The End of the Boy Scouts of America

They've largely succeeded in destroying one of the formative institutions of my youth.

The Boy Scouts of America is considering declaring bankruptcy, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The Wednesday report comes in the wake of sinking membership and multiple controversies surrounding the 108-year-old organization, including sex abuse allegations and its controversial decision to change its program name from Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA and allow girls into that program....

As the organization has made decisions deemed to be more inclusive, such as allowing openly gay scouts in 2013 and scoutmasters in 2015 as well as the 2018 decision to allow girls, membership has continued to decline sharply, from over 4 million members at its peak to a claimed 2.3 million members at present.... Those numbers will likely continue to decline....

Additionally, the Boy Scouts have come under criticism of late for keeping records of sex abuse perpetrated by scoutmasters — called the “perversion files” — under wraps for decades instead of revealing them to the public.

I remember going to a state-level jamboree when I was ten or eleven, and being struck by all the Americana of the thing. There were hundreds of other boys in uniforms with American flags on the shoulders, and all sorts of knots and woodcraft, and the smell of pine wood fires by day and night. There was an astronaut who came not just to speak but to spend the day wandering around and meeting the boys, giving us a sense of what we as Americans might aspire to do if we worked hard. There were fireworks one night, and patriotic music.

It was one of two moments in my life when I felt the most patriotic, the other one coming many years later under fire in Iraq. I was there, I don't doubt in part, because of the impact made on me by the Boy Scout Handbook of my era. "Be always ready with your armor on," it said without irony, and, "Maintain the honor of your country with your life."

Somewhere between then and now, a lot of people decided to change the Boy Scouts from what it was to what it is. It looks likely to die of what has been done to it. With it will pass away one of the glories of my youth, one of the last institutions that shaped young men to seek high things like honor, duty, love of America, and the strength and skill to walk the Wild.

Speaking of Foreign Agents....

The problem with suddenly enforcing a long-unenforced law is that lots of people have been ignoring it. You may end up catching the very people you had hoped to help out.

A Few Pieces on General Flynn

I admired now-retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn during his time running intelligence in Afghanistan. I was thus really saddened to see both his failure to reform DIA, and the harm to his career it caused; but I was really sad to see him arrested and charged with being a foreign agent. The idea was that he was somehow involved in a quasi-treasonous conspiracy with the Russians.

Well, that turned out to be only sort-of true. The foreign government he was working for turned out to be not Russia but NATO ally Turkey; and the charge isn't so much that he was a spy as that he didn't file the right paperwork to lobby for a foreign government. Also, until that day the law had not been prosecuted as a rule; you just were required to go back and fill out the forms. The law was really on the books, even if it was unenforced, but it was a little unfair to make a special exception for this one guy -- especially in light of his history of genuinely excellent service in Afghanistan.

And then it turned out that the original frame was based on the Logan Act, that unconstitutional piece of nonsense that went unenforced for two centuries -- in spite of far grander and more obvious violations, by people who went on to become Senators and Secretaries of State.

So, at some point my sadness at Flynn's tragic downfall began to alter to a suspicion that he wasn't being fairly treated.

There is some new evidence coming to light now that makes clear that he really, really was not fairly treated. Even the scoundrels in the Mueller investigation have finally asked that he receive no jail time, perhaps in part out of a sense of guilt about what they've done to the man. Perhaps he should have known not to trust the FBI when they told him to meet with them without a lawyer; perhaps he should have known that he was subject to legal penalties for lying to them even if they characterized the meeting as a 'visit' rather than an 'interview,' and even if they didn't warn him about his liability. But he can't be held responsible for the fact that the FBI agents' conclusion that he was being open and forthcoming would be painted as 'lying,' or that he'd be forced by debt and massive overcharges to plead guilty to a crime that he plainly did not commit.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial calling it entrapment. Sarah Carter has a story that says that the FBI mishandled evidence and rewrote the material statements about the interview months later. James Comey admitted that he took steps in the 'investigation' that were not standard.

