It's As If Trump Wanted to Make Joel's Head Explode

Although, as usual, what he said wasn't as stupid as what he is reported to have said.

The issue came up when an audience member asked Trump: "As president, what specifically would you do to support all victims of sexual assault in the military?"

Trump had agreed it's "a massive problem," and something should be done.

"The numbers are staggering, hard to believe it even -- but we're gonna have to run it very tight. I, at the same time, want to keep the court system within the military. I don't think it should be outside of the military," Trump said.

There is an existing military court system, with judges, prosecutors and courts martial, but lawmakers have sought to change the current system to better address sexual assault.

I think every headline version of this I've seen has claimed that Trump said he wanted to 'set up' a court system in the military. What he really said was that he wanted to keep the court system for these charges within the military. Given that some in Congress are talking about what can be done to further stem sexual assault in the military, this sounds less like the blathering of a moron who doesn't know anything and more like a kind of left limit to the sorts of reforms he'd entertain.

I'm not sure that the press didn't really hear him say he wanted to 'set up' a court system in the military, rather than that he wanted to 'keep' these cases there. They seem to want to have heard it very badly.

A Poor Strategy for a Sailor

Showing disrespect to the flag during Colors is not going to go over well with her chain of command. It's protected free speech when a football player does it. It's a violation of regulations for her.

I'm Beginning to Think There Might Be Something Here

I thought the 'she's so sick' rumors were largely just ordinary getting-older stuff until her team started pushing back so hard against reporters asking about it.

Now I wonder what's got her team so worried. She could just go get a physical and publish the results if this were a serious but unfounded concern.

FP: Hey, What's Obama Want With This Giant Surveillance State?

Foreign Policy points out that the United States of America is now the largest surveillance state the world has ever known and asks -- why?

I want one of these

I need to get right to work organizing one on nearby St. Charles Bay.

So What About this Business in North Dakota?

If I lived closer to North Dakota, I think I'd probably go out to these protests.

I'm not a big fan of the NPR spin, where this is somehow part of some overarching American nastiness toward minority groups (especially Native Americans). Oh, they're using dogs, just like in Selma! Whatever.

But I would still go, just because I get not liking having people steamroller your home in the name of 'progress,' oil-related or not. I don't have a problem with oil. I just have a problem with the use of wealth and force to override a community's will about the place where it lives and eats.

Apparently Jill Stein got arrested out there for tagging a bulldozer with spraypaint. My sense of what ought to be done with unwanted bulldozers is somewhat more severe.

XKCD on Geese

Clanadonia & Albannach

Some good Scottish music to go with Beer Lover's Day.





Notice that there is one set of Great Highland Bagpipes among all those big drums, and you can hear it perfectly plainly.

Abolish the Family!

It's a source of inequality, argues.... er, a philosopher.

So many disputes in our liberal democratic society hinge on the tension between inequality and fairness: between groups, between sexes, between individuals, and increasingly between families.

I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally.

The power of the family to tilt equality hasn’t gone unnoticed, and academics and public commentators have been blowing the whistle for some time. Now, philosophers Adam Swift and Harry Brighouse have felt compelled to conduct a cool reassessment.

Swift in particular has been conflicted for some time over the curious situation that arises when a parent wants to do the best for her child but in the process makes the playing field for others even more lopsided.

‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’

Once he got thinking, Swift could see that the issue stretches well beyond the fact that some families can afford private schooling, nannies, tutors, and houses in good suburbs. Functional family interactions—from going to the cricket to reading bedtime stories—form a largely unseen but palpable fault line between families. The consequence is a gap in social mobility and equality that can last for generations.

So, what to do?

According to Swift, from a purely instrumental position the answer is straightforward.

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’

They give a history lesson about this argument, which you can read if you want to do. Here's my version of it:

Plato argued in favor of abolishing the family in the Republic, though it's not clear how much that was just a thought experiment. Aristotle rejected the idea outright in the Politics II.2, on the grounds that abolishing the family means abolishing the state. The argument he gives is an early form of the principle of division of labor: the family is more diverse and also more self-sustaining than an individual, and a city more than a family. By eliminating the family in order to give the state greater unity (of which 'less inequality' is a kind), you would end up decreasing the ability to sustain the state.

And indeed that is true. The state is capable of surviving even major disruptions in large part because people can rely upon their families for so much. If the family fails, the state has to pick up a lot more weight -- and, in taking on a vast multiplicity of tasks for which it is unsuited, it becomes far more fragile.

Swift doesn't concede the value of the family to the stability of the state, arguing instead only from Aristotle's formulation of the tragedy of the commons. Rather, he decides that "it is in the interest of the child to be parented, and be parented well." He ends up concluding from this that there may be a higher value than equality (heaven forfend!), and that we shouldn't force parents not to read to their children even though being read to as a child confers advantages later in life.

There's an additional point, which is that a state that tried to abolish the family would become unstable for another reason: parents would unite in destroying it. That doesn't seem to occur to him, but he's an Australian. The value of revolution to the moral health of society is more classically an American point.

Jimbo on Hillary Clinton

Uncle J, guest hosting on the Secure Freedom Radio Show, tees off a full-length monologue against Hillary Clinton. Corruption? Quid pro quo? Lawlessness? It's all there.

Today is Beer Lover's Day?

I didn't realize Scotland had a national holiday for that. Or just one, for that matter.

Lazy Americans

If you were to call any subset of Americans "lazy," you'd be described as engaging in stereotyping or even hate speech.

Republicans for Centralized Government

Trump's friend Peter Thiel suggests that the Republicans have been enabled to move toward a new era in which they push for government that works.

Probably Americans would like government that worked better than the rampant incompetence and wastefulness we see today. However, I still think that central government itself is the problem because it imposes one-size-fits-all solutions on a nation that doesn't agree about what the proper mission of government is.

I don't want a government that will efficiently do the very things I think it ought not to do. Thank you, but no.

Lying to the FBI is Also a Federal Crime

No wonder they want us to swear not to use hacked documents against them.

"Hillary Clinton says that she can’t remember what a 'C' in brackets stands for. Everyone in positions of government and in WikiLeaks knows it stands for classified, confidential. And in fact, we have already released thousands of cables by Hillary Clinton…with a 'C' in brackets right there," said Assange while producing one of the documents. "Thousands of examples, where she herself has used a 'C' in brackets, and signed it off, and more than 22,000 times that she has received cables from others with this 'C' in brackets. So, it’s absolutely incredible for Clinton to lie. She is lying about not knowing what that is, but it’s a bit disturbing that James Comey goes along with that game.”

If that's true, then what she said was an obvious lie. I mean, it was extremely implausible before. At the point that you can show that she used the notation herself, though, then there's no possibility she didn't know what it meant. Her claims to the contrary are false statements, which is a Federal crime in this case.

King Sockpuppet Has A Point

Glen Greenwald writes:

Krugman’s column, chiding the media for its unfairly negative coverage of his beloved candidate, was, predictably, a big hit among Democrats — not just because of their agreement with its content but because of what they regarded as the remarkable courage required to publicly defend someone as marginalized and besieged as the former first lady, two-term New York senator, secretary of state, and current establishment-backed multimillionaire presidential front-runner.... Thankfully, it appears that Krugman — at least thus far — has suffered no governmental recriminations or legal threats, nor any career penalties, for his intrepid, highly risky defense of Hillary Clinton.

Try setting up a 501(c)3 with "Tea Party" or "Patriot" in the name, though, and see what happens.

Or, you know, try giving money to an existing one.

(I suppose it's been long enough that we might consider letting Greenwald walk from the sockpuppet thing, but it's still what I think of every time I see his name.)

What Wrong Looks Like

Nick Palmisciano finds his picture used by the Army as a bad example:

I think they've got you fair and square on this one, Nick.



(Not entirely safe for work.)

Enemy of the State

The odyssey of a cake baker.

Appreciating the Effort

A "liberal sociologist," also known as a "sociologist," spent 5 years in what the article describes as "Trump's America." She was actually trying to find the Tea Party's America, but this was back before the Obama IRS did its best to prevent any actual grassroots Tea Party groups from forming. As a consequence, the Tea Party groups that formed were just fronts for establishment Republicans like Karl Rove, and the popular movement became even more hostile to Washington.

Thus, Trump, the only figure in either party's race who was clearly not a part of anyone's establishment. Whatever bad things can be said about him, that much at least is true.

