Is Right-Wing Extremism the Biggest Threat to America?

So asks a writer at the HuffPo, with the following shocking evidence:

Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, anti-government fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.

Forty-eight deaths in 14 years in a nation of more than three hundred million does not even rise to the level of statistical noise. Meanwhile, this charming study ignores the thousands of Americans killed by self-proclaimed jihadists in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere.

Terrorism in general isn't much threat in America. This is true even if we extend "terrorism" to what would normally be considered random acts by psychopaths rather than part of a coherent terrorist agenda. There have been a few acts directed at police lately, apparently inspired by the BLM movement. If you were reading the news last week, it probably sounded like a crisis -- and each act is certainly a tragedy, especially for the family and the department. All the same, 2015 is shaping up to be among the safest years in a quarter century for police officers. Note that the 36 officers projected is quite close in number to the 48 Americans killed by non-Muslim "extremists," but in a single year. A very safe year.

In the same year, 668 Americans have been killed by police. We can't really say if that's good or bad, because this is the first time anyone's really tried to keep the numbers. Typically, for comparison, there are about 3,500 drownings in a year. Millions of people interact with the water or the police every year, and for the most part neither the water nor the police intend to kill you. However, if you're going to panic about 48 people killed over fourteen years by "radical right wing extremists," police and swimming pools should scare you to death.

UPDATE: Another grave danger: car ownership.

Happy "World Beard Day"

Today, while celebrating the glories of beards around us, we contemplate an immortal question: Who had the better beard?

Odin?

or Zeus?

Turning from gods to wizards:

Gandalf?

Or Merlin?

Turning from wizards to kings:

Arthur?

Or Aragorn?

Hah! That's a trick question -- Aragorn didn't have a beard. If you run his name through Google, though, you'll be pretty sure he did.

Trump Beats Clinton

According to SurveyUSA:

Donald Trump has a clear path to the White House, according to a shocking new poll from SurveyUSA. Trump beats Hillary Clinton 45 percent to 40 percent, with 16 percent of voters undecided. He wins a huge share of the Democrats’ non-white base — 25 percent of African Americans, 31 percent of Hispanics and 41 percent of the relatively small Asian vote. That’s a heart attack for the GOP establishment...

For the GOP establishment? How do you think it plays with the Democratic Party establishment?

SurveyUSA is a pretty good outfit as pollsters go. In 2012 it skewed Republican v. the final results, but only by 0.5%, with an average error of 2.3% -- meaning it erred both ways, but overall it erred on the Republican side slightly more often. Gallup, by contrast, had an average error of 7.2%, all toward the Republican side.

Every other candidate in the race has nowhere to go but up versus Trump because of his strong name recognition. But Clinton is a household name, too. Everyone else can take comfort in the fact that as people come to know who they are, they'll earn support against Trump versus where they are now. Clinton's camp can't believe that to be true.

Always Hire Experienced Help

Headline: "Iran working with North Korea to thwart U.N. nuclear inspections: report."

Who else would you hire? They're the world-beating experts on that.

Their presence in Tehran has been kept secret with the help of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite military force that serves Iran’s Supreme Leader.

The nuclear experts work in a guarded office building at the Hemmat complex and are transported to and from work in tinted-glass vehicles escorted by members of the terrorist-affiliated Quds force.

In addition, the six-man North Korean team reportedly collaborates with Nouri Industries, which builds warheads for Shabab and Ghadr missiles. Nouri also works closely with a subdivision of the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, also known by its Farsi acronym SPND.

Oh, well, it's good that we gave away sanctions on Iran's purchase and testing of ballistic missiles, then.

Life Imitates The... Duffel Blog

Duffel Blog, 2012: "Mob Violence Breaks Out At West Point, 63 Wounded."

Actual Headline, 2015: "30 military cadets hurt in West Point pillow fight."

Merle Haggard Answers Your Questions

Hey, Merle, what do you think of today's country music?

He had very nice things to say about up-and-comer Sturgill Simpson, who is currently opening for Merle on tour. He says, "As far as I'm concerned, he's the only one out there...he comes out and does a great show."

