Of Trebuchets and Founding Principles

I particularly enjoyed a NOVA special about trebuchets. In the episode, they build a lathe, to build a better lathe, to finally turn an axle for the trebuchet. This idea that something can be used to make something better than itself is immensely gratifying to me. A process of perfectibility which strives towards perfection, and despite never actually reaching perfection, each iteration can be better than the previous.

So, it grates on me when some of my generally more "progressive" friends conflate what was made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with who made them, who they without much study or contemplation dismiss as universally, racist, sexist, slave-owning, evil bastards, incapable of generating anything worthy of our modern, progressive times.

Sadly, they'll never read anything like Robert Curry's spectacular Jefferson, Locke, and the Declaration of Independence  where he shows that despite Jefferson's profound respect and understanding of John Locke, the "self-evident" of the Declaration was not the self-evident of Locke, but rather that of Thomas Reid; the "unalienable rights" were not Lockean, but rather derived from Francis Hutcheson. Sure, Jefferson owned slaves, but his hypocrisy in life cannot in itself diminish the power of the ideal. A couple weeks before his death, Jefferson said:

All eyes are open to or opening to … the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

Jefferson may have been wearing boots and spurs, but it wasn't nature or God who put those on him. For this Passover, let us please remember there is a difference between where you are, seeing where you need to go, getting there, and finally arriving. Someone can lead you to the promised land even though they are forbidden to reach it them self.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson!

The more I learn about the founding of the US, the more of a Straussian of the Jaffa school I become, or that explains an aspect of my admittedly imperfect understanding of the founding of the US.

The radical, eternal, idea is that all men are created equal.

Now, this leads to all sorts of misunderstanding, but it's misunderstanding that, in my opinion, stems more from willful ignorance than just pure ignorance.

First, let us understand that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are incomplete and imperfect. But, try to understand what was trying to be said.

Now, I do subscribe to a mostly originalist perspective when it comes to reading the Constitution as law. My main justification for this is that it's the closest thing that's grounded in an objective reality. That is, if it's a living document that just gets interpreted however the hell you want, then it doesn't really mean anything. With originalism, you can at least try to understand what they were trying to write, and you have something you can analyze and argue about with a whole jurisprudence and history to back it up. Don't like what was meant? Change it. You've been given the tools. For instance, John Yoo over at NR schooled me in my lack of understanding about what declare war meant back in the day, and the precision with which the founders used language to allow us to disambiguate certain things.

My take was the Syria Tomahawk chop was unconstitutional, because only Congress had the power to declare war. Well, turns out back then, declaring war was more of a diplomatic thing that officially signaled times, they are a changing. Initiation of hostilities, combat, etc., was often, nay, usually, undertaken without formal declarations of war. The power Congress had was over the formation of the military. If Congress didn't like what Executive was doing, they just defund the military. Read Yoo's piece for more.

Now, as far as the Declaration goes, I will be a skosh hypocritical, perhaps, in my originalist approach, and submit that, we may and should read "men" as "people".  So, we have:

... all people are created equal ...

This really isn't that much of a stretch, and I'd bet that it would be an easy sell to TJ back in the day, if only it sounded right to his 18th century ear. It actually *is* what he meant, but that's just not the way you talked back then. Originalism is about what it meant then, not how it reads in any time.

Now, the second part that gets folks gummed up is "equal". This really should be as self-evident as self-evident can be, but the power of willful ignorance and delusion is, well, powerful. Equal in this context does not mean "capably equivalent" or "indistinguishable from". This is intuitively obvious to any kid who has had the pleasure of spending recess organizing into teams to play some sport. The two kids who had it the roughest was the third best athlete and the worst. The best and second best were the captains. Third best wasn't picked captain despite thinking they should and the worst kid was picked last. Brutal in its way, but it made sense to everyone, and no one thought anyone was "equal" in ability, focus, commitment, empathy, honor, skill, etc.

No, equal means equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Playing the hand you're dealt, but getting to play it.

Compare this to the divine right of kings and all of the might makes right of most of human history.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Jefferson!

   

Peter Bradshaw puts Milo through Hitchens test

Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw whittles down to size Bill Maher's... um-what's-that-you-say? comparison of the anti-Carlin to Christopher Hitchens in his musing I put Milo Yiannopoulos through the Christopher Hitchens test. He failed. How would Maher ever think to associate the one with the other? The label of provocateur by which I associate, then separate, MY with GC? Perhaps. However, I think my conflation/deconflation is more apropos since GC used his provocations as both means to earn a living (as does MY) as well as to make well-reasoned points (MY? Hmmm...). For CH, the role of provocateur is a side-effect of his pursuits, although I won't deny that he used the notoriety to advance his career and amplify his celebrity, but it's fundamentally different.  CH is more like Patrick Buchanan, willing to bloody his knuckles for what he believes in, and if get gets a rep, so much the better. MY is like someone who wants to go down in history for delivering the best The Aristocrats joke.

