All the news that's fit to argue about -- Well, at least, all the news the Hall told me they read. Or almost all of it. For everyone who contributed, thank you very much! Also, in addition to the below, let me recommend the sidebar links under each contributor's name.
I am not familiar with all of these, so if I have mis-categorized something, please let me know. Also, if I left something out, or if you've thought of something else you'd like to add, let me know. Or, if you have a better system for categorization. Etc.
Advice
Several people mentioned their Facebook feeds, and Grim gives this related advice: "I get a lot of news off Facebook these days, as friends of various kinds
are interested in a lot of things that differ from my own interests.
Since my friends are of a wide range of political views, I get a wide
range of information and news in that way. It's the best real advice I
can give here: not that you should read this or that site, but that you
should cultivate friendships with intelligent and decent people of many
different views."
Links below the fold.
The Fall of Brazil
A friend of mine from Brazil recommends this video as a relatively minimally biased piece for Americans trying to understand what is going on.
Friday Night AMV
Ride of the Valkeries.
Hueys, Cobras, "Why-do-you-guys-sit-on-your-helmets?", Goth-lolli girl with a giant axe. Wait, what? So......what would happen if your average medieval fantasy world opened a gate into out world?
"Brought to you by Shinzo Abe". Heh.
Hueys, Cobras, "Why-do-you-guys-sit-on-your-helmets?", Goth-lolli girl with a giant axe. Wait, what? So......what would happen if your average medieval fantasy world opened a gate into out world?
"Brought to you by Shinzo Abe". Heh.
Marine Corps Pugil Sticks
A short video from the USMC's mandatory gender-integrated training.
Some thoughts about this.
1) The cadre jump in angrily and immediately to pull the male off her. You can tell they are mad because he tried to hurt her, but in this context that's exactly what he is supposed to do. The whole point of pugil stick training is to teach aggression in killing with the rifle and/or bayonet.
2) Now he's being asked to train as if his opponent needs to be protected and treated somewhat gently. It is a basic principle of combat training that you will fight as you train (because you won't have time to think carefully while in contact with the enemy), so you should train as you intend to fight. He is being trained to be less aggressive in hand-to-hand combat. That creates the danger of failure in the field, when his life and his unit's will be on the line.
3) If training is altered so that she is on a more even footing, meanwhile, she will also be being trained wrong. She will be being led to believe in a fraud: that she has been given the right training and tools to succeed in a real war against a male opponent. Belief in this fraud can only hurt her if she is ever called to serve in combat. It will set up similar danger to her life and to the survival of her unit. She needs to be taught to realize that she is at an incredible disadvantage if circumstances like these ever occur in the field, because she is. Her survival, already unlikely, depends on her fully grasping how dangerous the situation is.
4) Anyone who might later attain command over women in an infantry unit also needs to understand this limitation of some of the Marines under their command, just as they understand other tactical limits. The future leaders who will emerge from this training also need to see what happens if they should order female Marines under their command into situations in which this kind of combat is likely to occur. The success and even the survival of their units depends in large part on commanders fully understanding the limitations under which they and their units operate.
5) Thus, the cadre need to be trained out of their protectiveness if this is to continue. Pugil sticks are heavily padded, and combatants are in armor. Women Marines should be beaten as viciously as their opponents are able to beat them. That is the only way in which the training can teach the right lessons about how to survive and attain victory at war.
6) That fact alone ought to be reason to reconsider this whole enterprise. I don't think anything good will come of encouraging young men who excel in testosterone and strength to think of women as acceptable targets for their full strength. Such training will give us the most effective gender-integrated infantry units we could have, but they will still be less effective than all-male units -- and at the potentially substantial social cost of weakening our cultural norm against men using physical violence on women.
I cannot imagine the tradeoff is worth it, and least of all as part of a strategy for making American society better and more decent for women. This is hugely counterproductive for both the military's ends and the social aims allegedly justifying it.
