"Harry Jaffa vs. Willmoore Kendall Redivivus" Part I

This piece of D29's is too long to respond to in one sitting, so we'll break it up a bit for ease of discussion. 

The first things I want to go into, before we get into his discussion of the factions he opposes and what he thinks is the right way forward, is his argument about what his real opponents are doing. This whole article is essentially an unfriendly fight among friends, as it were; debates among members of the right wing about a problem and how to address it. It's being conducted aggressively, this debate, but it's a debate with a common set of goals assumed, including restoring the American republic and preserving its principles. 

His real enemies are the ones who are intending the opposite -- and they, he argues, are the people actually in power.

If America cannot recover the understanding of the founding in the way the founders understood the founding, then the crisis we face will forecast the destruction of the regime. But what right-thinking person can deny that America is truly the “last best hope” for the preservation of free government against the Biden Administration’s full-scale attempt to establish despotism in the name of preserving “democracy?” 

Every would-be despot knows that the quickest way to despotism is to promote anarchy: The reason is simple—anarchy is insupportable. Anarchy is the state of nature; civil society and the rule of law is designed to end the state of nature and the anarchy that makes human life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Almost any rule is preferable to the state of nature and anarchy. People will choose any rule—even despotism—to prevent anarchy. 

Yet, we see the Biden Administration deliberately promoting crime and race war. It undermines the nation’s sovereignty with its policy of open borders, which promotes illegal immigration—itself a crime leading to further crime. The Biden Administration is also clearly working to destroy the middle class, a long-standing goal of Democratic administrations. Its politicization of the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies is evident, as is its use of government agencies to interfere illegally in American elections. 

Skewing the economy by inflationary pressures to benefit ruling class elites and corporations at the expense of the lower and middle classes, and ensuring that the same ruling elites benefit from corrupt dealing with China are but a few of the myriad ways the administration actively promotes anarchy. 

The author (Edward J. Erler) is not very coherent in his remarks on the subject of anarchy, though I get where he's going with the idea. Anarchy is not 'the state of nature,' for example; it is still a form of human organization, just a voluntary one without coercive leadership. It may or may not be sufficient to hold back the dangers of the state of nature, and certainly faces challenges when it comes up against human forms of coercive organization. (Even on his own terms, the argument doesn't make sense; if the state of anarchy were the state of nature, it would not need to be supported in any case -- being natural, it would sustain itself.) We have to recognize that he's adopting a Hobbesian framework, and being imprecise in his discussion of alternatives.

In this framework, the aim of his enemies is to destroy the republic by destroying the order it establishes. This will cause ordinary people to fear the chaos around them, and therefore prime them to accept new despotic terms of rule instead of the constitutional republican order. 

There has already been a long discussion of whether this view is plausible. Throughout the Obama administration the watchword was, "Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence." We were, of course, assured of the intelligence of the President and his chosen band of friends, but the media assuring us of that intelligence would not know intelligence nor competence if it were bitten by them. (And that was the administration's opinion too:  Obama's right hand man, Ben Rhodes, described journalists as '26 year olds who literally know nothing.')

Some reasons exist to think that the series of crises of the last few years were at least partly effected in order to create opportunity for political changes that would cement the power structure in ways that would insulate the elite. These changes did in fact rise nearly to the level of chaos, and they came from several directions at once. I can understand how some might even think that the COVID matter was a planned excursion, given that it most likely occurred from a lab leak (which could have been on purpose), followed years of war games on how to deal with pandemics (which should have been the mark of reasoned planning by officials, but which a paranoid sensibility could see as preparation), happened to coincide with riots actually abetted by the government at several levels in order to weaken the police response and which led to frightened citizens, and which pandemic was used to justify a number of changes to election systems that coincided with fortification efforts that resulted in Biden's election. 

Yes, it all does look very suspicious; that doesn't mean the suspicions are accurate. Watching this crew handle the Afghanistan withdrawal, I am convinced they couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag. Even their military leadership seems somehow to have failed to learn how to plan a military operation. As weird as it may seem, veniality and senility, panic and in-group-thinking may explain the chaos better than any planned conspiracy. I don't think they have it in them: they may have sufficient ill will and evil intent, but they haven't the competence or intelligence. 

If that part is wrong, it doesn't make the rest of the analysis wrong: he might still be right about the argument he's having with his friends. It does lower the temperature of the overarching conflict, though. America is not being strangled by an evil elite intent on destroying it; America is dying of old age, as its once-vital institutions ossify, fail, and dissolve into incoherence and disorder. That is a natural process, one that states suffer even as men.

Tyranny Loves Emergency

Syria's "President," Bashar al-Assad, has waged war against his own people for quite some time. In addition to abusive secret police and the ordinary human rights abuses, he has destroyed neighborhoods and villages in order to create waves of refugees. That served the double purpose of reducing the population of elements he thought disloyal to himself within Syria, while also burdening Europe to such a degree that he was able to use the threat of further refugee waves in order to compel some concessions to himself. In that sense, he has used his internal war against his own people to create a weapon against neighboring states -- even powers such as Germany have bent before it. 

For a long time world leaders spoke in terms of him being a pariah who would, of course, eventually fall. However, since last month's devastating earthquake, there has been a move to deal with him because he's the only guy to deal with. If you want to help people in western Syria, you are going to have to talk with him.

Now in eastern Syria, where the Kurdish SDF exists and enjoys American support, it's possible to pass resources along lines that don't go through Assad's hands. Even there, though, Iranian-backed militia (including from Iraq) often control major river crossings. Since Iran supports Assad, it wouldn't hurt if you had his blessing to deliver aid even there. 

These sorts of emergencies (and this one is a legitimate emergency for many thousands of people) end up being used to paper over the sins and violations of tyrants. Not only do they force other people to 'forget' about past wrongs, the emergencies themselves are often invoked to expand government powers. It's a tragic cycle that empowers the worst sorts of humanity.

Background Bluegrass and Beautiful Photos

This isn't normal fare for the Hall, but I often listen to music like this in the background when I'm working, and this particular video has some stunning pics of the Appalachians, as well as black and white photos of people and life there maybe a generation or two ago, I guess. I thought some others here might enjoy it.

I've only been to the Appalachians once for a week, though I've driven through several times after that. It is an incredibly beautiful place.

The Centrality of the Declaration

D29 asked me to read and review this article on natural rights as crucial to the American project. It's a long piece that critiques a number of current positions on the American right. As a prerequisite, anyone interested in that should also read the author's earlier pieces in which he engaged in a debate over whether the Declaration of Independence is, or is not, central to understanding the Constitution.

There are established positions on both sides here. The division is close to exactly how he frames it. Positive law lawyers and jurists prefer that it not be, and that the Constitution stand on its own. Those who believe (as the author) that natural law is necessary as a founding stone to give left-and-right limits to what positive law can morally and acceptably do prefer to read the documents together.

