"Folies Des Policières"

Today the nearby small town of Sylva had a lockdown. It was occasioned by the police chasing a car that had been stolen in Asheville.  It had an OnStar system, so it was very easy to find. 

The cops assumed -- without evidence -- that the thief was armed, and further assumed -- again without evidence -- that he might have driven the hour from Asheville to Jackson County to shoot up a school. So they locked down all the schools even though they knew exactly where he was at all times because of the OnStar system. 

All day long I've been hearing rumors going around that he was a felon, with body armor, and long rifles, who planned to shoot up the school system. Apparently a local news and weather service even pushed out the claim about the body armor. Naturally the major effect of the lockdown was to send a wave of terror through the public (with the minor effect of destroying lunch traffic).

None of it proved to be true. He was unarmed, apparently intended only grand theft auto, and was wearing a tank top. 

He is still at large, though, because once he abandoned the vehicle and fled on foot he easily eluded law enforcement.

Perhaps the new sheriff, whomever he ends up being, might get the force started on a jogging program.

From bronze to iron

In the last couple of years I keep picking up books attempting to explain the abrupt collapse of Bronze Age civilizations in the Near East in the first half of the 12th century B.C. This week I've been listening to a series of YouTube lectures on the subject while I do work that occupies my hands but not my ears. One used a phrase that caught my imagination. After most of the other prominent regional civilizations had crumpled under what appears to have been the onslaught of what we now call the "Sea Peoples," Egypt alone managed to put up a more robust defense. Not an entirely successful one, though; the lecturer noted drily that while official propaganda as recorded on engraved stones would never quite admit defeat, it did acknowledge that the glorious victories were occurring "closer and closer to home."

The picture I'm getting is of a very old, very stable Bronze Age system of leaders who might be called capable or despotic, depending on your perspective. Bronze-based military culture relied on large quantities of copper and small quantities of tin. Copper was available in many locations, though concentrated and therefore fairly easily controlled by local rulers. Because tin, in contrast, was terribly rare and exotic, with some of the best sources located in Britain and Afghanistan, the production of bronze required stable long-distance trade, which in turn depended on widespread law and order. Something wrecked this delicate network and precipitated an abrupt systemic collapse, perhaps some unknown social or climate catastrophe that set the half-dozen or so allied Sea Peoples on the move from the western reaches of the Mediterranean. From Mycenae to Assyria to Cyprus to Babylon, the archaelogical evidence records conflagrations and violent death, whether of entire cities (presumably by invaders) or at least of palace-temples (presumably by local revolts). Large areas were depopulated. The written history goes dark for centuries; the Greeks had to develop writing all over again, with an entirely new alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians.

In the new world that followed, iron replaced bronze. Iron ore is much more common than copper or tin, its disadvantage being that refining it requires mastery of much hotter forges. Once the technology of sustaining enough heat was mastered and spread, however, the new ruling classes had nothing like the ability of Bronze Age rulers to monopolize the supply of raw materials for iron production. After the Bronze Age collapse, then, following an agonizing period of chaotic destruction and famine, the Near East saw a flowering of completly new cultures. This is the era of the post-Exodus Jews in Canaan, of the many rich, independent Phoenician trading centers along the coast of modern Israel and Lebanon, and of the birth of the Phoenician sea-faring trading culture that would colonize the coasts of Africa and Southern Europe and the island of the Mediterranean, including the largest and most successful city-state, Carthage. They had a good run before the next new batch of expanding empires devoured them: Babylonia, Persia, Alexander, and Rome.

She's onto something

“An Unusual Step”

The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis's van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing…

Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York's Eastern District, Breon Peace, who's handling the prosecution, took office, and you won't believe what happened next! In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely. The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the "history and personal characteristics of the defendants" and the "aberrational nature of the defendants' conduct." Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and…

They keep acting like they expect us to treat them like a legitimate government, one to which we’d show loyalty and pay taxes. 

Harsh but fair

How predictable it was that the United States fled Kabul, abandoning not just billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to terrorists, but also with Pride flags flying, George Floyd murals on public walls, and gender studies initiatives being carried out in the military ranks. Ask yourself: if a general during the Afghanistan debacle had brilliantly organized a sustainable and defensible corridor around Bagram Airfield but was known to be skeptical of Pentagon efforts to address climate change and diversity would he be praised or reviled?

Swift Water

I’ll be in the river all weekend in training as a Swift Water technician. You’re on your own for a couple of days.

Addendum

I did not include this in the text of the letter because I doubt the sincerity of the politicians raising this issue, and therefore its real rhetorical force. However, I note that these 'Red Flag' laws run into the teeth of the entire Black Lives Matter / Defund the Police movement's stated goals. Some activists may really care about it, so it's worth noting separately.

These aggressive 'Red Flag' laws are going to be enforced disproportionately against the black community, because that is where policing resources are already disproportionately focused. Likewise, rural sheriffs like mine are not going to enforce these laws because they won't believe in them. It could very well be that black Americans end up being the chief victims of these midnight raids by armed agents of the state into the sanctity of their homes, when they have committed no actual crime. It may well be that the accidental police shootings that will inevitably occur from these policies will chiefly affect the black community.

And even though I assume the police won't intend to kill anyone, the risks are great. They are being dispatched to someone's home whom they've been assured is so potentially dangerous that they must go disarm him right now. They're going to be on edge, and will deploy with officer safety in mind. The chances of someone getting accidentally shot are very high.

Indeed, if these raids are conducted at night when children are home, there's a high probability that this policy will actually kill more American children than the school shootings it is meant to prevent. This is because school shootings are random acts by a tiny fraction of the population, whereas these Red Flag laws would be enforced systematically across the country by organized police forces on a daily basis. Even though the police would not be intending to kill any one, the far greater incidence of these events coupled with their high risks make it likely that more innocent lives will be lost than saved. 

By night, these will sometimes include children who were sleeping at home. America will have relocated its gun violence problem from its schools to its homes, while dramatically intensifying the problem's incidence and scale.

Dear Senator

An open letter you are all free to deploy if you like.

Dear Senator:

School shootings are a problem, but they are a problem that is easily resolved without violating the Bill of Rights. The solution is a single point of entry, the sort the military calls an "entry control point (ECP)," plus a school resource officer inside the building to control it. Then even if someone attempts to force entry there is a trained, armed officer immediately on the scene whose job is simply to hold the entry from a covered position until responding units arrive to catch the attacker in a pincer. This tactic uses best practices to ensure student safety while also maximizing officer safety. Do that.

What you must not do, under any circumstances, is compromise one inch on the Bill of Rights. The proposals being floated violate the 2nd Amendment, certainly, but also the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th. We must not allow unconstitutional laws in a fit of emotion.

That the 2nd Amendment is being violated by so-called 'assault weapon' bans should be clear from the logic of both the Heller vs. DC decision by the Supreme Court, but also the logic of the 20th century US v. Miller decision. Heller held that weapons are protected by the 2nd if they are in common use for lawful purposes. The AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America, in very common use; and rifles of all kinds put together, including the AR platform and also all other rifles, account for fewer homicides than blunt instruments. Almost all rifle use is lawful. Thus, Heller's test is satisfied. 

