Pick 'em up trucks

Someone set a cat among the pigeons this week inviting America's elite to admit whether they knew anyone with a pick-up truck.  Around here, a more cogent question would be whether you know anyone without one.

Kevin Williamson leaped into the question by analyzing pick-up-truck ownership patterns in Houston, where apparently the usage is not authentically farm- or ranch-oriented.  Neither is ours, of course; we just like having a tow vehicle you can cart stuff around in.  I don't like driving it, and much prefer my SUV, which doesn't tow but works great for carting stuff around in.  We all keep track of who owns a trailer around here who will loan it to us to haul anything really big.

Williamson's piece ends on a nice note, though, which I thought I'd quote here:

Our politics is less and less about using the clumsy machinery of the state to try to mitigate the effects of this or that problem, and more and more about what kind of people we are, what kind of people we aspire to be, and — not least, never least — what kind of people we hate: effete Santa Monica liberals who don’t know where their food comes from, small-minded prairie bigots who shop at Walmart and have never visited Europe. We have a keen understanding for the vices of those who are unlike us. Their virtues, less so.

But the farmers and the bankers need each other. It is a big country, and there is room for both. A few years ago, there was a controversial Republican political figure who spoke to this under rather more intense circumstances: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

The election of 2016 was divisive, to be sure. It wasn’t Appomattox. The Real America has been through worse.

For Grim

I don't know if you hadn't seen this, or had seen it but didn't care for it, but it seems pretty in your general wheelhouse.

Free Leonard Peltier

Here's an interesting headline: Leonard Peltier's prosecutor has written a letter asking for him to be granted clemency.

Peltier has been in jail for decades, following his conviction for killing FBI agents during the Pine Ridge shootout. The incident occurred during the American Indian Movement's heyday, when Vietnam veterans from the reservations came home and build up a movement to resist government authority where they found it corrupt and unjust. Naturally, this is the sort of movement that appeals to me -- unlike the Left, I like it just as well when the Bundy family did it as when the Lakota did it in 1975.

It is worth noticing that in both cases the fight was over what the government claimed as Federal land, but to which the other party also had a competing claim. The government would prefer you submit your competing claims to adjudication in its own courts, but the Oglala Lakota's claim on Wounded Knee is one that is bound up in a history that does not suggest reliance on Federal good faith.

Peltier's defenders maintain that he is innocent and never received a fair trial. There is something to be said for this, given that he was assigned two life sentences based on no proof that he ever shot anyone at all.

[The] prosecutor eventually admitted in court that the US attorney’s office “can’t prove who shot [the agents]” and claimed that Peltier was guilty of “aiding and abetting” in the shooting.

Reynolds was appointed US attorney in 1976 and oversaw the case’s appeal when much of the evidence that raised serious doubts about the government’s case were revealed.

The former prosecutor’s letter to Obama does not address the underlying conviction, and in an interview, he declined to say whether he believed Peltier is innocent. But Reynolds said it was wrong for Peltier to remain behind bars after 40 years, particularly considering that prosecutors ultimately considered him an accomplice in the crime. “You’re not really participating in the crime yourself. Just because you’re there, you’re going to get nailed.”

Even 20 years ago, it seemed like a bit much to me given that no one has proven he had anything to do with the actual killings. Nor, really, do the deaths strike me as properly-speaking murders in any case: it was a skirmish, in which the Federal agents were taking aggressive action and got caught in a crossfire.

It would be a shame for Barack Obama, to whom the petition was addressed, to have made friends with the Weathermen but to refuse clemency to Peltier. The Weathermen were actual terrorists. Peltier has paid a high price for a crime no one ever proved he committed. If the point was for him to serve as an example, surely forty years is example enough.

Taco Bell Gets Healthy

Business Insider apparently stopped in one recently, and noticed that it wasn't quite as they remembered it.

