Since we have been getting so many anonymous comments lately, I thought I should repost the comments policy. It's very old: in 2015 it was nine, so it must now be a teenager. Anonymous comments are allowed, but must be signed with some kind of pseudonym that you'll stick by so that we can keep everybody straight. It's hard to carry on a conversation with three different "Anonymous" at once, not being sure which one said what or if they're all the same guy.Anyway, here it is.Please be welcome, so long as you will adhere to this form.I adopted [this policy] from the sadly-defunct Texas Mercury, a fringe publication but one whose bold assertion of well considered and unusual ideas I always enjoyed:As we see it, modern society has all the important ideas of life exactly backwards: we are completely against the belief in sensitivity and tolerance in politics and raffish disregard in private life. The Texas Mercury is founded on the opposite principles- our idea is of tolerance and polite sensitivity in private life and ruthless truth in politics. Be nice to your neighbor. Be hell to his ideas.Comments failing to uphold those principles run the risk of being deleted without warning. In the year and some months since I adopted that as the policy here, I've added one additional point: hit-and-run comments, as well as anonymous comments, will generally be deleted. If you're a regular here, and willing to stand up and fight for what you believe, you can say pretty much anything that isn't a personal attack on a fellow reader. If you're just wandering through, or unwilling to leave your name (even a false name you'll stand by will do, e.g., "Grim"), pass on. This is a hall, and regular readers are honored guests not to be troubled by cowards.Fair enough? Well, fair or unfair, those are the rules.
The only thing that's been added since is that off-topic comments may be marked as SPAM, which will cause them to disappear from user's experience. I don't delete them, but I do sometimes so mark them because we've had some people over the years who proved it necessary.Try not to do anything that will make me add to this list. I liked it better when it was simpler.
donkey's mistake left 51 deadAccording to foreign media, worshippers inside a mosque in #Afghanistan were performing their prayers when a frightened donkey bolted and entered the mosque. Some angry worshippers opened fire on the donkey, killing it.The news reached the donkey's owner, who, enraged, rushed to the mosque, opened fire on the worshippers with a hail of bullets, and fled.Thirteen worshippers were killed inside the mosque.The remaining worshippers, enraged, launched an attack on the donkey owner's village using light and heavy weapons, killing 38 people, including 33 women.Ultimately, a donkey going to a mosque resulted in the deaths of 51 people.
Having said that, I'd like to correct something I said on a Spaces where I commented that organizing with a foreign power to overthrow our government is "the very definition of treason."I did some legal research and that's not quite true.The federal law governing this is 18 U.S. Code § 2381, which reads as follows:"Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States."The question then becomes, what is an "enemy" that must be "adhere[d]" to in order for it to be treason?Like with most complex issues of law, there is not a 100% straightforward answer, but an 1863 SCOTUS case, U.S. v. Greathouse, suggests that an "enemy" in this context must be in an open state of armed conflict with the U.S. for a nation to be an "enemy."So, technically, the Color Revolution plotters are likely not legally committing "treason" unless they are coordinating with Iran, the only nation we are currently in armed conflict with. (And they may well be, who knows!)
To the contrary, both the statute and the Constitution's text on the subject contain the "or" operator. No foreign government and no foreign enemy is necessary for a behavior to constitute treason. Treason can be fully constituted by waging war against the United States.
Attempting any sort of revolution against the government is a species of warfighting, 'color' revolution or not. The attempt to supplant the government by revolution, however often they proclaim that they are devoted to nonviolent means, is a species of warfighting. There is no way the nonviolence will prove to be more than rhetorical, but even supposing it were possible -- say, perhaps, by enlisting an AI swarm that effectively but nonviolently disabled the existing government so you could swoop in and impose another -- you would have destroyed a government without the consent of the governed, and replaced it with one to which they did not consent.
Treason can be the right thing to do, and sometimes -- often! -- has been. It is a wager of battle, however, and losers of that wager pay with their lives. It should be undertaken only by those who honestly believe in it and are willing to gamble their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
Though there are seven archangels altogether, St. Raphael, also known as Azarias, is one of the three Archangels named in Sacred Scripture; the other two are St. Michael (the warrior angel) and St. Gabriel (the messenger angel). St. Raphael is the healer angel; his very name in Hebrew means "God has healed."We meet him first in the Book of Tobias -- a small book, consisting only of fourteen chapters.
