Forty Days and Forty Nights

The Georgia Legislature is back in session. An attractive feature of our system is that it can only convene for 40 days a year. They can run 24 hours a day if they want, or they can convene for one hour in the afternoon, but they can only convene on forty days a year. The rest of the time, they have to leave us alone.

This is the second of a two-year session, so bills that didn't make it during the last 40 days can be brought up again this year. Of these, the most important is Georgia's Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Its importance can be seen in the fact that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution insists on referring to "religious liberty" in scare quotes, not just in editorials but in its news stories as well.

The bill is of course opposed by all right-thinking people, including the Republican Governor, the Republican speaker of the house, major Georgia corporations such as Coca-Cola, the newspaper, the entire Democratic party as far as I can tell, and a large swathe of the Republican party that is aligned with Atlanta instead of the rest of the state. It is just for that reason it is needed: the current environment is hostile to traditional religious liberty exercises by a large plurality, perhaps even a majority, of Georgia's citizens. They're unfashionable Christians it's true, including many evangelicals. Their expressions of these liberties are often though ugly by those right-thinking folks. Still, their rights are their rights, and the courts are plainly in need of instruction on how important those rights happen to be. The fact that there's such a unity of opinion among the powerful that is dismissive of their traditional rights is a very good reason to toughen legal protections for those rights.

The rest of the big-ticket items are shockingly libertine for Georgia: medical marijuana, alcohol brewery liberalization, legalizing casinos, clarifying online gambling laws to make it easier to engage in Fantasy Football, and of course efforts to increase social spending on transportation and public health care.

It's not the state I grew up in, to be sure. No gun control bills on the horizon so far, although that's sure to change.

Get Out, Vox

I was reading Vox's "explainer" on the Saudi-Iran feud. It's only half bad for the first part, and much of my disagreements with it for that first part are about the interpretation of the facts rather than the facts themselves. Then they get to this:

There is indeed a religious division between Sunni and Shia Islam, going back to the first generations of the religion's founding in the seventh century. You can read about those ancient religious differences and how they opened here, but the truth is that this is not terribly relevant to today's violence.

Sunni and Shia have gotten along fine for much of the Middle East's history, and the Sunni-Shia divide was just not so important for the region's politics. In the 1980s, for example, the biggest conflict in the Middle East was between two Shia-majority countries — Iran and Iraq — with Sunni powers backing Iraq.

That changed in 2003, when the United States led the invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.

You're trying to blame the Sunni/Shia feud on George W. Bush? Are you kidding me with this nonsense?

That throwaway line about Iraq being a 'Shia-majority country' in the 1980s is intended to suggest that maybe Iraq was some sort of Shi'a democracy. In fact the whole power structure was based on Sunni domination of the Shi'ites. Saddam represented a minority that ruled over a majority it feared. The intense brutality of Saddam's regime is all about the Sunni/Shia feud. His war against Iran is explicable in part because of Iran's attempts to establish and promote radical Shi'a groups that would back its own sectarian revolution. Saddam had a feud with Iran for the same reason Saudi Arabia does: because Iran is trying to export its revolution across the Middle East, using this very Sunni/Shia divide as a rallying cry.

In 2003, I attended a briefing by Physicians for Human Rights, which had accompanied British forces in the south of Iraq during and after the invasion. They had interviewed families in these heavily Shi'a regions to learn about the human rights abuses Saddam used in those areas. They reported that one in three of the households they met with had a family member who had been disappeared by the regime. This repression of Shi'ites was intense and ongoing, and in fact had gotten worse in the years running up to the war.

I think Saudi Arabia is winning, currently. Partially I think Foreign Policy is right that the oil war they're starting is going to play to their strengths against Iran's weakness. They've also managed to bring Pakistan -- the only current Islamic nuclear power -- in on their side diplomatically. Iran will have to weigh that carefully in terms of further escalations, whereas Saudi Arabia wins if it can de-escalate the crisis into a cold war fought with oil prices.

Nevertheless, the Kingdom is playing a weaker-than-expected position because the United States has suddenly changed sides. Maintaining the illusion of the "Iran deal" is so important to the Obama administration that it's ignoring Saudi Arabia's explicit call for the United States to help de-escalate the situation. The Pakistanis got asked after we ignored the invitation to play the role of big dog.

