At first it looks very strange because there are around half of the expected number of characters to represent a word. This is because each character represents both consonant and vowel sounds. Thus, "August" is reduced from six characters to three; "Blackberry" from ten to three. This happens even though the word for "August" has more syllables than the word "August" itself: it's just one character for each syllable.
The committee said it found no evidence that Edwards engaged in sexual activity with or explicitly propositioned any of his staffers. However, he was aware “that his excessive attention toward the young women had led to rumors and innuendo in the office,” the report said.The committee found that while Edwards believed that none of his conduct was intended as a sexual or romantic advance, his behavior patterns “would lead a reasonable observer to interpret it as such.”According to the report, Edwards provided the two staffers “with lavish and recurrent gifts,” made “comments regarding their appearance and dress,” invited them “to intimate dinners and vacations” and sent notes “regarding his effusive affection.”...On one occasion, he and a staffer appeared to take a private trip to Las Vegas together, the report said. Edwards booked rooms at the Bellagio for him and the staffer, and also promised to get them tickets to shows in the city.At one point, after the staffer asked Edwards for ideas on what outfits to pack for the trip, Edwards texted: “A pair of jean shorts and a yellow blouse that you wore to a concert is baked into my memory, and a red dress you wore to a neighboring office event was a SHOW STOPPER!”Later in the conversation, before the flight, Edwards sent the staffer flowers, which she noted made her “uncomfortable.”“Just want to make sure this trip isn’t meant to be anything it’s not?” she texted.“I’m sorry it made you uncomfortable. Nothing was meant by it,” Edwards replied.On another occasion, Edwards offered to miss a House vote to help one of the staffers set up her Christmas tree, the report said. In another, he offered to reschedule a tele-townhall to meet the staffer for dinner.Other messages included in the report show that Edwards regularly invited the staffers out for dinner and drinks, as well as outings to casinos, theater, comedy and musical shows.
One doubts he was more effective as a lothario than he has been as a Congressman. He was absent and useless during Helene.
UPDATE: He’s out.
Although he was completely ineffective, both at Congressmanning and at seduction, I realize that I misjudged the man. He apparently at least has the decency to feel shame and to withdraw himself from consideration now that his shame is public. That makes him an order of magnitude better than many of our politicians. I apologize for underestimating his virtues, such as they are; but they're still more than I thought he had.
One of the senior officers in the auditorium spoke up quickly, and started to say we should not drink, eat, or smoke in front of Iraqis during Ramadan, to respect their culture. This CIA dude immediately locks eyes with this officer and asks very loudly “WHY?!”
The officer was a little caught off guard, and before he could answer the CIA guy started explaining. “You are American, you are Christian, you DO NOT celebrate Ramadan, and if you don’t carry on as an American during Ramadan it will be seen as weakness. It reinforces their idea that their god is the only true god, and that all others will bow before Islam. If they don’t offer you a drink when you come to their home, ask for one, during Ramadan!
There's something to be said for this refusal to be bound by religious conditions other than your own. Back in 2007 I drank beer at a bar cart on the streets of Zamboanga during Ramadan. The Zamboanga peninsula is a region where Islam and Catholicism are in conflict. Terrorist groups like Abu Sayyaf -- a subset of the Islamic State, these days -- were kidnapping Christians for ransom and murder. Showing that your own civilization's rules are the ones that apply to you can be important.
On the other hand, showing respect is also important for any sort of human relationships, and it can be particularly profound in establishing ties across large divides like religious differences. It could be received as submission to their god's norms and rules, or it could be received as a first offer in what could become mutual respect if it is returned. Developing terms of mutual respect on which you can live together peacefully is highly desirable in most cases.
In Egypt, I declined to tour some of the beautiful mosques because they required that I remove my shoes in order to go inside their holy building. This is a middle ground: I respect the rule enough to not violate it in their own mosque, but not enough to obey and submit to the rule, enough to just not go inside where the rule becomes an issue. That seemed fair to me.
Not being offered a drink in someone's home in Iraq, by the way, was usually a danger signal. I gather the new movie The Odyssey makes a big deal about the sacred nature of hospitality. That is a real thing, and a live issue in the Middle East to this day. If you were not offered a drink because it was Ramadan and you asked for one and were refused it, that would be even more reason to think that you'd better be on your guard in that part of the country.
