It's getting harder to tell
Powerline cites two posts that may be trolling or may be the genuine lunatic article. Myself, I think the first one may be for real; if not, its tone is so spot-on as to be truly admirable. The second I suspect is just a little too cute and probably is a troll.
As Powerline notes, by Jove, I think they may have discovered marriage.
I pronounce the first one Babylon-Bee-worthy, the second merely an honorable mention.
Stumbling Closer to War
The EU is debating whether to adopt strict natural gas rationing for its member states as its members worry about Russian interruptions. It's easy to say "I told you so" since we all did, but the Europeans are now heavily dependent on a power source that comes from a foreign state that uses it as a tool of national policy.
If the bloc’s 27 member countries agree to adopt the plan and the new legislation that goes with it, it would solidify the sense that Europe’s economy is on war footing because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Maybe it would 'solidify' that, but it won't make it solid. As long as you're effectively paying tribute, it's no better than a protest -- though a very difficult protest, and an expensive one.
Now if we hadn't cut off our own domestic energy production to such a degree, we might be positioned to offer an alternative and swing Europe back to American influence. Unfortunately, our 'greens' -- though not as strong as Europe's -- have likewise influenced our government to cut off its own nose to spite its face.
Start in the Wrong Place, Turn Left
As mentioned I get the NYT's morning newsletter. Today's is a true classic. It is a meditation on 'why the anti-democracy movement' is going on. The obvious problem is that there isn't, in fact, an anti-democracy movement in the United States. But let's not let that bother us!
“What is striking about the movement around the supposed theft of the 2020 election,” Charles writes, “is how much of it — the ideas, and rhetoric, and even the people involved in it — predated Trump’s presidency, and in some cases even his candidacy.”
Indeed, except the newsletter never mentions the name "Stacey Abrams" even once, nor the controversy she engendered about whether the election in Georgia was stolen by then-Secretary of State now-Governor Brian Kemp. As a consequence, they make two key errors that lead the whole piece into paranoid musings about anti-democratic fascists endangering America.
1) That suspicion of elections is per se an anti-democratic expression, and,
2) That it is only the right wing that does it.
Because of these errors, they never get around to asking whether there might be something about the nature of our elections that might be causing people not to trust the results. Abrams had a pretty good case that the Georgia election was extremely suspect: I know, I voted in it and wrote about it at the time. The voting machines did not produce printed receipts that might be used for an audit. Ballots were a plastic card with a magnetic strip on the back, which allegedly recorded your votes but had no visible signs of having done so -- and which were immediately wiped and re-used all day after they were swiped in the 'counting' machine.
The process was thus completely opaque and impossible to audit, but no worries: one of the candidates for the office being voted on was in complete charge of the election, and swore that he would oversee any recount efforts as well.
That doesn't mean Abrams won, of course. It does mean that suspicion of the election being dishonest was extremely well-grounded. If this is a terrifying prospect, there are easy things we could do to ensure that elections were more trustworthy. Having a print-out ballot so you can see that your votes were correctly recorded, and which can be compared against electronic returns in an audit is a good start. Voter IDs are a good start. Real IDs are connected to proof of citizenship centrally maintained, so that voting officials can check the ID both against your face and signature in person, and then verify that your birth certificate or passport is on file.
On the left people worry that these are voter-suppression efforts (and occasionally on the right as well), but there is no need that should be true. We could embark upon a campaign to make sure that all eligible voters have proper IDs and their proofs recorded in the system. We could establish -- pre-election -- independent bipartisan bodies tasked with auditing the returns. We could do the sorts of things we would do, in a system that was designed to be carefully audited to prevent abuse.
If we did those things, a lot of this would evaporate.
Finally, 'anti-democracy' is arguably a bipartisan impulse (if not on either side a movement). Democrats are working very hard right now to try to prevent democracy from informing abortion laws, leveraging courts, bureaucracies, and executive orders to derail efforts by actual democratically-elected legislatures. The Republicans do, certainly, benefit from the Senate and the Electoral College to some degree, but until this very year Democrats benefitted from the Supreme Court being willing to strip the democratic branches (and direct democratic votes, as in the case of California Propositions passed by referenda) of the power to rule on major questions. There's no anti-democracy movement, but there is a real impulse on both sides to try to set one's preferences beyond question.
Ha-Ha, It Is To Laugh
This letter is something else.
So at the start of this summer’s program, this teacher was supposed to have 11 students in his class. But on the first day only two students showed up and on day two he was down to one student. By week’s end, a few parents had withdrawn their kids but most simply did nothing.The teacher found there were five kids on a wait list whose parents wanted to see them get extra help but when he asked about getting them in to fill the empty seats. He was immediately shot down because the district will not drop any student from a class even if they never show up. They won’t even contact the parent to ask if they plan to send their child because this is part of their “racial justice overhaul.”Now, when I say the district is “not allowed” to do so, I don’t mean they’re forbidden by some state law or local ordinance. Rather, the district actively embraced this policy as part of their larger equity and racial justice overhaul, and even bragged about doing so in public-facing materials. Their explicit position is that requiring attendance for any district program unfairly victimizes children of color, as does factoring in attendance to any student’s grades during the regular school year. The administrator I spoke to seemed baffled that I would even ask. “I’ll let you know if any parents pull their kids out,” he told me, “but otherwise, your class is technically full.”,,,
I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state....
He concludes that the left has accidentally stumbled into a set of beliefs so crazy that to describe them accurately sounds like something made up, only they aren’t made up.
Shouldn't Be About Popularity
Allahpundit is worried that Republicans are overdoing it in Idaho. I'm not a Republican and I don't live in Idaho, and it's a party platform rather than legislation anyway; there's no reason anyone should care what I think about this.
If you happen to, though, what I think is that you should save the life that can be saved in cases where only one can be. It's not murder to save the one you can even if the one you can't is lost; that is a tragedy, which is what we call it when something terrible happens that is nobody's fault. (In Greek tragedy, you usually get there just because everyone was doing their duty instead of compromising it. Doing your duty is right, usually. Yet...)
I also think that concerns about what is popular shouldn't be the point. Winning elections shouldn't be the point. Doing what is right should be.
Asking somebody to die in spite of the fact that you could save them should only be done in the most extraordinary of circumstances: I think of the scene in The Rock in which the rebel Marines have to seal one of their own in with the VX gas to die. He was banging on the door to get out, but they didn't save him because of the peril that it would claim them all. Perhaps they could have saved him, but the risk was so great they refused.
There is no similar risk here. I can accept that a surgeon with religious convictions who believes his or her soul will be lost should be allowed to except themselves from all abortions; but were I a surgeon I think I would perform one under these circumstances, and simply pray for forgiveness if in God's judgment it was wrong. My understanding is that God will forgive you for anything if you ask, especially if it was done with a good will and for a good purpose such as saving an innocent life.
Only the Police Can Be Trusted...
