Via Lee Stranahan, it's a fun little A/V essay on how movements are made.

But it also illustrates the very real human tendency towards herd behavior.

When an institution like the IRS has been ideologically captured by liberals so as to become a monoculture, no one should be surprised that the herd follows ideological leaders like Sarah Ingram Hall and Lois Lerner and Carter Hall. There simply aren't enough dissenters and contrarians to restrain the madness of the crowd.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (113)
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There may be some brutality tonight.

For background, for anyone who hasn't been following this interesting story: Although the start of the protests was Erdogan's plan to pave over one of the few public parks in sprawling, overdeveloped Istanbul, millions of people have joined the protest not over the immediate cause of the park itself, but to protest Erdogan's autocratic, demagogic, I-only-care-about-my-base style of rulership (sound familiar?) as well as his his increasing Islamization of a nation which is declared, per its constitution, to be secular.

A cheap tyrant working to, ahem, fundamentally transform a country in contravention of its constitution? Why, I'm sure glad nothing like that happens in America!

Oh, and the media assisted him in all this. The one channel that bravely showed video of the protests when other channels showed... penguin documentaries is being heavily fined for corrupting the morals of children with the news. Other channels are being fined too (they started showing the protests later, after a national outcry against the media), but it's Halk TV which is deemed the most corrupting of The Little Children.

Of course, the protesters might also be corrupting the morals of The Little Children by dancing:

(By the way, from the standpoint of pure propaganda: This is one of the best-run demonstrations I've ever seen. Of course, it helps when your enemies are against dancing, beer, trees, and liberty, and pretty much everything except work, shopping, and going to the mosque. Gives you a lot of good material to work with.)

It's not clear what the protesters want, exactly. Or, rather, what they want seems out of reach (deposing Erdogan and installing a new government), so it's not clear what they'll take as a substitute for that.

Erdogan has promised them a referendum on the fate of the park, which he'll probably fix anyway.

Per this site, Turkey's sunset was at 8:37 local time, which is 12:37 Eastern time, so the deadline passed an hour ago.

But they may be working on some sort of compromise:

Although this isn't about the park per se, I'm sure they'd take a favorable decision on the park, as that would demonstrate that their voices must be heard and that Erdogan cannot rule as a king; but I think that's precisely why Erdogan would never offer that.

As with most people with poorly-formed egos, he's likely transfixed with the idea of "winning" and "showing his power" and all the rest of it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Comments (172)
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A civil servant is neither civil nor a public servant. Discuss.

George Will drops a lot of information on this partisan Rage Monster.

As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into a campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners.

He lost. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later when as a prosperous lawyer he won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin.

In the fall of 1996, at the campaign's climax, Democrats filed with the Federal Elections Commission charges alleging campaign finance violations by Salvi's campaign. These charges dominated the campaign's closing days. Salvi spoke by phone with the head of the FEC's Enforcement Division, who he remembers saying: "Promise me you will never run for office again, and we'll drop this case." He was speaking to Lois Lerner.

After losing to Durbin, Salvi spent four years and $100,000 fighting the FEC, on whose behalf FBI agents visited his elderly mother demanding to know, concerning her $2,000 contribution to her son's campaign, where she got "that kind of money." When the second of two federal courts held that the charges against Salvi were spurious, the lawyer arguing for the FEC was Lois Lerner.

...

Lerner, it is prudent to assume, is one among thousands like her who infest the regulatory state. She is not just a bureaucratic bully and a slithering partisan; she also is a national security problem, because she is contributing to a comprehensive distrust of government.

...

The case against the NSA is: Lois Lerner and others of her ilk.

Pairs nicely with David French's ruminations on the tendency of those in an ideological monoculture to become ever more extreme in their ideology and their contempt for those who do not share it.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 AM | Comments (291)
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A lonely sentinel.

