Nemesis Approaches

Nemesis... was the spirit of divine retribution against those who succumb to hubris (arrogance before the gods). Another name was Adrasteia, meaning "the inescapable".

Can you feel her coming through the chilling winter air?

The declaration came as an add-on to anti-Wall Street rhetoric she deployed in response to attacks on her acceptance of vast monies from Wall Street:

"There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail."

Even worse, her campaign tweeted the aphorism...

"There should be no bank too big to fail and no individual too big to jail." —Hillary #DemDebate

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 18, 2016

Thoughts on the US Navy/IRGC debacle

Note: these are my thoughts alone and reflect no one else's opinion outside of the voices that live in my head.

It Is An Important Question

"Will Hillary Clinton get prosecuted?" is most searched question on Google ahead of the Democratic debate on Sunday night. "Will Hillary Clinton win the nomination?" is second and "What did Hillary Clinton do that is illegal?" is the third.

Good Point

[T]he problem with this assumption [that Muslims are inferior] is contained in this Polish joke my cousin Tony Zbrowskis told me 50 years ago. But first, do you speak Polish?

No?

How does it feel to be dumber than a Pollack?

And so it goes with Arab Muslims and the Muslims. They speak our language, we do not speak theirs. They have their own alphabet and unlike the Cyrillic alphabet, it is not easily translated into the Western alphabet. Arab Muslims come here not as poor people looking for an opportunity to reach the upper class through hard work, but as students and the like from upper crust families. They study us. They know us. They speak our language and know are culture. They study our government. They do not seek to assimilate. Why would they? We are decadent.

The author goes on to state that liberals think they can use Muslims to further the liberal agenda, but that Muslims will use them instead. I'm not sure he rightly captures the spirit of the thing. The Marxist binary continues to animate the Left in our society, but it is now several binaries of oppression and domination: rich/worker, male/female, white/black, colonialist/oppressed. The last one in particular was a late addition to Marxism -- Lenin wrote a book about it, decades after Marx was in the grave -- but it is wholly out of date now. Colonialism started dying as soon as WWII ended. At least people keep being born male or female, for the most part. The colonial/oppressed model is vastly out of date.

Having these categories of thought blinds you to what is going on. You think you are doing your duty, for being a friend to the weak is 'the duty of a true knight, at least.' But the people designated as 'the weak' aren't so weak anymore: have you seen Dubai?

Yet the categories do not change. They cannot.

The oppressed cannot be the oppressor: that would be a logical contradiction. But human beings are not logical objects. We can oppress here, and be oppressed there: and that my father was oppressed does not mean his son is. Nor vice versa.

The logic of the arguments seems so convincing. The only question is whether the logic applies to the real world.

UPDATE: No kidding from Australia -- "anti-terror laws could prevent teaching from Koran," say Muslim clerics.

What Are "New York Values"?

On 9/11, I discovered much to my surprise that I was very angry about an attack on New York City. It wasn't obvious that I ought to be. My entire life had, after all, been marked by the New York Times remarking on my home and everything I loved in tones most suitable for 19th century anthropologists describing weird savages who practiced cannibalism and head-shrinking on their tribal enemies. I always had the sense that New York had settled itself in judgment against Georgia and the South. Why should I love or defend anyone who hated and despised all I cared about? And yet I did, for reasons that were hard to identify.

Equally hard to identify is exactly what this phrase means, "New York values." I have no idea what the Senator from Texas means by that.

It's a strange place. I've only been there twice, at very different times. The first time was in the 1980s, when it was dangerous and weird. The last time was just a few years ago, when it was gentrified and not very weird at all. It means a lot of things to a lot of people.

As for me, I enjoyed the Cloisters, and then I left. It's not for me. Is that because its values are not mine? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know how to tell you what it values, or if it values anything. People value things, and there are too many people there. How could you name a coherent vision from such a multitude? America is e pluribus unum, but not New York: it remains many, and if you come back in a decade or two it will be another many, different from before.

UPDATE: Stephen L. Miller proclaims himself a proud New Yorker, and tries to explain what he thinks New York is all about.

At its best, New York is a real, functioning, unglamorous, unforgiving machine. And it’s all of that despite what the balance in your account says. It’s not Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It’s the hidden neighborhoods, tucked out of the reach of the sightseers. It’s the concrete canyons filled with natives hunkering down in hooded jackets and earplugs, not the European visitors searching for Mad Men or the Kardashians. New York is the person on the subway with an overstuffed bag and unfashionable walking shoes, just trying to get to and from work or home. It’s the wind-bitten locals rolling their eyes at the throngs of out-of-towners....

