How Captain America: Civil War Should Have Ended

The gentle folk at How It Should Have Ended take on Captain America. They bring up some of the stuff we talked about in our earlier discussion.

Also, here there be spoilers!

Range 15 Update

It's still showing here and there. "Here" being a few screens that have gotten repeat showings, as interest continues. "There" being... Baghdad.

U.S. veterans and now stars of recent military horror-comedy, “Range 15,” visited service members Saturday-Monday and shared a screening of their movie.

Soldiers deployed to Forward Operating Base Union III in support of the Combined Joint Forces Land Component Command – Operation Inherent Resolve filed into a room to watch “Range 15” and got the opportunity to meet the stars – Mat Best, Army Ranger veteran and CEO of Article 15 Clothing; Jarred Taylor, Air Force veteran and Article 15’s chief marketing officer; and Nick Palmisciano, Army veteran and founder of Ranger Up clothing company.

Because most deployed Soldiers would not have gotten the opportunity to see “Range 15,” Palmisciano worked his contacts to set up the tour in coordination with Armed Forces Entertainment, Best said.

“There was no theatrical release overseas, and this movie was made by vets for vets,” he said.

"Those Of Us Who Are Over... 35 Or So..."

Some words from Ronald Reagan.



How are we doing on this, brothers and sisters?

Man Without Most of His Brain... Still Conscious

This goes with the 'male and female mice have different pain structures' discussion. We really don't have any idea how all this works.

Dear Piers Morgan: Don't Let The Door Hit You

His reaction to this commercial was to say that it was "One of the most disgusting things I've ever seen."



Well, we won't miss you, Piers. But I'd watch that talk if you ever run into my wife, because she's just this kind of girl.

Pocket Monsters

Get off the firing line, Pikachu! That's a safety violation! pic.twitter.com/WilmXFBHlf

— U.S. Marines (@USMC) July 11, 2016

(H/t Mad Minerva)

A bit of reverse cultural assimilation: Pokemon (ポケモン) is a Japanese contraction for the English words "pocket monster" (ポケットモンスター / poketto monsuta-). For some reason, I find it amusing to hear Americans say "Pokemon".

No, I have no excuse for posting this. It's Friday: We don't need no stinking excuses!

Heh

Good Question

[I]n November, when American voters choose how to cast their ballots for president, they will surely take policies and the candidates' personalities into consideration.

But they also have another question to answer, and it is not a frivolous one. Do they want four more years of leaders who respond to crisis by delivering self-righteous lectures to them about their faults?

The FBI Is Not Covering Itself With Glory Lately

The Bureau finds 'no evidence' that Omar Mateen intended to target gays in his decision to stage an Islamist attack at a gay nightclub.

Cf. this reminder of another recent FBI investigation:

Never in the history of world has a human being been so completely buried under a mountain of no evidence. Hillary Clinton can say there’s no evidence she sent classified emails until the evidence shows up, at which point there is no evidence she knew they were classified, until evidence of that shows up, at which point there is no evidence anyone got hold of it, until 400 people are willing to stake their lives that it was certainly compromised by sophisticated bad actors, at which point there is no evidence that it mattered.

This came to mind listening to FBI Director James Comey’s interesting phraseology, carefully formulated, no doubt: “We found no evidence” and “We did not find clear evidence” and “[Hillary’s lawyers] deleted all emails they did not return to State, and the lawyers cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery” (emphasis mine).

It does seem as if they are, lately, more devoted to finding "no evidence" than to finding evidence.

November Paris Attack Tortured Victims for ISIS Propaganda

The French government has suppressed the story until now.

The chief police witness in Parliament testified that on the night of the attacks, an investigating officer, tears streaming down his face, rushed out of the Bataclan and vomited in front of him just after seeing the disfigured bodies.

The 14-hour testimony about the November attacks took place March 21st.

According to this testimony, Wahhabist killers reportedly gouged out eyes, castrated victims, and shoved their testicles in their mouths. They may also have disemboweled some poor souls. Women were reportedly stabbed in the genitals – and the torture was, victims told police, filmed for Daesh or Islamic State propaganda.

At some point, we're going to have to start being honest with ourselves about what we're facing.