7) What is sometimes called the paradox of equality is on fullest display here. By creating a formal legal equality, we have created a massive actual inequality. You can repair the inequality of outcomes only by creating a new inequality -- for example, allowing the women paintball guns so that they can "win" against a pugil-stick wielding opponent by shooting him from a distance. That would potentially be decent training for both the man and the woman as it would teach the woman a workable way of surviving a situation like this one. It would also require the man to push even harder in order to succeed given the disability -- as he would have to if he were out of ammunition and facing someone with a rifle.
Some thoughts about this.
1) The cadre jump in angrily and immediately to pull the male off her. You can tell they are mad because he tried to hurt her, but in this context that's exactly what he is supposed to do. The whole point of pugil stick training is to teach aggression in killing with the rifle and/or bayonet.
2) Now he's being asked to train as if his opponent needs to be protected and treated somewhat gently. It is a basic principle of combat training that you will fight as you train (because you won't have time to think carefully while in contact with the enemy), so you should train as you intend to fight. He is being trained to be less aggressive in hand-to-hand combat. That creates the danger of failure in the field, when his life and his unit's will be on the line.
3) If training is altered so that she is on a more even footing, meanwhile, she will also be being trained wrong. She will be being led to believe in a fraud: that she has been given the right training and tools to succeed in a real war against a male opponent. Belief in this fraud can only hurt her if she is ever called to serve in combat. It will set up similar danger to her life and to the survival of her unit. She needs to be taught to realize that she is at an incredible disadvantage if circumstances like these ever occur in the field, because she is. Her survival, already unlikely, depends on her fully grasping how dangerous the situation is.
4) Anyone who might later attain command over women in an infantry unit also needs to understand this limitation of some of the Marines under their command, just as they understand other tactical limits. The future leaders who will emerge from this training also need to see what happens if they should order female Marines under their command into situations in which this kind of combat is likely to occur. The success and even the survival of their units depends in large part on commanders fully understanding the limitations under which they and their units operate.
5) Thus, the cadre need to be trained out of their protectiveness if this is to continue. Pugil sticks are heavily padded, and combatants are in armor. Women Marines should be beaten as viciously as their opponents are able to beat them. That is the only way in which the training can teach the right lessons about how to survive and attain victory at war.
6) That fact alone ought to be reason to reconsider this whole enterprise. I don't think anything good will come of encouraging young men who excel in testosterone and strength to think of women as acceptable targets for their full strength. Such training will give us the most effective gender-integrated infantry units we could have, but they will still be less effective than all-male units -- and at the potentially substantial social cost of weakening our cultural norm against men using physical violence on women.
I cannot imagine the tradeoff is worth it, and least of all as part of a strategy for making American society better and more decent for women. This is hugely counterproductive for both the military's ends and the social aims allegedly justifying it.
7) What is sometimes called the paradox of equality is on fullest display here. By creating a formal legal equality, we have created a massive actual inequality. You can repair the inequality of outcomes only by creating a new inequality -- for example, allowing the women paintball guns so that they can "win" against a pugil-stick wielding opponent by shooting him from a distance. That would potentially be decent training for both the man and the woman as it would teach the woman a workable way of surviving a situation like this one. It would also require the man to push even harder in order to succeed given the disability -- as he would have to if he were out of ammunition and facing someone with a rifle.
John R. Schindler on Clinton's NSA Problem
A veteran of signals intelligence writes on Clinton's other security problem. There are at least two massive issues revealed by the email dumps. The one we knew about -- somehow her confidante Sidney Blumenthal appears to have had access to NSA signals intelligence "somehow," although he had no security clearance at all and had been specifically rejected for government service by the President.
The other one is new, and involves Clinton's personal refusal to be bound by security standards. She wanted a Blackberry that she could take into Secure Compartment Information Facilities (SCIF).
Now it looks like there might be another angle: can they bracket at least some emails as having been sent from the Blackberry while in the SCIF? That would be a demonstrable violation of national security by Clinton herself.
The other one is new, and involves Clinton's personal refusal to be bound by security standards. She wanted a Blackberry that she could take into Secure Compartment Information Facilities (SCIF).
