"What’s up with the Aggies?"

Instapundit: "DISCRIMINATION: Texas A&M Students for Trump president ‘required’ to meet with ‘conduct’ office after placing Trump signs on ‘public property.’ Texas A&M has been a real problem school lately."

"What’s up with the Aggies?"

Many states have a rivalry between competing public university systems. Florida Michigan and Indiana come to mind. Texas also has a long standing competition between the UT and the Texas A&M schools. Usually these rivalries are acted on by students on the athletic fields and associated entertainments. In Texas they have become expressed in the modern sport of Competitive Virtue Signaling and devotion to The Cause by administrators.

Obama's SEAL Admiral that barked like a dog and rolled over for him gave a good speech and got hired as the UT system Chancellor. From that bully pulpit Admiral McRaven, while still in a legal pay status as on the military retired (technically a reserve status) list, he not only criticized the President but called for his removal and promoted slanderously false stories of Trump acting as a Russian agent that have given cover to real foreign intrusion and Vote Fraud by the Democrats. McRaven has moved on but the damage he did was real.

Since then the A&M system has had catching up to do to prove their woke bona fides. Since actual student contact for instruction is not part of their job this year, and indeed colleges are shedding faculty to protect the jobs of administrators, the desk jockeys at A&M have had the leisure to concentrate on perfecting their coercive apparatus and demonstrate their loyalty to their feudal lords, and not to the citizen taxpayers.

The administrators "How can you be successful?" is a threat, as if HR asks "Are you happy here?"

An Academic Joke

An Academic Joke.

An Engineer a Physicist and an Economist are on a desert island after a shipwreck. A can of food also washes up on the beach. They debate how they will open the can so they do not starve to death before a rescue arrives.

The Engineer says, "Using the available palm tree leaves as rotors, trunks as shafts and seaweed for lashing we may construct an ocean tide powered engine that moves a saw constructed from shells embedded in wood to open the can."

The Physicist says, "Elevate can Object A to height h and drop it so that it accelerates with the force of gravity g to velocity v until it strikes rock B, opening the can."

The Economist says, "Assume a can-opener."

Other professions or disciplines may be used but the punch line remains a constant.

The point of the joke is that Scarcity is what Economics is all about. If you can assume the existence of enough of anything then it is no longer a tradable good. There is no shortage of salt water in the ocean or of oxygen in the atmosphere so the need for them only becomes of interest to Economists under special circumstances. Advertisers and Politicians may create a perception of scarcity to induce demand.

Marxists live in the Economist's Joke Universe. That is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the Star Trek future where there is no longer a need for money. Marx phrased it thus, "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner" which ignored both the need to gain expertise and the benefits of trade based on comparative advantage.

What Roddenberry did was assume a technology that can instantly create matter, either in the Transporters or the Replicators. The matter produced may be either a person reassembled at a distant location or a chicken sandwich and coffee. However even in the Star Trek Universe the Economic Problem exists. The can of what is needed to satisfy all wants has simply been kicked down the road a bit. What is always in short supply is Energy usually in the form of Deuterium. With enough Energy the Replicators, Transporters, Warp Drives, and Photon Torpedoes work.

Hucksters Grifters and Politicians, but I repeat myself, have been selling Free Energy stories forever, probably since we climbed down from the trees. The motivation to try is a good thing. Storytellers keep motivating us to if not find the utopia of free energy to at least in the hunt for it find a chicken sandwich machine.

On Mob Violence

If you are part of a mob in which some members are being violent, by throwing chairs rocks sticks etc, or carrying displaying or using Molotov cocktails or firearms or knives or any other object that could be considered a weapon, or assaulting anyone, or threatening to assault anyone as part of a group such that a reasonable person might be in fear for their life then it does not matter if you are only carrying a phone camera. The mob is a weapon and by being part of the mob you are part of the weapon. If there is an armed mob then that is a Deadly Force situation. If you are part of that mob then you may be killed or grievously wounded.

Sworn law enforcement officers tend to be held to a higher standard than the general public. While they also must articulate a reasonable fear that deadly force was facing themselves or another, and often their rule is that they should act to defend themselves or another LEO but may act to defend civilians, the sworn officers are held to a high standard in risking injury by only confronting the one person specifically and individually posing a threat while the mob at large must be controlled if possible with nonlethal force. The public are not trained in or expected or even allowed to carry and use all the nonlethal means, sprays tasers and batons not used as clubs, that law enforcement officers carry.