The Miller test was of a claim that the National Firearms Act unconstitutionally proscribed sawed-off shotguns. The Miller court found that it was constitutional to ban them, however, because the 2nd Amendment specifically protects weapons that are fit for militia service. That is to say that 'military style' or 'assault weapons' are precisely what the Miller court thought enjoyed 2nd Amendment protection. The AR-15 is exactly the weapon that the US military would ask citizens to provide themselves with should, for example, a situation similar to Ukraine's ever eventuate here. While semi-automatic, its mode of operation is similar enough to the military's standard rifle that every Marine or Soldier could teach citizens its accurate use and proper maintenance. Further, stocks of spare parts and ammunition are widely available and distributed across America's military stockpiles. This is the clear choice for a militia rifle in the present moment; and thus, Miller's test is also satisfied especially by this particular weapon and its class.

The 4th Amendment requires probable cause for searches. All jurisprudence on this issue for centuries establishes that 'probable cause' means 'probable cause that a crime has been committed.' The 'Red Flag' laws being proposed eliminate this standard because they mean to effect seizures before any crime has been committed -- perhaps before one has even been contemplated. This is plainly unconstitutional.

The 5th Amendment provides that no one's property shall be seized without due process of law. The proposed 'Red Flag' law deprives people of the due process of law that has held sway since this country's founding. 

The 6th Amendment requires that citizens be presented with the opportunity to confront witnesses against them. 'Red Flag' laws also dispose of this bit of due process by having the issue handled outside the normal legal processes. The 6th does apply to criminal prosecutions, which these actions could not be as no crime will yet have occurred; but the core principle that one should  not be condemned by secret evidence or hidden witnesses must be preserved even here.

The 8th Amendment prohibits excessive fines. Seizing valuable firearms constitutes an excessive fine given that no crime has occurred that might justify any sort of fine. So too does requiring the condemned to hire a lawyer and fight a court case to prove his innocence in order to recover his property -- especially since his actual innocence is uncontested, since even the state admits he will have committed no crime at the time of the fine being imposed.

None of these are acceptable concessions. There are clear and affordable solutions that are readily available, as described in the opening paragraph of this letter. Use them, and preserve the Bill of Rights intact for we citizens and for future generations of Americans.

With all Due Respect,

-Etc

Let's Check in on the Department of Justice

Just a collection of news here.

Buzzfeed (BF): Secret DOJ report clears itself of political wrongdoing in Gen. Flynn unmasking

AP: Clinton lawyer cleared of wrongdoing in Durham case

Fox: Former US Attorney Brett Tolman: "There is not a single district court in this country other than Washington, D.C., where this [Clinton lawyer acquittal] would have happened."

WLTX: A Year and a Half Later, More People from the Carolinas now being arrested by DOJ in January 6th probe. "The FBI and prosecutors with the U.S. Department of Justice are not slowing down their effort to track the hundreds of people believed to be involved in the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol."

The Guardian (UK): DOJ Appears to be Investigating Donald Trump

Sword and Sorcery

An essay by Richard Fernandez.

UPDATE: Somehow I accidentally linked that originally to a YouTube performance of the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. The link is now fixed, but I kept the Conan link here in case anyone happened to want a link to that soundtrack.

Memorial Day 2022

The chaplain said in his prayer that we are a broken nation, and begged God to forgive and restore us. Another year that might have seemed unpatriotic; but not this year. 

Women failing for no good reason

Unfortunately, when you fail for no good reason, you're likely to latch onto a dumb explanation for failure and therefore advocate fixing the wrong thing.

The Wall Street Journal descended to a little pandering recently with an article about how women don't get promoted enough because they get asked to do scut work that's considered "non-promotable."

It should be obvious that any corporation not run by saintly geniuses is full of people who are very good at figuring out which hapless co-workers can be conned into doing their scutwork. The ones who qualify for promotions have the good sense to decline. It does seem that men disproportionately figure this gambit out, perhaps because women are too focused on playing Nice Girl and expecting a a warm, nurturing pat on the head as they are positioned for success, and therefore miss the chance to play Competent Team Member and earn a promotion honestly. If Nice Girl is more important, fine, more power to you, but accept that a promotion isn't in the cards. Your reward will have to take another form. Luxuriate in your indifference to filthy lucre and rejection of tainted patriarchal status.

The Journal cut off comments after receiving only about 55, but not before several women exposed the article's absurd premise.

"We will kill you graveyard dead"

The short version:



The long version:

Oh Dear

"'Guns should not be in the hands of the mentally unstable' says senile old man with nukes."

Chanconne

We’re the Apex Predators

 That bear was headed for the hills. 

The Government is Worse than Useless

Parents with guns would have solved this a lot faster, and would have saved some of their children doing so. Possibly some of them might have died trying to save their children; any parent worth the name would.

More grist for the thriller mill

A large underwater laboratory has abruptly disappeared from the sea floor.

Freebird

I still don't think this will make much difference at all -- and at first glance I read this as him preparing to slap the nervous bird rather than him graciously granting it freedom -- but here's hoping something comes of it. 

The West Hunter blog guy (G. Cochran?) has gotten a little strange over the years. Still, he posts interesting things every couple of months. Today's post, if not entirely persuasive to the non-paranoid among us, would at least make a terrific premise for a thriller. He mentions something that most science fiction writers noticed in the 1940s, and that my father confirmed to me from his own experience, which is that people who paid attention to these things were quite aware of the likely significance of the sudden radio silence in the early 1940s in the field of nuclear fission research publication. As I recall, the U.S. authorities actually interrogated some science fiction writers and other civilians about where they were getting their ideas. They were able to point out persuasively that it was hard to miss the sudden disappearance from public life of nearly everyone in the field.

Cochran's theory is that we were naive back then. Instead of an abrupt cessation of research publication, we should have reduced the output gradually, replacing it with word salad and irreproducible results, just like . . . hmmmm.

We All Seem to Agree that Courage is Lacking today- So What Do We Do?

 The subject of courage is one modern society hardly talks about- at least in traditional terms- and waters down to utter meaninglessness when it does (by design).

So how to address this?  One fellow seems to have made a start at it, and it seems interesting.

I think his analysis of the problem and how it's related to "safetyism" seems to me to be on the money:

He seems well on the right track.

He also seems to understand the importance of Horsemanship in the process-

Let us hope his dream of establishing an "Academy of Chivalry" by 2030 becomes manifest.  It can't happen soon enough for our society.

What he needs now are benefactors, hopefully he can find some.

Rain, Rain

Go away. 

We’ve had one call after another up here. Trees are falling left and right. Roofs punched through by trees.  Flash floods, warnings of floods, watches for floods. 

Supposedly it’ll stop tomorrow. 

Aristotle on Storytelling

A new translation of the Poetics aims to show contemporary writers that Aristotle still has a lot to offer their craft.

