Blue skies this afternoon, so it'll all be gone as if it were never here before you know it.
Early Snow
I don't remember seeing snow here in November before, but this morning there was a light dusting -- enough to turn the world white, though not enough to completely cover the grass and stones.
Selection
I was reflecting this morning on the way we choose people for roles that are important. There's been a lot of talk about whether proposed upcoming officials are qualified or appropriate for the roles they are being nominated to hold. To some degree that represents the need for outsiders from the credentialling systems, just because those systems are in deep need of reform. You can't nominate traditionally qualified people, in other words: the only people who could do the job of deep reform must be people who aren't coming out of our traditional cursus honorum.
So we need another method. There are two basic methods that we use besides elections, although there are other options including the Athenian one. The first one is testing, and the second one is ordeal. Often we combine these.
Testing is preferred when you can identify a competency associated with success in the position, can effectively test for that competency, and don't much care about the character of the person as long as they can do the job well. This was Plato's strong preference to the Athenian option, assigning roles by lottery, which he detested.
A testing system lets you skip the associated ordeal, which also allows for quick approval of qualified candidates when alacrity is needed. For example, you might let people test out of having to go to commercial drivers' school if they can demonstrate on a practical road test that they can safely handle a big truck, and on a written test that they understand the regulations of the road and how to operate it. If they've got all that, it's enough to go along with and they could learn the rest on the job.
Ordeals are preferred when the character of the person is the first consideration, and we want to make sure that we either (a) select only people whose character we have had time to be sure of, or (b) select people only after they have gone through a character-testing-and-shaping process. There are often tests worked into the ordeals, but the real issue isn't the tests or their scores, it's suffering the process.
All sorts of organizations use ordeals. Academia has the long Ph.D. process that subjects grad students to poverty, intense stress, and years of proving that they can get along with the academic structure well enough to be accepted and approved -- in addition to the various courses, tests, the dissertation, and the need to publish in approved journals. The Civil Service inducts people and then subjects them to its human resources' continuous monitoring, and its internal bureaucratic process of selection for promotion, to identify the most compliant and obedient candidates whose character guarantees that the organization's broader purpose will be pursued by its officers. Motorcycle clubs usually require prospects to spend a year or more on a probationary status, subject to service requirements and forbidden the prestige of full membership; only after a long prospecting period can they be voted on as members. Our fire department has a six-month probationary period during which you are expected to attend meetings and trainings, and to take supporting roles on calls outside the 'hot zone.' Following that, you can be voted on as a full member -- although there are still vast amounts of training courses, practical and written tests, before you will be certified as a 'Firefighter' or 'Technical Rescuer.'
Indeed, as mentioned we often combine testing and ordeal. For example, if you want to become an Army Ranger, you will first be tested for basic qualifications; then, if you pass the tests, you'll go through the Ranger Assessment and Selection Process (RASP), which is an 8-week ordeal designed to test your character. If you pass that, there are more ordeals and further tests as you progress. The SEALs famously use 'Hell Week' as part of a difficult selection process; the Special Forces have an even more onerous selection process that entails significant service before you can even begin it.
There aren't good tests for the roles we are trying to fill. The traditional ordeals, meanwhile, serve to ensure that candidates are aligned with the organization's purpose -- which is what we don't want in a reformer. That leaves us with an alternative option, like the Athenian one; or with another sort of ordeal.
In our context, WF Buckley's '100 names in the phone book' concept is close to the Athenian approach. He doubted our institutions' ability to either test or set ordeals that would produce the right kind of people. Instead, he preferred to rely upon the common sense of Americans to assign jobs of importance -- at least in theory, and as a quip. Whether he would endorse it now, when it might violate his patrician sensibilities, is not as clear; but he endorsed the principle, once upon a time.
What is really being done is the choice of an alternative ordeal. Each of these candidates has been subjected to the ordeal of torment by the state and the very thing they are being asked to reform. That guarantees someone who understands what is bad about the organization, and thus in need of reform.
What this process may not do is select for people who understand what is good about the organization that might need to be preserved -- Chesterton's Paradox of the Wall. Maybe some of these organizations don't serve a sufficient good to justify the harms they cause now. Maybe all of them don't. That is the risk, though; it is the gamble.