The judge in the case has, a year after the guilty plea and at the sentencing hearing, suddenly had to demand that all exculpatory information be revealed to him by the prosecution.

I'm starting to think that the wrong man is in danger of prison time.

UPDATE: I'm going to forward one more just because I love the title: "James and the Giant Impeachment."

Appreciation

Sorry I have not been posting as much lately, but I have greatly appreciated all the posts from my co-bloggers. It's nice to feel the sense of community, and even if I haven't got something to say on a given day, I look forward to hearing from each of you. The comments, also, are a daily source of pleasure and a sense of camaraderie for me.

Thank you all for being a part of what we do here.

Aircraft thrillers

Every day lately Maggie's Farm has been posting YouTube clips on aircraft emergencies, usually just audio, with some kind of filler or computer-generated graphics for the video.  This morning's is really worth listening to, an 80-year-old newly bereaved widow who manages to put the family plane down after her husband suffers a heart attack at the controls.

She flew all the time with her husband and had had some rudimentary pilot training decades earlier.  She sounds remarkably calm.  Although there's a little more chaos on the radio than is ideal, and she often doesn't acknowledge and repeat the instructions she gets, everyone (including herself) does a great job getting her down.  How I love these rescue stories, with total strangers dropping everything to engage in an act of brotherly love.

Hoping to find an online account told from her point of view, I discovered only her obituary from three years later.

Quelle Dommage!

The IRS reported "gutted."

On the Gilets Jaunes

Two interesting articles on the current French revolt by the Yellow Vests, apparently another front in the rural-urban cold war. In some ways, their descriptions remind me of the Tea Party movement here, but in others, not. These are longish articles and I'm just quoting some interesting bits from them below the fold.

Peter Berkowitz: What the New Congress Can Learn from Aristotle

Dr. Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution at Stanford has a good article on the relevance of Aristotle's political philosophy to American government today. It's a good read, I thought. Here's a snippet:

Many on both sides take pride in assuming the worst about the opposition. The left bewails the onset of fascism in America. Yet Republicans have reduced the scope of government by cutting taxes and deregulating the economy. And rather than imposing American rule beyond the nation’s borders, the president and his party have sought to bring immigration under the rule of law.

The right adopts a siege mentality and girds itself for total war against the left even though in 2019 the GOP will still control the presidency, the Senate, 26 governorships, and 62 of 97 state legislative chambers ...

The routine exaggeration, the reflexive resorting to sloganeering and invective, and the determined refusal to countenance alternative opinions leave partisans imprisoned within their cherished clichés and mesmerized by their pet panaceas. What is needed is a larger perspective, a suppler outlook, a more capacious sensibility.

What is needed is a generous dose of Aristotelian political science.

But doesn’t Aristotle, writing in the twilight of classical Athenian greatness, proceed from a discredited conception of nature and human nature? Doesn’t he subscribe to the illiberal and antidemocratic view that the purpose of politics is to cultivate virtue, a task to which only the one best regime is suited? Doesn’t his defense of natural slavery and his subordination of women render his thinking offensive to contemporary sensibilities and irrelevant to contemporary politics?

Such questions provide an excellent introduction to Aristotle’s political science ...

Rendezvous with destiny

We watched "The 15:17 to Paris" this week, Clint Eastwood's movie about three American servicemen who foiled a 2015 terrorist attack on a French train.  I'm enjoying remembering watching it more than I did actually experiencing it.

Eastwood made a controversial decision to cast the three servicemen as themselves.  The acting, therefore, is a bit amateurish and flat, matched by the screenplay and directorial style.  "Lawrence of Arabia" or "A Man for All Seasons," it's not, but the effect is charming nevertheless.  The three young men are completely ordinary in an old-fashioned way, fellows of average ability and unremarkable upbringing.  The main focus is on the formative experiences of Spencer Stone, the guy who physically tackled the gun- and knife-wielding terrorist, from his mildly disappointing interactions with an unsympathetic education system, to his mother's disgust at the suggestion that he take drugs to keep him from looking out the window during boring classes, his impulsive decision to get into shape in order to qualify for a pararescue career in the military, and his sharp disappointment at failing to qualify for his first choice of service.