Dragon of Death

It's a cool name, anyway. " Scientists have uncovered the remains of one of the largest pterosaurs on record, researchers announced in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research."

Another Shooting

There's nothing new here, so there's nothing new to say. The shooter was, again, a crazy person known to police. This is true approximately 100% of the time. The obvious solution is to empower the police to go after unstable people, but the police work for a government that nobody trusts enough to do that. Neither engaged political faction, at least: the right correctly fears that red-flag laws would be applied politically, subjecting ordinary people to SWAT raids aimed at disarming them; the left is pushing for laws to remove police from schools because they don't trust the police either. 

So we end up debating things that are obvious non-starters, like banning the most popular rifle in America -- clearly protected by the Heller interpretation of the 2nd Amendment (see section II) -- in order to 'make it harder' for crazy people to get guns by making it harder for everyone to get guns. There's no political support sufficient for that, and a Supreme Court majority that would reject it; and it would create far greater violence trying to effect it in the teeth of political resistance than could possibly be avoided by it. 

In addition, even if it were successfully done it would subject Americans to the same kind of criminal violence as Mexicans or Brazilians from cartels and other organized crime. Brazil and Mexico, big multi-ethnic American states, are much better analogs for the USA than the European nations people like to cite. The same cartels operate here as there. They terrorize Mexico's citizens because they are disarmed, not because they are weaker people than Americans. They terrorize their police into accepting bribes in lieu of death because the police are isolated and alone, rather than being supported by a large armed populace. We're able to hold all this in check as well as we do because of our broad, deep capacity to resist organized criminal violence. 

So we're not going to do the practical thing that nobody trusts the government nor the police to do; and we're not going to do the impossible thing that would be foolish anyway. Therefore, we have to accept that this kind of thing is going to happen once in a while. There's nothing to be done about it within the realm of the possible, and politics is the art of the possible. 

Punching Down

The NYT has a job opening:

A recent Times job listing asks for applicants to cover “personalities,” news outlets, and “online communities” of the “right-wing media ecosystem that now serves many conservative Americans who no longer rely on the mainstream media to inform themselves.” 

Where a regular reporter might cover “subjects” or come prepared with a rolodex of “sources,” The Times notes in a telling choice of words that the ideal candidate for its new opening will already have a “robust list of reporting targets.”

'Corporate giants with deep political ties to our government's intelligence/surveillance community seek spy to infiltrate and report on suspicious fellow citizens.' Great.

Bison Born in Wanuskewin

In Saskatchewan, Canada, a bison has been born on Wanuskewin land for the first time since 1876. More are expect to follow as part of a reintroduction program.

"Xinjiang"

Chinese "re-education" facilities are overcrowded in what they are pleased to call their 'new frontier.' 

450 Buses

Texas has been busing illegal immigrants to D.C. in an attempt to pressure the government to stop leaving the border wide open. The governor, Greg Abbot, has apparently decided to up his game.

‘And we’re up to our 45th bus now, when you add a zero to that, I think Washington D.C. is going to soon find out they’re dealing with the same consequences as we’re dealing with,’ Abbott proposed.

This is not actually working as intended, though perhaps the increased numbers will force the government to take a hand in it. So far, the government and the pro-immigration NGOs -- Catholic and other churches especially -- have largely ignored this effort, and left these people to be sorted out by small-scale activist groups on the ground. These activists have been housing and feeding the migrants long enough to find out where they have family already in the USA, and then buying them Greyhound bus tickets back to wherever they want to be. Their stay in DC is short, and they end up wherever they wanted to go.

Abbot is putting a lot of pressure on these "mutual aid" activist groups, however, both organizational and financial. An increase in scale of this sort is likely to break their capacity to handle the migrants in this way. Either the actual government or the bigger NGOs will have to start playing, which may begin to have the effect Abbot intends.

War and Taiwan

CDR Salamander says that war isn't necessarily inevitable, but the need to prepare for one is -- especially if we want to avoid one.

The Viking Fighting Man

 

In the comments to AVI's latest, I present the lyrics to a song by an old friend of mine.

Feeling the fury of parents

The NASB has given itself a good scare. Not only has it watched mad wokiness drag down a stunning number of candidates over the last six or seven months, it lost about 40% of its members (and revenues, more to the point) in the furious reaction to its collaborating with the White House to sic the federal judicial system on uppity parents. Some of the NASB members, it seems, didn't appreciate the blowback from its characterizing parents as domestic terrorists for having the effrontery to speak up at school board meetings. Parents should be seen to drop off the bums on seats, not heard.

The NASB official who seemed to have the chummiest relationship with White House staff was given the ax early. NASB then followed up with an outside audit that established two valuable points: the White House's fingerprints were all over this disgraceful episode, and the NASB board itself can make a case that it was cut out of the loop by a rogue official who's now been safely defenestrated. Whether or not the latter claim is true, the NASB certainly making some very different policy noices these days:

The organization said it was implementing several actions based on the review’s findings. These include amending its constitution to confine its advocacy to “a united, nonpartisan national movement.”

The NSBA also said it would adopt a resolution that opposes federal intrusion and expansion of executive authority by the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies in the absence of authorizing legislation.

Soccer moms vote. I doubt this travesty contributed as much to President Biden's amazing slide in the polls as the Afghanistan debacle, inflation, or the empty shelves where infant formula should be, but any professional political advisor can read the tea leaves in the many elections that have swung against educrats on school boards and in state houses.

That's a good one

Apparently Lara Logan's fall from woke grace is complete. The NYT put together together one of those "should we have guess our neighbor was a terrorist? He always seemed so polite" pieces with this absolute howler:

More than half a dozen journalists and executives who worked with Ms. Logan at “60 Minutes,” most of whom spoke anonymously to discuss private interactions with her, said she sometimes revealed political leanings that made them question whether she could objectively cover the Obama administration’s military and foreign policy moves. She appeared increasingly conservative in her politics over the years, they said, and more outspoken about her suspicions of the White House’s motives and war strategy.

The horror. The horror.

As ithers see us

Every day I read the oddest descriptions of people with political beliefs more or less like mine. The Guardian has posted a screed from "labor reporter" Hamilton Nolan decrying the signs that yet another evil billionaire is taking an interest in politics, in this case Jeff Bezos, who recently reacted irritably to the White House's theory that inflation can be tamed by increasing taxes on the rich. Nolan clearly agrees with the White House on this rather than with Bezos, since he casually proposes that "Bezos could mitigate inflation’s damage by giving his own employees a raise." There's no limit to the absurd pronouncements on inflation's causes and cures by people who think that largesse from the state or employers will be anti-inflationary. Nor is it surprising that Nolan instinctively concludes, from an observation that stimulus checks can lead to inflation that harms people most who have the least income, that anyone who notices and decries the inflation must have wanted people who needed stimulus checks to starve to death in their jobless lockdowns.

