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.
Requiescat in Pace, David Allan Coe
Reliable sources are reporting the death of Outlaw Country legend David Allan Coe.
He was one of the last of the greats, and a true Outlaw; he was a full patch member of the Outlaws MC.
Next Up
With the Supreme Court's solid ruling in Louisiana v Calais et al., next up, I say, is partisan gerrymandering, gerrymandering by political party. That gerrymandering, decades of court rulings notwithstanding, is just as unconstitutional as racial gerrymandering. While Alito centered the Calais ruling on the 15th Amendment, both forms of gerrymandering--all such forms, come to that--treat one group of American citizen voters entirely differently from and at the direct expense of all other groups of American voters in direct violation of the 14th Amendment.
As a man almost said not so long ago, "There's not a liberal American voter and a conservative American voter. There's the United States of America voter. There's not a black American voter and white American voter and Latino American voter and Asian American voter; there's the United States of America voter."
Full stop.
Eric Hines
Three Strikes
Coffee and Covid notes a disturbing pattern in these assassination attempts. (H/t D29).
Taken together, the three attempts highlight a paradox: the protective apparatus keeps evolving— and so do the shooters’ tactics. It’s almost like each successive shooter knows how the Secret Service’s protocols have changed.
In the most recent two, the attacker was successfully neutralized before Trump was physically harmed, and in the latest, the suspect never made it to the final stairway. Yet, in spite of increasingly paranoid and enhanced security, each incident exposed a brand‑new seam — an unguarded rooftop, a gap in a golf‑course fence, a “layered security” perimeter that still allowed an armed man to sprint the last 50 yards....
If this were just three different shooters exploiting three different weak spots, that would be bad enough. But when you look more closely at the details, the pattern gets even harder to wave away as “bad luck.”...
Combine those three stories, and our N=3 dataset starts to look a lot less like three independent miracles of bad fortune and a lot more like a system that keeps failing in eerily specific ways.
One rooftop that was covered and then mysteriously uncovered. One would‑be sniper who spends hours inside the outer perimeter without any sweep pushing him out. One gunman who manages to pick the exact right moment when a half‑dozen security professionals aren’t physically in his way at a choke point designed precisely so that someone should always be in the way.
We can dismiss those questions as coincidence —as lottery-level luck— for three separate, consecutive “lone wolves.” If so, well, the crack where “incredible luck” lives is getting microscopically skinny.
By coincidence, this points to an unrelated sports article that AVI just posted with his own commentary about how people are bad at estimating the odds of three or more successive events.
This is an example of people not understanding that successive reasonable probabilities quickly become unreasonable. A 7-in-10 chance is good, but if it is combined with a second 7-in-10 chance it drops to 50-50 (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49), and a third one brings you down to about a 1-in-3 chance. (0.343)
That's true: even with good odds, getting three in a row is hard. How about with allegedly terrible odds?
Inside help looks like the most probable theory. That's not an accusation, just an observation about the math.
Looking for Bridges
In a comment to a post below, Tom was asking if anyone is still looking for common ground. The President of Dartmouth is.
When an encampment went up in May 2024, Beilock had protestors arrested within two hours. Under her leadership, admissions has prioritized students who can act as "bridges between people" and students with "underrepresented" viewpoints—the admissions director used as an example someone who led his high school's Young Republicans club and was dialogue-focused. Her Dartmouth Dialogues project has spent hundreds of thousands bringing in speakers from both sides.
Above all, Beilock believes schools should be "in service of truth," not "ideology," and cannot allow disruptions to free speech
One suspects that is a controversial position, especially in the Ivy League. An honorable one, though.
Another Piece on "Equality"
Now since all of you suffered through the long commentary on the EN last summer, which is available on the sidebar if you wish to revisit it (especially EN 5, for this matter), you can readily engage with this bit from American Thinker.