But personal electronic devices—your cellphone, your Blackberry—can never be brought into a SCIF. They represent a serious technical threat that is actually employed by many intelligence agencies worldwide. Though few Americans realize it, taking remote control over a handheld device, then using it to record conversations, is surprisingly easy for any competent spy service. Your smartphone is a sophisticated surveillance device—on you, the user—that also happens to provide phone service and Internet access.Recently there was a story about how the FBI was looking at pictures of Clinton using her Blackberry. At the time it was suggested they might be trying to figure out where there were gaps in the email record, as she deleted tens of thousands and never turned them over to the government, claiming they were "personal."
As a result, your phone and your Blackberry always need to be locked up before you enter any SCIF. Taking such items into one represents a serious security violation. And Hillary and her staff really hated that.
...
[T]here was no problem with Ms. Clinton checking her personal email inside her office SCIF. Hers, like most, had open (i.e. unclassified) computer terminals connected to the Internet, and the Secretary of State could log into her own email anytime she wanted to right from her desk.
But she did not want to. Ms. Clinton only checked her personal email on her Blackberry: she did not want to sit down at a computer terminal...
Why Ms. Clinton would not simply check her personal email on an office computer, like every other government employee less senior than the president, seems a germane question, given what a major scandal EmailGate turned out to be. “What did she not want put on a government system, where security people might see it?” the former NSA official asked, adding, “I wonder now, and I sure wish I’d asked about it back in 2009.”
Now it looks like there might be another angle: can they bracket at least some emails as having been sent from the Blackberry while in the SCIF? That would be a demonstrable violation of national security by Clinton herself.
Missed A Chance There
InstaPundit on failures by elites to understand the right:
The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.
Why Not Honesty?
The BART system explains why it was down recently.
@shakatron BART was built to transport far fewer people, and much of our system has reached the end of its useful life. This is our reality.Twitter is not the ideal way to communicate, but they managed to make it work.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@tquad64 Planners in 1996 had no way of predicting the tech boom - track redundancy, new tunnels & transbay tubes are decades-long projects.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@lisabari To illustrate this point - the number of people who exit at 19th street in Oakland has doubled in less than a decade.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@CBonneaux We have to fix what we have first - our system was built to last about 45 years and we've reached that limit.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@cliberti We have 3 hours a night to do maintenance on a system built to serve 100k per week that now serves 430k per day. #ThisIsOurReality
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
@cliberti The magnitude of repair projects is too great to do during our 3 hour maintenance window. 1/2 the time would be spent staging.
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
The last trains are leaving the end of each line within the next 15 mins - it's been a great conversation. Goodnight. #BayAreaRidesTogether
— SFBART (@SFBART) March 17, 2016
The Feast of Saint Patrick
Today the Army is in trouble for cultural appropriation.
The Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish-American cultural group and drinking society, is using St. Patrick’s Day to draw attention to its dispute with the United States Army over the Army’s “cultural appropriation” of the color green.If you're looking for an Irish meal today, corned beef is actually more an American-Irish meal learned from intermingling with other immigrants in our big port cities. If you want something from Ireland itself, try this amazing Dublin Coddle. Even if you don't care about the feast particularly, you can't go wrong with bacon, sausage, onion, and potato.
“Green is our fookin color,” according to Mickey McSorley of no fixed address, South Boston. “Nobody else’s! And by the way, everybody isn’t fookin Irish today, laddie. Just the Irish.”
“The real Irish. Not the ‘Scots-Irish’ frauds...” he added in a brogue that onlookers described as “wicked fake.”
It always strikes me as strange that this holiday comes right inside Lent, but is such a huge party. We used to leave Savannah for a week when we lived down that way. But there is a real saint behind the fake Irishness. Here is the prayer most associated with him.
