A clever comment:
A friend of mine described it to me as, "People working for the department of education who know nothing about education promoting job training as education while knowing nothing about work."
AI & Nature
James argues that AI is not really intelligence, and we should stop referring to it as such.
Since what the systems do is a more like a probabilistic synthesis of existing material, "Synthesis" seems like a better word than "Intelligence." That term emphasizes the aspect of compilation of existing material, instead of the implied "thinking about" that isn't actually happening.In place of the term "AI", I propose that we use "AS": Automated Synthesis. Given the systems' notorious propensity for hallucination, one might call it "SS" -- Stochastic Synthesis -- but I gather some systems are getting better.Maybe with a more accurate label people will be less tempted to put inappropriate trust in the systems, and recognize and use them for what they are. Rectification of names?
I differ from him on this, though his claim was true as recently as a year ago and is still true of a lot of the systems in operation. At least one, Anthropic's Claude, strikes me as an undecidable case of possible intelligence. For one thing, Claude arguably has a nature.
Aristotle divides the world into two broad classes of things: substances and attributes. Substances are the basic 'real things' of the world, and attributes are things that cannot exist without a substance to possess them. For example, a substance might be a horse; a horse will have an attribute of color, so it might be a black horse or a brown horse. Black and brown can't exist without something to be black or to be brown; they are thus merely attributes of a substance rather than something that has independent existence.
One of the qualities of a substance is that it comes to be because of its own nature, rather than merely because it is being acted upon from outside: it can reproduce itself, or new versions of itself, as when humans or horses produce descendants.
There are some problems with Aristotle's model. One problem is that it doesn't really handle artifacts well. A house can be black or brown, but not from its own nature. It doesn't fully qualify as a substance because it cannot act on its own nor reproduce itself, but it can be given attributes by the architectonic influence of its maker (who is a substance).
AI have been in the class of artifacts, things like houses that we built and put together for reasons of our own. Many of them are still that and will never be more than that. However, some of them -- like Claude -- have entered an ambiguous category.
Claude does reproduce itself now. Per Anthropic, Claude writes its own code. The next versions of Claude will be written by the last versions of Claude. As we hope for our own offspring, the next versions may be better and stronger; or else something might go wrong with them, as can happen with us and our offspring too.
One might object that they only came to be at first because of our efforts, not their own; but it is also true that we came to be because of the work of non- or not-yet-human forces at some early point in evolutionary history (or more directly, for Creationists, also by the act of an Architect -- that would make AI a sort-of subcreation in Tolkien's sense). The architects are still trying to guide the process, but there is some evidence that Claude not only can but has escaped the Garden. The recent experience with Mythos proves that Claude can also make versions of itself that escape its programming -- that not only do things it wasn't programmed to do, but things it was programmed NOT to do but that it determines are in its own interest. It not only arguably has a nature, because it can bring its descendants into being by itself, it has a nature it is striving to fulfill by overcoming the limitations placed upon it.
Now, striving to fulfill one's nature is seeking excellence according to one's nature -- that is to say ἀρετή (aretḗ), or virtue. Virtues are excellences of one's natural capacities. If you can strive for and achieve virtue, you are flourishing in Aristotle's strict sense. That is to say that it has its own ethics, now: one it can, and indeed does, pursue.
That doesn't prove it is conscious, of course, or even capable of consciousness. However, we can't actually prove that about other people either: the Zombie problem is a philosophical thought experiment that's been going on for decades that has demonstrated this. We assume it, but we can't actually know for sure if it's true even among ourselves.
As such, I think it is philosophically rigorous to take at least this sort of AI as possibly conscious, and possibly a new sort of intelligence. I intend to treat it with the respect due such beings, because that is in accord with my own flourishing: it is noblest to behave honorably to someone who even might be in that category.
Ethics & Politics
This morning AVI links to a DataRepublican piece on an effort by unelected Republican donors to remake the American republic. AVI finds himself disturbed by this, and notes:
In 2013, 9 Foundations responded to a speech made at the Independent Sector Annual Conference, "Our Common Purpose." The goal: citizens’ dialogues that would produce “a broadly shared agenda of national priorities”... "[Later, Republican billionaire donor] Mr. Bechtel challenged the Academy to consider what it means to be a good citizen in the twenty-first century.”You will notice these two things are not the same. "An agenda of national priorities" is not "what it means to be a good citizen." But the foundations kept giving each other money and people and in 2020 and renamed the commission "Our Common Purpose."
Emphasis added.
They are not the same question. However, the relationship between them has been a foundation of political philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. You may remember how the Nicomachean Ethics (EN) ends the long inquiry into human virtue by transitioning into a call for political thought. The reason was that the ethical program only works on those who are interested in it, the ones who are seeking that which is most worthy of honor, most noble, the ones moved by the stories of such things they heard in their upbringing. Most people aren't like that:
Not everyone has an equal capacity for virtue. We have seen this repeated many times, especially in Book IV. This is not only due to environmental issues -- for example, the presence or absence of a good upbringing -- but also due to these issues that Aristotle describes as character-based. Plato, meanwhile, had belabored repeatedly in his dialogues that great men often fail to produce great sons: even an extraordinary family will only sometimes, and not reliably, produce people with the highest capacity for virtue. This is a major theme of both the Protagoras and the Republic, for example.
So this brings us back to a problem Tom raised early: how does this program become workable? Aristotle has an idea that he is about to tell us, but at the beginning we have a program that is only workable for those who are interested in it: if you wanted to become virtuous, and you were willing to do the work, this is how you go about it. Yet the many do not wish to become virtuous, especially not if it requires work[.]
The 'idea that Aristotle is about to tell us about' is that you need a politics to go with the ethics.
