D-Day at 75

Charles Schultz was a veteran of the Second World War, having served in the 20th Armored Division (there is now only one, with armor units being usually organized at smaller scales and integrated with combined arms). Here is what he wanted children to know about D-Day.

There are numerous inspiring stories, including that of Bill Millen and the bagpipes. Via Instapundit, which has many relevant posts today, here's a very good post from a surprising outlet. Just a short part of the whole:

Taylor leads his section crawling across the beach and over the sea wall, losing four men killed and two wounded (machine-gun fire) in this brief movement. Some yards off to his right, Taylor has seen Lieutenants Harold Donaldson and Emil Winkler shot dead. But there is no halt for reflection; Taylor leads the section by trail straight up the bluff and into Vierville, where his luck continues. In a two-hour fight he whips a German platoon without losing a man.

The village is quiet when Pearce joins him. Pearce says: "Williams is shot up back there and can't move."

Says Taylor: "I guess that makes me company commander."

Answers Pearce: "This is probably all of Baker Company." Pearce takes a head count; they number twenty-eight, including Taylor.

Says Taylor: "That ought to be enough. Follow me!"

Inland from Vierville about five hundred yards lies the Château de Vaumicel, imposing in its rock-walled massiveness, its hedgerow-bordered fields all entrenched and interconnected with artilleryproof tunnels. To every man but Taylor the target looks prohibitive. Still, they follow him. Fire stops them one hundred yards short of the château. The Germans are behind a hedgerow at mid-distance. Still feeling their way, Taylor's men flatten, open fire with rifles, and toss a few grenades, though the distance seems too great. By sheer chance, one grenade glances off the helmet of a German squatting in a foxhole. He jumps up, shouting: "Kamerad! Kamerad!" Thereupon twenty-four of the enemy walk from behind the hedgerow with their hands in the air. Taylor pares off one of his riflemen to march the prisoners back to the beach. The brief fight costs him three wounded. Within the château, he takes two more prisoners, a German doctor and his first-aid man. Taylor puts them on a "kind of a parole," leaving his three wounded in their keeping while moving his platoon to the first crossroads beyond the château.

Here he is stopped by the sudden arrival of three truckloads of German infantry, who deploy into the fields on both flanks of his position and start an envelopment. The manpower odds, about three to one against him, are too heavy. In the first trade of fire, lasting not more than two minutes, a rifleman lying beside Taylor is killed, three others are wounded, and the B.A.R. is shot from Pearce's hands. That leaves but twenty men and no automatic weapons.

Taylor yells: "Back to the château!" They go out, crawling as far as the first hedgerow; then they rise and trot along, supporting their wounded. Taylor is the last man out, having stayed behind to cover the withdrawal with his carbine until the hedgerows interdict fire against the others. So far, this small group has had no contact with any other part of the expedition, and for all its members know, the invasion may have failed.

They make it to the château. The enemy comes on and moves in close. The attacking fire builds up. But the stone walls are fire-slotted, and through the midday and early afternoon these ports well serve the American riflemen. The question is whether the ammunition will outlast the Germans. It is answered at sundown, just as the supply runs out, by the arrival of fifteen Rangers who join their fire with Taylor's, and the Germans fade back.

Already Taylor and his force are farther south than any element of the right flank in the Omaha expedition. But Taylor isn't satisfied. The battalion objective, as specified for the close of D Day, is still more than one half mile to the westward.

Back in the "another grim milestone" days of the Iraq war, the press appeared to delight in reporting that the American death toll had climbed by five hundred that year, or a thousand. On D-Day, nearly as many Allied forces died as would die in the whole of our war. Perhaps they had a better cause; or perhaps it was the same cause, as some of us believed. In any case they are due the greatest honor for the weight they bore in defense of the cause of human liberty.

Can't We Just Dispense with Knowledge?

Professor of philosophy at King's College London and CUNY David Papineau says we should just get over the idea of knowledge already. The article is interesting, and I will just briefly give the gist of it in case you'd like to read it.

He claims:

I’m against knowledge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m as keen on the facts as the next person. I’m no friend of fake news. I want truth rather than falsity. It is specifically knowledge I’m against, not true belief. Knowledge asks more of us than true belief, and it isn’t worth it. In reality, the concept of knowledge is a hangover from a stone-age way of thinking that has long outlived its usefulness. We’d be far better off without it. 

In Praise of Killing

...a key lesson of D-Day's 75th anniversary should also be the day's moral import in our consideration of war. After all, D-Day proves that killing people is sometimes not simply necessary, but also inherently moral.

Strange, I Always Found the Game Empowering

Researchers allegedly prove that dodgeball teaches unethical oppression.

The Silver Age of Facial Hair

Following Hesiod's concept that the silver age follows rather than precedes the golden age, our Golden Age may well have been the 19th century; but there's a Silver Age upon us now. In fact it has a lot to do with the Silver Screen, argues this piece in the New Republic.

You could consume more than half a century of American popular culture, from World War II to Korea to Vietnam to September 11, without encountering many bearded manly heroes; facial hair was generally reserved for wild enemies foreign and domestic, swarthy terrorists and libertine hippies. Even American westerns posited a surprising number of neatly trimmed frontier protagonists, reserving scruff for their foes. Italian-produced spaghetti westerns, which introduced Clint Eastwood’s perpetually unshaven man with no name, seem the exception that proves the rule, deploying beards as to emphasize that their protagonists are deeply flawed antiheroes, operating outside mainstream norms....

[W]hy is ours such a hairy century? What began this trend, and what fuels it? There is an easy answer, though it leads to harder questions: We can thank the Global War on Terror—or the Long War, the Bellum Americanum, whatever you choose to call it—and the reluctance of military leaders to impose discipline on the most professional of the units that participated in GWOT, special operations forces. Generals preferred to allow those units to operate based on “big boy rules”—a devolution of authority empowering them to operate like Apocalypse Now’s mad Col. Kurtz, “without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.” The evidence of this is the proliferation of beards in the military, which now extends to civilian society. We worship the post-9/11 military operator. We are a nation drunk on “tacticool” culture.

I'll grant that there may be a connection between the popularity of beards and the cultural moment being enjoyed by operators in story and film. I reject just about everything else the article has to say, though, starting with its conception of 'big boy rules.'

Big boy rules is a real thing, but it doesn't mean that you're unrestrained. It's a simple concept: "Do what you think is right, being prepared to shoulder the consequences of your decision." If, like the authors, you wanted a tie to right wing American politics, you could point at the post-military career of LTC Allen West (who was and is clean shaven). He committed a war crime by staging a fake execution in order to intimidate a man into revealing details about the ambush that threatened to kill several of West's men. He then at once turned himself in, confessed himself, and took the consequences. His subsequent career is based not on respect for him being unburdened by morality, but by his moral decision to take the responsibility for bringing his men home alive even though it meant his career -- that, coupled with his complete refusal to try to dodge the responsibility for what he had done.

It is true that the American right saw the value in that, while the Left mostly saw the war crime; but the point is that it was metaphysically West's decision to make, he made it, and he owned the consequences. The law might argue that West had no right to make the decision; command and control might argue that it wasn't his to make. But ultimately, metaphysically, it was only he who was there in the position to decide.

