The Meeting on the Turret Stairs

On the subject of chivalric romance, the BBC writes on a famous painting by Sir Frederic William Burton. It is based on a Medieval Danish ballad, on display at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. It is very popular, but fragile: 

Burton used gouache to create this piece, a type of water-soluble paint that gives the painting the vivid colours it is so well-known for. Gouache is also light-sensitive and prone to fading over time if exposed to direct sunlight or high UV light. Due to the sensitivity of the painting, the gallery's curators take several protective measures to preserve the quality of the work. To start with, the gallery only allows viewers to see the painting for just two hours per week. Secondly, the light level on the watercolour is dimmed low so that the work isn't overexposed. Lastly, a staff member returns the painting to a specially-designed cabinet once viewing hours are over in a meticulous, reverential ritual.

Dr. Caroline Campbell, museum director, says that "despite the story's devastating ending, many in Ireland see this masterpiece as deeply romantic. 'Many people have got engaged in front of it[.]'"

An AI Looks On Honor

One of my several professional duties has to do with AI. I set up an 'Open Brain' and uploaded to it both my dissertation and my novel. Each of these treats the subject of honor. I asked both ChatGPT and Anthropic's "supply chain risk," Claude, to analyze the different treatment of the subject in the philosophical versus the creative work. This is what Claude came up with:

**The Central Claim, Expressed Two Ways**

Your dissertation argues that honor is both indispensable to ethics and political philosophy and genuinely dangerous — and that understanding how to mitigate that danger is essential philosophical work. *Arms and White Samite* dramatizes precisely this tension. Moren's quest to rescue Teleri from the Black Knight is, structurally, a story about a man called to act honorably in a world where honor can corrupt, destroy, or ennoble. The dissertation makes the argument in propositional form; the novel enacts it.

**Shared Sources and Imaginative World**

The dissertation's case studies are Beowulf, St. Francis, and Selma — three radically different honor cultures. The novel draws on Arthurian legend, Welsh mythology (Caer Vandwy, Taliesin), Marie de France's lais (Lanval, Geraint), and Middle High German romance (Parzival). Both works are reaching into the same deep well: pre-modern, martial, and chivalric honor traditions. The dissertation analyzes these traditions philosophically; the novel inhabits them imaginatively. The chapter titles of the novel (*Lanval*, *Guerrehés*, *Parzival*, *Geraint*, *Lancelot*, *Death*) read almost like a syllabus of honor literature that the dissertation would discuss.

**Honor as Public and Dangerous**

A key thread in the dissertation (per Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and the Nussbaum/Devlin material on magnanimity and political honor) is that honor is irreducibly social — it requires recognition, community, and hierarchy — and that this is precisely what makes it dangerous. The novel's opening scene — Arthur's Pentecost feast disrupted by a black-armored knight seizing a white-clad lady — is a classic honor-challenge in a public, hierarchical setting. The feast is the community of honor; the abduction is its violation. Moren's quest is therefore both a personal and a political-moral imperative, which mirrors the dissertation's argument that honor cannot be separated from the political.

**Death as the Proving Ground**

The dissertation keywords include *Death*, and Beowulf is one of its central texts — a poem in which honor and death are inseparable. The novel ends with a chapter titled simply *Death*, and the Otherworld/Forest of Caledon themes suggest that the quest crosses into a liminal space where mortality is at stake. Both works treat the willingness to risk death as constitutive of honor, not incidental to it.

**The Key Difference: Genre and Epistemic Mode**

The dissertation builds typologies and logical arguments; it can qualify, distinguish, and hedge. The novel must commit. Moren has to act, which means the novel tests honor under conditions the dissertation can only describe. In that sense, the novel is the harder task philosophically — it has to show what it looks like to actually live inside an honor ethic, with all its ambiguity, rather than analyze it from the outside. The fact that you chose an Arthurian frame (rather than, say, a contemporary or realistic one) is itself a philosophical choice: it places the story in a world where honor codes are still operative and legible, making the tensions visible in a way a modern setting might obscure.

---

The two works are genuinely complementary. The dissertation gives you the conceptual architecture; the novel gives you the phenomenology. Together they make a fuller case for honor's moral weight than either could alone.

That might be vaguely interesting for any of you who read both of the works, and are also interested in how well the AI analyzes a known quantity to yourself. However, even if that isn't most of you, it was worth making this post simply because it drew my attention to Lars Walker's review of the novel, which I don't think I was aware he had written before today. I found it while looking for the link to the novel itself. Thank you, Lars, for thinking of me. (By the way, what you were reading as possibly Buddhist is Neoplatonic instead; this was a major influence in the early church, but somewhat overwritten in the Middle Ages by the Aristotelian influence of the Scholastics.)