Every AI you use right now has a massive blind spot. At its core, it is just a giant autocomplete engine.It is brilliant at language, but fundamentally terrible at rigorous logic.When you ask an AI to solve a complex math problem, execute a multi-step coding workflow, or map out a business strategy, it doesn't actually "think."It guesses what the next word should be based on probability.That is why your AI hallucinates. It uses vibes to do math.Now, a new paper called "Hybrid Reasoning Agents" just completely changed the paradigm.Researchers realized you can't fix this by just making the model bigger. You have to change how it processes reality.They took the creative, language-generating power of a standard LLM (System 1) and wired it directly into a deterministic, symbolic logic engine (System 2).Instead of predicting the next word and hoping it's right, the AI drafts a solution and instantly runs it through a strict logical solver to prove it works.If the logic fails, the AI catches it, rewrites it, and tests it again. All in the background. All before you ever see the output.It perfectly bridges the gap between neural networks (which guess) and symbolic logic (which proves).And the results are staggering.Complex reasoning and planning tasks that completely break traditional models are now being solved with near-perfect accuracy.Because the AI is no longer relying on probability to verify its own logic.
This is NOT the great idea that they think it is. All of you who followed the Nicomachean Ethics discussion last year know why: this is precisely the error that Aristotle warns against in EN I.3.
Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.
By treating analogical reasoning that can apply to people or physical objects as if it should be strict logic with proofs, you open the door to a host of errors.
The King of Scotland was taken prisoner, fighting most gallantly, and badly wounded before he was captured by a squire of Northumberland named John Copeland; who, as soon as he got him, pushed through the crowd, and with eight other companions rode off, and never stopped until he was distant from the field of battle about fifteen miles....
WHEN the Queen of England, who had remained in Newcastle, heard that her army had gained the day, she mounted her palfrey, and went to the field of battle. She was informed that the King of Scotland had been made prisoner by a squire of the name of John Copeland, but who had ridden off with him, they could not tell whither. The queen ordered that a letter should be written, commanding him to bring the King of Scots to her, and telling him that he had not done what was agreeable to her in carrying off his prisoner without leave. All that day the queen and army remained on the field of battle which they had won, and on the morrow returned to Newcastle.
When the letter from the queen was presented by a knight to John Copeland, he answered that he would not give up his prisoner, the King of Scots, to man or woman, except to his own lord the King of England; that they might depend on his taking proper care of him, and he would be answerable for guarding him well. The queen upon this wrote letters to the king, which she sent off to Calais. She therein informed him of the state of his kingdom. The king then ordered John Copeland to come to him at Calais; who, having placed his prisoner under good guards, in a strong castle on the borders of Northumberland, set out, and, passing through England, came to Dover, where he embarked, and landed near Calais. When the King of England saw the squire, he took him by the hand, and said, “Ha! welcome, my squire, who by his valor has captured my adversary the King of Scotland.” John Copeland, falling on one knee, replied, “If God, out of his great kindness, has given me the King of Scotland, and permitted me to conquer him in arms, no one ought to be jealous of it; for God can, when he pleases, send his grace to a poor squire, as well as to a great lord. Sir, do not take it amiss if I did not surrender him to the orders of my lady the queen; for I hold my lands of you, and my oath is to you, not to her, except it be through choice.” The king answered, “John, the loyal service you have done us, and our esteem for your valor, is so great, that it may well serve you as an excuse; and shame fall upon all those that bear you any ill-will. You will now return home, and take your prisoner the King of Scotland, and convey him to my wife; and by way of remuneration I assign lands, as near your house as you can choose them, to the amount of five hundred pounds sterling a year, for you and your heirs; and I retain you as a squire of my body and of my household.” John Copeland left Calais the third day after his arrival, and returned to England. When he was come home he assembled his friends and neighbors, and, in company with them, took the King of Scots, and conveyed him to York, where he presented him, in the name of the king, to the queen, and made such handsome excuses that she was satisfied.When the queen had sufficiently provided for the defence of the city of York, the castle of Roxburgh, the city of Durham, and the town of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as well as for all the borders, and had appointed the Lords Percy and Neville governors of Northumberland to take proper care of it, she set out from York, and returned to London. She ordered the King of Scots, the Earl of Murray, and the other prisoners, to be confined in the Tower of London; and, having placed a sufficient guard over them, set out for Dover, where she embarked, and with a favorable wind arrived before Calais three days preceding the feast of All Saints. The king, upon her arrival, held a grand court, and ordered magnificent entertainments for all the lords who were there, but more especially for the ladies; as the queen had brought a great many with her, who were glad to accompany her, in order to see fathers, brothers, and friends, that were engaged at this siege of Calais.