So far, then, this is standard stuff--it's awful when rich guys espouse conservative or even moderate political views, because we want them all to act like George Soros--but I bring it up because of his caricature of the traditional parties, in which the Republicans are only slightly more insidious than the centrist Democrats. He refers to "the classic rich-guy belief that nobody poorer than himself should be in charge." Could he be aware at all that the classic rich-guy belief is probably that nobody other than himself, poorer or otherwise, should be in charge of his own wealth? Otherwise, classic rich guys these days throw their political influence solidly behind not only Democratic initiatives but solidly progressive ones.

"The big-picture impact" of a Bezos political sally, Nolan fears,

would be to add a huge weight to the neoliberal side of the party’s scale, a powerful force trying to tilt the party away from its recent tiptoes towards progressivism, and towards the vision of the Democrats as the sober new corporate-friendly counterweight to the psycho Maga capture of the Republicans.

The mad dash toward a list of politically toxic positions within the Democratic party over the last few years appears to him in the guise of some timid tiptoes towards correct thinking. I assume this is because he focuses almost exclusively on "labor" issues instead of the pink-haired screaming agenda, but in the face of polls establishing that voters are riveted on inflation and the economy as the mid-terms approach, I'm not sure converting a tiptoe toward Marxism to a full-throated mob charge is the winning formula he hopes for. Again, though, my purpose here wasn't so much to ridicule his views as to highlight how odd are his views about his opponents.

Union-busting, in Nolan's view,is

a great example of what could be the new vision of the Democrats: not the slick operators trying to arbitrage corporate campaign donations, but rather the party of labor, the party ready to take seriously its own rhetoric about the dangers of rising economic inequality. The Democratic response to the rise of crazies on the right does not need to be to simply try to woo Republican donors away; instead, the Democrats can become the actual populists, the ones who side with working people against the power of capital. (The Republican version of populism, which mostly means “being prepared to wear a John Deere ballcap while you say racist things”, pales in comparison.)

In these phrases, along with the view of "the psycho Maga capture of the Republicans," should I see myself? I'm accustomed neither to John Deer ballcaps nor racist pronouncements. Who knows what the word Maga stirs up in hearts like these? Could it possibly have anything to do with what a real Trump supporter values about him? When I speak, can someone like Nolan hear anything but "racist, racist, racist," even when as far as I can tell I'm nowhere near anything of the sort?

Nolan's problem, in part, is that working people aren't buying his line. Possibly they no longer react well to framing the struggle of working people against the elites in terms of labor vs. capital. Increasingly they see their elite opponents as pointy-headed Marxists in faculty lounges and supercilious newsrooms.

In the meantime, though I'd love to see someone with Bezos's resources become an asset on the philosophical Right, it seems like a long shot.

Where does pressure to change come from?

In the Washington Examiner, Kimberley Ross argues that conservatives should not simply abandon public schools, because if they remove their voices, there will be no more pressure on public schools to improve. What she misses is the enormous pressure that naturally results from parents having a real choice--not just parents who can afford to pay school taxes and private tuition, too, but parents whose access to charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling depends as a practical matter on relief from the double tax burden in the form of vouchers.

As things stand now, it's nice to think that parents can "have a voice" in the average public school system, but too often it's about as effective as the voice of prison inmates. The warden isn't all that worried about their views. Their dissatisfaction isn't threatening his livelihood. Nor is it threatening the pipeline of cash from the taxpayers to the teachers' unions to the pro-public-school-nonsense politicians.

Things would change fast if parents could vote with their feet and the school tax dollars followed the students. We'd have a completely different discussion about how hard it was to achieve reasonable results in reading and arithmetic on a budget, and how difficult it is to ensure students' basic physical safety, not to mention an orderly classroom in which lessons are rarely disrupted by fistfights with the teacher. Most of us know perfectly well these basic standards are achievable in the real world; the only way for public-school champions to avoid knowing it is to eliminate all that inconvenient competition, with its unfair practices of solving the basic problems parents care about on a rational budget. Meanwhile, the public schools spend more and more every year to accomplish less and less because, as Lily Tomlin used to say, "We don't care. We don't have to."

Knee jerks

Elie Mystal is a nut, but I'll grant him that we can explain certain failures of the Constitution only by the benighted views society took of certain issues in the 18th century:

Democrats are being urged by their “thought leaders” to pump it up: recent headline in Politico: “Democrats Should Be Less Boring; To avoid a midterm wipeout, the party should focus less on dry policy issues and more on eliciting an emotional reaction.” And in the meantime, lefty activists are drinking ever higher-proof rum rations. For instance, The Nation magazine’s Elie Mystal took excess to new levels of wretchedness when he said on MSNBC:

The Founding Fathers didn’t recognize abortion as a fundamental right because the Founding Fathers were racist, misogynist jerkfaces who didn’t believe that women had any rights at all!

I wouldn't call the Founding Fathers racist misogynist jerkfaces, but I'd allow that their view of the humanity of women and black people needed work. Nonsense like the 1620 Project aside, you can't read 18th-century accounts of anything without receiving shocks: casual anti-Semitism, casual assumptions that black people were subhuman, casual assumptions that women were chattels.

Okay, so it's not stunning that the original Constitution didn't reflect many modern changes to these views. On the other hand, the Constitution didn't leave us helpless to correct any flaws we might come to see in the couple of centuries after it was adopted. It contains within itself an orderly procedure for amendment, which we've used dozens of times successfully, usually even without a war for impetus.

How much better off would we be if instead of relying on rogue Justices or defiant legislatures or deranged protesters, we simply got to work on amending the Constitution when we discover we have a national consensus in favor of the upgrade?

A dilemma for pro-abortion zealots, however, is that they don't have the national consensus they pretend to have. At most they have a strong majority in favor of butting out of the abortion decision very, very early in gestation. They have only a small minority in support of abortion on demand through the last nanosecond before birth, if not after.

Something Interesting With Which We Can All Disagree

This essay begins and ends well; the middle is all about Covid, and should be skipped lest it rouse the passions we have so often discussed. Begin at the beginning, and when you reach "Our society’s response to Covid brought this anachronism,,," scroll to "It has been said that, in its formalism and insistence...."

You may certainly read the middle if you want, but I think it will provoke more than illuminate. The opening and closing are good and worth considering, however.

Reading Those With Whom You Disagree

In the comments to a post below AVI suggests "...the intellectual task of reading for six months people who disagree with you.... Grim, who is younger, probably has at least two [such exercises to perform], the poor bastard."

As I suggested in the comments, it might be more difficult for me to find people to read with whom I don't broadly disagree. My 'tribe' is attenuated and small, at this point, and though it exists it isn't much published. Even in the local papers you'll read few examples of the traditional Southern Democrat worldview of a Zell Miller or a Jim Webb. The local papers, like papers everywhere, trend left. 

Even outlets where I've personally published -- to include National Review, Human Events, The Federalist and American Greatness -- are very much not bubbles of like-minded sentiment. We have points of agreement, and broad disagreements. Still, it's better than the New York Times, where even points of agreement are hard to find; but I read their daily newsletter every morning.

