End of Roe

I have not had a chance to read the decision yet, let alone the concurrences and dissent, but if you wish to discuss it in the meantime here is a space.

UPDATE: The Justice Department is appalled and determined to do everything it can to oppose this decision.

UPDATE: Seen on FB.

Electoral Fraud, or Good Governance?

If you've been following the January 6th hearings -- which I have, dutifully -- you are aware that they have become a pageant of establishment Republicans and career bureaucrats lining up to support the Democratic establishment's narrative. The media has also lined up to help; it was the lead story in the Washington Post and NYT this morning, although even the WSJ and the LA Times could barely bother to notice it. Trump's claims are 'baseless,' 'false,' and 'unfounded'; and his attempt to get the Justice Department to look at them is 'an attempt to corrupt the Justice Department' and an attack on democracy (although it's hard to imagine what else a President should do who really believes a crime has been committed than to ask the police to look into it; or how much less corrupt one could easily be than to accept their refusal to pursue it and give over to the other guy as scheduled).

The idea that the election was not illegally and therefore unconstitutionally conducted is so rooted and reinforced that one might begin to doubt the evidence of one's eyes. However, D29 points out that the evidence of one's eyes continues if one knows where to look.

• In the midst of a labor crisis, the Department of Labor boasted that it was turning 2,300 American Job Centers previously focused on helping displaced workers find jobs into hubs of political activism. These new federally funded voter registration agencies were given guidance about how to bring in organizations to conduct “voter outreach.”
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services likewise announced plans to turn community health centers into voter registration agencies, using thousands of health care facilities to focus on voter registration and turnout.
• The Housing and Urban Development Department sent notice to public housing authorities that they should begin voter registration drives and participation activities. Previously, officials had been barred from electoral activities because they receive federal funding.
• “It is presumed residents of public housing might disproportionately vote Democrat. … The executive order targets people receiving government benefits who might think their benefits depend on one party in power,” Stewart Whitson, legal director for the Foundation for Government Accountability, told the Daily Signal.
• The Department of Education sent “dear colleague” letters to universities, telling them that Federal Work Study funds could now be used to support voter registration activities, contrary to previous guidance. The change was made without having gone through any rulemaking process to allow the change.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture said it’s using its child nutrition programs to push voter registration and enlisting state, local, and federally funded employees to implement voter registration drives in local schools.
• The Commerce Department produced a massive, 113-page report which likely took four agency officials many hours to generate. It directs local voting board members about polling stations and poll worker training.

Of course it is good that citizens should vote, if they are interested, engaged and educated -- and if indeed they really exist, and are in fact citizens. There's nothing in principle wrong with voter education and registration; it could be good governance. Yet it does look like the safeguards are being voided once again, and activity previously forbidden on ethical grounds is becoming mandatory. 

"With Nation Divided"

The AP is not outright activist as CNN has become, but this reporting is tendentious.

In a major expansion of gun rights after a series of mass shootings, the Supreme Court said Thursday that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, a ruling likely to lead to more people legally armed. The decision came out as Congress and states debate gun-control legislation.

About one-quarter of the U.S. population lives in states expected to be affected by the ruling, which struck down a New York gun law. The high court’s first major gun decision in more than a decade split the court 6-3, with the court’s conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.

Across the street from the court, lawmakers at the Capitol sped toward passage of gun legislation prompted by recent massacres in Texas, New York and California. Senators cleared the way for the measure, modest in scope but still the most far-reaching in decades.

Also Thursday, underscoring the nation’s deep divisions over the issue, the sister of a 9-year-old girl killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, pleaded with state lawmakers to pass gun legislation.

It's already a problem to link the court case to the actions in the legislatures. The court wasn't ruling on 'guns' per se, but on a particular controversy brought before it that has nothing to do with the particular bloody shirt the reporter wants to wave. The issue was specifically about law-abiding citizens who belonged to a shooting club, all of whom have perfectly exemplary records as citizens, who objected to not being able to transport their firearms for shooting matches and similar purposes. 

