Two Generations from Extinction

Ronald Reagan famously declared that 'freedom is never more than one generation from extinction.' Christianity might be luckier: it might have two. (H/t AVI)

British churches increasingly host iftar ceremonies during Ramadan, and senior politicians have accused clergy of facilitating bogus asylum petitions by immigrants who falsely claim to have converted to Christianity.

Britain isn’t unique. In the U.S., the leaders of Christian denominations have denounced federal immigration enforcement tactics, and Pope Leo marked the 250th anniversary of American independence with a visit to Lampedusa, an entry point to Europe for migrants crossing the Mediterranean. Leo insisted in a letter published the same day that the U.S. has a duty to welcome immigrants.... The xenophilic position dominant now emerged from a particular historical moment. Pope Leo and Archbishop Mullally are both baby boomers. So are most senior church leaders: in the U.S., the average Catholic bishop is 65½....

Boomers grew up in a high-trust, religious and family-centric culture cultivated by their parents and grandparents. Progressive members of this generation also got to enjoy the rejection of all that once the 1960s swung into gear. They benefited from the old culture and from its destruction. This is a trick that can only be pulled once....

When the boomers pass away, and a new generation assumes leadership positions, political change in the church could be rapid. Last week, a leaked video surfaced of a young French military chaplain addressing paratroopers in a cathedral in the south of France. To applause from the servicemen, Fr. Romain Ghandour poured scorn on leftists and warned against those who would “take the place of our values.” Left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon—a baby boomer—accused Fr. Ghandour of “preaching the return of the Crusades” and seemed to call for the priest’s imprisonment. The sermon was indeed closer to that of Pope Urban II than Pope Leo XIV.

I assume the readership of the Hall does not need an introduction to Pope Urban II or his significance.  

What I would have liked from the Catholic Church, when I converted to Catholicism, was a path to the chivalric knighthood whose values inspired so much of my youth. I would have liked for the Church to forgive some of what we did from necessity, and then sanctify and guide the work according to the wisdom of its ages. 

The Church still has some of the old military orders, though for the most part it has pacified them; in an era of violence against churches, having a certain number of young men who serve by standing guard over the assembled flock has practical as well as religious value. This would tie young men into the Church firmly, as the traditions involve prayer and fasting as well as the preparations for guarding and -- potentially -- martyrdom. The Church has no such path only because its leadership wants none; you'll become a Knight faster by becoming an elected Senator with favors to offer than by having a soul devoted to shepherding the weak through the valley of darkness. 

Even after 9/11 the pacifism hardened, refusing the sword instead of guiding its application. When it was needed most, the Church set its militant traditions beyond the Pale and refused to consider or lay hands to them. 

Perhaps the next generation will do better.

"Similar"

The headline finding: more Republican young men blame women for their problems than Democratic young men. Among Republican young men, it's 26%; for Democratic young men, 6%.

Footnote "similar" finding: young Democratic women blame men for their problems at a rate of 66%. The smallest percentage of Democratic women blaming men for their problems is 47% (age 50-64); the smallest percentage among Republican women is 16% (65 and older).

Young women are unique in their perceptions of gender discrimination in American society. More than two-thirds of young women believe that women face “a lot” of discrimination in American society. Fewer—though still a majority—of young men and older women share this view.  

There is a sharp political divide as well. Democratic women are far more likely than Republican women to believe women face considerable prejudice in the United States. But it is not only in the existence of discrimination that Democratic and Republican women are at odds. Democratic women are far more likely than Republican women to say that men are responsible for many of the problems women have in American society.  

These are perceptions; one argument for the delta in perceptions is that men really are more responsible for women's' problems than vice-versa. The partisan split would remain interesting even if that were true.

UPDATE: Via Instapundit, someone combined the graphs to draw out another point about the partisan split: Republican men/women are pretty even in blaming the opposite sex, but there's a huge Democratic variance.

Leaving aside the question of which perception matches actual reality best, there is a significant advantage to not blaming your problems on anyone else. It is, roughly, the Stoic insight: by focusing your attention on what you actually control, you gain a significant advantage. Blaming other people for your problems, whomever they are, puts the focus on things you can't really affect much; thus, you will tend to end up stewing in your problems rather than addressing them. 

There is the competing Zen insight, which is that focusing on yourself is the halfway point because some parts of yourself aren't really in your control either. "A man who blames his problems on other people is far from home; he who blames himself is halfway there. He who blames neither himself nor other people is almost home." 

Smoky Mountain Bike Week

Tennessee wasn’t entirely burned down anyway. 

UPDATE:

This fellow came to burn a little more of it. I don’t know who he is, although he described himself as a former Marine heading a honky tonk band. His original work is good, but he threw down on a cover of Jessi Coulter’s “Why You Been Gone so Long.”

UPDATE: That turned out to be Gethen Jenkins. I knew at least one of his original songs so well that I thought it was a cover when he was doing it, especially since he was doing many covers of Merle and Waylon and others. What a pleasure to have heard him live. 

Tennessee Glories

I’m going to Tennessee in the morning. Hopefully they don’t burn the place down. 

Moonshiner Heritage

El Camino SS.

That’s a Studebaker, in case you’ve never seen one.

Hot rods.

One of my favorite aspects of this annual heritage festival is the car show. Jerry Lee Lewis instead of bluegrass is the mountain music here. 

Pony cars and a Bandit-mobile. 

Corvettes were never moonshine cars either, but the same kind of shade tree mechanics love the old ones.

T-bird

Mountain Heritage

This week is the Mountain Heritage Festival. Tomorrow’s the big day, which I’ve written about before. Tonight there’s a free concert. 

