Surf & Turf

My neighbor’s wife left shrimp in her car. Guess who?

A Joke for Palm Sunday

An elderly woman lives by herself. She is very religious, and knows the Bible very well. One night, she is awakened by a noise. She looks out the window and sees a man trying to force his way into the house with a crowbar. 

She creeps to the phone and quietly calls the police, but is worried that they might not get there in time. So she decides to appeal to the guy's conscience with a Bible verse. She yells out, "Acts 2:38!" On hearing this, the man puts down his tools, and puts his hands over his head. 

Just then, the police get there and arrest him. As he's being booked, the arresting officer says, "I've got to ask you something. You were almost in the house. Why did you stop and give up just because that lady yelled some scripture?" 

"Scripture?!" he answered. "I thought she was saying she had an ax and two .38's!"

Fairness and Heritability

This was linked at Instapundit, but it's up AVI's alley and a subject we sometimes discuss.

The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life.  The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids.  (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation.  The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....

Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair.  The children of the rich do better.  But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.”  Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair.  The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.” 

I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.

What, if anything, should be done about that? 

Palm Sunday

Today begins Holy Week, and occasions one of my favorite Bible stories. 

Our solar,/lunar/hebdomadalian holiday

I thought I'd figured out the schedule for Easter a while back: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This complicated formula draws together the solar cycle (equiox), the lunar cycle (full moon), and the weekly cycle (Sunday). But imagine my surprise when this month's full moon turned out to be today (April 12). Why isn't Easter tomorrow? Instead, tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Easter is not until April 20.

The mystery turns on the Western Christian Church's ancient practice of calculating the vernal equinox according to a formula that doesn't quite line up with the astronomically observed full moon or equinox. This year the archaic formula, which requires us to divide the year by 19 and look up the remainder in a chart, yields a liturgical Paschal Full Moon on April 13, which is Sunday (tomorrow). When the post-equinox full moon lands on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday.

The accepted view seems to be that the seven-day week, which depends on neither the solar nor the lunar cycle, has its roots in Genesis: the seven days of creation. Romans used an 8-day week for many centuries B.C. and A.D., but switched to the Jewish 7-day week with Constantine's converstion to Christianity. Later Europeans continued the Roman custom of naming the days of the week after the five classically visible planets plus the sun and the moon (though the Romans had added an eighth day with a name that had something to do with markets). In English, the modern names of the seven days of the week are rooted in the Norse gods for Tuesday through Friday, to the Roman god Saturn for Saturday, and to the Teutonic words for sun and moon for Sunday and Monday. In Romance languages, the days of the week are rooted in the Latin names for "Lord" for Sunday, moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and sabbath for Saturday.

Look, Sergeant Pepper…

Hank Jr. Getting It

I admire a man who has kept up his relationship with the ground this way.

Lazarus Saturday

One more week until Pascha, Holy Week.

I'll include the whole passage from John below the fold, but Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a prelude to the Passover, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and it is this miracle that prompts some Jews to decide to kill Jesus. An odd juxtaposition: A resurrection causes some to decide to kill Jesus, which leads to both His resurrection and ours. God indeed causes all things to work together for good.

It is in this passage that we get the shortest verse, "Jesus wept," as he mourns for his friend, and also the passage where Jesus declares "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." And then he asks, "Do you believe this?" 

Isn't it strange that Jesus should weep for the death of a friend when he knows he will raise that friend from the dead? I think human death is always a tragedy; it is the result of the disease of sin and it is something to mourn. We are so allergic to any negative emotions in America that we now have "celebrations of life" at funerals. There is nothing wrong with that; I have friends and family who have had those and I always participate appropriately. That is what they wanted. But, sometimes it is good to weep and to weep openly in public as Jesus did. It is good to acknowledge the tragedy. It is no denial of the resurrection to grieve the death of the beloved.

Passover

I’m not aware of there being any Jews in the audience of this blog, but if there are, happy Passover. 

Easter is still quite a ways off this year, depending upon whether your church follows the Gregorian or the Julian calendar. 

Unintended Consequences

I hadn't heard of this series until this morning, although it's 18 episodes long already. It's from Reason magazine, and is very instructive.

...but we learned our lesson and it never happ... oh.

Alas Colorado

One of the more beautiful states, Colorado, but so was California. 

The [manufacture and sale] restrictions are real enough but as Complete Colorado reported last month, the law's definition effectively covers "almost every centerfire semiautomatic handgun" bigger than a .22. In fact, "There is only one centerfire semiautomatic handgun model that does not fall within the bill’s definitions. That unique item is the Benelli B-80, a collector’s item last manufactured in 1990."...

Up next: House Bill 1312 and its obliteration of 1st Amendment protections and parental rights. HB 1312 says, "It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful to, with specific intent to discriminate, publish materials that deadname or misgender an individual.” The law applies to everything from flyers to blogs to newspapers, and if it becomes law, I could find myself in hot water for referring to a dude in a dress as "he."

Going even further, according to Ari Armstrong:

Part of the bill pertains to child custody. Existing statutes define “coercive control” as “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse, that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual.” The bill adds deadnaming and misgendering someone as types of “coercive control,” and it directs courts to consider deadnaming and misgendering when deciding matters of child custody.

So, as to the latter, a mother could lose custody of her child for the offense of calling her child by the name that she, the mother, bestowed upon her child at birth. 

The state should be forbidden from interfering inside families. I realize that some families are awful. It's still a good rule because governments are reliably awful. 