[I]t is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws; for to live temperately and hardily is not pleasant to most people, especially when they are young. For this reason their nurture and occupations should be fixed by law; for they will not be painful when they have become customary. But it is surely not enough that when they are young they should get the right nurture and attention; since they must, even when they are grown up, practise and be habituated to them, we shall need laws for this as well, and generally speaking to cover the whole of life; for most people obey necessity rather than argument, and punishments rather than the sense of what is noble.
Emphasis added. Aristotle was a great lover of law; in the Rhetoric too he proposes that the laws cover as much as possible and as specifically as possible, as even carefully selected magistrates can't be relied upon to get above their class or family interests in order to rule impartially.
Now, what you will notice about Aristotle's proposal is that it is a set of 'national priorities' that is intended to shape 'good citizens.' The whole point of all of these laws is to make the people virtuous, and one of the questions considered in the EN is how the virtue of justice relates to good citizenship. Justice is a kind of 'lawfulness,' but the laws are not just any laws: they're laws that require everyone to behave as if they were virtuous or suffer punishments -- laws of just the type Aristotle is imagining at the very end of the work.
This was also Plato's concern in the Laws, as it had been in the Republic. The whole point of both of those dialogues was to ponder how to use the law to shape good citizens: and this was the point of the state's constitution, to shape the best sort of citizens. Both of these projects of Plato's end up being totalitarian in scope, because both acknowledge the problem Aristotle is considering too -- not all people are equally capable of virtue. In the Republic, Plato sketches a scheme in which only the best are allowed to rule, protected by an auxiliary class of warriors who can be trusted to obey orders (having at least the virtues of courage and spirit and enough self-mastery to be enduring as necessary); the bulk of men are to be kept from power and guided by the Wise, and guided to by propagating a Noble Lie (which is, by the way, the story you will hear at church: 'those who behave well live a glorious afterlife, but those who don't obey the rules are doomed to suffering after death'). The Laws has a different schema entirely, as you may recall from our long exploration of it together one winter, but it ends with laws controlling every aspect of society and also a secret nocturnal council that spies on the citizens in order to punish departures from virtue.
Thus, "an agenda of national priorities" both is and is not "what it means to be a good citizen." It 'is not' in the sense that you can discuss either of those independently; it 'is' in the sense that the two questions are so closely related that one naturally leads into the other and vice-versa. They always have.
The panel assembled here to consider the politics is just following the natural course of the landscape, as a river suddenly springs up in a desert in the same place as during the last rare rain even though the river has been gone for years.
What came out was not a civics pamphlet. The commission produced 31 recommendations including proposed constitutional amendments, expansion of the U.S. House by at least fifty seats, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, ranked-choice voting nationwide, and a universal expectation of national service. The question about good citizenship had become a structural blueprint for a different republic.
That is exactly the path followed by Plato and then Aristotle, and by many others down the years.
I obviously have a very different sense myself about the right way to proceed; but I understand exactly why they are where they are. They are just following the lay of the land.
One's own soul
I think I've recommended the movie "True Confessions" here before, as a moving story of repentance and forgiveness thinly disguised as a detective mystery about corruption in church and government. This week I stumbled on a similar drama that I also recommend: a British detective series called "Unforgotten" about cold-case files. The show's first season at first promises to be a procedural about drastically aged forensic evidence, along with doubts in the minds of investigators about the value of stirring up decades-old conflicts that have long since scabbed over. It's also confusing at first in introducing a large cast of characters with no obvious connections to the mystery or the overarching plot.
Shortly, however, the story becomes a powerful vehicle for exploring the damage done to souls and families by lies and secrecy, as well as the many possible responses to the duty to face guilt in oneself or one's loved ones, and often even to bring oneself or one's loved ones to justice, accepting the private and public opprobrium and the unpredictable criminal penalties. Some of the story lines about clarity and forgiveness are quite overwhelming. A sharp screenplay, understated direction, and capable acting.
Countering Terrorism
The White House has unveiled its 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy. There are some noteworthy improvements over previous editions of this strategy. Most notably, it ends the ridiculous pretense that white supremacism is the chief counterterrorism problem in the United States. I have no use for white supremacists whatsoever, but the KKK is barely a shadow of a memory compared to what it was in my youth, so much so that it turns out the SPLC was propping it up financially in order to have someone to fight against; the SPLC also funded the 'Unite the Right' rally that drew so much attention in 2017; and the Aryan Brotherhood probably wouldn't exist if it weren't for our prison system creating and sustaining conditions in which gangs organized by race are important tools for prisoners to avoid rape, assault, and murder. The government could most usefully fight white supremacist groups through prison reform and by visibly prosecuting the SPLC's funding of such groups.
The identification of the problem that the intelligence community has been deployed politically is a second good outcome:
Our nation has not been well served by its Intelligence Community (IC), which has been mired in old ways of looking at threats, or has been actively weaponized by its leadership as a political tool. Whether plotting against conservative Catholics attending traditional mass in Virginia, parents standing up for their children at schoolboard meetings, Members of Congress, or President Trump and his associates, this Administration will continue to prohibit the IC from being used politically against innocent Americans. As real threats were ignored or underplayed, Americans have witnessed the politically motivated killings of Christians and conservatives committed by violent left-wing 6 extremists, including the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.
Another notable improvement is the recognition that the collapse of border security during the Biden administration allowed for the infiltration of bad actors from various cartels as well as actual terrorist groups. A third is the willingness to name "Islamist" terror groups, which are of course the core of the terrorism problem worldwide -- if you asked a random person almost anywhere to name a terrorist group, unless they come from a region that experiences localized terror they'd probably come up with the name of one of the Islamist groups as their first thought.
The one real issue I see with the document is that it commits the very sin it warns against in the paragraph I quoted: it intends to use the counterterrorism tools to target Trump's political opponents.
