On Wild-Eyed Trump Critics

Henry Olsen writes that many critics seem to be 'gaslighting themselves,' a term I know from Tex's occasional use of it. I think that's right to a large degree: they're whipping themselves up in echo chambers on Twitter, and in societies for "Resistance" where their opinions are common to everyone. As a consequence they're reinforcing their own world view, which grows darker and more alarmed by the day. These growing fears are often unmoored from reality (See "Nazi" and "Boko Haram," immediately below).

I have been a frequent critic, through the campaign and to date. All the same, I have to say that -- on balance -- he is so far having a successful presidency. This is surprising given that he's been under serious investigation the entire time, and has run a White House and National Security Council that has been entirely too chaotic for its own good. His first Secretary of State was a disaster; his Attorney General, a source of grave disappointment even to Trump himself. All the same, he has managed to make good on strong tax cuts; a 'right to try' bill that lessens the Federal Government's sense of ownership of us even when we are in hours close to death; a gutting of many regulations, which combined with the tax cuts has spurred economic activity that President Obama thought would take 'a magic wand'; significant progress against ISIS; what looks like strong diplomatic moves on Iran and North Korea; he has obtained a number of concessions from China on economics; he has spurred a rethink of Turkey's drift into authoritarianism; he has, in short, had a few home runs and even more RBIs.

His rhetoric remains just as it always was, although some of his supporters think that is a large reason for his success. It may well be: it has been interesting watching him deploy his celebrity to smack down foes and build new alliances (e.g., the Kardashians; his pardon of a famous and mistreated black heavyweight fighter). His capacity to cause outrage frequently causes his opponents to lose the ball, running after this-or-that instead of remaining focused on opposing his policies. They have had successes in generating storms of outrage, but those do not necessarily translate into policy wins: the anti-NRA storm has not generated new Federal gun control, though it has generated many new NRA members; the current storm against border arrests may well reduce migration, just because it will send the opposing message to the one sent by the 'catch and release' policy, i.e., that bringing your kids not only won't get you automatic parole, it'll get you stress and difficulty. You may think, as many do, that stressing these families is immoral, but in effect all criminal legislation works that way. It is the fear of the penalty that makes the law effective.

As Olsen says:

Some Americans have been so disaffected by economic changes of the last decade that they see Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of American jobs for American workers as a breath of fresh air. Others find his staunch support of American security as reassuring. Trump’s proposed Muslim ban enrages many of his opponents, but the polling data suggests that this more than any other proposal is what made him president.

Others might be less enthusiastic about Trump but have good reason to think he’s doing a good job. Religiously traditional people see themselves under siege from an elite culture that holds them in contempt and have chosen to embrace the devil that backs them over the devil who does not.

Still others, many of whom are traditional business or free market conservatives, remain wary of him personally but increasingly like his policies. Indeed, there are a number of polls that show Republicans who voted for Gary Johnson to be of this view. They might prefer someone without Trump’s flaws, but faced with the evidence of a man who hasn’t screwed up and who has implemented much of their agenda they seem willing to reconsider their prior anti-Trump views.

Olsen goes on to point out that this could all turn the other way, too, if things don't continue to go Trump's way. Trump needs to gain support, not merely to rely on his existing support. But he may well, should the economy continue to boom and ordinary Americans come to see him as someone who has made their lives better. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" was a powerful campaign slogan once. It may well be again. That depends on it being a fact that most Americans really are better off than four years since. Still, they well might be.

I think the President is open to serious criticisms even yet, but you can't make them if instead you are yelling about fascism. Just this week a new NSC appointee was described in a press outlet as a "Neo-Nazi"; Google posted search results about the California Republican Party stating that their ideology was "Nazism." Both criticisms are both ridiculous and unserious. And if you are only raising unserious criticisms, you're missing the chance to stick the guy where he's open to being stuck. More, if ordinary Americans like him and you're not careful about this language, there's a risk that you'll accidentally end up rehabilitating Nazis.

