard to get in college; you really have to work at finding one. If you want to know the secrets of the universe, it's possible to learn a lot about them in a university. What you'll probably be routed towards, though, is a degree in 'education' or some nonsense 'social science' that teaches you nothing about physics, little about math beyond statistics, and assumptions about philosophy and history rather than a capacity to inquire into them deeply. You'll read Aristotle's name a few times, but you won't read Aristotle.
For me that was the real value in education, and most degrees do not now even aspire to it. Of course men might lose interest in something that has become less interesting. The question is why women continue to double-down on a play that has become vastly more expensive and obviously less valuable.
Ritual of Abortion
Everybody knows this 'Satanic Temple' bit is a play-acting legal falsehood. It intends to provide fake 'deeply held religious belief' cover for things like drug usage and abortion, to mock actual religion, and to force communities to build sculptures to Satan if they allow things like crosses for war veterans on public land. It's always been an open joke by people who hate traditional religion and want to mock it, and one that occasionally proves useful to the designs of their real ideology.
One wonders, however, if invoking the abyss often enough won't actually summon it.
"Protecting Women"
The Biden Administration's Justice Department vows to 'protect women,' by which they mean help them kill their children. Meanwhile, their new Taliban partners for peace are also interested in protecting women.
On the Importance of Sheriffs
The introduction is similar to the better movie Paint Your Wagon. This one has James Garner, and is lighter fare.
But Paint Your Wagon does seem to be the better prophecy.
The Dumbledore Fallacy
Have you noticed that it's very hard to talk sense with people? Oh, you have? Sorry, so it's not just me. Apropos of nothing in particular, I spent a few hours this week trying to engage people in discussion of the new Texas "heartbeat" law, usually beginning with the startling notion that some of us think unborn children are human beings. I got lots of responses more or less amounting to "but it's really hard on some women that they can get pregnant when men can't, and men don't always support their children." I answer, yes, these are very bad things, but the point of a law limiting abortion is to protect unborn children, not to take sides in disputes between adult men and women. The answer tends to be, "Oh, of course, I agree, but the situation between the adult men and women is really very unfair, so I believe in personal choice, and a decision between a woman and her doctor/God whatever."
My brow stayed wrinkled much of the time. Why do I bother? I'm not sure; it may be because to this day I remember being struck by a placard reading "I love YOU, and I'd fight for YOUR life, too." Even if I didn't really change my mind on the subject until years later, the argument did worm its way into my conscience and do lasting good work there.
Anyway, speaking of fallacies and the never-ending work of exposing them, I came upon this 2009 piece about the "Dumbledore Fallacy":
I understand what it means to say “X is a good act” or “X is an immoral act”. I don’t understand at all what people mean when they say that Y is a good or bad person. Every person (even the damned) is ontologically good: we are all made in God’s image, all called to eternal beatitude with Him, all addressed by the same moral law. Every person has both good and evil desires; every person is capable of good or evil acts. The moral law gives us a key to evaluating acts, not persons.
“Good person” talk is closely related to what I call the Dumbledore fallacy. Here’s how it goes. I say “homosexual acts are immoral”. J. K. Rowling responds “Dumbledore protects the children of Hogwarts from the evil Voldemort. This is a good act, right?” “Yes”, I reply. Rowling continues, “So Dumbledore is a good person. Ah, but Dumbledore also likes to have sex with men. Therefore, homosexuality is good.” QED.
Now, the Dumbledore fallacy is obviously invalid; it could be used to justify anything. “Ah, but Dumbledore sacrifices children to Moloch. Therefore, ritual murder is good.” “Ah, but Dumbledore rapes old women. Therefore, raping old women is good.” It proves no such thing. At most, it proves that certain virtues can coexist with certain vices. Actually, it doesn’t even prove that much, because Dumbledore is a fictional character.
Rowling’s argument actually depends on a couple of unstated steps. “If a person does a good act, he or she is a good person. All the acts of a good person are good.” The argument only has the rhetorical force it does because these steps are left unstated. Say them out loud, and you can’t help but notice how absurd they are.
