And / Or, We Can Launch Nukes

The Convention of States project is working to call an Article V constitutional convention to limit the power of the federal government. From their website:

The Jefferson Statement
 
The Constitution’s Framers foresaw a day when the federal government would exceed and abuse its enumerated powers, thus placing our liberty at risk. George Mason was instrumental in fashioning a mechanism by which "we the people" could defend our freedom—the ultimate check on federal power contained in Article V of the Constitution.

Article V provides the states with the opportunity to propose constitutional amendments through a process called a Convention of States. This process is controlled by the states from beginning to end on all substantive matters.

A Convention of States is convened when 34 state legislatures pass resolutions (applications) on an agreed topic or set of topics. The Convention is limited to considering amendments on these specified topics.

While some have expressed fears that a Convention of States might be misused or improperly controlled by Congress, it is our considered judgment that the checks and balances in the Constitution are more than sufficient to ensure the integrity of the process.

The Convention of States mechanism is safe, and it is the only constitutionally effective means available to do what is so essential for our nation—restoring robust federalism with genuine checks on the power of the federal government.

We share the Founders’ conviction that proper decision-making structures are essential to preserve liberty. We believe that the problems facing our nation require several structural limitations on the exercise of federal power. While fiscal restraints are essential, we believe the most effective course is to pursue reasonable limitations, fully in line with the vision of our Founders, on the federal government.

Accordingly, I endorse the Convention of States Project, which calls for an Article V Convention for "the sole purpose of proposing amendments that impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress."

And the signatories, the project's legal advisers, follow. Some of those who signed the statement have some fame or notoriety: Randy Barnett, Mark Levin, and Andrew McCarthy. You may know others I didn't.

And they are apparently having some success, having started less than a year ago and issuing the following progress update today:

• Four states have passed the Convention of States application - Florida, Georgia, Alaska, and Alabama.
• Seven state houses have passed our application - Arizona, Arkansas, North Dakota, New Mexico, Iowa, Louisiana, and Texas.
• Three state senates have pass our application - Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Missouri.
• Multiple state committees have passed our application.
• Thirty-seven state legislatures began considering our specific application this year -- a record in the history of our country.

Mad Max in Go-Karts and Paintball

How the Empire Started

General Mattis Crosses Potomac With 100,000 Troops; President, Senate Flee City

Suddenly it makes sense.

A Persuasive Alternative Theory

[US Department of] State considered this information classified at that time — as well it should, since it disclosed embassy security gaps and vulnerabilities. Only an idiot would send something like that in the open, and yet that’s exactly what happened.

Is "I'm an idiot" a useful legal defense? It's not usually considered a quality one advertises when running for office, but that may be water under the bridge at this point.

The Bible as Explained by Facebook

People have shorter attention spans brought on by social media. Some redaction is necessary to cope with this. Hopefully nothing too important got left out.

Slippery Slope

A school district in Tennessee slides down.

They aren't banning all flags from the property -- they'll presumably still fly an American flag on the flagpole -- but they are banning flag displays by students on their personal vehicles. That strikes me as the strangest assertion of authority: the school would seem to be on much stronger grounds in banning flag displays elsewhere than the parking lot used to enter and leave the school, on personal property of students who are entering or leaving.

I have often wondered, since I was a teenager in high school myself, how we think we can raise American citizens devoted to upholding their basic rights at any cost while educating them in an environment in which they are regularly asked to surrender those rights to the state.

Guerrilla Warfare, the Left, and Getting Paid

I'm short of time, so this will be rough.

I posted the basic point of this post over at neo-neocon's blog where she is calling for a march on Washington to oppose the Iran deal, and the conversation turned to the reasons why the right doesn't do activism very well.

One reason the right isn't good at activism is because we're amateurs, and amateurs pay for what they do. Professionals get paid.

The left understood long ago that they were insurgents. As I'm sure all of you know, one of the problems of waging an insurgency is logistics. The insurgent's answer is to steal the enemy's provisions and use them. So, if insurgents need guns, food, ammo, or just about any materiel, the best place to get it from is the enemy's supply lines. It's a double-win -- you deny the enemy materiel he has paid for, and you get to use it against him.

The American left took this to heart and went after the professions where they would get paid for their activism by the very system they intended to overthrow. They became professors and teachers, researchers with government grants, social activists and community organizers (also with government grants), government employees with powerful unions, judges, Hollywood movie makers and news reporters. The members of these groups get paid for their activism, and then they go out for a good time or home to enjoy the weekend.