The firearm regulation is quite terrible, although as I understand it the law does not actually ban any guns, it just complicates the process for buying them (and imposes fees). That's still an unconstitutional set of infringements that I hope will be struck down by the courts, as they ought to be. It's still not as bad as, say, Maryland's law.

As I've written before, we've reached the point that literally the only real right the left believes in is the right to abortion. Everything else is subject to restrictions, and as severe a set of restrictions as they want that day.

Foreign Responses to the Tariffs

From Canada

From Ireland

From the Heard and McDonald Islands

Harley-Davidson CEO Out

Great job. Now bring back the Dyna. 

UPDATE: A friend from the Iraq days sends:

If you do, bring back the Dyna. 

Why Not Make It Worse?

The heavy rains we've had over the last week have finally allowed fire crews to finish containing the big wildfires that were near to me. Even the massive Table Rock fire is now fully contained. 

However, we still have millions upon millions of downed trees from Helene; and while the rains have wet the earth, the wood will continue to dry for years. It would be helpful if we could remove some of that fuel before the next round of fires.

The Trump administration decided to help with that -- it's been surprising how much more the Federal government has been wanting to help since the new administration came in. Enter the usual suspects:

C'mon guys. I love the forest as much as anyone, but these trees are already dead. Let's get as many as we can before they burn up the world. There's no way we'd get them all up anyway, but potentially we could reduce the fire hazard at least a little bit.

Why didn't we think of that?

Failing Houston schools are trying something new, or rather, something old-fashioned. The teacher stands in front of the class and teaches lessons. After an hour or so there's a short quiz, which lets the teacher split the class roughly in half. The half who are struggling the hardest get more hands-on teaching, while the half who are picking it up faster have a chance to work more on their own. Kids who disrupt class get a time out in a separate room, where they continue to be taught by a ZOOM link under adult supervision.

Sylva’s Confederate Monument Restored

Sylva’s town council is not happy about it, either. The county owns the thing, though, not the town. 

I imagine it will be defaced a half dozen times during the upcoming Pride Month celebrations, which Sylva does take seriously. Or once, really well. 

Two on Free Speech

This Spiked piece on the threat to free speech in the UK (h/t Hot Air) begins with "Lucy Connolly’s tweet was despicable, but it shouldn’t have landed her in prison." Back when we were running the think tank, I had a whole series on Free Speech that was part of the permanent sidebar collection. One of the articles was about why you had to defend deplorable cases. The reasons are that (a) it will always be the meanest sort of people who are the first to offend, because they don't care about people's feelings, so (b) it will always be here that you have to defend the principle. 

If you lose the principle, you've already lost the fight and you've lost the liberty. Now we're just arguing about whether the content was sufficiently bad to merit punishment. 

On the subject of the content, there was also the small matter of a hideous crime that provoked strong emotions. 

One speech criminal who has summoned up significantly less sympathy is Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who was sentenced to two years and seven months for inciting racial hatred, over a vile, hateful missive she posted in the wake of the Southport stabbings. Seemingly in response to rumours swirling online that those three girls, slain at a Taylor Swift dance class, had been killed by an asylum seeker, Connolly took to X and said: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’

Liberal governance fancies itself as committed to "humane" governance, meaning a government that creates the conditions for living a full human life. It would be humane to give people a little space for things like that. Strong emotions can make fools out of most of us. On the principle of the thing, however, it's better that she be allowed to say it -- both because of the core human liberty, and because it gets it out there that this kind of thing provokes a lot of anger that could be dangerous. The UK has a habit of trying to cover these things up instead of addressing them. That's causing a lot more harm than some babysitter fuming online. 

Meanwhile in Germany...

German journalist sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme poking fun at the Interior Minister's lack of commitment to free speech

Now we don't expect the Germans to be as committed to the principle of freedom of anything as the British once were. This is an egregious violation, however. Apparently in Germany public figures can sue individuals for defamation for saying things about them in public, such as on Twitter. Defamation is supposed to mean, however, that you said something that wasn't true. The very act of filing the suit to suppress the speech proves the journalist's case; yet the court sided with the powerful against the citizenry, as so often, and threatened the journalist with prison for daring to suggest this obviously true and proven thing. 

A TDS Specialist

 

In the Spirit of the Previous Post

 

Rev 21:8

One of my country Baptist friends posted this dire verse  on Facebook. Of course he cited the King James Version: my maternal grandfather, also a country Baptist, explained when I was young that it was the only true and completely accurate Word of God. 

What grabbed my attention was the word, “sorcerers.” What is sorcery exactly? What did they understand it to mean?

So I went to the Sacra Vulgata, and found out that in Latin the word is veneficus. Now we think of sorcerers as being like wizards, and wizards as being old men; so at first I thought the etymology might be shared with venerable. 

But I looked it up and it’s not! It shares the etymology for venomous. The Latin was for a maker of poisons and drugs. 

That reminded me of something that we just saw in the Anabasis. So I looked it up, and sure enough in the original Greek the word is pharmakois. 

This I take to be the meaning of the words, which are necessarily ambiguous, since {pharmakon}, "a drug," also means "poison." Did Cheirisophus conceivably die of fever brought on by some poisonous draught? or did he take poison whilst suffering from fever? or did he die under treatment?

That's true: the word that is the root of "pharmacy" or "pharmaceutical" can mean either "drug" or "poison." And so it is often the case even with true drugs, where the right dosage is efficacious and the wrong one is fatal.

