Play Dead

"Play Dead, Copper!"

"Good horse."

Mercs v Pirates

Mercs v. Pirates:

Mercs win.

Sigurd the Crusader Invents An Interesting Maneuver:

From the Saga named for him:

King Sigurd then sailed eastward along the coast of Serkland, and came to an island there called Forminterra. There a great many heathen Moors had taken up their dwelling in a cave, and had built a strong stone wall before its mouth. They harried the country all round, and carried all their booty to their cave. King Sigurd landed on this island, and went to the cave; but it lay in a precipice, and there was a high winding path to the stone wall, and the precipice above projected over it. The heathens defended the stone wall, and were not afraid of the Northmen's arms; for they could throw stones, or shoot down upon the Northmen under their feet; neither did the Northmen, under such circumstances, dare to mount up. The heathens took their clothes and other valuable things, carried them out upon the wall, spread them out before the Northmen, shouted, and defied them, and upbraided them as cowards. Then Sigurd fell upon this plan. He had two ship's boats, such as we call barks, drawn up the precipice right above the mouth of the cave; and had thick ropes fastened around the stem, stern, and hull of each. In these boats as many men went as could find room, and then the boats were lowered by the ropes down in front of the mouth of the cave; and the men in the boats shot with stones and missiles into the cave, and the heathens were thus driven from the stone wall.

Then Sigurd with his troops climbed up the precipice to the foot of the stone wall, which they succeeded in breaking down, so that they came into the cave. Now the heathens fled within the stone wall that was built across the cave; on which the king ordered large trees to be brought to the cave, made a great pile in the mouth of it, and set fire to the wood. When the fire and smoke got the upper hand, some of the heathens lost their lives in it; some fled; some fell by the hands of the Northmen; and part were killed, part burned; and the Northmen made the greatest booty they had got on all their expeditions.

The lesson: every place of strength has a weakness. It's only that no one has yet thought of it.

There is always a thing forgotten
When all the world goes well;
A thing forgotten, as long ago
When the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell.

Bonus question: who knows why 'an arrow of snow' is such an appropriate metaphor in the context of poems about the Vikings?

What is to be done?

What Is To Be Done?

The real provocation here is the part of the law that imposes an individual mandate to purchase a hugely expensive product, with resistance punishable by up to five years in prison. Just to make sure we're clear on this, I'll cite Media Matter's own page, claiming to "debunk" that claim. It's not true that the law will send you to prison for not maintaining 'acceptable' levels of insurance; the law only forces you to pay a fine. It's only if you don't pay the fine that you go to prison. But hey, they add, "Willful failure to pay taxes of any sort can result in civil or criminal penalties." Indeed they can, but that doesn't change the fact that this is something new. We have now brought the 'willful failure' to purchase a private product from an insurance corporation into the realm of things we will resolve through punitive taxes, and prison time if you resist the tax.

Anyone who wants to complain about the rise of violent rhetoric among opponents of the law should recognize that the law is what first threatened violence. Throwing people into prison is violence. Extracting money from people under threat of throwing them into prison is violence. It was this law that decided to make "health care" into the kind of issue that we resolve, not with the market by other free private decisions, but through violence and threats of violence.

Health care has never been that kind of issue in America before. Until this law is repealed we have an era in which Americans are under actual physical threat over how they purchase insurance, or make decisions about the care of their family members.

The fact that the police and the courts are 'lawful violence' and resistance is not lawful is a reasonable point to make. It's worth remembering, when making that point, that the American tradition is laid on the idea that we have a right to revolt against tyrannical authority. The British Army was also 'lawful violence,' and the Stamp Act was far less provocation than this.

Indeed, I haven't quite finished describing just how provocative this really is. The fact that the individual mandate is enforcable by arrest and prison time is only part of the issue. The other part is that the mandate has been set so high that most American families will only be able to afford it through Federal subsidies. That means two things:

1) Taking a handout from the government will no longer be a matter for those who are down on their luck, to be done only for as long as absolutely necessary to get back on your feet. It will be the normal condition for American families. From now on, most of us will be dependent on a government handout -- because the government has mandated that we be dependent. That redefines the basic nature of the relationship between government "charity" and what was supposed to be a free and independent People.

2) Because of this dependence, we will be subject to whatever conditions the government puts on the aid. You can compare the experience of buying food with your own cash versus buying food with food stamps: suddenly, you're not really free just to get what you want. You have to submit to the approval of a distant government bureaucracy, which will tell you whether what you want is acceptable or not.

This mandate and that approval are at the core of the 'cost bending' aspects of this bill: in other words, they are indispensable to the whole idea of HCR as it has been put forward. The reason that this allegedly will not break the budget is that everyone will have to buy insurance at this massively expensive level, and that we'll be able to establish 'comparative effectiveness boards' to deny treatments to Americans that the government decides are too expensive.

Put in the most basic terms, the average American family is being told that they will be required to be a ward of the state, and that refusal to comply will result in fines, or arrest and up to five years in prison. Compliance, however, will mean that the decisions about what medical treatments are open to their families will be made by the government, no longer by the family.

What would Patrick Henry have said about that?

This is not a call for violence by me, nor is it a suggestion that violence is legitimate at this time. There are several years in which to rectify this error before that part of the law goes into effect. All I mean to say here is that the American tradition clearly endorses violence against far less tyrannical exercises of power than this. If we get to the point that people are really being threatened with arrest over this mandate, then the government will be the one threatening violence. If that draws a violent response from the citizenry, that may be a legitimate response according to our political tradition.

I think it's important to understand that, especially for those on the pro-HCR side. If you put people in this position, it won't do to complain that they are wicked for resorting to violence. They will reply that you ought not to complain about violence being introduced to the debate, as you introduced it. And they will feel legitimate in using violence against you; nor is it clear that they are wrong, given America's particular political tradition.

This is not the limit of the provocation, by the way; it's only the worst of the provocation. The law is provocative in requiring states to completely rewrite a huge percentage of their budgets in spite of a majority of states not wishing to do so. There are many other things people might complain about as well. Yet it is this imposition of a mandate, backed with the threat of prison, that makes this law an act of tyranny that might give the People a legitimate cause to revolt against Federal authority.

Now, what ought to be done instead of violence:

The best thing is for this to be resolved quickly, and through peaceful and constitutional means. The best way for that to happen is through state government action. The states should call for a constitutional convention to reinforce the restraints on the Federal government's power.

At a minimum, we should act to ensure that the commerce clause is restored to its originalist notion; and that we specify that neither Congress nor the executive branch may pass any laws, nor spend any money, in pursuit of any power not specifically delegated in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

I might suggest that the states consider additional rebalancing provisions, such as repeal of the 17th Amendment. Another very good idea would be to reinforce the originalist position that only the Congress may craft laws and regulations; a lot of that has been done by Federal executive agencies, under Congressional delegation of authority. The SCOTUS used to view such delegation as unconstitutional, and indeed it is not constitutional on an orginalist view; it may be worth re-banning the practice in order to ensure that the Federal government is returned to its intended, proper, constitutional limits.

Many of you are effectively without a voice at the Federal level, given that the opposition party has been reduced to ineffectiveness and wings of the Democratic party have proven submissive. However, your state governments still are under your control to a much greater degree. As they are also the place where action can be most effectively located, I suggest we begin here.

If the 2010 elections produce a Congress that is more balanced and responsive to the people, there may be some limited things that can be done as well. However, it is unlikely that repeal can be effected at the Federal level until 2013. The states are in play even right now. That is where we should focus, and the place where a peaceful and lawful resolution can be most readily created.