I've also had two turns in grad school, which means 9 full years of reading nothing but things and people with whom I disagree to a greater or lesser degree. This is why I have friends I can talk with who are Marxists and socialists. I also have many feminist friends, especially but not only from philosophy circles, which is why I have the ability to reach out and talk with a SCOTUS protest organizer on terms of trust and friendship. (By contrast, I don't know anyone who attended the January 6th protest/riot as a participant, though you might think they were more aligned with my political views.)

Even here, some of you (especially Mr. Hines) frequently tell me that I'm wide of the mark on issues we commonly discuss. That's fine; you're welcome. 

More too, I find that my views are changing in recent years, and may have even fewer in alignment. The intense patriotism I felt as a younger man has been replaced by a horror at how corrupt and indecent our government has become. I once thought of America as a force for good in the world; I don't think I still believe it is a force for good even at home. I think it is past time to dissolve the bonds that unite our nation, and replace them -- as the Declaration of Independence says we have both the right and the duty to do under such circumstances -- with better bonds to guarantee our natural rights and liberties. Increasingly my idea about what 'better bonds' look like is perhaps Tolkien-style anarchist, certainly voluntaryist, in its rejection of concentration of power and its embrace of diffusion of power among the people. 

I'm still working on formalizing the latter into something workable, but it's a project I take to be my own and not one where I have a large following. Certainly I know of no journal devoted to it; the journals of the day are all about retaining or recapturing the Powers that Be, to use them to drive the tribal will and suppress the other tribes. I want no part of that, and raise the black flag -- see sidebar -- as an alternative to that entire project. 

But direct me, if you can.

AAPI

So last year we heard a lot about the "surge" in violence against Asian Americans. Turns out that, statistically, Asians in America are not only at the bottom of the violence-victim hierarchy, they're the only group whose numbers are trending down.

Partly that may well be because there are so few acts of violence against them anyway; statistics get weird and unreliable whenever numbers are small. And it's good news, to be clear: no decent person wants them to suffer more violence. It's just another example of how our news is so fake and manipulated. We were all sold a narrative based on a few anecdotes and some polling that turns out not to be grounded in the broader reality.

You'd better run to the city of refuge

I love these Sunday-school-lesson folk gospel songs.

God called Moses on the mountain top
And he placed the law in Moses' heart.
And then he stuck this commandment in Moses' mind,
Then said, "Moses, don't you leave my children behind."

You'd better run, etc.

Well people believe and they think they done right;
You can pick up your bible and read it tonight.
You can read in Genesis you'll understand
That Methuselah, he was the oldest man.
Well he lived nine hundred and sixty nine
And then died and gone to heaven in good due time.

Well Paul's command for the Pharisees:
Well old Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews,
He came to Jesus, he came by night,
He said, "I want to be born into the heavenly sight."
Then Christ spoke to Nicodemus as a friend,
Said, "If you want to go to heaven you must be born again."
Well old Nicodemus didn't understand:
How could a man be born when he was so old.

Well beautiful Sampson from his birth,
He was the strongest man that ever lived on earth.
One day Sampson was walking along;
Well Sampson's strength was never found out.
But Delilah came and sat on his knee,
Said, "Please tell me where your strength might be."
He told her, "My strength lies in my hair.
You just shave a my head just as clean as my hand,
And my strength will become as a natural man."

"Sir, that's a window"

In fairness, Feynman really was a genius, but the fun of this story is how he lucked into looking like one on a particular occasion at Oak Ridge, by keeping a straight face. The man could tell a story.

Are COVID hospitalization rates rising?

Per the CDC, COVID hospitalizations are rising among those aged 75 and up, but not noticeably otherwise.

On these charts, it's usually best to ignore the dip in the last week, which persists and apparently relates to slow data processing.

The best kind of redistribution

"Mr. Bernard Shaw proposes to distribute wealth," Chesterton summarized. "We propose to distribute power."

A good Newsweek article by Lee Habeeb about decentralized power and the healthy competition sparked by federalism.

Mean tactics

This is as unfair as Libs of Tik-Tok's habit of publicizing videos that people take of themselves and post online with the expectation that others will watch them. When will the White House put a stop to the horror?

Not so easy this time

From Ed Morissey at HotAir:

Roberts could [hijack the Obamacare ruling] in 2012 because the court was split 4-4 with himself in the middle. All he had to do was persuade himself. This time, however, Roberts finds himself on the outside looking into a five-seat conservative majority. If anything, Thomas (and Alito) want to make sure that Roberts doesn’t keep playing politics by issuing judicially and constitutionally incoherent rulings just to keep favor with the press and the Beltway elite. Given what we know about Thomas, he probably sees that as the poison that led to this moment, and that the best antidote is to make sure you don’t get another dose of it.

Think of it as UBI rather than salary

"You can equalize salaries when the people getting paid aren't doing anything that matters."

This scales up brilliantly to a lot of public-sector work, as well as monopolies and industries heavily infiltrated by the state, which are public-sector-curious.

We Trusted You, Bush

Once upon a time we took your word. We wagered our lives on it. Some killed for it, and still carry the weight of that; some bear scars and great wounds; some died. 

On Sonnets

This is just a creative writing class, not a literature class; I gather the professor's point is that no one going forward will want to write in the classical styles, at least no one who wants to publish in a major creative writing or poetry journal being published today.

All the same, were I the professor I would not have dropped but rather emphasized the traditional forms. The stricter the form, the better the poetry: this is because the more imagination and thought has to be put into how to express one's intended meaning in the given form. Even a poor poet can produce a decent sonnet if they take the time to get the form right. The strictness drives the development of the processes of mind that allow for the construction of better poems then even in the looser forms. 

Tennyson did great things in blank verse, but he didn't start there. "He mercilessly subjected his productions to the most painstaking revision.[3] He attempted various styles, and experimented with all sorts of metres. Thus he served his laborious apprenticeship and acquired a mastery of his art."

(They don't study Tennyson anymore either.)

In any case I have written several sonnets in the 21st century. They are poor poetry, perhaps; they certainly would not obtain publication in a fashionable journal. That was not their purpose, however: nor their intended audience. Addressed to the right person, at the right hour, the form is of lasting value.

More on 18 USC 1507

There's been a lot of discussion about this Federal law preventing, inter alia, protests outside the homes of judges. 

Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

I recently spoke with one of the protest organizers about this to see what she thought -- no names, of course. She said that they were coordinating their protests carefully with the local police to ensure that they remained within the letter of the law. 

A lot of work is being done by the phrase "or near" here: how near do you have to be to trigger enforcement?  According to her they stay on the correct side of police barricades, where they are told it is ok to protest, and are outside the entrances to the neighborhoods rather than outside the actual homes of the Justices. 

It occurs to me on reflection that the Federal law being cited doesn't actually mention Justices anyway. It mentions judges, witnesses, jurors, and so forth. The legislative intent is to protect the integrity of the trial process by preventing intimidation of witnesses, jurors, lawyers and judges. This is because the trial is supposed to be dispassionate in nature; passion is proper to the political branches. The Supreme Court, though, has arguably become a political branch -- indeed, I think it would be hard to argue any other view. If and insofar as it has, it must be subject to the First Amendment's 'free speech / free assembly / right to petition for redress of grievance' guarantees as any other political branch.

