There is an op-ed in the Washington Post from Michael Vickers urging “limited U. S. military strikes” against Iran:

Just as in 1987 and 1988, Iran’s most recent attacks on U.S. military aircraft and international shipping cannot go unanswered. The United States must ensure its ability to operate over Yemen (where al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula still plots against the United States and American interests around the world) and in international airspace and sea lanes. The United States must also ensure the free flow of goods in the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-third of the world’s seaborne oil transits.

Iran’s drone shoot-down on Thursday wasn’t accidental or the result of a rogue operator, as Trump has suggested. The Iranians fired a missile at another U.S. drone a week ago but missed. Senior Iranian officials have not only acknowledged their successful attack on our Global Hawk but have also celebrated it.

Shooting down unmanned aircraft, moreover, is every bit as much an act of aggression as firing on manned aircraft. As automation advances, military force structures are increasingly unmanned, and unmanned systems — whether in space, in the air, on land, or on or under the sea — must be protected and defended.

The Trump administration should respond to these recent attacks with strikes of its own on Iranian and Houthi air-defense assets, offensive missile systems and Revolutionary Guard Corps bases. A measured but firm response is what is required. It needn’t rise even to the level of the Reagan administration’s successful counter to Iran’s Tanker War, but it must impose sufficient costs to make Iran think twice about doing this again.

Well, that didn’t take long. Have we ever actually deterred the Iranian government? Or was the Iranian government reluctant to escalate the conflict because it had just concluded a punishing but indecisive war against Iraq and didn’t want to be fighting on two fronts? How did that deterrent impede Iran from killing hundreds of Americans in Iraq, at least 15% of the total killed there?

Have I ever outlined the stages of newspaper editorial conviction for you? The lowest level is “Opposed”. That’s when an editorial against doing something. Then there’s “Not Convinced”. That’s when an op-ed is published and it’s accompanied by another op-ed opposing whatever position the op-ed advocated. After that there’s “Convinced”. That’s when an op-ed appears and the paper doesn’t contradict it, either with an opposing op-ed or editorial.

Finally, there’s “In Support”. That’s when the paper produces an editorial advocating a course of action. Unless an op-ed or editorial appears by the end of the day opposing war with Iran, put the WaPo down as “Convinced”.

How important is it that the last battle in which Chinese forces were victorious was the Battle of Cao Bằng during the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979?

The neocons are steering us towards war. The military is steering us towards war. Today I’m hearing just about every possible explanation for what’s going on with respect to Iran. The best remark I’ve heard is that we’ve dodged the bullet of war with Iran for tonight.

The revolutionary government of Iran declared war against the United States 40 years ago. So far we’ve largely ignored it for a simple reason. Iran doesn’t really threaten us. I think that has been prudent and remains prudent. Iran is larger than Iraq, more populous than Iraq, richer than Iraq, has better friends than Iraq, and is culturally better prepared to mount a strong defense than Iraq.

We should not go to war with Iran unless and until we are prepared to bomb its cities into oblivion which is presently not the case.

As states hurtle willy-nilly towards legalizing marijuana and movements to legalize prostitution gain steam, at Vox.com German Lopez presents the evidence that what you’ve probably heard about Prohibition is wrong:

Alcohol policy “needs to be considered in light of an accurate interpretation of the history of Prohibition,” Cook said. “Instead of saying that Prohibition was a failure so alcohol control is a nonstarter, turn that around and say that Prohibition on its own terms was successful to some extent. And there’s no reason to reject this overall approach [of alcohol control] just because of a misread of history.”

There’s a balancing act to strike. Prohibition had benefits when it came to health and some areas of crime and public safety, but it had a negative impact on pleasure, freedom, and other areas of crime and safety. That’s true in general for alcohol and other drug policy: Policies can impact freedom, pleasure, health, crime, safety, or a combination, but almost always with downsides in one or more of these categories as well — with different effects depending not just on the policy but the type of drug, too. Maybe a higher alcohol tax or some other approach would achieve a better middle ground than Prohibition did.

That’s something I have been saying for some time. What the real history tells us is that Prohibition broke the back of the saloon culture, injurious to poor families, reduced drinking, and did not spark an increase in violent crime. It worked. Its repeal was balanced by another reform implemented shortly after repeal: Aid to Families with Dependent Children.

An old liberal has figured out that today’s progressives are not liberal. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Michael Blechman writes:

I had always thought it was only bigoted Jim Crow juries and redbaiters like Joe McCarthy who rode roughshod over due process. Yet in 2011 the Obama Education Department sent a “dear colleague” letter to colleges and universities, threatening to cut off federal funding unless the schools changed their procedures to make it easier to discipline students accused of sexual assault. As a result, many students were stripped of their rights to counsel, cross-examination of their accusers and discovery of the evidence against them. Those procedures were re-examined by the current secretary of education, a step that was bitterly criticized by progressives because it may make it more difficult to punish the accused—the price of all due-process protections.

My first reaction to the #MeToo movement was satisfaction that victims of sexual harassment could feel safer about speaking out. Then, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, “women deserve to be heard” transformed into “women deserve to be believed.” A presumption of guilt replaced the presumption of innocence, and progressives seemed unconcerned. I can imagine a #MeToo version of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” with Mayella Ewell as the heroine, Atticus Finch condemned for “toxic masculinity” and the lynch mob cheered as an engine of popular justice.

Another tenet of American justice that inspired me to lean left was the idea that every defendant, however unpopular, is entitled to legal representation. Here my childhood heroes were lawyers like William Kunstler, who defended politically unpopular leftist clients, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which defended clients of every stripe when their constitutional rights were threatened.

This year, however, Ronald Sullivan, a Harvard Law School professor, became the object of student protests after joining disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein’s defense team. The protests led Harvard to fire Mr. Sullivan and his wife as faculty deans at Winthrop House, a campus residential college. The right of an unpopular defendant to counsel, it seems, is no longer a progressive value.

Another of my core values is free speech. In the McCarthy era, one often heard of professors and screenwriters being forced out of their jobs for expressing far-left views. Today it’s conservative professors that are an endangered species on campus. Progressive students have become expert at forcing the dismissal or resignation of professors who allegedly display insufficient sensitivity about racial or gender issues. All too often, such students are able to keep anyone they disagree with from even speaking on campus. Once again, progressives have become the most visible enemies of a core “liberal” value.

I know that young people are often idealistic and attracted to anything that seems like a fight against injustice. But progressives today are riding roughshod over much of what liberalism once stood for. I hope that old 1960s liberals like me will stand firm, not be shamed into silence, and call out those who challenge our core values, whether from the left or the right.

He’s right that liberalism is dying a hard, painful death. I think he’s whistling past a graveyard in hoping that “liberals like me will stand firm”. Most are either too old and tired or dead.

The news that came this week of a decision to cover up a WPA mural of Washington in San Francisco because students found it offensive is an epitome. It isn’t only that Washington owned slaves that today’s young find offensive. It’s what he has come to represent as well.

In his New York Times column Jonathan Alter says that Democrats are “reviving Roosevelt”:

From the 1930s through the 1970s, American politics took place largely on Roosevelt’s liberal terrain. Since then, even Democratic presidents have often been forced to play on Ronald Reagan’s conservative side of the field.

Suddenly, though, Roosevelt is alive again in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign: His ideas for using government to improve lives echo through stump speeches across Iowa and New Hampshire.

If so it will need to be a carefully edited version of Roosevelt. There are a number of actions by Roosevelt, not the least being the Japanese internment, that would suggest that he is a model that modern Democrats might want to shy away from. These include:

• Mexican repatriation. Roosevelt continued the policy, begun under Hoover, of forcibly transporting people of Mexican ancestry from the United States to Mexico. Estimates of how many people were involved vary from 400,000 to several million. It is believed that a majority of those transported were American citizens—if you looked Mexican you were a candidate for repatriation.
• Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative. Throughout his first two terms he steadfastly maintained his belief in a balanced budget.
• His policies may have prolonged the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a double-dip recession. The first dip occurred in 1929-1930. The second was in 1937 and was probably due to a combination of bad monetary and fiscal policies. Certainly increased taxes on businesses resulted in the “capital strike” of 1937.

