Now That You Mention It, This Does Sound Like An Odd Decision
Taranto mocks Governor Jerry Brown of California for approving state-assisted suicide, but not experimental drugs that might save your life. In other news, the Governor also opposes improving handgun laws so that more people can readily defend themselves... because he thinks guns lead to too many suicides.
The NRA Comes Out Swinging
The National Rifle Association was a little slow to respond to the President's call for 'Australian'-style gun confiscation. I checked their website the day of the speech and even after. The President really threw them the kind of ball they know how to hit. I figured they'd come out swinging:
So I was a bit surprised that they took a few days to get a sense of the field, and perhaps to give their opponents some rope with which to hang themselves. If so, it worked. Not only did they end up getting to hit the hanging curve, they waited long enough for Mrs. Clinton to take a position that they can beat like a drum all the way through 2016 -- assuming she manages to stay in the race. Or out of prison.
So I was a bit surprised that they took a few days to get a sense of the field, and perhaps to give their opponents some rope with which to hang themselves. If so, it worked. Not only did they end up getting to hit the hanging curve, they waited long enough for Mrs. Clinton to take a position that they can beat like a drum all the way through 2016 -- assuming she manages to stay in the race. Or out of prison.
Genocide and Personal Self-Defense
A meditation on an individual right that used to be treasured by the political left at least as much as the political right.
Of course, the Second Amendment doesn't only protect an individual right: it also protects the right to organize as militia. That may be the part we're missing in this discussion, both as applies to resisting armed tyrannical units -- the Waffen SS were a paramilitary, not a military force -- and as applies to a more coherent defense against active shooters. The citizen as officer of the state should be armed, trained, but also integrated as a potential actor into the official planning for responses. Much can be done by teaching citizens not only how to use a firearm to defend themselves and their immediate space, but how to link up and work together in the face of a common threat.
Of course, the Second Amendment doesn't only protect an individual right: it also protects the right to organize as militia. That may be the part we're missing in this discussion, both as applies to resisting armed tyrannical units -- the Waffen SS were a paramilitary, not a military force -- and as applies to a more coherent defense against active shooters. The citizen as officer of the state should be armed, trained, but also integrated as a potential actor into the official planning for responses. Much can be done by teaching citizens not only how to use a firearm to defend themselves and their immediate space, but how to link up and work together in the face of a common threat.
Gaza Declares a Curfew in Israel
A Palestinian cleric, brandishing a knife, commands his brothers to stab Jews. 'Now we know why the Jews built walls around Jerusalem: to keep their throats from being cut.'
Well, the walls you see around the Old City today were built by the Turks. But the purpose was the same. He is, in this limited way, correct: that is what walls are for. They are to protect the goods of civilization from the barbarians outside.
Israel has become incredibly isolated in the last few weeks. Even a month ago, it was possible to believe that Israel could unilaterally destroy Iran's nuclear program if it decided it had no other choice. Such action would have required them to become open about their possession of nuclear weapons, most likely: even our ground-penetrating conventional weapons might not accomplish the task. If we were going to take military action against Iran, it would be better to go in on the ground and use sappers, reserving the air forces to pin down and destroy the IRGC units that tried to stop us.
With the Russians deploying air forces and advanced anti-aircraft weapons in Syria, however, the odds that Israel even could stop Iran have lengthened considerably. Indeed, at this point it will be difficult for us to maintain our limited deployment in Iraq. Those forces are cut off in every direction, a danger that I wonder if the Obama administration has begun to ponder. They would probably be allowed to withdraw, if they go now. Alternatively we could send up a force through Kuwait to provide them a salient through which they could withdraw even in the face of Iranian opposition. But they are completely exposed to the whims of our enemies as it stands. They are even sharing basing with Iranian militias.
In time the logic of that will play out one way or the other. Either we will go, or our forces will serve as hostages for our good behavior, or they will be killed in a deniable act of war ordered by Iran but carried out by proxies they need not acknowledge.
