Hate Crimes and HAMC

Likely most of you, not being from California, didn't hear about this incident. Fortunately, no one was killed; but the ATF jumped in on what was clearly a local matter and turned it into a Federal "hate crime." The intent seems to be to paint the motorcycle club as a version of the Klan, a ‘hate group’ in need of destruction. 

Sose the Ghost, as this fellow is called, is himself Latino and doesn't buy a word of that "hate crimes" talk. He spoke to one of the involved parties, as he details in this clip. 

Now, many of you probably won't like the aesthetics of this clip. Nevertheless, he makes some excellent points here -- including that the basic facts being alleged are demonstrably false. Many of his best points, I note, are aimed at understanding across cultural and racial divides. Some of them would be very surprising (perhaps even inconceivable, in The Princess Bride's terms) to many: that militias aren't per se hate groups, but are tied to a traditional Constitutional right; that the Confederate flag might be a symbol of heritage and home not only for white Southerners, but for black ones he has met and spoken to about it. 

Other times he's talking about human universals, such as how all peoples are likely to stand up and defend their women against strangers who are harassing them. This sort of talk is the opposite of the racial division that we are told we are supposed to expect.

Now we were talking recently about the misuse of RICO by the Feds, famously also against this particular motorcycle club; here we're seeing the misuse of 'hate crimes' legislation (if indeed there is any correct use of what is essentially a criminalization of thoughts allegedly thunk). As Sose points out towards the beginning in talking about the Proud Boys, the effect is to define whole parts of American politics out of bounds. Criminalizing them is a short step afterwards. 

Is this a reasonable way to think about our Federal law enforcement? Funny you should ask. 

“Sociopolitical developments — such as narratives of fraud in the recent general election, the emboldening impact of the violent breach of the U.S. Capitol, conditions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and conspiracy theories promoting violence — will almost certainly spur some domestic terrorists to try to engage in violence,” the [FBI] report [establishing a new category of 'domestic terrorism'] stated.

Newsweek noted that each of the threats listed by federal authorities is closely associated with the MAGA Republicans who support Trump.

It's a short jump from painted-with-disapproval to criminal prosecution these days, whether for "hate crimes" or "domestic terror." One might reasonably defend those facing less than credible accusations in the hope of winning space for others disfavored by the powerful; perhaps even anyone who gains such disfavor. 

UPDATE: I remembered that the Hells Angels had a documentary made about them that released in 1983. There's a section where the filmmakers asked them directly about race relations. Language and general content warning for this entire film, but it's directly relevant.

       

Now that was forty years ago, and it leads with Sandy -- the New York City Charter President of the Hells Angels -- stating that while some members were prejudiced, he "believes deeply that you judge a man by his behavior, not his color." That's not a hate group, not when four decades ago they were choosing themselves leaders who were rejecting racial prejudice even among the often racially-charged violence of 70s/80s NYC. 

After some back and forth -- there's one of their lawyers, who says his initial impression was that they were a bunch of fascists 'but it's not true!' -- you actually see one of them wearing a t-shirt with a swastika and the words, "WHITE POWER." They ask him about why he's wearing it, and he says one of his brothers gave it to him, so he's going to wear it. Then they all have a big debate about what it actually means, and whether it should be "German power," but it's clear they're all drunk and probably high as well. Nobody has a speech prepared about white power or supremacy; even the worst guy they found is making excuses for it and laughing along with everybody else about having the guts to wear it in defiance of normal mores.

It's a pretty remarkable documentary, and this is the worst part of it. Most people would try to put forward the good and hide the bad about themselves; that's human nature. They seem to be willing to put it all out there, so you can judge for yourself how bad (and how good) they are. That part, at least, is praiseworthy.

That also happens to be the subject of my favorite line in the documentary, which comes from no less than Grateful Dead lead singer Jerry Garcia, who was performing at one of their events. Asked if he's scared of them, he affirms that he is. Asked why, he answers, "Because they're scary, man!" But then the goes on to explain how much he respects how honest they are about who and what they are, which includes being unwilling to put up with people acting like fools. 

Life Expectancy by American Class

If you use college as a rough proxy for social class in America -- which is indeed very rough, given how big the deltas are for those who went to Ivy League schools, ordinary public colleges, versus small regional state schools, versus community colleges that issue mostly near-vocational degrees in nursing or radiology and the like -- you get a picture in which those below the college class are really suffering.

It is this grim trend of shortening life expectancy among Americans without college degrees that explains why the U.S.'s mortality rate is a stark outlier among rich nations, far lower than countries such as Japan and Switzerland.... "It is the experience of those without college degrees that accounts for America’s failure."...

Case and Deaton note that they've found no precedent for this college divide in modern history except "in the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union." 

There's a graph about two-thirds of the way through the piece that shows how big an outlier this is, the second of two graphs. 

What Evidence of Race?

As an aside, a co-blogger  at Instapundit made the following statement:

The American Anthropological Association now wants to pretend that there are not two biological sexes, which is even more appalling than the group’s earlier decision to pretend that there is no such thing as race (never mind the genomic evidence revealing five distinguishable races).

Is there such evidence? My understanding of the science is in accord with this National Academy paper. As far as I know, all attempts to define race or account for it scientifically have failed for all the hundreds of years it’s been attempted. 

This isn’t a matter of fashion, and therefore unlikely to be the result of cognitive bias, either. At one time all the Wise believed in race, and couldn’t account for it; now none of them do, and still can’t. In the early 20th Century the same people who advocated for Darwin also were committed to race theory; generations before aristocracy used it to explain their commitment to slavery as a sort of humanitarianism. Now scientists are mostly on the Left (social science up to 44-1 Dem/Rep), and they want to use race too, for “anti-racist” action. It’s still not definable. 

Is that understanding challenged by new evidence? I’m genuinely not aware of whatever this co-blogger is so confident in referencing. 

A(nother) Secret Police

Just yesterday I was complaining to a friend that the NC legislature passes so many laws that even as an attentive and involved citizen I can’t keep up with the changes. Today I learned that one of those changes is that the legislature voted itself a secret police. 

Right now the Republicans have supermajorities in both houses, but that kind of thing doesn’t last forever. It sounds as if they can search and seize documents and enter both public buildings and private homes at will. Worse, you’re required to keep their activities secret even if you are the victim. 

This is unacceptable, and my legislators definitely did not seek my consent, or even try to make me aware that this was being proposed. 

Pride on Display

So this weekend was the Mountain Heritage Festival at the local university, which I've blogged about several times. This one was an enjoyable day as always. The Shape Note singers were back, and there was good bluegrass and Cherokee stickball. 

On the walk back to my motorcycle, I passed these dorm windows:

That sort of thing would never have been allowed when I was a college student, though something like it might have featured in the wilder sort of 'college life is crazy' movies. In those long-ago days, there was a notion that outright expressions of sexuality were disruptive and needed to be suppressed. 

What college dean could object to it now, though? After all, what is this but an honest expression of pride in one's sexuality? "Love wins," as they say, and this here is an expression of love. A proud expression. It's just another sort of pride display, isn't it? 

We fly that Pride flag at our embassies now, and put it centermost at the White House in a display paired with our national flag. Given such an official endorsement, how could a mere state university object to such openly and honestly displayed sexual pride? 