It is important for pro-HCR people to realize that they have provoked a potential legitimate revolt, I said above; it is important for anti-HCR people to realize the same thing. If we do not find a way to resolve this peacefully and through politics, there may be serious consequences. Those of us who are devoted to the survival and success of the Republic ought to make action a priority in the coming years, before this mandate goes into effect. It is a dangerous provocation, and one that is likely to produce very bad results if the Federal government tries to enforce it.

The brakes come off

The Brakes Come Off:

I'm sure many of you might like to discuss the passage of the health care bill in the House last night. I've been on a pretty even keel about this all along, simply because I can't see any way in which this thing lasts long enough to create the fundamental change in American society that Mark Steyn sees. The fact is that, pre-HCR, we had somewhere around $100 Trillion in unfunded liabilities. We've been a train racing down the mountain to Insolvency Gorge; all the HCR bill does is tear off what were already stressed and failing brakes.

From my perspective, then, all this means is that we get to the crash faster. The important questions have always been what we'd do after the crash, since it was clear these last few years that neither party in Washington intended to be the ones who avoided the crash.

However, if you really want to avoid it, take heart! The best thing that could have happened to you has happened. If the Stupak faction had held firm, yesterday would have been the end of HCR. We'd have a good six months of history to take people's minds off the attempt. Now, with the court cases that are certain to happen, and the possibility of the states demanding its repeal, it'll continue to be headline news every night. People will still be focused on it come Election Day, and the Tea Party movement -- which might be the one chance for those who'd really like to avoid seeing the nation crash into the aforementioned gorge -- will be strengthened by mounting populist outrage, and the states' need for a political force to help them repeal this before it destroys them.

We may even get to see a Constitutional Convention forced by the states. The Balanced Budget Amendment got 32 of the required 34 states to sign its petition; this bill creates even more pressure on the state governments than any previous act of Congress. A "reasserting the 10th Amendment" petition might well get the required 34 states, if the challenges to this bill fail in Federal court.

It's encouraging that there is a political movement forming around the idea of holding Congress to Art. 1 Sect. 8 and the 10th Amendment, just when one is needed. And it's good that this movement is now almost guaranteed to build in size and power before the elections, instead of fading away. It needs to continue to build and hold its power through at least 2012 to achieve the real effects that we need to save the country; but if it doesn't, we'll get those effects anyway. They'll just come through fire, instead, when the government can no longer pretend it will or can keep its word.

Pretty symbolic that the US lost its AAA bond rating in the same news cycle as the passage of this beast, eh? Would you loan this government money?

Horace's Epistles

Grim's Hall Book Club: Horace's Epistles

We'll be looking at Plutarch soon. Since we had no assigned reading for this week, though, let's take a look at something we can glance over today. I'm thinking we might usefully discuss a few of Horace's letters, specifically, the first, fifth, and sixth of the letters from his first book.

In the first letter, he declares his devotion to the study of virtue:

It is virtue, to fly vice; and the highest wisdom, to have lived free from folly.

Yet in the fifth letter, he declares to his guest his readiness to pursue folly in his expression of the virtue of hospitality:

We shall have free liberty to prolong the summer evening with friendly conversation. To what purpose have I fortune, if I may not use it? He that is sparing out of regard to his heir, and too niggardly, is next neighbor to a madman. I will begin to drink and scatter flowers, and I will endure even to be accounted foolish. What does not wine freely drunken enterprise? It discloses secrets; commands our hopes to be ratified; pushes the dastard on to the fight; removes the pressure from troubled minds; teaches the arts. Whom have not plentiful cups made eloquent?

In the sixth letter, he further complicates the picture:

Let the wise man bear the name of fool, the just of unjust; if he pursue virtue itself beyond proper bounds.... Lucullus, as they say, being asked if he could lend a hundred cloaks for the stage, “How can I so many?” said he: “yet I will see, and send as many as I have;” a little after he writes that he had five thousand cloaks in his house; they might take part of them, or all. It is a scanty house, where there are not many things superfluous, and which escape the owner’s notice, and are the gain of pilfering slaves.

In resolving these apparent conflicts we come to understand what Horace really meant. How should they be resolved?

Famous Castles

Some Interesting Photos of Castles:

I'd not encountered "ODDEE" before, so I'm not sure what this website is really about or where it's coming from. Still, they had an interesting short piece on famous and fascinating castles. There was also a reader-submitted list that is at least as good as the original piece.

The castles go from the most elaborate designs made without a serious purpose for defense, to the small, pragmatic fortified "Schloss" of a German raubritter.



Of particular interest is Marienburg, or "Mary's Castle," built by the Teutonic Order out of bricks instead of stone. The other one that caught my eye was the Hunyad Castle, where Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned. It is probably the most fearsome looking of the fortifications, having the look of a serious fighting position that was decorated entirely as an afterthought.

St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day:

Remember, tonight of all nights, that God loves a good fight, as long as it's fought with a good heart.

The Wild Colonial Boy - The Cl...

So we loosed a bloomin' volley,
An' we made the beggars cut,
An' when our pouch was emptied out.
We used the bloomin' butt,
Ho! My!
Don't yer come anigh,
When Tommy is a playin' with the baynit an' the butt.
--Barrack Room Ballad.

Lieutenant James Adamson was awarded the Military Cross after killing two insurgents during close quarter combat in Helmand's notorious "Green Zone".

The 24-year-old officer, a member of the 5th battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, revealed that he shouted "have some of this" before shooting dead a gunman who had just emerged from a maize field.

Seconds later and out of ammunition, the lieutenant leapt over a river bank and killed a second insurgent machine-gunner with a single thrust of his bayonet in the man's chest.

Traditionalist.

Richard Fernandez: The Age of Faith:

We talk about America and China competing for influence in Africa, but the Belmont Club points out that we thereby miss the real story.

In a process largely unnoticed in the West, billions of people in Asia and Africa have swapped out their indigenous faiths for either Christianity or Islam. And to an even greater astonishment of Western intellectuals most have chosen Christianity. Now the equalization of numbers has caused a fault line to appear through the Third World at about the tenth degree of latitude where the two aggregations face each other “at daggers drawn”.

The word “Christian”, associated in the 19th and 20th centuries with the missionary enterprises of Europe, has now come to mean something different in political terms. Today Christianity is a religion of the Third World. Europeans have largely converted to some soft and watered-down variation of the West’s only indigenous creed, Marxism, as represented by John Lennon’s “Imagine” song. Christianity can no longer be associated largely with the West. Ex oriente lux a phrase which once described the belief that all great world religions rose in the East is now truer than ever. With Marxism shrinking to the margins of the Guardian, the monotheisms have reclaimed the field....

The US is more deeply Christian than Europe, but a large percentage of its ruling class belongs to the "Imagine" religion instead.

Still, the real disadvantage here goes to China. China cannot market itself to Muslims in Africa as the competitor to America. To the degree that Africa is Christian, it will not look to China for leadership -- though there are millions of Chinese Christians, the state is in theory opposed to the faith. Muslims will not look to China for leadership either: worse than Christianity for Islam is polytheism (e.g., Chinese folk religion, certain variations of Buddhism) or the rejection of god (e.g, scientific atheism, other variations of Buddhism).

We may yet see the right in America build a unity on Christian grounds, and so adapt itself to the increasing percentage of Americans who are coming from the Catholicism of Latin America. If we do, America's leadership position within Africa -- and as a potential source of admiration for Chinese Christians -- will increase.

Grim's Hall Book Club: Franklin/Wife of Bath's Tale

Grim's Hall Book Club: The Fraklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

We looked at The Franklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale as well this week.