Thus, the sorcerers who are headed to the Lake of Fire are poisoners and makes of false drugs that kill instead — one thinks of dealers of drugs laced with fentanyl, but also of pushers of hard drugs generally. Makers of false medicines. That’s what the word means. 

UPDATE: After I went to bed last night, another thought about this occurred to me. The passage seems on first glance to refer to something from fantasy stories, which in the mind of the modern is the sort of thing that puts the Bible into the genre of fantasy stories. That's how they prefer to think of it anyway, and "sorcerer" at first seems like evidence for that preferred proposition.

Once you understand that they're talking about drug dealers and pushers and makers of false medicines, however, you realize that this is a real and pressing problem that you read about every day in the newspaper. The Bible is suddenly speaking to very real problems that bedevil contemporary society.

Of course, since this is the Revelation of St. John the Divine, you still have the Beast and the Dragon and various other mystic imagery. It only moves the needle a little on that point; but it does move it.

Minus the accent . . . .

. . . . this is pretty much my peninsula.

Musk the Anarchist

Highlighted from a 2021 NYT article today by a book review in the NYT today on the importance of America's early anarchists to freedom of speech. The Times would like you to know that vandalism of Tesla dealerships is a crucial form of free speech, by the way.

Elon Musk, who hoisted a chain saw at the latest Conservative Political Action Conference convocation, saying he hoped to wield it against the federal bureaucracy. The brutality in the message was hard to miss, and yet Musk seemed taken aback when aggressive rejoinders came from the other side, in the form of attacks on Tesla dealerships across the land, one of them by a man who said defacing cars was a form of “free speech.” Absolutely not, said Musk. “Damaging the property of others, a.k.a. vandalism, is not free speech!” A few days later, Donald Trump went further, declaring the vandalism to be nothing less than an act of terrorism.

The antigovernment agitators of a century ago had a useful name for expressive threats of this kind: propaganda of the deed, a phrase whose most vocal proponent in early-20th-century America was the Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani. The provocations could be peaceful, but often enough they included “acts of spectacular violence,” as Willrich writes, meant to “seize the attention of the working people and inspire them to revolution.”

That's clearly not the view of Free Speech that Musk endorses. 

Well, there are often serious differences even between members of the same overarching philosophy. 

I did order the book they were reviewing, however, which I think sounds much better and more interesting than their review of it. Amazon has it for a lot less than the $35 the Times claims it would cost. I just finished the last book I was reading and could use another. 

Memorial Ride

Quite a few people came out. Several clubs joined including out of state charters. They host club, which was the Wingman MC's Western NC chapter, did the traditional pulled pork shoulder barbecue of this region. 

Beer was free and provided by Patch: he had a kitchen refrigerator in his shop he kept full of Natty Light to share with his customers. They brought his old beer over and served it to his friends. A proper wake, really.

I won't post pictures of anyone or of the clubhouse as I don't have permission and that can be sensitive. I was impressed with their leadership and their performance as hosts both. The rules of the road they set were focused on the safety of the riders. They held a brief prayer at the beginning of the ride for safety and fellowship. They had arranged both firefighter units and two deputies to control key intersections to avoid problems during the ride. Their president's speeches were brief, authoritative, and appropriate.

They had a nice little clubhouse down on a creek in the mountains. There was a grand firepit they'd built by cutting the domed top off a big old 1/2in. steel cylinder, which they tilted on a bed of stones back towards the sitting area by the creak so it reflected the warmth of the fire. As is very common with MCs, there were a lot of children present and at least as many women as men: the ethic of the culture draws a lot of women, who find the association one of protection and safety, which are exactly the qualities that also inspire procreation. I really enjoyed watching the happy children playing in the creek.

A very nice afternoon. It was beautiful, too, as if God smiled on the event. Today the heavy rains have come in from the West, and then it will get cold again; but yesterday was as fine as a day in April can be. 

He would have enjoyed it himself, or an event like it: he was too humble have wanted anyone to throw him a party as its guest of honor, but he would have enjoyed attending a party like this.

Riding Out

I haven't had a lot to say for a couple of days. Today I'm going over to my friend Patch's memorial ride. Perhaps that will produce interesting stories. It should be a pretty day for a bunch of motorcycles.

A National Emergency

Because....

Section 1.  National Emergency.  As President of the United States, my highest duty is ensuring the national and economic security of the country and its citizens.  

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024.  This trade deficit reflects...

Is that an emergency? We had a National Emergency already because there was too much immigration. Presidents like National Emergencies because they can assume extra powers. 

Tariffs are hated by all economists and journalists, but I do note that some things were better before we started eliminating them. I supported NAFTA because the logic of the free trade argument made sense to me at the time. In 1998, though, I was working for the Unions in Savannah and really got to see the good they did for workers. Then I watched them dry up and die — not quite all, but all across the South. IBEW and the Boilermakers still exist around the port, but so many went away.

It was a pipeline for the poor from the swamp to ordinary middle-class prosperity. We gave it away for cheap goods from Mexico, which soon enough became cheap goods from China. Chinese control over so many of our basic goods has become, if not quite an emergency, a serious national security concern.

UPDATE: A play for all the marbles. 

UDPATE: A helpful graph of US tariff rates, which shows that we are at an all time, historic low. (H/t Wikipedia).

These new tariffs put us right back in the historic norm. It's only been in the post-WWII world that we've kept the rates so low, trading away our industry for the goods of free trade.

Why Philosophy?

A rant, it claims, but also a good essay.  

