Cadence to Arms

The Feast of Saint Patrick

Today the Army is in trouble for cultural appropriation.

The Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish-American cultural group and drinking society, is using St. Patrick’s Day to draw attention to its dispute with the United States Army over the Army’s “cultural appropriation” of the color green.

“Green is our fookin color,” according to Mickey McSorley of no fixed address, South Boston. “Nobody else’s! And by the way, everybody isn’t fookin Irish today, laddie. Just the Irish.”

“The real Irish. Not the ‘Scots-Irish’ frauds...” he added in a brogue that onlookers described as “wicked fake.”

If you're looking for an Irish meal today, corned beef is actually more an American-Irish meal learned from intermingling with other immigrants in our big port cities. If you want something from Ireland itself, try this amazing Dublin Coddle. Even if you don't care about the feast particularly, you can't go wrong with bacon, sausage, onion, and potato.

It always strikes me as strange that this holiday comes right inside Lent, but is such a huge party. We used to leave Savannah for a week when we lived down that way. But there is a real saint behind the fake Irishness. Here is the prayer most associated with him.

"The Great Fear"

Following up on Nassim Taleb's article from yesterday, Wretchard notes that this election is marked by a loss of faith in the establishment among the base voters of both parties. The elites have proven to have no clothes:

Rightly or wrongly Americans used to have a sense of place in the world. It was once a comforting place where the president -- be he from either party -- protected them. It was a place where secretaries of state and defense stood guard over the borders and American children could count as their birthright having better lives than their parents....

If Trump represents the Great Fear his origins can be traced in the arc from the Three AM Call to the Barking Dog. We needed to believe, in this dangerous world, that the former was true and not the latter. What Trump did was look behind the curtain and destroy one faith without giving us another. What now? What now? That may be the real question this campaign should answer.

Ted Cruz, for what it is worth, has taken a bold step in assembling an answer. His team at this time is big-tent enough that they hold competing positions, but that may be a strength at a time when the answers aren't clear. What may be needed are strong thinkers who find different views plausible, competing with each other over whose idea best fits the new reality. There are many different parts of that new reality, from crises in the South China Sea to Syria to North Korea. It may be that nobody has all the answers, or that many have only part of what a real answer might look like. Being open to competition of thought is a good start.

How Far Back in Time Could You Go and Still Understand English?

I am an exception, in that Middle English is no problem for me if it is written down. When spoken with the original accent, however, I am not practiced in understanding it.

Discipline is the Soul of the Army

Five deputy sheriffs are suspended without pay for failing to arrest the Trump activist who sucker-punched a protester.

I imagine they felt like the protester got what he deserved. However, those charged with enforcing the law on others are the ones it is most important to hold to legal standards. This is a dangerous year already; to fail to enforce these standards would be to court disaster.

NYT: That White Working Class Needs More Welfare

Paul Krugman disagrees with Williamson about the remedy.

How On Earth Does This Happen?

Headline: "CNN Poll: Most Voters Hate Both the Likely Nominees."

Fermat's Last Solved

Three hundred years is a reasonably long time, even in the history of thought.

NNT: This is a Global Rebellion Against Insiders

Nassim Taleb says this is not just American and Europe, it's India and the rest of the world too. Also, the criticism is justified.

What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think...and 5) who to vote for.

With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.

Philosophers: Terrible Spouses

Well, unless they have servants. I'm going to need a servant, I guess. Any volunteers of appropriately submissive temperament? (Not around here, I'll warrant!)

9mm v. 40 S&W

Following on the pistol discussion of yesterday, a trauma surgeon writes on this longstanding debate.

I notice he disallows 'larger' as an option early:

You have two options. You can use a really large round at very high velocity like the 30mm cannon rounds from an Apache helicopter's M230 Chain Gun, which produces substantial kinetic energy, or you can place your shot where it has the most effect. Obviously, shot placement is the only realistic option for a law enforcement officer.

Well, if that's obvious, we're done. Lower recoil is more important than size. But that doesn't follow all the way down: .22 LR is a terrible choice, although recoil is minimized to the point that it is almost negligible.