In another movie, all these experiences would show how society failed a young man and led him down a path of anomie and drug use, or spurred him to cure cancer in defiance of his small-minded critics.  Instead, Spencer fumes over his disappointments, but continues along the military paths that remain open to him, picking up tools and experiences here and there, showing mild sparks of courage and independence, and finally making the fateful decision to board the 15:17 train to Paris with his two childhood friends, now also in the service and also on leave.

The attack itself is not terribly dramatic, considering the potential for horrible injury and death.  It's over fairly quickly.  The heroes have a bit of luck.  The former would-be pararescuer calls on his physical strength, his jiu jitsu training, and a bit of first-aid education to stop the bad guy and help the injured train passenger.  All three take care of business briskly; the main character is awarded the Legion of Honor.

Mediocre critical reviews correctly noted the flat tone of the film.  What I enjoyed was the non-drama.  This was not the "They Jacked with the Wrong Guy" genre, one I particularly enjoy, in which the crisis happens to someone who is fatally underestimated by the villains, like Bruce Willis in "Die Hard." The Everyman hero in "The 15:17 to Paris" made something modest of his modest circumstances, which fitted him to step up and do the right thing in a moment of unexpected crisis.  He made few demands on life, concentrating instead on choosing something appropriate from the opportunities that randomly presented themselves to him and putting a reasonable effort into forming himself to meet them, without either whining or self-aggrandizing.  He apparently assumed that many of the things he tried to learn in the service had been dead ends or wasted effort, but they all came in handy when he disarmed the bad guy on the train and helped the injured guy until EMTs could arrive.

Spencer remained cheerful and open to both fun and duty while he cast about for a direction to his life.  If your neighborhood and your town were stocked with guys like him, maybe no one would be winning a Nobel Prize, but it would be a really good place to live.

Vive La France

Notes from the brink

Craftiness obsesses me at most times, but never more than at this season. It's amazing what you can find if you dig into a craft box you haven't opened for 30 years. And the instructions for folding these pretty strips of paper into Moravian stars were still available on the internet! Now I'm in search of a source of much wider and longer strips so I can make stars about 10 inches wide instead of these tiny things. The tiny ones will go on my tree, the big one on my Church's very tall (regrettably artificial) one.
   

Proof of concept:  you can, in fact, tape strips of ordinary typing paper together and make a bigger star.  Now I'll have to experiment with a nicer-quality paper with tape joints in different locations.  This 1-1/2-inch strip makes a star about six inches wide, almost as big as what I'm aiming at.

And here are the final products.  I can get a strip of 2-1/8 inches in width and 11 inches long by cutting an 8.5x11 sheet in quarters and taping four strips end to end to make a strip 2-1/8 by 44 inches long, about the right proportions.  Four of those make a star.  That's the size of the largest star, on the right.  The two tiny stars are made of strips 1/2 inch wide.

Yule Tree

The Hall’s tree. It’s not decorated to compete with Tex, but it is twelve feet tall. Second highest tree I’ve ever mounted, but of better quality I think. The other one was 18 feet, but a short needle pine. This one is a spruce.

Hypothesis Affirmed

Shooting the cops in this case is dangerous—they may send a SWAT team to kill you—and in many places it's illegal. But it is nevertheless morally permissible, indeed heroic and admirable.

This Time

An album from Waylon that found its way online.

One... MILLION Dollars!

The state of New York has an idea to reduce gun ownership: make every gun owner carry a million-dollar insurance policy.

Well, it's not a new idea. We've talked about this before, both here and at the now-defunct Winds of Change. Then as now, gun-haters were sure that the expense of such a policy would cripple interest in guns. The truth is, if such policies were widely offered, they'd be pretty cheap.