The legislatures can consider the one matter, the court was asked to consider a particular other matter. It ended up doing so on principled grounds that apply broadly, but there is no reason that a court case arising from the facts in New York city five years ago should be decided based on the passions of a moment in time five years later. 

Also, why would this ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States only affect states containing "about one-quarter of the U.S. population"? Rulings by this court affect all states and all Americans. 

What the reporter means to say is that only one-quarter of the population lives in states that don't already comply with the general principle that you can carry a firearm in public as an ordinary matter. That means that three-quarters of us already do live with the rules the Supreme Court acknowledged today. Most of us live in areas with much lower crime rates, including gun crime rates, than in those areas pondered by the reporter -- places like Chicago, D.C., New York, or Los Angeles. These include major metropolitan areas as well as rural paradises like my own. 

In point of fact, though the headline describes the nation as 'divided,' the division has a clear majority/minority split that runs against her favored position. My firearms carry permit is recognized by 38 states including my own. 

38 states is, coincidentally, the number required to call a constitutional convention, propose a new amendment to the Constitution, and then ratify it. It is the three-quarters supermajority that the Founders pondered as sufficient to justify altering the basic law. The Supreme Court has done nothing but bring the outlier minority into line with the general consensus of the United States of America. 

That's a painful process, as few know better than citizens of the South, which has so often been the object of the Supreme Court's edifying attentions. However, it is widely admitted these days that for the most part those painful adjustments have been to the general benefit and improved morals. In the fullness of time, it may be that these minority states will likewise come to see the wisdom of respecting the genuine dignity, and encouraging the martial virtues, of their citizens. 

Elevator pitch

I'm working on a Gutenberg project about the sources and meanings of Indo-European names, and have come to the section on the Nibelung myth cycle, with a really handy thumbnail sketch:

The great Teutonic legend, holding the same place as the deeds of Hercules, Theseus, and the Argonauts did in Greece, or those of Fionn with the Gael, is the story of the Nibelung. How old it may be is past computation, but it was apparently common to the whole Gothic race, since names connected with it come from Spain, Lombardy, and France: fragments of the story are traceable in England and the Faroe Islands, and the whole is told at length in Germany, Norway, and Denmark. Each of these three latter countries claim vehemently to have originated the romance, but there is little doubt that it was one of the original imaginations of the entire race, and that each division moulded the framework their own way, though with a general likeness.

* * *

The tale is begun by the Norwegian Volsunga Saga, and, about half way through, it is taken up by the Danish Vilkina and Niflung Saga, and by the German Nibelungenlied, and it is finished by numerous Danish ballads and German tales, songs, and poems, with the sort of inconsistencies always to be found in popular versions of ancient myths, but with the same main incidents.

The story, as it begins in the Volsunga Saga, relates that there were three brothers, Fafner, Reginn, and Audvar, or Ottur.... Transforming himself into the beast that bears his name, for the convenience of catching himself a fish dinner, Ottur was killed, in this shape, by Loki. The father and the other brothers insisted that, by way of compensation, in the Teutonic fashion, Loki should fill the dead otter's skin with treasure, which he accomplished, but laid the treasure under the curse, that it should do no good to its owner. Accordingly, the amount excited the avarice of Fafner, and after murdering his father, he transformed himself into a dragon, and kept watch over the treasure, to prevent Reginn from obtaining it.

* * *

The main points in Siegfried's story are that he was the son of Siegmund the Volsung, and of Queen Sigelind; born, according to the Book of Heroes, under the same circumstances as Perdita, in the Winter's Tale; put, by way of cradle, into a drinking-glass, and accidentally thrown into the river, where he was picked up by the smith Mimir, and educated by him. In the Book of Heroes he is so strong that he caught the lions in the woods and hung them over his castle wall by their tails. Reginn incited him to fight with and slay the dragon, Fafner, and obtain the treasure, including the tarn-cap of invisibility. Also, on roasting and eating the heart of Fafner, he became able to understand the language of the birds. And by a bath in the blood he was made invulnerable, except where a leaf had unfortunately adhered to his skin, between his shoulders, and given him, like Achilles and Diarmaid, a mortal spot. His first discovery from the song of a bird was that Reginn meant to murder him at once; he therefore forestalled his intentions, and took possession of the fatal gift, thus incurring the curse. The Book of Heroes calls him Siegfried the horny, and introduces him at the court of the German favourite, Theodoric, and the Nibelungenlied separates the dragon from the treasure, and omits most of the marvellous in the obtaining it.