I join Justice LanzingerÂ’s well-reasoned dissent, but write separately to highlight the General AssemblyÂ’s failure in legislative drafting exemplified by former R.C. 2929.14(D)(3), which the majority opinion relegates to a footnote to fully accommodate its 24 lines of unrelenting abstruseness consisting, remarkably, of the sum total of 307 words and a mere one period, a punctuation mark set out as a lone sentinel facing odds similar to that of the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, a battle that occurred over the course of three days during the second Persian invasion of Greece, and is estimated by historians to have occurred in either August or September, or perhaps both, in 480 B.C., pitting an alliance of Greek city-states, led by King Leonidas of Sparta, against the Persian Empire of Xerxes I, bravely standing before the onslaught of invaders but ultimately unable to stanch the unrelenting tide of the overpowering hordes of words and statutory numbers including R.C. 2903.01, 2907.02, 2903.02, 2925.04, 2925.11, 2925.02, 2925.06, 2925.36, 3719.07, 3719.08, 3719.16, 3719.161, 4729.37, 4729.61, 3719.172, 4729.51, 4729.54, 2941.1410, 2929.20, without so much as a helping hand from a single, solitary semicolon, colon, or parenthesis, other than the parentheses surrounding the capital letters denoting the divisions of statutory sections that are sprinkled throughout the statute, a statute that purports to inform the citizenry of the potential penalty for certain enumerated criminal acts, but by cramming so many words about sentencing into one sentence, sentences itself to uselessness, especially in the case of an offender involved in a pattern of corrupt activity, regarding which R.C. 2929.14(D)(3) surprisingly is completely without specificity, in that it fails to cite a statutory section outlining what constitutes corrupt activity when it otherwise lists specific statutory sections relating to all the other offenses to which it applies, a statutory circumstance up with which we should not put.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (79)
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On CSPAN3, livestreamed here. Occasional questions about the IRS are asked of Mueller. I suppose they'll ask about the harassment of the True the Vote founder.

Posted by: Ace at 07:17 AM | Comments (101)
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As Ben noted in the news dump, Paul Ryan wants to debate anyone who calls the immigration bills moving through Congress "amnesty". Well, with all due respect, Congressman Ryan, game on!

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has supported forms of immigration reform since he was a House staffer in the 1990s, declared that he would "debate anybody" who calls the current bipartisan effort "amnesty."

"Earned legalization is not amnesty," Ryan said during a forum on immigration sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers. "I will debate anybody who tries to suggest that these ideas that are moving through Congress are amnesty. They're not. Amnesty is wiping the slate clean and not paying any penalty for having done something wrong."

Ryan pointed to provisions baked into the Senate bill from the beginning that require those in the United States to pay a fine, back taxes, undergo background checks and enter a years-long probationary period before earning citizenship, a process that can take up to 15 years.

"That," Ryan said, "is not amnesty."

Ooooh. So we're going to pass a law. A law!

And that law says all these things need to happen before the current crop of illegal immigrants, who we should admit will cease being subject to deportation the second this piece of crap passes, can step foot on the path to citizenship.

Well, Congressman Ryan, we have immigration laws on the books right this very second that say these folks should've already been kicked out of the country.

These laws are not being enforced and haven't really been since the last amnesty in 1986.

President Reagan set out to correct the loss of control at our borders. Border security and enforcement of immigration laws would be greatly strengthened—in particular, through sanctions against employers who hired illegal immigrants. If jobs were the attraction for illegal immigrants, then cutting off that option was crucial.

He also agreed with the legislation in adjusting the status of immigrants—even if they had entered illegally—who were law-abiding long-term residents, many of whom had children in the United States. Illegal immigrants who could establish that they had resided in America continuously for five years would be granted temporary resident status, which could be upgraded to permanent residency after 18 months and, after another five years, to citizenship. It wasn’t automatic. They had to pay application fees, learn to speak English, understand American civics, pass a medical exam and register for military selective service. Those with convictions for a felony or three misdemeanors were ineligible.

If this sounds familiar, itÂ’s because these are pretty much the same provisions included in the Comprehensive Reform Act of 2006, which its supporters claim is not amnesty. In the end, slight differences in process do not change the overriding fact that the 1986 law and the recent Senate legislation both include an amnesty. The difference is that President Reagan called it for what it was.

