Start By Speaking the Truth

Belmont Club author Richard Fernandez:

Both the Obama administration and the Franco-Germans are as trapped as the Ukrainians in Debaltseve. The Ukrainian troops are surrounded by the Russian troops, while the Western leaders are imprisoned by their own lies. The soldiers are invested by encroaching lines. The statesmen are trapped in a high wall of political bricks comprised of their own falsehoods. Having led their nations forward with false assurances of safety, both the EU leaders and the Obama administration are struggling to find an escape without admitting error.

They will not find it easy. Both cornered groups are hoping the cavalry will arrive before the last cup of water runs out. The soldiers are hoping for the European monitors to ride to the rescue, while Merkel and Hollande for their part must also be looking for a miracle. Maybe Putin will relent. As for Obama, he must be praying as he has never prayed before that ISIS will have a change of heart.

Taranto at the Wall Street Journal:

As funny as it is, it also feels a bit unsporting to pick on Harf like this. After all, she’s just doing her job, which is to act as a mouthpiece for an administration whose guiding principle seems to be that political correctness—which is to say, a thoroughgoing dishonesty—is the best weapon for dealing with Islamic terrorism.

Sometimes they even admit it.

After a discussion of religion

The Washington Post, tortured by a fear of backlash, struggles to find the words to describe today's story of a Detroit muslim who asked some fellow bus passengers whether they were Muslim, and on hearing that they were not, stabbed them.  Per Ace, the first try was:

Police: Man stabs two after asking if they are Muslim.

followed by (after protests):

Police: Muslim man stabs two after discussion about religious beliefs.

Ace's commenters suggested the following alternatives:

Conversation Over Islam Leads to Stabbing, Police Baffled.

Hate Crime Charges Likely After Muslim Man Survives Knife Attack During Religious Argument.

1938: Trains begin transporting Europe's Jewry to unknown locations to the east, after a discussion of religion.

What do they want?

I don't think it's that much of a mystery to the Hall, but apparently it's finally sunk in, even for those on the Left.

The linked article from the Atlantic lays out in massive, I'd say scholarly, detail where Daesh came from, their goals, their plans to achieve those goals, and possible ways to thwart them.  Most of it was already known to me, but there were some pieces that I did not know as well.  It's long, but very much worth it.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat

It is shocking to realize that her citation of Revelations 20:4 is not in any way altered.

Then I saw thrones, and those seated on them were given authority to judge. I also saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” — Revelation 20:4

She has a very generous soul. My own desire, I confess, is to say with Isaiah: "Here I am: send me."

Life Begins

...in unexpected ways.

Jeffrey Kieft, PhD, professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and corresponding author of the article in Nature, said scientists have long thought that the molecular signals that initiate protein synthesis in bacteria and eukaryotes are mutually exclusive. Scientists in Kieft's lab explored whether a structured RNA molecule from a virus that infects eukaryotic cells could function in bacteria. Surprisingly, they found that it could initiate protein syntheses, a process necessary for life.

"What we found bridges billions of years of evolutionary divergence," said Kieft, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist.

We often talk about viruses about being a kind of quasi-life. Maybe they are also pre-life.

Climate Change

Power is out. The trees are sheeted in ice. Stand outside on the porch, and you will hear a near constant set of crashes from breaking limbs and falling trees.

No problem. We have firewood and all we need.

May not post much for a day or two. Supposed to get record breaking cold tomorrow. But there is plenty of wood yet.

Message Received

The Islamic State’s Al Hayat Media, the group that has published the previous beheading videos in the Middle East, produced the Libya video titled, “A Message Signed With Blood To The Nation Of The Cross.”

“All praise is due to Allah the strong and mighty,” said an ISIS jihadist dressed in military fatigues in American-accented English. “And may blessings and peace be upon the ones sent by the sword as a mercy to all the worlds,” he added.

The masked ISIS member continues:

Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of Al-Sham and Dabiq’s plain, chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross for a long time, and today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message.

All crusaders: safety for you will be only wishes especially if you are fighting us all together. Therefore we will fight you all together. The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden’s body in, we swear to Allah we will mix it with your blood.

After the ISIS leader finishes speaking, his fellow terrorists then commence the beheading of the 21 Egyptian Christians. “And we will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission, the promise of our Prophet, peace be upon him,” The militant leader says after his comrades slaughter the Christian hostages.

Censorship is Damage

We have this thing called "the Internet" that routes around it.

Death to the Iran Deal

There is a general rule of thumb that if you have to make a deal, you often have to make a bad one.

The problems raised by authorities ranging from Henry Kissinger, the country’s most senior former secretary of state, to Sen. Timothy M. Kaine, Virginia’s junior senator, can be summed up in three points:

●First, a process that began with the goal of eliminating Iran’s potential to produce nuclear weapons has evolved into a plan to tolerate and temporarily restrict that capability.

●Second, in the course of the negotiations, the Obama administration has declined to counter increasingly aggressive efforts by Iran to extend its influence across the Middle East and seems ready to concede Tehran a place as a regional power at the expense of Israel and other U.S. allies.

●Finally, the Obama administration is signaling that it will seek to implement any deal it strikes with Iran — including the suspension of sanctions that were originally imposed by Congress — without a vote by either chamber. Instead, an accord that would have far-reaching implications for nuclear proliferation and U.S. national security would be imposed unilaterally by a president with less than two years left in his term.

We don't have to make this deal.

"Bush Lied."

Well, at least, he demonstrated substantial self-control in disseminating secret information that could have helped his cause in 2006.

