Preach It

I have seen, in Catholic churches, minimalist Stations of the Cross that hardly can be recognized as depictions of the Passion. I have seen crosses that look as if a modernist Jesus were flying with wings outspread, like a theological pterodactyl. I have seen the Eucharist relegated to what looks like a broom closet. I have seen a baptismal font that bubbles. I have seen beautifully tiled floors, with intricate cruciform patterns, covered over with plush red carpet.

I have heard for decades effeminate “hymns” with the structure and melody of off-Broadway show tunes. I have read hymn texts altered so as to obliterate references to God with the personal pronoun “He.” This music would not be acceptable for a jingle to sell jelly doughnuts on television.

I have seen and heard enough.

This One's Going to be a Hard Sell

ISIS: Cannibalism is halal!

I'd love to see the argument, because I have a feeling that one is a stretch too far. Sex slavery of infidel women, yes, I can see the argument for that one. Eating human beings, well, I'm not sure how they're going to get there. But hey, let's keep an open mind and see what they have to say.

Talent Creates Conflicts of Interest

COL(R) David Johnson points out that our country is losing a lot of talent because government ethics officers are so worried about conflicts of interest. The more talented you are, however, the more likely you are to have created something that will result in a conflict of interest if you should enter government:

As part of his effort to eliminate conflicts of interest, Viola was negotiating the sale of his majority share in Eastern Air Lines for part ownership of Swift Air. Ironically, this divestiture created another conflict. The New York Times reported that Swift Air is “a charter company with millions of dollars in hard-to-track government subcontracts,” and that Viola “would find himself in the precarious position of being a government official who benefits from federal contracting.” More broadly, “his airline negotiations bring an unexpected twist, showing that even when appointees try to sell assets, the transactions can be bedeviled with ethical issues.” Viola withdrew his nomination.

Viola is yet another example of the costs one’s success can impose on those who seek to enter public service. Nevertheless, in the eyes of ethics lawyers in the government, it is an open and shut case. It is also a high-profile case where the conflicts are easy to identify yet the remedies by the individual, difficult to provide.

There may be other reasons to prefer a different candidate, of course. Still, there's a point to be made here. Aren't the people who have succeeded in creating successful businesses often going to be the very people we want?

"Drastic Cuts" Has Such A Nice Sound

Of course, "drastic" is in the eye of the beholder. My guess is that anything less than a continually-increased EPA budget will strike many as "drastic."

Germania

DB Headline: "‘We’re making real progress,’ say last 17 commanders in Afghanistan."

Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Germania, chapter 37:

It was on the six hundred and fortieth year of Rome, when of the arms of the Cimbrians the first mention was made, during the Consulship of Caecilius Metellus and Papirius Carbo. If from that time we count to the second Consulship of the Emperor Trajan, the interval comprehends near two hundred and ten years; so long have we been conquering Germany.

When You're Right, You're Right

Apropos of the last post:

Challenge: "Design a wearable solution that can keep women safe."

Accepted: "Didn't Col. Colt and John Moses Browning take care of this over a century ago?"

Turns out. Equality is a function of the firearm.

Women With Guns

Subtitled "the newest threat to the Democratic party," this article takes note of the increasing popularity of shooting among American women and wonders about its effect on electoral politics.

Well, anyone who believes the Second protects a real and vital right is going to have trouble finding Democrats to vote for right now.

Hunting, she said, "has always been a gender-neutral sport, and I think more and more women are realizing they want to be part of the adventure and the advantages of being able to feed your family with your own hands.

"Women have a tendency ... to not only feel but behave much more confidently when they know they are not only able to provide food for the table but also be able to protect ourselves."

Protecting the constitutional right to bear arms has driven women like her to vote for political candidates who are Second Amendment advocates.

"It was the leading reason that I voted for Donald Trump last November," Croney says. "He gave voice to a strong support of Second Amendment rights when he released his picks for the Supreme Court during the campaign [and] he followed that up, true to his word, with his pick of Neil Gorsuch."