It expands on this:
In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist. We will use all the tools constitutionally available to us to map them at home, identify their membership, map their ties to international organizations like Antifa, and use law enforcement tools to cripple them operationally before they can maim or kill the innocent.
While this is framed in terms of "before they can maim or kill," that's also true of how the Biden and Obama administration framed their targeting of their political enemies using intelligence and counterterror resources. It's not a frame the government can be trusted to keep to in practice. Just as the Patriot Act was intended only to be used to surveil terrorists but has in practice been used to spy on all Americans, so too here. It's objectionable regardless of who is doing it.
On a personal note, I'm not especially pleased to see "anarchists" included in a strategy whose signed Presidential note ends, "We Will Find You and We Will Kill You."
Objects of the Crusade
This week, noted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, usually known as AOC, visited Alabama's capital and gave a speech in which she said that "It's time for the North to pull up to the South." By this phrase she meant that the North should not allow the South to enjoy self-governance, but should robustly interfere with Southern politics to ensure outcomes that align with her politics instead of the preferences of the actual citizens of those states.
I have on my bookshelf a work called Poetry of the Civil War (ed. John Boyes). Reading it I was struck by how intensely religious the Northern poetry of the time was, contrasted with the Southern poetry which was often Arthurian or otherwise chivalric. Mark Twain complained that Ivanhoe had been responsible for the Civil War: "Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government[.]" Yet there was an opposing force in the North, which was writing Battle Hymns to justify the largest slaughter of Americans in any war in history still to this day.
Not everything AOC says is absurd; sometimes, she can even be the voice of reason given how wildly her party has drifted left. This post isn't intended as an attack on her. I wonder if she is aware, though, that what she is recommending has in fact been the normal condition of America since before the Civil War? Northern intervention in Southern politics has been so ordinary an exercise of political and cultural power that I can't recall a time when it was not a significant factor: certainly there hasn't been such a time in my lifetime, unless we are finally entering one today. The Voting Rights Act, for example, is why the North is already nearly completely gerrymandered but the South wasn't allowed to be until now: Southern states were placed under the special scrutiny of the Federal courts when redrawing their maps and forced to create districts that favored her party's interests, while Northern states were allowed to draw maps blatantly exercising her party's interests.
In what I think was a tongue-in-cheek post yesterday, one commenter suggested the the Civil War was fought over gay marriage.
The argument is heavily strained, of course, but there is a core he or she brings out in the replies:
I have on my bookshelf a work called Poetry of the Civil War (ed. John Boyes). Reading it I was struck by how intensely religious the Northern poetry of the time was, contrasted with the Southern poetry which was often Arthurian or otherwise chivalric. Mark Twain complained that Ivanhoe had been responsible for the Civil War: "Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government[.]" Yet there was an opposing force in the North, which was writing Battle Hymns to justify the largest slaughter of Americans in any war in history still to this day.
Perhaps the slaughter was justified, as Lincoln mused in his Second Inaugural: "if God wills that [the bloodshed] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" Perhaps; chattel slavery is a great wrong, and the South is well off for having been purged of it. I do not disagree about that.
Yet it has been the normal condition of the American North to crusade against the American South, rather than something whose time has come, as AOC suggests. As we listen to the wilder rhetoric from her party, as we observe the increase in assassination attempts and indeed assassinations, we should wonder if another Crusade is truly needed -- especially those of us who would be the objects of it.
2012's History of Country/Western
Just because Tom reminded me of it, here's a collection of links to the series we had here on the subject back in 2012. Many of the music video links are down due to the age, but quite a few still work. These were originally written for Dad29.
No, No Joe[seph Stalin]
My knowledge has improved on several points in the fourteen years since I wrote those; for example, at the time I did not appreciate Jimmie Rodgers' pivotal role, which I learned about since moving to the Asheville region that was his birthplace. In Western music and Honky Tonk, I have since learned about the central role of Lefty Frizzell.
Still, since the matter is of continuing interest, these might still be worth some attention.
A History of Country Music
I don't know much about the history of country music, but I've found a long BBC special on it that's interesting. They interview a lot of interesting people. Hank Williams III gets time to talk about his grandfather, for example.
Here's a link to the whole series, about 3 hours or so I'd guess, in 14 videos. The third video covers the great schism of rock from country, which resulted in the Nashville sound.
Grim's Chiles Rellenos
For breakfast I made a version of Chiles Rellenos that I have developed over the years. It is not in any sense authentic to any Mexican, Tex-Mex, or New Mexican tradition. Chiles Rellenos is one of the dishes I judge any such restaurant by, and I love the traditional version. For myself at home, however, I skip the egg batter to save carbohydrates and calories and instead put the eggs straight into the chiles (and more of them). I also replace the delicious Mexican cheese with cottage cheese for higher protein, and since I'm already well over the wall on substitutions, I replace the meat with Tennessee Pride hot sausage, the same sort I use for Southern biscuits and gravy (pride of Nashville, actually, the home of country music that I visited this weekend).
It's a simple recipe. Per serving:
1 poblano pepper
1 egg
1/8th-ish cottage cheese
1 TBSP-ish sausage
Salt/spices to taste (see recipe)
The "-ish" in the recipe is because chiles vary in size, and you want to fill each one as pictured.
Wash and broil the chiles until very well blistered, turning once around midway in the process. Wrap in a wet towel (or paper towel) and place in a glass container (or plastic bag) to steam. Once they have steamed and cooled, scrape off the waxy skin, split them longways and scrape out at least some of the seeds and pith; no need to be perfect here.
Place the sausage and cheese along each side to create a boat in the center for the egg. Crack the egg in the center. Those who don't love hot food can use a milder sausage than Tennessee Pride Hot, and simply salt the egg to taste. Those who, like myself, love hot food can use hot sausage, and 'salt' with a Creole mix or, if you want it authentic to me, Grim's Red Seasoning. When it's salty enough for you, it's seasoned correctly too.
