Random Images and a Song

Now that Lent, Holy Week and Easter have passed, I’ll post a song that is a bit irreverent. Also, some photography from my life. 


Love those Springer forks. 

For some, a freshly cut stick is the best thing in life. 

Gotta make sure you’re not going anywhere. 

The local market, just thirteen miles away. It’s pretty Wild West: almost every man you meet there is wearing a gun except me. I wear a knife. 

A non-controversial statue also by the Sylva library.

This is the Way

Civilians with permits stopped the attacks more frequently and faced a lower risk of being killed or injured than police. Officers who intervened during the attacks were far more likely to be killed or injured than those who apprehended the attackers later.

…[A]rmed citizens reduce the number of deaths in active-shooter incidents significantly more than the police do. In fact, armed citizens reduce the number of people killed by 49 percent, while the police increase the number killed by 16 percent in comparison to the omitted class (shooters who are arrested later or stopped by unarmed citizens or stop of their own accord).

Good paper by John Lott and Carlisle Moody.  

A Recruiting Boom

As you may recall, military recruiting has been terrible since the Afghanistan withdrawal demonstrated that the American military was not led by serious people. It was thought that this might be a lasting problem, similar to the recruitment shortfalls in the 1970s after the Vietnam War was thrown away by Congress. 
“This is the start of a long drought for military recruiting,” said Ret. Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank. He said the military has not had such a hard time signing recruits since 1973, the year the U.S. left Vietnam and the draft officially ended. Spoehr said he does not believe a revival of the draft is imminent, but “2022 is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.”

The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.

An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007. 
Apparently not.


He may not dress the right way for Esquire, but having a fighting man as SECDEF seems to be having a positive effect on morale and recruitment. 

An Alternative Look at Student Loans

The White House says it is going to go aggressively after student loans in default. He's also planning on resumption of payments, and cancelation of some of the easier-term payment plans. 

Student loans are an effective culture war tool for the President, because his support tends to be strongest with those who have less education. If you've been to graduate school, the odds that you will support him were much smaller than they are for the general public in all three of his elections.

When I hear Republicans talking about this, they tend to describe it in terms of fairness: you took a loan, you ought to pay it back in full (with interest). When I hear Democrats talking about it, they also talk in terms of fairness: the government made a deal with the students that included loan forgiveness at some point (usually 20 years, sometimes 10 for those in public service jobs), and it's not fair to revoke that deal now.

There's an alternative way of looking at the problem that I haven't heard people discussing. The government has essentially inflated these debts twice. It did so first by making student loans the main way of paying for college, so that the costs soared as the colleges could add on fees and higher tuition knowing that Uncle Sam would foot the bill. That's not the fault of anyone who wanted an education, but it is a fact that they had to deal with. 

Then, since the 1990s but especially under President Obama, the government made deals on how much former students had to pay that caused their loans to increase again. If you were in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and also Income Based Repayment, you weren't paying enough every month to pay off the debt in the 10 years it would take for you to get to forgiveness. Therefore, your loan balance continued to grow. You could have chosen a more expensive option, but since the government was promising to forgive the debt, why should you take money out of your family's pocket to do so? You were keeping up your end of the deal the government had made with you.

As a result of the first inflation, it now costs almost thirty times as much to go to college as it did in the 1970s. As a result of the second, people who owed X amount now may owe 2X as a consequence of keeping faith with the government. Assuming you relied on loans to go to college as many do X was, thus, thirty times what it used to be, and now is sixty times what it was. 100% of that vast increase in debt is due to government action, the largest part of which no one could escape except by virtue of being born earlier than they were. 

The government is basically altering the deal with people after the fact, mostly in order to punish them for political opinions. Likewise, Biden's ham-handed and failed attempts at student loan forgiveness were mostly to reward people for their political opinions. 

That's not really a legitimate function of government. It's certainly not fairness, no matter how you look at it. It's more like extortion in the one case and bribery in the other; criminal behavior in either case, when it isn't being done by the government. 

In Praise of my Father

Today was my father’s birthday. Because of the damnable algorithms I have been seeing all day ads for products that you should buy to capture your father’s story before it’s gone. 

Well, it’s gone, you bastards. He told me so many stories so many times that I thought I could never forget them, but I have. 

He was the best man I ever met, and far better than I could ever relate. I cannot imagine that he needs my prayers nor yours, but pray for him anyway, as you might pray for me. I definitely need your prayers. 