A cinematic version of this occurs in the movie Flyboys, based on WWI-era Americans fighting in a volunteer flying squadron in France. Complaining about the murder of one of their own by a German ace, the men are told by their commanding French officer: "You want justice? You're the man with the gun." There may not be any justice forthcoming for what was done, but if there is, it's going to be on them to make it. Nobody else is going to step up and make things right. You have to decide what that's worth to you, and accept the consequences of whatever decision you make.

It is not that the man is unquestionable, nor that he is merciless. He submits to judgment after the fact; and perhaps his mercy was exercised on the wives and children of his men, rather than on the ones plotting to kill his people. The point is only that he had to make a decision, and he didn't hide from it, not in the moment and not after.

If you understand that, the rest of their essay unravels. Too, perhaps, you can come to see why this thing they are criticizing might prove to have some value after all.

One Reason I Don't Listen to Country Much Anymore

Of all the varieties of country music, I tend to like the sound of Outlaw Country the best. Robert Burke Warren & Holly George-Warren describe their time at the Outlaw Country Cruise in All in the Same Boat, and they focus on the politics of it. That is, mostly they talk about how left-wing, open borders, and anti-Trump the musicians are and how little of a clash there was with many of their presumably right-wing fans.

Fair warning: There's some pretty vulgar language in the quotes below.

Male Disposability

The biology behind this is obvious, but it does sometimes strike me as odd how much people don't realize that our society is structured this way. We have a "Violence Against Women Act" even though by far most victims of violence are men; and this kind of thing somehow makes sense to people to say out loud.

In a 1998 speech delivered before a domestic violence conference in El Salvador, former US senator and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat.”

She didn't just say that out loud, somebody wrote it down for her. A speech of that prominence got through some sort of editorial process, and that line stayed in.

Pay Attention

A feud I have been studiously ignoring has been drawn to my attention, even though I'm not a member of the target audience for this essay. But the guy's right, and his point applies more broadly than he makes it.

A religious minority cannot expect to last very long in a society, like the one the progressive left advocates, that is allergic to tradition and intolerant of dissent. Only in an America that takes faith seriously, that respects and empowers community, and that shudders at any attempt to censor wrong beliefs and incorrect thinking, can [religious minorities] hope to thrive.

The thing is, we're all religious minorities now. America's majority religion might still be mere Christianity, but it isn't any particular kind of Christianity; nor Judaism; nor Islam; nor Buddhism; nor any of the many other faiths that people practice. Or don't practice: "People with no religion - known as 'nones' among statisticians - account for 23.1 percent of the U.S. population, while Catholics make up 23 percent and Evangelicals account for 22.5 percent, according to the General Social Survey."

So it's all of us who need to take this seriously.

On second thought

Rumors greatly exaggerated.

Cities and Countries

It's commonplace now to note the distinctions between the urban and the rural political cultures in America; but maybe the bigger point is that the cities no longer belong to our countries at all.

Where the street once buzzed with English, spoken in a variety of accents, now you can go through an entire day without hearing English. From her small terraced house, she hears Pashto over one garden fence, Romanian over the other. In the nearby row of shops, the English-speaking Indian-owned mini-supermarkets have given way to Polish shops outside which young men gather every evening, speaking Polish.

Maybe you could have that international, global government in every city over a million in population; provided that no sovereignty was claimed over the surrounding countryside.

The Bear and the Maiden Fair

I'm not sure I understand the maiden's objections to the bear. Maybe she could do worse. A big, strong bear isn't the worst partner, if one is on offer.

Gentlemen

Well, now, 'gentleman' is a thing we've made easy to come by. Once upon a time, it meant something. Now it doesn't, really. Is that an improvement? Are we glad about all this progress?

Boogie Barr

Mr. Chait is quite right to be terrified.

Yearning for a Brexit without tears

Or more likely, no Brexit at all:

It’s as if after America declared independence in 1776, your Founding Fathers then decided that self-government was just too difficult. Imagine if, instead of getting together in a court house in Philadelphia to hammer out a constitution, George Washington and Ben Franklin instead sent emissaries over to London to ask George III how best to arrange things.

* * *

Broadcasters, particularly those at the BBC, have taken every opportunity to try to delegitimise the referendum result, reporting as fact absurd stories of Russian intervention and implying that those that voted to leave were motivated by nothing more than nativism.

Rather than accept the referendum result as a legitimate expression of the public’s desire for self-determination, the political class has behaved as if it was all a massive mistake made by their social inferiors that now needs correcting.

Russian interference may turn out to be this decade's preferred method of undermining elections.  The Deep State resistance, of course, is old hat.

Too nuanced for my taste

Mueller and his staff were trying to function as impeachment counsel.  It probably would have been a lot more successful if not for our good fortune in the appointment of AG Barr, a plain-spoken man with coherent principles.  He doesn't lose his temper when people try to feed him nonsense, but he doesn't swallow it, either.

My Head is Filled With Music

Something I found while looking into Piper Bill Millen who I mentioned in a post yesterday- a nice song by Celtic Punk band the Real McKenzies-

Wolves and poodles

What college could be like if professors weren't expected to walk on eggshells for fear that their students might curl up into the fetal position:

[W]hen an undergraduate announces to the class that women only earn 57% of what men earn due to the patriarchy, one need only respond with, “Well Ms. Bernstein, let me ask that if you are the CEO of GM, would your fiduciary responsibility to investors, many of whom are women, require you to fire all men (or least as many as possible) and replace them with equally competent cheaper female employees and thus boost the quarterly dividend? And, for good measure, tell us how you would address the many government regulations designed to prevent sexual discrimination in employment? Surely the fired men would sue and how would you instruct the GM legal department to respond? Is social justice a legal defense?”

To take the reverse of this technique, I can remember three arguments that reduced my constitutional law professor to sputtering incoherence.  One classmate was not considered a bright student, too simple-minded.  I wish I could remember this fellow's name, because I'd like to look him up now.  He once asked, very innocently and in good humor, why we couldn't settle some hot-button social-justice issue by letting different states resolve it differently.  The professor snapped that we'd fought a war over that--as if she felt she'd elucidated a legal argument to stun him into silence.

Later, my classmate wondered whether a peremptory juror strike was really unlimited, something that could be used to oust any potential juror for literally any unexplained subjective reason.  Could the prosecutor strike all black jurors, for instance?  Well, obviously yes, you idiot, the professor replied.  Peremptory means peremptory, weren't you listening?  Only a few years later that tactic became a hot topic in the appellate courts.

Finally, he asked whether charging someone with murder for kicking a pregnant woman and inducing a miscarriage were not in some way inconsistent with an absolute right to abortion.  I mean, weren't we sort of implying that the fetus is a human being?  Again, of course not, you Neanderthal.  The professor wouldn't even argue that one.  It was beyond the pale.

Honor and Ceremony

No one does formal ceremony like the French.  That talent was appropriately used 14 May 2019 to honor the two French Commandos killed in an operation that successfully rescued four hostages in Burkina Faso on 10 May.  They were Cédric de Pierrepont, Commando Hubert, 17/07/1986 - 10/05/2019, and Alain Bertoncello, Commando Hubert, 1991 - 10/05/2019.

 

One of the most stirring of French military marches -- the Soldiers of Robert the Bruce -- has Scottish roots. Here it is played at the burial of two French commandos who died in Burkina Faso.https://t.co/TsoDqFBHkH

— wretchardthecat(@wretchardthecat) May 31, 2019

The second half of that video is the chant "Loin de Chez Nous" (Away from home).  A very appropriate choice and beautifully rendered. A poor (direct) translation here (I could not find a good poetic translation).