Further Research on Honey Cakes

I spent part of last evening reading the relevant chapter of The Hobbit, just to focus a bit more on what the target is. The cuisine that Beorn serves is not described in great detail except for two things: the drink is mead, and there is a form of cake he makes with honey that is twice-baked for long-lasting storage. These are probably intended for winter rations rather than for journeys, as we know that he can travel quite rapidly in the form of a bear (for whom the whole world, more or less, is food). 

That suggests to me that there is a normal, everyday honey cake that is not twice-baked, but that a certain number of the cakes gets twice-baked to further preserve them for winter storage. Honey is mentioned as an ingredient of these cakes, and honey also has strong preservative qualities. 

Now if you look at this list of twice-baked foods, you'll note that there is very substantial variety: everything from biscotti to Detroit-style pizza and New York-style cheesecake. The most interesting one on the list to me is the first one, Bappir, an ancient Sumerian way of preserving grains and gruit for beer-making.

An historical Sumerian twice-baked barley bread that was primarily used in ancient Mesopotamian beer brewing. Historical research done at Anchor Brewing Co. in 1989 (documented in Charlie Papazian's Home Brewer's Companion, ISBN 0-380-77287-6) reconstructed a bread made from malted barley and barley flour with honey and water and baked until hard enough to store for long periods of time; the finished product was probably crumbled and mixed with water, malt and either dates or honey and allowed to ferment, producing a somewhat sweet brew. It seems to have been drunk with a straw in the manner that yerba mate is drunk now.

Probably closer to Beorn's product is the medieval biscuit, however. Given Tolkien’s work in philology, he would have known this root. 

The Middle French word bescuit is derived from the Latin words bis (twice) and coquere, coctus (to cook, cooked), and, hence, means "twice-cooked". This is because biscuits were originally cooked in a twofold process: first baked, and then dried out in a slow oven. This term was then adapted into English in the 14th century during the Middle Ages, in the Middle English word bisquite, to represent a hard, twice-baked product.

This gives rise, as they point out, to the English usage of the word "biscuit" as a kind of cookie, drier and crumbly compared to the soft American biscuits. Given further Tolkien’s love of English traditions, I think this is likely the concept he was thinking of when describing a twice baked cake. 

So I think the final product should be much like a biscuit, capable of being twice-baked in a slow oven to produce the preserved form that will store well, but also of being enjoyed once-baked when long-storage is not a concern. 

Twelfth Night Cake

In honor of Bilbo and Frodo's birthday.

The second experiment towards Beorning Honey Cakes is a recipe called "Twelfth Night Cake," which comes from the King Arthur Flour 200th Anniversary Cookbook. This is without question or near comparison the best baking cookbook I know. Coincidentally, the 200th anniversary was apparently in 1992, just before the woke wave began, so the cookbook still has the traditional Arthurian logo on the cover. 

Chancellor Gates on America

Robert M. Gates is a former Secretary of Defense, controversial CIA officer -- including its Director just after the Iran-Contra period -- and currently a university chancellor. He has served in both Republican and Democratic administrations at the highest levels. He has penned a piece for Foreign Affairs that shows how such a figure views the current moment.

One thing he says that I found surprising is that he views the US economy as strong.

For now, the United States would seem to be in a strong position vis-à-vis both China and Russia. Above all, the U.S. economy is doing well. Business investment in new manufacturing facilities, some of it subsidized by new government infrastructure and technology programs, is booming. New investments by both government and business in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and bioengineering promise to widen the technological and economic gap between the United States and every other country for years to come.

Since this is mostly a piece about competition with China and Russia, I suppose it's fair to view the US economy as strong-by-comparison. Both of those states are having substantial economic troubles at the moment. The US economy is not "doing well" from the perspective of ordinary people: but he's not talking to ordinary people, or with them, he's talking to other elites for whom all that may matter is relative strength.

His list of problems that we face embraces the establishment Republican criticisms of our politics: he lists "political dysfunction," "runaway spending," failure to reform Social Security and Medicare, President Trump's tenure, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, diplomatic failures, a bad military appropriations process from Congress, and several more. 

Likewise, his list of solutions will be unsurprising: more military spending, more international trade agreements, and "a constant drumbeat" of persuasion to convince the American people that this foreign policy stuff is more important than their own concerns at home. Americans should sacrifice to maintain "leadership," meaning of course his leadership: his and those like him, his class, his kind. 

At no point do I see an appreciation for the problems Americans themselves face, or any sense that their concerns should be addressed except by "doing a better job of explaining" the importance of doing things his way. This is of course why the establishment is faring so badly in the current moment: their elites are interested in being elites first, Democrats or Republicans second, and Americans third at most. 

How Long Ago was the Dawn of 'Everything'?

AVI has had a series of posts on a revisionist history by an anarchist activist and a professor of archaeology. His latest quotes a review that is quite negative, and that opens with an analogy whose force is meant to suggest that only an American could believe such things (although the anarchist here was from London, presumably that analogy is meant to extend to Westerners in general).

I haven't read the book and therefore can't review it, but I do note that there is a grave difficulty in the project. Archaeology is indeed an obvious way to proceed, because our written records don't go far back into a matter that began somewhere between 12,000 and 300,000 years ago. 

What the historical record does suggest on the question, as far back ago as we can really go, is that there were a lot of different things in play. Chesterton remarked that the dawn of history (from his perspective) shows it dawning on the bulk of cities, perhaps civilizations already old, but also on nomads and tribes with no real government beyond family ties. That is contra Aristotle, who argued that politics arose naturally whenever family ties weren't enough: in fact, we see that throughout history there were places where family ties sufficed, and families were just melded in marriage as necessary. 

Plato, meanwhile, included this discussion (which you may remember from the Laws, Book III).

Ath. Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?

Cle. Hardly.

Ath. But are sure that it must be vast and incalculable?

Cle. Certainly.

Ath. And have not thousands and thousands of cities come into being during this period and as many perished? And has not each of them had every form of government many times over, now growing larger, now smaller, and again improving or declining?

Cle. To be sure.

"Every form of government" does not necessarily include anarchy, though it does include forms of democracy, constitutional governments, oligarchies, aristocracies, kings and tyrants: we know that because those forms are all named in Aristotle's Politics. Anarchy, too, is a word we have from ancient Greece: αναρχία, 'without a ruler.'

As for the analogy, I don't think it's very impressive. Asking someone from a warzone if they prefer that to a state at peace is a highly biased way of framing the question of whether egalitarian societies are preferable to ones with a hierarchy based on dominion: it is a frame that is almost guaranteed to produce the Hobbesian response that it does. Ask someone who lives in a peaceful agrarian society whose members come together voluntarily to do things like raise each others' houses and barns, have dances and celebrations, attend church services together, drink together at their local feasts and festivals, and so forth -- and then compare that to the response of someone who has lived in a stable but oppressive state. Even mildly oppressive states are quite unpleasant, and some societies become sufficiently unpleasant that a warzone really is preferable to them. 

The review goes on to suggest that the author finds it implausible that, if life in such societies were really so much better, they wouldn't have out-competed hierarchies and become the norm. Sadly, that is probably not true: the great challenge isn't whether it would be better without oppressive force, but whether it is possible to resist the introduction of oppressive force from abroad without adopting governments, armies, and police at home. My sense is in many places that possibility awaited the introduction of the rifle, a technological change that empowers the individual sufficiently that a large enough number of individuals voluntarily choosing to cooperate can keep themselves free. 

