Resisting madness
Ann Bauer has not had good luck in her life, but she seems to have a tough core, a commitment to truthfulness and rationality that will see her through.
Good climate news, shut up
Roger Pielke unwraps the brand-new IPCC report:
For my technical readers, the scenarios judged unlikely by the IPCC are high emission (“such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5”) and the scenarios “in line” with current policies are intermediate scenarios (“RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and SSP2-4.5”).
This is huge news. Fantastic in fact. Why? The extreme scenario RCP8.5 was in the most recent IPCC report identified as our most likely future. Now IPCC has completely reversed that, and it is now considered low likelihood. There could not be a more profound change in the scenario foundation of climate science.
Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: Great News! The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood. I am actually floored that this incredible change in such a short time apparently hasn’t even been noticed, much less broadcast around the world.
Racist obsessions
Maybe it's a sign of creeping old age to have lived long enough to see the better part of a century lurch from one racist extreme to another. Don't get me wrong: it's always been obvious that you can identify human genetic groups with striking differences in their averages according to an impressive variety of measurements, from height to intelligence to resistance to different diseases. Racism is something different: an insistence that race, however defined, is a reliable basis for assessing human worth and a proper basis for rigid social and political ringwalls around individuals regardless of their actual traits and behavior. As a shorthand, I think of it as dreaming up of reasons why Jews can't be admitted to good universities or hired by good law firms. You have to be an incipient geezer like myself even to remember when excluding Jews didn't make most people scratch their heads in bewilderment--but the same people who've forgotten the treatment of the Jews in the not-all-that-distant past often have little difficulty swallowing an explanation for why universities and law firms must now employ similar practices to enforce quotas against whites or Asians. (I leave aside for the moment the resurgence of bare-faced Jew-hatred.)
Decades ago I read and enjoyed "Guns, Germs and Steel." That was near the beginning of the online discussion age, so I was unprepared for the bizarre debate that broke out in the Amazon review section. Back then, as I recall, the fury was provoked by Jared Diamond's undervaluing the virtue of superior cultures, which led him to use environmental determinism to explain variances in success among ancient genetic/geographical groups. Certainly his analysis was flawed in many ways, but not in its basic curiosity about the impact of the regional availability of suitable crops and animals for domestication, or suitable East-West migration routes for expansion without encountering radically different growing conditions.
It's amusing now to discover that a new crop of critics detests Diamond for his failure to acknowledge that the only acceptable alternative to the racial superiority explanation is racial oppression. Diamond is no more a racial supremacist than he is blind to horrifying clashes between genetic groups, but he has sinned against his culture by opting to consider any other factors at all. For the most part we appear nearly incapable of imagining that a lot of things can be going on in a clash between cultures, from bigotry to luck to disparities in cultural competence--and that none of these factors proves a moral superiority in either the culture or the individual hearts of the victors or the vanquished.
Sheriff: State Officials Ordered Voting Laws Ignored
Wisconsin's Racine County Sheriff is partially just restating what we already knew from the Time Magazine article: several states violated their own laws in the 2020 elections. It is news, however, that officials ordered citizens to go along with violating the laws. Nursing homes across the state, for example, were ordered to comply with the election law violations.
The US Constitution says that states or Congress shall set the laws governing the conduct of elections; instead, such laws were violated in favor of the edicts of bureaucrats and governors. The election was consequently illegitimate, root and branch, in all such states. There appears to be no remedy for this.
UPDATE: The Sheriff says that the state Attorney General has rejected calls for an investigation at the state level. No charges are being brought at this time by prosecutors.
UPDATE: This is a slam-dunk case with hard evidence.
The investigation focused on abuse of voters confined to nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Investigators discovered that Wisconsin Election Officials expressly discussed that their proposed conduct for the 2020 election would violate state law, and yet they decided to do it anyway. They memorialized their decision in a letter they wrote and disseminated to every single county clerk’s office in Wisconsin.
Sheriff Schamling stated that officials indicated that they “needed the flexibility to violate the law,” and that they needed to “instruct county clerks to break the law.” Despite the blatant absurdity of the statements, the express illegality of their activities, and the fact that they were all being recorded on their Zoom meeting, election officials went ahead and violated the law anyway. The sheriff’s office played the video from the Zoom meeting of the commissioners discussing their need to break the law and instruct others to do the same.
Emphasis added. They estimate somewhere between fifty and a hundred thousand fraudulent votes from this activity alone, in a state Biden allegedly won by only twenty thousand.
Republican Perfidy
This guy is one of my Senators. Both of their names always turn up every time there's an establishment compromise, because he's really there to represent the corporations -- woke or otherwise -- and to line his own pockets.
After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.They talked for 50 seconds.Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
Fauth has been dodging the subpoenas inquiring about this from the SEC, but has managed to find time to be re-appointed to his government sinecure by Joe Biden. Trump originally appointed him, I would guess as an unrequited favor to Burr.
The Left is crazy, and many Democratic politicians are likewise corrupt (for example look at Pelosi's stunning success in the markets). The problem isn't as simple as swinging party control of Congress or the White House, though. Corruption is systemic: both parties and the bureaucracy have turned government into a wealth-extraction business for themselves. Bigger changes need to be made if this corruption is to be resolved.
"Why won't anyone listen to us?"
The scary thing about progressives wailing when people won't listen to their wisdom is how quickly they're willing to conclude that they'll just have to find ways to use more force than persuasion, for our own good.
In the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber conducts a long-winded analysis of the "Obama-Springsteen" echo chamber. I had to get to the very bottom to find his point: his crowd always has hoped and believed, with good reason, that they can conduct stealth politics by controlling popular culture, but now he finds with dismay that people sense the stink of propaganda and tune out the culture. People outside the Obama-Springsteen echo chamber may actually recoil and find both their entertainment and their political messages elsewhere--from those bad, bad people with a different message that we haven't managed to squelch yet.
Indeed, many of the people Obama wants to reach are the ones who systematically avoid him for reasons of culture, politics, or both. . . . Obama demonstrates the toxic effects of Fox News by recalling an anecdote from late in his White House tenure. He had gone to visit a community college in a red state, and the locals tuning in to his speech from a nearby bar asked, “Is this how Obama usually sounds?” to a reporter who was there with them. Clearly they had been getting their news from sources that rarely broadcast the commander in chief speaking uninterrupted.
“Now, keep in mind, at that point I had probably been president for the last five or six years,” Obama says to Springsteen. “The filter was so thick that I, as president of the United States, could not reach those guys unless I actually went to their town.”
Why, yes, you can inspire a target audience to recoil in horror and, even if they can't escape your deeply unpopular laws, to exercise their right not to soak up your condescending lectures. They aren't required to continue to listen. They may even start listening to other people whose messages you deplore. This is what happens to people who don't genuinely believe in the power of persuasion, only the power of propaganda and, if that fails, censorship and force.