The thread that tweet is in also has a nice mention of Piper Bill Millin.

Grandfather Mountain

Grandfather Mountain. The Linn Cove Viaduct is that tiny, tiny line on the bottom left corner of the photo. 

Crossing under the viaduct into Grandfather's boulder field.

One of the larger boulders, with the viaduct for scale. 

Looking back at Grandfather from the bike.

Tough crowd

We knew already that life in North Korea's fast lane is no picnic.  Still, how would you feel if you walked out of negotiations, only to find that your adversaries afterwards took their head negotiator and a handful of his underlings out back and shot them?

Kim Hyok Chol was executed in March at Mirim Airport in Pyongyang, along with four foreign ministry officials after they were charged with spying for the United States, the Chosun Ilbo reported, citing an unidentified source with knowledge of the situation.

“He was accused of spying for the United States for poorly reporting on the negotiations without properly grasping U.S. intentions,” the source was quoted as saying.

That's an odd note to strike. I get that North Korea has such a horrible government that its emperor can have some poor flack shot because he muffs it at the bargaining table, pour encourager les autres. Maybe the next guy will read the tea leaves better.  But calling something like that "spying for the U.S." is kind of a stretch, except in the sense that anything that annoys a dictator can be labeled "spying" for his enemies  It's not like he has to worry about people parsing his words and wondering if he's crazy.

At least the dictator in this case isn't trying to pass off the failure of the negotiations as no big deal.  That's a lot of public chagrin over "not properly grasping U.S. intentions":  bullets in the brain-pan at the airport.

I like that "unidentified source with knowledge of the situation."

Rolling Thunder

The ride to Rolling Thunder was a nine day adventure, a little less than half of it in the DC metroplex, and a little more than half on the road up and back. I am very glad that I went, but I can see why the organizers are considering making this one the last one. It's an event that creates an astonishing effect, but there's a huge amount of work and expense on the back end, as well as a substantial amount of physical risk for participants. The original participants are Vietnam-era veterans, now in or entering their 70s, for whom the risks are now far greater than once. The popularity of the ride has also greatly increased the scale of the risks.

The two main risks are heat exhaustion and motorcycle wrecks during the ride itself. On Sunday, I arrived at the Pentagon parking lot at 7:30 AM. My group began the ride through DC six and a half hours later. Sunday was a typical day for late May in DC, hot and humid, spent under a bright sun with few clouds on a sea of asphalt and no shade. I brought a half a gallon of water, strong sunscreen, and clothing that was light enough to wear in the heat but would protect me from the sun. Even so, I consumed the entire half a gallon of water and refilled it thanks to the Christian Motorcyclist Association, which did great ministry by providing free water to riders. If you had your own container, they would refill it, but if not they would give you water in cups inscribed with prayers and evangelical writings; they also gave out free cloths, dipped in cold water, that were similarly inscribed. The fire department set up several trucks around the Pentagon with sprays of water to help cool riders, but the Pentagon parking area is so large that no such truck was anywhere near us.

As for the risk of motorcycle crashes, I've seen figures for the ride everywhere from 500,000 riders to 900,000. While many come in groups that know each other, very many more are people who have never ridden together before and have no shared agreements on how to do so. The ride (like a long route march) has an accordion effect, bunching up and stopping in places and stretching out into relatively high speeds at other places. It was chaotic, sometimes two abreast, sometimes four, sometimes falling into single file. It is a testament to the skill of the individual riders that there were not far more crashes than there were -- the figure I've heard is fifteen, which in a ride of half a million to nearly a million is itself amazing. This is all the more true given that all the riders were subject to prolonged heat and sun before the ride, and that so many of them are older Americans for whom such exposure is more dangerous than once.

Thus, I get why the organizers might be thinking it's time to hang up their spurs. It's been amazing, but the very scale of their success has made it dangerous to participants.

Now that I've said all that, let me talk about the ways in which it is very much worth preserving.

From Thursday night, DC was taken over by Veteran and Veteran-friendly motorcycle riders. You'd go down to the Lincoln Memorial, near the Wall, and there would be thousands of bikes parked on the grass. Thousands more lined the Mall. The sound of them was constantly in the air. All along the walks and the oaks by our national memorials, men in cuts covered with patriotic patches would greet you as "brother." By Friday, the police had given up on enforcing traffic lights: groups of bikes went together as one vehicle, be they a string of fifty or a hundred bikes long. By Saturday, the already-heavy Memorial Day crowds of ordinary Americans were supplemented by a million or more of us: the riders themselves, and those they brought with them.

I counted dozens of riding associations and motorcycle clubs, all of them patriots. Hotels used to lobbyists in suits and ties were full of bikes, AC/DC blaring in their parking lots. The Legion Riders and the VFW Riders were there in force, as of course was the Rolling Thunder group. The Combat Vets Motorcycle Association had many members there. I mentioned the Christian MA already, but during the heat of the day Sunday they were joined by the Sinland MC, who was grateful for the water they brought. On Saturday I dined at a sports pub in Crystal City, just by the Pentagon. The Nam Knights MC had largely taken over Crystal City, but a bunch of other groups were there as well, especially the Leathernecks MC. The IBEW even had a crew of electrical workers who were also veterans. Unlike at many rallies, though, there was no sense of tension between the various groups -- nobody was trying to prove anything. Everybody was a brother, everybody was already proven, and we were all there for the same reason.

Most of all I will remember the spectators, who lined the ride with flags and flattering signs, and cheered us on the whole way. I've been on many rides before, but never one in which the community made us so welcome. They were proud of us.

After the ride, with my bike in Potomac Park and the shade of the trees to rest in, I met a group of riders one of whom was having his shoe tied by the other. The one guy couldn't bend his back anymore due to injuries, so his brothers knelt down on the grass and tied it for him. He didn't get left behind. No one gets left behind. That's what the ride was about, with the POW/MIA issue as its main focus. It wasn't just words. They were living it out.

The Long Rider Returns

I finished the ride today, passing through my two favorite places on the Parkway. The first was Grandfather Mountain. Grandfather is the home of the mighty Linn Cove Viaduct, the most complexly engineered stone bridge ever built.



Grandfather Mountain is majestic and beautiful, and regularly featured here over the years because it is the home of the Grandfather Mountain Scottish Highland Games. I also passed by it on another long motorcycle ride some years ago.

It was an absolutely perfect morning in Linn Cove. I found it very hard to leave -- I often have the sense there that I never want to leave -- and might well not have done so if it had not been for the thought of my wife waiting at home. She had been expressive of missing me on the phone the night before, however, and, well, somehow I found the strength to ride away from a place of breathtaking beauty.

At some point between Blowing Rock and Asheville, the Blue Ridge Parkway leaves the true Blue Ridge, and begins traveling along the crests of other ridges. North of Asheville, it follows the crest of the Great Craggy Mountains. (AVI will have seen this part recently on his trip to Craggy Gardens). Then, south of Asheville, the parkway mounts the Pisgah Ridge. The Pisgah Ridge section is the highest section of the parkway, frequently over five thousand feet and at one point well over six thousand.