Packing Mounts

A couple of months ago I sold my Jeep; a couple of weeks ago, my Ford decided it needed a new transmission valve body. This is an ideal time of year for living on the back of your motorcycle, which I mostly do anyway, but there are a few chores that it’s helpful to have a truck to do. I have been working around the issue using modified pack animal techniques.

For groceries, I lashed a Duffel bag across the back. That plus the saddle bags allowed me to carry everything I needed. 

The trash situation after two weeks was approaching Alice’s Restaurant territory. So, today:

Zero points for guessing what I used to create the lashing points on the bag. You can see one of them here. 

"Corporate Death Penalty"

A New York judge has just ordered the Trump Organization destroyed.

A Manhattan judge on Tuesday found Donald Trump and his real-estate company liable for fraud.

The judge ordered the Trump Organization's New York corporate charters revoked immediately.

A receiver will be appointed to "dissolve" the company — but years of appeals may play out first.

Note that this is only the second time this penalty has been assigned. The first time, the same prosecutor sought it, and look who the target was: 

...the penalty is so rare that the only previous time it's been attempted on such a grand scale — when James sought the corporate death penalty in her three-year-old, ongoing fraud lawsuit against the NRA — has failed.

"It's a staggering judgment," said John Moscow, a former financial-crimes prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney's office.

"It means you are no longer a company, and the judge is appointing someone to take over the assets and distribute them as the court sees fit."

So the only two corporations in the history of Manhattan, home of Wall Street, that have merited this penalty in the eyes of the state are the NRA and the Trump Organization?  That strongly suggests that corporate malfeasance isn't the real issue behind these prosecutions and the seeking of this penalty. 

The Birthday of Bilbo Baggins

Frodo as well, as I recall, was born on the 22nd of September in Middle Earth. However, there is a slight difference in the calendars of Middle Earth and contemporary Earth, so it's not clear exactly when that falls on our calendar. An exact match may not be possible, but within a few days it'll certainly have happened if any of you are inclined to cake. I may try my next, more cake-like Beorning experiment to go along with the occasion.

A Remarkable Poll

Only Rasmussen would even ask this question.

A police state is a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents. How concerned are you that America is becoming a police state?"

I'm Concerned-

DEM: 67%

IND: 72%

GOP: 76%

All Voters: 72%

So 2/3rds of Democrats, and nearly 3/4ths of all voters? That's not a fringe position, then. 

A Remarkable Indictment

If you, like me, were absolutely astonished by the manner in which the withdrawal from Afghanistan violated all the established principles of military science on how to conduct a retreat/withdrawal/retrogade movement/"advance to the rear," here is an explanation of how that happened.

A misguided attempt to reform professional military education (JPME) in the 1980s led by the late Ike Skelton and other military reformers in Congress mandated that masters-level degrees be granted at all command and staff colleges, as well as a required study in "jointness." This forced all the military midlevel colleges to make room in their courses of study to accommodate the requirements of civilian academia to grant an advanced degree.... 

Command and staff colleges had traditionally been the places where aspiring senior commanders really learned their trade as majors or lieutenant commanders. This used to include a serious study of military theory, history and staff planning. That is not currently the case.

Today, seminar groups are led by two instructors -- one a uniformed officer and the other an academic. There is generally no requirement that either be an expert in combined-arms combat on land, in the air, or on the sea. In some cases, they're simply not knowledgeable about the study of war.

Well-meaning reforms sometimes go astray. "Jointness" definitely has its uses: the story of the Gulf War victory is a study in the military branches interoperating in a form of maneuver warfare that let Army and Marine land forces draw smoothly on Air Force and Naval air support. 

Yet why should a military college be "forced" to issue Masters of Military Science degrees, say, on the terms of a civilian school? Presumably that was a choice; there's no reason that the School of Advanced Military Science should have to ask any civilian school what its requirements are for a Masters degree. As for accreditation, who is going to tell the US military that its Masters of Military Science isn't valid? 

China, maybe, if this keeps up. 

The GWOT and You

The Washington Post published an op-ed today with a title that I found surprising: "A memorial to the war on terror is coming. Here is why you should care."

Why you should care, according to the author, is that those who fought in the Global War on Terror (GWOT) feel alienated from their society and are committing suicide at high rates.

“I can’t imagine what you went through over there …”

Most veterans of the Global War on Terrorism have heard this line at some point....  Before we left for war, the experience of most veterans was completely recognizable. We might not have attended your high school, but we went to a high school. We might not have rooted for your sports team, but we rooted for a sports team. The rhythms of our lives matched your rhythms. Then, we went to war. And, yes, war changed us.

But it did not make us so different from you.... If you still believe we had truly unimaginable experiences at war, then it follows that we — America’s veterans — were forever altered in ways that make us unknowable. And, if that is true, it means we never really get to come home.

"You can never go home again" is a truism for everyone, though. For some people it's more strongly true than for others. Some people's homes were bulldozed and replaced by suburbs, or their communities uprooted and destroyed by rising or falling property values. The TVA flooded quite a few people's homes and communities back in the day. Yet even if your house is still where it was and your parents still live there, when you go back it's not the same. As you get older, more things have changed; more people have died. 

A memorial only gives you a place in the world consecrated to the memory. The memory can live there, and you can go and visit it, and while the memorial last -- probably longer than you -- it will offer a stable home for your memories. It can't bring anything back.

Nevertheless, the Vietnam Memorial -- discussed at length in the piece -- has been important in the ways the author describes. The Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally for decades rode past it, in honor of those who had served in Vietnam. 

The piece includes a call for participation in the design of the memorial. That's an interesting challenge. The war was fought in the Philippines, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, across Africa, and in less violent ways in the West itself. Its proximate cause was the fall of the Twin Towers, which is a ready symbol that could be employed, but also the strike on the Pentagon on the same day. Thinking about what the right symbol is for this is going to take some imagination. 

If you have ideas, starting tomorrow you can submit them at this link.

Swedish Torch

Grilling over a Swedish Torch

I cut one tree this year that proved unreasonably difficult to split, so instead I cut it into Swedish Torches with my chainsaw. This turns out to be great for outdoor cooking as it provides a stable flat surface. 

Ætena Hlaf: An Experiment towards Beorning Honey Cakes

I have not forgotten that I promised to develop a more authentic recipe for Beorn's Honey Cakes. To that end, I am experimenting with a set of medieval recipes for similar items. The first one I decided to bake was Ætena Hlaf,  "hlaf" being an obvious Anglo-Saxon/Norse cognate for "loaf" (like "hval" for "whale"). “Ætena” is less obvious: the cognate is ‘eating.’

Autumnal Equinox

A mountain home.

Today is the first day of Autumn, at the end of a long summer. To celebrate, my wife and I rode over to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for the Mountain Life Festival. 

Apples in the Apple House.

The Apple House.

The festival celebrates and showcases mountain folkways. They were cooking apple butter, and had a horse turning a milk to grind sorghum, which they were then boiling to make molasses. There were lectures on the importance of pork both for meat and lard — which they claimed is healthier than butter — for cooking and food preservation.

