From Your Lips to God's Ears, Senator!

Elizabeth Warren: "The next president can honor the simple notion that nobody is above the law, but it will happen only if voters demand it."

A Patriot's Take on Oregon

I've posted this guy's videos before: if Arab immigrants were all like him, we couldn't have too many. We might not even be able to have enough. Some of the language is strong, but only a bit.

Ah, the United Nations

In the comments to Tom's post, I was offering super-national organizations as a counterexample on issues of governance. They worked in that one case, but that's not to be misread as a general endorsement by me of them. They are potentially a serious affront to sovereignty, and they can become badly misguided.

For example, just this week the United Nations has had one of its working groups declare that the United States should pay reparations to black Americans, and also 'affirmed abortion as a human right.'

Now, in the past I've defended the plausibility of reparations, but conditioned on the ideal of compensation as settling the matter once and for all. That's not where the working group was headed. They want "reparatory justice" to be accompanied by "monuments and memorials" to make sure, I suppose, that future generations never forget the offense. The whole concept of a weregeld is that the blood money should settle the blood feud. You don't keep bringing it up. It's settled.

As for abortion being a "human right," what about the human's rights whom you are killing? I can accept the necessity of abortion in cases where the mother's life will be lost as well as the child's due to complications in the pregnancy. In that case, though, we're not talking about the exercise of a right but the performance of something akin to a duty. It shouldn't be a choice for which someone should feel guilty, but rather a tragic but necessary action taken to save life.

Internationalism has its place in dispute resolution, but the nice thing about it is that they aren't capable of forcing you to comply. They can make suggestions, but they are just suggestions unless you consent as a nation to be bound.

Why Real-World Democracies Don't Have the Consent of the Governed

Ilya Somin has an interesting article which argues that "the authority of actually existing democratic governments is not based on any meaningful consent. In a genuinely consensual political regime , 'no' means 'no.' But actual governments generally treat 'no' as just another form of 'yes'".

He contrasts our common idea of consensual, e.g., I order something from Amazon and Amazon sends it to me, with the government. One example he uses is that I may vote against a particular law, or a politician who promises to impose that law, and yet if more people vote the other way, the law will be imposed upon me against my will, the exact opposite of what we mean by "consent" in other matters.

He points out that we have no reasonable way to opt out of government control. Moving to another country simply doesn't solve the problem.

Additionally, he points out, the government has no enforceable duty to us. The USSC has repeatedly ruled that the police have no duty to protect you; if they ignore your 911 call and you die because of that, too bad.

So, in short, this is rather like Amazon simply deciding to charge you for things, never sending them, and you having no recourse. If it were not government, backed by overwhelming force, we would never stand for it.

He covers a number of other reasons why current democratic governments are non-consensual and then moves on to why that is important.

... the nonconsensual nature of most government power does not prove that government is necessarily illegitimate, or that democracy has no benefits. Government power might often be justified on consequential grounds, such as its ability to increase social welfare, provide public goods, or curb injustice. ... And democracy still has a variety of advantages over dictatorship or oligarchy. Among other things, those types of regimes are usually even less consensual than democracy is.

But the lack of consent does undercut arguments that we have a duty to obey the government because we have somehow agreed to it or because it represents the “will of the people.” When the government makes unjust laws, it cannot so readily claim we have an automatic duty to obey them, regardless of their content.

Moreover, if government power must be legitimized by its consequences rather than by its supposedly consensual origins, that strengthens the case for imposing tight limits on the state in areas where the consequences are negative, or even ambiguous. ...

And this is pretty much where he leaves it. I wish he would have explored what a consensual government would look like, or even if such a thing is possible. One of his sources, Georgetown Professsor Jason Brennan, argues that it is not.

Brennan, according to his bio, is currently writing two books with the titles Against Democracy and Global Justice as Global Freedom. I can guess where he goes already.

So what about consent and the justification for democracy? What about those consequential justifications? What about the idea of the "social compact / contract" for those who were born into the system and had no say in writing that compact or contract?

Somin is a libertarian, and I also think that's where this leads us: All government is violence: vote for less.

But. I also question the idea of consent as applied only to particulars. Instead of this particular law or that particular tax, consent could be to the system. In this case, democracy looks more like a team sport. I don't consent to the other team scoring a goal -- in fact I do my best to make sure they don't. But I do consent to play the game and abide by the rules and the referees' calls.

That is weak, though. In a sport, if I decide I no longer want to play or abide by the rules, I can quit and do something else with my time. Not so with government. This is a sport we are forced to play. Again, I think the coercive nature of the relationship argues for the minimum government necessary. The less the government impacts my life, the more I can live it in consensual relationships outside of government control. It isn't perfect, but it seems a lot better than the alternatives.

Woah.

Carly Fiorina rings some bells on why Mrs. Clinton cannot be President.

