Good Dragon, Nice Dragon

...and then there's the other dragon. The Chinese produce a film that sounds at first as if it were a Sino-centric version of Act of Valor.

Somewhere in the Gulf of Aden, Somali pirates hold the crew of a container ship hostage on the ship’s bridge. The ship is trailed by a frigate, and elite naval commandos are now stacked on the ladders leading to either side of the bridge. A helicopter from the frigate makes an extreme maneuver, allowing a sniper on board to attempt an impossible shot, perfectly timed with the detonation of breaching charges. It is not SEAL Team 6, but the Chinese Jiaolong (Sea Dragons).

It's a great movie, the review at the US Military Academy's Modern War Institute says, right up until the end. But then...

The second dragon emerges only from the shadows in the final minute of the film, almost as if it were added as an afterthought, as if the film were viewed by someone in power who decided that the tone was too cooperative and insisted on the addition. In fact, the scene shows no individual characters, just ships at sea. After the events of the rest of the film, and thousands of miles away in the South China Sea, a flotilla of PLAN ships approaches what appears to be a smaller US flotilla of one Ticonderoga-class cruiser and two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers conducting a freedom of navigation operation. Alarms sound on the PLAN ships and a voice comes over the loudspeaker repeating in Chinese and English: “Attention! This is the Chinese Navy. You are about to enter Chinese waters. Please turn around immediately!” The second dragon is the one that makes and aggressively enforces destabilizing maritime territorial claims. This is the China that creates its own rules by ignoring the existing ones. The second dragon is the one that much of the world hopes to see fly away in favor of the first.

Don't bet on seeing the end of that second dragon. It's the real one.

Extremists Training School Shooters in New Mexico

"Extremists" is loose language, since no one is merely extreme; they are an extreme something-or-other. In this case, the author is clear about just what kind of extremists they were.

Siraj Ibn Wahhaj — son of radical imam Siraj Wahhaj, one of America’s most prominent Islamic clerics and Linda Sarsour’s mentor — kidnapped his own child in order to exorcise him of his physical disabilities that his father attributed to demonic possession.

A search for the boy led authorities to a remote compound in New Mexico, where local police found Siraj Ibn Wahhaj heavily armed. Court documents filed stated the compound served as a training camp to teach children to commit school shootings.

The author is herself a Muslim, one who isn't afraid to talk seriously about the issues her faith is facing. Indeed, joining the Clarion Project is a clear commitment to facing those issues head-on. She has, separately, some advice for Muslims running for office.

If Only There Were A Way of Aligning Pay with Perceived Value

Doctors make too much, argue the people who believe that fast food workers should be making $15 an hour.

Elite US Para-Athletes in Scotland

A friend of mine, Alexander "Tank" Armstrong, is over in Scotland right now introducing what he calls the 'adaptive' classes to Scottish Highland Games. Tank competes in Highland Games here in America, as well as in Strongman sports, in which capacity he won America’s Strongest Athlete with Disabilities this year. Born in Canada, he came to America to serve in the US Army before his injuries.

Normally one says something about how it's great to see people overcoming difficulties and not losing spirit in the face of serious injuries, and that's true enough. But for me Tank is always the guy who came to me when I was down and discouraged and buoyed me up. As is always the case with the best kind of men, he isn't just carrying his own weight even though his weight is heavy. Everywhere he goes, he's helping others to succeed also. That's what he's doing over there in Scotland, opening up an old tradition to a new class of competitor to whom it will mean a lot.

Endorsed

Glenn Reynolds: "The next step in criminal justice reform is fewer laws."

It's a great argument.

Empowering the Powerful

I've heard these people proclaim that they are on the side of the oppressed, but by definition you don't make people less oppressed by further empowering the powerful. Moves to silence opponents at best makes a new class of oppressed, but there's no reason to think it'll help the old class. Insofar as their interests differ from those of the powerful, they'll just become more oppressed than ever.

AVI often says that we never get to defend the people we'd rather, and that's true here too. Alex Jones is a lunatic. But the reason I know that he's a lunatic is that his speech was freely available for me to read and consider. If the first time I'd heard of him was today, I might think he had something good to say. Making him a martyr elevates him in a way that won't work to anyone's good.