As far as other contemporary country music artists? "The rest of them sound like a bunch of (crap) to me," he says.

I think there are some great acts out there, but they aren't making it to the radio. In any case, here's the one he likes.





You know, he does sound kind of like some of Merle's old friends.

I admired Merle's answer to the question of what he's doing with his declining years.

"I feel fine right now. I don't really have much sign of aging and I've been through cancer, so I ain't scared of that no more. Looks like somebody wants me alive, so I'm gonna do my best to act like I'm alive. i still enjoy playing. The traveling gets a little rougher every year, but maybe they'll fix the roads."

Maybe they will.

A Modest Proposal

A proposal from what I think is probably a young feminist: "We Need to Be Able to Call Out Kim Davis’ Bigotry without Slut-Shaming or Hillbilly-Shaming." The move to try to divorce bigotry from being a hillbilly is new to me: I haven't seen that one before. It's a healthy concept, though.

I'm not sure it's very important to "be able to criticize her bigotry," as mostly a charge of bigotry is used to raise an emotional wall with her on the other side of it. You need not examine her position more closely, because if she's a bigot she's a bad, ugly -- well, not in the physical sense -- person who's obviously nothing like us good people over here. It would be worth seeing if she can be criticized on rational grounds.

And, as it turns out, it's not even hard to do this. She's at fault for being a public official who does not obey the law. For the most part, and with some exceptions, conservatives have no problem admitting to this. Even if you admire her guts for standing up to the Supreme Court, conservatives in general know what the responsible line to take is. So if you want to criticize her on those grounds, you'd find that mostly your opponents on the larger issue (bigots, no doubt) agree with you.

So why not defend the idea that the people whose job it is to enforce the law must obey the law, or be disqualified from holding public office?

When Kim Davis, the Rowan County, KY, clerk was hauled off to jail for refusing to give marriage licenses, a White House spokesman said no official is above the law. Hillary Clinton cheered on Twitter.

Oh, right. That's why.

Apparently Someone Is Jealous That Iran Gets All The Attention

Also known as, 'We could totally take Okinawa.'

Especially nice given the translation of the final lines in Chinese, which CFR gives as:

China is strong, victorious wars require deaths; for all to be strong and safe, [we] face the risks and dangers of war. We wholeheartedly love peace, but must be prepared for the likelihood of war. We respectfully and solemnly commemorate the 70th anniversary of the war against Japan.

Oh yes, very respectful. I'm sure the Japanese will appreciate the sentiment appropriately.

This is what bothers me about knee-jerk neo-feminism

This webcomic posits that "since Disney killed the Expanded Universe [in Star Wars], there is no reason to assume all Stormtroopers were men except Patriarchy" (added emphasis mine).  My objection is that either way I can read that statement, the artist is wrong.  And we're going to get into some Star Wars esoterica here, so if that's not your thing, you may want to skip this one.

A Hilarious Juxtaposition

In reply to the excellent Atlantic article, "The Coddling of the American Mind," by Greg Lukianof, of FIRE, and Jonathan Haidt, a social scientist with a dangerous streak of honesty in him, George Sachs, a clinical psychologist, writes "10 Ways White Liberals Perpetuate Racism."

Lukianof and Haidt argue that the spirit of "vindictive protectiveness" that demands punishment for people who commit alleged microaggressions actually harms the very students it claims to protect. "A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers," they write, "is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically."

Sachs's counter-argument, of course, is that they should just shut up. He writes:

Perhaps you agree with The Atlantic and think that college students are just too uptight and politically correct. Most of The Atlantic readers are liberal White Americans who are doing their part to make the world a better place for all creeds and colors. Like many 40-something White liberals, I too assume I'm relatively open-minded and conscious of my white privilege. "I'm not a racist," I say to myself, when images of police brutality flash on the screen. "I'm not like those white people."

Or am I?

Like me, you probably voted for Barack Obama, were outraged by the verdicts in the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. You even work hard to check your white privilege at the door when going to a #blacklivesmatter protest march.

...

Many of you may stop reading now, thinking, "Here we go with the political correctness." You say to yourself: "I'm not perpetuating racism, and I'm certainly not invalidating people of color. Donald Trump may be, but not me.

