Some John Hartford for Saturday Night

Well, This Happened

5/12/25 Update: I've decided to add a bit of content advisory to this video. It's Willie Nelson & some fellow named Orville Peck (real name?) singing about gay cowboys. I posted it as a kind of "What the heck?" thing, but maybe it was too much; it does get a bit risqué toward the end, though still well within YouTube guidelines. I'll leave further discussion to the comments and maybe a later post on the topic of entertainment. Also, what the heck?

 

A Friar Becomes the Pope

Congratulations to Pope Leo XIV; may he be guided to wisdom in his new role. I know nothing about the man at all, having never heard of him until yesterday. I asked Dad29's opinion, which was mixed, although he did say that the Pope is reputed to say the Old Rite Mass, which is encouraging. D29 also noted a good article that the new Pope's X account had 're-tweeted,' but who knows if a Cardinal runs his own social media account? I wouldn't, if I could task that to some younger aide. 

What I do know is that the Augustinian Order he comes from is a mendicant order. Its members are friars, a recent innovation of Catholicism's dating only to the late Middle Ages. The Order is not subject to the bishops, one of whom this particular friar eventually became. 

To celebrate the occasion, I will reprint Sir Walter Scott's poem "The Barefooted Friar," from his excellent novel Ivanhoe.

1.

I’ll give thee, good fellow, a twelvemonth or twain,

To search Europe through, from Byzantium to Spain;

But ne’er shall you find, should you search till you tire,

So happy a man as the Barefooted Friar.

2.

Your knight for his lady pricks forth in career,

And is brought home at even-song prick’d through with a spear;

I confess him in haste—for his lady desires

No comfort on earth save the Barefooted Friar’s.

3.

Your monarch?—Pshaw! many a prince has been known

To barter his robes for our cowl and our gown,

But which of us e’er felt the idle desire

To exchange for a crown the grey hood of a Friar!

4.

The Friar has walk’d out, and where’er he has gone,

The land and its fatness is mark’d for his own;

He can roam where he lists, he can stop when he tires,

For every man’s house is the Barefooted Friar’s.

5.

He’s expected at noon, and no wight till he comes

May profane the great chair, or the porridge of plums

For the best of the cheer, and the seat by the fire,

Is the undenied right of the Barefooted Friar.

6.

He’s expected at night, and the pasty’s made hot,

They broach the brown ale, and they fill the black pot,

And the goodwife would wish the goodman in the mire,

Ere he lack’d a soft pillow, the Barefooted Friar.

7.

Long flourish the sandal, the cord, and the cope,

The dread of the devil and trust of the Pope;

For to gather life’s roses, unscathed by the briar,

Is granted alone to the Barefooted Friar.

Caput Apri Defero

I had to dig to the bottom of the big chest freezer for my wife today, and while I was there I remembered I still had the head of the deer I butchered last autumn. I didn’t kill him; he was shot by a poacher and survived with serious injuries long enough to encounter one of our firefighters. The firefighter was law abiding enough to call the game warden for permission to put the stag out of his misery and harvest him. 

He did have me butcher him in return for as much venison as I wanted. I kept the head meaning to clean the skull but never got around to it. 

Well, it’s a pretty afternoon to sit by a campfire. 

Police Corruption Has Costs

In Alabama, a Grand Jury -- famously an institution that will indict a ham sandwich -- just no-billed 58 felony cases over police corruption. The District Attorney is not upset.

Cullman County District Attorney Champ Crocker on Wednesday said the grand jury made the decision in April following an Alabama State Bureau of Investigation audit into the Hanceville Police Department. Crocker said the grand jury was left with no choice to dismiss dozens of cases that the Hanceville Police Department previously investigated due to “illegal actions” taken by former officers with the department.

“The Grand Jury that unanimously indicted the former Hanceville police officers determined that those officers’ cases, and other cases from the Hanceville Police Department, were unprosecutable,” Crocker said.

“The same Grand Jury reconvened in April and voted to no-bill, or dismiss, 58 felony cases due to the illegal actions of those former Hanceville officers. “Most of these cases involved drugs, and only a few were personal crimes with victims. One dismissal is too many, but the Grand Jury had no other recourse.”

One dismissal may be too many for a District Attorney, but it strikes me as a fair price to pay to make sure that the police obey constitutional protections of the rights of citizens. Although some dismissals are more expensive than others: in New York, it may be the most famous murderer of the hour.

Latest motion states patrolwoman searched Luigi’s backpack at McDonald’s without a warrant, then repacked the items and left the restaurant with the backpack, with no body cam footage for the next 11 minutes during her drive to the precinct. Upon arriving at the precinct, she resumed the warrantless search and “found a handgun in the front compartment.”

There's reasonable doubt that this handgun was in the backpack when she took it, given that she moved it out of sight of everyone to another location and then (still without a warrant) re-searched it and "found" a handgun. A jury might reasonably wonder if the handgun wasn't actually found at the site of the murder, and then placed in the backpack later. 

Of course there are other issues at stake in that case, like his alleged confession; a lawyer would have to get that suppressed, though that is frequently done on grounds of coercion. The fact that basic Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections weren't respected by a 'professional modern police service' -- indeed, the primus inter pares of such services is in America -- is a striking issue. I think I would grant the defense motion to suppress all the backpack evidence if I were the judge, including the handgun. You probably wouldn't go as far as no-billing the case, but the prosecution would find itself in a much harder spot. The risk to the public of turning Luigi loose on the world is less, however, than the risk of running a gigantic and well-armed police force that doesn't respect the Constitution. 

