Ah, the Patriarchy

A "Feminist Father" wears a T-shirt with the following "Rules for Dating My Daughter":

1. I don’t make the rules
2. You don’t make the rules
3. She makes the rules
4. Her body, her rules

This is, of course, just as accurately a statement of the law. It's exactly what the law says, it's exactly how any American court will rule should a relevant case appear before it.

So, if he's a "Feminist Father" for declaring these rules, do we have a "Feminist System of Law" as well? I thought we were living in some sort of patriarchy -- even a rape culture. How surprising to learn that, instead, the positive laws perfectly adhere to Feminist principles on the subject of greatest interest to them.

Charts!

A newsletter linked me to these WaPo charts, describing any number of U.S. trends by state and by county.  Most of them make Texas look pretty middle-of-the-road.

Cleansing

Starting with "The Washington Racecards," the National Review Online is soliciting our help in coming up with a new and more appropriate name for the sports franchise that dare not speak its name. "The Redtapes" is good, I think.

Songbirds

Dr. Althouse posts a short piece about people reacting very angrily to a woman who posted a picture of a rabbit she was skinning for dinner. "Rabbit ate my parsley," the lady wrote. "I am eating the rabbit."

Well, of course you are. That makes total sense to me. Apparently not to everyone!

The second item in the piece by Althouse has to do with a dog-eating festival in Yulin, China. One of the comments to the post says, "I love to have some dog- and cat-eating Chinese and Koreans as neighbors so as to help reduce the annual 1 billion songbird slaughter."

I assume he means by the dogs and (especially) the cats. But what it brought to my mind was a memory from China, when my wife and I were hiking on Precious Stone Hill near Hangzhou. We heard a beautiful songbird, and I suddenly realized that I couldn't remember having heard one the entire time I'd been in China. Walking forward excitedly, we came around a bend in the trail and found... several men, who had brought birds in cages up to the top of the mountain and were getting them to sing to each other.

I learned after that there is a cultural pride taken in being the top of the food chain, such that animals in general are considered edible. I began to notice that the stalls in the market had a huge variety of eggs for sale, not just chicken or duck but of all sorts of little birds.

To this day I don't know if the men up there were using their caged birds to try to lure more birds for them to catch as food, or if they were just a small society of men who longed to hear a songbird in a wild place.

Whatevering

Matt Walsh has lost patience with single dudes who no longer have the vocabulary to describe whatever it is they are or aren't doing with female dudes. "We're 'talking.'  We're 'hanging out.'  We're 'whatever.'"

Here’s some brutal honesty for you:  if you ‘aren’t ready for something serious,’ then you need to go get yourself ready and leave these ladies alone until you do.  You can’t go out and have sex (I mean, ‘hook up,’ as the middle schoolers at the lunch table might call it) and then claim that you ‘aren’t ready for something serious.’  It’s too late, friend.  Sex is something serious.

Barber Shops

I used to go to barber shops. My favorite one was run out of one end of a tire shop. They'd use a pressurized air line to blow off the back of your neck that was hooked to the same pump that they were airing tires with on the other side of the wall. They'd shave your neck with a straight razor.

These days my hair is too thin to bother a barber about. I just shave it off once every week or so. Testosterone poisoning, you know. Huge beard, no hair.

But I remember them fondly, those barber shops.

Technical Difficulties

Speaking of computer crashes, I've had one recently. I paid a substantial fee to get my hard disk reformatted and my data restored, but now it seems to be crashing again less than a week later. This is one of a half a dozen major mechanical or technical malfunctions that have come up all at once, and the second one to recur after I thought I had it fixed.

It may be that my connectivity will be limited for a while, as some of these things are of more immediate need than my having a working computer.

Hate speech

In order to protect children from hate speech, a Connecticut high school blocks internet access to the National Rifle Association, the Connecticut GOP, and right-to-life groups, the Vatican, and Christianity.com, but allows access to Moms Demand Action, Newtown Action Alliance, Planned Parenthood, Pro-Choice America, the state Democratic party, and Islam-guide.com.

Taking lessons from the IRS, no doubt.

Today's News, Yesterday

June 17, 2014, 1:21 PM, Allahpundit:

I’ll spare you a click and Voxsplain this one right here: Clearly the answer is to increase the IRS’s budget, so that they can afford more reliable PCs.

June 18, 2014, 12:10 PM, Vox:

Headline: The IRS scandal shows the IRS needs a bigger budget

Wow. Good call, AP.

Two ways to water

California's, and Dean Kamen's.

IRS Emails

So, that IRS email story is pretty unbelievable, huh?

What would it take to cause the executive branch to tell such an obvious lie to Congress?

Two theories:

1) Not much, because the Justice Department is so corrupt that, even if a special prosecutor were appointed, they know the appointment will be so in the tank that there's no danger in outright lies.

