Twenty-Five Russian Heavy Bombers attack Syria

There were rumors since the downing of the Russian jetliner that Putin was in talks with the West about using nuclear weapons against ISIS, but wanted to make sure that his deployment of nuclear assets wouldn't cause an accidental world war. It looks as if the truth behind those rumors was that Russia was planning to deploy not nukes themselves, but nuclear-capable heavy bombers in large numbers.

Launching 25 bombers on one mission is an impressive undertaking.... America’s bombers often sortie alone or in pairs, only rarely coming together in large numbers. Seven B-52s flew together to launch cruise missiles at Iraq in the early hours of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and a group of eight of the giant warplanes repeated the feat on the first day of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003.

The comparison is a little off, since there were 504 sorties during the opening phase of OIF 1. Even if only eight flew together at one time, we fielded dozens of heavy bombers in that campaign in a sustained manner.

Nevertheless, it clearly shows that Russia wants to make a point -- and not just with ISIS, which couldn't take down far less capable aircraft than they deployed. They're wanting to make a point about the improvement of Russian military capabilities, which they have also been doing in Syria, where their naval gunnery has been far better than we knew they could manage. Putin's investments have been paying off, and so the real message is for us: if he's capable of this, what other cards does he have that he isn't showing?

The lesson we're meant to draw is that we're better off working with him than against him. Accepting clear Russian (and Iranian and Chinese) zones of hegemony is the deal he wants in return for this cooperation against terrorists like ISIS: give up on the idea of humanity living according to what President Obama calls "our universal values," and accept that large sections of humanity are going to live under the domination of very different systems.

It's a deal I suspect the world will prove only too eager to accept. We'll help put the Iron Curtain back up, as long as they promise to keep a heavy hand on those living on their side of it.

It's Not An Argument

An Iraqi humorist describes Western reaction to the Paris attacks.

It’s like a bad Monty Python sketch:

“We did this because our holy texts exhort us to to do it.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Wait, what? Yes we did…”

“No, this has nothing to do with religion. You guys are just using religion as a front for social and geopolitical reasons.”

“WHAT!? Did you even read our official statement? We give explicit Quranic justification. This is jihad, a holy crusade against pagans, blasphemers, and disbelievers.”

“No, this is definitely not a Muslim thing. You guys are not true Muslims, and you defame a great religion by saying so.”

“Huh!? Who are you to tell us we’re not true Muslims!? Islam is literally at the core of everything we do, and we have implemented the truest most literal and honest interpretation of its founding texts. It is our very reason for being.”

“Nope. We created you. We installed a social and economic system that alienates and disenfranchises you, and that’s why you did this. We’re sorry.”

“What? Why are you apologizing? We just slaughtered you mercilessly in the streets. We targeted unwitting civilians – disenfranchisement doesn’t even enter into it!”

“Listen, it’s our fault. We don’t blame you for feeling unwelcome and lashing out.”

“Seriously, stop taking credit for this! We worked really hard to pull this off, and we’re not going to let you take it away from us.”

“No, we nourished your extremism. We accept full blame.”

“OMG, how many people do we have to kill around here to finally get our message across?”

Wakey Wakey, Lash Up and Stow!

Wikipedia informs:

The first lines of the British Cavalry "Reveille" were for many years rendered as:

Soldiers arise!
Scrub the bloody muck out of your eyes...

The infantry and general "Reveille" ran:

Get out of bed,
Get out of bed,
You lazy bastards! (repeat)
I feel sorry for you, I do!

In the Royal Navy, "Reveille" was usually verbalised as:

Wakey Wakey, Lash up and Stow!

To the U.S. tune:

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up this morning;

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up,

I can't get 'em up at all!

The corporal's worse than the privates,

The sergeant's worse than the corporals,

Lieutenant's worse than the sergeants,

And the captain's worst of all!

< repeat top six lines >

The Celtic Underbelly of the English Tongue

A missing piece from your philology, perhaps. Everybody knows about the Normans and their importation of a kind of French to impose itself upon the Old English. But how much do you appreciate about the Celts?

[T]ry naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? ...

[T]o the untrained eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.

The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought their language to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke very different tongues. Their languages were Celtic ones, today represented by Welsh, Irish and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders – roughly the population of a modest burg such as Jersey City – very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.

Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). But also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: they used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker – as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones. Notice how even to dwell upon this queer usage of do is to realise something odd in oneself, like being made aware that there is always a tongue in your mouth.

Not the only really cool insight that was new to me, who has occasionally read into these matters for decades now.

Tuesday Night AMV

Well, seems everybody is...