The Pisgah ridge is also where two of North Carolina's National Forests come together. The northern forest is itself called the Pisgah National Forest, and the southern and western one is the Nantahala (a Cherokee word that means, I am told, 'the land where the sun sets at noon' -- which is certainly true of the Nantahala Gorge, a steep-sided festival of waterfalls).

This is the section of the parkway, more than any other, that gives you the feeling of being in a wild world without civilization -- except for the road itself. You can see for miles and miles, and all away below you are ranks upon ranks of mountains and valleys, covered in forest, with no cities in sight.

There are some impressive physical features, though, such as Looking Glass Rock.

The parkway finally ends at the southern entrance to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Here it intersects US 441, which goes south away out of the park and into the Cherokee reservation held by the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation. Turn north, and you will come at last to Gatlinburg -- but not before seeing some of the most striking and beautiful country in the world.

But that ride is for another day.

Bee Stings

NBA To Assign 'Adversity Score' To Pudgy White Guys Who Want To Play Professional Basketball

Groot In Hot Water After Recent 'I Am Groot' Comments

Ocasio-Cortez Disappointed To Learn The 'Free Market' Isn't A Grocery Store Where You Don't Have To Pay For Anything

Amazing: Mueller's Statement Confirms Whatever You Already Believed About Trump

The Mellow Mushroom

The Mellow Mushroom is a pizza chain founded in Atlanta, Georgia in 1974. In its youth all of its restaurants were Grateful Dead themed, but at this remove from the end of the Grateful Dead, it has expanded and employed a creative team designed to make each one unique. I was told tonight by the bartender about her favorite, which was themed on Alice in Wonderland; this one is the one I think of as "the Hobbit" Mellow Mushroom, for reasons that should be obvious. In Gainesville, Georgia, they have occupied an old mansion with stained glass windows and turned it into a masterpiece.

Pizza is an American dish, not much like the Italian namesake, with several regional styles especially including New York and Chicago (and Philly's 'tomato pie'). The Mellow Mushroom deserves to be numbered among this elite as the Southern variation on pizza. The dough is made from spring water and excellent wheat, and is chewy and buttery. Ingredients are numerous and thickly cut, preserving their flavor and texture even after cooking. They prefer a rich tomato sauce, but also make a white pizza named after the Beetles' album, and a good pesto. I've never had a bad one. The one pictured is a small half-House Special, half-Pacific Rim (with both pineapple and jalapenos, as well as thick, applewood-smoked bacon).

They generally also have an ace beer selection, as if there wasn't enough to like about the place already. The wife tells me the salads are fantastic, but my appetite for research has not so far extended to them.

Roanoke to Blowing Rock

Today's ride was shorter than yesterday's, according to my decision to take it easy coming home. After the big, impressive rocks north of Roanoke, the Parkway levels off near the city where I spent last night. It then resumes a climb to the crest of the Blue Ridge, but the climb is steady and gentle and the ridge is wide enough that you might not think you were in the mountains at all for a long time. Several tiny towns, and a few pretty churches, bestride the route.

I spent some of today talking with other bikers returning, or going further out from, Rolling Thunder. One of the vets I met asked after the knife I was wearing, and then showed me the dagger he was carrying on a neck chain. I advised him of the local laws on the subject, so that he could avoid police trouble. His was a lot shorter than mine, but NC is an open-carry state with one of those stupid knife laws that bans concealed knives by name: dirk, dagger, Bowie, etc. I'm working on rationalizing the laws, but I think it will be a difficult process. My first attempt got good responses from legislators, but didn't go anywhere practically.

There's a lodge at Peaks of Otter that looks like it might be fun for a future trip. There's also a "Northwestern Trading Post" where I bought my wife a scarf woven with skulls and roses. She'll love it, I don't doubt, and she's never read this blog so it's safe to tell you.

At one point a hawk flew over my head. Otherwise, unlike the rampant and frequent deer yesterday, there was little wildlife besides songbirds in evidence. The country grows wilder and more mountainous as you approach the North Carolina border, just south of Fancy Gap. Most of the day I had the Parkway entirely to myself, no other traveler in sight in either direction.

I'm spending the night in Blowing Rock, my favorite little mountain town in the north of North Carolina. The picture above is of the countryside from an overlook nearby. It's beginning to get nice, but the very best country lies on tomorrow's ride.

A Little Reading

Five Philosophy Books to Take on Holiday

The Philosophy Behind the First American Dictionary

Why Won't Socialism Die?

A Claim That Seems Like Silly One-Upmanship: Muslims were in America before Protestants

Enjoy!

Bilbo Baggins' Global Restaurant (and Green Dragon Pub)

There aren't a lot of great restaurants in the DC area, but there is one in Alexandria, Virginia. Of course, I only thought to try it because of the Tolkien-themed name. That was fifteen years ago, though, and every time I happen back it's just as good as it used to be.

Plus it has a great mural on the upper floor, and an excellent beer, wine, and cider list. Its mead list is limited to only one item, but in fairness, it was the first restaurant I know of to carry any sort of mead at all.

That treatment of the dragon with the hairy back is clearly drawn from the 1977 animated film version of The Hobbit. Sure enough, the restaurant dates to 1980, same owner all that time. I wonder how he ever got permission to use the characters and names? But clearly he must have, since he's carried on doing it ever since.

Shenandoah

I decided to intercept the Shenandoah National Park's Skyline Drive at the Thornton Gap, and head south from there. It's been years since I took that particular route, but there is much to recommend it. (And one thing to recommend against it: there's a sizable per-car fee, which is only slightly smaller per motorcycle). It is similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway, which begins at the end of Skyline Drive, except that much of it overlooks the Shenandoah Valley.

I had left Arlington at 3:30 AM in order to avoid the heavy, crazy traffic. This was a good decision, even though it entailed rising at 3 AM. The traffic was already heavier than I'd have liked, even at that optimal hour. But by about 6:00 AM, I had escaped to the mountains via Warrenton and US 211. Once I entered the park, I was almost completely alone due to the hour, the weekday, and probably partly as an effect of the aforementioned fee.

It began to rain at Sperryville, and continued to rain for an hour or so. Then it got hot as the day went along. I swapped gear several times as I moved from humid and warm, to cold and wet, to hot and humid. All the same, it was an enjoyable ride through lovely country.

Traffic picked up once I got on the Blue Ridge Parkway, which is free to travel; but it was also later in the day. Mostly motorcycles still, even though the long weekend is over. A few more than myself decided to stretch it out, I suppose.

Now what?

I guess she might make a career as a motivational speaker.

Rolling Thunder was a real experience. I’ll have more informed thoughts after I have returned home. I’m taking the ride slow and easy on the way back. Should be in Thursday evening. A long ride now and then does the soul good.

The EU election was a banger.

Always hatin on the cauliflower

What's a woke folk to do?  If we plant cauliflower in our community gardens, we're guilty of colonialism.  If we plant yucca and plaintains, we're culturally appropriating.  If we plant no community gardens, we're murdering Gaia and propping up Big Agriculture and capitalism, assuming we don't live in a produce desert.  What's left?  Planting in our own back yards?  Elitist pigs!  How dare we elevate ourselves over tenement dwellers, us and our land-grabbing culture?

If we grow no food, at least we can watch a culture consume itself.