UPDATE:

Drudge provides an illustration of why some people are not so very unhappy with Donald J. Trump.

The response from critics was to complain that it was a "crime" for him to issue the information from the jobs report before it was released by the agency (which works for him). This is the kind of unhinged nonsense that is going to render criticism even of legitimate issues irrelevant. You want to jail the guy who brought us to record-low unemployment? Because he didn't follow D.C. protocol? C'mon.

Separating Children at the Border

Our nation is failing badly at our public discourse. This week has seen one of the outrage storms that are increasingly common, this time over the Trump administration's decision -- this is how it is painted -- to separate the children of immigrants from their families at the border. I have seen this compared to the Nazis taking Jewish children as a prelude to murdering them. A number of children have been 'lost' by the system; I have seen this compared to the 'lost girls' seized by Boko Haram.

This is all madness. What's really at stake is that a Federal judge on the 9th Circuit has been pressing successive administrations to obey a 1997 settlement agreement. The agreement wasn't really meant for the circumstances that have arisen since then, which has led to negative consequences when it is applied anyway. Multiple administrations have dealt with these consequences, and really the problem is that Congress needs to revisit the law. But Congress can't do that because it is too divided on what the law should be.

As a result, the real debate we are having -- apparently entirely without realizing it -- is whether justice morally requires us not to enforce Federal criminal immigration laws, in every case in which they might be enforced on migrants traveling with children they claim to be their own. There are very negative consequences to accepting that criterion as requiring the waiving of criminal sanctions, especially in that it empowers human traffickers but also in that it encourages migrants to bring children along on a very perilous journey. We really should be discussing that, and trying to decide what the right solution looks like. Instead, we're talking about Nazis and Boko Haram.

What's going on here is that there was a 1997 settlement to a 1985 dispute called the Flores Settlement Agreement. This is not a law, but it is treated by the courts as if it were a sort of contract between the government and any migrants it might arrest. The 9th Circuit Court has applied it in this way for decades. Of particular interest here, the Flores agreement requires that children who are not suspected of a crime not be detained by the government. If it happens to detain some by accident, it has to release them within 20 days. The 9th Circuit polices the government aggressively on this point.

This is why the Nazi/Boko comparisons are so silly. These children aren't being separated from their parents in order to do them some harm, but because they are receiving due process of law, aggressively policed by a court interested in protecting their rights. They're being set free, not stolen. And the reason the system is losing so many is that they're being turned over to family by preference, without checking their immigration status. When you turn over someone in the country illegally to someone already part of the migrant underground, you shouldn't be surprised when a high percentage of that group don't answer your mail or help you arrange visitation. But unlike Boko Haram, the government isn't trying to steal these kids from their families. It's trying its best to return them to their families, while prosecuting parents who have broken the law.

This prosecution is not being done maliciously either. Bringing your kids into the country illegally is a felony, "people smuggling" -- ten years per child in the Federal pen. These folks are only being charged with the misdemeanor offense of bringing themselves. The government doesn't even want to keep the parents in jail for very long. It is merely that the government knows these people are in the country illegally, and wants to hold them until it can have their asylum and deportation hearing. The Trump administration's original idea, shot down by the 9th Circuit last July, was to hold the kids with the parents. The 9th Circuit said they had to either not hold the parents ("catch and release," as this approach is sometimes called), or separate them from their children and release the children.

This process does not work perfectly. This is the same Federal government that lets Veterans, perhaps the most respected American demographic, die on waiting lists. The Federal bureaucracy can't do anything both well and quickly. Since the 9th Circuit insists it be done quickly, unsurprisingly the rapid release of the children isn't done well. That was true for the Obama administration (which is the one the report everyone is raising Cain about reports having lost all the kids), and it will be true of the Trump administration as long as we keep using this silly system. Human traffickers, an aggressive bunch, have been successful at applying for sponsorship of these children -- and getting it, because the Federal bureaucracy has 20 days from finding the kid in the desert to having to hand them over to somebody.