Kornhaber concludes that the peril of the echo chamber "only emphasizes the limits of politics-as-culture":
The Biden era has already provided a clinic in the seriousness of those limits: Here is a president, like Obama before him, backed by Hollywood and enjoying a popular-vote majority—yet still unable to pass his agenda due to intractable political obstacles. Would any amount of conscientious conversation nix the filibuster or sway Joe Manchin? Money, demographics, institutions, and pure power still rule, and many of the stories we tell lately in hopes of shifting that reality just end up distracting from it.So the problem is money, demographics, institutions, and pure power, not that Biden can't get his way because too many people despise the policies he's now pushing, after running a campaign in which many understood him to be promising something completely different. Kornhaber seems to labor under the delusion that Biden conscientiously conversed with voters, who inexplicably failed to listen. Frankly, Biden didn't try, and if he had, the voters' rejection wouldn't have signaled a problem with their ears, but with the content of the message. Thus Biden follows up with the notion that he's "running out of patience." And the terrible voters don't like that either.
Numbing guilt
The Washington Examiner looks at a recent John McWhorter analysis of wokeness as a religion. Part of McWhorter's approach is almost getting to be old-hat: the equation of woke frenzy with other anti-intellectual fundamentalisms. One part that caught my eye was his observation that wokeness appeals to our deep need to silence a nagging conscience.
My own view is: beware any creed that soothes your conscience without changing your own behavior. There's a reason the communion prayer includes the request to guard us from the temptation to seek solace only, and not strength, or pardon only, and not renewal. In my experience most of us are in an almost ceaseless quest to find the magic elixir that numbs pain, whether it's drunkenness, rage, power, security, or the many distractions of hedonism. Without ever having been much attracted to Eastern mysticism, I do appreciate the directive of Buddhism to pay attention and respect to what is actually happening here and now, no matter how distressing, not papering it over with fluff. What can't be cured must be endured, but what can be cured should be. If it needs to change, change it, stop wishing it away or hoping someone else will pay the price to alter it. In short, spend your own treasure on whatever you claim is bothering you.
The flip-side of trust
The flip-side of trust is self-government.
Control yourself, or others will control you. Many will try, anyway, but we don't have to tempt them any more than necessary, or make it easier for them.
Trust
I sometimes find that I watch nearly all dramas through the filter of the "Prisoner's Dilemma": how will people behave so that they can trust each other? What rotten and avoidable things will happen when they don't? An article this morning about draconian enforcement of Title IX rules to punish college students who have casual sex with drunk partners reminded me how crazy human interactions can get if we persist in pretending we are invulnerable, autonomous, and amoral particles when engage with each other. That works reasonably well for routine, repetitive, predictable economic transactions with distant strangers. It's a ridiculous approach to neighbors, friends, and certainly sexual partners.
The linked article described two panicked college students who woke up after a one-night stand in which both were too drunk to have given effective consent. Knowing that either could ruin the life of the other by being the first to lodge a Title IX complaint, the young man decided to be the first to rat. Title IX prosecutions being the Kafkaesque joke they are, the slower-to-complain young woman found that defending against such accusations is futile. Both would have been fine if they'd each demonstrated a spine, but neither could be sure the other would. Or maybe the whole story is nothing but a dystopian fable, who knows. If so, it's not an implausible one.
The Prisoner's Dilemma poses a limited threat to people who have an unshakeable moral core and go to some trouble to become intimate only with others who clearly have the same. With casual neighbors, you can generally limit your exposure to self-defeating treachery by trusting each other provisionally on smaller, lower-stakes interactions. The worst that can happen is probably no more devastating than not getting your borrowed tool back, so you'll know better next time. With friends, well, if he habitually walks the check or spills your secrets or expects to be bailed out of jail without reciprocating, you'll learn. With lovers, you may have to forgo sex with someone you just met and about whom you know absolutely nothing--especially if you attend a university run by crazed ideologues.
How a young woman, or even a young man, could maintain any self-respect while whining about "non-consensual" sex in any other context than violence, I cannot imagine. It's as if people were begging to be subjected to a rigid system of chaperonage. They're practically shouting "I can't be trusted to exercise any judgment about how out-of-control and helpless I render myself among people whose trustiworthiness I haven't troubled to learn anything about." In other words, you can't trust me, I can't trust him, and we all need to live in tyranny in order to be even remotely safe.
When we've exhausted the protective strategies against betrayal and still get caught short, we still have a choice: not to be a jerk. Yes, we may be unfairly punished, but we don't have to be a jerk in a more comfortable cell.
Whiteside
That is the name of the mountain to the right, which is more obvious when the sun is on the rock face. The basin below is the headwaters of the Chatooga river, a tributary of the mighty Savannah.
Maybe just a tad of projection?
As Glenn Youngkin ties up Terry McAuliffe in the race for governor of Virginia, the forces of blue are getting a little wild-eyed. First former Pres. Obama showed up to accuse the dreadful GOP of manufacturing fake outrage over petty incidents like girls being raped in public school bathrooms by boys in skirts. Now McAuliffe has blurted out a classic line:
“Folks, we will not allow Glenn Youngkin to bring his hate and his chaos in our Virginia schools. And we will never let our children be used as political pawns.”I imagine I'm not the only voter who sees more hate and chaos in nutty school policies that leave 15-year-old girls the pawns of woke-trans orthodoxy. The upcoming Virginia election returns may display some outrage that's not at all fake.
A Tax on Unrealized Gains
For the last decade or so, I've been hearing about Modern Monetary Theory and how the government can just print money to buy whatever it wants. Now apparently it has decided it can also tax money that hasn't actually been made.
This idea could work -- badly, and with many negative economic effects, but it could work -- if you forced everyone to sell off all their investments every year, realize their gains, pay taxes on them, and then re-purchase whatever they could afford of their investments with the money they had left after you taxed them.
The idea as presented is madness, confidently asserted by the very experts and elites who are supposed to know what they are doing.
Oh, a Fed
Suddenly the chief mystery of Jan 6 — to whit, why the more-than-ample security forces available to the Capitol were close to unemployed, the Capitol being instead defended by a smaller cohort than typical for a weekday— looks as if it might have a good answer.
Dune (Part I) Review
It was far too beautiful an afternoon to spend in a movie theater, but I did spend it anyway because my wife has been longing to see this new movie for months. The novel at least is something that has meant a great deal to me; I read it each time before deploying to Iraq, because its intense politics of assassination was a great way to get into the mindset of the business at hand.
Many people have long desired a new Dune movie. The 1984 adaptation is a better movie than it often gets credited for being, and comparisons with this movie make that clear. This new movie, like the deplorable recent Hobbit adaptation, has decided to spin out into multiple movies what was done in just one in 1984. Perhaps because they thought all that extra time would give them time to spare, they edited with much less care. Every minute of the 1984 movie is spent telling the story; this one spends a lot of time playing out visual spectacles (even repetitive ones, like multiple landings of spacecraft when one would have done, or when it might have been omitted).
Yet the 2021 movie ends up leaving out a lot of the story that the 1984 film conveyed in a shorter time frame. One now never sees the Emperor or hears of his court, nor meets his daughter -- the ultimate political object of the action of the film being her marriage to the protagonist and its subsequent conveyance of the throne onto him. One does not meet several other major characters. Exactly what the order of Bene Gesserit women is up to is spelled out in sketch rather than detail. It's quite surprising how deficient the storytelling is given that they had a lot more time.
The characters, mostly, are not as well portrayed. The exception is the Harkonnens, who are definite improvements over the clownish 1984 villains. These are much more believably malicious, though again important details are left out, as are major characters.
