Things A Man Should Be Able To Do

Many thanks to our friend AVI, who kindly sent me a pair of works by and about Chesterton. One of them, The Man Who Was Chesterton, begins thus:

There are normal things that a normal man ought to do, as he sleeps or wakes or walks. One of them is to sing, to a plain tune with a common chorus, as our fathers did round their supper tables. Another is to dance, however clumsily, at least some of the dances of his native land. Another is to speak with clearness and moderate cogency in any council of his equals or on any not disreputable public occasion. Another is to recite poetry if he likes it; another is to be at ease and tolerably intimate with domestic animals; another is to know, even slightly, the uses of some weapon; another is to know common remedies for quite common maladies. And another is to be able to write down in pen and ink what he really thinks about public questions, and why he thinks it: which is all that I have done here.

Now I can claim a normal man's capacity in all of these things, except possibly to dance however clumsily at least some of the dances of my native land. In fact I was only ever taught one, and have not endeavored to learn more: indeed I have hardly used the waltz save at rare family weddings.

That it deserves to be titled a 'dance of my native land,' however, is beyond question.



What can you do?

That's Nonsense, Howard Dean

Dean, declaring how happy he is for the FBI to have Hillary's server, declares also that he's confident she will be vindicated. There's a good summary of the law at the link.

But it doesn't matter. "I don't think she's going to get the blame for it because she didn't know" is a nonstarter as a defense. Given the security markings the Inspector General assigned to the emails, she had to know. You would not have access to sensitive signals intelligence and top-flight imagery without being read into those compartmentalized programs and trained in their Operational Security requirements.

There is no way she or anyone with that access did not realize that what they were doing was a potential violation of security at the highest levels. Long before they sat down to write an email referencing satellite imagery or sensitive signals intelligence, they had been trained to know that before discussing that information they should check its classification level and releasability, and use only appropriate measures. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance when you've received extensive and specific training is no excuse at all.

We're Cleaning

Steve Reichert points out that Clinton committed a separate offense when she passed these emails, on the thumbdrive server, to her uncleared attorney.

Gentle giants

The plight of the unarmed perp.

An armed protester was shot by police during this week's peaceful anniversary protests in Ferguson, Missouri.  It wasn't his fault, though:

"It was a poor decision to use plain clothes officers in a protest setting because it made it difficult for people to identify police officers, which is essential to the safety of community members,” said Kayla Reed, a field organizer with the Organization of Black Struggle.

TOP SECRET // SI / TK // NOFORN

According to the Inspector General's letter, that is the proper marking for the top level of classification found in Hillary Clinton's unsecured private email. Let's go through that, just to be sure we're all clear on exactly what she's done. All of this information below is available in open sources, but it is not well understood by (say) voters.

TOP SECRET is information whose release could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." No one may access this information who has not been through the very thorough background investigation, and even then you must demonstrate need to know.

SI means "Special Intelligence," and is a subset of SCI, or "Sensitive Compartmentalized Information." This information is tightly controlled, so that not only do you need to have need to know, you must have been properly read into the specific program from which the information comes.

TK is "Talent Keyhole," which governs our best aerial and satellite reconnaissance. It is always SCI information, and is extremely sensitive because it gives enemies a sense of exactly how good our reconnaissance technology has become.

NOFORN means "not releasable to foreign nationals." This caveat is discouraged because "NOFORN" means not the British, not the Canadians, not the Australians, not New Zealand. You can mark the data to be shared with the other Anglosphere powers, our very closest allies, with the caveat "FIVE EYES," or "FVEY". We have a treaty with them that governs the controls of sensitive signals intelligence. If the Inspector General has determined this item was properly marked NOFORN, it means that the information was so sensitive that we shouldn't share it with the British or the Australians in spite of that treaty.

It sounds like the two emails must have included intercepts of the most sensitive sort -- too sensitive to tell our closest allies about -- and possibly satellite imagery as a file attachment (or at least detailed descriptions of same). No one could have mistaken either of those things for unclassified information.

The Hill caves?

HotAir and Ace are both reporting that the FBI finally has gotten its hands on the Clinton thumb drive, held to date by her lawyer, which is supposed to hold a copy of all the emails on her personal server.

Even more shocking, the New York Times, L.A. Times, and Washington Post are carrying the story as well.

Earlier in the evening came reports that the Inspector General had found two top-secret communications among Clinton's emails.

Understanding an Earlier Age

Spengler is pessimistic, although he himself shows that with an effort it is not impossible:

When the West cared about Christianity and its paradoxes, it couldn’t take its eyes off Tirso’s villain. By the time Byron wrote his eponymous epic, Christianity had faded from the culture and with it the public’s interest in Don Juan. Without Mozart, he would be forgotten. My daughter had attended a seminar on Mozart’s opera, and we had discussed Tirso’s theological joke beforehand. She called me crestfallen afterwards: most of the students wanted to know why Don Giovanni’s behavior was a problem in the first place. Wasn’t it a lifestyle choice?