2) Something huge, because the price -- even without a special prosecutor -- is convincing the American people that the civil service, and not merely the elected executive branch, is wholly corrupt and in need of replacement.

Opinions?

GySgt Johns

Gunnery Sergeant Johns, a veteran of several Iraq campaigns and a former drill instructor, was killed as a contractor. I'm not sure how well linking to a Facebook post works, but I think we should pay particular attention to these American contractors who are doing the fighting in Iraq. They are America's face on the ground, and likely the only Americans who are going to be contesting ISIS's advance in direct combat.

Post by Dakota Meyer.

Rest in peace.

A Tomb Fit For A King

What does one look like? Here's the design chosen for the tomb of the recently-recovered body of Richard III:



Here's the tomb of another, not quite a king but a truly great figure in English royalty: Edward "The Black Prince" of Wales.

A Man Could Get Killed Doing That

Secretary of State John Kerry “should be on a plane right now for Baghdad,” former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said Tuesday.

“The focus has been on the conflict, that is indeed serious, but, you know, diplomacy is what is crucial right now,” Crocker said on “CBS This Morning.” “We need to work with the Iraqis at the highest level,” which, he said, entails having Kerry urge Iraq’s leaders to pursue a national unity government.

Further down the report, Hot Air draws the wrong conclusion from a report that 44 detainees were killed in a gunfight near Baqubah. They say that ISIS killed them; the report says that they died in a jail being defended by Shi'ite militia. More likely the Shi'ite militia killed the detainees to prevent them being rescued and released by the ISIS. They were, after all, enemies of the government, and the militia couldn't be sure they could hold the jail. If the militia thought they would pick up arms for ISIS if released, it very likely summarily executed them.

This is no place for John Kerry. We should send someone serious, if we have anyone left.

Fireflies

June is the best month for fireflies. Once, long ago, I walked down by the Rappahannock river in a field of trees cut down by beavers, whitened spears in the early dark, with hundreds of fireflies flashing against the trees.

Tonight there were fewer, but still many, past dusk but not quite full dark. The thunderheads of early evening had moved off west, still flickering with lightning from cloud to cloud. We caught one, put it in a jar with holes in the lid for a while, then let it go. The horses came down to see what we were about. The air smelled of rain.

We call them "lightning bugs" here in Georgia, more often than "fireflies." They're among my favorite things.

Battle of the Presidents

An interesting contrast!

Uh-oh

Russia just carried out its threat to cut off gas supplies to the Ukraine.  Europe had better get fracking.

Abortion vs. contraception

Melinda Gates announced that the $40 billion Gates Foundation will no longer fund abortions.  While she declines to discuss her own views on abortion, she explained that her first allegiance is to providing parents--especially women--support for contraception, prenatal care, and newborn care.  She finds that her preferred policies enjoy a broad and deep consensus, while abortion is a lightning rod for controversy.  Conflating abortion with family planning complicates her primary task, so she's opting out.

Organizations like Planned Parenthood, in contrast, seem to go out of their way to conflate abortion with family planning, for at least two purposes:  to permit them to accuse any opponents of interfering with both, and to stymie efforts to sort out what portion of their funding pays for abortions.

More On Defections

The captured were mostly these Iraqi Air Force we've been talking about:

Most of those captured were air force cadets, the employee said. Those who were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were marched and trucked off to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in Tikrit, where they reportedly were executed.

Lots of caveats about how reliable the images are, and the reports themselves. That's good -- the journalists may have learned a thing since the American part of the war, where they tended to take insurgent claims of massacres at face value. Often if we sent an infantry unit out there to see if there really were heads piled up like the newspapers said, there was nothing of the sort. But the report, in the international press, multiplied the effect of their propaganda.

For Tom, Who Asked

'Why did the Iraqi Army melt away?,' Tom asked recently. We went through a few reasons at the time. Here's an interview that confirms some of them, for a Shi'a soldier from a distant (and safe) city, with officers and fellow soldiers he didn't trust to do their duty.

On Day Four of clashes in Mosul between encroaching jihadists and Iraqi security forces, two officers visited an outpost of the Iraqi 2nd Division’s logistics battalion with bad news: they said that all senior commanders had fled.

Stunned and confused, the men called headquarters and received the same information, that all officers colonel and above had abandoned their posts....

Had the Iraqi military brass in Mosul been chosen because of competency rather than cronyism, Nasseri suggested, perhaps the Islamic State’s march toward Baghdad could’ve been halted, or at least stalled.

“I know what I need to know about fighting in a city,” Nasseri said. “I fought side by side with Americans. Their military has leaders that tell the soldiers what the plan is, and fight. We don’t. There were many more terrorists in Fallujah and the fight was over in a month. (Mosul) wouldn’t have been a big problem if we had leaders.”

Compare and contrast with the story about the American contractors, who were able to pick up the rifles dropped by the fleeing soldiers and hold off the ISIS until they could be extracted.