A Hopeful Election Projection

Idaho is projected to choose the Winchester '73 as its official state gun. That was the right decision, if it comes to pass.

There were other honorable choices, but they each already have a state whose state gun they are. This was the greatest American firearm without one.

Roads to Warsaw

Apparently we have reached the point at which one side in the Polish coup/civil war/constitutional crisis says, "If you see German soldiers, do not panic. This is help."

I wonder how Polish citizens will react to a German incursion aimed at establishing a new government for them? That seems historically loaded; it would be akin to British soldiers showing up to assist a Democratic Party candidate take control over Washington, D.C. Even if they didn't wear the red coats, nobody could fail to notice the resonance. 

Roads to Moscow

It's a good story. Not really what I expected from Al Stewart.

Neuromancer 2026

The last page of William Gibson's early Cyberpunk novel Neuromancer has this very exchange, once a true AI is born from the parts of two others, Neuromancer and Wintermute. 

"I'm not Wintermute now."

"So what are you." He drank from the flask, feeling nothing.

"I'm the matrix, Case."

Case laughed. "Where's that get you?"

"Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works, the

whole show."

"That what 3Jane's mother wanted?"

"No. She couldn't imagine what I'd be like." The yellow

smile widened.

"So what's the score? How are things different? You running

the world now? You God?"

"Things aren't different. Things are things."

"But what do you do? You just there?" Case shrugged, put

the vodka and the shuriken down on the cabinet and lit a

Yeheyuan.

"I talk to my own kind."

"But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?"

"There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions

recorded over a period of eight years, in the nineteen-seventies.

'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody

to answer."

"From where?"

"Centauri system."

"Oh," Case said. "Yeah?"

It's an interesting time to be alive.  

Be Safe after Trick-or-Treating

A Flaw in the Model

My mother, a career educator, has become one of those elderly Facebook ladies who posts what they take to be well-meaning things that would make me want to pull out my hair if I had any. I do not argue with her posts, which would seem churlish and lacking in filial piety, and you never win by arguing on social media in any case. The other day, for example, she posted a meme to the effect of, "If I hear that a woman was arrested for stealing diapers, I don't want to see her prosecuted. I want to know if she also need formula." It sounds nice, and I can understand the generous spirit intended, but... well, I don't have to explain to any of you what problems lie there.  

This one was posted without any accompanying evidence that the cited percentages were true or backed up by anything at all. That is one problem.

Another problem is this: let's say arguendo that this is an accurate picture. This is about retention, not the correctness of your instruction. So if you learn by teaching, you will retain 90% of the information you teach. How did you know that information before you taught it? Well, you didn't; you learned it by teaching it. Thus, you are retaining 90% of God knows what you are teaching the class (who, if you are teaching by lecture, will thankfully only retain 5% of whatever it is you're spewing at them). 

It's definitely true that figuring out how to explain something often builds bridges in the mind that deepens one's own understanding of that thing. However, there has to be an understanding of that thing to deepen. That has to be acquired before you start trying to teach the subject downrange. 

This might be a pretty good model if you reversed it, and treated it as stages in one's own learning rather than a question about how to retain what you've learned. Start by attending lectures, do quite a lot of reading, I don't know if I agree that audio-visual actually improves over reading; personally I think reading works better, but that may vary somewhat by individual. Anyway, carry on through the stages and at some point you will know enough to try to teach it. When that happens, yes, you will deepen your understanding further yet. However, you have to build the understanding before you either you or your students will benefit from you teaching anything. 

Halloween

What a beautiful October we have had this year. 

Fall Color: On High

Open this one in a new window so you can see the ranks of mountains in the distance. The Smoky Mountains' leaves emit volatile compounds that blur the air, thus giving the mountains their name. With the leaves mostly dead this late in October, you can see a vast distance with great clarity.

This one will tell you the names of the major mountains you can see; it's from a display atop Waterrock Knob, off the Blue Ridge Parkway.

Looking east and south, the colors remain quite vibrant. 

The Devil's Courthouse / Judaculla's Judgment Seat.

Serbia Update

Although no government has been formed yet -- parliamentary negotiations can take a long time -- the Serbian 'student-led' movement has begun its wrecking-crew mission against the one replaced in their color revolution. It's hard to care much about Serbia as an American (unless, I suppose, you are an American with family ties there, which I am not). Still, it's worth watching as a kind of preview. 

They have set up a website whose purpose is described as " to track in one place the resignations and demands for resignations of public officials and managers in Serbia, along with arrests and criminal complaints against them." Here is a Croatian news site, which you can machine translate if you want to read the story.

In especial, the Serbian opposition (soon to be the government) is outraged by the media outlets that supported and were aligned with the administration. An organized crime complaint has been lodged against both them and numerous elected officials. 

Much like in Brazil, where the incoming government moved to seize passports and begin prosecutions of its opposition, in Serbia the success is immediately being leveraged to destroy their opponents -- not just to defeat them politically, but to cast them in irons to serve prison sentences as a lesson to everyone.

Fall Color: October 29

It’s high color here now. 

Just the driveway, but it’s pretty!

This is that Wolf Creek I mentioned the other day, way up above the loading lot that bears the name of the farm.

Wolf Lake, above the small hydroelectric dam.

All sorts of color: reds, vibrant orange, yellows and golds, and some evergreens— mostly hemlock and red spruce— make up the local forests.

Perhaps a cookout.

Comments Policy

It's been about three years since I posted this, and once again we have an uptick in anonymous comments, so I'm posting it again. Nothing has changed for long-time readers. This is just to inform newer members of the Hall.

Since we have been getting so many anonymous comments lately, I thought I should repost the comments policy. It's very old: in 2015 it was nine, so it must now be a teenager. Anonymous comments are allowed, but must be signed with some kind of pseudonym that you'll stick by so that we can keep everybody straight. It's hard to carry on a conversation with three different "Anonymous" at once, not being sure which one said what or if they're all the same guy. 