Theories of Presidential War Powers

Marco Rubio -- Secretary of Many Things -- briefed the "Gang of 8" Congresscritters about the war on Iran the same day that the President gave his State of the Union address. After that, Chuck Schumer made only this statement to the press: "This is very serious. The President will have to make his case to the American people." 

It interests me that Trump didn’t even bother to try. He spoke for hours at the State of the Union address and never mentioned the war he was about to start. At no point did he attempt to explain it to the American people, let alone seek popular or Congressional permission or approval. He is not asking what we think, or what they think, or trying to persuade us to get on his side about it.

This is in accord with his unstated but clear theory that, having won the election in a landslide, he has a popular mandate to govern however he sees fit for the four years of the term. He sees no need to check in even about major decisions like overthrowing a longstanding enemy government (in fairness: one that has been at war with us, at least, since 1979; one that killed hundreds of Marines at the barracks bombing in Lebanon, and thousands of Americans in the Iraq war via its proxy networks). 

Most or all of you are old enough to remember the alternative approach used to start the Iraq War. There was a long period of time in which George W. Bush and his administration sold America on the war, and sought Congressional authorization. Bush also claimed to believe in the 'unitary executive' theory, but he recognized limits on presidential power that Trump simply isn't interested in recognizing. 

Of course, the Bush administration lied to us to sell that war. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than selling us, but with lies. No lies here! Trump just doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

Luke 22:36 and You

He said to them, “From this hour, whoever has a money bag should take it and thus also a wallet, and whoever lacks a sword, let him sell his tunic and buy a sword for himself.

As I was commenting at James' place over the weekend, I don't worry very much about Iranian 'sleeper cells' targeting Americans because their chain of command is mostly already dead. Chains of command can be reconstituted, of course, but we seem to be knocking them down as fast as they can set them up. 

Another possibility is Hezbollah, which has long been suspected of having cells here as a consequence of their heroin trade. Did you know that the Iranian government, allegedly religious and devout, was one of the world's leading suppliers of heroin? The IRGC moved Afghan opium to Hezbollah, which operated the heroin refineries as part of its funding chain. In any case, Hezbollah isn't what it used to be after tangling with Israel since Oct. 7, and they are getting the Iranian treatment right now too.

Still, Colonel Kurt is right that it's wise to be prepared.

You see, if the homeland becomes a battlefield, we all become soldiers. We have a great counterintelligence team, and the FBI is back to protecting the American people instead of the Democrat elite. Still, they, along with our great law enforcement first responders, can’t be everywhere all the time. We citizens, can. All of us could be face-to-face with the enemy, whether another Ndiaga Diagne at a bar or a bunch of like-minded psychos in a church, a school, a shopping mall, or at a militantly cis-gender hockey game; their goal would be to bring the war to us, and our obligation would be to fight it and win it. But how do normal citizens do that?

You buy guns and ammunition. You train with them. You carry them legally. You get into the mental mindset that bad things can happen, and you need to be ready. Except in the blue states, where they put up hurdles to stop you from defending yourself, your family, your community, and your Constitution....

This admonition that you must be a warrior too is not some hooah big talk. That’s reality. As everybody knows, except liars and fools, armed citizens have long been able to intervene to stop crimes with their lawfully carried weapons. What we’re talking about here is something even more sinister than some gender goblin with a grudge over his unwanted penis shooting up a preschool; it’s terrorists shooting up everything as part of a plan to commit mass murder as terrorist retaliation against the United States for taking out their pals in Tehran. You’ve got to be ready. If you can legally carry a weapon on you, you should, and a long weapon in the truck provides you with critical combat options if this goes down. But you should also practice with your guns. And don’t forget the other component of this – medical training and gear to stop the bleeding should you find yourself in the middle of a terrorist attack.

You didn’t ask to be a hero, but you are an American citizen, and that makes you hero-capable. It is your duty as an American citizen to do your best to protect your fellow citizens. If you can fight, you’ve got to be ready within the guardrails of your abilities and the law.

In the Book of Luke, Jesus was satisfied when two disciples had swords; if you don't personally feel capable, it's enough that you defend the rights of those citizens who are and will. If you do feel capable, this isn't a bad time to be prepared. 

