Everything is under control

Did the takeover of Mosul come out of the blue?

The Kurds became especially alarmed at signs that ISIS had already formed a shadow government in Mosul, weeks before initiating the carefully planned takeover of the city 10 days ago.  According to the same Kurdish military sources it was accomplished with ease and without serious fighting after local Iraqi commanders agreed to withdraw.

The prime minister of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region, Nechirvan Barzani, says he warned Baghdad and the United States months ago about the threat ISIS posed to Iraq and the group’s plan to launch an insurgency across Iraq.  The Kurds even offered to participate in a joint military operation with Baghdad against the jihadists.

Washington didn’t respond—a claim that will fuel Republican charges that the Obama administration has been dangerously disengaged from the Middle East.  Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki dismissed the warnings, saying everything was under control.

Alternative forms of commerce

I'm all in favor of whatever kind of exchange leaves both parties to the transaction satisfied enough to complete it, but this is a little weird.

"In Fact I'm Glad You Mentioned It."

Apparently prosecutors make good Congressmen sometimes -- especially in the face of corrupt officials. Trey Gowdy raises an important legal point, and then turns the IRS's defense into an invitation to consider what criminal charges ought to be brought against them.



I love hearing an IRS official stating that he doesn't need to know the law, because you can use "common sense" to know what's right. Yes, in theory, that's how it ought to be. The law ought to line up with common sense, such that an ordinary person need not be a lawyer in order to know how to behave in a fashion that is both moral and lawful. That is the only proper way to arrange a state, given the practical need of division of labor in an advanced economy: we can't train everyone as lawyers, because time and money for education are limited and we need most people to do other things. Therefore, the law should accord with the common sense, so that honest people can rely on the resources they can actually expect to have in order to be good citizens and avoid criminality.

Nothing could be further from the actual facts of how our Federal laws and regulations are ordered, however. How charming to see the defense -- which any court would reject were it raised by a citizen without legal training -- raised by a high official of a Federal regulatory agency who is himself a lawyer!

Bannockburn, Day I: The Death of Henry de Bohun

During the events described in the first post below, an English knight named Sir Henry de Bohun broke away from the English vanguard because he saw the Scottish King, Robert the Bruce, and recognized him. The king had come on a palfrey, not a warhorse, to observe the battle and issue orders rather than armed to partake in the battle. This account describes the palfrey as a "pony," which is not I think accurate; but the Scottish horses were generally substantially smaller than the English horses, making them less capable in a heavy charge but better for extended marches and long raids.

Fully armed, riding upon his great war-horse, the English knight came thundering on. Bruce, on his little pony, could have no chance against him. There was a dreadful moment of suspense. The two armies watched breathlessly. Bruce waited calmly, and when Bohun was almost upon him, he suddenly turned his pony aside. Bohun dashed on. As he passed, the King, rising high in his stirrups, brought his battle-axe crashing down upon the knight's head. The steel helmet was shattered by the mighty blow, Bohun fell to the ground dead, and his frightened horse dashed riderless away.

Cheer after cheer rose from the Scottish ranks, and the generals gathered round their King. They were glad that he was safe, yet vexed that he should so have endangered his life. "Bethink you, sire, the fate of all Scotland rests upon you," they said.

But the King answered them never a word. "I have broken my good axe," was all he said, "I have broken my good axe."

"This Is A Totally Dopey Criticism"

Physicist Sean Carroll explains to his colleagues some misconceptions they have about philosophy.

Liberty and education

I realize most people are never going to homeschool, and I'm not going to claim I never disagree with Rand [correction: Ron] Paul, but he speaks to me on education issues:

“The idea that government ‘experts’ can centrally plan a nation’s educational system is just as flawed as the idea that government can centrally plan the economy."

. . . The Ron Paul Curriculum, launched last fall, is designed to be used by homeschoolers, and takes a unique approach to education that reflects Paul’s libertarian-leaning political values.  The Curriculum includes lessons on Austrian economics and libertarian political theory, and teaches students how to start their own business on the Internet.  It almost totally eschews social studies until students are at the high school level, taking the view that early childhood social studies education mostly promotes statism.  The Curriculum also reflects a Christian worldview, with early history education putting significant focus on the Book of Genesis, Biblical Israel and the Reformation.