His next exploit was the rescue and awakening of Brynhild; but he fell into a magic state of oblivion as to all that had passed with her, when he presented himself at the court of Wurms, and became the husband of Gudrun, or Chriemhild, as a recompense for having, by means of his tarn-cap, enabled Gunnar to overcome the resistance of Brynhilda herself, and obliged her to become his submissive bride. Revelations made by the two ladies, when in a passion, led to vengeance being treacherously wreaked upon Siegfried, who was pierced in his vulnerable spot while he was lying down on his face to drink from a fountain during a hunting party in the forest. The remainder of the history is the vengeance taken for his death; and the North further holds that his child, Aslaug, was left the sole survivor of the race, and finally married Ragner Lodbrog, whence her descendants always trace their pedigree from Sigurdr Fafner's bane.

Keep _And_ Bear

Yes, obviously.

"In this case, petitioners and respondents agree that ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense. We too agree, and now hold, consistent with Heller and McDonald, that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Court's opinion. "Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution."

The right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to human dignity. To say to someone that they are not entitled to defend their lives lest they harm someone else is to elevate the dignity of 'someone else' over the dignity of the person being stripped of a right to self-defense. To say that you have the right to defend yourself but not the right to the tools that would make such a defense practicable is to say that you don't really have the right after all -- somewhat like a right to freedom of the press, but a prohibition on presses and similar technologies.

Likewise citizenship: to say that you are 'a citizen' but obligated to remain disarmed under the unchallengeable power of armed agents of the state is to say that you are in fact a subject.  Citizenship is only meaningful if the citizenry retains the power the Declaration of Independence asserts is its natural right, that is, the right to reject a government that has turned tyrannical and to replace it in spite of that government's own preference to remain in power. 

The rifle makes the citizen, as it makes the dignified human being whose life is valuable enough to merit protection even if that protection entails dangers and risks. 

Anti-Semites Abound!

I won twenty dollars today off a professor I know who took this piece, published at Volokh, to be anti-Semitic. I wagered it would prove to be self-deprecating humor by another Jew; the author proves to be a board member of the Jewish Center for Religious Liberty. He's apparently drawn fire from progressive faculty before, who have trouble telling the difference between jokes like "Two Jews, three opinions" and actual anti-Semitism. 

That was my tip-off, actually. I have heard that joke before, and from very proud Jews; it's not really self-deprecation, either, because they're honestly and legitimately proud of their cultural disposition towards fractious, vigorous intellectual debate. As I've said about religion and jokes before, religious jokes are great as long as they're offered in the right spirit. That spirit is the one that jokes from a place of love for the thing being joked about.

The union that isn't

This is what can happen when a group of people realize that their ostensible allies can't wait to put a knife in their backs.

The National ICE Council says its members are sick of being labeled Nazis and racists by fellow unionists and is filing charges with the Labor Department to seek financial autonomy from its parent unions, the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Government Employees.

The council says it cannot get adequate representation from the two organizations, which “foster hate and prejudice” against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and have backed political candidates who call for defunding ICE — essentially advocating for the erasure of the 7,600 jobs the council represents. The council accuses the two labor groups of holding ICE employees captive. It says the parent unions, wanting to garner “partisan political favor” from the administration, refuse to let the employees manage their own affairs but won’t advocate for them.

“AFGE and the AFL-CIO became far-left organizations a long time ago,” Chris Crane, the council’s president, told The Washington Times. “They don’t care about workers. They only care about their far-left agendas and politics. The corruption and misspending in the organization is out of control. ICE employees want no part in it.”

Senator Actually Works for 5 Hours

...declares national emergency.

The Fed Has Surprises Coming

J. P. Morgan's discussion of forthcoming Fed policies leads with Ezekiel 25:17.

The NYT's daily morning reader was all about this subject as well. Inflation must come down; that means demand must be destroyed. That means higher interest rates, which will increase unemployment, which will destroy demand. It's going to suck, especially for you people who don't work for a central bank.