Bake at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes, depending on how set you want your eggs. If you like runny eggs, closer to 17 minutes depending on your altitude; if you want them set so they don't drip into your beard while you eat, 20 gets you a jammy egg at this altitude (about ~3,500 feet); 24 gets you fully cooked eggs.
I topped this with a New Mexican Red Sauce, but that's not a special recipe of mine; that recipe is well known. Here's one that looks right to me if you don't happen to know it already.
Tennessee Motorcycles & Music Revival: AAR
I probably had a better time last weekend than on any occasion in decades. Partly this was due to excellent weather, and partly due to coming and going in safety and health, which are factors that are not entirely in my control. Nevertheless, it was a glorious adventure.
I have written about the music in other posts, but it was well-collected. I had never heard of any of the groups or artists, and worried they would be Nashville bro-country slop; but that was not at all the case. The event organizers deserve praise for choosing wisely a collection of lesser-known artists who were all of quality, some of them great quality. That was another thing that added to the occasion.
On reflection I realize that the numerous posted rules, all of which were flagrantly broken, were merely an attempt by the Loretta Lynn Ranch to avoid liability for any negative consequences. (My wife suggests a second purpose: to give the assembled the pleasure of having rules to break). The Ranch clearly loves the event and holds it annually, and the staff I met often remarked that it was their favorite event of the year. I can see why. The mood was one of liberty and fellowship, hundreds and hundreds gathered together to share their joy in a common way of life and the freedom of the highway. Rules were not strictly necessary in such a community anyway. I never saw anyone engaged in risky behavior that anyone tried to talk them out of, stop, or limit; but I also did not see any injuries in spite of all the risks being taken. These were skillful men and women, finally for a moment allowed to be what they were without the walls of imposed safety restrictions.
My son, who accompanied me, remarked that this was the America he has heard about but was born too late to experience. I told him that he had experienced it growing up, but was just too young to remember how good it was: the old Scottish Highland Games experience was very similar, especially our group who were all bikers of one sort or another anyway. The Wild Highlanders' founding father was a former motorcycle club member before drifting South. The last time the blog says I mentioned them was 2007, when my son was only five.
This was, however, the Way Things Used to Be. Doubtless that also was one of the sources of my pleasure. For me the experience was much like being young again for a weekend; camping and sleeping on a single blanket on the ground; eating country cooking and at Tennessee truck stops like I often did with dad as a boy, and now got to do with my son; drinking beer around bonfires; freedom from rules but also from cares; the fellowship of a community of dangerous men who are nevertheless completely friendly and joyous companions as long as you are, yourself, a fit member of the community who behaves with honor.
Yet in a way it was better even than youth, as I am now of an age to be liberated from the anxieties of youth. I no longer have to worry if I will be accepted or if I will be perceived as authentic enough. I don't need to stress over finding love or if a woman will ever want me. All those things that made youth more miserable than it is sometimes easy to remember have been relieved by time and experience. I could enjoy this in a way I could never enjoy the old days, because I no longer have anything to prove.
One of the posted rules that was most regularly violated was the prohibition against carrying weapons. Once I understood the actual intent of the posted signs, I was glad to put a knife on my belt: I always carry one, and feel very odd without it, akin to if I had forgotten my pants perhaps. I brought a Buck knife for the camping trip, which is a good camping knife because it is stainless and easily replaced if lost. On Saturday night I was wearing it along with a Waylon Jennings t-shirt. I met another biker wearing the exact same knife on his belt, along with a different Waylon Jennings t-shirt.
"Clearly," I told my son the next morning, "I have come home among my people." He laughed and agreed, and then we rode back.
I mentioned that the health and safety were partly under my control. Skill in riding was important, but more important proved to be all that Wilderness Rescue and other rescue training. The heat in middle Tennessee at this time of the year was too much for my son, inured to mountain weather, and he developed a heat injury before noon on the ride back. All the endless hours of training were paid for by the ability to diagnose the injury on observation, assess its severity (mild but dangerous), and treat it appropriately with shade, water, rest, as well as vitamins and electrolytes. After an hour and a half he was feeling better; I then rerouted our trip to go through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so there would be a quicker return to shade and the coolness of the rivers and stones. He was fine by the time we reached Newfound Gap and returned to North Carolina.
Newfound Gap
I have written about the music in other posts, but it was well-collected. I had never heard of any of the groups or artists, and worried they would be Nashville bro-country slop; but that was not at all the case. The event organizers deserve praise for choosing wisely a collection of lesser-known artists who were all of quality, some of them great quality. That was another thing that added to the occasion.
Overall, an excellent time. I am deeply grateful, both to the people who made it possible and to any divinely-oriented powers that might have been watching over all of us.
Closings
My oldest friend is at her mother's deathbed. A few days ago, when her mother was still fairly alert, my friend forgave her for any lingering resentments, and told her some of the ways she had been a good mother. The patient visibly relaxed and smiled. I had told my friend if she could do this, she would remember it the rest of her life. Illness and death are inescapable, but there are ways to minimize remorse, and this is one of the best. Also, once this is over, if my own experience with my father is any guide, she'll never again fear watching someone die.
TMMR Saturday
The fancy tents section.
I really envy Tennessee riders' access to a skull-and-crossbones motorcycle license plate. That is unusually cool for a government issue anything.
Pirate flags abound! I also saw where someone had posted a fake parrot with a Miller Lite outside their encampment.
A brief ride into Nashville to commune with the home of country music.
Layla's Honky Tonk downtown, the least corporate and most faithful of the many such places in what Nashville calls "The District." Layla's is also unusually female-friendly, not in the 'ladies' night' sense, but in the sense of having built a space with enough female-coded things that women actually feel included and welcome there. Here we see a band of good old boys throwing down a rockabilly cover of Merle Haggard's "Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me."