As Screwtape said, "Do remember you are there to fuddle him. From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!"
I Guess It's Labor Day
Never was one to cross a picket line, myself. The unions may have gotten greedy and made it hard to compete with Japan, but it was the Chamber of Commerce that sold out America to Communist China.
Burn some brats, have some beers.
Frankland: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Again
My own pet project of establishing a new state of mountainous Appalachia has a precedent: the state of Franklin, or "Frankland," following the etymology that should be well known to readers here.
Franklin represents the early American concept that “if your government is not representing you, then it’s your right and your duty to throw off that government and establish a new government,” Barksdale says. “Franklin demonstrates how the statehood movement in the heart of Appalachia was [of] central [importance] to our new nation immediately after the American Revolution.”
It didn't work out, but it should have.
Flipping Virtue on its Head
Montesquieu warned "As virtue is necessary in a republic, and honor in a monarchy, fear is what is required in a despotism. As for virtue, it is not at all necessary, and honor would be dangerous there.”
True enough. This take, however puts a spin on it that may be even more true, and perhaps even more dangerous, as in the way C.S. Lewis warned us about tyrants with good intentions:
A tyrant that is not just an individual head or small group is difficult to unseat.
True enough. This take, however puts a spin on it that may be even more true, and perhaps even more dangerous, as in the way C.S. Lewis warned us about tyrants with good intentions:
A tyrant that is not just an individual head or small group is difficult to unseat.
Mapped Ballot Fraud
From TrueTheVote:
We'd watched the mass mail out of paper ballots to highly inaccurate voter records, the harried installation of ballot dropboxes privately funded by billionaire tech magnates, and the hundreds of legislative changes, lawsuits, and consent decrees that fundamentally altered election processes. All of it came together in 2020, under the fog of COVID. It was planned. It was purposeful.
Indeed, they said as much themselves in that Time article.
Having studied election process for decades, our team was well aware of the pitfalls associated with America's uniquely insecure approach to elections. We knew that attempts to prove certain types of election malfeasance would fail, so we chose instead to focus on the grifts that would necessarily leave trackable, provable data trails.
To test our trafficking theory, we acquired over ten trillion location-based cell signals in major metropolitan areas across six states. Initially, we worked with whistleblowers and witnesses, but soon enough, the data alone told the tale. Using mobile and GPS data, we mapped the travel patterns of ballot traffickers to ballot dropboxes.
They point out that this kind of tracking has been used by the NYT and by the government in several cases, so it's well established as a commonplace way to approach this kind of issue.
So what did they find?
Our findings reveal overwhelming evidence of ballot trafficking, some of which is highlighted in the article. We have much more.
All our research, including suspected locations where ballots were delivered, processed, and distributed, along with the individual devices associated, has been submitted in the form of a formal complaint, along with all data, to the FBI. Briefings have been provided to state law enforcement and political leadership in several states. These conversations will continue to broaden in the coming days.
We've also acquired over a petabyte of video surveillance data. The quality of this video is inferior overall; lighting is bad, cameras are poorly positioned, timestamps are manipulated, key timeframes are often missing. Nevertheless, we are working video by video, using proprietary AI-based code we've written to screen the over 100,000 clips in our possession. The result? We are successfully finding video evidence that corroborates the digital data and supports the need for full investigations by law enforcement.
The problem is, of course, that 'law enforcement' has not touched it for the same reason it will not touch it: law enforcement is controlled by the winners of that stolen election, people who intend to continue to steal elections from now on. The last thing they'd want is for law enforcement to get on with investigations into this.
The exception are the nation's Sheriffs, who are independently elected officers who do not report to the centralized governments -- not mayors, not governors, not Presidents. For this reason, in major cities they are generally defunded and their funds turned over to a "City Police" department whose leadership is hired and fired by the mayor and/or city council. This keeps law enforcement pliant.