While the police may arrest someone and you if you survive or your family if you die may say that you were not armed or violent but only documenting with your camera and chanting slogans you may well be a legitimate target for someone under attack who responds with their own deadly force. Once you join a mob you give up the right to claim that you are a peaceful protestor or an innocent observer. If 50 people are standing in a park not blocking people and holding signs and chanting slogans then that is peaceful protest. If one person leaves that crowd and attacks someone then the crowd is still peaceful and not a legitimate target. However if 200 people attack a restaurant then every member of that mob is a legitimate target if any of the people in the restaurant feel in reasonable fear for their lives and respond with deadly force.

The politicians and the BLM/ANTIFA activists have by pressuring the police not to confront criminals, and by releasing those who are arrested, made it more reasonable that a peaceful citizen might feel the need to defend themselves and not wait in the expectation that the police will protect them as a threat escalates. While six months ago a jury might have felt that someone carrying a weapon was seeking to be a vigilante and had escalated prematurely to deadly force or killed an innocent person who was not themselves a threat, and this point has nothing to do with the general right to bear arms, now if anything the use of force by civilians is both more likely and more justifiable.

I would go further and say that unless they have been kidnapped or are legally incompetent, like the child that Saddam Hussain pawed on television, a person is liable if they do not move away from the mob as fast as their furry feet will take them. If you intend to join a peaceful protest and when you look around you see people with shields, clubs, gasoline, rocks, helmets, unlicensed medical trauma teams, and those that anyone old enough to walk to school on their own should recognize as bad to be near or totally crazy then it is on you if you are part of the mob when violence breaks out.

"Tiles"Comment on Sarah A, Hoyt's "A Meeting With Friends" Facebook Chain

Tiles.
My sharing stories and politics came later. While I avoid anything that seems like a chain I may do this and copy to my moribund blog. Finding you on Fbook reminded me of when I was child and we went on a trip to Europe that started in England and finished in Portugal. It was a tour and the others in our group included characters that might have gotten rejected from a "Ugly American" documentary as too stereotypical. One started yelling at the little guy at the front of the bus in Portugal, which resulted in the guide screaming, "We are not hoodlums! You are not in Chicago!" That gave me visions of ending up in a 800 year old dungeon. While in Portugal we got some lovely tiles that are now on my dining area table. I should clean it off but here is a detail.

(Chain text follows, NOT for use here.)
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Those who have known me in some way, no matter what stage of my life, surely know a little bit about me! Maybe we're not bffs this moment, but we are linked by some fortunate time when our paths have crossed. I'm curious how willing we are to use our time to write something to someone else. I decided to participate in an experiment called "A Meeting With Friends". The idea is to see who reads my post without a photo, as we are often so immersed in the images, that any concentration in reading is appreciated. If no one reads this message, it will be a short social experiment, but, if you read to the end, I want you to post a word that connects you to me! For example a place, an object, a person, a moment that brings us back to our past or current relationship. After, as the experience dictates, copy the text and paste on your wall. I'm going to your wall to leave a note that ties me to you Please don't comment on this post if you don't have time to copy the text, it would ruin the experience! Gratitude! Just as you remember, people remember you too.

Overidentification With The Men

Regarding Captain Crozier of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) when I was at Naval OCS they showed us two movies for Leadership training. One was "In Which We Serve" with Noel Coward (and by Coward and David Lean) and the other was Henry King's "Twelve O'Clock High" with Gregory Peck and Gary Merrill. Noel Coward's character in IWWS was based on Lord Louis Mountbatten and all of the characters in Twelve O'Clock High were modeled on real members of the 8th Air Force. Captain Crozier is undoubtedly a fine brave skilled and accomplished man. He was trained on this. He knew better.