Maher's association of MY and CH may have been hinted at by an unintended consequence of what I perceive to be a trend toward "narrative journalism" in favor of traditional reportage in the front lines of the press. Whereas we know the issues associated with the story becoming more important than the facts (cf. George Packer's The New Yorker takedown of Rolling Stone), there seems to be a blurring of what's op-ed, what's genuine analysis, what's gumshoe reporting, and what's just saying whatever to make a buck. If you can no longer tell just by looking at the headline, then it's all one and MY is just as much a "journalist" as CH, George Packer (op cit), Dexter Filkins, David Halberstam, Sy Hersh, and HL f'in Mencken.

Compare Hitchens to Mencken and Milo to Bob Saget, but the men associated by "to" should not be in the same category as the men from which they are separated by "and". I won't link, just google Saget Aristocrats. 

Milo Yiannopoulos is not George Carlin

Milo Yiannopoulos is not George Carlin.

GC might have been wrong about the Columbus/Indian affair, but he knew how to know his audience.

Nuff said!

Make America Sane Again: 4th Estate, it starts with you

Laugh or cry? I won't go over all of the greatest hits in Heather Wilhelm's The Media's 'Me Party' over at NR, but her citation of Thomas Friedman saying on MSNBC that the Russian hacking was a 9/11 scale event, and even a Pearl Harbor scale event.

Wow.

That's hyperbolic AM talk radio level hyperbole, there. I'm not going to google it. I'm sure she's not going to (horribly) misquote Friedman, and it sounds like it's pretty hard to take it out of context, so I'm going to refrain from my instinct of fact checking in this instance and trust Ms Wilhelm, because I think I might spontaneously combust if I watched it. If he would just come out and say "I'm, you know, like the Milo Yiannopoulos of the Davoise", I'd feel so much better.

Even with the understanding that the Russians were up in our business -- quite frankly I would find it improbably that weren't -- I haven't heard of anything that's radically foundation shaking or fundamentally changes the dynamic between the nations. Fake news, turns out, is a pretty good propaganda technique. I only hope it doesn't blow up our enormously effective real news propaganda.

Dadgumit.

And about the hacking. Yes, it's terrible. But, cracking a weakly-secured server and leaking out what should have probably been leaked by a reputable staffer hardly equals destroying a fleet in harbor and drawing a nation into a world war. I don't know if the Dems are ever going to figure out what ails them. Blaming the Russians ain't gonna do it.

Deep State does not require conspiracy

David Graham of The Atlantic has written a piece about the Deep State generically, but also how it's operating here. Now here's the thing. Deep State does not require conspiracy. Sure, you can do conspiratorial Deep State, I suppose. But all it really requires is bureaucracy. Throw in some partisanship and wanting to keep your GS ratings and benefits, and poof! Deep State! No conspiracy, no malice aforethought, no Evil Genius required.

Think about it this way. If "the mission" is good, then the "bureaucracy" is good, and everything should be done to grow the bureaucracy because that will better support the mission. However, at some point, the acquisition of resources to support the mission comes into competition with the mission itself. How much time do Representatives represent versus how much time they raise money to get reelected so that they may represent? I don't know the breakdown, I know that I have heard Representatives and Senators alike complain about how much time and energy they and the bureaucracies under them have to spend on fund raising.

Maybe the founding fathers were onto something with this limited government thing.

Leaks! (And whatever's coming next) It's a conspiracy!

No, it's not. The nine current and former officials who leaked, or perhaps in light of what's happened, made anonymous allegations gussied up as a leak are much more likely just an indication of widespread fear and loathing. If you're going to have a conspiracy, especially in the IC, it has to be small, because the rank and file are myriad, and for the most part (more than you find in most other places, in my experience) remarkably talented and patriots in the best sense. Sure, they have partisan opinions, but that's not something that they don't let affect their work and focus on the mission (though they should probably start turning of the TVs in the halls, LOL). It's as you start climbing up the rungs toward the Director's office that you start to see politics. The nicer the suit, the more the askance the covert looks.

If you're at a family reunion and an interloper comes in a makes a disparaging remark about the clan, no one will wait for a deliberation to respond. There may be some little collaboration here and there, but there is no conspiracy.