Operation Kayla Mueller

According to the New York Post:

The military operation targeting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was named for Kayla Mueller, the humanitarian aid worker the terrorist leader captured and tortured until her death in 2015.

...
Mueller, of Prescott, Ariz., was 25 when she was taken captive by ISIS in August 2013 after crossing the Turkish border into Syria to visit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo. She was held for 18 months before her death was announced in 2015.

An appropriate name for such an operation.

Ranger Up marks the occasion as well.

Update: USA Today has an interview with Mueller's parents, a sad but satisfying exchange.

Disturbing news regarding the "hero dog" of the al-Baghdadi raid.

Courtesy of the Babylon Bee

Riding Report

Saw another bear today, smaller than the last one. Classic shape and colors, black with a tan muzzle. I'd estimate 225-250 pounds, whereas I think the fellow from the Mexican restaurant was north of 350.

The light and the color of the leaves today was as fine as I've ever seen it. You get a real sense of verticality riding up and down these mountain roads, as you see ridges that you then descend in amongst, or rise back out of again. The weather was warm enough to ride without gloves, though as the afternoon lengthened I added a long-sleeved shirt.

Good day.

Wolf Lake.

Two great theories

We're all wondering how California could have painted itself into such a lurid corner on a lot of subjects, the most recently obvious one being a dramatic failure of the power grid.  USA Today helpfully quotes two citizens--one famous and one not--who are floating explanations that surely will catch on.  First,

For San Francisco resident and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer, the blame lies at the doorstep of the White House. He says, "We can't solve this within the Golden State. We are in a fight for our lives, and the president isn't doing anything to help us. In fact, he's making things worse."

Mr. Steyer offers no explanation for his theory, which perhaps needs none. Second,

Susan Smith, [a] resident of Shasta County, where 40,000 PG+E customers had their power turned off, has lived through tornadoes and hurricanes but has never dealt with as many outages as she has since moving from Texas [clue alert].... "If PG+E doesn't have faith in themselves that they can't withstand a wind storm, then they need to go out of business," Smith says Sunday while charging her phone at a community resource center set up in her hometown of Anderson.

Well, PG+E is in its second bankruptcy of the last two decades, so we'll see, but the special thing about state-regulated monopolies is that they generally don't go out of business no matter how fantastically they fail. It's kind of why people go for the monopoly gig in the first place.  In any case, while PG+E can expect limited sympathy considering whom it's in bed with, it is now and ever has been the truth that when a heavily state-regulated monopoly does a bad job, it might be a good idea to consider the barking-mad regulatory system it lives under. It's freaking California, after all, and when you untether a company from market forces by granting it monopoly status, all you have left for protection is the gummint.  That's the state gummint, by the way, the one answerable to California voters, not the Bad Orange Man in Washington.

Major Gabbard Worries the Democratic Establishment

She's only polling around three percent for now, but her attacks on Hillary Clinton -- and her heresy on abortion as well as foreign wars -- seem to have scared the party into backing her primary opponent.

She responded by declaring she wouldn't seek re-election to her House seat at all, but would focus on becoming President. That's shaken them up a bit.

So she's now a right-winger! A Russian Spy!

They're sounding a little bit crazy these days. I wonder if they're aware of the tinge of hysteria that is creeping into their collective voice.

Double-plus un-education

I know this has been going on for a while, but don't we detect a kind of end-stage frantic spiraling climax? If I understand correctly--however unlikely that be in light of my pathetic loyalty to stale intellectual customs that are destroying the world and literally (srsly you guyz) killing otherkin students of all otherilks--this seems to be the plan:

(1) “redesigning assessment ecologies,” and quite a few “dimension-based rubrics."

(2) ???

(3) righteous emancipation and “inclusive excellence.”

So allrighty then.

The Flynn case keeps making me angrier

Flynn's new counsel is tearing the prosecutors up with demands for copies of exculpatory documents.  They should be terrified of this woman.

They live for this

Give a dog something to do that he's all in for.  You can get amazing photos.

Nakba!

The Durham inquiry into the Russiagate conspiracy turns into a formal criminal investigation -- of the investigators of the Russiagate conspiracy.

My faith in the Department of Justice is not so very great that I have high hopes here, but I certainly long to see justice done in this matter. Good hunting, but be transparent and open with the people, and let the chips fall where they may.

Toto Reference from the DB

Headline: "U.S. General blessed the rains down in AFRICOM."

Ironically, the actual AFRICOM headquarters is in Stuttgart, Germany. They probably have rain there too.