An Interview With the Woman in Charge of the T-TIP

Do you have concerns about the damage to national sovereignty from the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership? Have you noticed the intense popular opposition to it, and how it steamrollers on without taking much notice? A reporter from the United Kingdom's Independent got a word with the boss, who explains.

When put to her, Malmström acknowledged that a trade deal has never inspired such passionate and widespread opposition. Yet when I asked the trade commissioner how she could continue her persistent promotion of the deal in the face of such massive public opposition, her response came back icy cold: “I do not take my mandate from the European people.”

So who does Cecilia Malmström take her mandate from? Officially, EU commissioners are supposed to follow the elected governments of Europe. Yet the European Commission is carrying on the TTIP negotiations behind closed doors without the proper involvement European governments, let alone MPs or members of the public. British civil servants have admitted to us that they have been kept in the dark throughout the TTIP talks, and that this makes their job impossible.

The T-TIP's mirror image is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, which is also being negotiated in secrecy. Congress wasn't allowed to look at the text except in a secured room from which they were not allowed to take notes, and they were sworn not to talk about what they saw. When the Obama administration was asked about opposition, they had the audacity to say that their opponents couldn't name anything specifically wrong with it. Well, indeed they could not: they were forbidden by law.

Both of these treaties need to be shot down or, failing that, abrogated immediately by the first better administration we get.

Babylonian integral calculus?

This article claims the Babylonians knew that the area under a curve showing velocity as a function of time equaled the distance traveled.

When we're not watching

Sheriff's office's got moves.

Common Ground: What about Daily News?

Where do the folks at the Hall get their daily news?

For me, I tend to go to aggregators first:

Real Clear Politics (and its associated sites) does a great job, I think. I particularly like that they'll put opposing articles on top of each other. E.g., from today's RCP:

Clinton Harmed Our Country & Helped Our Adversaries - John Schindler, NY Observer
Hillary Clinton Is the Change America Needs - John Stoehr, The Week

The Drudge Report

Then, I like to follow USA Today, because I like to think it's what the average American who is not totally consumed by politics would see every day instead of all the stuff I read.

I'm afraid I only read a few blogs on a daily or near daily basis. In addition to the Hall:

Instapundit
Ace of Spades

There are a couple of conservative / conservativish sites I check daily:

The Federalist -- One of my favorite places, these days.
PJ Media

I have to confess that I think I should be reading a broader range of stuff. For example, I do little to keep up with what Progressives are saying, or defense news, or international news sources.

So what do you read on a regular basis?

Common Ground: Short Reads

There's a good list of sources which have influenced various members of the Hall at the Common Ground: Sources post. Here, I thought it might be useful to link the shorter ones that could be read relatively quickly. The longest is "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," a novella that might take a couple of sittings. I have included links to the Wikipedia articles on these documents as a starting point for understanding their context, history, etc.

Feel free to add more short sources in the comments, or to give related sources and links (e.g., websites or books that explain or interpret these sources).

The Magna Carta (This is the National Archives page on the document. Here is the text.) (Wikipedia article)

The Declaration of Arbroath (This is the National Archives of Scotland page on it. They offer a PDF with the original Latin and translation in English.) (Wikipedia article)

The Declaration of Independence (Wikipedia article)

The Constitution and Bill of Rights (Wikipedia article)

NB: The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights pages are part of the National Archives's Charters of Freedom website, which has a number of pages which explore the history and impact of these documents.

"Harrison Bergeron", Kurt Vonnegut's short story about the push for complete equality (or, depending on your interpretation, his sarcastic attack on those worried about the push for complete equality) (Wikipedia article)

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella about life in the Soviet gulags (Wikipedia article)

OK, So Maybe This "Shariah" Thing Has Gone Too Far

The Parliament of the United Kingdom may be forced -- in a country they allegedly rule, without 'branches of government' or 'separation of powers' -- to forgo having a bar in their building because it is governed by shariah law.

In June 2014 George Osborne announced that Britain was launching the first Islamic bond scheme in the non-Muslim world. Three Government buildings in Whitehall were transferred to Islamic bonds, switching the ownership from British taxpayers to wealthy Middle Eastern businessmen and banks. The issue of bonds raised £200million and was the first carried out by a Western country and Osborne said it would turn the UK into 'the western hub of Islamic finance' and the 'undisputed centre of the global financial system.'

But critics say the scheme would waste money and could undermine Britain's financial and legal systems by imposing Sharia law onto government premises. The bonds – known as Sukuk – are only available for purchase by Islamic investors. The money raised will be repayable from 2019.

But instead of interest, bond-buyers will earn rental income from the three Government offices as interest payments are banned in Sharia law. The Treasury agreed to make the sukuk fully compliant with Sharia law to ensure investors were not put off investing in the scheme, meaning each of the buildings used to finance the products must meet the terms of Sharia law, including the ban on alcohol.

