From the Stone Mountain Collection

Here are a few photos I took at the Stone Mountain historic collection of Civil War goods.  Most of these relate to the Battle of Atlanta, and Sherman's march east toward the sea.  I'm afraid I don't have notes, although Lewis Grizzard did:

PS:  Some of you may have found Mr. Grizzard's description of the army of General Sherman a little dismissive.  Here's how he handled our own Georgia Tech:

Confer

Elizabeth Duffy:  "How to Like Women."

Megan McArdle:  "Why Does Everyone Hate Women?"

It strikes me is that what people hate isn't the women, but the power structures that women often set up.

I understand disliking a specific woman who is vicious.  I also understand women like Ms. Duffy, who found the power structures that seem natural to girls horrible to live under as a girl, and who therefore wanted no part of them as an adult woman.  Some men, I suppose, are unable to win free of such things, and find themselves driven like cattle from one thing to another.  These women and these men have a natural antipathy to a form of control they do not know how to resist, and which is punishing and hateful to them.

Still, I've always liked women, and part of it is that I've always found myself entirely outside of these sorts of power plays.  The kinds of power that move me are different kinds, and these sorts of things have passed over me like shadows, without the power to bind.

Nevertheless, I can see how they bind others.  The question of how you treat those over whom you exercise power is deeply relevant to whether or not you earn my respect.  The women who have -- and there are many -- share a virtue in this regard.

Believe the Government - or Else!

I've been taking a first look at the complaint in Michael Mann's new lawsuit against Mark Steyn, National Review, and others. There's so much that's interesting, but I want to focus on one aspect.

As others have often noted, such a lawsuit runs up against the hardest standard for libel cases - New York Times v. Sullivan. Basically, if a "public figure" (which Mann essentially admits he is in paragraph 14) sues a "media defendant" (which fits most or all of the defendants here), he can't recover a penny of damages unless he proves "actual malice" - that is, he's got to prove that the person who made the statements knew they were false, or acted with "reckless disregard" as to their falsity. (The latter was important in the original case, because at least one statement printed by the Times actually was false.) Naturally, in reading the complaint, I was interested to see how Mann was going to argue that.

The answer is found in paragraph 21:

Following the publication of the CRU emails, Penn State, the University of East Anglia...and five governmental agencies...have conducted separate and independent investigations into the allegations of scientific misconduct against Dr. Mann and his colleagues. Every one of these investigations has reached the same conclusion: there is no basis to any of the allegations of scientific misconduct or manipulation of data.

Paragraph 30 goes on to say that "well-respected journalists," the pop-science magazine Discover, and (drumroll) the Union of Concerned Scientists all said nasty things about Steyn, NRO, and CEI "in the wake of these attacks."

Now, as it happens, Mann attaches the offending articles from CEI and NRO. And both these articles explain briefly why they don't agree with the "independent" investigations exonerating Mann. The CEI article includes links to the sources for their belief, and Steyn makes a pretty obvious reference to the "Mike's nature trick" Climategate email.

So there you have it. If the government conducts a bunch of investigations, and you don't believe them, and you don't believe left-wing advocacy groups and an editorial in a pop-sci magazine, according to Mann you've got "actual malice." Believe the government - or get sued and pay damages. The Green left has wandered into strange territory indeed!

A few other thoughts from me. In exhibit C (NRO's response to Mann's original threat), Rich Lowry comments that discover in this case may discomfit Mann considerably. That may well be true. Truth is a defense to libel claims, so any evidence that shows Mann is a "data manipulator" is relevant, and he can be made to disgorge it.

But the defendants should still try to have this complaint dismissed before discovery begins. The complaint itself and the attached documents, it seems to me, make a good case for that - a complaint has got to state facts which, if true, entitle the plaintiff to relief. "He had actual malice" is a legal conclusion, not a fact; "the government did investigaitons and said I'm innocent" is a fact, but in light of the attachments is a "so-what?" fact. If they can't get it dismissed, they should above all things try to win on summary judgment - show the judge that Mann has no evidence to prove Steyn disbelieved (or didn't care about the truth of) what he was writing - and not be tempted by courtroom glory, that serpent's eye that charms only to destroy.