Unless you’re a hardcore follower of the chain, you may not have noticed the change, so we’re going to fill you in: Taco Bell has started to become one of the country’s healthiest fast-food chains.

It seems a little weird that a restaurant that offers a Doritos-shell taco would warrant that title, but it’s the gospel truth.

In the past year or so, Taco Bell has been restructuring menu choices from top to bottom, especially on the company website and mobile platform. The goal? To give consumers a choice. They can pig out on Crunch Wrap Supremes if they want, or they can go for a healthier option that’s still quick service and delicious.

The high-protein chicken "Power" burritos are not a bad choice if you have to eat fast food for some reason. When I travel I sometimes eat them. You can get a reasonably healthy dose of protein for around four bucks, even at an airport or a train station.

Showing Off That New Technology

Amazon's new "Alexa" has a lot in common with Mack.



I wouldn't have one in my house for other reasons, in any case.

Tough love

Everyone knows by now that you can sometimes hurt by helping too much.  So it should come as little surprise that some of the nation's non-profits, horrified by the Trump election, have doubts about helping too much.  Not that they're worried about helping the needy too much; the real problem is that, by ramping up private charity, they might be encouraging conservatives to think their preference for keeping government out of the charity business is a model that works:

Caleb Gayle, a former program officer at the George Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote an op-ed last week for the Chronicle arguing that the philanthropic sector shouldn’t spend more to make up for gaps in government funding.

“It should instead exercise strategic restraint,” he wrote.

Gayle is unabashed about his plan to put partisanship above helping people. “To many foundations, it might seem cruel to resist calls to spend more . . . But if grant makers start to far exceed the 5 percent annual minimum, they will validate the conservative desire to strip money from government antipoverty measures.”

Small gov

Let's make even the name smaller!  I'm just barely old enough to remember Goldwater's presidential campaign.  We thought the height of clever humor was to say his name stood for "urine."  Here he is on his political goals:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is “needed” before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

A natural act

From an AEI article by Frederick Hess on the education wars:

At root, teaching and learning are intuitive acts. Kids are naturally curious; they’re natural learners. The human mind is hard-wired to ask questions and seek out knowledge. And adults are predisposed to share knowledge, interests, and skills. When one feels confounded or overwhelmed by the challenges of educational improvement, it’s worth keeping in mind that teaching and learning aren’t the product of some mysterious alchemy—they’re deeply natural acts. Systems, structures, and bureaucratic rules designed to support and promote learning need to be scrutinized with an eye to whether they respect that truth.

We can all do a lot better to steer clear of words that have been stripped of meaning. School reform is filled with such words: “consensus,” “best practices,” “differentiation,” “21st century skills,” “rigor,” “effective teaching,” “accountability,” “empowerment,” and so on. Most of the time, it’s not clear what any of these placeholders really mean. They’re often just a way to skip past complicated questions. The problem is that mushy language leads to fuzzy thinking. When I use these words, I frequently realize that even I don’t know exactly what I’m saying.

I was lucky to have many first-rate teachers. One thing they avoided was buzzwords and empty process. They knew how to keep order (and were not undermined in this by their institutions), they knew their subjects, and they cared about nothing but making the intellectual contact necessary to get their knowledge and skills across. Some did this warmly and personably, others with a cool, demanding style. Some were didactic, others collaborative. They gave and demanded respect. They believed that what they had to teach was valuable and showed that they cared whether I got it.

The bad teachers were checking off boxes, warming benches, picking up paychecks, perpetuating fads, using their desks as a soapbox. If they knew their fields at all, they didn't get much of a charge out of communicating its content.

I honestly don't know what's supposed to be going on in education colleges.  There must be some training going on there that circumvents the thick fog of buzzwords; I'm sure some of my good teachers--the ones from public schools--had made it through without being ruined.  At worst they had some of their time wasted.

Scots-Irish Music in America

A documentary.

