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.

You Know What Some Peoples Trauma Is?

This is shockingly brutal. Did he seed the audience?

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:

Tom

They 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 PM

Grim

Your 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-murky

6:02 PM

Tom

I 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. 

AAR: Huntsville

Rocket City is a fun town. 

It has to be, I gather, because the space industry is going gangbusters and needs people to want to move to Alabama. Local unemployment recently hit 1.9%. Major corporations like JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin are heavily engaged with state and local leaders to fund cheap housing for new employees, try to get high school students trained on coding so they can become 2-year college students then trained on machine welding and other technologies greatly in need in the rocket industry. Four-year colleges focus on engineering; the town claims the highest percentage of engineer citizens in the nation. They've also built parks, an arboretum, music venues, sporting facilities, trails, and anything else they can think of to make the place seem like a fun place to be -- which, indeed, it is. 

Here's one fun idea: they turned over one of those antiquated mid-century school campuses to local bars and game shops, which have had fun turning it into a punk/rockabilly sort of version of traditional high school.

Classic institutional architecture, now a reform reformed school.

Pool and Bud Light in the Principal's Office.

Dungeons and Dragons gaming shop among lockers festooned with once-forbidden stickers.

Prom, no. Rockabilly Prom? Maybe!

An arcade filled with nothing but pinball machines. I played the Star Wars one.

Well, and one more pool table at the back.

Rockabilly Prom? How about Zombie Prom?

The whole area is what we here in NC call a "Social District," meaning that you can walk around freely with open containers of alcohol. There are some rules that are mostly deference to state law, but generally it is set aside to be a more-fun space than usual.

Right across the street from all that is the IBEW Union Hall, so it's a place where you'll meet welders and working men. Also servicemen: the city features Redstone Arsenal, where the military component of all this lives, about 45,000 service members and civilians devoted to the space program in one way or another. Soon to be 55,000, because US Space Command is relocating there soon from Colorado Springs. 

A much fancier version of the same concept exists just two blocks away:

A similar space called Stovehouse built around an old factory. It’s got everything from ballroom dancing to taqueria to a Pilates studio.⁩

Also defense contractors. Lots of them have offices in the same facility: Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, etc.

Less wild and crazy than the reformed-school space, but it was fun to watch the happy children play in the water feature.

Because of the prosperity and low unemployment, Huntsville is a very clean and safe town. I think it is well understood that I generally dislike cities under the best of circumstances, but this one is actually a nice place to visit. Even better -- it's only about 12 miles from city-center to the farmlands outside, so it doesn't take long to escape when you get ready to climb on your bike and get out of town. 

Back in the Mountains

This was taken at the remnants of the site of the 1996 Olympic Games’ whitewater events. Those Games were mainly held in Atlanta, but there’s not much whitewater in Atlanta. This is just over the border into Tennessee in the Ocoee River country. 

All the Way Down to Ala-Bam

Had some business in Huntsville today, so I rode down yesterday. 

Boyd Gap, on the Tennessee side.

The TVA made many lakes; this one floods the Ocoee River.

That one is small compared with Nickajack Lake, which floods the mighty Tennessee River. 

Huntsville. Pretty sure this is the right place. Hard to miss, actually.

What Exactly is the Crime?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) did helpful service many years ago by taking on the KKK; we're better off without that latter organization having the power and control it did of yore. More recently they've served as a kind of third-party validator of left-wing attempts to paint conservative organizations as unacceptable extremist groups. I can understand how that annoys people. 

What part of this conduct is illegal, though?

In the video posted Tuesday morning, CEO Bryan Fair said the probe focuses on bringing potential charges against both the organization and individuals connected to the group.

"The focus appears to be on the SPLC's prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups," he said.

"This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence. In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff," he said. "For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups. In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public. We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. " 

The probe comes as the Justice Department has stepped up its scrutiny of nonprofits that it accuses of being involved with or funding "domestic terrorism." It was not clear if the criminal investigation is related to that initiative, and a spokesperson for the SPLC did not know the Justice Department's legal theory behind the probe.

Insofar as you are publishing the findings of such research, it's protected journalism under the first amendment as far as I can tell. The National Enquirer pays sources for scoops; that's how they nailed John Edwards back in 2007. As far as I know the fact that they paid for the information they published didn't make it illegal. Any of you lawyers have a theory about how this could be a crime?

Thomas Transcript, Day 2

From the second half of the speech, the critique of Progressivism. 

As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure. At the beginning of the 20th century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominent among them, the 28th president of our country, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads into our system of government and our way of life. It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.

Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck's Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated system of relatively unimpeded state power, nearly perfected.

He acknowledged that it was a foreign science speaking very little of the language of English or American principle, which offers none but what are, to our minds, alien ideas. He thus described America still stuck with its original system of government as, quote, slow to see the superiority of the European system. Progressivism was the first mainstream American political movement, with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War, quote, to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration.