Outside the cities the sheriffs remain potent. Unfortunately, the fraud is city-based. Sheriffs still exist, and perhaps some of them can be convinced to take this up. If it can lead to arrests and prosecutions (another problem in those cities where non-prosecuting prosecutors have been solicited by left-leaning NGOs) maybe something can finally be done within the system.
It's a big lift, though, because the whole system has been turned against citizen self-government. The thieves are in charge across the board.
This Airport Story
The version of the story given to CBS News is, as has become usual, designed to hide the Biden administration's culpability for a horrible situation.
Excerpts of an email from the State Department to members of congress viewed by CBS News acknowledged that charter flights are still on the ground at the Mazar-i-Sharif airstrip in northern Afghanistan and have permission to land in Doha "if and when the Taliban agrees to takeoff."
Such is the situation as of Sunday. On Wednesday, however, I was on a call with a member of the air evacuation efforts and the head of a small airline not in the Middle East, brokering a way to transfer people into normal airlines following their successful flight out. Everything was in place except the money, and donors had been found -- just not quite enough as at that moment.
I infer that someone within the Biden Administration or the State Department (whom the effort had been briefing, as we would need institutional support to finalize visas in some cases) decided to try to find their own way out, and decided Qatar was the obvious choice. Telling Doha about this is equivalent to having informed the Taliban of it, because Qatar hosted them in their exile, brokered the peace talks, and is one of their chief supporters. Qatar told the Taliban, and the Taliban now have these people as hostages.
The Biden Administration is trying to convince the press that the Taliban are the bad guys here, and they certainly are among the bad guys: they're now holding Americans hostage. But the Biden administration also has a lot of blame to carry because they gave the game away. Instead of working with veteran operators they blew things up by trying to take over and run things with their regular incompetence.
He's in a tough spot
CNN offers the President political advice, after sympathizing with his rotten luck, what with the Taliban's betrayal of his trust, Delta unexpectedly cratering job creation, Republicans inexplicably continuing to push their agenda, and Democrat legislators balking at a couple of the fringes of the leftist agenda. Should he pick projects with broad appeal to Americans that can command a clear majority in Congress? Oh, gosh, no. He should forcefully support the Democrat traitors until they fall back in line:
What's Biden to do in the face of all these obstacles? The most important thing he can focus on at this point is keeping his party in line. He will need to lean in harder on Manchin and Sinema, giving them the support they need to retain their electoral standing while offering not-so-subtle reminders about the importance of putting on a united front to fulfill his agenda. If Democrats are perpetually stuck in a legislative logjam as the nation struggles with broken infrastructure, natural disasters, and an ongoing pandemic, there's little chance voters will give the party another shot at trying to address the many problems they face going into 2022.There's also the danger that he will be distracted by the need to solve immediate problems with visible competence and honesty. No one cares about that stuff: voters want him to create a nationwide standard of ballot fraud and undermine the nation's energy independence, STAT.
Biden also has to actively shape his message and agenda, rather than react to events and circumstances as they occur. As the going gets tough, it is easy for presidents to be caught on the wrong foot and get swept up in the noise of the moment. What great presidents learn is that focus means a great deal. Presidents have the power to keep the nation — and Congress — on track. They have the ability to keep pushing specific issues like the urgent need to protect voting rights or address climate change — even if the news cycle veers off into different directions.Keeping the news from veering off into unauthorized directions is pretty straightforward: just get the press back in line, where they're begging to be, anyway. Maybe they need more "support," too. That should help keep all those pesky voters from veering off into savaging the President's competence in the polls.
Heartbeats
I'm no Politico fan, but I trust the legal analysis and judgment of Sarah Isgur, the talented daughter of my first client, who is one of the smartest, most humane men I've ever had the pleasure to know. I met Sarah once when she was about four, so it's exciting to see the adult woman she grew into. This analysis is head and shoulders above anything I've read this week, regardless of anyone's position on the underlying merits of the contentious new Texas "heartbeat" law. She makes a good point about the dangers of approving the clever procedural gambit on which the law is based.