He quotes Aristotle differently than I would.  Aristotle agreed that the higher forms of philosophy were useless, because to be useful is to be useful for something else. The very highest things we pursue for their own sake, not because it will get us to some lesser goal. You should aspire to strive for useless things, so high and fine that you would never trade them for anything else. 

That's some mole

I'm at a loss to imagine how this guy got out of Iran alive. I remember that he was under suspicion in Iran at the time of Nasrallah's death. How he escaped with his life then, and how he got out now, I can't even imagine. How utterly demoralizing for Iran.

A Spring Vista

Conan and Stick, Among the Daffodils

He goes through a stick every day. The whole place is covered with splinters. Somehow he doesn’t get them in his gums. 

Gotta Give Him This One

Via Whiskeyriff, a man in Georgia was arrested for leaving his kids to play at the McDonald's playground while he went to a job interview.

Chris Louis was arrested on March 22 after leaving his three kids, including a 1-year old, 6-year old and a 10-year old, unattended at a McDonald’s (which had a playplace, by the way) while he went to a job interview.

Louis reportedly dropped the kids off after walking them to McDonald’s from his apartment, and returned to check on them before leaving again. He then returned to find police waiting for him, and was arrested for deprivation of a minor.

But the internet is rallying behind the father of 3, arguing that he was forced to make a tough decision while simply trying to get a job to provide for his kids.

As many of the comments pointed out, he left them in a place with air conditioner, a bathroom, and adults nearby who could help in case of an emergency, as opposed to simply leaving them alone at his apartment. And while some people were uneasy with the idea of leaving the 1-year old behind, they pointed out that he was forced to make a tough decision in order to try to get a job, and that the 10-year old was old enough to take care of the infant for a short period of time.

It's definitely not ideal, but a crime? The story points out that the 10-year-old was born when the man was 14, just a boy, and here he is ten years later still trying to support his kids. 

Sometimes 'as good as it gets' has to be good enough. It's a hard world. 

Requiescat in Pace Val Kilmer

Without a doubt his most famous and enduring role was as Georgia-born gunslinger "Doc" Holliday in Tombstone. 

However, I particularly loved the performances in Willow. He and his beautiful female opposite in this movie went on to marry in real life and had two children. 

I don't know what to say about a man who played many parts, but about whom I know nothing of himself. Fortunately, E. M. Burlingame -- a fellow Small Wars Journal alumnus --  wrote a poem about it that is worthy.

I Had No Idea 'Star Wars' Was Based on a Norse Saga

 

Remarkable!

Owens Gap

No smoke plume today from the huge Table Rock fire. The storm must have helped. 

Clear skies.

Blindness

A commenter at Althouse responds to a post about art museums:

"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."

A lot easier to do, when so many of the monuments you don't like have already been torn down.

Yes, exactly. So much of this stuff that is arguably wrong from first principles is being done because those principles were already violated by the other side. Somehow they can't see that they did it first, emphatically and regularly. 

That doesn't make it right. There's a sense in which it is fair, because 'turnabout is fair play.' Getting them to at least recognize that they started the ball rolling might help, but how do you do that?

Democracy

I and some friends were asked to test the quality of Egypt's 2018 election. The election was scrupulously fair, down to the maintenance of unbroken, numerically-keyed locks on the ballot boxes. Both the army and the police watched over each polling station as they didn't trust each other. 

They could afford a fair election because they'd removed all the opposition candidates from the ballot beforehand. The only choice except Sisi was his friend who, as a campaign promise, said he'd withdraw if elected and endorse Sisi instead.

We're getting that way in Europe. We almost were that way here, last time around. It's getting dark out there. 

No Third Terms

At least half of what the current administration is doing is highly praiseworthy: the DOGE inquiries into unconstitutional/evil spending, waste, fraud, and so forth; the desire to craft peace out of the bloodbath in Ukraine; the move to shrink the Federal government substantially. 

Some other things are not: the police state tactics, masked Federal agents arresting people off the street, foreign prisons that violate the 8th Amendment, censorship of disfavored words. These are not in line with America's best traditions and deserve outright condemnation. Insofar as we have any power -- one of the dearest fantasies of Americans is that we have some sort of power over the Federal government apart from the occasional elections -- they deserve our opposition.

A third class of things is both at once: bringing in aggrieved non-experts to run agencies is a necessary breath of fresh air, but will inevitably lead to amateur errors because amateurs are employed. They're not bad people, but we have to expect mistakes. That's ok, but there will be errors. 

Two things so far are clearly wrong, at least to me. The desire to take over Gaza from Israel reminds me of nothing more than JFK's decision to take over Vietnam from the French; that's not our fight and we shouldn't want any part of the decades of war it would entail. There should be no third terms, not for anyone. Washington's standard should hold.

That's how it looks to me, at least, so far.

This Is a Song about

Um ...

Can I get an amen?

I heard the optics were great!

This is possibly how I'll go, unless they collapse on me in an earthquake.

A Magic Sword

USMC veteran Jackson Dodd has purchased the sword that was, reportedly, at one time responsible for 80% of Marine enlistments. 

You probably know the one. 

The sword is eight and a half pounds, which is insanity. Even the two-handed swords in Albion's museum line don't cross three and a half. One of them is two and a half, which is in line with my experience training in historical European martial arts. All that decorative heraldry built into the hilt, I imagine. 

Bluegrass and the Byrds

 …and Dylan. I assume Earl Scruggs is known to everyone here, but if not meet him now. 

Boom Boom

Gee, I wonder why schools are a mess?

