You Can't Mock This Stuff

If this was a joke, what would you say differently?

The guide also discourages the use of “mothering” or “fathering,” so as to “avoid gendering a non-gendered activity.”

It's amazing. Instead of saying "healthy," say "non-disabled," but don't then say "disabled"!

What on earth are they trying to teach our children?

Strange I've Not Heard Of This Before

Washington state has a law called "mutual combat," which allows people to engage in freely engaged fisticuffs if supervised by a police officer. This sounds like just the sort of thing I've long advocated. I can't seem to find much data on how it's worked out, though, which probably means that it hasn't been a total disaster.

An Old Folk Song About That Coward Robert Ford

From The Long Riders, a traditional folk song about Jesse James. Outlaw songs tend to romanticize the hero, but Robert Ford deserves his infamy.

Vote for the Socialist?

I'm certainly not planning on it, but I'll say this for Sen. Sanders: he has a refreshing habit deflating rather than hiding behind buzzwords.

Ezra Klein
I want to make a turn to foreign policy. Is there a particular foreign policy school of thought you ascribe to? Do you describe yourself as a realist or a democratic socialist?

Bernie Sanders
I don't know what that means. I trust we're all realists.

Ezra Klein
I'm not sure we are.

Bernie Sanders
I don't know what that word means.

...

Ezra Klein
Do you view yourself as a Zionist?

Bernie Sanders
A Zionist? What does that mean? Want to define what the word is?

I think it's fair to say that, having read this interview, you will know what Bernie Sanders really thinks about everything. I applaud him for that, even where I think he is badly wrong in his thinking. Honesty and directness are the hallmarks of a healthy democracy. We ought to share out views openly and clearly, debate them vigorously, and then choose. Lies and deceit are not befitting in the leadership of a free people. Indeed, it becomes questionable how free any democratic choice can be when its leadership habitually deceives about their intentions.

Incunabula

The Vatican Library has been digitizing its collection, making many beautiful works from throughout the 2000 year history of the Church available to view. Among these are incunabula, that is, printed works from the earliest period of printing. Given our recent discussion of the early history of printing, I thought some of you might enjoy looking at them.

You can visit that section directly through this link.

The Third Planned Parenthood Video

An interview with one of their doctors, who fainted the first time she was asked to do what they had hired her to do. “I thought I was going to be just drawing blood, not procuring tissue from aborted fetuses,” she says.

Beware if you aren't ready for similar sights. "Toward the end, though, an undercover camera catches the horrifying reality of organ harvesting. The hands and feat of dismembered fetuses are clearly visible."

Impossible thrust

That EM propulsion system  that appears to defy the law of conservation of momentum doesn't seem to be going away.  I'm hoping someone (James?) can chime in.

Huckabee: No, Really, Genocide

'You're talking about killing the Jews in Israel. Or, at least, the Iranians are sure talking about it.'

He could be wrong, but there's the very great danger that he might be right. I mean, we all saw the thing the Supreme Leader sent out that has a silhouette of Obama holding a gun to his own head. What's suicidal about war with Iran? Nothing, unless they have access to nuclear weapons.

By the way, we don't know what we promised as a condition of this deal, as no American was allowed to see it. And since neither the main deal nor the side deals treat the Bushehr heavy water reactor, we still haven't seen the terms. We have absolutely no idea what we're agreeing to.

Down

Let's throw this one down for tonight. Freddie King.

Planning to Carry More Often?

Instapundit has a good reason to direct you to Amazon, and if you like those holsters by all means buy through him.

But if you want something a little better, allow me to recommend Mernickle. They can hook you up with an heirloom.

Famous Men and Their Motorcycles

A meditation from the Art of Manliness.

Those IGs Are the Heroes of this Story

I'm beginning to understand why the administration is so concerned to cut them off at the knees.



Analysis from Hot Air. An IRS love song from Remy.

Tour de France

Congratulations to the winner, in what one news source is calling "the single most dominant performance in the 112-year history of the event."

The World is Upside Down

The President has given the green light to Turkey's bombing of the Kurds, the only effective resistance to ISIS in Iraq except for the Iranian-backed Shia militias. US and British veteran volunteers are fighting alongside the Kurds, and will now be at risk of being killed by NATO bombs.

Why? Turkey was just struck by a major ISIS bombing attack this week. Of course, it struck the secular opposition party, not the ruling Islamist party.

"The Most Important Battle You've Probably Never Heard Of"

Well, the headline was written for the general public, not denizens of the Hall! The date was eight hundred years ago today, and the battle was Bouvines:

"Without Bouvines there is no Magna Carta, and all the British and American law that stems from that. It's a muddy field, the armies are small, but everything depends on the struggle. It's one of the climactic moments of European history."