Readers probably know that I am of the school that makes the Declaration, and not the Constitution, the central document. The Constitution is not the first incarnation of the American project; it replaced the earlier Articles of Confederation. Even they were not the first incarnation, but the revolutionary governments which rejected British royal authority under the terms of the Declaration. The positive law formulations of any particular government are temporary and may be set aside when they cease to work; the principles of the Declaration are eternal, and explain how and when positive law governments may be set aside.

This is the principle the founders mentioned in the Federalist, which our author duly quotes:

“The first question is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.”

As he goes on to point out, the Articles were 'the institutions [which] must be sacrificed' on that occasion, and the reason that they had to be sacrificed rather than amended was that they were inadequate to the only real purpose of government according to the Declaration:  defending the natural rights of the people. 

In any case, it's some good preliminary reading for the bigger discussion to come.

The NYT Loves to Lecture Georgia

Maureen Dowd wrote in a classic genre this week, the genre of New York Times pieces looking down on Georgia (which is itself a subset of the larger genre of New Yorkers looking down on the South). I'm not going to link to it, because who cares what New Yorkers think about how Georgians ought to live? If they don't like Georgia, they can stay right up there in the cold. As the late Lewis Grizzard said of similar complaints in a famous column thirty years ago, "I live in one of the most progressive cities in the world. We built a subway to make Yankees feel at home."

It really is a venerable genre of American letters, though. I once read a piece from its early decades, if I recall correctly, criticizing the South for holding a tournament in the style of Ivanhoe. Harpers in the era said Ivanhoe was responsible for the Civil War. Mark Twain himself partly agreed with the charge, naming Sir Walter Scott 'at least partly responsible.' 

There is some irony, though, in reading Dowd's lament for the Georgia that elected Jimmy Carter in favor of the one that exists today. The Georgia of those days was tightly divided between Democrats and other Democrats. The election of 1968 saw some Democrats (including Carter's successor as governor) voting for Republicans in order to vote against Democrat Lester Maddox, the noted segregationist who drove black men from the doors of his business with an axe handle. That Georgia had the Confederate battle flag on its state flag. The Georgia of today does not, and is apparently tightly divided between Democrats of Dowd's own sort and the Republicans she despises -- who, whatever else may be said of them, were never segregationists and never posed with the Confederate flag. 

Many good things were true of that Georgia too; it was the one into which I was born, and where I grew up and lived many years. There are lots of things about it I miss. Yet the last person who should complain about the changes is a writer from the New York Times. 

High Adventure

It is often hard to know if you've saved someone's life. I don’t always know with these search and rescue missions if we actually did save the people, just that they were alive when we put them on the ambulance; or, in other cases, if they were really in deadly danger. Mostly they're tourists and you never hear about them again, so you don't know how it went one way or the other.

That wasn't true today. This guy was succumbing to hypothermia when we got there, with a broken foot at the bottom of the second waterfall deep in a gorge. He was soaked to the bone because he fell in the river, and at three hundred pounds he was not coming out of there. His family knew where he was, but all of them together couldn't have brought him out. It was in the forties and more cold rain was falling.

The trails were precipices, slick with mud and sometimes so narrow that only one foot could step on it, with nothing but the gorge and the waterfall on the other side. It took hours to get him out, with ropes and pulleys and main strength, two feet at a time the whole way up. Then we had to carry him about a mile. That was as close as an ATV could get to where he had fallen, because for all that long distance the trails were too bad for one to travel.

He'll be ok now. A broken foot isn't that big a deal, not once you're safe and warm in a hospital instead of at the bottom of a cold, wet gorge. This time I know we brought somebody home. 

Active lies

A HotAir article reports on Vanity Fair's discovery of a mildly encouraging trend at the New York Times, to resist woke staff's demands for censorship and cancellation of their colleagues. The reasoning is odd, though.

The editorial staff correctly asserts that the accurate reporting of facts cannot be presumed to create a "hostile workplace." Next, it assumes that the woke crowd is really objecting to expert journalistic decisions from upper management. Management then makes the wild and unsupported leap of equating its journalistic decisions with fidelity to facts. It goes on to strike an even weirder note by asserting that objecting to the accurate reporting of facts is "activism," which it will not tolerate. The conclusion is that the NYT can allow debate over journalistic controversies, but must prohibit attacks on the "journalism" of colleagues.

This is very confused. All journalists should pursue accuracy whether or not they're also activists. A partisan journalist might report nothing but true facts, then inject a lot of opinion in the service of activism, as long as the opinion is clearly identified as such. This approach need not be particularly balanced or fair: a partisan might also choose to dwell only on the (true) facts and issues that support his cause, but he need not publish lies if he understands at all the duty of honesty. Once a writer jettisons the need for accuracy and values only the success of his cause, however, he abandons journalism for propaganda. What's more, he is the lowest sort of propagandist: not just a selective partisan but a deliberate liar.

I suspect that NYT management correctly appraises its partisan reporters as habitually dishonest. It's not a big problem for management, however, unless management disagrees with the rank and file over whether their particular form of dishonesty serves management's overaraching journalistic goals, which are every bit as partisan as those of the most crazed junior staff. Similarly, the junior staff aren't agitating to force management to be more truthful, only to agree with them more closely on which truths must be suppressed, and how viciously the group will excommunicate anyone who steps out of line.

This is how you get mainstream newsrooms--and presidential administrations--arguing with a straight face for the censorship of facts, not because they are untrue, but because knowledge of them might have a "dangerous" effect on the behavior of the unwashed masses. As always, it puts me in mind of Screwtape's advice to his nephew, the junior tempter, always to advise his target to "believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason."

Carl Schmitt

AVI links to a piece about Carl Schmitt, who might or might not be described as an important 20th century political philosopher. AVI says he hadn't encountered him before, and that is not surprising: I don't recall a single one of my philosophy professors ever saying his name or referring us to a reading of anything he wrote, not even the ones who apologized for Heidegger and included his work. Heidegger was an important 20th century philosopher who was also a devoted Nazi; Schmitt was a devoted Nazi who also engaged in philosophy (but more importantly to his own career, in law of a sort -- another devotee of the idea that 'legal' and 'lawful' might come apart, perhaps). 

The article AVI links ends up making both cases: that he was an important philosopher, because his ideas were influential in his lifetime and have become important in ours due to being picked up by contemporary totalitarians in China and across the worldwide authoritarian Left; and that he was not, because he was never able to escape from the legacy of Hobbes that he meant to criticize. 

I think there's ultimately some good philosophical advice about how to handle Schmitt at the end:

It should be no wonder, then, why despairing conservatives in the West might see echoes of Schmitt’s ideas in action everywhere, and then to logically look to him for understanding. And they absolutely should read him, just as they should read the cutting analyses of Marx. But, just as when reading Marx, they’d best do so while maintaining a very healthy wariness about his prescriptions...

