Just Not Getting It

The SCOTUS issued what strikes me as a completely weird decision today on the census. As I'm sure you've heard, they declared that the administration's explanation for wanting to ask whether counted people were citizens was "insufficient," and sent the case back down for more consideration once a fuller explanation was provided.

I'm unclear on exactly why any explanation is needed. This is surely what a census is supposed to do. What exactly is the census for if it isn't to count the number of citizens in each state? Is there some reason the United States government shouldn't be allowed to know how many people are inside a given state who aren't citizens? By law, all of those people should have a legal status registered with the government, after all: a visa or a permanent residency, for example. Conducting the census is an actual Constitutional duty of the Federal government. Why should the government need to explain itself at all?

Political Courage in Contemporary America

Tim Young: I dont know about you guys, but I thought the bravest, most courageous moment of the #DemDebate was when Julian Castro defended a transgender woman's right to have an abortion.

I wonder how long it will be before "Life of Brian" is held to be hate speech -- not because it makes fun of Christianity, but because of this scene:

Dan Crenshaw vs. Google

The tech giants seem determined to force a conflict in terms of their effect on our self-governing republic, and they're starting to get one.

Tulsi Beats Warren

Her argument that she is 'the most qualified to be commander-in-chief' is not quite right, but she is the most qualified of the ones who have any kind of chance. They're running a bunch of career politicians, so she's the closest thing: a real military officer, albeit one who served in a medical staff role rather than one who would have "commanded" in the ordinary military sense of the term.

She won the Drudge Poll and the Google Search quasi-poll, and Reason was impressed with her.

I like Tulsi, as I've said before. It's just hard to imagine turning the keys over to her given her courting gas-my-own-population Assad. On the other hand, she has been a strident defender of religious liberty at a time when that liberty is under heavy assault. We could certainly do worse than to have her head the Democratic ticket.

UPDATE: TNR strikes a measured tone:

Over the course of two hours, approximately seven minutes were devoted to the top existential threat facing humanity. And only four of the ten candidates on stage were asked directly about how they intend to rapidly reduce carbon emissions over the next eleven years—something that must be done to preserve a livable planet for future generations.... It was, to put it lightly, a disgrace—and not just because climate change was the number one issue that Democratic voters wanted to see discussed at the debate. The debate itself was held in Miami, Florida, a city that’s literally being swallowed by the rising ocean.

If you are curious, Tulsi's "vision" says some very sweet things about the environment, but has zero specifics on exactly how to attain any of them.

The debates

John Podhoretz on the elevated tone we can expect:

The only way these debates will matter is if they are exciting. And the only way to ensure that people keep watching them as the months pass, and thereby create a sense that the Democratic Party is full of life, is if these first debates reward their interest with fireworks.

It’s the shmendricks who need to set the debate hall on fire — you know, the ones you’ve never heard of, like the governors of Climatechangiana and Potsmokia and the House members from Whereverdude and Freestuffistan.

If only I had more confidence one of those guys wasn't going to end up with the nomination.

Bill Barr, Bagpiper

With the full marching band backing him up it's hard to hear how good he is, but it's a fine look for an Attorney General.

Study: Americans Angrier

Technically, the finding is that 84% of people think Americans are angrier than they used to be. VodkaPundit notes that this seems to be an artifact of the media, especially social media: "In real life, people don't seem much different."

Iowahawk was just making the same point, following a long round-the-country trip he's just finished. "You can learn a lot more about this country from a dashboard than from a keyboard.... The USA is an amazing, beautiful place, full of friendly people of all types and all political persuasions, who don't scream invectives at each other all day long in real life."

In general, I think most of America's problems are confined to small places with loud voices. There are some that are not: the opioid crisis is not; rural unemployment is not. Increasingly the immigration crisis is spilling out of the border regions and major cities and into the whole country. These things need to be addressed before they wreck the whole.

Still, for the most part the America I see from the back of the bike is much as they describe it. Anywhere you stop, people are friendly enough. You exchange pleasantries, and then ride on. If you should move and settle somewhere else, your neighbors make you welcome, and then largely leave you be. It's a pretty good place, most of the place and most of the time.

Nor can I easily recall the last time I saw someone, face to face, speak as rudely to another person as seems to be the standard on social media. I take Conan's position on this, as R.E. Howard related in The Tower of the Elephant.

A little more exposure to peril might improve our "civilized" class.

Federal Prosecutors Warn Judge Not To Interfere

The victims are that much less important than the people being protected by DOJ's exercise of discretion in this case.

Starship Troopers tax

Instapundit reports that Robert Francis ("Call me Beto") O'Rourke is channeling Robert Heinlein and proposing a tax on households that lack current or past armed service members.  The idea has a superficial appeal:  fund veterans' benefits by putting an extra tax on the population that benefits from military service without personal sacrifice.  On second thought, though, isn't it just another way of saying vets should get taxpayer-funded benefits, with the new wrinkle that vets and their famlies should get a tax break, too?  Why not just fund vet benefits at a suitable level and, while we're at it, quit playing games that make the benefits unreasonably hard to get?

