The Mother of All ORCAs

Via Ace and Breitbart, a truly harrowing tale of the GOPs fumbled ground game on election day.

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

It gets worse. Read the whole thing.

On pain of sounding like a paranoid Florida Democrat circa 2000 . . . jeebus, but can mere incompetence really explain a Charlie Foxtrot of this magnitude?

On a lighter note: Blogger reminds me this is my 1000th post. Many thanks to all my readers and commenters for helping to make this a great six-and-a-half years.

Bye bye Davie

I FREAKING KNEW IT!!!

At least, in general. I was loosely acquainted with one of the members of Gen. Petraeus' personal security team and . . . well, they talk. Not specifically, but the gist was that he was an old goat with a fondness for the ladies.

I got to see him in action. While I was was in Kabul, I sat in a meeting with Gen. Petraeus and forty or so representatives from USAID, USACE, and the embassy. Gen. Petraeus came in, made himself comfortable, and promptly singled out a striking blonde lady (who will go nameless, but she was an "engineer" with the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) down in Kandahar) for a special hey-there-good-to-see-you-again. The woman flushed with obvious pleasure that the rock-star general would remember her from his visit down south several months before. It's good to be the king, I thought ruefully.

Well, the tomcatting finally caught up with him. I can't say I'm sorry. Had it not been for Petraeus' lies testimony to Congress, we would already have quit Afghanistan.

Further Post-election Ruminations

The elementary school here in Φ's lily-white little burg held a straw poll amongst its 1st thru 6th graders. Romney won . . . by two votes. Pedro got a vote, as did "Undecided".

Steve has a lengthy post analyzing election data, including the changing splits for various constituencies between 2008 and 2012 . Some things that jumped out:

• The two voting groups with the largest changes in voting split between 2008 and 2012 were Jews and Asians. Neoconservatives have been making a fair amount of noise for a while about how insufficiently pro-Israel Obama is. Whatever you might think about it, this seems as plausible an explanation as any for Romney’s 9% pickup. But to what do we attribute Romney’s 9% loss (from 30% to 21% IIRC) of Asians? Yes, the American electorate has been slowly dividing itself between the White Party and the Non-white Party, and I expect these trends to continue. But I can’t point to any one thing (e.g. the Wen Ho Lee case that precipitated the Asian slide towards the Democrats in 2000) that would provoke so much movement in one cycle. However, I will say this: Romney’s promise to staple green cards to STEM degrees was obvious code for throwing America’s doors open to the Asian hoard. Were it generally true, as the mainstream narrative constantly assures us, that the key to non-white votes is increasing the number of their immigrant co-ethnics, then Romney should have done better among Asians. Obviously, the mainstream narrative is wrong yet again. But I’m still flummoxed by the shift.
  
  

• Why the falling turnout? I mean, I can give account for why I abandoned the Republicans at the top of the ticket (although I did vote Republican locally), and I understand (though do not agree with) the uninspired voters unwilling to stand in line for an hour to tap the screen for no-hopers like Goode or Johnson. But it beggars the imagination that McCain was more inspiring to Republican voters than Romney! It might be true generally that Palin was more inspiring than Ryan (my 2008 opinion) but, again, I don’t actually know the answer.
  
  

• I mis-called this election. Notwithstanding my non-support, I expected a Romney win. I was, I think, overly influenced by his late swell in support from highly visible elites. In retrospect, this was largely a function of his increased support among Jews.
  
  

  That this president, with this record, could win reelection tells me the usual rules don’t apply anymore. Paul Kersey is right: America is going the way of Detroit, a city that continued to return the same black Democrats to power as the city slid into oblivion. Romney offered the country abundant personal magnanimity – if not charisma – and a lengthy track record of executive accomplishment against an affirmative action depressive. His adherence to long-standing Republican Party principles – what few remain of them – appeared to be genuine, more than could be said in 1988. And he ran a disciplined, agile, and well-funded campaign.
  

  Unfortunately, it appears that fewer and fewer votes in America are cast in sensitivity to these kinds of factors, and more and more of them are cast out of reflexive tribal loyalty in hatred of founding-stock Americans.

Today’s Military

I wrote a post a while back quoting without comment one day’s worth of headlines from articles collected by Military.com, a site that, whether they intend to or not, documents the armed forces’ apparent slide into leftism.  This prompted the following exchange in the comments.

Elusive Wapiti:  A depressing collection. [These events] are indicators that the military is rapidly moving away from being the "bastion of conservatism" it was alleged to be when Clinton was president.

Samson:  Really? Colour me overly optimistic, but it seems to me that these are policies enforced from on high, not necessarily in line with the feelings of the rank and file.