Israel is very much alone at the moment. It would take very bold action for America to protect them, action that would need to be both bold and wise if it was not to set off a war with Russia. We do not currently have the leadership for such action. Our civilian leaders are neither bold nor wise, not in their carrying out of foreign policy in the Middle East, and Central Command is dogged by a scandal that reaches to its highest levels. It will be some time before that could possibly change for the better, and at this point it must be doubtful that it ever does.
Well, the walls you see around the Old City today were built by the Turks. But the purpose was the same. He is, in this limited way, correct: that is what walls are for. They are to protect the goods of civilization from the barbarians outside.
Israel has become incredibly isolated in the last few weeks. Even a month ago, it was possible to believe that Israel could unilaterally destroy Iran's nuclear program if it decided it had no other choice. Such action would have required them to become open about their possession of nuclear weapons, most likely: even our ground-penetrating conventional weapons might not accomplish the task. If we were going to take military action against Iran, it would be better to go in on the ground and use sappers, reserving the air forces to pin down and destroy the IRGC units that tried to stop us.
With the Russians deploying air forces and advanced anti-aircraft weapons in Syria, however, the odds that Israel even could stop Iran have lengthened considerably. Indeed, at this point it will be difficult for us to maintain our limited deployment in Iraq. Those forces are cut off in every direction, a danger that I wonder if the Obama administration has begun to ponder. They would probably be allowed to withdraw, if they go now. Alternatively we could send up a force through Kuwait to provide them a salient through which they could withdraw even in the face of Iranian opposition. But they are completely exposed to the whims of our enemies as it stands. They are even sharing basing with Iranian militias.
In time the logic of that will play out one way or the other. Either we will go, or our forces will serve as hostages for our good behavior, or they will be killed in a deniable act of war ordered by Iran but carried out by proxies they need not acknowledge.
Israel is very much alone at the moment. It would take very bold action for America to protect them, action that would need to be both bold and wise if it was not to set off a war with Russia. We do not currently have the leadership for such action. Our civilian leaders are neither bold nor wise, not in their carrying out of foreign policy in the Middle East, and Central Command is dogged by a scandal that reaches to its highest levels. It will be some time before that could possibly change for the better, and at this point it must be doubtful that it ever does.
Ten Seconds to Midnight
Unconfirmed reports indicate Turkey may have shot down a Russian fighter that violated its airspace. If you've been watching the news, there have been two recent reports that Russian fighters (or possibly Syrian ones -- it is unclear that Russia is operating MiG29s in the area) had locked on to Turkish fighters for extended periods this last week. Turkey's patience with such antics may have worn out.
Turkey, where bombs targeting pro-democracy protesters killed at least 97 today, is dangerously unstable and can ill-afford to appear weak. Russian provocation may have run up on a target that has less to lose from fighting back than from not fighting back. Still, Turkey is a NATO "ally" -- in fact, they've stabbed us in the back several times -- and we are at least in theory obligated to respond to an attack on Turkey as we would to an attack on the United States.
Oh, by the way, remember how we discussed a few months ago how the US would be without an aircraft carrier in the region for the first time in recent history? That aircraft carrier just left the area. Russian naval vessels have been pouring in, however.
Turkey, where bombs targeting pro-democracy protesters killed at least 97 today, is dangerously unstable and can ill-afford to appear weak. Russian provocation may have run up on a target that has less to lose from fighting back than from not fighting back. Still, Turkey is a NATO "ally" -- in fact, they've stabbed us in the back several times -- and we are at least in theory obligated to respond to an attack on Turkey as we would to an attack on the United States.
Oh, by the way, remember how we discussed a few months ago how the US would be without an aircraft carrier in the region for the first time in recent history? That aircraft carrier just left the area. Russian naval vessels have been pouring in, however.
