Careful what you ask for

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.” ...

GEORGE ORWELL

Olav Trygvasson and Violent Conversion

An essay.

Contradictions

The Border Patrol's parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, has stopped referring migrants with children for prosecution. They claim the 'zero tolerance' policy is still in effect, but since they have been ordered not to separate parents and children, and since there is no legal way to hold the children under existing law and jurisprudence for more than 20 days, they simply cannot do everything they've been told to do.

One might think that this is a sort-of mutiny at CBP, but it's really just a basic contradiction in their orders. They're ordered to arrest everyone and hold them for prosecution; they're also ordered not to separate the alleged parents from their children. They can't do both of these things, so they're failing. Failure is what will usually happen when one programs any system to do contradictory things.

I rather liked Dianne Feinstein's bill on this issue, by the way, because it would have built a similar contradiction into nearly all Federal law enforcement. Anywhere within 100 miles of a border or port of entry, such as an international airport, Federal agents would have been barred from separating parents from their children -- "parents," not "illegal immigrant parents" or anything similar. Pretty much all Americans with children would have been liberated from obedience to Federal laws in one fell swoop.

The head of CBP says he's working to 'develop a plan' on this issue, but I'll be surprised if he can come up with one. New orders will need to be written, preferably by the legislature, that redoes this tangle of old laws and court rulings and newer executive orders.

Security vs. Law Enforcement

A surprisingly philosophical account of the distinction, and why the border crises must be solved as a species of the former.

Soccer Editorial Comment

For those of you following the World Cup, this, which my wife ran across:

Interviewer: "Do you think Brazil's 1970 team can beat today's Argentina?"

Pelé: "Yes."

Interviewer: "By how much?"

Pelé: "1-0"

Interviewer: "That's it?"

Pelé: "Well, most of us are over 75 years old now."

https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065

Eric Hines
https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065
https://twitter.com/WorIdCupFC/status/1011019183176536065

Thinking Things Through

In 2006, I wrote a piece diagnosing what I thought was going wrong with the country. It was called "Time for a Change." It was a very long piece, but it was built around the idea that the Federal institutions were failing and exposing key fault lines in the nation. We got through the rest of the Bush administration and all of Obama's without reaching the point of absolute failure, but the stresses identified mostly kept growing. Now, with even USA Today publishing pieces that openly wonder about civil war, I wonder how much longer before the shear forces tear us apart.

These days, after twelve years' more experience, I would name mostly different solutions than the ones that seemed plausible to me then. One area where I still think the solutions look similar is the problem posed by the Federal judiciary, and its penchant for imposing one-sized-fits-all solutions on a divided America. That's where so much of the tension is coming from. If we could fix that, we could live together in peace on most issues.

Consider a point Gringo made in the comments below, on the issue of Lexington, VA. I pointed out that Lexington is a town with a particularly unwelcoming structure for 'woke' politics. He responded:

Lexington city voted ~2:1 for Hillary, while Rockridge County voted ~2:1 for Trump. Which gives me the impression the restaurant won't lose much business.

If that's true, then even in the reddest parts of America many cities are blue. And that seems right, because the same holds for towns like Birmingham, Alabama; or Athens, Georgia.

There are a few issues, like immigration, where ending one-size-fits-all can't solve our problems. Yet there are very many issues where a solution that allowed rural areas to have different laws from urban ones would greatly reduce the tensions facing the nation.

Of course, that requires a change to the Constitution, which requires a supermajority of states to go along with it. It's a hard pull to get there in a nation so divided and whose divisions are so contemptuous of each other.

Rumbles in the Forest

"Is America headed to a civil war" asks... USA Today. Well, it's the Sage of Knoxville writing in the pages of USA Today, but the editors agreed to publish the piece. That this newspaper of all of them would carry a piece warning about a potentially imminent civil war suggests to me that the idea is now completely mainstream.

Who knows? We might catch up to Mexico in political assassinations sooner than anyone thinks.

UPDATE: Calls for more.

Interesting Point

A former lawyer (J.D. cum laude, according to her bio), writes in defense of the 'separation of parents and kids is bad' thesis -- but without exception.

Indeed, studies show that maternal separation is a major stressor even in newborn infants. And fifty years of social science evidence teach us that, on average, children separated from one or both biological parents fare worse, across virtually every measurable indicator, than children who have not been separated from their own married parents.

Given how crucial intact families are to human flourishing, it is appalling that a purportedly pro-life and pro-family Trump administration would use any measure of its discretion to rip families apart. But I would also note that many of those loudly championing children at the border take an incompatible position when children are separated from their parents under other circumstances.

Children’s need for their parents in cases of intentional single-parenthood, divorce, surrogacy, and abortion, is no different than the needs of the children at the U.S. border. In these cases, though, the same needs of children to be raised by those who are most likely to fully invest, care for, and protect them — their biological parents — are ignored.

This is not to say, such as in the case of most adoptive parents, that there are not heroic individuals out there who have stepped up to give non-biological children the best life possible under what would otherwise be extremely difficult circumstances. This is also not to say that divorce is never warranted — although modern attitudes about the purposes of marriage and the no-fault system have overwhelmingly been a bust for children.