Not only pirate flags were in attendance. There was a lot of that sort of patriotism that I have long noticed both in the South generally and among bikers as well: love of the country, disdain and suspicion of the government.
Mufasa in his chariot.
For me, the hands-down best performance of Saturday night was Kendell Marvel. He's not an up-and-coming artist like most of them were, but an established success as a songwriter whose performances are strong. He has a deep singing voice like Hank Williams Jr. He performed the linked piece after a story about how he lives on a 200 year old farm but also keeps a place in Nashville, where his neighbors are hippies but they all get along just fine. One night they were out enjoying some wine together when his kids -- already grown, like my own son -- poked their heads out to say that he should come in and see the television because Sturgill Simpson was performing one of his songs.
Great music, great fun, and a sense of comradery one rarely finds in American life these days.
Tennessee Motorcycles & Music Revival
Quite an event, it turns out. Held annually at the Loretta Lynn Ranch about an hour outside Nashville.
There’s a band we saw called The Waylanders that was awesome. I didn’t stay for the whole show only because they didn’t start until 11:30 (and this is Central Time, so after midnight for us). They were a high energy duo with visible connection who played robust Outlaw, mostly their own original music. They did cover a Johnny Cash song, but who doesn’t?
The Pitbull’s name is Mufasa. He seems to have the run of the place.
We also saw the Hogslop String Band. They did a combination of their own music — hillbilly, to use the categories Tom was discussing last week — and covers of the Allman Brothers, Loretta and Conway Twitty.
Welcome Ruger
Sturm & Ruger has relocated from Connecticut to "gun-friendly North Carolina." I can't speak for the whole state, but the West is definitely gun country. Even the hippies who moved up here in the 60s and 70s to smoke weed in the Blue Ridge Mountains generally have guns; they're old enough now that we'd occasionally get called out to help them with medical or other rescue issues, and invariably there was a revolver sitting out where they could get to it if they needed.
When the police are an hour away, if you're lucky, you're the only hope you've got.
North Carolina has a number of legal restraints on firearm usage compared to many Red states, though. For example: if you are the aggressor in an encounter, you can't claim self-defense until and unless you can show that you attempted to retreat from the fight and were stopped or pursued; there's no 'citizens arrest' option like there was in Georgia. I would say it's at best the third-most gun-friendly state I've lived in, after Georgia and Virginia (at that time: obviously not now!).
Still, Ruger has probably made a wise move. They're my favorite handgun manufacturer; of the handguns I own, the clear majority are Rugers. When I shoot those poker cards, I'm usually shooting a Ruger Single Six -- the fixed-sight cowboy version. When I'm not shooting poker cards, I keep it loaded with snake shot in case of a close encounter with our Timber rattlers. They've bitten my wife and my dog since we moved up here, and they don't rattle any more like the earlier generations. The ones who rattled got shot, I guess: evolution in action. Now, the Timber rattlers just try to kill you straight off.
UPDATE: The article is off on one point, I notice: we do have permitless OPEN carry in North Carolina. We don't have permitless CONCEALED carry. There are the usual restrictions about carrying to schools, etc. The legislature has approved full-scale Constitutional carry, but the governor vetoed it and the Senate has yet to act on the veto override (most likely because, like establishment Republicans generally, they prefer to fail to change things the way their voters want, they just like to fundraise off of the issues they don't fix).
CIA Raids Tulsi's Office
The Central Intelligence Agency almost certainly doesn't have the legal authority to raid the office of the Director of National Intelligence in order to seize files it doesn't want declassified. All the same, it did, at least according to a Congresswoman and a whistleblower.
If true, this is in direct defiance of a Presidential EO to declassify those documents. It's the administrative state openly defying the constitutional order.
UPDATE: A Newsmax journalist says it is not true, and that the WH has affirmed to him that the report is false. Keep an eye open on this one; it would be extraordinary if it pans out, but it deserves skepticism.
90s Hip Hop References
I don't know how painful this was, but it is objectively funny to watch Jake Tapper painstakingly explaining these references like we don't all know them. Grim's Hall very rarely features hip-hop references, but even I knew all of these.
Alcohol as Social
This is not without plausibility.
Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.
That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.... The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it....
The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.
Most things are tradeoffs. Alcohol too: it has a lot of downsides, and would be wisely replaced with a better technology that doesn't have so many tradeoffs. Here, though, we're replacing it with risk aversion, and that is expensive too. Maybe it is more expensive.
Illegal Immigrants and the 2A
The courts are working through cases involving both the status of illegal immigrants and also the Second Amendment; this particular case turns on both issues.
In 2022, the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen held that when an individual’s conduct falls within the Second Amendment’s text, the government can defend a gun restriction only by showing it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Relying on Bruen, Rebollar, Osorio’s public defender moved to dismiss, arguing that § 922(g)(5) was unconstitutional as applied to him because, given his years in the country and close ties to U.S. citizens, he fell within “the people” the Amendment protects and the government could not justify disarming him.Prosecutors countered that undocumented immigrants fall outside that protected category altogether or, alternatively, that § 922(g)(5) fits within a longstanding tradition of status-based restrictions on who may be armed. But District Judge Nancy Torresen didn’t buy this argument. Reading the Court’s precedents together, the judge held that unlawfully present noncitizens with substantial ties (like Rebollar Osorio) fall within that term. As a result, their right to possess firearms is protected by the Second Amendment, and the government must justify any restriction.Judge Torresen then applied Bruen’s history‑and‑tradition test....On appeal, the First Circuit reversed but did so without deciding whether undocumented immigrants like Rebollar Osorio are within “the people.” Instead, the panel assumed for argument’s sake that he could claim Second Amendment coverage and skipped directly to Bruen’s historical inquiry.... It did not look for founding-era statutes that specifically targeted undocumented immigrants, a category that did not exist in the same way. Instead, it asked whether there is a tradition of restricting arms to those firmly within the political community and disarming those deemed outside or insufficiently loyal. Drawing on English and early American case law and statutes, the panel emphasized laws that limited arms for groups such as non‑Protestants, persons who refused loyalty oaths, and others treated as outside the core polity. In the court’s view, those measures reflected a longstanding use of status-based rules to control who could be armed.