Free speech has to be fought for. It's the best thing for everybody, even if some people think they're too powerful to need the guarantee.

America Should Be Happy to Have Sikhs

This affair prompts this most recent in the occasional Grim's Hall series on Sikhs. The Sikh faith is perfectly suited to America and her Second Amendment traditions.

One of the tenets of the Sikh religion is that adherents must carry on their person a knife, called a Kirpan. The Kirpan is a reminder that the carrier should have the courage to defend all those who are persecuted or oppressed.

In our enlightened, politically-correct times, however, this has caused some problems. The blade -- traditionally between six inches and three feet in length -- seems to be "intimidating" in the Age of the Common Man, and thus has been variously legally required to be "less than four inches", or blunted, or even sealed inside of its scabbard with glue.

I mention this because initial reports state that when Evil presented itself in his place of peace and began to slaughter those of his flock, 65-year-old Satwant Singh Kaleka did his level best to punch the ticket of the decades-younger murderer with what the Media has described as a "butter knife" -- a blunted blade, less than four inches in length.

Our stout-hearted Ambassador to the United Nations was a Sikh before becoming a Methodist. She is one of the shining lights of the current administration.

The US military has adapted its uniform code to allow for Sikh beards, as is right and proper given that Sikhs frequently seek out military service.

All people of the right should learn to recognize Sikhs and be glad to have them as part of our national experiment. Theirs is a faith with many excellent qualities, which produces fine people on a reliably regular basis. Make some room for them.

Testing Power & Privilege

There were some developments over the weekend in the NYT racism story. Noted African-American right-winger Candice O. posted exactly the same language that was used against "white people," except she swapped in "Jewish." Now according to the prevailing neo-Marxist "only the powerful can have racism" theory an African-American woman should be able to say whatever she wants without it being racist, as her group memberships mean that she is not privileged nor powerful. But she was suspended immediately, due to what Twitter in embarrassment later proclaimed was an 'error.'

Meanwhile, someone drew an interesting comparison between the cases of this writer and Papa John. Again, according to the prevailing theory, Papa John should have been too privileged to be held accountable: he was white, male, and extremely rich. Yet he was purged ruthlessly by his own company for mentioning a racial slur; she was promoted in spite of (or, a friend of mine mentioned privately, because of) hers. Who really has privilege here?

Iowahawk has a suggestion for evaluating these cases.

Voluntary-ish euthanasia

Bookworm Room muses on whether "free" medical care makes euthanasia a less dangerous policy.  The idea is that greedy family members might choose euthanasia over costly medical care, but the state would never make that kind of calculation, right?

Land use

Cool graphics.

Matter of Fact That Was The Name of the Place

The story behind the song George Will hated, "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother." The author of the song explains how he was one of the hippies. The story is pretty amusing.

Faulty Scholarship

But not faulty in a surprising way. Just exactly in the way you'd expect. And for the reason we were discussing earlier this week, as applied to the discipline of sociology instead of social psychology. "Musa al-Gharbi’s research was published in the latest issue of The American Sociologist, a peer-reviewed journal that also recently published an article revealing that only two percent of sociology professors self-identify as conservative."

"NYT Hires Racist for Editorial Board"

From Patterico. "P.S. Kevin Williamson and Roseanne Barr, don’t get too excited. A different standard applies here." (For the record, Williamson is fine with it.)

This isn't a particularly important story. I'm just posting it because one of her trolling posts reads:

I dare you to get on Wikipedia and play "Things white people can definitely take credit for," it's really hard.

— professional twiter name (@sarahjeong) November 25, 2015

It's really not hard.

UPDATE:

Other statements she made are not at all racist, but still pretty nasty. Of course, it's all protected free speech. And it's good to know whose side someone is on. We could hardly wish for more transparency.

Catechism Declares Death Penalty Morally Forbidden

I'm pretty sure that I don't agree with this decision, or the chain of logic behind it. As the article spells out, it's a long evolution for the Church (which has in the past practiced the death penalty itself). Previous Popes have all participated in the motion. It wasn't done quickly or without thought.