Not Quite, Doc

You'd think an expert opinion might indeed be forthcoming from a man with these qualifications: 
John D. Bessler is a law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Human Rights Center.
I wanted to agree with him, because as you know I also have 8th Amendment concerns about Trump and especially his stated intention to deliver American citizens to foreign prisons. However, the professor's logic doesn't work.
The Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits this course of action. White House lawyers should read the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Trop v. Dulles. The court barred the government from rendering U.S. citizens stateless, which is similar to what Trump is threatening to do if Americans are imprisoned abroad.

During World War II, Albert Trop, an American citizen, was serving as a U.S. Army private in Morocco. He escaped a stockade and was taken into custody the next day and court-martialed. Convicted of desertion, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor, forfeiture of pay and a dishonorable discharge. When Trop applied in 1952 for a passport, his application was denied on the ground that, under the Nationality Act of 1940, he had lost his U.S. citizenship by virtue of his conviction.

In Trop, the Supreme Court held that denationalization as a punishment is a violation of the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment....The Trop case makes clear that any effort to incarcerate U.S. citizens abroad would be an Eighth Amendment violation. Were that to happen, people would — as a practical matter — be deprived of their fundamental constitutional rights. 

Apparently the professor missed the part of his own story in which Trop was incarcerated in Morocco. That wasn't an issue for the court. They just said that he couldn't be denaturalized. Trump hasn't proposed denaturalizing American citizens, just having them incarcerated outside the territorial USA. Trop was so incarcerated himself, presumably by the US Army but there's no reason the prison couldn't be run by foreign contractors instead of American soldiers or prison guards.

Likewise here: 

The case of Kilmar Abrego García, an immigrant and longtime Maryland resident who the Trump administration admitted in court was sent in error to El Salvador, illustrates the threat. The Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate García’s return, but it has resisted taking action. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III — a Reagan appointee — warned in his Fourth Circuit order on April 17 that “the government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”

The government’s claim that nothing can be done for García now that he’s out of U.S. custody, Wilkinson observed, “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” 

That's surprisingly irrelevant to the case of Trump doing the same thing to American citizens. The reason they have no authority to do anything about Garcia is that he is a Salvadoran citizen, in El Salvador, under the control of his own lawful government. An American citizen abroad continues to enjoy US protection (and, in fairness to Trump, he has been pretty energetic about getting US citizens out of foreign prisons during his tenure). Whereas the US has no lawful power to demand El Salvador do much of anything for its own citizens, the US has a keen interest in protecting American citizens abroad.

I would like to believe that this is forbidden by the Constitution and specifically by the 8th Amendment, but this is not a good set of arguments for that being the case. I think the conditions in CECOT plainly violate the 8th Amendment, and that it shouldn't be legal to send Americans there under any circumstances. I wouldn't want to send them even to a nicer and more humane prison in El Salvador (or anywhere else). 

Saw That Coming

"Tesla, take me somewhere I've never been before."

Car's got jokes.

The Times Are A'Changing

PJM points out that comedian Larry David's mockery of Trump-as-Adolf doesn't line up beautifully with their actual coverage of Adolf back when he was a going concern. 
Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she turned out to be an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, for she appears to have been something of a Hitler fan. In the presence of this man whose name has become today synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed... Oh, the Führer’s eyes! “His eyes,” she told the world, “are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”

Hitler speaks “slowly and solemnly but when he smiles—and he smiled frequently in the course of the interview—and especially when he loses himself and forgets his listener in a flood of speech, it’s easy to see how he sways multitudes.” What’s more, “Herr Hitler has the sensitive hand of the artist.” He tells McCormick coyly: “Ah! Women! Why, women have always been among my stanchest [sic] supporters. They feel that my victory is their victory.”

By coincidence, the history I am currently reading contains a similar off-key note from the NYT. When WWI broke out -- I not II -- the NYT loved the new Espionage Act and its crackdown on free speech, especially speech by recent immigrants with radical views. They liked the draft too:

Powerful New Yorkers viewed [Federal law enforcement agencies] as allies in their effort to turn the war into a moment of broader social reckonings. The New York Times welcomed the arrival of the military draft as "a long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain insolent foreign element in this nation." [Willrich, Anarchy, 190]

On the one hand, I suppose it would be a lot to ask of an institution to remain perfectly consistent over a hundred years of change such as we've experienced. Still, it's interesting to see that they took a very Trumpian position a hundred years ago, or even in Adolf's day. 

On the other hand, they do show perfect consistency in wanting to use Federal agencies to force the rest of the country into line with their views. "Disciplining a certain insolent... element in this nation" is one thing they've been clear supporters of right down the line. 

Whiskey before Breakfast

 

Remarkable what one can do with junk.