UPDATE: Col. Kurt says this means the elite can't trust the police either. He says "thirty cops," but that was the figure from The Terminator that was supposed to be comforting until Arnold showed up. There were almost four hundred cops in and around that building in this case.
Sketchy Review of "Alvin's Secret Code"
Written by Clifford B. Hicks, this 1963 book is a kid-level introduction to cryptography hidden in a mystery novel. My guess is that it will appeal most to the 10-12 y/o demographic.
Alvin, AKA Secret Agent K-21 1/2, accidentally finds a message written in a secret code. Is someone spying on the defense plant in town? He sets out to solve the mystery with his trusty sidekicks Agent Q-3 and The Pest. Soon, he begins learning about ciphers, codes, and codebreaking with the help of a retired and bedridden WWII spy, which allows him to solve the mystery. Meanwhile, a new puzzle has arrived with one Miss Fenwick, a mysterious Mr. Smith, and a cryptic message.
Today, it seems like novels for kids have followed Hollywood in introducing some exciting event first and then sharing bits about the characters as the story evolves while keeping up the excitement. Alvin's Secret Code was written before that storytelling development and introduces the characters first, so it seems a bit slow to get started. However, the action gets going around the third page and the story is fairly well-paced after that.
The story introduces substitution ciphers, codes, scytales, and symbol ciphers. There is even an appendix with additional information on cryptography, including key word substitution ciphers, the Alphabet Box, and a common Civil War cipher. The appendix also includes frequency tables of letters and some hints on how to break ciphers along with a few practice exercises.
Hicks was a professional writer and editor for most of his life, but in WWII he served as a USMC officer on Guam and Bougainville and, according to Wikipedia, earned the Silver Star. In his biography at the back of the book it states that "In the service he learned something about codes and ciphers, a subject he had studied briefly in college." My guess would be that he did something in intelligence, but a short search didn't turn up anything more specific.
If you know kids who like solving puzzles, I would recommend this book.
Update: To make this review a little less sketchy, I'll add that the story part is only about 132 pages long, and the appendix adds about 15 pages. I read it all in 2 evenings, and I enjoyed it as well, even though I'm considerably older than 12.
An American Gunfighter
Hero bystander stops mall shooting in Indiana.
"The real hero of the day is the citizen that was lawfully carrying a firearm in that food court and was able to stop that shooter almost as soon as he began," [Police Chief Jim] Ison told reporters during a press conference on Sunday night.
Well done.
A Short Trial
Provocateur and talk jockey Steve Bannon is beginning his short trial for contempt of Congress. Not only is he plainly guilty -- contempt of Congress is the duty of every American these days, but is a more technical sense of 'contempt' of defying an order which he did in fact defy -- and not only is this another trial in DC, where the juries are returning universal convictions against anyone associated with Trump in any way. Also, the judge has disallowed all of his proposed defenses in advance.
In a pretrial hearing last week, the judge overseeing Bannon's case, Carl Nichols, entered a series of rulings that will significantly limit the lines of defense Bannon's attorneys will be able to present to the jury.Nichols said Bannon won't be able to claim he defied the subpoena because Trump asserted executive privilege over his testimony, nor can Bannon claim he relied on the advice of his lawyer, or that he was "tricked" into believing he could ignore the subpoena due to internal DOJ opinions from previous administrations about executive branch officials' immunity from complying with congressional subpoenas.Nichols also rejected Bannon's defense that prosecutors would need to show that he knew his conduct was unlawful, saying that prosecutors only need to prove that Bannon acted "deliberately" and "intentionally" to defy the Jan. 6 panel.Bannon's attorney, David Schoen, questioned the judge's rulings, asking the judge at one point, "What's the point in going to trial here if there are no defenses?"
It shouldn't take long to get through the need to hold a trial with no defenses, so we can get on to the punishment part that is the point of the exercise. Obama officials defied Congress with impunity, but special rules as always apply.
The Scotsman Public House
Waynesville has a new attraction, the Scotsman Public House. It’s pretty great.
Haggis egg rolls.
A fine gentleman in the entry.
Lochaber axes.
The food is great. Good jukebox here. Black Sabbath, Joan Jett, Joy Division, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Iggy Pop, Motörhead. The first song I picked a lady at the bar said, “This is one of my favorite songs.” Then while Joan Jett was playing the barmaid came over and said, “You’ve got good taste honey.”
My new favorite place.
Heroines of the Middle Ages
The article begins with a sort-of amusing story.
Isn’t it irritating when your ancestral manuscript collection gets in the way of your ping-pong tournament? That was Colonel Butler-Bowden’s predicament in the early 1930s. He was so peeved by the heap of rubbishy papers cluttering up his games cupboard that he declared his intention to burn the lot. Luckily, his ping-pong companion that day happened to be a curator at the V&A, so the colonel was dissuaded from book- burning and his manuscripts were shipped instead to the museum’s London archives.Among the collection was the unique edition of the Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiography in English, a sensational account of a woman’s mystical visions, travels and tribulations. For centuries, while her book hibernated in the Butler-Bowden estate, Kempe was completely unknown.
It would have been a great tragedy if that book had been burned. One wonders how many works of great interest have been, over the years, for idle reasons or impassioned ones like Henry VIII's desire to weaken the Catholic Church by destroying its libraries.
Show-Voting
Over at Hot Air, they missed the important part and only got to the second-most important part in the exit question.
Exit question: Would a federal assault weapons ban even be constitutional in light of the recent SCOTUS decision in Gruen? AR-15s are very much “in common use,” a key factor in the Court’s reasoning, and nearly all of them are used for “lawful purposes.” (Much more so than handguns are.) So how could Congress lawfully ban them presuming they had the votes to do so?
Hall readers probably know that the Gruen standard is actually the Heller standard for keeping and bearing arms. The recent case merely reaffirmed that the 2nd Amendment protects weapons that are "in common use for lawful purposes."
The Cicilline bill – which currently has 211 Democratic co-sponsors and no Republicans – would make it illegal for anyone to “import, sell, manufacture, or transfer” semi-automatic rifles that have certain “military features.” These features include a “detachable magazine” or “a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds.” Semi-automatic pistols and shotguns with similar features would also be covered.
This standard includes all of the most popular rifles and pistols in the United States. The bill would ban the strong majority of firearms currently manufactured in America. This would include not only the AR-15, the most popular rifle in America, but all versions of (great-)granddaddy's Colt 1911, all Glocks, and generally all semi-automatic pistols for which a 'detachable magazine' is a standard feature. Only some shotguns would be affected, but for rifles and pistols it would be a massive manufacturing ban.
So yes, it's clearly unconstitutional according to the standard the SCOTUS has upheld since 2008; and yes, they don't have the votes for it anyway.
The real question, though, is whether Americans would obey a law like this in the first place. A government that passes laws in defiance of American moral values will eventually destroy its own legitimacy in the eyes of the People -- the standard that the Declaration of Independence explains is the point at which a change of governments is a right, and even a duty.