Reports are that he then helped a woman who was shot in the chest, and that she was alive when the paramedics took her. Good luck to them both.
UPDATE: Preparation pays off, it seems.
From Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston & London: Shambala Books, 1993), 52-3: Lesson 42.
Huanglong said to the great statesman Wang Anshi:*
Whatever you set your mind to do, you always should make the road before you wide open, so that all people may traverse it. This is the concern of a great man.
If the way is narrow and perilous, so that others cannot go on it, then you yourself will not have any place to set foot either.
* Also considered one of China's great poets, Wang Anshi was a Chan practitioner and an active statesman. At the peak of his career he was highly placed and tried to institute sweeping reforms in government. He met with great resistance from entrenched interests, and was eventually ousted.
-Translator.
The book is called Zen Lessons because Americans would know the word "Zen." Here and throughout, the lessons are actually Chan Buddhist rather than Zen Buddhist, Chan being the Chinese school from which the Japanese derived their own unique method which became famous in the West.
Confer Mt. 7:13-14. It's worth reading with the immediately prior post, as well; the wide road is the humane standard, perhaps the only one the human being can aspire to traverse. Nevertheless, the alternative does come well recommended.
A reader named Victor wrote to me this week with a confession. A United States Latino, steeped in the Chicano Movement, he had gone to Spain braced to hate it. He had been educated to loathe the brutal colonial country of the Conquistadores who raped, pillaged and genocided his — our — ancestors. He expected, upon landing in Spain, to feel the old inherited grievance rise in his throat [but found that] Spain was a diverse land of many different kinds of people, and none of them, now, were conquistadores. He grew to love it. He learned to hold the present beauty and the tragic history of Spain — real Spain, not the idea of Spain — in the same hand. “It’s complicated,” he wrote.Those two words are the most honest thing anyone has said to me about our complicated American Latino history and Spain’s role in it in a long time.We are primed, as Latinos in the United States, to hate present-day Spain. It’s a litmus test of belonging the right way. How do you feel about Spain? The question never means modern Spain. For United States Latinos, Spain froze back in 1540, when it toppled Moctezuma’s empire, a Forever Inquisition onto which we have projected all the simplified racialized sins of United States slavery, only brown instead of black. How do I feel about Spain? we answer, standing before the proverbial class, all eyes upon us, fingers hovering over the big red cancel button. If we want to fit in as real woke U.S. Latinos, there is only one correct answer: Spain is the colonizer, and because we are enlightened Latinos, we hate Spain and we hate Spaniards.American Latinos are trained to look at a modern, democratic, post-Franco country and see nothing but the Inquisition wearing a fresh suit and ridiculously shiny Italian loafers. For educated U.S. Latinos, Spain ceased to exist and evolve in the 16th century, and is nothing but a racist, colonizing land full of white people. In reality, Madrid itself is home to 1 million Latin American immigrants in 2026 — meaning there are more Latinos in this one city in Spain than there are in the entire nation of Uruguay. And Spain itself has never been a monolith. Far from it. But like everyone else in the United States, U.S. Latinos gravitate towards simplistic racialized stories of Good versus Evil to explain every fucking thing in the world. And it’s exhausting.
Emphasis in the original. I often elide curse words in the interest of keeping the Hall family friendly, not because I personally oppose them nor their usage. I'm going to leave that one out of respect for her voice.
It's a much longer post that's worth reading. She's finding a lot to struggle with that is analogous to what any of us would; and, indeed, she's only part way there because she still does have good guys and bad guys in her conceptions. On the closest examination, everyone is imperfect; in the American context, for example, it's the very same people who freed the slaves who committed the genocide against the Lakota or the Cheyenne or the Apache. Not the same kind of people, the same people: Sherman and Sheridan and Custer and their commands.
There may not ultimately be good guys and bad guys at all. Virtues are strengths, and thus the virtuous are "powerful for good and evil," as Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the Scots-Irish on the American frontier. The harmless are usually weak, not virtuous; the great usually have scores on both sides of the ledger. You end up forgiving either the weakness or the sins, or else you don't forgive and hurt yourself most of all.