The solution to North Korea

According to Theodore Dalrymple:

The North Korean regime is all-or-nothing. You can’t worship Kim Il Sung (President for Eternity) just a little. The leaders are either in power or they are dead. Neither of its immediate neighbors wants the regime to collapse, fearing a flood of starving refugees more than they fear an all-out attack. It is difficult to know what the best policy toward such a state should be, Seoul being only an artillery barrage away from it.

Perhaps we should offer the 1,000 highest people in the hierarchy (and their families) a golden asylum in Estoril, Rome, and France in general—the resorts of deposed European monarchs such as King Zog of Albania—and promise China and South Korea to share out evenly whatever refugees the collapse of the regime would result in. The Koreans are just the kind of immigrants Europe needs: hardworking, docile, intelligent, capable, and probably immunized against ideology by their long experience of it. They would be bewildered at first, but would soon find their feet and become an asset to their new countries.

And Who's Going to Enforce This Curfew?

“What real impact would a curfew have?” you might ask. Certainly it would send the message that we are taking men’s behaviour seriously and that it is no longer acceptable. Certainly it would allow women to move about more safely at night — on campus, in their homes, at bars, at the bus stop. Certainly it would name the problem. It would say, unequivocally, “The problem is you, men. You are the problem, and therefore, it is you who must be stopped.”

Think of it as a mass grounding for men. After a designated period of time, we’ll allow them back on the streets after dark to see how it goes. If the sexual assaults and harassment continue, well, it’s back to the curfew.

I mean, really, they asked for it.

The writer is from Canada, where perhaps men might accept 'being grounded' without complaint (or even, it being Canada, with apology).  Good luck enforcing such a curfew on American men.

Also, by the way, what happens if the men who refuse the curfew in Canada are the same demographic who caused the problems in Germany? Canada has just made a big deal about accepting a bunch of them. They allegedly sang them a song that was sung to Mohammad right before he killed a bunch of Jews in the town that accepted him.

The idea of the song is that it is being sung to welcome Mohammed to Medina after he fled Mecca. So it is a song about migration. Except that after Medina welcomed Mohammed -- the first Muslim refugee, you might say -- he killed all the Jewish men and enslaved the women.

Well, then, I guess the song is on point! But instead of directing concern in that direction, let's 'ground' Canadian men, so they won't be around to help when the issue of this policy comes to the fore.  Who else might be there to help, if the Canadian men did accept the curfew?  Who would be there to enforce the curfew on those non-Canadian men who refuse it?

It's the virus in the wild. They really can't see it.

The Twelve Battles of Arthur

Cattle raids, a historian suggests.

King Arthur’s legendary battles were fought over food for his people - not land or gold - after a volcanic eruption caused a global famine 1,500 years ago, a Celtic history expert has claimed. Andrew Breeze said a massive volcano eruption in El Salvador in 535 AD spread ash into the atmosphere, obscured the sun and ruined harvests - meaning that Britons were left starving. The British academic claims Arthur’s mission was actually to rustle cattle from neighbouring tribes in Scotland, and he became a hero for helping the people of Strathclyde survive a famine.

There's a small problem with this hypothesis as a complete explanation, which has to do with the reality of the Saxon migration. Evidence from graves shows that there was one, and that it reversed during a specific period around the time associated with any historical Arthur.

Still, it might be a partial explanation for some of what went on.

Prison '16 Update: No Obama Endorsement for Hillary Clinton

Not in the primary, at least.

UPDATE:  FBI expands its inquiry into Clinton Foundation corruption.

One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be “screaming” if a prosecution is not pursued because “many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation.”...

[I]n the Clinton case, the number of classified emails has risen to at least 1,340. A 2015 appeal by the State Department to challenge the “Top Secret” classification of at least two emails failed and, as Fox News first reported, is now considered a settled matter.

...

Fox News is told that about 100 special agents assigned to the investigations also were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, with as many as 50 additional agents on “temporary duty assignment,” or TDY. The request to sign a new NDA could reflect that agents are handling the highly classified material in the emails[.]

Oh, Come Off It

I understand that the rhetorical point here is that American conservatives are all horrid racists, but this is nonsense.