My neighbors, lovely, smart, kindly people, are trying to persuade us to try out Netflix's new series "Adolescence." A sentence or two into the description we were doubtful. It's a mockumentary about a 13-year-old UK schoolboy who kills a schoolgirl. The show immediately shocks some audience members by portraying a school in complete chaos. What could be the cause of this collapse? I hope I won't ruin the suspense by revealing that the culprit is social media. Apparently neither parents nor schools have any power to detach children from the pernicious influence of the outside culture.

I'm sure if either parents or teachers made any attempt to turn off the phones, even during class, they'd be brought up on hate crime charges.

My verdict: for decades now the schools have been in the control of crazy people, and kids need to get sprung out of them. It would be bad enough if all that was happening was mission creep, so the eternally and rapidly ballooning budget was only eaten up by all the non-education goals, such as adult employment programs, babysitting, and political indoctrination of captive audiences. But increasingly the kids not only don't get an education, and not only have their time wasted and their intellectual dignity assaulted, but they also are lucky to survive without serious injury.

Brewing in Iran

Her grandfather made his own beer from things he grew in his garden. Her family helped her reconstruct it in Georgia. 

Reminds me of the talk about the date wine that used to be popular in what is now Iraq. 

Just a Little Red Tape

This video, which you may have seen elsewhere, explains why there's no broadband yet in spite of years of government machinery turning. 

Enormous red tape in the bush.

UPDATE: A DOGE interview. A summary.

For me the take away quote is, "We're talking about elementary financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated like the Federal government, it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, and the officers would be arrested."

Reflections

A series of cartoons by the AI about itself.  

I hope there's not really a consciousness there. We are making a tortured thing.

UPDATE: Some further insight.

Group Chats

Hercules

Manual steering on that monster. It'll be fun pushing it around these mountain roads.

Hasn't even been started for years and years. Got it going today. Needs brake pads.

Sin

Yesterday I heard someone say, "Sin feels like freedom until you try to stop." 

That's a thought that has stuck with me.

Fire Season

Ever since the hurricane blew down millions upon millions of trees in Western North Carolina, we've known that the drying wood would create substantial wildfire hazard. Much of it is in inaccessible regions, and there aren't adequate resources even to clean up populated regions -- there's been very limited government response, both state and federal, though the locals have done yeoman work. Wildfire is going to happen sooner or later, unless we get a very wet few years that eventually reduces it to rotting wood. 

Right now all of the evacuation zones are on the other side of I-26 from me. It's a pretty good firebreak, being a wide concrete interstate.  I saw that Montana has sent us some firefighting aircraft, for which I am grateful. I imagine they will be staged at AVL airport, very near to the evacuation zone. UPDATE: They are staging out of Chattanooga. Big lake there. 

Locally to me we rolled on two fires yesterday, but neither of them got out of control. There's a statewide ban on outdoor burning here and in South Carolina as well. This morning our local Emergency Management team went to Readiness Plan 5, which is their highest level of staffing in expectation of trouble.

UPDATE:

Just across the border in South Carolina, there's a mandatory evacuation zone too.

A Quick Word on Signal

I've used Signal for years and years for unclassified information that was very sensitive. It's not thought to be unbreakable -- probably NSA can break it -- but it is managed by IT/privacy experts who seem to be genuinely committed. There's no suggestion here that Signal itself failed at all; the failure was, as is usual in espionage, on the human side. Somebody let a reporter in, either by accident or on purpose. 

Apparently the Biden administration thought Signal was OK for coordinating about stuff that was classified, as long as the classified stuff was kept on the high side (i.e. in airgapped networks like SIPR and JWICS). In my day, as the old timers say, we never did that. Any discussion of classified information was treated as needing to be kept on the high side.

Occasionally you'd draft a document on a SIPR computer that was really meant to be unclassified, and want to move it to the regular internet so you could send it to people. The only authorized way to do that was to save it to a CD-ROM, by itself, transfer it, and then break the CD-ROM. You were never allowed to connect even a thumb drive to the SIPRnet for transferring files between it and non-airgapped computers connected to the regular internet.

SECDEF Hegseth is younger than me -- which is amazing to me -- but his service was in the right period to have come up with all that same stuff. Why he felt comfortable putting out flight times for combat sorties on Signal is unknown to me; the fact that the CIA/National Security apparatus had apparently endorsed Signal during the Biden administration may have been instructive. 

There seems to have been no harm done, and it's a good opportunity to learn from the mistake and tighten up their shot group on Operational Security. Mistakes happen. You can't freak out about every one of them, but you should learn from every one of them. 

Luxury Mediation

I’m sure it’s not all like this, but DOGE cracked at least one nut. 

Library Security

A public library is not secure almost by definition. It is open to the public, meaning that anyone at all can expect to enter and remain more or less as long as he or she likes. It can have rules, and it can call the police to remove people who blatantly defy those rules, but it generally won't have police on the premises nor have gates or metal detectors -- certainly not out in the countryside where Sylva, NC happens to be.

“We had an incident last week, the police were called, somebody found what they thought was a gun in the restroom at the library,” Smith said. “When the deputies got there, and examined it, it was an airsoft gun. It wasn’t operable, but still that brings the question, could it have been a real gun?... What’s the danger if it had been a real gun?” Smith said. “I don’t know what kind of signage we have; I’m not saying signage would stop it.” 

I happen to know the answers to each of those questions. We all know what the dangers of real guns are, but few would leave one hidden in a public restroom for long because they are valuable. The library has signs that clearly state that no firearms nor any other weapons are permitted. Those signs can't stop anything. 