In especial the film completely misunderstands the Lady Jessica, who is portrayed here as emotional, weak, and brittle. I cannot understand how anyone read the novel and came to the conclusion that this was the right way to portray her. Perhaps they meant to give her a longer character arc, but that was an error if so. Her character arc was long enough even starting as a master of politics and her arts, of extreme personal discipline that gave way only occasionally out of her capacity for deep love. This version of her is vastly less admirable, which diminishes the whole.
Paul's arc always started weak, but this Paul is especially weak. Weak men seems to be the style of the era. The Duncan Idaho character (very well played by Jason Momoa, as was Duke Leto by his actor) even mocks his lack of muscle in lines the film added to enhance his pathetic stature. This is a model well-familiar to audiences of contemporary movies; it was the one used for Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. It is not quite right for a story set in a world as harsh as Dune's.
Thurfir Hawat is depicted as a fat clown in a swollen uniform who fails at everything. This is entirely a betrayal of the logician and mathematician who is also a deadly Master of Assassins. Hawat was one of the strongest characters in the novel, and is almost a nonentity here.
There are the usual irritating submissions to the idol of diversity, including turning the planetary ecologist and Judge of the Change into a black female for no other reason. The Fremen, being the good guys, are depicted as a relatively diverse coalition of Africans and Arabs. This is an attempt to portray them as if they were contemporary Muslims -- who really are diverse -- rather than as the novel's intended aboriginal population of a desert planet, whose faith is not Islam but a future creation inspired in some ways by Islam and in some ways by Bene Gesserit manipulations (again, only hinted at in this film).
So, for the most part, this was an inferior production even compared to the 1984 rendition that is often panned for its cartoonishness. Where it excelled, very much, was in its visuals and audibles. The Voice is conveyed well using improved audio technology; the visuals are often quite stunning. The shields used in the sword and knife fighting are much improved over the silly CGI of the 1984 edition, and the depiction of weapons technology also very much better. It definitely does not come off as cartoonish; it's just not good in many important ways.
The sandworms are, I think, a kind of draw. The new ones move more like living beings, and have their own plausibility; but the 1984 sandworms remain very strong characterizations.
Worth watching to see the visuals; quite disappointing on substance.
UPDATE: This guy liked it more than I did, but I think his article underlines the critique. If you just saw the movie, you wouldn't know any of the stuff he points out. What are the weird space nuns doing? Who are these guys with tattooed lips whose eyes roll back in their heads while they perform advanced calculations? (They should be stained lips, but whatever.) Why are there no computers anywhere?
It only takes him a few hundred words to lay out the basics in his article, which means that you could have told the viewer all of the important parts in a two and a half hour movie -- let alone several of them.
Seen Riding
I rode the Nantahala Gorge and down into Georgia, as far as cotton country. The cotton is looking good this year. I saw a lot of political flags, mostly Trump-related. But I saw one big billboard near Murphy, which read:
WE THE PEOPLEare pissed off!-------------------Gun Store, 1 mile on right.
Beautiful weather, but a very late autumn for color. The trees have had a good year, my wife says: low stress, plenty of water, warmth late.
Sose on Australia
I realize that only a few of you are motorcycle riders, and those of you in clubs or associations are not 1%ers but members of Veteran clubs and the like. Nevertheless I think this is one of those 'first they came for the...' situations, where we ought to stand up for the rights of free expression and free association for the outermost.
Likewise, I realize this is Australia, which is a sovereign nation and not a part of our business. However, these are natural rights violations in the Anglosphere -- a process already too far along in terms of the right to self defense, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to speak freely even when others call what you say 'hateful,' and now the right to wear clothes or tattoos the powers dislike, or to gather with those you choose as friends.
"We get closer and closer to Communism every day."
Scroll to 9:30 for his set of solutions if you don't want to hear him discuss the problem at length.
Vikings in America by 1021
A new study radiocarbon-dates the tree rings cut by settlers at L’Anse aux Meadows.
Maoist Self-Criticism
Yalies are upset that people are using the term "Maoist" to describe their forays into self-criticism, declaring with four-letter emphasis that the terminology is "racist."
These Ivy League places are apparently not very good schools. Mao was of course not a race, but an individual; Maoism was not limited to the practice of any race, but was an intense species of Marxism that became popular among more radical Communists worldwide.
Meanwhile they are avoiding grappling with the merit of the analogy between their practices and Maoism. Like all analogies, this one only carries as far as it does; but there really is a similarity between Maoist self-criticism (a practice that belongs especially to Maoism as opposed to Communism generally) and their teachings on race. Particularly when they are doing 'white fragility' training, the idea is so close as to look like a straight borrowing from Maoist practice: to constantly examine yourself for ideological failings, to self-confess these publicly, and to seek to make further amends in the hope of becoming more perfectly ideologically aligned.
All this is of course aimed at providing cover for their efforts to eliminate competing ideologies, in this case the Federalist Society. This too is characteristic of Maoism as well.
Lawyers are often told to bang the table when both the facts and the law are against them, but this is mere childish folderol. Yale should be ashamed to be producing such specimens.
Boosters
We got booster Pfizer shots this week. Sore arms, otherwise no big deal. I'm increasingly concerned by the trend of growing per capita breakthrough deaths among populations who are farther and farther from their initial vaccination dates. As a general rule, us older types may have immune systems that need more frequent reminders. If I'm wrong, well, I made the best guess I could.
I'm thinking of getting caught up on other vaccinations, too: tetanus, shingles, maybe even flu. Never having had the flu, as far as I know, I've never been in the habit of giving it much thought.
I continue to spend some time on social media every day spreading what I think is the most reliable information about the relative risks of COVID and COVID vaccine. Most people haven't a clue about probability or risk, it seems. Someone almost invariably responds with an anecdote about a single person's counter-experience, an approach that makes sense only when one is presented with a claim that a particular result is 100% uniform, and can be falsified by a single negative result. The idea of comparing two relatively small risks is quite foreign. A lot of people complain, too, that they can't find absolute answers to questions like "how long will my natural or vaccinated immunity last exactly?" It's like asking, "How many days until I get a particular kind of cancer, and then how many days will I live?" Not that it's an excuse for medical experts (or bureaucrats) who offer paternalizing absolutist pap in the form of ironclad edicts, but sometimes you see what tempts them to snap "Stop arguing about it and just do what I say."
Nevertheless, I'm not an idiot, and I have no plans to enjoy being dictated to by people who have blown their own credibility too many times to count.
Lower Your Expectations
There's a quip going around that yesterday's Washington Post editorial summarizes the current administration's policy as nicely as Trump's slogan summarizes his.
Trump: "Make America Great Again."
Biden: "Try Lowering Your Expectations."
There's an important distinction to be made between policy and individual life. As an individual, in fact many of these disruptions are going to be quite beyond your power to affect. You may be wiser to accept that, and lower your expectations about what your society is able to achieve -- at least for a while. You'll be happier if you focus on the things you can in fact affect.
Indeed, this is the core insight of both Stoicism and Zen/Ch'an Buddhist ethics. For example:
40. Being in the World Without MiseryHuitang said:What has been long neglected cannot be restored immediately.Ills that have been accumulating a long time cannot be cleared away overnight.One cannot enjoy oneself forever.Human emotions cannot be just right.Calamity cannot be avoided by trying to run away from it.Anyone... who has realized these five things can be in the world without misery.
[Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston & London: Shambala Pocket Classics), 1993]
The Stoic knows that he cannot change very much at all about the world, and so focuses on the few things that are in his power. These chiefly include whether he becomes upset about things he cannot control, or accepts the world as he finds it and focuses his effort on behaving virtuously. This begins with accepting that death is certain, and he must live courageously in spite of its certainty. (Cf. 'calamity cannot be avoided by trying to run away from it.') It eventually embraces all things that cannot be changed: the bus is late, the supply chains are disrupted, the autumn is short and the cold winter is coming, beloved dogs do not live as long as we do, and neither do our fathers.
So, as an individual ethic, this is excellent advice that lies at the core of wise ethical systems.
It is less good as policy advice. There are more things that an organized community can do than that an individual can do, and merely accepting that things will get worse was not acceptable even to the Stoics or the Buddhists. Marcus Aurelius was both a Roman emperor and a Stoic philosopher. He did not neglect the affairs of the empire out of Stoic virtue, but rather used his Stoic virtue to focus on what he could change for the better at any moment in time. That Zen Lessons in Leadership book is chiefly intended to capture lessons about how monasteries and communities structured themselves and were led by wise men. The best course for anyone is always to do one's duty, and if one must have leaders their duties entail good leadership.
While these problems cannot be cleared away overnight that does not mean they cannot be cleared away at all. Oil prices are high because of decisions about pipelines and drilling as much as because of other things. We could be building nuclear power plants near cities to pursue both power and clean energy. We could eliminate punitive government regulations that tie up truckers and ports -- indeed even the current administration waived the regulations on port operating hours as a part of its strategy for overcoming the problems.
Part of the administration's problem is that it refuses another core Stoic lesson, which the Zen and Ch'an Buddhists also accept: living in accordance with nature. They keep wanting wind and solar power to be the answer, so they act as if the technology were as reliable as they want it to be rather than as reliable as it actually is. Germany is having power problems because they focused on wind, and the wind was light this year. China is having power problems because they relied on hydropower -- which works pretty well in some places -- and then this year there wasn't much rain. Solar power likewise has limits they don't want to accept.
It would be very nice for them if everyone would lower his expectations, or hers as the case may be. Then they might be better placed to act as if the world worked the way they wanted it to instead of the way it does. Somehow socialist economies always come around to "lower your expectations" because expectations at any level prove increasingly difficult to satisfy. Humans have a nature too, one that we have to accept rather than trying to change, and this is the core difficulty of their project.
So in a way the quip was right about the political matters, though quite wrong about the ethical ones. That would be an oddity if Plato had been right that the community should be ordered the same way as the soul; then politics would be an exact reflection of ethics, with the community ordered so as to be brave and moderate, wise and good but simply at a higher level of organization.
In fact Plato was wrong about that; that is the fallacy of composition. What is right at one level of organization is not always right at another. A good family operates on different principles than a good state, rather than the state simply being a higher order of the family. A good person is not merely a good member of his various communities, though the Stoics are correct that it is in communities that individuals flourish. The internal virtues remain important even when one is alone, and even when interacting with strangers with whom one shares no community -- as at war, when courage matters in facing an enemy, and magnanimity might lead one to victory or peace through the establishment of a new kind of community.
Crusader Sword found off Israel
It hasn't been cleaned up yet, but it looks like a 900 year old sword probably lost at sea in battle.
How is this not Satire?
I had to double check because of course it must be; but no.
"Dr. Rachel Levine becomes nation's first transgender four-star officer."
Headlines from 1984
"Iron Maiden-loving principal will keep her job, despite parents’ petition for dismissal."
Really, Iron Maiden? Did Tipper Gore come out of retirement?
These days I guess they'd be controversial for a whole new set of reasons.
RIP Colin Powell
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has died at age 84. The news reports all mention "COVID complications," as well as the fact that he was fully vaccinated. What's probably more telling is that he was also being treated for multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells that collapses the immune system. The best vaccine in the world won't help someone whose immune system in kaput.
Who's under the thumb
My old hometown newspaper misses the point of objections to mandates. In this OpEd, it argues that "a ban on mandates is still a mandate." I suppose so, if you want to put it that way, but what's wrong with mandates is not just that they're an exercise of power. There's a big difference between a mandate that ties the hands of a government and one that ties the hands of a citizen. The U.S. Constitution is full of mandates that tie the hands of governments, and thank goodness.
No matter how many COVID mandates Gov. Abbott bans, no individual in Texas is any less free to receive all the vaccines he can get his hands on, provided that the FDA doesn't outlaw them and medical staff don't refuse to administer them. The push for COVID mandates can't be contorted into a blow for freedom or autonomy, unless by "freedom and autonomy" one means the freedom of governments to bully their citizens. If someone is breaking no law, the government shouldn't be able to force him to do anything--and we should be careful what laws we pass.
Employers have more discretion, but even they are limited in some of the ways they're entitled to intrude on their employee's religious and medical decisions. In that arena, though, I'm more inclined, first, to prevent the government from leaning on the employer and, second, to let the employees vote with their feet.
Astonishment on a Ride Through Georgia
I went down to the Stone Mountain Scottish Highland Games this weekend. Friday night was warm, and very little autumn color has occurred there though in other years it is often high color by the weekend of the Stone Games. We camped as always; on Saturday morning a squall blew through hard and fast, and by afternoon the weather was cool and clear.
One of the people around our fire Saturday night was a Canadian singer of Irish traditional music named Michael Kelly. He and I went through a whole host of songs, and to my astonishment he and I knew almost none of the same songs. Wild Rover we both knew, but he had never even heard of Dubliners or Clancy Brothers standards like The Old Orange Flute, or Kelly, the Boy from Killane.
Instead, he knew a whole array of songs I've never heard before. It was akin to discovering that there's a second Bible, or a whole set of Tolkien novels you'd never read.
Looking at his YouTube channel I see that we know a few more of the same songs than we happened to come up with by the fireside, but it's still got a number of songs that may be new to you as they are to me. And of course the echoing joy of will be when he discovers the Clancy Brothers, which a singer of Irish traditional songs will love like finding the first Bible.
Denying Last Rites in the name of Security
There’s just been a complete loss of perspective about what really matters.
Not watching the same movie
A CNN political analyst betrays a strange way of thinking about the decisions voters will face in 2022:
[Voters will] look to Virginia to assess the importance of key issues and talking points. Republicans will gauge how effective their culture war agenda is faring. Should they continue railing against vaccine and mask mandates and criticize the way race is taught in schools? Or should they focus on other concerns like inflation and supply chain disruptions to undercut the President and win elections in 2022?
Democrats on the other hand, will assess their core arguments -- namely that the President is normalizing governance and putting forth effective policies to contain the spread of the pandemic. Will this be enough to win the support of voters in swing districts who are crucial to maintaining control of the House in 2022?This fellow looks at a Republican philosophy of autonomy and personal responsibility and mostly sees a culture war combined with a weird "wailing" about what all right-thinking people obviously acknowledge to be core principles of citizenship: forcing vaccinations and masks on the unwilling while shutting down debate about their efficacy and risks. He apparently believes inflation and supply chain disruptions are more like real issues, but in the hands of Republicans, they become mere tools to "undercut" our rightful leader. On the other hand, when Democrats have ideas, they are "core arguments," even if they consist of patent lunacy, like the notion that the President is doing something we could call "normalizing governance" or pursuing "effective policies," or that responsible parents should keep shoveling their tax dollars into a race-baiting public school curriculum, while letting their daughters be raped in bathrooms by boys in skirts, then jailed for complaining about it.
