DAVID BOAZ IS FAIRLY BULLISH ON SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE.
Archive for 2014
September 12, 2014
IN THE MAIL: From Michael Rittenhouse, Sex: What Your Parents Didn’t Tell You.
Also, today only at Amazon: Burn Notice: The Complete Series, $49.99 (67% off).
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 491.
A THEATRICAL APPROACH TO TEACHING AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW: Law class combines courtroom and theatre. My colleague Joy Radice has brought theater students in to help teach law students, and it has worked out very well.
STEPHEN CARTER: The Islamic State’s Centuries-Old Strategy.
What the debate is lacking is a sense of history. And the historical antecedents do supply an early analogy to Islamic State — a warrior people who came out of nowhere, defeated mightier forces in battle, accumulated wealth and, in their bloody ferocity, terrified every civilization with which they came into contact.
I refer to the steppe nomads.
The steppe nomads were fearsome horsemen of varying ethnicity who first encountered the great empires of antiquity around 700 B.C., and reappeared with regularity well into the Middle Ages. They lacked the sophisticated technology, wealth and professional bureaucracy of the great powers like Rome and China. Instead they had horses. Cavalry was something new, and the traditional empires had difficulty adjusting to the tactics of the unanticipated invaders, who although loosely organized slowly conquered vast swaths of territory.
Like Islamic State. As a matter of fact, back in the seventh century B.C., a group of steppe warriors, the Scythians, actually ruled a region roughly contiguous with the territory now controlled by Islamic State.
Ironies abound. For example, CNN has reported that the black robes and turban worn by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi intentionally “harken back” — one assumes the writer meant “hark back” — “to Arab rulers from 1,500 years ago.” But if we go back that millennium and a half, to the era al-Baghdadi’s attire is meant to evoke, we find ourselves very close to the time when steppe warriors led by Attila the Hun came swarming into the remains of the Roman Empire, finally sacking the walled cities that had defied earlier invaders, because they had mastered the Roman technology. The Huns used battering rams and scaling ladders to take the fortified cities, and Attila spent his plunder wisely, hiring the finest engineers (many of them Romans) to figure out how to outwit the defensive technologies of the supposedly more advanced cultures of the West.
Not sure about this analogy, but one thing’s clear: The various civilized nations fought among themselves, and sometimes allied with the nomads, when they should have realized that the nomads were enemies of all civilization.
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE JUST DEMOCRATIC PARTY TOOLS: Howie Carr: Anti-war crowd stunningly silent now.
All that moralizing from 2002-2008: Partisan hackery entirely devoid of any moral content. I didn’t respect them then, and I certainly don’t respect them now.
I THINK THAT MEANS THAT WE NEVER REALLY GOT THE JOB DONE: Watch Each of the Last Four U.S. Presidents Announce That We’re Bombing Iraq.
INSTAVISION: I talk with Townhall’s Conn Carroll. Breaking the Banks and Government with Libertarian Populism. YouTubed.
PHIL HAMBURGER: Audited.
Over at Instapundit, I read yesterday that the IRS defended its Breitbart audit with this statement: “The IRS stresses that audits are based on the information related to tax returns and the underlying tax law — nothing else.”
Glenn aptly writes “And who could hear this without laughing?” Actually, I know from personal experience it is false, because a while back I was subject to a “practice audit.” . . .
Of course, I was not going to hit the IRS guy. I was only going to ask what the hell a practice audit is? What did the IRS think it was doing in practicing on me–in dragging me and my accountant to an audit that had no other purpose than to train an IRS employee who did not even turn up!
But curiosity, anger, and pushback are not advisable when dealing with the IRS. My accountant was wiser than I was, and I am forever grateful. But I also am grateful for the opportunity finally to tell this story. Let’s see if I get audited for it!
As the number of Administration critics increases, their resources will be considerably more strained, compared to a few years ago, when they could audit that Tim Geithner “Tax Cheat” guy. Who, happily, was undeterred.
WAR ON WOMEN: Mom arrested for carrying licensed firearm slams NJ prosecutor who let Ray Rice off but is throwing book at her. The prosecutor’s name is Jim McClain.
UPDATE: The Ordeal Of Shaneen Allen.
MICHAEL BARONE: Large government out of place in a society based on small technology.
Civilian technology, Joel Mokyr notes, has also gone “small” — nanotechnology, genetic engineering, custom-engineered materials, “mass customization” through 3-D printing. If the Rouge plant looming over Dearborn was the iconic symbol of the industrial age, the iconic symbol of our information age is the smartphone in your pocket.