In its landmark 2022 Bruen decision, the Court held that modern gun rules must be consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.... Applying the historical test to modern sporting rifles has produced conflicting results. A divided panel of the 7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.” The court pointed to historical restrictions on Bowie knives as a relevant analogue.Days later, the 3rd Circuit went the other way on New Jersey’s similar ban. In a 10-5 decision, the majority rejected the Bowie knife comparison. There was no evidence those knives were commonly used for lawful purposes before being restricted, the court noted. By contrast, tens of millions of AR-15-style rifles are in civilian hands today and are overwhelmingly used for lawful purposes.
The 7th Circuit opinion is here. The relevant part begins on page 20; the dissent also cites and challenges the interpretation starting around page 67. Of special note here is the majority's rejection of the idea that Bowie knives were particularly criminal-linked, asserting that they were in common use for lawful purposes -- but were still commonly banned by laws because of their occasional utility to criminals. This is a surprising attempt to deploy the Heller standard to challenge the Bruen standard.
The 3rd Circuit opinion is here. New Jersey cited Bowie knife bans in its arguments, and the 3rd circuit rejected them "for two reasons: They are too late in time, and none enacted an outright ban on a class of weapons in common use for lawful purposes." To some degree that is a difference of historical interpretation: were Bowie knives in 'common use for lawful purposes,' or were they not?
However, there's another issue that the 3rd Circuit is raising: the 'assault weapons ban' doesn't bar a particularly dangerous sort of semiautomatic sporting rifle, it bars the entire class of semiautomatic sporting rifles. These can be shown to be both in common use and, statistically, almost exclusively for lawful purposes. Though legislatures attempting to ban them point to highly visible mass shootings involving such arms, mass shootings are a tiny part of the class of shootings; separately, homicidal shootings involving rifles are a tiny class. Once you get to 'mass shootings involving sporting rifles,' you're at statistical noise: better than 99% of such firearms are used exclusively lawfully. Indeed in any given year, in that post the math works out to 99.9975%.
This brings us to an issue not raised in any of the cases so far: the vagueness of the restriction. In the frontier era, such statistical nicety was not possible and legislatures were going off of press reports rather than hard numbers. This, I think, accounts for most of the historical knife bans. "Bowie knives" were not a very well-defined class of knives, and indeed historians still debate exactly what Jim Bowie's knife looked like. The link says the original was 'like a butcher knife in profile,' and doesn't mention if it had a hand guard of any sort. Early attempts to replicate it vary widely:
Early Bowie knives do not fit the popular image of the weapon. One thinks of a blade with a concave arch (clip point) cut into the end of the blade, and a cross-guard to protect the hand. Early examples, however, had a thick, heavy butcher-knife-like blade, with a straight back (top) and no clip point or hand guard. The blade varied in length from 8½ to 12½ inches and was sharpened on the true edge. Wooden handles were attached with silver pins and washers. The Searles knives of the 1830s were one-piece ebony, checkered, and decorated with small silver nails. Blacksmiths fashioned most of the subsequent Bowie knives and added rudimentary crossguards to keep the hand from sliding onto the blade. Eventually, they lengthened the guards as protection from an opponent's blade, but the owner often found the extended guards clumsy and cut them off. The clip point, a curve on the top of the blade back of the point, became popular. The clip was often sharpened so that a backstroke would inflict a serious wound. Spear-point Bowie blades also were forged, dagger-shaped, with both edges sharpened. Blacksmith-made Bowies were generally plain and unsigned, had iron or brass mountings, and hardwood, bone, or horn handles. The knife was both a hunting knife and a tool. With it, one could clear a path, hack a sapling, dig a hole, or butcher game. In the siege of Bexar in 1835, Texans used Bowie knives to dig through roofs and walls and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the Mexicans. The knife was not designed or balanced for throwing....
Bowie knife collections indicate that only about one in ten was American made. English cutlers applied clever motifs and blade etchings that appealed to American tastes and patriotic spirit. Examples include such labels as "American Bowie Knife," "Texas Ranger Knife," "Arkansas Toothpick," "Patriot's Self Defender," "Death to Abolition," "Death to Traitors," "Americans Never Surrender," "Rio Grande Camp Knife," and "I'm A Real Ripper." Handle and guard mountings also carried symbols and slogans with American appeal. Cutlers attached handles of ivory, pearl, tortoise shell, black and gray buffalo horn, India stag horn, and fine woods. Handle pommels of nickel silver featured horseheads, shells, and geometric designs.