The Controversial Monument

I mentioned this the other day, but on the assumption that it will probably be defaced or destroyed, I went and took some photos of it for history's sake. 



The local town is not exactly the right place for such sentiments anymore, although it was rededicated in 1996, which is surprisingly late. These days it's a quite blue town.

A Beatles and Grateful Dead-themed restaurant side-by-side on Main Street.

A typical house with Ukraine flag replacing the American one, anti-Trump/Musk signage, muticultural multicolored sign, and Peace Sign.

Probably the local college kids will just spraypaint it over and over until the county gets tired of having to pay to clean it and arranges for it to be moved. But these days, you never know. The Georgia Guidestones got the dynamite stick, after all. 

Birth Control vs. Women's Suffrage

So, I am reading Michael Willrich's, AMERICAN ANARCHY: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books Perseus, 2023) which I mentioned recently. I am not ready to review it in full yet, but it has indeed been extremely enlightening. Not about the philosophy; the author doesn't really care about the ideas, and makes no attempt to elucidate them. He's a historian, not a philosopher, but he takes his part seriously -- that is, getting the facts straight and presenting them honestly.

One subset of the book that I have just finished was the way in which birth control arguments developed independently from the women's suffrage movement. I was quite surprised by this, as in my lifetime and my parents' as well the two things were presented as part of the same general feminist struggle for additional rights for women. 

That was not true at the beginning, however. Women's suffrage was a comfortably middle-class issue, with some wealthy women also quite engaged in it. Birth control was an anarchist movement, attempting to help poorer workers deal with the burden of large families. Richer women didn't have a problem with obtaining birth control, because their private physicians could prescribe it under existing laws. 

The obscenity laws that forbade even discussing or printing materials about birth control were protected first and foremost by the churches' influence on society. Anarchists wanted to reduce the amount of religious law affecting private conduct. The Suffrage movement, meanwhile, had been joined at the hip from the beginning with the Temperance movement, an intensely religious movement to drive out the demon alcohol from society -- which the anarchists also did not want, many of them being Germans and Italians, whose cultures were built around beer and wine respectively. 

The same class distinctions turned up in Prohibition as in birth control, in fact: even during the period of Prohibition, the 18th Amendment which was ratified just a year before the 19th Amendment, those same private physicians could prescribe you whiskey. The rich were omitted from both the obscenity laws and the anti-drinking laws through the same back door. 

Likewise, Suffrage was successful because it was an anti-immigrant move -- more men than women had migrated in the 19th century and early 20th century (as indeed also today), so giving women the vote was plausible to a lot of older American men (the ones who voted it in) because it diluted the migrant vote by more or less doubling the old American vote. Just as Prohibition was anti-immigrant, so too Suffrage in its way. 

So these things really didn't belong to the same 'feminist' movement at all, not at first. They were oppositional drives by women of quite different classes and mostly different ethnicities. 

What brought them together, you may be amused to learn, was a trial of 'Queen of Anarchists' Emma Goldman for passing contraception pamphlets. At her conviction, one member of the three judge panel (all male, of course) foolishly remarked not only that her pamphlets were obscene, but that he thought that the women who kept asking for 'equal votes' could do a lot more good by encouraging women to have more children instead.

That one remark, widely reported, incensed the wealthy women so much that birth control very quickly became taken up by the Suffrage movement as well. They were successful in getting birth control laws overturned well before getting either of their real desiderata, Prohibition or Suffrage. 

The rest is history. 

UPDATE: I wondered how Wikipedia told the same story, and they emphasize mostly different things. They suggest the movement started in 1914, which actually isn't the case according to Willrich's book, which mentions several predecessors among the anarchist movement dating into the 19th century. It also plays up Margret Sanger, who fled the country to avoid prosecution. Her husband ended up taking the rap for her after some police entrapment around his wife's work. 

Sanger and Goldman are reported by Willrich to have been increasingly antagonistic to each other over these issues. Sanger was one of the upper class women, younger and less famous than Goldman but more well-connected socially. She initially favored birth control over abortion, on the correct grounds that abortion necessarily involves taking life no matter how early it is done; but we all know how her organization turned out in the end. 

Yeah, You Wouldn't Like My Clothes Either

A writer for the NYT and Esquire decides that it's very important to detail how SECDEF Hegseth doesn't dress like one of the elite.

250th Anniversary


As it was Holy Saturday, I thought that should take precedence, but it's a good time to remember these things. I'm looking forward to the 250th celebrations.

Hoplophobia

 A good insight here, but coupled with a lot of irrational fear of weapons.

