Grim's Hall

A National Emergency

Section 1. National Emergency. As President of the United States, my highest duty is ensuring the national and economic security of the country and its citizens.

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024. This trade deficit reflects...

Is that an emergency? We had a National Emergency already because there was too much immigration. Presidents like National Emergencies because they can assume extra powers.

Tariffs are hated by all economists and journalists, but I do note that some things were better before we started eliminating them. I supported NAFTA because the logic of the free trade argument made sense to me at the time. In 1998, though, I was working for the Unions in Savannah and really got to see the good they did for workers. Then I watched them dry up and die — not quite all, but all across the South. IBEW and the Boilermakers still exist around the port, but so many went away.

It was a pipeline for the poor from the swamp to ordinary middle-class prosperity. We gave it away for cheap goods from Mexico, which soon enough became cheap goods from China. Chinese control over so many of our basic goods has become, if not quite an emergency, a serious national security concern.

UPDATE: A play for all the marbles.

UDPATE: A helpful graph of US tariff rates, which shows that we are at an all time, historic low. (H/t Wikipedia).

These new tariffs put us right back in the historic norm. It's only been in the post-WWII world that we've kept the rates so low, trading away our industry for the goods of free trade.

Why Philosophy?

A rant, it claims, but also a good essay.

He quotes Aristotle differently than I would. Aristotle agreed that the higher forms of philosophy were useless, because to be useful is to be useful for something else. The very highest things we pursue for their own sake, not because it will get us to some lesser goal. You should aspire to strive for useless things, so high and fine that you would never trade them for anything else.

That's some mole

I'm at a loss to imagine how this guy got out of Iran alive. I remember that he was under suspicion in Iran at the time of Nasrallah's death. How he escaped with his life then, and how he got out now, I can't even imagine. How utterly demoralizing for Iran.

A Spring Vista

Conan and Stick, Among the Daffodils

He goes through a stick every day. The whole place is covered with splinters. Somehow he doesn’t get them in his gums.

Gotta Give Him This One

Via Whiskeyriff, a man in Georgia was arrested for leaving his kids to play at the McDonald's playground while he went to a job interview.

Chris Louis was arrested on March 22 after leaving his three kids, including a 1-year old, 6-year old and a 10-year old, unattended at a McDonald’s (which had a playplace, by the way) while he went to a job interview.

Louis reportedly dropped the kids off after walking them to McDonald’s from his apartment, and returned to check on them before leaving again. He then returned to find police waiting for him, and was arrested for deprivation of a minor.

But the internet is rallying behind the father of 3, arguing that he was forced to make a tough decision while simply trying to get a job to provide for his kids.

As many of the comments pointed out, he left them in a place with air conditioner, a bathroom, and adults nearby who could help in case of an emergency, as opposed to simply leaving them alone at his apartment. And while some people were uneasy with the idea of leaving the 1-year old behind, they pointed out that he was forced to make a tough decision in order to try to get a job, and that the 10-year old was old enough to take care of the infant for a short period of time.

It's definitely not ideal, but a crime? The story points out that the 10-year-old was born when the man was 14, just a boy, and here he is ten years later still trying to support his kids.

Sometimes 'as good as it gets' has to be good enough. It's a hard world.

Requiescat in Pace Val Kilmer

Without a doubt his most famous and enduring role was as Georgia-born gunslinger "Doc" Holliday in Tombstone.

However, I particularly loved the performances in Willow. He and his beautiful female opposite in this movie went on to marry in real life and had two children.

I don't know what to say about a man who played many parts, but about whom I know nothing of himself. Fortunately, E. M. Burlingame -- a fellow Small Wars Journal alumnus -- wrote a poem about it that is worthy.

I Had No Idea 'Star Wars' Was Based on a Norse Saga

Remarkable!

Owens Gap

No smoke plume today from the huge Table Rock fire. The storm must have helped.

Clear skies.

Blindness

A commenter at Althouse responds to a post about art museums:

"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."

A lot easier to do, when so many of the monuments you don't like have already been torn down.

Yes, exactly. So much of this stuff that is arguably wrong from first principles is being done because those principles were already violated by the other side. Somehow they can't see that they did it first, emphatically and regularly.

That doesn't make it right. There's a sense in which it is fair, because 'turnabout is fair play.' Getting them to at least recognize that they started the ball rolling might help, but how do you do that?