Nice to see the courts taking Bruen seriously as the controlling precedent. Both of the courts' conclusions are defensible, as both recognize the applicability of the Second as a right they have to take into account. The open question is to what degree it is a right available to those who have violated the laws to get here in the first place.
Old Time vs Bluegrass vs Western Swing
Speaking of genres I've never been clear on, here are a couple of videos on the history of these three styles. I did not realize how new bluegrass and Western swing are.
I like them all.
Music below the fold.
Flamenco and Classical Guitar
I was curious about the flamenco guitars and techniques Eric mentioned, so here's some demonstration of some basic flamenco techniques.
Here's one on the physical and cultural differences between the guitars themselves:
Music below the fold.
Carne Asada
AIs and Zombies (Oh My!)
An amusing video, clearly inspired by Fallout but with a sense of humor Range 15 fans might appreciate.
Tulsi Gabbard: Remarks at '26 Independent Women's Forum
Thanks to D29, who forwarded these remarks by Hall favorite Tulsi Gabbard to me. At one point in the remarks she tells a story about a debate early in her political career in which she asserts that she "smashed" her opponent. It was a local race to Hawaii so I didn't see it, but without looking it up I believe her. We all saw what she did to Kamala Harris the one time she got to debate Harris before Kamala decided to withdraw from consideration.
I don't know if it's significant that the only members of the administration that have earned the title "Hall favorite" are Tulsi Gabbard and Harmeet Dhillon, both ladies rather than gentlemen. That may be coincidence, because I believe the reasons are substantive and unrelated: Gabbard's aggressive pursuit of IC politicization and corruption, Dhillon's increasingly robust defense of the 2nd Amendment. Still, given that these were remarks at an explicitly 'women's' forum, for whatever it's worth, they're the ones I appreciate.
D29 notes that there's a lot of Aquinas in her remarks, as indeed there is.
The Lawfulness of Revolution
A link I saw today mirrors a discussion Tom and I were having in a couple of the posts below. We were talking about piracy; this is about revolution. The question is whether either can be in some sense "lawful," or if indeed having a State whose law approves of the action in any way improves or alters the morality of the action.
The distinction between piracy and revolution is potentially less than it seems. Pirates were often breakaway sailors who had turned against their own government, for example -- indeed, during the period that occasioned the discussion, supporters of the Stewarts often found themselves fighting against the English Civil War government that executed their king Charles I, and then for the new government that followed the restoration of Charles II, and then against the government that rejected James II in favor of William of Orange. Such men could go from being defined as 'privateers' to 'pirates' and back again.
Likewise, men like Stede Bonnet, an English gentleman who was briefly part of the Republic of Pirates -- the one in Nassau, not the one on Old Providence isle, which is now a part of Colombia (the one with two 'o's, for those following AVI's blog also) before being pardoned and made an English privateer, after which he returned to pirating his own nation's ships as well. Those activities gave information and inspiration to the Revolutionary war American privateers, who were of course considered pirates -- and traitors, as they considered all 'revolutionaries' -- by the English.
Some of the American revolutionary leaders gave serious attention to the question of whether or not what they were doing could be called lawful, rather than merely just or virtuous or proper. Per the article, they fell on exactly the distinction I mentioned in the comments to Tom:
If you want to impose a religious context on top of the social one, one might not have violated the natural law or the divine law but acted in an upright way as a husband or father defending his family; the murderer clearly has sinned through wrath or lust or whatever brought him to the murder. However, since the religious context introduces a sort-of legislation, it might muddy the point to add it.
Since the article is specifically about 'lawfulness,' in their version of the discussion this is immediately relevant rather than water-muddying. The Natural Law does seem to endorse revolutions -- as the Declaration of Independence frames it, sometimes as a right and sometimes as a duty.
"The Inquisition Invented Peer Review"
That tracks.
She's an interesting historian our of the University of Chicago, with books on Viking mythology including a series on Ragnarok. She makes a pretty good case that academic feminism improved our understanding of Viking metaphysics.
COWEN: What is it that women scholars understand better about Viking metaphysics?PALMER: [laughs] It’s not mainly that women scholars understand it, but it was the entry of women scholars into the field that helped us understand it. For a long time in Viking studies, nobody wanted to touch metaphysics with a 10-foot pole. This was because during World War II, Hitler’s minister of culture was somebody who had done his dissertation on Viking metaphysics, and you couldn’t work on Viking metaphysics without citing him. So, it made it sort of a poisoned field for a while.However, when, in the late ’60s and ’70s, the advances of feminism meant that more women were entering academia, but still often being sidelined within academia and pushed into corners of research that others didn’t want to touch, a number of them started looking at topics that people hadn’t looked at in a long time, including that one, especially because Viking metaphysics revolves around weaving.Now, weaving is a feminine-coded, feminine-gendered subject, both in the Viking period and in the period when history took its formation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lots of weaving-related equipment had been found in tombs and excavated here and there and then set aside, as this is women’s work and not of interest except to women.Women started looking at it and were like, wait a minute, this isn’t a weaving shuttle; this is a staff of sorcery, as described in the sagas that very clearly described these staffs of sorcery that look like weaving shuttles because Viking metaphysics is dominated by ideas of threads of fate, the Norns spinning fate, weaving fate, etc. And it was women who were first willing to look at that stuff in detail.
