Uh-Oh

Russian ambassador shot in Ankara, Turkey, reportedly by a gunman yelling about Aleppo.



UPDATE: The ambassador is dead. The gunman yelled "Allahu Akbar" and about Aleppo. Look for Turkey to join Russia's war effort in Syria, fracturing NATO's commitments and cementing Russia's strategic gains.

UPDATE: Conveniently, Russia and Turkey agreed last week on the way forward in Syria.

President Vladimir Putin said he and his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan are working to organize a new series of Syrian peace talks without the involvement of the United States or the United Nations.

In a snub to Washington, Putin made clear on Friday that the initiative was the sole preserve of Moscow and Turkey and that the peace talks, if they happened, would be in addition to intermittent U.N.-brokered negotiations in Geneva.

Anarchy in the UK

Well, insofar as they have ant colonies, at least.

We know now that ants do not perform as specialised factory workers. Instead ants switch tasks. An ant’s role changes as it grows older and as changing conditions shift the colony’s needs. An ant that feeds the larvae one week might go out to get food the next. Yet in an ant colony, no one is in charge or tells another what to do. So what determines which ant does which task, and when ants switch roles?

The colony is not a monarchy. The queen merely lays the eggs. Like many natural systems without central control, ant societies are in fact organised not by division of labour but by a distributed process, in which an ant’s social role is a response to interactions with other ants.

There Is Already Plenty of Evidence in the Clear

Russian involvement should be proven by declassifying the CIA's findings, say many on the Left. I've been arguing that, just because we take the threat seriously, we should not expose our sources and methods. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross (h/t Wretchard) points out that there is already plenty in the public space to show the involvement of Russian hacking organizations.

Even if Russian propaganda operations are at most a marginal concern vis a vis our elections, it doesn't make any sense to help them out by getting all panicky and putting everything we have in the clear. When it's dangerous, that's just when it's most important to relax.

What to do in Syria?

A US Army planner writes up two options that have been widely discussed by politicians here in America: the No Fly Zone, and removing Assad from power. Of the first:

There would be little gain from establishing a no-fly zone in Syria. Not only would the immediate risks outweigh any perceived gains in the long-term but it would not necessarily help those people still trapped inside Aleppo or other population centers.

That's quite right, I think. Of the second:

U.S. involvement would increase tensions with not only Russia and other regional actors but would embroil U.S. forces in another possibly decade-long occupation and stability operation. More civilians, not less, may be caught up in the post-Assad violence that would certainly hamper efforts at rebuilding.

Certainly if we ended up in a proxy war with Iran (unmentioned, but a major player on the ground in Syria) and Russia, the odds of a long period of "post-Assad violence" that cost a lot of civilian lives is high. It would also cost a lot of American lives.

The piece concludes, "Recommendation: None."

Grandfathered

Susan McWilliams, grandchild of The Nation's editor who 50 years ago commissioned the piece that became Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, has gotten the magazine to publish a full-length rumination on the book's relationship to Donald Trump.

No, really.

I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

So, let me take this seriously long enough to ask a follow-on question. How many times in 50 years have 'the motorcycle guys' broken into a cocktail party for a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter? Am I right in thinking the answer to that question is "Never, not even one time"?

In Pennsylvania, meanwhile, plainclothes state police have been detailed to protect the lives of the state's 20 electors. You might want to re-examine which set of fears deserve your first attention.

News from Tintagel

A royal palace discovered by archaeologists dates to the era when Arthur is supposed to have been born there. Roman pottery and other finds support the dating.

If you're not interested in archaeology, though, you may still want to click through to see the new statue of Arthur. It's artistically interesting.

From the Duffel Blog

Headline: "Pentagon officials fear ISIS militants now armed with reflective belts."

Oh no!

RT Is Just Having Fun With This Now

Headline: "Revealed! Putin personally hacked DNC from surveillance aircraft with bear on board."

A robot bear.

While We're on the Topic of the Irish and Occasions

Funerals:

Love the pipes on that one. It's probably a bit odd, but I love both of these songs.

Ol' St. Nick

I posted about him back on his feast day that one of the things he is known for is decking the heretic Arius. Mississippi kindly linked the following in the comments, but I am just now getting around to posting them:

Why isn't the the patron saint of pugilists, again?

Actually, just today I was reading about saints and I started to wonder, where did this "patron saint of X" idea come from?

A Marine Passing Time in the Desert

A video posted by 👮Jose Torres👮🚓🚨🚓🚔🚓🚨🚔 (@josebrroo) on Dec 16, 2016 at 6:54pm PST

H/t: Terminal Lance.

Hillary Clinton Cancelling Headphones

Probably more popular before the election, but still ...

Product Description at Amazon:

Do Hillary’s lies have your public, private, and professional lives suffering a painful downward spiral? Then relax security around that Benghazi you call a bank account and allow Hillary Cancelling Headphones to invade your ear compounds. These headphones safeguard your mental well-being by obstructing Clinton at every turn, a feat sure to make you the envy of every Republican Congressmen and Senator. Order your pair now before Clinton’s first term (the only term Democrats don’t want to abort). Bide your time until the 2020 Republican takeover with Hillary-Cancelling Headphones! Boring descriptive technical jargon: Frequency Range 20Hz-20KHz; Impedance 32 Ohm +/- 15%; Sensitivity 103dB +/- 5db at 1 KHz; Speaker 40mm; Plug Type 3.5mm stereo; Cable Length 1.5m 

Christmas Charity

If any of you are looking for an appropriate place to donate, here are two that are on my radar:

1) Wreaths Across America had some trouble reaching its goal, although it did, to fund its annual placement of wreaths on the graves at Arlington National Cemetery. The laying happened today, in what Uncle Jimbo says were icy conditions. People came anyway. If you want to help them get started on next year, you can.

