My precious

About sums it up for me.

Sure, I know, Republicans had a narrow majority, and they could only pass something through the Senate by reconciliation, which imposes limitations. But the thing is, Republicans don't hide behind the vagaries of Senate procedure during campaign season. Trump did not win the Republican nomination telling rallies of thousands of people, "We're going to repeal and replace Obamacare — as long as it satisfies the Byrd rule in the judgment of the Senate parliamentarian!"

What's so utterly disgraceful, is not just that Republicans failed so miserably, but that they barely tried, raising questions about whether they ever actually wanted to repeal Obamacare in the first place.

Honky Tonk Rock

This piece comes from a list of ten similar pieces compiled by Rolling Stone. They describe them as Mike Ness' "country-punk covers," although in this case it's just a honky tonk version of a song Ness wrote himself. Unlike the others in the list, then, it's not really a cover.

Speaking of Rolling Stones, that band did one of these things too. Here's their honky tonk version of "Honky Tonk Women."

The Sword in (Late Medieval) War

John Clements of ARMA writes.

On the Lapse in Political Virtue

David French is quite right.

Best Thing Under the Circumstances

The Republican-led health care act was hideous, and we're better off without it. Someday we'll get the Federal government out of health care, but this didn't even pretend to do that. Someday we'll get to price transparency and fee-for-service instead of an insurance model, so we can have true markets. This bill didn't do that either. It didn't do anything I'd want done to try to fix the way we pay for health care, but it would have propped up all the worst features of the current system.

Hopefully the Trump administration learned that Congress is a co-equal branch that can't be just ordered to support a policy whether it makes sense or not. Failing that, hopefully at least Congress learned that about itself today.

They can take their time and get it right, or they can just repeal O-care with a one-year delay to give time for alternative solutions appear, either at the state level or from the market itself. Or they can do nothing and hope it all falls apart someday on its own, which would still be better than this. Under the circumstances, killing this bill was the best idea.

Christianity is Irrelevant

So argues this writer, who is quite pleased about it:

I’m excited the North American church is dying. Christians not having the influence we once had in the 1900s gives me great hope. For the past 100 years we’ve had a lot of cultural converts. Everyone is a Christian because they grew up in Texas. Or they go to church. Or their mom and dad raised them that way. Hell, according to the U.S. census 70% of Americans identify as “Christian.” But the vast majority of those responses are nothing more than cultural identification, not Christianity. I imagine that’s why so many people despise Christians. Their belief is cultural, and no one intends to follow the man they claim governs their life, so we end up this giant homogenous blob of hypocrites that judge and condemn people, instead of looking like they did in 165 AD. Instead of rushing to the aid of others, or paying for pagan burials like our ancestors did, we have half-hearted followers who run rampant through the streets of social media pointing the finger to everyone except themselves.

The reason I’m excited about the shift is because as the cultural converts die, vibrant Christians will take their place. Churches will be smaller and stranger to the public, but they’ll be healthier.

Last night I watched another '70s counterculture movie -- Vanishing Point, which has an awesome Dodge Challenger as its real main character -- and was reminded of how 'small and strange' that version of Christianity is. It's really strange, but not really bad: the "Long Haired Friends of Jesus" in the song (and movie) Convoy.

It's true that I meet fewer and fewer young people who recognize obvious Biblical references in movies or television. "That's Ecclesiastes," I'll tell them, and they kind of seem surprised that something so cool could have come out of the Bible. We none of us control any of this, and what is going to happen will happen. Still, there is some reason to hope that it won't all be bad.

The Guy Who Got Ben Rhodes' Job

The Atlantic has a piece on him, which a friend of mine who is quoted in it describes as fair and accurate. The guy's name is Michael Anton, and you probably read an article he wrote during the election last year.

We traded up, in this respect at least.

Air Assault in Raqqa

U.S.-backed Syrian Arab forces landed on American military helicopters with Apache gunships flying overhead.

The indigenous forces were accompanied by U.S. special operations “advisors,” the spokesman added.

“It takes a special breed of warrior to pull off an airborne operation or air assault behind enemy lines,” said Col. Joe Scrocca “There is nothing easy about this – it takes audacity and courage. And the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) has that in spades.”