How soon do you need to know?
The Week in Pictures is up. I'm not sure if I'm binary or non-binary. Is there a deadline for my choice?
The Hon. Jim Webb on Afghanistan
I would be remiss not to draw your attention to this piece by my own favored 2016 Presidential candidate (and former Senator during my years in Virginia), author, scholar, diplomat, former Secretary of the Navy, and decorated Marine Jim Webb.
Webb's military and diplomatic service were both especially centered on Vietnam, so in the course of his description of the events he notes something probably many people missed.
In a remarkable display of tone-deaf diplomatic naiveté, the Vice President was pictured sitting in front of a sculpture of Ho Chi Minh during a meeting with Vietnam’s President Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the very moment the rest of the world was comparing America’s humiliating and incompetent dilemma in Kabul with the 1975 fall of Saigon.
The rest of the initial description is well known to all, and even the administration's defenders would be hard pressed if they tried to deny that it was a "disgusting nightmare of incompetence that can only be rectified by holding those responsible accountable." They're doing their best to try to avoid holding those responsible accountable, or even identifying them, but they're aware enough of the danger of engaging the argument that the President and the Secretary of State are not taking questions.
Likewise his list of military truisms, as he calls them, are very similar to the discussions we have had here. These are clear and obvious principles, at least they were clear and obvious to military officers at one time. His third section, a contrast with the much-less-calamitous Vietnam retrograde, likewise is a more detailed version of what was said here.
His concluding remarks are where the focus should be.
In a perverse way, perhaps we should look at the calamitous blunderings in Afghanistan as an opportunity to demand a true turning point. Americans know that a great deal of our governmental process is now either institutionally corrupt or calcified. They want change, as evidenced by the election of Donald Trump in 2016, no matter his empty credentials in government. Lacking clearly expressed options, most don’t really know how to articulate the specifics of what that change might encompass. It’s kind of like the statement of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart many years ago that he couldn’t define pornography for you, but he knew it when he saw it. In this case, most Americans can clearly agree that what they have been seeing time and again, domestically and overseas, is not good government, despite honorable intentions among many dedicated people.Even the very best among those who come forward to serve often find that the good they came to do is stultified by distracting debates over the very premise of why the American system of government was created and whether the icons of our past were truly motivated by the words incorporated in our most revered documents. The military itself is increasingly being used by leftist activists as a social laboratory to advance extreme political agendas. Congressional oversight leans heavily toward social issues, with too many members struggling without success to focus on accountability at the very top when, for instance, good people at the bottom have to implement poorly conceived plans that might kill them.This is not an exaggeration, and it is not just what has been happening at the Kabul airport and elsewhere in Afghanistan. Those situations merely provide us a microcosm, a symbolic moment in time, that allows us to see the implications of confused or distracted leadership, military and civilian alike, motivated by political machinations. In the American political system, we have the capacity to demand that this inequity change. What we need is the will to do it.
Webb and I see things in some ways very similarly; instead of 'calcified' I generally say 'ossified,' but the ossification analogy likewise depends on calcium. I have been examining underlying principles since last year precisely because I think we need a new beginning and -- as Webb says -- we need to be able to say what exactly it is we think the change should be. I wish he had been clearer about what he thinks the change should be, because I do not know from these brief remarks exactly what he thinks would do.
I know what I think, now: I think the governments of the United States and the several states should be dissolved. Some urban regions may wish to establish socialist governments on European models, but most of America by land mass should pursue new foundations laid along lines of volunteer government in which a central principle is that no one may make money through their efforts in government. This will both remove the corrupting effect of making your living from governing others or regulating others, and force the volunteer government to take on much less because you only have time for governing when you aren't making the living you still have to make through some service to others in the private market. Likewise I think we should restore the idea that the sole purpose of this volunteer government is to defend the natural rights of the people, exactly as the Founders held. Nothing else is the proper duty of government, and anything else is at best a distraction.