That's what I used to think. But, right there, you're committing a microinvalidation. It's called Denial.

Yes, that's right. Denying you are racist is, as we've all suspected for so long now, proof that you are racist. Sachs then lists 10 ways white liberals are racist.

I'll summarize below the fold, but I highly recommend you just go over and read it in all of its awesome absurdity. It's well worth it.

Keep in mind, this is what they're teaching kids at school these days.

Take the Fifth? Like a Fifth of Bourbon?

That was Ace's echo of Hillary Clinton's inimitable "Wipe the disk? Like with a cloth?"

We hear today that Clinton's IT aide will take the Fifth rather than testify before Congress about her email server.  But not to worry, the Clinton campaign has explained that this in no way casts a criminal light on Her Inevitableness:

. . . Bry­an Pagliano, the former State De­part­ment com­puter staffer and aide in her 2008 White House run who helped to set up Clin­ton’s private serv­er in 2009, planned to in­voke his Fifth Amend­ment rights in­stead of ap­pear­ing at a de­pos­ition be­fore the com­mit­tee next week.

Re­pub­lic­ans served him with a sub­poena last month.

Clin­ton’s cam­paign said Pagliano’s de­cision was dis­ap­point­ing but un­der­stand­able. “We had hoped Bry­an would also agree to an­swer any ques­tions from the com­mit­tee, and had re­cently en­cour­aged him to grant the com­mit­tee’s re­quest for an in­ter­view,” an aide said. “Bry­an is an ut­ter pro­fes­sion­al and a won­der­ful young man who does not live in the pub­lic eye and un­der­stand­ably may not wish to be drawn in­to a polit­ic­al spec­tacle. So his de­cision is both un­der­stand­able and yet also dis­ap­point­ing to us, be­cause we be­lieve he has every reas­on to be trans­par­ent about his IT as­sist­ance,” the cam­paign aide said.

 Elijah Cummings has dutifully taken up this refrain.  There's just one problem:  you don't get to take the Fifth because you'd prefer not to be drawn into a political spectacle.  You have to be facing the prospect of incriminating yourself by answering questions.

It Would Certainly Complicate the Agenda

“The idea of natural law superceding this court’s authority would be a dangerous precedent indeed,” U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning told Rowan County clerk Kim Davis.

Turns out she's an elected official, which I hadn't realized. The government can't just fire her: she occupies the office by popular mandate. So jail it is, until and unless she submits to the will of the Federal courts.

UPDATE: On reflection, if that is the judge's reasoning, this is a case that really deserves appeal. There's an argument that natural law absolutely must supersede the court's authority because it is the source of the court's authority. The argument goes like this:

1) The Declaration of Independence states that breaking away from the British was justified by a decision to assume the separate and equal status to which "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

2) The Declaration of Independence further states that the justification for the forming of this or any government is to protect rights from the "Creator," and that any government that becomes destructive of this defense of natural rights may be altered or abolished -- that is, superseded.

3) The US Constitution is only one such government, and indeed the second iteration of the project declared by the Declaration of Independence. It does not have authority separate from the appeal to the Laws of Nature and Nature's God cited in the Declaration.

4) Therefore, the Laws of Nature and Nature's God very much do supersede the decisions of this or any Federal court. Not only the court but the Federal government exist only to guard the rights that also are rooted in the Creator's laws.

5) Since the Constitution is justified as an iteration of this claim, the antiestablishment clause of the First Amendment must be read as not in conflict with the claim. No government can have a just power to violate the Laws of Nature and Nature's God under the terms of the Declaration, and this government is only the second iteration of the Declaration's project.

The Federal courts need to show not that they are independent of, let alone superior to, natural law -- they cannot be. They need to show that this project is in accord with natural law.

See also this paper, which inspired my line of thinking, and which is subtitled, "Why the Constitution is a Suicide Pact." By similarly deriving all Constitutional powers from the claims of the Declaration, he finds that there are some things that the Constitution cannot allow us to agree to even if it means our national destruction -- for example, abrogation of natural rights. If that argument is right, so is this one.

