Former Delta Force Leader Uninvited From Ft. Riley Prayer Breakfast

LTG (R) Jerry Boykin was one of the greats in his day, and now seems to spend most of his time on issues of faith. So of course that's where they hit him:

A Kansas military base abruptly canceled an upcoming prayer breakfast that featured retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin after complaints were lodged that Boykin is anti-Muslim and anti-gay.

Military Religious Freedom Foundation founder Mikey Weinstein told Army Times that Boykin’s invitation had caused great angst among soldiers at Fort Riley – leading some to break down in tears.

“I have clients of ours weeping on the phone about this,” he said.

Weeping? Oh, please.

“I sincerely doubt that America can expect to win wars if the people who are tasked to do so are frightened by an old retired general with biblical views and a testimony of faith,” Boykin told me.

Boykin, an original member of Delta Force and an executive vice president of the Family Research Council, was scheduled to deliver remarks at a June 6th prayer breakfast. The event was set to be held in conjunction with the 1st Infantry Division’s Victory Week celebration....

“He sows hatred and heinous divisiveness with his sickening screed of fundamentalist Christian supremacy, primacy, exclusivity and triumphalism,” Weinstein wrote in a complaint to Fort Riley.

I don't share Boykin's views, but to find them "sickening" represents a pretty harsh opposition to his mode of faith -- in fact, at least as harsh a mode as the one Boykin aims at Islam, which is one of the MRFF's complaints against him.

The MRFF has a page in which it was asked whether it focuses on beating up Christians exclusively, or if it sometimes worries about other religions such as Islam. You know, Islam: that religion that has resulted in several blue-on-blue incidents such as the fragging at the start of the Iraq War, or the Ft. Drum shootings.

Their response is several paragraphs long, but here is the nut: "We simply do not receive similar complaints involving any religion other than Christianity."

Aristotle said that justice lies in treating similar cases similarly. The big question there, as here, is what constitutes "similar."

Hahahahahahaha

NYT Headline: "Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say."

Where've you been these last few years?

Trump is the only one who even might prosecute top members of the Clinton machine. If Hillary Clinton is elected, it'll be open season for high-level corruption, the sale of American power to the highest bidder, and bribery on a scale never seen before in the United States.

I don't know if Trump would be good or bad for the rule of law. But I know he can hardly be worse. What's surprising to me is that the Times can't see how ridiculous it is to put forward the Clinton machine as Guardian of the Rule of Law.

I can see the slogan now: 'Vote Fox for Henhouse Sheriff!'

UPDATE: Related: "We’re all thinking the same thing but an RNC spokesman was the first to get to say it: Of the two major-party nominees this year, it ain’t Trump who mishandled classified information."

UPDATE: Also related: We hear about how Trump marks the rise of brownshirt fascism, but somehow it's his rallies that keep getting attacked by mobs.

None of this stuff is of the tu quoque fallacy. It's not that Trump's opponents do it too. It's that the charge that he does it overlooks the fact that his opponent is far worse on all of these issues.

The Greatest Beer Run Ever

Not the Duffel Blog

Actually, the Washington Post: "Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don’t respect them, study finds."

This Happened in Georgia?

A burqa-clad assailant allegedly attacked a woman with her own American flag.

Amusingly, the article posts a burqaless mugshot. If maintaining modesty at radical Islamic levels is important to you, you'd better obey the law.

Guns Save Lives

Sometimes, they're the right lives.

You can increase your odds of it turning out right by practicing and training regularly.

"Seven Hobbit Meals"

Actually, the first one is Beorning.

They all look pretty good, though.

"Putting a Wife to Work..."

I've been sharply critical of Donald Trump's remarks on women throughout this election season, but this time I think the media may be misreading what he said. He's not suggesting that it's dangerous for a husband to have a wife who works. If I understand him he's suggesting that it's dangerous to employ one's own wife as a business subordinate.

Now we have all these rules about sexual harassment in the workplace just because we recognize that it's perilous to go the other way -- to seek a wife (or husband) from among one's business associates. The idea that it's dangerous to combine the two spheres of engagement is thus not a very strange thing to say at all, especially not from a feminist perspective: they've been driving most of these rules for just this reason.

So why should it be surprising to learn that it works the other way too? If the creation of intimacy can put undesirable stresses on a business relationship, why would it be surprising that bringing an intimate relationship into the workplace might put undesirable stresses upon the intimate relationship? It seems well-established that the two relationships are at cross-purposes in certain respects.

On the other hand, there are millions of stories of immigrant families who came to America and built a successful business around their family ties. Just over the hill is an Indian family who runs a small convenience store. The father, wife, and son all take turns staffing it, and the revenue is managed as family income. This program has worked to the good of generations of immigrants, helping them become established in what can be a difficult economy.