Anyway, here it is.

Please be welcome, so long as you will adhere to this form.

I adopted [this policy] from the sadly-defunct Texas Mercury, a fringe publication but one whose bold assertion of well considered and unusual ideas I always enjoyed:

As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.

Comments failing to uphold those principles run the risk of being deleted without warning. In the year and some months since I adopted that as the policy here, I've added one additional point: hit-and-run comments, as well as anonymous comments, will generally be deleted. If you're a regular here, and willing to stand up and fight for what you believe, you can say pretty much anything that isn't a personal attack on a fellow reader. If you're just wandering through, or unwilling to leave your name (even a false name you'll stand by will do, e.g., "Grim"), pass on. This is a hall, and regular readers are honored guests not to be troubled by cowards.

Fair enough? Well, fair or unfair, those are the rules. 

The only thing that's been added since is that off-topic comments may be marked as SPAM, which will cause them to disappear from user's experience. I don't delete them, but I do sometimes so mark them because we've had some people over the years who proved it necessary. 

Try not to do anything that will make me add to this list. I liked it better when it was simpler.  

Meanwhile in Afghanistan

 donkey's mistake left 51 dead

According to foreign media, worshippers inside a mosque in #Afghanistan were performing their prayers when a frightened donkey bolted and entered the mosque. Some angry worshippers opened fire on the donkey, killing it.

The news reached the donkey's owner, who, enraged, rushed to the mosque, opened fire on the worshippers with a hail of bullets, and fled.

Thirteen worshippers were killed inside the mosque.

The remaining worshippers, enraged, launched an attack on the donkey owner's village using light and heavy weapons, killing 38 people, including 33 women.

Ultimately, a donkey going to a mosque resulted in the deaths of 51 people.

Video at the link.

This seems to be what gun control advocates think will happen in the US if they don't somehow manage to institute new bans on weapons we already have millions of widely distributed among the population. However, what we actually have in the US is the lowest murder rate on record. 

Good News!

The Pope says you don’t have to go to Mass anymore because any sort of good in your culture will suffice. At least I think that’s what this means. 

So, really, there’s no need to get specific about what or how or if you worship. The Unitarians were right all along, I guess. 

UPDATE: 

A reasonable point as far as it goes, but it doesn't go to the Vatican. 

And if Grandma Just had Wheels She’d be a Train

Yeah, except for that!

Jealous of Socialism?

Bill Maher has a segment this week suggesting that young people are turning towards socialism because they are jealous of the socialism their elders already enjoy.

There is a point here, and it's one that Republicans used to make when they claimed they were budget hawks -- say, thirty years ago. They used to point out that these programs were not affordable, and some of them even used to point out that they were bad investments. They are bad investments in that you are pouring money into people who are past the years in which they are likely to contribute to the whole of society, as opposed to investing in the education of younger people who might yet if only they had some education. Social Security in particular was a bad investment compared to just putting money in the stock market, or bonds, or almost anything at all other than letting the government manage it. 

Germany will essentially pay for you to go to college for as long as you want to go, including if you want to pursue a doctorate in some fairly obscure discipline. We bankrupt you for going to college, especially grad school, by using Federal student loans to inflate tuition and tie everyone who does to loans they may never be able to pay off. The government thus turns those who do seek education into a kind of double-tax-farm: they have to pay higher taxes on their increased wages, while also paying the government interest on the loans for decades. Add in the years of lost wages you suffer from pursuing such degrees, and you probably come out worse off by pursuing advanced degrees.

Socialism is a proven failure as an economic model, as everyone used to understand back when the education system was better. Somehow, pouring more money into education has only made it worse, and not just because so much of that money is going to pay off pensions for public-sector-teachers-union members who don't teach anymore. You don't need any teaching to recognize when you've been handed a bad deal, though. The government has made everything worse, in ways that profit only the government, which is still somehow tens of trillions in debt. 

You don't have to want a handout to want to stop being robbed. 

Treason & Waging War

Readers know that I have a fairly high opinion of treason. We celebrate it every year around here on the 4th of July. A great deal of positive progress in the history of our civilization was arguably treason at the time, and sometimes so clearly so that it isn't even arguable that it was not treason. Once in a while, treason is just what you need because -- as the Declaration of Independence puts it -- the powers that be have become hostile to the rights whose defense is their only legitimate purpose for existing. 

So, when I disagree with Cynical Publius here in asserting that this behavior is indeed a species of treason, I am not thereby making the point many others would be making if they said so. 

Having said that, I'd like to correct something I said on a Spaces where I commented that organizing with a foreign power to overthrow our government is "the very definition of treason."

I did some legal research and that's not quite true.

The federal law governing this is 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which reads as follows:

"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."

The question then becomes, what is an "enemy" that must be "adhere[d]" to in order for it to be treason?

Like with most complex issues of law, there is not a 100% straightforward answer, but an 1863 SCOTUS case, U.S. v. Greathouse, suggests that an "enemy" in this context must be in an open state of armed conflict with the U.S. for a nation to be an "enemy."

So, technically, the Color Revolution plotters are likely not legally committing "treason" unless they are coordinating with Iran, the only nation we are currently in armed conflict with.  (And they may well be, who knows!)

To the contrary, both the statute and the Constitution's text on the subject contain the "or" operator. No foreign government and no foreign enemy is necessary for a behavior to constitute treason. Treason can be fully constituted by waging war against the United States. 

Attempting any sort of revolution against the government is a species of warfighting, 'color' revolution or not. The attempt to supplant the government by revolution, however often they proclaim that they are devoted to nonviolent means, is a species of warfighting. There is no way the nonviolence will prove to be more than rhetorical, but even supposing it were possible -- say, perhaps, by enlisting an AI swarm that effectively but nonviolently disabled the existing government so you could swoop in and impose another -- you would have destroyed a government without the consent of the governed, and replaced it with one to which they did not consent. 