So, OK. Let's no do that anymore. I agree. Let's find a different system. What should it look like?

Well, let's start with the dilemma that the Flores Settlement Agreement provokes. Either you must let any migrants go if they are traveling with children they claim are their own, or you must separate them from children who probably really are theirs. Taking the second horn of the dilemma provokes the Nazi talk. But taking the first horn provides perfect cover for human traffickers traveling with child slaves who really have been stolen from their families.

The Trump administration can't do anything except choose between these horns. The 9th Circuit could do something else, but their enforcement of the Flores agreement is consistent -- I don't doubt they think they are just doing stare decisis and correctly applying existing case law. The one group of people who could fix this is Congress.

Congress could provide authority to overturn the Flores Settlement Agreement and replace it with new positive law governing the treatment of these cases. They could allow the government to hold families intercepted crossing the border together, never separating them until their asylum claims can be adjudicated and their deportation or admission arranged accordingly. During the investigation of such claims, they could sort out if it was in fact parents with children they had found crossing the border, or smugglers with slaves. In the former case, sentences can be suspended and the family can be returned to their country together. In the latter, the felony charge should be brought, and the slavers placed in prison. Then the children can be returned to their real families, who are probably desperate with terror.

In that way, you do not incentivize bringing children into danger, and you catch a very bad class of people who really are stealing children to do bad things to them. The 9th Circuit Court should respect that, given that it would be done by an act of law rather than unilaterally by an administration (whether Obama's or Trump's).

So if you're going to call your congressman to talk about this, that's what I suggest you say. But do what you want. Just please stop screaming about Nazis.

Memes

Ha.

Memorial Day Weekend

I wish you all the best on this solemn occasion. Enjoy it, though, partly in memory and in part because it's what they would have wanted.

Progress

President Trump issued three executive orders chipping away at some of the crazier aspects of the federal civil service.

The first executive order aims to strengthen accountability for federal employees and makes it easier to fire poor performers in the federal government.

The second executive order creates a federal labor relations working group to analyze union contracts with the federal government. It also makes it harder to pay federal unions to appeal firings and to lobby Congress.

The third executive order, focused on federal unions, is aimed at reducing waste and expenditures and requires federal employees to spend at least 75 percent of their time working on the job they were hired to do, as opposed to working on federal union work. It will also allow the federal government to start charging unions for office space in federal buildings.

DB: Living Paycheck to Paycheck

Spend wisely this holiday weekend.

Good Question

Noting that Philadelphia has barred Catholic Social Services from handling foster children, Bethany Mandel asks: "If the State has determined that you cannot be a foster parent if you hold these Catholic views, at what point do they determine that you are an unfit parent for holding them too?"

"Common Sense" Regulations To Prevent School Shootings

A modest proposal from the NRA.

Michael Stoner

"The original family name was Holsteiner."

Old American, however German: mentioned alongside Daniel Boone in the great old records. Johnny Cash memorialized him. If you don't know him, learn of him.

A Strange Inversion

This debate over whether or not to refer to MS 13 members as "animals" has weirdly reversed the positions of the left and right. The left has normally taken themselves to be the descendants of the heroes of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and thus has argued that it is good for us to recognize that humans are merely another kind of animal. Seeing humanity as separate or special leads to 'anthropocentric' thinking, they normally go on to argue, that blinds us to the fact that animals are much more like us that we are prepared to admit. Vegetarianism and veganism, as well as animal rights arguments, rooted in this basic approach are far more common on the left than otherwise.

The right, meanwhile, has normally advocated the orthodox Christian position that humanity is categorically different from animals: that we, alone of creation, were made in the image of God. In addition to serving to ground laws that tend to follow Christian doctrine, this tends to root right-leaning doctrines of conservation (rather than environmentalism), good husbandry (rather than veganism), and the like. The idea that man is special, and placed on earth with authority over it, arises here.

Of course these days everything is about Trump, and the fact that he said it means that one group must defend it and the other oppose it. Principled arguments are not as common as once.