For myself, I favor .44-.45 diameter choices. I realize that the science shows that .357 Magnum out of a four inch barrel is the best one-shot stopper. I favor .44 Smith & Wesson Special or properly structured .44 Remington Magnum or .45 Long Colt cartridges for revolvers. These have the advantage that, when hiking in grizzly and moose country, you can readily step up to a cartridge that can handle big game defensively.

As a consequence, if I carry a semi-automatic, I prefer .45 ACP as the closest equivalent to .44 SPL. Still, if the suggestion is that there's no difference in trauma worth noting between .40 S&W and 9mm, the lower recoil could be decisive.

No One Who Mattered

Clinton claims 'We didn't lose a single person in Libya.'

Well, um.

In addition to the Americans lost at Benghazi, including a US Ambassador -- the very figure of American power -- the real test of whether Libya was a wise decision or not has to do with the fact that ISIS has taken over parts of it and is using them to stage head-cutting videos. President Obama blames this on Europe not doing a good enough job of following his 'lead from behind.'

You don't start a fight, run away from it, and then complain that the people you left behind lost without you.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Trump-Mas

"Ohio election officials say that more than half of all early voting on the GOP side is from voters who were recently Democrats or Independents."

Herself got a lot closer to putting an end to the Sanders insurgency tonight, although he has a good slate coming up and plenty of cash from his successful fundraising. A few likely wins will be putting some energy back in his campaign, assuming that he -- as seems likely -- is stubborn enough to not give up.

But on the Republican side, there's no real joy for anyone but Trump tonight.

So I guess the question is, did those early voting Democrats in the Republican primary come to stop Trump or to join him? It was Trump's only loss of the night, to a favorite son candidate in his home state. Maybe Kaisch came over the top to beat Trump's supporters plus a bunch of Democrats, but probably this was the only success of Operation Chaos.

Preventing a second Clinton Presidency is my major goal for our country this next little while. For some of you, it's stopping Trump. We probably need to talk this through, because we're getting very close to having to make a call between those goals.

Personally, I can rest safe in the knowledge that my vote is never going to Clinton -- but it doesn't matter, because I live in Georgia, where any Republican will beat her easily. I could write in anyone I want and be sure that I was not casting a secret or accidental vote for Clinton.

It's going to matter in other ways, possibly. Where are we, people of the Hall?

But How Would Corporations Make Millions Off That?

The U.S. Army's chief of staff said Thursday that if he had his way, he'd abandon the bureaucratic Modular Handgun System effort and personally select the service's next pistol.

Speaking at the Future of War Conference 2016, Gen. Mark Milley said he has asked Congress to grant service chiefs the authority to bypass the Pentagon's multi-layered and complex acquisition process on programs that do not require research and development.

"We are not exactly redesigning how to go to the moon, right?" Milley said. "This is a pistol."

It's a fair point. Pistol technology is mature. The basic design of the semi-automatic pistol has been refined rather than fundamentally altered in the hundred years since John Moses Browning's 1911. The common choices among elite military forces today have fused plastic receivers, and polycarbon slides, neither of which can be readily disassembled -- but which are so reliable and cheap that they never need to be. They're good-enough accurate out of the box and indestructible in normal use with normal lifespans.

For an army made up mostly of teenagers and 20-somethings, several manufacturers offer off-the-shelf pistols that are not just adequate, they're perfect. Pick one.

Odin versus Loki

In today's Commentary magazine, John Podheretz poses seriously:

Trump, I’ve often said, is a manifestation of Loki, the god of misrule. Misrule breeds chaos. Chaos breeds violence.

This reminds me of a quote that Joel Leggett sent me a week ago, which I have been pondering. It is from C. S. Lewis.