"The Great Fear"
Following up on Nassim Taleb's article from yesterday, Wretchard notes that this election is marked by a loss of faith in the establishment among the base voters of both parties. The elites have proven to have no clothes:
Rightly or wrongly Americans used to have a sense of place in the world. It was once a comforting place where the president -- be he from either party -- protected them. It was a place where secretaries of state and defense stood guard over the borders and American children could count as their birthright having better lives than their parents....Ted Cruz, for what it is worth, has taken a bold step in assembling an answer. His team at this time is big-tent enough that they hold competing positions, but that may be a strength at a time when the answers aren't clear. What may be needed are strong thinkers who find different views plausible, competing with each other over whose idea best fits the new reality. There are many different parts of that new reality, from crises in the South China Sea to Syria to North Korea. It may be that nobody has all the answers, or that many have only part of what a real answer might look like. Being open to competition of thought is a good start.
If Trump represents the Great Fear his origins can be traced in the arc from the Three AM Call to the Barking Dog. We needed to believe, in this dangerous world, that the former was true and not the latter. What Trump did was look behind the curtain and destroy one faith without giving us another. What now? What now? That may be the real question this campaign should answer.
How Far Back in Time Could You Go and Still Understand English?
I am an exception, in that Middle English is no problem for me if it is written down. When spoken with the original accent, however, I am not practiced in understanding it.
Discipline is the Soul of the Army
Five deputy sheriffs are suspended without pay for failing to arrest the Trump activist who sucker-punched a protester.
I imagine they felt like the protester got what he deserved. However, those charged with enforcing the law on others are the ones it is most important to hold to legal standards. This is a dangerous year already; to fail to enforce these standards would be to court disaster.
I imagine they felt like the protester got what he deserved. However, those charged with enforcing the law on others are the ones it is most important to hold to legal standards. This is a dangerous year already; to fail to enforce these standards would be to court disaster.
NNT: This is a Global Rebellion Against Insiders
Nassim Taleb says this is not just American and Europe, it's India and the rest of the world too. Also, the criticism is justified.
What we are seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking "clerks" and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think...and 5) who to vote for.
With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30y of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, microeconomic papers wrong 40% of the time, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating only 1/5th of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats wanting to run our lives aren't even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. I have shown that most of what Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types call "rational" or "irrational" comes from misunderstanding of probability theory.
Philosophers: Terrible Spouses
Well, unless they have servants. I'm going to need a servant, I guess. Any volunteers of appropriately submissive temperament? (Not around here, I'll warrant!)
9mm v. 40 S&W
Following on the pistol discussion of yesterday, a trauma surgeon writes on this longstanding debate.
I notice he disallows 'larger' as an option early:
For myself, I favor .44-.45 diameter choices. I realize that the science shows that .357 Magnum out of a four inch barrel is the best one-shot stopper. I favor .44 Smith & Wesson Special or properly structured .44 Remington Magnum or .45 Long Colt cartridges for revolvers. These have the advantage that, when hiking in grizzly and moose country, you can readily step up to a cartridge that can handle big game defensively.
As a consequence, if I carry a semi-automatic, I prefer .45 ACP as the closest equivalent to .44 SPL. Still, if the suggestion is that there's no difference in trauma worth noting between .40 S&W and 9mm, the lower recoil could be decisive.
I notice he disallows 'larger' as an option early:
You have two options. You can use a really large round at very high velocity like the 30mm cannon rounds from an Apache helicopter's M230 Chain Gun, which produces substantial kinetic energy, or you can place your shot where it has the most effect. Obviously, shot placement is the only realistic option for a law enforcement officer.Well, if that's obvious, we're done. Lower recoil is more important than size. But that doesn't follow all the way down: .22 LR is a terrible choice, although recoil is minimized to the point that it is almost negligible.
For myself, I favor .44-.45 diameter choices. I realize that the science shows that .357 Magnum out of a four inch barrel is the best one-shot stopper. I favor .44 Smith & Wesson Special or properly structured .44 Remington Magnum or .45 Long Colt cartridges for revolvers. These have the advantage that, when hiking in grizzly and moose country, you can readily step up to a cartridge that can handle big game defensively.
As a consequence, if I carry a semi-automatic, I prefer .45 ACP as the closest equivalent to .44 SPL. Still, if the suggestion is that there's no difference in trauma worth noting between .40 S&W and 9mm, the lower recoil could be decisive.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)