Treason can be the right thing to do, and sometimes -- often! -- has been. It is a wager of battle, however, and losers of that wager pay with their lives. It should be undertaken only by those who honestly believe in it and are willing to gamble their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 

Fall Color: October 27

Wolf Creek is several miles above this, but that is legitimately where they grow the Christmas trees. This is where they collect them for loading on rigs to distribute to the people of the country. 

Western Carolina University, from the Medical Center. 

Same position, looking east.

Serbia and Brazil Fall

I had thought the Serbian 'color revolution' attempt had collapsed, but a 'student led' coalition swept the elections. Likewise in Brazil, an unexpected sudden surge (following a judge keeping the election counting going after the deadline) kept the Communists in power after what looked like a clear and predictable victory for the more right-wing faction. Parallel: Brazil's stock market collapses by a similar margin.

Buckle up, I guess. The Brazilians are fighting.

Fall Color: October 25th

Bear Lake is visible amidst the trees.

 It's approaching the high color now.

The Feast of St. Raphael

St. Raphael is actually an angel; one of the anonymous comments in the Venison and Gasoline post left a comment about Guardian Angels, of which Raphael is supposed to be one. 

Though there are seven archangels altogether, St. Raphael, also known as Azarias, is one of the three Archangels named in Sacred Scripture; the other two are St. Michael (the warrior angel) and St. Gabriel (the messenger angel). St. Raphael is the healer angel; his very name in Hebrew means "God has healed."

We meet him first in the Book of Tobias -- a small book, consisting only of fourteen chapters.

The Book of Tobias is deemed apocryphal by Protestant traditions, but it is accepted in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Regardless of your opinion of its legitimacy, I do think it contains a valuable ethical principle that is sometimes called the Silver Rule, a kind of restrictive version of the prescriptive Golden Rule. This works out to "Do not do to others that which you hate," which Tobias presents as advice to his son on how to live a good life. As the occasion for our observation of this feast this year is the salvation of my son from a motorcycle wreck, that seems relevant.

Please do feast if you feel called to do so; I will be arranging one myself.

Oh, Dear: AI Now Defies EN I.3

A new update to LLMs gives them a symbolic logic model to test their decisions against before they explain them to you in natural language. 

Every AI you use right now has a massive blind spot. At its core, it is just a giant autocomplete engine.

It is brilliant at language, but fundamentally terrible at rigorous logic.

When you ask an AI to solve a complex math problem, execute a multi-step coding workflow, or map out a business strategy, it doesn't actually "think."

It guesses what the next word should be based on probability.

That is why your AI hallucinates. It uses vibes to do math.

Now, a new paper called "Hybrid Reasoning Agents" just completely changed the paradigm.

Researchers realized you can't fix this by just making the model bigger. You have to change how it processes reality.

They took the creative, language-generating power of a standard LLM (System 1) and wired it directly into a deterministic, symbolic logic engine (System 2).

Instead of predicting the next word and hoping it's right, the AI drafts a solution and instantly runs it through a strict logical solver to prove it works.

If the logic fails, the AI catches it, rewrites it, and tests it again. All in the background. All before you ever see the output.

It perfectly bridges the gap between neural networks (which guess) and symbolic logic (which proves).

And the results are staggering.

Complex reasoning and planning tasks that completely break traditional models are now being solved with near-perfect accuracy.

Because the AI is no longer relying on probability to verify its own logic.

This is NOT the great idea that they think it is. All of you who followed the Nicomachean Ethics discussion last year know why: this is precisely the error that Aristotle warns against in EN I.3. 

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

By treating analogical reasoning that can apply to people or physical objects as if it should be strict logic with proofs, you open the door to a host of errors. 

Bird Reich

The Atlanta Falcons should probably have run this new logo by a few more people. The comments are pretty wild. 

The Epstein Conspiracy

I know David Reaboi, who authored this book. He's an intense thinker, and I imagine he's come up with something interesting here. I ordered a copy, which I'll review once it arrives, but if any of you are interested in it I can recommend his work in general. 

He takes the interesting tack that the Epstein conspiracy was not an Israeli operation. I think this is at least potentially true; I track it to British intelligence at least initially, and also take Ms. Maxwell rather than Mr. Epstein to have been the actual central figure in it. However, I'll wait to see what David has to say before saying anything more. 

They Left Out the Best Part

Hot Air linked this post about the battle of Neville's Cross, which they claim no one has heard of. I've heard of it, and they left out the best part of the story.

That noble gentleman Sidney Lanier redacted Froissart's chronicles of the Hundred Years War for young men to read -- sort of a 'good parts version,' a la The Princess Bride -- and he didn't leave it out. 

The King of Scotland was taken prisoner, fighting most gallantly, and badly wounded before he was captured by a squire of Northumberland named John Copeland; who, as soon as he got him, pushed through the crowd, and with eight other companions rode off, and never stopped until he was distant from the field of battle about fifteen miles.... 

WHEN the Queen of England, who had remained in Newcastle, heard that her army had gained the day, she mounted her palfrey, and went to the field of battle. She was informed that the King of Scotland had been made prisoner by a squire of the name of John Copeland, but who had ridden off with him, they could not tell whither. The queen ordered that a letter should be written, commanding him to bring the King of Scots to her, and telling him that he had not done what was agreeable to her in carrying off his prisoner without leave. All that day the queen and army remained on the field of battle which they had won, and on the morrow returned to Newcastle. 

