The Murder of an American Soldier at the University of Maryland

The author of this piece thinks it was a racially motivated killing; perhaps it was. Of greater importance is that he was a lieutenant in the United States Army.

Collins, of Calvert County, was scheduled to graduate with a degree in business from Bowie State University Tuesday, and was commissioned May 18 to join the United States Army. He was involved with Bowie State's ROTC chapter, police said.

Darryl L. Godlock, a pastor who was serving as a spokesman for the Collins family, said the young man had obtained his airborne certification. Collins wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father, a military veteran, Godlock said.

"He wanted to make his parents proud of him so he went into the military to serve his country," Godlock said.

We should avenge him as a soldier.

"A Communist Fanfic"

No kidding. His argument that the recent Mad Max movie fits this plotline is basically right, though. It just ends with the release of all the water that was being wrongfully hoarded to grow plants, rather than continuing to the point at which the now-held-in-common water is all gone and the plants have been swept over by the desert that surrounds them.

But hey: "Make sure to buy the t-shirt!"

Jerusalem

It is amazing to me that no US President has before visited the Old City. I had read and studied the conflict for years before I went, but only standing there did I understand the close scale and what was at stake. The "pre-1967 borders" of which you hear so much would require yielding up the Old City, including the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and -- of moment to Christians -- the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

For Christians, it may well be enough that the city is controlled by those who will protect the sites and permit access to pilgrims. We have seen the Taliban and others destroy heritage sites of other religions in order to establish the primacy of their own faith; but actual control may not be of special importance if protection is guaranteed. Muslims also care about the preservation of their shrines. The Iranians use the protection of special Shi'a shrines in Syria and Iraq as a major focus of their recruiting of local militias who will serve as reliable proxy forces. But the Muslims also assert a physical claim more boldly: the Old City's Muslim quarter is closed to non-Muslims lacking special permission. As a practical matter they do rely on the Israelis to protect their shrines, but it is clear that the Muslims of Jerusalem do not trust any outsider to do it: not even to pass nearby.

For Jews, though, Jerusalem has another importance. Go up on the Mount of Olives, within sight of Jerusalem's Old City and another place that would have to be surrendered. Gethsemane lies between the Old City and the Mount of Olives. The mount is chiefly a graveyard. Thousands of years of Jewish graves are there. For a people whose whole history has been marked by exile, Jerusalem is the one place that is truly home.

You can appreciate all that intellectually from afar, but it takes on a new clarity when you go and see it. All Presidents should go there, at least the ones who intend to meddle in this conflict.

Woah

Many Purple Hearts issued even today were manufactured in 1945, because the DOD expected so many casualties from the invasion of Japan.

As late as 1985, the Defense Logistics Agency still had about 120,000 refurbished Purple Heart sets dating back to World War II, said DLA spokeswoman Mimi Schirmacher.

“There could be a small number of WWII-era medal sets still in the hands of military service customers and it is possible that recent and current issues of medals were made from stock produced in previous time periods,” Schirmacher said in an e-mail.

The DLA has ordered about 34,000 Purple Hearts since 1976, of which 21,000 were ordered in 2008, she said.

But Giangreco, who wrote a book about the planned invasion of Japan, maintains that the bulk of Purple Hearts in stock date back to World War II. His research found that most of the refurbished Purple Hearts were sent to military depots, units and hospitals between 1985 and 1999.

Mr. Wednesday

I don't know the book or the TV show, but here's a video by a scholar on how well it fits the mythology. He was mostly impressed. There's some good lessons along the way on Old Norse versus Old English, the stories being drawn upon, and so forth.

Andrew C. McCarthy on Comey, Trump

Jim Comey is a patriot. That I have disagreed with him on some big things, does not change that. Disagreeing is what Americans do – that’s self-government by people who care passionately about how we are governed.

But let’s assume for argument’s sake that I am wrong. Let’s say that, as Sean Spicer says, Comey is a grandstander who has intentionally politicized an investigation in order to undermine the president. He’s still not the Russians. “America First,” remember? Comey is an American who believes in America; Lavrov and Kislyak are Putin operatives who oppose America at every turn. Comey believes in freedom and the rule of law; the Putin regime believes in Soviet tyranny and the rule of Putin.