There's something you don't see every day.

UPDATE:

Related.

How the Irish Were Always White

David Bernstein, in "Sorry, but the Irish were always 'white' (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)" over at the Volokh Conspiracy, touches on a topic that relates to my own past research.

The relevant scholarly literature seems to have started with Noel Ignatiev’s book “How the Irish Became White,” and taken off from there. But what the relevant authors mean by white is ahistorical. They are referring to a stylized, sociological or anthropological understanding of “whiteness,” which means either “fully socially accepted as the equals of Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic stock,” or, in the more politicized version, “an accepted part of the dominant ruling class in the United States.”

Those may be interesting sociological and anthropological angles to pursue, but it has nothing to do with whether the relevant groups were considered to be white.

Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions).

Some of my graduate research in history involved looking into Irish immigration to the US from the 1830s to 1850s and the nativist response to it. At the time, the Irish were considered white even by the Anglo-Saxon Americans who opposed them. Race was understood quite differently then than it is now (as Bernstein points out later in the article), and the idea that the Irish were not white when they arrived uses today's race and ethnic studies definitions and projects them onto American society in the past. It has nothing to do with how Americans in the 19th century viewed the Irish and everything to do with how race and ethnic studies researchers view race today.

One factor that Bernstein does not touch on, probably because it is not widely recognized, is that nativism in America prior to the Civil War was not about immigration per se but rather religion. The nativists had no problem with many other immigrant groups coming in, but they had huge objections to Catholic immigration.

Read nativist writings and over and over you will read about how Catholics can never be true Americans because they owe their final allegiance to the Pope, whom nativists often depicted as a foreign prince. As millions of Catholics poured into the US, they developed a separate Catholic school system, avoiding one of the main ways immigrants were assimilated in the North. There were legal battles fought over whether states could mandate that schools use the Protestant version of the Bible (it wasn't questioned that they could mandate study of the Bible). The separate school system and various other Catholic social organizations that sprang up seemed like an effort by the whole population of Catholic immigrants to avoid becoming American. That's why the "nativists" (an epithet invented by their political enemies) called themselves "native Americans" and formed the American Party. As Catholics became important voting blocks in Northern cities and began to exercise political power, the nativists began to view mass Catholic immigration as an invasion by a foreign power.

All of this built on centuries of anti-Catholic sentiment in England which came to America early on. The Puritans, after all, wanted to purify the Church of England of all its Catholic aspects. Anti-Catholic bigotry was probably the oldest kind of bigotry in the American colonies, and it continued into the new nation. I've read that at the Constitutional Convention there was a debate over whether Catholics should be allowed to vote. The winning argument was that there were so few of them in the nation that it couldn't hurt anything to let them vote. That began to change with Irish immigration during the famines.

No Problem, Boss

A teenage boy was told by school leaders that he had to “tolerate” undressing in front of a female student and to make it as “natural” as possible, according to a blockbuster lawsuit filed in a Pennsylvania federal district court.

You might think that teen pregnancy is something to be avoided. No worries, mate: the female student identifies as male, so he couldn't possibly get pregnant.

"Reasons to Vote for Democrats" Becomes Amazon #1 Best-Seller

Earlier this month we looked at the insightful book Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide by Michael J. Knowles with its amazing reviews. It looks like the book has reached #1 best-seller status on Amazon.

 

It currently has 1747 reviews and a 5-star rating. Since the book is almost entirely blank, that's an interesting feat. It does apparently have a real bibliography, though, which makes me curious ... Is it worth six bucks to see what's in the bibliography? I guess I could keep it at the office to annoy co-workers with, too ... 

The reviews really are worth reading, if you haven't been over yet.

Terrorism as Boredom

So, today there was another terrorist attack in London, involving ramming people with autos as has become usual. The attacker was exactly who you'd expect, and indeed he was exactly who authorities expected, because as usual they admit he was known to them before hand. The head of police in London said, as usual, that we should keep an open mind and not assume anything about motives (from this guy they already knew about), but also that we must take time to remember the stress that this puts on Muslim members of the community, who are especially prone to feeling unwelcome at times like this.