Consent Decrees

One of the most useful tools of antidemocratic Democratic politics is the consent decree. The way this works is that some state or local politician gets elected by promising votes the usual things that win elections; however, the newly elected secretly harbors a desire to appeal to the National Party so they can be considered as a Senator or a Presidential candidate. That means doing things local voters would never support, so an excuse is needed. The consent decree is the answer. 

The consent decree occurs when a lawsuit is filed by some friendly activist group, the politician 'is forced to admit the government is wrong,' and the two parties 'agree' on a settlement that a friendly judge then endorses. With careful judicial forum shopping you can be reasonably sure of the friendliness of the judge where you file the suit. The party's well-funded activists thus advance their agenda even though the agenda couldn't win at the ballot box -- often not even if Democrats were the only ones voting. 

One such case is currently in play in the Senate race here in North Carolina. Now you all know that I despise Roy Cooper for personal reasons dating especially to the Hurricane whose two year anniversary was yesterday. The reason to vote against him is Helene and how he treated the mountains and their people, from where I sit; but this bit is what everyone else seems to want to talk about. 

Roy Cooper turned loose many felons, half of whom went on to commit new crimes, several of whom committed new murders, one of which murders has become famous because of the beauty and innocence of the victim and the vicious character of the killer. 

Roy would like very much to be excused for having set all these killers free, and given more power and a national platform to boot. So, he explains, he had no choice: he was forced by a binding legal settlement. 

Except, this turns out to be just another consent decree: 

Cooper agreed to the deal in February 2021, settling a lawsuit brought by the NC NAACP, the ACLU of North Carolina, and Disability Rights NC. The settlement required the state to release 3,500 inmates over six months, framed as a public health response to COVID-19 in the prison system. But what Cooper's administration told state lawmakers at the time, that only non-violent offenders nearing the end of their sentences would walk free, turned out to be false. Violent offenders, including convicted murderers and rapists, made the list.... A 2024 state report found that 48 percent of the released inmates reoffended. More than 600 committed serious felonies.... 

When Cooper's team briefed North Carolina's General Assembly on the settlement, prison officials assured legislators that only convicts with sentences ending in 2021 would be released, nobody who had "committed a crime against a person." That assurance later collapsed.... 

The Washington Free Beacon reported that 51 North Carolina convicts serving life sentences for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or first-degree rape appeared on the early release list. Over 90 percent of those lifers secured release after Cooper signed the settlement. These were not low-level drug offenders or people weeks from finishing their terms. They were among the most dangerous people in the state prison system.

Emphasis added. 

No majority even of Democratic voters would ever have endorsed this vision of the activist Left. I have no brief for prisons; I think we should completely abolish prisons because they don't work. However, until we develop a democratic agreement about what we might replace them with, this is the alternative: a bad and nonfunctional thing not as a solution, but as a workaround that prevents at least some violent crime being visited on ordinary people. It is the small-d democratic solution even if it is a bad one (as democratic solutions often are: popularity is no guarantee of wisdom, as we all learned in junior high school). 

If elected, we can be reasonably sure that Cooper will continue to genuflect to the antidemocratic activist Left; he will, as he has, continue to ignore what his constituents want in favor of what is wanted by those who can advance his power, position, and wealth. I wish his campaign every ill, even though I don't have any positive reason to favor his opponent. 

AI and Working Memory

A plausible theory; certainly at least part of the explanation.

When an AI system solves a difficult mathematical problem, the usual explanation is that it has become more intelligent.... [but also] AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain.

Or, more precisely, it has access to an enormous external symbolic workspace that performs many of the functions that working memory performs in humans.

This difference may be especially important in mathematics.

Emphasis in the original. 

One AI recently informed me that I have "used 50x as many tokens as The Hobbit" on that platform. That's a silly thing to say. Tolkien didn't use tokens to write anything, so it's incommensurable; but his experience of authoring the book also involved his decades of study, wide reading in several languages, and so forth before he even sat down to write. (The process for  composing LotR was far more intricate.) If you asked one to 'compose The Hobbit' it would not use anything like the number of tokens it would take to replicate in training cycles what Tolkien did in study; it doesn't have to do so.

The AI experience is that there have been vast cycles of training that have gone into building this 'working memory' (or, as noted, its analog). It can practically draw on much more than even Professor Tolkien, or than Thomas Jefferson dining alone. 

That in itself makes AI extremely useful partners to humans in thinking. We should take care to continue to train our own memories, even to recover the benefits of the discipline of wide reading and study. Yet neither ought we to disregard the clear advantages of such a practical increase in working memory.

Iran at the United Nations

The United Nations, generally a useless joke of an organization in practice, has a powerful opening line in its founding document: 

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...

So today we have the very strange spectacle of the President of Iran addressing the United Nations General Assembly a day after the President of the United States threatened to annihilate his country.  The President of Iran on most days is expecting to be killed by a US or Israeli airstrike; today he's in New York City, traveling freely about town under the protection of the US Secret Service. (Yes, really.) 

Apparently there is some diplomacy occurring, with direct talks between the administrations of Iran and the US occurring at the conference. 

A Stormy Autumn Equinox

Heavy thunderstorms started here in the middle of the night, and have carried on through the morning. Season changes sometimes have this sort of volatility. It's a good day to keep inside as much as you can, though duty calls you where it does.

This Poor Guy

Giving an interview to a journalist can ruin your life, but especially if you're some poor delivery driver in China.

I assume the journalists gave him a fake name at least, but it won't matter in a country where everybody's face is mapped by the state. His picture at the top of the article, combined with public complains about Xi's economy as Xi is about to come to the United States for a diplomatic visit, is going to assure that they track him down and make him much more miserable than he already is.