Existential Threats and Lies

Harvard professor Charles Murray, most known for his book The Bell Curve, was invited to speak at Middlebury College in Vermont this past Thursday. Protestors disrupted the room and he was moved to a private room where he spoke via live web stream. After the protest, as he was leaving, a Middlebury professor who was escorting him was assaulted and injured.

“The protestors then violently set upon the car, rocking it, pounding on it, jumping on and try to prevent it from leaving campus,” he said. “At one point a large traffic sign was thrown in front of the car. Public Safety officers were able, finally, to clear the way to allow the vehicle to leave campus.

“During this confrontation outside McCullough, one of the demonstrators pulled Prof. Stanger’s hair and twisted her neck,” Burger continued. “She was attended to at Porter Hospital later and (on Friday) is wearing a neck brace.”

In the past, I've seen a number of comments from the right that the pajamaboys of the left can't really be dangerous, but I disagree. It's not like one of them is going to step up and challenge a conservative or libertarian to individual combat. No, when it happens, it will begin like this, hundreds of lefties surrounding the target, shouting hatred, someone pushing the target to the ground, and then a frenzied beating and stomping. God forbid, but that's where I see this trend heading.

But what was the protest about? Why did the protestors feel justified, even compelled, to attack? Before Murray spoke, apparently 500 alumni wrote a letter in beyond the green, which claims to be a student-run blog at Middlebury College. The claims in that letter are worth considering, so I will excerpt them at length.

Prof. Borjas on Immigration, Again

We've talked about Harvard Kennedy School economics professor George Borjas twice before at the Hall. Once when he wished Fidel Castro "Good riddance!" and again in the comments of a post on refugees as the author of a study on immigration.

Here he is recently at the NYT:

...

Over the past 30 years, a large fraction of immigrants, nearly a third, were high school dropouts, so the incumbent low-skill work force formed the core group of Americans who paid the price for the influx of millions of workers. Their wages fell as much as 6 percent. Those low-skill Americans included many native-born blacks and Hispanics, as well as earlier waves of immigrants.

... 

The National Academy of Sciences recently estimated the impact of immigration on government budgets. On a year-to-year basis, immigrant families, mostly because of their relatively low incomes and higher frequency of participating in government programs like subsidized health care, are a fiscal burden. A comparison of taxes paid and government spending on these families showed that immigrants created an annual fiscal shortfall of $43 billion to $299 billion.

...

Similarly, the ideological climate that encouraged assimilation back then, neatly encapsulated by our motto “E pluribus unum” (Out of many, one), is dead and gone. A recent University of California directive shows the radical shift. The university’s employees were advised to avoid using phrases that can lead to “microaggressions” toward students and one another. One example is the statement “America is a melting pot,” which apparently sends a message to the recipient that they have to “assimilate to the dominant culture.”

Europe is already confronting the difficulties produced by the presence of unassimilated populations. If nothing else, the European experience shows that there is no universal law that guarantees integration even after a few generations. We, too, will need to confront the trade-off between short-term economic gains and the long-term costs of a large, unassimilated minority.

...

He points out that Trump's answer to the immigration question is to put Americans first, and asks a poignant question.

Many of my colleagues in the academic community — and many of the elite opinion-makers in the news media — recoil when they hear that immigration should serve the interests of Americans. Their reaction is to label such thinking as racist and xenophobic, and to marginalize anyone who agrees.

But those accusations of racism reflect their effort to avoid a serious discussion of the trade-offs. The coming debate would be far more honest and politically transparent if we demanded a simple answer from those who disagree with “America First” proposals: Who are you rooting for?

Personally, I think he's casting his pearls before swine, but maybe this is how the conversation starts. There are some sensible people at Harvard, and at the Ivies in general. They are just a minority, and they're not usually the loud ones.

Poker Card Shootout

I've hit upon a new thing, inspired by the local rifle team, of setting up a poker card for my first set of practice shots. Not my last, at the end of the session. Not a set after I've warmed up and gotten into it. The very first six out of the very first cylinder, because that's how you're going to shoot -- at best -- in the field.

These were at forty feet.

Working Men

Secretary of Interior off to Good Start

Sea, land, air, horseback.