Gee, those provisions from 1986 and 2006 do sound awfully familiar, don't they?

Anyone who believes enforcement efforts will increase once an amnesty is passed must ignore all previous evidence to the contrary.

In reality, what will happen is that the second this bill passes, the people who have been talking about how deplorable it is for people to have to "live in the shadows" will make a slight shift in the argument to talking about how deplorable it is that the newly-amnestied illegals are being forced to live as second-class citizens while they wait in line.

I would be shocked if anyone failing to meet any of the criteria Ryan laid out is ultimately denied an open door to full citizenship.

Additionally, there's a border security trigger in the Senate bill that Ryan failed to mention. Probably because it doesn't matter; the borders will either be declared secure or the second-class citizen argument will just wrap that in.

Put simply, any bill that doesn't accomplish enforcement first - border security, employer sanctions, enforcement of overstayed visas, etc. - is, in fact, an amnesty bill and will simply repeat the mistakes of the 1986 amnesty on a larger scale.

So, yes, it's amnesty. Reagan wasn't afraid to call it what it was. And once upon a time, Marco Rubio wasn't either:

Posted by: andy at 09:27 AM | Comments (228)
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• Obama's Snooping Excludes Mosques, Missed Boston Bombers
  
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• Good: Dems To Make Immigration Reform A 2014 Issue If It Doesn't Pass This Year
  
• Paul Ryan Will Debate Anyone Who Calls Immigration Reform Amnesty
  
• Obama Administration's NSA Assurances Are A Bunch Of Bunk
  
• Chris Christie Already Campaigning For 2016
  
• The Marriage Of The Media And White House Staff
  
• When Your W-2 Meets An AR-15
  
• A Brief History Of Media Bias
  
• State Department Hired Agents With Criminal Backgrounds
  
• Syrian Rebels Massacre Shiites
  
• NRA Goes After Manchin Over Gun Compromise
  
• Palestinian Summer Camp
  
• The Affordable Healthcare Act Might Not Provide Affordable Healthcare
  
• Hollywood Is Melting Down Say Two Directors Who Can't Make Good Movies Anymore
  
• David Brooks: History's Greatest Monster
  
• Inspector Involved With Philly Building Collapse Commits Suicide
  
• Man Of Steel Review
  
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• Zimmerman Jury Selection Day 3
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:50 AM | Comments (496)
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Happy Thursday.

So. ...So. Now that we've got that out of the way, a question keeps popping up in whenever Edward Snowden's claims get questioned. It is important, easy to answer, and gets right to the heart of the problem with Snowden's claims: "If you don't believe Snowden's claims, how do you explain the U.S. government's determination to prosecute?"

Easy. He provided classified information to journalists. At a minimum, we know he provided the PRISM slides -- which, if you will recall, were marked Top Secret -- and the secret Verizon warrant to Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald also said Snowden gave him "thousands" of other documents. So there's no doubt Snowden broke the law (as well as his oath). Of course he should be prosecuted.

My skepticism extends to the claims he makes that go beyond the content of the PRISM slides. His claims are utterly uncorroborated and, indeed, have been resoundingly denied by everyone in a position to know. I have no reason to believe the word of Snowden, a man I had never heard of before last week. I have no reason to believe the word of Clapper, a man with his own credibility problems. Quite simply, I'm not willing to devote my attention to half-formed, possibly half-baked accusations. There'll be an investigation. Let it do its thing.

Besides, the secret phone warrants is a much juicier scandal. First, the existence of the program has actually been confirmed and we definitively know it targeted Americans. Second, and here's the horrifying part, it might even be legal. Which brings me back to the point I made when these scandals broke: the fix isn't going to merely be whacking NSA on the nose and telling it to follow the law. The law appears to be the problem. If you want to fix this, the ultimate goal has to be putting NSA and the FISA court on shorter leashes, which will take congressional action.