Gotta have chickens for eggs, too: hens live in this coop.

Read the sign to learn how to make lye soap!

Pretty neat stuff. There are large parts of this that we have incorporated into our lives — my wife has gotten into chickens this year. We garden and preserve food with canning and drying, and while I don’t own pigs I do render lard and use it in baking. Some other parts for now we’ve let go, but it’s good to know how it was done just in case. 

There was also an Appalachian folk music demonstration. This is quite different from bluegrass, more Celtic and often like traditional ballads. 

Romans on the mind

Conspiracy Under Color of Law, Part II

In line with yesterday's announcement, the Department of Justice has just announced a "rule change" that would enact a very significant gun control law without the bother of consulting Congress.

Senator Roger Marshall (R., Kan.) and six other Republican senators submitted a letter to U.S. attorney general Merrick Garland on Thursday, voicing their “strong opposition” to a new gun-control rule proposed by the Department of Justice.

Under the recently proposed “Definition of ‘Engaged in the Business’ as a Dealer in Firearms,” any person who sells a gun for profit to anyone else, including family members, would be considered “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms. As a result, a person would be required under federal law to obtain a federal permit, conduct a background check, and complete gun registration paperwork.

Such a license costs between $30 and $3,000, depending on whether they'd let you register as a "collector" or in fact (as the article says) a "dealer" ($200 minimum). That's not the real issue, although raising our costs and thereby making firearms more expensive is surely a partial motive. A real dealer divides that $200 over many transactions, but a person who just wants to sell one gun to a friend or family member is adding $200 to the purchase price of the gun.

The real issue is that this would require all firearms transactions to be reported to the Federal Government, which would then be able to build a registration/confiscation database. The FBI would also be required to approve or reject anyone who wanted to purchase or trade for a firearm. 

This is the so-called "gun-show loophole" that the gun control people have been railing at Congress about for years. It's really about all private transfers of firearms, not only or even mostly 'gun shows,' and bringing them under Federal control. 

Congress has refused the request to pass such a law for decades. So, instead, DOJ is attempting to wrest legislative authority away from the legislative branch in order to do by executive fiat what the democratic system has long refused to do. This is, of course, unconstitutional.

It is also illegal: see prior post. DOJ is clearly timing this in line with the Biden administration's push for an executive agency that aims at depriving Americans of as much of their Second Amendment rights as it can arrange. That brings the DOJ's leadership into a conspiracy to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights under color of law. 

18 U.S. Code § 242

The newly-announced "Office of Gun Violence Prevention," which will be led by several big names in Gun Control organizations, is manifestly a conspiracy to deprive Americans of Second Amendment rights under color of law. That is a violation of Federal law. 

Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both; and if bodily injury results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include the use, attempted use, or threatened use of a dangerous weapon, explosives, or fire, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section or if such acts include kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, shall be fined under this title, or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.

So if any act by this new office subjects anyone in America of a deprivation of their Second Amendment rights, it's a minor felony. If police are used and it results in injury, a major felony. If anyone dies as a result of the police action to deprive them of their rights under color of law, a capital crime. The Supreme Court has clarified recently that the Second Amendment is "not a second-class right," so it is entitled to these protections just as much as voting rights, civil rights, or any other rights. 

The next President inclined to supporting the Second Amendment should immediately impound all their records, and send everyone who was involved in any such activity to prison. Candidates for that office ought to make clear that they intend to do so, as a prophylactic against misbehavior by those assuming these positions. 

Only Shows One Tattoo at a Time

Another fun little tune that came up this week. Reminds me of some people I know. 

Missing: One F-35

As Col. Kurt points out, a private who lost his night-vision goggles in the field is treated by the military as a major failure that can result in the whole unit being punished. Jimbo suggests we had better hope the Chinese economy collapses before they want to fight a war. 

The only thing I would point out is that this was a Marine Corps F-35. You can't put this one down to "Oh, the Air Force has a corporate rather than a military culture" or "Oh, the Navy...." The Marine Corps is famous for holding itself to a higher standard than any other branch: only the special operations units impose higher standards of discipline and performance than the USMC. Training is dangerous and accidents happen, but if this can happen here it can happen to any part of our military at this time. 

On the other hand, it's not like this is the worst thing that the military has lost in its air operations.

Right Angles to a Unicorn

This video, which I don't think I can embed, is an demonstration of why mathematicians like to describe imaginary numbers as "orthogonal" to reals. It also makes the case that complex numbers -- defined as numbers that include both imaginary and real numbers -- are essential to our description of reality (as does this article).

Indeed they may be! However, that presents us with two very different possibilities: that imaginary numbers may be essential to our description of reality, or to reality itself. Epicycles were at one point essential to our description of reality; no longer.

It's neat how it produces wave functions that are familiar and useful. However, it strikes me that saying that the "are" orthogonal because it makes sense to graph them as such really is akin to saying that you can draw a picture of me (or you) and a unicorn at right angles. Then the picture of me/you and the picture of the unicorn are indeed at right angles, and they are equally real (as pictures). The difference is that one of them has a referent in the physical world, and the other doesn't; and the referents are not, therefore, equal. One of them is real -- indeed it is actual -- and the other is imaginary.

But the physicists and mathematicians are really saying something stronger than that, which is that 'the sense that it makes' to graph them this way implies that there is a rational relationship between the real and the impossible; and then, applying this equation to reality, that this relationship between the real and the impossible ends up giving rise to the actual. That's an extraordinary claim, which at least some of them really seem to believe.

What is the Constitutional Ground for the DOJ?

The question is rhetorical; I assume you all know the answer. It is not a Constitutional organ, but rather an old executive office, an outgrowth of the office of the Attorney General that was set up by a 1789 law passed by Congress and signed by a President -- George Washington, no less. 

And there shall also be appointed a meet person, learned in the law, to act as attorney-general for the United States, who shall be sworn or affirmed to a faithful execution of his office; whose duty it shall be to prosecute and conduct all suits in the Supreme Court in which the United States shall be concerned, and to give his advice and opinion upon questions of law when required by the President of the United States, or when requested by the heads of any of the departments, touching any matters that may concern their departments, and shall receive such compensation for his services as shall by law be provided.

Neither the Attorney General nor the DOJ is meant to be independent of either Congress or the President, from whom all their authority is derived. Insofar as the Attorney General is misusing his power, those branches are responsible for him. That means that, like it or not, he answers to them. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland struck a defiant tone Wednesday in defending the Justice Department as independent of the White House and Congress, but Republicans attacked him repeatedly for the handling of high-profile investigations of Hunter Biden and Donald Trump.

"Our job is to uphold the rule of law," Garland told the House Judiciary Committee in an uncharacteristically emotional statement....

Garland reminded lawmakers, according to the prepared remarks, that he represents the American people rather than the president or Congress.

“Our job is not to take orders from the President, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” Garland said.  

That is simply not true. Practically, he acts as if he knows it: he is clearly being guided by political imperatives in his handling of cases both high and low profile. The independence he pretends to is unconstitutional and improper. 

Here as elsewhere, I am not suggesting a program of reform but just trying to speak the truth about it. Congress is toothless against the bureaucracy and does not want their power back; the President is a nonentity, and none of his proposed replacements have the necessary virtues either. The DOJ is doing what its leaders please to do, politically: they are indeed functionally independent, exactly as they should never be. The system is broken, and is not capable of fixing itself. 