We're all on the same hook
Kevin Williamson on why there's no such thing as "raising taxes, but only on the rich," or "increasing regulation, but only on Big Business."
Setting the record straight
So I saw this on my social media today:
And it's cute, but completely wrong.
And it's cute, but completely wrong.
“We pledge our blood. We will not comply.”
The largest civil disobedience rally in American history just happened.
In the fantasy of gun control advocates, they'll just be able to order it done -- Second Amendment notwithstanding -- and their agents, the state, will enforce their rule. In practice, they should take on board that there is absolutely no guarantee that the police will enforce unconstitutional laws in the face of armed resistance. For one thing, a lot of the police are on our side. The sheriff's office that responded to the last mass shooting is on the record that they will not enforce unconstitutional orders to disarm the public. The Oath Keepers, which contains military, police, and veteran members have listed orders of this type as first among the sort they will regard as criminal and will not enforce. While it is unclear how many actual members they have, if a crisis came and they stood firm, many who sympathize would be forced to take a stand one way or the other.
How high do you suppose the percentage would get of servicemembers and police who reject such an unconstitutional order? I don't have any way to guess about the police. Among the military, though, it seems like a real probability that it could break fifty percent. More than forty percent of the military is Southern, where gun-rights sentiment runs strongest. Assuming that they broke 75/25 against the order, that would get you to better than thirty percent right there. If the right leaders -- and respected, retired leaders -- were to endorse the refusal as a violation of the military oath, it might get well above fifty percent.
Even if they didn't refuse to comply, but elected to "obey orders in the least likely way to bring about the intended result," there would be enough of them to foil the order. There's a reasonable chance that an order like this could provoke a genuine mutiny, because it would be so clearly a unilateral attempt to overwrite the Constitution by the will of a single political figure. If it didn't produce a refusal to obey orders, I might even say, it would be to the enduring shame of every one who took the military oath. Each one swears: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; [and] that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same." What clearer example of a domestic enemy of the Constitution could you ask? What clearer example of tyranny? What does true faith and allegiance to the Constitution mean, if it does not mean refusing to participate in its violation?
“This isn’t just a protest. We are here to openly violate the law.” Attendees publicly transferred their guns to each other in violation of I-591’s background check provisions, and some even bought and sold guns just a few feet away from law enforcement. A fire pit blazed throughout the rally, and at the conclusion, gun owners lined up to burn their concealed weapons permits. A petition was circulated affirming gun owners’ refusal to follow I-594, which ended with, “We pledge our blood. We will not comply.”Gun control advocates need to understand that this is different from other issues. Immigration, free exercise of religion, all the rest of it: violations of those things can be solved later at the ballot box, or sometimes in court. When you demand that we surrender our arms, we understand that to mean that we will never again be able to set the violations right.
As the RSVPs in advance of the rally grew to over 6,000, the police – most who probably detest I-594 – decided not to enforce the law.
In the fantasy of gun control advocates, they'll just be able to order it done -- Second Amendment notwithstanding -- and their agents, the state, will enforce their rule. In practice, they should take on board that there is absolutely no guarantee that the police will enforce unconstitutional laws in the face of armed resistance. For one thing, a lot of the police are on our side. The sheriff's office that responded to the last mass shooting is on the record that they will not enforce unconstitutional orders to disarm the public. The Oath Keepers, which contains military, police, and veteran members have listed orders of this type as first among the sort they will regard as criminal and will not enforce. While it is unclear how many actual members they have, if a crisis came and they stood firm, many who sympathize would be forced to take a stand one way or the other.
How high do you suppose the percentage would get of servicemembers and police who reject such an unconstitutional order? I don't have any way to guess about the police. Among the military, though, it seems like a real probability that it could break fifty percent. More than forty percent of the military is Southern, where gun-rights sentiment runs strongest. Assuming that they broke 75/25 against the order, that would get you to better than thirty percent right there. If the right leaders -- and respected, retired leaders -- were to endorse the refusal as a violation of the military oath, it might get well above fifty percent.