I suspect the power to manipulate even the squishiest of "I just want everyone to act nice" moderates with the argument that President Biden is normalizing government or pursuing effective policies has sputtered out over the last six months. It may sound like a culture war to CNN, and not the good kind, like keyboard-headbutting acronyms for social justice revolution, but voters in 2022 may have let the current powers that be get on their last nerve.
In the meantime, I hope CNN has its finger on the pulse of the Democrat leadership's preferred path to win voters' hearts and minds, and that the path leads to a flame-out you can see from space.
Speaking of space:
I'm no Democrat, apart from being a Democrat
This is about like saying, "I'm no Communist, but I advocate seizing all the means of production by force." True, it's intellectual lunacy, but that doesn't matter, because Trump.
Put the Whole Government on Vacation
"Permanent Emergency Powers"
Australia has hit upon the winning idea of disqualifying legislators over COVID mandates, "giving Labor a majority in both houses of parliament, allowing them to pass proposed permanent emergency powers."
That's Australia. Here in North Carolina, they're about to disqualify Republican-appointed justices on the state supreme court -- NOT over COVID excuses -- in order to overturn a constitutional amendment requiring Voter ID.
We are getting to the point that there's no pretense, only power plays.
No one wants to hear it
Kurt Schlichter looks forward to a GOP primary battle in 2024. He assumes it may be with Mike Pompeo, whom he likes well enough in a (yawn) way, but he'd prefer Trump if his President in Exile can run the right campaign:
Trump has to work out some kinks in his delivery. As Byron York observed, at a recent rally he had the crowd rocking when he was roasting President * over his myriad failures, from the border to Afghanistan to inflation and beyond. Yet, when Trump started going on and on about 2020 in excruciating detail, the rally got off to a flying stop.
The Closer
We watched and enjoyed "The Closer." It's a little startling to see Netflix show some spine about this.
"People can and should disagree with one another, but canceling speech is not an argument."
An Eldritch Tale
Once upon a time there was a college of wizards who strove for light and knowledge. Unbeknownst to them, however, their most trusted body of elders were swayed by love of wealth and power into the service of ancient, dark gods.
For years the college heard dark rumors of graduate students being exploited, forced to work for poverty wages while taking on massive student loans. They heard about students mortgaging their futures to gamble on being one of ten thousand chosen for a tenure-track job. They watched those students work for free for years, producing journal articles for free in the hope of bolstering their chances at one of those rare jobs.
The tenured wizards watched with dismay, too, as most of their students failed and ended up in adjunct or lecturer positions that held no hope of rising to the security or pay they themselves knew. A scant few managed to obtain positions on the tenure track, but even these lucky few sacrificed years more in unpaid service and free labor producing 'peer-reviewed' scholarship in hopes of finally gaining tenure.
All the while, however great their discomfort, the tenured wizardry let the wicked cabal feast upon the blood of the young and the weak. They kept their own safety around them like a cloak, sorrowing for their students but defending their own gain.
And then one day, it turned out that the blood feasts had brought unspeakable power to the wicked circle at the core of the college. That was the day they proved strong enough to feast upon the tenured, too.
Least This Complaint is Real
Our Lieutenant Governor is a pretty cool guy, but he shares the conservative black community’s idea about trans*\gay stuff. Normally attempts to cancel conservatives are spun sugar, but this guy is definitely clear about his thoughts.
“I’m saying this now, and I’ve been saying it, and I don’t care who likes it: Those issues have no place in a school,” Robinson said at Asbury Baptist Church in Seagrove, N.C. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality — any of that filth.”
This is much harsher than my own opinion about homosexuality at least, but it is the traditional understanding— indeed it would have been an unexceptional thing for a man to say, even a politician, when I was young. Critics say that it now represents an unacceptable proof of discrimination, even hate speech.
He’s an elected official, so you could say that the voters will decide what is acceptable. One might say instead that political officers ought not to hate or discriminate; but I notice that standard is never applied to those who hate conservatives.
I suppose I care a lot more about his robust defense of gun rights than his opinion of sexual minorities. I can see how a gay man might be alarmed, though.
Straw men
As this Washington Examiner article notes, it's hard enough to reach a compromise when you have some idea what your opponent wants:
A 2018 study asked 2,100 adults to identify what they believed about a wide range of political issues and then asked them to estimate what people in the other political party believed about those same issues.
The study found that centrists and those not interested in politics did much better at estimating what the other party believed than politically involved partisans. But while a person’s level of education made no difference when Republicans estimated what Democrats believe, the more time Democrats spent in school, the worse they did at identifying what Republicans believed. Democrats with a high school degree did worse than those without. Democrats with a college degree did worse than high school graduates. And Democrats with a graduate degree did worst of all.
It seems that the longer liberals stay walled off in communities dominated by their own kind, which is exactly what higher education has become, the worse they are at understanding and empathizing with those who hold other views.Censoring all the unclean thoughts comes with a price.
Report on Post-Vaccination Peri/Myocarditis Side Effect
This is a presentation by a cardiology fellow on the issue of pericarditis (inflammation of the pericardial sack around the heart) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart tissue itself) following COVID-19 vaccination.
I've set it to start when he discusses the wider conclusions and implications. The first roughly 10 minutes are a detailed discussion of two patients who suffered these side effect.
TL; DL (too long; didn't listen):
This side effect is mostly seen in male (76%) patients aged 12-29 (57%). Out of 52 million people vaccinated in that age group, there have been 1,226 reports of this side effect. It's not nothing, but it's pretty rare.
Selective trust
Grim's post about the Ships of Tarshish reminded me of the excellent Orthosphere site, where I found this useful guide to selective trust and distrust of experts. I can scarcely remember a time in my life when so many people were leaning on me to believe them uncritically, and with so little demonstrated justification.
Meanwhile, people who think I should take their journalism seriously are doing their best to hide a fairly big story about a growing trend toward general strike. Could these people finally have jumped the shark?
Blackstrap Molasses
Mentioned in the recent recipe, blackstrap has a long history of recommendation as a health food.
CNN: American Forces in Fallujah were Murderers
It’s par for the course these days, as contemporary left-leaning media continue to play out their Vietnam-redux fantasy. They even mention Vietnam, while quoting only servicemen who describe the battle as a source of shame and moral concern.
Yale: Official Commitments to Academic Freedom Don't Represent Who We Are as a University
'We're more of a woke kind of place, really.'
"What are Yale’s promises worth? If we are to believe its lawyers in court a few weeks ago, they’re not worth that fancy paper the Woodward report is printed on."
The princess and the pea
"Come and get me, copper!" I guess we're talking about psychic violence, because otherwise I can't make much sense of allegations of terrorism against soccer moms who raise their voices at school board meetings.
So [in] this crazy time that we’re living in, I can’t even believe it’s happening, you really learn who’s willing to put their boots on your neck, given the opportunity. And when this is all over, we all need to remember who those people were, because we can’t trust them anymore.Our local schools are nothing to write home about, but the school board doesn't have jackbooted goons on it, either.
