Captain Barnes and the Wilderness – NYTimes.com

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The Wilderness was particularly awful in several ways; it covered some of the same ground of the battle of Chancellorsville, so often there was fighting among the bones of the dead from that battle. There were also wildfires in the forests which killed a number of men.

My great-great-great-grandfather Norman DeFord Corser fought with the Fighting Fifth New Hampshire. They weren’t in the first two major battles of the Overland Campaign, but they were moved up for Cold Harbor, where Norman Corser was wounded for the second time (a wound sustained at Seven Pines kept him out of the fighting at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, where so many of his fellow soldering in the Fighting Fifth were killed).

Anyway, this is a good account of that first battle in the Overland Campaign:

Gen. Robert E. Lee, who commanded the Southern forces, attacked Grant’s forces on May 5, setting off two days of bloody fighting that left some 26,000 total casualties, making the Battle of the Wilderness one of the costliest engagements of the war. Many of the wounded, especially on that first day, were stuck in the underbrush, too far from the front lines to rescue. And so they moaned through the night.

Suddenly the haunting voice of a man in prayer rose above the cries of the wounded. One Union soldier who had nodded off to sleep after that first day of hellish fighting awoke to the sound with a start.

“I never before nor since heard such a prayer,” he noted years later. “It seemed, lying there in the darkness of the night in the woods, that his deep, sympathetic voice, mingled with the voices and groans of the dying ones, sounded as from some other world.”

The soldier recognized the voice. It belonged to Dennis Barnes, his captain, a square-shouldered, six-foot lumberman from New York who was on a self-appointed mission to rescue the wounded from his company after the day’s desperate fighting. Barnes was picking his way across the densely wooded landscape, exhausted and pained from an injury he had suffered to his hand. It was near midnight when he found a corporal who had succumbed to the gaping wound in his belly.

via Captain Barnes and the Wilderness – NYTimes.com.

To Have or to Be? by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2014

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I hesitate to quote Karl Marx, but he was surely right when, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” he wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

This truth, however, which is so obvious that it ought to be, if it is not, a cliché, does not mean that choice does not exist. The inevitable existence of circumstances does not mean absence or abrogation of choice. To know the circumstances of a man is not also to know his future actions.

via To Have or to Be? by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal Spring 2014.

The Last Psychiatrist: Who Bullies The Bullies?

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The Last Psychiatrist puts a finger on the issue of our time:

Hess yells about a world of masculine power because she has the power to yell at it. But of course her power is limited only to yelling, she is impotent against a troll who yells at her. But her mistake is in thinking he has the power. No one has it, the system doesn’t allow it. Even the mighty Economist demo feels impotent. Are they all delusional? This is the true critique of the system, not simply that one group reliably oppresses another; but that the entire system is based on creating a lack. This lack is not a bottomless hole that nothing could ever fill, but a tiny, strangely shaped divot in your soul into which nothing could ever fit: not money, not sex, not stuff, not relationships. Nothing “takes.” Nothing counts. Nothing is ever right. Only novelty works, until it wears off.

This lack of power– not power to rule the world, but existential power– what is the purpose of my life? What is this all for? I get that I’m supposed to use my Visa a lot, but is that it? Shouldn’t I be able to do more than this? Everything is possible, but nothing is attainable. Nothing tells them what is valuable; worse, everything assures them that nothing could be more valuable. That the media is the primary way the system teaches you how to want should have been obvious to Hess, she works for it, but for that same reason it was invisible to her.

via The Last Psychiatrist: Who Bullies The Bullies?.

Too Big To Audit? Large Partnerships Escape IRS Scrutiny, GAO Reports | CNS News

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In 2011, while the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was busy scrutinizing the tax-exempt status of 100 percent of Tea Party groups and other conservative non-profits, the tax agency did not audit a single high-value electing large partnership (ELP) with more than $100 million in assets.

That’s according to a preliminary report released to Congress by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) April 17th. (See GAO.pdf)

An ELP is a business entity with more than 100 partners and more than $100 million in assets that is required to file a 1065-B tax return every year. They include large private equity firms, hedge funds and oil and gas partnerships.

“No partnerships that filed a Form 1065-B from tax years 2002 to 2011 had their tax return audited and closed by IRS from fiscal years 2007 to 2013,” a footnote on page 14 of the GAO report stated.

via Too Big To Audit? Large Partnerships Escape IRS Scrutiny, GAO Reports | CNS News.

L. Gordon Crovitz: The End of the Permissionless Web – WSJ.com

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Mr. Schneiderman has targeted Airbnb, an online service that lets users easily rent homes or apartments for short-term stays, giving travelers a new option. The hotel industry, concerned about being disrupted, is lobbying hard to kill the upstart. Mr. Schneiderman went to court demanding the names of people who rent out their homes to see if they violate any laws. Airbnb objects to this fishing expedition. With a valuation in the billions, the Silicon Valley company can afford lawyers to protect its customers, but costly regulatory overreach will inevitably suppress new startups from trying to compete.