Comey is one of us. Lavrov and Kislyak are two of them.

Treason Prospers

The word "treason" is getting thrown around a lot these days in very loose ways, and on very limited evidence. Let me say that by "treason" I mean the explicit Constitutional definition of aiding the enemy, and by "enemy" I mean an actual enemy that is trying to kill American soldiers using physical violence. By this standard, PFC Bradley Manning was clearly a traitor. He was saved from the charge only by the good fortune of having a chain of command that terminated in someone uncomfortable with the traditional definitions of "traitor," "treason," "enemy," and similar things.

Now it looks like the traitor, styled "Chelsea," is likely to be the focus of a documentary. Naturally, there will be a substantial payment to the principle.

On May 17th, Chelsea walks free and will reveal herself to the world. XY Chelsea is the journey of her fight for survival and dignity, and her transition from prisoner to a free woman.

Celebrate what you like, I suppose, but be clear on what the offense is. Manning betrayed the trust of fellow soldiers, and indeed of every American on the ground in Iraq, by recklessly trading secrets whose contents he hadn't bothered to learn himself to anyone who would broadcast those secrets to the enemy. In doing so, he endangered and doubtless cost the lives of fellow Americans who had deployed with him to war. He broke his oath and he broke his trust.

Fight as Manning will, there is no dignity now to be had. Not after that.

Jim Webb on Trump, Democrats

Loyalty & the Oath

I take this essay to be significant. Its subject matter is eternally so. Its timing is perhaps more so. Even eternal things have their special hour.

A Convincing Piece on Fraternities

I never even considered joining a fraternity at any point in my college life. This piece convinces me that I may have made a mistake.

Reform is not possible because the old-line, historically white social fraternities have been synonymous with risk-taking and defiance from their very inception. They are a brotherhood born in mutiny and forged in the fire of rebellion. These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection.

They cannot reform.

That sounds awesome. I thought they were just a bunch of loud-mouthed rich boys.

Fake News, Right and Left

Don't believe in fake news, says National Review's Kevin Williamson -- be suspicious of internet-sourced stories, he says, but then claims that traditional journalism is more or less reliable. There isn't really 'fake news.'

Oh, yes, there is, says Vox on the left. And -- they go on to add -- our side does it too.

An interesting pair of admissions against interest, both aimed at trying to restore some capacity for a reasoned debate between the factions.

UPDATE: In addition to genuinely fake news, there's also the more traditional problem of bias.

A major new study out of Harvard University has revealed the true extent of the mainstream media’s bias against Donald Trump... They found that the tone of some outlets was negative in as many as 98% of reports, significantly more hostile than the first 100 days of the three previous administrations.

That was a European outlet, though. The major American outlets were much closer to nine out of ten than ten out of ten.

UPDATE: The actual Harvard study is here.

ESP is Real and Science is Broken

So argues an article at Slate.

Having served for a time as an associate editor of JPSP, Bem knew his methods would be up to snuff. With about 100 subjects in each experiment, his sample sizes were large. He’d used only the most conventional statistical analyses. He’d double- and triple-checked to make sure there were no glitches in the randomization of his stimuli.

Even with all that extra care, Bem would not have dared to send in such a controversial finding had he not been able to replicate the results in his lab, and replicate them again, and then replicate them five more times. His finished paper lists nine separate ministudies of ESP. Eight of those returned the same effect.

Bem’s 10-year investigation, his nine experiments, his thousand subjects—all of it would have to be taken seriously. He’d shown, with more rigor than anyone ever had before, that it might be possible to see into the future. Bem knew his research would not convince the die-hard skeptics. But he also knew it couldn’t be ignored....

[F]or most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you’d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field—and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind—could be total bunk.

Confirmation bias check: I very much agree that most of what we think we understand about the mind is bunk.

UPDATE: This article later made Arts & Letters Daily, which makes me even happier to have mentioned it here first. It's really worth your time, no matter how devoted to science you are or are not. It raises significant questions about the state of our knowledge, and what it means to know what we think we know.