Even if they didn't refuse to comply, but elected to "obey orders in the least likely way to bring about the intended result," there would be enough of them to foil the order. There's a reasonable chance that an order like this could provoke a genuine mutiny, because it would be so clearly a unilateral attempt to overwrite the Constitution by the will of a single political figure. If it didn't produce a refusal to obey orders, I might even say, it would be to the enduring shame of every one who took the military oath. Each one swears: "I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; [and] that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same." What clearer example of a domestic enemy of the Constitution could you ask? What clearer example of tyranny? What does true faith and allegiance to the Constitution mean, if it does not mean refusing to participate in its violation?
D29 in Georgia
I had an opportunity to sit down for lunch with our own D29. We met at a pizza joint that happens to share a birthplace and year with me, the "Mellow Mushroom." I think it's the best pizza in Georgia, although you can now get it in many cities in other states.
I was somewhat amused because he was worried that it would be hard for us to recognize each other. I told him, "You won't have any trouble recognizing me. I'll be the biker with the big beard, and the jacket painted with my coat of arms." Though I make no attempt to stand out from the crowd, I've noticed that I have only the smallest potential to blend into any given social background.
The conversation was pleasant, treating not only religion and politics but history and places worth visiting across the United States. It was good to meet one of our long-standing companions over a good meal, and on a fine October afternoon.
I was somewhat amused because he was worried that it would be hard for us to recognize each other. I told him, "You won't have any trouble recognizing me. I'll be the biker with the big beard, and the jacket painted with my coat of arms." Though I make no attempt to stand out from the crowd, I've noticed that I have only the smallest potential to blend into any given social background.
The conversation was pleasant, treating not only religion and politics but history and places worth visiting across the United States. It was good to meet one of our long-standing companions over a good meal, and on a fine October afternoon.
Old-fashioned kids' books
A lazy day of Gutenberging allows me to relish 19th-century juvenile literature. This one, "Lion Ben of Elm Island" (Rev. Elijah Kellogg, 1869), is about a small early-American community in Maine. Not much plot or suspense, just families and towns, a more primitive Mayberry RFD, including details of how people build their houses, make their livings, and raise their kids:
He was neither in his own opinion, nor by profession, a religious man; but the teachings of a pious mother had laid deep in his young heart the foundation of faith and love. When torn from her by the savages, in the solitude of mighty forests, he had pored and prayed over them, till they ripened into a heartfelt love for Him "who causeth the grass to grow for cattle, and herb for the service of man."
His teachings were therefore of such a nature, that while divested of the stiffness generally connected with all attempts at advice or instruction, they deepened every good impression, and stirred the young heart to the quick.
A most silly and hurtful notion, often entertained by young people in respect to religion, is, that it has a tendency to make people narrow-minded, or, as they phrase it, meeching. Such a feeling was effectually repressed, as they listened to ideas of that nature from one who hesitated not to grapple with the fiercest beasts of the forest, and bore on his person the scars of many wounds. His influence over them was very much increased, for the reason that he seemed anxious to make them happy in this world, as well as the other; inculcated with great earnestness those principles which lie at the bottom of thrift, competence, and the well-being of society.
Religious discourse from their parents, the catechising of the minister, advice in respect to their conduct in life, might be quite dry and uninteresting; but with what power to attract and move were the same ideas invested, as they fell from the lips of the hunter and warrior, on a wild sea-beach, amid the roar of breakers; in some sunny nook of the hills, with the rifle across his knees, made juicy and attractive by his graphic language; not thrust upon them against the stomach of their sense, but, like the teachings of the great Parent of nature, in harmony with bursting buds, the springing grass, shading into a deeper green, or mingling in their ear with the brook's low murmur, and the music of summer winds among the foliage,--thus imperceptibly, as the increase of their strengthening sinews, growing up with, and moulding the very habit of their thoughts!