Acting straight

This is one of those articles that send you to the thesaurus looking for an interesting new synonym for "unhinged."  Greta LaFleur worries that Pete Buttigieg's Norman Rockwell treatment on the cover of Time Magazine represents the triumph of "heterosexuality without women."  In this context, being straight has less to do with literal sex than with the awful sort of acting-white contagion that might lead black kids to do well in school in order to improve their lives and the futures of their communities.

We have oreos and bananas and apples as slurs for blacks or Asians or Native Americans who act too white.  It will be trickier to devise a slur for gays who act too straight, but I imagine someone's working on it.

Darth Vader takes over the Energy Star

It's hard to imagine a more irritating virtue-signal than Energy Star ratings, which apparently measure the degree to which an appliance lards on a lot of stupid options in an expensive cyborg brain that will only break expensively and often, while doing a poor job of whatever the appliance is supposed to do by restricting its use of water and power.

So I was delighted to see that the Koch brothers' evil plan to take over the universe has now advanced a step by bagging a coveted Energy Star award.  In a few days, no doubt, we'll see this award reversed as abruptly as some university department's ill-considered extension of a speech invitation to a wrongthink reactionary.

The smug party

In my distant youth I was taught to associate smugness with Republicans, not Democrats.  As Tucker Carleton hilariously put it earlier this year, Republicans always denied they were the party of the rich.  "We denied by the poolside, at the club.  'Boy, another bourbon, please!'"  I instinctively associated the Democrats with individual rights, dignity, and freedom as well.  Somewhere in the 90s all that changed for me.

A Quillette article ruminating on the existential shock of the Australian election included this chart showing the realignment of conservatives and liberals according to educational attainment, which tells us a lot about educational trends in the last few decades:

What the election actually shows us is that the so-called quiet Australians, whether they are tradies (to use the Australian term) in Penrith, retirees in Bundaberg, or small business owners in Newcastle, are tired of incessant scolding from their purported superiors. Condescension isn’t a good look for a political movement.

Combine this scolding with the demented balderdash emanating from ivory towers, and you've got a good recipe for people shaking their heads at the Church Lady and switching to another station.

How Much Is a Dragon Worth?

For aspiring knights and dames and hobbit-adventurers, Forbes staff writer Michael Noer does the analysis.

Last year, to quell lingering suspicions that we simply “make-up” the net worth numbers for the Fictional 15, our annual ranking of the richest fictional characters, I decided to publish the calculations behind my evaluation of Smaug’s fortune, the dragon from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (See “How Much is a Dragon Worth.”)

Taking into account a variety of factors including the estimated length of a dragon (64 feet), how many scales he has on his belly (822), the percentage of air in the treasure mound (30%) and the price of gold, silver and diamonds I estimated the ancient wyrm to be worth $8.6 billion.

The Internet disagreed.

Citing errors in everything from the value of the “Arkenstone of Thrain” to the price of mithril armor, Fictional 15 fans critiqued nearly every aspect of my calculation, usually concluding that I had vastly underestimated the old flamethrower’s net worth. One reader, gvbezoff, pegged Smaug’s wealth to be $870 billion, calling it a “conservative estimate.” For context, that’s about 12.5 times richer than Carlos Slim Helu, the planet’s richest non-fictional being.


Still, I am man enough to admit to making a few imaginary errors. So I carefully recalculated Smaug’s net worth taking into account the comments on last year’s post. And the Internet was right. He is worth a lot more than $8.6 billion. $53.4 billion more in fact. Let’s go point by point:

Click over for the point-by-point analysis if you wish.

Worst places to live

Someone has figured out the worst towns to live in for all fifty states.  Most of them are pits for the usual reasons of poverty, joblessness, and crime, but some states, like Nebraska, apparently are so uniformly liveable that all the surveyors could find to complain about is that residents didn't have ideal access to fresh produce.  The case against Derry, New Hampshire, is particularly thin:  the cost of living is high in this well-employed, safe little town.  In one Utah town--horrors--the nearest hospital was 10 miles away.  I wish.

At least no one mentioned limited Starbucks accessibility or the over-prevalence of Chick Fil-A.  Two other subjects studiously avoided were demographics and politics.

I have decided to ride up and join Rolling Thunder with some of my old comrades. I will be a week or so. There may be updates from the road.

There Is No Such Thing as "Scientific Proof"

A helpful reminder from Psychology Today.

Nothing But Process Crimes

Byron York says what I have also been thinking: Mueller's failure to find a single plausible Russian agent, or even coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, largely puts paid to this saga. Most of the convictions were guilty pleas that weren't court-tested; many of them were for process crimes, that is, crimes that didn't exist until the investigation itself created them.

The "obstruction!" talk is an attempt at another process crime. There's no underlying crime whose investigation could be obstructed (to say nothing of the glaring absence of formal and even legal modes of obstruction, such as the exercise of executive privilege vs. Mueller). Impeachment is a political process, and you can in a sense impeach for anything you want, but it makes no sense to impeach a President over allegations of a process crime.

I am beginning to think that the Republican congressman who joined calls for impeachment is really working for Trump. It'll be even harder to ignore calls from the hard left base with a Republican siding them, but on the House side where his apparent defection doesn't change the math. Either the Democrats give in and spend the 2020 election season failing to remove the President in the Senate trial, or they refuse and demoralize/split their base going into the 2020 election cycle. Either way, Trump comes out ahead.

They should bury this and "Move On" as quickly as possible. But maybe they can't, with the flipside investigations into how the investigation came to be coming due.

The View from Hornyhead

No trail to the summit, just a long push through the brush to reach this summit at the southwestern corner of the Middle Prong wilderness, Nantahala National Forest. The last hundred plus vertical feet are a real fight, bare stone precipices rather than anything you can walk upright. It's a long way from anywhere. Too bad there aren't more places left that are.

The real problem with fake SAT scores

You may have thought the real problem with monkeying around with measurements of scholastic aptitude was that lying to ourselves only leaves us with less trustworthy information to guide our actions with.  No, no.  The real problem is that jimmying the SAT scores to reflect the impact of adversity only obscures the real point, which is racial quotas, because they alone can purge the sin of slavery.  Well, maybe racial quotas and a healthy dollop of reparations.  Apparently only pitifully demoralized liberals still think measurable adversity is the real problem.  Besides, how would you measure it?  Quit wasting time and show us the money.

By the way, remember when "SAT" stood for "Scholastic Aptitude Test," before we started to pretend it was simply three neutral letters chosen more or less at random?  "Scholastic" raises all kinds of uncomfortable issues, as does "Aptitude."  "Test" produces anxiety.  Soon we'll have to call it "banana," and we'll have to get to work on that hateful term "score."

Climate what?

We were talking recently about the exhausting task of updating terminology in order to stay among the elect in the field of woke.  The Guardian style guide is right there to help us:

The new terms aren't mandatory (yet).  This is just a heads-up to would-be members of the elect, like a warning that the network will be down between 4 and 5 pm for updating.  The true woke don't wait for written orders, anyway.  They are exquisitely sensitive to more vague and preliminary currents than that: a frown, a slight turning away, a decrease in invitations to the right parties, signs that your own head could be next on the chopping block.

I applaud "climate crisis," with its built-in urgency scrubbed of any specifics, and "climate breakdown" is admirably content-free, but what's with "climate heating"?  I thought the whole idea of "climate change" was to avoid the embarrassing lack of evidence for increased Btu's.  Heating is such a stark term, no nuance, no subtlety.  If "change" sounds too cuddly or Obama-like, surely they could try "disruption" or "shock."  We've had a good run with "trauma" and "bombshell" lately.  Climate annihilation?  Climate Ragnarok?  Climate weasels-ripped-my-face?