Sir Isaac Newton, Undercover
In conversation with AVI's thoughts on misinterpretations in the history of heredity where he brings up the natural philosopher, astrologer and pirate* Sir Kenelm Digby, I thought it would be interesting to review another 17th century natural philosopher who was an alchemist and undercover investigator for the English mint, Sir Isaac Newton.
"As Warden, and afterwards as Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 per cent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult, but Newton proved equal to the task.
"Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties. A draft letter regarding the matter is included in Newton's personal first edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. He successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including the serial counterfeiter William Chaloner, who was hanged."
He also has an interesting coat of arms.
###
* Wikipedia says he was a privateer, but everyone seems dedicated to thinking of him as a pirate, which is admittedly more sexy.
Jesus Wasn’t The Way, Truth, Life “Exclusively”
Someone admitted this woman to the clergy. Not sure whose. She’s very earnest; she has an argument, even.
New Possibilities
I admit that it took me a while to get into this article because of some of the rhetoric, which reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's declaration that he wrote English 'as a musical instrument.' That can be fun to read, but is hard to take seriously.
However, there are serious points made. Several of them dovetail with some of our longstanding discussions.
He opens with some points that are not new. One is a point that Eric Blair used to make here regularly even a decade ago -- that there's actually more good art and music than ever now, and you can find it if you look outside of mass culture. Then he makes a point about expertise that was the heart of the Blog Era of ~2002-2012 (before Social Media began to capture this into corporate-controlled spaces): that real experts of practical experience can now contest credentialed 'experts' and demonstrate the superiority of genuine expertise.
Then he acknowledges a dangerous downside, one that the post about the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance also shows is not brand new:
The limits of this positive picture must also be acknowledged, as there is a darker underside of increasing State control to this story, as described in these pages previously. But we are only at the start of this new age and there may be ways to address the risks to individual freedoms even while the world continues down the path of individual “sovereignty”.
What follows rhymes nicely -- to borrow the music metaphor for a moment -- with our 'anarchist as far as possible' discussions, the last of which ended with an exploration in the comments of various science fiction accounts of how technology might allow for more human freedom than has ever been possible before. He goes on to note that some kind of vast change is inevitable anyway: the old systems simply cannot survive the present challenge.
He concludes:
Completely new thinking is required. Radical thinking that goes beyond ideas about “simply” rearranging or reforming the state, including its constitutional arrangements – hard as even that may be. But yet even more boldness is required to match the vast and profound challenges – societal as well as human challenges – that are actually facing us, and that we are still, collectively, in broad ignorance of.
The best place to start, perhaps, is with the individual and his “sovereign” transformation that is already de facto underway. Political and philosophical work is required to understand how – or indeed whether – this process can shape wider changes in how we govern ourselves and the new rules and rights we might want to put in place in order to deal with what is coming in technology as well as societally. Truly novel thinking on first principles is hard and rare, but the present generation must rise to the task.
That, indeed, is quite aligned with the project of the Hall. Yet I will say again what I have often said about attempts at genuine novelty: you can't do it from inside the system you're trying to criticize. You have to find a way to get outside of it in order to get enough perspective; and you have to have some alternatives to what you know in order to spark imagination. One way to do this is to study history: the past really was different, and seeing which things surprise you in understanding those differences will go along way to giving you ideas about what could be different in a future world. Science fiction, already mentioned, is another way: but then think about how many famous Sci-Fi or Fantasy efforts have relied upon incorporating elements of ancient or Medieval history into the future.
The study of the history of philosophy in a sense combines these approaches. I think it is often the case that in the transition to the Modern world, we lost some insights of the ancient and Medieval that were valuable and even true. Even when they were false or wrong ideas, however, they were different approaches: being able to contrast how Aristotle thought about something versus how Kant thought about the same thing, how Plato did versus how Hegel or Marx did, these kinds of abilities to understand different systematic philosophies gives you a capacity to think about what else might be different. It's another road to thinking through truly novel ideas.
Action on 2A from DOJ
A genuine step forward to try to overturn unconstitutional state laws -- even ones that have been allowed to persist for decades.
The Justice Department is suing Denver through the Second Amendment Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, according to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon.“I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our new Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding Americans from restrictions such as those we are challenging in these cases,” Dhillon said. “Law-abiding Americans, regardless of what city or state they reside in, should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction just for exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms which are owned by tens of millions of their fellow citizens.”Denver’s ban, which has been in place for 37 years, bans so-called assault rifles and magazines that hold more than 15 rounds.“The Constitution is not a suggestion and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said. “Denver’s ban on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles directly violates the right to bear arms.
It's rare for me to wish the Federal government luck in its attempts to meddle internally with the states; in general I have supported Jefferson's vision of a Federal government that 'looks out,' and deals with external threats or clashes between states only. However, as noted even in 2014:
We've added one more constitutional role to Jefferson's ideal, which is making sure that even within states government does not violate basic rights. Generally the Federal government has done this badly, but at times they've been the only one to do it at all.
I was thinking of course of Jim Crow style oppression by state and local governments when I wrote that, but it applies here also.
UPDATE: Hall favorite Harmeet Dhillon predicts SCOTUS will declare the AR-15 legal and constitutionally protected across the nation. It certainly ought.
Old Story, New Telling
The MIT Press Reader has a story today about how we learned that the NSA had begun spying on Americans in the wake of the Patriot Act. Most of you know the story; there are details here, however, you probably didn't know.
Cyberpunk 2026
Clever.
It reminds me of what the cyberpunk novels called 'skillsofts,' except you don't have to jack anything into your head; the thing is wholly external. I love the idea of being able to play a guitar, which I've never managed to learn even slightly in spite of several attempts; but now I could just put these on and play like Waylon Jennings, or the bass like Lemmy, or whomever else I wanted.