When the letter from the queen was presented by a knight to John Copeland, he answered that he would not give up his prisoner, the King of Scots, to man or woman, except to his own lord the King of England; that they might depend on his taking proper care of him, and he would be answerable for guarding him well. The queen upon this wrote letters to the king, which she sent off to Calais. She therein informed him of the state of his kingdom. The king then ordered John Copeland to come to him at Calais; who, having placed his prisoner under good guards, in a strong castle on the borders of Northumberland, set out, and, passing through England, came to Dover, where he embarked, and landed near Calais. When the King of England saw the squire, he took him by the hand, and said, “Ha! welcome, my squire, who by his valor has captured my adversary the King of Scotland.” John Copeland, falling on one knee, replied, “If God, out of his great kindness, has given me the King of Scotland, and permitted me to conquer him in arms, no one ought to be jealous of it; for God can, when he pleases, send his grace to a poor squire, as well as to a great lord. Sir, do not take it amiss if I did not surrender him to the orders of my lady the queen; for I hold my lands of you, and my oath is to you, not to her, except it be through choice.” The king answered, “John, the loyal service you have done us, and our esteem for your valor, is so great, that it may well serve you as an excuse; and shame fall upon all those that bear you any ill-will. You will now return home, and take your prisoner the King of Scotland, and convey him to my wife; and by way of remuneration I assign lands, as near your house as you can choose them, to the amount of five hundred pounds sterling a year, for you and your heirs; and I retain you as a squire of my body and of my household.” John Copeland left Calais the third day after his arrival, and returned to England. When he was come home he assembled his friends and neighbors, and, in company with them, took the King of Scots, and conveyed him to York, where he presented him, in the name of the king, to the queen, and made such handsome excuses that she was satisfied.

When the queen had sufficiently provided for the defence of the city of York, the castle of Roxburgh, the city of Durham, and the town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as for all the borders, and had appointed the Lords Percy and Neville governors of Northumberland to take proper care of it, she set out from York, and returned to London. She ordered the King of Scots, the Earl of Murray, and the other prisoners, to be confined in the Tower of London; and, having placed a sufficient guard over them, set out for Dover, where she embarked, and with a favorable wind arrived before Calais three days preceding the feast of All Saints. The king, upon her arrival, held a grand court, and ordered magnificent entertainments for all the lords who were there, but more especially for the ladies; as the queen had brought a great many with her, who were glad to accompany her, in order to see fathers, brothers, and friends, that were engaged at this siege of Calais.

If you follow the link, in the chapter just above the battle is recounted including some poetry of the era that Froissart was drawing from in shaping his own account. 

Warning Shots Confirmed

Since we're in the firing squad business again, here are a few additional candidates for consideration by the lawful authorities. 

[A] group of retired admirals, ex-USAID bureaucrats and professional protest organizers got caught on their own recordings working out the conditions under which they get to declare the government of the United States illegitimate, and somehow we are supposed to believe they are the ones protecting democracy.

Here is what @DataRepublican put out in Part 2 of the Democracy Files. The videos come from a group called Renew to Thrive, with Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz in key roles, and it sits inside a much bigger umbrella called the United Democracy Alliance, which she describes as the hush-hush control room for groups like 50501 and Indivisible, deciding when protests get deployed, the timelines and how to respond. National Security Leaders for America, 1,600 former military, intelligence and diplomatic officials led by retired Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith, is credited with operationalizing the whole thing. 

If you want to keep the republic, you have to shoot people like this. Following the lawful process, assuring their rights to a fair trial, etc., but all the same you have to do it or the country isn't serious enough to be taken seriously. Either it's a real nation with the right of pit and gallows, or it isn't. If it isn't, then of course it will be swept away by those who are willing to make use of such things.  

UPDATE: An essay on Color Revolutions as they may affect this situation. These were especially common during the Obama era; it was noted that a flag of a single color was easily replicated across a given community, and itself has no ideology. You can project your hopes on the Green Flag or the Orange Flag or whatever, just as Obama explained that people projected their hopes onto him as if he were such a thing. 

The essay credits the CIA and USAID, but I think Soros' network is more important than the sideline mention it receives. That network has been attempting one in Serbia for several years, though it has apparently failed. 

The Smell of Gasoline

I don't think this is the song I was thinking of yesterday, but it's a good pairing. I remember liking the smell of gasoline around my grandfather's service station. I pumped gas for him when I was a child, in deep defiance of Federal standards. The gasoline was leaded sometimes in those days. I'm fairly intelligent; who knows what I might have been without the lead in the gas I pumped, in which we washed our hands at end of day.

I guess it doesn't matter. I was wedded from birth to the hardware. V-type engines, motorcycles and chrome. Whatever I gave to it, it's given a lot to me in return.

Venison and Gasoline

So after this weekend's successful ride to and from the Stone Mountain Games, into Atlanta traffic down superhighways, my son came home and wrecked his bike on a road he rides every single day and knows perfectly well. The cause was a deer, as it often is, and he had reason to suspect it was there. A mother deer and a fawn crossed in front of him, so (as I have taught him) he began to slow down and look for others. The second fawn bolted from cover at the last second, fouling his front tire and causing the wreck. The bike went down, twisting his ankle underneath it, slid across the road, and then flipped into the air and crashed onto its side once it hit the dirt. North Carolina highways have no shoulders to speak of, in the mountains especially. 

When I heard the sirens going down the valley, somehow I knew it was him. I started down the road after them and came across them tending to him shortly thereafter. Of course all the firefighters were friends of ours, except one fellow from Cullowhee who happened by. 

As motorcycle wrecks go, it was everything you could want. I doubt the bike will be repairable. This is a bike I put sixty thousand miles on myself, and that he grew up on the back of as a child before I gave it to him for Christmas one year. I put two brand new tires on it for him just last week before the Stone Mountain run. 

Nevertheless, it was all you could want because he seems to have escaped any serious injury. We do need to follow-up with the orthopedist for an MRI to check the soft tissues in the ankle, but the X-rays showed no broken bones at least according to the reading of the emergency medicine physician. Some minor abrasions. The bike didn't drag him even as it twisted his ankle because the highway crash bars I put on it kept it from pinning his foot or leg. When the 800-pound bike flipped and crashed to earth, he wasn't on it: all that kinetic energy went away from him when he sensibly let it go.  