Same Mouths, Different Day

The same people who are today saying, "The Syrian refugee crisis is just like the Jews in WWII, only racists could not let them in"* are the people who spend most days saying, "The state established by the Jewish refugees from WWII is a racist apartheid hell run by religious fanatics."

And the same people, who are today saying that only racism or Islamophobia could account for not wanting to admit vast numbers of Syrians to America are the ones who -- for years now -- have been loudly celebrating how impending demographic changes from mass immigration are going to destroy American conservatives and win the culture wars for liberals forever.

Also, that it's impossible to undo mass immigration, and we need to hurry up and give them citizenship. So they can destroy your values. Racists.

The effect of all this has been that we now have a leading American candidate for President openly talking about "deportation squads" going house to house to search for illegal immigrants. How sure are you that this fire needs a little more gasoline?

Let's help the Syrian refugees. Let's give them food, clothes, supplies, and a military mission that will ensure they have a home to return to. Let's help them rebuild that home once they're free to return to it. I'll be happy to go myself and be a direct part of the effort.

It's disingenuous, though, to plan on the one hand to use immigration to overrun your domestic political opponents -- and then claim that the only reason to oppose yet more immigration is some kind of racism. You're the ones who made this an all-important political issue that touches every aspect of American culture and values. If you insist on throwing more gasoline onto the fire you yourselves built, it's likely as not that you're going get burned worse than anyone. Imagine how much you'll enjoy an America with deportation squads led by President Donald Trump.

Then, when you're done reflecting on that image, stop throwing gas cans around. Let's address this problem in a way that doesn't further damage the peace of the American republic.

Unfortunately True

This story matches my own experience with the Carson campaign.

How Curious

Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State from 2009 until 2013. How strange that her private foundation suddenly had to amend its tax returns... to account for large donations by foreign nationals... during exactly that time frame.

The foundation refiled its Form 990 tax returns for 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013, while the Clinton Health Access Initiative refiled its returns for 2012 and 2013 after Reuters discovered errors in the forms earlier this year.

"Errors," yes.

UPDATE:

Her critics, especially political rivals in the Republican Party, have said the charities' reliance on millions of dollars from foreign governments creates conflicts of interests for a would-be U.S. president. They have also criticized the charities' admitted failure to comply with an ethics agreement Clinton signed with Barack Obama's incoming presidential administration in 2008 in order for her to become secretary of state.

That's funny. It's like her signature on legally binding documents -- such as a nondisclosure agreement governing access to classified information -- just doesn't mean anything.

Well, I'm sure she can be trusted to be President.

La Marseillaise

Grim's post the other night got me to doing a little research. I think the translated lyrics of La Marseillaise would go well here. Some of them seem quite appropriate.

La Marseillaise

Arise, children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny's
Bloody banner is raised,
Bloody banner is raised,
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They're coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!
     
To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let's march, let's march!
Let an impure blood
Water our furrows! (Repeat)

Non-Constitutional Crisis

As far as I know, the President has the Constitutional authority to admit anyone to the United States he wants to admit. Nevertheless, 25 Republican governors plus one Democrat means that more than half of the top elected officials of the states have said that they want nothing to do with this program.

Now, even if the governors lack final authority to bar Syrian refugees from their states -- as they well may -- they can suspend cooperation with the Federal government in the resettlement efforts. Of course, the Federal government has lots of money (as much as cares to spend, in the opinion of the current administration).

It's not a constitutional crisis, but when the Federal government sets out to override the will of a majority of the states, it's a crisis of some sort. Given that our enemy has specifically and repeatedly announced its intention to use this refugee flood as a vector for infiltration and recruitment, it's not exactly insane to think that this is a questionable idea. Perhaps permanent resettlement in the United States is not the right option. Perhaps victory in Syria, so they can return home, is the better way.

Bankroll

The President's campaign to bankroll college protests. Literally, his former campaign, "Obama for America." That's what they do now.

The senseless protests we’re seeing break out on the campuses of the University of Missouri, Yale and other colleges, as well as on bridges and highway overpasses and outside police stations, are precisely the kind of thing Obama was trained to organize while attending leftist agitation schools founded by Chicago communist Saul Alinsky.... Now Obama is returning the favor of his Alinsky masters, training and cloning an army of social justice bullies to carry on his revolution to “fundamentally transform America.” He’s doing it mainly through a little-known but well-funded group called Organizing for Action, or OFA, which will outlast his administration.

OFA, formerly Obama for America, has trained more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in Alinsky street tactics. The leftist group, which recently registered as a 501c4 nonprofit eligible for unlimited contributions, holds regular “organizing summits” on college campuses.