Grim's Barbecue Sauce
Tonight I'm making pulled pork and smoked chicken for my guests, the pork being a Boston butt seared on the grill and then slow cooked overnight in the crock pot. I like barbecue as a meal for traveling guests (at least those who are not ethical vegetarians -- I'm not quite sure what I'll feed her yet) because it can enhance the touring experience. Barbecue is a food with many regional sauce variations, and some cooking variations, so you can show outsiders both what the barbecue is like here and what it is like in various regions nearby.
I secured the local barbecue sauce from the firefighter who makes it for the annual VFD fundraiser barbecue. It's more vinegar-based than I like myself, but it is locally very popular. Across the border in South Carolina they make a mustard-based sauce, and across the border in Tennessee they make a ketchup-based sauce.
I grew up in the Great State of Georgia, though, so I make a Georgia-style sauce that is spicy and slightly sweet. I thought some of you might like to try it. I never measure anything, so measurements are somewhat guesswork -- if you make it yourself add more of whatever you think you'd like more of, and less if you'd like less of it.
Grim's Barbecue Sauce
1 can (8 oz) tomato paste
Several cups brewed black coffee
1 tbsp packed brown sugar
1 tbsp blackstrap molasses
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp chipotle powder (a smaller amount of cayenne would be more typical for a Georgia sauce, but the larger quantity of chipotle adds to the smoky flavor)
1 tsp smoked or hot paprika
1 tsp chili powder (or just ancho chili powder)
1 tsp black pepper
Small shot, Apple cider vinegar
Salt to taste
Scrape the tomato paste out of the can and into a warm (not hot) cast iron pan (or you can do it in a crockpot on low heat). Dissolve the tomato paste in hot black coffee. When I'm doing it, I use French roasted coffee, make more coffee than usual that morning, and leave it to cook down for hours until it is very strong. Dissolve sugar and molasses into this mixture, tasting to ensure it is sweet enough but not sweeter than you'd like. (You might try dividing the tablespoon into three teaspoons if you'd like a not-very-sweet sauce, and adding one of each until it's where you want it. As I said, I'm only guessing about how much I use anyway.)
After you get the sweetness where you want it, add the spices, adjusting as you like until it suits your particular preference.
Cook over low heat until the sugars caramelize, adding more brewed black coffee as necessary to thin it so it doesn't burn. You can also thin it with more apple cider vinegar if you think you'd enjoy a brighter, more acidic flavor. Once the sugars are caramelized properly, you can allow it to thicken. Remove from heat and serve.
Alternatively, you can double the recipe and cook it all together with the meat in the crock pot. That will give it a much meatier flavor as the sauce will absorb the juices from the pork.
UPDATE: I often add oregano or sage to it once it boils, especially if they're in season.
Childproof caps
I never thought I'd come to enjoy Matt Taibbi so much.
This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law. It couldn’t be people were just tuning out papers for a hundred different reasons, including sheer boredom. It had to be that their traditional work product was just too damned subtle. The only way to avoid the certain evil of audiences engaging in unsupervised pondering over information was to eliminate all possibility of subtext, through a new communication style that was 100% literal and didactic. Everyone would get the same news and also be instructed, often mid-sentence, on how to respond.
Sleepwalking into disaster
Ezra devotes a great deal of this very interesting political analysis of pollster-strategist David Shor to bemoaning the fact that Democrats are pushing policies that voters should love but in fact hate, and to evaluating competing strategies for finding a way of talking about unpopular policies so that voters see the light and fall in line. Failing that, to hiding the Dems views on toxic subjects. Sadly, voters sometimes resist falling in line and even, horrifyingly, find out what Dems really are like to do and therefore vote for the bad people on the right.
Shor’s critics [including Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.] argue that he’s too focused on the popularity of what Democrats say, rather than the enthusiasm it can unleash. When pressed, Podhorzer called this theory “viralism” and pointed to Trump as an example of what it can see that popularism cannot. “A lot of things Trump did were grossly unpopular but got him enormous turnout and support from the evangelical community,” Podhorzer said. “Polling is blind to that. Politics isn’t just saying a thing at people who’re evaluating it rationally. It’s about creating energy. Policy positions don’t create energy.”
Podhorzer also pointed to Biden: “He’s done much more than I thought he’d be able to do. All the things he’s doing are popular. And yet he’s underwater.”I'm not sure how to account for Podhorzer's belief that "all the things Biden's doing are popular," unless he means that they're popular with his buddies. The polls have been brutal lately across the entire board, from COVID strategy to Afghanistan to taxing and spending to the border to Biden's character and mental decline. In any case, Dem strategists betray a strange disconnect from the idea that they are accountable to voters, tending instead to view themselves as doctors who need to slip us a mickey so they can undertake massive reconstructive surgery that we'll thank them for later.
What does create energy, Podhorzer thinks, is fear of the other side. His view is that Democrats’ best chance, even now, is to mobilize their base against Trump and everything he represents. “The challenge in 2022 is to convince people that they’re again voting on whether or not the country is going in a Trumpist direction,” he said.What he doesn't see, presumably, is the kind of fear his own party creates in its opponents, though he and his friends will speak casually about how much conservative Hispanics turn from blue to red because they fear job destruction, border chaos, and socialism.
This is an argument Shor is happy to have. “I think the conventional wisdom has swung too far toward believing policy isn’t important,” he said. He agrees that enthusiasm matters, but it has to be enthusiasm for a message that doesn’t alienate the undecided. “A lot of politics is about what you talk about,” he told me. You should sort your ideas, he said, by popularity. “Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people. But I think that what actually happens is people sort by excitement first. And the problem is the things that are most exciting to activists and journalists are politically toxic.”
This can read as an affront to those who want to use politics to change Americans’ positions on those issues. “The job of a good message isn’t to say what’s popular but to make popular what needs to be said,” Shenker-Osorio told me.
Unexpectedly!
I wonder if there were any energy policies we might have been pursuing that could have avoided some of this trouble?
A "global energy crisis caused by weather" is one way to put it, if you want to obscure the fact that the weather in question is cold, while still beating this drum: "Further complicating the picture is mounting pressure on governments to accelerate the transition to cleaner energy as world leaders prepare for a critical climate summit in November."
Just keep digging that hole.
Maricopa County: Yes, We Deleted Election Data
This hearing is lawyerly but brutal. The congressman gets them to admit that they deleted the data ("but we archived it") and did not turn over subpoenaed data to the audit ("because they did not subpoena our archives, only our servers"). It turns out, though, that the data was deleted after the subpoenas arrived.
Then he gets them to intimate that this 'archiving' of data is just standard practice due to the needs of clearing out space on servers for the next election. "Can you explain, then," he asks only after giving them all this rope, "why the records from earlier elections are still present?"
Oh.
On Scots
An anonymous commenter left a link to an interesting article on the Scots language. I love linguistic history, and Scotland and things Scottish, so it was well-placed here. There is, however, an important omission in the history as presented.
Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Before then, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland, and wasn’t unified in any real way, least of all linguistically. It was less a kingdom than an area encompassing several different kingdoms, each of which would have thought itself sovereign—the Picts, the Gaels, the Britons, even some Norsemen. In the northern reaches, including the island chains of the Orkneys and the Shetlands, a version of Norwegian was spoken. In the west, it was a Gaelic language, related to Irish Gaelic. In the southwest, the people spoke a Brythonic language, in the same family as Welsh. The northeasterners spoke Pictish, which is one of the great mysterious extinct languages of Europe; nobody really knows anything about what it was.
