“Jackery” Indeed

My mother kindly sent me this as a gift this Christmas, thinking I might need a solar generator in case of another hurricane. This product is clearly labeled and marketed as a solar generator. 

What it is, however, is a battery. It has no electricity generating capacity of any sort. It is compatible with separately sold solar panels, which do all of the “solar generating” but are not included. The panels cost more than the fraudulently labeled “generator,” as indeed they should since they do all the work of generating electricity. 

I gather this company is doing very well on Amazon, which is thereby a (probably unwitting) participant in the fraud. I’ve tried to alert them, but their customer service for that has been outsourced to a bot that doesn’t understand the problem. 

So anyway, be warned about this company and its unethical practices.  

Beauty

I have finally found an internet link to the 1987 film "Life Story: The Race for the Double Helix," with Jeff Goldblum and Juliet Stevenson. I was struck dumb by this production when I saw it in the late 1980s and have always wanted a copy. This link to Part 1 and Part 2 is a perfectly awful print with slightly mismatched sound, and yet I was as transfixed watching it just now as I remembering being the first time. A thoroughly satisfying story from the first scene to the last.

One for Gringo

Medieval Studies

I have spent a lot of my life with Medieval texts, as have many of you. 

Boston University is offering a graduate-level “Medieval Trans Studies” course for the upcoming spring semester that explores how “medieval texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies.”

The course has drawn criticism from scholars who argue that it reflects modern ideological biases rather than historical accuracy.

It considers “the deep histories of transgender embodiment” through an examination of texts stemming from the Middle Ages, according to the course description.

Students will read about “alchemical hermaphrodites, genderfluid angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, trans saints, sex workers, and genderqueer monks,” according to the university.

Adam Kissel, a fellow with the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy [...said] it is permissible for universities to study how Medieval writers understood their fantasies regarding gender. However, BU’s course is “a distraction from better emphases.”

“In the Middle Ages there was no rational doubt that humans were created only male and female. The people knew that freaks of nature were abnormal,” Kissel said.

That's stronger language than I would have used, but it is definitely true that the Medieval understanding of humanity and creation is exactly that human beings were created male and female. The most rational minds of the age were trained by the Church, for whom* it is a point of clear doctrine.

Having spent a lot of time with Medieval texts, I have to say that while there are some interesting cases, you have to go a long way to find them. There is also a lot more about cross-dressing by clear males or females than anything resembling trans-* cases. There's a certain amount of playful literature about cross-dressing, both females dressing in armor in order to pursue a knightly quest, or male knights dressing as women to humiliate each other (either by beating the other male while dressed as a woman, or by forcing the other to wear female clothes as a forfeit for losing). This wasn't aspirational, even in the literature; it was a joke, the way that in Norse mythology Thor is pictured cross-dressing in a comedy story about how he pretended to be a bride in order to recapture his hammer from a giant who had stolen it. In Malory, for example, it's usually a story involving Sir Dinadan, who is most usually a comic relief figure in the Tristan stories.

Outside literature, Joan of Arc dressed as a knight (but didn't fight as one, though she led inspirationally from the front). A Persian scholar describes female Crusaders dressing in armor but not presenting themselves as males, but it doesn't appear this really happened and the story was probably made up to make the Christians look bad. The religious ruling about this holds that such women would be 'anathema' and this scholar thinks it is unlikely women really did this, at least regularly. There were probably females in armor successfully hiding their sex in order to fight as mercenaries, I would guess, but it wasn't an ideal people were striving for -- and it was more likely, I assess, among poorer women who had relatively few options and found mercenary work palatable. 

None of this really even approaches the side cases that this course will apparently take as its foci. I think the effect is likely to suggest that the Middle Ages were quite different from what they were, which could easily be a disservice to students. Only after a basic appreciation has been conveyed should such fringe elements be taught to avoid that deception. This is said to be a graduate-level course, though, so perhaps that will be the case.

* Ecclesia is a person in the Medieval Catholic understanding, indeed a female person.   

The Quality of Mercy

I'm not in principle opposed to commutations of sentences or even pardons. It's a royal prerogative that for some reason the Founders chose not only to retain, but to vest in the executive. It might also have been vested with the truer sovereign, the American people, as perhaps by having annual referenda on it. [UPDATE: Or administratively, which seems to have problems too.] It might also have been rejected as incompatible with the judiciary's independence; but the Founders usually preferred to limit independence with checks and balances between the three branches. 

Courts often get things wrong. They are human institutions, and any system of rules can end up being unjust by applying those rules to a situation that they weren't really fit to handle. The rules are written in advance of the reality of the cases to which they end up being applied, and as such the cases may involve aspects the legislators never considered. This also has the happy quality of preventing magistrates from drafting rules that will favor their own side, of course; that was what Aristotle liked about the approach, and why he recommends it strongly in Rhetoric I.1. Still, the other side of that coin remains: sometimes the only rules we have don't fit a particular case well. Justice seems to involve setting the rules aside. Pardons and commutations are an approach to that problem that has evolved over human history, and retaining it doesn't seem in principle problematic to me.

One problem with locating it in an individual, though, is that the individual may prove to have poor judgment. This works in both ways: they may lack the virtue to stand up for the interests of justice by issuing a pardon when it is deserved, or they might lack the virtue to use the power in a just manner and end up pardoning people they should not.