Cause and effect

For a good look at how hard it is to make sense when discussing cause and effect in complex systems with ill-understood dynamics, try this article and the associated discussion in the comments.  I'm not sure most of us ever get beyond the magic stage.

The Wind Under the Stars

I don't think I've ever heard wind like tonight.

The wind was on the withered heath,
but in the forest stirred no leaf:
there shadows lay by night and day,
and dark things silent crept beneath.

The wind came down from mountains cold,
and like a tide it roared and rolled;
the branches groaned, the forest moaned,
and leaves were laid upon the mould.

The wind went on from West to East;
all movement in the forest ceased,
but shrill and harsh across the marsh
its whistling voices were released.

The grasses hissed, their tassels bent,
the reeds were rattling—on it went
o'er shaken pool under heavens cool
where racing clouds were torn and rent.

It passed the lonely Mountain bare
and swept above the dragon's lair:
there black and dark lay boulders stark
and flying smoke was in the air.

It left the world and took its flight
over the wide seas of the night.
The moon set sail upon the gale,
and stars were fanned to leaping light.

Horseshoes & Handgrenades

A piece from last year by Onion. For some reason, it's an evergreen.

I, Tuggy

The author is skeptical, but I think these little hospital robots sound great.

Bionic binoculars

From Rocket Science, news of a contact lens that activates a magnifying lens at the blink of an eye.  It's still experimental and can be worn for only a few hours at a time, because it deprives the surface of the eye of oxygen, but they're working on that.

Protecting Religious Dissent

Maggie Gallagher has a good piece with a large number of examples of people punished for expressing ordinary religious opinions.

Some people suggest that you should just, in the interest of courtesy or social concord, keep your mouth shut outside of church or the home. During the 19th century, there was a similar movement promising liberation for Jews in central Europe: the slogan was 'be a Jew at home, and a man in the street.' The problem was that this solidified the opinion that only non-Jewish values were legitimate in the 'man in the street,' while undercutting the separate place in which Jews had been allowed to exist as a separate minority.

There's another problem, which is that sometimes one must engage the public discourse.

Gordon College students are banned from tutoring public-school students, because of the college’s embrace of standard orthodox Christian rules (no sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman); the request of its college president for a religious exemption from President Obama has now triggered a possible threat to its accreditation.

...

In Lafayette, Calif., parents of 14-year-old public-school students are suing because their children were asked in English class whether their parents would embrace them if they were gay — and then these Christian students were publicly shamed and humiliated when they supported their parents’ values....

Note the similar strategies here: invite or force public comment and then discipline those who say the “wrong” thing.

The public school case is interesting. Because of the establishment clause, no public school teacher would be permitted to make the argument that their parent's values are just ordinary religious values of longstanding and with significant philosophical underpinnings. Any teacher may make the argument that religion is stupid and ignorant, and its values deserve scorn in the classroom.

Somehow an important part of the First Amendment's intent, that of protecting religious dissent, has become perverted. We may now suppress religious dissent, while still permitting mockery of that dissent, so long as we do the mocking from a non-religious perspective. That's handicapping the fight, and in a way that the Founders did not at all intend.

What About "Natural Rights"?

Headline: Green County:”Nature Rights” or Secession!

My kind of brass band

A friend at church sent me this link to an odd brass band concert.  Excellent stuff.

If my church wanted to do some less traditional music, I'd prefer this type.  Last week, we had something called "Camp Sunday," a kind of tribute to the various annual retreats that the Episcopalian Church tends to host.  I think they must involve campfire singing, because that's what we sang during the service.  One of the songs, and I'm not making this up, was to the tune of the theme from M*A*S*H.  Another was to the tune of the Rod Stewart song "Sailing," though without attribution, so it may have been unintentional.  That one was rather nice, actually.  Others inexplicably involved one or another member of the choir interjecting a loud "Whoop!" during the refrain, and even, once, "Yay, God!"  There was also a certain amount of tambourine action.  Perhaps white Episcopalians shouldn't try this sort of thing.  The right sort of performance involves un-self-conscious writhing in ecstasy, and we're just not good at it.

Lawyer Killjoys

A corporate liability lawyer wonders what could possibly go wrong with Target's plan to sell 50 Shades of Gray sex toys:

“Let me get this straight. You want to sell oil candles, as in the items with an open flame and that are a common cause of house fires, especially when placed in bedrooms, and you want to instruct people to pour the melted oil onto their partners, possibly on sensitive areas.

“Furthermore, you want to sell these flaming sex toys next to blindfolds…at Target where impulse dabblers—not actual dominates and submissives, who at least have some previous knowledge and experience with bondage sex play—shop. Then, when the hyped bondage-for-amateurs movie comes out, you want to have these items available at hotels—hotels which have essentially advertised ‘Go see a bondage movie and then come to our establishment for a night while we ply you with drinks, give you implements of restraint and violence, and encourage you to get it on.’ Do I have all that correct?”

The PR team: “Yeah, basically.”

...

“Wow. Well, we can draft a waiver of liability for rape, but using it during a promotion that encourages customers to drink and copulate when intoxication negates consent—that’s a potential gross negligence problem. And then..."

It does sound like Target may be setting itself up for failure here, although I don't think I've ever heard of a sex toy shop being sued for gross negligence. But then, there's no point in suing a sex toy shop, because they have no money.

Target has lots of money.

"AUOMFG"

On the absurdity of the current "request" before Congress.

To quote a 1944 speech by the famous judge Learned Hand, we “rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”