My guess is that Webb has both a longer and a less-thoroughgoing list of reforms. Perhaps it would thereby be more palatable to the many, and even (or especially) to the powerful. It is time to begin laying out these thoughts plainly. We must be able to say what exactly we want to accomplish in this moment of demanding what he calls a "true turning point."
Fake News Today
Expertise
I couldn't agree more:
As a trial lawyer, I both worked with and cross-examined hundreds, likely thousands, of experts in various fields. Many of them had extraordinarily impressive credentials. My experience was that experts are like everyone else. Some know what they are talking about, others don’t. Some back up their opinions with sound data and careful reasoning, while others crumble under adverse examination. Deferring to someone merely because he or she is a credentialed expert would be a terrible, and sometimes potentially suicidal, practice. Don’t do it.
Texas II
With all the fuss over the abortion law and it's bounty hunter provisions, nobody's talking about the fact that the Texas election security law was watered down substantially. This gives Democrats a talking point while preserving their capacity for fraud in state elections; a significant failure by the Texas Republicans to restore the capacity of citizens to have any confidence in the elections that are at the core of our model.
Commandeer
The newest from South Australia: all citizens will have to carry a digital monitoring device at all times, and be subject to random orders from police to submit face-scanned and geo-tagged location data to prove they aren't violating house arrest.
People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”
You might say, "Look, these laws might not be constitutional in America, but this is Australia. The police clearly seem to have the power to forcibly quarantine / place the entire population under indefinite house arrest whether they are sick or not. So why, if that is already off the table, quibble about the means of the quarantine/imprisonment?"
There's still a point to be made even there about the mode of action, to whit, the government seizing your private property to use against you. This is called 'commandeering,' and in America is most famously a police power used in Hollywood movies where The Heroic Detective needs to borrow a citizen's car to chase a criminal. Those movie scenes always struck me as crazy: some guy runs up waving what might be a badge, if you had time to examine it, and orders you to immediately surrender your car (which he then drives off with rapidly).
Here the government is commandeering everyone's property in order to enforce extraordinary restrictions upon them, and they are supposed to be subject to compliance checks at whim. The police aren't usually supposed to stop you -- certainly not to frisk you -- in the absence of evidence of illegal activity. Now you owe them an immediate response proving your innocence at any time of day or night they should choose to demand one. Not only has your phone been commandeered, you are ordered to attend to it in case you might be signaled to report compliance at any 15 minute interval of the day. Not only are they commandeering your property, they're commandeering 100% of your time. In a sense they are commandeering your whole life, then, insofar as 'life' means 'the time you have to spend alive.'
A government that can commandeer your property is dangerous; one that can commandeer your life moreso. Occasionally it is a power that is used, as for example to compel jury duty; of old it was used to compel service at war (and perhaps shall be again, for who would now enlist but the youngest and least wise?). It has even been used this way in compelling your attendance at internment camps, though that action by FDR is now generally regarded as having been improper and tyrannical in the extreme.
I wonder how many policemen South Australia has. It's a big territory. (UPDATE: fewer than six thousand for a territory of almost four hundred thousand square miles, though 77% of the population lives within the metro area of the capital city.) I know cell service here is very spotty, and a policy like this would compel many officers to spend a lot of time on the road. Cell service may be better there, but they'll log a lot of hours 'following up' on those calls. The point is to keep people from encountering each other, so why not send hundreds of officers driving up and down a wide territory every day?
Working Dogs
Were they abandoned in Afghanistan? No, says the Department of Defense; but at the same time also yes.
Not Satire
Headline, The Hill: "FTC looking into broken ice cream machine at McDonald's."
As I understand capitalism, economic competition with competitors should address this issue, either by drawing customers away from McDonald's franchises (I haven't set foot in one in years, though I am not a big consumer of fast food of any kind), or else by convincing McDonald's to invest in more functional technology.