Falsification

My neighbor who lurks here reports that her niece can't hear arguments against man-made climate catastrophe; she fends them all off with the assumption that they're funded by the Koch brothers.  If she could listen, this would be a good place to start:  a fair-minded fellow who tries to make basic, non-threatening points to a group of nice college kids.  The Q-and-A session afterwards suggests that not much got through, but you never know.  For every well-meaning question posed with a confused lack of rigor, there may have been several kids quietly wondering if the whole thing makes as much sense as everyone's been telling them it does all these years.

It's very discouraging to me that it's so difficult to concentrate anyone's attention on the failure of our climate models to make verifiable predictions, let alone on more difficult questions like "Even assuming you're correct about the probable severity of the problem, is the policy you're proposing to cure it actually likely to cure it?" and "If so, at what cost, and how does that cost compare to the benefit?"

ERB: Teddy versus Churchill

It's worth comparing this with the recent Tolkien vs. Martin post by Thomas, if you're interested in the format. (Language warning.) They both feature an English legend against what is presented as a blowhard American. The effect, however, is quite different.



I'm curious as to why, given the political leanings of ERB, they treated the Spanish American War as kind-of glorious, and outright ignored Churchill's contributions to Britain's colonial wars.

I think they think that Churchill won this one as convincingly as they set up Tolkien to win over Martin (which of course he should have done, were the thing real). I'm pretty sure that's not true. The Bull Moose looks to me like he came out well on top, given the way that Churchill presents his argument.

Bierdna

Aristotle Generally Has A Point

Glenn Reynolds responds to an article in the Washington Post in a way I find is not uncommon, but is ill-advised. The article cites a passage from Aristotle's Rhetoric, which I'll give in full in a minute. Reynolds responds:

Given the change in military technology and the state since Aristotle, I’m not sure the quotes are apposite.

That is doing Aristotle poor justice. He is not talking about military technology or the state here. He's talking about persuasion, and in particular in persuasion by example. So here's the citation:

The “example” has already been described as one kind of induction; and the special nature of the subject-matter that distinguishes it from the other kinds has also been stated above. Its relation to the proposition it supports is not that of part to whole, nor whole to part, nor whole to whole, but of part to part, or like to like. When two statements are of the same order, but one is more familiar than the other, the former is an “example.”

The argument may, for instance, be that Dionysius, in asking as he does for a bodyguard, is scheming to make himself a despot. For in the past Peisistratus kept asking for a bodyguard in order to carry out such a scheme, and did make himself a despot as soon as he got it; and so did Theagenes at Megara; and in the same way all other instances known to the speaker are made into examples, in order to show what is not yet known, that Dionysius has the same purpose in making the same request: all these being instances of the one general principle, that a man who asks for a bodyguard is scheming to make himself a despot.

A position I've long defended in this space is that this kind of reasoning is analogical. It would be easy to read this as a kind of logical reasoning instead. "Instances of one general principle" sounds like there is a single thing of which this is an instance; a type of which this is a token, to put it in the way contemporary philosophers prefer.

But that isn't Aristotle's point. Here's what he says next:

There is an important distinction between two sorts of enthymemes that has been wholly overlooked by almost everybody-one that also subsists between the syllogisms treated of in dialectic. One sort of enthymeme really belongs to rhetoric, as one sort of syllogism really belongs to dialectic; but the other sort really belongs to other arts and faculties, whether to those we already exercise or to those we have not yet acquired. Missing this distinction, people fail to notice that the more correctly they handle their particular subject the further they are getting away from pure rhetoric or dialectic.

As a point of pure rhetoric -- which is what he was talking about -- the charge by example that a bodyguard implies tyranny is an effective tool. As a point of understanding the real world, that is not the case. The more correctly you understand your subject, the less you're doing rhetoric, and the more you're doing arts and science, certainly to include military and political science (which are more properly sciences on Aristotle's terms than on the contemporary understanding of what a "science" is).