It's so routine now. This time the Prime Minister was nearly within arms' reach of the attack, but so what? You can always get another Prime Minister. They're just as disposable as everyone else. The important thing is that no one jump to conclusions about that thing we already know about.

Insanity Abounds

So, just this week, we had a hearing in Congress in which the FBI director admitted that someone -- probably on Team Obama -- had committed a serious felony by leaking FISA warrant information.

Democrats: 'You're trying to change the subject!'
Republicans: 'This is a serious crime!'

Today, the head of House Intelligence revealed FISA warrant information to the press.

Democrats: 'This is a serious crime!'
Republicans: 'You're trying to change the subject!'

Do any of you in Washington care about national security at all?

UPDATE: I wonder how much of this turns on 'need to know.' The President has whatever security clearance he needs, ex officio, but he doesn't necessarily need to know everything. Normally there's nothing he wouldn't 'need to know,' but a collection effort targeting him and his companions for possible action might qualify. Now the Congress might really 'need to know' that, because they have legitimate oversight purposes.

The press has neither the clearance nor the need to know. Does the citizenry need to know? Most wouldn't have the clearance, so it's an irrelevant question. Until it isn't, because the formal structures begin to fail and there's no hope but a recourse to the People.

Reflections

Did you ever wonder why artists painted such obsessively realistic still-lifes, including shiny objects?  Apparently because it's simply an absorbing task to trick the eye into seeing distorted reflections by using only flat color.  This is the newest Chrismon I've completed:

Originalism vs Textualism?

In a discussion below, there was a thread about how originalism is inferior to textualism. The second, as described, sounded to me like a subset of the first. Judge Gorsuch seems to think they're the same thing:

[The] second point I would make is it would be a mistake to suggest that originalism turns on the secret intentions of the drafters of the language of the law. The point of originalism, textualism, whatever label you want to put on it–what a good judge always strives to do and what we all do–is to understand what the words on the page mean, not [to] import words that come from us, but [to] apply what you, the people’s representatives, the lawmakers, have done. And so when it comes to equal protection of the laws, for example, it matters not a whit that some of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment were racists–because they were–or sexists–because they were. The law they drafted promises equal protection of the law to all persons… I think that guarantee… is the most radical guarantee in all of the Constitution and maybe in all of human history.

"Tribal Epistemology"

In which Vox hits upon the truth, but thinks it applies to the other side.

I mean, by all means read it -- some of their allegations against our side are serious, and you should prove them wrong by considering them fairly. It is amazing, though, to see them come right to the very edge and not ask, "Hey -- do we do this too?" The closest approach to that is an assertion that the problem disproportionately affects Republicans, which is at least a wave in the direction of the idea that it might sometimes appear on the left as well.

In Praise of Hierarchy (and Bureaucracy!)

Several leading philosophers, including Kwame Anthony Appiah, have a piece calling for a reconsideration of how important these things are.

Appiah is on my radar for his work on honor, which I think is incomplete but nevertheless interesting. Honor is like hierarchy in that relatively few thinkers today want to spend much time praising it, perhaps for similar reasons.

Susan Rice on Honesty and the White House

The Washington Post decided to publish an article by the least credible person in America on the importance of White House officials speaking the truth. They seem to be completely oblivious to the irony of having Susan Rice lecture us on this question.

Credibility is the currency in rhetoric, and Rice could not be less credible than she is. However, there's more to life than rhetoric. Philosophically, it is improper to dismiss her simply because she is a hypocrite who is manifestly guilty of the same offense -- or an even worse one, as her lies were carefully planned. That would be the logical fallacy of tu quoque, combined with the fallacy of ad hominem. She might have a point, even though she's a horrible person and a hypocrite.

And, indeed, she does have a point. Honor holds the world together. Truth is a force multiplier. Those things are true, whoever says them.

More Cultural Appropriation

I think they may be appropriating us, actually, but whatever. Maybe that's all to the good.



If you don't know the artist, she went on to be somebody. Cultural appropriation was a big part of that.

Just for Fun