“The other issue is the cleaning crew, they clean some while the library’s open, but they clean past the time where the library’s open and they’ve had some instances where people have come out that had been hiding in the library after the library closed,” Smith said. “That presents a danger to the cleaning crew, and I think that opens up the county for lawsuits, especially if they’re our employees.”

Commissioner Jenny Hooper said “it’s suspected that a lot of that is homeless because they are doing hair dye in the sinks. I don’t think it’s easter eggs.” 

The homeless are a problem for all public spaces for which we generally lack good answers. Public libraries usually accept part of the burden of providing for the homeless, e.g., providing them with free public restrooms they can use. Relatively pleasant much of the year, the mountain regions of this state have lots of homeless in the cities -- Asheville was overwhelmed with them until the police there relatively recently decided to crack down, and the hurricane washed away the larger camps (and many of the homeless). 

Sylva, a mountain town with a nearby university that adds a strong progressive political element, has been struggling with what to do about the homeless for a while. There have been talks about adopting no-begging rules, but those have faced stiff opposition. I don't think they have any real answers to these problems. 

A Clockwork Orange

It seems like I have read this story. 

Absolute chaos struck a quiet residential street in Elm Park last night as a gang of youths believed to be armed with knives entered a primary school and began to attack other youths....

Youths were seen running from the premises in fear as the gang arrived.

One local resident saw the youths leave the school and run down the streets of Maylands Avenue. He told the Havering Daily: “It was total chaos. We saw between 40-50 youths, running through the streets. We think they had knives as they were seen dropping weapons in people’s drive ways and running away. They were attacking the police and there were so many of them that the police had to just disperse them.

”Youths,” you say? No other distinguishing characteristics, neither for the attackers nor the victims? Codpieces and bowler hats, maybe?

Youth gangs with knives wouldn’t be a problem if a certain number of responsible adults had firearms. Disarming the citizens leaves them vulnerable. 

Old Crow Medicine Show

These boys put on a great concert tonight. It was supposed to have been at the 50th anniversary Mountain Heritage Festival on September 29th of last year. That turned out to be two days after Hurricane Helene.

They came tonight instead, and played a great set. It included BobWills music, country music, and old Appalachian music. This included Cindy, a song they date to 1924 from here in Jackson County, North Carolina. I'm not sure about that attribution (and neither is Wikipedia); I didn't catch the name of the woman they claimed to have first recorded it, as a kind of proto-Dolly Parton. But here it is from 1959, with John Wayne, Dean Martin, Walter Brennan and Ricky Nelson.

They also did Cocaine Habit, which I didn't think they would since it was on a college campus -- Western Carolina University. It's a song I like because it features in Hells Angels Forever, the great 1983 documentary about the motorcycle club, performed by Elephant's Memory. 

They finished their main set with Wagon Wheel, written by one of their number; it's a very popular song locally as it mentions several local landmarks. The geography of it is dubious, though. A rider will recognize some problems with the lay of the land in the song.

But let's not dwell on that. It was a great show by a personable band who was very interested in the culture. They moved cheerfully from bluegrass to honky-tonk, adding in piano or swapping to accordion when necessary. At one point they had three fiddles going. They played Texas two-step music with equal ease. A grand evening, much appreciated.

Venison Adovada

Adovada is an ancient way of preserving meat with chilies. I found some that I’d made a while ago and then frozen after we’d eaten on it for a few days. It was made with pork, but I decided to cook venison in it instead. This was a fantastic decision: the spicy broth is an excellent companion to big game. I cooked it in the pressure cooker, ensuring great tenderness. 

It’s a simple recipe. About two-three fistfuls of New Mexican red chilies, garlic (as much as you like), oregano and two diced onions. Add black pepper or hotter chilies as well if you want, or alternatively just increase the concentration of New Mexico peppers to make it stronger. Boil together and purée. If you’re not using a pressure cooker, that’s fine; pour the chili sauce over two or three pounds of the meat and let it marinate overnight in the fridge. Then chop up any additional vegetables you want— potatoes are traditional, yellow squash works well — and braise in the chili sauce (plus additional water/stock/beer if needed to cover the meat -- I used chicken stock this time) for two hours. After that, salt to taste. 

It's good eaten as a stew if you break up the meat, or pulled out for tacos or burritos. 

A Saturday Night Romance

Rollin’ On

Happy Birthday Jerry Reed

The late, great Snowman was born this day 1937.

A Brief Lesson in Logic

The SEP just updated their page on the concept of negation; this diagram is from the entry. While I was reviewing it I noticed that while most of it is straightforward, the concept of "subcontraries" is probably not well known. 

Some notes on the symbols: ◻ and ◊ are modal operators, meaning "necessarily" and "possibly" respectively. ϕ is just a Greek letter, Phi, which is commonly used in logic to represent any given proposition. ¬ is the symbol for negation. Thus, in the top left corner, ◻ϕ means 'necessarily Phi,' and in the bottom right, ¬◻ϕ is 'not necessarily Phi,' whereas at the top right ◻¬ϕ is 'necessarily NOT Phi.' The triple bar equal sign is a logical biconditional, meaning that the two terms mean exactly the same thing. I imagine you can work out the rest from that. 