The thing about analogies is that they always break. The question about analogical reasoning -- which includes all forms of the example -- is whether the breaking point comes before or after the thing you're talking about. If you're using rhetoric to try to understand the world, that's the thing to keep in mind.

If you're just trying to persuade someone of a point you'd like them to adopt, well, this is a perfectly good rhetorical argument. It's not that Aristotle didn't understand enough to give you good guidance. It's that even the people who read him rarely read him closely enough to understand what he was talking about. Here he's just talking about persuasion, creating the impression that a single real principle is governing disparate events. In fact, that is never the case: analogies always break. It is my contention that Aristotle knew this perfectly well, and defends it as a governing principle of ethics and politics in the early Nicomachean Ethics. (1094b12-28, for those who are serious about following along.)

Gratitude for 2016

Though it is quite common to view 2016 as a particularly bad year, I found that it contained a number of very high moments. Of course, my list of what was good about it matches other people's list of what was bad about it in part. Still, overall there are some things about the year that were unexpected and good.

I'll list them in chronological order, where the chronology is 'as I remember it' rather than me looking it up to confirm I have the dates right.

1) The end of the Bush family dynasty in Republican politics: nothing against the Bush family, but everything against family dynasties in our Republic.

2) Brexit, which offers many reasons for hope.

3) The discovery that the Republican party was not really controlled by the elite that tried to run it, but that it was a genuinely small-d democratic party that would live with the will of its voters. That was quite surprising and unexpected.

4) The absence of violence at the RNC in spite of predictions.

5) The revelation of the corruption of the DNC, not because it was good that it was corrupt, but in the hope that it might be a corrective in the future. There is a minority element of the party, centered around Bernie Sanders' supporters, that is committed to such reforms because they are still young enough to genuinely believe in democracy. Maybe they'll win. Even if they don't, maybe they'll break some of their chains. Their naivety may finally fail, and their starry-eyed leaders become corrupted by power -- but on the other hand there's little power left, outside California, so there's a chance that their idealism may succeed. Who would want to corrupt them, outside California, where they have nothing to offer in return?

6) The end of the Clinton family dynasty, which is an unalloyed good for America.

7) The survival of the United States Constitution as a document that might possibly limit government powers, rather than as a document that licenses the government 'to do good things.' The conservative view of the Constitution would have passed away forever with a 5th progressive vote on the Supreme Court.

8) Suddenly it became important to be concerned about the health of our democratic forms, and limits on executive power, and other things that some of us have been talking about this whole time.

9) A revival of interest in Federalism, although nascent, as a means of controlling a Federal power that is suddenly frightening to the American left.

10) Some of these potential cabinet appointments look good -- especially Mattis, but not only Mattis.

11) A chance to revisit and reform numerous Federal policies and agencies. So far it's just a chance, and it may be squandered or it may fail in spite of diligent effort. Nevertheless, there would have been no chance at all otherwise.

There's a lot to do now, but these things were good things from my perspective.

Civil Rights and Terror

A historical parallel:

Thousands attend their rallies, claiming widespread discrimination. They wrap themselves in displays of “interfaith” cooperation. National, state, and local officials pay them heed. Words that “offend” them are removed from movies, newscasts, and even official government reports. All the while, the men who lead this organization have appeared extensively on FBI wiretaps and are known to federal law enforcement to be involved in a national criminal conspiracy.

You could be forgiven for thinking this describes the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)... But no. The year is 1971, and the pressure group is the Italian American Civil Rights League (IACRL). Its founder, Joe Colombo, is known to federal law enforcement as the head of New York’s Colombo crime family...

It may seem like a punch line now but, in the 1970s, the effort by gangsters to don the mantle of activists and wrap themselves the flag of “civil rights” was taken semi-seriously. Many prominent Italian-American elites (prominenti in Italian) endorsed the call, throwing their influence behind the grievance-mongering.