More tipping points

I suppose if Nigel Farage becomes Prime Minister, he'll be accused of collusion with China.

Update:  Green party takes an unexpected drubbing in Australian elections.

Tipping which way?

The Washington Examiner marshals evidence that voters worldwide are wearying of expensive and unconvincing policies to address climate whatever.  The Guardian finds it equally obvious that we're on the cusp of a worldwide conversion to true belief and deep sacrifice.

Or maybe the sides are just sorting out and we're about to go to war.

They don't need to be green or nude, either

From Powerline's always excellent "Week in Pictures," including a round-up of headlines (many involving our hero, "Florida Man"):  Cocaine in the Thames is another problem eels don't need, says wildlife expert.

As Zippy the Pinhead used to say, "Toreador pants are something that make your feet look big, too."

Uptick in law enforcement?

Maybe I'm just paying more attention, as a result of anxiety over a corrupt Deep State, but it's both alarming and encouraging to see four corrupt American defense or intelligence officials go to jail this year for spying for the Chinese between 2010 and 2017.

Maybe party time is over.  Joe diGenova said recently that some of the RussiaGate offenders ought to retain five lawyers apiece.  I'm thinking five law firms apiece, but we'll see where all this goes.  We should have the IG report soon.  The FISA court fraud alone is a big deal.  After that, we'll see where U.S. Attorney Durham's efforts lead us, given that his powers are broader than the IG's:  he can subpoena non-government employees.

I'm a little surprised no one has yet panicked and turned state's evidence.  These guys ain't Gordon Liddy.

The Great Awokening

This Quillette article points out that not all true believers in the new Woke religion are cynical charlatans, because "[s]incere belief and status motives often conspire."

Because it allows a person priority access to crucial and coveted resources such as money and mates, the desire for status is probably a fundamental human motivation. And because that desire is primitive and powerful, many social practices and activities function at least partially to delineate status relationships. These can be analyzed as status systems and operate in predictable ways because, whatever its diverse manifestations, status has some invariant features. Most importantly, it is inexpansible. That is to say, its supply does not grow. Unlike the economic pie, the status pie remains roughly the same across time. Therefore, players in the status game inevitably inhabit a zero-sum world. If one person’s status goes up, then another’s must go down, which explains why people are exquisitely sensitive not only to gains in their own status, but also to gains in other people’s status. Another’s triumph inevitably rearranges the distribution of a finite and precious resource.

And the zero-sum game explains why "people in Woke culture expend so much effort sending signals to each other and so little quietly working to improve people’s lives."

RIP Mr. Kelling

A founder of the "Broken Windows" approach to police work has died.

The endgame for much of academia and for “progressives” is to eliminate proactive policing in minority neighborhoods. These critics remain wedded to the idea that crime can be lowered only by solving its alleged root causes: racism and poverty. Kelling asserted the opposite: that constitutional, responsive policing is the best hope that law-abiding residents of high crime areas have to live free from fear, a right that people in safer neighborhoods take for granted. Portraying the police as a force for evil is one of the most destructive consequences of the 1960s revolt against traditional authority. George Kelling’s empirically based wisdom revived the understanding that protecting public order is an essential and humane function of government—and that the viability of cities rests on respect for the law.

Mr. Kelling probably wouldn't have thought much of the "expressing pain in a bodied way" approach.

A Song on a Lute

This is a song without a long history, but it does have a history: it's from a 1990s video game called The Elder Scrolls: Arena, but was included in 2011's The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim as well. Skyrim, like the Conan movie of a few posts back, paid a real composer to produce a real score. This piece isn't part of that score, though, just an acoustic update of a tinny version written for early 1990s IBM PC sound cards. It's a surprisingly nice piece of music, considering.



The full soundtrack (which doesn't include this piece, but the true compositions) is here. Some of it is extraordinary.

"Intellectualization"

Today I learned of a Freudian concept with a built-in Kafka trap.

Among the intellectual defenses against analysis are a refusal to accept the logic of emotions, attempts to refute the theory of psychoanalysis,[19] or speculating about one's own problems rather than experiencing them and attempting to change.[20]...

A woman in therapy continues to theorise her experience to her therapist – 'It seems to me that being psycho-analysed is essentially a process where one is forced back into infantilism...intellectual primitivism' – despite knowing that she 'would get no answer to it, or at least, not on the level I wanted, since I knew that what I was saying was the "intellectualising" to which she attributed my emotional troubles'.[33]

I'm often critical of the theory of psychoanalysis, especially Freudian analysis. It's characteristic of Freudian theories that you can't prove you aren't sick; they used to make movies about that, back when involuntary psychiatric imprisonment was a thing. You say you don't have an Oedipal complex, sir? Well, that's a sign that you're repressing it, and that's even more dangerous!

Here we get a pure form of the Kafka trap, though. The Kafka trap is (as I imagine all of you know) the kind of a trap in which declaring your innocence proves your guilt. The only way to prove yourself correct is to admit guilt, in which case, of course, you're declared guilty. In this case, the very act of questioning the validity of the theory under which you stand accused proves that you're guilty of the accusation. That blog post describing a Kafka trap would certainly be said to be an act of 'intellectualization'; any attempt by the author to refute the theory, for example in order to establish that this was a correct description of the world rather than a psychological defense mechanism, would be taken as evidence that they were involved in psychological defenses.

That's a problem because, as always, Freudian concepts are fielded as weapons.

Generally, you can only intellectualize when your body and life are safe. So it makes sense that people who are white, male, heterosexual, or able-bodied, are quickest to adopt intellectualization, while those who are brown and black, non-male, queer or who have a disability are so clearly angry, sad, and scared.

As a white female, I was raised with this idea that if you want to be heard, you have to be emotionless. It’s infused in our culture, that the rational, emotion-free argument is the best type of argument. The qualities of detached rationality are generally attributed to white men, and so white men are unconsciously taught to believe themselves to be fair and unbiased arbiters of all situations. Which is how you get seven white men signing away the healthcare rights of women around the world....

Then I became both a therapist and a feminist, at the same time.... I got called a bitch and accused of PMS-ing and laughed at and mocked–but I also found my people. I found whole humans who knew that we cannot bring ourselves to any conversation without bringing our bodies and real emotions.

The opening assumption is wrong, but I can see why she assumes it. Just the other day a feminist on a college campus flew into a rage and physically attacked some anti-abortion protesters. (Not for the first time.) This would be said to be 'expressing her real, deep pain,' in a 'bodied' way; which is to say, the violence would be licensed. And, indeed, the police did not even handcuff this slight female who repeatedly punched a man in the head. The news report describes her as having been 'arrested,' but if you watch the video you see the police explaining that they're just giving her a citation "which is the same thing as an arrest." Except for the arresting. So for her, it probably does seem like she can only intellectualize if she feels safe; when she doesn't feel safe, she must 'act out her real feelings' using her 'body.'

But if a man like me lashes out violently at another person, the police are going to respond very differently. We would certainly be arrested -- actually arrested, taken away in chains and booked -- and possibly not released on bail before the trial, if a judge considered us at risk of lashing out violently again. As I've related before, the last time I got pulled over the cops immediately assumed bracketing fire positions, hands on their guns.