It’s possible they would be better off listening, as Schmitt might have, to Ernst Jünger. He despised totalitarianism (and in particular “the Munich version – the shallowest of them all”) as the worst manifestation of liberal modernity, a force capable only of turning men into soulless automatons. Like his estranged friend, Jünger would also ask himself during the war what one could “advise a man, especially a simple man, to do in order to extricate himself from the conformity that is constantly being produced by technology?” In contrast to Schmitt, the answer Jünger, an atheist, eventually settled on was: “Only prayer.” For, “In situations that can cause the cleverest of us to fail and the bravest of us to look for avenues of escape, we occasionally see someone who quietly recognizes the right thing to do and does good. You can be sure that is a man who prays.”

Schmitt's legal theories end up setting aside law in favor of power. The author is correct that this is also the position of many on the authoritarian Left today. The shift to a 'friend/enemy dynamic' instead of traditional American politics has intensified (which AVI often calls tribalism).

He is also correct that the rule by permanent emergency is becoming a feature that our government, and not only ours, cannot seem to walk away from. Witness Justin Trudeau in Canada, who set aside everything of Canadian civil liberties by embracing emergency powers that would allow him to freeze the bank accounts of citizens on suspicion alone. Thereby he forbade them from participating in the market, buying or selling even basic goods, making mortgage payments -- all for the unproven 'crime' of having made donations to a lawful charity approved for such donations by his own government.

So I agree the article is worth reading, and Schmitt as well. I also agree that it is crucial not to lose sight of the transcendent and the divine while you do so. Or, as Nietzsche warned, "When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." 

Abyssus abyssum invocat. Beware.

"Debunked?"

With a hat tip to D29, a new book analyzes the election of 2020 with some care. The author is careful, for example, not to focus only on the one side of things: the book has chapters on fraud claims that obviously proved false, such as the 'Kraken' claims. The author is also careful to say that the Biden administration was the legal winner... just not the credible winner.

If you follow the third link, you'll find several excepts that give one claim each from each of the swing states. Some of them are pretty explosive even after all this time. I'll give just one of those, and leave you to read the rest if you find it intriguing. It's from Georgia, the one of these states I know best.

The number of unsupportable ballots found for [Atlanta's Fulton] county is forty-five times larger than Biden’s margin of victory for the entire state. Here are just five of the 15 findings:

1. Although it takes one second to scan a ballot, there are over 4,000 ballots with precisely the same timestamp -- to the second. Not possible.
2. 16,034 mail-in ballot authentication (sha) files were added several days after scanning. Also impossible.
3. There are no ballot images to support 17,724 final certified recount presidential votes.
4. There are no images to support 374,128 “certified” in-person votes, which is a violation of both federal and Georgia law.
5. 132,284 mail-in ballot images have no authentication files.

I assume the author's description of Biden as the "legal" winner is an attempt to stay out of jail by warding off, say, an FBI investigation into himself. I notice that he identifies several law violations even in just the article excerpts. That certainly sounds like a lawless election to me, from which therefore there could be no lawful winner. 

I suppose it is no surprise that a nation that can no longer define the difference between a man and a woman also makes fuzzy distinctions between lawful and legal. 

Expert Advice

It would be a shame if a government shutdown were to cause us to have to do without such sage advice from expert professionals.

WARNO: Grim’s Hall 20th Anniversary Celebration

According to my calculations, St. Patrick’s Day of this year will mark the first full day of Grim’s Hall’s third decade. This happens to be a Friday, and St. Patrick’s Day. Prepare appropriately. 

Luxury

If I become Empress of all the Known Worlds, I'd like this to be my private office.

Unthinkable but Inevitable

Many times in life, physical forces make inevitable a thing that human beings find unthinkable. Some things are unthinkable because they don't seem logical, but reality doesn't obey strict logic (as physical objects are unique and logical objects are alike by kind). Other times the consequences of the thing are so horrible that the mind refuses to think about it. Yet there can come a point at which that thing, however impossible to consider, is no longer avoidable. The ship is going to sink, and nothing can save it now.

I think all this talk about a 'national divorce' is close to that category. Not for ordinary people; many and almost most of us not only can think about it, we can see the value of it. 

...we’re almost certainly talking about somewhere between 100 and 150 million Americans who think it’s entirely possible the country may need to be split into red/blue sections or alternately, who expect a civil war to crank up. In other words, we’re not talking about a few cranks here. This is a mainstream belief, and it seems entirely possible that we could reach a MAJORITY of Americans that would like to see the country split up in the next few years.

The advantages of the Union are so powerfully compelling to the establishment, though, that neither party can entertain the thought. They can't talk about it as something that might really happen; and because they control the conventional levers of power, they think that settles the matter.

It doesn't, though. At some point if trends continue, the decision will be made without the government... in spite of the government... to put an end to the government. That does not necessarily entail violence. The government in Washington may continue to meet, but it will no longer rule because people will no longer obey -- and no power exists that can compel 330 million people to obey a power they no longer recognize.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that the matter is inevitable yet, but it's getting closer to becoming so. If people in power are serious about avoiding this they need to start thinking.

Powerhouse

Yesterday was the 80th birthday of one of the more memorable cartoon songs.

Smartphones, Social Media, and the Youth

I have observed several discussions about this subject led by some of you. I want to think about it in terms of the danger to military recruitment of a youth that seems increasingly to be struggling with mental illness (as well as obesity and drug use). This, then, is what we used to call a 'bleg,' i.e. a request by a blogger for links and information. What are your favorite pieces on these issues, which make and defend what you consider to be the most important points? 

Tuesday Morning Blues

 Albert King with a young Stevie Ray Vaughn back in 1983

Overcharging

Alec Baldwin blew it big time when he carelessly shot his camerawoman on set, and shouldn't get kid-glove treatment just because he's a rich, powerful Hollywood celebrity. Still, "enhancing" his criminal charges because a firearm was involved looks to me like prosecutorial game-playing.

We add firearms enhancements to other criminal charges on the theory that a firearm provides a criminal with a visible threat to use again his victims, and that its use converts an only moderately dangerous criminal enterprise into a deliberately deadly one. That reasoning shouldn't apply to an actor who is holding firearm as a prop on a film set. The prosecution hasn't argued that Baldwin intended to hurt the camerawoman, only that the gun had been negligently handled by a group of people that included Baldwin, partly because he should have checked it personally before pointing it at anyone, and partly because he was a principal in the production, rather than a mere actor with no effective control over safety procedures on the set. There was no alleged separate criminal enterprise for the firearm to enhance. I'm satisfied, therefore, to see the "firearms enhancement" charge dropped.

Mashed turnips

We found a Palestinian cookbook with a recipe for mashed turnips with greens, onions, and feta cheese. We added the bacon on general principles.