I wanted to include these because there was so much interest in Chaucer associated with our discussion about the descriptions of women in The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale. One of the things that you may not know about Chaucer unless you read the whole of The Canterbury Tales is that he chases the questions of men and women all the way around, trying to view them from every side. So, you have loyal wives and disloyal wives; you have devoted husbands and scoundrels; you have tales of courtly love, and ribald stories; you view it from the perspective of the Church, and from very earthy perspectives.

The Wife of Bath's Tale shows some signs of being among Chaucer's favorites. For one thing, he gives her an extraordinary prologue! It's as long as some of the tales by itself, and contains a remarkable number of well developed theological arguments. It also includes some ribald "advice" on how to chew up a husband who gives you trouble, although it advises also that you accord with one in peace once he stops trying to boss you around. That last bit of advice is the most important, and makes up the subject of the actual story.

The story is Arthurian, and treats the question of "What women want most." What it proves that they want most is sovereignty: in Chaucer's version of this story, over their men as well as themselves. This is not the only version of this story, however, and in many versions it is simply to be sovereign over themselves.

Since we all read Cassandra as well, I'd like to mention this piece, which was a guest post at the blog of the lady who wrote the 'frigid wife' piece she cited earlier this week. The man who wrote the guest post took his lady up on the challenge to read some romance novels, which would explore the same question -- "What do women want?" He discovers that what they want is men who are "tall," who "can't be bald," who "move in without invitation and touch" (though noting that only the hero is welcome to do this! The same quality that makes the hero more attractive makes the villain wicked and hateful), be "preternaturally competent and successful at everything," "Have money," etc. But then he gets to this one:

2. Let her rescue herself.

This surprised me. I was under the impression that the hero’s role in romances was to rescue the heroine. But in all of these books the heroine has the most significant role in her own triumph over adversity.

Ah, well, that's the real trick, isn't it? The male figure in this story isn't the hero. He's the love interest. The damsel in distress is still the damsel; but the difference between a story written by a man and a story written by a woman is that in the women-written romances, the woman rescues herself.

What is the man for, then? He's the love interest. That's all, really; love is important enough that he doesn't need to do more than love and be loved.

The Wife of Bath's Tale puts the lady in the role of the rescuer, even of the knight. In learning to serve her and be guided by her, the knight -- it is usually Sir Gawain, in this tale, though Chaucer doesn't name him -- finds a lady love who is both beautiful to him and faithful, though at first he took her to be rather otherwise.

In The Franklin's Tale, we have a story with some resonance today: it is the story of a military wife whose husband is deployed, and who finds herself being pursued by a young squire who develops an ardent fascination with her. She is loyal to her husband and true, but finds herself responding to his flirtation with a playful promise she takes to be impossible. The squire arranges to have a wizard and illusionist make the impossible appear to come true, and then reminds the lady of her promise to give her love to him.

The lady's response is virtuous: she considers, but rejects, suicide, and instead confesses everything to her husband so they may think about the matter together. The knight who is her husband takes her honor to be as important as his own, and says that she must keep her word having given it. In spite of the sorrow and pain he feels, and the shame this will bring on him, he counsels her to be as bound by her word as he would be by his own.

She goes to do this, but is so upset by it that the squire is moved by her pain and love for her husband to release her from her vow. The wizard, in return, is moved by the squire's mercy, and releases the young man from his debt. The tale ends:

"Masters, this question would I ask you now:
Which was most generous, do you think, and how.
Pray tell me this before you farther wend.
I can no more, my tale is at an end."

It's a good question. Is the knight the most generous, to put his lady's honor at the level of his own? Is the lady the most generous, to have loved her husband so much as to trust him with her sorrow? Is the squire the most generous, to lay aside his claim on the lady in honor of the truth of her heart? Or is it the illusionist, who has a legitimate claim on the squire that the squire brought on himself by wickedness, but who lets it go when he sees the squire abandoning his evil?

Nelson Lee

Grim's Hall Book Club: Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches:

Quite a story! The most memorable scene for me is the shipwreck, early in the tale, where Lee describes hanging from the mast and watching the swirling waters below. What was the part that sticks with you?

The question attending Lee's book is whether or not it is legitimate. It would be welcome, in a sense, to suppose that it wasn't: then we could dismiss the various cruelties, especially toward babies, as being simple legends. Indeed, one of the oddities is the cruelty toward babies; we see that with tales about the Comanches, but normally frontier stories suggest that the Indians kept captured children and raised them, even if they slaughtered adults or traded them as slaves.

So is it legitimate? The Handbook of Texas, Online, says:

Of this probably spurious classic work, Walter Prescott Webb stated that "there is no better description of the life of the Texas Rangers than that of Nelson Lee." The book has since been a source for several writers about Comanche culture. But in 1982 anthropologist Melburn D. Thurman called Lee's account of Comanche ceremonies "blatantly erroneous" and demonstrated that Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel's discussion of the "Comanche" Green Corn Ceremony in The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (1952) employed questionable data from Lee's book. Though noted Indian scholars have long identified the Comanches as a nonsedentary and therefore nonagricultural people, Lee narrated to his New York editors that Comanches planted corn, beans, and tobacco. Other wildly erroneous claims abound. Lee said that the Comanches wrote hieroglyphics on tree bark; built villages with central squares, streets, and houses of important men located on the squares; and resolved irreconcilable differences between two adversaries by lashing them together with a cord and requiring them to fight to the death. Accordingly, Thurman and other specialists of Plains Indians disputed Lee's captivity claims and, by extension, other claims he makes concerning his exploits.

I'm left admiring the quality of the tale, but I think we have to believe that some of the wilder stories were put in to make it salable.

Yet the Rangers have always liked this book, and still like it, as evidenced by the fact that it's posted on their website. What do you think?

Star Wars in Old Norse

Tattúínárdœla saga:

Via Lars Walker, a highly unusual saga in Old Norse:

After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”). This compels Anakinn to recite his first verse:

Þat mælti mín móðir,
at mér skyldi kaupa
fley ok fagrar árar
fara á brott með jeðum,
standa upp í stafni,
stýra dýrum xwingi,
halda svá til hafnar,
hǫggva mann ok annan.

There are quite a few more posts on the blog, with most of the text being in the Old Norse. It's a fairly plausible bit, actually: the dialogue is just what the sagas should contain.

Honor is Absent

The Absence of Honor:

Perhaps Dan Riehl qualifies as a "conservative blogger" in some sense, but not in any sense that matters to me. If you're willing to dispense with the idea of not calling for the death of the injured wives and children of your political foes, you've already walked away from everything I ever wanted to conserve.

In his comments section, Riehl justifies himself: "I've been watching you high-minded twirps get your lunch money stolen by the Left for years."

That's not true: who won the fight on Iraq, and on holding out in Iraq long enough for the good to come? It was those who fought with honor, and who by honor won the victory both here and in Iraq itself. We sometimes fought hard, against our foes; we didn't wage war on their wives and children.

Yes, the opposition does; we've seen just such war waged on then-Governor Palin and her children. Perhaps in part due to such tactics, Obama won an election. That happens; you can't win 'em all. Neither Obama nor his allies nor his policies will last more than a brief season -- if he manages to enact any policies at all. His ideas were exhausted when he arrived, and they have already been broken by the change in economic fortune. These policies are in rapid retreat across the world. This is the end of the age of his kind; you will soon see the last of them, whatever you do.