Navy SEALs Granted Tartan

You might wonder why the US Navy SEALs would want a Scottish tartan. I do not have the answer to that question, although I did know a SEAL who was a prominent figure at the Grandfather Mountain Scottish Highland Games at one time.

In any case, a surprisingly large number of members of US military units have registered them in honor of their particular branch of service. The United States Marine Corps has the Leatherneck Tartan, which you can get in two quite different shades as you prefer. The US Army has a tartan, as do the US Special Forces, the US Army Rangers, and US Army Civil Affairs. The US Navy has a tartan as well. The US Air Force has one for the service, and one for its Reserve pipe band. Even the US Coast Guard has a tartan.

I'm probably even missing a few.

I guess a lot of Americans of Scottish heritage serve in the armed forces. In any case, though you rarely see a servicemember wearing a kilt outside of a Scottish Highland Games, it's more common than not for the option to exist.

Subsidies

The Heritage Foundation has claimed that the average annual benefits paid to Illegal-Alien Headed Families is $24,721. Wretchard asks the right question which is, "Isn't this a subsidy to employers who can hire for less because the govt pays more?"

It sure is.

It used to be the case that the Forsyth County Sheriff's Department paid such low wages that deputies were eligible for food stamps, Medicaid, and all sorts of other assistance from the state and Federal governments. The county commission argued that they were being good stewards of our tax dollars by getting a great deal on law enforcement paychecks.

In a way that was true: they had hit upon a successful scheme to push part of the cost of employing a deputy off onto taxpayers from outside the county (indeed, from across the entire nation). However, it was never clear to me why anyone in Oregon (say) should help pay the freight for local law enforcement from which they obtained no benefit whatsoever.

What's the benefit that we taxpayers obtain from high levels of illegal immigration? I know what benefit the corporations obtain, and what benefit the Democratic Party expects. But what's in it for us who are paying for it?

Patton

Turns out the famous speech that opens the movie was a highly-edited version of a speech Patton regularly gave. You can read the original, in all its profane glory.

Didn't Think That Through

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is one of those people whose chief claim to fame is being a "first," in his case being London's first Muslim mayor. Now, it can by accident happen that any given person is the "first" of a type to occupy some position -- first prominent member of the Rotary club, first semi-professional golfer, whatever. The issue with these people who focus on being the "first" whatever is that they're offering their accidental identity as if it were proof of some positive accomplishment -- as if it were a reason to vote for them, some virtue in respect of which they ought to be preferred for the office.

In any case, he decided to give a speech on the evils of nationalism.

The world is becoming an increasingly turbulent and divided place. We’ve seen Brexit, President Trump elected in the United States and the rise of right-wing populist and narrow nationalist parties around the world.... The last thing we need now is to pit different parts of our country or sections of our society against each other — or to further fuel division or seek separation.

There are two problems with this. The first is that he decided to give this speech in Scotland, a nation whose elective offices have been recently dominated by an organization called The Scottish National Party.

Oops.

The second problem is that Khan himself is a living symbol of an even more divisive, even more narrow mode of 'pitting different parts of our country or sections of our society against one another.' If this is the right standard for judgment, identity politics fares even worse than nationalism, which at least is willing to take any kind of Scot as long as they're Scottish. Drawing the division at the level of the nation at least avoids drawing divisions below that level.

Nor is it clear that it is the right standard in any case, as even supra-nationalist divisions can end up being destructively divisive. Communists were not usually guilty of nationalism -- Ho Chi Minh and a few others excepted -- because they wanted to dispose of all nations in favor of a global government. They still ended up dividing members of nations against one another. Indeed, if strife is the proper measure, it was the singers of the Internationale who had more blood on their hands than anyone.