Seven years into the Obama presidency the right feels the same way about President Obama as I would if I woke up tomorrow and a talking horse were president. I'd be like, "Seriously? This horse is the president? Well, that just doesn't make any sense. Lemme see that horse's papers. I know I saw them before, but I just want to see them one more time."

The big difference between me and the right is that after seven years of the Mr. Ed presidency I think I would start to settle in and believe it was true. But to the loudest members of the GOP, something still doesn't feel right about this Obama character being President. So they can't trust anything that comes out of his mouth.

You know what else the President said? He said that if you liked your plan, you could keep it.

The President also said that he did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.

The President also said "Read my lips, no new taxes."

Treating Barack Obama's word as suspect isn't to treat Obama as a suspicious figure somehow holding the noble office of the Presidency. It's to treat him exactly as Presidents have shown for decades that they ought to be treated. To question whether he's lying to you is to treat him exactly as you would treat a President if you are a free citizen and want to remain one.

And let me be clear about something else, gun owners. I want President Obama to want to take your guns away. I don't trust you with your guns.

Duly noted.

A Little Winter Fell on My Patch of Wilderness

I don't own any wilderness to speak of, but wherever I am I find some to befriend. Here it was today.

A Former KGB Officer on Ideological Subversion

Note the date on this is fully thirty years ago, at which time he felt that the first stage -- demoralization -- was complete. Consider how far we've come since then in running down America, its Founders and its Constitution, as an aspirational ideal.



This was the official plan of the KGB, and one that they used effectively in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. (Also in Asia.) Why didn't it work here? Possibly because the Soviet Union collapsed, and so the professionals behind the program weren't there to leverage and guide the moment of crisis when it finally came. The Marxist-influenced intellectuals actually became in charge, rather than being shot against the wall and replaced with professionals.

But also possibly because the crisis was never great enough to overcome the American capacity for force. You couldn't roll tanks into America like you did in Czechoslovakia, and the country was always too big, too spread out, and too well armed to rule with a secret police. We can't even manage to get people to stop selling each other drugs, let alone effect totalitarianism.

In any case, this was the plan, and it failed. We still have to deal with the effects of the demoralization, however. It remains a huge problem for our country that the young have -- for what is now four generations -- been half-educated to despise its ideals and their own history. Recovering a natural patriotism and a proper admiration for the ideals of human liberty remains a major part of the work to be done.

There's a much longer interview with the same man here, for those who want to learn more.

The Seventh Century Lives

A genetic study of Britain shows that Britons still live in the same places as their ancient kingdoms of 600 AD.

In fact, a map showing tribes of Britain in 600AD is almost identical to a new chart showing genetic variability throughout the UK, suggesting that local communities have stayed put for the past 1415 years.

Interesting. That does not hold for the United States.

The Texas Plan

Wow, Tex. Your governor really gets it.

Here, per the document, are the nine constitutional amendments Abbott is backing:

I. Prohibit Congress from regulating activity that occurs wholly within one State.

II. Require Congress to balance its budget.

III. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from creating federal law.

IV. Prohibit administrative agencies—and the unelected bureaucrats that staff them—from preempting state law.

V. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

VI. Require a seven-justice super-majority vote for U.S. Supreme Court decisions that invalidate a democratically enacted law.

VII. Restore the balance of power between the federal and state governments by limiting the former to the powers expressly delegated to it in the Constitution.

VIII. Give state officials the power to sue in federal court when federal officials overstep their bounds.

IX. Allow a two-thirds majority of the States to override a federal law or regulation.

No Offensive Lingo Allowed!

The next logical step in purging New Orleans of offensive speech has arrived:

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu should explain why anti-abortion banners festoon the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground, since he has decided to be the arbiter of what symbols are so offensive that they must be removed from public property, City Councilwoman Stacy Head said at a recent meeting....

As a woman, Head said, she feels like the banners are a nuisance since they "negatively influence the perception of my civil liberties as a woman. I believe I'm being discriminated against." ...

"We are looking to the admin to decide which objects and symbols are appropriate for the city on city property. Which ones offend us. Which ones are negative," Head said. As a woman, it offends her to have to drive by them and be reminded of the oppression, she said. Does that give her standing to call for their removal?

Head called the banners "political signage for a particular position that I perceive as a nuisance. I perceive it as offensive. I do not see it is a promoting awareness."