I have a million dollar liability policy as part of my homeowner's insurance. The cost of this policy is a few tens of dollars a year -- on the order of thirty bucks. I spend more on coffee, monthly, than I do annually on this policy. And that is in spite of the fact that this covers a wide degree of risks, everything from 'slipped on the ice on your walk in the winter' to 'chose to climb a tree on the back 40 and broke my leg.' It covers you if you get burned on my fireplace, or if a roofbeam should fall on your head. Lots of stuff is covered.

The gun policy they're proposing only covers one thing: if I should shoot someone and get sued for it.

Let's run through that in very round numbers to make the math easy. Now there are 300,000,000+ guns in America, owned by around 100,000,000 households. There are just around 100,000 gun injuries or deaths a year. Two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. Those that are intentional homicides wouldn't be covered by insurance policies because they are crimes, and you can't insure yourself against the consequences of intentionally committing a crime. Only the rare accidental shooting (489, or about half of one thousand in 2015), or a lawful self-defense that resulted in a successful lawsuit, would be covered.

So we've got around 500 annual accidents in a nation of three hundred million guns; assuming all guns were equally likely to cause that injury, and a 100% probability of the insurance company having to pay a claim over it, then the probability that your insurance company has to pay a claim is about .000016. Add in estimated defensive gun use, and there's another group of guns you'd have to insure, but again it's divided over 300,000,000 guns owned by 100,000,000 households. Estimates for how often guns are used defensively vary widely, but the low side numbers are all from the gun-control side; if they believe their own numbers, it's going to be a vanishingly small number of incidents that need to be paid out.

It's a million-dollar policy, but the average cost of a gunshot wound is only $150,000. Assuming that adding in the defensive uses to the accidental shootings fully doubles the number of payoffs, then we've got $150,000 x 1,000 incidents, or $150,000,000 in annual payouts. Divide that by 300,000,000 guns, and we'll need about fifty cents a gun to cover that.

So, if you own six guns, that's three dollars a year. Of course it'll be a bit higher, because the insurance company would have operating costs. But it's not going to break the backs of the firearms injury, even if it survives constitutional review.

'The Virgin Mary Couldn't Consent'

An argument from a Satan-loving professor in Minnesota.

“The virgin birth story is about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity impregnating a human teen. There is no definition of consent that would include that scenario. Happy Holidays"

Another Twitter user called the professor’s claim into question, noting that the Bible states that the Virgin Mary did, indeed, agree to God’s plan for her.

“The biblical god regularly punished disobedience,” Sprankle rebutted. “The power difference (deity vs mortal) and the potential for violence for saying ‘no’ negates her ‘yes.’ To put someone in this position is an unethical abuse of power at best and grossly predatory at worst.”...

Sprankle also decorated his Christmas tree with Satanic decor, as shown in another tweet he sent this past weekend.

The Bible makes a surprisingly large amount of God's desire for human consent, when you consider the power differential. God doesn't need human consent for anything. Like Eru Ilúvatar in the opening act of the Silmarillion, an all-powerful God could readily rework even the most rebellious dissent into a new harmony. So he could respect your free will without cost to himself or his designs. In point of fact, on this model, it's only because of his choice that any of us have free will at all. A god like Ilúvatar could have built mindless machines to execute his designs.

One of the interesting things about the Bible, then, is just how interested God seems to be in humanity's willful compliance. It's true that God punishes bad behavior sometimes. It's also true that God forgoes punishment where there is reform, sometimes. But the central fact of Jesus' mission in the Bible is the search for individual choice -- consent -- on behalf of each and every soul. Jesus does not compel, he argues in favor and leaves it to his listeners to decide what to do with what he says; ultimately, what to do with him.

It's an unreflective pose, this professor's. One ought to think more deeply when one is supposedly wed to the life of the mind.