"What business have people who call might right to worship Odin? The whole point about Odin was that he had the right but not the might. The point about Norse religion was that it alone of all mythologies told men to serve gods who were admittedly fighting with their backs to the wall and would certainly be defeated in the end. 'I am off to die with Odin' said the rover in Stevenson's fable, thus proving that Stevenson understood something about the Nordic spirit which (Nazi) Germany has never been able to understand at all. The gods will fall. The wisdom of Odin, the humourous courage of Thor (Thor was something of a Yorkshireman) and the beauty of Balder, will all be smashed eventually by the realpolitik of the stupid giants and misshapen trolls. But that does not in the least alter the allegiance of any free man. Hence, as we should expect, real Germanic poetry is all about heroic stands, and fighting against hopeless odds."

Odin is an interesting figure. Many of the Norse Gods have clear echoes in Greek or Roman gods, or (especially in the case of Thor) in Irish gods. They aren't quite the same, but the figures are recognizably similar. Odin, and the Germanic Woden from which the Norse got the name, is in many ways unique.

Tacitus thought Woden was the Germanic Mercury/Hermes, but that is not quite right. They are alike in that they are gods concerned with transitions over boundaries between worlds. Both are concerned with poetry and literature. But Odin is not a messenger god. He is a god of nobility of the soul. He is the patron of kings and warriors who aspire to a glorious life and a glorious death. The boundary they most wish to cross is into Valhalla. Odin inspires poetic flights, but like Bacchus rather than like Hermes: with the intoxicating "mead of poetry," which intensifies access to knowledge and allows wisdom to flow like honey wine.

And Odin searches always for wisdom, even through great personal suffering. When Ares is speared in the Iliad, his suffering does not produce anything glorious like wisdom: if anything, he slinks off to Olympus to sulk. Not Odin, who seeks out suffering for its mysteries and the wisdom to be gained.

Wounded I hung on a wind-swept gallows
For nine long nights,
Pierced by a spear, pledged to Odin,
Offered, myself to myself
The wisest know not from whence spring
The roots of that ancient rood.
They gave me no bread,
They gave me no mead,
I looked down;
With a loud cry
I took up runes;
From that tree I fell.

Nine lays of power
I learned from the famous Bolthor, Bestla' s father:
He poured me a draught of precious mead,
Mixed with magic Odrerir.

Waxed and throve well;
Word from word gave words to me,
Deed from deed gave deeds to me....

The Wise One has spoken words in the hall,
Needful for men to know,
Unneedful for trolls to know:

Hail to the speaker,
Hail to the knower,
Joy to him who has understood,
Delight to those who have listened.

It is strange to see the Norse gods invoked in our politics today. They have not been invoked in this way in a long time. I wonder what it means.

It is easy to choose between Odin and Loki, between seeking honorable wisdom at personal cost versus seeking power without the wisdom to use it well. It is better to die well than to live without honor. It is better to suffer in wisdom than to play in wickedness. The noble of soul know this.

What Tolkien added to the Norse mythology was a Christian concept: that the noble of soul, fighting with their backs against the wall, against certain doom, might be aided suddenly from the root of the world. Odin was written into the Lord of the Rings as Gandalf. He fought the Balrog and fell into darkness, only to be purified. Denethor was driven to despair by the strength of Mordor, and threw himself into fire. Gandalf led the armies against Mordor in the face of despair, only to see a miracle worked by suffering against strength.

We must do our duty, and hope. We ought to seek wisdom, but not trust too much in it. The world is bigger and wiser than we, and its author moves it in ways we do not understand. Strangely enough, Odin teaches this too, in the Havamal:

It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
The fairest life is led by those
Who are deft at all they do.
It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
No man is able to know his future,
So let him sleep in peace.

It is best for man to be middle-wise,
Not over cunning and clever:
The learned man whose lore is deep
Is seldom happy at heart.

An Incomplete Truth

In the Islamic Monthly, Lord Jonathan Sacks -- a rabbi -- writes of the Jewish debt to Islam. What he says is quite true. It's just incomplete.

It was the great Islamic theologians and thinkers — among them al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) — who recovered the classical tradition of philosophy, leading the West out of the Dark Ages.

Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish thinkers in the past 1,000 years, was also deeply indebted to them. Throughout his masterwork, The Guide for the Perplexed, he is in constant dialogue with the Mutakallimun, or the Muslim Kalamists. Even his great religious law code, the Mishneh Torah, was inspired by Sharia codes. Maimonides, in turn, influenced Christian thinkers like Aquinas. Thus, both Judaism and Christianity are deeply indebted to the thinkers of Islam.

I gave a talk on this subject once at US Central Command. Avicenna in particular is important to Christianity because of a mistake that was very helpful to Aquinas. Avicenna inherited a work of Plotinus' that had been wrongly titled The Theology of Aristotle. Plotinus' philosophy, which we call Neoplatonism, is really not at all similar to Aristotle's metaphysics (which is the closest he ever gets to a theology). Avicenna devoted himself to harmonizing these two doctrines because he thought that doing so was necessary to understand the deeper, hidden message of Aristotle that somehow these two quite different works were both attempting to convey.

Avicenna's metaphysics was therefore quite useful to Aquinas, who inherited Aristotle from the early phases of the Christian reconquest of Islamic Spain. Aristotle's works were scientifically far superior to what existed at the time, but they were philosophically incompatible with the Neoplatonic thought that had influenced many early leading thinkers of the Church. Avicenna provided the way forward: he showed how to harmonize the new Aristotelian science with the Neoplatonic-influenced interpretations of Christian writings that were important to several early saints (even Augustine).

All of that is right. And yet if you turn to the back of Avicenna's metaphysics -- I have a copy right handy -- you find plenty of the following: "As for enemies and those who oppose the law, [the legislator] must decree waging war against them and destroying them -- after calling on them to accept the truth -- and [decree] that their property and women must be declared free for the spoil." That's exactly ISIS's position, you'll notice.

Likewise: "The same applies to people that are far removed from acquiring virtue. For these are slaves by nature -- as, for example, the Turks and the Negroes..."

So, do we owe a lot to Avicenna? Yes. Does that imply that our views and Islam's are fully compatible? No. Some small objections remain.

Trump and the Revenge of the Constitution

Reading some of these articles on whether the Republican Party can be "lent" to Trump without it being fundamentally transformed, I realize that there's a point being missed by everyone. First, here is a strong version of the argument:

...if he cleans up tomorrow night, you’re going to see an explosion of pieces online like the one Ross Douthat published yesterday urging the RNC to deny Trump the nomination by any means necessary — including a rule change before the convention, if need be, that frees up delegates to vote their conscience. (“A man so transparently unfit for office should not be placed before the American people as a candidate for president under any kind of imprimatur save his own.”) A member of the RNC’s Rules Committee is already circulating a letter suggesting, contra all available evidence, that delegates are not bound on the first ballot and haven’t been in 40 years. The price of stealing the nomination from Trump after he’s supposedly clinched it would be sky high. It would delegitimize the RNC; it would vindicate Trumpists’ criticism that the establishment is corrupt and that the system is rigged; it would certainly doom the GOP’s chances in the general election as millions of Trump fans decide to stay home or vote third-party in protest; and it would effectively disenfranchise the millions of Trumpers who turned out to vote for him throughout the primaries. It very well might destroy the GOP. But hardcore anti-Trumpers have already reached the point where they view that as the lesser of two evils. Better to protect the country by booting him out of the party and into independent never-neverland, even at the cost of an irreparable rupture on the right, than to protect whatever small amount of “integrity” the GOP has left by crowning Trump as the duly elected nominee.

Here is my alternative view: Trump winning the GOP nomination and the election does not mean the GOP is surrendering to Trump. It means they are recognizing the sovereignty of the voters. The moral independence of the party as a whole is a reason to think that Trump as President can be contained as a threat in a way that President Obama never can be.

The reason is that impeachment and removal from office by Congress returns as a real potential under a Trump administration. With Democratic loyalty to President Obama being so intense, he has been able to operate lawlessly on immigration, on foreign affairs, in terms of protecting from prosecution criminals in his administration from Lois Lerner to Hillary Clinton, and in unilaterally rewriting the law where he likes.