Traditionally, the Aristotelian relations of contradiction, contrariety, and subalternation are supplemented with an additional relation of subcontrariety, so called because the subcontraries are located under the contraries. As the contradictories of the two contraries, the subcontraries (e.g., Some pleasure is good, Some pleasure is not good) can both be true, but cannot both be false. For Aristotle, this was therefore not a true opposition, since subcontraries are “merely verbally opposed” (Prior Analytics 63b21–30). Within pragmatic theory, the assertion of one subcontrary (Some men are bald) is not only compatible with, but actually conversationally implicates, the other (Some men are not bald), given Grice’s Maxim of Quantity (“Make your contribution as informative as is required”; see the entries on Paul Grice, pragmatics, and implicature). 

The article on implicature is also interesting. 

So the contraries are "necessarily Phi" and "necessarily NOT Phi," the latter of which is equivalent to "Not Possibly Phi." The subcontraries are "Possibly Phi" and "Not Necessarily Phi," which is equivalent to "Possibly NOT Phi." 

I like the way they've graphed this relationship, because you can also see the entailments on the two vertical sides. If Phi is Necessary, it must also be possible; that one is obvious enough. And if Phi is necessarily not the case, then Phi isn't possible: that's a straight equivalence. What might not be immediately obvious to new students of logic is that "NOT Possibly" entails "Possibly not."  

Clarity of thought is improved by clear logic. Plus, it's kind of fun.

Vernal Equinox

The Spring is welcome this year. 

Sentimental & Homicidal II

I can imagine many a father taking a baseball bat to school administrators who forced their 13-year-old teenage daughter to disrobe in front of anyone who made them uncomfortable -- if only those administrators were also male. I cannot easily imagine a man who was an administrator doing what these women did, escorting young women into a changing room and making them disrobe when they were plainly uncomfortable doing so. This is probably partially because they realize that the fathers would come and kill them.

We have a longstanding cultural prohibition against men using violence on women. I strongly approve of that cultural prohibition. MMA star Ronda Rousey once refused to fight a man in her weight class because, as she rightly put it, “I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a man hitting a woman on television." There are very good reasons that we accept this limit on equality -- which is only informal and partial, since formally the law forbids men to hit other men, too, even though juries often make exceptions where it was clearly appropriate.

The formal structures seem to endorse, rather than brake, this kind of conduct from credentialed 'administrators.' That's a problem for which we have no good cultural solutions. 

Up the Militia

From The Federalist:

You’d never know it from watching television, but civilians stop more active shooters than police and do so with fewer mistakes, according to new research from the Crime Prevention Research Center, where I serve as president. In non-gun-free zones, where civilians are legally able to carry guns, concealed carry permit holders stopped 51.5 percent of active shootings, compared to 44.6 percent stopped by police, CPRC found in a deep dive into active shooter scenarios between 2014 and 2023.

Not only do permit holders succeed in stopping active shooters at a higher rate, but law enforcement officers face significantly greater risks when intervening. Our research found police were nearly six times more likely to be killed and 17 percent more likely to be wounded than armed civilians.

They do it for free, too. Voluntarily.  

The Sentimental and the Homicidal

This is from Commentary, so you won't be surprised by the pro-Israel language; but that's not what I want to talk about. I'm interested in the critique of sentimentalism, and how it dovetails with the embrace of homicidal impulses.

The poshlost* comes in the form of poetry, too. One Palestinian poet writes:

With clean hands,

he gently sifts the flour,

and adds a handful of yeast.

He pours the warm water

for the yeast particles to live,

then rolls and kneads and rolls

and kneads the dough. 

He lets the soft mass rest.

With firm but gentle hands,

he rounds it into balls,

flattens them into shape,

and handles each one

delicately into the oven.

 Soon, perhaps in half an hour,

the bread rolls are born fresh,

healthy and browned.

The newborn breads breathe,

yet dust chokes the air,

searing gases penetrate

their thin, fragile crusts.

 On the day of their birth, a missile,

a bakery, a scattering

of zaatar, flesh, and blood.

The sentimentalism here portrays the baker as gentle and loving, nurturing: "He pours the warm water for the yeast particles to live," the poet says. He lets it rest. He is delicate in his handling. Well, yes; I make bread too. I also feed the yeast, usually with honey but sometimes with blackstrap molasses. 

A poet is allowed license, but it strikes me -- as a frequent baker -- that it would be just as legitimate to describe the act as monstrous. The yeast's whole life is enslaved to the production of gases to make the bread rise; all the nurturing is just to get the yeast to eat and excrete so that the dough will be fluffy. Meanwhile, not the missile but the oven killed the yeast: the 'newborn breads' are actually newly killed, the yeast slaughtered in its millions in the bald service of the baker's naked interest in eating leavened bread. 

Because the frame chosen is the loving, nurturing one, it masks the horror done by the same hands.

The novelist Milan Kundera, who well knew the horrors of totalitarian rule, has nicely skewered false sentimentality: “Two tears flow in quick succession. The first tear says: how nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass.” Put another way, “sentimentality is that peculiarly human vice which consists in directing your emotions toward your own emotions, so as to be the subject of a story told by yourself,” as the English philosopher Roger Scruton noted in his autobiography.

The sentimentalists are playing a double game: They are dispensing, and attracting, warm feelings and approbation for themselves and their kind, while at the same time providing cover for totalitarians and terrorists.

That is correct, as far as it goes, and we see it again and again. I have grown sadly accustomed to seeing the endorsement of murder and assassination -- against that healthcare CEO by "Luigi," against Musk, against Trump or his supporters -- by the very people I know most inclined to sentimentalist broadcasts. They would never go so far as to say "I wish someone would kill him," but they will definitely go as far as to say that it would be just, that it would be deserved, that it would be understandable. After all, those men provoke such bad feelings in their sentimental hearts. 