I'm really not sure if she seriously thinks he should pick up this responsibility and run with it, or if she's chiding him for having 'decided to be the arbiter of what symbols are so offensive that they must be removed from public property.' The latter would be a clever argument: the mayor has definitely opened himself up to a nest of legal issues.

Hillary for Prison Update

This one's going to be hard to wave away.

In a thread from June 2011, Hillary exchanges e-mails with Jake Sullivan, then her deputy chief of staff and now her campaign foreign-policy adviser, in which she impatiently waits for a set of talking points. When Sullivan tells her that the source is having trouble with the secure fax, Hillary then orders Sullivan to have the data stripped of its markings and sent through a non-secure channel.

That should be game, set, and match, yes?

There's still time to get your signs.

Lone Wolf in Eric Blair's Backyard?

The officer did well:

Hartnett was shot in the arm multiple times after 13 shots were fired into the vehicle. He was able to return fire and hit the suspect, 30-year-old Edward Archer, who has survived. Police are now confirming the situation as a terrorism investigation and have revealed the suspect admitted to carrying out the shooting in the name of Islam after pledging loyalty to ISIS.

"He [the suspect] said he did it for his religious beliefs," police officials said Friday in a press conference.

I see via Instapundit that the weapon used by the terrorist was a stolen police firearm.

Judgment and Prejudice

On the one hand, it's good that the Germans have accepted responsibility for the Nazi movement and are now reflexively opposed to prejudice.

Anti-Islam demonstrators were outnumbered by 10 to one in Cologne tonight as the city’s famous cathedral turned out its lights in a symbolic protest against the Pegida movement.

The so-called “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamification of the West” (Pegida) had planned to hold a march there following weekly rallies in Dresden but only 250 supporters showed up, compared to more than 2,000 counter-demonstrators.

They lined the Cologne’s largest bridge as the cathedral stood in darkness, holding placards reading "refugees welcome", "I heart immigration" and "no Nazis here".

On the other hand, prejudice is "pre-judgment," and being opposed to pre-judging someone or something should not require you to suspend post-judgment in the face of evidence. In the wake of an attack by more than a thousand Muslim refugees on German women, and the confession by police to victims that they cannot guarantee women's safety and that women should thus avoid the city center, it's not prejudice to oppose taking new refugees. It's not prejudice, but appropriate and rational judgment, to assert that this culture is not compatible with your values and that you don't want it in your country.

The inability to make considered, rational judgments because of a fear of prejudice is a category error. That is a quite serious philosophical mistake. It is perfectly possible to avoid prejudice without suspending one's faculty of judgment permanently. For example, you could elect to accept people who are Muslims and refugees if and only if they as individuals embrace your values. Some do, and some don't, and yes that may mean breaking up families in terms of whom you accept.

Normally we wouldn't want to do that on principle -- which, by the way, is another way of saying that we have pre-judged these situations have have a pre-judgment, a principle, we reflexively apply. Having principles is also a kind of prejudice, a pre-judgment. Sometimes principles have to be set aside based on the facts that make the cases unusual. In this case rational judgment may suggest it:

The horrifying story of an “honor killing” in Germany spotlights the sheer madness of importing millions of unvetted, unassimilated migrants.

The victim, a 20-year-old woman known as “Rokstan M,” is one refugee who had a strong case for asylum. She was gang-raped in Syria, emigrated to Germany two years ago, and found employment with the German government as a translator.

However, she strongly suspected her family wanted her dead for being “unclean,” and her suspicions appear to have been confirmed, as the German police believe her father and brothers slaughtered her with knives and buried her body in a garden, allegedly at the instruction of her mother.

Normally we wouldn't want to break up families. Here's a case in which it would have been a good thing for her to be separated from her mother and father and brother. She would have fit into German society quite well. They will never.

That's not prejudice, it's the judgment of reason applied to the truth of the facts.

ISIS Kills Female Journalist

Not for being female, but for being a journalist. A good one -- the kind who perform a true service to civilization.

A Second Exchange

As a point of rhetoric, it's interesting that CNN set this up the way they did. They could have chosen another crime victim who would have been less sympathetic, which would give the President an easier out. Instead, they put him in the position of having to affirm her right to keep and bear arms, and to clarify that he does not intend to do anything that would make it harder for her to own a firearm.