O'Rourke's proposal smuggles in the assumption that we can't treat vets properly unless we raise taxes.  As usual, his mind goes straight to a tax that lands on some but not others, because that's the only way to achieve social justice.  Someone always needs to pay reparations to someone else.

Consummatum Est

As announced recently, David Bellavia was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor today.

He is the first living Iraq War veteran to receive this highest of awards.

Task & Purpose, like true enlisted men, frame the story in terms of the back pay to which SSG Bellavia is now entitled.

Congratulations to an American worthy of the name.

That crazy Conway

AVI posted links to a number of old articles, many from 2016.  I particularly enjoyed the WaPo October 2016 article dripping scorn on Trump's ridiculous PR team and their ignorant, probably insincere disregard of the prevailing wisdom in the "lamestream media."  The article ends with this taunt:

On Nov. 8, I fully expect Trump TV to say that Trump actually won. After all, Conway said they would. Unequivocally.

Conway's electoral map predicted Clinton would take California, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Minnesota, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and New Mexico. She assigned toss-up status to Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.

And what happened? Conway was right about all the definitely-Clinton and definitely-Trump states. What's more, she didn't do badly on the toss-ups. Clinton took Conway's toss-up states of Nevada, Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, and Virginia. Trump took the toss-up states of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida.

The WaPo's own "realistic" map blew not only the predicted states but the toss-ups.  It assigned "weak Clinton" and "weak Trump" status to six states; Trump took them all home on election day. WaPo assigned toss-up status to only three states, all bagged by Trump in the end.

The final taunt turned out to be the best prediction in the piece.

How about this year?  Are the polls any more competent?  They sound a lot like the 2016 polls, just as the reports of amazing rally crowds remind me of 2016.

Wonderful News

...if true.

The sprawling Democratic presidential field is incredibly diverse, but a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs finds Democrats give a collective shrug to gender, race and age as factors they’re considering when supporting a candidate.

Instead, Democratic registered voters are yearning for experience in elected office. A whopping 73% cited that as a quality that would make them more excited about supporting a presidential candidate.

Citizens

One end of my county is stirred up over an annexation effort by a small town on our southern border.  A bit further south sit three or four other smallish towns that are growing both commercially and industrially, and on the other side of them, across Nueces Bay, the larger town of Corpus Christi has quite a bit of industry.  Our county, in contrast, watched industry pass it by during the 20th century, leaving it to develop primarily as a tourist and fishing spot and home for retirees.  Jobs for young people aren't plentiful here.  The commute to the greater employment opportunities to our south is doable but not obviously attractive, especially since our rent prices are pushed up by the coastal location and the tourist trade.  The tourist trade, in turn, depends on our preservation of the bays and shores.

The town on our southern border, Aransas Pass, is the mainland twin to the barrier island's much more prosperous Port Aransas, covered with condos, bars, and restaurants.  Aransas Pass struggles with its infrastructure and tax base.  It also fears incursion and encirclement from its municipal neighbors to the south.  It has constantly to reckon with the mixed blessing of industrial development, particularly to the south, tempting with its jobs and property values but threatening with its dirt.

In the southern, unincorporated part of my county, which has mostly scattered residential development, is the site of an old carbon-black plant.  A new owner recently has invested a lot of cash into cleaning up the unsightly but largely inert crud left behind and has received state environmental clearance to redevelopment the property for commercial or industrial but not residential uses.  The city of Aransas Pass, noticing this spring that Texas was about to pass a new law requiring the consent of the annexees, quickly took initial steps to annex an area that includes the old plant site.  They hoped to be grandfathered under the old statute, thus avoiding the expense and uncertainty of a referendum.

The proposed annexees generally oppose the city's move, fearing that they'll pay much greater taxes without getting any services.  Many city residents to the south applaud what they see as a chance to use a city's statutory land-use restrictions to control or prevent industrial development, powers that are largely denied to a county government.  Opponents of the annexation are mixed on their view of the proposed industrial development, but some question whether the city genuinely will restrict it, given their current negotiations with industrial developers on the other side of town.  Others view the developers and the annexing city with perhaps equal suspicion.

It is my painful duty to report the unsurprising news that public officials have not achieved the highest possible level of transparency and informed citizen involvement.  Many citizens are only now beginning to pay attention.  Accusations of smoke-filled-room tactics and hypocrisy are vying with charges that previously uninvolved citizens are belatedly second-guessing the beleaguered public servants.

In short, it's a dispute after my own heart.  My neighbors are struggling with the trade-off between creating jobs and preserving habitat.  If a site was used industrially for a century, what should be done with it now, and at whose expense?  Should taxpayers buy it up and turn it into a bird sanctuary?  Should it be set aside for industry, so we can concentrate on preserving other, still pristine coastal marshes?  Do we have the right to insist that the owners fund a residential development--or even a nature preserve--instead?  If they build a residential neighborhood, are we really sure that canals, lawns, septic tanks, pesticides, and fertilizer will affect the bays less than some kind of light industrial park?  Should more houses be built practically at sea level in hurricane country?  Did the city skip steps in its rushed annexation move, or must it start over and this time subject itself to the new resident consent process?