And you have to be able to love it. All of it.

That's New York at its best, according to someone who says he does love it!

I'm glad you're happy, really. I'm just even more glad that I can stay a very long way away from any place like that.

There's No Substitute for a .50 Cal

Apparently Mythbusters got to this 'can you fell a tree with a machine gun?' thing a while ago. They determined that yes, you could, in 45 seconds.



So that's 2,250 rounds, which at $0.50 a round is $1,125 for the tree.

Looks to me like it takes about three .50 BMG hits to knock down that tree in the clip below. Now, BMG is a little more expensive -- about $3 a round -- but that still works out to $9 for the takedown. If it takes four or five hits, it's affordable.

Sounds to me like there's no choice but to prefer the .50 BMG rifle for lumberjack work.

A Local Monument

Cauliflower emerges from the shadows

It must be the paleo craze.  My bad luck:  just when I discovered that I really enjoy cauliflower cooked in some surprising new ways, the demand soars and the supply crashes.  What we need is price controls.

And That's That

The VPC-written assault weapons ban in Georgia is officially dead.

House Speaker David Ralston said Friday that legislation to ban assault weapons in Georgia will not become law on his watch.

“As long as I am speaker of this House, I will not use any of our valuable time taking away the constitutional rights of our citizens,” Ralston told reporters at an impromptu news conference, making the end of the first five days of the 40-day legislative session.

"Hillary Clinton Doesn't Trust You"

That is true in so many ways. Why did she ever decide to put up a personal email system? Because she didn't want her emails to become public records, which would allow the American public to judge her performance. Why did she invent the weird story that the Benghazi attacks were a spontaneous response to an internet video -- in an area where internet access is extremely spotty? Why did she work so hard to cover up her husband's sexual improprieties? Why, finally, is she apparently incapable of expressing herself to American voters without seeming like she's putting on a calibrated, artificial act?

Set all that aside. For now, let's talk about health care.

Hillary Clinton's campaign has spent the past few days indulging its worst instincts. It blundered into a dumb attack on Bernie Sanders, but rather than back down it raised the stakes. The result has been a reminder, to liberals, of what they like about Sanders and mistrust about Clinton.

This is the beginning, by the way, of a strongly pro-Clinton article. This is as good as it gets for her: an article headlined "Hillary Clinton Doesn't Trust You." You're supposed to realize by the end that you're the problem, and that you should do more to earn her trust. Maybe then she will quit lying to you, and start taking you in to her confidence about how she is going to organize your life.

Point, Counterpoint

It is true that by this definition, young people today are mostly not very cool. On the other hand, it may be that 'being cool' is something that a certain earlier generation or two significantly overvalued.

I mean, I don't think so. But maybe I'm just too old to appreciate the joy of singing along to whatever the current corporate-generated pop songs are, in a large crowd of people who are just like you in nearly every way (but "diverse!"). I never meet anyone who is just like me, and rarely meet anyone who is approximately like me. Maybe there's something to be said for the experience.

For Eric Blair

Best Insults from Ancient Rome.

I think the "still broke" one is the best, or at least the one for which I can think of the most applications today.

Um, Mr. Boot...

Max Boot offers a rather tendentious description of the choice facing Republican voters in foreign policy:

This, then, is the choice confronting Republican primary voters in 2016: Whether to continue the traditional, Reaganesque foreign policy that has been championed by every Republican presidential nominee for decades or to opt for a Jacksonian outlook that is as crude and ugly as it is beguiling....

[L]ong experience shows that America has been most successful in achieving its objectives in precisely those places—such as Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, Bosnia, and Kosovo—where it has kept troops for decades and fostered new regimes to replace the old. Occasionally, as in Grenada or Panama, the U.S. can achieve its objectives and pull out. But in numerous other instances, such as Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, an overly hasty pullout has sacrificed whatever gains U.S. troops have sought to achieve.

Of the successes, Grenada is not 'Reaganesque' but actually Reagan's policy.

The close second of the successes is Panama, which his former Vice President did. So the two examples of 'occasional' successes of the Jacksonian type are the two most Reaganesque successful policies.