2) Dolly Parton is helping those hurt by the recent wildfires near Gatlinburg, TN, which is her part of the world (and also much of my family's). Her foundation has started what she is calling the "My People Fund," which is soliciting donations from those who'd like to help families from the Great Smoky Mountains who must rebuild after the fires.

Why do the Irish hate Christmas?

Or maybe they just love it ... differently ...

Has Russia Subverted US Intelligence?

John R. Schindler raises the possibility in his latest piece.

North Carolina Legislature Pushes Hard Against Incoming Governor

He's threatened to sue, which I suppose will test the validity of all this legislation. North Carolina is a state where the urban/rural division troubling America is on particularly clear display. A technology-driven immigration has caused some of the urban areas to boom, leading people who vote like Twitter and Facebook employees to surge in numbers. At the same time, outside of those urban corridors North Carolina is a very rural, Southern state.

The Democrats captured the governor's house in this year's election, ousting a Republican governor over anti-transgender legislation that had caused economic boycotts. However, the legislature remains in Republican control.

So, the legislators did something they now claim they'd been meaning to do for a long time: they gutted the power of the governor's office, and transferred it to themselves.

The legislature approved a proposal along party lines Friday that would effectively give Republicans control of the state Board of Elections during election years and split partisan control of local boards of elections, as opposed to giving the governor’s party the majorities on those panels. Outgoing Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed the bill into law Friday, despite not issuing any comment on the drama wracking North Carolina politics since Wednesday.

The legislature also looks poised to pass, for the first time in decades, a law requiring the governor to get approval by the state Senate for his Cabinet appointees and ending his ability to appoint members to the board of trustees of the powerful UNC school system. The bill would also drastically reduce the number of state employees the governor can directly hire and fire from 1,500 to 425.

The measures were just two of several bills the legislature considered in a last-minute, year-end special session that would reduce the governor's influence in state government, the judicial branch, the education system and elections oversight, while strengthening the GOP-dominated legislature's influence in all those areas.

The courts will presumably be asked to rule on whether or not these changes were both legal and fair. They are certainly political hardball. They are also a product of the hostility that is certain to result when a traditional, rural population finds itself under the domineering influence of an urban elite that disdains them.

Figuring out how to let the cities and countryside live the very different lives they want is going to be a tremendous political challenge for the next years. It'd be nice if the cities were each states, so we could let Federalism work. Instead, the conflicts are strongest in cases like this one, where big cities exercise a powerful influence within a state that is culturally very different overall.

Less and less convinced

From James Taranto today:

Two additional points. First, the Post describes the CIA’s report as “secret.” So how is it that everyone knows about it? The answer, obviously, is that officials who were privy to the secrets improperly provided them to the press. (Here we should note that we do not fault the Post or the Times for having published the information they received, and that we would have done the same.)

Second, according to the Times report, even if the Russians were trying to help Trump, they didn’t expect to be successful:

The Russians were as surprised as everyone else at Mr. Trump’s victory, intelligence officials said. Had Mrs. Clinton won, they believe, emails stolen from the Democratic committee and from senior members of her campaign could have been used to undercut her legitimacy.

So American officials made secret information public with the effect—and, one may surmise, the intent—of raising questions about the legitimacy of President-elect Trump. That’s exactly what they accuse the Russians of having planned to do to Mrs. Clinton.

The DHS Hacks Multiply

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes that more states have followed Georgia in finding DHS hacking attempts on their computers.

The two states to come forward now are West Virginia and Kentucky, plus Georgia. Attacks seem to have targeted voter registration sites. I wonder if this was part of an investigation to see whether Southern states were involved in voter suppression tactics. Would DHS run something like that?

President Obama is Not Going to Save You From Trump

In terms of the relationship between his White House and the incoming Trump administration, Obama said Friday there was no "squabbling" between them and insisted that a roiling debate over Russia's intrusion into the US election should be confronted on a bipartisan basis....

Despite his assurances, his White House has increasingly been engaged in an escalating rift with Donald Trump's transition team over Moscow's intrusion into the US vote. At the same time, Obama is working to foster a productive relationship with his successor in a bid to influence his presidential decision-making.

That idea is both wise and good, and a welcome change from the near-nuclear language we've been seeing from elements of the left. Good for him.

I also endorse the view that this should be a bipartisan issue, and that we should take steps to identify weaknesses in our voting process and correct them for the future. One of them that seems highly plausible to me is Wretchard's two-step proposal to have paper ballots, plus voter ID laws requiring a secure form of identification.

We should certainly oppose manipulation through information warfare, as well. However, insofar as an adversary sticks to telling the truth, it's hard to be very opposed to that. Lies, distortions, propaganda -- all these things we should oppose. That a foreign government may have access to some uncomfortable truths is not necessarily. We also run intelligence and information operations (even if you doubt RT's claim, cited below, that Hillary Clinton's support of NGOs in Russia was aimed at influencing public confidence in their election process, we certainly have done many such things over the years). Telling uncomfortable truths is something that probably should be part of how we operate with regard to manipulative elections in places like Iran or China. It's hard to object to having it done right back to us.

The better thing would be for the DNC -- and, insofar as they have similar practices, the RNC -- to straighten up and fly right.

What Do We Mean When We Say, "I Don't Know The Future"?

A useful introduction to the philosophical problems about knowing the future. There are important questions about whether or not there is anything to know, what it would mean to say that you did or didn't know something about the future, and other questions as well. This article is a helpful historical survey of the development of thought about this set of problems.