Randy Howard was the name of a country singer who sang about the glories of the "American Redneck."
Following a failure to appear before a court on charges of DUI, driving on a revoked license, and various other things, the court's bail bondsman sent a bounty hunter to track him down and bring him back. He opened fire on the bounty hunter, and that man killed him.
It's a very fitting end, all things considered.
James Horner, RIP
Remembered here mostly for his soundtrack for Braveheart, that least historically-faithful but nevertheless well-intentioned movie about Sir William Wallace: one of Scotland's greatest heroes, and the world's.
The soundtrack had strong moments.
The gentleman died piloting a single-engine aircraft, which is an honorable passtime just because of the danger and glory of flying on one's own.
The soundtrack had strong moments.
The gentleman died piloting a single-engine aircraft, which is an honorable passtime just because of the danger and glory of flying on one's own.
Agents Provocateur
What if the former Secretary of State is working behind the scenes to destabilize Asia in order to provoke a crisis between the United States and China? So argues one China hand:
Now, of course, the DoD has a new boss—Secretary of Defense Ash Carter; and PACCOM has a new commander—Admiral Harry Harris, and the general consensus is that the muscular defense sector has wrestled China policy away from the milquetoastian White House. Interestingly, Admiral Harris was previously the Pentagon’s liaison to to the State Department under Hillary Clinton as well as John Kerry, which reinforces my impression that Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy advisors have pre-loaded China policy with her supporters, and I expect things to get ugly quickly so that the nasty and awkward business of starting the confrontation can be done under Obama before Clinton enters office.
As I put it elsewhere: Hillary wants to inherit her China crisis from Obama, not foment it herself.
Another One Down
A key Army commander in the U.S. war against the Islamic State has been reprimanded by the Pentagon for steering a defense contract to a firm run by two of his former classmates at West Point, becoming the latest high-ranking officer to land in trouble for personal misconduct. Maj. Gen. Dana J.H. Pittard, who as the Army’s deputy commander for operations in the Middle East oversaw the training of Iraqi forces, was formally reprimanded in February.... An Army review board is considering whether to strip him of his rank as a two-star general before he is allowed to retire this year.One wonders how you maintain a standard of discipline when, say, the previous Secretary of State was running the shop as a vehicle for just this kind of 'steering.' The Army holds itself and its own to a higher, better standard. Yet officially, the State Department is in the lead: to head the State Department is to be in the position of greater honor.
I suppose we will learn how this works a fortiori if we elect that same Secretary of State to the Presidency.
How to choose a lawyer
From "Emotional Vampires" by Albert Bernstein, good advice about how to hire a lawyer, in this case, a divorce lawyer:
Good lawyers should:
* Return calls promptly. I'm surprised at how many lawyers don't. I'm talking about calls during office hours. Never accept an attorney who doesn't get back to you for days, unless someone from the office contacts you to explain why. Even then, be skeptical. How long does a phone call take?
* Be more decisive than you are. Good lawyers should be polite, but not necessarily nice. The last thing you want is a lawyer who is too conflict-avoidant to deal effectively with the [a-hole] that your ex will hire. You want your lawyer to be stronger and more decisive than you are, not less.
* Be proactive. You do not want a lawyer who counsels you to wait to see what someone else does. The battle goes to whoever gets there first with the most. This is particularly true is matters of custody and visitation. Always ask an attorney what the overall plan is. If there is no overall plan, you don't have an attorney.
"Interstate Commerce" doesn't mean "You're a Sharecropper"
Though Court-watchers were disappointed not to see a ruling on the two hottest pending cases this morning, they were pleased to receive one on a "takings clause" case that has gotten less attention. Small-government types scored a win with Horne v. Dept. of Agriculture, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the seizure of part of a farmer's raisin crop (nearly half in at least one year) constituted a "taking" that required due process as well as just compensation. In Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that they weren't really seizing the crop, because they permitted the farmer to retain a contingent interest in the proceeds of its later sale, at a time and price of the DOA's choosing. The Court sorted out that pretzel by observing that, once the crop is seized, any later payments come under the heading of "just compensation"--but the seizure itself still requires due process.
In further Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that the privilege of participating in interstate commerce is a benefit that the federal government may withhold unless the citizen waives constitutional rights. Of the nine Justices, only Sotomayor went for this one.