Asheville Celtic Festival

Albannach throwing down. If I can’t hear tomorrow, this is why. 

It’s good to see ladies attempting the Caber toss. 

More snowflakes

We got what probably will be our last little cold snap. Today is sunny and mild, but the snowflakes keep coming.

Footsteps

A Stoic Insight

….from the Drifting Cowboys band, backing up a singer of some small renown. 

A Cooling Fire

Over at HxA, a new paper suggests that academic Wokeness may be burning out.

In Compact Magazine I recently argued that, by several measures, the “Great Awokening” seems to be winding down. Starting in late 2021, and continuing throughout 2022, there appeared to be a moderation trend across many social indicators. I was curious whether this pattern could be observed in academic research as well. I was also eager to replicate Rozado’s general findings in alternative data sets. 

Analyzing trends in different academic databases (described below) over the last 23 years, I found roughly the same patterns of behavior that Rozado observed. There was a significant uptick in research focused on various forms of bias and discrimination starting in 2011 and persisting through 2020. Rozado’s findings were therefore not an artifact of the specific data set he used but replicated across a range of scholarly databases. 

However, the additional two years of data I was able to analyze were also quite revelatory. After 2020, there were declines across the board in published research focused on identity-based bias and discrimination. Academic scholarship seems to have passed peak “woke.”

It would not be difficult to guess why 2020 would have been the point at which people began to rethink their commitment to this course of inquiry, and its wisdom. That was the year that riots on these issues erupted around the country, the police went into hiding in large parts of the nation, and crime began to surge -- as it continues to do. Over almost the same period, rape is up 38%(!!); aggravated assault, 29%(!) murder, 26%(!); violent crime overall, 12%.

This coincides, by the way, with a marked decline in property crime. People aren't stealing more; they're stealing less. They are raping, assaulting, and killing more. 

It may seem ironic that this correlates with an intense period of interest in justice, and opposing traditional prejudices. The correlation would not surprise a Traditional Conservative of the 19th Century, of course; he might have pointed out that the whole point of social controls, which are often found oppressive, is to corral and shape the parts of society that are otherwise inclined to violence. 

I think it offends contemporary conservatives to suggest that policing is or ought to be oppressive, let alone that its function is to oppress rather than to gently guide, serve, protect. Yet I observe that it does so: if the police bother to show up at all, the best you can hope for is that they will leave again without taking any actions that are harmful to people on the scene. They may arrest, taser, shoot, beat; they may initiate a process that leads to chains, fines, or imprisonment. Your life is never going to improve by meeting a police officer, not as such things are done these days; if you're as lucky as possible, they'll just go away again and leave you alone.

[Contrast with the Fire and Medical services, which often help people they encounter. I have met many people who were heartily grateful to see rescue or paramedic personnel.]

One can guess how academics, inclined to thought and -- increasingly -- trained by their education towards sensitivity of feelings, would be deeply moved by a sober assessment of how awful policing is. Even more so, our prison system, which is massive and undisciplined, full of sexual assault and rape that it barely addresses which much of society seems to regard as an additional part of the intended punishment. Full, too, of racist gangs that further the worst sort of the very impulse that 'social justice' thinks it intends to counter, not always noticing that they usually end up feeding the ideas of racial solidarity and resentment rather than cooling those things.

No, it's the Gods of the Copybook Headings again, which a famous 19th century Traditional Conservative warned of in his poem. It may not seem right; it may not seem kind. It may in fact not be in any sense kind or merciful. Societies do it anyway because, well, the alternative is that 'the Gods of the Copybook Headings/ with terror and slaughter return!'

Perhaps some day we might find a better way; but this was not the one. Yet as the article notes in closing, the end of the fire only means living among its ruins; it won't put anything back the way it was, if indeed it were right to do so.

Brutalist tromp-l'oeil

Should Ron DeSantis win the Republican presidential nomination over Donald Trump? Is he more electable, would he do a better job? I don't know, but I do suspect that the frantic opposition to DeSantis in the press is scraping the bottom of the barrel pretty hard in dreaming up attacks: he's a fascist, he's an authoritarian, he suppresses voters, etc. In a sign of unusual desperation, Jeff VanderMeer has latched onto a startling accusation: DeSantis's minions are so mean to the press that they "coarsen" the discourse and make

almost every issue in Florida a slow grind to move through, but also as gray and lifeless as a Brutalist trompe-l’oeil.

As HotAir's David Strom notes, that's a pretty obscure complaint. Myself, I'm aware of Brutalism, and of tromp-l'oeil, but the intersection between the two is a new one on me.

Wiki summarizes brutalist architecture as "characterised by minimalist constructions that showcase the bare building materials and structural elements over decorative design. The style commonly makes use of exposed, unpainted concrete or brick, angular geometric shapes and a predominantly monochrome colour palette...." Fair enough. Brutalist paintings tend to jar the eye with visual and thematic ugliness. In contrast, the style called tromp-l'oeil, or "fool-the-eye," normally connotes decorative surfaces that create an illusion of space or three-D objects. The effect can be surreal or disturbing, but more often is wish-fulfilling and pretty.

While I can do without Brutalism, a serious buzzkill, tromp-l'oeil is the essence of fun, to the point of flippancy. Nor is it easy to grasp what DeSantis's meanypants PR pro Christine Pushaw is doing to make public discourse gray and lifeless. If anything, she should be accused of sacrificing sober fairness in service of vivid and effective humor. She punctures humorless windbags like VanderMeer with memorable efficiency.

Here's some nice tromp-l'oeil.

Here's some brutalism:

This is the closest I've found to something that might be called tromp-l'oeil brutalism:

It could be called too cute by half, or reviled for inducing queasiness, but I'd never say it was gray and lifeless.

Hoaxters

It's mildly encouraging that the Columbia Journalism Review published a four-part series examining the abject failure of the U.S. press to meet any reasonable standards of journalistic ethics or competence in the Russiagate hoax. Having encountered unexpected difficulty in finding a convenient link to the four parts of the series in order, I've compiled the following:

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

The NYT, it seems, is beyond embarassment or self-reflection, but the series is worth reading for everyone else.

Valentine's soup

Lamb and beet borscht:

Valentine’s Day Tip

“Hey, it’s Valentine’s Day. What’d you get for your wife?”

Manure. 

And mulch. February is a good time to start preparing your garden. 

Amateurs get flowers. Pros help her grow her own flowers all year. 

The Wife’s Bike

Chris Stapleton to sing National Anthem

For those of you who remember the interlude of musical analysis back during Dry January, Chris Stapleton was the young man doing David Allan Coe's "Tennessee Whiskey." You can be sure he'll take it seriously.

I won't be watching the game tonight, because who could possibly care about Philadelphia versus Kansas City? Even the Eagles fans are mostly looking forward to the riots after rather than the game itself. 