Lots of the commenters reference Alinsky in support of Riehl's tactic. That's mere power worship, to say that it worked once, and therefore we "must" follow to compete. We need not. What will win the next election is the economy and the cancer of Federal spending promises; all the Alinsky tactics in the world will not save the candidate on the wrong side of that issue.

Alinsky dedicated his work to Lucifer. Take him at his word, and take his word as a signpost as to where his road may take you. The Devil is granted an hour now and then, but that doesn't mean he's won the war, or that it's time to change your flag. Do what is right, and have faith.

WTF? Jefferson

I'm Sorry, But This Is A Really Strange Thing To Do:

The Texas Board of Education drops Thomas Jefferson from its early modern political philosophy (folded into "social studies," in high school). They add in his place John Calvin, Blackstone, and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Now, obviously the point of this is to play down the importance of the Enlightenment, and to restore the position of certain religious thinkers, and of the powerful heritage of traditional British law. That's OK: we are probably at the right moment to rethink the Enlightenment's place in our heritage, and to perhaps revise downward its importance somewhat.

However, if you were going to do that, wouldn't you get rid of one of the other Enlightenment thinkers, given that you're teaching students who live in the United States of America? Does a citizen of the United States and the great state of Texas really need to know more about Charles de Montesquieu's thinking than he knows about Thomas Jefferson's? Really?

Dangerous Work

Dangerous Work:

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a story about working in the Arctic.

If something happens, and you leave your vehicle, you will not be rescued in time. You do not leave the road; to leave the road is to die. You are given an orange safety vest, so they can find your body, in case you don’t listen.

The road is usually a frozen river. To break through the ice and fall into the river is yet another way to die. Sometimes the road is the frozen-over Arctic Ocean. When you break through that ice, you sink. They say it’s the air bubbles in your decomposing body that cause it to float, and in the sub-freezing water of the Arctic Ocean, human bodies don’t decompose. If you fall into the Arctic Ocean, your corpse may be well-preserved, but no one will risk a life, or expend the cost, to retrieve it.

Suppose you do fall in. By the time you reach the surface, the hole you fell into may have frozen over already. If you can punch through ice with lungs full of 35° water, maybe you deserve to live, but then you’re soaking wet in subzero temperatures, and you will spend your last few conscious minutes too delirious with hypothermia to be thankful that your next of kin will have something to bury.

Once, I asked a guy who’d worked up there for twenty-five years if he’d known of anyone who’d fallen through the ice and lived. He could think of only two.... [one] rescued driver immediately went to the bar, where he wasted no time telling his story. A number of his listeners didn’t believe him and even took umbrage with the tale, at which point, the rescued driver became aggrieved, and a fight broke out. Less than twelve hours after he was submerged beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean — a situation that no one in recent history had ever survived — the rescued driver was nearly beaten to death in a dingy bar. He was taken back to the same hospital he had just left, and this time, he was there for two months.

The story about walking to the Post Office is amazing, too. The description of the place as resembling the Moon reminds me of FOB Hammer; and indeed, it suggests that someday we really will go places like the moon, or Mars, to live and work. We already do.

Cooking with Cast Iron:

Instapundit links this enthusiastic chef on cast iron cooking.

Here at the Hall, I cook with little else. I have a few stainless steel pots that I use for things like warming sauces, but any serious cooking is done on black iron. I use it for roasts, steaks, etc., as everyone else does; but it also works extremely well for quesadillas and grilled sandwiches, any sort of frying, chili or stew, and so forth.

A recent discovery: cast iron works even better than having a pizza stone for baking deliciously crisp pizza crusts. Make your pie up in a skillet, and bake it in the skillet. It comes out perfect every time. You don't even have to oil the skillet -- just toss a bit of corn meal in the bottom so nothing sticks.

Pairings

Pairings:

Pairing one:

Gallup: more and more Americans think Global Warming is exaggerated.

TWS: A five page report on Climate Change fraud and error.

Pairing two:

In Kentucky, if you don't vote for 'revenue enhancement', your district doesn't get school money.

In Kansas City, bankruptcy concerns close half of the schools.

Death of Euro

The Death of the Euro:

The Economist has a five page article on the troubles in Europe. They call for a limited bailout, coupled with new regulatory powers that would keep Greece-type situations from recurring.

Arts & Letters Daily interprets the article thus: "The Euro is finished."

That's not what the article says; but it may very well be the truth. Arts & Letters Daily adds this and this to its reasoning.

Funny Dowd

The Funniest Thing She's Ever Written:

From Maureen Dowd, on her trip to Saudi Arabia:

Couldn’t Mecca, I asked the royals, be opened to non-Muslims during the off-season?

The problem with her being a print journalist is that there were consequently no cameras in the room. That would have been something to see.

Hooah!

Hooah!

Bill Whittle, in rare form -- as he might be, speaking of one of his own.

My brother Steve is a year younger than me. Right around age 13 Stevie used to take a tent, his dog and a shotgun and hitchhike from our home in South Florida out into the Everglades. He’d usually be gone or two or three days. Did my mom worry about him? Yes she did, but on some level I guess she preferred to raise an independent boy who was living his life to the fullest rather than perpetually trying to defend a life-long infant.

A few months ago I heard in passing that Steve had been on his way to work one morning when he passed a car that was on fire with the driver still inside. He pulled over, grabbed his crowbar, smashed the window and with the help of another passing citizen pulled her out and saved her life. He never thought to mention this to me.

Now that's the kind of boy a man could be proud to raise.

Correcting the Ill-Mannered

Correcting the Ill-Mannered:

I was visiting beautiful Athens, Georgia, today; and after I finished my business there I went to get some coffee. On approach to the coffee shop I noticed a homeless man sitting at one of the tables -- homeless, but with enough wealth to buy a cup of coffee, and therefore with every right to occupy one of their seats for a while.

Just as I was passing by, someone in a nearby car leaned on their horn in displeasure. As they stopped, the homeless man yelled out: "This ain't New York City!"

"Hear, hear," I said, and we exchanged a smile as I went to get my coffee.

So, I put it to you: is this a wonderful thing about America, where even the homeless may buy dignity for the price of a cup of coffee, and chide the wealthy for their rudeness? Or is it a wonderful thing about the South, where being downtrodden does not mean that you will suffer poor manners?

I suppose it could be both.

The Holmgang

The Holmgang:

Our friend Lars Walker has finished his series on the history of the Holmgang. You might wish to read through the three-part series:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

I do have one mild comment, wherein my understanding differs from our learned friend: Germanic society had both "duels" and "judicial combats." The duel -- whereby two men settle an affair of honor -- was known in every such culture except, oddly, the Anglo-Saxons (see Henry Charles Lea, The Duel and the Oath, p. 111 & 115). The judicial combat was to settle the truth of criminal charges: also called "the ordeal of battle" (or "wager of battle), it was a final appeal to arms in cases where a man felt he was being handled unjustly by the law -- or in cases too serious for the swearing of oaths by even the most honorable men to be considered adequate evidence.

I'll quote Lea on the Holmgang, simply because it will amuse some of you to see one of my earlier namesakes fare poorly in the test. (Not the earliest Grim, however!)

