Lies and Chardonnay

Senator Kamala Harris, who like Senator Booker is using the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings to grand-stand in pursuit of higher office, put out a deceptively edited video that she chose to describe as a "dog whistle." In fact, the claim she was deceptively trying to attribute to Judge Kavanaugh was merely used during his description of the plaintiff's claims; he was not endorsing their description, merely describing what they said was the issue. Politifact, not always a friend to the Republican party, reviewed Sen. Harris' claim and labeled it clearly false.

What do you do when you're caught in a lie? Apologize? Promise to do better?

Of course not. You call for supporting fire from someone with no ethical issues that would stop them from endorsing your lies.

I hope that the Democrats realize that President Trump's vulnerabilities are his refusal to show proper respect for others, and his penchant for being completely careless about the truth. Trump wins in spite of these qualities, not because of them. He wins because he is the only candidate on the field who is on the side of ordinary people, rather than a card-carrying member of an elite that despises ordinary people. That is why he gets as much of a pass as he does for the things that people hate about his manner. If Democrats could be on the side of the people, honestly and respectfully, they'd clean up.

Instead, Democrats seem to have decided that deception and disrespect are Trump's sources of strength. They have gone beyond carelessness about the truth, and seek to surpass him by direct and intentional lies.

Madison and Mob Rule

A pretty good piece. You may not agree precisely with his description of the problem set, but his solutions include some ideas that we all believe in -- especially Federalism and constitutional education, i.e., civics.

To combat the power of factions, the Founders believed the people had to be educated about the structures of government in particular. “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both,” Madison wrote in 1822, supporting the Kentucky legislature’s “Plan of Education embracing every class of Citizens.” In urging Congress to create a national university in 1796, George Washington said: “A primary object of such a national institution should be the education of our youth in the science of government.”

The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative. At the same time, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has found that citizens, whether liberal or conservative, who are educated about constitutional checks on direct democracy, such as an independent judiciary, are more likely to express trust in the courts and less likely to call for judicial impeachment or for overturning unpopular Supreme Court decisions.

Well, at least 'overturning them via constant re-litigation.' Stability is helpful, but a bad decision needs to be addressed. Understanding the constitutional mechanisms allows us to do that in a way that is more likely to be accepted as legitimate.

Federalism, meanwhile, remains a core part of the solution. However, I've become convinced that we also need a way to create a distinction between urban and rural that has constitutional force. It seems that we have two modes of life here that are fundamentally incompatible, not only in their desires but in their needs. Ensuring that the cities can't impose their will on the countryside, and vice versa, might lower the temperature a lot.

The Mustache Isn't Playing

National Security Adviser John Bolton threatens to arrest any International Criminal Court judges who try American soldiers for actions in Afghanistan. As a power move, that's the kind of thing that the kids today call "alpha" or "baller." It's certainly the sort of thing that a dominant power would do. And it is true, as Bolton says, that the ICC isn't accountable to Americans or really to anyone: it's the kind of unelected international elites that the Trump administration was elected to oppose. Americans have a right to be tried by a jury of their peers, not by strangers and foreigners but by their fellow citizens.

That said, I have not been impressed lately by our system's success at holding its members to account. If we're going to be credible here, we need to do a good job of ensuring that we uphold our own rules and laws. The military justice system as I've observed it probably does this better than the rest of our so-called justice systems, to be fair.

Enid & Geraint

Per custom, today's only post will be a republishing of the 9/11 poem.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.
The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Substantial Police Brutality Against Innocent Veteran Alleged

The way the man tells the story, he was set upon by two thieves and went out of his way not to shoot to kill. Prosecutors charged him with attempted murder anyway, and held him for three years awaiting trial -- much of it in solitary. When a jury finally got the case, they backed him completely. Now, he's suing over the way he was mistreated.

Johnson's lawsuit also makes a startling claim -- that when he complained about all that time in solitary, guards beat him.

"They immediately cuffed me," said Johnson. "As soon as I was cuffed that's when they began to, you know, they beat me up."...

His lawsuit says Johnson tried to warn jail officials about one guard who would "sadistically and maliciously abuse" prisoners: "I'm the one who wrote a grievance on Lubrin saying that if you don't stop this guy, he's gonna kill someone."

His lawyer says, just one month after Johnson filed that grievance, Officer Jereh Lubrin and two other guards beat a mentally-ill inmate, Michael Tyree, to death. The officers were convicted of second degree murder.

These kinds of cases undermine trust and faith in government.

Pay Me My Money

A claimant for a prize around establishing the identity of Arthur.

Sniff tests

This is a happy development:  it looks as though people really are trying to do something about the replicability crisis in psychological studies.  One tool that's proving useful is a "trading market," in which a lot of independent analysts make online bets about which studies will replicate, using subjective tools they might have hesitated to use in public or formal settings.

What clues were the traders looking for? Some said that they considered a study’s sample size: Small studies will more likely produce false positives than bigger ones. Some looked at a common statistical metric called the P value. If a result has a P value that’s less than 0.05, it’s said to be statistically significant, or positive. And if a study contains lots of P values that just skate under this threshold, it’s a possible sign that the authors committed “p-hacking”—that is, they futzed with their experiment or their data until they got “positive” but potentially misleading results. Signs like this can be ambiguous, and “scientists are usually reluctant to lob around claims of p-hacking when they see them,” says Sanjay Srivastava from the University of Oregon. “But if you are just quietly placing bets, those are things you’d look at.