An Unwise Protection

Reason magazine is correct here: this is a bad idea.

Last week the House of Representatives, by a margin of more than 10 to 1, approved a completely gratuitous, blatantly unconstitutional bill that would make assaulting a police officer a federal crime.... The Protect and Serve Act prescribes a prison sentence of up to 10 years for anyone who "knowingly assaults a law enforcement officer," thereby "causing serious bodily injury," or "attempts to do so." Such conduct is, of course, already illegal in all 50 states, and there is no reason to think local law enforcement agencies are reluctant to arrest and prosecute people guilty of it.

Nor does the problem addressed by the bill seem to be on the rise, notwithstanding all the overheated talk of a "war on cops." The number of law enforcement officers who are feloniously killed each year is small and volatile, but according to the FBI it dropped by 30 percent last year, and the average for the last 15 years (51) is lower than the average for the previous 15 (65).

In any event, the Constitution does not give Congress the authority to fight local crime.... The Protect and Serve Act explicitly allows federal prosecution of someone who is acquitted in state court, or who is convicted but receives a penalty the Justice Department deems too light....

These issues should be familiar to anyone who has followed the debate over federal prosecution of hate crimes, which occur when the victim is picked "because of" his "actual or perceived" membership in a protected group. The Senate version of the Protect and Serve Act takes that analogy and runs with it, targeting assaults and attempted assaults committed "because of the actual or perceived status of the [victim] as a law enforcement officer."

Under that bill, someone who takes a swing at a guy he mistakenly thinks is a cop has committed a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison—even if he misses.

Resisting an unlawful arrest is protected behavior, but this would seem to create a loophole that would allow them to send you down for a decade anyway. After all, you need only show that they "attempted" to cause "serious" harm, not that they actually caused any harm. Ten years for that?

Crisis in Constitutional Government

I think VDH is correct in his surmise that they simply don't see it.

While we understand those on the left refuse to believe that a constitutional “legal scholar” like Obama would even think of allowing the executive branch to go rogue, it is indeed strange that in almost every NeverTrump attack on Trump’s conduct, there is almost no recognition or indeed worry that we have been living through one of the great challenges to constitutional government in our history.

Does anyone remember that the Obama Administration allowed Lois Lerner (“Not a smidgen of corruption”) more or less to weaponize the IRS to help the Obama 2012 reelection effort? Does anyone remember Eric Holder’s surveillance of the Associated Press... the strange treatment accorded to investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson by U.S. intelligence and investigatory agencies... the Benghazi pseudo-video narrative and the strange jailing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula...?

There's a lot more.

UPDATE:

Another article, more examples.

Enemies of the Constitution are now hiding in plain sight....

Who can forget the editorial by Georgetown Law Professor Louis Seidman in the New York Times called “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution.” After all, as he put it, “a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries and knew nothing of our present situation and thought it was ok to own slaves disagreed” with what progressives want to do. This is in the New York Times by a Georgetown Law professor.

Then, getting closer to my area of expertise – election law – there was a law review article in the Stanford Law and Policy Review by an election law professor -- University of Michigan’s Ellen D. Katz -- "Democrats at DOJ: Why Partisan Use of the Voting Rights Act Might Not Be So Bad After All."

When I say they hide in plain sight, these are the things I mean.

Looking for Nessie

A new approach: looking for DNA in the environment of the loch.

2nd Look: Love and Honor in Porco Rosso

2nd Look has a reasonably good discussion of these themes in the movie. Big spoilers ahead!

Overall, I appreciate his analysis, but I do have a quibble. I question his claim, beginning around 6:05, that Porco had planned to marry Gina before the war, but decided not to because she was Austrian. He claims Miyazaki said that, and it may be true, but he doesn't give his sources.

What is stated in the movie is that Gina was married to Porco's best friend Bellini two days before Porco and Bellini were sent to the front together. Also, I haven't seen any hint that Gina is Austrian in the movie, though maybe I've missed something.