I suppose it hardly matters if there's no chance the law might pass.
Riders from the North
I met some good bikers today, down all the way from Michigan to ride the local mountains. We had a great conversation about the local roads. I discovered that they'd been on some of the best ones, pointed them at some others, and gave them some advice about riding the most dangerous ones. "That one's in my fire district," I told them, "so if you screw it up it's me they'll call to come get you."
They laughed merrily and said not to talk that way. Nobody did call me to come get them, so they must have made it. They said they'd done more than a thousand miles over the last few days, and had as far at least to go again. Good luck to them.
Denial of the Analytic
In philosophy, 'analytic' as a term of art means that the truth of a proposition can be determined from itself. The etymology of the word comes from a very old root that means 'to cut apart,' so that you find the thing you were looking for in the pieces. Another way of describing an analytic proposition is something that is true by definition; another one yet is to say that it is a logical truth. Properly speaking, it is or is almost a tautology; you are only saying the same thing in two different ways.
This week I made a dear friend of mine cry, for what I think is the first time in the long time I've known her, just by insisting on an analytic truth. "Abortion is murder" is a debatable proposition; sometimes, at least, it might not be. "Abortion is homicide" is purely analytic. "Abortion" means the killing of a thing that is a human being; "Homicide" means "the killing of a human being" (homi-cide from homo sapiens sapiens). It's not quite a tautology, because there are sorts of homicides that aren't abortions; but every abortion is certainly a homicide. That's analytic.
As such, abortion is the sort of thing that cannot be a right. Self-defense is a natural right that may sometimes -- often! -- entail homicide. Yet homicide itself is not and cannot be a right without disposing of the basic human equality that underlies the theory of rights. To say that one class of people has the right to kill another is to deny that human beings are equals in this basic sense. Homicide must always be justified.
We can argue all day about what the proper justifications are or might be; we can argue at length about whose authority suffices as justificatory. What we can't argue about sensibly is whether or not a homicide is under discussion.
Yet I found myself hearing things like "Those are not human beings." Yes they are, undeniably. You can see from their genetic code that they are homo sapiens. That's analytic too, literally written in the thing. "It is an insult to compare a being like me to them." No it isn't; you were one, and were we all, necessarily. It is only an accident that we happen to be older and bigger now. "If they're a being, they should be able to survive in the world on their own without my help." A born baby can't do that, not for a long time; nor can an elder, sometimes, though no one would deny that they were (and had long been) human beings.
A lot must be at stake in this capacity to kill your children for whatever reason, without having to justify it to anyone else. It can't just be money; there's not enough money in the world to have convinced my mother to kill her children. The denial of logical truth, of the evidence of your eyes, it can't just be ideology. There is something awful hiding here.
Cultural Suicide and Classical Greece
An interesting piece by Benedict Beckeld in Quillette.
Once they have left their mythical past behind, and scored successes against neighboring peoples, they become aware of their own power, knowledge, and uniqueness.
Well before then, actually: the sympathetic view of the enemy he assigns to Aeschylus is also present in Homer's Iliad. Simone Weil called the play a "miracle" just for that reason.
And self-analysis requires a distancing of the self from itself, in order to view the object of study in its entirety.
That is the very process of the creation of the world according to Plotinus, who discusses it at length in Ennead V.II-III. A problem is that it is both necessary and apparently impossible. In separating the thinker from the thought-about, the thinker divides itself into parts. These parts have different characters: one active, the other passive. The thought-about parts of the self are frozen, in effect, while the thinker actively thinks about them. But being frozen, they are no longer part of the active mind: and thus, it is not possible to think about 'the object of study in its entirety.'
As a consequence of this, as well as Plato's deduction that everything must be in some way ultimately One (see the commentary on the Parmenides, sidebar), Plotinus worked out a theory of multiple levels of intellect, including a higher Mind that could perceive the forms (themselves activities by nature), and thus do the thinking and being-thought-about all at once.
As an act- and one whose very being is an act- it must be undistinguishably identical with its act: but Being and the Intellectual object are also identical with that act; therefore the Intellectual-Principle, its exercise of intellection and the object of intellection all are identical. Given its intellection identical with intellectual object and the object identical with the Principle itself, it cannot but have self-knowledge: its intellection operates by the intellectual act which is itself upon the intellectual object which similarly is itself. It possesses self-knowing, thus, on every count; the act is itself; and the object seen in that act- self, is itself.6. Thus we have shown that there exists that which in the strictest sense possesses self-knowing.
[If anyone wants to try to follow Plotinus' explanation, let me know. He's notoriously difficult to read and understand.]
In any case, after exploring this Greek fascination with self-knowledge, he notes that Classical Athens was nevertheless patriotic:
Herodotus, for his part, is happy to travel but thinks the Greek world best, especially Athens, which he seems to prefer (Histories 5.78) to his native Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, which is under tyrannical Persian sway. Thucydides has Pericles utter some of the most patriotically beautiful words imaginable on the greatness of Athens and the indomitable Athenian spirit (History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35–46). Aristotle considers it quite clear, in many different passages of his works, that his Greek compatriots are culturally superior to other peoples. So these men, and others, are able to analyze and even question their own traditions without thereby slipping into oikophobia.
What happened? Class warfare.
The crushing naval victory at Salamis, won by poor and simple oarsmen rather than by comparatively wealthy, landed hoplites, leads the poor to demand more rights. This is why the conservative Plato views that battle in a negative light (Laws 707a–c), even though it was a Greek victory. He feels that it caused a more assertive citizenry of individuals who believe more in themselves than in the community, and he is echoed by Aristotle at Politics 1274a and 1304a.
You can find my commentary on that part of the Laws here.
Increasingly, the rich and the poor, the democrats and the oligarchists, come to hate each other more than either group hates the Persians. Since the common civilizational enemy has been successfully repulsed, it can no longer serve as an effective target for (and outlet of) the people’s wrath. Human psychology generally requires an adversary for the purpose of self-identification, and so a new adversary is crafted: other Greeks, and other Athenians.
For us, I suppose, the end of the Cold War and the intellectual transformation of China into a trading partner rather than an enemy (although it still smells and looks a lot like an enemy at times...) began this spiral. Yet no: it must have happened earlier. All of the 'woke' hatreds of America and her history have roots at least to the 1970s, and indeed those are only radical and intellectual versions of movements that date to the 50s and 60s. Certainly the successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Society did not tame these complaints -- they have sharpened and deepened as criticisms since the days of Dr. King's soaring rhetoric. Beckeld suggests that the Great Society may be particularly at fault, though he does not mention it by name here: he is discussing a similar program in ancient Greece.
[D]ependence makes people resentful and miserly, and the more they receive from the state, the less they will respect it. This is why there is often a dynamic of mutual strengthening between oikophobia and government largesse, and oikophobia and the entitlement mentality go hand in hand.... Once this sense of entitlement becomes the predominant outlook, the citizens of a state begin to compete more with each other, while the external enemy recedes into the background.
