Berdoo Is The Weirdest Thing I've Ever Seen

Initial reports are never right, but today was really strange. Who are these guys?

1) It seems clear that this was a semi-professional team of guys who knew how to work together, and who had either the capacity to make pipe bombs or connections who did. They carried out their plan and managed to exfil successfully before police could arrive. Yet hours later, they're still driving around in the same car, in the same kit, a mile and a half away?

2) The target doesn't make any obvious sense as a terrorist target, except that it was a soft target with lots of people.

It's like you had a team of guys who meticulously planned out how they'd carry out a major attack, but never got further in their planning than how they'd drive away from the scene within a given response time, leaving IEDs to cover their tracks. There was apparently no "then what?" considered. There were major freeways they could have taken, and if you've got three guys you surely have access to more than one car. They could have dumped the SUV and their kit, piled into a white sedan, and been in another state by the time the police caught up to the first vehicle.

Wannabe martyrs? One of whom lost his nerve and fled on foot when the final firefight arrived? But then why bother with the exfil? You could have stayed and killed a few more people, and become martyrs where you were. The police were coming.

It's like they had everything mapped out until a minute after they drove away, and then suddenly realized they had no idea what came next (and no imagination between them that would let them plan up something better than 'drive around the neighborhood in the getaway car').

The one thing that might make sense is if they had been trained by professionals who considered them disposable. They were taught how to do the part they did right, and then... what now?

Or maybe they're just yahoos who thought this out carefully on their own, and weren't bright enough to think beyond it.

Otherwise, conflicting details in all the reports make it hard to know what to think so far.

Final IAEA Report on Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program Released

Two weeks early, too. Iran definitely had one, it lasted formally until 2003, informally continued after, and the IAEA has gotten chiefly stonewalling and obfuscation from Iran about its program since then. Iran's written answers promised under the "road map" in July were so ambiguous that the IAEA provided a list of follow up questions and held a number of technical meetings to try to get answers, but the report rather suspiciously says absolutely nothing about whether any answers were forthcoming.

Too bad we'll all be having another round of talk about how important it is to strip Americans of their weapons today instead. This will probably slide into the ether almost unnoticed.

Quiz: Opening Lines of Medieval Literature

Without making any use to any reference materials whatsoever, including of course search engines, I managed 9 of 10. Oddly enough, I'd read the one I missed many times -- Erec en Enide -- but somehow failed to remember the opening.

Dissent Magazine: "Beyond the Wage System"

A call for a universal basic income to address the exploitative nature of work, "under-work," "over-work," and non-work.

The author "teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at Duke University. She studies feminist theory, political theory, the critical study of work, and utopian thought."

By coincidence, I also ran across this image from an anarchist cartoonist that seems to capture the argument surprisingly well:

The American People Are Uniquely Bad

Asked about the "mass shooting" where a nut job shot three people at a Colorado abortion clinic, President Obama once again became exasperated with the American people.

"I say this every time we've got one of these mass shootings: This just doesn't happen in other countries."

He actually said this. In Paris.

The author thinks it might be part of a case for his removal from office -- not by impeachment, but for cause of mental impairment according to the 25th Amendment. That of course is merely a rhetorical flourish: the 25th Amendment requires members of his cabinet or the President himself to admit that he cannot perform the functions, and the action can be undone simply by the President sending a letter to the effect that "no such disability exists" unless the Vice President anda majority of executive branch heads insist that he is not able. It was very carefully balanced so as not to be an extra tool for Congress to use against a President it didn't like.

Still it is a strange thing to have said, in Paris.

UPDATE: The Washington Post fact-checks the statement.

Is his statement true?

In one sense, the answer would be “yes.” President Obama’s statement was in the form of: “Every time X happens, I say Y.”

For Your Friend, Tex

You can wait until next Thanksgiving if you want, but let us know how it goes.

The Fruits of Gun Control Talk

This is probably a great time to invest in gun manufacturing stocks, given that the President claims it'll be a major focus of his final year in office. Congratulations to those who already do own such stocks: you'll probably be getting a nice dividend.

Please Refrain From Shooting Your Cab Driver

The fact that your cab driver is a Muslim does not justify the practice. If he took you where you wanted to go without heavily padding the fee by ferrying you along the "scenic route," you should tip him instead.

Unless your cab driver should try to kill you, kidnap you at gunpoint, or something similar, shooting them is always inappropriate.

You Know What Doesn't Matter to Children? Parents.

A rather bold thesis! Let's look at the evidence.

In terms of compelling evidence, let’s start with a study published recently in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics.1 Tinca Polderman and colleagues just completed the Herculean task of reviewing nearly all twin studies published by behavior geneticists over the past 50 years....