Yay, A Tyrant To Rule Us!
Ezra Klein's shark-jumping website explains that emailgate tells us that Hillary would be perfect as President: she wouldn't let her exercise of power be controlled by anything at all. "Liberals need an iron fist in the White House to make progress."
Not big fans of the Founders, their idea of separation of powers, checks and balances, or the Constitution? Vote H!
Not big fans of the Founders, their idea of separation of powers, checks and balances, or the Constitution? Vote H!
"Globalization" = "human cooperation"
Kevin Williamson digs into Paul Theroux for his smug and ignorant economics:
Theroux may not have picked this up this tidbit while growing up on the mean suburban streets of Medford, Mass., but the fact is that given a choice between a) picking cotton and b) almost anything else, the vast majority of people choose b. (Or at least they used to; picking cotton is a pretty good job now.) They didn’t lose their jobs to mechanization — they were liberated from them by new economic development.
It is emphatically not the case that the South, or the United States in general, engages in less manufacturing today than it did in the so-called golden age of the postwar era (during which years a lot of poor people in the South, members of my family included, supplemented the wages they were earning during the manufacturing boom by . . . picking cotton, by hand, and being paid by the pound). We manufacture much more today than we did in the 1950s, and we grow a lot more cotton, too — and both enterprises require fewer workers today than they did back then. When one worker can produce what ten workers used to produce, or a hundred, wages go up, which is why you can make $100,000 a year harvesting cotton today, massive capital investments and innovation having turned what was once the work of slaves into a fairly lucrative skilled occupation.
* * *
Just as the gentlemen of the Times were putting the headline on Theroux’s daft little tantrum, the World Bank published its estimate that this year — this year, not at some point in the happy-happy future — the number of people living in extreme poverty on this planet will dip below 10 percent for the first time in the history of the human species. Change will always inconvenience somebody, it is true, and those great jobs sewing underwear in Southern factories for $100 a week no longer exist. Famine no longer exists and several million formerly poor people get to eat, and the terrible tradeoff is what? A fellow who used to work in a sneaker factory has to go hustle real estate or become a restaurant proprietor? Meanwhile, the poor people of Mississippi, still our poorest state, on average have to get by on a mere 118 percent of the median income in France.
What "coming out" looks like now
This article caught my eye because Johnny Depp's 16-year-old daughter, who is enjoying a burgeoning career as a model, looks almost exactly like her father in his youth. (Not a bad thing; she's beautiful.) But then I was arrested by this throwaway line:
The budding model, whose mother is French actress Vanessa Paradis, is also taking part in the Self Evident Project, which is an accumulation of 10,000 Americans who place somewhere on the LGBTQI spectrum. The teenager revealed in August that she falls somewhere on the spectrum.Well, who doesn't? At least, I've forgotten what "Q" and "I" stand for, but whatever they are I imagine I'm in there somewhere. Even if you're at one extreme, aren't you still on the spectrum?
Harsh Truths
It is rare that there is any other kind. But those who willfully ignore facts will find the truth harsher than most.
You Know What Happens If You Talk Too Much
I can't answer for the visuals on these videos. But turn up the sound.
30 Ways to Be a Modern Woman
After Grim's game with the topic of the modern man, I ran into and posted a link to a fisking of the original NYT article on the blog Cedar Writes. The main author there, Cedar Sanderson, has put up a commenter-suggested list of 30 ways to be a modern woman, including such things as:
There is kind of a theme going on over there.
Turns out Cedar Sanderson is also an Air Force brat turned novelist.
6. How about “The Modern Woman has a gun, because the Modern Man is apparently too much of a wuss to protect his family”? — Tom Knighton
30. A modern woman is confident in her ability to defend herself but will allow men to defend her if they have superior firepower. — Karen D.
There is kind of a theme going on over there.
Turns out Cedar Sanderson is also an Air Force brat turned novelist.
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