All the same, it strikes me as philosophically disordered, and unsupportable from revelation as well. It cannot be a violation of the dignity of the living to die in this metaphysical system, as the God who made all of the living built death into the experience as an unavoidable aspect of that life. Nor does it seem reasonable, in a faith whose scripture teaches that 'the wages of sin is death,' to refuse to pay the wage to someone who has shown a certain commitment to the sin. A workman, after all, is worthy of his hire.

Forgiveness of the soul is important, crucial, perhaps the greatest and hardest and key teaching of Jesus. But the body dies, and so necessarily that natural theology cannot reasonably be read as otherwise than suggesting that it is God's will that it should die. It is freedom, not life, that is the dignity that needs to be most carefully preserved. To preserve life instead of freedom, and indeed at the consequence of lifelong imprisonment and unfreedom, strikes me as a fundamental moral error. To give them the wage they chose to seek is to respect their freedom; to refuse them their wage, and instead imprison them for decades in conditions far more restrictive of liberty than even slavery is the true violation of their dignity.

I suppose I am in danger of falling into heresy. What remains to be decided, by me, is if I will to be.

Seizing Property without Consent or Compensation

Over in South Africa, there's a move on by the ANC to change their constitution to allow them to just take what they want. South Africa might be thought to have a particularly difficult history that explains this otherwise radical policy.

On the other hand, in Georgia, one of the two candidates for governor agrees with the general idea. She sponsored a bill to require the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to "seize and destroy" broad classes of privately-owned firearms. The bill did not suggest that any of these arms would be paid for; just taken, and destroyed. Both actions are said to be justified because they are 'in the public interest.'

Georgia might also be said to have a 'particularly difficult history that explains an otherwise radical policy.' The same candidate has called for the destruction of the monument carved into Stone Mountain, although in calmer moments she has also endorsed better, wiser ideas for dealing with the monument and the history of the site. (The idea was popular enough that a comedian's fake Facebook event to 'Witness the Implosion of Stone Mountain' was floating around for a while. Lest people think this is a simple proxy for race, a whole bunch of people I know -- all of them white liberals -- were enthusiastic about this event, which is how it came across my page.)

On the other hand, I've been listening to all the talk about America from the Left that's been going on these last few years. I'm wondering if there's any place in America, or the West, that they don't think of as having a 'particularly difficult history' that justifies radical policies. And it occurs to me that it's easier to effect all the most radical ones after you've effected the seizure and destruction of the people's arms.

Real ID

Georgia started doing this a few years ago, but I had bought an 8 year driver's license and wasn't minded to go back before it was necessary. My next one will be a Real ID, though. I just applied for it last week. It's actually no more painful to get than the standard ID, which required nearly as much documentation. In North Carolina, which offers both a Real ID and a non-Real driver's license option, it's just as onerous to obtain the one as the other. You might as well get the Real one, if you're eligible for it.

Confirmed: Twitter Social Psychologists Solidly Anti-Trump

Per our discussion of the other day, it was always very likely that this would occur simply because less than four percent of social psychologists are socially conservative. But they picked some outspoken ones, just to be sure.

Good to Know

BB Headline: "Ginsburg: ‘I Am Mentally Fit Enough To Serve Through The End Of President Eisenhower’s Term.'"

The Wisdom/Madness of Crowds

Another Maggie's Farm link this morning:  An interview with Peter Thiel, whom I don't think I'd heard of before.  Very interesting fellow, a gay tech venture capitalist from the Silicon Valley who supports President Trump.  He talks about a number of pendulum-swings, such as the initial benefits of centralized networking followed by the drawbacks of congestion, and the need to avoid both closets and ghettos in identity politics.

Seems only fair

If a society chooses simultaneously to refuse to look at individuals as individuals, and to adopt absurd notions about whether traditional groupings of individuals are based in reality or empty convention, what's a guy to do when he finds his insurance company wants to charge him more for auto coverage than it would charge a woman?

The story reminds me of the old Jeff Foxworthy routine about answering the door to a sheriff's deputy who wants to arrest him if he can't pay some outstanding tickets.  He protests he's broke.  The deputy asks if he can write a  check.  "No, I can't write a--wait, hold on.  A check?  Well, heck, yeah, I can write you a check.  I thought you wanted money."