Solstice

The Summer Solstice came at 5:14 AM today, beneath an alignment of all the visible planets. I happened to be awake for that, and it is quite a show. The planetary conjuction continues until the 27th.

Flavors of crooks

We watched 1981's "Absence of Malice" last night and were struck by what an innocent time it was. The plot turns on a strategic leak of a federal investigation, along with warrantless wiretaps, all intended to pressure someone who wasn't a real suspect into finking on some of his mobbed-up family members. There is a well-known climactic scene in which Wilford Brimley, an Asst. AG, shows up and shuts down the freak show with some scathing rebukes and pink slips for federal underlings who break the law. ("You're no presidential appointment. You work for me.") It's a very old-fashioned "the grownups are still in charge" moment.

The plot doesn't call for anyone even to be aware of anyone else's party affiliation, though the chief crooked fed does make a point of resenting the crime family's role in the suppression of unions. The journalists are treated with kid gloves, exquisitely aware of the inevitability of causing collateral damage with their courageous crusade to publish the truth, but also bravely willing to face their own moral failings in striking this balance.

A more prescient scene was the climax of 1975's "Three Days of the Condor," after Robert Redford has risked his life getting the incriminating files to the New York Times, and creepy spook Cliff Robertson asks him, "What if they won't publish it?"

These screenwriters wouldn't have known what to make of Rathergate, not to mention Russiagate, NYT vs. Project Veritas, or the recent poo-flinging at Wapo.

Since it’s Juneteenth

UPDATE: The Orthosphere on the traditions of a holiday that is new to many outside Texas. I recall it being celebrated in Atlanta thirty years ago, but then went more than two decades without hearing it mentioned after I moved out of that city.

An “anvil” was a volley of gunfire.  I have found no discussion of the word, but the usage was clearly Southern and my guess is that “anvil” was a corruption of the word enfilade.

That sounds plausible, and is a nice preservation of the linkage between the rifle and individual democratic liberty.

Happy Father's Day

A number of you, like myself, are fathers. If you're like me, you forgot this day existed until you woke up this morning and saw somebody post it on Facebook. Fatherhood is not much celebrated in America today; indeed parenthood is not greatly appreciated by our cultural guardians, and fatherhood is both unacceptably masculine and indicative of some sort of biological binary that one might not be perfectly capable of transcending in the name of 'gender identity.' I suppose we shall hear even less about it in the future.

Still, fatherhood is a proud service that when done well provides lasting benefits to those who receive its service. It can also nurture important virtues in the man himself. As such it is worthy, quite apart from also being necessary to the survival of humanity and any sort of civilization.

Well done, ye who have done well.

Good reflexes

This could have ended worse. Hatchet Guy had recently been released from jail in the Chicago area.

Learning from antiquity

Week in pictures

A Viking Shipyard

Discovered at Birka, being investigated by the University of Stockholm. 

Cyberpunk 2022

A hit video game at the present moment is Cyberpunk 2077, which is tightly based on an old role playing game from the 1980s called Cyberpunk 2020. (Tightly enough that the original rulebook's sample adventure is actually portrayed in the game.)  The game was based on fiction by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, later filled out by others like Walter John Williams. 

How close are we to that world? There are occasional stories about people figuring out how to integrate computers with human neural networks; last week there was a story about the Japanese figuring out how to make living, self-healing skin. Political theorists worry about it. You might find a lot of comparison between the original sources' concerns about corporate power (and continuing trouble from Russia, especially where hacking and aggression are concerned) and the real world we inhabit.

Amusingly, though, when they set out to build 'dark future' gas prices for the 2077 game they did so during the Trump administration. As a result, fuel prices in the game are lower than they are today.

It's not quite gasoline, though; the fuel is CHOOH2, an alcohol fuel similar to the ethanol the Biden administration has decided to choke us with. It'll destroy your engines if the engine wasn't specifically designed for it, as most engines aren't at even the 15% Biden is mandating -- let alone a pure alcohol fuel. It's especially destructive to small engines, motorcycles, and watercraft.