Victory

I won my election!  You may now address me as Madame Commissioner Tex99.

Porco Rosso

Tonight and again on the 23rd are your chances to see Porco Rosso on the big screen. It's about an ex-fighter pilot-turned-bounty hunter, and it takes up the themes of the brotherhood of war, honor vs. loyalty, honor vs. celebrity, Old World vs. New, genius vs. experience, and, of course, love. The early part of the movie is more for kids and is rather comic. For me it is an odd juxtaposition with the more serious themes that emerge later in the film. I guess, then, another theme would be the heart of a child vs. the heart of a combat veteran.

Being able to see it in theaters is due to the efforts of GKIDS, the distributor for some anime in the US. Last year, GKIDS sponsored Studio Ghibli Fest, which put one Studio Ghibli animated movie in theaters each month. It was apparently pretty successful, so they are doing it again this year. Studio Ghibli is Hayao Miyazaki's studio, the most famous Japanese anime studio. It created films like Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away.

If you are interested, you can see if any theaters near you are playing it by going to the Studio Ghibli Fest website, scrolling to Porco Rosso, and putting in your zip code.

Rule of law

Andrew McCarthy has written another in a series of articles digging into the bizarre misinformation campaign spinning out of the behavior of the FBI:

If you or I had set up an unauthorized private communications system for official business for the patent purpose of defeating federal record-keeping and disclosure laws; if we had retained and transmitted thousands of classified emails on this non-secure system; if we had destroyed tens of thousands of government records; if we had carried out that destruction while those records were under subpoena; if we had lied to the FBI in our interview — well, we’d be writing this column from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth. Yet, in a feat of dizzying ratiocination, Director Comey explained that to prosecute Mrs. Clinton would be to hold her to a nitpicking, selective standard of justice not imposed on other Americans.

So it was that the New York Times, in this week’s 4,100-word exposé on the origins of the FBI’s Trump–Russia probe, recycled the theme: Government investigators were savagely public about Clinton’s trifling missteps while keeping mum about the Manchurian candidate’s treasonous conspiracy with Putin.

As we contended in rebuttal on Thursday, the Times’ facts are selective and its narrative theme of disparate treatment is hogwash: Clinton’s bid was saved, not destroyed, by Obama’s law-enforcement agencies, which tanked a criminal case on which she should have been indicted. And the hush-hush approach taken to the counterintelligence case against Donald Trump was not intended to protect the Republican candidate; it was intended to protect the Obama administration from the specter of a Watergate-level scandal had its spying on the opposition party’s presidential campaign been revealed.

But let’s put that aside. Let’s consider the disparate-treatment claim on its own terms.

Highlanders

A small piece of a bit more than seven minutes. The first song is "Atholl Highlanders."



UPDATE: Dueling Highlanders.



If you're about Franklin, NC, they are holding a "Taste of Scotland" Festival from 14-17 June. I'll be out that way.

Music for a Stormy Weekend

Ted Cruz on Hamas

Apparently he's not too impressed with the media's treatment of the latest invasion peaceful protest.

Henry Kissinger: How the Enlightenment Ends

In a thoughtful exploration of philosophy and technology, Kissinger argues that AI developers should start thinking through the philosophical questions raised by AI and that the government should start seriously thinking about AI and its possible dangers. It's difficult to excerpt because he uses the entire article to make his point, but here is his hook:

As I listened to the speaker celebrate this technical progress, my experience as a historian and occasional practicing statesman gave me pause. What would be the impact on history of self-learning machines—machines that acquired knowledge by processes particular to themselves, and applied that knowledge to ends for which there may be no category of human understanding? Would these machines learn to communicate with one another? How would choices be made among emerging options? Was it possible that human history might go the way of the Incas, faced with a Spanish culture incomprehensible and even awe-inspiring to them? Were we at the edge of a new phase of human history?

"A Terrorist Organization"

Hamas, which claims 50 of the dead from yesterday's protests in Israel, is a named Foreign Terrorist Organization -- but all the coverage I've read is treating the deaths as if they were innocent "protesters."