The commitment to long stays are all someone else's, whether successes or failures. Germany and Japan are Trumanesque, and were already long solidified by the time Reagan got there. South Korea is much the same. Bosnia and Kosovo are Bill Clinton's projects, well after Reagan had retired from the stage.

Among the failures, Clinton's were Haiti and Somalia. The Iraq pullout was Obama's decision.

Lebanon is the only one of the failures that can be laid at Reagan's door, and that mission was a United Nations force. Reagan withdrew at the same time as the French, who made up a strong component without which we'd have had to have committed forces much more heavily to a conflict in which our local allies were collapsing. If the argument is that we should have made an Iraq out of it, OK, but there's no reason to suggest that such a policy would have been "Reaganesque." What Reagan himself chose to do was the opposite.

Reagan himself took a Jacksonian approach in Grenada and won; his VP later became President and did the same thing in Panama, and won. Reagan took the internationalist approach favored by Bill Clinton in Lebanon and lost. Perhaps he could have won if he'd doubled down, but that isn't what he himself chose to do.

So the most obviously "Reaganesque" policy really is the Jacksonian policy. Reagan kept his Long, Twilight conflict cold, and used hot war only when victory could be had quickly or when there was a large international coalition backing the play. George H. W. Bush did the same thing -- Panama, but also the Gulf War with its huge international coalition. The other policies may be wise or foolish, but they aren't "Reaganesque."

Why Would Anyone Need a .50 Caliber Incendiary?

One of the weirder features of the Georgia bill -- the one that convinces me it was probably written by the VPC, and is just being farmed out to legislators around the country -- is its focus on '.50 caliber incendiary' rifles. That's a strange thing to be concerned about, given that the things have been used in almost no crimes. VPC has an extensive list of cases "involving" .50 cal rifles, but they're almost all cases in which the involvement is limited to the police having seized one pursuant to another investigation. There are only four cases in twenty years in which one may have been fired in a crime, and some of those are dodgy (e.g., the Branch Davidian case, in which suspiciously little evidence survived -- here's a Democratic Underground forum in which DU gun control advocates are convinced by the evidence that the rifles may not have existed).

Still, you can -- as they might well like to do -- turn the question around. OK, so maybe they're not a pressing threat in our city streets, but they are very powerful and could conceivably be used to do harm. Why would you need one?

FPS Russia is here to help you out.



That's a machinegun, of course, but a rifle would work better -- you could place your shots with care, so that very little of the firewood was destroyed. I suddenly realize how much this would streamline my firewood production cycle.  Too, it would allow me to drop the tree from an adequate distance that I could eliminate the risk of death from having the tree fall on me.  It's a lifesaving implement!

I've dropped trees that hung up while falling with a .30-30 before, but this is a whole new concept!

BLM & Reckless Burning

A video from the protesters out West showing BLM agents burning fires that destroyed summer feed, cattle, and the homes of ranchers. Now, this is taken from the perspective of the protest movement, so of course it shows what things look like from their side. Still, you can see them burning a family's house down through reckless fire-setting. You can see the burns on the cattle.

It may be that there's more to this case than the charges against an individual family -- or the questionable tactics of the group that is protesting in Oregon. This starts to look like a much bigger deal that needs attention.

UPDATE:  Local Fire Chief resigns, supports the armed protest.

The Harney County fire chief resigned Wednesday because he says he no longer trusts the local government. Chris Briels stood next Ammon Bundy, the leader of an armed group that has taken over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Burns, and announced he had turned in his resignation to county Judge Steve Grasty.

Briels accused the Bureau of Land Management of land grabbing and supports the effort to hand over the land to ranchers, but he also feels betrayed by Grasty and other members of the county government, a first sign of fracture among local leaders.

Sounds like the Fire Chief has some beefs of his own with the BLM.

UPDATE: Fire chief says he caught FBI agents masquerading as militia and harassing locals to make the militia look bad.

UPDATE: The Pacific Patriots Network, an organization of III% and militia in the northwest, sent a team a while ago to try to negotiate a settlement between the Oregon protesters and the Feds. They've made a proposal that would be hard for the NYT wing to sneeze at:

Carrying guns, they presented a resolution to the FBI and local law enforcement calling for the return of land to the people of Harney County—and surprisingly, recommended co-management with the Burns Paiute Tribe.