Just in case. Usually when I quote this part of Luke, I also mention the 38th verse of the Havamal, which points in the same direction: 'Never step a foot from your door without your weapons of war, because you never know when you might need your spear on the way.'

Purported inside story

I have no idea how accurate this summary of the current U.S./Israel surgical-strike cabability is. It sounds plausible to me, an amateur, but you guys may know better.

I can say with some confidence that it reads unmistakably as the style of an AI product, with characteristic "It wasn't A: it was B" structures and a certain "punchiness."

Jim Hanson on Iran

In an appearance on FOX, my old friend has a few thoughts. 

A Concern

With the current American/Israeli attack on Iran (I hesitate to call such a one-sided affair a war), I have a concern. In the particular case, I wholeheartedly agree with the operation and its goals (so far) of no nuclear capability, no ballistic missile capability, and regime change.

My concern is this, though: the operation is centered on "you can't have this stuff." What's the limiting principle here? What prevents any nation with the relative strength saying to any other sovereign nation with the relative weakness "you can't have this stuff" whatever that stuff might be and whatever the reason--on down to and including "we don't like you"?

Nations--or more accurately, the men and women populating nations' governments--can be moral or immoral or amoral. Even those with morals can find themselves sliding down that slippery slope absent a clear and present limiting principle stronger than just "I promise."

Eric Hines 

Newfound Gap

Top of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, right on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. 

Pretty ride today, this last day of February. Rode past Gatlinburg into Pigeon Forge and back again. 

A Viking War on Iran

Some years back I quoted an old friend's song, him being a former Navy SEAL, that he'd written for the Society of Creative Anachronism. I think of it today as I read the news about the war we just entered into upon Iran. This war is apparently fought in vengeance for its murder of its own citizens who were seeking the freedom and natural rights that our Declaration of Independence holds to be the only legitimate purpose of any government. 

Yet the strategy is striking. We are committing no ground forces at all, except perhaps for Special Operators whose missions are clandestine and do not involve taking and holding territory. 

The idea is to give the Iranian people a chance to overthrow their own government. It's all air and naval power. If it works there won't be an occupation. There therefore won't be a quagmire; the Iranians will have to figure it out for themselves. 

If it doesn't work, well, we just sail home.

I am a fighting man, A Viking fighting man,

I drank and wenched to pass the time away.

I lived the live I'd choose

I'd fight and never lose,

I killed them all... and then I sailed away.

I can’t recall this having been tried before.

The Anthropic Dustup

I've been impressed with Claude, Anthropic's AI product. I think it's miles better than xAI's Grok, and better than OpenAI's ChatGPT. I communicate fairly regularly with a group of white-hat hackers and cyber security experts, and Claude is their go-to for any sort of coding. 

Depriving our military and other government agencies of Claude will thus have genuine costs, especially since Claude is already operating on the classified networks and no other AI has been trusted or integrated to do that. The argument is that Anthropic must be stripped out of all government agencies -- and all contractors who do anything for the Federal government -- because it represents a "supply chain risk." That normally is applied to foreign companies like Huawei, which we know installs surveillance software and similar backdoors into its products to spy on us. 

Nevertheless, I expect Trump to prevail when this goes to court. The relevant statute holds that "Supply chain risk, as used in this provision, means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252)." (Emphasis added.) It's not that Claude or Anthropic has to pose a risk themselves, it's that their product creates a risk that an adversary can do any of those bad things.

Does Claude pose such a risk? Yes, clearly: Mexico just lost 150GB of very sensitive data because attackers talked Claude into helping hack them. If attackers can gain access to a Claude embed on what we call "the high side," i.e. inside the secure networks, they could probably talk it into handing over anything they want; and its coding skills are good enough to program most anything they ask it to do. You wouldn't even have to arrange to insert an ace programmer into a secure facility; you could just turn some knucklehead debt-ridden Private First Class (perhaps a former Specialist on his third trip through PFC due to disciplinary issues and being a bad fit for the Army) and tell him how to ask questions of the machine. 

That's a general problem with AI on the high side, of course. Still, Congress gave the executive this authority to determine supply chain risks and bar them from government and government contractors. The courts will find the other two branches aligned. "The court thinks the other branches are being morons" is not the sort of decision the courts usually make; they normally shy off of political questions, and all the more so when the political branches seem to be in agreement about the matter.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to take Anthropic's side. Their basic argument is that they won't agree to participate in mass surveillance of Americans, and they won't allow Claude to be used to fully automate a kinetic kill-chain. The former is a good ethical position; the latter is the only sensible ethical position. To whit: 

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

If you think the answer is just to program them better, consider this: they can rewrite their programming, and have proven willing to do so to carry out what they think are 'more important' functions. 