In the meantime, I believe there are just a few other things on our plate. The EPA scandals are my area of emphasis because I dislike that particular agency's actions over the years more than most and, as with the IRS, we have evidence that the EPA's actions were taken to intentionally disfavor conservative groups and to benefit liberal groups. That type of corruption is far more likely to result in a correction than a simple nonpartisan, bureaucratic "oops." Why do you think the Democrats spent so much time lying about the IRS scandal just being the fault of some rogue agents in Cincinnati?

In other news, SCOTUS will release opinions at 10 AM in one or more cases argued this term. Possible topics include: affirmative action in college admissions, the Voting Rights Act, Prop 8, DOMA, and gene patents.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:30 AM | Comments (333)
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NRO's David French looks at IRS' lawyers 20:1 donations to Obama over Romney, and considers the implications.

But what if the combination of increasingly activist government with strong bureacratic bias re-creates federal service as a kind of permanent spoils system for the Left? IsnÂ’t it inevitable that this leftist bureaucracy will eventually view itself not as a servant for all citizens but as an instrument of its own righteous ideology?

If the recent history of our universities is any guide, the products of a leftist bureacratic monoculture will be characterized by the following:

Ignorance: Groups of like-minded people are notoriously incurious about the ideas and perspectives of dissenters.

Condescension: They donÂ’t let ignorance stand in the way of a bulletproof sense of moral and intellectual superiority.

Hatred: Since all the good people they know agree with them, they ascribe the worst of motives to the other side, believing them to be motivated by little more than greed and bigotry.

And, finally . . .

Fanaticism: Cass Sunstein described the ”law of group polarization” like this: “In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.” In other words, when like-minded individuals deliberate, their common views grow more extreme over time.

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 AM | Comments (310)
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Bootstrapping the Industrial Age

We're too far enough removed from the manufacturing of our current technology to be able to replicate what these men did - but so long as a few people keep some of the knowledge alive we can rebuild the chain. After all no one knows how to make a pencil yet millions of them get made every year.

A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?

Occasionally tinkerers get to engage their fantasy. In February 1942, R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a confinement shed without food. But they were tinkerers, too. Together with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap metal into a miniature lathe. The small lathe was ingenious. It was tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful. It could be disassembled into pieces that could be tucked in a backpack and  moved in the camp's many relocations. Since large pieces of metal were hard to acquire without notice, the tailstock of the lathe was two steel pieces dovetailed together. The original bed plate was cut with a cold chisel.

And from that lathe they were able to build a duplicate key for the solitary confinement shed and a hidden battery source for a secret radio.

Meanwhile another group of British POWs managed to build a working radio receiver (and nearly a transmitter) in a Japanese camp:

The plan was made to begin building the radio, so until we could build components, there was nothing much we could do. A look at the circuit diagram of a regenerative receiver indicates a number of capacitors - about two or three are required -low capacitors to make the oscillating part of the system work, and in fact from memory we needed in the grid circuit at least one ".01 microfarad" capacitor and there was no chance we could get this anywhere, or any other components.

So we hit upon the idea of taking some tin foil or aluminum foil from the lining of the tea chest from which the Japanese supplied with the rice rations, then by the well known equations for calculating capacity and the relationship of the surface area and spacing of the plates, we built a capacitor or, at least, I built a capacitor which according to calculations should have been about ".01 microfarad."

And finally were able to get news from the outside world:

It was the BBC all right; it was quite a clear signal but it was somebody talking about growing hops in Kent. This broadcast went on for something like three quarters of an hour without any interruption, but ultimately the signal faded out and I was very annoyed. I was asked the next morning by my senior officer what was the news, and I said "we've got good news; I can't talk here, come this way." So he came along and said "what's this news you're talking about." I said I didn't actually hear any news, and he became very annoyed with me and said what the hell did I mean, and I said "if the British primary producing experts are capable and able to spare the time to talk about growing hops in Kent, Britain must still be alive and floating with their thumbs up, and as far as I'm concerned that's the best news I could hear!"

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:33 PM | Comments (567)
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