At this point your culture is largely at war with itself, and a sort of suicide threatens. Certainly other powers beyond your vision, growing stronger while you focus on the threat inside, may suddenly appear on your borders or well inside of them.
Nobody Loves You
The top story at the New York Times today is a poll showing that Democrats don't want Biden to be President again. Sixty-four percent overall, but the number among Democrats under thirty rises to 94 percent.
UPDATE: Today the NYT follows up with a poll from the Republican side, showing that half of Republicans are ready to move on from Trump.
"The Culture War Between the States"
A subset, it turns out, of the economic war. City Journal analyzes the trend.
More on the Abe Shooting
Weirdly, the suspect is both mentally incompetent and also capable of making sophisticated home-made guns. That seems an unlikely combination, but it's not impossible. As Wretchard points out, a Japanese cult once figured out how to make functional sarin gas weapons. Crazy people are not good agents, so he's unlikely to be both crazy and someone's pawn. He might be faking the crazy, I suppose.
What a Jerk
I guess the Killer was kind of a jerk too, though. Maybe it goes with playing piano like an ace.
'An Astonishing New Theory'
Pluses: it's a new theory about time and reality from MIT!
Minuses: it's not from an astronomer or a physicist, but from an MIT philosopher. Also, either he or the journalist hasn't done the reading. Probably it's the journalist.
An incredible new theory established as the “block universe” theory asserts that time does not actually “flow like a river”; rather, everything is ever-present.Dr. Bradford Skow, a philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposes that if we “look down” on the cosmos as if it were a piece of paper, we would see time stretched out in all directions, just as we perceive space at any given time.
This is not a new theory. This is roughly Aquinas' theory of what reality looks like to God, who 'looks down' on time from eternity, which is not everlasting time but something beyond time. Thus, God can see the whole at once.
Immediate downside: predestination and collapse of free will. In addition to being undesirable, the loss of free will violates our most basic experience. You can't do the scientific method without free will, because you have to decide what to study and decide to take the steps, and at every point in the experience of conducting an experiment you're making choices -- at least apparently.
They go on to say how this enables a new theory of time travel, but even insofar as it does it makes time travel pointless. You can't 'go back' and alter the past or change bad decisions you'd made if everything is frozen in a big block of time -- or, to put it in the Norse mythological terms, if the Norns wove the skein of wyrd long ago, and all will happen as foredoomed.
Alternative theories have existed for centuries to grapple with that problem. You can read a layman-level explanation of two of them, one of them my own, in my novel Arms and White Samite. One of them, mine, preserves free will more successfully than the other. The other one is known as perdurism, or 4D-ism, and there are numerous scholarly books about it.
Army Kills FT Benning Multi-Gun Tournament
A big hit in the past, this year it was canceled because of newly-imposed 'safety' registrations that made it difficult and expensive for competitors. No problems had occurred in the past -- the competitors are highly professional athletes at running their firearms. However, 'in an abundance of caution' to avoid active shooters on the military base, the new regulations would have required everyone to stay off-post, travel off-post for all meals, fill out registration forms for every firearm brought onto base for the competition, and travel on-post only from the gate to the range and back.
Well, there are other places you can find a range.
Women in the History of Philosophy
Cambridge University Press has made free four of its six books on the subject. Unfortunately the one of probably greatest interest to most of you, Early Christian Women, is not one of the four (though you can still buy a print copy, they are quite expensive). You can get a book on Pythagorean philosophers who were women, however, as a free download. If you've enjoyed the ancient philosophy commentaries here, you may well like learning about these thinkers.
The others may also be of interest especially to the feminists among you, but they are outside my area so I can't offer any useful remarks: mostly for being too contemporary, but one for being a Korean Neo-Confucian of whom I admit I've never heard before this morning.
Ave, Abe
Shinzo Abe, a longstanding firebrand of a Prime Minister in Japan, was assassinated yesterday while giving a campaign speech for a party member. [Link is to the Wall Street Journal, but pick whatever paper you'd like: this story tops all the major ones today.]
Abe was one of those foreign leaders often described by our press as 'conservative' even though he doesn't fit an American mold very well at all. He was the reason that Japan is as well-positioned as it is now to resist a resurgent China, keeping its 'self-defense forces' as close to being capable of real military operations as he could without violating Japan's pacifist constitution. Under his watch, Japan began building what was obviously a power-projection capacity, including its first aircraft carrier since World War II.
He was also a nationalist and a patriot, the kind who is willing to forgive his country for its sometimes-intense sins in order to celebrate its genuine glories. As far as I know he was unapologetic about this habit of character unto his death. A 'habit of character' of such strength in moral matters is either a virtue or a vice in Aristotelian terms; Abe was loved or condemned depending on what judgment individual people had of which category his habit properly belonged.
Though he was thereby an American ally, he was always Japanese first, as he ought to have been. Loyal to his ancestors and his people, he passes now to face a better judgment and a final one.
Confidence in Institutions
The new Gallup poll on Americans' confidence in our institutions is out. Longtime Hall readers know I've watched this poll for a very long time. For a long time my great concern was that confidence in our democratic and constitutional organs was falling, while only coercive institutions -- the police and the military -- managed to stay above water. That suggested dangerous consequences, should the organs of constitutional government collapse while people still believed in and trusted institutions whose purpose is to force people to obey.
This year confidence in the military is down somewhat, but still above water; somewhat surprising, I think, given the massive recruitment troubles they're having. Confidence in the police is now below water at 45%, with the left wanting to defund them and everyone else noticing that they stopped enforcing the law during the recent riot seasons. Forty-five percent is still too much, if you ask me; indeed neither of these institutions deserve to be considered widely credible.
Congress has generally enjoyed the lowest level of confidence from everyone, and this year has single digits across the board except among Democrats -- and even there they only rise to ten percent. But look at these Presidential numbers:
Republicans: 2%
Independents: 18% down from 31% last year
Democrats: 51% down from 69% last year.
Two percent is even lower than Congress, and even Democrats could barely muster a majority with faith in the institution with it firmly in their control.
Boom in Georgia
Somebody blew up the Georgia Guidestones last night -- well, one of them. The Georgia State Police apparently destroyed the rest of them 'for public safety.'
And here's one of the guideline panels, which includes at least one piece of very excellent advice we should be following even today:
There's apparently been some controversy over them lately, with some calling them 'satanic' for some reason that escapes me. I guess people didn't like that they were astrologically aligned, but that's if anything pre-satanic: Men of the West were aligning ancient stones with the sun and stars long before anyone knew the name, at least. They had some ancient languages inscribed on them, as well, but the 'guides' were more Star Trek than satanic; I'd guess it was a collection of new wave professors from the nearby University of Georgia who put the things up.
I rode out to them back in 2015 after I'd heard a rumor about their existence. Here's the panel talking about the astronomical alignment.
And here's one of the guideline panels, which includes at least one piece of very excellent advice we should be following even today:
The marble is from nearby Elberton, Georgia, where my son used to wrestle occasionally back in high school. It is the home of a notable quarry, which if were I Sherlock Holmes I is where I would begin my investigation into who blew the thing up. That explosion looks like dynamite to me: not big enough to be artillery but still sizable, and near a quarry where dynamite is available and where there are people who know how to use it. I am not Mr. Holmes, however, so I shall leave the matter in accord with the Two Rules of Business.
Draining US Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Lower Gas Prices....
More than 5 million barrels of oil that were part of a historic U.S. emergency reserves release to lower domestic fuel prices were exported to Europe and Asia last month, according to data and sources, even as U.S. gasoline and diesel prices hit record highs.... The flow is draining the SPR, which last month fell to the lowest since 1986....
Cargoes of SPR crude were also headed to the Netherlands and to a Reliance (RELI.NS) refinery in India, an industry source said. A third cargo headed to China, another source said.
Real Journalism
The Washington Post deserves praise for this story, adapted from a book by the authors, exploring how the opioid crisis was made possible by Big Pharma suborning DEA.
Corruption abounds, but it's rare to see a forthright examination of it in a major media outlet. Good for the Post.
An Idea Whose Time has Come- Electoral College for States
Honestly, I can't believe I've never heard anyone suggest this before. Not only that we need the Electoral College federally, but that we should extend it to the state level to counteract the new 'big states', the megalopolis city-states that run our lives.
Razorfist's (aka Rageaholic's) shtick is to be crude and drop a lot of F-bombs- I even debated not posting the video- so be forewarned that there's more vulgarity here than you'd normally expect in the Hall- but it's too good an idea he's presenting to not post this- so I beg your indulgence this once-
I think this is an idea whose time has come, and even if we were unsuccessful in implementing it, a Democrat party/media complex would be too busy fighting this to go after the Federal Electoral College, which would itself be a win.
Sketchy Review of "Woke Racism"
This isn't a good review of John McWhorter's recent book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Nope. For that I'd have to do a lot more work and time is short.
In brief, McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics at Columbia U., argues in six quick chapters that CRT and all that racial wokeness is a new religion that is unintentionally racist and harmful to black Americans. He calls the members of this new religion the Elect. He offers a way to genuinely help black children instead of teaching them all that CRT nonsense and a way to deal with the Elect.
McWhorter is a leftist and starts by saying he's writing for fellow leftists. While he doesn't say what his own beliefs are, in arguing that wokeness is a new religion, he treats religious belief as essentially irrational, unprovable, and not amenable to rational argument. He reminds me of Steven Pinker, a Harvard linguist who is also on the left but who argues for Enlightenment rationalism as well as freedom of thought and speech.
As for helping black children, his answers are nothing new: "1. End the war on drugs." "2. Teach reading properly", i.e., via phonics. And "3. Get past the idea that everybody must go to college" and focus a lot more on vocational education.
His method for dealing with the Elect is remarkably similar to what I've heard from the right. In a section titled "Just say no", he writes, "What we must do about the Elect is stand up to them. They rule by inflicting terror ..." A key part of that, he claims, is that people need to get over their fear of being called racists in public (172-3). You can imagine what he says in the next section titled "Separation of church and state." Finally, he offers sample scripts for how these conversations with the Elect might go. Kinda interesting how he imagines them.
A significant part of the value of this book for me was how he gets to these conclusions. I won't even attempt a summary; the value is in his complete arguments, because he argues rationally from the left's viewpoint.
There are things I disagree with McWhorter about, but it's a good book, a quick read, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this topic, especially if you live or work in a woke environment.
More Worries about "Christo-Fascism"
Vice has pulled a video from Tik Tok that it believes illustrates a serious threat. I appreciate that they defined their terms.
Christian nationalists believe that their country’s national policies and laws should reflect evangelical Christian values, and culture war issues like LGBTQ rights, “critical race theory,” or immigration, are regarded as signs of moral decay that imperil their nation’s future.Christo-fascists take that one step further, and believe that they’re fighting primordial battles between West and East, good and evil, right and left, Christians and infidels. These two labels, however, sometimes overlap.On TikTok, ideologues from both ends of the spectrum are weaving together a shared visual language using 4chan memes, scripture, Orthodox and Catholic iconography, imagery of holy wars, and clips from movies or TV...It’s no accident that this community is burgeoning on TikTok of all places, according to Thomas Lecaque, an associate professor of history at Grand View University in Iowa who focuses on apocalyptic religion and political violence. “You build your audience with a young demographic, and then you spread your ideas that way. This is how you build the next generation of fascists,” he said.
Christianity could be associated with a fascist movement because both the faith and the ideology are corporatist. That doesn't mean 'corporation,' but rather comes from the Latin corpus meaning 'body.' The idea is that the Church or the state is a kind of organism, and the different parts of the organism have different functions. This is by analogy to the way that the hand or the eye are different organs with different functions, but each of which is part of a greater whole that it serves according to its functions. The Pope or Leader is supposed to be the brain; the eyes are inquisitors or police; the hands are the people who do the work they are assigned and directed to do.
Fascism gets its name from the Roman fasces, a device that was both a weapon and a symbol. The fasces was a bundle of sticks bound together, sometimes with an axe head bound up in one end. Roman magistrates carried one to administer corporal punishment, but more to symbolize the way the Roman order worked: the sticks were individually brittle and weak, but bound together they became strong.
The trick is that some version of that idea is necessary for any successful politics: if you can't come together in common purpose, you aren't going to build any sort of state. It is thus not merely fascists who have reason to talk this way; any political philosophy at all is going to have to do it. Anarchists may wish to do without leaders, but they can't do without common purpose and people pulling together to get things done. Together we are stronger, and it is only by pulling together that we get the garden dug and weeded and harvested.
So you do get communities of a corporatist mindset in Christianity -- abbeys and monasteries and religious orders and the like -- but of course you do, because you couldn't build a society that didn't have some version of that idea. The presence of a necessary condition is not surprising just because it was necessary.
There's something similar at work here, I think. Christianity is under attack -- I see memes designed to mock and belittle it every day -- and not only nor even especially from 'the East' but from those within our culture. Pulling together in defense of it is the only way in which it might survive.
Also, I notice the two images that they pulled as exemplary are not unhealthy messages by themselves. "Revolt against the modern world not because it is modern but because it is evil" says one; perhaps you might substitute "insofar as it is evil," but otherwise this is a traditional message for every age. The second one features a knight wearing Crusader livery, and says "For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind." That's a healthy message.
Delta
"Ladies Love Outlaws" is a classic Waylon album from 1972, and he is now classic Americana. Waylon thus provides a good ending piece for Independence Day.
That album also featured this piece, which I think he got from Elvis. The 1972 version was not especially great, as he was still sounding a lot like Nashville (and notice the clean shaven face in the album cover). By 1974, he really had his sound worked out with his band.