Power Over Nature

One of the co-bloggers at Insty linked to an article on anorexia. The Instapundit crew was mostly interested in the contemporary commentary on social media and mental health, but I thought this argument was of greater import:

Women in the early to late Middle Ages who starved themselves were later worshipped as saints, such as Wilgefortis (meaning strong virgin), Rose of Lima, Orsola Giuliani (known as Saint Veronica Giuliani), and probably most famously, Catherine of Siena. Almost all of these young women stopped eating when their parents were arranging their marriages. Catherine of Siena’s parents were hoping she might marry the widower of Catherine’s adored older sister, who died in childbirth. Catherine was less than thrilled at this idea and starved herself until any thoughts of marriage were moot....

The self-denial of Catherine—and the others—was seen as akin to holiness. While it’s tricky to compare eighth- to fifteenth-century women with twenty-first-century ones, the phenomenon of girls and women starving themselves has existed for millennia. And even if Catherine of Siena and Zhanna Samsonova were not classified as suffering from the same syndrome, they both learned that a woman not eating is an effective way for her to seize control when she feels otherwise powerless. All the saints listed above stopped eating at the time their parents were urging them to get married. I paused time by starving and arresting my puberty.

Anorexia gave me nothing. All it did was take away my teens and twenties. But for the medieval girls, it gave them enormous power.

Arresting puberty as a means of self-empowerment has obvious parallels with the puberty-blocking drugs sought for teenagers today -- and with the more-permanent surgical options. Also, in the case of women, with birth control and abortion. 

All of them are alike in finding power, as they describe it, in being able to deny their nature. This is an odd locution when you think about it. Both "power" and "energy" are usually described as the ability to do work. "Horsepower," for example, is the mechanical ability to lift 550 pounds one foot in one second. Here "power" is being sought by preventing function rather than enabling it. 

What sort of power is this? The power of the will over the physical, but what is being willed? It is not to be what one is, not to change, not to have one's body develop and flourish according to its nature; not to marry, not to conceive, not to move from girlhood to womanhood, from womanhood to motherhood. 

It is a will to stillness and the absence of change, which is to say that it is a death-wish. It is therefore not surprising to find that it ends in death. 

So does life, of course. 

Why are the Flags at Half-Mast?

I don’t know if I have just been noticing more these last few years, but it seems like the flag is at half-mast a tremendous amount of time. A nation cannot be perpetually in mourning, but it seems like I see the flag displayed in the attitude of mourning much of the time. Often, I have no idea what tragic event occasions the display. 

If you’re wondering about it as well, here’s a free resource that explains why the flag is at half-staff today.  In our case, it’s a statewide declaration from our governor to honor a deputy sheriff who died recently. 

Self-Imposed Limits

Ironically, the same day that AVI is talking about the lack of self-discipline in humanity, my friend Andy at the Norse Mentality is talking about how to break self-imposed limits. [This is a Strongman training video, so expect profane language and gestures. Also, however, frank talk from big burly men about their feelings, their experience with meditation, and how they strive to do their best for their families as well as themselves.]

In a way it underlines AVI's point, really: human beings frequently do not set appropriate limits on themselves where it would be helpful, but likewise do set self-imposed limits on themselves where it causes them problems. Both approaches are irrational, but so are people. 

In the comments, there is a Tolkien quote that helpfully addresses yesterday's essay on Just War Theory. [Given the provenance, I will take the unusual step of assuming the quote is accurate without checking.]

"Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have been far worse than Sauron. He would have remained ‘righteous’, but self-righteous. He would have continued to rule and order things for ‘good’, and the benefit of his subjects according to his wisdom (which was and would have remained great). Thus while Sauron multiplied [illegible word] evil, he left ‘good’ clearly distinguishable from it. Gandalf would have made good detestable and seem evil."

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

If Just Wars are to be fought over justice, and not interest, we are in the same peril as Gandalf with the Ring. Interest, of course,  has its own perils: and sometimes the weak and suffering might really benefit from a hand. Yet the peril is very terrible, and that should be remembered. When I was young I was very inclined to what seemed to me to be Just Wars; looking back now, I wonder how wise they were. 

99 Bottles

I realize it's very early in the workweek for this sort of thing, but I heard it today and it struck me how obvious it was to make this song -- yet no one had ever done it. We all know the old campfire / road-trip classic, and there are plenty of beers out there to sing about, so why not make an elaboration? Someone finally thought to do it, and it's kind of fun.

Two on Philosophy of War

What follows the jump is a brief commentary on a pair of essays on the philosophy of war.

Happy Birthday, Hank

In the same spirit as the congratulatory post about Junior below, the senior Hank Williams turns a hundred today. Sadly he only spent not quite thirty of those years alive. Spotify put together a tribute, linked above. 

Doing things right

Whatever opinion you may have about Texas AG Paxton's lawsuits against the Biden administration, or Paxton as a man, I maintain that it's important to solve political problems at the ballot box and legal problems with due process in court. These are two recent articles, both written before the acquittal vote in his impeachment trial, that ably explain the insufficiency of the evidence against Mr. Paxton.

The Texas AG has enemies, and I can't be sure that some of them don't have a point. If their main problem is his politics, however, they're off base in their chosen tactics. His politics clearly enjoy the support of Texas voters, and the complaints against him clearly have never been sufficient to convince voters. After years of a whisper campaign implying that they had their enemy on some kind of legal infractions, the best they could come up with to impeach him with was a lot of surmises that fell apart as soon as someone bothered to cross-examine the witnesses. As for the argument that we should trust the FBI about any part of the investigation, I can only laugh. That ship has sailed.

Silly Stuff on a Saturday Night

How often do you think about the Roman empire?

I first saw this internet trend in the Babylon Bee, and was confused:

Man Who Hasn't Thought About The Roman Empire In Over A Week Worried He Might Be Trans

What?

Then, I thought I'd listen to some music on YouTube and there was Brett Cooper, talking about this:

Well, now I (we) know.

So, how often do you think about the Roman empire?

Edward Gibbon comes up in my research from time to time, so once a week or so for me, I guess?

Why Should You Care?

An article at First Things has a stunning opening, then leads to a deep question.

There’s a very short and very brutal poem by the Scottish poet Hollie McNish, written in 2019 and titled “Conversation with an archaeologist”:

he said they’d found a brothel

on the dig he did last night

I asked him how they know

he sighed:

a pit of babies’ bones

a pit of newborn babies’ bones was how to spot a brothel

“It’s true, you know,” said the writer and lawyer Helen Dale when we had lunch in London last year and I mentioned this poem, which I chose as one of the epigraphs to my book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. Helen was a classicist before she was a lawyer, and as a younger woman she had taken part in archaeological excavations of ancient Roman sites. “First you find the erotic statuary,” she went on, “and then you dig a bit more and you find the male infant skeletons.” Male, of course, because the males were of no use to the keepers of Roman brothels, whereas the female infants born to prostituted women were raised into prostitution themselves.

She of course ties this to our own addiction to abortion, a move she herself describes as "a provocation." I think there's a real division between those to whom the connection is obvious and those to whom it is a provocation. But she is not fully opposed to abortion; as she notes, she might want one herself someday. 