How does a Western government agree to a scheme in which only Muslims can buy bonds? Is there a similar scheme for Anglicans?

Parliament is a thirsty bunch, by the way -- check the sidebar on how much liquid their house bar moves every year.

State Department Cuts Sling Load

I'm sure you all saw the story that State won't be releasing some of Clinton's emails, even redacted, because no amount of redaction would make it safe to release the information. That's a big, bad-sounding story, but it's not the worst story for her today.

The worst story for her today is that the State Department itself declared 22 of her email threads to be Top Secret.

The reason it's much worse is that the determination that her emails couldn't be released redacted came from the intelligence community, and the IC has already given a sworn statement to its Inspector General that her emails contained Top Secret and Special Access Program information. Until today, though, State has held that there was no genuinely Top Secret information included. State's position has been that the IC was overclassifying the information it found in her emails, and that the worst she was guilty of exposing was Secret information.

The Clinton camp could thus claim that this was all a bureaucratic, interagency dispute. One determination is just as valid as another! The IC must be pursuing a vendetta against her, some vast-right-wing-conspiracy type of thing.

John Kerry is Secretary of State. There is no right wing conspiracy vast enough to include him. If his office is saying she passed Top Secret information in the clear, then she can't attribute the charge to partisanship.

Furthermore, this eliminates the dispute between the IC and State on whether or not she insisted on a system in which Top Secret information was passed on an unsecure server. The Federal government now has a unified position: she did.

Now the only question that matters is what they are going to do about it.

From Jonah Goldberg's newsletter:

Speaking of Sanders, some wag on Twitter noted that the best thing about the run on the grocery stores in blizzard-besieged D.C. is that it gave the Beltway crowd a sense of what it will be like under a Sanders administration. I don’t want to live under a socialist president, but a silver lining would be seeing all those MSNBC hosts waiting in line for toilet paper.

Against Multiple Regression Analyses

I mean, really against them.

A huge range of science projects are done with multiple regression analysis. The results are often somewhere between meaningless and quite damaging.... I hope that in the future, if I’m successful in communicating with people about this, there’ll be a kind of upfront warning in New York Times articles: These data are based on multiple regression analysis. This would be a sign that you probably shouldn’t read the article because you’re quite likely to get non-information or misinformation.

Journalism is hard hit, but -- as the article shows -- the biggest damage is to psychology.

Now You're Talking

A house done right: a photo essay.

A Comprehensive Answer to which Elite College is Best

You've probably heard alumni of Harvard and Yale sneering at each other, while wondering whether either of them really know as much as they think they do. A better question may be whether they know the right things. Thanks to the Open Syllabus project, we can now say which of these universities offers the best education. The answer is: the University of Chicago, with the University of Pennsylvania in second place.

I make this judgment based on the most-read books in their courses; obviously it doesn't measure how well the books are taught. Still, in any university much depends on the student. The University of Chicago list is short on Plato and Homer, but is overall the strongest list. The Princeton list, by contrast, contains only three books of lasting value: Thucydides, Schumpeter, and Henry Kissenger's Diplomacy. (I suppose some people would argue for Weber.) Harvard's list is likewise mostly fashionable noise, although it has a few highlights: Dr. King's letter, Machiavelli, and Rawls (though reading Rawls without Aristotle is like making a stew out of a rich marrow bone, and then just eating the bone).

Yale's list has both works of Homer's, which is good, and I thought Ralph Ellison's book was very insightful (but of interest probably chiefly to Americans). They also read Tocqueville (also especially of interest to Americans). Amazingly, you have to go all the way down the list to Columbia to get Kant; but it is to their credit that the work you then encounter is the later Metaphysics of Morals, and not the earlier and more-often read Groundwork. The latter is much more famous because it is where he lays out the overarching moral theory, including three formulations of the Categorical Imperative. But the later work offers a much richer picture of his actual moral vision. He anticipated JS Mill's harm principle, although he isn't usually credited for doing so, in his division between cases where state coercion is acceptable, and cases that are moral questions but matters for individual virtue. And it is only in the late work that you learn how completely he believed his Groundwork concepts would recreate Christian morality from the ground of pure practical reason.

The University of Chicago, however, gives first place to Aristotle -- the top two places are for Aristotle's Ethics, most likely always the Nicomachean Ethics but possibly occasionally the less-read Eudemian Ethics. They also read Kant's late work, St. Augustine, and both famous works of Machiavelli. (His Art of War is of no interest except for students of period warfare, as he has largely dramatized Vegetius with very few updates, none of which turn out to be of universal or lasting value).

The University of Pennsylvania is not as philosophically strong, but does include several excellent dramatic approaches to understanding life. Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, Sophocles, and Benjamin Franklin join Plato there, not rising to inclusion on the most read lists anywhere else. It's a good list, and marks a different approach but a valid one.