Democracy

I and some friends were asked to test the quality of Egypt's 2018 election. The election was scrupulously fair, down to the maintenance of unbroken, numerically-keyed locks on the ballot boxes. Both the army and the police watched over each polling station as they didn't trust each other.

They could afford a fair election because they'd removed all the opposition candidates from the ballot beforehand. The only choice except Sisi was his friend who, as a campaign promise, said he'd withdraw if elected and endorse Sisi instead.

We're getting that way in Europe. We almost were that way here, last time around. It's getting dark out there.

No Third Terms

At least half of what the current administration is doing is highly praiseworthy: the DOGE inquiries into unconstitutional/evil spending, waste, fraud, and so forth; the desire to craft peace out of the bloodbath in Ukraine; the move to shrink the Federal government substantially.

Some other things are not: the police state tactics, masked Federal agents arresting people off the street, foreign prisons that violate the 8th Amendment, censorship of disfavored words. These are not in line with America's best traditions and deserve outright condemnation. Insofar as we have any power -- one of the dearest fantasies of Americans is that we have some sort of power over the Federal government apart from the occasional elections -- they deserve our opposition.

A third class of things is both at once: bringing in aggrieved non-experts to run agencies is a necessary breath of fresh air, but will inevitably lead to amateur errors because amateurs are employed. They're not bad people, but we have to expect mistakes. That's ok, but there will be errors.

Two things so far are clearly wrong, at least to me. The desire to take over Gaza from Israel reminds me of nothing more than JFK's decision to take over Vietnam from the French; that's not our fight and we shouldn't want any part of the decades of war it would entail. There should be no third terms, not for anyone. Washington's standard should hold.

That's how it looks to me, at least, so far.

This Is a Song about

Um ...

Can I get an amen?

I heard the optics were great!

This is possibly how I'll go, unless they collapse on me in an earthquake.

A Magic Sword

USMC veteran Jackson Dodd has purchased the sword that was, reportedly, at one time responsible for 80% of Marine enlistments.

You probably know the one.

The sword is eight and a half pounds, which is insanity. Even the two-handed swords in Albion's museum line don't cross three and a half. One of them is two and a half, which is in line with my experience training in historical European martial arts. All that decorative heraldry built into the hilt, I imagine.

Bluegrass and the Byrds

…and Dylan. I assume Earl Scruggs is known to everyone here, but if not meet him now.

Boom Boom

Gee, I wonder why schools are a mess?

My neighbors, lovely, smart, kindly people, are trying to persuade us to try out Netflix's new series "Adolescence." A sentence or two into the description we were doubtful. It's a mockumentary about a 13-year-old UK schoolboy who kills a schoolgirl. The show immediately shocks some audience members by portraying a school in complete chaos. What could be the cause of this collapse? I hope I won't ruin the suspense by revealing that the culprit is social media. Apparently neither parents nor schools have any power to detach children from the pernicious influence of the outside culture.

I'm sure if either parents or teachers made any attempt to turn off the phones, even during class, they'd be brought up on hate crime charges.

My verdict: for decades now the schools have been in the control of crazy people, and kids need to get sprung out of them. It would be bad enough if all that was happening was mission creep, so the eternally and rapidly ballooning budget was only eaten up by all the non-education goals, such as adult employment programs, babysitting, and political indoctrination of captive audiences. But increasingly the kids not only don't get an education, and not only have their time wasted and their intellectual dignity assaulted, but they also are lucky to survive without serious injury.

Brewing in Iran

Her grandfather made his own beer from things he grew in his garden. Her family helped her reconstruct it in Georgia.

Reminds me of the talk about the date wine that used to be popular in what is now Iraq.

Just a Little Red Tape

This video, which you may have seen elsewhere, explains why there's no broadband yet in spite of years of government machinery turning.

Enormous red tape in the bush.

UPDATE: A DOGE interview. A summary.

For me the take away quote is, "We're talking about elementary financial controls that are necessary for any company to function. If a commercial company operated like the Federal government, it would immediately go bankrupt, it would be delisted, and the officers would be arrested."

Reflections

A series of cartoons by the AI about itself.

I hope there's not really a consciousness there. We are making a tortured thing.

UPDATE: Some further insight.