Welcome Ruger

Sturm & Ruger has relocated from Connecticut to "gun-friendly North Carolina." I can't speak for the whole state, but the West is definitely gun country. Even the hippies who moved up here in the 60s and 70s to smoke weed in the Blue Ridge Mountains generally have guns; they're old enough now that we'd occasionally get called out to help them with medical or other rescue issues, and invariably there was a revolver sitting out where they could get to it if they needed. 

When the police are an hour away, if you're lucky, you're the only hope you've got. 

North Carolina has a number of legal restraints on firearm usage compared to many Red states, though. For example: if you are the aggressor in an encounter, you can't claim self-defense until and unless you can show that you attempted to retreat from the fight and were stopped or pursued; there's no 'citizens arrest' option like there was in Georgia. I would say it's at best the third-most gun-friendly state I've lived in, after Georgia and Virginia (at that time: obviously not now!).

Still, Ruger has probably made a wise move. They're my favorite handgun manufacturer; of the handguns I own, the clear majority are Rugers. When I shoot those poker cards, I'm usually shooting a Ruger Single Six -- the fixed-sight cowboy version. When I'm not shooting poker cards, I keep it loaded with snake shot in case of a close encounter with our Timber rattlers. They've bitten my wife and my dog since we moved up here, and they don't rattle any more like the earlier generations. The ones who rattled got shot, I guess: evolution in action. Now, the Timber rattlers just try to kill you straight off. 

UPDATE: The article is off on one point, I notice: we do have permitless OPEN carry in North Carolina. We don't have permitless CONCEALED carry. There are the usual restrictions about carrying to schools, etc. The legislature has approved full-scale Constitutional carry, but the governor vetoed it and the Senate has yet to act on the veto override (most likely because, like establishment Republicans generally, they prefer to fail to change things the way their voters want, they just like to fundraise off of the issues they don't fix).

CIA Raids Tulsi's Office

The Central Intelligence Agency almost certainly doesn't have the legal authority to raid the office of the Director of National Intelligence in order to seize files it doesn't want declassified. All the same, it did, at least according to a Congresswoman and a whistleblower.

If true, this is in direct defiance of a Presidential EO to declassify those documents. It's the administrative state openly defying the constitutional order.

UPDATE: A Newsmax journalist says it is not true, and that the WH has affirmed to him that the report is false. Keep an eye open on this one; it would be extraordinary if it pans out, but it deserves skepticism. 

90s Hip Hop References

I don't know how painful this was, but it is objectively funny to watch Jake Tapper painstakingly explaining these references like we don't all know them. Grim's Hall very rarely features hip-hop references, but even I knew all of these.

Alcohol as Social

This is not without plausibility.

Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.

That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.... The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it....

The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.

Most things are tradeoffs. Alcohol too: it has a lot of downsides, and would be wisely replaced with a better technology that doesn't have so many tradeoffs. Here, though, we're replacing it with risk aversion, and that is expensive too. Maybe it is more expensive.

Illegal Immigrants and the 2A

The courts are working through cases involving both the status of illegal immigrants and also the Second Amendment; this particular case turns on both issues.

In 2022, the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen held that when an individual’s conduct falls within the Second Amendment’s text, the government can defend a gun restriction only by showing it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Relying on Bruen, Rebollar, Osorio’s public defender moved to dismiss, arguing that § 922(g)(5) was unconstitutional as applied to him because, given his years in the country and close ties to U.S. citizens, he fell within “the people” the Amendment protects and the government could not justify disarming him.

Prosecutors countered that undocumented immigrants fall outside that protected category altogether or, alternatively, that § 922(g)(5) fits within a longstanding tradition of status-based restrictions on who may be armed. But District Judge Nancy Torresen didn’t buy this argument. Reading the Court’s precedents together, the judge held that unlawfully present noncitizens with substantial ties (like Rebollar Osorio) fall within that term. As a result, their right to possess firearms is protected by the Second Amendment, and the government must justify any restriction.

Judge Torresen then applied Bruen’s history‑and‑tradition test....

On appeal, the First Circuit reversed but did so without deciding whether undocumented immigrants like Rebollar Osorio are within “the people.” Instead, the panel assumed for argument’s sake that he could claim Second Amendment coverage and skipped directly to Bruen’s historical inquiry.... It did not look for founding-era statutes that specifically targeted undocumented immigrants, a category that did not exist in the same way. Instead, it asked whether there is a tradition of restricting arms to those firmly within the political community and disarming those deemed outside or insufficiently loyal. Drawing on English and early American case law and statutes, the panel emphasized laws that limited arms for groups such as non‑Protestants, persons who refused loyalty oaths, and others treated as outside the core polity. In the court’s view, those measures reflected a longstanding use of status-based rules to control who could be armed.

Nice to see the courts taking Bruen seriously as the controlling precedent. Both of the courts' conclusions are defensible, as both recognize the applicability of the Second as a right they have to take into account. The open question is to what degree it is a right available to those who have violated the laws to get here in the first place.

I like it

How to Make the Trump Battleship Even Deadlier with this One Weird Trick.

The Origins of Country Music

 Seems legit ...

Old Time vs Bluegrass vs Western Swing

Speaking of genres I've never been clear on, here are a couple of videos on the history of these three styles. I did not realize how new bluegrass and Western swing are.