More Retroactive Censorship

The next post Google decided to censor -- and this one it killed outright, no mere 'content warning' page -- was from 2011. It was a post about then-Governor Nathan Deal being labeled a Nazi by some activist. Back in 2011 that sort of thing was still remarkable enough to have drawn a comment; these days it's a dime-a-dozen sort of deal that probably wouldn't even raise eyebrows. Nathan Deal had been my Congressman, though, and I thought it was a striking thing to say given that he was clearly -- whatever else you might want to say about him -- not a National Socialist, nor indeed a socialist of any description. 

Google claims that the post violated its standards on 'malware and viruses,' which is hard to imagine unless one of the pages I linked to back in 2011 has been repurposed as a malware site. Whatever; clearly the ship has sailed on trying to point out how absurd it is to wield the "Nazi" language in ordinary American politics. Clearly too this algorithmic purging of the blogosphere is going to go on for a while. 

Timely How-To from the Babylon Bee

13 Ways To Tell If Your Priest Is An Undercover FBI Agent

Feb 10, 2023 · BabylonBee.com

So there you are, trying to worship peacefully, and then out of nowhere a priest tackles you to the ground and arrests you for radical traditionalism because you spoke in Latin. Now you're in Guantanamo Bay being waterboarded about where you were on January 6.

How'd you get here? You didn't keep your eyes open for FBI priests!

Here's how to discern that your parish is under federal control:

1. He's wearing aviators and an earpiece with his vestments

2. The new confessional booth looks a lot like a white van with FBI agents in it

Click over for the rest

In related news: FBI Investigating Plot Inside The Catholic Church To Worship Something Other Than The State

A Man Can Stop and Take His Rest

Odysseus wasn't too proud to claim to be a beggar, though I don't think he ever claimed to be a slave. A slave at least was due some food; but a beggar man was free.

Reading

I'm recovering from a minor procedure and milking it for all it's worth as an excuse to hang out all day listening to books on tape and crocheting snowflakes, which is what I was doing anyway. I note that I last posted on Jan. 20 in the throes of snowflake mania. Nothing has changed. At this rate I'll cover the entire house in snowflakes and have enough left over to decorate the trees of everyone I know. Two books I can highly recommend: "Index, a history of the" was the contribution of pre-surgery houseguests, and it's one of those wonderful combinations of an offbeat topic handled by a sparkling mind, someone you'd love to be seated next to at a long dinner. The other, also nonfiction, is "The Rescue Artist," about an eccentric undercover Scotland Yard detective with an unusually good record for recovering stolen artwork. Pix from the annual oyster extravaganza last weekend, starting inside and finishing out by the firepit:

Heads Up

 Be that.

I just got a phishing email titled Your post titled "910 Group" has been put behind a warning for readers, and it claims to concern my post on grimbeorn (Grim's Hall) 'way back in December 2006.

I have no such post; I'm not sure I was reading this blog then. There is such a post, and it has no comment thread; although it is behind the "warning" block, and the warning block demands a login in order to view the post.

I don't think even Google (now Alphabet) reaches that far back to manufacture warnings. I'm running a deep scan with my malware package.

Eric Hines

The Religious as Enemies of the State

Today Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post has a piece written out of a poll about "Christian Nationalists," which asserts that those who believe that America ought to be guided by Christianity are also racists; D29 links to a similar piece about an FBI analyst's concern that Catholics who prefer the Latin Mass are 'white supremacists.' 

It concerns me that our national elite has come around to the view that having traditional beliefs is itself evidence of both racism and also being an enemy of the American project as they conceive it. There are a number of reasons to prefer Latin that I can think of, not one of which is remotely connected to race. 

More, the use of Latin explicitly removes the religious experience from the province of American or any other nationalism. While it was once the language of the Roman Empire, no nation now speaks it as a national tongue: one could even say that it has become in that sense a language of the Otherworld. My maternal grandfather once told me only to read a King James Bible because it was the only true word of God. Doubtless Jennifer Rubin would understand that as a racist claim, because the KJV is in English and an English that is tied to America's European (and explicitly British) heritage. Yet if you shift off of the KJV to the Sacra Vulgata, aren't you also rejecting the idea that English is the language of the word of God?

Rubin's decision that Evangelicals are racists mostly hangs on a single question from the poll, which asks if you believe that it is God's will that America sprang forth as a nation where European Christians would set an example for the world. She describes that as explicitly racist, although there was a time (not long ago) when "European" would have been seen by racists as a term covering many different races. More, though, the view the question is asking about is older than the nation itself: in 1630, John Winthrop gave a sermon about a City on a Hill that held:

Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles. We have professed to enterprise these and those accounts, upon these and those ends. We have hereupon besought Him of favor and blessing. Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.

That sermon, once well-known to Americans from school, echoed through our national discourse as recently as Ronald Reagan's presidency. The sentiment that the American project was a City on the Hill endorsed by God was probably a non-controversial view in the generation before mine; it is the sort of thing John Wayne might have said in a movie devoted to American patriotism. I imagine it was taught explicitly in schools; it was certainly implied in school as late as my own early education. I can easily recall hearing versions of it from my elders when I was young; indeed, as an explanation from a religious elder that God had willed the South to lose the Civil War so that a unified America might be strong enough to stop Hitler and the Holocaust. (That it also happened to stop slavery did not come up, though that is at least as good a piece of natural theology.)

These were the people who fought Americas wars, who built and then served in her institutions, who made the nation whose elite now considers them enemies. They do so out of a conviction that their own understanding of these principles is the only right one; they do so without even troubling to understand what the people they are condemning understand these words to mean. 

Claim: The US Blew Up Nord Stream 2

The claim is being raised by Seymour Hersh, whose track record includes some significant reports of US government misconduct: the My Lai massacre, Abu Ghraib, and Watergate being examples of his having been right. There are other examples where whether his claims were right or not remain disputed, especially his suggestion that Assad did not use chemical weapons as accused during the (ongoing) Syrian civil war. His claims about the killing of Osama bin Laden were widely rejected by authority figures.

This one is also being attacked and denied by authorities and their allies in the press, who are calling him a "discredited" journalist and pointing out that his piece is helpful to Putin. Well, his piece about Abu Ghraib was helpful to al Qaeda, but that didn't make it false. I didn't want to believe it, but in the end he turned out to be right about that -- as he had been right about My Lai, which I would also prefer had not been the case. 

So here's the thing: somebody blew up the pipeline. That's a hard fact. The list of institutions that could have done it without raising alarm in waters heavily patrolled by Russia, Sweden, and NATO is very short. The US military is one of the small number of names on that list.

The naval exercise he claims was used partly to cover the planting of the bombs really happened; the Navy dive school he identifies really exists. He's right, too, about the prestige aspects of the Navy that make those divers far less glamorous within the Navy than their SEAL comrades; more importantly, he's right about the requirements for reporting to Congress that would make a SEAL operation less likely to have remained secret for six months. 

