Blowing Up My Insurance Was One Thing...

...but this time you've gone too far, Obamacare.

"We Heard There Was Jihad Going On Without No Union Cards..."

"Say it ain't so."

Federalism: Still A Long Way To Go

If you are a lover of the Constitution, and especially if you are the kind of Constitutionalist who takes originalism and/or the 10th Amendment seriously, this Pew poll contains a little good news and a lot of bad news. The good news is that Americans have a very low opinion of the Federal government, and are open to stripping it of some of the powers it currently exercises. The bad news is that majorities still think the Federal government should have "a major role" in tons of things that the Constitution intended to leave to the states.

Fully 80% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they prefer a smaller government with fewer services, compared with just 31% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Yet both Republicans and Democrats favor significant government involvement on an array of specific issues. Among the public overall, majorities say the federal government should have a major role in dealing with 12 of 13 issues included in the survey, all except advancing space exploration.

Oddly, not even a third of Republicans and Republican leaners say they are angry with the Federal government, which they certainly have cause to be. Only half of this group thinks the Federal government runs its programs poorly, which may be even stranger for the party of Reagan in the wake of the VA scandal, the complete failure to enforce immigration laws, the Obamacare debacles -- think how much fun it must be to be one of those millions who have lost their health care plan twice due to Obamacare and its collapsing "marketplaces" -- the foreign policy embarrassments, the Justice Department's failure to prosecute crimes for politically favored individuals, the Fast & Furious scandal, the IRS-stalking-conservatives scandal, the....

You have to assume people just aren't paying attention.

A Slight Miscalculation

These airstrikes were launched not because U.S. officials were prescient. They came after the Obama administration found and quietly fixed a colossal miscalculation. U.S. intelligence had grossly overestimated the damage they’d inflicted during airstrikes on the militants’ oil production apparatus last year, while underestimating Islamic State’s oil revenue by $400 million.

That's four times as much as the administration had previously believed they were getting, and doesn't count income from the slave trade, general crime and extortion in its area of operation, etc.

Political Suicide

There are many ways in which the Democratic Party is pursuing an agenda that is bad for ordinary Americans, but for the most part the public hasn't grasped just how and why it is bad for them. There are two areas, however, where the public has clearly and substantially rejected the current agenda of the Democrats in Washington:

1) Gun Control,

2) Increasing immigration -- especially immigration of refugees from the civil war in Syria, but also generally.

The polling on these is clear, but if you don't trust polls practical behavior by Americans shows the degree to which these positions are rejected. On the one hand you have the record gun sales across the country, lasting for years. On the other you have the sustained popularity of Donald Trump, whose major virtue in the eyes of the public is intense, loud opposition to immigration. You've got the fact that a majority of state governors felt that it was good politics to formally reject new refugees last week.

What if we could combine both of these into a single symbolic effort to tie the Democratic party to the two things Americans have most clearly rejected?

Mike's got the principled argument against all this right in his post below. Even if you rejected the principles, though, politically this is irrational. It's as if they were trying to throw the 2016 elections.

Froggy Used To Call These "Security Rounds"

On stopping active shooters.

A reasonable person might well expect a suicide vest from someone engaged in an essentially terrorist act. We haven't seen them deployed in active shooting situations in America usually, but they're commonly deployed overseas. There's no reason it shouldn't become common here, really.

Why are they allowed to have guns?

We get this piece of silliness from ABC News:
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/667080923561766913/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

It notes that individuals on the FBI terrorist watch list can legally purchase firearms.  What an outrage!  Why should people, arrested and charged with no crime whatsoever be allowed to exercise their Constitutional rights!  They're on a watch list!!!  Isn't that like, super important?

Well, As noted over at Ace of Spades, Charles C. W. Cooke breaks down how it's not just the NRA that opposes restricting firearm purchases by those on the terrorist watch list, but that infamous right-wing group the ACLU does as well.  Why?  Well, there's this little thing called the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution that says that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".  And one of those liberties that no person shall be deprived of is the right to bear arms as guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Because there is no due process involved with getting on a terrorist watch list.  One is placed on that list by whim of the FBI, not by a court of law, or a jury of one's peers.  If all it took was an unelected official to declare that the NRA was a terrorist group to forbid its membership from purchasing firearms legally, well then you don't actually believe some future administration wouldn't be a bit tempted to do so, do you?  Listen to the rhetoric of people like Michael Bloomberg or Gavin Newsome.  I guarantee you if they had their way, anyone who owns a firearm would be thrown onto such a watch list.

And this brings me to the last point.  Legal points of sale are not what the terrorists have ever previously shown an interest in.  For the Paris attack (in a country with strict gun control... sorry "common sense" gun control), they did not get their weapons from the US, or another lax gun control law nation.  They got them illegally in Belgium which, if anything, has even stricter ("more sensible") gun control laws than France.  Restricting the ability of citizens to purchase weapons legally does not stop those who wish to purchase them illegally.