Just What You Want In A Commander-in-Chief

A complete lack of confidence from the people who would be serving under her:

A new RallyPoint/Rasmussen Reports national survey of active and retired military personnel finds that only 15% have a favorable opinion of Clinton, with just three percent (3%) who view the former secretary of State Very Favorably. Clinton is seen unfavorably by 81%, including 69% who share a Very Unfavorable impression of her.

Emphasis added.

One of the things pollsters sometimes do is subtract the "very" categories to determine something about the strength of the mood for or against someone or something is in their sample. So if a President has a 55% approval rating, but 45% of that is less than "very strong" support and 30% of his opposition is "very strong," you end up saying that there's a 20% intensity of opinion against him even though he is above water overall.

That gives us an intensity index in this case of two-thirds strongly against.

So Who Do You Think We Are? Morons?

Mr. Obama grew especially animated in rebuffing suggestions by some Republican presidential candidates, governors and lawmakers that the United States should block entry of Syrian refugees to prevent terrorists from slipping into the country.

“The people who are fleeing Syria are the most harmed by terrorism; they are the most vulnerable as a consequence of civil war and strife,” Mr. Obama said. He added: “We do not close our hearts to these victims of such violence and somehow start equating the issue of refugees with the issue of terrorism.”

Without naming him, Mr. Obama singled out a comment by former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, one of the Republicans seeking to succeed him, for suggesting the United States focus special attention on Christian refugees. “That’s shameful,” Mr. Obama said. “That’s not American. It’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.”

That's funny, because as I understood it your State Department specifically rejected visas for Christian refugees. That's been true both in specific cases and as a general policy.

At a time when they are facing specific threats just for being Christians -- and at such a scale that Catholic charities warn that Christianity itself will be wiped out of the Middle East within a decade -- one might think that a religious test would at least not be applied against them. Maybe it even makes some sense to favor Christians, given that they are the ones under threat of extinction, and given that they would fit in pretty well in an America that remains ~75% Christian (and which is culturally informed by Christian values even among those who are not themselves Christians). It would make sense for them, and it would make sense for us.

Over at Hot Air, they're scratching their heads about the politics of this move.

Skip to 2:15 to watch Rhodes, responding to the news that one of the Paris bombers washed up onshore in Greece just six weeks ago, claim that it’s full speed ahead on the U.S. accepting 10,000 Syrian refugees of its own. The Democratic nominee-in-waiting said on Saturday night that she wants 65,000(!) refugees here, albeit “only if we have as careful a screening and vetting process as we can imagine.” That’s a mighty bold move by Democrats given that a majority of Americans already opposed admitting refugees back in September, with that number sure to rise now in the wake of the attack. And it goes without saying that if someone makes it over here via Obama’s refugee policy and promptly blows themselves up in Times Square, it’ll be night-night for Democrats in next year’s election. That’s a gigantic risk for O and Hillary to take. So why are they doing it?

It's not the President's only risky move on this score lately. What's less clear is why Clinton is doubling down on it. Given the polling you'd expect her to make a much vaguer statement of support for the President for the duration of the primary, and then come out hard against him on this in the general. Instead, she really has to hope that there are no Islamic terrorist attacks in the United States this coming year -- especially any that can be tracked to refugees, but really any serious such attacks at all.

A Devil's Dictionary for Wall Street

They're in the news lately due to Mrs. Clinton's love affair with them, which is probably why this came across my desk this morning. It's pretty funny, where "funny" is an adjective that means "accurate."

Thrift (n.)
The obsolete practice of spending less money than you earn; once believed to be a virtue, now regarded as a disturbing form of deviant behavior.

Central bank (n.)
A group of economists who believe that their current forecasts will turn out to be accurate even though their past forecasts have been unreliable, that their present policies will succeed even though their past policies have failed, that they can prevent inflation from occurring next time even though they didn't prevent it last time, that they can foster lower unemployment in the future even though their practices worsened it in the past, and so forth.

You should be able to answer this riddle: What's the difference between a central banker and a weather vane? They both turn in the wind, but only the central banker thinks he or she determines which way the wind blows.

Tolkien's Beowulf: Not A Good Translation?

A scholar named Andy Orchard says that Tolkien's Beowulf was probably never meant to be published:

Orchard is the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, the same position held by Tolkien from from 1925 to 1945....

Orchard calls the published version of Beowulf by Tolkien “a horrible, horrible, horrible translation” one that the English scholar never imagined would be published. The translation was made by Tolkien in the 1920s and intended it to be “crib notes” that was to be used by students he was teaching at Oxford.... Still, this edition of Beowulf, which was posthumously published over forty years after Tolkien’s death, is very valuable to scholars according to Orchard. He calls the end notes offered with the text “brilliant” and something that can be very useful to those who are studying the poem.