Paul’s program is also designed to be relatively cheap, as it uses no textbooks and is mostly self-taught, meaning there is little need for costly teachers.  High school learning builds up to students taking CLEP exams that can provide students with college credit, thereby allowing them to graduate earlier and at a lower cost.

Bannockburn, Day I

Here's how Wikipedia describes the first day of the Bannockburn.

Here is the description from In Freedom's Cause:

On the morning of Sunday, the 23d of June, immediately after sunrise, the Scotch attended mass, and confessed as men who had devoted themselves to death. The king, having surveyed the field, caused a proclamation to be made that whosoever felt himself unequal to take part in the battle was at liberty to withdraw. Then, knowing from his scouts that the enemy had passed the night at Falkirk, six or seven miles off, he sent out Sir James Douglas and Sir Robert Keith with a party of horsemen to reconnoitre the advance.

The knights had not gone far when they saw the great army advancing, with the sun shining bright on innumerable standards and pennons, and glistening from lance head, spear, and armour. So grand and terrible was the appearance of the army that upon receiving the report of Douglas and Keith the king thought it prudent to conceal its full extent, and caused it to be bruited abroad that the enemy, although numerous, was approaching in a disorderly manner.

The experienced generals of King Edward now determined upon making an attempt to relieve Stirling Castle without fighting a pitched battle upon ground chosen by the enemy. Had this attempt been successful, the great army, instead of being obliged to cross a rapid stream and attack an enemy posted behind morasses, would have been free to operate as it chose, to have advanced against the strongholds which had been captured by the Scots, and to force Bruce to give battle upon ground of their choosing. Lord Clifford was therefore despatched with 800 picked men-at-arms to cross the Bannock beyond the left wing of the Scottish army, to make their way across the carse, and so to reach Stirling. The ground was, indeed, impassable for a large army; but the troops took with them faggots and beams, by which they could make a passage across the deeper parts of the swamp and bridge the little streams which meandered through it.

As there was no prospect of an immediate engagement, Randolph, Douglas, and the king had left their respective divisions, and had taken up their positions at the village of St. Ninians, on high ground behind the army, whence they could have a clear view of the approaching English army. Archie Forbes had accompanied Randolph, to whose division he, with his retainers, was attached. Randolph had with him 500 pikemen, whom he had withdrawn from his division in order to carry out his appointed task of seeing that the English did not pass along the low ground at the edge of the carse behind St. Ninians to the relief of Stirling; but so absorbed were knights and men-at-arms in watching the magnificent array advancing against the Scottish position that they forgot to keep a watch over the low ground. Suddenly one of the men, who had straggled away into the village, ran up with the startling news that a large party of English horse had crossed the corner of the carse, and had already reached the low ground beyond the church.

"A rose has fallen from your chaplet, Randolph," the king said angrily.

Without a moment's loss of time Randolph and Archie Forbes set off with the spearmen at a run, and succeeded in heading the horsemen at the hamlet of Newhouse. The mail clad horsemen, confident in their numbers, their armour, and horses, laid their lances in rest, struck spurs into their steeds, and, led by Sir William Daynecourt, charged down upon the Scotch spearmen. Two hundred of these consisted of Archie Forbes' retainers, all veterans in war, and who had more than once, shoulder to shoulder, repelled the onslaught of the mailed chivalry of England. Animated by the voices of their lord and Randolph, these, with Moray's own pikemen, threw themselves into a solid square, and, surrounded by a hedge of spears, steadily received the furious onslaught of the cavalry. Daynecourt and many of his men were at the first onslaught unhorsed and slain, and those who followed were repulsed. Again and again they charged down upon the pikemen, but the dense array of spears was more than a match for the lances of the cavalry, and as the horses were wounded and fell, or their riders were unhorsed, men rushed out from the square, and with axe and dagger completed the work. Still the English pressed them hard, and Douglas, from the distance, seeing how hotly the pikemen were pressed by the cavalry, begged the king to allow him to go to Randolph's assistance. Bruce, however, would suffer no change in his position, and said that Randolph must stand or fall by himself. Douglas, however, urged that he should be allowed to go forward with the small body of retainers which he had with him. The king consented, and Douglas set off with his men.