Commitment > Balance

According to the NYT report, the Administration is weighing the trade-off between modest actions that would be legally defensible, and bold, symbolic actions with questionable legal authority.

I'd wager they're all in for symbolic actions with questionable legal authority. 

A Round for Freedom

Always remember that the two enemies are the Communists and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

While the war raged in Korea, the war at home between beer lovers and anti-alcohol groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union was fought to keep beer out of the hands of the GIs. Then, a couple of brewing heavyweights escalated the conflict.

Milwaukee's own Jos. Schlitz Brewing Company and Blatz Brewing Company offered to buy the troops a round and see what might happen.

One of my favorite movies, on this very subject and from not too long after this era, is Hallelujah Trail. 

Science as a detective mystery

I've just finished a spectacularly dull county commissioners conference in Corpus Christi, something's that's required for continuing education hours. The only bright spot was the daily commute, about an hour each way, during which I turned to an audiobook I ordered more than six months ago. I'd started it, I think, and got bogged down in the first chapter or so. When I picked it back up this week it really took off. The book is "The Writing of the Gods," by Edward Dolnick, about the race to decode the Rosetta Stone. What a romp! And what a pleasure to read a well-put-together scientific discovery thriller written by an imaginative author with a graceful style, along with a gift for narrative and for developing broad techological themes.

I can't remember how I stumbled on this book last year, whether I was browsing on Audible or responding to a hint here or perhaps at Maggie's Farm.

When I was a kid my father did me the great favor of recommending Oscar Ogg's "The 26 Letters" and the World Books Encyclopedia entry on the alphabet. I never knew him to be interested in cryptology per se, though he loved puzzles. He did have a strong interest in the history of languages and often talked about the trends in sounds such as those identified by the collector of Grimm's Fairy Tales. He was also, even in adulthood, as fascinated as any young boy by the language and culture of ancient Egypt. We spent an enjoyable month once building a model pyramid for one of my school projects, complete with hieroglyphics on the tomb wall.

I've now ordered two more Dolnick audiobooks, one about the theft and recovery of "The Scream" (the Munch painting) and the other about Isaac Newton.

Swiftwater Technician

Usually it takes weeks to get exam results, but I guess they got excited. I am informed that all of us who survived to take the final have passed. We are now Swiftwater technicians, as certified by the state of North Carolina. 

Punishment Regardless of Fact

The Border Patrol agents involved in the so-called 'whipping' incident will be punished, in spite of the fact that they do not carry whips, the so-called whips proved to be reins, and they did not whip anyone in any case. The Biden administration will issue some sort of 'administrative' punishment -- loss of rank or pay, I imagine -- since there are no facts that would ground a criminal or even a civil one.

The Biden administration is also moving to 'take legal action' of some sort against an independent coin vendor who decided to mint a commemorative coin of the incident. However offensive such a coin may be, it's hard for me to see how there isn't a First Amendment right to mint one if you really wanted to do so. It's artistic expression, which doesn't have to be in good taste to be protected; and it could even be political expression (e.g. of support for harsh measures against illegal immigration), which is especially protected by the First Amendment regardless of whether the views are appropriate or offensive.

Sam

 

Shared Reality?

An analyst at CNN suggests that the January 6th hearings are 'testing whether Americans can agree on a shared reality," or if -- instead -- tribalism will reign. The problem is that those hearings are a show trial with only establishment voices being allowed to describe the 'shared reality.' What is really being tested is whether America will once again submit itself to elite preferences about how we should view the reality we live in. (I'm not entirely sure they believe it themselves -- at this point they must know the whole Trump/Russia thing was a mock-up -- but it is important that we do.)

Americans can probably all agree that it has been raining in Yellowstone, and hot in Texas and the Deep South. It's too much to ask that they should all believe the same people who have staged one such hearing after another, from Mueller to the two impeachments to this. It's a drama, not a reality.