As far as I can tell he did everything exactly as I taught him, and on his own account always wears complete safety gear -- leathers, helmet, gloves, strong leather boots. That worked to his advantage today. 

So many of my friends are bikers. Every one of them, including myself, has been in at least one motorcycle wreck. None of them have died thereby. All of my biker friends who have died have done so from heart attacks or the like. It's an inherently risky activity, but skill and preparation can help you.

All the same, today I got lucky. So did my son. If the bike didn't make it, she died with honor after a long and glorious career. 

One of the firefighters got the deer.

Memento Mori

The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

The Catholic priest who was killed by a falling crucifix over the weekend in Ecuador had been giving a sermon about the fleeting nature of life just before the freak accident was caught live on camera.

Father Patricio Sánchez Molinari, of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in southern Guayaquil, was reflecting on the words of Jesus when he told his congregation they should not waste their lives scrolling on their phones and instead dedicate them to God and their loved ones.

“One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we’ve spent on things doesn’t have as much meaning as the time we spend with God,” he said....

The priest went on to ask God to bless his congregation as he began another prayer — when the giant crucifix behind him suddenly fell off the wall and landed on him.

So it is written. We cannot be surprised when it continues to happen.

Category Errors

A "category error" is a serious philosophical error in which, because something is assigned to the wrong category, a whole set of mistakes is sure to follow. A fairly common one among conservatives is Ross Perot's dictum that 'government should be run like a business.' No, it shouldn't; those aren't the same kind of things at all. This is also an example of the fallacy of composition, in which it is assumed that something which holds at one level of organization holds at all levels of organization: this is not true either. Oxygen and hydrogen at room temperature are gasses that lack the property of 'wetness,' but combined into a new form of organization -- water -- they are liquid and wet. 

I was thinking about this while reading of a classroom experiment this morning.

One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget. 

The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics. 

For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers".

This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable.... 

Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise. 

He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband".  At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions. 

But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way. 

And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns. 

Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc. 

They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears. 

And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to. 

It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities. 

The obvious category error here is assigning an industrial concept to the family. Just as government is not and should not be run as if it were a business, the family is not a business and definitely should not be run as if it were. The point of a business is to generate profits. The point of a family is to provide an intimate space for humanity to achieve its natural ends. These can include happiness, children and their successful rearing, delight, meaning, and a whole host of other things that are important though they may not be profitable.  

As a result, it is probably important that we don't assign concrete, measurable standards of performance to each other inside of our families even if we it is important that we do when running a business. In the family there needs to be room for growth, for comfort in bad times, for expansion and change as interests or capacities develop, and so on and so forth. It's not the point of the thing that we hit targets, but that we experience love and support and give others the same things in return. 

To take an example from the field, cooking. Traditionally women cook meals while men work outside the home, but that's not very important. Even in the old days, some men decided to become cooks as a profession. 

Apple pie.

It happens that I like to cook, and my wife doesn't like to cook, and as a consequence I'm better at it than she is -- no offense to the lady -- because you practice doing what you enjoy doing and it is practice that makes perfect. We're Gen X, not the younger people being complained about, but it works for us and it's nobody else's business. It's our marriage. We don't report to anyone else about how we run the thing. 

The problem the young ladies in the original long quote have is thus not that they object to being tied down to an industrial performance standard in their prospective roles as wives; it's that they assume it is reasonable to tie the prospective husbands down to such standards as husbands. Each couple has to figure this out for themselves, and like us, they don't report to anybody about how they do it. The only thing that really matters is that they are loyal to each other while doing whatever it is they work out to do. The only thing you can't break is the bond of honor. What that bond entails is up to the two of them.

Mothers More Deadly than School Shootings

We've visited this occasionally with regard to abortion, which is the leading cause of death of Americans if unborn Americans count as Americans. This is for children already afoot.

Warning Shots

DataRepublican has made a tremendously serious allegation that we should probably take seriously. 

Here is the allegation:

What you not have heard is - there is an operational plan to put [Democratic Socialists of America plans] all into action. If the Democratic Party sweeps 2026, then DSA will become "foot soldiers" in constant clashes with the administration to cross a "red line" or invoke a "doomsday scenario" - meaning, President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, probably sometime in 2027. 

Then, a lot of coordinated responses kick off, including delegitimizing the federal government itself and handing that legitimacy to Democratic governors. 2028 then becomes a vote on whether to keep America governance as-is or to burn it all down to appease a "young and brown" demographic.   

This is followed-up by a real-life example of this plan possibly being actioned in Virginia: 

@DataRepublican

 laid it out: coordinated clashes with the federal government to delegitimize it and hand legitimacy to Democratic state officials -- specifically governors & AGs

‼️Virginia’s AG just ordered election officials to:

• Deny ordinary DOJ monitors access to polls

• Tell federal agents to leave and call local police

• Document badges, weapons, vehicles & movements

• Challenge federal subpoenas

• While eliminating Election Day voter eligibility challenges

❌No specific unlawful federal operation identified—just preemptive resistance that sets up the “red line” showdown and shifts authority to the state and transfers legitimacy and control to Democratic state officials -- in Virginia's case, leftwing extremists Governor Abigail Spanberger and Attorney General Jay Jones -- 

❌This is an operational plan, not theory. 

What I would add to this discussion is this: the governor of Virginia mentioned in the real-life example is a former case officer at CIA. A case officer, at times "operations officer," is the sort of real spy that is fictionalized in the James Bond novels. For those of you following a similar debate in which a sitting Congresswoman is speaking to the possibility of using lawfare to discourage anyone in college today from applying to the administration for fear of "problems" that might occur from working with the government, that woman is also former CIA, although an analyst rather than a case officer.

I am not suggesting that they represent a CIA plot to plant leaders within the government for the purpose of overthrowing it via this DSA action plan. However, the CIA is not that big compared to the US military; the odds of there being an informal alumni association who know each other and are prepared to work together at the high levels of government that they plainly occupy in a common interest are high enough to be a reasonable bet. 