Very productive years for him, seventy-two to seventy-four. By seventy-four he was at the top of his game.
Bluegrass, Red Rock
The music is fine, but the rocks are the real attraction here. My goodness, what beautiful stone.
Epictetus on Freedom
We spent part of the winter with Epictetus, so you might be interested in hearing his thoughts on freedom.
Via the Daily Stoic, which adds that changing our nation's history is beyond us, but striving to perfect adherence to our principles of liberty is within our power. That is a worthy goal for free human beings.
Independence Day
This year I have had women write to tell me that they don't feel like they can celebrate Independence Day. This strikes me as a strange sentiment; 'I feel our government is so oppressive that I can't celebrate the idea of overthrowing an oppressive government.' This should be the ideal holiday. Go practice handling explosives.
Democrats in general seem to be having trouble this year. Same answer.
Read again The Spirit of Rebellion. If you're against the government, do something about it. Be free for an hour of your life at least. If you're not, have a barbecue to remember those who once were. Authority turns septic sometimes. Human dignity entails and requires occasional rebellion.
Perhaps -- so the Church teaches -- it also requires occasional (or even regular) submission to legitimate authority. We can worry about that on another day. Today is the Fourth of July.
Happy Independence Day.
Off the Request Line
I don't know who that guy is, but the meme is by request in the comments below.
Spirit of Rebellion 2022
If you click on the black flag on the sidebar, you'll be taken to one of my favorite things I've ever written, an Independence Day post called The Spirit of Rebellion. It is originally from 2015, and ties together a number of historical trends -- including the recently-mentioned Robert the Bruce and the War of Scottish Independence -- that brought us to our American nation. The Declaration of Independence is the root of our tradition, its principles having survived the Articles of Confederation and the establishment of the Constitution, and those eternal principles shall survive the Constitution when it finally falls. Yet these even older things are the seed from which the root sprang, and we are wise to remember the deep history.
This year the spirit of rebellion is being seen mostly on the left, surprisingly since the Democratic Party controls all the Federal levers of electoral government. The loss of the Supreme Court, which was for so long their method of amending the Constitution without the bother of obtaining a three-quarters majority of states' consent, has been hugely upsetting. Yet according to this poll, up to a quarter of Americans are nearly ready to take up arms against the government, and spread across the political spectrum (one in three each of Republicans and Independents, one in five Democrats).
Ironically, only about a third of those declaring for war are currently gun owners. The long feared militia movement is not going to be the source of revolution; if it occurs, it is likely to be a combination of abortion supporters on the left and those among the general citizenry horrified by the corruption they can witness in the government and its allied elites: a majority of all voters say the system is corrupt and rigged against ordinary people, and 49% say they have come to feel like strangers in their own country.
It would be wise to remember the closing point of the Independence Day essay.
Maybe we can pick a nice day in mid-October, when the weather will be excellent for the celebratory cookouts that mark it. I understand the former Columbus Day has opened up as a holiday, but any of the days nearby it are usually excellent.
And for anyone reading this who might occupy a position of power: beware. You tread on thin ice with very many political factions among the citizenry, and you will be judged by those eternal principles in the Declaration. If you fail that test, you will not be missed: rather, your fall will be toasted for centuries to come.
Happy Independence Day.
The Oaken Heart of Robert the Bruce
One of the great stories about the heroic King of Scots, Robert the Bruce, is the story of his heart. On his deathbed he asked his old companion, Sir James Douglas -- known as Good Sir James in Scotland, and Black Douglas to those Englishmen who encountered him on the field of battle -- to take his heart on crusade.
According to Jean le Bel, when Bruce was dying he asked that Sir James, as his friend and lieutenant, should carry his heart to the Holy Land and present it at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as a mark of penance. John Barbour, alternatively, has Bruce ask that his heart should simply be carried in battle against "God's foes" as a token of his unfulfilled ambition to go on crusade. Given that Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands since 1187, this second is perhaps more likely.
Douglas faithfully fulfilled one of these two proposed vows, which suggests it was probably the one actually asked of him. When Bruce was dead, Douglas had his heart placed in a silver and enamelled casket and wore it around his neck, sailing to Spain to join King Alfonso XI's crusade. Douglas was killed at some point in the great battle that brought victory to the Spanish king.
Recently a way to fulfill the second proposed vow has been found. An oak tree the Bruce himself planted 700 years ago died, and its heart-of-oak was removed. This was carved into the shape of a man’s heart, and taken on pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. There it was lain in the place where Jesus was thought to lay, and prayers offered for the Bruce.
This act is in the spirit of wild romance that was the very soul of the Age of Chivalry.
The Weirdness of 'White Fascism'
I don't mean the obviously fake kind, where everybody pretends that the National Right to Life Coalition represents some kind of 'Christo-Fascist white patriarchy.' I mean the only-maybe-fake kind, these guys who went to Ukraine to join the Misanthropic Division, Europeans mostly.
THE DEATH OF a French volunteer in Ukraine is the first clear evidence that there are at least some far-right extremists among the foreign fighters who have flocked there to fight Russian forces.... The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front....Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” ... Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry.
For the years since 2016, I've been reading journalists who inform me that Vladimir Putin was symbolic of right-wing white nationalism broadly, and that the Russian Orthodox church was aligned with Putin in trying to create a Christian nationalism also broadly aligned with this sort of white nationalism. But here are people who feel like it is their moral duty to "kill Russians" in order to make Europe safe from "Asiatic hordes." (Are there Asiatic hordes? China's population is headed off a demographic cliff.)
Several pages down into the report, we get a clue.
As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim.
Now they've got photographs of a guy with a tattoo on his head, which indicates some level of commitment (assuming it's not photoshopped). It's hard to tell, though, how much of any of this is more than the fevered imaginations of people who spend a lot of time online -- even the ones who actually went to Ukraine.
Justice Sotomayor on Justice Thomas
A remarkable description full of sympathy and kindness, not at all what one might expect from media portrayals.
McGinnis: The Court as Schoolmaster
The Court serves a bigger purpose than resolving controversies and cases, he argues.
In a notable essay, University of Chicago political theorist Ralph Lerner captures this essential function of the Court. The Court is, in his terms, “a republican schoolmaster,” bringing to life the enduring text of our fundamental law and applying it to a new age. As Lerner notes, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the Court early in its tenure as “the educator, molder, or guardian of those manners, morals, and beliefs that sustain republican government.” The Court thus has an educational task—bringing each generation back to consider anew the foundations of the American republic.The Roberts Court faces a tough task because it must speak to the American people through channels in which most messengers and interpreters—the press and the academic world—are radically hostile to its messages. Indeed, their hostility is magnified by the recognition that Court is now the one institution historically dedicated to reason, which progressives do not control. Progressives may have an easier time accepting that elections may sometimes go against them: politics can be dismissed as an arena of base interests and manipulation. But when an institution dedicated to reasoned deliberation and interpretation is not aligned with the progressive program, it creates a serious threat to progressive hegemony over social thought. The Court’s opportunity to contest that hegemony and restore the fixed foundations of our republic thus provides the crucial social context of its opinions this term.
Ironically Martha Nussbaum made a very similar argument in her works aimed at getting the Supreme Court to endorse gay marriage and similar practices. The court's rulings serve to teach the public about morality, showing them how to fit together questions of religious or cultural traditions, emotional processes like disgust, and ideals of fairness and equality. People may have been raised to view homosexuality as immoral, but the court by its example can teach them to view it in another way that is more sensitive to the feelings of their fellow Americans who happen to be gay.
This is a similar project, except that the thing being taught is to resolve these matters in ways that accord with our democratic political tradition:
...the Constitution’s text should ideally be understood today as the Framers would have understood it. And the Court makes clear the benefits of its interpretation to the public. On controversial issues on which the Constitution is silent, democracy offers the flexibility to make varied compromises over time....Because the dissenters cannot contend that anyone thought that the provisions of the Constitution at the time of their enactment contained a right to abortion, they advance three distinct attacks on the majority’s originalism. First, they suggest that, at least on issues of concern to women, the document’s original meaning may not be binding, because women did not participate in making the Constitution. It is true that women did not vote to ratify either the original Constitution or the Fourteenth Amendment. But how does it follow from that observation that the Constitution should be interpreted to include a right to abortion? No evidence suggests that if women had voted in the ratification process that a right to abortion would have been on the agenda. Even now, the percentages of men and women who favor and oppose abortion rights are roughly equal.......the Constitution provides a mechanism for evolution: the amendment process. In contrast, there is no provision that delegates to judges the authority to “evolve” the Constitution. Indeed, in his famous defense of judicial review in Federalist 78, Hamilton was at pains to dispel the anti-federalist fear that equitable interpretation would give the courts the freewheeling authority to consolidate all power in the federal government. Not so, said Hamilton: they would be bound by “strict rules.”
The Supreme Court has been the favored mechanism for altering the Constitution for decades because amendments are very hard to come by. They require a level of consensus almost impossible to achieve in America today. Yet by insisting on them, and rolling back to the Constitution as it was adopted rather than as it was adapted by earlier Courts, the Supreme Court is being genuinely conservative. They could move faster, even though their present speed appears to scare the Democratic party a great deal. They are, instead, simply rolling back and insisting on change coming through the democratic process.
That may, indeed, teach people to use that process again -- and how to use it.
SCOTUS Kills the EPA
D29 has been arguing that this is perhaps the biggest case of the year, after the abortion decision.
Requiescat in Pace Hershel “Woody” Williams
Today also marks the passage into eternity of the last Medal of Honor recipient from World War II. I never met him, but he remained very active in the American Legion for a long time. Other Legionnaires describe him as one of the kindest and most respected members of the organization.
He received the Medal of Honor for actions on Iwo Jima, described at the link.
"Cloud Cuckoo Land"
A British filmmaker whose films are being used against Donald Trump by the January 6th committee describes Trump as "living in 'cloud cuckoo land.'"
The reference -- I assume he knows -- is to Aristophanes' infamous play The Clouds, a work of art that so badly slandered Socrates that the people of Athens convicted him of what the play had said he was guilty of doing. Charged with corrupting the youth of Athens, he was accused of using sophistry to make weaker arguments appear stronger so that they'd win -- which the play suggested was his primary business, when he wasn't 'off in the clouds.'
It is an interesting choice of allusions given the choice to participate in this political theater ongoing in Congress.
Requiescat in Pace Sonny Barger
Sonny Barger has died at 83. He was, most famously, the leader of the Hells Angels charter at the Altamont music festival's great disaster. The culture turned against them after that -- until then, the Angels were appearing regularly in movies as they were picaresque and picturesque, and readily available in Hollywood. However, it is my judgment that they were the only ones there who acted with honor.
Barger is less well known for his more recent life, but if you followed him more recently you'd have found that in his older years he became a devout Christian and helped to publish a series of charming children's books. He continued to ride motorcycles, write books, and to advocate against smoking (which caused him a vicious bout of throat cancer in earlier years).
His final message to the world ends, "Keep your head up high, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor."
UPDATE: Aggie says the first link bothers his antivirus, so here's a photo of the statement by Sonny announcing his death.
Beware Republicans Bearing Gifts
Really, you'd think after the Kavanaugh show trial that they'd have learned to just beware any single witness offering everything they wanted tied-up-in-a-bow, but without anyone who would corroborate her stories.
Maybe they thought it was too good to check.
...if Ornato calls her an outright liar? Major disaster. Not just a legal disaster, in that a key witness to potential criminal charges for Trump will have suddenly been blown up, but a political disaster for the committee. It’s unconscionable that they would put a witness on television to make an allegation that shocking without having run it down first. Republicans will say that if they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — separate fact from fiction with the SUV incident, there’s no reason to believe they did so in other aspects of the investigation.
I can't believe anyone is still using the word "unconscionable" with regard to Congress as if it didn't obviously apply to them all of the time. "Congress is unconscionable as usual," sure. "It would be unconscionable for Congress to..." as if that suggested they surely wouldn't do that thing, no.
A Shield Maiden
We are all familiar with the story of how Viking warrior women, known in the myths and sagas as shield maidens, were long thought purely mythical until archaeologists recently discovered war-trophy filled graves sometimes had female skeletons in them.
One such now has been facially reconstructed, sword wound to the forehead and all.
Only Government Agents Can Be Trust... Er...
First Sergeant is going to be up a tree about this.
When a Texas woman found an unsecured M4-style rifle inside an unlocked Texas National Guard truck Monday, June 27, she took matters into her own hands by, well, taking the weapon into her own hands.“Today, I got my hands on a fully automatic weapon thanks to the stupid, irresponsible #TexasNationalGuard #OperationLonestar who left their vehicle running & unlocked with guns inside on the side of the road,” Marianna Wright tweeted Monday. Operation Lone Star is the long-term deployment of Texas National Guard troops to the US-Mexico border within the state. “Guess the truck could’ve been mine, too. #PublicSafety, #Texas Style.”
If it had been a Hummer it could have been. They don't even have keys. I don't know why they left the keys in the pickup they were using, but that's commonly done with fire/rescue people in case somebody needs to move the thing out of the way of another responding vehicle.
A Good Scouting Story
It's been a long time since I heard anything but bad news about the Boy Scouts of America, but the Washington Post today has a story of a 15 year old Scout who escaped from the wreckage of the recent Amtrak derailment to comfort the dying truck driver.
Fifty Dead in San Antonio
There's a lot of noise coming out of DC and NY like always, but this is objectively the biggest story in the country today in spite of a relative lack of news coverage. I'm linking to a site from the trucking industry.
Officials say that the number of people who perished in a hot trailer in San Antonio on Monday has risen from 46 to 50 people, with 48 people pronounced dead at the scene and two other people dying in hospital care after suffering from heat related illness...While the vehicle involved bears the colors and DOT number of Alamo-based Betancourt Trucking and Harvesting, company leaders say that the vehicle information was “cloned” or illegally copied. They say that their truck has been used to haul grain from Harlingen to Progreso and has not been in San Antonio recently, and that their trailer is in the company lot.“Our [refrigerated trailer] is sitting right in the yard. That one in San Antonio is not our trailer,” Felipe Betancourt Jr told San Antonio Express-News.
These human smugglers have the resources not just to steal a truck but to repaint it exactly like another one whose data they steal and copy. If you saw it on the road you'd think it was a grain truck, and if you had the ordinary cop resources to run the tags and such you'd still think it was a grain truck -- one properly registered to a good company that has proper manifests and pays its taxes.
Meanwhile, these criminals don't care if they kill dozens of people in order to extract a little wealth from them for making the journey, and a little more from the people they are trafficking them to on the other end. That's a part of the story we're missing: they were going somewhere, with jobs lined up from people who don't care that they put people at these kinds of risks just so they, the employers, don't have to pay market wages to American workers.
A lot of people should be rounded up and hanged for this, and not just the cartels who back the smugglers.
A treat in store
For years I've eagerly awaited new pieces of news in the publishing world: (1) an evolutionary biology book willing to grapple with the huge hole in our scientific approach to the origin of life, and (2) a new book from Nick Lane, who writes some of the best popularized science I've ever found. Imagine my delight to see an email teaser this morning for Nick Lane's new book, Transformer. I can't actually get a copy until at least July 12, but I found an excerpt from the first chapter, including this:
If there is a view from modern biology, it is that genetic information structures the flow of energy and materials. To a first approximation, biology is understood in terms of information networks and control systems. Even the laws of thermodynamics, which govern the behaviour of molecules and their interactions and reactions, can be recast in terms of information – Shannon entropy, the laws of bits of information. But this view generates its own paradox at the origin of life – where does all this information come from? Within the realm of biology, we already have a simple explanation: natural selection sifts through random differences, favouring what works, eliminating what doesn’t, generation after generation. Information accumulates with function over time. We can quibble over details, but there is no conceptual difficulty here. At the origin of life, though, this view will not do. Place information at the heart of life, and there is a problem with the emergence of function, which is to say, the origin of biological information. . . .
Thinking about life only in terms of information is distorting. Seeking new laws of physics to explain the origin of information is to ask the wrong question, which can’t be answered precisely because it is not meaningful. A far better question goes back to the formative years of biology: what processes animate cells and set them apart from inanimate matter? The idea that there is a vital force, that life is fundamentally different from inanimate matter, was disproved long ago and is now only wheeled out as a straw man to burn – even though it’s an understandable illusion for anyone who has shared van Leeuwenhoek’s captivation with busy animalcules. Yet biochemistry – my own discipline, which deals with the flow of energy and materials through cells – has, with a few notable exceptions, been blithely indifferent to how this unceasing flux might have arisen, or how its elemental imprint could still dictate the lives and deaths of cells today, along with the organisms they compose. You and me.
Jim Mattis: Still a Marine
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis has finally gotten married after decades of putting his devotion to the Marine Corps and the rest of the U.S. military above his personal life. And he did it in the most Marine way possible...
Yes, with Elvis in attendance.
'Great' Advice
From VDH, on the "Great Reset":
Assume the worst when the adjective “great” appears in connection with envisioned fundamental, government-driven, or global political changes. What was similar between Lyndon Johnson’s massively expensive but failed “Great Society” and Mao’s genocidal “Great Leap Forward” was the idea of a top-down, centrally planned schema, cooked up by elites without any firsthand knowledge, or even worry, how it would affect the middle classes and poor.
Those precedents certainly didn't turn out as intended. Are there any counterexamples of centralized policies billed as "Great" by their advocates that actually did what they promised? "The Great Depression" doesn't count because it wasn't something people were advocating for being great, just something they were enduring.
First question
"Greetings, aspiring auditors. Welcome to your annual ethics exam. Let's get started! In your own words, explain whether you would have a problem with cheating on this exam."
Rich White Honky Blues
Hank Williams, Jr. has a big hit with his latest, an all-blues album put together following the death of his wife. You can listen on Spotify here.
3M Earplugs and Veteran Hearing Loss
I used these stupid things too, as probably did many of you. The WSJ suggests at least some of the guys may get paid back for their hearing loss.
Sun and Steel
Quilette reviews a book that sounds like I'd really enjoy it. Perhaps some of you would also.
An America Unready for War
For the first time in decades, America appears to be facing wars it is in no way ready to fight. In Europe, we have suddenly deployed tens of thousands of additional troops with no clear end-state.
The number of American troops in Europe has risen sharply in the four months since Russia invaded Ukraine, from about 65,000 in mid-February to 100,000 today.That increase, one of the most rapid U.S. military buildups on the continent in the post-Cold War era, has no clear end date or any obvious metrics to determine when troops could come home or be repositioned to other theaters such as the Indo-Pacific.Instead, their mission is to deter further Russian aggression and prevent any attack on NATO territory. That goal will prove difficult to measure and could justify a years-long mission as Russia and Ukraine settle into a slow, bloody war of attrition in the Donbas.The long-term consequences for the U.S. and its foreign policy priorities could be significant, some analysts say, because Washington likely can’t afford to maintain such troop levels in Europe over the long haul without sacrificing resources in the Pacific.
Speaking of the Pacific, Taiwan is facing increasing threats from Beijing, which is also loudly opposed to American military activities in the South China Sea.
We don't have the force structure for a two-theater conflict at this time, not even if one of them is limited to 'reassuring' Europeans with increased presence. We aren't going to get it, either, because recruiting has become a serious challenge in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle -- and the refusal by the military to hold anyone accountable.
“This is the start of a long drought for military recruiting,” said Ret. Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr of the Heritage Foundation, a think tank. He said the military has not had such a hard time signing recruits since 1973, the year the U.S. left Vietnam and the draft officially ended. Spoehr said he does not believe a revival of the draft is imminent, but “2022 is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.”
The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.
An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007.
Things are so bad that the Army is dropping the requirement for a high school education -- not even a G.E.D. will now be required. Retention is also bad, with big bonuses being pondered as a means of trying to keep the people who have been willing to serve in the past. The Army is also fronting cash bonuses for new recruits -- up to $50,000 just to join the Army. In spite of the economy being terrible, and worsening, military service is not appealing with the command environment so broken.
It's hard to remain a great power when your people stop being willing to fight for you, but it is a problem the US Federal Government has brought upon itself. If they cannot restore confidence, and find ways to educate youth to want to serve -- and to have the physical capacities to do so -- they will not remain a power that bestrides the world.
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