The Anglian people, who were Germanic, started moving northward through England from the end of the Roman Empire’s influence in England in the fourth century. By the sixth, they started moving up through the northern reaches of England and into the southern parts of Scotland. Scotland and England always had a pretty firm border, with some forbidding hills and land separating the two parts of the island. But the Anglians came through, and as they had in England, began to spread a version of their own Germanic language throughout southern Scotland.There was no differentiation between the language spoken in Scotland and England at the time; the Scots called their language “Inglis” for almost a thousand years. But the first major break between what is now Scots and what is now English came with the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century, when the Norman French invaded England....Norman French began to change English in England, altering spellings and pronunciations and tenses. But the Normans never bothered to cross the border and formally invade Scotland, so Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff. It would have been a pretty tough trip over land, and the Normans may not have viewed Scotland as a valuable enough prize. Scotland was always poorer than England, which had a robust taxation system and thus an awful lot of money for the taking.“When the languages started to diverge, Scots preserved a lot of old English sounds and words that died out in standard English,” says Kay.
Now if that were true, Scots would be nearly as incomprehensible to Modern English speakers as Old English and significantly moreso than Middle English. Middle English is the form of English that resulted after the Norman Conquest changed the language of the English court to French, so that the common people began of necessity to adapt to a lot of French sounds, words, and concepts. In fact the bulk of Modern English's words are Romance words that came into the language through the Anglo-French lords who followed the Norman conquest, though the most common used words are old Germanic words from the original language.
In fact, Scots is at least as easy to comprehend as a modern English speaker as is Middle English -- probably rather moreso. There are two reasons why this is true.
First, the account omits the English conquest of Scotland by Edward I "Longshanks," and second, it omits that the nobility of Scotland was even prior to that Anglo-Scottish and intermarried with the Anglo-Normans. Thus, even in the north the Scots language was being influenced by French in parallel with the southern English. As a result, Scots is more like Middle English than Old English both in vocabulary and in difficulty of cross-comprehension with Modern English.
Scotland benefitted from this familiarity with French in several respects over the centuries. It gave outlaw Scottish lords a place to go during the long War of Independence, and a place to which they could appeal for support. After the Scottish victory under Robert the Bruce, Scotland and France developed warm ties and trade relations. In the Hundred Years War, they were frequently allied against the English.
The English did later try to suppress Scottish culture, as the article goes on to suggest; and yet the French ties remained. The Jacobites who supported the kings who went south to rule over England were eventually to appeal to the French much as their ancestors had done in Robert the Bruce's day, and after their final defeat at Culloden it was to France that Bonnie Prince Charlie fled.
In any case Scots is a good language to learn, as it helps the mind to be able to stretch into allied languages. Here is an introduction.
Clear as mud
I usually like to put the effort into teasing apart the confusing accounts of U.S. Congressional parliamentary squabbles, but I've about had it with the "bipartisan" $1.5T Spendapalooza Classic vs. the "Build Back Bolshevik" $3.5T(-ish) Spendapalooza on Stilts, and the daily drama over whether one can be done without the other, or whether the national monetary system will crash if we don't do both, or if we don't raise the debt ceiling, adopt more continuing spending resolutions, or pack the Supreme Court, or admit ten new states, or abolish the Electoral College, or put the final stake through the heart of the filibuster. These people have all lost their minds.
HotAir ran a piece that explains a bit about whatever today's possible world-saving pseudo-deal may be. My simplistic take, all I could figure out before exasperation set in, is: reconciliation is a way to get out from under the filibuster without actually abolishing the filibuster. We can do only one (?) reconciliation gambit per year. Reconciliation is unattractive, however, because if you pretend something is a budget bill, people can try to attach endless amendments to it, and U.S. Senators have to vote on each amendment, without any ability to pretend they don't know what their positions are or what's in the bill. Also, it eats up time and patience, hence its nickname Vote-a-Rama. That is, it's OK to eat up the common people's time and patience, but for Vote-a-Rama the Senators actually have to sit through it and cast all those tiresome votes in person when they have better things to do.
So Mitch McConnell agreed to some kind of deadline extension, but threatened to drag the Senate through Vote-a-Rama later, whereas the Democrats have no intention to doing any such thing now or later. In the meantime, we still don't know whether the Dems can resolve their internal dissent long enough to salvage one bad bill, Classic, as the risk of losing their shot at an even worse one, Stilts, absent which no agenda worth having can possibly be shoved down the country's throat before they're all ejected bodily from office.
As usual, it's all the GOP's fault for failing to support the Dems' dreams of a perfect world.
Locust Update
The first night I fed our guests protein-plus pasta, topped with home-canned sauces made from my garden. One of the sauces was a rich sausage sauce, partly Italian sausage and partly Andouille. Of course their daughter is an ethical vegetarian -- isn't everyone her age? -- and so separate elements of meals have to be prepared for her. She is nevertheless the least irritating member of the family, so it's fine. I made a sweet basil and tomato sauce that was meatless just by good fortune, so that was easily done the first night.
The second night I decided to do cowboy cooking. They went off to Asheville with my wife, so I had a quiet day to prepare. I had not intended to make chili, because these people are from Indiana. My wife asked if I was going to make chili, in fact, and I said, "Of course not. These Indiana people can't eat my chili."
"That's true," she replied at once.
Nevertheless while they were off for the day I realized I had some hamburger that was getting old, so I decided to make chili for myself for lunch. Since I had it on hand, then, I offered it at supper as well.
When I do cowboy or 'chuck wagon' cooking, the rule is that everything has to be the kind of thing you could either carry on a chuck wagon or source along the trail. You can incorporate some fresh peppers, since you could pick peppers on the trail, and fresh onions travel well in a chuck wagon. Of course you could kill a steer or pluck some trout out of a stream. Butter travels well if packed in flour, as does bacon. Otherwise everything has to be dry goods: dried peppers and chilies, spices, powdered buttermilk biscuits, dried beans, and so forth.
So I ended up serving a bone-in chuck roast, cowboy beans, bacon, biscuits, trout for the ethical vegetarian (who will eat fish 'because it isn't raised in horrible factory farms'), and chili because I had it.
Served all of this, my brother-in-law immediately asked, "Is there some sort of sauce for the meat?"
"Yes," I said pleasantly. "There's this chili con carne I made. You probably won't want to eat it straight, but it would be an excellent dipping sauce for the meat."
(That meat was delicious plain, but there's no accounting for bad taste.)
So he dipped his beef in the chili, and shortly thereafter commenced to making gasping sounds and drinking lots of water. Still, I'll give him credit -- he kept going back and trying it again, even though each time he went on about how it had a lot of bite and burn ("About seven seconds in").
My wife told me that after I left the room for the evening he allowed that it was the best chili he'd ever tasted, even though he couldn't really eat it. I notice he didn't bring his family by for dinner tonight, though.
Modeling human action is hard
Powerline linked to an article that tries to think sensibly about what kinds of lockdowns do more good than harm, and why predictive lockdown models failed so miserably.