What she's really worried about is the end of Christianity's heritage in our moral understanding, including her own:

I’m emotionally and intellectually drawn to Christianity, and—like everyone else—I was raised in a culture suffused with fading Christian morality and symbolism. But I don’t believe, not really. 

So if you don't believe, why do you care? I mean the question sincerely: it's worthy of exploration. 

One possibility is that it's just a kind of hangover, a product of having grown up in a society that believed certain things, having rubbed up against those things until they were somewhat internalized, and now having the residue of that even though you aren't convicted. If that’s all that’s driving your moral feelings, you might as well abandon them; they were only ever an accident anyway. Nothing hangs on their passage, well, but for some lives of children.

Another possibility is that at least some of the claims of the faith are true: that there is a thing in us that longs for justice, and finds justice outraged by the killing of the innocent to serve the interests of those stronger and bigger than they are. (Even if this is not, as she suggests, 'murder,' noting that both infanticide and abortion almost could not be convicted in court in England or Scotland even while juries were all male and the society much more Christian than presently.) 

If there is something true to which you are responding, perhaps others will continue to respond. Even if you don't believe in the whole, you must at least believe some part of that to think it even matters if the morality of the public changes. 

She closes with another striking passage, which deserves mention. 

What if... we understand the Christian era as a clearing in a forest? The forest is paganism: dark, wild, vigorous, and menacing, but also magical in its way. For two thousand years, Christians pushed the forest back, with burning and hacking, but also with pruning and cultivating, creating a garden in the clearing with a view upward to heaven.

But watch as roots outstretch themselves and new shoots spring up from the ground. The patch of sky recedes. “Paganism has not needed to be reinvented,” writes Steven Smith: It never went away. “In a certain sense, the Western world has arguably always remained more pagan than Christian. In some ways Christianity has been more of a veneer than a substantial reality.””

With no one left to tend the garden, the forest is reclaiming its ground.

Paganism is also a clearing in the forest, though: we know that from the Venerable Bede, who recorded a conversation with a converting pagan on just this point. He likened the passage through life to that of a bird appearing in a fire-lit hall of an evening and flying to the other side. While it was in the hall and visible to others, it was bright and beautiful; but before it came in the hall, and after it left, nothing could be said about it at all. We knew nothing about the bird, as the pagan knows nothing about where the soul is before death or what happens after; the man is only visible for a short space. A clearing in the forest would do exactly as well in this metaphor as the fire-lit hall. 

Chesterton transformed that story into a few lines of his famous ballad, in which he characterizes the pagan's worldview even more despairingly than that.

‘For this is a heavy matter,
And the truth is cold to tell;
Do we not know, have we not heard,
The soul is like a lost bird,
The body a broken shell.

‘And a man hopes, being ignorant,
Till in white woods apart
He finds at last the lost bird dead;
And a man may still lift up his head
But never more his heart.

Chesterton wasn't quite right about that. The pagan thought of death as a return, of sorts; to the ancestors, or the land of the dead where souls wait to be reborn (perhaps, as in Valhalla, after a destructive turning that causes the whole world to be reborn). Still, a return to paganism doesn't create an escape from the problem; and the question of what, if anything, is owed to the weak and the helpless will remain. The reasons why we care about that are important. 

A More Successful Approach

As an addendum to the last, here's another young female singer whose work I have heard and do like. She has a similar problem -- her situation, in the song, is the sort of thing that might provoke rage. Yet this is not a song of rage; it's a song of joy and friendship in spite of legitimately bad conditions.

What strikes me here is that she has adopted as her frame not sex but class. Suddenly, instead of looking at the men around her as oppressors, she is able to see them as friends and allies against the way in which they are all being kept down by economic and social class features. They're all suffering, but they're suffering together, and recognizing that they can build relationships that can help them both endure the suffering and find ways to live a life you can be happy to live. 

This is one of the genuine insights the Marxists had, I think: that American institutions in some sense strive to divide us by things like race and sex because those differences can distract us from oppression by class. The institutions serve the actually privileged, who benefit from keeping those they are oppressing (and from whom they are extracting wealth and power to support their position) squabbling over things that can't be fixed.

In any case, this approach leads her to friendship across the sex divide, a comradery made up of a recognition of shared problems and shared situations. Whiskey and rum may not lead them out of the situation they are in, but at least they're not stewing in rage and misery.

An Inversion of Categories

Via Instapundit, a 'sociological law' (subject to the same limitation as all such 'laws,' which is that they are not laws if they do not apply).

I had a crack at coming up with my own sociological ‘law’ and my first effort went as follows: “The more progressive a country is when it comes to sex and gender, the more authoritarian it is when it comes to speech and language.” I was thinking of Ireland which, having legalised abortion in 2018, is about to impose the most draconian speech restrictions in Europe. I now propose a second law: “^Any group described as privileged is in fact marginalised; and any group described as marginalised is in fact privileged.’

A case in point is white men – and in particular cisgendered, heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class white men – who are now at the bottom of the intersectional hierarchy of oppression in most professions. But to add to their misery, these poor, benighted souls have to pretend they’re at the top of that self-same pyramid if they’re to retain their jobs, apologising for their ‘privilege’ in front of their more powerful black, female, non-binary, gay and disabled colleagues.

The author is apparently British; he goes on to provide some data backing up that claim.  

Some will think I’m being deliberately provocative, so I’ll reel off some facts and figures to illustrate this point with respect to just two groups: men and women. Their relative status is the exact opposite of how it’s usually described, making it the perfect illustration of Young’s Second Law. Some of the stats about just how underprivileged men are probably won’t come as a surprise. We all know boys fare worse than girls at school, one reason 35,000 fewer 18-year-old boys will go to university this month than 18-year-old girls. We also know that men are more likely to be addicted to drugs and alcohol, account for three-quarters of all suicides and almost 90 per cent of the homeless. But did you know men make up 96.2 per cent of Britain’s prison population and are 23 times more likely to die at work than women? Research carried out by the Future Men charity found that 29 per cent of young men feel ignored, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that we have a minister for women and equalities and a women’s health ambassador, but no minister for men.

The figures are similar in the United States, where men are on the order of 90% of the (much larger) prison population, and the majority of suicides; we hear a great deal in our media about the problem of teenage girls' suicidal ideation (which is clearly undesirable) and not much about the fact that teenage males actually kill themselves more. Men are the victims of all forms of violent crime at higher rates, including rape once you include the ubiquitous rape culture of our detestable prison system and it's 90+% male population.

What strikes me often, though, is the cultural blindness attendant to all of this. I got an ad somewhere advising me to read an article about a young singer named Olivia Rodrigo -- perhaps all of you but me know who that is -- who has a new album expressing female rage against the unfair 'expectations' of her society. "The singer-songwriter says “All-American Bitch” is “sort of about that,” and is a song she’s 'very proud of.'"