What should he have done? Clearly it was his duty to inform the outbreak of a contagious and debilitating disease on his ship be made known to senior officers. Indeed given that the CVN is a capital ship and major national strategic asset he was expected to do so in a matter that would come to the attention of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Secretary of Defense, and even of the President (Who is referred to as the National Command Authority). He was in fact expected to seek relief for the ill and their isolation or removal to protect the other crewmembers. Above all his duty was to keep his command combat ready or support measures to restore it when it was unable to fulfill any assigned mission. This is the key. His first duty was to his mission. He was expected to care for his troops and inspire their loyalty but not at the expense of the mission.

How should he have done that? By sending a classified message through his chain of command that informs all concerned parties and is marked of such urgency that it will come to the attention of the NCA. The means of doing so is in a formatted message called a Casualty Report or CASREP. It is the same method used for reporting a broken part. The urgency of the problem can be marked in the message in a manner designed to get it responded to effectively. There are additional message formats the Captain could have used within the system. He also could have sent a personal message to the CNO or Secretary of the Navy if he thought that his needs were not being addressed and a serious threat to national security was being created by the neglect of his seniors. All of these messages would be classified.

What he did instead was to send an unclassified letter stating that the health of the crew took priority over any operational mission. That letter which was certain to become public informed all potential or actual enemies of the United States that the Theodore Roosevelt was not combat ready.

There is a reason that officers are told not to get to close to their troops. An Infantry officer once said to me, "Don't use their first names. You may have to send them to their deaths." The Naval Officers Guide warned that even if you had the gift connecting informally you had to be careful because you must not make it harder for the next guy.

I am sure that I would have felt the urge to support him. It is difficult. We need not accuse him of wanting to be an American Caesar without more proof, and the military is cursed with to many gray technocrats who cannot Lead or do not care for their troops but his use of the line "we are not at war" in his letter was I fear inexcusable.

It was called "Overidentification with the men."

Joe Biden is Fired Up

Joe Biden is fired up.

Fredric March is brilliant but the play and film do a disservice to William Jennings Bryan, who was a more consequential person of greater learning and human sympathy than the caricature depicted. In the real Scopes trial Bryan, who had opposed criminal penalties and had called for laws that called for the teaching of Evolution as a theory instead of as a fact, offered to pay the defendant's $100 fine. Bryan died in bed 5 days after the trial ended. The modern Liberal Democratic Party, the party of FDR LBJ and Joe Biden, owes at least as much to William Jennings Bryan as it does to Clarance Darrow and the sophisticated intellectual elites sympathetic to international socialism.

Comment on Facebook: Wretchard T. Cat,"Will the Olympics be postponed?"

Wretchard, "Will the Olympics be postponed? Back in the day wars were postponed for the Olympics. During the second Greco-Persian war in 480 BC Xerxes invasion could not be met because of the Olympic truce. Therefore Leonidas and his 300 were sent ahead as a sacrificial delaying force to allow the Spartans to come after the truce."

Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire described how the Greeks returned to the pass and sanctified it with athletic events and ceremonies and left an inscription on a stone, composed by the poet Simonides.
O xein angellein Lakadaimoniois hoti tede
keimneta tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi

Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws, we lie.

They did not sully the sacred fire, obedient to their laws.
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Mary Renault's "The Praise Singer" is a historical fiction whose central character is Simonides that focuses on the flowering of Greek culture in Athens under the Peisistrades and the fall of the Tyranny.

Words I think were seen as almost magic. A form of power from the gods that enabled time to be controlled by men. When Alexander destroyed Thebes he ordered the house of Simonides rival the poet Pindar spared.

The Olympics were an opportunity for people, both the athletes and the communities that they represented and which commemorated their athletes with odes and statues, to approach the Heroic ideal of the Immortal. The perfection of the Beautiful and the Good made men more than beasts.

Both words and athletics were seen as ennobling. Those with Arete were not only οἱ ἄριστος aristocrats better than the common man but associating with them and remembering them made the οἱ πολλοί commoners better too.

Without the ideal to emulate people as individuals and as communities become a feral mob. As the Bard of England put it, "Thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason."

The degeneration of athletics into corrupt spectacles has paralleled the decline of civil and political culture. Where once the challenges of an often hostile world, both by man and nature, were met by active engagement with each heeding Theodore Roosevelt's call to be "The Man in the Arena" now people slink like dogs into caves to self quarantine until their betters tell them that it is safe to emerge.