Daily dose of lunacy

You may not know that the problem with the Democratic Party is that it's too policy-based and rational. Poor things, they can't compete with the Right's ninja-masters of emotional manipulation. This Politico article explains that Democrats need to get angry to win. Maybe some riots? Some shrieking at the sky in online videos? No more Mr. Nice Guy Wonk. Spitballing here: there could be an issue with policy-based persuasion if the audience doesn't fully appreciate the fabulous results of the policies so far. If your opponent can generate rage and fear in the electorate by simply pointing to the effect of your recent initiatives in the core areas of our lives, the problem may not be the the unfair use of rage and fear in the politics of persuasion. I'll leave for the imagination of the reader the question whether the current batch of Ds could be said to favor gonads over gray matter more than any political movement in human history.

Good to Know

"The mere advocacy of political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophic embrace of violent tactics does not constitute domestic violent extremism or illegal activity and is constitutionally protected."

From a new DHS memo.

Hiking the Art Loeb Trail

Yesterday I went up on the Art Loeb Trail near the Shining Rock Wilderness, in the Pisgah Forest, just north of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The pile of rocks you can see behind me in this shot is Mt. Tennent.

I reached it shortly after snapping that shot. It has a plate in honor of its namesake. This view is looking south, over the Nantahala National Forest, this being approximately where the two national forests come together. (For Mike G., the exact border is NC 215, which separates the Pisgah's Shining Rock Wilderness from the Nantahala's Middle Prong Wilderness. There was a motorcycle wreck up there yesterday on my way back, also on a motorcycle. I stopped to help, but Balsam Grove Volunteer Fire Department had it in hand. We often partner on wildfires in the Nantahala.)

Goodbye, Madison Cawthorn

I may have mentioned my opinion that my current congressman is an idiot. A lot of people would describe him in worse terms: embarrassment, vicious, liar, and worse even than that. I don't bother with those matters. Of course a Congressman is a sexually-perverse liar who abuses those over whom he or she has authority. How can you expect any better than that, looking at Congress? They're the scum of the earth, with rare and blessed exceptions -- and fewer of those all the time.

No, what really bothers me is that every time he opens his mouth he says something dumb and/or useless. I don't expect a Congressman to be decent or moral or upright, but I do expect them to be useful. As far as I can tell Cawthorn isn't even useful to his funders or himself. 

Therefore it is with some small pleasure today that I notice his defeat in yesterday's primary. He will not be missed.

The general election will be between a Republican who is a member of the state legislature prayer club and shooting club, and an Asheville councilwoman who is a married lesbian mother of three and an ordained Christian minister. This perfectly summarizes the current condition of Western North Carolina. 

Food riots

There's not much people won't do in the face of starvation.

Crazy as a rat in a coffee can

I can add nothing to expose any more clearly the lunacy embedded in every sentence of this description of a political strategy.

Good wolf

Freddie DeBoer inadvertently makes the case that the last few decades of decline in U.S. colleges has been a clever Republican gambit to eliminate their taxpayer funding.

Dodd. v. Roe

Setting aside for a moment what the law of abortion should be, what the frantic controversy over the Supreme Court's impending ruling in Dodd suggests most strongly is that almost no one in the U.S. has the least notion how the three branches of government interact or what it means to have a system composed of federal and state governments, each with its own proper sphere. It's just too complicated, I think, and editors of moderately respectable newspapers suffer a brain freeze over the notion that there is a Single True Law enforced by a Single Dear Leader.

Jazz Shaw at HotAir often gets these things right:

[I]f they overturn Roe, they will not be criminalizing abortion. Nor will they be mandating it be legal. They will be allowing the states to decide for themselves. If a state chooses to restrict abortions through legislative action, it will not be “defying the Supreme Court” or undermining its authority. They will actually be following the court’s ruling by making their own choice. The same goes for states that elect to keep the procedure legal or even further safeguard it. If anything, the Supreme Court’s relevance and authority would be exemplified by such scenarios.

As the author notes, if you want an example of real confusion created between state and federal law, you have only to look at conflicts on gun law and drug law, and the problem isn't the Supreme Court, it's the other branches of government.

Red-pilled oddballs in LaLaLand

I have no idea if this guy Michael Shellenberger would make a good governor. I bought his book "San Fransicko" a while ago, but haven't yet read it. Still, the bar for sanity in California is low, and he does at least appear to have retained some capacity for rational thought, which makes him a unicorn in that state's politics. Per his interview with Bari Weiss:

It boggled his mind that the other candidates running for governor were 100-percent certain about what they couldn’t know, and weirdly unsure about how to fix things that could be fixed.

“Politics should be a means to an end of a good society,” Shellenberger said. “They’re making it the end.” He was referring to the homeless activists who were his nemesis, but he could have been talking about the environmentalists or the pro-lifers in the desert. “Their real goal is control and moralizing and power. Mine is freedom, care, civilization.”

Not that I agree that the goal of pro-lifers is control and moralizing and power, but the goal of some people in politics on any issue certainly can become that, and it behooves us to watch out for the trend.

[H]e knew there was a chasm between what progressive activists said they wanted and what they actually wanted. They claimed to want to end homelessness, just as the environmentalists had claimed to want to combat climate change. But that wasn’t true. Really, they wanted the fight, the feeling of moral superiority and, of course, the cash for their NGOs.

That sentiment alone makes him a valuable heretic.

Inflation, What Is It?

A bad first day.

The answer, which she never got near, was that government's raising taxes on the wealthiest (corporate or individual) could potentially decrease the money supply, such that fewer dollars were chasing the existing goods. However, since that answer depends on government controlling its own spending rather than just pumping those dollars out on something else, it's as fantastical as a chimera or a unicorn.

Red Moon at Night

My poor cellphone is inadequate for celestial photography, but last night was a clear night excepting a few low clouds. The lunar eclipse settled into the gap below the Corona Borealis, right of Serpens Caput and left of Bootes. 

At first I could only see the brightest five stars around the red moon, so it looked to be inside a pentagon. As the eclipse came on stronger, though, the constellations shone through more and more, until eventually you could see them all clearly. 

It was a fine sight.

One more reason to vote MAGA

Dr. Fauci says he couldn't bring himself to work for Trump again. I'm guessing not for De Santis either.

What Constitutes a Burger

A heated discussion with incorrect poll results. The patty melt is a burger. The patty melt is a variation of a burger, and therefore a member of a subset of the burger set. As a subset, all members of the subset are also members of the set. Therefore, all members of the patty melt subset are also members of the burger set. QED.

One can, however, defend a vagueness-theory answer in which some things are clearly burgers, and some things are clearly not burgers, but there are going to be median cases where -- while there may be a fact of the matter about whether or not they are -- we lose clarity on the question. "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" is a good example of another debate people have in which the answer seems vague rather than clear. 