There are other facts that could be checked. One of them is his claim that the waters chosen lack major tidal currents. I don't know how to check that, but it should be possible. A lot of the other claims can't be verified without investigative resources and authorities. 

I don't know if the claim is true or not, but I can't see anything in it that looks false on its face. If the claim is true, the Biden administration committed an act of war against Germany as well as Russia -- and, again if true, in a manner expressly designed to avoid consulting with or informing Congress of its intent to do so. 

"Like saying Italians..."

You probably shouldn't take pop culture seriously as a source of ideas.

"It's crazy," said Rogan. "Did you see him sitting next to Ilhan Omar, where she's apologizing for talking about it's all about the Benjamins? Which is just about money. She's talking about money. That's not an antisemitic comment, I don't think that is. Benjamins are money." He went on: "The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That's like saying Italians aren't into pizza. It's f****** stupid."

Rogan later said about Oman: "Whether you agree with her or not, she has a bold opinion, and that opinion is not her own. There's many people that have that opinion, and they should be represented.

...

Sharing a snippet of the podcast on Twitter, Baddiel, the author of Jews Don't Count, wrote... "For the hard of understanding, 'Jews are into money' is not like 'Italians are into pizza. Because unless my history lessons really missed something out, no-one has exterminated a large section of the entire Italian community because of their love for pepperoni."

This debate makes me feel dumber for having encountered it. The only reason to even mention it is that while everyone knows that 'pizza' as we have it here in America is American, not actually Italian, not everyone knows that pepperoni isn't either. If an American were to naively ask for a 'pizza with pepperoni' in Italy, they would be very surprised at the flatbread topped with peppers that came out. 

All analogies always break, though we have no choice but to reason with them as they are the only tool that works for most practical situations. This whole set of analogies, however, are too weak to hold any weight whatsoever. 

Rogan does kind of have half a point, though: Omar is clearly antisemitic, but she really does authentically represent her particular district.  The people who vote for her are disproportionately bad people just like her. 

There's a kind of democratic authenticity to that. Our system tries to express all three of the Aristotelian divisions of government: government by the many, few, and one. Congress is thus the democratic branch to the executive's tyrannical branch and the judiciary's oligarchical branch; and the House is the democratic wing of the democratic branch, with the Senate also representing a kind of oligarchy (though less so than before the 17th Amendment). If it is important for a democratic branch to authentically represent its voters and their interests, arguably she does the job better than anyone else could. 

What Does a Stick of Eels Get You?

I recently discovered Historia Cartarum and a fun article there about paying rent with eels in medieval England. So what does a stick of eels get you? Dr. John Wyatt Greenlee, medieval and cartographic historian, attempts to answer that question. Here's his intro:

A question that has come up several times in conversations with people about eel-rents concerns the value of a stick of eels.  The records tell us that X mill owed Y abbey Z sticks of eels per year…but what does that really mean?  How much value is the abbey actually getting in their taxes?  This is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat difficult question to answer.

There are very few handy charts telling us how much a stick of eels is worth, and it is difficult assessing this type of question from monastery records.  Part of the problem comes from the fact that there are often several centuries between records of payment types, meaning that it can be difficult to make assessments of eel equity when rents shifted to currency.  This is further complicated by the fact that eels had a specific value to monks that went beyond their more general market worth:  since they were not considered flesh, they could be eaten during Lent and during other Church celebratory days that banned meat.

However, there are places where the archive lets us make an educated guess, and so here is a back-of-the-napkin attempt at finding the value in a stick of eels.

Click over for the math. And if you decide to pay your Cornell U tuition in eels this year, he'll give you an idea of how many you'll need to bring to the bursar's office.

Now That Would Be Edgy

The one I heard about today sounded like a joke to me: red leather? Fire imagery? Fake horns on their heads? That wouldn't have been edgy in 1979, after that decade of music. By 1985 Iron Maiden would have made it seem tame and mainstream. 

Backup performers in dominatrix outfits? Displays intended as affronts to mainstream Christians? Have you heard of Madonna? She's not dead yet. Heck, neither is Ozzy Ozbourne, though I hear he decided to quit touring this year. 

These kids should work on being able to write riffs like Black Sabbath. The parody was already done by Spinal Tap, long before they were born. 

Or, if they really want to be edgy, learn to sing opera. I guess you won't get invited to the awards show, though.

More Motorcycle Problems for the Boy

As I am sure I've mentioned before, my son -- who is not actually still a boy -- purchased for himself a used motorcycle some time ago. It was a good starter bike, a 2007 Yamaha V-Star 650 Classic. However, he bought it from a guy who'd wrecked it and done only cosmetic repairs, and had left it sitting outside in all weather for many months. It looked great, in other words, but it has a lot of problems. 

In a way that's also a good 'starter' experience, as you learn most about motorcycle maintenance by doing motorcycle maintenance. Today's problem is an electrical problem, which are the worst in terms of diagnosis. I asked my buddy who builds electrical motorcycles to have a look at the wiring diagram while I pulled everything apart with my son and we traced connections and tested them with a multi-meter.

In the end my friend and I came to the same conclusion independently, which is that it was probably the starter solenoid. That's weird, because I just replaced it last summer to address another one of the many problems this bike has had. However, it's a cheap part and an easy swap ("easy" after disassembling the whole bike to test various electrical connections and relays). It's also a part that fails commonly because it takes a lot more current than any other relay on the bike -- the only real drain on the battery is when the starter circuit dumps current through the solenoid to the starter motor in order to turn the engine over until it starts. After that the bike generates enough electricity through normal operation to recharge the battery and operate all the other electrical systems.

Hopefully another new solenoid will fix the issue.

VFD Gets its Money’s Worth

The ‘day’ opened with a midnight chimney fire, then a brush fire in afternoon, at which one of the trucks got stuck on muddy ridgeline precipice.

That took hours to free; then we had a meeting and evening training class.  

I feel like I really earned my pay. As my father used to say, “If we keep this up we’ll get a raise, and next year we’ll make double nothing.”

Earl Hooker

While he was most famous for his slide guitar, which used standard tuning instead of the more usual open tuning and a short slide that allowed him to switch between slide and fretted playing, I can't find any videos of him playing slide. He was born in Mississippi in 1930 and died from tuberculosis in 1970, but in his day he was an influential blues player in Chicago and touring the US and Europe. John Lee Hooker was his cousin and he was influenced by Robert Nighthawk (early electric blues guitarist) and T-Bone Walker. Some of you may recognize this tune

Maybe from here

 

More below the fold.

Grim's Chuck Wagon Chili

Yesterday's recipe posting has me feeling like posting some more about food. There's a lot of good food writing on the internet, and I doubt that I have a great deal to offer in most areas. However, I make many good chili dishes in various forms. Here's another one.