Perhaps people have switched away from McDonald's over this issue, but the capitalist pressures haven't made them change their technology. As the article points out, the corporation mocks its own machinery on Twitter.
Could be ice cream was never that big a part of their success story, and they figure it's cheaper to take the hit than to pony up for more functional machines. Perhaps a nice taxpayer-funded investigation of their private business practices will lay clear the source of this national scourge. Thank goodness we have whole agencies of experts employed to do this important work.
Bounty Hunters of Texas
Here's an interesting aspect of the Texas heartbeat bill that I had not heard of before now:
S.B. 8 not only bans abortion at six weeks, a period of time when many people don’t know they’re pregnant, but it also deputizes citizens to enforce the ban. The law financially incentivizes private citizens to actively seek out and sue people for “aiding or abetting” women who are attempting to get abortions in the state of Texas. If someone successfully sues, they could receive a bounty of $10,000 and have all of their legal fees paid for by the opposing side.
So it's not the women themselves who can be sued, it's groups that organize to try to get them abortions after the six-week period. These can be sued by private citizens (or competing nongovernmental organizations) for 'aiding and abetting an abortion,' and cash transferred from the pro-abortion organization to the anti-abortion one.
That's a new way of weaponizing government to aid political warfare. I'd like to hear a defense of it from someone who thought it was a good idea before I decide what I think about it.
Impeachment and Feasance
The votes are obviously not there, and won't be there; but I do see some discussion about whether or not the Afghanistan matter ought to result in impeachment. The standard for impeachment is 'high crimes and misdemeanors,' and -- the argument goes -- nothing actually illegal was done here.
Against that concept I'd like to suggest that there is a set of misdemeanors around feasance, that is, the performance of one's duty. Impeachment is appropriate for cases of nonfeasance, in my opinion: consider the case of these prosecutors who were apparently elected not to enforce the law in major cities. Prosecutorial discretion is legal, but prosecutorial discretion on this scale has led to a large scale rise in crime in our cities, and is tantamount to usurpation of the legislature's constitutional power to define the laws that apply.
That, in turn, denies the citizenry a representative government -- instead of living under laws enacted by their legislatures, they find themselves effectively denied the protection of (say) shoplifting laws, and thus are forced to live in a society in which theft is effectively legal. Nor can they turn to their representatives for relief, for the law has already been passed and placed on the books: there's nothing more the legislator can do.
It seems to me that it would be perfectly appropriate to impeach or recall a prosecutor over this practice. Removal from office is exactly the correct remedy.
Similarly, misfeasance -- which this horror show in Afghanistan certainly is -- and malfeasance are both proper reasons to impeach someone in my opinion. Even if they are not very serious crimes, and might not be punished with prison time, because they are crimes of duty they are get to the heart of why someone might be properly removed from office. Officers are charged with the duties that define their office, and if they fail to do their duty removal is entirely proper.
Anarchy in the NC
We’re expecting massive rainfall today. VFD is preemptively patrolling the backroads looking for fallen trees (of which there have been several). The only actual call for a fallen tree blocking a road so far, though, was addressed by local citizens without intervention. By the time we got there they’d already cut it up and moved it out of the road.
Government can be useful but it can also derail citizen virtue. Left to their own, people get it right more often than not.
Diaspora
Some people at least can see what's airless and stultifying about the Big Apple. It makes me wonder if Kurt Schlichter is onto something in his "Split" novels.
Tragedy
As the President takes credit for what he apparently believes was a great operation, an Army Ranger mourns.
I understand his position. I would not now want my child to take the oath I so gladly swore at 18.
Meanwhile, the only courageous officer in the Marine Corps resigns.
Three to Six
The county pushed out over the emergency system to expect 3-6” of rain today. That’s going to be catastrophic in the valleys.
Conversations with Mom
Based on last night's talk with my mother, who has been a pretty good barometer for American politics, she is terrified of my criticism of America's government. I'm not sure if she fears I will be arrested or killed because of it, but she is clearly afraid and certain I should stop speaking out against the current government.