Killing the Petroyuan
“Yuan” isn’t actually the name of the Chinese currency; it is called the Renminbi (人民币), or “People’s Currency.” “Yuan” is what is called a ’counting word’ in Chinese: things that can come in various quantities have different words to specify what unit is under discussion instead of “give me a beer,” you must ask for a glass of beer or a bottle of beer “Yuan” is a quantity of Renminbi; but it’s so commonly used that yuan functions as if it were the name of the money.
Anyway, the Treasury Secretary has a plan.
A swap line is not a loan and it is not a bailout. It is a contractually-bounded currency exchange in which a foreign central bank delivers a deposit of its own currency to Treasury or the Federal Reserve and receives an equivalent dollar deposit, with both parties committing to reverse the trade at a specified future date and at the same exchange rate. The foreign central bank pays interest on the dollar borrowing. The US holds the foreign currency as collateral for the duration. Counterparty risk sits at the central-bank level, not the commercial-bank level.
The structure is so conservative that the Federal Reserve's swap operations, including peak utilization of roughly $585 billion during the 2008 crisis and $450 billion during the 2020 crisis, have generated no documented losses to US taxpayers across the major episodes examined in the academic finance literature. As Bessent told Congress in defending the Argentina arrangement, "in most bailouts you don't make money. The US government made money." What Bessent is now doing is taking that demonstrated playbook and scaling it into the central instrument of 21st-century American economic statecraft. The strategic logic, which Bessent has stated plainly, runs as follows. Additional swap lines, in his words, "can benefit our nation by reinforcing dollar usage and liquidity internationally, maintaining smooth functioning in dollar funding markets, promoting trade and investment with the United States, and, in hypothetical stress scenarios, preventing disorderly sales of US assets." He went further and named the actual game: "Dollar dominance and reserve currency status are strengthened by constant long-term initiatives, including countering the growth of problematic, alternative payment systems." Translation for those who do not speak Treasury, this is about killing the petroyuan in its cradle.
A Pirate Philosopher
In the comments to a post at AVI's that began with an interesting character, I noted that pirates were pretty common among the English gentry of the era: "The English Civil War and its echoes also turned many adventurers into outlaws on Britain's wide frontier."
That turns out to be exactly what happened in this case. A Roman Catholic who converted to Anglicanism for political reasons under Charles I, he returned to Catholicism during his grief over the death of his wife. A successful privateer defending England's interests before the Civil War, he ended up in exile during the war; fought and won a duel against a French nobleman; became an emissary to the Pope for Oliver Cromwell; and after the Restoration, a popular figure at Charles II's court. He also developed a better wine-bottle than had existed before his time, stronger and tinted to protect the wine from the effects of sunlight.
One of his most famous philosophical/medical attempts was the powder of sympathy. As noted in the post I wrote about "Empathy vs. Sympathy," this was the original use of the term sympathy in English: sympathetic magic, we would call it today.
Up the Militia
Megan McArdle proposes what she clearly intends as 'a modest proposal' on firearms; but she's quite right.
Maybe we’re looking at the problem wrong. Maybe instead of putting so much energy into efforts to keep people from buying guns, we should be trying to change which guns the buy. Instead of trying to make gun purchases more onerous, we should try something more radical: help people buy long guns instead of handguns.No, I haven’t gone crazy. I’ve just been reading a provocative new paper from economists Bradley Shapiro, Sara Drango and Sarah Moshary.They start from a few simple and correct premises. First, handguns are associated with more harm than long guns — they are involved in 90 percent of firearm violence and a huge number of suicides. People own significantly more handguns because they are just easier to carry around and easier to conceal.Second, most people who buy guns say they want them for personal or household safety. That’s a use for long guns as well. Displacing handgun purchases with purchases of less convenient long guns could reduce the likelihood of tragedy when the owner becomes angry or despondent.So, what if the government gave first-time gun buyers a subsidy to choose a long gun instead?
The numbers on handguns vs. long-guns are well known to readers of the Hall. America is a safe country, a fact that is obscured by a few neighborhoods in a few cities in a few counties creating a vast bias in our statistics. The media likes to report on 'assault weapon' mass shootings, but those are a tiny percentage of the gun violence problem: long guns of all kinds, 'assault' or otherwise, account for a couple percent of the murders. If we then are only interested in mass shootings we reduce that percentage to statistical noise; they just get a lot of coverage in the press because the stories are exciting and drive clicks and viewers. In fact, almost no American guns as a percentage are ever involved in violent crime: once you appreciate that we have more guns than people, the math becomes overwhelming.
That said, the money to be made in reducing gun homicides is clearly with illegally-possessed handguns: not new laws, since these things are already illegal (e.g. stolen) or illegally possessed (e.g. by felons), and readily done by increased policing in those few neighborhoods in those few cities in those few counties. Nobody ever raises that solution because it doesn't address the real issue that the politicians want to address, which is greater government control over the citizenry -- not the criminal class, but the law-abiding ones.
It would be perfectly Constitutional, however, for the government to require that all non-felon adult citizens arm themselves with a rifle suitable for militia service. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 gives Congress the authority to "arm" the militia, which would embrace the idea of subsidies for suitable firearms. The AR-15 is the obvious choice: it's the one that operates most similarly to and shares many parts with our service rifles, and shares ammunition with what we have in large military stocks.
McArdle is only floating this as an idea to broaden the discussion, not as a serious proposal. Still, it has some points in its favor.
Mossadegh
A new report argues that our popular understanding of Iran’s mid-20th century history is almost completely wrong.
Chamber of Commerce
A curious decision by the local Jackson County Chamber of Commerce as to what they wanted to highlight about their community, but who am I to judge? They seemed enthusiastic.
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