There are many sorts of chili, I have learned in a life of loving chili. One of the chief divisions lies in whether one sears the meat first, or boils the meat first. Another lies in whether there are or are not beans included; another in whether the chilies used are green, dried brown, or red. 

This is a red chili in the old Texas style. Meat is boiled raw rather than seared first.

2 pounds ground beef, 20%+ fat

Sufficient water to cover the beef

Additional beef fat ('suet'), up to 1/2 cup if beef is lean

Dried onions, 1/2 cup (add additional onion powder if desired)

Dried garlic to taste

1/2 to 1 TBS tomato powder (or substitute tomato paste)

1/4-1/2 cup dried New Mexico red chilies or guajillo chilies

2 ancho peppers

Chipotles to taste (at least 3, more if you like spicy chili)

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp oregano

2 tsp sage

1 tsp black pepper (fresh ground)

Lime or lemon juice to deglaze

Salt to taste

Add meat to cast iron Dutch oven. Cover with water; add suet. Boil, covered with iron lid, until beef is soft. Add dried onions and garlic, some salt but not yet enough to finish.

Roast peppers and cumin in black iron, add water to soften once roasted and hot; puree; add to Dutch oven.

Add aromatics (sage, oregano, black pepper) while boiling.

Cook until flavors are well combined. Deglaze with squeezed lime or lemon 5 minutes before finishing. Alternatively, remove from heat (covered) while still boiling, and allow to rest overnight in a cool place. Return to boiling to sterilize. Cool and salt to finished taste preference.

A Plethora of Potentials

The local college that is putting on the EMT course for us also has training in fire fighting, motorcycle safety, casino gambling, bartending, and law enforcement.

That's quite a range. People used to tell me that studying the humanities was the road to maximizing your potential, but I don't think there's nearly as much spread between creative writing and history these days.

Grim’s Accidental Bacon-Garlic Chocolate Chip Cookies

In the manner of my grandmother, when I cook bacon I reserve the grease for later use. (I also reserve beef tallow and general pork lard.) The other day I sautéed some garlic in the bacon fat first, and just added it to my standard stock because when don’t I add garlic to a dish?

So tonight I found that my wife had purchased chocolate chips, which indicated to me that she wanted chocolate chip cookies. Therefore, I made cookies. Absently I forgot that the bacon grease was garlicked, and used it as I usually do. I realized my mistake when I smelled it baking.

It turns out that bacon-garlic chocolate chip cookies are fantastic. So, here is an opportunity for you to share in the benefits of my fortunate mistake. 

Recipe:

Prior to baking, cook approx. 6 strips of bacon (I use applewood) in a cast-iron skillet. Add some fresh, crushed and diced garlic right at the end to infuse the bacon grease with garlic flavor. Remove bacon and garlic; use this for other dishes such as sandwiches, quesadillas, as a pizza topping, etc. Reserve bacon grease with garlic infusion.

Grim’s Accidental Bacon-Garlic Chocolate Chip Cookies:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. I keep a pizza baking stone in my bread oven, but you probably don't need one.

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup garlicked bacon grease (if you didn't quite get 1/2 cup of grease, make up the rest of the 1 cup total fat with more butter)

1/2 cup granulated white sugar

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 full cup packed brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp maple syrup

2 eggs

2 1/2 cups flour*

1 12oz package semi-sweet chocolate chips

Soften butter and bacon grease; whip together with sugars, baking soda, and vanilla until fluffy. Continue beating on a lower speed as you add each egg. Add chocolate chips. Add flour in divisions to allow easy admixture. Spoon onto greased baking sheets; bake until cookies are browned across the top and at the edges, then remove to cool. Switch to cooling racks after approx. one minute. Eat hot and gooey, or save for later consumption. 

* I used 1.25 cups King Arthur whole red wheat flour, and 1.25 cups White Lily Self-Rising flour; you can substitute any 2.5 cups of all purpose or similar baking flour. I like this mixture because the red wheat flour is very nutty, but then benefits from the lightness of the White Lily and its additional rising products. White Lily is the only flour capable of producing Southern biscuits, which are extremely light and tender. The red wheat flour is heavy and dense, so this mix gives you the nuttiness without the weight. A regular all purpose flour is probably just fine. 

The Feast of Brigid

There is an ongoing debate about whether Brigid was an early abbess and saint whose life became intertwined with stories about an earlier pagan goddess of the same name; or, alternatively, if the folk tales later thought to be survivors of an earlier pagan tradition were themselves just spinoffs of the stories ordinary people came to tell about St. Brigid. 

It is emblematic of our age that Ireland has decided to elevate her status to that of a third patron, along with Patrick and Columba, a celebration that entails her being depicted as a "kick-ass warrior poet and goddess" by the celebrity appointed to honor her. As Irish Times dryly noted, "Few people have described St Patrick as kick-ass." Just as per the recent post here and at AVI's place on the way in which Jesus was differently depicted by different ages, though, the 'kick ass warrior goddess' is the only one our age knows how to value; if she is to be important to our culture at all, she perforce must be important in that way. 

What Brigid was really good at -- both the myths and the saint-stories agree -- was multiplication. She was reputed to be able to encourage or bar fertility, including of a pregnant nun (as one can multiply by zero, I suppose): "A certain woman who had taken the vow of chastity fell, through the youthful desire of pleasure, and her womb swelled with child. Brigid, exercising the most potent strength of her ineffable faith, blessed her, causing the child to disappear, without coming to birth, and without pain." This has led to a pro-abortion NGO being named after the Catholic saint, which is an irony of ironies; what the Church thinks about that particular saint-story, I have not heard. 

Irish Central has a collection of prayers.

The Postmodern Bill of Rights

The Orthosphere is being satirical today; Satyrical, even, in places.

"1. Congress shall make no law respectful of religion...."

Jaroslav Pelikan’s Life and Works

 "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name." – Jaroslav Pelikan

In a discussion over at AVI’s, james brought up Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006), a scholar I don’t believe I’d ever heard of before but, after a bit of investigation, I truly wish I had.

Wikipedia tells us he was “an American scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology, and medieval intellectual history at Yale University.” A bit of a prodigy, he had earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary and PhD from the University of Chicago by the age of 22. He spent most of his career teaching at Yale. Coming from a line of Lutheran pastors, he also was ordained a Lutheran pastor early in life. Later in life he and his wife both became Eastern Orthodox Christians. 

Wikipedia gives a humorous anecdote from his life:

While at Yale, Pelikan won a contest sponsored by Field & Stream magazine for Ed Zern's column "Exit Laughing" to translate the motto of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary & Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association ("Keep your powder, your trout flies and your martinis dry") into Latin. Pelikan's winning entry mentioned the martini first, but Pelikan explained that it seemed no less than fitting to have the apéritif come first. His winning entry:

Semper siccandae sunt: potio
Pulvis, et pelliculatio.