Military Coup Attempt in Turkey

Unfolding. The Turkish military was entrusted by Ataturk with the duty of preserving his revolution, which has been undermined somewhat by the present administration's flirtation with Islamism. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

MikeD, Call the Office

Hey, Mike, I have a message for you and I don't seem to have your email. A friend of your friend COL Sobichevsky is trying to get in touch.

Viking Ship Update

Popular Mechanics has confirmed that it's actually four hundred thousand dollars that is being demanded in piloting fees.

Good gracious, people. Even if this were a commercial and profit-making vessel, how could that be a reasonable figure?

Immigration and Terrorism

A post at Fabius Maximus.

Europe is in a situation much like the forests of the western US. Years of policy errors have made both into large tinderboxes. Prevention is impossible; massive fires are inevitable. Mitigation is the only option. That’s easy (albeit expensive) with forest fires. Less so with the consequences of mass immigration.

France will have to live with the great rings around its cities of disaffected, poor, unassimilated migrants and their children. Fundamental Islamic groups have spent years building their infrastructure, with jihadists lurking within. More attacks are likely.

One could also cut down the forests. We don't, but only because we value the forests a great deal.

Brains and Immunity

Back in March, the University of Virginia announced that the brain turns out to be connected directly to the immune system -- and by structures we didn't know existed, long after most medical doctors thought the body was fully mapped. Now it turns out that the brain's connection to the immune system appears to govern something important about our social interactions.

So could immune system problems contribute to an inability to have normal social interactions? The answer appears to be yes, and that finding could have significant implications for neurological diseases such as autism-spectrum disorders and schizophrenia.

That's going to change the way we think about a number of different things.

Weber Was Wrong

Bear this in mind, as you bear your arms.

Here’s the issue before us, after Dallas: Is the United States a state?

The question seems strange; this nation’s full official name suggests not only a state, but also a union of states. Among defining attributes of a state, the United States possesses a territory, a flag, laws — and courts and bureaucrats to enforce them.

What it doesn’t have, crucially, is a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence by a central authority.

In part, this is by design. The Constitution provides for the legitimate use of violence by a federal government, but also by the 50 semi-sovereign entities represented in Washington. Indeed, in the founding era, the federal government exercised only limited power to establish a standing military or law-enforcement apparatus; it relied heavily on state cooperation, and state resources, to provide what we know today as “national security.”

And then there’s the Second Amendment, which gives “the people” a right to “keep and bear arms,” thus legitimizing nongovernmental violence, not only by groups — from slave patrols to pioneers to sheriffs’ posses — but also by individuals, from hunters to homeowners.

No constitutional provision better expresses an essential difference between the state as Europeans understood it and the “republic” America’s founders conceived. Yet none has spawned more debate, confusion and conflict within America itself, right down to the present day.

No greater matter exists for us as a free people. The United States must never be a "state" by this European notion. Should it come to an appeal to the God of Hosts, we must keep this right subject to the People. This is what enabled Magna Carta, the Declaration of Arbroath, the Declaration of Independence. There is no more fundamental matter, nothing more important save the salvation of our souls.

And even there, if we are wrong, we have the comfort of praying for forgiveness in our error.  But we aren't wrong:  Luke 22:36.

Bastille Day

30 dead in France. The weapon of choice? A big truck.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité still need fighting for. Aux armes, citoyens. You're likely to need those arms, and your ploughshares won't stop them.

That's true there, here, and everywhere.

UPDATE: There seems to be a big fire at the Eiffel Tower.

UPDATE: At least 75 killed. Bodies for a mile, some of them children. This is accounted a great day by our enemies.

Cornell West: Obama Has Failed Us

I note that Professor West has also announced that he will be supporting Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and not Hillary Clinton. It's interesting that he chose the Guardian, out of the UK, for this article.

Unfortunately, Obama thrives on being in the middle. He has no backbone to fight for justice. He likes to be above the fray. But for those us us who are in the fray, there is a different sensibility. You have to choose which side you’re on, and he doesn’t want to do that. Fundamentally, he’s not a love warrior.

Funny, I'd heard that he was a "lightworker," whatever that meant. Guess it's not the same thing. Maybe lightworkers are like Jedi, and they aren't allowed to love?

"There Are Two Americas...."

John Edwards' famous stump speech is coming true, although not in the way he envisioned it. In one America, violent crime is at historic lows. In 35 American cities however, as we were discussing yesterday, there has been a spike in murder rates coinciding with the spike in tensions between the police and black Americans.