The good:

[E]very time we build a new tool of state power — every time we cheer on its use against our enemies — we increase the chances it will be turned around and used against us. And each time it happens, people act surprised.

That’s where we are now, again. President Trump is openly using the machinery of the federal government to prosecute political enemies. He wants to “root out” the deep state, deport migrants unilaterally and deploy the military on U.S. soil. He has made no secret of it.

Liberals see this and panic. They’re right to be alarmed — but they’re wrong to treat this as something new. What they’re witnessing isn’t the sudden collapse of American democracy. It is the logical consequence of decades spent building and normalizing a government that increasingly operates with few real limits.

This didn’t start with Trump. Many of the very tools Trump wants to wield were built with bipartisan support. The post-9/11 security state — with its surveillance dragnet, indefinite detention, “black sites” and bloated executive authority — was cheered on by both parties in the name of fighting terror.

President Barack Obama didn’t dismantle that machinery — he streamlined it. He claimed the right to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and expanded domestic counterterrorism. He helped perfect the arsenal that Trump would later inherit.

It was the left, not the right, that normalized censoring disfavored online speech during the pandemic, often using intelligence-linked partners to do so. It was establishment liberals who applauded when the FBI investigated Trump-world operatives — not on the basis of principle, but because they liked the target.

The bad:

There’s a well-known finding in psychology called the “weapons effect.” It describes how the mere presence of a weapon increases the likelihood that it will be used — not just by hardened criminals or soldiers in combat but by anyone, in ordinary settings, even and especially in the home. The deadly object creates a condition of heightened possibility. Violence moves closer to the realm of the likely.

We rarely admit that this applies to government.

As I remarked at AVI's place, this is really a logical deduction rather than a 'finding in psychology.' A weapon that doesn't exist has a zero probability of being used. A weapon that does exist has a non-zero probability. Even if it's very low, logic dictates that the presence of a weapon makes it more likely that one will be used than if one is not present.

However, it wasn't just a logical error. He expands on this later in ways he would have been wiser to leave out.

The ugly:

Cultural neuroscience tells us that environments shape behavior more than we realize. The tools we surround ourselves with — whether in a home or in a bureaucracy — subtly shape what we think is possible. In a household with a loaded firearm, the gun doesn’t just sit there. Its presence hovers. In moments of anger, fear, confusion or desperation, it calls to be used.

"Cultural neuroscience"? Cultures do not have neurons, so he must mean a form of actual neuroscience that likes to talk about culture and its effects. 

This gun-fear is irrational, however. I have a revolver that hangs from my bedpost in a gun belt. It's been there for decades. I check it nightly, clean it regularly, but otherwise it really does just sit there in the holster. It doesn't have a 'presence' to 'hover.' It never 'calls' to me or to anyone else. This kind of talk is senseless. 

Still, the good part is really pretty good. It would have perhaps been better to use Chekhov's Gun as the metaphor, rather than reaching for 'psychology and cultural neuroscience.' In a drama -- which politics is, among other things that it is -- guns that are introduced or even displayed are usually used. I once saw a Roy Rogers film with a rifle that hung on the wall the whole movie without anyone using it for anything; I can remember how strange that seemed in a movie, even though it's exactly what I was just describing as the real fact of my own home.

The state is a kind of weapon, or a set of weapons, which are designed to be used chiefly against us. And that's something to remember when Trump is doing it, too: an excellent reason to stand firm against his police-state impulses is that what goes around comes around. Well, it's been around and it's come around again, but the cycle doesn't stop with him.

Senses of Humor

Out in Montana, some local police came up with a game.
The secret game came to light Thursday, when Bozeman Police Chief Jim Veltkamp held a press conference to reveal details about the game. In his statement to the press, Veltkamp insisted the rights of those stopped by BPD were not violated as part of the game. 

Veltkamp said officers, “Were engaged in a bingo competition where success in the game hinged on whether they engaged in actions listed on the bingo card.”

“It did look like your standard bingo card,” added Veltkamp. “They filled in squares of things they wanted to see happen or have happened in order to check off that box in the bingo card.”

Other categories included “FOOT PURSUIT FOR ARRESTABLE OFFENSE” and “APPLY TQ OR CHEST SEAL,” referring to the use of a tourniquet or sealing wounds to a person’s torso to stop blood loss. 

“One of those was to do a search warrant on a car,” said Veltkamp. “Which in and of itself, that is part of their duties. The concern is if they manipulated anything in order to be able to search a car.”

It took two and half months for the BPD, the Bozeman City Attorney's Office and the Gallatin County Attorney's Office to release information about the game. 