The use of the clemency power in grand gestures is likely to prove problematic, as it is very likely that grand gestures will end up including some candidates who shouldn't have been included. On the other hand, there is Biblical warrant for a complete jubilee -- perhaps there is a basic wisdom to the idea that everything should be wiped clean every so often. Perhaps we should even use the power in this wide-ranging way more often that we do.

These big questions are in the news because of a series of Biden administration pardons and commutations that seem to range between somewhat unjust to completely unjust (e.g. his pardoning of his own son in the face of manifest criminal wrongdoing in which the elder Biden is also involved). However, there's also a set now from the outgoing governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper. Readers know that I think he has been a terrible governor, and I sorrow that his chosen replacement will become our next governor. That said, I don't get the sense that on this occasion he has engaged in anything unjust. 

Before Tuesday, North Carolina had 136 offenders on death row. Cooper’s office said it had received clemency petitions from 89 of them.

Cooper’s office said it considered a variety of factors, such as a defendant’s conduct in prison, the adequacy of legal representation and sentences received by co-defendants.

“These reviews are among the most difficult decisions a Governor can make and the death penalty is the most severe sentence that the state can impose,” Cooper said in a news release. “After thorough review, reflection, and prayer, I concluded that the death sentence imposed on these 15 people should be commuted, while ensuring they will spend the rest of their lives in prison.”

I'm inclined to accept this as a reasonable use of the power; it is not an extravagance, and the penalty that remains imposed is quite severe. (I'm not in fact sure that 'life in a state prison without the possibility of parole' is preferable to death.) The pardon power is possible to use well, and whether or not I agree with Gov. Cooper in each particular case, I am satisfied that he took his duties seriously here. That may be the best we can do as human beings.

What COVID taught us about censorship

The CISA was a potent source of the censorship madness that engulfed the USA in 2020.

A remarkable politician

Argentina's Milei is a rare example of a libertarian who knows how to use power.

3,500 Years of Hangover Cures

Gone

The Old Year now away is fled…

Hogmanay Muted

The event was canceled in Scotland this year due to wild weather, high winds and rain that made the outdoor Fire festival untenable. Here we are having it without the customary venison steak pie because our oven has died, and will be weeks without replacement. Such is life. 

So a very simple fire festival, expecting an intensifying winter. But today was warm enough to ride in the high afternoon, and I’ve plenty of wood that I’ve cut and split myself. We’ll be warm enough in the cold to come. 

Hogmanay Sleigh Ride

Black Moon Over Hogmanay

Tonight’s festivals will feature the second New Moon in a month. This is the “Black Moon,” a companion to the more-famous “Blue Moon” (i.e. a second full moon in a single month).

How the Victorians Celebrated Christmas

 

This is part of the Victorian Farm series, featuring some of the same people as the Secrets of the Castle and the Tudor Monastery Farm. I enjoyed this series quite a bit as well.

18th Century Hot Drinks for New Years

A bit of history interspersed with some cooking -- punch, egg nog, and hot buttered ale.

Good news updates

I wrote some days back how delighted I was to be able to help save two Corpus Christi dogs. One came to me last Friday for a short stay before he was to be picked up by transport to a rescue operation in Wisconsin. Within 24 hours he'd gotten away from me and disappeared. After 48 hours, however, he was safely caught up about a mile from here, thanks to the work of a lot of neighbors who kept watch and reported sightings. He won't even miss his transport, scheduled for Wednesday evening. I have another couple of days to try to fatten him up. In the continuing saga of nanopreemie Riley, he went home with his parents yesterday, weighing a little over 5 lbs. He still hasn't reached his original due date.

The 12 days of Christmas on a Tudor Monastery Farm

This is part of the Tudor Monastery Farm series, which has the same experimental archeologists and historian who worked on Secrets of the Castle living on a recreation Tudor farm for a year. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Newly Relevant: US Army Equine Funeral Unit Troubled

Carter was Navy, but it's the US Army that runs Arlington, and their horse-drawn funeral unit has been having some serious problems. Somewhat ironically, as you can see from the formal photos, it's blue-cord Infantry from the Third Infantry Regiment that are running this equine operation, not a US Cavalry unit.

The plan as announced will have him buried in Plains, GA rather than Arlington, but it's very likely this unit would have been involved -- and may yet be. In any case the horses deserve better treatment than they've been getting at the hands of our Old Guard, another sign of the notable decline even in treasured elements of a once-unmatched military.

Requiescat in Pace Jimmy Carter

On the day I was born he was Governor of the Great State of Georgia, where I happened to come into the world due to my father's work having taken him from Tennessee to Atlanta. Georgia in the 1970s was far from the worst place in the world, and in fact a very nice place to grow up. For whatever he had to do with that, I thank him.

When I was young he was President of the United States. At the time I knew almost nothing about what that meant, and for whatever he did to keep a world in which children could be blessedly ignorant of politics, I thank him.

It is also due to him, at least in part, that I grew up in Reagan's America. That too is a matter of some gratitude he is partially owed. 

De Mortuis nihil nisi bonum.

The Feast of St. Thomas of Becket

Another feast day follows in the Christmas celebration.