Language Like a Free Market

Several of us seem to be interested in language, so I thought I'd post a link to editor and language columnist for The Economist Lane Greene's thoughts on the descriptivist / prescriptivist divide and the ways in which language operates like a free market.

Some quick excerpts:

Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. By and large, it still does. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Either you smugly preen about the mistakes you find abhorrent – this makes you a so-called prescriptivist – or you show off your knowledge of language change, and poke holes in the prescriptivists’ facts – this makes you a descriptivist. Group membership is mandatory, and the two are mutually exclusive.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. I have two roles at my workplace: I am an editor and a language columnist. These two jobs more or less require me to be both a prescriptivist and a descriptivist. When people file me copy that has mistakes of grammar or mechanics, I fix them (as well as applying The Economist’s house style). But when it comes time to write my column, I study the weird mess of real language; rather than being a scold about this or that mistake, I try to teach myself (and so the reader) something new. Is this a split personality, or can the two be reconciled into a coherent philosophy? I believe they can.

...

Descriptivists – that is, virtually all academic linguists – will point out that semantic creep is how languages work. It’s just something words do: look up virtually any nontechnical word in the great historical Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which lists a word’s senses in historical order. You’ll see things such as the extension of decimate happening again and again and again. Words won’t sit still. The prescriptivist position, offered one linguist, is like taking a snapshot of the surface of the ocean and insisting that’s how ocean surfaces must look.

Be that as it may, retort prescriptivists, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. ...

Read on for a discussion of changes in English in the Great Vowel Shift, the evolution of the word buxom, the loss of Old English case endings, and the ways spontaneous order does its work in a language, much like it does its work in an economy.

But Is It Conscious?

And how would you know?

There are some standing answers, such as the Turing test, and Sebastian Rödl's test for self-consciousness. These are 'just to be sure' tests, though; they're arguments that we have reason to treat these as thinking beings, as conscious beings, and no reason not to do so. To be sure we aren't exploiting them, then, we should do so.

But consider the arguments from the Aristotelian discussion below, and think about the problem. Are these things somehow programmed to mimic consciousness, or are they becoming conscious? How could you tell?

Solstice tree

Different Definitions of Racism

Over at The Federalist, David Marcus writes about the problems America has because of the starkly different definitions of "racism" progressives and conservatives have. He suggests ways we could compromise on action without compromising on principles. I generally agree with his points, but I don't think the left wants to compromise on actions. I could be wrong, of course.

Here are the definitions and some key points about them:

There are two basic definitions of racism in the United States, one roughly associated with progressives and one roughly associated with conservatives. The former describes racism as the failure to acknowledge and seek to redress systemic discrimination against select disadvantaged minority groups. It is very broad and captures everything from unconscious bias to white supremacy. The latter views racism as making assumptions about, or taking action towards, an individual or group on the sole basis of their race. It is narrow and generally requires belief, intent, and animosity.

These definitions don’t simply differ; to a great extent they actually contradict each other. Much of the contradiction stems from the fact that the progressive definition of racism requires that an advantaged individual or group must be attacking the less privileged. The more conservative and narrow definition of racism requires no appeal to power structures, only to bias, and can be committed by anyone towards anyone.

 ...

There is a double standard here that progressives don’t actually deny. It is, in fact, baked into their definition of racism. Under their rubric, the definition of racist has a double standard precisely because society has double standards that they argue overwhelmingly disadvantage the less privileged. It is internally logical and consistent in a way a lot of conservatives don’t quite understand.

On the other hand, those on the left are often shocked when polls show that majorities of white people believe that they are discriminated against in the United States. They will point to economic data, political power, and cultural representation and say, “You people are crazy.” But under the narrower definition of racism, it makes perfect sense. These white people are reacting to the fact that they can be attacked on the basis of their race in ways others can’t. In addition, whites — and increasingly Asians — look at programs like affirmative action as inherently racist.

I think he's done a good job in teasing out the definitions and why conservatives and progressives misunderstand each other on this point.

What to do about it is another thing altogether.