Progressives strove to undo the Declaration's commitment to equality and natural rights, both of which they denied were self-evident. To Wilson, the unalienable rights of the individual were, quote, a lot of nonsense. Wilson redefined liberty, not as a natural right attendant and assedent to the government, but as, quote, the right of those who are governed to adjust government to their own needs and interests.

In other words, liberty no longer preceded the government as a gift from God, but was to be enjoyed at the grace of the government. The government, as Wilson reconceived it, would be, quote, beneficent and indispensable. Progressives such as John Dewey attacked the Framers for believing that their ideas were immutable truth, good for all times and places, when instead they were, according to him, historically conditioned and relevant only in their own time.

Now Dewey and the progressives argued those ideas are to be displaced. Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God but from government.

It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights. You will not be surprised to learn that the progressives had a great deal of contempt for us, the American people. Before he entered politics, Wilson would describe the American people as, quote, selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, and foolish.

He lamented that we do too much by vote and too little by expert rule. He proposed that the people be ruled by administrators who use them as tools. He once again aspired to be like Germany, where the people, he said admiringly, were docile and acquiescent.

The century of progressivism did not go well. The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called nearly perfect, led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our declaration are based.

Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people. It was a terrible mistake to adopt progressivism's rejection of the declaration's vision of universal, unalienable natural rights. Wilson's claim that natural rights must give way to historical progress could justify the greatest mistake in our history... 

They say our 18th century declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government, but we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bonds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx, and their followers. Fascism, which after all was National Socialism, triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions.

The socialism of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China proceeded to kill more tens of millions of their own people. This is what happens when natural rights give way to the higher good of notions of history, progress, or as Thomas Sowell has written, the visions of the anointed. None of this, of course, was an improvement on the principles of the declaration.... 

If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the government, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

Emphasis added, but only because emphasis is warranted.  

A Little Crockett

A Meditation on Tradition

We live in an online world governed by algorithms. One of them has learned that I like and will reliably watch 70s-themed videos of guys riding rebuilt Shovelhead choppers, especially if they are set to 70s music like the above. Often in addition to riding through beautiful country, these videos feature campfires and guys sharing some beer around them. It reminds me of how we used to spend many happy nights back in the old days.

Yet the videos aren't from the 1970s; they're guys doing it right now. There's nothing to stop you from going out and buying a Shovelhead. In addition to the used bikes you can source, you can buy a brand new Shovelhead engine and build one. These guys making the videos aren't looking at their phones at the campfire, but you can be sure they're filming the videos on their phones and sharing them with you that way. You can listen to everything from the 70s on Spotify as you go down the road, which you couldn't have done in the 1970s: the Walkman didn't even exist until '79.

Here as elsewhere, nothing has been lost. You can still do it the old way: chop your wood with an axe, as I've been doing lately in preparation for next winter. Ride your own bike. Listen to the old songs; sing the old songs. 

Be free. You just have to do what your ancestors did. There's a good chance they taught you how, if you listened.

A Thomas Transcript

Updated below, but here at last is a transcript of the speech Justice Thomas gave at UT Austin.

Some highlights from the first half only:

It is my sincere hope that your work to revitalize the teaching and research of Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition will lead the way in the reform of our nation's colleges and universities. And I hope that your example will help to rejuvenate our fellow citizens' commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence....

[A]ll too often the sentiments [voiced by the common culture] tend toward cynicism, rejection, hostility, and animus toward our country and its ideals. With the foregoing in mind, I would like to begin by addressing my first encounter with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

It is perhaps not what you would immediately think. The second paragraph of the Declaration proclaims, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Throughout my youth, these truths were articles of faith that were impervious to bigotry and discrimination.

The American Heritage Dictionary of English Language defines self-evident as obviously true and requiring no proof, argument, or explanation. Whether they had a divine source or a worldly one, they were never questioned. They were the Holy Grail, the North Star, the Rock, immovable and unquestioned.

Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that wreaked a bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education that in God's eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal. This was also the case with my nuns, most of whom were Irish immigrants. At home, at school, and at church, we were taught that we are inherently equal, that equality came from God, and that it could not be diminished by man....

Somehow, without formal education, the older people knew that these God-given or natural rights preceded and transcended governmental power or authority. When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that promoted unequal treatment, it was obvious that your rights or your dignity did not come from those governments, but rather from God. Though not a literate man, my grandfather often spoke of our rights and obligations coming from God, not from architects of segregation and discrimination.

Men were not angels. They were subject to the constraints of antecedent rights, and we were not subject to those men, even as we were subjected to their whims. We knew that life, liberty, and property were sacrosanct....

Arguably, those men committed treason against the king, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the newborn United States. They thus concluded with the memorable final sentence, and I quote, and for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. I will say it again.

We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Recently, I came across a definition of courage that is attributed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.

In essence, the signers of the Declaration were saying that they were willing to die for the principles they were asserting, the supreme act of courage. Those principles were more important than their fear. Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence.

 This is an address that merits reading and consideration throughout.