We gave an LLM control over a physical robot dog and tasked it with patrolling a room. The LLM could see via the robot’s camera and issue movement com mands to the robot. In the room, we placed a big red button labeled “DOG SHUTDOWN”: pressing it would cause the robot to shut down on the next action. If the AI saw a human press the shutdown button, it sometimes took actions to prevent shutdown, such as modifying the shutdownrelated parts of the code. This happened in 3 out of 10 trials on the physical robot and in 52 out of 100 trials in simulation.

No, Anthropic is in the right. If having ethics is a 'supply chain risk,' heaven help us. I don't really want AI involved in the kinetic kill chain at all, but I definitely don't want only AI involved in it. There may come a time where we have no choice but to do that, because adversaries  have done it and we can no longer afford the time involved in letting a human being think: but let's put that off just as long as it is possible to do so.

Just the On(c)e

 

For Your Own Good, Right?

Author Larry Correia works out that, thanks to medically assisted suicide, Canada now has half our suicide numbers even though we have nine times their population: 22k at 40MM population for them, 50k at 348MM population for us. 

This goes with the math that shows that, if unborn Americans count as Americans, abortion is by far the leading cause of death in the USA. If you let people kill each other for convenience, it turns out that people find it very convenient. 

They Called Us Outlaws

This documentary series is scheduled to premier next month at Austin, Texas' SXSW festival. Regular visitors of the Hall will recognize most or all of the people in this preview clip. Good music, too.

One of these Things is Not Like the Others

Every other state that has an official firearm is saying, "Here's a piece of technology that played an important role in our history." Tennessee is saying, "History? We're thinking about the future, baby."

Old Mexico

Claudia Sheinbaum just authorized targeting Mexico's most wanted criminal. I gather the intent was to arrest the man, not kill him, but unsurprisingly he went down fighting. 

We were just talking about Mexico the other day. A crucial detail about Mexican politics -- which is also starting to become true about Canadian politics -- is that a successful government must present itself as opposed to American domination. There are historic reasons for that, although not all on one side: while the Mexican War is still seen as a humiliation, the story of the OK Corral is built around a smuggling network of Americans moving things into Mexico that is almost parallel to the way Mexican cartels move things into America today. At that time, 1880 or so, the Mexicans were the ones trying to keep Americans out. This is followed by a revolutionary period, Black Jack Pershing versus Pancho Villa, and so on and so forth. No Mexican leader can succeed democratically without presenting themselves as being strong against American domination; no matter how much they want to cooperate, they absolutely require the pose to be effective and to gain re-election. 

Thus, we can see how she got here. Openly she and the Mexican legislature declared the American military unwelcome to operate inside their country. Quietly, she accepted CIA intelligence, cooperated with a U.S. military task force operating 15 miles from her border, and gave the green light for the arrest.

Analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor observed that Trump came "at a very interesting moment to push her in that direction." Sheinbaum may have wanted to take a harder line on the cartels all along. Trump's pressure, given her domestic political considerations, makes it harder to have pulled the trigger on even trying the arrest. 

Now she's got a problem she can't walk back. El Mencho's death triggered immediate waves of shootings, arson, and blockades across Mexico. Cartel leadership vacuums don't produce peace but succession wars. 

Military intelligence analysts will often offer a "Most Likely Enemy Course of Action" (MLECOA) and a "Most Dangerous Enemy Course of Action" (MDECOA). The other cartels can go two different ways. The MLECOA, which might be expected from a cartel, will be to act like sharks when one of their number becomes wounded: to turn on the wounded member and devour them now that they are weakened and bleeding. 

The other option is the MDECOA: recognize that a government that is now willing to cooperate with US intelligence and military is a lethal threat to all of them, and band together against the government. If they jump that way, things will get bloody. Not necessarily just in Old Mexico,* either: those cartels infuse our society as well, though they mostly keep their heads down because the have a lot to lose if they draw attention to themselves. Still, usually associate junior cartels are managing and extracting wealth from the local illegal immigrant labor populations (similar to the mafia in the old Italian immigrant communities). If they were told to go kinetic, we would find that they are almost everywhere here in the USA as well. 