That may or may not be true -- it may simply be that he has no capacity at the moment to do anything that would make it harder for her to own a firearm, but that he would be happy to create the "Australia style" rules he has referred to several times as his ideal if he only had the power. That seems likely to me. Still, it is an interesting moment. Imagine how it must sound to a gun-banning progressive: do they see it as merely useful rhetoric to get the camel's nose under the tent, or are they appalled to see him surrender the basic concept that firearms in the hands of citizens are a basic right that is justified by the need to defend against things like criminal violence?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, in California, a whole new list of handguns are now illegal... but that's not the President's proposal.

UPDATE: Congress may be sending him a test for this. Why shouldn't DC recognize the concealed carry permits of the states, if as he says he's not opposed to law-abiding citizens like her using firearms for the purpose of protecting themselves and their families?

UPDATE: Commentary's Noah Rothman says that this exchange, taken together with the Clinton email, the terrorist attack in Philly, and another plotted by refugees just arrested, makes it a very bad day for the narrative.

Chris Kyle's Widow Takes on the President

It's a pretty amazing exchange, and one that speaks well of our country at this late date.

She says you 'can't outlaw murder,' which of course is misspoken somewhat: murder is outlawed in all fifty states. Still, when addressing someone as prominent as the President of the United States, it's not surprising if you get nervous and don't speak as clearly as you would at your dinner table. To his credit, the President did not pretend to misunderstand her for rhetorical advantage.

He does say something I think needs clarification:

"[W]hat you said about murder rates and violent crime generally is something we don’t celebrate enough,” he agreed. “The fact of the matter is that violent crime has been steadily declining across America for a pretty long time. And you wouldn’t always know it from watching television. Now, I challenge the notion that the reason for that is that there is more gun ownership. Because if you look at the where the areas are with the highest gun ownership, those are the places that the crime hasn’t dropped down that much."

I'm not sure if this statement is false, or if he's just thinking of 'the areas' at a specific level where it happens to hold true statistically. What I think is true is that gun ownership rates have declined somewhat in spite of a vast increase of real numbers of firearms, which is to say that somewhat fewer people own many more guns. These people are the sort of people who have wealth to invest in durable goods they don't require for survival. By that I mean that once you have about three guns, if you chose carefully, you've covered your bases: a rifle for distance shooting including hunting, a shotgun for small game or home defense, and a handgun to fight your way back to the longarms. If you buy more than that, it's because you like or collect the things, or participate in sports involving specialized arms, or something similar.

So, if 'the areas' means 'areas where middle to upper-middle class households with money to invest in guns,' I don't think it's true that the crime rate is especially high in those areas. If it hasn't declined much, it's only because those areas are small ball for violent crime in the first place.

Still, maybe he means something else. It'd be helpful if he would expand and clarify these remarks, because I'm not sure what he's getting at. The decline since 1993 or so is so sharp -- we're talking about a halving of violent crime -- that it would be really strange to find many places where crime 'hasn't dropped down that much.' The ones that come to mind are the poorer regions of cities like Chicago, which have robust gun control laws but also serious poverty, drugs, and gang problems. Those aren't the people who accounted for the vast increase in private firearms that these two are discussing.

Yay For White Privilege!

The Baltimore Sun publishes a piece by a woman whose judgment is... remarkable.

I'm less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore, I declared as we discussed the issue, than I am by those permitted gun owners. I know how to stay out of the line of Baltimore's illegal gunfire; I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by "the game."

So... segregation is a good thing now, from the white liberal perspective? 'You know, I'm not endorsing it, but it does keep me safe...'

Also, by the way since her framing story happens in Florida: those permitted gun owners in Florida are extremely well-behaved.

“Since 1987, the state of Florida has issued 2.5 million concealed-carry permits,” Raso says in his latest opinion piece for the NRA News network. “Of those, only 168 people have committed firearms crimes. That’s .00672 percent of the total amount issued.”*

It's not a bad idea to discuss gun safety with the parents of your children's friends, of course. You can make an informed judgment about whether you want your kids playing with them based on the outcomes of those conversations. What she wants instead is universal gun registration worked into a "searchable database" that would identify gun owners for her convenience -- or that of criminals who want to steal guns, or government officials who want to round them up. That's a much less reasonable proposal.

Marjah Update

Former SEAL Congressman demands answers on how our forces got trapped in Marjah for hours without relief.