The equality of man is found at the forefront of our Declaration of Independence and is considered an uncontested virtue of free society. However, disagreement over its implementation has raised the following questions: What exactly is equality in a state? Which things should be equal? Which should be unequal? What are the consequences? A nation’s concord depends on the answers — and yet today, these questions are rarely examined.Historically, this was not the case. In Aristotle’s exploration in Politics, equality is governed by justice — the principle that each is given his due. But exactly what is “due” depends on the object being distributed. To account for this, Aristotle distinguished two types of equality: numerical, or equality of distribution, and value, or equality of proportion. The first is characterized by each receiving the exact same, the second by each receiving an amount proportional to his contribution, ability, or merit.A just society requires a combination of both, each to its appropriate object. Any misplacement of a form of equality to a domain where it doesn’t belong is an error that, if absolutized, manifests in two extremes. The first assumes that if all are equal in one aspect, they ought to be equal in all aspects — e.g., if two people are equal in citizenship, then they should also have equal amounts of material goods or wealth. The second supposes that if some are unequal in one aspect, they should be unequal in all aspects — e.g., different laws for different classes or levels of wealth.The question, then, is which aspects of society should be governed by which types. Citizens should have numerical equality in that which is innate and belongs to man by nature itself: rights endowed by the creator, equal protection under the law, respect, and dignity. A just state gives these things equally to everyone; they don’t require another’s physical production and are intrinsically owed by the laws of nature. Proportional equality, however, should be owed to objects that belong to man by action and do require external production by other humans: wealth, services, and material goods.
There must be some advantages to philosophy, after all. Not serious ones, since it is worth doing for its own sake: as Aristotle says in the beginning of De Anima, the best kind of mind wants to know the truth about the highest things. The very highest things are useless, since to be 'useful' is to be useful for something else; and that something else must be higher in some sense than the first thing. Yet there are advantages to knowing, all the same.
Manfesto: "Message: I Care"
Usually a manifesto contains some sort of model for improvement that justifies revolutionary violence. This one does not. I infer from this that his revolutionary Leftism is an essentially conservative movement: it is trying to roll back the changes of the Trump administration, to restore the order of perhaps the Obama era. The shooter in this case was, after all, a credentialed California educator: he doesn't want to change anything, he just wants to stop the changes.
He expresses this, however, in terms of how much he cares, a statement that follows a large number of apologies to express how much he cares about the people he is affecting. Then his 'manifesto':
On to why I did any of this:I am a citizen of the United States of America.What my representatives do reflects on me.And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)
I am also a citizen of the United States of America. I don't think I agree, however, that what my "representatives" do reflects on me at all. I don't feel the least bit responsible for them, and I don't think that I ought to do. For one thing, I don't think the system is in any way representative: my Senators work for the major corporations of North Carolina, not for me, as they prove every day (at least every day that they bother to work) by their conduct. Even my Congressman -- indeed my last few Congressmen -- have made no attempt to suggest that they care what I think or if I vote for them. Why should they? They're gerrymandered into perfect security.
The Presidential races are at least competitive, but my input into that system is so minimal that I don't see how I can be morally responsible for the selection; and once selected, especially this President has made clear that he is not interested in further input from me or you or anyone for four years.
I used to believe that citizens' thoughts were important to the system, and that we could influence the system through argument or letter-writing or petitions or demonstrations. I used, therefore, to argue passionately to try to persuade fellow citizens about what I thought were the best available policies. I no longer believe any of that; I think the political elections are a kind of dramatic show that is only intended to produce the illusion of choice and therefore to manufacture consent to what the permanent, unelected bureaucracy that actually is the government was going to do regardless of who was elected.
Those people aren't my representatives even in theory. They work for the state, and are self-selecting. I have neither influence nor input into their decisions; occasionally there is a public comment period for certain proposals, but they're going to do what they want regardless of how clever your arguments to the contrary may be.
In any case, I feel that my duty to object to the government is mostly satisfied by stating the objection, which I usually do here. No one who reads the Hall probably thinks that I am in approval of the government of the United States in general, or the particular 'representatives' in especial.