Among the heathen Norsemen, indeed, the holm-gang, or single combat, was so universal an arbiter that it was recognized as conferring a right where none pre-existed. Any athelete, who confided in his strength and dexterity with his weapons, could acquire property by simply challenging its owner to surrender his land or fight for it. When Iceland, for instance, was in process of settlement, Kraku Hreidar sailed thither, and on sighting land invoked Thor to assign him a tract of ground which he would forthwith acquire by duel. He was shipwrecked on reaching the shore, and was hospitably received by a compatriot named Havard, with whom he passed the winter. In the spring he declared his purpose of challenging Sæmund Sudureyska for a sufficient holding, but Havard dissuaded him, arguing that this mode of acquiring property rarely prospered in the end, and Eirek of Goddolom succeded in quieting him by giving him land enough. Others of these hardy sea-rovers were not so amenable to reason as Kraku. When Hallkell came to Iceland and passed the winter with his brother Ketel-biorn, the latter offered him land on which to settle, but Hallkell disdained so peaceful a proposition, and preferred to summon a neighbor named Grim to surrender his property or meet him in the holm-gang. Grim accepted the defiance, was slain, and Hallkell was duly installed as his heir.

This section goes on for about half a page, offering additional evidence; Mr. Walker alludes to it in his part three, where he speaks of a class of professional duelists who had so prospered. However, this was not the judicial use of combat: no one here was accused of a crime, or proving his innocence by ordeal of battle. In all cases, these fights were about settling a private dispute, not a public or criminal matter.

Snowmelt, Cherokee National Forest

Snowmelt, Cherokee National Forest:

Thor's Hall on Gun Mags

Thor's Hall on Gun Magazines:

It's not just gun rags that do this:

HOW GUN MAGAZINES WRITE ARTICLES

Instruction From The Editor To The Journalist:

Frangible Arms just bought a four page color ad in our next issue. They sent us their latest offering, the CQB MK-V Tactical Destroyer. I told Fred to take it out to the range to test. He’ll have the data for you tomorrow.

Feedback From Technician Fred:

The pistol is a crude copy of the World War II Japanese Nambu type 14 pistol, except it’s made from unfinished zinc castings. The grips are pressed cardboard. The barrel is unrifled pipe. There are file marks all over the gun, inside and out.

Only 10 rounds of 8mm ammunition were supplied. Based on previous experience with a genuine Nambu, I set up a target two feet down range. I managed to cram four rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. I taped the magazine in place, bolted the pistol into a machine rest, got behind a barricade, and pulled the trigger with 20 feet of 550 cord. I was unable to measure the trigger pull because my fish scale tops out at 32 pounds. On the third try, the pistol fired. From outline of the holes, I think the barrel, frame, magazine, trigger and recoil spring blew through the target. The remaining parts scattered over the landscape.

I sent the machine rest back to the factory to see if they can fix it, and we need to replace the shooting bench for the nice people who own the range. I’ll be off for the rest of the day. My ears are still ringing. I need a drink.

Article Produced By The Journalist:

The CQB MK-V Tactical Destroyer is arguably the deadliest pistol in the world. Based on a combat proven military design, but constructed almost entirely of space age alloy, it features a remarkable barrel design engineered to produce a cone of fire, a feature much valued by Special Forces world wide. The Destroyer shows clear evidence of extensive hand fitting. The weapon disassembles rapidly without tools. At a reasonable combat distance, I put five holes in the target faster than I would have thought possible. This is the pistol to have if you want to end a gunfight at all costs. The gun is a keeper, and I find myself unable to send it back.

The Mystic and the Muse

The Mystic and the Muse:

Mr. Douthat, whom I first encountered only last week, has a most interesting piece on mysticism.

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

This, at least, is the stern message of Luke Timothy Johnson, writing in the latest issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal. As society has become steadily more materialistic, Johnson declares, our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever.

He starts thus, but ends better: because his ending has a notion in it of what a mystic might really be.

...that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

What would that mean? None other than that "the heaviest hind may easily come silently and suddenly upon me in a lane," as Saint Mary is reported to have said to King Alfred. It has its clearest expression in the myths of Arthur, where a knight hears a bell deep in a forest, and follows its sound to whatever adventure it leads; or he sees a white stag, and takes the chase to whatever destruction or rebirth it brings him. The mystic is at the root of the tales of Arthur, more than elsewhere.

It is, in other words, that singluar devotion to the chase: to the quest. It is that which leads you beyond the fields that you know, and to strange places that may remake you. That way lies Elfland; or stranger kingdoms, yet.

...the Red Cross Knight climbed with the hermit to the top of the hill and looked out across the valley. There against the evening sky they saw a mountaintop that touched the highest heavens. It was crowned with a glorious palace, sparkling like stars and circled with walls and towers...

To which St. George, in service to the Faerie Queene, might not yet ascend: for he had deeds to do in this world.

People scoff at these stories, as they do -- a bit -- at C. S. Lewis when he wrote in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe of a professor who chided the children to use "logic!" when presented with the impossible. Lucy, the honest child, was the one who spoke of something that could not be; and her honesty should be a guide to the value of her testimony in the face of impossible things as well as with possible ones. In other words, we might yield up our ideas of what is possible in the face of the word of an honest woman, or even a very honest girl.

Last week I attended a lecture on metaphysical modal logic by Dr. E. J. Lowe, who is a fine man and a learned. Modal logic treats what is necessary and what is possible in the world. The good doctor asserts that what is possible and necessary can be understood by grasping the essential truth of the thing being examined; if you know what a thing essentially is, you will know what is necessary for it to exist, and what it may possibly do.

He mentioned bronze sculptures as an example. A sculpture is different from a lump of bronze in several ways; one of them is that its form may not change much if it is to continue being a sculpture. He contrasted a sculpture of Socrates, versus shooting two cannons full of bronze so that -- for an instant! -- they happened to form a similar picture of Socrates in the air.

I had a chance to question him. He agreed to my suggestion that one of the essential qualities of a sculpture was that it was put into a form by an artist (or, if you follow Aristotle, that a form was put into it). I asked him to imagine a case where the two cannons were full of hot bronze, being fired by Jackson Pollack. He takes the largest fused piece, and puts it on a pedestal, calling it his sculpture.

Randomness is not form: it is, logically, the opposite of form. Therefore, we are either mistaken in our definition of what is essential to sculpture... or our modal logic is lying to us about what is necessary and possible in this world.

The good doctor argued that we should simply refrain from calling this "sculpture," in order to preserve the definition. That is the one unsatisfying answer. Both of the alternatives proposed are true: human definitions cannot really capture the world, and therefore a logic based on human definitions cannot tell us what is necessary, nor what is possible.

Besides, Pollack's proposed definition of sculpture is contained within the definition: if sculpture means "having form," then it doesn't mean "without form." Pollack could draw the meaning from the negation of the definition. Modal logic, then, becomes not a proof, but a dare. "We say this cannot be done: prove us wrong." And so we ought to, if we can!

Preserving the concept at the expense of our actual experience is a lie. It is what Edward Abbey called "Indoor Philosophy": it defies the world, because the world won't live up to our ideas about how the world should be. Yet the world remains: and the very honest girl is honest whether she reports the mailman, or an angel.

Lamento di Tristano - La Rotta...

UPDATE: Related is this article on certain philosophers versus Darwin's evolutionary biology. Philosophy is very powerful, and I'm sure all of you know how devoted I am to the art; but you should always start your philosophy with experience and evidence. You should never start simply with concepts, and then instruct the world that it is wrong to behave differently than your reason says it ought to do.

Grim's Hall BC Followup

Grim's Hall Book Club: Next Work

When I first proposed the concept for the club, I had intended that the second book would be Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches. I haven't been able to find an etext version of that, however, and I'd like to try to maintain as much of the club as free and readily accessible online, to ensure we can all participate.

When we discussed it last, several of you endorsed Plutarch, and several Chaucer. I'm going to tap Eric to try to pull a few selections from the works of Plutarch online -- it's a very long work taken as a whole, but Eric's expertise in these things Roman will serve us well.