It's presumptively impolite to suggest that someone's feelings aren't valid, and she has doubtless felt such things at times. Yet it should be striking that such an expression receives not disapproval, but elevation including not only an article in People magazine but purchased internet ads distributing it so far as to have it on my desk, who must be as far from the demographic who listens to her music as is possible to get within America's context. Nor is she a rare exception to a generalized hostility to 'female rage'; the Barbie movie the sociological piece begins with is a billion dollar project; the most famous singer in the world right now, I gather, is one Taylor Swift who, I also gather having not listened to her music, made her name with a series of angry songs about men generalized to men in general. Nor is this in any way new; a generation ago (when I was more likely to hear such music) Alanis Morissette also sang about how "I'm a bitch" and made millions doing it; Tori Amos, who really was a fantastic musician capable of crafting songs of great beauty, sang about almost nothing else than her rage. 

What strikes me, again, is the blindness: for decades I've been hearing this talk, and the people who are culturally aligned with it really can't see that it's not true. The world oppresses women, they repeat every  year, and it won't allow women to express rage or their true feelings. Yet every year they do so to wild acclaim and success, while living in a society in which they are practically better off by all these demonstrable metrics. 

Another one: we always hear about men being paid more per hour than women, and arguments about whether or to what degree that is true; we almost never hear about the fact that, since metrics were kept, women control about 85% of spending decisions. Whoever earns the money, women mostly decide how to spend it, and for that reason they have intense cultural and economic power. Every shopping mall in America has a store or three devoted to more-or-less exclusively female interests like boutiques or pedicure places; you have to go a long way to find a store that's about mostly or exclusively male interests. 

Women may still be full of rage, even though they now have a vast amount of power and a significant set of advantages. I suppose they must be if they keep, generation after generation, being willing to shell out such coin to celebrate expressions of their rage. I wonder, though, how much that rage could be addressed if it were possible to have a clear-eyed recognition of their privileged position in much of American and British society; or if, indeed, there is any set of facts that would resolve the rage that arises in the female experience. It may not entirely be a product of the physical facts of the situation; there may be some core of it that is permanent and eternal. 

A Tail of Chickens and Snakes

That snake was in the chicken coop this afternoon, trying to feast on eggs. The only problem he had was that the real eggs get removed every morning, so what he'd found was my wife’s fake concrete eggs that are glued down in the nesting boxes. (They're to show the hens where to lay, apparently.) 

She collected him up and put him in a sack I held for her, which we tied off and then took off the property. I had to go by the VFD to sign some training forms, so we took him over there on the motorcycles. She said she'd let him go while I went in and signed the forms.

"No," I said, "bring him in so Terry can meet him." Terry's the Fire Chief. 

"Is he afraid of snakes?" she asked.

"Reckon we'll find out shortly."

Oliver Anthony Update

Since we're on the subject of country music, that artist Douglas introduced us to a few weeks ago has had an interesting few weeks. I understand there is some concern that he might have been a put-up -- I've seen D29 voice that concern at his place -- but I really don't think so. It's an understandable concern, though: in the wake of the TEA Party movement, suddenly there were all kinds of TEA Party groups emailing you for money, backed by people like Karl Rove. The idea that this too could just be an attempt to exploit and (more importantly) control people's rage is not an unreasonable one.

That said, I've been watching him now and he looks pretty genuine to me. The fake groups were all about the money: he just canceled a show because he found out people were being charged extra to meet him, and declared that his future shows will be priced between $25 and $40. He took personal responsibility for that, too, stating that it was his fault for not having been involved enough in the contract negotiations and that he would do better in the future. 

Also, I've seen him doing interviews a couple of times, and what he tends to do when asked what he wants is pull out a Bible and start reading from it. The verses he picks aren't partisan favorites -- nothing about smiting or Sodom and Gomorrah or millstones about necks -- but verses about praying for forgiveness and healing of the nation. Another time he was asked about the fact that he was apparently mentioned at the Republican presidential debate, and he laughed and said that those guys were what his song was about. 

He's a young man navigating sudden fame, and all kinds of people must be coming out of the woodwork to try to tempt him. He seems to be doing as well with it as can be expected. Some mistakes are sure, and it would be easy to misinterpret them in this atmosphere of understandable concern. I think he's just an honest kid who's trying to do right, and speak the truth as he sees it. 

Congratulations, Hank

Bocephus married this weekend, to a long time friend. He had spent a year in mourning for his previous wife of some 32 years after her tragic death. Congratulations and best wishes to Mr. and Mrs. Hank Williams, Jr.

Classical Guitar in Medieval Churches

James Russell along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route

"Beorn’s Honey Cakes"

Baking on the hearth in an iron camp stove.

Someone recently bought me a cookbook of recipes "inspired by" the world of Tolkien; I do not recommend it, unless for a young person who is learning how to cook for themselves. It is in no wise an attempt at authentic versions of the meals cooked in Tolkien's stories: their version of "Beorn's Honey Cakes" is banana-bread muffins cooked in cupcake papers. Bananas and other tropical fruits were somewhat thin on the ground near northern Mirkwood, and unlike the Elvish king Beorn enjoyed no wide trade network with which to provide himself with foods. The recipe was even worse than that: the 'honey cakes' were made with no honey! You were just to drizzle honey on top when finished. 

Now admittedly baking with honey is a little advanced, and a popular cookbook targeted at a general audience might well fall back on an easy recipe like this. I will, later, construct a genuine recipe for a Beorn-style honey cake and do a separate post about that. Today, I substituted apple sauce for the ridiculous banana, and baked it in an iron oven over (and under) wood coals.

Rights versus "Public Health"

The governor of New Mexico has issued a decree purporting to "suspend" the right to carry a firearm in Albuquerque -- most famously the site of Bugs Bunny's repeated failures to take the right turn -- after a series of shootings.  I say "purporting to" as an antidote to the news reports, which breathlessly claim that she did "suspend the right," as if that were something she has legitimate power to do.

I don't have the figures in front of me, but my guess would be that approximately zero percent of the shootings were the product of people lawfully carrying firearms using permits. None of the stories in the press sound like they were the products of people with concealed carry permits: they sound like a collection of mostly crimes and a few accidents that wouldn't actually be affected by this edict at all. 

I do see that several law enforcement leaders have already said they won't enforce her unconstitutional order, that lawsuits are expected, and that there is talk of impeachment for having issued it. Those things are good. 

Supporters are not bothered by either the unconstitutionality nor the fact that it wouldn't have any effect on the actual problem, and instead resort to genuinely stupid mottos.

Miranda Viscoli, co-president of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, applauded the governor’s order as a courageous and necessary step to curbing gun violence, even if its legal fate is uncertain.

“If it saves one life, then it’s worth doing,” she said.

Normally I try to refrain from calling my opponents stupid, but that rhetoric is not compatible with thought. Here's a humorous video illustrating the point.

Of interest, though, is that the purported excuse granting the governor power to ignore the constitution and basic rights is "public health." 

The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks.

One might give a slippery slope argument here -- at first they're just going after guns which they never thought of as a 'real' right, but if you let this stand they might use 'public health' as an excuse to go after First Amendment rights like religious exercise or Free Speech. One might, except that of course it's the other way around: they started with religious exercise and free speech, as well as freedom of movement and association and other rights. 

That was during the COVID period, of course, and although many expect a renewed attempt to restore COVID restrictions in order to -- frankly -- defraud the 2024 election using similar measures to the 2020 one, the circumstances are different. In 2020, COVID was novel virus apparently leaked from a bioweapons lab: we had no natural immunity to it, and no idea how horrible it might prove to be. It was rational to treat it like a genuine emergency. These days, almost everyone has been exposed to COVID and has natural antibodies; there are also, er, treatments available some of which are apparently better than others. It's annoying to have what amounts to a second flu, which will kill a certain number of people every year as the flu does, but it's not an emergency on the same scale as before. 

