Thursday roundup

It's been 28 years since the United States tested a nuclear weapon. Shay Khatiri at The Bulwark makes a cogent argument that the current contemplation of a resumption of testing is well-founded. The post-Cold War breathing room we enjoyed is no more. We're in another era of great-power competition, and we can ill afford any slop in our nuclear preparedness:

Nuclear tests exist for several reasons. The first is to ensure the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons. We don’t want our nukes to detonate where they shouldn’t—that’s what we mean by safety. And we want to make sure that they do detonate where we need them to—that’s reliability. There are two main types of nuclear delivery systems: gravity bombs and non-gravity bombs. (For the purposes of simplicity, we can set aside less common delivery systems, such as mines and nuclear munitions.) Gravity bombs are those that you drop out of a plane. Non-gravity bombs are delivered by a missile, mostly cruise and ballistic; these could be launched from air, land, and sea (the “nuclear triad” that candidate Trump was unaware of back in 2015). Different temperatures, altitudes, pressures, speeds, and other conditions risk unintended detonations of nuclear weapons. It is to make sure that both the “physics package”—the nuclear warhead proper, the part of the weapon that detonates—and the delivery system meet our requirements for safety and reliability that we have nuclear testing.

Since Joe Biden has pledged to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if he's elected president - a guarantee no doubt more pressing for him now, in light of his, um, unfortunate utterance at the end of his interview with Charlemagne Tha God - it behooves us to consider whom he might choose. Kevin Daley at The Washington Examiner looks into some choices that are probably on his radar. It's not an uninteresting group of people. They have some interesting credentials. The extent to which any of them would instinctively lean left in rulings from the bench is not necessarily discernible from their careers to date. He looks at previous judging experience, any clerking they've done, private practicing of law, and where they were educated. Here's the lineup:

There are two broad groups Biden might select from, the first including sitting judges on federal and state courts, the second with more academic backgrounds. The leftwing group Demand Justice, which is pressing Biden to release a shortlist of potential nominees, has released its own list, which is heavy on academics and cause lawyers. A Washington Free Beacon analysis found the most likely candidates are U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, California Supreme Court Justice Leondra Kruger, and U.S. District Judge Leslie Abrams Gardner, with Stacey Abrams as a possible wildcard pick.

Here's a taste of the kind of detail that doesn't lend itself to stereoptyping:

Jackson had an unlikely ally in former House speaker Paul Ryan when she was nominated for the federal bench. The judge's husband, Patrick Jackson, is the twin brother of Ryan's brother-in-law William Jackson. Ryan introduced Jackson during her 2012 confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"Our politics may differ, but my praise for Ketanji's intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal," Ryan told the committee.

Her confirmation would mark the first time that two African Americans have served together on the Supreme Court. Jackson lunched with Justice Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court clerk and recounted the experience to Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher for their 2007 book, Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas.

"I just sat there the whole time thinking: ‘I don't understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with,'" Jackson said. "But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know."

Jackson's time in private practice could complicate her prospects. Her résumé—which runs a wide range of law practice—includes experiences liberals will admire, like a three-year tour in the federal public defender's office and a clerkship for Justice Stephen Breyer. Yet she also advised corporate clients for nearly a decade, first for a Washington arbitration boutique, then at such "BigLaw" standbys as Goodwin Procter and Morrison & Foerster. 

And I wasn't aware that Stacey Abrams had a sister on the federal bench. That sister's marriage is a pretty interesting footnote:

Abrams's personal life is particularly compelling. Her husband, Jimmie Gardner, was falsely imprisoned in a West Virginia penitentiary for 26 years, following wrongful convictions for sexual assault and robbery. Gardner was a victim of the notorious laboratory technician Fred Zain, who fabricated or manipulated evidence in dozens of cases to help state prosecutors obtain convictions. Gardner was released in 2016 and married Abrams two years later.

John Hinderaker at Power Line shares the coverage of last night's Minneapolis riot from Kyle Hooten of Alpha News, which is kind of a citizen-journalism outfit based in the Twin Cities.  Hooten got right in there and shot some pretty graphic documentation of the mayhem.

The Imaginative Conservative offers a lot of book reviews that are really more than just examinations of one particular book. They are contemplations of the entire subjects of the books in question. There's a really good one up right now. It's a review by Cicero Bruce of Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin by Tracey Lee Simmons.

The review - we should really think of it as an essay on the general topic of classical languages - gets one thinking about why these languages were considered so important to the notion of a proper education in the early days of our nation:

The last century heard from other apologists for Greek and Latin besides those recollected above. Most, though, were among what Mr. Simmons describes as the last group of writers, reared and educated between 1870 and 1920, “whose early exposure to classical rigors at school allowed them as adults to be literary masters and gourmands.” This band of cultivated men consisted of W. Somerset Maugham, R.W. Livingstone, Rupert Brooke, Ronald Knox, C.S. Lewis, Albert Jay Nock, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice. It also included W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh, in whom Mr. Simmons finds especial inspiration.

In a utilitarian age like ours, wrote the former, “the modern revolt against centering the school curriculum around the study of Latin and Greek is understandable,” although it is “deplorably mistaken.” Auden avowed that few persons of his generation ever “kept up” their Greek and Latin after leaving school, but he was certain that something of real value abided nonetheless: “Anybody who has spent many hours in his youth translating into and out of two languages so syntactically and rhetorically different from his own learns something about his mother tongue which I do not think can be learned in any other way.” Such effort, he added, “inculcates the habit, whenever one uses a word, of automatically asking, ‘what is its exact meaning?’ ”

Waugh agreed. Although in later life he admitted to remembering no Greek and to having never read Latin for pleasure, he expressed no regrets for having devoted countless hours of his boyhood to the supposed dead languages: “I believe that the conventional defense of them is valid; that only by them can a boy fully understand that a sentence is a logical construction and that words have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.”

Both Waugh and Auden thought that persons never schooled in Greek and Latin suffer a most unfortunate deprivation, a sentiment shared wholeheartedly by Mr. Simmons. Those who have been most deprived ever “since classical education became ‘undemocratic,’ ” Auden observed, “are not the novelists and poets—their natural love of language sees them through—but all those, like politicians, journalists, lawyers, the man-in-the-street, etc., who use language for everyday and nonliterary purposes.”

The White House is going to take a pass on issuing a midyear economic update.