When the English saw him approach they recoiled somewhat from the square, and Douglas, being now better able to see what was going on, commanded his followers to halt, saying that Randolph would speedily prove victorious without their help, and were they now to take part in the struggle they would only lessen the credit of those who had already all but won the victory. Seeing the enemy in some confusion from the appearance of the reinforcement, Randolph and Archie now gave the word for their men to charge, and these, rushing on with spear and axe, completed the discomfiture of the enemy, killed many, and forced the rest to take flight. Numbers, however, were taken. Randolph is said to have had but two men killed in the struggle.

The greater fight was to come.

To Tame A Horse And Ride It To War

The men emerged over the crest of a ridge and guided their horses along a tree line, skirting a wide meadow. They picked their way along narrow trails, climbing higher into the Sierra until a panorama of snowcapped peaks and a broad green valley unfolded beneath them.

The men, Special Forces soldiers dressed in jeans and other civilian clothes, led their horses into a thick stand of pine trees, where they dismounted and let the horses drink from a clear mountain stream before breaking out their own rations.

At this remote training area high in the Sierra, the U.S. Marine Corps is reviving the horsemanship skills that were once a key part of the nation's armed forces but were cast aside when tanks and armored vehicles replaced them. The need to bring these skills back was driven home in Afghanistan in 2001, when the first Special Forces soldiers to arrive found themselves fighting on horseback alongside tribesmen in rugged terrain without roads. Many had never ridden a horse before.

"We don't want to reinvent anything," said Marine Capt. Seth Miller, the officer in charge of formal schools at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. "These are skills that were lost."

Marine instructors are teaching the students, most of them Army Special Forces soldiers, how to control horses, care for them and load packs. The students are taught how to calculate routes and distances for rides and what to look for when purchasing horses from locals. For example, checking teeth is a good way to determine age and avoid getting ripped off by a farmer trying to pass off an ancient mule or horse.

In a throwback to the old Wild West days, instructors are considering training soldiers in how to shoot from a moving horse....

There's quite a bit more at the link. We may see a swelling in our ranks.

More on the IRS Email Backup Firm

So apparently the IRS decided not to renew that company's contract to back up their emails, just weeks after Lerner's hard drive crashed... and just weeks before other crashes of drives of involved parties.

So the first question is, what does Sonasoft have? Were they obligated to destroy, or to retain, the records that the IRS had already paid for them to store?

The second question is, did the IRS decide to go with a different firm -- or to stop backing up its emails?

Public Radio Continues to Shine

This week on NPR: 'Speaking of budgetary concerns, a country doesn't really have to have an army, you know.'

Maleficent and Benghazi

Last night I had a date with my one-and-only, and for reasons I won't discuss we ended up seeing this damnable new take on Sleeping Beauty.

Now I wasn't expecting much. What little I see of current Hollywood doesn't leave me impressed with its imagination; and "reimaginings" without imagination don't do much for me. But I walked out of this one spitting mad. Indulge me a moment while I say why.

If you haven't seen it (lucky souls), the concept is perfectly simple. The king from Sleeping Beauty owed a great debt to the "bad fairy," but instead betrayed her to gain power for himself. (The poor thing didn't understand how greedy men were 'til later...her Green credentials are spotless.) It relates to his desire, and his father's, to steal the peaceful woodlands from the magical creatures who inhabit them -- and if they'd only leave them alone, or make amends and give back what they stole, all would be well. The fairy's curse is a burst of understandable righteous anger at the king's perfidy; but he's able to get a measure of mercy out of her just by begging on his knees, that being the right position to check his privilege. And later on the conscience-ridden Maleficent does everything she can to fix the problem. And in the end "true love" is revealed to be, not a romantic attachment between man and woman (which our female lead denies, and she's never proven wrong), but pity and remorse for a victim.