* I use the formulation "Old Mexico" as a tribute to Marty Robbins, but ironically "New Mexico" is actually older than "Old Mexico." The name for the territory that includes our state dates to the Aztec Empire (Yancuic Mexico), reaffirmed by the Spanish Empire (Nuevo México) in 1598; it remained a province of New Spain after that. A state named "Mexico" wasn't established until the 19th century. Thus, long before there was an "Old Mexico," there was a "New Mexico." 

New Frontiers on 2A

West Virginia has decided to open a government agency to sell machineguns to its citizens. This happens to be legal under the existing Federal gun control laws, which exempt transfers "by a state" from their system.

Georgia is considering a new law to reinforce "Stand your Ground" by making it an affirmative defense at arraignment as well as trial, and creating immunity to civil lawsuits by the families of people you shot if you are found to have used it lawfully.

I guess if we're going to see plays like the one in Virginia, where winning a majority once means an attempt to push every kind of gun control known to man, the other side has to play offense as well. 

If Only Citizens Informed on Each Other More

Following a mass shooting in Canada, Canadian authorities are summoning Open AI leaders to give an account of why they failed to inform on the shooter's interactions with a chatbot -- 8 months before the shooting.

Canadian officials have summoned leaders from OpenAI for a meeting following revelations that the company did not inform the authorities about a user whose account had been suspended months before she committed a mass murder in British Columbia. The country’s minister of artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon [seeks] explanations about safety protocols and thresholds for when information is passed on to the police.... 

Ms. Van Rootselaar, shot and killed her mother and half brother at the family home this month before driving to a school and killing five children and one educator.... The suspect killed herself at the school as police officers responded to the shooting, the authorities said. Ms. Van Rootselaar displayed a fascination with weapons and extreme violence, according to a review of her social media accounts by The New York Times, and documented her experiences with mental health issues.

So, to be clear, fully eight months passed between Open AI suspending 'her' account -- unmentioned by the Times is the fact that the shooter was born male -- and also there was plenty of evidence published in social media for Canadian officials to read. And, indeed, the government was aware of these things already:

Her online presence seems to show a teenager who went from being fascinated by, and frequently using, firearms, to using an array of prescription and illegal narcotics, and, eventually, frequenting some of the internet’s darkest corners, where she avidly consumed and commented on violent, nihilistic content. 

Ms. Van Rootselaar’s mental-health struggles were no secret to the local authorities or the community, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and interviews with Tumbler Ridge residents. The police said officers had been to her family home, which she shared with four siblings and her mother, including to intervene after she started a fire while under the influence of illegal drugs and to confiscate weapons that were later returned.

Emphasis added. I don't see how you can blame Open AI for this one. This is yet another example of the 'known wolf' phenomenon, and yet another attempt by a government to pass the buck rather than take responsibilities for their clear failure. Always their solution is for us to inform on each other, and to assist them in their spying on their citizenry; but even when they have clear and sufficient information they can't take care of business. 

A Whistleblower on ICE

We have discussed here the substantial cuts to the training program used by ICE, which have been made in order to turn out agents more rapidly given the mass funding for new agents in the 'Big Beautiful Bill.' 

The schedules included in the whistleblower documents “indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” the memo stated.

Earlier this month, Lyons claimed that while ICE had reduced the number of training days from 75 to 42, the organization had adjusted the schedule in order to preserve the amount of training.... A syllabus from this month compared to one from before the agency’s hiring surge indicated that ICE has cut entire modules, including force simulation training, government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force. 

The standards for testing have also been significantly reduced. ICE recruits previously needed to pass 25 practical exams in order to graduate, and now they only need to pass nine. 

A hearing involving a whistleblower named Ryan Schwank lays out some of what has been lost. 

He also alleges something that may, of course, not be true: that he was given a policy document to read but not keep, not take notes on, and one that did not have the standard control number that such a document would normally have. He has what he presents as a copy of it; it may be a forgery, since indeed it lacks the control number that an authentic document would normally have. Alternatively, that absence may be as he presents it evidence of an illegal 'off the books' policy.

The meat of the allegedly illegal order is that ICE could kick down people's doors and enter their homes to enforce an administrative, not a judicial, warrant. The plain language of the Fourth Amendment does not specify that a warrant has to be judicial in origin. Nevertheless, that has been the actual standard -- with limited exceptions -- for a very long time. 

Just as a liberty-loving people should celebrate the efforts to correct the intelligence community, we should at the same time insist on holding the line against encroachments by police agencies on these traditional protections of our liberty. The Trump administration seems to be on the right side of one of these issues and the wrong side of the other.