The ruling is interesting for the further reason that it clears up a controversy over whether "takings" jurisprudence is limited to real property; the Court held that it applies to personal property as well.
The raisin-confiscation program dated from the Depression and, like so many DOA plans, was intended to support prices. Justice Scalia noted, "Central planning was thought to work very well in 1937, and Russia tried it for a long time."
In further Orwellian fashion, the DOA had argued that the privilege of participating in interstate commerce is a benefit that the federal government may withhold unless the citizen waives constitutional rights. Of the nine Justices, only Sotomayor went for this one.
The ruling is interesting for the further reason that it clears up a controversy over whether "takings" jurisprudence is limited to real property; the Court held that it applies to personal property as well.
The raisin-confiscation program dated from the Depression and, like so many DOA plans, was intended to support prices. Justice Scalia noted, "Central planning was thought to work very well in 1937, and Russia tried it for a long time."
No Obamacare or same-sex marriage rulings today
Per Scotus blog a few minutes ago:
For those of you who have just logged in, there was no ruling today (and will not be any ruling today) on same-sex marriage or ACA subsidies. The Court has finished for the day.So you can ignore all the teasers on the TV and the net. UPDATE: But more decisions will be announced on Thursday, June 25, and perhaps again on the 29th.
Solstice
Someday, I want to go to one of this guy's parties.
Thousands of people have congregated at Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice....He reminds me of a late friend of mine, greatly missed since he passed on a few years ago.
Arthur Uther Pendragon, who claims to be a reincarnation of King Arthur, was there to knight new followers to his druidic order – the Loyal Arthurian Warband – which he described as the political wing of the religion.
"We're the ones who get into trees to stop roadbuilding and take on people like English Heritage over access to the stones. We're sworn to fight for truth, for honour and for justice," he told The Guardian.
Is it terrorism?
That's not going to be an easy question to answer until we figure out what we mean by terrorism. The term used to refer to violence perpetrated against non-combatants by groups not obviously associated with an identifiable army, for the purpose of persuading the populace that it will be too dangerous to give their political support to a particular regime. Lately the definition has mushed into something more like "deplorable and scary public violence by relatively crazy people who may have had a somewhat coherent political or social axe to grind."
Kareem Abdul Jabbar stuck to a fairly workable definition in his Times oped today:
Allahpundit analyzes the New York Times's take, which is that the dictionary definition of terrorism is "the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy." The "especially" leaves enough wiggle room to make this definition so all-inclusive as to be useless. When there is clear evidence of scary force as a political weapon or policy, I'm comfortable calling it terrorism; without that qualifier, we'd have to include a very large chunk of all violence, from domestic abuse to gang warfare to drug cartels to the Mafia. Those are all bad things, but why insist that they're all exactly the same bad thing? But then Allahpundit goes too far, I think, in differentiating the Charlie Hebdo murders from Dylan Roof's rampage on the ground that "When that jihadi animal killed four French Jews at a kosher deli in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo, no one thought that was a 'hate crime' because they were targeted first and foremost for their religion. It was terrorism." When you target people for their religion, I'm inclined to call it a hate crime, unless there's something else going on that makes it looks like organized political action. In the Charlie Hebdo case, the red flag wasn't the anti-semitism, it was the organization of the gang and its explicit ties to a political group. Not that it's necessarily any great linguistic advance to distinguish terrorism from hate crimes. The term "hate crimes" is nowhere near as useful as it's cracked up to be.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar stuck to a fairly workable definition in his Times oped today:
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not this was a terrorist act. Terrorism is a political tool that has a specific goal. Terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan want to drive Americans out of their countries. Terrorists in other countries do it for the same reason: to gain political power. After an hour at the prayer meeting, Dylann Roof stood up and proclaimed that he was there “to shoot black people.” His rambling manifesto during the shootings was: “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” In his mind he was a terrorist, but in reality this was nothing more than hate crime using terrorist tactics to enact his racist fantasy. Roof had no hope of driving African Americans out of the country, starting a race war or engendering any political or social change at all. We shouldn’t use it as an excuse to discuss terrorism because that diverts us from the actual problem.Unfortunately he then returned to the useless "terrorism is whenever people do bad stuff" definition in urging us not to "allow this incident to be used as a political football by those who hope to leverage it to their gain, which is a more subtle form of terrorism: media terrorism." Granted that human beings often use incidents as political football for their own gain, calling such use terrorism is only silly. Jabbar was on a more promising track when he implied that the hallmark of terrorism was the hope of using violent tactics against ordinary (typically unarmed) citizens to engender a political or social change. Roof didn't look like a guy who hoped that the public murder of a number of black people would cause a mass exodus of black people from the United States, or even that fellow travelers would rise up and murder all the black people he couldn't get to personally. He was just a nut who thought the evils of the United States could be pinned on a particular ethnic group, who were therefore proper targets of his personal extermination program. Jabbar had another good point, I thought, in disparaging any attempt to view Roof's rampage as targeting Christians. If Roof had been completely silent, I might buy that as a plausible alternative, but his own words make it pretty clear that his problem with the prayer meeting wasn't the prayer but the race of the praying people.