This approach may finally be similar to AVI's in effect, where we ultimately lose any final answer on what is or isn't a burger or a sandwich; but there are facts of the matter about what different people take to be such things at different times and places.

However, the history of hamburgers is fun to read about. Sources are too unclear to be sure that we have the archetypal hamburger at any point before the 1920s, when early major chains like White Castle went into operation. However, there are viable claims all the way back to the 1740s. 

White Castle actually claims their sandwich originated at the hands of one Otto Krause in 1891, with a fried egg -- still very popular in Australia -- and was popularized by German sailors. I think that sounds entirely plausible: that period knew a great many German sailors, who could easily have spread the style to America and Australia as well. However, German instability had existed since the Thirty Years War, and there had been many earlier waves -- including in the 1700s, making the earlier claims quite possible too.

Of course we would run into that 'but was it really a hamburger qua ground beef mince, or some other kind of sausage that was known in Hamburg and just called a 'Hamburg sausage' in 1747? No one knows.

The late 19th century through all these Worlds Fairs and similar fairs that are mentioned in the article was also the great period for the American popularization of chili -- and also wide variants of exactly what chili might be, from the chili con carne of the Southwest, to Texas Red, to New Mexican Green and Red, to even the Midwest's Cincinnati chilli (not a typo). These days you get chili with and without beans, with and without meat, and with nontraditional meats. 

All quite fascinating stuff, and why I am up after midnight for no good reason.

A Moment of Punk Rock

I don't know Gentleman Jesse, but I went to college with his wife so we know each other on Facebook. She's proud of him and wanted everyone to hear his new single, which is part of a larger recording to be released on Third Man Records. (I don't know of them either, but I get the reference.)

We don't do a lot of punk rock around here, but I like the genre. This has something of the CBGBs era sound, which is later than I usually like; but the subject matter is a little more mature than you often get. It's a song about how your life will turn out to be meaningless if you don't spend it protecting something or someone that matters, because then at the end you won't matter to anyone either.

It doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but if you click through the first link you can listen on SoundCloud or in your browser. [UPDATE: Soundcloud has an embed option, so you can hear it below as well.]

Third Man Records · Gentleman Jesse, Protecting Nothing

Fear of the WHO

Following James' suggestion at AVI's place, when this wild-eyed letter came across my desk today I looked up the actual treaty they're freaking out over. There really are some worrisome aspects to it, just not the one the out-freakers identified. Actually-worrisome things include Article V, Surveillance, which authorizes the WHO to engage in direct surveillance operations inside member countries if they determine that the member country isn't spying enough on its own. Surely the last thing we need is even more surveillance by spies on ordinary people.

Likewise Article VI, which demands the submission of "wherever possible, genetic sequence data" to the WHO. You can understand exactly why they'd want that information as, you know, the World Health Organization. Genetic sequencing is a highly useful technology for disease control. It's also excellent for developing advanced biological warfare weapons that can target populations based on genetic data. 

Yet the parts the letter says to worry about are anodyne. They call out by name Article XII, sections 2, 3, and 5. Article 3 has already been struck. Article 2 authorizes the WHO's Director-General to "notify," "seek the views of the Committee," and then, if a public health emergency is identified, "seek the views of the Emergency Committee." There's nothing stopping them from doing that now. Everyone has a right to talk to people, notify them and/or seek their views on things. 

All this ultimately refers to Article 49, which lays out a procedure for determining if there is a public health emergency or not. This procedure explicitly permits dissenting views, and requires that all such views -- majority and dissent -- be made available to member states. Then the procedure allows for the collection of even more views, this time from the member state governments. 

The only muscular part of this comes at the very end, where the member states are obligated to enact these regulations into their own domestic laws within five years. Unless they don't: "If a State is not able to adjust its domestic legislative and administrative arrangements fully with these Regulations or amendments thereto within the periods set out in paragraph 2 of this Article, as applicable, that State shall submit within the period specified in paragraph 1 of this Article a declaration to the Director-General regarding the outstanding adjustments and achieve them no later than 12 months after the entry into force of these Regulations or the amendments thereto for that State Party."

So if you don't comply, you are required to send a letter explaining why you won't.

The UN isn't the threat people sometimes imagine it to be. It is, and always will be, a completely useless organization made of of rent-seeking bureaucrats with no actual power. 

News to me

Did Steny Hoyer mean to blurt out that the U.S. is at war in Ukraine?

Sanity outbreak at MIT

Yikes. Did you know MIT students' mean math SAT score is 790? I guess if you can't hit a solid 800 there you're chopped liver. Now for the sanity outbreak: schools all over the country are engaging in the suicide pact of ceasing to require SAT scores in the admissions process. MIT tried it at the beginning of the pandemic, then noticed it was having an awful retention problem with students who had been admitted to a program beyond their reach, so it's reverted to requiring SAT scores. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but since the school isn't willing to water down its standards, it faced a choice between eliminating students before they arrived or after.

Regardless of how unfair anyone may think it is, SAT scores are a fantastic predictor of academic success, particularly in the elite STEM fields. MIT requires a solid core of STEM courses no matter the students' major, so there's basically no escape from the horsepower requirement. I suppose the next step is to argue that the core STEM curriculum is colonialist and patriarchal.

Choosing a college

This link looked like classic click-bait, but I hit the bait like an eager fish. It turns out to be a fairly interesting list of the "worst" college for your money in each of the 50 states.

On the one hand, the approach of ranking the schools according to average cost per year, average total student debt, average earnings several years after graduation, and default rate on student loans is a helpful organizational and analytical tool. The article largely avoided the subject of the quality of education by focusing instead on whether a student could expect to earn a living sufficient to pay off his student debt. The odd thing was the comments section for each school, which dwelt almost exclusively on students' complaints about how non-nurturing the staff was and how un-fun the extracurricular life was, with a minor emphasis on how dilapidated the buildings were.

I was also surprised by the statistics on admission and graduation. The commentary assumed that a high admission rate was a good thing but a low graduation rate was a bad one. Maybe, and it certainly would interest me to find that schools sucked students dry after a couple of years then kicked them out once they couldn't qualify for any more student debt. When it comes to turning a degree into a job, however, it seems that a low graduation rate might easily result from a school's unexpected adherence to standards for graduation, especially if the admission rate is very high: admit 'em all and let the failure rate sort 'em out. But graduation rates in the neighborhood of 16%? Yikes. That's really testing an approach that encourages everyone to give it a shot, no matter unpromising a match there might be between their backgrounds and the prospects for higher education.

In general, neither the article nor the students interviewed showed much interest in anything that would occupy my attention in evaluating a college. Besides wanting to understand how much academic excellence could be encountered, I'd want to know whether including the degree on a resume would be likely to increase my chances in landing a job in a particular field and whether, once I'd landed it, the content of the coursework would be likely to improve my chances of demonstrating excellence in my new position. There may have been career counselors at my university (no life coaches, I feel sure), but I don't recall meeting any. Our sports programs were barely detectable. Campus party life did exist, but few of us had a lot of leisure for it, and to the extent we did, I suppose we mostly made our own fun. Catapult-propelled water balloon wars between dorms were popular. Parties tended to be private and impromptu. There were some bars and restaurants near the campus, but the supply of students was too small, too cash-strapped, too car-less, and too frantically busy to support the kind of off-campus student scene you might find at, for instance, UT Austin.