Starlink Waitlist
Over at Instapundit, Vodkapundit points out that Starlink is sold out again. North Carolina is one of the regions.
No wonder! In the recent hurricane, Starlink was the only thing that connected us to the world. Phones were down— landlines were down as well as cell towers— and cable and therefore cable and phone-based internet. People were cut off for weeks, unless they had Starlink and a generator. Then you were just fine.
One of the best things we had was a mobile Starlink attached to a brush truck. People could come up to the fire station and use the wireless network it projected, and we could take it out to the backcountry to help distant families let their loved ones know that they were safe.
I’m a big fan. They really came through when needed.
One of my favorite amendments
From DC Draino on X:
We had free speech on 1 social media app for less than 2 years and won the White House, Senate, House, and the popular vote
This is why they freaked out when @elonmusk bought Twitter
Their regime can’t survive without censorship
Living into the Intentionality of what Openness Can Be
Clarity of thought and clarity of expression are often linked. It is striking how elaborate the elocutions become when you don’t just want to speak the plain truth, in this case, “Our principles were getting in the way, so we disposed of them.”
Beware what you're a magnet for
Though I had a hard time sustaining attention during the extended football analogy at the beginning of this article, I was rewarded with some eye-popping statistics about the Nobel Prizes awarded to legal immigrants to the U.S. First, there was this pithy observation from the guy who so closely resembles our Bad Orange President:
When hundreds of Jews left Germany, including 16 who had been awarded the Nobel Prize, Adolf Hitler declared, “If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!”Your terms are acceptable, as they say these days.There follow some observations on recipients of Nobels in economics that I will pass over in dignified silence on the ground that competence is no more associated with prizes in that field than in the field of world peace. The article then gets to the real meat:
Of the 117 Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in chemistry, medicine, and physics since 2000, 45 went to immigrants. Since 1960, nearly a hundred immigrants have won the “hard science” Nobels. Legal immigrants. In some years, such as 2016, the majority of people in the entire world recognized by the Nobel Committee were American immigrants.As the author argues, we might want to look harder at EB (employment-based) green card policy while we're tightening up the border obstacles to Tren de Aragua members in the next four years.
Killing is the Business
A hiker writes an opinion piece for the Washington Post.
As I walked that day, I thought a lot about what we’re doing when we elect a president of the United States. This country is the most powerful and arguably the most violent empire that has ever existed, and to the extent that we have an emperor, it’s the president. Through policy choices at home and military action abroad, every president kills people. It could be thousands of people or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, depending on circumstance and their inclination. Killing people, choosing who will die both here and abroad is a fundamental part of the job. It is the job. Whatever else the president does, they do on their own time. Is “Emperor of the Violent Hegemony” the kind of job that’s possible to be a good person in? Is it the kind of job where anyone, however well-intentioned, can effect positive change?
Is it possible to be a good person while being a farmer?*
Killing is what happens on farms. Seriously. I'm saying this as a farmer.
City people think that farms are "where life happens." Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. I don't even raise livestock or poultry and I have to kill stuff.
I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition. There have been days when I've trapped 50+ pocket gophers and shot 100 ground squirrels - before lunch. They needed killing, and the next day, more of them were killed because they needed killing. At other times, I've shot dozens of jackrabbits at night and flung them out into the sagebrush for coyotes to eat.
And none of that starts in with helping neighbors slaughter steers, lambs, chickens, etc.
That's farming: killing. Lots of it.
I suppose one could make an argument about the USA being 'the most violent empire that has ever existed,' although one would have to argue both that it was "an empire" and also that it was more violent than some obvious alternative contenders. Still, there is a point to be made that a whole lot of killing is necessary for cultivation -- of a civilization, or a culture, or of a field of crops.
Killing is inevitable for life; that is one of the basic facts of reality. The question isn't whether you kill, but whether what you killed for was worth it.
*The citation on that from 2008 is dubious; Cassandra posted it here and ascribed it to me, but the dead hyperlink points to National Review; I think it sounds like VDH. I've only ever written one thing for National Review, and it was not on this subject; and we don't have jackrabbits or pocket gophers, so I'm sure I didn't write it.
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