The public discussion of all these issues is confused, opaque, and fraught.  There are now three lawsuits pending or threatened, one for defamation of the plant-site owners, another alleging the plant-site owners are pursuing the defamation action to squelch public participation in a legitimate policy dispute, and a third attacking the annexation process.

I'm in my element, attending meetings and hearings, writing them up, posting them on Facebook, doing my bit to keep the public discussion fact-based and focused, and trying to make the implicit trade-offs more explicit.  I'm meeting some interesting new people and encouraging them to run for office.

#CancelStudentDebt

Although I don’t intend to sell my vote, I do appreciate that the opening bid is in the six figures. I suppose it’s a sort of respect to assume the bribe would need to be quite high.

If bribery is the platform, Bernie’s going to be hard to beat. Maybe Kamala will promise to cancel my mortgage.

Aristotle’s Ethics: Politics and the Nature of Man

To quickly review the first post on the Hillsdale course Aristotle’s Ethics, there were three main points.

1. We are looking for an appropriate level of precision and evidence. The precision and evidence expected of mathematics is different from that expected for biology, history, etc.
2. There is a hierarchy of “good” in things, pursuits, methods, etc. Some things, pursuits, methods, etc., are more valuable than others. I think it is easier to think of it as a hierarchy of value, maybe, but the Nicomachean Ethics (EN) consistently calls it good, the good, goods, etc.
3. This hierarchy is established first by the theory that if something exists for the sake of something else, that something else is a higher good, or more valuable.

The example was the work of the bridle maker, which, in ancient Athens, was for the sake of having cavalry, and cavalry was for the sake of military victory, and that was for the sake of preserving the city-state. So, the work of the bridle maker is good, but that of the cavalryman is a higher good, that of the general even higher, and the existence of the city-state yet higher. I surmised that this would make the work of citizenship, political engagement, the highest form of work.

The very highest goods exist for their own sake, like happiness.

ThinkSpot

Sounds like Dr. Peterson has a new project aimed at securing freedom of speech and thought.

In a rambling column today, Martha Gill, one of The Guardian’s authoritarian scribes, attempts to take Dr. Jordan Peterson to task for launching Thinkspot—a new free speech-friendly social media platform.

Well, thanks to the Guardian. I hadn't heard of this endeavor before now.

"The End of an Era"

I suppose eras are always ending these days. Quillette has an excerpt from a book by Phyllis Chesler, whose given name marks her era quite well. In the Baby Boom, close to ten thousand girls a year were given the name "Phyllis" some years; in 2012 it was 13.
This is a real change, but a small one. She has seen bigger things.

After 9/11, I felt as if the Afghanistan I’d fled so long ago had followed me right into the future and into the West. That distant and dangerous country began to dominate American and European headlines. Muslim women started wearing burqas (head, face, and body coverings) and niqabs (face masks) on the streets of New York City, London, and Paris.

As global violence against women gained horrendous momentum, many Western feminists became increasingly afraid to criticize that violence lest they be condemned as colonialists and racists. This fear often trumped their concern for women’s human rights globally.... Many feminist academics and journalists now believe that speaking out against head scarves, face veils, the burqa, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, and polygamy is somehow racist. I did not foresee the extent to which feminists who, philosophically, are universalists would paradoxically become isolationists. Such timidity (presumably in the service of opposing racism) is perhaps the greatest failing of the feminist establishment.

The bulk of the work appears to be biographical tributes to the Second Wave feminists she worked with, as well as a sorrowful retrospective on what has become of their common work. I suppose she must be intending to close off her own era indeed, given some of her comments. She will not now be welcome on many a campus.

The Army Loves Reflective Belts

T&P reports that the Army has finally realized that it isn't necessary for every soldier to wear one in the daytime. Now if only they could realize that it isn't necessary to wear one in a war zone. I suppose there were probably numbers to back up that being struck by a vehicle while inside the wire was a bigger threat than being shot by a sniper. Maybe.

What would we do without research

Actually, this research appears to have been pretty open-minded.  The researchers left wallets all over the world and tried to figure out what influences people to try to return them to their owners.  They found interesting trends in national location, level of average local education, and size of wad of cash (would you have guessed that the greater the cash, the greater the chance of return?).

I tried to do a thought experiment about finding a wallet.  My first impression is that I'd never dream of failing to try to find the owner.  When I try to imagine find a stash of money large enough to be seriously tempting, I also start imagining making myself a target for death from some cartel.  Finding big money always gets people in trouble in movies and books.

The perception gap

This study concludes that people on both the left and the right overestimate the extreme views of their opponents.  The effect is less marked for those who are not very engaged politically.  The upshot is that people on either side of the political divide probably have more views in common than they realize.