The right is in the opposite position. If they want to take action, they lose money. They have to take time off from work, or close the shop for the day, or spend their day off on it. They have to pay their own transportation, and buy their own signs, and in the end it saps their resources and makes them tired and hard to get along with.

The left is paid and energized from their activism, the right is drained of money and energy in theirs.

50 years ago, the left was the insurgency. Today the positions are reversed, but many on the right still look to conventional forces for salvation: maybe the GOP will turn it around, maybe the Koch brothers will buy up some major media outlets, maybe Jesus will return and we won't have to mess with any of it anymore.

Conventional forces still have a role to play, but conservative politicians and other public figures can't fight nearly as effectively as they should because they have tremendous strategic disadvantages. The left controls the strategically essential ground of the universities and educational system in general, they have tremendous air superiority in the mainstream media, and they have a direct line to the hearts and minds of the citizenry through the entertainment media. If the conservative tanks roll out, they are immediately hit with artillery from universities full of enemy experts, enemy airwave assets degrade their credibility and reputation, and then the ground troops, high on the false promises of Hollywood moral crusades, move in and finish the job. Conservatives have seen this play out over and over, but for some reason many of them are still waiting for the cavalry to come over that hill.

Well, they can't get here. They're bottled up. They'd probably be destroyed if they genuinely tried to break through, as we saw with the government shutdown. We need to take out a good part of the enemy's air assets and take a bunch of those hills and mountains. We need movies and novels and songs and poems to build up the courage of our fellow fighters. We need to create the situation on the ground where our conventional forces are free to maneuver and bring their big guns to bear on the fight. The only way to win this is to embrace the reversal and throw ourselves into our role as infiltrators and insurgents.

And that means we need to get paid for our activism, preferably by the same system we hope to overthrow.

Threshold

I think we've identified it: it's the point at which these two things become more likely than not.

1) Facts emerge that make it likely a court could rule that Hillary Clinton is disqualified from ever holding any further public office.

2) The party gets some comfort with the emerging Biden ticket.

Get comfy, killers. You may be about to watch the destruction of one of the great powers of our age pour encourager les autres. Whatever comes after, it's going to be a tremendous spectacle.

Ending Discrimination Against Military Men

Scott Faith at the Havok Journal has a solid point buried several paragraphs below some ranting about how women aren't forced to register for the draft.

Men and women are held to two different physical fitness standards–VASTLY different standards— yet we all compete against each other for assignments and promotions. I don’t compete against just the other men in my career field for promotions and career-enhancing jobs, I compete against EVERYONE in my career field. With the doors to combat arms branches and units being flung wide open to admit women, those women have institutionalized, gender-based bias in their favor when it comes to physical fitness standards as they join units that highly value physical fitness. They aren’t any more fit, mind you; they just enjoy a much better score on their physical fitness evaluations.

Because of their gender, and all other things held equal, female troops have an unfair advantage over men because a number on their evaluation will be significantly higher in physical fitness tests for the exact same quantifiable performance. And because the Army is an institution that values easily-quantifiable numbers over substance when it comes to promotions, women have a distinct and unfair advantage.

As just one example, in the 17-21 year old age group, the minimum passing score for men is 42 pushups. What is the maximum score for women in that exact same age group? You guessed it, 42 pushups. So in this age bracket, 60 points for men = 100 points for women. The bare minimum score for a male Soldier is literally the max possible score for a female. This would be the academic equivalent of giving a D-minus to a male student while giving an A+ to a female for getting the exact same answers right on a test.

Promotion points are a big deal, and physical fitness tests definitely influence promotions. You could easily see the opening of the combat arms to women meaning that women are promoted ahead of much more physically fit men, which sets up a dangerous situation in the field. It's already the case that your platoon sergeants, being E-7s, are going to be much older than the young men (and, I suppose, soon women) they are commanding. They're the ones with the experience to know what to do and how to do it, and to bring these young guys back. If we set up those privates with NCOs who are physically fragile by comparison, we are setting them up for failure. Failure means death. It could mean the collapse of the unit, too, which means that the whole infantry structure will be weaker on the "for want of a nail" principle.

Now, the counterargument -- which has heretofore held the day -- is that equality means making sure that women aren't excluded from promotion. If you really held them to the male physical fitness standards, only the women who could max the female PFT would even pass the non-gendered PFT. While being able to do well on the PFT is important for promotion, not being able to pass it on multiple attempts is grounds for dismissal. Accepting genuine equality of standards thus means accepting a lot fewer women in the military.