Experience has taught me to be against using trials for spectacles. If you're suing someone, you're there to get the money. If you're getting sued, you're there to not have to pay. If you're facing possible criminal charges - you're there to avoid the punishment, or as much of it as you can. You are not there to tell the world about something - there are many forums for that. If discovery turns up the kind of data that Mann is wont to refuse, well and good, but that should never become the purpose of defending the lawsuit. Litigation, civil and criminal, goes its own strange ways, and does strange things to people - shrinks them if they are not careful.

The same goes for the discovery process. It occurs to me that Mann may be playing a slightly deeper game here. To be sure, the defendants can demand documents, e-mails, etc. from him to show he manipulated data; but he can insist the defendants themselves submit to depositions. Now, really, all Steyn has to say is "I read this book and I chased links at this website and I believed them over the government" - and if Mann doesn't have proof to the contrary, he is (or ought to be) hosed.

But maybe his lawyer's planning to grill Steyn at deposition (rather than trial) on his lack of science background, to make the deposition testimony itself embarrassing ("So, you didn't graduate college? - So, you're not a statistician? - So, you just believe these guys over those? - Because they fit your ideology...?") - and leak it publicly, to make him look foolish. I haven't had to deal with the issue of whether that's forbidden in civil litigation, but I have a hard time believing a deposition from this case would stay secret if it had polemically useful material.

Progress

UNINSTALLING OBAMA.....……………. █████████████▒▒▒ 90% complete.

The Stone Games

The Fortieth Year of the Stone Mountain Highland Games has come and gone.  I've been going for twenty, excepting years when I've been out of the country.

The carving on the mountain is the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world.

The Games for me are a lot of work.  I spend most of the weekend on my feet in the ring, teaching history and the physics of medieval warfare, and telling stories of how American freedom and culture has deep roots in Medieval Scotland and Britain.

The best part of the Games for me, though, comes before and after the crowds.  When the Games are not going on, we spend the weekend camping and feasting with old friends.

Nobody said a word to me about the sword strapped to the bike.

The mountain at dawn.

Rise early, and there is a quiet moment to read by the fire before others get up.

It was good to see reader V. R., who stopped by the ring to chat as she usually does.  For her as with me the Games are mostly work, as she is associated with a charity aimed at helping the elderly and disabled enjoy the festival.  It's a noble thing.

Screwtape for the quantum age

God doesn't play at dice, but the Devil can't get enough of it.

Slow down

Take it easy, and enjoy a lightning strike at 7,207 frames per second.  XKCD explains some things about lightning here.

Super-cheap blood tests . . .

. . . developed by Cambridge non-profit funded by the Gates foundation.

H/t Instapundit.

Inconvenient religion

King's College, an evangelical Christian school based in Manhattan, has kicked out Dinesh D'Souza for getting engaged before he's quite finished divorcing his wife.   D'Souza is making quite a stink about it. ("I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced.") Ann Althouse also is puzzled, as are many of her readers; the discussion wandered into the usual weeds over the image of God as the lawgiver vs. the kindly old gentleman (as C.S. Lewis put it) who didn't have very firm ideas about prohibiting bad behavior but instead "liked to see the young people enjoying themselves."   Gradually, however, a couple of traditional thinkers waded in and tried to stem the tide of rampant moral relativism.   All of commenter Paddy O's posts are worth reading:

Jesus, as you note, took the rougher part on himself, while giving grace to others.  Again, it just seems curious that of all the very tough demands Jesus makes on us, some are seen as selective and some are seen as absolute, the selective ones seeming to be applied to that which we would rather not give up, and the absolute seeming to be applied to others who we would like to manage.

Paddy O also offered the useful suggestion that D'Souza should follow the example of Henry VIII and start his own college.

Whether we look at the issue from the point of view of religious principles or just etiquette or mental health, I think it would take a strange view of marriage and commitment to get engaged before you finish divorcing.  Isn't there some essential confusion here?  I've never understand the point of marrying at all if one takes that vague a view of whether he's in a marriage or not.