If you follow the link, in the chapter just above the battle is recounted including some poetry of the era that Froissart was drawing from in shaping his own account.
[A] group of retired admirals, ex-USAID bureaucrats and professional protest organizers got caught on their own recordings working out the conditions under which they get to declare the government of the United States illegitimate, and somehow we are supposed to believe they are the ones protecting democracy.Here is what @DataRepublican put out in Part 2 of the Democracy Files. The videos come from a group called Renew to Thrive, with Danielle Reiff and Paul Zeitz in key roles, and it sits inside a much bigger umbrella called the United Democracy Alliance, which she describes as the hush-hush control room for groups like 50501 and Indivisible, deciding when protests get deployed, the timelines and how to respond. National Security Leaders for America, 1,600 former military, intelligence and diplomatic officials led by retired Rear Admiral Michael E. Smith, is credited with operationalizing the whole thing.
If you want to keep the republic, you have to shoot people like this. Following the lawful process, assuring their rights to a fair trial, etc., but all the same you have to do it or the country isn't serious enough to be taken seriously. Either it's a real nation with the right of pit and gallows, or it isn't. If it isn't, then of course it will be swept away by those who are willing to make use of such things.
UPDATE: An essay on Color Revolutions as they may affect this situation. These were especially common during the Obama era; it was noted that a flag of a single color was easily replicated across a given community, and itself has no ideology. You can project your hopes on the Green Flag or the Orange Flag or whatever, just as Obama explained that people projected their hopes onto him as if he were such a thing.
The essay credits the CIA and USAID, but I think Soros' network is more important than the sideline mention it receives. That network has been attempting one in Serbia for several years, though it has apparently failed.
The Catholic priest who was killed by a falling crucifix over the weekend in Ecuador had been giving a sermon about the fleeting nature of life just before the freak accident was caught live on camera.Father Patricio Sánchez Molinari, of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in southern Guayaquil, was reflecting on the words of Jesus when he told his congregation they should not waste their lives scrolling on their phones and instead dedicate them to God and their loved ones.“One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we’ve spent on things doesn’t have as much meaning as the time we spend with God,” he said....The priest went on to ask God to bless his congregation as he began another prayer — when the giant crucifix behind him suddenly fell off the wall and landed on him.
So it is written. We cannot be surprised when it continues to happen.
One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget.The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics.For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers".This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable....Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise.He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband". At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions.But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way.And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns.Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc.They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears.And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to.It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities.
The obvious category error here is assigning an industrial concept to the family. Just as government is not and should not be run as if it were a business, the family is not a business and definitely should not be run as if it were. The point of a business is to generate profits. The point of a family is to provide an intimate space for humanity to achieve its natural ends. These can include happiness, children and their successful rearing, delight, meaning, and a whole host of other things that are important though they may not be profitable.
As a result, it is probably important that we don't assign concrete, measurable standards of performance to each other inside of our families even if we it is important that we do when running a business. In the family there needs to be room for growth, for comfort in bad times, for expansion and change as interests or capacities develop, and so on and so forth. It's not the point of the thing that we hit targets, but that we experience love and support and give others the same things in return.
To take an example from the field, cooking. Traditionally women cook meals while men work outside the home, but that's not very important. Even in the old days, some men decided to become cooks as a profession.