I expected some genuflections to the prevailing orthodoxies of PC and "Cultural Marxism." I didn't expect them to replace the whole story. If you're a civilized ruler under attack...white male type...well, that settles it, you must have provoked it. In a classic heroic fairy tale (or even a healthy cartoon version), there's evil in the world and it's got to be fought, and kings, princes, knights, and soldiers have an especial duty to do so. In this? There's no evil but what you create yourself; no one's out to attack you unless you provoked it; the "victim card" not only explains but excuses every evil; and those who can play it have all the noblest sentiments. In fact, no one except victims has any noble sentiments, not in this film they don't. The story's been rewritten to include hundreds of soldiers, but they're either villains or faceless dragon fodder, and everyone from king to peasant would be better off without them. The cartoon was truer to life.

It seems to me this new take on the classic tale is the same viewpoint that inspired certain parties' incorrect assertions on the subject of Benghazi. I don't think they invented the "video" story out of whole cloth. I think it was their first instinct. Americans under attack by Muslims? It must be our fault. We must have provoked them. Send in the troops? Get our people out at once? Perish the thought -- that might provoke them some more. Better to show an appeasing image. And when the first instinct turned out to be untrue...it was still the natural story to run with. Teach every child that view; then our future leaders are secured.

Apparently now not only our schools and our press, but our fairytales as well, must teach suicidalism.. This civilization's going to be hard to rebuild. I think all that's left for Hollywood is to retell Aesop's fable of the Wolves and the Sheep to explain how it's all the Sheepdogs' fault. Which, come to that, is just what the wolves were saying.

Harvey Mansfield Decides To Retire

At least, I assume so, given his decision to publish this as an employee of Harvard.

Well, the man was born in 1932. It's no surprise he might be ready to "spend more time with his family."

Who embodied evil before Hitler?

Tyler Cowan muses on what historical or literary figure people referred to before Hitler became everyone's stock idea of a villain?  It turns out that Pharaoh and Judas were favorite choices for millennia.  Commenters chime in with nominations for Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and other barbarian invaders.  Nero, Caligula, and Domitian fell out of favor a while back.

Once Hitler came along, he really enjoyed a consensus.  This is a Western perspective, of course.

"They Are Excommunicated"

This is perhaps less directed to the ‘Ndrangheta themselves than to the priests who serve in their communities. What the Pope said was not that he was excommunicating the mafia, but that they were excommunicating themselves by their choices of associations and actions, their "adoration of evil and contempt for the common good."

So priests in southern Italy should refuse them Communion, or a Catholic burial should they die without reconciliation.

It's a significant move, and I wonder why it has never been done before.

But this is the same Pope who insisted on ditching the bulletproof glass.

"It's true that anything could happen, but let's face it, at my age I don't have much to lose," he told Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia in an interview published Friday and reported on in English by Vatican Radio. "I know that something could happen to me, but it's in the hands of God."

So maybe the answer's as simple as that. He is not afraid.

"Lions Ate Him."

Nick at Ranger Up has a good story about the time he was almost eaten by a lion during a college trip to Africa.

Interestinger and interestinger

How would you like to be the CEO of the company to which the IRS outsourced its data backup?

Well, I'm sure it's all a big misunderstanding.  Or else a lot more people are planning to take the fifth soon, and mostly the latter.

Regulatory failure

I'm reading John Allison's "The Financial Crisis," a free-market take on the collapse that precipitated the Great Recession.  He's been discussing the moral hazard of deposit insurance, a difficult topic for me.  I've known since the S&L crisis in the mid-1980's, which created the wave of bankruptcies on which I cut my teeth as a young lawyer, that deposit insurance threatens a dangerous spiral in interest paid on consumer deposits, followed by riskier bank investments needed to generate the higher interest.  Without deposit insurance, a bank that pays too high an interest rate on consumer deposits will face a corrective mechanism: the difficulty of finding safe borrowers who can pay high interest on loans.  If the bank takes too many wild flyers on its borrowers, it goes broke, and its depositors lose their money.  Depositors who don't want to lose their money won't deposit it in a bank with a reputation for wild-eyed lending.

No one likes this disciplinary mechanism, because it tends to lead to panics and bank runs, especially on the part of small mom-and-pop depositors with all their liquid eggs in one basket.  Politically and practically, we're going to have deposit insurance one way or another.  Allison points out, however, that even with deposit insurance, people with deposits over the insured limit can exert useful pressure on banks to moderate their appetite for making risky loans.  But in the run-up to the 2008/2009 financial crisis, the uninsured-depositor disciplinary mechanism broke down.