Burns Paiute tribal chairperson Charlotte Roderique has stated to the media her irritation with Bundy and his “militia” supporters goal of “giving back the land to ranchers.” “It’s been validated we’ve been here since 15,000 years ago,” she told ICTMN. “These people are ignorant of the history and that they don’t think about the statements they are making. They are misinformed.”... In light of this [proposal], Roderique says, “we are not adverse to a land transfer however, it’s not something that you would just do. There would have to be financial arrangements made. Accommodations for people who work there. We’d be interested in co-managing the refuge to protect our sites out there.”

So, that's a "yes," plus an opening position for further negotiations.

Swinging For The Fences

Six female Democrats from urban districts here in Georgia have introduced a new gun control bill, as expected. What I didn't expect was that they'd go whole hog to this degree: the bill would, I estimate, convert something like a majority of Georgia families into felons.

This is because the define their terms in such a way as to make felonies out of the possession of the most commonly owned rifles, and magazines of the standard size that come with the most commonly owned handguns. Indeed, even magazines that 'can be converted' to hold more than ten rounds are felonies to possess. Not every family in Georgia owns firearms, but I'd guess that half or so do, and most of them will fall under the proposed ban. Which, by the way, would forbid you from selling the guns you own -- you'd have to surrender them, if I read it correctly, or be a felon.

(But the President isn't trying to take your guns! That's just paranoia talking!)

I'll keep an eye on it, but frankly, I don't think it'll even get a vote before a single house. It's totally out of order with the state of Georgia.

DuffelBlog: Navy Downgraded to "Regional Force For Good"

[T]he contentious “catch and release” of 10 Navy sailors in Iranian waters prompted a rapid decision on it.... “We thought about playing it off as a stunt raising awareness for the ‘Hands Up Don’t Shoot’ initiative,” a Navy public affairs official admitted, “but ultimately we decided to just pull a Blackwater and re-brand instead.”

...

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus revealed another spin during a press conference, remarking that “this historic event with Iran proves that women can be prisoners of war just as well as men can. I look to the Marine Corps to emulate this shining example.”

The administration and its allies have been particularly disgraceful in the last 24 hours.

By the way, it's not quite true that there's no difference in how men and women were treated as prisoners of war. You can easily spot the female American sailor in these pictures because she was forced to cover her hair.

The Hell You Say

State of the Union:

In today’s world, we’re threatened less by evil empires and more by failing states. The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia.

No way! I heard Vox say just yesterday that George W. Bush caused all that Sunni/Shia stuff.

By the way, the site hosting the transcript of tonight's SOTU? Vox.

I don't really care what the man has to say after seven years. Facta non verba, or, if you like, 'Your actions speak so loudly I can't hear what you are trying to say.'

Music For The Wasteland

The current hit video game Fallout 4 carries forward its series' conceit of a future post-nuclear America that longs for its civilizational apogee. One of the ways in which this is displayed is an affection for mid-century American music, which are broadcast on wasteland radio stations (an innovation in Fallout 3, but the affection was there from the very beginning: the introductory music to the original, way back in the 1990s, set the tone).

Two of the songs chosen for this version are of interest given the "Game Gate" event that was ongoing while Fallout 4 was in construction. The designers were burned a little bit by the "Gamer Gate" flame wars, as when they released their trailer they took some flak for having defaulted to a male character. In fact, as with all of their recent stuff, you can play male or female characters without any difference -- both are not only equally capable, they are treated as exactly the same in terms of the way their stats work. The series makes no distinction between straight and gay relationships, either: all characters who are 'romanceable' are just as willing to go with a guy as a girl. Both of these conceits are extremely unrealistic, but you'd have thought they'd have satisfied the radicals that Bethesda was on their side. Not quite!

In any case, of the many songs they pulled from America's musical history for their wasteland radio, two deal with women's frustrations against men. Both of them happen to represent a significant improvement over the way male/female frustrations often express themselves today.



I like this one even better:



Maybe a subtle comment from the game designers: none of this stuff is new, but we used to be able to recognize that members of the opposite sex are both occasionally infuriating and also wonderful. You can't expect to fix the underlying tensions, and sometimes you may need to shout about it, but in the end we go together.

News blackout officially over

When it was Muslim refugees terrorizing Germans on the street, it took days for the story to come out, and then only when the social media buzz got too loud to ignore.  That problem's all fixed, now, since "right-wingers" are now loose in public.  Reuters is all over it now, with Tuesday-morning reports of Monday-night outrages.