Doing no harm

Not having a heart attack? You probably shouldn't have a stent. Beta-blockers are iffy, too; it may be that they will have no effect on your likelihood of heart disease or death, though you'll probably die with better-looking blood pressure numbers. That proposed knee operation might bear a little scrutiny, too. The article doesn't discuss statins, so don't even get me started on those. A good way to look at proposed treatments is to compare the "number needed to treat" with the "number needed to harm."

Walter Russel Mead: No Way Trump is in Russia's Pocket

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he'd be doing:

* Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
* Blocking oil and gas pipelines
* Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
* Cutting U.S. military spending
* Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia's ally Iran

That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice. Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump...

For now, as Dr. Mead goes on to note, this is all talk from Trump. He has a prediction about how to judge the actions that follow the talk too.

Wasters

We use wooden wasters for a lot of Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA). Via Insty, here's a video about how dangerous these little things really can be.



Still, you gotta practice with something.

Chaos Keeps Chaos At Bay

In praise of Jim Mattis.

A Pretty Clever Protest

CPAC attendees were tricked into waiving little Russian tricolor flags with "TRUMP" inscribed in gold upon them.

The protest group that pulled that off deserves a moment of credit. I might not have noticed the symbolism myself, given that the Russian tricolor is red, white, and blue. In my mind's eye, the Russian flag still looks like this:



Any other flag is barely going to impact my consciousness as a symbol of Russia.

Bent Out Of Shape

People are all bent up about the 90-day by-country bar on entry in Trump's immigration Executive Order. The only thing it was meant to accomplish was to give the various agencies involved time to come up with a better method of vetting those who wanted to enter the United States from seven terror-prone regions -- I say "regions" and not "countries" as parts of some of them are effectively ungoverned. The bar was never meant to be in place for more than 90 days, it was just meant to buy time for study.

When the AP trumpets this leaked report, they see a pungent criticism of the Trump administration's order.

A draft document obtained by The Associated Press concludes that citizenship is an "unlikely indicator" of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria's civil war started in 2011.... The three-page report challenges Trump's core claims. It said that of 82 people the government determined were inspired by a foreign terrorist group to carry out or try to carry out an attack in the United States, just over half were U.S. citizens born in the United States. The others were from 26 countries, led by Pakistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iraq and Uzbekistan. Of these, only Somalia and Iraq were among the seven nations included in the ban.

I don't know that it's right to say that the document "challenges Trump's core claims," since his core claim was that he wanted his agencies to study the issue during the 90 days and come up with a better system. That sounds like what they're trying to do.

It's interesting that one of the early conclusions is that the list of seven "countries" -- which, we all know, was generated by the Obama administration -- was itself faulty in excluding many of the worst offenders. Note that Saudi Arabia didn't make this list either, which is interesting given that the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis.

So: if the list of nations wasn't solid, and citizenship is a poor indicator anyway, what's better? That's the thing that we really need an answer to, and it's work like this that is going to help us get there. Rather than proving that Trump is a fool (quod erat demonstrandum for the media these days), this seems to prove that his people are taking the task seriously and trying to sort out a good answer to that question.

Childhood in Scotland

Not for most Scottish children, more's the pity, but for four blessed ones.

Behold the Bolt-Action Glock

Yes, it's real. Why? California.

Symphony in Consciousness

We're also putting in a massive budget request for our beloved military. And we will be substantially upgrading all of our military, all of our military, offensive, defensive, everything. Bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and hopefully we'll never have to use it, but nobody's going to mess with us, folks. Nobody. It will be one of the greatest military buildups in American history. No one will dare question, as they have been, because we're very depleted, very, very depleted sequester. Nobody will question our military might again....

I say Democrats, please, approve our Cabinet and get smart on health care, too, if you know me. But we're taking meetings every day with top leaders in business, in science and industry. Yesterday I had 29 of the biggest business leaders in the world in my office. Caterpillar Tractor, Campbell Soup, we had everybody. We had everybody. I like Campbell Soup.

His style is inimitable, but there really is a kind of style to it.

What did you think of the speech?