America's New Poet Laureate

Natasha Trethewey, originally of Mississippi and now at Emory University in Atlanta, is America's nineteenth poet laureate, and the first Southerner to hold the post since the original.

What kind of writer would you have become if you had been born outside the South?

I have no idea. I can’t begin to imagine myself without the fate of my geography. I feel lucky to have been born into a troubled and violent history and a terrible beauty.

Here is the poem cited in the first part of the review. You can see her annoyance at the refusal to see the South she loves -- which is, in a way, different from the one that I do. Yet we are both of the thing, of the place.

The Al Smith Dinner

Four years ago, John McCain killed at this event. This year, well, see for yourself.

I Just Want To Make Clear: Our Sons Are Entitled To Every Form Of Nutrition

H/t: D29.

What Do You Mean By 'Entitled To'?

The difference between Joe Biden and Mr. Obama includes this fact: when Joe Biden says he wants to be clear about what hemeans, he usually proceeds to be quite clear about what he really means. This time I'm not sure.

BIDEN: I want to make this clear so there no misunderstanding anybody. I got a daughter, lost a daughter, got four granddaughters, and Barack has two daughters. We are absolutely — this is to our core — my daughter, and my granddaughters and Barack’s daughters are entitled to every single solitary operation! EVERY SINGLE SOLITARY OPERATION!

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find a transcript of the remarks, so I'm not sure what he means by "entitled to" in this case. Does he mean that no operation should be unavailable to 'daughters' who want it? It's not clear that this is right: what if 'someone's daughter,' to use Biden's phrasing, wants to amputate her hands for no medical reason, as part of an art project? I would think that a doctor's oath would, or ought to, forbid participation.

Does he mean 'entitled to' in the sense that the operation should be not only available to them, but free to them? That's a highly problematic view, but if you want to endorse single-payer health care, say so. (Is the proposition that only women should have single-payer health care, or are women just the wedge to force it on everyone?)

Or does he mean 'entitled to' in the sense that no one should forbid access to an operation that is common practice? In that case, Hot Air raises a good point about Obamacare's IPAB board, which will in practice deny care to some 'daughters' -- even if their parents are likely to be long dead themselves.

Or is this just about abortion? If so, it's questionable whether it's reasonable to describe that as an "operation." In a sense it is a medical operation, because there are medical personnel involved. But the point of an operation is health, and the point of abortion is the destruction of a human life. An execution is not an "operation," and in that sense an abortion is not one either.

Guess I'll Be Getting Some Phonecalls Soon...

The NRA is loving the last debate. After four years of Democrats being afraid to even pretend to symbolically embrace gun control, good old President Obama went all in. Gives them somewhere to spend their big campaign bucks, and no doubt it's going to give rise to another round of fundraising soon.

Well, you know what? He has it coming. You pay the money, and you take the ride. If there's one thing the folks down Ohio way don't like very much, it's gun control. Georgia gun laws are little looser.

What's the Economy on This?

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS: Is this Aston Martin 77. Santa, are you listening???? I’ve been a good girl, sort of. :)

-Elizabeth Price Foley

That's a two-million dollar automobile. I'd have settled for a new Harley. C'mon, Santa. The best ones are a hundred times cheaper. Surely a bad man is worth 1/100th of a good girl?

Yeah, OK, probably not. Can't blame a man for trying.

Speaking of Vigilantes

You're probably aware of Anonymous, the hacker group. You probably haven't heard much to recommend them to you before now. Here's their argument for vigilantism. It's well worth considering.

So is this.

Terror

It's time to mothball the term "terror" for a while.  It's lost all meaning.  It was being steadily drained of meaning years ago when people started asking, "Isn't it terrorism when someone makes me uncomfortable?  Isn't all force terrorism?"