Over coffee before curtain time, I offered that people in the past had different concerns than ours — for example, the Catholics of Spain at the height of the Thirty Years’ War, when Tirso published his play. “What are people concerned about today?” my daughter asked. I took a long time to reply. “I’m not sure they give much thought to big questions any more.” “That’s right,” she said. “This is a thoughtless age.” The lights darkened at the Repertorio Espanol, and the cast appeared onstage to twerk through a Caribbean pop number by way of overture. It was idiotic. We left after the first act. It’s hard to find a rendition of classic theater uncorrupted by postmodern directorial whim. Neither performers nor audience has any idea what the work is about, so it doesn’t much matter.

We can no longer teach Mozart, let alone Tirso, to undergraduates. We cannot place ourselves among the passions of Spain’s Golden Age, when the literary giant Lope de Vega wrote sonnets caricaturing Cervantes as a dirty Jew for lampooning the chivalresque pretensions of the Spanish nobility in Don Quixote. The great artists of the Golden Age were also soldiers and statesmen, important players in the prolonged wars that utterly ruined the Spanish Empire. In a post-Christian world we cannot understand what the Spanish were on about.

MooMetal

Not to be outdone by the cowpunks, here is James Hetfield throwing down on a Waylon Jennings classic.

Cowpunk

Dwight Yoakam gave an interesting interview on his early years in Los Angeles. The music he did was quite different from the Outlaw Country being produced in Nashville and in the East.

Merle Haggard once said to me, when we were doing an interview for the Country Music Hall of Fame, and they were doing an exhibit on Bakersfield, he said that the difference between the country music from Nashville and the country music from the West Coast was that country music in Nashville came from churches, and the country music in the West Coast came from honkytonks and bars. And it really was about that.

Every 10 years, there's a cycle, and the young rockers will rediscover their heritage, if you will: the Okies, John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath heritage on the West Coast -- the country music that came out of here during the end of the dustbowl and led to the Bakersfield sound -- in greater Bakersfield, actually. It's around all the San Joaquin Valley, and its labor camps.

He hooked up with punk rockers who were fading out of that scene, and rediscovering the older sound. It became something that sounded a bit like this:

Oath Keepers Interfering with Racial Grievance Narrative

The Oath Keepers are a network of current and former military and police that exists to defend Constitutional rights against government overreach. There are a small number of them -- four or five according to reports -- who have deployed to Ferguson on the anniversary of the riots there. They are going among the protest groups lawfully armed. Police may have a duty that requires them to be in opposition to the protesters in terms of controlling violence and lawlessness, but in this way some of the police can show that off-duty they have an equal concern for the rights of black citizens. Although the police leadership has suggested it would prefer they go away, on the ground officers seem to have worked out an understanding with them that's keeping both sides cooler than they might otherwise be.

Naturally, this is unacceptable. It's important to remember that armed white people are scary and unwelcome. Anyone who suggests that the rights being defended first came to be realized because of similar armed citizens -- many of whom happened to be white -- are dangerous history nuts.

I Don't Want A Pickle

You can ride all year in Georgia, but I love to take the long road. The weather's getting better. School has started. The road, ah, the road...

Growing Salads in Extreme Environments

Inspired by James' comment in the second salad post:  How about Iraq?  Here are some photos I took myself back in the day.

A model farm our Civil-Military Ops cell and ePRT were helping the Hamdani tribe set up.  Traditionally Iraqis would irrigate the way the ancients did:  they'd route water from the Euphrates or Tigris to flood a field in great trenches.  The sun evaporated much of it.  We taught them to make small mounds of earth, and lay tubes with holes in them atop each mound.  Evaporation was reduced substantially, meaning that much more land could be irrigated with the same water. 

The guy in the blue shirt and ACU armor was (and is still) a US State Department diplomat.  At that time he was head of the ePRT.  I will withhold his name.  He was a good guy, though.  The guy in the khaki pants is one of his people. I mention this because the State Department gets a lot of the blame for what happened later, and its leadership deserved it.  Not all of them deserve it.  Some of them were right there outside the wire with us. 

A simple pump moved the water from the old irrigation channel to the overhead tank.  Once it was overhead, opening the valve would cause it to gravity feed to conduct the irrigation. 

An American soldier attended by children, name also withheld, in those salad days of 2009 before the precipitous withdrawal plunged the nation back into war.

Traitor!

Chuck Schumer is the latest example of the reflex to label as traitors those who dare to dissent from the President's opinion.

The Israeli flag is a nice touch -- without needing words it gets in a very classic 'dual loyalty' smear against him, and warns other Jews what to expect should they dare to speak up in opposition to the One.

Bio-hacking

Home-grown insulin?

Beset with salads on every side, Part II

Personally I'm all for salads, but I prefer the old-fashioned way of describing them to the sort of style that's de rigueur now:  "According to NASA’s research, fresh vegetables 'could have a positive impact on people’s moods.'"

In most of the science fiction I've ever read, someone was growing veggies somewhere on the spaceship.  It's got to beat MREs.

Just let the detectives do their jobs

Oldie, but worth it:



Via doubleplusundead.