Allahpundit analyzes the New York Times's take, which is that the dictionary definition of terrorism is "the use of force or threats to demoralize, intimidate and subjugate, especially such use as a political weapon or policy." The "especially" leaves enough wiggle room to make this definition so all-inclusive as to be useless. When there is clear evidence of scary force as a political weapon or policy, I'm comfortable calling it terrorism; without that qualifier, we'd have to include a very large chunk of all violence, from domestic abuse to gang warfare to drug cartels to the Mafia. Those are all bad things, but why insist that they're all exactly the same bad thing? But then Allahpundit goes too far, I think, in differentiating the Charlie Hebdo murders from Dylan Roof's rampage on the ground that "When that jihadi animal killed four French Jews at a kosher deli in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo, no one thought that was a 'hate crime' because they were targeted first and foremost for their religion. It was terrorism." When you target people for their religion, I'm inclined to call it a hate crime, unless there's something else going on that makes it looks like organized political action. In the Charlie Hebdo case, the red flag wasn't the anti-semitism, it was the organization of the gang and its explicit ties to a political group. Not that it's necessarily any great linguistic advance to distinguish terrorism from hate crimes. The term "hate crimes" is nowhere near as useful as it's cracked up to be.
Strong Differences
Tex is having a historically low ebb in her trust of pollsters, so perhaps this is an artifact of bad methodology. Still...
All of these things are immoral according to traditional Christian theology. What I find interesting is that (with one exception within the margin of error) majorities of men agree that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral only where far larger majorities of women say they are moral. When minorities of men want to say that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral, women are less likely than men to agree.
I wonder if this means that the traditional authority on this issue has been sustained in spite of the changing attitudes. What our ancestors used to refer to as 'the civilizing influence of the fairer sex' seems to be intact, perhaps: but it turns out it can be a de-civilizing influence too, where women decide to abandon traditional moral standards for whatever reason.
All of these things are immoral according to traditional Christian theology. What I find interesting is that (with one exception within the margin of error) majorities of men agree that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral only where far larger majorities of women say they are moral. When minorities of men want to say that these traditionally-immoral behaviors are moral, women are less likely than men to agree.
I wonder if this means that the traditional authority on this issue has been sustained in spite of the changing attitudes. What our ancestors used to refer to as 'the civilizing influence of the fairer sex' seems to be intact, perhaps: but it turns out it can be a de-civilizing influence too, where women decide to abandon traditional moral standards for whatever reason.
The new Lysenkoism
Via Maggie's Farm, Matt Ridley:
The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.
What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).
But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.
Forgetting The Whole Thing
From 1965, a film about that wise advice. You should all watch it, especially if you have not seen it before. It so nicely ties together so many of our recent discussions.
English is a Difficult Language
It's really hard, I know.
Don't feel bad. A similar error is behind a very common misreading of the Second Amendment.
The rules are simple. Every time a Republican who is a Catholic is asked for an opinion on the encyclical, place him into one of two categories: the Catholic Republicans or the Republican Catholics.You've got it exactly backwards. The "term doing the modifying" is the adjective, not the noun. So in "Republican Catholic," you're talking about a Catholic who happens to be Republican. They're the ones who will put their Catholicism first, and their Republicanism will only modify that essential Catholicism. Vice versa for your other category.