Beyond statistical issues, it strikes me that several of the studies that didn’t replicate have another quality in common: newsworthiness. They reported cute, attention-grabbing, whoa-if-true results that conform to the biases of at least some parts of society.

Commandments for the Current Age

Coveting again, but in an unexpected way. Although I think there is an older prohibition here against showing continuing affection for one's spouse after a certain point in time, lest it aggrieve the jealousy of those who have lost the spark.

A Story in Two Tweets

Apparently Obama gave a speech. In it he apparently said something about people finding it difficult to say that Nazis are bad. This occasioned some comment.

One:

Two:

Signs point to 'no.'

Volk & Family

The loss among Swedes of a sense of home, of living in a place where you have to be taken in even when you don’t deserve it, haunts Swedish politics today—and, more broadly, all European politics. It is one of the great drivers of xenophobia because it stresses questions that never arose in the old days: Who deserves a place in the family and why? At root, the mourning for folkhemmet recognizes the loss of any sense of mutual obligation. It’s not easy to imagine the policies or the politicians who could restore such a sense today. In the meantime, many Swedes are choosing to heed their own lost leftist ideals by voting for the far-right at the ballot box. Unlike most of the Swedish establishment, the populists at least acknowledge that those ideals have been breached.

The "old days" the article refers to are a brief post-war period of consensus. Otherwise, I'm not sure you can say very many human civilizations have ever enjoyed the luxury of the question never arising: what do people have to do to "deserve" what they take from the fruits of others' labor?

Rebellion in the Senate

Sen. Booker, a man well-known for his melodrama, has decided to openly defy the rules in order to put out what he plainly views as explosive emails from the SCOTUS nominee. Having read them, though, I'd think these emails would be reassuring to Democrats about the quality of the man they are considering for the post.

For example, here he is defending the independence of the law-enforcement arms of the Executive from the politics of the elected President. As I understand it, that is exactly the position of Democrats vis a vis Donald Trump and the FBI or DOJ. The nominee was on their side way back in the Bush administration.

And here is the nominee asserting that he is on the side of a "race neutral" airport security policy in the wake of 9/11, when profiling (more on religion than race) was being put forward by many as an obvious security procedure. Again, for Democrats, this should put him on the side of the angels.

Booker says he's prepared to be expelled from the Senate in order to get these documents in front of the American people. Well, OK, thanks I guess. What does he see in these documents that is so alarming?

UPDATE: Booker was just grandstanding, it looks like -- the documents were cleared for release last night, at the request of his staff.

A Confession

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them....

This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.

You can read his (or her) defense of this approach to electoral government at the link.

That's Not Going to Cut It, Francis

The Pope says that our response to the current scandals in the Church should be "silence and prayer."

What's Fonzie Like?

UPDATE: Original text deleted. This looks to be a death hoax, which is a strange form of internet behavior I’ll never understand. The article claims he had no children, but he has 3 according to Wikipedia. People should cut this sort of thing out.

I Guess There's Some Football Going On

...and thank God for normal America.



I guess we aren't quite done yet.

Kyl Back to Senate

McCain's term will be finished by his old colleague John Kyl, another 'grand bargain on immigration' guy. Even in 2007, when that article was written, his voters were incensed about the issue. I don't get the sense that the Republican electorate has grown more accepting in the ensuing decade.

Conversational Old Norse

Phrases you can use with friends and family, from our favorite cowboy scholar.

Senescence Affects Ideas

The WSJ has an article today describing our left's ideas as 'exhausted.'

This liberalism evolved within a society shamed by its past. But that shame has weakened now. Our new conservative president rolls his eyes when he is called a racist, and we all—liberal and conservative alike—know that he isn’t one. The jig is up. Bigotry exists, but it is far down on the list of problems that minorities now face. I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It’s harder now for young blacks to find a closed one....

Today’s liberalism is an anachronism. It has no understanding, really, of what poverty is and how it has to be overcome. It has no grip whatever on what American exceptionalism is and what it means at home and especially abroad. Instead it remains defined by an America of 1965—an America newly opening itself to its sins, an America of genuine goodwill, yet lacking in self-knowledge.

Spengler writes that last week's funeral for John McCain was really a funeral held by members of his elite class for the world they thought they lived in. That world, above all, they mourn.

Both items h/t Wretchard.

Responses to Tyranny from America's Geniuses of Vienna

Three of the great minds of the last century, Joseph Schumpeter, Karl Popper, and Friedrich Hayek, all wrote pieces on how to respond to tyranny if it ever came to the West. The Economist has a helpful survey of their ideas.

Hayek and Popper were friends but not close to Schumpeter. The men did not co-operate. Nonetheless a division of labour emerged. Popper sought to blow up the intellectual foundations of totalitarianism and explain how to think freely. Hayek set out to demonstrate that, to be safe, economic and political power must be diffuse. Schumpeter provided a new metaphor for describing the energy of a market economy: creative destruction.

These are ideas that are well worth considering at length.

Politics as Usual

The funeral of Senator John McCain was a festival of anti-Trump rhetoric, in spite of the fact that some Trump family members were in attendance. Well, that's doubtless just what McCain would have wanted. However, there is a footnote to this story that is worth knowing.