At Least McCarthy Was Worried About a Deadly Enemy

The Russians are not our friends, to be sure. They have their own interests, to be sure. They violated the sovereignty of an allied and friendly nation, Georgia, when they seized south Ossetia. Georgia's army was unable to resist in part because a large portion of it was deployed in Iraq alongside American forces at the time. At some point, we owe both the Georgians and the Russians a debt over that.

On the other hand, Russia is not formally our enemy. The Communists meant to destroy America, and indeed the whole capitalist world. The Russians want a regional hegemony. There are plenty of things that are in Russia's interests that are also in our own, such as encouraging energy development and trying to figure out how to tamp down Islamist terrorism.

Watching people go after Jeff Sessions for being a Russian agent today -- Jeff Sessions! -- is like watching the Red Scare play itself out again, only without an Evil Empire that really does intend to destroy the United States.

It's not just that the accusation is contrived, as the written context for the oral questions clearly established that Sessions wasn't being asked about his work with Senate Armed Services. It's not just that the Hillary Clinton State Department played the same games with Putin that Putin was playing with Hillary. It's not just that Russian intelligence collection efforts aimed at the Trump campaign mirror CIA collection efforts aimed at the Socialists in France, which the CIA did for perfectly legitimate reasons of national interest.

No, this is chasing after Russian spooks even where it is completely implausible that they exist. Sessions may have moderated his tone on Russia in order to align himself with the Presidential campaign he was supporting, but that doesn't change the fact that he's been one of the biggest Russia hawks in DC forever and a day.

Meanwhile, as W.R. Mead was recommending recently, why not look at the actions of the Trump administration to see how friendly it really is to Russia?

Is all this paranoia indicative of self-medication by the defeated elite?

Seamus Heaney's Translation of Beowulf

Part 1

Part 2

Pagan metal

Maybe Ash Wednesday isn't the best day to showcase a proudly heathen band, but I do like this music. Although the band seems to have some connection to the Netherlands, its vocalists are Northmen of various sorts, channeling the old culture.

Trump Channels Malory

... lexicographer Kory Stamper, who writes and edits dictionary definitions for Merriam-Webster, wants it known that bigly is a real word — even if it’s not the word Trump meant to use.

...

Stamper offers a brief history of the word bigly. This adverb came into use around 1400 and stuck around for roughly 500 years. It has been used two different ways over the centuries.

The first meaning, says Stamper, was to mean “with great force or violently or strongly.” It appeared in such fashion in the classic King Arthur tale Le Morte d’Arthur, published way back in 1485: “So roughly and so bigly that none might withstand him,” wrote Sir Thomas Malory.

The second meaning, which has been more popular in recent centuries, means “boastfully, haughtily or proudly.” Thomas Hardy put it to use in his 1874 novel Far From the Madding Crowd: “I don’t see that I deserve to be put upon and stormed out for nothing, concluded the small woman bigly.”

So, yes, let's cut taxes with great force, indeed.

The Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian

O Lord and Master of my life, take from me the spirit of sloth, despair, lust of power, and idle talk.

But give rather the spirit of chastity, humility, patience, and love to Thy servant.

Yea, O Lord and King, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother, for blessed art Thou, unto ages of ages. Amen.

Bear and Wolf

A beautiful series of photographs, capturing a surprising pair.

DB: Pentagon Cadence Study

"We know the saying: train like you fight," said Evans. "So why are you going to be chanting something that you're never going to encounter in a combat environment?"

According to Evans, the drive to overhaul cadences came when after-action reports from the 75th Ranger Regiment on the popular multi-service "C-130 Rolling Down a Strip" cadence showed that not only did Airborne Rangers' chutes not open wide, but when the reserve failed they were not able to go after Satan.

"Most couldn't even penetrate the ground," according to Evans...

Good news about napalm, though.

The Elite Smokestack in Britain

We have a problem here in America that I was recently discussing as the problem of the cursus honorum. All our leadership thinks alike, because nearly all of them went to Ivy League schools, then Ivy League grad schools, Ivy League law, then Wall Street or a ladder in government.

It's even worse in Britain. As the Guardian points out, the UK's government is almost wholly led by people who graduated from one university, Oxford, with exactly the same degree: Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).

These schools, including Oxford, are not necessarily bad schools. They may well deserve much of the accolades and respect that attaches to them. But they produce tokens of a type, and that type has its own biases, and places where its mind is closed.