Still, it's not weird to think that the business and the intimate don't go together well. The American business environment is an ideally asexual, professional environment built on competition between atomic actors for position, responsibility, and salary. A marriage is an ideally sexual, intimate environment in which resources are pooled for the common good. It should be no surprise at all to learn that the two forms wear against each other. The conclusion that they might be better kept separate seems like wisdom to me.

Um, Bill...

The retired former President chides Trump supporters.

“The last serious terrorist incident in the United States occurred in San Bernardino, Calif. Those people were converted over the internet,” Clinton said. “You can build all the walls you want. You can build them all across Canada; they got a bunch of foreigners in Canada. You could build a seawall in the Atlantic and a seawall in the Pacific. …. And then you could send the Navy to the Gulf of Mexico to block anybody else, and put all the planes in the Air Force up. You could not keep out the social media.”

Actually, the wife went to an Islamic school in Pakistan before returning to Saudi Arabia. She and her husband met online, and he was probably radicalized by her, but he also went to Saudi Arabia for a while -- that is probably where they received whatever training they had that allowed them to build destructive devices and execute the attack.

Not that social media and self-radicalization aren't a problem. Your example, however, was particularly poorly chosen.

Another Sword-Fighting Game

Hatashiai! is the latest "we can make a realistic sword-fighting game" to seek crowd funding. I notice that in addition to six Japanese schools, they include "Chinese Sword" and "[Western] Long Sword" as options for players.

By the way, Kingdom Come: Deliverance is now in beta testing. It aims at a much wider kind of realism than just the sword-fighting, attempting to accurately recreate a moment in the Middle Ages as thoroughly as possible.

Crush the Clintons in California!

A possible loss in California has the Clinton machine in panic mode.

Bernie's victory, should he attain it, almost certainly won't propel him to the nomination. It might cause the death of the Clinton machine, however, as it is not clear that it could maintain its monetary racket without plausible access to the political influence it is selling. The scale of Clinton corruption is such that its death would be a major step forward in correcting American political corruption.

What comes next? Joe Biden, maybe. Maybe a free-for-all at the convention. Whatever it is, it would be better.

Zoos' Weapon Response Teams

Via Wretchard, this week's tribulation over the gorilla has brought to everyone's attention the fact that zoos have some pretty serious ordinance right to hand.

The team armed themselves with four guns from a locked cabinet kept in the general curator’s office. Salisbury carried a 12-gauge shotgun. The remaining staff carried two .375 rifles and a 30.06 rifle.

That .375 is a beast. If it were used in a crime, the news media would describe either of those calibers as "a high-powered rifle" and/or "a sniper rifle" and/or "a rifle designed to penetrate police body armor." Well, it wasn't really designed to do that -- it was designed to penetrate heavy bone and fat deposits in order to reach the vitals of big game animals like buffalo. But it certainly would penetrate any body armor you want to name.

Neuroscience Can't Solve Donkey Kong

We hear increasingly confident claims from advocates of neuroscience that we shall soon understand how the brain works.  How plausible are these claims?  Someone thought of a test.

The human brain contains 86 billion neurons, underlies all of humanity’s scientific and artistic endeavours, and has been repeatedly described as the most complex object in the known universe. By contrast, the MOS 6502 microchip contains 3510 transistors, runs Space Invaders, and wouldn’t even be the most complex object in my pocket. We know very little about how the brain works, but we understand the chip completely.

So, Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording wondered, what would happen if they studied the chip in the style of neuroscientists? How would the approaches that are being used to study the complex squishy brain fare when used on a far simpler artificial processor? Could they re-discover everything we know about its transistors and logic gates, about how they process information and run simple video games? Forget attention, emotion, learning, memory, and creativity; using the techniques of neuroscience, could Jonas and Kording comprehend Donkey Kong?

No. They couldn’t. Not even close.

Now, that's interesting, but it depends on an analogy that is increasingly questionable. Here's an article that argues that your brain does not process information, and is nothing like a computer.

Pakistani Women Are Not Having It

The recent Islamic committee ruling that Pakistani husbands could beat their wives "lightly" has produced a significant backlash.

I imagine the committee members are surprised.  The committee was just reiterating a perfectly well-established shariah law principle.  Pakistan, 'the land of the pure,' was established just so that people could live authentically Muslim lives.  Why wouldn't women be on board with such an obvious ruling, well within the luminous tradition of their faith?