And now:

The Army last week warned all military personnel in the United States to avoid 37 American cities this week over concerns that anti-police protests, dubbed “Days of Rage,” are planned and could turn violent. The July 8 notice from the U.S. Army North said there is a potential for violence or criminal activities in the aftermath of the shootings of five Dallas police officers.

Want to bet those lists of cities overlap more or less completely?

The article notes that the Army's warning seems based on an internet rumor. Still, mobs -- including flash mobs -- can organize around internet rumors as well as anything else.

False Positives on Racism

As someone who thinks that the issue here is really one of training -- specifically, of training for a stimulus-response reaction of shooting when hands get out of sight in cases where weapons are considered likely -- I've tended to dismiss or downplay the idea that racism is much at the back of these issues. Many, many people disagree with me about that. I would say that it is the most commonly held opinion among the 'great and the good' that America is still suffering from a simmering racism that has never been expiated through all our suffering.

I believe racism exists. I grew up in a county in Georgia where the Klan recruited openly, wearing their robes but not bothering with their hoods because they didn't think what they were doing was shameful. I just don't see racism like that any more, except in fringe cases. For example, in both the Stone Mountain rally here in Georgia, and the "Traditional Workers Party" rally in California, the members of the pro-white racist groups were vastly outnumbered by the anti-racist groups. In Stone Mountain, all the arrests were of anti-racists. In California, the police elected not to protect the white separatists.

Last night I was reading an article at the Huffington Post that investigates a suggestion that one of the slain Dallas cops was a "proud, open white supremacist." The HuffPo author ultimately approves the idea, saying that the signals individually could be dismissed, but that all together they are demonstrative.

Here is the alleged evidence:

These strike me as a collection of false positives, none of which should individually or collectively be taken as evidence of racism.

Support for Donald Trump is apparently taken to be prima facie evidence of racism, as is the display of any sort of Confederate flag. There are plausible non-racist reasons for either, to say the least that might be said.

I don't know who Pastor Greg Locke is, but I'm not a Protestant evangelical, and my guess is that he's known for more than just being opposed to trans* issues. I don't see how that's relevant to whiteness anyway; lots of trans* people are white. It's relevant to traditional Christian culture. Many Americans from traditional Christian faiths feel under siege on these issues, and some of the rhetoric has been angry, but it's got nothing to do with race.

Same deal with a Crusader tattoo. Chris Kyle had one. Was it about race issues in America? Of course not. It was about 9/11, and the sense that the West was under attack from radical Islam. Islam is not a race, and although many people would like to run "Islamophobia" in with racism, the comparison isn't plausible. Race is an invented, pseudo-scientific category that refers to nothing actually real in the physical world. Islam is a real thing. Anger at Islam for events like 9/11, or Orlando, or San Bernardino, or Chattanooga, or Fort Hood, or... well, anyway, it's not difficult to understand the anger. Maybe Muslims worldwide have some valid reasons to be angry with America, too, such as a sense that we are polluting their culture with images they find pornographic. Either way, it's got nothing to do with racism.

What they are calling an "Iron Cross" is properly called a cross formée or cross pattée. There are two of them on the sidebar here, one red and one white. It's a traditional piece of Christian heraldry, much older than and quite apart from any use by Germans, quite apart from any use by bikers (such as myself) or surfers. The Pope wears them on his sash. Others have other heraldic reasons for using them.

So what about the Thor's Hammer? You know, we talk about Vikings all the time around here. In the last week, I've had a post about the Viking ship sailing across the Atlantic and another about Wagner's Ring. Others inspired by such things include noted Roman Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien -- if you read the Silmarillion, note the character of Tulkas the Valiant. There's a very popular television show right now about Vikings. Interest in such things has been intense since about the middle of the 19th century, and for good reasons. The sagas and poetics have proven tremendously inspiring, and they are even today a continuing source of high art. That it may appeal more to people who have a sense of kinship with the Vikings is no more racist than the fact that Beijing opera appeals mostly to Han Chinese. Beijing opera has a kind of universal appeal -- witness Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or for that matter Xena, Warrior Princess -- but it also has a cultural context that makes it more resonant for those within that culture. That's not shocking.

False positives are not helpful. Let's not magnify the perils of racism in our imagination, but rather fight it forthrightly where it unambiguously exists.