While he's doing that, why don't we go ahead and do a couple of the Canterbury Tales? Based on our recent discussion of Chaucer, I'd like to do The Franklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale. These are not so very long -- we won't need weeks to read them -- so why not try to aim for those for next week, i.e., a week from this Sunday?

Following that, we'll tackle Plutarch, if Eric has prepared for us a good selection of lives to consider.

A Clash of Foodstuffs

A Clash of Cultures:

Mr. Brooks says the Tea Party members are "Wal-Mart Hippies." I take it he thinks that's a clever line, because I heard him repeat it while watching that clip from the Colbert show a few days ago.

So, what does it mean to shop at Wal-Mart?

In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods....

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

Mr. Brooks is also wrong to say that the Tea Party has a 'mostly negative' agenda: it actually has a positive document that explains precisely how it wants the government to function. It's called "the Constitution of the United States." The thing is, these crazy Tea Party people take it seriously -- they really want the government to function just that way, Tenth Amendment and everything.

Jews/Tolkien Redux

Other Writers on the Jews and Tolkien:

We discussed this issue a few days ago. The main thing seemed to me that the Jews aren't really bothered by "medieval" swords' having been borne against their ancestors, but rather by what their ancestors did with swords during Israel's heroic age. After the Holocaust, their own heroic tradition must seem alien and alienating; whereas Tolkien's tradition, because it was the root of Just War theory and the idea that heroes should protect noncombatants, would only make more sense after World War One and Two.

A few more writers have considered the question since, and some of them (not really Wonkette) have serious thoughts about the issue.

Gene Expression challenges the assertion that Jews don't write fantasy:

Is Christianity fundamentally more comfortable with the pagan than Judaism, as the author above asserts? I doubt it. The basics of Northern fantasy draw from a rich peasant cultural folk tradition which the Christian church ignored at best, and attempted to suppress at worst. The tradition was most robust in the regions which were Christianized last, so that relatively thick cultural memory remained from which to draw during the 19th century Romantic revival of national traditions. It is notable that Ireland in particular in the British Isles preserved its own mythic tradition; I chalk this up to the indigenous origins of Christianization, so that the culture-bearers of the past were not superseded by missionaries who dismissed the indigenous stories as being part & parcel of the pagan intellectual edifice. Tolkien was in part trying to create an Anglo-Saxon mythic cycle from fragments such as Beowulf and Scandinavian analogs. The Irish have no need of reconstruction. Culturally the Jews are very distant from their peasant origins, and naturally much more detached from their pagan past than Northern Europeans. For the past 1,000 years Ashkenazi Jews have been an urban minority, as insulated from the world of faerie as Christian priests. No wonder that Jewish authors, such as Neil Gaiman, draw upon Northern motifs. How popular is urban fantasy as a distinct genre anyway?

Russ Douthat of the New York Times asks why Jews would want a Jewish Tolkien at all.

But once you add up these insights, they jostle uneasily with Weingrad’s professed desire for a Jewish Tolkien, or a Jewish Lewis. What he seems to have demonstrated is that modern fantasy depends on Christianity, or at least a Christian-pagan synthesis of some kind, for its forms, conventions, and traditions. This suggests that you could write a novel that embodies a kind of Jewish critique of fantasy — in much the same way that China Miéville’s novels are a kind of Marxist critique of Tolkien, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” was a feminist critique of Arthurian-based fantasy, Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is an atheist’s critique of C.S. Lewis, and so on. (And indeed, Weingrad’s essay reads Lev Grossman’s new novel “The Magicians” as a kind of crypto-Jewish critique of Narnia and/or Harry Potter.) But the genre itself will remain irreducably Christian, and a truly Judaic fantasy would have to belong to, or invent, a different genre altogether.

Those two posts seem to run straight at each other! So-called "urban fantasy" is a new idea, actually; we used to call that genre "horror," because it was meant to be horrible. Lately it has become fashionable not to dread vampires, but to envy them. The werewolf was supposed to be a symbol of what it would be like for man to lose his humanity, and be turned back into a beast without reason or self-control. It has been converted, lately, a symbol of what it might mean for a man to be more in harmony with nature. Today we are asked to imagine the joy of running down a deer under a full moon, and drinking its blood.

(Mark will thank me for not quoting Chesterton here, on nature religions: "A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate.")

That's fantasy, perhaps, but it's not heroic fantasy. It is the notion of heroism that bothers. It is interesting that so many would rather be monsters than dare be heroes. That says much about how difficult it is to be a hero, and how very difficult to believe in one.

It is harder, I think, for some people to believe in heroes than vampires. That is true even though they might meet a hero in the street, while vampires do not exist.

Americaland

Americaland:

When we lived in China, there was a theme park near Hang Zhou that was called "Americaland." It was supposed to be a place you could visit to see what that strange place called America was like. No one would ever give us directions as to how to get there, probably embarrassed about what the stereotypes would reveal.

It's not only the Chinese who have these dreams:

Americaland is real place for British writers, it is built from thousands of fragments of American TV, films, music, comics and other cultural artefacts. It’s a place filled with 1950’s dinners and long desolate highways among other things. And its just as imaginary as a Britain filled with red telephone boxes and bowler hatted business men.

And Swedes! I somehow entirely missed this band called "the Rednex," whom I found tonight entirely by accident while searching for a traditional tune. They are nothing except a Swedish projection on American mythology, especially the mythology of the West.





(The underlying tune is "Orpheus in the Underworld," which was used in Can-can shows across the West.)



(Note the rifles and dog sleds!)





This is a little bit shocking, like discovering that you've been made into a god by superstitious islanders in the South Seas.

A fertility god, at that!

ARMA

ARMA Art, I:

The ARMA has quite a gallery of Medieval and Renaissance art associated with questions of battle. Here is one:

The clear effect of even single-hand sword blows against steel helmets. In the center a sword splits the top of a helm from behind. On the right two swords hack into the sides of helmets while a spiked mace delivers a crushing blow. Notice also the portions of each sword (their center-of percussion) that does most of the striking is invariably the last third to second-half of blade. One rider in the center has an arrow in his cheek that appears to have hit behind his mail coif. On the lower right, a long axe cuts powerfully against a rider’s neck and back of the head, pulling him off his mount. On the ground one fallen fighter has deep shoulder and head wounds while another has a deep cut on the neck. Four different types of helmet are visible. All the shields appear to be medium sized flat heaters. From the gruesome Maciejowski Bible, c. 1250.

Father Sends

My Father Sends...

...a story about a cowboy.

A cowboy from Texas attends a social function where Barack Obama is trying to gather support for his Health Plan. Once he discovers the cowboy is from President Bush's home area, he starts to belittle him by talking in a southern drawl and single syllable words.

As he was doing that, he kept swatting at some flies that were buzzing around his head. The cowboy says, "Havin' some problem with them circle flies?"

Obama stopped talking and said, "Well, yes, if that's what they're called, but I've never heard of circle flies."

"Well, sir," the cowboy replies, "Circle flies hang around ranches. They're called circle flies because they're almost always found circling around the back end of a horse."

"Oh," Obama replies as he goes back to rambling.

But, a moment later he stops and bluntly asks, "Are you calling me a horse's ass?"

"No, sir," the cowboy replies, "I have too much respect for the citizens of this country to call their president a horse's ass."

"That's a good thing," Obama responds and begins rambling on once more.

After a long pause, the cowboy in his Texas drawl says, "Sure is hard to fool them flies, though."