We did mostly manage to become gainfully employed. Student debt was not such a thing back then. Only the most determined Peter Pans among us were likely to experience serious difficulty in avoiding a student loan default.

All this made me curious to see how my alma mater's statistics compared to the nation's "worst" schools. The admission rate today is 11%, below any on that list, I think. The on-time graduation rate is 83%, high for the list. The average graduating salary is much higher, especially if you take the easiest path to riches: computer science. (When I graduated in 1978, that was an exotic new choice.) The loan default rate is extremely low, about 1%. I notice that the male/female admissions split is now 50/50. In my time, men outnumbered women about 4 to 1. I'd be interested to see what that ratio looks like today in the STEM majors.

The Two Best Days of My Life

I've just had them, and I can't tell you about them. I didn't get rich, and I very pointedly didn't hurt anybody. There's a convicted felon up on fresh assault charges right now who'll never understand how happy it made me to protect him... from me.

I did the right thing, spoke the truth, hurt no one and I'm a better and happier man than I was two days ago. It's always the morning of the world; every day you can suddenly wake up in it.

No questions.

God Hears You, Boys

Lots of people think they aren’t religious. If you talk to God, you know you’re talking to someone. If you believe enough to pray, I think you believe enough. 

Why Jews are persecuted

Since I was a child and learned about the Holocaust, I've wondered what it is about Jews that makes so many cultures lose their minds. The best theory I ever came up with was something about their alien insularity, which triggers xenophobia and envy as long as they remain differentiated, cohesive, and successful. This canary-in-the-coalmine explanation rings more true for me, though, than anything I ever came up with:

“Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds.”

In other words, where liberty thrives, Jews thrive. But where liberty is under siege, Jews will inevitably be, too.

Beware any culture that celebrates antisemitism.

That's some deep bench

The darkest of dark horses just won the Kentucky Derby at 73-to-1 odds after filling in for a scratched horse just before the race.

The overhead video shows absolute nobody Rich Strike starting way back in the pack, then apparently deciding, "I don't like all these horses in front of me. Is this supposed to be a race or something? Is this the best the rest of you guys can do?"

Maybe Not Everybody

Joe Biden today, repeating his campaign misstep of praising the comity he had with segregationists: "Even back in the old days when we had real segregationists... at least we'd end up eating lunch together."

Not everybody would, since the lunch counters were segregated. I guess everyone who was important to him was there, though. 

Platonic versus Aristotelian Causality

Tom asked a question about how things are caused in the post about the philosophy of abortion. This is exactly the sort of question that most people will find impossibly irritating, dense, arcane, and useless to consider; it is also, therefore, exactly the sort of question I love to think about. Aristotle says that the highest things are of course useless: to be useful is to be good for something else, as a tool is good for being able to perform a repair, and the repair is good for being able to return to using the truck, and the truck is good for being able to fetch food for yourself and your family, and the food is good for feeding the people you love so that they won't die. The people you love, though, are good for their own sake: they may not be useful at all. Nevertheless they can become the focus of your whole life: especially a baby is not useful but readily becomes the focus of the parents' lives for quite some time.

So too philosophy, especially metaphysics: it may not be useful at all, but that is because it is the study of the very highest things.

So I'm going to answer this question at length. Out of courtesy for the rest of you, I'll put it beyond a jump break so that you can dodge the question if you want.

PR Firm: Keep Your Corporate Mouths Shut

A major PR firm that reps for Coca-Cola and others is advising its clients not to talk about abortion. They warn that this is a 50/50 issue, and the brands risk permanently alienating a large part of their customer base  no matter what they do. The journalist reporting on this is so unhappy about it that they cited, in parentheses, a poll that found that 72% of Americans object to overturning Roe. Yet the polling is all over the place on this subject; Gallup found that 70% of Americans favor abortion restrictions.

Long term, there have been very durable gains in pro-life sentiment. Gallup polls conducted in 1995 and 1996 indicated that less than 37 percent of Americans identified as “pro-life.” When the results from Gallup polls conducted between 1995 and 2009 are averaged, “pro-choice” outpolled “pro-life” by six points. However, over the past decade, the pro-life position has reached parity with the pro-choice position. The 14 polls Gallup has conducted on this issue since 2010 show that an average 47 percent of Americans identify as pro-life, and an average 47 percent identify as “pro-choice.”

As clearly as I can make out the numbers, there are less than a fifth of Americans in the "ban all abortions" or "ban no abortions" camp. The rest of the country is in the middle somewhere (including me, as you know from reading my philosophical account of it from the other day). How you phrase the question can lead to a 70% figure on either side of the issue, but that's illusory. For the most part Americans want to restrict abortion somewhat but not entirely, and differ about just where the line should be.

The Second Russo-Japanese War

 History rhymes, they say:

Although Russia suffered a number of defeats, Emperor Nicholas II remained convinced that Russia could still win if it fought on; he chose to remain engaged in the war and await the outcomes of key naval battles. As hope of victory dissipated, he continued the war to preserve the dignity of Russia by averting a "humiliating peace". Russia ignored Japan's willingness early on to agree to an armistice and rejected the idea of bringing the dispute to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague. The war was eventually concluded with the Treaty of Portsmouth (5 September [O.S. 23 August] 1905), mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt. The complete victory of the Japanese military surprised international observers and transformed the balance of power in both East Asia and Eastern Europe, resulting in Japan's emergence as a great power and a decline in the Russian Empire's prestige and influence in eastern Europe. Russia's incurrence of substantial casualties and losses for a cause that resulted in humiliating defeat contributed to a growing domestic unrest which culminated in the 1905 Russian Revolution, and severely damaged the prestige of the Russian autocracy.

The Russians have once again found themselves in a conflict with a power they assumed inferior that they can neither seem to win nor escape. In this case the sticky element is again that the supposedly inferior power proved to have military might much greater than expected: the Japanese because they'd carefully constructed Western-style technologies over the decades following the Meiji Restoration; Ukraine because NATO and especially the United States have found ways to support the conflict without being dragged into it (so far).

Russia is still making slow progress in the Donbas region, which was the main objective of their offensive, so they may avoid a 'humiliating peace.' Their reputation as a military power has been savaged, though, and the prestige of the Putin regime badly damaged. Whether that portents a future revolution in Russia remains to be seen.

A Revealing Press Conference

Jen Psaki says that the President supports no limits on abortion whatsoever, and refuses to condemn people who are posting maps to the homes of Supreme Court Justices.

The Supreme Court put up barricades today, making it now the case that all three constitutional branches of the Federal government feel the need for walls to protect themselves from their own citizens. 

With some justice: