So Obvious It Shouldn't Need To Be Said

Nevertheless, of course, it is very much in need of saying: Politicizing the FBI is very dangerous.

Men of the West, Rangers of the North

Headline: "ISIS Calls for Random Knife Attacks in Alleys, Forests, Beaches, 'Quiet Neighborhoods.'"

Aragorn:

If Gondor, Boromir, has been a stalwart tower, we have played another part. Many evil things there are that your strong walls and bright swords do not stay. You know little of the lands beyond your bounds. Peace and freedom, do you say? The North would have known them little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us. What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?

'And yet less thanks have we than you. Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names.... Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown.

'But now the world is changing once again.'

If Kurt Schlichter Did Parody Videos of Famous Hollywood Actors Acting Influential ...

Ranger Up language warning for the next video (NSFW).

Good Piece, Colonel

A defense, not exactly of Trump the man, but of the phenomenon. It was written for a German audience, so it's got an enviable level of detachment -- what you get from trying to explain the thing to outsiders.

Probably most important is the anger at being treated like suckers by a corrupt establishment:

At the same time, rampant corruption among those connected to the liberal establishment – most shockingly with Hillary Clinton being cleared of charges of misusing classified material when the same facts would have doubtlessly led to the imprisonment of unconnected Americans – opened a path for Trump. This was especially disruptive because so many Republican politicians, while ideologically conservative, culturally identified with prosperous coastal, urban elites over the suffering citizens of “flyover” America and tried to enforce the same “political correctness.”

It makes sense that people are tired of having their government run by self-dealing liars who treat them like fools, while also subjecting them to social pressures designed to shame them into knuckling under.

Still, what caught my eye about this piece is the author's comment on the shift toward isolationism. It's partly about a failure of allied governments (and, frankly, allied nations' populations) to be willing to stand up and suffer for allegedly shared values. But it's even more about a loss of trust in our own leaders to defend our sacrifices:

The non-elite Americans who make up the military have suffered greatly in wars they see as perfectly justifiable morally, but which were fought without a commitment to victory and therefore led to an inexcusable waste of soldiers’ lives.

Furthermore, Trump has given voice to the feeling that those America has fought to free – and keep free – are ungrateful and unwilling to shoulder the burden of their own defense. His recent heresy on NATO’s Article 5 was not based upon a misunderstanding of America’s treaty obligations but upon the widespread feeling that America’s allies have had a free ride on America’s largesse, and that this must end. Having served in the U.S. Army in Germany in the Cold War, I understood my mission in case of a hot conflict would have been to kill Russians until either the reserves arrived or I died, and this was fine – I knew a large and powerful Bundeswehr would be fighting by my side. But today, Germany and Europe have allowed their militaries to wither into near uselessness. Trump embodies the question on many Americans’ minds – if the Germans don’t think defending Germany is worth German money and lives, why is it worth American money and lives?

If we can't trust either our allies or our leadership, why go off to die in foreign lands? For adventure, perhaps, or for glory; those are good things, to be sure. But more important than either adventure or glory is the sense of being engaged in a moral purpose, especially in war where you will often have to do morally difficult things, or watch good men die. It needs to be worth it, and that means you need to be able to have confidence both that there is a moral purpose, and that the sacrifices will not be in vain.

Our leaders have not taken either of those factors seriously since George W. Bush left office. The nearly complete erosion of the American position in west Asia and the northern Middle East is a consequence. I doubt it will be the only consequence.

SHARP = 'Office of Gender-Based Misconduct'

DB: "‘We’re just as good as men,’ Infantrywoman says from back of ambulance."

Quaker City Night Hawks

Listening to BRMC ever since Grim posted it and this popped up on YouTube's recommendations this evening. Good stuff.

I get pretty odd sets of YouTube recommendations. Three on the same screen tonight were BRMC, a Dwight Yoakam tune, and the Royal Navy's "Heart of Oak." I'll bet most of you get sets like that.

Gosh, I've Seen This Movie Before, Too...

Obama DOJ drops charges against weapons smuggler to avoid political embarrassment for himself or Hillary.

Yeah, I've Been Getting That Impression

While media outlets endlessly poll and probe the American people to understand why they feel so disenchanted with their government, Professor Benjamin Ginsberg and Senior Lecturer Jennifer Bachner instead looked at America's political ruling class for answers. The federal bureaucrats, think tank leaders, and congressional staff members they surveyed, Ginsberg said in an interview with VICE News, "have no idea what Americans think and they don't care. They think Americans are stupid and should do what they are told."

I have an amusing counter-proposal.

"Gender-Based Misconduct"

The biggest thing I didn't realize about this story was the fact that it happened in the "elementary" section of a rather difficult foreign language (Chinese, I assume Mandarin). This is a point at which you're lucky if you can say much of anything at all, and may be struggling to come up with any of the phrases you know under the pressure of being called upon in front of the class.

He got in trouble for doing something completely inoffensive: he referred to himself as handsome in a class.... According to Sweetwood, the incident happened in his Chinese class. He was supposed to say something in Chinese, and that's what he picked. The professor later told him she thought it was a funny remark, but one student had complained. That was just the beginning:

Later that day, my advising dean emailed me to say, "The University's Gender-Based Misconduct Office contacted us because they received a complaint about your behavior towards your Elementary Chinese II professor. It is important we meet to discuss this as soon as possible." I responded in a defiant tone, denying any wrongdoing, though I agreed to meet the next day.

Sweetwood's dean made him promise never to make any upsetting remarks. When the student refused, he was sent to the Gender-Based Misconduct Office, where an administrator attempted to persuade him to abandon his micro-aggressive ways.

If the phrase is so offensive, by the way, why was it among the first things taught to students?

UPDATE: Related.

You Should've Seen the Other Guy

And Now

The FBI is actively destroying evidence.

Eric Hines

Bitter Fury, October Edition

I find myself very angry right now, perhaps because I am still working through grief. But perhaps it is also because of stories like these, which are daily events now:

Donald Trump: Military suicides happen to servicemembers who 'can't handle it'

FBI Allowed 2 Hillary Aides To "Destroy" Their Laptops In Newly Exposed "Side Agreements"

Unfortunately, I can't just walk away. None of us can.

Lindsey Stirling

h/t My Muse Shanked Me

I'd never run into MSgt B before tonight when I wandered in on a Lindsey Stirling video link, but he's got a Nathanial Rateliff video up and a dog that eats lawnmowers, so I figure he'd fit in here.

Smaller libraries

Martin Amis on re-reading the authors whose voices you hear best:

I find another thing about getting older is that your library gets not bigger but smaller, that you return to the key writers who seem to speak to you with a special intimacy. Others you admire or are bored by, but these writers seem to awaken something in you.

For me the two, the twin peaks, like two mountains, are Saul Bellow and Nabokov. And those two I go on reading and rereading. And the great thing about the great books is that it’s like having an infinite library, because every five years you can read them again and the books haven’t changed but you have. And they seem to renew themselves, transform themselves for you.

So you can never say you’ve read a novel. Nabokov always said, funnily enough, you can’t read a novel, you can only reread a novel. If you listen to music, you don’t say, “That’s it.” If it speaks to you then you play it dozens of times, and you probably won’t like that piece of music until you get to know it. It’s the same with a novel. You have to know the kind of thing a novel is, you have to know what it’s about, and the second time you read a novel you can see how this is achieved.

When I teach literature I always tell them, these would-be writers (we don’t do workshops, we just read great books), I say, “When you read Pride and Prejudice, don’t if you’re a girl identify with Elizabeth Bennet, if you’re a boy with Darcy. Identify with the author, not with the characters.” All good readers do that automatically, but I think it’s helpful to make that clear. Your affinity is not with the characters, always with the writer.

NRO On Why Hillary Wasn't Indicted

This has been Mr. Hines' theory all along.

Is this MRAP Really Necessary?

Police go after unarmed "water protectors" in full kit.

OK, I get that the law has sided with the corporation here, and thus that these protests are a kind of trespassing that the police have a duty to stop. However....

"After the Republic"

If it is not res publica, it is because the government has turned against the people:

The Democratic Party—regardless of its standard bearer—would use its victory to drive the transformations that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its members can imagine. We can be sure of that because what it has done and is doing is rooted in a logic that has animated the ruling class for a century, and because that logic has shaped the minds and hearts of millions of this class’s members, supporters, and wannabes.

That logic’s essence, expressed variously by Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson, FDR’s brains trust, intellectuals of both the old and the new Left, choked back and blurted out by progressive politicians, is this: America’s constitutional republic had given the American people too much latitude to be who they are, that is: religiously and socially reactionary, ignorant, even pathological, barriers to Progress. Thankfully, an enlightened minority exists with the expertise and the duty to disperse the religious obscurantism, the hypocritical talk of piety, freedom, and equality, which excuses Americans’ racism, sexism, greed, and rape of the environment. As we progressives take up our proper responsibilities, Americans will no longer live politically according to their prejudices; they will be ruled administratively according to scientific knowledge.

Emphasis added.

Of Course She Did

Preparation is easy when you get the test questions a week in advance.

Is anybody surprised by this?

UPDATE: Ironically, an article on how dangerous it would be if the American people came to believe the election was rigged.

The right question

A lot of the debate coverage is an argument over which candidate won the kind of contest the author thinks should matter to the rest of us.

Drew McCoy wrote, “Before declaring one ‘the winner’ and the other ‘the loser,’ consider their goals, their specific audiences, etc. Did they accomplish them?”

What did blue-collar voters in swing states get from Hillary Clinton in this debate? What did college-educated whites in the suburbs get from Trump in this debate?

Glenn Reynolds calls it a draw on the ground that Trump didn't throw anything and Clinton didn't cough up blood.  Others point out that although Trump's arguments were lackluster, all he really needed to do was appear calm enough to dispel his persistent portrayal as a nut job; from there he can rely on the desperate desire of many voters for a change, any change.

Joe Bob Briggs was right on point:

I’ve got news for these Rhodes Scholars. People don’t care about who’s prepared. They care about who’s lying and, in this case, who’s lying more than the other liar. . . . This is where we end up—two liars arguing over who’s the bigger liar and who’s more crazy. Trump probably wins that argument, simply because all his sins were under the rubric of surviving in a brutal business world, whereas all Hillary’s were committed while serving as an office holder.

First Convention of States Simulation Completed

The first ever, historic Convention of States Simulation is now complete. One-hundred and thirty-seven delegates representing every state in the nation convened in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, Sept. 21-23. It was an amazing experience and the Convention operated flawlessly. If you watch the live stream link below, we know you'll agree.

Click over to read the whole report and watch the vids.

Here is a summary of the amendments agreed upon:

1. Requiring the states to approve any increase in the national debt
2. Term limits on Congress
3. Limiting federal overreach by returning the Commerce Clause to its original meaning
4. Limiting the power of federal regulations by giving an easy congressional override
5. Require a super majority for federal taxes and repeal the 16th Amendment
6. Give the states (by a 3/5ths vote) the power to abrogate any federal law, regulation or executive order.

And here's a PDF with the full amendments. Interesting stuff.

It's good, but I am disappointed that no check on the Supreme Court made it through.