At the press conference held at the Bozeman Public Safety Center, Veltkamp said the game went on for 12 days until someone alerted command staff, who shut down the game.
I get the concern that improper searches or arrests might have been motivated by the desire to check off a bingo block. However, I have to say that the game sounds like it was probably just good fun. I could easily see a Firefighter or EMS version of this (especially since some of the things overlap -- "Apply Successful CPR" or "TQ" for example). 

It would never be permitted, just as the police had to cancel this one as soon as leadership learned about it. The problem is that members of the public do not always share the dark sense of humor that tends to develop in public safety. The hardest I usually ever laugh is often on EMS Continuing Education training night, which our various EMTs and Paramedics have to take regularly and which is helpful for me even though I don't require it. You need a sense of humor to confront injury, sickness, and death on a regular basis. It's good for them to laugh. It helps them help others.

It does hurt people's feelings, though, so you have to keep it behind closed doors. 

James' New Story

As you may also have seen at his blog or AVI's, James has published a new story in a collection called Magic Malfunction. I've just ordered a copy and so haven't read it yet, but I can't imagine that at least his part of it won't be good. 

When to Start Killing

Unlike most respondents to this Substack post, which you've probably all read before now, I don't have a problem with it in principle. America was founded by revolutionary violence, and the logic of the Declaration of Independence is eternal. It is not madness to ask when it might be time to do what Washington himself did. The current administration is in fact destroying a lot of the government, which is what I like about it but is definitely offensive to those for whom that bureaucracy represents a set of desired goods. 

Given the intense feelings on the left against the Trump administration it is probably healthy for them to have a conversation about what their terms are. I don't think it's unreasonable at all for them to discuss where they draw the line. 
And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice. 

That's actually pretty close to what Jefferson wrote.

...that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends [of securing the natural rights of the people], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. 

Some of the terms show a lack of understanding of the present moment: censorship of political opponents justifies a revolution, like what the Biden administration did so emphatically using cut-outs with NGOs, academia, and foreign governments? Fraud in the electoral process, like in 2020? Jailing political adversaries, like the current President who was hit with 34 'felonies' based on paperwork errors or his supporters who protested excessively on that infamous January 6th? Ignores the will of Congress, like the Biden ATF that decided it could just issue 'final rules' that rewrote gun control laws without Congressional input? 

This is typical, however: it is similar to how college-educated conservatives understand the liberal position quite well, since all their educators explained it to them at length, but the liberals often don't have any visibility on right-wing arguments at all. It reminds me especially of the Gay Marriage debate before SCOTUS, in which the position of Justice Kennedy was that it just wasn't possible to have a rational argument opposing gay marriage -- even though Immanuel Kant, that most reason-oriented of philosophers, had constructed one in his Metaphysics of Morals. You don't have to agree with it; I don't agree with it. To say it wasn't possible to construct one is just ignorance. I imagine here too this young man doesn't know what he doesn't know. 

Some of his terms are reasonable, though. I would expect a reaction perhaps to include revolutionary violence if the President were to cancel the elections and attempt to stay in office past his term. I trust that won't happen, but if it did happen I could definitely understand taking up arms. 

In Pace Requiescat, Pope Francis I

I admired his courage; he set an early standard of getting out from behind the bulletproof glass to be among his people. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.

We understand that God is not a wish fulfillment machine, but it is still a little surprising to see a public prayer so emphatically fail. I trust that the Lord knows best. 

All We Know

A tale of Sam Houston:
Young Sam Houston was a lively, high-spirited lad, who caused his widowed mother more trouble than her other eight children combined. Sam had just turned twenty when he was aroused by the War of 1812. When a recruiting demonstration took place in his small Tennessee town, Sam stepped up and took a silver dollar from the drumhead. He was in the regular army by that token, but, since he was under age, he needed permission from his mother.

She handed him a gun, saying, “My son, take this musket and never disgrace it: for remember, I had rather all my sons should fill one grave than that one of them should turn his back to save his life.”

Then she slipped a plain gold ring on his finger. Inside this ring was engraved a single word. That ring was his talisman for fifty years. The one word in contact with his flesh guided him through a lifetime of danger and leadership where others faltered....

It was not until his death that any man knew the command of that talisman he had used for half a century. Then his wife slipped the ring from his lifeless finger and held it to the light so that his children, too, could see the word that had led Samuel Houston steadfastly through trials to victories.

The word was “Honor.”

Easter

Today I give you Dad29’s post, leading with Bach. 

UPDATE: We were talking about the dating schemes; here is an article that is going around on that topic.

UPDATE: The Clan sends.