“Large” technology requires the standardization of masses of people, centralized command-and-control, conformity to social norms. Massive work forces and massive armies cannot operate optimally otherwise.
“Small” technology enables individuals to make personal choices, fashion their world to their own dimensions, deploy their own talents and pursue their interests in ways of their own choosing. Standardization yields to customization.
President Obama doesn’t seem to get this. He sees history as a story of progress from minimal government to ever-larger government. He’s only sorry that he hasn’t taken us farther on that track.
But history doesn’t proceed in a straight line; it moves around. “Large” technology made big government seem necessary in 1914. “Small” technology requires something different, something more adaptive today.
Indeed. You could almost write a book about that.
DO TELL: McClatchy: Misconduct at Justice Department isn’t always prosecuted. “Dozens of Justice Department officials, ranging from FBI special agents and prison wardens to high-level federal prosecutors, have escaped prosecution or firing in recent years despite findings of misconduct by the department’s own internal watchdog. Most of the names of the investigated officials, even the highest-ranking, remain under wraps. But documents McClatchy obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal for the first time a startling array of alleged transgressions uncovered by the department’s inspector general. . . . In at least 27 cases, the inspector general identified evidence of possible criminal wrongdoing but no one was prosecuted.” By contrast: “During the George W. Bush presidency, records show, 41.6 percent of the official corruption referrals resulted in prosecution.”
They sure like to keep their own misbehavior secret in this Administration.
UH HUH: Kerry: ISIS not a ‘war.’
The United States is not at war with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL), Secretary of State John Kerry said Thursday.
Kerry said the administration’s plan to combat ISIS includes “many different things that one doesn’t think of normally in context of war” during an interview with CNN.
“What we are doing is engaging in a very significant counterterrorism operation,” Kerry said. “It’s going to go on for some period of time. If somebody wants to think about it as being a war with ISIL, they can do so, but the fact is it’s a major counterterrorism operation that will have many different moving parts.”
In a separate interview with CBS News, Kerry also rejected the word “war” to describe the U.S. effort and encouraged the public not to “get into war fever” over the conflict.
“We’re engaged in a major counterterrorism operation, and it’s going to be a long-term counterterrorism operation. I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity,” Kerry told the network.
They don’t want to call it a war because you can lose a war, and they’re afraid they’re losing. I’d prefer someone who calls it a war, and is determined to win.
HI FOLKS. YOU’RE KINDA LATE TO THE PARTY. TRY NOT TO BE SO EASILY FOOLED NEXT TIME. Women, Hispanics, Youth Losing Confidence In Obama.
THE ISLAMIC STATE’S global reach.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Landrieu Fails to Produce Promised Air Charter Travel Report on Time.
When the controversy surrounding Senator Mary Landrieu’s (D-LA) use of taxpayer funds to pay for campaign travel first broke back in August, her Senate office spokesperson Matthew Lehner promised Landrieu would produce a full report of her travel activities “by the time” the Senate returned from its August recess and returned to session in September.
By Thursday, the fourth day since the Senate’s September session began, Landrieu has produced diddly squat.
Efforts to contact Lehner, who made that promise on her behalf, resulted in an automatic email saying that, as of September 2, he no longer worked in her congressional office. Calls to her campaign were not returned.
We’ll probably find that it was stored on one of Lois Lerner’s hard drives.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: GOP Majority In Congress Could Stop Unlawful President. Yep. GOP control of Senate in 2015 is vital for limiting lame-duck chicanery, especially as the Dems will surely go nuclear-option on the filibuster if there’s a Supreme Court vacancy.
THE STORY OF the Falling Man.
I THINK THE POLICE WERE IN ON THE ABUSE, OR BEING PAID OFF, OR (MOST LIKELY) BOTH: Researcher who tried to expose Rotherham abuse ‘feared for life after police officers’ threat.’ “A Home Office researcher whose report into child sexual exploitation problems in Rotherham was ‘suppressed’ more than a decade ago has claimed she was threatened by two police officers. The researcher claims she was approached by two officers while she was in her car at night, to be told it would be a ‘bad thing’ if the abusers she was investigating found out her home address.”
See, in America you can just say “yeah, ’cause then I’d have to kill them, and come looking for you.”
September 11, 2014
AND SO THE DAY ENDS. Don’t forget what those bastards did to us.