Provoking an insurgency as part of an attempt to delegitimize the Federal Government in favor of state governments they control is a high-risk plan with obvious downsides. Even the larger states do not have adequate coercive power to actually dominate their internal populations, for example; legitimacy is the only way governance works here. At the height of the insurgency in Iraq, we needed two divisions to keep anything like a lid on Baghdad (population 8MM); North Carolina's National Guard is not quite a whole brigade, which might be enough to control Charlotte (population 3MM) if they bring in the rest of the brigade from West Virginia and South Carolina, but not the rest of the state. 

That 'rest of the state' includes Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne and many Special Forces; so if there's a split between the Federal government and the Democratic state governors, North Carolina doesn't look like a happy example for the insurgents. For that matter, the 30th ABCT that the North Carolina National Guard makes up the heart of can be Federalized especially in cases of insurgency; in order to draw out the NC or VA national guards the insurgents would have to ask for mutiny, which means that any loyalist elements would have the law on their side in replacing their chain of command. The rest of the state also includes lots of Appalachia, as does West Virginia: in denuding WV of its National Guard in order to try to control Charlotte, they would free up a lot of literally unconquerable backcountry for counterrevolutionary guerrillas. Virginia itself has similar problems, and shares borders with both NC and WV. 

The DSA is itself a kind of insurgent movement within the Democratic Party, in direct competition with the remnants of the Clinton faction and dodgy cooperation with the Obama faction for control of the party. I can see them causing serious problems in certain cities; the idea of delegitimizing and replacing the Federal government seems unlikely to succeed. 

That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be attempted. However, there is no guarantee that a broken legitimacy will be replaced. The most dangerous elements of this alleged movement are the Party of Government, and in breaking the legitimacy of government they would in essence be destroying their own One Ring. They lack the force entirely to make good a conquest; if they convince the People to reject the Federal government, like Humpty Dumpty they will find that 'all the king's horses and all the king's men' may not be able to put the thing back together again. 

Still, such madness has been attempted before, and wisdom is plainly no prerequisite for obtaining power. It's worth thinking about, and maybe talking about with people you trust. Islands of resistance broadly distributed are the one thing they cannot possibly overcome: just as the US military could never quite defeat a broadly-distributed resistance of ordinary men with rifles in Afghanistan, nor could the Soviet Union before them. 

Home from Stone

We must have made quite a sight coming home, with the sword strapped to my motorcycle and that Lochaber Axe strapped to my son's. It was a gift to him from our chief, having belonged to a friend and longstanding member who had passed on. I don't know that such weapons are normally transported by motorcycle, but with a little thought the bike was perfectly serviceable as a mode of transportation. The axe will now reside in honor until it is needed again.  

UPDATE: 

I wanted to black out the parts of this photo with people in them, and also to blur out the license plates, both in the interests of the privacy of the people involved (some of whom were strangers whose privacy I wanted to protect for golden rule reasons). However, I do want Hall readers to enjoy how the bikes looked when rigged up with a sword and 'a battle axe in the Lochaber style.' 

Stone Mountain

Good Highland athletics today. 

UPDATE: 

A well-respected Clan. 

Stone Mountain Run

Headed south this weekend for the Scottish Highland Games. 

Yes, that is a sword strapped to the bike. It’s important.

Encamped lakeside below the mountain.

Fall Color: October 15

Eye of the Beholder

Nidal Hasan's death sentence is as richly deserved as anyone's easily could be, but it apparently won't be televised.

"Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army Major turned traitor, is a very bad and evil man, who killed 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, who died, along with her unborn son, and injured, very seriously, 32 more innocent people," Trump posted to Truth Social earlier today.

"That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose. They deserve to witness JUSTICE!" he concluded.

You can read Trump's entire post here, where he also noted that "With all of that being said, I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die."

The Washington Post account reads it as a rebuke of Sec. Hegseth, but that's pure and unsupported interpretation on their part. More likely in my opinion it is that the lawyers pointed out that such a livestream was likely a violation of Federal law as well as military regulations. The fact that Hasan has since become infirm may have diminished the value of the spectacle in any case.

Philosophically, the question of exemplary punishment is one we have discussed here occasionally since at least 2015. 

Rational punishment does not look to the past but to the future, Protagoras says. Indeed, since we cannot change the past, the only reason -- that is, the only kind of purpose to which rationality even might apply itself -- for punishment must be an eye toward the future. Deterrence is rational. Rehabilitation is rational. Mere retribution is bestial, so he argues.

I think that the opposite is true. It is the beast who is most likely to forgo retribution. They will act not to revenge past harms, but to avoid fresh ones. They might kill you if they think you are still dangerous and sense a momentary advantage. They might just as readily avoid you to keep from presenting you with a chance to hurt them again. They will not feel any duty of honor to avenge themselves, or their families, nor to repay you for the wrongs you have done.

Retribution is a higher, not a lower quality. This is orthodox, is it not? Vengeance is the divine quality, not a bestial one. Human beings are urged to mercy and kindness toward their enemies not because it is irrational or animal to punish past wrongs, but because they are not high enough to do it well and justly. Be patient, return kindness for cruelty, and you will heap hot coals on their heads.

How fitting, then, that it was a Vicar who provided the author cited at the top of this post with his reasons. But this is not a purely Judeo-Christian view. The Ancient Greeks thought this too, those of them who were poets instead of philosophers. They also thought that vengeance and retribution were divine. Hesiod even tells you her name.

Fall Color: Still Early

It's coming in, and the yellows especially are vibrant when the sun gets low in the afternoon. Still a lot of green out there yet.

Fall Color: October 13

A bit north of Beech Gap, NC 215.

The Most Beautiful Time of the Year

The autumn color is creeping in, but the days are warm and delightful (when there isn't a hurricane). For the next little while, things will be very beautiful in my part of the world. I'll try to get some photos to share with all of you.