For a man like me, the ability to set aside emotion and respond intellectually is the only thing that creates safety. If I respond with my real emotions and body, I might well get killed by defense mechanisms society has built for that express purpose. As the recent book The Goodness Paradox points out, civilization and morality seem to have come to be in order to license and enable the killing of strong males. A male who cannot restrain his 'real emotions' and 'body' is subject to potentially deadly force by police, at essentially all times.

So I guess in that sense it is a 'defense mechanism,' but not a Freudian one. It's a real defense. It creates actual safety where otherwise there is grave peril. And that's not a bad thing, all psychoanalysis aside.

This Should Be Interesting

Twitter has chosen a stunning graphic to highlight that SAT story.

Over/under on how long it will remain up? I'll go with an hour.

The privilege index

The annals of IQ insanity:  college admission boards rely on SAT scores because professional educators associate high IQ with probable academic performance.  Somehow they intuited that high school GPAs weren't 100% reliable at signaling IQ.  SAT scores, in contrast, correlate with fantastic fidelity to IQ.

We barely are allowed to think, let alone talk, about what IQ is and why it might be valuable (but it doesn't make you a good person!).  Nevertheless, experience keeps confirming uncomfortable theories that it has something to do with competence in academic, technical, or cognitive tasks, which, for now, we still sort of think is a good thing, at least in the neurosurgeon who's about to operate on us.  Also, competence in those brainy areas--whether or not we're prepared to admit it is useful to society or praiseworthy in any way--correlates well with financial success and level of education.  What's worse, it seems to run in families, which means that on the whole it also correlates well with the financial success and education of one's forebears.  The horrifying cherry on top is that it correlates strongly with race, the uncomfortable implication being that race also must have something to do with inherited qualities, not all of which can be scrubbed away by the right research filter.

Well, we can't have that.  What we need is an adjustment to SAT scores for adversity.  What qualifies as adversity?  Among other things, all the background conditions that correlate strongly with low SAT scores, such as parents with all the economic, professional, and educational characteristics of groups with low SAT scores.  But that's no good, because the idea of parents sneaks back in that uncomfortable concept of inheritance.

Inheritance doesn't tell you everything by a long shot.  SAT scores give a pretty sharp picture of a college-bound student's horsepower; circumstances give a fuzzy one, though strongly correlated.  We ought to be ignoring the fuzzy signal and using the sharper one.  Instead, we're pretending that the fuzzy signal is some kind of contraindication, if not an outright thought crime for which we have to do penance.

If IQ matters, inheritance is going to favor some students over others, an advantage that also will be broadly reflected in their circumstances.  If IQ doesn't matter, we ought to chuck the pseudo-IQ tests and make college admission a free-for-all:  a simple lottery, or racial quotas, or even an expansion of the wide-open public school system to age 22.  Or, heck, federally mandate lifelong free education for anyone who still feels he hasn't reached his full potential as a neurosurgeon.

This guy was general counsel for the FBI?

James Baker, former GC for the FBI, is a confused man.  A contributing editor for the website Lawfare, he posted a rambling account of his spiritual conflicts in opposing our dangerous president.  Hatred, he counsels us, hasn't worked, as evidenced by the president's stubbornly steady poll numbers.  Why don't we try love?  By love, he doesn't mean something warm and fuzzy, he means full-throated bold opposition, in the tradition of Martin Luther King.  Maybe that will bring Trump's polls down at last.  Throw in some Dalai Lama, perhaps even lethal force, if spiritually appropriate.  Whatever works.

At the same time, he's troubled by damage to his beloved FBI's reputation.

One of my dearest relatives, who happens to be a supporter of the president, asked me last year, “Jimmy, is everyone at the FBI corrupt?” I was dismayed.

It's possible that Baker, whose mind apparently is more unhinged than wonderfully focused by the prospect of his own hanging, would do well to give both hate and love a pass for now and concentrate on honesty, both internal and external. Some of this swirl of love and hate might come into sharper focus for him.

Isaiah 6:8

A brief movie review of Fury, which I just got around to seeing this weekend.



This was one of the harder movies to watch that I've seen, which means that it is a good war movie. There are several war crimes executed by good men, which is an accurate depiction of the nature of war. They do right sometimes, wrong often, and they're the good guys. They die well. It is honest about the brutality and the hardness of it all, and the ways in which they can come to love it.

The hardest scene to watch, though, is of an impromptu dinner party with some German locals. Half the tank crew wants to have a moment of normality and decency; the other half is so harmed and haunted by what they've done that they can't stand it, and try to destroy it. They're sorry, but they can't, and it's because they're too hurt to pretend things can still be normal.

It isn't an art film. It's not a masterpiece. But it's honest and it's direct, and that's not nothing.

J. Roddy Walston & the Business

A young group with an interesting sound.



I liked this one better, though it's more erotic than we usually do here.

Giving or Taking?

Jared Diamond, a noted historian, says it's basically even money whether civilization will utterly collapse by 2050. What are those numbers based on?

Today, the risk that we’re facing is not of societies collapsing one by one, but because of globalization, the risk we are facing is of the collapse of the whole world.

How likely do you think that is? That the whole network of civilization would collapse?

I would estimate the chances are about 49 percent that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.... At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted. Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably. With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer. Which means that by 2050 either we’ve figured out a sustainable course, or it’ll be too late.

Well, I could say that collapse has a 50% chance of occurring: either it will, or it won't.

On the other hand, he has some surprisingly positive things to say about the role of corporations.

I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page. When there was the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska, you can bet that made the front page. When Chevron was managing its oil field in Papua New Guinea in a utterly rigorous way, better than any national park I’ve ever been in, that certainly did not make the front page because it wasn’t a good picture.

That sounds suspiciously like sanity. So maybe give him your ear, and see what you think.

Everything not mandatory is forbidden

I grew up in Houston, famous for its lack of zoning.  In most cities, that's an unthinkable heresy.  Blue-state types naturally embrace zoning as part of the cradle-to-grave involvement of government in virtually every aspect of life that otherwise might be guided by free choices between buyers and sellers, a/k/a vicious dog-eat-dog capitalism or, to troglodytes like myself, the free market.

All-powerful zoning predictable screws up market to the point that people are shocked to discover that housing prices are insane and there are an inexplicable number of homeless people whom society has failed to provide with attractive housing options.  California is the poster child for this kind of thing.  Having noticed that mandatory zoning has led to an unreasonable fraction of developable land's being set aside for single-family homes, today's activists have executed an abrupt about-face and announced that single-family zoning must be replaced by multi-family zoning in order to redress past inequities.  One might think this kind of change might be pursued locally by changing the standards of the zoning committees, but why trust them to do that when you can ask the state government to make it mandatory for all cities?  So they'll change from mandatory single-family to mandatory multi-family:  anything but let the market adjust to what buyers and sellers want to do with their land.  How would they know what's good for them?

Running Out the Guns on Abortion

Georgia's heartbeat bill was signed last week. Today the Alabama state legislature passed a law that is clearly unconstitutional under current SCOTUS jurisprudence just precisely in order to provoke a court challenge. Frankly, if I were the governor of Alabama -- the actual governor is a woman, by the way -- I would veto it in spite of all the reasons to oppose abortion. The Georgia law may not survive constitutional challenges either, but at least it aims at being a workable law: it defines the beginning of human life as the beginning of the natural heartbeat (philosophically indefensible, that, but it does track the equally wrong but actually legal standard for death as the end of the natural heartbeat). All legal protections start there.