NOVA and Virginia

Governor McAuliffe surrendered on his repeal of handgun carry reciprocity between Virginia and many other states. Republicans in the state apparently agreed, in return, to prevent people subject to "permanent" protective orders for domestic violence from carrying guns for the two years during which the order is valid. (Yes, two years is "permanent" in Virginia.) That seems like a very worthy trade to me, as so-called 'permanent' orders involve a real court hearing in which both sides are allowed to present their side -- they're not issued just for the asking, or on one person's unchallenged testimony. Violence against women over domestic issues remains a serious matter. Two years is probably long enough in most cases for the tortured romantic feelings to pass away, after which it's not an issue on the same scale.

So, well done. And a compromise of a sort, which should make Cassandra feel good about her southern neighbors.

A Good Point

John R. Schindler in the Observer:

All this angers Americans with experience in our military and intelligence services who understand what Ms. Clinton and her staff did—and that they would be held to far harsher standards for attempting anything similar. They know that brave Americans have given their lives protecting Top Secret Codeword information. They know that in every American embassy around the world, our diplomatic outposts that worked for Hillary Clinton, Marine guards have standing orders to fight to the death to protect the classified information that’s inside those embassies.

He goes on to say that she needs to explain herself if she expects to be Commander in Chief. I would say that no explanation for this behavior could possibly be sufficient to permit her to assume that office.

The Efficacy of "Government Vetting"

We've heard quite a bit from the Obama administration (when it can divert its time and attention from childish taunts and trash talk aimed at U.S. citizens who oppose its policies) about how rigorously they plan to vet migrants and refugees fleeing Syria and other war torn hellholes That Enlightened-and-Uber-Tolerant Paradise Across the Pond. But casual perusal of the daily news offers few grounds to support the requested leap of faith:

...the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms. A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper. This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials.

And then there's this:

Health and Human Services delivered over at least six migrant children from Guatemala into the hands of human traffickers without visiting the homes where they would live or verifying any family connection to them, a Senate committee has found. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, a leading crusader fighting to crack down on the trafficking of children in the United States, said the Ohio case is just one of many examples of HHS's systemic lapses in the way it handles the placement of migrant children out of U.S. detention centers for illegal immigrants. The findings derived from a case in Marion, Ohio in which six defendants allegedly lured child victims to the United States with the promise of schooling and a better life and instead enslaved them on an egg farm and forced them to work 12 hours a day in squalid conditions with no pay. A report by the committee found other disturbing examples of HHS delivering minors into the hands of sex traffickers or sexual predators.

The report found widespread evidence of "lax verification standards" and systematic defects, concluding that despite repeated indicators that something fishy was going on with the Marion placements, [wait for it...] "HHS failed to connect any of the dots." None of this is confidence inspiring. If the federal government lacks the ability to vet people who are already here in the U.S. before placing innocent children in their power, how on earth are they going to vet migrants from other countries effectively?

"Do We Know What We Are Doing in Afghanistan This Year?"

A small question from retired Major General Eric T. Olson. (Note that this is the retired Army general and former 25 ID commander, not the retired Admiral and Navy SEAL of almost the same name, Eric Thor Olson).

As the NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan mission drew to a close in December 2014, President Obama said:

For more than 13 years, ever since nearly 3,000 innocent lives were taken from us on 9/11, our nation has been at war in Afghanistan. Now, thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending, and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.

More than a year later, in President Obama’s final State of the Union address, concerning the progress of the mission in Afghanistan, he said … nothing.

This is disappointing, but not surprising. The Obama administration often prefers to leave open difficult questions about U.S. failures to meet its goals.

So, he says, we should look elsewhere. However, looking at official military records leaves us confused, as he notes: we have been repeatedly told that the remaining US mission, except for a counterterror element, is 'advise and assist' at the corps-level and above. US forces are not involved in "combat operations." However, the recent attack on US forces in Marjah was not a counterterrorism operation, but was rather an embed at the battalion level who was directly involved in combat. So the top level characterization of our mission is not, strictly speaking, accurate.

Olson puts together a picture of the mission and its likely changes in the next year, and figures we're going to have to up our force structure even if the Afghans are able to take more of the weight of the fighting. Alternatively, we'll have to cut loose some of the restrictions the President has imposed on our fighters in terms of what they're allowed to do. Either way, the looked-for drawdown isn't coming.

It's pretty obvious that the President actually intends to run out the clock on Afghanistan, the war he promised to win, and pass it off to his successor. That may be the best of possible worlds from here. His half-surge-with-an-expiration-date proved capable only of getting a lot more Americans killed than in the Bush years, and is going to leave the Taliban in a stronger position than they were eight years ago. More leadership from this President may not be what we need.