The 1970s models of thinking that “children are resilient” in the face of divorce has given way: “The myth of the good divorce has not stood up well in the face of sustained social scientific inquiry – especially when one considers the welfare of children exposed to their parents’ divorces,” observes University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox.

She goes on to more anecdotal examples, which are not to my thinking as strong. But there's an interesting point there, one that echoes a line of thought that Chesterton advanced. Chesterton is so frequently on the side of the contemporary Right that it is easy to think he isn't going to be very challenging for an intellectual on that side of the fence. Yet he is not always so, and this favoring of the family over capitalism is one of the ways in which he is not:

If it be true that Socialism attacks the Family in theory, it is far more certain that Capitalism attacks it in practice...So the factory is destroying the Family in fact; and need depend on no poor mad theorist who dreams of destroying it in fancy.

This is from a piece called "The Superstition of Divorce," written at a time when widespread divorce was more theoretical than actual. The Right has moved on from that ground, for the most part; this one former attorney being a rare exception.

How Are Things South of the Border?

Headline: "Extraordinary moment Mexico arrests town's ENTIRE police force of 28 officers 'over murder of a mayoral candidate' amid country's bloodiest election campaign."

120 candidates have been murdered since September. This one was a rather extraordinary moment -- the assassin just walked up and shot him in the back of the head, and then walked freely away. But it's only one of three such murders in the last week or so.

Fun with neologisms

Zero Hedge introduced me to two new words this morning.  I fell for them briefly, then realized they are both amusing examples of turning the tables in the endless propaganda effort to coin words containing unexamined and unearned insults.

One was "pedophrasty," literally meaning not much more than "verbal expressions involving children," but in context the callous use of children as political cannon fodder, as in "How can we ever arrest adults who have a connection of any kind to children who would not be able to accompany them into a jail cell?"

The other was "bigoteering. " I particularly like that one, because I've long been interested in what happened to the word "profit" when it was transformed into "profiteering."  Originally "eer"was fairly neutral suffix along the lines of "-er" or "-or," meaning "person who engages in."  Some time back, it became a little shady.  If the Royal Navy is honorable but letters of marque are not far removed from piracy, then the suspect "private" easily becomes "privateer."  If profit becomes a filthy enough concept, "profiteering" acquires a sneering veneer.  Soon any word can be similar sullied by adding "-eer," so it seems fair that unscrupulous scandal-mongers (mongeers?) should be pilloried with the term "bigoteering," with its hint of using imaginary bigotry in others for one's own personal gain.  So we might also have "ecologeering" and "equiteering."

Fun with curve-fitting

These are the great results you can get if you look backwards at brief intervals of data and don't check your results by hypothesizing a causal mechanism, making a prediction, and finding out whether your curves match into the future.  For instance, there is an uncanny ten-year correlation between the number of letters in the winning word in the Scripps National Spelling Bee and the number of people killed by venomous spiders.

Counterpoint: Needed, More Americans

Bret Stephens thinks we are dangerously underpopulated:

…America is vast, largely empty and often lonely. Roughly 80 percent of Americans live in urban areas, covering just 3 percent of the overall landmass. We have a population density of 35 people per square kilometer — as opposed to 212 for Switzerland and 271 for the U.K.

We could use some more people. Make that a lot more.

He has some arguments about new immigrants being, on average, better people than Americans. They'll work harder for less money, go to church more often, and -- he claims -- get into less trouble with the law. It's hard to say if that's true or not, actually; drug traffickers who cross international borders make up almost half of Federal prisoners, but that's not representative of populations in state prisons or local jails, where 90% of prisoners are but which are not good about submitting statistics in a fashion that can be readily studied. Clearly 100% of illegal aliens have committed at least a misdemeanor Federal crime; but since the debate is about whether or not to eliminate those very laws, that's not of much interest to the discussion.

Myself, I hold these truths to be self-evident.

1) American cities are too crowded, and the bulk of new immigrants are going to go right to those cities -- just as they cluster in cities in the countries from which they come. (Besides, huge swathes of the unoccupied land in the USA -- especially out West -- is Federal land in national monuments, forests, parks, and wildernesses. The same folks who want to up our population density to UK levels would have a fit if you proposed opening that land to settlement and economic exploitation.)

2) New immigrants can in fact be better Americans than native-born Americans, but only if they come loving the American way of limited government and maximum freedom. Some do: likely you've known them, as I have. One of the best Americans I ever knew was a Korean-born Korean who fought the Communists in the 1950s, and then came here. He loved America with all his heart, and did his best to impress his love of the American ideal on all of his students once he became a professor of Political Science. I'll take all the guys like him you can find.

But that's my marker for whether or not America would benefit from any given immigrant. America is in a key sense a philosophy. If they share the philosophy, well and good: we can use all the Americans we can find. Otherwise, there are already plenty of folks on the highway.

In Lexington, Virginia?