In this drama, the heroes are the Democratic leadership acting in support of intelligence and Federal law enforcement communities in their tireless efforts to stop Donald Trump; the villain, of course, is Donald Trump. Now Trump is a buffoon, as I've always maintained, and regularly says and does careless or stupid things (though he also managed to do some surprisingly solid things as President, chiefly by ignoring the establishment view; when he acceded to it, it inevitably hurt both him and the country). This 'criminal referral' they are promising at the hearing is just another bite at the apple. 

Yes, some crimes were committed on January 6th. Almost all of them were misdemeanors. The only procedural outcome that was changed by the riot was that the objection to the certification of the election was dropped and no evidence heard before the vote. The vote was delayed a few hours. The world did not end.

Yes, it probably wouldn't have happened if Trump had been smart enough to hold his protest somewhere besides right by Congress. However, the people who started the riot never went to his protest -- they were already at Congress. 

And yes, the FBI's behavior here as in Michigan invites investigation into whether they were here as there engaged in entrapment and/or incitement. Also in the Trump/Russia business, no? Also in the Flynn affair. 

Share that reality. Donald Trump is just an old reality TV show and former president, not the chief enemy of the United States of America. He probably won't be president again, but making a martyr out of him turns him from Old News into Headline News. Perversely, his best chance lies with these idiots staging their show.

That Makes Sense

A California pet shelter has banned anyone who supports gun rights from adopting dogs. They also pledge to sue you for fraud if you lie about it. 

Well, at least they're up front about it. Thanks for not wasting my time. 

Army Veteran Held in Pre-Trial Solitary, Acquitted at Trial

In only two hours, a US Army veteran who defended himself was set free on all charges by a jury of his peers. The Washington Post thinks the problem was that he was black, though it sounds like everyone in that jail was being mistreated. 

...a nighttime encounter with two strangers in San Jose led to his arrest for attempted murder. Johnson insisted he was defending himself and had done nothing wrong. But at 26, he was sent to solitary immediately after he was booked into the jail to await trial....While Johnson was being held, he witnessed fellow inmates being beaten by guards and was beaten himself, according to a lawsuit he filed in 2018 alleging his civil rights were violated. From his tiny, barren cell, he listened to the cries of a mentally ill inmate as he was pummeled by three sheriff’s deputies, who were later tried and convicted in the man’s death.

Prosecutors offered Johnson a lesser sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, but he refused to accept a deal.

“My frustration with my case will not allow me to consent to a lie,” Johnson wrote his mother in a Nov. 15, 2016, letter. “I am a warrior until my death and I must stand [up] to injustice no matter how dismal the odds.”

It would take three years — almost half of it in solitary — before Johnson got the chance to testify in his own defense. It would take just two hours for a jury to acquit him.

This story is almost a litany of everything wrong with our criminal justice system. The author focuses especially on the brutality of solitary confinement as a practice -- pre-trial, even, while one is 'presumed innocent' -- but many other bad things are illuminated as well. The practice of using threats of severe prosecution coupled with pre-trial confinement to force a plea bargain on an innocent man is unethical.  It might even be unethical aimed at a guilty man.

Swiftwater Finals

Turns out we started with 18; eight survived to take the written final. We won't know for weeks who passed that. 

I actually can’t be 100% sure if I passed the written exam in spite of significant study because the course covers so much stuff. (What is the nighttime landing zone minimum for a UH-60 Blackhawk? Which of these is not one of the types of injuries you should be trying to prevent during rescue operations? What type of PFD is used in deep water shipping where long rescue times are expected? What parts should be lubricated on a boat trailer? Now for ethics…)

I never took a class in pursuing an academic degree that was a fifth this challenging. Not even our filter advanced logic course, Deductive Systems, because it didn’t require passing 26 practical exams showing that you could tie knots, swim against strong water, rig a high line to a boat and then successfully rescue people from it. You just had to do logic, and you had a semester instead of three weeks.

Should you ever meet these people in the course of your lives, show them some respect. They've earned it even if you haven't seen it.

COVID hospitalizations down

As always, discount the last week's data, but the couple of weeks before that should be solid. This wave barely affected anyone under 75, and is waning even in that particularly exposed demographic.

Color

We got a wild hair and painted the living room a deep orange with green trim.