The difference between the categories depends on which term is doing the modifying. A Catholic Republican is a Republican whose Catholicism comes first, whose faith and devotion to the teaching authority of the Magisterium of the church takes precedence when a conflict or tension arises between it and loyalty to the party's ideology, policy platform, and electoral prospects. A Republican Catholic, on the other hand, is a Republican who puts his devotion to the party ahead of his faith...
Don't feel bad. A similar error is behind a very common misreading of the Second Amendment.
Mirror neurons
From SlateStarCodex, a thoughtful article about trying to look at things from both sides, sometimes irritating but worth reading if only for the following:
Microagressions. Nanoagressions. Picoagressions. The Planck Hostility.And perhaps for this conclusion: "If we can get to a point where we don’t feel like requests are part of a giant conspiracy to discredit and silence us, people are sometimes willing to listen." But if you take my advice you'll stay away from the comments.
Orders of Magnitude
Of course, 99 percent of southern whites will never go into a church, sit down with people and then massacre them. But that 99 percent is responsible for the one who does. We white southerners — those of us who left, the others who stayed, and even those millions who have migrated to the Sun Belt — are all Dylann Roof. We are all responsible. We cannot shirk it.The white population of South Carolina in the last census was 3,253,700 (total population * 68.88 (percent white) / 100). If 99% of them never go into a church and massacre everyone, that means that 32,537 of them do -- for which massive wave of violence the culture is certainly responsible.
No? Well, perhaps it's 3,253 massacres.
No? 325?
32?
Three?
I'm prepared to turn the other cheek at the anti-Southern rhetoric today, because I understand people are angry and afraid. But come on. Just because you hate your homeland, and therefore part of yourself, don't try to put that on me or mine. We aren't the source of your problem. We're the kind of men who stand ready to kill or die to stop such things. You may hate us, but we aren't your enemy.
Confidence in Institutions
Gallup's annual "Confidence in Institutions" poll is out.
No Federal institution polls above a third of Americans being confident in it. Congress remains near its record low at 8%.
From a broad perspective, Americans' confidence in all institutions over the last two years has been the lowest since Gallup began systematic updates of a larger set of institutions in 1993. The average confidence rating of the 14 institutions asked about annually since 1993 -- excluding small business, asked annually since 2007 -- is 32% this year. This is one percentage point above the all-institution average of 31% last year. Americans were generally more confident in all institutions in the late 1990s and early 2000s as the country enjoyed a strong economy and a rally in support for U.S. institutions after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.The biggest collapse in public confidence is with the police as an institution. The obvious reason why that might be true is heavy media coverage of controversial police shootings and militarized police responses to protests in Ferguson and elsewhere. But the media has been relentlessly positive about Pope Francis, and the Catholic Church remains at its historic low point in spite of the glowing attention. (Besides, confidence in the media is pretty low too!)
No Federal institution polls above a third of Americans being confident in it. Congress remains near its record low at 8%.
United States Marine Corps Raiders
The Marines will rename several special operations units as Marine Raiders at a ceremony Friday, resurrecting a moniker made famous by World War II units that carried out risky amphibious and guerrilla operations....It's good to have a historical legacy against which to measure yourself.
During World War II, the Raiders were organized in response to President Franklin Roosevelt's desire to have a commando-style force that could conduct amphibious raids and operate behind enemy lines. Raider commanders studied unconventional warfare tactics, including Chinese guerrillas, and were given their pick of men and equipment, according to Marine historians.
Raider units were credited with beating larger Japanese forces on difficult terrain in the Pacific and they participated in key battles including Guadalcanal and Bougainville. They were disbanded toward the end of the war and the Raider name hasn't been used in an official capacity since, said Capt. Barry Morris, a U.S. Marines spokesman.
"What the name 'Raider' does, it harkens back to the legacy that the Marine Corps has latched onto and has drawn a lot from, both in an esoteric and practical sense," Connable said. "It is a remarkable legacy."
A Heroine of Charleston
Cassandra points us to a story about a central figure in the capture of the Charleston killer: a florist and minister named Debbie Dills.
Winning Irregular Wars
A long read, but iconoclastic for something published by Leavenworth. Normally when I see a publication from there with a length over six hundred pages, I expect it will be produced-by-committee garbage that managed to 'staff out' every useful thing contributed. This work is not like that. It has a clear, strong voice.
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