It's the little things they get wrong...

From the Washington Post: "Thousands of e-mails that have been released by the State Department as part of a public records lawsuit show Clinton herself writing at least six e-mails containing information that has since been deemed classified."

No, that information was always classified, she just violated the law by failing to mark (and treat) it as such. Classified information is classified because of what it is, not how it is marked. And I expect much of her defense will revolve around "well I didn't KNOW it was classified since it wasn't marked" (which is a pathetic excuse and immaterial to the crime itself anyway).They have not been deemed classified now, they have merely been exposed as containing classified information.  They were classified when she wrote them.

"In response to questions . . . Mr. Pagliano’s legal counsel told the committee yesterday that he would plead the Fifth to any and all questions if he were compelled to testify,"

To me, the solution seems simple. Offer him total immunity to any charges relating to the actions he took in that timeframe (but NOT to lying to Congress). He then cannot plead the Fifth as he cannot incriminate himself with his testimony. We shouldn't really care about prosecuting this guy, we should care about nailing his lawbreaking boss to the wall.

Nothing to See Here

The President has advised us to ignore Iran's Supreme Leader, so all that 'Death to America' stuff and the Ayatollah's 416-page book detailing his plans to "outwit the US and destroy Israel" can be safely set aside.

Are we also supposed to ignore the Revolutionary Guards' top commander when he explains that "(the US and the Zionists) should know that the Islamic Revolution will continue enhancing its preparedness until it overthrows Israel and liberates Palestine”?

Probably, since his orders come from that "Supreme Leader" guy. We've already been told that nothing he says really matters.

An Odd Thing To Be A Felony

As Ricochet’s Tom Meyer points out, the third-degree charges—which constitute a majority of the total charges—actually stem from the pictures Copening had of himself. The implication is clear: Copening does not own himself, from the standpoint of the law, and is not free to keep sexually-provocative pictures, even if they depict his own body.

But consider this: North Carolina is one of two states in the country (the other is progressive New York) that considers 16 to be the age of adulthood for criminal purposes. This mean, of course, that Copening can be tried as an adult for exploiting a minor—himself.

None of the charges really make a lot of sense, since the other pictures were of his girlfriend and she willingly took them herself and sent them to him, in return for the pictures of himself he sent her. This business of transmitting naked photos of yourself to potential suitors is an odd practice, and I would advise against it if we have any teenage readers. It is not a great idea for a host of reasons, even where you won't face felony charges for doing it. And I would certainly advise you that if a young lady does send you naked photos of herself, you should immediately remove them from your phone and under no circumstances ever transmit them to anyone else nor allow them to fall into anyone else's hands. A gentleman's discretion is never better exercised than where a lady is concerned.

Still, as inadvisable as the practice certainly is, it is also rather clearly different from the child pornography that I assume was the real point of the NC law. In any case, the 16 year old girl also faced charges for taking a photo of herself, and plead guilty to them. The charges the young man is facing, however, are felony charges that could send him to prison for up to a decade.

Killing Tunisia

An incredibly sad piece on Tunisia after the terrorist attack on the beach:

Look at Tunisia’s resort city of Sousse on the Mediterranean. Two months ago, an ISIS-inspired nutcase named Seifeddine Rezgui strolled up the beach with a Kalashnikov in his hand and murdered 38 people, most of them tourists from Britain.

The police shot him, of course. There was never going to be any other ending than that one. And before the police arrived, local Tunisians formed a protective human shield around Rezgui’s would-be foreign victims. “Kill us! Kill us, not these people!” shouted Mohamed Amine. According to survivor John Yeoman, hotel staff members charged the gunman and said, “We won’t let you through. You’ll have to go through us.”

Tunisia’s hospitality and customer service are deservedly legendary, but that was truly above and beyond. It’s how Tunisia rolls, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Tourists are not going back.

The loss of the tourism trade is badly hurting the city, but they have a treasure in their people and their culture. I hope they can find a way to recover.

I love puns

This is mostly for Ms. Cass, but I'm sure the Hall will appreciate it as well.