A White Horse is not a Horse

No, not that one. That one's really not a horse. I mean to refer to a philosophical argument from China's Warring States period. The author is somewhat like Socrates, in that he questions the basic uses of language and points out difficulties in how our concepts apply to the world. He is unlike Socrates, if the historians are right, in that he did this chiefly for fun. For Socrates, these philosophical problems were the most important thing in the world -- literally worth dying for, if Plato's treatment of Socrates' defense and death are accurate.

For Gongsun Long, they were a way of entertaining at court. He offered five proofs that 'white horse is not horse.' You can read them all, and a careful analysis of them, at the link above. Here are two of the proofs by themselves, for you to wrestle with before you click through to read the analysis.

Argument 2.
If someone seeks a horse, then it's admissible to deliver a brown or a black horse. If someone seeks a white horse, then it's inadmissible to deliver a brown or a black horse. Suppose white horse were indeed horse. In that case, what the person seeks in those two cases would be one and the same. What he seeks being one and the same is the white one not being different from horse. If what he seeks is not different, then how is it that the brown or black horse are in the one case admissible and in the other inadmissible? Admissible and inadmissible, that they contradict each other is clear. So brown and black horses are one and the same in being able to answer to “having horse” but not to “having white horse.” This confirms that white horse is not horse.

Argument 5.
“White” does not fix what is white.… As to “white horse,” saying it fixes what is white. What fixes what is white is not white. “Horse” selects or excludes none of the colors, so brown or black horses can all answer. “White horse” selects some color and excludes others; brown and black horses are all excluded on the basis of color, and so only white horse alone can answer. Excluding none is not excluding some. Therefore white horse is not horse.

The translation is a bit confusing here. When he says "'white' does not fix what is white," he means that asking for a "white" thing doesn't tell you what kind of thing is supposed to be white. You fix the issue of just what is white not when you specify white, but when you specify the kind of thing you want. This is the same issue that caused Aristotle to divide the world into substances (like horses) and attributes (like being white). So it's not an idle thing to notice; Aristotle hung his basic ontology on the same point.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

In fairness, this is exactly why people voted for Donald Trump.

Toby Keith is headed to the Middle East to join President Donald Trump on his trip to Saudi Arabia. The country singer will perform at a free, men-only concert Saturday in the capital city of Riyadh alongside Saudi singer Rabeh Saqer, The Associated Press reported.

Over/under on whether he'll perform this fan favorite?



Before you say there's no way, take a moment to watch this video as well. There's a kind of showmanship at work here.

Expel Turkey's Ambassador

So says Sen. McCain.

Yesterday's violence, against American citizens on US soil for engaging in their constitutional rights, is completely unacceptable.

Gonzo Second Amendment Advocacy

From Joe Bob Briggs:

Hunter S. Thompson used to mail me giant photos of objects being blown to smithereens with dynamite or flung from some kind of skeet contraption so they could be exploded midair, and in most cases he was both the photographer and the destroyer. He would scrawl the precise date and time of the explosion on the bottom of the photo and copy it to the sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, who had repeatedly warned Thompson that he was in possession of illegal military ordnance, that he was in violation of pyrotechnic laws, and that he was in imminent danger of jail. As a Second Amendment radical, Thompson wanted to document exactly when, where, and how he had violated the law, then dare the law to do something about it. To me he would just write, “I’m on it.”

Taki's Magazine prefers that you read the rest there, in order to preserve their revenue stream. The rest is a book review of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia.

How to Leak Documents: A Primer from the Patriots at the Washington Post

Just in case any of you were thinking of violating your oaths to keep the secrets you swore to protect, here are step by step instructions.

The Comey Memo

This one may really do it.

“I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Comey, according to the memo. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”…

It's only obstruction if he threatened to fire Comey to get him to drop the investigation, says Richard Painter, George W. Bush’s former chief ethics lawyer; but he went beyond threats and actually fired Comey.

And then he explained why he did: because of this Russia probe.

When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.... Look, I want to find out if there was a problem with an election having to do with Russia. Or, by the way, anybody else. Any other country. And I want that to be so strong and so good. And I want it to happen. I also want to have a really competent, capable director. He's not. He's a showboat.