Cowboy Mounted Shooting

Ed Driscoll at InstaPundit has published a couple of photos of a mounted shooting competition. This is a fun sport, although you should take it with a grain of salt. The .45s in this competition are loaded with wax for safety reasons, and it disintegrates under the pressure of the explosive gas created by the cartridge going off. That's why, in the second shot, you see what appear to be rays of light going off in many directions: they are bits of burning wax flying through the air. As you can see, they don't go all that far before burning up and falling out of the air. That means it's safe to shoot guns in the arena with spectators all around you -- as long as they are more than a few feet away, there's no danger to them.

However, it also means that the revolver is acting more like a shotgun than like a revolver being fed traditional solid bullets. The accuracy of the riders is thus somewhat difficult to judge. Would they have hit the balloon if they'd been firing lead flat nose rounds? Maybe! It's still a lot of fun.

What's the Worst Problem in Human Thought?

Overconfidence, says Daniel Kahneman. Stereotyping is unavoidable in spite of its tragic nature:

“Think of it this way. A form of stereotyping is involved in understanding the world. So I have a stereotype of a table, I have a stereotype of chairs. Now when you start having stereotypes of social groups, it’s the human mind at work. It’s not a different mind. It’s what you need to get around in the world.” You can slow down and become aware of this, Kahneman believes, but the underlying mechanism isn’t going to change.

Not that he's in favor of it: the article goes on to relate his experience as a victim of the Holocaust. But compared to overconfidence, stereotyping is at least mostly useful most of the time. It's absolutely necessary to understanding the world, even though it leads us to error now and then.

It's an issue we discuss here from time to time. It's what I mean when I talk about physical reality being analogical rather than logical. If "human" was a logical object, you could make claims about a human that would be absolutely certain to hold for any human. It turns out that you can't do this with logical certainty: even claims that hold almost all the time ("a human being has two eyes," "a human being is either male or female," "a human being will have exactly one parent of each sex") turn out to admit of exceptions. We are blindsided by the exceptions because we think of the category as logical, but it's really a stereotype -- or, as I prefer to explain it, the members of the category are members by a relationship of analogy. It's not that they really belong to a hard, logical category. It's that we've found ways in which they seem to be alike, and have made analogies between them in our minds.

Recognizing that should do something to undermine the problem of overconfidence, as you suddenly become aware that much of your understanding of the world is built on shaky ground. It is characteristic of analogies that they always fail. Sooner or later, your analogies will break.

By the way, his examples are interesting because tables and chairs are artifacts rather than naturally occurring things like human beings. With artifacts, you really can make at least some logical claims because they were created by a human mind for a particular purpose. You can say with certainty that "any artifact that is a table will be potentially be capable of holding objects up off the floor or ground" because that's what a table is. These are actually the best case scenario for stereotypes about physical objects that hold universally.

In Fairness, the Evidence Strongly Supports Their Belief

Rand Paul: "Clintons think they live above the law."

Filial Piety

For reasons I won't go into, I was looking back at some old posts about my father and grandfather. There's one in particular I'd like to bring forward.

The Ides of March.

Much of this was written way back in 2004. I was a better writer, then. Things have become clouded that were once clear. It is good to revisit the old days when skies were bright.

Against Genocide

Mike Huckabee apparently thinks he's found the unifying characteristic of foreign and domestic policy.

"This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven. This is the most idiotic thing, this Iran deal.

...

"The fact that [Planned Parenthood is] getting between $500-540 million of taxpayer money is really a disgrace. It is disgusting to fund an organization like Planned Parenthood that chops up babies and sells the parts like parts to a Buick. America needs to come to grips with a 42-year nightmare of taking babies from their mother’s womb. This needs to come to an end."

An Evangelical mother I know sent me a graphic the other day that asserts that, if you kept a moment of silence for every American baby killed by abortion since Roe, you would be silent for over a hundred years. If "moment" means "minute," that's true even with the five year old data from the link. America's population would not necessarily be fifty-seven million greater since we could easily have cut into that by not opening the floodgates of immigration. It would be substantially more black and less Latino, though, as without abortion the black population would be 36% larger than it is. Around a third of black babies are aborted at their mothers' own choice, albeit a choice frequently made under the duress of poverty.

Justice Ginsburg said that "at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don't want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion." The author didn't follow up to ask which populations those were, but we can see the results fairly plainly. Huckabee's language is explosive, but there's a valid point buried where he's digging.

UPDATE: Huckabee says he really means it on the dangers of genocide in Israel.