Taylor Swift: A Socratic Dialogue

In spite of my best efforts, I do occasionally find myself exposed to popular culture. As a result, this is amusing.

Flat curves

Trump is confusing me on the tax front:

As with many of Mr. Trump’s policy ideas, confusion seems to be keeping interested parties from knowing exactly how to respond. In an interview with Fox News last week, Mr. Trump said a flat tax would be a viable improvement to America’s tax system. Moments later, he suggested that a flat tax would be unfair because the rich would be taxed at the same rate as the poor.

“The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” Mr. Trump said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind.”

Does this man understand that a flat tax means one that's not progressive? That a tax code can't be both at the same time?  The most charitable construction I can put on this is that he'd like the code to be pretty flat until you get to the super-rich, then do a hockey-stick.  Unfortunately, top-heavy tax structures  are notoriously unstable, yielding high revenues in good times and dropping sharply in bad times, as California is discovering.  Sometimes sticking it to rich people, no matter how satisfying, doesn't yield economic prosperity for the rest of us.

More discouraging political news: poll respondents' answers vary considerably depending on whether a question reads "Public Figure X supports policy ABC, do you agree?" or "Public Figure Y supports policy ABC, do you agree?" In particular, you can get quite different results on issues like affirmative action and the Iran deal depending on whether you insert "President Obama" or "Donald Trump." Sadly, you can get different results even if you insert a fictitious "policy ABC," such as "Should we repeal the Public Affairs Act of 1975?"  You can get a good chunk of people to guess what's in such an Act, which doesn't exist.

Maybe I'm weird: I decide whether I can stomach someone like Donald Trump on the basis of what policies I think he'll support, not vice versa. His tax views aren't helping. He sure can get attention, though, which is something. He went on Twitter the other day to call Anthony Wiener a "purve sleazeball," which makes up in vivid accuracy what it lacks in propriety. Along those lines, I find a sneaking admiration for Sidney Blumenthal's powers of expression in calling John Boehner "louche, alcoholic, lazy, and without any commitment to any principle." Like RedState, I had to look up louche, a word I've been hearing all my life without attaching any very specific meaning to it: it means discreditable, disgraceful, dishonorable, ignominious, infamous, disreputable, notorious, opprobrious, shady, shameful, shoddy, shy, or unrespectable, though literally "cross-eyed" or "squinty."

H/t my morning's email from Jim Geraghty, which I don't know how to link.

'Stands to Reason' Economics Takes A Hit

Noah Smith says that economists are "a rogue branch of applied math."

Traditionally, economists have put the facts in a subordinate role and theory in the driver’s seat. Plausible-sounding theories are believed to be true unless proven false, while empirical facts are often dismissed if they don’t make sense in the context of leading theories. This isn’t a problem with math -- it was just as true back when economics theories were written out in long literary volumes. Econ developed as a form of philosophy and then added math later, becoming basically a form of mathematical philosophy.

In other words, econ is now a rogue branch of applied math. Developed without access to good data, it evolved different scientific values and conventions. But this is changing fast, as information technology and the computer revolution have furnished economists with mountains of data.

His proposed solution is to turn the thinking over to machines instead of people. I wonder how well that will work? Economic activity is based on decisions made by people for fairly complex reasons that machines don't experience. On the other hand, they'll be considering the data at a level of abstraction that will mask the actual causes of the decisions, and treat the decisions themselves as the data. Does losing the causality hurt anything? We'll find out.

My concern, of course, is that if it does work well the people literally drop out of the equation. We'll make policy as if the decisions were what counted, and not the people who make those decisions -- and especially not what they hoped to achieve by making the decisions. But the purpose of economic activity is that very thing we'll be dropping out of our system for thinking about the activity. The real question by which you should judge economic activity is how well it helps the many, many people involved achieve what they'd hoped to achieve by undertaking an economic action. If you get a job, does it help you flourish, or does it lock you into a company store? Are you blocked from making economic decisions about selling your milk or pumpkins because of oppressive government regulation, and your inactivity doesn't show up in the data because it never rises to the level of a decision that can be counted?

Just the things I think we ought to care about are the things that will drop out of consideration.