Still More Truckin' Songs
In the most famous of them all, the truck-driving singer proclaims, "I could have a lot of women, but I'm not like some of the guys." Red Sovine was singing about being one of those guys.
That tune -- which you may recognize from Sesame Street -- is not the original tune for the Motorcycle Song, but Arlo adopted it in some later renditions. (You can scroll back in this video if you want to hear amusing stories.)
Dick Curless sang about being 'one of those guys' too.
I guess there's a sense in which truckers were like the sailors of an earlier era, with 'a wife in every port.' There are a lot of songs about that too.
Believe These Scientists?
Project Veritas nails Pfizer with multiple interviews from their scientists. Short findings: the vaccines are not as effective as natural immunity; the money is so huge as to be corrupting to the culture in Pfizer; and vax-induced heart attacks are a big enough concern that they're conducting an internal study that might result in the vaccine being pulled from the market.
Oz loses it
New South Wales's government rattles itself to pieces.
In the United States, we tend to think of the Aussies as rugged individualists with little tolerance for government oppression. In that sense, we probably see some similarities between our two peoples. But as one Aussie analyst recently quipped during the evening news, the problem isn’t that Australia is peopled by folks who are the descendants of criminals and prisoners. The problem is that it’s being ruled by the descendants of jailors.
Hamstringing your own IQ
Thoughts about reality testing, or what I would call the ostensible crime of "sowing seeds of doubt," from Jonathan Haidt at Persuasion:
In 1859, John Stuart Mill laid out the case that we need critics to make us smarter, and that we should have no confidence in our beliefs until we have exposed them to intense challenge and have considered alternative views:[T]he only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner. The steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others, so far from causing doubt and hesitation in carrying it into practice, is the only stable foundation for a just reliance on it.* * *
By abolishing the right to question, a monomaniacal group condemns itself to holding beliefs that are never tested, verified, or improved. We might even say that monomaniacal groups are likely to be wrong on most of their factual beliefs and their diagnoses of the problems that concern them. And if they are wrong on basic facts and diagnoses, then whatever reforms they propose to an institution are more likely to backfire than to achieve the goals of the reformers.
Maintaining a healthy skepticism is not the same as nihilism. We can remain open to information and ideas even while adopting temporary, tentative conclusions that aid whatever decisions cannot rightfully be postponed. There will even be times when a potentially temporary conclusion seems so obvious that we feel entitled, not only to adopt it for our own behavior, but to impose it on others by force. On those occasions, however, our willingness to tolerate seeds of doubt in ourselves and others is heightened, not relieved. As compelling as is our duty to use discernment and judgment in reaching conclusions that guide our own behavior, we'd better be all that much more rigorous in our discernment and judgment about people to whom we delegate power, or whose crusades we enlist in, because when we act in concert, we multiply both our power and our blameworthiness if we get it wrong.
We should be fastidious in action and the use of force, but generous in entertaining new data and counterintuitive notions. What I'm seeing increasingly in my country's culture is the opposite: careless abandon in imposing wild new schemes of mandatory behavior or commandeering of resources, combined with rigid control over the discussion and dissemination of contrarian ideas and puzzling information.
Rank Betrayal by the 82nd Airborne Commander
The 82nd is a storied unit, and one of the front line forces of the United States because of their rapid deployment capability. They take pride in this difficult duty, and as an Airborne unit their members are authorized distinctive maroon berets.
Most recently they were rapidly deployed to Kabul to shore up the airhead at HKIA during the military collapse in Afghanistan. For the most part these paratroopers behaved honorably during a difficult and sudden duty.
During the last hours of the evacuation, according to troops under his command and as documented by photographs and witness statements, Donahue ordered all of the passengers aboard a C-17 transport plane to disembark so he could have a souvenir loaded onto the plane. That souvenir, or “war trophy,” was an inoperable Taliban-owned Toyota Hilux with a fully operational Russian ZU-23 anti-aircraft autocannon mounted in the bed. Once the Hilux was loaded passengers were allowed back on the plane, but, of course, there wasn’t room for all of them. According to troops on the scene, at least 50 people and perhaps as many as 100 people were left at Kabul to make room for the Hilux.It is believed that many of those left behind have been or will be killed by the Taliban, in part because of information allegedly provided to Taliban commanders by Donahue himself....One military intelligence source, who requested anonymity, told RedState:“Some of those on the last planes out were key HUMINT assets. At least 50, likely as many as 100 were left behind after being removed from the flight. But the 50 were bonafide personnel that should have been evacuated. They will likely never be heard from again. The Taliban was given literally everything that would prevent any of those people from hiding or escape and evasion, and we know that there are a lot of ‘disappearings’ going on.”
Nor was that the only failure that the RedState report reveals. The commander did not apparently obey US laws governing war trophies.
He also failed to destroy sensitive equipment left behind, which can be reverse engineered by the Chinese military now operating in Afghanistan. Learning to defeat this counter-rocket-and-mortar technology endangers every ship in the US navy, should the Chinese go to war with us.
So far no accountability has occurred for senior leaders, though; only for the one guy brave enough to put his rank on the line and demand it. He's still in jail. Several Congressmen have demanded his release, so far fruitlessly.
The Fall of Númenor
I saw this at Dad29's place, and it's quite an essay. I won't excerpt it, but I will add that the king who captured Sauron and was later ensnared by him was Ar-Pharazôn the Golden. Probably there are few enough of us who would know that off the top of our heads.
Sent by a Friend
An Impeachable Offense
Dishonorably discharging those who have served honorably is malfeasance as Commander in Chief. This is a disgrace; forcing out servicemembers who won't take the vaccine is one thing, but treating them as felons and denying them the benefits they have earned at war is monstrous.
Potential consequences for non-compliance with Pentagon vaccine mandate are dire, including loss of eligibility for a range of important benefits, opportunities, honors and rights. A United States Marine corporal who served in Afghanistan during Operation Freedom Sentinel and Operation Southern Vigilance is facing dishonorable discharge for refusing to take the COVID-19 shots as required by the secretary of defense.Having been diagnosed with two heart conditions, arrhythmia and right bundle branch blockage, taking an experimental drug with unknown long-term side effects isn't a medical option for him, he says, especially since the shots have already been proven to cause blood clots and heart inflammation. However, he was informed that the only medical waiver he could receive was if he was diagnosed with congenital heart failure.
In terms of correlation-not-causation, anecdotal evidence, my blood pressure has shot from 120/80 before the vax into ranges that are causing the nurse practitioner I recently sought out for a physical to demand that I start taking medication. There's no obvious other explanation for why my blood pressure would shoot up tens of points on both scales in months; but if clots are thickening my blood, I might have all kinds of medical problems resulting from it. You can't ask a guy with known heart conditions to take the thing if a previously healthy guy like me develops serious conditions at least correlated with it and with no obvious other cause.
Likewise, in the UK there is a mysterious rise in heart attacks from blocked arteries. Correlation, not proven causation; but that doesn't make people less dead.
Using the weapon of dishonorable discharges -- a species worse than 'bad conduct' or 'other than honorable' discharges -- is evil and wrong. This guy deserves an honorable discharge, even if you parted ways with him on this contentious issue. Other case may be otherwise, but 'dishonorable' is almost certainly out of order. It denies you civil rights, including the right to own or bear arms. It's another weapon our enemies in our own government are using against all of us, any of us whom they can.
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