I've been hearing people mockingly say, 'Get woke, go broke' fairly often lately. This guy, though, really might. It's one thing to refuse to serve a prominent member of the Trump administration at a restaurant in DC, or in New York City. Lexington, Virginia, is not the right town for that.

It's been purged from the English-language Wikipedia article, but if you check the German-language one it still refers to Lexington as "The Shrine of the South." This is the site of Robert E. Lee's grave in the chapel named after him, at the University named after him, where also is the grave of his horse, Traveller. Stonewall Jackson was born here, and Sam Houston nearby. Currently it is the site of the Virginia Military Institute, producer of the kind of hardcore second lieutenants that come out of these Southern military academies -- the Citadel in Charleston, SC, produces their like as well. It seems like every other highway in the surrounding countryside is called "Lee Highway." Confederate flags abound.

There's a reasonable argument for freedom of association allowing a business owner to refuse to serve guests of whom he morally disapproves. There's a countering argument, also reasonable, that public accommodations should not discriminate for moral reasons to include religious beliefs. Those discussions are worthy and interesting, but here I'm merely struck by the practicalities of this decision. It's not like you can up and move your cozy bed-and-breakfast to another town, the way you could close a franchise of a chain. There's an irreplaceable investment that's been made in a particular location, which has a particular environment around it. People don't come to Lexington, VA, on tour because they are interested in woke politics. They come to see their kids at VMI or Washington & Lee -- both on the list of "Most Conservative Colleges in Virginia" -- or to tour the shrines of the South.

I guess he deserves some respect for having the courage of his convictions. If you're willing to pay the freight, you can do what you want.

Randomness beats faulty prediction

I've signed up for an Aeon feed and so far am finding the occasional interesting article.  Here's one that examines how seemingly meaningless augury techniques might be a good way to break people of the habit of using affirmatively harmful predictors.  As I see it, though, the real trick is the double-blind study:  one group uses the proposed predictors while the other relies on a random draw, then you figure out which produced better results.  Randomness for the sake of randomness doesn't have the appeal for me that it seems to have for the author.  But as a way of deciding whether that herb supplement is worth the money and risk, sure.

How's that Warming Going?

A thirty-year report.

Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios... Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago....

These corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people world-wide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?

Well, because the payments aren't evenly assessed world-wide, thus allowing nations like China and Russia to 'catch up' with the West.

Support Group for the Woke

A parody from the BBC.

A Pictish Fort Destroyed by Vikings

AS the Vikings sailed away, they probably thought they'd done a good day's work.

The Pictish fort behind them was ruined and ablaze, its defenders put to the sword and anything worth looting had been thoroughly pillaged.

But now archaeologists examining the remains of the 10th-century settlement at Burghead on the Moray coast say the attack by the Northmen has actually helped preserve the site and ensure it could be studied by future generations.

Somewhat like a volcano, I suppose.

In other Viking science, a close examination of relics has produced a sense of what color paints were commonly used to decorate in the Viking Age.

I've got to remember this line

Useful filler next time you need to say nothing:

Even some Democrats, including warriors of press and tube, are beginning to take note that separating the children was first an Obama idea. A CNN interlocutor braced Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin with a loaded reminder that many critics of Donald Trump, who are now critical of bunking the children on mattresses within enclosures of wire and steel, made no criticism when Mr. Obama did it.

“You know,” Sen. Baldwin replied, in a voice as bland as a bowl of Cream of Wheat, “on this issue that we get into a moment where we’re making progress and then when it stalls we turn around. I think we all need to continue to be focused on it and press it through.”

Aren’t There Enough People In America?

Another Anton piece.

I don’t want to oversell Anton. I’ve met Anton a couple of times. We haven’t talked, because he’s the kind who talks so much that I don’t bother to try to talk with them. He’s a foppish dresser, proudly so. I don’t know how much we have in common. But look at this, where he gets the working man exactly right:

“After at least two decades of wage stagnation and even decline, now that we’ve finally reached the nirvana of full employment (and who knows how long it will last), why not take advantage of this tight labor market to raise wages across the board? Especially for the working and middle classes that got nowhere or even lost ground during the housing, finance and tech booms of recent years?”

Boy is right about that. He’s got a few other strong points too.

The other half of the motive

And if a hope of currying favor with the expected new president isn't enough, now there's the fear of suffering reprisals from the possible new Congress:

The Justice Department’s tepid OIG report, with its risible assertion that there was no political bias in the FBI’s Clinton email probe, suggests that it was written by people afraid to tell the unvarnished truth about the conduct of the federal government’s police apparatus, an agency that openly defies congressional oversight and has participated in a vendetta against a sitting president. The FBI’s leadership clearly hopes that the Democrats will win majorities in Congress and put a halt to the investigations into its multifarious abuses of power. The OIG is loath to face the ruthless reprisals that would inevitably follow such a disaster.

In other words, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General is filled with people who fear the FBI. Think about that for a minute. What is the usual term for a government whose members live in fear of its police arm? Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” The OIG report suggests that its demise may be only one election away.