Chivalry & Solidarity in Game Theory

"Chivalry & Solidarity in Ultimatum Games"

An interesting game theory experiment from 2001 appears to show that women find it very easy to come to agreements with other women; but men are far readier to accept offers from women than from other men. The two effects are noteworthy, though painting the woman/woman effect as "solidarity" seems a bit odd. It's more likely that they understand each other, and have similar desires to come to agreement; whereas men, who understand each other, want to compete.

By the same token, "chivalry" is the wrong term here; this tendency describes all men who participated. It would have been very great good luck to gather only chivalrous men into the study!

When a woman is his partner in the game, however, a man becomes much less competitive: he is ready to accede to her requests almost at the same rate that women agree to accept/agree with either men or mixed groups. Men facing other men, however, accept offers only if they are much more generous.

The graph on page 184 is the main thing, I think. It shows that actual results are fairer in men/men pairings; but agreement is far more common in female/female pairings. That may mean that women are more interested in agreement than fairness (or gain); but it also may mean that men are more willing to resist authority if they feel it is not treating them fairly. After all, the proposer is in the position of authority where the resource division is involved; all the respondent can do is accept or reject the proposal. Men would rather punish unfair actors than seek agreement, even if that means gaining nothing rather than gaining an unfairly small amount.

Unless, that is, they are receiving the proposal from a woman: then, they're much readier to be treated unfairly!

Another way of saying that, though, is that they are more willing to accept female authority -- fair or unfair -- than they are to accept unfair male authority. From another man, they will only accept fairness.

This only treats initial acceptance, of course. One might later resent being treated unfairly, even if this proves that -- in some cases -- one is readier to be treated unfairly. It's also interesting that both men and women are readier to be treated unfairly by women than by men.

The Cathedral of Dawn:

A find in archæology is startling because of its age, but not because of its purpose.

[U]nder our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization....

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for "potbelly hill"—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey.

This we have heard before, and wisely.

Even in trying to prove that religion grew slowly from rude
or irrational sources, they begin their proof with the first men
who were men. But their own proof only proves that the men
who were already men were already mystics. They used the rude
and irrational elements as only men and mystics can use them.
We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime
too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred
to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness;
and man became a living soul.

***

The modern man looking at the most ancient origins has been
like a man watching for daybreak in a strange land; and expecting
to see that dawn breaking behind bare uplands or solitary peaks.
But that dawn is breaking behind the black bulk of great
cities long builded and lost for us in the original night;
colossal cities like the houses of giants, in which even
the carved ornamental animals are taller than the palm-trees;
in which the painted portrait can be twelve times the size
of the man; with tombs like mountains of man set four-square
and pointing to the stars; with winged and bearded bulls
standing and staring enormous at the gates of temples;
standing still eternally as if a stamp would shake the world.
The dawn of history reveals a humanity already civilized.
Perhaps it reveals a civilisation already old.

There are a few men who have seen so clearly as to be able to predict both the future and the past. Chesterton was one.

(H/t: Lars Walker.)

Kitten

"That Bull Wouldn't Hurt A Kitten."

It's part of the honor of those who work with large and powerful animals that there is a certain danger in the work. Frequently we play that down, amused at those less experienced with the creatures' strength and willfulness; but the danger never passes.

Ricky Weinhold, of Reinholds, was attacked Saturday by a 1-ton bull on a farm where he leased barn space in Wernersville, about 60 miles northwest of Philadelphia, Berks County Deputy Coroner Terri Straka said. The son of the farm's owner found his body Sunday in an outdoor pen.

The property owners had encouraged Weinhold to get rid of the bull, Straka said. She said the same animal believed responsible for the weekend attack rammed Weinhold last summer, breaking several of his ribs.

"He's been known to be temperamental," Straka said. "The property owners just didn't trust him. They told Ricky, 'This bull has got a bad disposition."'

Well, bulls are dangerous. Mr. Weinhold doubtless knew that, and gloried in what he did. Anyone might die in a conflict with a bull, and all must die sooner or later. At least here is a man who lived.

All of which reminds me of a story. It is meant with no disrespect, told in this context. As I said, it is the essentially dangerous nature of the bull that makes it honorable to deal with bulls; so this story is no insult, but a blessing.

A Federal officer stops at a ranch in Montana, and talks with an old rancher. He tells the rancher, 'I need to inspect your ranch for illegally grown drugs. The old rancher says, 'Okay, but do not go in that field over there.'

The officer verbally explodes saying, 'Mister, I have the authority of the Federal Government with me.' Reaching into his rear pants pocket, he removes his badge and proudly displays it to the farmer. 'See this badge? This badge means I am allowed to go wherever I wish...on any land. No questions asked or answers given. Have I made myself clear? Do you understand?'

The old rancher nods politely, apologizes, and goes about his chores. A short time later, the old rancher hears loud screams and sees the officer running for his life chased close behind by the rancher's prize bull. With every step the bull is gaining ground on the officer, and it seems likely that he'll get "horned" before he reaches safety.

The old rancher throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs..... "Your badge! Show him your badge!"

Of course, in real life a Federal officer needs a warrant as well. Not, that is, that bulls are any more impressed with the one than with the other.

Zebras and Mules

Zebras and Mules:

How much can you know by deduction from facts you already know? A famous thought experiment ponders the question:

Suppose you are at a zoo in ordinary circumstances standing in front of a cage marked ‘zebra’; the animal in the cage is a zebra, and you believe zeb, the animal in the cage is a zebra, because you have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts. It occurs to you that zeb entails not-mule, it is not the case that the animal in the cage is a cleverly disguised mule rather than a zebra. You then believe not-mule by deducing it from zeb. What do you know? You know zeb, since, if zeb were false, you would not have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts; instead, you would have empty-cage percepts, or aardvark-in-a-cage percepts, or the like. Do you know not-mule? If not-mule were false, you would still have zebra-in-a-cage visual percepts (and you would still believe zeb, and you would still believe not-mule by deducing it from zeb). So you do not know not-mule. But notice that we have:

(a) You know zeb

(b) You believe not-mule by recognizing that zeb entails not-mule

(c) You do not know not-mule.

Knowledge by deduction would normally permit you to reason to not-mule; this experiment suggests we may not be able to do that with confidence.

Of course, all this turns on the question of whether you could really cleverly disguise a mule to look like a zebra. Compare and contrast:






More contrasting than comparing, isn't there? From the shape of the ears to the general confirmation, there's no comparison. Of course, you can breed a donkey to a zebra, and then you get something that looks a lot like a cleverly disguised mule:



But it's neither a mule nor a zebra. It's a zonkey.

The real answer to the question, though, is not "Can I really know if I'm looking at a zonkey or a zebra?" Rather, the real question is, "Whose job is it to be able to know how to tell the difference?" The thought experiment errs by assuming that just because person X can't tell the difference, knowledge isn't possible. It is possible, though, for the zoologist; and he's probably the one who put the sign on the cage. So, can person X know that he's looking at a not-mule? Yes, if the zoologist can be trusted.

Bill Whittle wrote about that, once. That's why the climate-change apostasy is so disturbing: it's a direct assault on that web of trust upon which civilization is founded.

Tolkien Wasn't Jewish

Tolkien and Judaism:

Did you know that there was talk of a Nazi edition of The Hobbit?

When the publishing firm of Ruetten & Loening was negotiating with J. R. R. Tolkien over a German translation of The Hobbit in 1938, they demanded that Tolkien provide written assurance that he was an Aryan. Tolkien chastised the publishers for “impertinent and irrelevant inquiries,” and—ever the professor of philology— lectured them on the proper meaning of the term: “As far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.” As to being Jewish, Tolkien regretted that “I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

The article goes on to wonder why there are no Jews in the top authors of fantasy literature. Tolkien's remark about giftedness is clearly on point: the author of this piece can unselfconsciously wonder about "an entire literary genre—perhaps the only such genre—in which Jewish practitioners are strikingly rare." Who besides the Jews could honestly claim that there was only one literary genre in which they were rare? Not many!