I generally think that political violence is fundamental to the American project, which began in revolution because people who likewise felt strongly about it decided to take up arms. I don't especially object to him trying, since he feels that way too; he's taken up what we used to call The Wager of Battle and lost. Having freely chosen it, he now has to pay up. In the old days we'd have hanged him; these days he'll probably get a life sentence that will be commuted by some future Democratic President, leading to a sinecure on talk shows where he'll be lecturing us all from his position of moral superiority as someone who "tried to do something about it."
I'll be skipping the lectures when they arrive. I already know what he thinks; he thinks what they all think. It is the Standard Position of the credentialed class, and devoid of original thought.
Gun Control vs. the White House Correspondents Dinner
Just as an aside, the shooter who went up against several Federal police agencies at the White House Correspondents' Dinner was armed solely with firearms that comply with the strictest gun control laws in America. The pistol he carried is Maryland and California compliant. His main choice of weapon was a pump-action shotgun, which he explains that he loaded with buckshot thinking that might let him get past the body armored security without killing them (a rather dodgy plan, but let's leave that for the moment). It wasn't even a semi-automatic weapon; you can get pump action shotguns even in the UK with the right friends in high places paperwork.
Once again, these laws don't actually solve the problems they purport to solve. Their regular and comprehensive failure leads me to conclude that no one actually cares if they work; their real intent must be something else.
I’d Like An Argument Please
The Heterodox Academy, which is doing good work in trying to create space for viewpoint diversity in American universities, is holding an event they call Disagree With A Professor.
Please join the Heterodox Academy Campus Chapter at Stanford University for the inaugural Disagree with a Professor lunch event on Meyer Green on Tuesday, April 28th from 12:00pm - 1:15pm where you’ll be able to engage with different faculty about a variety of claims, including:
- Mail-in voting was a bad idea. Everyone should vote in-person on Election Day.
- Forget the Electoral College; we should abolish the Presidency.
- We are less prepared for the next pandemic now than we were before COVID, despite significant advances in our ability to detect, analyze, prevent, and treat infectious disease.
- Grading of students by the professor who teaches the class is biased. It should be eliminated or supplemented with evaluations by unaffiliated evaluators.
- The world is a safer place in the 21st century than ever before.
- Geography is the force that drives history.
Those sound like spirited topics! Naturally, however, I thought of this:
SPLC and USAID
In the comments to the earlier post about the SPLC's criminal problems, I commented: "It sounds like the allegations aren't really about paying for sources, but about paying to create and sustain terrorist and extremist groups because it was useful to have them as a political foil. That's akin to how USAID was using 'aid' money to fund NGOs that were funding all sorts of bad activities. The SPLC was I suppose part of that large NGO archipelago."
That supposition is now confirmed.
USAID was funding the SPLC through an organization called the Tides Center, based in San Francisco.From 2016 through 2024, USAID granted $27 million to the Tides Network to “strengthen global civil society organizations, promote transparency, accountability, citizen engagement, and serve as fiscal agent for USAID’s Civil Society Innovation Initiative.”The Tides Center set up a fund through its Tides Foundation with that money for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Vote Your Voice” initiative.The executive director of the Tides Center is Ayesha Khanna. She was co-chair of Women for Obama in Atlanta, Georgia.
In the comments to AVI's post on the same topic, Tom and I had this exchange:
TomThey needed an enemy, so they funded one. They became what they hate. Not sure where they go from here. If I recall, they have half a billion dollars in assets. Maybe, I don't know, give it to the poor?3:49 PMGrimYour recollection is incomplete. They have about a quarter billion dollars in assets offshore. They’ve been moving them offshore aggressively for a decade— since just about the time of Unite the Right, I suppose.https://freebeacon.substack.com/p/southern-poverty-law-centers-murky6:02 PMTomI stand corrected. Again. Still.
Not still: even more. This sudden move to aggressively offshoring its wealth now looks strongly like knowledge of guilt, and a recognition that this wealth needed to be protected by being put beyond the ability of a future US government to target as a part of a prosecution like this. Last time I was questioning whether there was a real crime to target: now I see that they themselves appear to have recognized that there was a crime, and that they needed to offshore a lot of money in defense against future prosecution.