The 30+ books he wrote which are listed on Wikipedia should provide something interesting for anyone in the Hall interested in Christianity, I would think. I’ll put the full list below the fold, but AVI recommends JesusThrough the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (1985). James read one of his 5-volume history, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, 5 vols. (1973–1990). 

Titles that also grabbed my attention included Bach Among the Theologians (1986), Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (1993), Faust the Theologian (1995), and What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint (1998). However, almost all of his work sounds interesting for me.

His life and more on his works are given over at Christian Scholars Online.

I’m happy james and AVI brought him to my attention. If you two read this, thank you!

I’ve included a long-ish selection of his works (copied from Wikipedia) below the fold.

Fancy "Dinner"

You have probably seen Hollywood movies in which, for a joke, an intensely masculine character played by someone like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold is taken to a restaurant at which tiny pieces of food are served as "dinner." I was taken to one such restaurant in D.C. during this last week, and the experience was much as Hollywood portrays it for laughs. 

The menu was 90%+ a wine list, the less said about which the better. Though I was a guest and all such expenses were to be covered, the prices were so outlandish that I refused to spend even someone else's money on such a thing. In any case there were cocktails and champagnes provided as part of the meal, which already required breaking my January fast out of politeness to my host, so I did not feel that anything beyond water was necessary in addition.

The first course was what turned out to be a fried piece of pigeon, which was quite delicious but perhaps one and a half ounces fully cooked. It was arranged with a symmetrically tiny piece of some sort of hash, the two miniscule pieces of food arranged on a full-sized dinner plate that was decorated with a geometric drizzle of some sort.  

The second course was pasta, and there were approximately four spoonfuls of it. It was good, as was the pigeon -- "squab" -- but it was obviously not intended to serve as a meal for a grown man.

The main course was billed as "surf & turf," and I think I know what that means: it means a steak served alongside a lobster or fish or the like. In this case it was about 4 oz. of slow-cooked beef shank, which again was very tasty; the 'surf' portion turned out to be the sauce provided on the side, which was made with ingredients that included fish. 

Now this whole dinner was served over the course of two hours, with many lectures from wait staff about the particular ingredients used and cultural reference points -- one of the drinks they served was "Death in the Afternoon," which required some discussion of Hemmingway -- so I was good and hungry by the time the meal ended. 

All was forgiven, however, when I returned to my hotel and found that the 'gift box' they had provided diners on the way out the door turned out to be -- I am not making this up -- an elaborately-wrapped cheeseburger. It would have been better hot, but the joke was well-played. 

Next time, all the same, I'd prefer a real steak sizable enough that I won't mind if you keep the fish.

Dragons of Occoquan

While waiting for my evening flight, I visited the little riverside town of Occoquan. 

Some Blues for Friday Night

 

Wild Coincidence

While here in DC, I caught up with a good friend from the Iraq war. We randomly went into an Italian restaurant because the place he wanted to eat was closed. This flag was in a frame there. The certificate has a picture of the Al Faw palace in Iraq, which was on Victory South where we were stationed together. The date of the certificate is a day we were there together, and it’s signed by the general who was our Corps commander.

Still at it

It's a month past Christmas, but my snowflake mania hasn't abated yet.

Years of War

The NYT is reporting that the Pentagon plans to increase production of 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine to 90,000 a month — in two years. 

Without getting deeper into it, that accords with what I’ve been hearing up here in Mordor. They think they’re going to drag this out for at least two years, and bleed Russia white. Can you imagine the effects of 90,000 heavy artillery shells a month on a nation? Those are the big boy shells used by platforms like our Paladins. 

Sorrows of Parting

It’s always hard to leave behind someone you really love. 

I mean the bike, not the Winchester ’94.

I crossed the high pass at Panthertown this morning. It was 34 degrees and pouring. After a long day of airports I’m in rain-soaked DC. I’ll be here through Saturday. 

Traveling Anew

Today I am packing for another trip to the DC region, my second in a month. I will be there for a week in case any of you are passing through. 

Someday I hope I get to go somewhere more fun than DC and various other warzones. Once I did get to go to Jerusalem, for which I remain very grateful; and some of the warzones have had their attractions. The southern Philippines were truly beautiful, and Iraq was at least a field of honor and a place of great interest. Perhaps it is too much to wish to go to Scotland, or to Spain.

UPDATE: That piece is from the "Ladies Love Outlaws" album, which has also this funny song that I don't think I've ever put up here before.

And of course, for those who have gotten to travel widely, there's always the piece initially made famous by Hank Snow, and yet more famously recorded by Johnny Cash.

Two Differences from the Declaration

In the comments to the post on arms below, Tom asks after two differences between the logic I offer and the one from the Declaration of Independence.

GRIM:

The Declaration asserts two things that I’m not arguing here:

1) That there is a right to life (it is named, alongside ‘liberty and the pursuit of happiness’);

2) That establishing a government is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for defending these rights.

I’m not arguing (1) because I am not sure about it. I’m not arguing for (2) because I hope it isn’t true.

TOM:

I would be very interested in your thinking on these two things you aren't arguing.

The latter is easily explained. I hope it will prove to be true that an adequate defense can be made through voluntary organizations of free individuals, which would not rise to the level of 'a government.' An adequately distributed capacity for resistance might make a populace sufficiently prickly, as it were, that even a tyrannical state would find it to hard on their throat to swallow. 

One might argue that something like that proved to be true in Afghanistan. The analogy benefits from setting aside the question of what constitutes tyranny, and focusing purely on the dynamic of whether a free association can prove indigestible to the most highly-organized government. The Taliban's loose organization of families and those freely choosing to resist conquest proved impossible for the United States and its coalition to digest, though it kept Afghanistan in its gullet (as it were) for two decades. Previously the Soviet Union had a very similar experience, substituting for American technical proficiency significantly brutal tactics. That did not work either. 

In other words, Joe Biden's favorite claim that resistance to the American government requires F-15s instead of AR-15s is likely exactly backwards. A government that depended on F-15s would have logistical chains that could be easily broken by the American military, quickly collapsing its ability to resist conquest and domination. A nation adequately provided with AR-15s could have a distributed capacity for resistance to those things that would be insuperable even by the US Army and Marine Corps even if they were provided with air superiority, fire support, and decades of time. We might do better to ship rifles to Taiwan than air defense systems. 

That is what I hope is true. It does not admit of a logical proof such as I was offering in the post below, only pragmatic arguments. If it is true, though, then we can organize ourselves in the human future along the lines of anarchy: no leaders, no masters, no domination. Just free individuals defending each other's liberty, as we come together to do other worthy things -- whether churches or volunteer fire departments, accepting that the latter would require another funding model in the absence of grants from tax-funded state agencies. That would be a better way forward, one that lacked even the mechanisms for the grasping to exert power over others. It is the 'Black Flag America' that I hope someday might become the freely-chosen human future.

I will put the other question after the jump.