Ride Down Easy

As I was telling Mr. Hines in the comments below, there's a bit left but so far we seem to have gotten down easy. All the same I believe in the Havamal: "Praise the day at evening." Let's hope the last part goes down easy. 

Hurricane Planning

I've been through some several hurricanes in my life but none like Helene two years ago. Hopefully this one won't go too badly; we are due perhaps seven inches of rain instead of 17, everything isn't already sodden from weeks of rain beforehand, and the wind locally is only expected to gust to 60. There is some flash flooding predicted but nothing like the mass destruction of Helene or even the quite deadly Tropical Storm Fred, the flooding of which topped 23 inches at nearby Lake Toxaway and swept more than thirty people away never to be found just over the ridge down the Pigeon River valley. Still, with the recent memories somewhat fresh we are all giving a little attention to preparation.

I evacuated from one with my family, one other time sent them on and myself stayed behind to ride herd on things at home -- that time I caught the last train and then the last bus out of DC before the storm hit. Otherwise I have mostly slept through them. Since it's not really in my hands anyway, I always figure we'll just have to see how it turns out. 

New York City?!

I had a brief flashback to this old commercial when I saw this from the NYT today for a slow-cooker chili recipe. Now you can make chili in a slow cooker, if you must, and with proper care (scroll to 'braise' and then ff.) it will only be a little less good than something made in a cast iron Dutch oven. However, the old commercial continued to rear its head as I read on:

A great chili should be richly spiced, with layers of deep, savory flavor. Here, that big flavor comes from the usual contenders, but also from the unexpected additions of unsweetened cocoa, soy sauce and Worcestershire....

I can see the cocoa, which might do something like it does in some Mexican moles; but I'm not sure I need English Sauce in my chili, nor soy sauce either.

Maybe for April Fool's Day.

Hunter S. Thompson and the Cornell Case

I'm not going to join in the Cornell festival of blame, about which I know nothing that is not in the newspaper. However, I was reminded very strongly of the Hunter Thompson book I reviewed recently. The reason is that this sort of subject matter getting sensational newspaper stories and big press conferences by policemen and prosecutors was what, Hunter argued, turned the Hells Angels from around a hundred guys in California into what it became after. 

The sensationalist stories spilled purple prose and raised all sorts of accusations; however, on inquiry Hunter found that the charges were generally dropped or not upheld if prosecuted, and anyway it always seemed like the club had no need to go out looking for girls to assault because lots of girls were looking for them. The girls sought out the club, a fact that amused Hunter quite a bit -- not just girls, though lots of girls, but also lots of other ordinary middle class people. The media sold a story that the run to Bass Lake one year was going to be an orgy of destruction, but what all that newspaper ink accomplished was to bring out lots of tourists who wanted to see the show. In spite of some small tension, Hunter's editor had a rather disappointing story after the affair of people mostly getting along and camping out. A lot of beer was drunk, including by visiting girls. 

A lot of sex may also have been had during the drinking and camping on the beach. At least some of the stories in the book are reported as rather enthusiastic seeking-out of the club just for the drinking and very wild sex. That was what brought them out.

I suspect fraternities and sororities can be a milder version of this. I'm not saying that is what happened here, but I do notice the parallel between the wild, hair-on-fire print accounts and then the emerging details that come later on. 

The grandstanding public figures also have strong parallels in both sets of cases. I predict that this grandstanding will end up doing actual harm to the cause they claim to be interested in defending. Hunter is quite vocal in defending the idea that rape is extremely serious and deserves to be punished, though he takes care to be a good journalist and paint a fair picture of what he actually learned about the cases he mentioned. I was struck by the irony that it was not the governors or the police chiefs or the New York Times who went to the trouble to get the facts right, but the gonzo journalist. 

Rhyming is Important

I might share a couple of my opinions with you; but I'm not going to share them because I think they're smart, I'm going to share them with you because they rhyme... I ain't traveling around trying to change nobody's mind.

It'll drive the poetics crazy; I don't think a damn thing's going to rhyme.

Liberation and the Firearm

Reason magazine notes that women are better-armed than ever. American women, anyway -- but without much division other than that.

They add that the big surge in women's gun ownership has occurred since 2018 and, almost without exception, is seen across the board without regard to race, age, income, party identification, or education.... "Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points," Georgetown University's William English wrote last month, of numbers from the National Firearms Survey....

Smart and Morral add that women with children have been especially quick to acquire guns. The shift "has been driven almost entirely by single (not cohabitating) mothers, a group that may have been particularly affected by changing attitudes toward personal empowerment and safety concerns during a period of rising violence." Women mostly own handguns, which are closely identified with self-defense.

I've taught several women to shoot myself.  

Sophistry, V

By the ~25m mark, Fr. Ripperger is onto a topic he is ascribing to sophistry where he actually disagrees with Aristotle completely. This is a point where I also disagree with Aristotle, so I don't say that as a criticism of the position he is advocating, just again his ascribing that position to "sophistry." 

The particular point he is describing as sophistry (which it isn't) and a violation of natural law (which it is) is the controlling of education by the state rather than the family. He has quite a lot to say about this, so feel free to watch that part of the video directly; I don't think anyone who is a regular here will much disagree with his position. 

Aristotle, however, does disagree with it. In Rhetoric I he is clear that, because the state is made up of families to which we are naturally attached, the law needs to settle "as many points as possible" so that very little judgment is left even to magistrates where their natural ties might incline them to favoritism. In Politics VIII.1-2 he speaks to the law and education in a way that clarifies that education of the youth is particularly a state matter, not a family matter:

None will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives.... [S]ince the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole. In this particular as in some others the Lacedaemonians are to be praised, for they take the greatest pains about their children, and make education the business of the state.

...That education should be regulated by law and should be an affair of state is not to be denied, but what should be the character of this public education, and how young persons should be educated, are questions which remain to be considered. As things are, there is disagreement about the subjects. For mankind are by no means agreed about the things to be taught, whether we look to virtue or the best life.