This is the view from our upstairs bedroom, across the stair landing and into the upper part of the living room:

An Interview with Robert Duvall

The whole time I was in Iraq, 2007-9, I wore a Stetson hat that looked like his. Not outside the wire, of course: I wore a helmet for that. Inside, though, that's what I wore.

"To the sunny slopes of Long Ago." 2007 is only fifteen years; but not everybody made it, and that makes it seem longer.

Seen on FB

Do they really think this kind of penny-ante censorship applied even to jokes on small FB accounts is going to make people trust them more?

On Assassination in General

Assassination is on everyone's mind thanks to the arrest of an armed felon apparently attempting murder at Kavanaugh's house. Assassinating a Supreme Court Justice is an obvious step in certain respects: they  have a lifetime term, impeachment requires an unattainable supermajority, and you get to appoint a replacement right away if you happen to control the White House and Congress. Partisan power games are such right now that there's no doubt the party in power would be willing to effectively endorse the assassination by using it to seize control of the Supreme Court. That this would also effectively endorse assassinating political figures in general, themselves included, might be worth the price to them. Such is the lust for power among our political elite.

Murder is one of those things that is always wrong, but murder is properly defined as "the intentional killing of the innocent." The intentional killing of the guilty is not always wrong, can be justifiable or even praiseworthy. The philosophical case for assassination begins with the idea that it can be a form of intentional killing of the guilty. Lots of people philosophically endorse the idea that assassinating Hitler would have been justified, for example.

Likewise, the philosophical case for assassination goes on to point out, the guilt of the political figure is often the actual and relevant guilt. If instead of assassination a dispute devolves into war, soldiers and policemen and outright innocents are likely to be killed who bear little or no guilt relevant to the dispute. Soldiers especially are likely to be honorable and to possess significant virtues of courage and self-discipline; the politicians we are protecting by fighting wars instead of assassination campaigns are usually neither honorable nor virtuous. It would arguably be much better to shoot the politicians one by one as they need it than to have the ordinary people slug it out on their behalf.

Governments and churches -- including the Church -- oppose assassination, but I often wonder if their unity here is more to do with the fact that they all represent a form of institutional power. Archbishops and Cardinals, and certainly Popes, might well worry that they too could fall prey to an assassin's bullet or blade. Keeping the structure of conflict pushed away from the powerful, with actual violence falling on the shoulders of the poorer and ordinary, is definitely in their self-interests as individuals, as members of their class, and as members of their institutions. Legislatures and churches may not be the most reliable source of philosophical insight to be had in this case.

I do not write to endorse the concept, but to raise the matter for consideration. Apparently a fair percentage of our youth, women as men, Republicans as Democrats, have come around to the idea. It's probably a good time to think it through.

A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action

Among young Democratic men and also young Republican women, a larger percentage approves of assassinating than of threatening "a politician who is harming the country or our democracy." 

Thirty-one percent of young Republican women and forty percent of young Democratic men approve of making threats. Forty percent of the women and forty-four percent of the men approve of assassination.

The other demographics work the way you might expect, with harsh words being more acceptable than actually killing people. The only older demographic that breaks single digits on assassination is older Republican women, and just barely at 10%. Opposition among older people is about 90% for all older men, surprisingly less -- 86% -- for older women regardless of party affiliation.

Young blood runs hot I guess, but the inverted response on actual murder surprises me. (Young Republican men underperform their Democratic peers by ten points on killing people, by the way, in case you were worried about the wave of right-wing fascism you have heard so much about lately.)

"The Only Thing Keeping Us Free is the 2nd Amendment"

A confession, of sorts, by Naomi Wolf.

(H/t: D29)

'We Regret to Inform You...

 '...that we are canceling your auto insurance policy because our underwriters have determined that your back seats are too large and comfortable.'

A Moment of Appreciation

This guy may be a coyote, but he’s got brass. 

Cracks in the California blue

Chesa Boudin, the "DA" from San Francisco, went down in flames in his recall election. Republican Caruso has a narrow early lead in the race for mayor of Los Angeles.

A Swedish Custom

This is not only weird, it violates what I would have thought a universal law of hospitality. 

"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.