Panic In Aisle Nine

Instead of depending on temporarily rare toilet paper why not use the now worthless Chinese currency? Warning, bleach before using as unlike Old Glory those colors may run.

We are seeing stories of WalMart shelves cleaned out to look like Venezuela and people fighting over Costco toilet paper like it was Black Friday in the toy department of JC Penny. What we have in the panic buying of toilet paper and other consumables is nothing less than a form of a bank run. This is a good thing in that we know about bank runs. At least we know at least as much about bank runs as we do about bathroom runs. With the gentle reader's permission I will now move on from that graphic analogy. The point is that there is a model for what causes a bank run and how the bureaucrats can respond to one. They are trained on this.

Money to an Economist is just another good, like food, clothing, shelter, gasoline or forgive me toilet paper. What is special about it is that it enables the trade in other products. That is not exclusive to money though. After all being well fed, protected from the elements, well rested, able to transport goods or the people who perform services, and being clean and healthy are all also important in completing transactions. Money just makes things easier.

Panics and bank runs periodically plagued capitalist societies, including in America. Major depressions, which were called Panics until 1929 when the term Depression was introduced as being less alarming, happened during the 19th century. The Federal Reserve (1913) was designed to reduce the risk of panics and bank runs. However they still can happen.

The subsequent Great Depression may have shown that the government's response to a panic was not perfected but they have since worked diligently on the problem. Economists study this and model how to use tools just as the military studies hypothetical crises and games out the application of the tools available.

Seriously what the government needs to do is approach the market disruptions revealed by panic buying and hoarding of some goods by using the Bank Run model. They can do this.

It's either that or distribute copies of Izvestia and Pravda, or Renminbi.

On Woody Allen

Instapundit: "HOLLYWOOD ENDING: Breaking: Woody Allen memoir canceled after publisher’s staff walk out in protest."

My assumption, without other evidence that can be tested and proven in court, is that Woody Allen did not commit pederasty or sexually abuse Mia Farrow's children. That does not make him Father of the Year.

There is little doubt that as a man in his 30s and 40s Woody Allen chased 17 or even 16 year old women. That is condemned in our society. It can even be legally sanctionable. It is also common. For the vast majority of human existence it was considered normal. When was the last time that it was prosecuted, except for a teacher or person in a similar position of trust abusing their authority? Note that I said women, albeit young women, and not girls to differentiate between ephebophilia and pedophilia. They are different conditions and conflating the two with a linguistic sleight of hand does a disservice and comports with Stalinist tactics.

It has been said that Mia Farrow's ex-husband Frank Sinatra had warned Woody that Mia was unstable. Sinatra, who consumed women voraciously, did not tolerate what he considered creeps and was not rumored to pursue underage women. The ambiguity of the culture on that issue is shown by the opening scene of Sinatra's own peak performance in "Pal Joey" where he is thrown onto a train by cops who tell him that the girl he was with was underage, and the mayor's daughter. That was later parodied in "Animal House."

There is no doubt that in the 1970s-80s Woody Allen was deliberately unconventional in his conduct. That is especially true in his relations with Mia Farrow and her children. His behavior was theatrical ostentatious and deliberately provocative and challenging to Middle Class standards. It was approved of in elite and artistic social circles. It was even considered a Political act. It was also self indulgent unwise and likely to harm the children involved, who needed the stability of a more traditional family.

Disclosure, but not full disclosure as I wish to preserve my privacy and going near this subject risks doxxing and destruction by inflamed mobs. I have met Woody Allen and his wife. For my nickel's worth of opinion they have a real marriage. Is it possible that as a skilled performer he could fool people? Yes it is. Still over time we meet many people and that includes some monsters. To a degree one learns to rely on their own experience and impression. Unless better evidence comes to light I will rely on my judgment and consider him if not innocent then at least not guilty.

Regarding the conduct of the staff at the publisher. They should be fired. Publishing production display or sale is not an endorsement. We have been assured of that regarding both books and the offering of other creative works. The product may be condemned as without merit on its own or it may be important whether the person behind it is a saint or a monster. The publisher may institute a policy of not doing business with people they find offensive. They are a private business. What they should not do is submit to pressure from censorious staff.