The NRA, on the other hand....

WSJ: NRA vs. Authoritarianism

In New York, a telling exercise of power.

War and Natural Law

Soon I’ll have the ability to engage pieces like this again. I’m looking forward to it. For now, I’ll just forward it to your attention.

Felony relo

A Seattle councilwoman wants felony charges brought against Amazon for threatening to leave town if the city taxes workers to make a dent in the affordable housing crisis.

Socialists really need to find a solution to this problem of the golden goose walking off.  Has anybody thought of putting up guard towers at the borders?

"Property can’t leave, so seize it."

Illinois flirts with the Caracas solution, a/k/a the Cuban (etc.) solution.

Speaking of Caracas, what amazes me if that buyers are still making cash offers on real estate, and even more, that sellers are still holding out for a better price.  Let's hope they get one before cholera and cannibalism set in.

Happy Nabka Day

Seventy years after Israel had the effrontery to become a nation, seventy-three years after the Allies liberated the few remaining survivors at the concentration camps, a diseased culture still can't get over its antisemitism and do anything productive about refugees from long-lost wars.

Lessons from the NRA Convention

A guy writes who didn’t grow up around guns.

The Carter Family

Alt-Country That I Want to Like

I really like the sound of the Old 97's, but the lyrics ...

(Foul language and sexual content warnings apply, not to mention stupid drunkenness, immaturity, and word plays -- but it's Saturday. Best paired with something cheap and tasteless.)

Don't tell me you weren't warned.

CNN Report: Evil Trump Kidnaps Three People from North Korean Paradise

The Babylon Bee has them covered.

It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song

The alt-country band Old 97's used a line from that in their song "Big Brown Eyes."

The (obvious) problem with equating skin color with "priviledge"

Mild language warning, (well deserved) emotional violence against a clueless leftist:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/993513778653290497.html

Speaking of Birthdays and Events on May 8

Friedrich August von Hayek was also born on that day. Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek share a birthday. Huh.

Jerry Douglas, Edgar Meyer, Russ Barenberg

These three musicians put out one of my favorite instrumental albums, Skip, Hop, and Wobble. There's a clear bluegrass influence, but they take it new places.

You can listen to the whole thing on YouTube, but here are the first two tunes.

Kingship in the Viking Age

An essay on whether scholars are 'reading in' Anglo-Saxon values when they study the Norse sagas.

Grim's Hall

Some of you expressed thoughts about the place, including a request for photographs. Here are a few that give the sense of the place. You can see how much it resembles what you had thought it would look like.

Dragon's breath at sunrise.

Inside the hall.

Below the waterfall.

R. L. Burnside

Marking the Day

Karl Marx's birthday (pro, con)

Robert Johnson's birthday

VE Day

Gangstagrass

Best known for the theme song to the series Justified, Gangstagrass also has a couple of albums out.

Don't call my bluff

Rookie moves from a prosecutor who's more political than prosecutorial:

Alas, figuring that he was playing with the house money, Mueller made a reckless bet: He charged not only Russian individuals but three Russian businesses. A business doesn’t have the same risks as a person. A business can’t be thrown in jail. And while members of Mueller’s prosecutorial stable have a history of putting real businesses out of business, a business that is run by a Putin crony and serves as a front for Kremlin operations is not too worried about that either.

So . . . guess what? One of those Russian businesses, Concord Management and Consulting, wants its day in court. It has retained the Washington law firm of Reed Smith, two of whose partners, Eric Dubelier and Katherine Seikaly, have told Mueller that Concord is ready to have its trial — and by the way, let’s see all the discovery the law requires you to disclose, including all the evidence you say supports the extravagant allegations in the indictment.

Needless to say, Mueller’s team is not happy about this development since this is not a case they figured on having to prosecute to anything more than a successful press conference. So, they have sought delay on the astonishing ground that the defendant has not been properly served — notwithstanding that the defendant has shown up in court and asked to be arraigned.

