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 Wikipedia recounts:

"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. 

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

Happy Birthday Willie

Willie Nelson is 93 today. 

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.