In spite of this great lack of clarity about what precisely was being banned -- note this part of the story is quite analogous to the 'assault' weapons ban attempts -- "Bowie knives" were quite commonly on ban lists and even today are often mentioned by name in knife laws. This is because of the tremendous fame of the Sandbar fight in which Jim Bowie's prowess became nationally (in)famous. Legislatures didn't know exactly what they were, but they knew they didn't want such things around whatever they might be.
Other knife styles commonly banned by name include 'dirks' and 'daggers.' Today, a 'dirk' is most famously the heritage Scottish weapon; but legislatures don't seem to have intended it at the time they invoked the name in the laws. Rather, they often seem to have been worried about German submarine infiltrators, assuming the Germans would be armed with their naval knife which was at the time commonly also called a 'dirk.' It's actually a double-edged knife we would more usually call a "dagger," unlike the Scottish dirk which is single-edged and usually has fish-scaling ridges on the reverse.
The American Took & Knife Institute here has a similar historical article about the dirk, which was so badly defined in the law that you could sometimes be charged for carrying both a 'dirk' and a 'Bowie Knife' under different statutes for the same knife -- which, whatever it was, wasn't both at once. Likewise:
Yet another example of elastic application of a statutory “dirk” restriction appears in Virginia, where the dirk restriction was applied to a “butterfly” knife. In the case of Delcid v Virginia, 526 S.E.2d 273 (2000), the defendant argued at trial that his butterfly knife did not conform to the judicially established definition of a dirk which held it to be a knife with two sharp edges and a point and the knife in question had a single sharp edge. The trial judge ruled that the knife was “a dirk with one side,” thus avoiding controlling authority from a higher court in the state. The conviction was upheld on appeal.
The ignorance of legislators is, sadly, not without widespread historical precedent. Neither has been the willingness of police and even courts to apply laws vigorously without clear understanding of what they actually intended to mean. That is a species of unconstitutional vagueness that ends up being dangerous to our Constitutional rights -- and not only the 2nd! All such rights can be winnowed if vague laws are allowed to infringe upon them, especially if the laws are then enforced with the carelessness that is common to the system.
[T]here are hundreds of thousands—millions—of people who don’t have the talent to make a living at writing, art, or music, but who would love to do it seriously and are willing to live modestly, if necessary. These people deserve [such] jobs – modestly paying, undemanding, part-time jobs with benefits. The alternative is [worse] jobs, which would pay more but kill the creative spark and leave them exhausted and miserable....Didn’t Marx promise that after the revolution we would hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and criticize in the evening? Yes, the young Marx promised that. The mature Marx had second thoughts:Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production…Freedom in this field can only consist in the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature;…But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
A Marxist I know tells me that the 'fish in the afternoon' quote was actually drafted by Engels, and that Marx included but always hated it. Pity; it was the only thing of value that Marx ever published. As an aspiration, who shouldn't want that? I quoted it just the other day while gently mocking a certain film critic.
When Cleopatra became queen of Egypt, in 51 BCE, the oldest pyramids that graced her realm, constructed in the 27th century BCE, had already been standing for more than 2,500 years. Cleopatra is one of the most iconic figures from antiquity, yet she is nearer in time to the present than she was to those first pyramids – by a half-millennium, no less....Hoards of Roman coins have been found well beyond the frontiers of the empire, from Scandinavia to India. A papyrus from Egypt in the middle of the 2nd century CE records the details of two contracts for the import of various goods from India, including pepper, pearls, silk and gemstones, shipped to Alexandria from the port of Muziris in Kerala, southwest India. What all of this implies is a far-flung web of transimperial commercial contacts....Further east, near the oasis of Dunhuang, at the head of the Hexi Corridor leading into the North China Plain, a cache of letters from the early 4th century CE written by Sogdian merchants and addressed to recipients in Samarkand, in Uzbekistan, detail the Central- and East-Asian trade in precious metals, spices and textiles, including silk. These ancient commercial networks can be traced all the way to the Pacific rim of East Asia. The most spectacular finds come from the port city of Guangzhou, in southern China, where the tomb for Zhao Mo, the ruler of the regional kingdom of Nanyue in the mid-2nd century BCE (137-122), contained a number of exotic objects, including African elephant tusks and a silver box with motifs and craftsmanship derived from Persia.