The investigation is an interesting one.

To answer the question of why Jews do not write fantasy, we should begin by acknowledging that the conventional trappings of fantasy, with their feudal atmosphere and rootedness in rural Europe, are not especially welcoming to Jews, who were too often at the wrong end of the medieval sword. Ever since the Crusades, Jews have had good reasons to cast doubt upon the romance of knighthood, and this is an obstacle in a genre that takes medieval chivalry as its imaginative ideal.

It is not only that Jews are ambivalent about a return to an imaginary feudal past. It is even more accurate to say that most Jews have been deeply and passionately invested in modernity, and that history, rather than otherworldliness, has been the very ground of the radical and transformative projects of the modern Jewish experience.

It goes deeper than this, though, if I may say so. Jewish thinkers have very often been suspicious not merely of feudal or medieval ethics, but of heroic ethics. I suspect the reason has to do not nearly so much with our history or literature, as with their own.

After the battle is won, the Israelites capture the five fleeing Ammonite kings. Joshua drags the monarchs before him and orders his generals to "put your feet on the neck of these kings." As they stand on the kings' throats, Joshua tells his commanders, "Do not be afraid or dismayed: Be strong and courageous; for thus the Lord will do to all the enemies against whom you fight." Then, Joshua himself executes the kings and hangs their bodies in the trees. This episode is so proudly barbaric that it's painful to read. It's clear that we readers are supposed to take the Israelites' side here—they're conquering the Promised Land, they're God's Chosen People, the Ammonites are vile statue-worshippers, etc.—but the unapologetic savagery is hard to bear. This probably reveals a profound weakness in me, but I imagined myself—in the way one always imagines oneself inside a book—not as one of my own ancestors, the victorious Israelite generals, but as a heathen king with a boot on my neck, moments from a brutal death.

Joshua and the Israelites have been doing nothing but killing in this book—killing by the thousands, killing women, killing children, killing animals—but it is the death of these five men, who aren't even innocents, that inspires the most revulsion. There's an obvious reason for this, one Stalin understood: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." All the other killings in Joshua are mass killings. This is the only time the book of Joshua gives us death in a tight close-up, and it's appalling.

The rest of the chapter is gruesome, but in the statistical way. Joshua sweeps from city to city across southern Canaan, sacking them one after another:

Joshua took Makkedah on that day, and struck it and its king with the edge of the sword; he utterly destroyed every person in it; he left no one remaining …
Then Joshua passed on … to Libnah … He struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it; he left no one remaining in it …
To Lacshish … He took it on the second day, and struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it …
Gezer … Joshua struck him and his people, leaving him no survivors …
To Eglon … [They] struck it with the edge of the sword, and every person in it he utterly destroyed that day … etc. etc.

The worst parts of Leviticus seem positively joyful compared with this smug roster of slaughter.

Read that in the echo of the Holocaust, and you can begin to understand why there is little interest in writing Jewish heroic fiction. The tradition they would naturally draw on leads directly to a soul-shaking conflict, for their own heroes treated the women and children of fallen nations in a way that has to be horrifyingly familiar.

Consider Simone Weil's War and the Iliad as a counterexample. Weil was Jewish by ancestry, though she became a Christian mystic after a religious experience at Assisi. Her work is characterized as "an inspired analysis of Homer's epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost." She actually calls it "the only true epic the Occident possesses," standing head and shoulders over all the other great poems and tales of the West because it treated the slain with the same sympathy as the slayers.

It may be the only poem that ever has, not merely in the West. Yet it is no accident that Tolkien's Catholicism could stand as a root for a recovery of the heroic tradition, even in the wake of World War II. It was the Catholic tradition that gave rise to the concept that the hero defends the innocent as well as fighting his enemies; and that their women and children are not legitimate targets.

The Peace and Truce of God was a medieval European movement of the Catholic Church that applied spiritual sanctions in order to limit the violence of private war in feudal society.

This was the tradition that invented the idea of loving enemies even as you fought them. It was this tradition that first introduced the idea a warrior could swear himself to the service of a lady, rather than regarding her as a mere prize or slave. (Contrast part 1 of Mr. Plotz's essay on the Book of Joshua, wherein women are normally prostitutes!)

It is not, then, simply that the Jews of the Middle Ages suffered from the swords of knights -- though they certainly did, at times. It is that modern heroic literature is rooted in a concept of what it means to be a hero that is originally Catholic; it is not rooted in Jewish epics, in the ancient Greek epics, any more than it is rooted in Chinese or "Aryan" epics. If Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were the first to pull it forward, it is because they were closest to the garden in which it grew.

Let that not be the last word! The modern world needs heroes, and it needs heroes from precisely this tradition. If Jewish writers want to tackle heroic writing, this is the road to take: one that views their enemies as potential friends, and their enemies' innocents as sacred. Anyone who can write in that tradition will be improving our world: we need far more of that vision than we've had.

Unfortunately, the essay ends pointed in another direction. The final example, of what the author hopes is an emerging tradition of Jewish heroic fiction, is merely self-obsessed.

[T]heir deepest struggles are expressed in the language of contemporary self-actualization. “Before I can return with you to any human realm and be who you expect me to be,” Yonatan tells the empress with whom he has fallen in love, “I have to deal with who I am.” The empress meanwhile learns that, to fulfill her own magical quest, she must discover that “the abyss is within you … you must jump into the depths within yourself.” Yanai’s former involvement in Israel’s New Age culture—she wrote for a prominent New Age magazine, spent time in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, and edited a volume of literary erotica by women before turning to fantasy—makes itself felt here.

The author says that he would hesistate to give the book to a teenager, because it contains nothing they don't already know. Self-esteem is not the reward the hero seeks. Honor is sacrifice. It is repaid not with self-love but with the love of those you have served.

For Tolkien's tradition, it was both God and one's beloved that one served, in the hope of love. As Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willhelm said to his knights, "There are two rewards that await us: heaven, and the recognition of noble women." For those who wish to write in another tradition, you can speak of service to the ethic of heroism instead of service to God; you can speak of service to any beloved person or community. Yet it is service that defines.

The Declaration of Arbroath

The Declaration of Arbroath:

In an interview with a Tea Party founding member, there is this quote on what to do with certain celebrity figures trying to associate themselves:

She, like many Tea Party members, resists the idea of a Tea Party leader — “there are a thousand leaders,” she says.

Glenn Beck? “He can be a Tea Partier, but it’s not like the movement bends to him.”

Sarah Palin? She will have to campaign on Tea Party ideas if she wants Tea Party support, Ms. Carender said, adding, “And if she were elected, she’d have to govern on those principles or be fired.”

That's the spirit! Robert the Bruce would have understood, since his supporters had the same opinion:

Him, too, divine providence, his right of succession according to or laws and customs which we shall maintain to the death, and the due consent and assent of us all have made our Prince and King. To him, as to the man by whom salvation has been wrought unto our people, we are bound both by law and by his merits that our freedom may be still maintained, and by him, come what may, we mean to stand. Yet if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us our King; for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

It must not be enough that a person says the right things; we need them to do the right things. These things will be hard, but it is time to start taking apart the anti-constitutional parts of the Federal government, and restoring the Constitutional order. The Federal government certainly has a role, but it is a role limited by enumerated powers, balanced and checked.