Turn it Around

I'm going to give them some leeway on this one because they open with an acknowledgement that Castro was, inter alia, an authoritarian. 

Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.

The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.

How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. 

Ok, fair enough. But before we go any further with this line of inquiry, have you considered what the cost was for opposing the government from, say, Obama through the present administration? The controlled opposition did OK, of course, because they are part of the system of control: John McCain wasn't in any danger because they knew they could count on him to defect to their side when it really counted. Mitt Romney was never. 

What about those who really wanted change? 

UPDATE: To borrow a tack from a recent post, what are the costs of opposing the government in the UK, where thousands are being arrested for expressing 'offensive' opinions? Is the UK an authoritarian state? Is France? Is there any major power left in the West that is not? 

What should be done about this problem?

Originality and Humanity

This is a short bit of thinking-out-loud from the Orthosphere, which isn't wholly wrong; I just want to take a moment to point out that it isn't entirely right, either. The Aristotelian tradition, so important to Aquinas et al, shows us why. Tolkien cements the picture.

How do you tell whether what you are reading was generated by AI, or by real humans (or, for that matter, other real spirits)?

What has been generated by real substantive beings is somehow original, somehow new, and somehow unsuspected in what has already transpired. What has been generated by mechanical procedures cannot be that. It must by comparison seem relatively boring, stupid, or repetitive.

How to tell the difference between creative originality and repetitive stupidity?

In the end, it seems to me that it must come down to something like smell. We don’t smell rot or poison on the basis of a process of ratiocination. Indeed, most of our apprehensions of falsehood or error arise not from some discursive procedure, but rather from a relatively raw intuition; a hunch, a stink, an unease, a horror.

Genuine originality is not what human beings' arts are for. As Aristotle points out, the function of art is to perfect nature. We know what an eye is for by applying reason, which we have by nature; once we know that, we can tell if the eye is performing its function well or badly. I was just at the eye doctor this week, so that he can apply the art of optics to perfecting what nature aims at but did not fully achieve (mostly because I read too much and have thus trained my eyes towards nearsightedness). 

That link just above is to an SEP article on Aristotle's aesthetics, which is in fact where the Orthosphere is going too. 

If something seems off to you, not so much wrongly (we can after all disagree honestly about facts and their reasons) as oddly or weirdly, it probably is.

Or fake or ghey; that, too, is a good indicator. What seems hard to entertain prima facie is … hard to entertain.

This should be the tell, actually, that the 'smell' metaphor works but that the article has pointed it wrongly. It is not the lack of originality that makes AI fail to 'smell' right, but the lack of connection to nature. The AI can't see nature. It can only see human reflections of nature that we have trained it on. It is more disconnected from the true thing that art exists first to understand, and then to perfect. 

I don't think AI had much to do with what he's calling 'fake or ghey'; mostly I think that was bad artists, human enough but also misunderstanding that the perfection of nature is the true teacher and target for art. That is why such art seems fake; it isn't tied to the real thing, which is the natural function and purpose that our reason discovers. 

Or, as Tolkien put it, it falls to us to be subcreators. In the Silmarillion, he proposes a creation story in which the god-figure creates with a song that all of his angel-figures are supposed to join in. Mostly they do, creating a harmonic beauty. One of them, the devil-figure, begins to introduce his own discordant notes. The creator is able to alter the work so that the discord deepens and improves the beauty of the whole; and thus the devil-figure is not able to disrupt the overall beauty of created nature as he had willed to do.

Subcreation happens within the context of the natural, to include natural reason's understanding of it and response to it. Only by accepting this do we properly perform the human arts, which adjust and perfect the natural good. We might be original at times, as perhaps the inventor of optical lenses was, but what is good or great about what we do is not the originality. It is the perfection of the natural good that we ourselves did not create.

The Pan American

I saw one of these the other weekend while I was at the Spring Bash. It's a great looking motorcycle, intended for offroad as well as on-road use. I probably won't go see the movie because I don't like superhero films, and this sounds like the anti-hero version of the Avengers. 

Short Story Review: "By the Book" by James

It's quite a change to go from a dense academic history with vast footnotes to a collection of short stories about magic. Our good friend James has penned a short story as part of a collection called Magic Malfunction. I have only read his story, so I can't attest to the quality of the book as a whole. 

James' story is a pleasing romp through cryptology and magic in Eastern Europe. The main character is bashful and imperfectly insightful, very quickly understanding that he is being recruited by a secret service but never understanding the women he meets. (In fairness, this is a problem many of us have; I think I finally understand my wife after nearly thirty years, but every now and then she still surprises me.)

I won't give the plot away in case any of you wish to read the story, but it revolves around grimoire. 

The etymology of grimoire is unclear. It is most commonly believed that the term grimoire originated from the Old French word grammaire 'grammar', which had initially been used to refer to all books written in Latin. By the 18th century, the term had gained its now common usage in France and had begun to be used to refer purely to books of magic. Owen Davies presumed this was because "many of them continued to circulate in Latin manuscripts".

I own one of these myself, the Icelandic Galdrabok. Don't rush out to buy that one; the spells probably don't actually work. I haven't actually tried them, mind you, but they don't sound plausible to me having read through it. I'm not sure I would want the powers it describes if they did work; winning a woman's heart, for example, should be done honestly or not at all. 

Bending lightning, which is a power discussed in James' story, that might be fun. So too is the tale, which you may enjoy if you choose.