In the spirit of the season

Graceland

Continuing our African fusion theme, here's a song from my favorite Paul Simon album.

Ouch!

My neighbor just posted this on Facebook. I love watching these things just to see the old dancers, and it's fun to have it set to a modern funky song. But even if you don't enjoy that, the final few seconds are not to be missed. I wouldn't have thought it was possible to survive a dance move like that.

 

Also, I do love me some Fred Astaire, from head to toe.

More Friday Night Music

Continuing with the African theme, I wore out the cassette tape of this album in college. One hoped to see more of the fusion going on here.

Some Very Different Music For a Friday Night

Not sure if this is more diverse or more vibrant, but it's kind of cool.

Zero Hedge: Most of the Country Peaked in the Late 1990s

...and the labor force participation rate hasn't been this low since Carter.

Why Is It So Hard To Speak The Truth?

Someone must have seen that Iraqi comedian making fun of us for not being able to call ISIS "Islamic," and decided they needed to push back really hard.

Really hard.



So now George W. Bush is the spokesman for the Democratic Party? On the right attitude towards the war?

People can't seem to distinguish between the following claims:

1) "ISIS is essentially Islamic."

2) "Islam is essentially like ISIS."

Claim 1 is demonstrably, empirically true. ISIS -- like a number of other Islamic organizations to include Hizb-ut Tahrir and of course al Qaeda -- is founded for no other reason than to realize a particular vision of Islamic law on earth. They have put a tremendous amount of work into developing their visions. Many of their leaders are lifelong religious students. ISIS leader Baghdadi was a cleric before he became a revolutionary. These organizations have published decades' worth of material explaining exactly how their vision aligns with sha'riah law and the life of the Prophet and his companions.

Furthermore -- whether you like it or not -- their interpretations of sha'riah law are not absurd. They are often the most obvious readings of those laws.

Claim 2 is not obviously true.

For one thing, there are a lot of different schools of sha'riah law. Most of the Islamic world doesn't live under any interpretation similar to this, however obvious these interpretations may be, and haven't historically. That makes perfect sense. Catholics have the Bible, and we also have the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas -- a huge series of densely-argued Aristotelian philosophy about how to interpret the Bible, as well as a long history of earlier Catholic philosophers. The results they come up with are not always the most obvious readings of the Bible. Some Protestant schools prefer more obvious and literal readings. That doesn't make Protestants un-Christian, nor Catholics either.

Jews, by the same token, have on the one hand the Torah; and on the other, a vast collection of Rabbinical scholarship that tries to interpret and understand. Islam, for its own sake, has a similar tradition in its history. One of Thomas Aquinas' chief sources was Averroes, also known as Ibn Rushd, who was an Islamic law judge as well as a philosopher and whose reading of Islamic law was fairly humane (especially in his treatment of women).

So, are we at war with Islam? No. Are we at war with a radical Islamic group? Yes. Are they Muslims? Yes. Are all Muslims them? No. Is ISIS Islamic? Yes, essentially so. Is Islam like ISIS? Not all of it, not by far. Does Islam have anything to do with ISIS? Yes, obviously.

Speak the truth.

Safety in Numbers

One:

“This has been an absurdity from the beginning,” Keane said in response to questions from Royce. “The president personally made a statement that has driven air power from the inception.”

“When we agreed we were going to do airpower and the military said, this is how it would work, he [Obama] said, ‘No, I do not want any civilian casualties,’” Keane explained. “And the response was, ‘But there’s always some civilian casualties. We have the best capability in the world to protect from civilians casualties.’”

However, Obama’s response was, “No, you don’t understand. I want no civilian casualties. Zero,’” Keane continued. “So that has driven our so-called rules of engagement to a degree we have never had in any previous air campaign from desert storm to the present.”

This is likely the reason that U.S. pilots are being told to back down when Islamic State targets are in site, Keane said, citing statistics published earlier this year by U.S. Central Command showing that pilots return from sorties in Iraq with about 75 percent of their ordnance unexpended.

Two:

President Obama’s marquee deportation amnesty has been stalled by the courts, but the rest of his executive actions on immigration, announced exactly a year ago, are moving forward — including his move protecting more than 80 percent of illegal immigrants from any danger of deportation....

“There are 7 or 8 or 9 million people who are now safe under the current policy. That is a victory to celebrate while we wait for the Supreme Court,” said Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who was among the chief cheerleaders pushing Mr. Obama to go around Congress and take unilateral steps last year.

Vibrant diverse youths

The AP staff must have a macro that generates these phrases:

Saint-Denis is one of France's most historic places. French kings were crowned and buried through the centuries in its famed basilica, a majestic Gothic church that towers over the area. Today the district is home to a vibrant and very ethnically diverse population and sees sporadic tension between police and violent youths.

The Flowers of Bermuda

The chorus carries a haunting juxtaposition:

He was the Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock Shoal

Jacksonians Forever

W. R. Mead is not pleased with the defiance of the old tradition.

To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place?

Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time.

Moreover, many of those “benighted” people were willing to sign up for the U.S. military and go to fight ISIS in Syria to protect the refugees....

The “why are Jacksonians such xenophobes?” conversation, given the way so much of the country’s media works, is the conversation we are having. It is not the conversation the country, or even the President, needs.... Things can and will get worse as long as American policy continues to flounder; instead of arguing about how to shelter a few thousand refugees we need to look hard at how we are failing to address the disaster that has created millions, and that continues to grow.

That's right, first to last.

Challenge Accepted

Instapundit suggests putting this map of states that refused refugees and plugging it into the Electoral College.

Here's what I got, giving the D's all the states that haven't taken the step of formally refusing.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

(Updated with new information this afternoon.)

What is Education For?

Maggie's Farm provides a link to two different conceptions. The latter is from a venture capitalist who often found that education was not a good predictor for who would be good at innovation:

I gravitated toward those with exceptional academic backgrounds, which seemed like the right priority. They had stellar resumes, early career success (often in consulting, investment banking, or corporate America), and were driven to succeed. Yet such patently qualified people often proved hopeless in the world of innovation, and I couldn’t quite figure out why....

When my son was in third grade, his science class was studying simple machines. With twenty bucks and a quick trip to Home Depot, we got everything needed to set up shop in the basement, and started playing around with boards, screws, and pulleys. One evening, we set out to design something that would let him lift a cinder block with his little finger. We came up with an approach that, I remarked in passing, he could use to lift his 250 lb. basketball coach. We laughed.

The next week, he came home from school discouraged: “I guess I’m not good at science.” He showed me his simple-machine test, which had blobs of red ink over the question “What simple machine would you use to lift a grown man?” His response was “a six-pulley system,” and included a sketch with pulleys, rope, and stick figures of a man and a child. While the design looked sound, there was a big red X across his answer with the terse note: “ -17. LEVER ! ! ”

After putting my Tiger Dad response behind me, I approached the teacher with a constructive suggestion: “Instead of asking which simple machine to use, why not ask students to come up with as many designs as possible?” The answer floored me. “Throughout school, these kids will need to take standardized tests. We need to prepare them properly. Open-ended questions can confuse them.”

So, there's your answer: education is to prepare you to excel at standardized tests. Unfortunately, or fortunately, life stops throwing standardized tests at you the minute you leave the schoolhouse.

If you want to learn to innovate, two excellent fields are history and philosophy, especially the history of philosophy. That's probably counter-intuitive: innovation is about the future, not what people did or thought in the past. However, while studying Medieval waterworks won't help you to innovate in the field of plumbing, it might be that you'll find there a concept they brought to bear that will prove to have an analogous application in the field in which you are innovating.

Likewise in the history of ideas generally, problems harmonize even when they are not strictly the same problem. As we were just discussing in the comments to this post about physics, one of the exciting new theories is really just an application of an ancient Greek concept -- atomism -- that was applied first to classical physics, and then to early Medieval theories about time.

They cite Aristotle as the origin point for his opponent's view, but Hogan’s instinct here is actually quite as old. He's arguing the atomist position, which comes up when you try to get a handle on the problems of how motion is possible in a continuum. This is Zeno stuff: if space is really infinitely divisible, then how can you traverse any distance given that you must first traverse an infinite series of divisions of that distance? It is impossible to get through an infinite sequence, so...

The atomist's position falls out of that naturally enough: well, what if there's not a continuum, but a structure made up of smallest-possible units? Then we just do them one at a time, and it's not an infinite number.

Aristotle's answer to Zeno wasn't that different, actually: he ends up arguing that there are no actual infinities, just potential ones. So, yes, theoretically (or even just conceptually) one could make all those divisions -- but they aren't actually made, so you don't have to traverse an infinite series.

The same thing came up years later when the Neoplatonists were trying to get a handle on the nature of time. It seems that time is also infinitely divisible, and it's most obvious unit -- now -- seems to be infinitely small. So one of the Neoplatonists -- Proclus, I think -- came up with the idea of 'time atoms' just as the earlier ancient Greek physicists had come up with the idea of atoms for space. It's a natural enough thing to think of, but that doesn't mean it's true.

This new atomism is really new, but it harmonizes with concepts that were deployed by both the Medievals and Ancients. It's an innovation, but a natural way to find it would be to read some very old thought. The problems aren't quite the same, but they're similar enough that the possible solutions align.

Is education for that? So you can innovate better?

Well, no. Education finally isn't for anything. It's not instrumental: it's a realization of your basic nature as a human being. All men, Aristotle says at the opening of the Metaphysics, desire to know. We don't educate ourselves to pursue some goal. Education is the goal. We want to understand. We want it by nature.

I may pursue instrumental goals on the way toward that ultimate goal, but to learn and to understand is itself the goal. That's what education is, not what it's for. There are a few things in life that are the true ends: love, friendship, honor, and wisdom. Everything else is for them.