Like Airbnb, mobile-phone app Uber creates a marketplace directly linking buyers and sellers—in its case, passengers and drivers—outside the ornate regulations of analog-era municipal taxi commissions. Brussels, Seattle and Miami have banned or strictly limited Uber cars. New York’s Mr. Schneiderman objects to the company’s practice of pricing more when demand is heavy. The alternative is severely restricted supply, as anyone knows who has tried to hail a cab in the rain.

The drone industry in the U.S. has been grounded because the Federal Aviation Administration has banned commercial use of drones pending new regulations. Meanwhile, countries such as Canada and Australia encourage drones. “As American regulators struggle to come up with a rulebook for the fast-moving industry,” Toronto’s Globe and Mail bragged recently, “Canada has emerged as perhaps the center of commercial drone technology—from Ontario farmlands to Alberta’s oil sands.”

Other examples include the Food and Drug Administration’s scrutiny of 23andMe’s marketing, which forced the company to stop offering health data from its at-home $99 genetics-analysis kit, and prohibitions against selling self-driving cars, which have left the U.S. in the dust behind less regulated Europe.

via L. Gordon Crovitz: The End of the Permissionless Web – WSJ.com.

Obama’s highway tolls take cash, time and privacy: Column

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One of the nice things about driving in America today is that if you tire of the Big Brother aspects of air travel, you can just get in your car and go. Sensor-equipped tolls will make it easy for a government that already spies on us too much to spy on us some more. Whatever promises are made now, experience shows that’s exactly what the government will do.

If the gas tax really isn’t raising enough money to fix the roads, then our politicians should man up and increase it or better yet stop spending so much of it on sidewalks, bike lanes and mass transit. The worst possible outcome is tolls that instead of just taking our money like a gas tax, will take our money, waste our time and destroy our privacy.

via Obama’s highway tolls take cash, time and privacy: Column.

Instapundit » Blog Archive » STATE-LED CALLS FOR CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS:  If you can’t get 2/3 of both houses of Congress to …

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Hmmm…. let’s consider the themes here:  The liberals/progressives want to amend the Constitution to limit one of our most fundamental freedoms.  The conservatives/tea partiers want to amend the Constitution to limit government power.   But somehow the average American–even prominent Republicans themselves– thinks of the GOP as the “Party of No”?

via Instapundit » Blog Archive » STATE-LED CALLS FOR CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS:  If you can’t get 2/3 of both houses of Congress to ….

Donald Sterling ban: He should sell the Clippers, but the NBA shouldn’t force him to do it.

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or Sterling to finally get his comeuppance, to feel the wrath of public opprobrium, and to lose his prime asset seems just. For the NBA, which was engaged in a decades-long battle with its longest-tenured, and worst, owner, this was a perfect opportunity to act swiftly and harshly.

Yet one has this niggling feeling that Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has a point when he says, “If we’re taking something somebody said in their home and we’re trying to turn it into something that leads to you being forced to divest property in any way, shape, or form, that’s not the United States of America.”

via Donald Sterling ban: He should sell the Clippers, but the NBA shouldn’t force him to do it..

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics | TIME.com

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Some good sense from Kareem:

The big question is “What should be done next?” I hope Sterling loses his franchise. I hope whoever made this illegal tape is sent to prison. I hope the Clippers continue to be unconditionally supported by their fans. I hope the Clippers realize that the ramblings of an 80-year-old man jealous of his young girlfriend don’t define who they are as individual players or as a team. They aren’t playing for Sterling—they’re playing for themselves, for the fans, for showing the world that neither basketball, nor our American ideals, are defined by a few pathetic men or women.

via Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Welcome to the Finger-Wagging Olympics | TIME.com.

Harry Reid’s Long, Steady Accretion of Power & Wealth | RealClearPolitics

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Senator Reid: are you honest in your dealings with your fellow men?

David Damore — a University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor whose research focuses on Silver State politics — has closely followed Reid for years. He said that the balance between helping family and constituents is a common tension for powerful politicians. “I’m going to put this politely: Their personal interests, they seem to see, represent the common good. They don’t differentiate those two.”

Another longtime Reid-watcher believes that the latest string of incidents, stretching over the last decade, is just a result of more coverage of Reid — and not a product of him changing his style.

“As he’s become more known and a much higher dollar target for his critics, anything he does to assist his family now pegs on the radar,” said John L. Smith, a columnist who has written about Nevada politics for nearly as long as Reid has been in Washington.  “I don’t think he’s changed his personal method of operation throughout his whole career.”

Smith added, “I can’t see him ever denying his family a break or an opportunity if he could provide it. I guess that’s just part of being a dad and a guy with a certain level of influence.”

Nowhere is Reid’s influence more profound than in his home state, where he has built a dizzying network of mutually beneficial political, personal, and business alliances. These associations benefit Reid, his family, his close friends, and, very often, the state that he loves. The sphere of influence took decades to create.

via Harry Reid’s Long, Steady Accretion of Power & Wealth | RealClearPolitics.