"Hiring Lunatics"

That's how Michael Yon describes the Army's move to permit wavers for recruits with certain mental disorders.

People with a history of “self-mutilation,” bipolar disorder, depression and drug and alcohol abuse can now seek waivers to join the Army under an unannounced policy enacted in August, according to documents obtained by USA TODAY.

The decision to open Army recruiting to those with mental health conditions comes as the service faces the challenging goal of recruiting 80,000 new soldiers through September 2018. To meet last year's goal of 69,000, the Army accepted more recruits who fared poorly on aptitude tests, increased the number of waivers granted for marijuana use and offered hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses.... accepting recruits with those mental health conditions in their past carries risks, according to Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatrist who retired from the Army as a colonel in 2010 and is an expert on waivers for military service. People with a history of mental health problems are more likely to have those issues resurface than those who do not, she said.

“It is a red flag,” she said. “The question is, how much of a red flag is it?”

While bipolar disorder can be kept under control with medication, self-mutilation — where people slashing their skin with sharp instruments — may signal deeper mental health issues, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Well, or it may not. I knew a Major who had a huge brand on his arm that he'd gotten from his college fraternity. He was a good officer. Likewise, the Army has been forced to ease its policy on tattoos recently, too. Tattoos are similar to scarification in most respects. Tattoos were looked upon similarly as a sign of mental health or adjustment issues when I was young; now they're close to full acceptance as a mode of self-expression.

The best way to know that someone has their issues (whatever they may be) under control is to see that they have led a successful life. Maybe they drink a bit too much; lots of soldiers do. Maybe they used to cut themselves as a teenager. Nevertheless, they've held jobs of increasing responsibility, they've managed relationships with stability over a long period of time, they have achievements under their belt. 'Warning signs' are just warnings; sometimes ignoring a warning doesn't cause any problems at all.

The problem is that Army has to make decisions about this while people are still young enough that they haven't been tested yet. They are often going to be the first test that these young people might pass -- or might fail. That's a tough spot to be in: if only recruiting 40 year olds was practical.

A Saudi View on Reforms

While I assume the author is employed by the Saudi state to say this, frankly I wouldn't mind seeing a little reform along these lines among our own governing parties.

Corruption has always been the Kingdom’s worst kept secret.... Up until this point, the default expectation among ordinary Saudis was that an official is corrupt. If, by chance, he proved not to be corrupt, the people would go out of their way to praise him for having integrity. And, up until recently, no one expected anything to change.

As such, news of the arrests came as a surprise. Saudi citizens were hit with unprecedented live coverage of arrests of a handful of princes, former ministers, and bureaucrats, some of whom have been around for more than twenty years, and were always perceived to be above the law or “untouchable”. Given the widespread usage of social media, including WhatsApp and Twitter, the Saudi public is very familiar with the personalities involved as well as the ins and outs of the alleged cases of money laundering, bribery, and misuse of power.

While some in the West fret about a “purge” of business elites and political enemies, most Saudis are eagerly following and cheering what they see as a historic step forward for the Kingdom’s justice system.

There's so much corruption at the higher levels of our government that it's hard to say where such a purge would have to end. Nor have we much reason to be confident in our institutions, should they attempt one.

I don't know that the Saudis are definitely getting a good deal here either, but I can certainly understand their enthusiasm for anyone who seemed inclined to make the attempt.

Honor

I hope that this story proves to be untrue, but if not, the Green Beret in question showed a high degree of personal honor.

The mysterious death of US Army Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar is under scrutiny after the Green Beret, who was killed by strangulation, reportedly declined to accept money from a dubious scheme.

A Daily Beast report, sourced from five service members in the special-operations community, says that a portion of funds used to pay informants in Mali for intelligence were allegedly pocketed by members of the elite SEAL Team Six. The SEALs' actions were reportedly discovered by Melgar, who eventually turned down the money when he was offered a cut.

Prior to his death, Melgar reportedly told his wife of the problems he had with two of the SEALs, and was going to elaborate further when he went home, the Daily Beast said.

The story holds that he was choked to death during martial arts practice, and that the claim that he had died unexpectedly because he was drunk proved false on medical examination. I hope that there proves to be another explanation, and that the investigation shows that no pilfering of cash was taking place. It is never proper to take accusations as proven simply because they have been forwarded in the press. The press report follows an official notification that the NCIS is investigating his death as a homicide, so in time we should see the evidence formally presented.

There is No 2nd Amendment Jurisprudence

So I gather from the fact that people keep writing these 'assault weapon' bans the way that they do. The Miller decision protected weapons precisely because they had a military use appropriate to a militia; the AR-15 is the single best candidate for protection under that doctrine today. Its similarity to the military's standard rifle means that extant training regimes can be immediately brought to bear as necessary to training up a militia with Army or Marine Corps personnel, should that be necessary; many of them share ammunition with existing military supply chains (though some use the .223 Remington, which can be fired from a weapon chambered for 5.56 NATO but not vice-versa).

Thus, if Miller is in any sense guiding our understanding of the 2nd Amendment, the AR-15 should be protected from Federal bans. It is the single most obvious choice for a militia weapon currently in existence.

Meanwhile, under Heller (which cites Miller to expand on it, not to replace it), the standard is that weapons protected are those "in common use for lawful purposes." The AR-15 is one of the most commonly-used rifles in the United States, for lawful purposes including self-defense, hunting, sport shooting, and for those who wish to be prepared to render militia service if necessary.

Every one of these laws seems to be designed for the express purpose of voiding what 2nd Amendment jurisprudence there is, effectively meaning that there isn't any that proponents of gun control are prepared to accept.

Boxing People In

I have a friend who talks the same way about Donald Trump voters, except on the male/female rather than white/black divide.

...the deepest rift is with the apologists, the “good” Trump voters, the white people who understand that Mr. Trump says “unfortunate” things but support him because they like what he says on jobs and taxes. They bristle at the accusation that they supported racism, insisting they had to ignore Mr. Trump’s ugliness. Relying on everyday decency as a shield, they are befuddled at the chill that now separates them from black people in their offices and social circles. They protest: Have they ever said anything racist? Don’t they shovel the sidewalk of the new black neighbors? Surely, they say, politics — a single vote — does not mean we can’t be friends.

I do not write this with liberal condescension or glee. My heart is unbearably heavy when I assure you we cannot be friends.

From June of last year, we were in a binary choice between surrendering the Constitution or accepting Donald Trump as President. The Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court was going to be filled by the next President, and a President Clinton was going to appoint a fifth doctrinaire "living Constitution" Justice. The 'living Constitution' is of course no Constitution at all; if the Constitution means whatever the powerful would like it to 'evolve' to mean, then it means whatever the powerful want. A constitution that means whatever the powerful want it to mean is not in fact a constitution at all, because a constitution's purpose is to restrain the government's use of power. The choice really was between the end of a Constitutional form of government, or this bullying blowhard from Manhattan.

That's not a great choice. Some went one way, and some went the other. It disturbs my friend, and this writer, that some could stomach voting for Trump in spite of his 'unfortunate' remarks. It disturbs me that some could stomach voting for Clinton in spite of the fact that it would have meant the end of a system of Constitutional limited government; indeed, I think they saw that as a feature rather than a bug of a prospective Clinton presidency. At long last, the Constitution would never hobble them from using the government to pursue the goods they wanted. We would hear the Supreme Court rule that the Constitution existed only to limit Americans' freedom to exercise racism or sexism or whatever-else-ism, never that it forbade the government from exercising some power 'to do good.' Rather than restraining the government, the Constitution would have been nothing more than one more weapon for the government to exert itself against the people.

What I just said will sound to them as if I meant, "I couldn't vote for Clinton because she would have turned the Court into a weapon against my right to exercise racism and prejudice." The real issue is completely opaque to those making these arguments. Indeed, I think this writer is so invested in the identity politics that it might not be possible to sever the issues conceptually. Perhaps the writer imagines that this sense of the indivisibility of identity from justice, which seems so self-evident to him, must necessarily be equally in the minds of everyone else as well.

Veteran's Day

All honor to the warriors. Some of them grew grey in the service, as this famous artistic treatment imagines.



George Washington, too.

At the close of the Revolutionary War in America, a perilous moment in the life of the fledgling American republic occurred as officers of the Continental Army met in Newburgh, New York, to discuss grievances and consider a possible insurrection against the rule of Congress.... Washington then took out a letter from a member of Congress explaining the financial difficulties of the government.

After reading a portion of the letter with his eyes squinting at the small writing, Washington suddenly stopped. His officers stared at him, wondering. Washington then reached into his coat pocket and took out a pair of reading glasses. Few of them knew he wore glasses, and were surprised.

"Gentlemen," said Washington, "you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."

In that single moment of sheer vulnerability, Washington's men were deeply moved, even shamed, and many were quickly in tears, now looking with great affection at this aging man who had led them through so much. Washington read the remainder of the letter, then left without saying another word, realizing their sentiments.

His officers then cast a unanimous vote, essentially agreeing to the rule of Congress. Thus, the civilian government was preserved and the experiment of democracy in America continued.

As Washington shows us, sometimes men grown grey can yet be of service.

Happy Veteran's Day.

Happy Birthday

The Marine Corps is 242 years old today. Felicitations are due.

Sometimes the Onion is Just Funny

WASHINGTON—Saying the financial risks and hours of hard work would pay off in the long term, former president Barack Obama revealed Thursday that he has sunk his entire life’s savings into the development of a tabletop game based on the American presidency.

Obama confirmed that over the past 10 months, he has spent the bulk of his family’s net worth to create Commander In Chief: Executive Power, a hybrid role-playing and board game about running a presidential administration. He has reportedly devised more than 50 possible storylines players may encounter while they work together to complete a term in the Oval Office, planning fiscally sound federal budgets, negotiating trade deals with foreign countries, and delivering aid to states struck by natural disasters.

“Once Commander In Chief hits the market, it’s gonna blow up just like Terra Mystica did, but right now funding is the biggest issue,” said Obama, sitting at his dining room table and showing off a prototype that included a 4-by-4 foot game board, stacks of handwritten index cards labeled “event” and “item,” and a set of polyhedral dice. “I drained our bank account to pay this specialty manufacturer to make the game components, and I’m hoping the Kickstarter money will cover the cost of renting warehouse space to store the finished product.”

...

Flatfoot 56 for Friday

We've Got Your Solutions Right Here

Headline: "DNC Unveils Clinton Institute For Campaign Ethics Reform In Response To Corruption Allegations."

A Promising Crisis

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is changing. Fast.

A Banner Week for Government Competence on Guns

The USAF simply failed to inform the rest of the Federal government that the Texas shooter was disqualified from own firearms. A government-run mental facility failed to inform on the same shooter, two strikes. (H/t: D29) And now, just to make us even more certain that the government are the only ones to trust to manage American firearms, this story:

In July, Robert Manson, a unit chief in the F.B.I.’s international terrorism section, had his Glock .40-caliber handgun, a $6,000 Rolex watch and $60 in cash stolen from his room at the Westin hotel in Charlotte, N.C....

Federal law allows agents to carry concealed weapons while off duty, but not while they are intoxicated.

One begins to wonder what the overlap is, in the Venn Diagram sense, between Federal police who are "off duty" but "not intoxicated."

UPDATE: TSA fails to detect weapons in undercover tests 70% of the time.

Wars Day-By-Day

Some fellow who goes by the moniker Emperor Tigerstar has put up a bunch of animated maps on YouTube showing the day-by-day conflicts for a number of major wars. Here's the Civil War:

Legend:
Maroon = Confederate States of America and territories
Red = Areas occupied by Confederate forces
Pink = Gains for that Day
Dark Blue = United States of America and territories
Blue = Areas occupied by Union forces.
Light blue = Gains for that day
Yellow = Border states / disputed areas.

You know that train gonna come tonight

I need a break from horror and revulsion at the news and the perfidy of political opponents.  But I keep thinking about Judgment.

A Setup

So it looks very much like Fusion GPS set up the Donald Trump, Jr., meeting with a Russian national -- and had 3 of their people in the room. The Russian had been working with the Justice Department on an unrelated case for a year or so, and she met with a Fusion GPS guy before and after that meeting.

Looks like collusion, all right. Of a sort.

Al Jazeera: Gun Control is Pretty Racist

They're not wrong, although I'm not sure why the Qatari government is interested in American civil rights. They certainly aren't interested in advancing civil rights in their own country.



The NRA has a sterling original story here, but the criticism of their moves in the 1960s is valid. So too is the ongoing criticism of their lackluster response to the Philando Castile shooting, in which a legally armed man was killed for no good reason by a frightened policeman. I don't know that I think that the NRA is being racist in the latter case; I think they're afraid to be critical of police, who are a crucial group they need to lobby in order to pursue their main mission. All the same, Philando Castile should be alive, and the NRA should be out there defending him.

I Seem To Remember This Language

In fact, we all of us used it ourselves. It's as if we were always right in our depiction of the crime.

An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey’s statement exonerating Hillary Clinton from the email scandal contained much stronger, consequential language that would seem to indicate Clinton, in fact, violated the Espionage Act. What’s more, there is reason to believe the individuals involved in editing the memo were unduly influenced by political bias.

According to a report from The Hill, the wording of Comey’s statement was changed from saying Clinton had been “grossly negligent” in handling classified information to a softer accusation of being “extremely careless.”...

The relevant section of the Espionage Act, Title 18 Section 793(f), states:

“Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed … Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

Olofsdotter is a Great Name

Another of Tex's 'Gorillas in the Mist' pieces on trying to understand what they are calling "Trump's America." Well, willing to vote for Trump, anyway.

Here was their first mistake:

On one side of Ambassador Karin Olofsdotter sat a former German defense minister and on the other a Washington think-tanker, a former Obama White House official who had organized the Trump country excursion.

Why would you get an Obama White House official to organize your trip to understand 'Trump's America'?

“Do the people who live in the Trump circles work in these high-tech companies?” Olofsdotter asked during her meeting with editors at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“It’s a little scary, but a lot of them work in the medical field,” one of the editors replied.

Yes, being completely terrified of these wild animals helps you understand them.

Now for their second mistake:

Soon they came to a stop at the public library, a new, two-story brick building, where the parking lot was full and the librarian was eagerly waiting for them by the front door.

Public libraries are like deep-blue monasteries in the reddest of red places. Go to Madison County, Georgia, and you'll find the only "Coexist" and "Clinton 2016" bumper stickers in the whole county on the two cars parked in the employee lot. These people -- who may be very decent, in most respects -- will not help you understand Trump voters.

“Do Trump voters go to libraries?” one of Smith’s former Obama administration colleagues, now a University of Pittsburgh professor, had asked her the previous day.

You're off to a grand start with your understanding tour.

Tone deafness

So, thanks to Ace, I found this article this morning and read it.  For those of you not willing to churn through a bunch of navel gazing about "why New Atheism failed" (surprising me both that there was a "new" atheism and that it's already been determined to have failed; given that I knew nothing about it in the first place), in short it wonders if this "new wave of atheists" failed to gain any traction in society because they were preaching "obvious truths" to like-minded believers (no pun intended).

And as I read it, it discussed the fact that 80% of Americans identify as "religious", 63% "claim" to be absolutely certain there is a God, and 46% think the Earth was literally created in seven days.  So I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the author (who seems to be an atheist) to say, "you know, maybe mocking people who believe different things than we do is the reason we don't gain converts from among them".  And it simply never happened.

This person literally questioned everything about why the New Atheist movement (and again, my apologies, I never even knew this was a thing) failed to gain traction, and never once thought about the fact that by basically calling every person of faith deluded, wrong, and even stupid (in fact, the author goes so far as to say religion causes homophobia and terrorism), that they just might not be willing to give your philosophy a fair hearing.  One almost gets the feeling from the article that the author never expects to sway the other 4/5ths of their countrymen, and have written us off entirely.  Almost completely admitting that they don't actually care what the rest of us think.

Now, let me be clear, my very best friend in this world (besides my wife) is an atheist.  And unlike this author, he neither looks down upon or denigrates those who do not believe as he does.  I have even seen him take other (more militant) atheists to task for trying to berate someone for praying.  "You are the kind of person who makes atheists like me look bad", were his exact words.  I have no issues with someone who simply does not feel what I feel, what I have issues with is someone who demands that not only do I give up my faith, but that I (in effect) admit how stupid I am for having it in the first place.  The first is non-negotiable, the second is laughable.  "Molon labe" comes to mind.

Hard shells

In Texas, even if you shoot up a church on Sunday, you may find yourself taking return fire.

A horrible, horrible story, a number of young children among the dead in a tiny town that just lost nearly 10% of its people.  Sutherland Springs is a short distance southeast of San Antonio, almost in the middle of what was Eagle Ford shale boom country until quite recently.  It's maybe 100 miles northwest of us.

We know very little about the now-deceased 26-year-old New Braunfels man who was the shooter. I find myself wondering if he's going to turn out to have been on antidepressants.  It wouldn't prove much, since so many people are.  God have mercy on the grieving families.