If you went back over the course of the last twenty years, her support went to every winning campaign except Trump's in 2016. She gets her ideas from what is popular, I think, and as such is almost always on the winning side.
She's been a pretty good judge of where the country was going before now. On the other hand, a government like the one she apparently fears we have is one that deserves replacement. It's bad enough that an ordinary woman like herself should have internalized the idea that such criticism -- constitutionally protected free speech -- is gravely dangerous.
Adieu Afghanistan
Reportedly, all American forces have left Afghanistan at this time. Perhaps that isn't strictly true; it would be ordinary for some highly classified forces to remain behind on special reconnaissance or similar duties. However, this time it may really be true; the Biden administration and its subservient military leadership has done everything wrong so far, so why not one last thing?
We have left behind at least hundreds of American citizens, and untold numbers of friends and allies. Apparently we incinerated one family of friends and allies with that drone strike against 'ISIS-K planners' the other day, perhaps having taken Taliban instructions on whom to hit.
Horrible things will happen to those left behind, whose names we apparently gave to the Taliban to make sure they knew whom to look for in their searches. Whole busloads of American citizen females were apparently turned away at the airport; translators are reportedly having their tongues cut out; I've seen video of a hanging using one of our Blackhawks as a public demonstration.
All that said, I am relieved that we managed to extract our battalions of paratroopers and Marines, who were put in a deadly situation by incompetent leadership. We could have lost all of them. Thank God they are safe, assuming the statements from the White House and leadership are not lies, which in fact we can no longer safely assume.
Stoicism
This time of year, pretty much every Sunday morning there is a call arising from the adventurous spirit that people come up to these mountains to exercise. Today's was a young man who had decided to take charge of his slide into obesity and, having already lost forty pounds, to hike down into a gorge to see some famous local waterfalls. Unfortunately for him, he stepped on a yellow jacket nest and -- while trying to escape them -- gruesomely broke his ankle, fell, tumbled, and struck his head.
Fortunately, another pair of hikers were on the trail one of whom happened to be a nurse. He stayed with the injured guy while his girlfriend (or wife, I'm not sure) went for help. Now there's no cell-phone service in these mountains most places, but there is a church nearby. Most of the week it's just an empty building, but this was Sunday morning. As a result she found it full of people, one of whom was an older man who had formerly been an active firefighter, and who was still in the habit of carrying his radio. Thus she was able to summon aid very quickly.
The young man in the gorge was badly hurt, but he showed significant character. In addition to having internally recognized his slide and taken charge of it, he had developed the understanding that he could also be in charge of his emotional reaction even to very bad things. He was polite, tried to laugh and joke in spite of his injuries and shock, and refused to get more upset than he could help. His fate was not in his hands, but his attitude was, and his recognition of that helped him and it helped everyone else who was trying to help him.
We got him out of the gorge with a basket and a rope system, and thence to a helicopter called in to get him to a hospital. I hope they'll save his foot. I later met his brother because I had to return their dog, who was hiking with him at the time of his injury. For whatever reason she decided I was the one there she would trust, so I ended up taking her and his Buick and driving them over to where his family could collect them.
By coincidence, shortly after turning over the dog and car I met again with the nurse and lady. They were up on vacation, and were eager to hear how the whole thing had turned out. Nice folks, although I was amused at how perfectly their discussion matched up with the description given by the White Fragility author of bad ways white people allegedly talk to minorities -- in their case, however, they were of foreign extraction, and talking about Southerners. 'Everyone thinks you're all prejudiced up here, and still think it's 1956,' they said, 'But we know you're not all like that. We wanted to meet real people, not all these folks with the Audis and Mercedes in the parking lot here in this town. We could meet them anywhere. We wanted to get out where the real people are.' Well, thanks. (And cf. the descriptions also here and here, which I was looking at again last night following the discussion on Tex's post.)
Nice folks anyway, the kind of people who'd stop to help you on a trail if you needed it. That's what really counts.
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