What the Obama administration has been lying about is not whether the attack and murder of our ambassador and other Americans in Benghazi was an act of terror in some ineffable sense.  It has been lying about whether the attack was a spontaneous mob reaction to a provocative video, or a professional and pre-planned armed assault by an al Qaeda affiliate in a region where the administration had been crowing over the demise of that group.  The fact that the President vaguely alluded to the word "terror" in his remarks the day after the attack is not the point, as even Candy Crowley admitted shortly after the debate concluded.  The important point is that the President and his spokespersons repeatedly insisted that the attack was an unpredictable eruption of crowd hostility sparked by a YouTube video, long after it was crystal clear the attack was heavily armed, carefully coordinated, and took place in the complete absence of any crowd demonstration, video-related or otherwise.

I'm sure the attacks were terrifying.  They would have been equally terrifying whether they resulted from a proto-military assault or a crowd that suddenly lost control of its humanity.  The issue is not whether they inspired fear but whether they were an assault by a previously identified enemy about whom we had solid intelligence, or some kind of bolt-from-the-blue mass hysteria that no one could have planned for.  I fear the distinction is being lost in the endless parade of fuzzy blathering.

If Romney wanted to nail Obama on his prevarications, he'd have done better to focus on when Obama or his surrogates first admitted publicly what he'd known all along, which was that there was no public demonstration of any kind out the Benghazi facility that night, and that the attack was a sudden, coordinated onslaught by men with RPGs, whom we quickly learned were associated with al Qaeda.

Armed Posse Patrols Timber Land in Sheriff's Place

Story from Oregon here, about citizens stepping up to do local police work. One part I do not get -

Policing expert Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, says neighborhood watch efforts can be positive but turn into problems when volunteers "decide that instead of supplementing law enforcement, they are going to replace law enforcement. Then you cross potentially into vigilantism."... Nichols says what his group is doing is "not vigilantism at all."

Okay, I get why an academic might say it, and why the word carries emotional freight that would make someone want to deny it. But I never heard before that was the distinction. Vigilantes at their best, if I remember, could and did work with official law enforcement (when there was any), and hand their prisoners over to the courts for trial (when, again, there were any). The crowd in The Ox-Bow Incident turns evil, not when they decide to apprehend suspects in a murder, but when they follow a leader who decides that they're going to do their hanging on the spot - "because they don't think the courts are fast enough."

What an Unpleasant Debate

Not because I think it didn't go well, although it wasn't the walkaway stomping of the first debate. The tone was what made it unpleasant.

Still, the final arguments were convincing. Romney gave the best answer I've ever heard him give. Obama started off by saying something implausible ('I believe in free enterprise'... 'I don't believe that government creates jobs'), and went on to level a series of negative arguments designed to undermine what his opponent had just said.

Some other observations: Obama didn't answer the question on Libya at all. Apparently Mitt Romney was the only person on the stage or in the audience who knew the difference between an AK-47 and an "assault weapon." I couldn't understand why Romney didn't answer the outsourcing question by coming back to his energy policy -- you can't outsource North American oil production -- but maybe he felt he had landed all the blows he wanted to in the first part of the debate.

Anyway, we'll see what the independents thought soon enough. I imagine they will have been put off by the tone. If I was, surely they were also.

Well, now I feel bad

I know how it feels when the media won't give you a fair shake.   So now I'm full of warm fellow-feeling toward the courageous freedom fighters who shot that 14-year-old Afghan girl for advocating education for girls, only to suffer under a deluge of scorn and contempt locally and abroad.

“The Taliban cannot tolerate biased media.”  The commander, who calls himself Jihad Yar, argues that death threats against the press are justified:  he says “99 percent” of the reporters on the story are only using the shooting as an excuse to attack the Taliban.

You carry out a perfectly justified attempted murder against a dangerous heretic, and then you make death threats against the biased press that cover the story, and suddenly you're the bad guy?

Mullah Yahya agrees with Jihad Yar that the media and the Americans are side by side against the Taliban.  “But I would blame the Taliban as well,” he says.  “If they allowed independent media to visit Taliban-controlled areas, it could have a very positive effect on their coverage.  In fact we have suggested this to their media department, but they’re only interested in kidnapping reporters, not in cooperating with them.

I thought journalists were supposed to be sensitive to other cultures.  If kidnapping is part of their culture, who are we to object?

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