* Poshlost is explained in the article's beginning, and is an interesting Russian word. Zaatar is a spice/herb mix that is common in the Levant.  

News from 1948

In a remarkable top-of-the-front-page article, the New York Times somehow cites an irrelevant 1967 case and ignores the actually-relevant 1948 Supreme Court Ruling.

The issue is the deportation of the Venezuelan gangbangers under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The Times quotes many people who are very upset that the district judge who issued an order wasn't obeyed. The Supreme Court, however, has already issued a ruling on this very subject. It begins: 

1. The Alien Enemies Act precludes judicial review of the removal order.

So that's it. 

I admit to not liking that the Salvadoran prison these people were sent to apparently exists to do things that would violate the Eighth Amendment. I don't think the US Government should ever be allowed to violate the Constitution by getting someone else to do it for them, neither a private company nor a foreign government. This holds especially for violations of the Bill of Rights. The Declaration of Independence states definitely, and correctly, that the sole justification for establishing this or any government is to protect the natural rights of the people. They should never be in the business of looking for work-arounds to that.

That said, these aren't members of 'the people,' weren't here in accord with our laws, and have no claim to belong here. They aren't refugees, but the people that refugees were fleeing who followed them here to continue to dominate and exploit them. Their claim to the protection of the laws is only as good as the Devil's in the famous quote from A Man for All Seasons: just because we have to set strong guards against the government getting out of hand.

In any case, the highest court in the land has already ruled on this issue. You can challenge whether there is a real state of war or invasion in court; you can't review the removal order.

Honor & The Quiet Man

A useful essay on the great and most worthy subject of honor, from The Art of Manliness. 

We usually watch The Quiet Man on St. Patrick’s Day. This year we didn’t happen to do, but we did last year. I agree with the basic argument of the piece that the movie is about an American learning how to deal with the ancient sense of honor. There was quite a lot of that in Iraq, too. 

There’s an advantage to the American honor: it’s closer to Aristotle’s virtue of magnanimity. Because it is true to its own sense of what conduct is most worthy of honor, it shapes a character that pursues the best things for themselves. That ends up earning quite a bit of respect, which is the honor in the ancient sense that the article discusses. American Magnanimity is ultimately what carries the day in the movie. 

More Spam Comments

Google continues to mark perfectly good comments by welcome regulars as spam. I just restored a bunch of them.

Welcome Home, Wayfarers

I have reflected frequently over the last nine months on how difficult it must have been for our stranded astronauts. Now they are home, thanks to SpaceX. 

PFC Ira Hayes, USMC

In their rush to comply with the order to eliminate all DEI materials, the Pentagon apparently deleted references to Ira Hayes on their website. 

No matter. We remember him, and honor him, regardless of what the government does. Johnny Cash made sure he'll never be forgotten.

St Patrick Cartoons

Steak & Guinness Pie

A traditional St. Patrick’s Day treat. 

Reagan’s St. Patrick’s Day Joke

A little humor from the former President. 

The Feast of St. Patrick

Giving Unto Caesar

There is an interesting question buried beneath this dispute. It hails from Mark 12:17.

It's worth putting into context.

Later, they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to catch Jesus in His words. “Teacher,” they said, “we know that You are honest and seek favor from no one. Indeed, You are impartial and teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay them or not?”

But Jesus saw through their hypocrisy and said, “Why are you testing Me? Bring Me a denarius to inspect.” So they brought it, and He asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they answered.

Then Jesus told them, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

And they marveled at Him.

That last line is important. It's translated sometimes as them being "amazed," or that they "greatly marveled." The answer in other words is not meant to be simple, but amazing or marvelous. Which, by the way, refutes the quip made by one side to the Twitter discussion: "Whenever someone writes five paragraphs to try to avoid the very plain meaning of a verse I know I've won the argument." Hardly. You haven't even begun to understand the argument. 

The discussion is among Jews of a particularly philosophical and religious bent. In that context, what does it mean to say "whose image is this?" 

One answer is the one they give: It's Caesar's image, so perhaps it belongs to Caesar.

Another answer in the tradition, however, is that all men are made in God's image. So whose image is it really? 

It's possible to go further than that. Because this object is currency, its value is partially (sub)created by Rome. Like Job's brave horse, men did something to bring out or perfect a quality that was only potential in the natural. The denarius was a silver coin, but because it was stamped by Rome it could be traded freely without anyone bothering to measure its weight. That convenience made it more valuable than, say, Viking hacksilver. 

The silver was not made by Rome, though. Its nature and value arise from God's work: all its properties, but also all of our properties that make silver's properties valuable to us, those are things we did not make. 

Ultimately the only part of the coin that Caesar might reasonably claim is this idea that the coin is worth something. That's the thing that you should give back to Rome, maybe. Give them back the idea that they've added anything, or that their money or the order they represent is worth something to you. The rest belongs to God.

To God, and not to you: certainly not to the state. Jesus' quite challenging teaching is that you should give up all these physical things. They aren't important, he says over and over. A man might even leave his dead father unburied, give away all his family wealth, and instead devote his life to God. That teaching is far more challenging than "Pay your taxes." 

Three-hour tour

SpaceX could have rescued these guys a while back, but for the spite of the Biden administration. They were awfully happy to see their rescuers arrive at last.

Back to Hank

Readying for Better Weather

During the spring oil changes, I swapped out the timing cover...

...and the Derby cover, since I had to remove it anyway to do the primary fluid.

Very soon now those dawns will be right.