Before progressing, I should note that behavioral geneticists make a finer grain distinction than most about the environment, subdividing it into shared and non-shared components.1,2,3,4 Not much is really complicated about this. The shared environment makes children raised together similar to each other.3 The term encompasses the typical parenting effects that we normally envision when we think about environmental variables. Non-shared influences capture the unique experiences of siblings raised in the same home; they make siblings different from one another. Another way of thinking about non-shared environments is that they represent the parts of your life story that are unique from the rest of your family. Importantly, this also includes all of the randomness and pure happenstance that life tends to hurl in our direction from time to time. Returning to the review of twin research, the shared environment just didn’t matter all that much (that’s on average, of course, for some traits it mattered more than others). The non-shared environment mattered consistently.

The pattern of findings mentioned above is nothing new.1,2,3,4,5 The importance of genetics and the non-shared environment (and the relatively minor importance of the shared environment) was already so entrenched in behavior genetics that years before the Polderman study was published it had been enshrined as a set of “laws.”2 The BG laws, though, are based largely (but certainly not completely) on twin studies, the meta-analysis by Polderman et al. was comprised of twin studies, and if you pay attention to this sort of thing you’ve probably heard some nasty things about twin studies lately.3 You’ve read that twin studies contain an insidious flaw that causes them to underestimate shared environmental effects (making it seem like parents matter less than they do). The assumptions of twin research, however, have been meticulously studied. The methods of twin researchers have been around for decades and have been challenged, critiqued, refined, adjusted, and (perhaps most importantly) cross validated with other techniques that rely on different assumptions entirely.3,4 They work, and they work with impressive precision.

Based on the results of classical twin studies, it just doesn’t appear that parenting—whether mom and dad are permissive or not, read to their kid or not, or whatever else—impacts development as much as we might like to think. Regarding the cross-validation that I mentioned, studies examining identical twins separated at birth and reared apart have repeatedly revealed (in shocking ways) the same thing: these individuals are remarkably similar when in fact they should be utterly different (they have completely different environments, but the same genes).3

So, good news for those of you who are parents: Junior is a rat because of your rotten genetics, not because of your moral failings.

Well, and his peer group: it turns out that the 'socialization' that really matters is the kind of kids he runs with. "As Harris notes, parents are not to blame for their children’s neuroses (beyond the genes they contribute to the manufacturing of that child), nor can they take much credit for their successful psychological adjustment."

Psychoanalysts hardest hit.

Holiday Lesson Proves Nothing

These guys are good singers, though.

Oh, It's Even Worse Than That

Michael Ledeen writes on the Iran deal:

I dare say very few people realize there is no formal deal. Countless journalists refer to something that was “signed” or “inked” in Vienna, even though no such thing took place. A handful of careful writers, notably Yigal Carmon and Amir Taheri have gotten it right, and last week the State Department admitted that nobody has signed The Deal and it is not legally binding on anybody.

As I wrote in July, Iran has promised to be on good behavior, and we have promised to pay for it. We are indeed paying, as we have for more than two years ($700 million per month), and the Iranians, as is their wont, have done their worst to spread terror and jihadism all over the world, from the Middle East to Asia, Africa and South America.

Such a deal! Carmon thinks Obama will have to admit failure, and return to the negotiating table. As I predicted…

Oh, it's been signed by one person. Thus, it's legally binding on one country.

Guess which one?

I'm Big on Metaphors

Sounds like you're suggesting unions for grad students. Which, frankly, isn't that insane given the tremendous abuses they are suffering under currently: for below-poverty-line pay, you teach most of the courses the university offers. As Federal student loans vastly enrich university budgets, and as the teaching is the real value the university provides, that's the kind of imbalance that leads to people thinking that a union might not be a bad idea. Solidarity, baby! Popcorn!

Grim's Law of Wrench-Turning and Social Media

When looking for practical advice on how to repair mechanical problems with your ride, remember: YouTube is invaluable, Google is helpful, and Facebook is evil.

Don't forget to mix sugar into your gasoline to make sure it doesn't get too thin in the dry winter weather, and be sure to let all the summer air out of your tires and refill them with winter air so they don't burst in the cold.

In Fairness, the Baptists Banned Alcohol Sales Too

America's first majority Muslim city has elected its first majority Muslim city council, and they've passed their first laws.

While the members of the Hamtramck, Michigan city council have denied that they would put religion into politics, their actions show otherwise. They’ve already banned alcohol sales within 500 feet of local mosques, and allowed daily calls to prayer to reverberate through town as early as 6am.

I suppose churches would want to be excepted from public noise ordinances insofar as they had church bells. On the other hand, they wouldn't generally be ringing them at six in the morning.