What's even funnier is that they asked for a few weeks to brief that extraordinary position.

The Steeldrivers

This might be our theme song ...

Maybe add some horses and bikes, UH-60s, claymores ... but, pretty close.

Sunday Night Movie Music Video

Haven't done this in a while, but this caught my eye yesterday. I think I own all these movies. Mifune will hold his own against anybody you care to compare him with.

All My Hope Is in Jesus

Grim’s Hall

We are moving again, which explains the recent lack of posts. This time, we are moving to a place that befits the name “Grim’s Hall.”  I’ll be another three weeks with it at least, but that’s what is keeping me away.

Samantha Fish and Some Cigar Box Blues

Elmore James (1918-1963)

"Dust My Broom" opens with one of the best-known blues riffs of all time. BB King used it later on.

James wrote "The Sky Is Crying" in 1960 or so. Stevie Ray Vaughn (1954-1990) did a good version of it.

An Interesting Take on Hume's NOFI Principle

David Hume famously argued that you cannot logically deduce an ought from an is, which principle can be abbreviated as NOFI: No Ought From Is. This seems reasonable but it potentially leaves morality in a quandary.

Some time back we discussed whether or not there could be moral facts; I thought there could be moral facts, but some here vehemently disagreed. One of the possible conclusions from NOFI is that moral facts are impossible. Maybe a moral statement like "murder is wrong" is simply cheerleading: "Yay for not murdering people!" Or maybe it is a command: "Don't murder!" But it cannot be a fact that murder is wrong because there is no way to deduce what ought not be done just from what is.

Philosopher Charles Pigden disagrees. He has a different explanation for NOFI and its implications. Since I am not a philosopher, nor do I play on one TV, it is best to read his explanation if you are interested. However, in brief, as I understand it, he uses historical evidence and reason to clarify that Hume's NOFI claim was that there was no logically valid way to derive ought from is, but that Hume left open analytically valid ways to derive morality. This, then, would leave the door open for an objective basis for morality.

As to why I am considering Hume's NOFI principle at 4:12 a.m., I will leave that to the reader's imagination, but note that champagne was involved.

Good night, all.

In the Cathedral of May

But how many months be in the year?
There are thirteen, I say;
The midsummer moon is the merryest of all
Next to the merry month of May.
IN summer time, when leaves grow green,
And flowers are fresh and gay,
Robin Hood and his merry men
Were [all] disposed to play.

Then some would leap, and some would run,
And some use artillery:
'Which of you can a good bow draw,
A good archer to be?

'Which of you can kill a buck?
Or who can kill a doe?
Or who can kill a hart of grease,
Five hundred foot him fro?




Queen Guinevere's Maying

"It's a matter of consumer perception"

Yeah, I'll say it's a matter of consumer perception.  New York restaurants are coming unspooled over the consequences of the minimum wage hikes that, in theory, both they and their fashionable patrons support 100%.  But wait, someone has to pay the higher wages.  Let's see, can we eat into restaurant profits?  Surely not.  Magically save money somewhere else?  Apparently we can't.  Well, we could charge the patrons more for the food.  How do we do that?

It's very complicated.  There are these things called menus that reveal the prices.  Suppose we change the numbers there to higher numbers?  What, and spook all the people impressing their clients and their dates by taking them to expensive fashionable restaurants?

I know, let's leave the menu prices alone and add a surcharge at the very last minute on the check, when everyone's too drunk to notice.  Because social justice for the back-of-the-house staff.

The problem is, apparently the restaurants need a city ordinance to allow them to add such a last-minute surcharge, and the city fathers aren't dumb enough to catch this hot potato when it's tossed back to them.  The patrons believe in social justice, the restaurateurs believe in social justice, and the politicians believe in social justice.  They just don't want to be blamed for it.  Thus the spectacle of restaurants running full-page ads demanding the right to impose the surcharge and blaming the city for subjecting them and their underpaid staff to financial hardship.  We want to pay the staff more!  You just won't let us, you meanies!