I don't particularly care about "fairness" standards -- I think men and women are too different for any talk of "same standards" to be sensible in any case. The other examples he gives -- women can have longer hair! Can wear earrings! Are sometimes excused from uniform standards! -- don't strike me as important, and I'm completely opposed to the idea of registering women for the draft. We don't use the draft anyway, and if we ever have a big enough war that we need to, our civilization will need those young women to recover in terms of population. Men are far more disposable on that score. That's not fair either. Life isn't.

The point about a sharply increased fragility in the NCO corps on the field of war, however, is really strong. That's a serious danger: to the soldiers, to the units, to the successful execution of tactics, of strategy, of national security. It's a change with the potential to be genuinely disastrous. At least for the combat arms, maintaining standards can't be done if existing lower standards for women are employed.

UPDATE: OAF Nation weighs in. An excerpt of the argument that I think strongest:

For some odd reason, the anatomical argument receives the least traction (maybe because it’s irrefutable statistics, therefore a buzzkill to the debate). So, I will play the game and abide, and get the anatomical stuff out of the way. It is truly the tip of an ice burg called the Musculoskeletal Injuries in Military Women , but consider these stats: the astronomical difference in reported pelvic stress fractures in male and female recruits (1 per 367 females, compared to 1 per 40,000 males), ACL ruptures in athletes (females range from 2.4 to 9.7 times higher), or trainees discharged from Basic Combat Training for medical reasons (12.7% females, compared with only 5.2% for males). These are only a few of the many findings that should obviously be considered.

Unfortunate choice of words

I hope they mean they captured the whole guy, still breathing:

The head of a Chinese exchange that trades minor metals was captured by angry investors in a dawn raid and turned over to Shanghai police, as the investors attempted to force the authorities to investigate why their funds have been frozen.

The Dow has already bounced back up 500 points, by the way, but things are still looking a bit hectic here and there around the world.  West Texas Intermediate oil slipped below $38/barrel.

Crash!

Dow is down around another 1,000 this morning, a few minutes after opening.

You don't need permission

You don't even need a band.

The Media Begin To Notice The Air Gap

For now, it's just a writer at PJ Media, but this is of course the real story that people do not understand. Most people have never dealt with classified information systems, and don't realize that the air gap exists. If they understood about the air gap, they would realize that there is no chance that these various Hillary defenses could possibly hold water.

I've been reflecting on it more since we last talked about it, and I think maybe the most likely case is that the Hillary State Department -- or at least her clique of advisers and aides, as well as non-DOS personnel from her faction like Sidney Blumenthal -- were just completely careless about classification. It's less likely that they downloaded or wrote down information from the TS system to transfer onto the private email server than that they summarized what they'd read on the TS systems in unclassified emails. Quite possibly she and they believed this was perfectly safe to do, as they controlled the server and were only talking to other members of the trusted in-group. The danger of hackers? We have a top-flight (at least very well-connected) IT firm to prevent that from being an issue. Classification rules? I slept through that briefing -- who cares about rules, rules, rules? We're the powerful.

In that case you wouldn't need a firewalled tie-in, nor a band of flunkies whose job it was to strip classification markings. There were none to strip, since the information was transferred across the air gap in your brain. This seems like the simplest explanation, provided that we discover no examples of actual classified documents in the email. We should expect, if this is right, only to see summaries of classified information in these private, unclassified emails.

From the perspective of the law, this makes no difference. The rule is that a document that contains classified information is classified, and if it was built out of another document or set of documents, the new document inherits the highest level of classification of any of the summarized documents. Thus, if I write an email to you about yoga and your daughter's wedding, and at the very end say: "PS: Did you see the column of tanks moving up on Benghazi this morning?" based on a satellite photo from the high side, the email I have just written now needs to be marked "TS // SI / TK // NOFORN" and cannot be sent on the unclassified system. Indeed, just because the computer will automatically save a draft of that information on the unclassified system while I am typing it up, just by typing it up and not sending it I have already committed the crime that Petraeus went down for (i.e., storing classified information in an unapproved location).

She's in real trouble, and sooner or later the reasons why will seep out into the public debate. Wiping the server will look more and more like destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice, as there's already enough to convict her of several felony counts in what they've found.

Girls and Cigar Box Guitars for Saturday Night

Luke 17:33

Chris Norman, the Briton who participated in the salvation of the French train against a mysterious young man with unknowable motives said this when asked about why he fought back: "I figured, I'm probably going to die anyways, so let's go.... Either you sit down and you die, or you stand up and you die."

But you didn't die. You're the one giving the interview.

This is one of those New Testament passages that comes up over and over and over again. Chesterton said of it:

“He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.