He was competent enough to keep memos on his conversations with an unpredictable President, apparently. Or so we shall discover if the Congressional subpoena produces this alleged memo.

Rethinking Gays in the Military

It's been several years now since "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was replaced with openly gay service. At the time, those of us who were opposed to the repeal worried that introducing sexuality into line combat units would be disastrous for unit cohesion. Military service is rightly conditioned on the needs of the service, without disrespect to those who are excluded for having conditions -- whether blindness or any other condition -- that are not ideal for service.

Our opponents argued that, in fact, asking people to live a lie was too big an ask: they should either be allowed to serve, or not allowed to serve, and realistically with Obama in office that meant they should be allowed to serve.

Some political arguments are about morality, but many political arguments are about forecasting. Once a decision is made and some time has passed, it's possible to go back and examine whether the forecasts were good or not.

On reflection, I think that those of us who opposed the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" were right about the danger of introducing sexuality to line military units, but wrong to think that gays posed much danger here. There just aren't enough gays, as a percentage of humanity, to create that much change. It's not all that likely that a company of infantry will have one gay guy in it; if they have two, that's unusual. There is thus little reason to be afraid that they will pair up, and even if they do, it's really unlikely there will be a third gay in the unit who might become jealous. The argument that it could happen is not wrong, but as a practical matter it doesn't really happen in the kind of small, line units where unit cohesion is of such critical importance.

By contrast, the Marines United scandal shows that the real dangers come from introducing heterosexuality into line units. Even though there aren't that many more women than gays in line infantry units, nearly all the men are subject to feeling attractions and jealousies towards them. There is a serious threat to good order and discipline when the majority of the unit is involved in competing with each other for the sexual attentions of the rare woman; a male/female pair will become the focus of intense jealousy; and if a breakup occurs, you run into an increased risk of photo sharing of the sort that the Marines United scandal is all about.

Since there is apparently no possibility of asking people not to hook up with fellow servicemembers, nor to ask them not to share nude photos of themselves while in the military, we are left with a pretty damaging dynamic to unit cohesion. The military is trying to address it by cracking down on the photo sharing only, which strikes me as a half-measure that won't be effective because it doesn't begin to treat the emotional issues that are really at work. Young people have higher hormone levels and less experience, and they are easily swayed -- we all remember how easily from our own youth -- by longing and loneliness and jealousy.

Consider too that those high hormone levels, in the form of testosterone, are even helpful for the basic mission of the infantry. Yet insofar as these same high levels make one more likely to make bad love-related decisions that will now result in a mandatory separation review, it sounds as if the introduction of sex to the infantry really is proving disastrous. Not only are these units cracking up over the sexualization of fellow soldiers or Marines, the chosen solution is likely to expel chiefly those whose hormone mix best supports battlefield performance.

So, we were right about the sex. We were wrong about homosexuality, though. It's too uncommon to be the kind of problem we thought it might be. Rather, heterosexuality is the real danger to the military's unit cohesion.

Brief Thoughts on Constitutional Interpretation in a Common Law System

It occurred to me the other day that a lot of Tea Partiers and other sundry and assorted Conservative types tend to treat the US Constitution as if it were in a civil law system rather than a common law system.

In a civil law system, when a judge or court makes a decision, it does not set a precedent that binds future judges or courts. All a court has to look at are the statutes in question and the facts of the case. This is similar to the old "What part of 'shall not be infringed' do you not understand?" rhetoric I've heard many times in discussions of the 2nd Amendment.

Stare decisis, or precedent, is an essential feature of common law systems like ours, which we inherited from the English. You can't just look at the law and the facts in a common law system. You must also look at precedents set by previous courts. As a result, we can't just read the text of the Constitution itself to understand what is and is not constitutional.

Although I think the system we ended up with was brilliant, I personally think the Founders messed up when it came to the judiciary. They have become a rolling constitutional convention because of the role of precedent. I have thought quite a bit about how to solve that problem, but maybe a simple solution would be to strip USSC rulings on the Constitution of precedent.

Of course, I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on TV. My suggestion would probably wreck the whole system and bring about the Fimbulwinter and eventual Apocalypse. But if you ignore that, it's kind of an interesting idea.