Of course, that view is the very reason that "diversity" arguments are floated at these very institutions: the idea is that more people from different backgrounds should undergo exactly the same education. What is needed is diversity on the other end, in terms of electing and appointing leadership.

That kind of diversity would undermine the existence of these schools, however. So much of what they do is built around producing the leadership class, which then hallows their position by sending its offspring back to the very same schools.

First Amendment Update

A Georgia couple is facing a combined 35 years in prison today after flying Confederate flags at a black child's birthday party. The longest sentence, 20 years with 13 years mandatory prison time, is technically for "aggravated assault," although it actually sounds less like assault and more like the misdemeanor offense of pointing a weapon. The state managed to convict on three counts of aggravated assault in spite of the absence of an actual assault.

The group was prosecuted under the Street Gangs Terrorism and Prevention Act, on the strength of the fact that they were part of a named group ("Respect the Flag"). In other words, organizing for a political purpose -- a protected 1st Amendment free association liberty -- now opens you to prosecution as a street gang.

Although the prosecutor denies that their choice to fly the Confederate flag in any way relates to the incredibly harsh sentences for a nonviolent confrontation, the judge described the confrontation as "a hate crime."

Georgia doesn't have a law against "hate crimes."

It looks a lot like the judge chose to accept a theory of prosecution under which free expression and free association are aggravating factors. The protected political freedoms, in other words, are themselves the reason why a misdemeanor is transformed into a 20 year felony. They chose to create a group to pursue a political agenda, and the fact that they had a group name is what lets them be prosecuted as a "street gang." They chose to fly flags and speak disapproved words, and that's what allows them to be convicted of "aggravated assault" instead of "pointing a weapon." They were convicted of the hate crime, in other words, that exists in the judge's mind even though it does not exist in the law.

AVI often says that we never get to pick the things we have to defend, and here's a good example. Doubtless these people are rednecks, probably they are racists, and nevertheless their protected liberties have been transformed by the state into crimes. That has to be opposed, even if the people involved are not particularly worthy of respect.

UPDATE: According to NPR, the sentence extends even to banishment.

UPDATE: This reminds me of a story I've been thinking about for a few days, but that I only know firmly know what to think about. Arizona has been considering a law to apply racketeering laws to political organizations whose protests become violent. This also allows the government to treat people who have come together to express a political opinion as a criminal organization, if at any point there is an altercation about it.

These are serious threats to important First Amendment freedoms.

Of Course

Headline: "Ex-Calif. State Sen. Leland Yee, gun control champion, heading to prison for weapons trafficking."

His organized crime associates know perfectly well that gun crime works better when the victims are disarmed.

The Kitchen They Called Hell

Sword and Sorcery Future

Wretchard writes that we are returning to an age of magic.

This, though, should not be a surprise. King Arthur came after the Roman age, not before it. A few years earlier, and Tacitus was writing his histories. A few years later, and you might ride out into a dark and mysterious forest and encounter a giant or a dragon.

I only wish I were younger again. But maybe I shall be.

Declassified Commie Jokes

No, really. The Agency apparently collected them like we'd collect "atmospherics" in Iraq. They just declassified a bunch of them.

Sentence from a schoolboy’s weekly composition class essay: “My cat just had seven kittens. They are all communists.” Sentence from the same boy’s composition the following week: “My cat’s seven kittens are all capitalists.” Teacher reminds the boy that the previous week he had said the kittens were communists. “But now they’ve opened their eyes,” replies the child.

I guess this is the week for Communist jokes, because I just ran across this one the other day.

American Legion Riders Unwelcome

We are extremely grateful to all of our active military members and veterans and are honored to have them as valued guests in any of our locations.

“Our dress code, which prohibits evidence of gang affiliation, is in place to ensure that everyone is able to enjoy themselves in a fun and safe environment. Though we understand that the American Legion promotes a positive mission, for consistency reasons we cannot allow motorcycle jackets displaying patches or rockers.

Seems like there's a well-known quote about foolish consistency.

This is roughly like deciding that, since you don't like fascists, and fascists wore uniforms, you won't allow anyone in uniform to eat in your place. Boy Scouts, cops, soldiers, nuns... we have to be consistent about providing that 'fun and safe' no-uniform environment!

Morons.

If They're 3,000 Years Old, They're Not Scottish

Headline: "Archaeologists Uncover 3,000-Year-Old Scottish Weapons Under Soccer Field Site."