This called to mind several observations I’ve made about young people in the military recently.  As you know, I started a new job last year.  For the first few months, while I awaited my security clearance, I was sequestered away with a score or so of new hires, mostly civilian, and mostly recent graduates.  This was a fairly novel experience for me, at least in the 15 years I’ve been married.  And it exposed me to a few cultural trends that I hadn’t especially noticed before.

As regular readers may recall, I’ve mixed it up with commenters about the prevalence of premarital cohabitation.  So I might as well start by admitting that it’s a lot more common than I realized.  It’s less common among junior officers, although I’m not sure if that’s moral or structural:  officers are expected to move every 3-4 years, which makes it more difficult for relationships to just hang in limbo.  The pressure is on them to close the deal if they expect a woman to follow them from one end of the country to the other.  But I’m pretty sure that almost every one of the civilians had an LTR story that involved cohabitation.

Young civilians are also much more candid with politically incorrect racial views than when I was a twenty-something, and not just among whites.  They expect to discuss these things openly, and even in the presence of minorities, in a way that I would have been afraid to.  The cry of “RACIST!” is now more often a punch line than a charge to be taken seriously.  That said, I reserve judgment about whether these kids are the shock troops of HBD awareness, or rather they just get a thrill out of shocking grownups in general.

But the military guys are another matter.  They were all very professional – and I don’t mean that as a compliment.  In all the joking around and wide-open political discussions we had, I can’t recall once where they joined in.  They were straitlaced, humorless, and . . . kinda boring.  If the lot of them had an independent thought in their lives, they had it beaten out of them.

The Christians among us have our secret handshakes, as you can imagine, and thus we enjoy a bit more opportunities for the camaraderie of shared culture.  But in general, I don’t see much evidence of resistance.  They think whatever they’re told to think.

Question on the Morning After

What, exactly, do you call a member of the Constitution Party.

I mean, a member of the "Republican Party" is a "Republican". A member of the "Democrat Party" is a "Democrat". But it just wouldn't do to call myself a "Constitution".

"Constitutionalist" would seem like a candidate, but it already has an established definition, and is unlikely to be identified with a particular platform or even a specific worldview. Plus it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

"Constitutional" might be better. "I'm a Constitutional!" is much more likely to provoke "What's that?", which is kinda what I want.

Any other ideas? (Serious entrants only. I'm not looking for snark, e.g., "No-hoper" I already get that.)

$700K vs. “Drunk at a Party”

I have just a couple of observations about this story:

• There couldn’t be too many Brazilian women, possessed in this case of merely above average attractiveness, and without the kind of scruples that would prohibit having sex with a stranger in return for cash, that are still virgins at the age of 20.
• I hope somebody has explained young Catarina Migliorini that, in the event her Japanese client expects her to fulfill the terms of her contract in the first round, she’s in for a world of hurt.
• . . . kind of like this girl:

Thoughts on Abortion

As a Christian, I count myself a supporter of two moral propositions:

• Abortion, like murder, is a great evil; and
• Sex should be reserved for marriage.

I am not unsympathetic to the burdens that complying with these propositions might pose in extermis; for instance, the burden on a family faced with the prospect of caring for a severely disabled child, or the burden on that child as he grows up faced with the improbability of ever finding someone to marry.  But that sympathy does not extend to elevating human frailty above God’s instructions.

That said, I couldn’t help noticing the Oscar buzz generated by the film The Sessions, the apparently true story of a severely disabled man who hires a prostitute “sexual surrogate” to whom he loses his virginity.  Now, it may not necessarily be a contradiction, strictly speaking, for liberals to argue, as they apparently do, that someone with disabilities doesn’t have a right to life but does have a right to fornicate.  But it does seem just a little . . . incongruous.

Speaking of abortion, I read, via Ace, another media frenzy over a Republican straying off-script:

Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said Tuesday that pregnancy that results from rape can be “something that God intended to happen.”

“I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize life is that gift from God,” Mourdock said at a debate. “And I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Now, on the one hand, as a Calvinist who subscribes to the English Reformers’ view of the sovereignty of God, that Mourdock isn’t that far off.

The decrees of God are His eternal purpose, according to the counsel of His will, whereby, for His own glory, He doth foreordain whatsoever comes to pass.

But that said . . . I’m rethinking this whole “gift of life” business.  It is true that in the Bible, as throughout history until relatively recently, children were always considered a blessing.  But I’m not sure that the phrase “gift of life” appears in the Bible in the context of children, nor am I convinced that there is a moral obligation to procreate irrespective of any other consideration.  I haven’t thought this through all the way, but these thoughts did cross my mind as I read Mourdock’s statements above, and I can’t help think that the phrase “gift of life” seems a little jarring in the case of rape-induced pregnancy.