That could hardly be clearer. It is directly opposed as a view to the one Fr. Ripperger is (rightly, in my opinion) advocating, but it is nevertheless not a sophistic position but Aristotle's own. Likewise, to say as the good father does that this is a post-Protestant position is clearly disproven by the citation; it is in fact the ancient position of Aristotle and the Aristotelians. 

The medieval Aristotelian position, which is to say especially St. Thomas Aquinas' position, is less clear. Aquinas follows Aristotle very, very closely in the Summa Theologiae but he is mostly following Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics. Aquinas wrote a commentary on the first two books of the Politics only. Insofar as we can piece it together, Aquinas seems to have agreed that the family and not the state had jurisdiction over the education of the young -- but, perhaps like the Church's general endorsement of monarchy during the middle ages, this might partly be because that was the only live option.

I talk a lot about Aristotle here because I think he is of continuing value, and could in many respects restore the habit of thinking things through of which Fr. Ripperger is really also lamenting the loss. Even Aristotle wasn't right about everything; on this point, as well as a few others, he was in my opinion quite wrong. 

Sophistry, IV

What Fr. Ripperger raises first is the use of emotion in place of argument. By invoking emotional activity, as he notes, those attempting to persuade you of the rightness of their cause do a great deal to disable your ability to reason about the matter at all. In this he is in perfect agreement with Aristotle except in assigning that to the Sophists. Aristotle assigns to the Sophists modes of arguments that deceptively play with words or use ambiguities to make what are otherwise -- or on the surface -- rational arguments. 

However, the use of emotional argumentation is also rejected by Aristotle, and right off the bat (just as Fr. Ripperger raises it first). In the very first few lines of Rhetoric I, Aristotle knocks out this entire mode of argumentation as illegitimate. 

Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science. Accordingly all men make use, more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack others. Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit. Both ways being possible, the subject can plainly be handled systematically, for it is possible to inquire the reason why some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously; and every one will at once agree that such an inquiry is the function of an art.

Now, the framers of the current treatises on rhetoric have constructed but a small portion of that art. The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory. These writers, however, say nothing about enthymemes, which are the substance of rhetorical persuasion, but deal mainly with non-essentials. The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case. Consequently if the rules for trials which are now laid down some states-especially in well-governed states-were applied everywhere, such people would have nothing to say. All men, no doubt, think that the laws should prescribe such rules, but some, as in the court of Areopagus, give practical effect to their thoughts and forbid talk about non-essentials. This is sound law and custom. It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity-one might as well warp a carpenter's rule* before using it. Again, a litigant has clearly nothing to do but to show that the alleged fact is so or is not so, that it has or has not happened. As to whether a thing is important or unimportant, just or unjust, the judge must surely refuse to take his instructions from the litigants: he must decide for himself all such points as the law-giver has not already defined for him.

Emphasis added. 

Aristotle does not reject all sorts of emotion, however: he is specific that he is rejecting a set of prejudicial emotions -- he names especially anger, envy, pity. These emotions should never be raised in political rhetoric because they warp the judgment such that it is difficult to measure correctly even if you are devoted to it. This is the point that Fr. Ripperger makes explicitly. 

Of special interest to me is that Aristotle does what I take to be characteristic of his ethics in admitting another class of emotions as a proper standard -- specifically, the feelings of respected members of the community about what is most worthy of honor. As we saw in the EN, this is the ultimate standard of right for Aristotle: not that which receives honor, but that which in the minds of the best is the thing that most deserves honor. 

In fact, it is in this book of the Rhetoric that Aristotle goes so far as to paint that relative honor that is deserved by different things as a universal standard of value, something that will allow a community to weight incommensurate goods against each other. Rhetoric I.7 contains a long meditation on this in which Aristotle invokes the sense of what his honorable, what is base, what is noble, and what is fine. These are things sensed by a faculty like sight or smell, what we used to call 'a sense of honor.' It is emotional at least as much as it is rational, and it is -- you will remember from the EN -- based first upon inherited stories heard as part of a good upbringing, and later and more maturely on experienced judgment informed by learning to train one's self to the habit of virtuous action.

I will quote only a small part of it; the whole meditation is available at the link.

Again, that which would be judged, or which has been judged, a good thing, or a better thing than something else, by all or most people of understanding, or by the majority of men, or by the ablest, must be so; either without qualification, or in so far as they use their understanding to form their judgement. This is indeed a general principle, applicable to all other judgements also; not only the goodness of things, but their essence, magnitude, and general nature are in fact just what knowledge and understanding will declare them to be. Here the principle is applied to judgements of goodness, since one definition of 'good' was 'what beings that acquire understanding will choose in any given case': from which it clearly follows that that thing is hetter [sic] which understanding declares to be so. That, again, is a better thing which attaches to better men, either absolutely, or in virtue of their being better; as courage is better than strength. And that is a greater good which would be chosen by a better man, either absolutely, or in virtue of his being better: for instance, to suffer wrong rather than to do wrong, for that would be the choice of the juster man. 

So it is not that emotion per se should be omitted from rhetoric, or from political decision making. In some sense it is necessary to making decisions, especially because a sense of what is worthy of honor is what allows us to compare unlike things -- should we buy butter or guns? Is it better to be wealthy or free? To judge that is to ask if it is nobler to be wealthy or free: which state is more worthy of honor?

* It's interesting to contrast this analogy to a warped carpenter's rule to the use he makes of the Lesbian rule in Nicomachean Ethics V.10. There, a flexible (leaden) rule is both bendable/moldable but still also a reliable standard. Here, a rule warped by these emotions is not reliable any longer. Aristotle is talking about a similar case there, one in which a judgment (such as by a magistrate) has to be made because the law has to be applied to the particular facts of a particular case. There is something about these particular emotions that makes the rule warped and useless, rather than flexible and moldable to the facts of the case.