I like them all.

Music below the fold.

Flamenco and Classical Guitar

I was curious about the flamenco guitars and techniques Eric mentioned, so here's some demonstration of some basic flamenco techniques.

Here's one on the physical and cultural differences between the guitars themselves:

Music below the fold.

Carne Asada

That fire roasted corn was amazing. The sirloin was good too, but I wasn’t expecting the corn to be as delicious as it was. The bacon-wrapped potato slices were a good experiment, but they needed more time and slower heat. 

Never Before

Possibly never again; depends on future events. Definitely unprecedented. 

A Good Orthodox/Catholic Joke from the Bee

I won't spoil it; go see for yourself. 

AIs and Zombies (Oh My!)

An amusing video, clearly inspired by Fallout but with a sense of humor Range 15 fans might appreciate. 

Licklog Gap

Tulsi Gabbard: Remarks at '26 Independent Women's Forum

Thanks to D29, who forwarded these remarks by Hall favorite Tulsi Gabbard to me. At one point in the remarks she tells a story about a debate early in her political career in which she asserts that she "smashed" her opponent. It was a local race to Hawaii so I didn't see it, but without looking it up I believe her. We all saw what she did to Kamala Harris the one time she got to debate Harris before Kamala decided to withdraw from consideration.

I don't know if it's significant that the only members of the administration that have earned the title "Hall favorite" are Tulsi Gabbard and Harmeet Dhillon, both ladies rather than gentlemen. That may be coincidence, because I believe the reasons are substantive and unrelated: Gabbard's aggressive pursuit of IC politicization and corruption, Dhillon's increasingly robust defense of the 2nd Amendment. Still, given that these were remarks at an explicitly 'women's' forum, for whatever it's worth, they're the ones I appreciate.

D29 notes that there's a lot of Aquinas in her remarks, as indeed there is. 

The Lawfulness of Revolution

A link I saw today mirrors a discussion Tom and I were having in a couple of the posts below. We were talking about piracy; this is about revolution. The question is whether either can be in some sense "lawful," or if indeed having a State whose law approves of the action in any way improves or alters the morality of the action.

The distinction between piracy and revolution is potentially less than it seems. Pirates were often breakaway sailors who had turned against their own government, for example -- indeed, during the period that occasioned the discussion, supporters of the Stewarts often found themselves fighting against the English Civil War government that executed their king Charles I, and then for the new government that followed the restoration of Charles II, and then against the government that rejected James II in favor of William of Orange. Such men could go from being defined as 'privateers' to 'pirates' and back again. 

Likewise, men like Stede Bonnet, an English gentleman who was briefly part of the Republic of Pirates -- the one in Nassau, not the one on Old Providence isle, which is now a part of Colombia (the one with two 'o's, for those following AVI's blog also) before being pardoned and made an English privateer, after which he returned to pirating his own nation's ships as well. Those activities gave information and inspiration to the Revolutionary war American privateers, who were of course considered pirates -- and traitors, as they considered all 'revolutionaries' -- by the English. 

Some of the American revolutionary leaders gave serious attention to the question of whether or not what they were doing could be called lawful, rather than merely just or virtuous or proper. Per the article, they fell on exactly the distinction I mentioned in the comments to Tom:

If you want to impose a religious context on top of the social one, one might not have violated the natural law or the divine law but acted in an upright way as a husband or father defending his family; the murderer clearly has sinned through wrath or lust or whatever brought him to the murder. However, since the religious context introduces a sort-of legislation, it might muddy the point to add it.

Since the article is specifically about 'lawfulness,' in their version of the discussion this is immediately relevant rather than water-muddying. The Natural Law does seem to endorse revolutions -- as the Declaration of Independence frames it, sometimes as a right and sometimes as a duty. 

"The Inquisition Invented Peer Review"

That tracks. 

She's an interesting historian our of the University of Chicago, with books on Viking mythology including a series on Ragnarok. She makes a pretty good case that academic feminism improved our understanding of Viking metaphysics. 

COWEN: What is it that women scholars understand better about Viking metaphysics?

PALMER: [laughs] It’s not mainly that women scholars understand it, but it was the entry of women scholars into the field that helped us understand it. For a long time in Viking studies, nobody wanted to touch metaphysics with a 10-foot pole. This was because during World War II, Hitler’s minister of culture was somebody who had done his dissertation on Viking metaphysics, and you couldn’t work on Viking metaphysics without citing him. So, it made it sort of a poisoned field for a while.

However, when, in the late ’60s and ’70s, the advances of feminism meant that more women were entering academia, but still often being sidelined within academia and pushed into corners of research that others didn’t want to touch, a number of them started looking at topics that people hadn’t looked at in a long time, including that one, especially because Viking metaphysics revolves around weaving.

Now, weaving is a feminine-coded, feminine-gendered subject, both in the Viking period and in the period when history took its formation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lots of weaving-related equipment had been found in tombs and excavated here and there and then set aside, as this is women’s work and not of interest except to women.

Women started looking at it and were like, wait a minute, this isn’t a weaving shuttle; this is a staff of sorcery, as described in the sagas that very clearly described these staffs of sorcery that look like weaving shuttles because Viking metaphysics is dominated by ideas of threads of fate, the Norns spinning fate, weaving fate, etc. And it was women who were first willing to look at that stuff in detail.

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.