Not citizenship, though, which requires the child being born under the 14th Amendment. The earliness of the heartbeat also means that abortion may not practically be an option for most mothers, which is going to be hard for the SCOTUS to swallow. I don't think the votes are there to support repealing Roe and Casey yet -- I'd expect Roberts to defect, and Kavanaugh perhaps given his commentary in the confirmation -- but the approach is defensible. Establish that the child is a legal person, alive and entitled to an equality of rights.

The Alabama law doesn't even try to construct workable standards. The legislature was clear that its intent is to provoke, rather than to craft a law that could apply to practical cases in the world. That is not the purpose of legislation, and there definitely aren't the SCOTUS votes to win given that it defies every single aspect of the extant jurisprudence. I would think a governor would rather not take a case like that to court.

Academia as a subprime mortgage broker

Allen Farrington at Quillette, on academia:

Parkinson’s Law holds that a task will take as long as the time allotted to complete it. It seems to be a kind of social equilibrium theorem applicable to any complex organisation. Normally such organisations would simply collapse under the weight of their own bureaucratic inefficiency, but academia is different. It will never be allowed to collapse because education is a right.

* * *

Peter Thiel has given a uniquely scathing critique of the insanity of this system. . . . It is effectively a Ponzi scheme. No wonder Thiel calls college administrators subprime mortgage brokers. They get a cut on selling pieces of paper that are only as valuable as we all pretend they are.

All the local governments here just approved a county Economic Development Corporation, in the belief that a unified mouthpiece for rightthink from community leaders will attract new business and jobs. How it will achieve this goal remains murky, beyond the intention to bribe prospective employers with tax abatements, but there is much enthusiasm for "enhancing the workforce." Although it's unclear what anyone proposes to do to enhance the workforce beyond what we'd normally expect from public schools, the idea may be to create a para-academic institution in which useful knowledge is imparted to a select group of youngsters who want to learn it and can be expelled if they fail to learn or if they disrupt the classrooms too much. If that's the plan, I'll probably get on board, while regretting that we still have to fund the public schools with sky-high ad valorem taxes. Vouchers would let the parents choose the schools that produce results that suit their families, and watch the non-functioning schools die on the vine.

OK, we'll quit exposing you to wildfires

PG+E entered its second bankruptcy last year when it was threatened with $30 billion in damages from the horrific Camp Fire conflagration.  Now it's determined never to cause anyone that kind of disappointment again:

The Camp Fire in November, along with fires from the prior year, exposed PG+E to an estimated $30 billion or more in claims from blazes, hastening its January bankruptcy. Since then, the utility giant has been under pressure to better ensure that its equipment won’t spark fires. Earlier this year, PG+E said it would widen the scope of its power shutoffs to include high-transmission power lines, potentially impacting nearly 10 times the number of customers compared to an earlier plan.

Of course, there will be new kinds of disappointments.

John Adams vs. the Mob

I was eager to bring myself up to speed on America’s revolutionary history.

The most memorable story I heard during that tour was of a young John Adams, a future U.S. president, successfully defending Thomas Preston, a Captain of a redcoat British regiment who’d been accused of ordering the aforementioned massacre after British soldiers were hit with rocks and snowballs. When the administration of Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson put Preston and his men on trial, Adams agreed to serve as defence counsel, despite the fact he’d already staked out a reputation as a leading Patriot. Years later, he would declare that “the part I took in defence of [Captain] Preston and the soldiers, procured me anxiety and obloquy enough. It was, however, one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country. Judgment of death against those soldiers would have been as foul a stain upon this country as the executions of the Quakers or witches.”

Part of a piece chiding Harvard, and defending the ideal that even those accused of serious crimes deserve a proper defense. This ensures that the state exercises its power only when it has properly proven the charges, not merely when it has raised serious charges.

We could use more rather than less of that. The recent Mueller investigation was characterized by serious charges being used to justify extraordinary exercises of power (e.g., violating the attorney-client privilege of the President of the United States in order to raid his home and office, seize his documents, and read them). These accusations were rarely tested in court because of the plea bargain process, in which very easy terms were offered for a guilty plea compared with the severity of the punishments if you dared to contest the charges. A man of adequate honor might refuse to plead guilty when he was not, but perhaps not; given the ruinous cost of an extended defense to his family, even a man of high honor might choose to prefer harm to himself over harm to his family.

A lawyer might now begin to worry about offering a defense, if he might himself become the target of a prosecution or persecution thereby. We need more capability to defend those accused of serious crimes in an actual court-tested case, not a lessened capacity. This is a pillar of our liberty that is under tremendous stress.

Medicare For the Whole World, Courtesy of the US Taxpayer

You're just making things up now, Senator.

Easter Snow

A bit past Easter, but my mother said it was snowing where she was yesterday on Mother's Day.



These are the Uilleann Pipes, quite different from the great pipes usually featured here.

Biden vs. AOC

I'm not inclined to be mean to the young lady from Brooklyn, or the Bronx, or whichever part of NYC she's supposedly from; I can't be bothered to remember much about them anyway, though I know from visiting that the Bronx is in the north and Brooklyn is in the south. Still, she's a celebrity of a sort within the party, so when she decides to go hard against the presumptive nominee it's interesting.

Labor

How does a government act when it genuinely wants its existing labor force to thrive?  From a Claremont article about Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:

“[W]e want a Hungarian Hungary and a European Europe,” he said. So he sought alternatives to Muslim migration that would allow him to keep Hungary’s full-employment economy from stoking inflation. He has stepped up efforts at reintegrating into the economy the backward but considerably more fecund Roma minority. He has lowered the minimum school-leaving age from 18 to 16. He has remobilized retired people. He has pushed the unemployed onto workfare.

And he has made it possible for the German factories that are the backbone of Hungary’s manufacturing economy to ask for up to 400 hours of paid overtime from their workers annually. So short of labor is Hungary that two strikes in January 2019—one in the 4,000-strong Mercedes plant in Kecskemét, one at the vast Audi plant in Györ, with 13,000 employees—ended with 20% and 18% raises for workers, respectively. In the past year Hungary has (very discreetly) offered residence to Venezuelan refugees of Hungarian background. And Orbán has drawn up a plan offering a $30,000 loan to first-time mothers that gets written off when the mother bears a third child, and grants every woman who raises four children an exemption from income tax for the rest of her life.

Beautiful, Warlike Music

The 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie transcends its genre at times, and in several ways, but never more than in the beauty of the score.



Someone made a good decision in hiring a real composer to write a real composition. It raises the movie -- sometimes good, often clever, sometimes silly -- fully into the realm of art.

Glenn Reynolds is Right

The Sage of Knoxville:

BETTER THAT THEY SHOULD BE VICTIMS? Students who tackle shooters die as heroes. Some experts worry ‘we’re setting our kids up to be martyrs.’ “”We’re asking children to make executive decisions, life-and-death decisions.” We’re not asking them to. Life is forcing them to. And this isn’t unusual, but rather — since these “children” are teenagers — the norm for human existence. You could join the Roman legions at 14.

It is?

@Comey: "Reasonable," "totally normal step" to plant undercover sources in a political campaign.

Was that supposed to be reassuring, hoss?