Report from the Red State Gathering

Yours truly, though a lifelong Southern Democrat, is enough of a "Reagan Democrat" to have merited an invitation to the Red State Gathering this weekend. I was there with Uncle Jimbo, and we had an excellent time. The main feature was a set of speeches and Q&A with many of the Republican Presidential candidates. (Jim Webb, the leading Southern Democrat, did not attend and was probably not invited, but it would have been nice if he had been.) I'm going to give you my sense of them.

Donald Trump was going to speak on Saturday evening, but did not appear because Erick Erickson told him he was no longer welcome. This was because of Trump's remarks about a female reporter, which were as rude as they could possibly have been. We don't speak of ladies in that way in Georgia, and Erickson properly told him not to darken the door.

Before that, however, Trump had already made a small splash. What I heard from a sponsor was that the conference had been trying to get him to appear early on the first day, as Trump has his own 757 and could be there before anyone else. Trump's people refused, as they didn't want to have him speak early in the morning. So they the conference tried to schedule him at some other time, but his people put them off until all the slots were filled. Then Trump's people decided they wanted him to come, so the conference tried to help him by allowing him to speak at a separate location from the conference proper (the College Football Hall of Fame) where they were having the closing party. Trump's people accepted, and immediately began to tell reporters that he was the "keynote" speaker, and that Red State 'had to rent a larger hall to accommodate all his crowds.'

Nice.

Of the serious Presidential candidates, Jeb Bush was clearly the media favorite. The press mobbed him like no one else. He had almost no support in the hall, though: I only met one professed Jeb Bush supporter, a guy in a red-white-and-blue suit and tie ensemble who had purchased red, white, and blue custom leather wing-tip dress shoes to go with it.

Fiorina was a crowd favorite, but everyone is worried about her experience problem. She could help herself a lot if she could put together a kitchen cabinet because people would be much readier to support her if they knew she had top, competent people who had committed to being in her corner.

Rick Perry was there without a security detail. But, you know, he carries.

Uncle J was pleased by Walker, long his favored candidate, whom he thought presented himself as competent, experienced, and a proven winner.

For me, the two best speeches were given by Rubio and Cruz. They were quite different speeches. Both of them sounded like Ronald Reagan, but different Reagans.

Rubio's was a solid General Election speech. It was warm, hopeful, moving, filled with references to family and hope and economic progress. It reminded me of the later Reagan, the Reagan of his Farewell address in which he summed up all that America had accomplished in his tenure. You came away feeling like Rubio had a similar Morning-in-America vision, and honestly believes he could turn things around and make the place shine again.

Cruz did not give a speech of that kind. Cruz is out for blood.

His speech was a Reagan Insurgency speech, the kind of speech Reagan might have given before he won the nomination in 1980. Cruz is as angry at the Republican leadership in the Senate as he is at the Democrats. He outright accused them, in exactly these words, of "playing for the other team." He is furious about the direction of the country, and is committed to overthrowing the Republican leadership, gaining the Presidency, and overturning everything Obama ever did.

The crowd was really feeling it. They reacted to that speech like no other thing I saw. These people are out for blood too.

Good.

Categories

Ambiverts.

Due to Budget Cuts, Army Moves to New Weaponry

Soldiers to be issued kits and build their own ...

Speaking well

The Earl of Chesterfield's account of a bill he introduced in the House of Lords in 1751 to reform the Julian Calendar:

I acquainted you in a former letter that I had brought in a bill into the House of Lords, for correcting and reforming our present calendar, which is the Julian, and for adopting the Gregorian. . . . It was notorious, that the Julian calendar was erroneous, and had overcharged the solar year with eleven days. Pope Gregory XIII. corrected this error [in 1582]; . . .  It was not, in my opinion, very honourable for England to remain in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company; the inconvenience of it was likewise felt by all those who had foreign correspondences whether political or mercantile. I determined, therefore, to attempt the reformation; I consulted the best lawyers, and the most skilful astronomers, and we cooked up a bill for that purpose. But then my difficulty began; I was to bring in this bill, which was necessarily composed of law jargon and astronomical calculations, to both of which I am an utter stranger. However, it was absolutely necessary to make the House of Lords think that I knew something of the matter, and also to make them believe that they knew something of it themselves, which they do not. For my own part, I could just as soon have talked Celtic or Sclavonian to them as astronomy, and they would have understood me full as well; so I resolved to do better than speak to the purpose, and to please instead of informing them. I gave them, therefore, only an historical account of calendars, from the Egyptian down to the Gregorian, amusing them now and then with little episodes; but I was particularly attentive to the choice of my words, to the harmony and roundness of my periods, to my eloquence, to my action. This succeeded, and ever will succeed; they thought I informed, because I pleased them; and many of them said, that I had made the whole very clear to them, when, God knows, I had not even attempted it. Lord Macclesfield, who had the greatest share in forming the bill and who is one of the greatest mathematicians and astronomers in Europe, spoke afterwards with infinite knowledge, and all the clearness that so intricate a matter would admit of; but as his words, his periods and his utterance were not near so good as mine, the preference was most unanimously, though most unjustly, given to me....