Current Affairs – US

1. UK Crime and more Donald Trump nonsense
As usual, Donald Trump was talking mostly bullshit when he claimed that the 13% rise in UK crime was due to Muslim terrorism.

2. Normalizing Donald Trump
Jay Rosen wrote this posting a month or so ago about the dangers of normalizing Donald Trump, who, as Jay Rosen points out, is not a normal President.

3. Brexit and its impact on UK motorsport
In 2016, shortly after the shock vote in the UK referendum to leave the EU, motorsport journalist Joe Saward wrote a posting summarizing the results, the likely dynamics between the UK and EU, and some cautious thoughts about the potential impact on the UK motorsports industry.
The posting is still as relevant as it was over a year ago. Motorsports teams want the best people no matter where they come from, and any clampdown on the free movement of labour in motorsport will result in an exodus of high-tech teams from the UK to Europe. Now that aerospace has declined, motorsport is one of the remaining UK high-tech success stories, but it may not be for much longer.

Ken White, unlike most of the ratchet-jawing amateurs who seem to think that they know that players not standing for the anthem are breaking the law, actually knows a bit about the law. He is a lawyer specializing in First Amendment litigation.
This is his concise explanation for why Roy Moore is talking deliberately deceitful bullshit, extracted from this Twitter thread,

Here, very briefly, is why Roy Moore is wrong — almost certainly dishonestly wrong — in saying taking the knee is “against the law”
Moore said this as part of a deeply disingenuous paean to the rule of law
The law he’s talking about is 36 USC 3001, which sets forth anthem etiquette
Two points. First, the statute uses “should” throughout. Under common rules of statutory construction, that makes it permissive.
Mandatory statutes use words like “must.” No factors here suggest that “should” is to be read, unusually, as mandatory.
Second, it’s been black-letter constitutional law for 74 years that the state cannot compel patriotic displays.
In other words, even if the statute purported to be mandatory, it would be unconstitutional as applied to civilians.
(The conduct of uniformed military officers is a different question, naturally.)
Moore is many things, but ignorant isn’t one of them. He’s dishonest, and a traitor to the most central concepts of American liberty.
This concludes today’s installment of “Things I Once Assumed Were Obvious And Widely Agreed Upon.”

You cam argue that the players are disrepecting the Anthem or the flag (one is a tune, the other is a piece of cloth) but you cannot sustainably argue that they are breaking the law.
This, by the way, is why Roger Goodell, in his public statement about player conduct, said “players should stand for the anthem”. As a lawyer, he knows that forcing them to stand for anthem is flat-out illegal, as ruled multiple times by SCOTUS.

This post is a two-fer.
One of the phenomena that drives me nuts in the modern world is that whenever groups of people get fired up about an issue, or a perceived deficiency in society, or something that they consider to be A Bad Thing, or something that they hold dear that they perceived as under attack, they immediately announce either that somebody else is conducting a “war on XXXX” or that they and all Smart like-minded people (shorthand: anybody who uncritically agrees with me) should conduct a “war on XXXX”.
This whole use of language creates all manner of logical and practical dangers and traps.
1. It leads to grammatically and logically nonsensical memes, Like “the war on Terrorism”. Waging war on an abstract noun? This, grammatically and practically, is nonsense. It truly is vacuous sloganeering.
2. It becomes a standard tactic for people who are paranoid or who feel threatened and persecuted (translation: my privileges are being threatened) to announce that there is a “war” being conducted against them and their ideas and values. Think “the war on Christmas” or the “war on Christianity”. The last time I looked, nobody was prvented from saying “Merry CHristmas” to anybody else, and churches are among the most privileged entities in the modern USA.
3. The use of the word “War” elevates the efforts by opponents of “XXXX” as something more malevolent than mere dislike. The implication is that either we fight the opponents or they will not only win, they will destroy us. This in turn conjures up an existential struggle, a “kill or be killed” dichotomy. As a result, believers in the idea of a “war” end up engaging in all manner of overreach, abuse of power, and in some cases, plain illegal and ultimately murderous conduct, justifying it on the grounds that “we were fighting a war”. Think The War On Drugs as a good example.
At the end of the day, “war on XXXX” is quite often a rallying cry, a slogan not only devoid of logically useful content, but unsupported by any viable evidence. It is vacuous, pompous, self-important rationalization for all manner of stupid utterances and even more stupid ideas.
Which brings us to President Trump’s address to the Value Voters Summmit, where he claimed that there is an “attack on Judeo-Christian values”.
Jim Wright wondered what “Judeo-Christian values” might be. Atfer all, if these values are so universal and pervasive, any Christian should be able to articulate them.
It turns out, there is a big deficit in the ability of responders to Jim’s question to actually define “Judeo-Christian values”. Incoherence, confusion and poor reasoning skills abound in the attempts at an answer.
Jim expanded his analysis of the response into a much more interesting posting that attempts to define “values” in a more universal way. It is worth reading, since it sweeps the inane sloganeering off the table in favour of a more substantive and much more interesting analysis.

Those saying "Rich athletes shouldn't be protesting"

Literally cannot comprehend anyone who doesn't embrace "Fuck You, I got mine"

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) October 18, 2017

…when people tell me “all of the politicians are shysters and hucksters”, I tend to ask who voted them into office.
One of the challenges being that electorates, for reasons that are not clear to me, are prepared, at least some of the time, to embrace candidates who are really more deserving of ridicule than serious attention, and who are certainly not worth anybody’s vote.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you an excellent example of one such candidate.

Overheard in District Court –

Pro se Defendant, at trial: "Do I need a lawyer?"

Judge: "That probably would have been a good idea."

— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) October 17, 2017

While there is a political point-scoring cum pissing contest going on over whether the President should have explicitly commemorated the deaths of 4 US servicemen in Niger, a more significant underlying question has yet to be answered, as pointed out here by Jim Wright:

Let's back up a bit.

How many of you knew there were US forces in Niger? What's their mission? What are we doing there? https://t.co/fW6NXe7cec

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) October 15, 2017

It is possible that the reluctance of the administration to publicly commemorate the deaths of the service members is because, officially, their mission did not exist, and they should not officially have been anywhere near the country. Which would not exactly be a new development in the modern era. The USA has been engaging in covert actions in dozens of countries. Some of those covert operations may never be revealed, they will stay officially non-existent.
All of this is part of the Faustian bargain that Congress and the Senate struck with the Presidency starting in the Cold War, where they abdicated oversight of overseas military command to the POTUS. This gave them the best of both worlds. if the overseas involvement was seen to be successful, they would praise the military, wrap themselves in the flag, and move closer to the POTUS at press conferences and photo-ops. If the operation was seen as unsuccessful they would be able to accuse the POTUS of “military misadventure” and walk away from the outcome.

Hello, I'm John Expert (@johnexpert) just here to share my expert views, as I'm an expert on these views.

— Bobson Dugnutt (@SirMustard) October 12, 2017

https://twitter.com/i/moments/917382897182609408

Telling reality from bullshit in the online world is becoming progressively more difficult. One reason is the proliferation of fake troll accounts, often controlled from elsewhere.
This article looks at one specific troll account.