In July 2008, regulators shut down IndyMac, with loans (assets) of $32 billion and deposits (liabilities) of $19 billion, without opting to cover any of the $1 billion (5%) of its deposits that were uninsured, (that is, deposits exceeding $100,000 per customer).   It was the largest collapse of an FDIC-insured institution since Continental Illinois in 1984, and it hit the public hard.  Five percent of deposits being uninsured may not seem like a lot, but the public was nervous, and it didn't help that newscasts showed unhappy depositors lined up at windows.

So the stage was set for real jumpiness over the summer.  Regulators had known for most of the year that failure was inevitable at Washington Mutual, the country's largest savings & loan, with assets in mid-2008 of $308 billion and deposits of $188 billion.  Whether because of the IndyMac experience, general jumpiness in the real estate market, or machinations by regulators and their cronies (the last possibility is the subject of litigation that hasn't yet quit, six years later), WaMu suffered a $16 billion bank run in September 2008 just before regulators shut it down and sold its assets to J.P. Morgan for a pittance.   Regulators, in no mood to spark an even more widespread bank run, made a fateful decision to cover all uninsured deposits.

Here is where Allison argues the biggest mistake was made.   It would have been possible to cover the uninsured deposits with taxpayer money.  That would have been politically poisonous, of course, but infuriated taxpayers could have done little about it in the short run.  Instead, however, regulators dumped the entire hit on WaMu's bondholders:  that is, the capital markets that had provided liquidity to the bank via traditional loans rather than through insured deposits.  Unlike taxpayers, the capital markets could and did retaliate instantly.  Allison, who ran BB&T (a real-estate-oriented Atlanta bank), reports that the capital markets had been tight during that troubled summer, but BB&T had just succeeded in floating a bond issue before WaMu failed.  The day after the feds stiffed the WaMu bondholders, the capital market for banks dried up without a trace.  Allison argues that this event was far more damaging to the liquidity of the financial markets than the failure of Lehman Brothers that same month.  He also argues that it was D.C.'s panic over the dried-up capital markets resulting from the WaMu decision that drove the TARP bank-bailout bill later in the year.

Solstice

O thou who passest thro’ our valleys in
Thy strength, curb thy fierce steeds, allay the heat
That flames from their large nostrils! thou, O Summer,
Oft pitchedst here thy golden tent, and oft
Beneath our oaks hast slept, while we beheld
With joy, thy ruddy limbs and flourishing hair.

Beneath our thickest shades we oft have heard
Thy voice, when noon upon his fervid car
Rode o’er the deep of heaven: beside our springs
Sit down, and in our mossy valleys, on
Some bank beside a river clear, throw thy
Silk draperies off, and rush into the stream:
Our valleys love the Summer in his pride.

Our bards are famed who strike the silver wire:
Our youth are bolder than the southern swains:
Our maidens fairer in the sprightly dance:
We lack not songs, nor instruments of joy,
Nor echoes sweet, nor waters clear as heaven,
Nor laurel wreaths against the sultry heat.

-William Blake

Paying Attention

A friend, veteran, and fellow biker sends:

Today was the date for the publication of my very favorite annual poll, the Gallup Confidence in Institutions Poll. As you know from hearing me talk about this in the past, all of our democratic and political organs have been suffering a long-term decline in public confidence. Congress is now down to seven percent! None of our major political institutions now command "a lot" or "quite a bit" of confidence from a third of Americans.

The police still command a majority (though still behind 'small business' and 'the military'). So clearly my friend's sentiment is not widely shared.

Nevertheless it's an interesting point. The biker's loyalties are unknown, and he has adopted a posture that suggests he is dangerous. On the other hand, the shotgun he's carrying is of limited hazard. The policeman belongs to a unit, with military-grade gear, and has the backing of the government. Obviously the policeman is far, far more dangerous.

But people trust the police, and even more the military, though they don't trust the government that they serve. That's interesting. It seems like there's got to be a kind of very serious tension there: trusting the servant, but not the master. Or do we trust that those in arms are gentlemen, and will at last do the right thing no matter how corrupt their leaders might be?

Friday Night AMV

Bad boys. Yeah. That isn't anything new.