Trump would not have that luxury. People have expressed concern that a man who suggests he would cover the legal fees of those charged with violence against protesters cannot be trusted with the Constitutional power to pardon. But Trump would come into office facing a House and Senate led by nominal allies who are deeply suspicious of him, and would indeed love to find a way to rid themselves of him without losing the support of his voters. Republican party leaders in Congress will be only too ready to join with Democrats in removing him from office if he makes an egregious overstep.

Thus, one option might be to consent to Trump in the convention in return for a Vice Presidential pick acceptable to the party's Congressional wing. That would make impeachment and removal even easier to contemplate. Indeed, it would make it an attractive option that Trump would have to work hard to avoid them electing to pursue.

Our Constitutional controls on the President have been failing since Clinton because of party loyalty. Political parties are an extra-Constitutional feature of our government, part of the dangers of factionalism warned against in the Federalist Papers. The absence of party loyalty to Trump would allow the Constitutional controls on the President to function as designed for a change.

Military Times Survey: Trump or Sanders

In a survey of the preferences of serving members of the military, including the National Guard, strong preferences emerge in each race for the insurgent candidates.

However, they ran the question as a 'first choice for President' without requiring you to specify which in primary you were going to vote. Thus, we get a sense of overall support that is surprising.

In the Army and Marine Corps, Trump dominates the field. In both services, he has approximately twice the support of the next leading candidate.

In the Navy and Air Force, Sanders is the overall winner. Sanders edges Trump by a few points, though, rather than dominating the field as Trump does. Trump is an easy second place in both fields, although far more so in the Navy: Ted Cruz is close to Trump in the Air Force, but a bit behind.

Even in those latter services, where Sanders is the overall winner, Democratic first-choice votes are a minority. Sanders thus has extremely intense support, because he overcomes both the alleged frontrunner in his own party and a divided Republican field.

Clinton is the first choice of only about ten percent of military voters. The bigger services favor her more than the smaller ones: she is slightly above 12% in both the Army and the Navy, but well under 10% in both the Air Force and Marine Corps.

False Positives? Never!

How could hundreds of peer-reviewed studies possibly be so wrong? There may be a way to explain it, and it's shaking researchers to their cores.

Every time scientists conduct an experiment, there's a chance they'll find a false positive. But here's the scary thing: Psychologists are now realizing their institutions are structured so it's more likely that false positives will make it through to publication than inconclusive results.

"We’re now learning that there’s so much bias in the published literature that the meta-analyses can’t be trusted," Simine Vazire, a professor of psychology and the editor in chief of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, tells me.

We were just talking about the problems with multiple regression analyses. On the other hand, here's a meta-scientific study that concludes that earlier meta-scientific studies about the replicability of many other studies was tainted by failures to replicate the studies correctly. And then....

One of My Senators Writes on the Republican Chaos

Whatever his other flaws may be, Sen. David Perdue is not a long-time D.C. figure: this is his first term in the Senate, and his first job in government. I tend to regard him as a part of the crony-capitalist Republican elements, as he made a fortune in business while a cousin was Governor, and then was suddenly picked out of the blue to be a candidate for an open Senate seat. Still, for what it's worth, here's what he thinks about why the Establishment is on fire.

This town is filled with well-intentioned people who believe they are doing the right thing, but far too many have lost their way after years in Washington. Politicians pay more attention to special interests groups and powerful lobbyists writing checks to their next campaign, than listening to the people back home who sent them here in the first place....

Georgians sent me—someone who had never run for elected office—to the United States Senate to try and do something about it and change the system. In state after state this year, voters have voiced support for presidential candidates who are not part of the political class.

This is a growing movement, and it is bigger than any one candidate or election victory. Unless the political establishment is willing to learn from the anger felt by millions of Americans who feel left behind, this will not end in November.

True to form, though, political elites prefer tearing down individuals to understanding what created this movement. This movement of Americans wants nothing to do with Washington, and neither endorsements nor criticisms are going to change that.

No matter who our Republican presidential nominee is at the end of this process, one thing is clear, we cannot allow Democrats to double down on the failed policies of the last seven years.

Bucking for Vice President, Senator?