Betting against mistakes

I'm liking this guy Matt Levine, who writes for Bloomberg:

Neumann, the founder of WeWork, will walk away from this corporate bonfire with a billion dollars and a bunch of fancy houses. His great-grandchildren will be prominent philanthropists with their names on museums and universities, the strange origin of their fortunes long forgotten. Neumann did a certain sort of capitalism—one with some cachet at HBS!—as well as anyone has ever done it. It is one thing to build a successful company that creates a lot of value and take some of that value for yourself; Neumann created a company that destroyed value at a blistering pace and nonetheless extracted a billion dollars for himself. He lit $10 billion of SoftBank’s money on fire and then went back to them and demanded a 10% commission. What an absolute legend.

As a friend I spent time with last week at a small reunion used to say, "Hey, when did I fall off the fast track?"

The Codevilla Tapes

Some of you will be interested in this.

Mountain Dining

Stopped for dinner at a little Mexican place last night. Apparently I wasn’t the only “Beorn” to think of it.

I’m guessing he’s been a regular visitor. Big sleek fellow with a very glossy coat. Not unfriendly.

Impeachment Replays

William Mattox, of the James Madison Institute, has an interesting idea.

An acquittal should allow a president to run for a third term.

Not a bad one, either.

Eric Hines

Remind me again what these cities have in common?

Again, h/t Instapundit:  top honors for rat infestation go to Chicago, then L.A., with New York, San Francisco, etc., bringing up the rear.

Alliances as a means, not an end

Loyalty and faithfulness to commitments are good things, but nations aren't people. George Washington warned us that

“habitual hatred or a habitual fondness” turns a nation into “a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.”

That's not to say that a nation should lead other nations on, then disappoint them, only that it should think carefully about what it commits to.  In other words, exhibit a little impulse control.

But what did you MEAN by that?

And they say BoJo is rash:

Which brings me back to Alexander and his knot. For the plan of Boris Johnson is not just the bold one. It is the only answer that can stop the courts, MPs, and others from doing for the rest of our natural lives what they would very happily do. Which is to continue to stand before the 2016 result and insist either that it cannot be acted upon or that it should not be acted upon. The media version of this is to pretend that it is not clear what the British people meant when they voted to leave the EU. Somehow it would have been completely plain if we had asked to remain.

Two good ones from Instapundit

Ad Hominem as a Cognitive Bias

Ad hominem is one of the more common informal fallacies, but I have decided that it is also a significant cognitive bias. A cognitive bias is a mode of thought that speeds analysis but tends to lead to errors. A famous one is the availability heuristic, the tendency to make judgments on available information rather than seeking fuller information. For example, I might decide to adopt a new diet because I've seen it depicted favorably in television shows and news programs. Those positive depictions are available without further work. However, further study might show that the new diet was much more questionably beneficial, or even harmful.

Another famous one is the confirmation bias, in which I am inclined to approve information that supports what I already believe to be the case (and to discount evidence that suggests I might be wrong). This one is a very powerful bias that affects everyone, no matter how careful a thinker they may be. It is very difficult to correct for it.

The ad hominem bias, another heuristic bias, which I am proposing works like this: it is easier to understand a known individual's bad qualities than to understand a complex situation in which they are involved. If a bad quality attributed to the known individual can reasonably be inferred to be the cause of a bad but complex situation, the ad hominem heuristic occurs when you make that easy move.

The ad hominem cognitive bias is similar to the availability heuristic in that it works on information that is already available, partly in order to avoid the difficulty of understanding the complex situation. However, it is also similar to confirmation bias in that you believe the bad attribution you yourself are making just because you already believe the person is bad. It is more complicated than the other two, however, in that -- because this is your own attribution, and you therefore believe it -- the new, probably false belief gets filed as further evidence of the bad quality of the person you dislike or hate. The ad hominem heuristic thus contains a feedback loop in which it strengthens itself the more often it occurs; and since it is a cognitive bias and thus likely to lead to error, that means you tend to drift further and further away from what is really true.

In extreme cases, all the problems in your world can end up seeming to be the fault of this one pernicious individual. If only he (or she) could be removed, the improvement would be systemic and massive. This kind of belief can justify many sorts of extreme conclusions, or even violence against the hated individual.

Perhaps it has a name already.

Poor Target Selection

Granted that this man wasn't carrying either his machine-gun or his sniper rifle at the time, but what thief looks at this guy and thinks to himself, "Oh, yeah, of all the people in the city today this is the one I'm going to pick out to rob"?