Orchard's interested, of course, in that he has his own translation he'd like you to buy. There's an excerpt at the link.

In Which I Almost Agree With Frank Bruni

Even a near agreement is closer than I can recall us having been before.

Still, in the wake of the Paris attacks, I have seen almost instantly:

* Hillary Clinton leading American gun-control advocates electing to mourn this as an incident of "gun violence," implying that we should defer to them in stripping us of our rights even though Paris has exactly the gun laws they would like us to have.

* Gun-rights advocates suggesting that France needs to adopt the 2nd Amendment -- Bruni cites Coulter among others.

* Bernie Sanders suggesting it just shows that we shouldn't have invaded Iraq, like that despicable woman Clinton agreed to do in accord with George W. Bush.

* Libertarian isolationists suggesting that this proves that Western arrogance in the Middle East bears evil fruit that we more or less deserve.

* Climate change warriors suggesting this was all about climate change (Bruni deserves credit for seeing this one on his own side).

One person who didn't do this was retired Democrat Jim Webb.

Those in France and elsewhere should be able to feel safe and free from the forces of terrorism. This has been our policy for more than thirty years and it will continue to be. But this is not a time for emotional outbursts or empty threats. In key moments such as now it is vitally important for us to assemble a complete picture of what happened and why before recommending what specific actions need to follow. I would urge the President and other national leaders to work carefully with our national security leaders and to apply this approach in the coming days.

That's pretty good advice.

Bait & Switch

I wonder if she even noticed herself the flaw in her logic.

The term “political correctness” may be new but its foundations are not. For centuries, people of color have been expected to not offend white people—and were jailed, whipped, or murdered if they did. From the mid-19th century through the mid-20th century, African Americans were lynched by white mobs for all sorts of “reasons”...

“Political correctness” only acquired a name when, relatively recently in American history, the idea of treating others respectfully was finally extended to include how white people treat black people, how men treat women, and so on. Prior to that, the idea that some people were owed deferentially considerate treatment—even in its most extreme, vicious incarnations—didn’t need a special term. It was just the way things were.

The obvious conclusion is that "political correctness" is the name applied to the idea that "some people [are] owed deferentially considerate treatment[.]"

And, indeed, that's just what it does mean. It means that using language or displaying behavior objected to by the class owed 'deferentially considerate treatment' deserves severe punishment. Fair enough, right? We should object to political correctness as a less-severe incarnation of the same bad idea that undergirded lynchings. I wouldn't have put it that way, but I can see the point: just as not adhering to extreme deference in avoiding offending white women was once grounds for excessively severe punishment, so today...

Of course, she concludes the exact opposite of what logically follows from her setup.

Political correctness is a good thing—the idea that we should treat our fellow human beings with equal respect, despite their race or gender or sexual orientation, and the idea that we might all learn and get better at doing so because of feedback and changing norms.

No, the frame you set up was one in which "political correctness" is the heir to not treating people 'with equal respect,' but asserting that some deserve especial deference -- and that severe punishment should fall on members of the disfavored class(es) who violate that deference.

Political correctness is thus bad, not good, for the same reason (but to a vastly lesser degree) that lynching was bad. It is a system of punishing members of disfavored classes for failing to adhere to standards of excessive deference in avoiding giving offense to members of favored classes. The good thing would be not doing that.

Secure Communications

I suspect Eric Blair is right that important communications are no longer conducted electronically, but Belgium thinks that it has identified at least one such route still in operation: PlayStation 4.

Clever engineering

A group at MIT has figured out a way to get salt and other crud out of water using what I guess amounts to distillation that works on an electrical gradient rather than a gravitational one.  It's just an early idea, which would have to be refined before it could scale up and compete with the current RO desalination technology, but it's interesting.

Paris

Coordinated attacks across the city tonight with the obvious purpose of terror, but so far no claim of responsibility. There is work to be done.

Lafayette, at least some of us still remember you.

UPDATE: Wretchard writes --

It looks like the wave of attacks is over, been some time now no new incidents. Period of damage assessment, counting up casualties, finger pointing and political posturing to follow as usual.

The significant thing is the attacks happened in the teeth of a heightened alert associated with big soccer matches. In fact Hollande himself was watching a game. So the French security forces and intelligence people were completely blindsided on this.

That means there are networks they don't know about, which are capable of Beirut-size operations. I think Scotland Yard and MI5 will be burning the midnight oil tonight.

Not only them.