Maybe the question is which Roosevelt? Not the Roosevelt of his first two terms, the pragmatic Christian Democrat who would be mostly unrecognizable to today’s Democrats.

A “Perry Mason moment” is a dramatic revelation from the witness box during a trial that completely up-ends the proceedings. They are extremely rare in real life. A real-life Perry Mason moment has just occurred in a highly publicized trial. NPR reports:

The war crimes trial of Navy SEAL Chief Edward Gallagher took a dramatic turn Thursday when a lead prosecution witness — another SEAL who has been granted immunity to testify — confessed that he was the actual killer of a 17-year-old ISIS prisoner.

Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Corey Scott stunned prosecutors as he described a previously unheard version of events, saying he asphyxiated the teenage Islamic fighter as an act of mercy.

Among other charges related to his 2017 military service in Iraq, Gallagher is accused of killing the insurgent.

Scott began his witness testimony as prosecutors had expected, KPBS reporter Steve Walsh told NPR. Like several other witnesses who have taken the stand earlier this week, Scott first said Gallagher plunged a knife into the neck of the wounded ISIS captive as they were providing him with medical care.

But Scott’s account radically diverged from the familiar narrative during the defense’s cross-examination when he revealed that “it was in fact he who killed [the combatant] by closing off an airway to a breathing tube for the wounded fighter and then he slowly watched him die,” Walsh said.

He claims that he was convinced that the Iraqis would have tortured the boy to death and his intention was to save him from that.

Was it murder or mercy? Or both? Was it a war crime?

Here’s an interesting study. Researchers dropped wallets containing various objects including money in cities around the world and kept track of how many were returned and whether the contents made a difference. It did. From Science:

Does temptation shape dishonesty? For example, when a person finds a wallet on the street and decides to return it to its owner, it may be because the contents of the wallet are not very tempting or, alternatively, because people care about complying with norms of good conduct, that is, civic honesty. Scientists commonly explore such questions about human honesty through artificial laboratory tasks, but such studies have not provided conclusive evidence about the extent to which people are honest in natural circumstances. Cohn et al. (1) describe a field experiment involving 17,000 people in 40 countries to provide a new measure of honesty. The results show just how prevalent civic honesty is, and they raise many questions, such as how environments can be designed to foster civic honesty.

The more money a wallet contained the more likely it was to be returned. The researchers attributed that to a combination of altruism and “theft aversion” (they didn’t want to feel like thieves).

The results varied by country, too, with the Swiss, Norse, Dutch, Danes, and Swedes the most likely to return the wallets (in that order) and the Chinese the least likely with the U. S. somewhere in the middle.

I also think that the results form a fair proxy for the degree to which people trust their governments and why. We have good reason to trust our government half as much as the Swiss do theirs.

Hat tip: Gizmodo

At RealClearWorld Jeffrey Wilson warns of the risks of a “rare earths trade war”:

Rare earth minerals have emerged as the latest front in the escalating US-China trade war. Nearly a decade after the Chinese government controversially suspended rare earth exports to Japan during the 2010 Senkaku dispute, similar threats are now being made if the bilateral trade dispute with the US deepens.

How prepared is the global economy for another deployment of the so-called “rare earths weapon”?

Rare earths are an ideal instrument for economic coercion. They are an essential input into a wide range of high-technology products, across the electronics, petrochemical, renewable energy and defence sectors. As there are few economically-feasible substitutes for their use, any suspension to rare earth value chains would have a disastrous impact on an economy’s technological ecosystem.

China also possesses an extraordinary degree of market power. While not strictly a “monopolist”, in 2017 it produced an estimated 79% of the world’s rare earth oxides. By comparison, OPEC – a longstanding and sometimes-feared energy cartel – accounts for only 41% of global oil output. Outsized market power gives the Chinese government considerable scope to use rare earths as leverage in diplomatic disputes.

How long could the U. S. military continue operations if the supply of rare earths were disrupted? It’s a serious question. What in the heck do we have a military that can’t continue operations for?

This is entirely a self-inflicted wound. The U. S. used to be the world’s primary supplier of rare earths. We stopped due to environmental concerns and China’s illegal subsidies to its own industries. At the very least we should be producing enough to supply our military.