The Feast of St. Andrew

Saint Andrew is a strange choice to be the national saint of Scotland. Scotland has plenty of its own saints, had they wished to choose a Scot. The Scots nevertheless chose him, but celebrate his feast day with a celebration of traditional Scottish culture. Just as ironically, Romania celebrates the Feast of St. Andrew -- who was a Jew from Galilee in spite of his Greek name -- with a festival descended from the Roman Saturnalia.

In any case, here's an appropriate video.

Yeoman "Farmers"

W. R. Mead is on ground I find very familiar today. He is making a pragmatic argument about why we should shift to a system that prefers small business development, but there's a political philosophical argument for the proposal as well. It's Jefferson's old argument about the increased practical liberty that comes from owning your own means of production. Political liberty is good, but if you are effectively under the thumb of another, you are not really at liberty to speak your mind. This is why James Jackson, that greatest of Georgian political heroes, fought to undo the Yazoo land fraud and ensure a Georgia in which you could own your own land.

When I say he fought for this I mean literally fought, not "fought for" in the figurative sense preferred by contemporary politicians. First he fought in the Revolutionary War for the principle of political liberty. Then he fought four duels in the course of trying to undo the Yazoo land fraud as his opponents tried to kill him to prevent his success. He was not dissuaded by these multiple attempts on his life, but saw the question through to victory.

So what was the principle for which he fought? It was that the American system of government should work to ensure that Americans had at least the real potential to own their own means of production. Instead of a society structured around a renter/land-lord relationship, it would be a society structured as much as possible to be about individual families owning the things they needed to produce a living. Then they could say what they wanted when it came time to reason politically rather than having to scrape to the opinions of the great or the rich. It would enshrine the political control of the community among the people because the people would be practically as well as formally free.

There is an Aristotelian idea behind this model as well. In the Politics, Aristotle writes that the least dangerous group to own power in any society is the propertied middle class. Because they have land or businesses of their own, they want strong protections for private property, and thus will not (as the poor tended to do in Aristotle's time) vote to 'take from the rich and give to the poor.' Because they are not so rich that they can afford to be long away from tending to their own business, they will not seek to rule any more than is absolutely necessary, ensuring that government remains limited to only those concerns that absolutely require it. Unlike government by the rich or by those who are paid to govern, popular government led by the middle class will not seek to overawe every aspect of life in order to further their own class interests.

Thus they will avoid both the problems associated with government by unregulated democracy, and government by an elite that is rich or that is paid to perform public office.

It remains a good ideal for future reform. Government could do much less, so much less that it was only done part time by those who would want as quickly as possible to get back to literally minding their own business. What is the solution to poverty on this model? Encouraging the poor in coming to develop a productive business of their own.

"Reason" a raison

Little French lingo for a Monday afternoon, since the President is badmouthing us in Paris at the climate change conference. On his other favorite topic, Reason magazine has the sense of it: "Obama Insists 'We Have to Do Something' About Mass Shootings but Can't Say What or Why It Would Work."

The Times describes Obama as increasingly exasperated by Congress's refusal to enact the gun controls he supports. Some of us are increasingly exasperated by Obama's failure to elucidate any logical connection between those measures and the crimes they supposedly would prevent.

It's a faith-based approach, which, actually, is another tie between his two favorite subjects.

UPDATE: It sounds as if the President's spokesman does have a specific plan:

The Obama administration is pressing for gun control, repeating a demand that Congress pass a ban on gun ownership for Americans on the no-fly list.

“If the U.S. Government has determined that it is too dangerous for you to board a plane then you shouldn’t be able to buy a gun,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said during a press conference in Paris today.... “Congress should pass this law before leaving for the Holidays,” Earnest said.

So, your proposal is that Congress should immediately give the executive branch unilateral authority to rescind any individual's Constitutional 2nd Amendment rights based on whatever criteria it likes, without any due process at all? That's a modest proposal.

Knocked That One Out Of The Park

Noah Rothman at Commentary magazine notices that "Problems change, but the remedy doesn't." The old problem was the Soviet critique of Western imperialism. The new problem is how to resolve an alleged crisis with climate change. Those sound like they are different enough problems that they should have nearly wholly different solution sets. But no, the solutions proposed are the very same solutions:

The notion that the American way of life is unsustainable and unfair toward the rest of the world’s population is an old argument, and its remedies are suspiciously familiar. It was once claimed that the prosperity of the first world must be curtailed if there was to be peace.... Replace the scourge of climate change with poverty and “climate-friendly technologies” with advanced military-industrial technologies, and you have a boilerplate Soviet speech aimed at an international audience.

It's not very surprising to find John F. Kerry at the forefront of advocating that America yield to the Communist agenda. He's been at that for a while now.

The Beauty of Nature, Perfected by Art

Isle of Lewis, Scotland. Someday, I think I may need to go and visit that place.

Of Course He Did

'At Paris Conference, Obama says US Partly to Blame for Climate Change.'

We're lucky he didn't assume the whole blame for us.