There's a line to walk here, as groups that legitimately exist to protect civil rights are often co-opted into going along with groups like these. That provides an additional complication, as it is necessary to disaggregate the legitimate groups from the ones that exist to provide cover for dangerous organizations. It wouldn't do to run the Anti-Defamation League out of business along with CAIR, even though they frequently end up going along with CAIR. That makes it more difficult, but still necessary, to criticize effectively.

A lengthy aside, that may serve as an example: ADL has other conceptual problems, too, such as listing the Celtic Cross as a "hate symbol," along with Anglo-Saxon and Norse runic writing. The Celtic Cross is one of the most common expressions of Christianity in much of the United States, as well as of course in Ireland. Runic writing is of great interest not only to neopagans, but to lovers of J. R. R. Tolkien and medieval history in general. The fact that somebody somewhere used a symbol in a hateful way does not make the symbol itself a form of hate.

In fairness, ADL does clarify a few cases in which "interpretation" is important. I would say they understate the case, and that such a symbol should only be taken as an expression of hate if no interpretation is required to see that it is intended as one -- it's not as if the KKK or the Aryan Brotherhood are shy about what they think. The attempt to ban or constrict speech and expression is not desirable, nor is it wise to yield up powerful symbols to the hateful. Far wiser would be an effort to reclaim those symbols, by contesting that the legitimate use of them is the one fully proper use. I raise that criticism of the approach, however, without wishing to undermine the cause of rejecting Anti-Semitism.

To return to the main point, it can be difficult to disentangle the group you want to expose as a front group -- CAIR -- while not undermining the legitimate group that has adopted exactly similar rhetoric, and that appears at some of the front group's events. Likewise, when prominent people are suckered into playing along, you can't help but frame your criticism of them in a way that is going to make them look foolish (at best). The alternative is to let bad actors get away with disabling necessary security work.

Our outgoing administration has erred significantly in the one direction. It remains to be seen if the incoming administration will get the balance right, or if it will err in the other direction. At the moment we've gone so far down the one road that even an error in the other direction would be corrective. Still, it would be best by far to get the balance right.

"DID YOU REMEMBER TO VOTE?!?"

A Deadly Few Weeks

We are entering into a dangerous passage, a period of great uncertainty that will last several weeks. You're doubtless aware of the transitional period between administrations with very different world views, which is one problem. But another problem is that, for the first time since World War II, we will have no carriers deployed at sea anywhere in the world.

As former President Bill Clinton said, one of the first questions that comes up in a crisis, from a tsunami to an invasion, is "Where is the nearest carrier?" The answer for a little while is going to be: "There isn't one."

Auld Lang Syne

Performed by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards.

UPDATE: Congratulations on surviving 2016, those of you on the East Coast. Now for 2017.

Iceland Ends the Year with No Government

REYKJAVIK (AFP) - 
 
Iceland is ending an eventful year in a political quagmire, left without a government for two months after the Panama Papers scandal and a snap election reflecting deep divisions in the island nation.

"In recent years we thought we were seeing the craziest, but we were proven wrong every time -- Iceland found ways to be even crazier," a parliamentary assistant from the Icelandic opposition said on April 6, seeing a government in tatters hesitate on its next move.

Iceland, getting even crazier. Finland has some work to do.

Apparently, the Pirate Party made a run at it, but ultimately failed to take the ship of state.

Update: The AFP article doesn't tell us this, but according to the Wikipedia article linked above, the Pirates actually won 23.9% of the vote and are the largest party in Iceland right now.

But it's not all bad:

Its economy is flourishing with growth expected to reach five percent, after 4.2 percent in 2015. Unemployment has virtually disappeared. Incomes are rising fast. Construction is booming.

Iceland has become a hot spot for tourists from Britain, the US, Asia or Germany, at almost any time of the year, fuelling the creation of thousands of jobs and generous spending.

Cause? Effect?

Hogmanay

One of these years, I have to get out to Edinburgh for this festival.