Still, the idea that the COVID emergencies allowed the camel to get its nose into the tent should be alarming. "Public Health" was used as an excuse to limit even the most basic freedoms, by pure executive orders like this one. This was done, and enforced, even in cases like this one where the evidence strongly suggested that the order would have no effect on public health ("wear one of those cloth masks you made at home, or maybe a bandana") or kept in force long after they had proven to have no effect.

There is a reasonable debate -- allied to the general discussion we are having about anarchism and volunteerism -- about whether a government is necessary to address genuine emergencies like the Black Death, and if so what powers it should have for that purpose, for how long, and what limits it should be required to obey even in such an emergency. Actions like this one are well outside the parameters of any such reasonable discussion. 

Anarcho-Capitalism in Argentina

The story is in Jacobin, whose name heralds their opinion of the philosophy without the need of reading it. Still, Wretchard took note of it so I read it anyway. Anything a man as intelligent as himself finds interesting usually is. 

[T]he self-described “anarcho-capitalist” made a name for himself by excoriating right-wing politicians for their moderation and quoting obscure paleolibertarians.… Discounting the possibility that ten million Argentines made a midnight conversion to free-market fundamentalism, explanations tend to focus on the fact that Milei’s rebellious image struck a chord with an increasingly disillusioned electorate. 

…[the] two-party system is coming undone, insists Pryluka, under the weight of decades of inflation and economic stagnation.

If government is the problem, anarchy is certainly a solution. Combining it with free markets may prove difficult, as governments are usually thought to have a key role in protecting property and enforcing contracts. Whether the coercion can be done without is a question with which I am also keenly interested.  

Tintagel

The British have decided to protect the lands around Tintagel Castle, preserving a natural character to the area. Tintagel was of course the castle where Arthur was supposed to have been conceived, and later born, according to Sir Thomas Malory's account (and many others on which he drew, or which drew on him).

Smith’s Cliff, on the north Cornwall coast, will be cared for by the conservation charity as a space for wildlife to flourish, for heritage to be conserved and for people to access and enjoy forever.

The 55-acre (22.6 hectares) acquisition puts in place a vital piece of the coastal ‘jigsaw’ for the National Trust in the area, joining up land that the charity looks after at Barras Nose, which lies north of the castle, all the way to Bossiney, to become a continuous 2.7-mile stretch of coastal land.

Knitting together these sections will create a coastal corridor that connects and encourages the spread of wildlife within a naturally and culturally significant landscape. The site sits within the Cornwall Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) and the Pentire-Widemouth Heritage Coast, and forms part of the setting of the spectacular Tintagel Castle.

Tintagel is also the home to an interesting sculpture of Arthur. The castle itself is a kind of memorial to Arthur: it was built in 1230, but " inspired by the association with Arthur, [Richard, Earl of Cornwall] had the castle styled to appear older."

It strikes me that this attempt to build a natural corridor around Tintagel will actually make it less like it was in Arthur's day (i.e., around 500 AD, not that we are sure that Arthur actually ever lived at all), because then it was a bustling area rich enough to build and sustain a castle. There would have been farms and bakeries and wells and wagons all up and down the nearby areas, commerce and merchants, peasants and men of the church. 

The influence of the idea of the Wilderness on how we envision Arthur is long and striking, though; it is as old as the desire to build monuments either physical or literary to him and his tradition. Merlin in the earliest stories is tied to a man who went mad in the wilderness, and long dwelt there; as is Lancelot, in much later stories. The knights are always going to the wild to seek adventure, encamped in some forest or by some crossing to offer joust or battle to any who pass by. 

An Example to All

The Orthosphere on a recent sentencing in the J6 case:

I believe John Derbyshire coined the phrase “cold civil war” as a name for the ever-worsening feud...[the phrase] came to mind when I read in this morning’s paper that... Enrique Tarrio has been sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for “inspiring followers with his charisma and penchant for propaganda.”  This was in connection with the 2021 Capital Hill protest, which Tarrio did not attend, but about which he appears not to have felt sufficiently sorry.

The judge in Tarrio’s case, one Timothy Kelly, told the court that the sentence was exemplary: “we need to make sure the consequences are abundantly clear to anyone who might be unhappy with the results of 2024, 2028, 2032 or any future election.”  I trust Judge Kelly did not mean that unhappiness with election results is now a crime punished by twenty-two years in prison, but prudent losers... should in future limit their expressions of disappointment to a quiet “darn it” or “shucks.”

I would think it would be grounds for appeal of a sentence if it was given on an 'exemplary' basis: that is, not out of considerations of justice for a particular act of which one had been found guilty, but out of concern for future acts that might (or might not!) be committed by someone else. 

Nevertheless the idea of punishing in this way is very old. In Plato's Protagoras, the title character argues the point to Socrates as a proof that virtue can be taught:

[If] you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong, only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention, thereby clearly implying that virtue is capable of being taught. 

On this argument punishment is really only defensible as a means of avoiding future harms, not of creating a sort of justice for past ones. This puts the Proud Boy in the position of the sacrificial animal: he suffers that we may benefit, and become better people by his suffering. 

So it is really we, you see, who are being sentenced to prison: it is a suspended sentence, for us, but we are meant to understand that anyone who 'might be unhappy with the results of 2024, 2028, 2032 or any future election' is the judge's target. Torres (who is widely reported to have been a Federal informant at least) is just the one who has to suffer for our conversion. 

UPDATE: Here's another exemplar. It's a much shorter sentence being sought, but he also didn't enter the Capitol; he's being prosecuted for exercising what is usually considered protected free speech outside.

The Biden DOJ claimed that Shroyer "spread election disinformation paired with violent rhetoric" to viewers in the months leading up to January 6, and that on the day, "Shroyer took to a megaphone before leading a crowd to the Capitol" and said "The Democrats are posing as communists, but we know what they really are: they’re just tyrants, they’re tyrants. And so today, on January 6, we declare death to tyranny! Death to tyrants!"

"Shroyer did not stop at the sight of tear gas or sounds of explosions on the west side of the Capitol. He continued marching around to the top of the east steps chanting '1776!,' where rioters would eventually violently breach the Capitol and its police line and halt the transfer of presidential power," the court document states.

The usual standard is that a threat isn't protected if and only if it's a real threat against an actual individual that you plausibly intend to carry out. Vague statements like "Death to Tyrants" are usually protected as political rhetoric; heck, people set up fake gallows and guillotines (depending on their own political orientation) to convey the same idea, but without any actual violence occurring.

Meanwhile, remember how the anti-police protests in Seattle and Portland actively protected arsonists and others physically attacking Federal buildings and personnel from arrest? The one-sided nature of these prosecutions is galling even to ordinary people who would never attend a protest of any kind.

Here as elsewhere, I get the sense that our system is so bent on destroying Trump and his movement that they're ripping up their own pillars. A political system is analogously like a building: it's built to withstand force, but only so much. The more force you apply, the more danger you'll rip out a supporting wall (and thus bring the whole thing down).