Here are some of her conclusions. On overall motivation:

They feel their cultural beliefs are denigrated by the culture at large. They feel that they’re seen as rednecks, that they live in a region that’s being discredited. Many of them are deeply devout, but they see the culture at large becoming more secular. And then they see economically that this trapdoor that used to only affect black people and people one class below them is now opening and gobbling up them and their children too. So altogether it makes them feel like a forgotten tribe. “Strangers in their own land” is a phrase that kept recurring to me as I spent time there.

And the main point is that they feel the government, the federal government, has been an instrument of their marginalization. If you give it an arm, it’ll take a leg....

On what she calls "deep story":

Think of people waiting in a long line that stretches up a hill. And at the top of that is the American dream. And the people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their best, and were waiting for something they deserved. And this line is increasingly not moving, or moving more slowly [i.e., as the economy stalls].

Then they see people cutting ahead of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public-sector workers. And even an oil-drenched brown pelican getting priority. In their view, people are cutting ahead unfairly. And then in this narrative, there is Barack Obama, to the side, the line supervisor who seems to be waving these people (and the pelican) ahead. So the government seemed to be on the side of the people who were cutting in line and pushing the people in line back.

On hard work and social class:

Another thing, a lot of the people I talked to were doing really well now — but they had grown up in poverty, or their parents had, they’d struggled hard, and they’d worked hard. They were also white men, and they felt that there was no cultural sympathy for them, in fact there was a tendency to blame the categories of whiteness and maleness. I came to realize that there is a whole sector of society in which the privilege of whiteness and maleness didn’t really trickle down. And I think we have grown highly insensitive to that fact.

I think she puts too much emphasis on race, but she says that someone like me would think that. In any case, it's nice that she actually wanted to know what people like us think about things.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a less generous take on her book.

Firm Founded by Clinton Chair Reps Corrupt Serbian Oligarch’s Business Interests

Here is the second big Free Beacon story:

A lobbying firm founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and run by one of her top fundraisers represents the business interests of a Serbian oligarch accused by U.S. and Serbian authorities of widespread corruption, public records show.

Since 2013, the Podesta Group has represented two companies run by Miroslav Miskovic, a Serbian billionaire recently convicted of tax evasion charges stemming from a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme....

A diplomatic cable sent to the State Department by the U.S. ambassador to Serbia in 2007 recommended that Miskovic be denied entry to the United States due to his involvement in corrupt business practices.... “We now have solid [evidence] that Miskovic was the beneficiary of egregious political corruption, which has had a serious adverse effect on U.S. national interests, … namely the stability of democratic institutions and U.S. foreign assistance goals,” according to the cable, which was posted online by the group WikiLeaks.

It recommended employing a presidential proclamation designed to combat corruption to preemptively deny Miskovic a U.S. visa “so that he does not derive the further benefit of access to the U.S. from his pillaging of Serbia.”

Read the rest.

How Much Did Beijing Give the Clinton Foundation?

The Washington Free Beacon is on a roll. Story #1: Clinton turned in a Chinese defector to aid Beijing. The case was known, but apparently her story about it was -- as usual -- false.

Earlier, Clinton said during remarks to Chatham House, a British think tank, that Wang “did not fit any of the categories for the United States giving him asylum.” She said he “had a record of corruption, of thuggishness, brutality” and was “an enforcer for Bo Xilai.”

But a State Department document from 2010 contradicts her assertion. The document, labeled “secret,” outlines in detail how officials at U.S. diplomatic outposts should handle foreign nationals who seek to defect. The foreign nationals are called “walk-ins” and can provide valuable intelligence.

“Walk-ins (1) may be sources of invaluable intelligence; (2) pose numerous security challenges; and (3) may need protection,”states the cable, made public by Wikileaks. “Improper handling of walk-ins can put them and post personnel at risk and result in the loss of important intelligence.”

The document lists all categories of potential defectors expected as walk-ins, including “members of the national police and the military,” as well as “political party officials.”

Wang held several senior positions in Chongqing, including deputy Communist Party chief; deputy chief, party chief, and head of Chongqing police, and vice mayor.

Instead of asylum, Clinton could have helped Wang by authorizing “temporary refuge” at the consulate, but that option also was rejected.