Money Pit

From the Blueberry website (from Gov. Perry's joke about Austin's being the blueberry in the tomato soup of Texas), a tale that punches my buttons from both sides.  On the one hand, the 1890's home in Old West Austin is just the kind of building I love, and few things would make me happier than to have a few million dollars at my disposal to give it a loving restoration.  On the other hand, it doesn't belong to me, and neither I nor its owners have that kind of cash available for the necessary work.  What the owners have instead is a lot of neighbors who wish someone else would undertake the project so they could enjoy the fruits of it gratis.

I run into the same attitude here on my underdeveloped little semi-rural peninsula:  none of us enjoys seeing undeveloped land turned into new housing.  When someone else owns the undeveloped land, we experience it as a neighboring parkland, without the inconvenience of paying taxes on it or forgoing the income from selling it to a developer.  Such a crime to destroy the parkland!  And yet all of us live in houses that were built on previously undeveloped land.  Most of my neighbors prefer to clear nearly all of their previously undeveloped land, even the parts that their houses don't sit directly.  Somehow, in spite of this, they are up in arms when someone else nearby does the same.  Yet it never occurs to them to pool their resources and buy the undeveloped land so they can lovingly preserve it as habitat.  That's always for some other rich guy to do:  the besetting policy sin of our age.

Do I wish more people were passionate about undeveloped habitat and 19th-century buildings?  I sure do.  I wish they cared enough about it to make it a financial priority in their own households, instead of only important enough to try to bully other people about.

Maybe We Just Shouldn't Have "Supreme Courts" Anywhere

Barrister Jeremy Brier, former adjunct professor of EU law at Pepperdine, writes:

But there was always a particular moment, midway through our first lecture on the EU, when my American students would look particularly dumbstruck.  It was when they learnt that the common market, entered into in a spirit of amity to heal war-torn Europe, had by the reasoning of its appointed Judges, determined that EU laws must reign supreme over those of the EU’s member states.

...

In the present British debate, it is informative to recall the shock that greets an outsiders’ first understanding of how the EU grew. Its history is of an unstoppable escalation, either emanating from its own internal logic and powers or by a concerted but quiet power grab.

Open borders with Turkey within a decade is the inevitable apotheosis of a century in which we diluted our laws, pooled our sovereignty and vowed to intermingle our land and laws with our neighbours and beyond.

Thunderbolt Iron

King Tut's blade turns out to have been forged from the stuff.

Lord Dunsany explained how this is done.

Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. Of these thunderbolts, that had no earthly forging, were made, with suitable runes, such weapons as had to parry unearthly dangers....

To her he said that the day of his need was come. And she bade him gather thunderbolts in her garden, in the soft earth under her cabbages....

On the grass beside her he laid those strangers to Earth. From wonderful spaces they came to her magical garden, shaken by thunder from paths that we cannot tread; and though not in themselves containing magic were well adapted to carry what magic her runes could give. She laid the thigh-bone of a materialist down, and turned to those stormy wanderers. She arranged them in one straight row by the side of her fire. And over them then she toppled the burning logs and the embers, prodding them down with the ebon stick that is the sceptre of witches, until she had deeply covered those seventeen cousins of Earth that had visited us from their etherial home. She stepped back then from her fire and stretched out her hands, and suddenly blasted it with a frightful rune. The flames leaped up in amazement. And what had been but a lonely fire in the night, with no more mystery than pertains to all such fires, flared suddenly into a thing that wanderers feared.

As the green flames, stung by her runes, leaped up, and the heat of the fire grew intenser, she stepped backwards further and further, and merely uttered her runes a little louder the further she got from the fire. She bade Alveric pile on logs, dark logs of oak that lay there cumbering the heath; and at once, as he dropped them on, the heat licked them up; and the witch went on pronouncing her louder runes, and the flames danced wild and green; and down in the embers the seventeen, whose paths had once crossed Earth's when they wandered free, knew heat again as great as they had known, even on that desperate ride that had brought them here. And when Alveric could no longer come near the fire, and the witch was some yards from it shouting her runes, the magical flames burned all the ashes away and that portent that flared on the hill as suddenly ceased, leaving only a circle that sullenly glowed on the ground, like the evil pool that glares where thermite has burst. And flat in the glow, all liquid still, lay the sword.

The witch approached it and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets. She sang of old Summer noons in the time of harebells: she sang on that high dark heath a song that seemed so full of mornings and evenings preserved with all their dews by her magical craft from days that had else been lost, that Alveric wondered of each small wandering wing, that her fire had lured from the dusk, if this were the ghost of some day lost to man, called up by the force of her song from times that were fairer. And all the while the unearthly metal grew harder. The white liquid stiffened and turned red. The glow of the red dwindled. And as it cooled it narrowed: little particles came together, little crevices closed: and as they closed they seized the air about them, and with the air they caught the witch's rune, and gripped it and held it forever. And so it was it became a magical sword. And little magic there is in English woods, from the time of anemones to the falling of leaves, that was not in the sword. And little magic there is in southern downs, that only sheep roam over and quiet shepherds, that the sword had not too. And there was scent of thyme in it and sight of lilac, and the chorus of birds that sings before dawn in April, and the deep proud splendour of rhododendrons, and the litheness and laughter of streams, and miles and miles of may. And by the time the sword was black it was all enchanted with magic.

Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic, and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.

And now the witch drew the black blade forth by the hilt, which was thick and on one side rounded, for she had cut a small groove in the soil below the hilt for this purpose, and began to sharpen both sides of the sword by rubbing them with a curious greenish stone, still singing over the sword an eerie song.

Alveric watched her in silence, wondering, not counting time; it may have been for moments, it may have been while the stars went far on their courses. Suddenly she was finished. She stood up with the sword lying on both her hands. She stretched it out curtly to Alveric; he took it, she turned away; and there was a look in her eyes as though she would have kept that sword, or kept Alveric. He turned to pour out his thanks, but she was gone.

Tyranny, Theory and Practice

Donald Trump gave a press conference yesterday in which he aggressively challenged the press, even calling one journalist a "sleaze." I'm not sure if the charge is accurate.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines:

"Just because you're a journalist you are not exempted from assassination if you're a son of a bitch."

"Most of those killed, to be frank, have done something," [President] Duterte said, according to AFP. "You won't be killed if you don't do anything wrong."

He also said journalists who defamed others weren't necessarily protected from violent attacks.

"That can't be just freedom of speech. The constitution can no longer help you if you disrespect a person."

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh:

“No one in this country has the right to speak in a way that hurts religious sentiment,” she said while exchanging greetings with Hindu leaders on Thursday.

“You won’t practise religion – no problem. But you can’t attack someone else’s religion. You’ll have to stop doing this.

“It won’t be tolerated if someone else’s religious sentiment is hurt,” the prime minister said.

After the murder of secular blogger Niladri Chatterjee Niloy at his house in Dhaka on Aug 7, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal and police chief AKM Shahidul Haque issued similar warnings.

What we need to decide, and it's a decision to be taken seriously, is whether Trump is of the same kind and merely different in degree, or if he is of a different kind. There are arguments to be made in both directions. One could argue that the media has really deserved harsh criticism, and that bringing such criticism is fair play. One could argue that verbal criticism is only part of the free exchange of ideas, and that being subject to criticism makes the press more likely to do a better, more thorough job in proving their case.

On the other hand, one could argue that such language from a man seeking a position of great power is suggestive that he would suppress criticism forcefully once he had power. One could suggest that his restriction to verbal criticism is temporary, and that once he has the power of the presidency he will not feel so restricted.

Certainly the power of the presidency is great. Especially under Obama the ability to avoid the law, by using Presidential power to refuse to enforce it on one's self or one's operatives, has grown vast. Still, my sense is that Trump would have a lot less power as President than Obama has had, or than Clinton would have, because he will be subject to impeachment and removal. His lack of backing within the deep establishment of his own party means that he would be easy to constrain. The party seems to be lining up behind him for the duration of the election, as he has won the nomination fair and square. I don't think that their willingness to accept the will of the voters in terms of their nominee means that they have abandoned their objections to Trump in general.

That could be wrong, though. A lot depends on whether Trump is just a big talker, or whether he's the kind of man who would be turned by power into a tyrant. Is he challenging the free press in a way that will force it to do its job better -- recognizing that it has, in fact, done a pretty poor job lately? Or is he laying the ground for suppressing the free press after his election? It's an important question.

Sanity on Weapons -- in the New York Times!

No less than the Times editorial board has penned an essay calling for a loosening of New York's "outdated" knife control laws.

I'm not sure the law they endorse is strongly enough worded to attain their outcome. It would be better to repeal the provisions against "gravity knives" altogether. Still, sanity on weapons from this podium does not come all that often. Let us celebrate it while it's here.

Poll on Clinton and Indictment

So, the red-line Drudge headline calls this a "shock poll" because 71% of Democrats think that Clinton should keep running even if indicted. Here's the part that I think is more troubling:

Sixty-five percent (65%) consider it likely that Clinton broke the law by sending and receiving e-mails containing classified information through a private e-mail server while serving as secretary of State. This includes 47% who say it’s Very Likely....

But just 25% think it is even somewhat likely that Clinton will be indicted.

There's your measure of effectiveness for our legal institutions. Two-thirds of voters think she broke the law (which, of course, she did). Only one in four think there's any real chance the law will be applied to her.

The party of more government has an interest in maintaining faith in the government. They're sacrificing more than they know on the altar of Hillary Clinton.