It is good, it is encouraging, to see that men are taking this to heart once again. It is a practical as well as a spiritual insight, a hint from the designer at a surprising truth built into the structure of the world. It's an Easter egg in reality, so to speak.

Another Saturday quiz or two

Someone has come out with a list of 99 of the 100 best novels in the English language, presented alongside a ten-question quiz about their authors and circumstances of publication.  I believe I've read 27 of them, though some were so long ago that I may have confused them with something else.  Others seemed familiar, but probably only from movie treatments.  Some I didn't care for, and wouldn't have finished if they hadn't been assigned to me in school, such as "The Great Gatsby."  One of them I happen to be re-reading with pleasure at this very moment.  As for the associated quiz, I totally bombed it:  2 out of 10.

A New Idea For Reparations: Weighted Voting

The author likes the idea of America paying reparations to blacks to repair the damages of slavery, but doesn't want money. He wants a bigger vote. Specifically, he wants to repair the 3/5th compromise by giving black Americans a 5/3rds vote.

It's a more interesting piece than it sounds like from that summary, as he tries to wrestle with some of the complications of the idea.

And then the problem of who exactly is eligible must be addressed. Would a biracial voter qualify? A black immigrant? And what exactly is an election official to do when Rachel Dolezal shows up to claim her five-thirds vote? The government shouldn’t be the sole arbiter of who gets to be black — nor flirt with archaic prescriptions such as the one-drop rule in determining a voter’s race. The most straightforward approach would be to limit access to weighted voting to those American-born citizens who have demonstrated through government documents, such as drivers’ licenses or birth certificates, that they identify, and are identified by others, as black or African American. There are bound to be instances where this approach is challenged, and one answer would be to model guidelines after the general requirements for establishing American Indian or Alaska Native ancestry as outlined by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which involve establishing that a lineal ancestor belongs to a specific tribe and then producing vital records that document a relationship to that ancestor.

The 3/5ths compromise didn't give blacks 3/5ths of a vote, though: it gave states representation in the House of Representation based on counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person. (I suppose we all understand that the South wanted to count slaves as whole people, and the North wanted not to count them at all.) If you wanted to do this in a way that mirrors what was done during the slaveholding era, to count blacks as 7/5ths of a person (a more obvious standard than 5/3rds, being 2/5ths off in either case), it would be purely to determine how many representatives in Congress each states get.

Now, that would doubtless increase black representation in Congress somewhat. It wouldn't have the wild swings that are posited in the article, though, because it wouldn't affect the Senate or the Presidential election at all. It would only mean that places like Georgia would have more congressional districts, and because black voters were considered 7/5ths of a person, more of those districts would end up being gerrymandered into black-majority districts than currently is the case.

The author points out that 90% of white Americans are opposed to the idea of reparations. I am not among them: it satisfies my Viking sense of justice, because it is a parallel to the weregeld. That was also inheritable by the family (indeed, it was often paid in cases where the person wrongly offended had been killed). We used to help the tribes in Iraq negotiate diyya payments to settle similar feuds. Assuming we can work out a deal of that kind, I would not be opposed to making the deal. The terms are, though, that the payment resolves the debt in full -- honor is satisfied, and we discuss it no more.

For that reason, the proposed 24-year period of weighting doesn't strike me as the right approach. The payment should be a one-time thing, something everyone agrees to accept as a settlement of the debt, so that we can finally put it behind us forever.

Weekend Quiz

Name these 12 famous people from the Middle Ages. It's tricky, since of course we don't have photographs! My first-time score was 92%.

They'll Find The Trains Are Guarded By...

You know the song, but let's hear it anyway given the news of the day. More, let's hear it a cappella since their brothers apparently didn't need instruments to perform.



UPDATE: Apparently the initial reports were wrong: no Marines were involved. The three Americans were a National Guardsman, an Airman, and a civilian. A Briton and one Frenchman were also involved in taking down the attacker. You can read about them here.

Strong work, gentlemen.

Justice, A Long Time Coming

Way back in 2003, during the initial invasion of Iraq, a soldier named Hasan K. Akbar fragged two of his comrades while deployed at war. A military court has upheld his death sentence.

The decision was not unanimous. Two dissenting judges objected to the fact that his diary was made available to the court martial panel:

“These pages included a running diatribe against Caucasians and the United States dating back 12 years, and included repeated references to (his) desire to kill American soldiers ‘for Allah’ and for ‘jihad,' ” Judge James E. Baker noted.

I don't know: that sounds pretty relevant to me.