Insurrection and the American Project

Johns Hopkins' Center for Gun Violence Solutions has produced yet another of the endless calls for gun control that is their purpose for existing (and source of their funding). This one asserts that gun control is necessary to control 'insurrection,' arguing against "the false narrative that the Constitution creates rights to insurrection and the unchecked public carry of firearms[.]"

Well indeed, the Constitution does not create any rights at all. The Constitution does recognize certain rights, but explicitly recognizes that there are other rights that people have which are not spelled out in its text. Balancing the natural right of rebellion with a stable government's need to be able to put down illegitimate insurrections is one of those hard tasks of governance that isn't reducible to a simple rule. "Insurrection is a right" or "insurrection is never right" are both immoral principles because they would lead either to chaos or tyranny. 

The Declaration of Independence, meanwhile, explicitly recognizes the right -- and the duty -- to revolution under specific circumstances. There is no way to disentangle the American project from the Declaration of Independence, nor from the insurrection and revolution that gave rise to America and its subsequent legal forms, including the Constitution.

Meanwhile, the Center has it backwards: an attempt to violate the natural right to arms would, by itself, justify a revolution. It is a basic violation of natural rights to disarm a population in order to render them subjects.

Fortunately the Center is as wrong pragmatically as it is theoretically; the estimates of AR-15s in American hands alone runs to one-in-twenty households, or perhaps 44 million spread across this vast  nation. The resources do not exist to strip even that one rifle out of American hands, not if every police agency in the country turned their hands to the project at the expense of all else. If you called up the whole of the US military and put them to doing it, each servicemember would need to collect 22 rifles apiece. If you drafted the whole population of age for it, they'd still each need to bring in three -- and that's assuming that the whole population was willing to be drafted into such a program. 

Give it up. The ship has sailed. You live in an armed society, and also one of the most peaceful on earth: much of the United States has a murder rate of zero.

More Such Apparent Impropriety

It's hard not to see New York's actions against a certain political candidate and real estate magnate as similarly apparently improper. This is especially true given that the governor has assured other real estate magnates in the state that they won't be held to the same standard. This isn't a new standard of law that applies to all people equally, it's just the particular stick the state has chosen to beat this one guy.

That appears to a layman to be a violation of the 8th and 14th amendments -- "excessive bail" and "excessive fines" are both plainly forbidden, as is a state depriving a person of the equal protection of the laws -- and arguably Article I, Section 9, Clause 3 ("No bill of attainder," although this was a judicial action rather than a legislative one it serves the same purpose).

The apparent purpose of this is to not only to punish him for his political activity, but to hamper his pursuit of further office by tying up his personal wealth. I would say that this appeared to be extraordinarily corrupt except, of course, that it's only one of several similar actions ongoing at the same time in courts around the country. 

The Appearance of Impropriety

So if you are facing an impeachment inquiry based on the testimony of an FBI informant, why not just arrest him and charge him with lying? That disrupts his credibility, makes him unavailable to testify to Congress, and lets you counterattack on the charges facing you and your son.

Why not? Well, usually because of the appearance of impropriety.

The appearance of impropriety is a phrase referring to a situation which to a layperson without knowledge of the specific circumstances might seem to raise ethics questions. 

I don't really need to be convinced that an FBI informant might be lying; rats are rats. When you try to silence him instead of rebutting his testimony, though....

NYT: "No One Deserves Citizenship"

I think that the idea of citizenship is very difficult for progressives because it entails a created difference between human beings that allows for unequal treatment. This piece begins with an example that tries to create emotional weight on the question, suggesting that it's just nonsensical to treat two children of one parent differently because of which side of a border they were born upon. 

She ends up framing the core argument thus: "After all, none of us born here did anything to deserve our citizenship. On what moral grounds can we deny others rights, privileges and opportunities that we did not earn ourselves?"

The immigration issue ends up blurring what is really the core issue. My family has been in America since before the Founding. In every generation it has paid its taxes, fought its wars, built its infrastructure, elected its officers, served in its institutions. That's why I deserve citizenship.

Others families came later but have similarly been involved. Some were imported as slaves, and deserve citizenship partly in recompense for that. Other families crossed the seas and joined America afterwards, and earned for their children a place among us. 

Someone new, from somewhere else, has no similar claim. There is another road -- migration -- that is sometimes open according to particular rules. I agree some of those rules don't make sense: for example, I don't think it's sensible to extend citizenship to a child whose parents have no established connection to the nation, just because they happen to be on US soil at the time of birth. 

Citizenship is earned, though, and it is deserved. It is just as sensible to defend the rights, privileges, and opportunities of your fellow citizens as it is to defend the interests of your family members. Indeed, as Aristotle points out, the polity is an outgrowth of the families that came together to form it. It is our country in the same way that it is our family.

The rights that are particular to citizenship have that status because they are part of governance. We defend everyone's freedom of speech or thought because those are human rights that everyone should have. The right to vote or to serve on a jury is about how Americans govern themselves, and that is American business. It belongs to those of us who have earned it, because we are part of the families that came together to form the nation. 

Experiencing Eternity and the Divine II

Last week's post in response to James' post garnered an interesting discussion, with Tom entering in towards the end to add the Orthodox perspective. What came out of that was a recognition for me that, while the Catholic Church incorporated Neoplatonic ideas early and then found a way to modify its theology later to accomodate Aristotelian ideas, the Orthodox are essentially applying Neoplatonism's approach to Christianity directly. 

This concept that Tom is talking about, theosis, involves using the parts of ourselves that are 'like' God as a road to returning to God. In Greek philosophy, that part is the energia or activity as opposed to the matter: the word form is also sometimes used to translate the concept. Matter is ordered and structured so that it becomes a table or a dog or a particular human being, and the order is a kind of activity imposed on the matter. 

(An aside: This 'order is an activity' is really true, too, at least for organisms -- Jonas' point -- because what it is to be an organism is to be an activity of taking matter from the world, as by eating or breathing, and organizing it in to the form that is also yourself.)

Since God is (incompletely) conceived of as pure energia, in that sense we have 'the image of God' in ourselves, and that likeness provides a bridge to the divine which we can follow. 

Wikipedia helpfully draws out how this Orthodox concept differs from the strict Neoplatonic approach.

Naturally, the crucial Christian assertion, that God is One, sets an absolute limit on the meaning of theosis: even as it is not possible for any created being to become God ontologically, or even a necessary part of God (of the three existences of God called hypostases), so a created being cannot become Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit nor the Father of the Trinity.

Most specifically creatures, i.e. created beings, cannot become God in his transcendent essence, or ousia, hyper-being (see apophaticism). Such a concept would be the henosis, or absorption and fusion into God of Greek pagan philosophy. However, every being and reality itself is considered as composed of the immanent energy, or energeia, of God. As energy is the actuality of God, i.e. his immanence, from God's being, it is also the energeia or activity of God. Thus the doctrine avoids pantheism while partially accepting Neoplatonism's terms and general concepts, but not its substance (see Plotinus).

To put it even more simply, Iamblicus or Plotinus thought that the matter was just another spun-out emanation from the One, and thus that everything that had proceeded from the One could (would!) return to it. Iamblicus, the later thinker, worked out a mode for attempting to approach the One by seeking grace from those spin-offs that were closer to the One than we are ourselves. This system of seeking grace from an intermediary to help you come closer to the One is obviously readily adaptable to seeking the Father through the Son, whose being is closer to God -- he is God -- but also more like us than the Father because the Son is also man.

The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an excellent article on Neoplatonism that comes from a contemporary, skeptical perspective. 

The result of this effort was a grandiose and powerfully persuasive system of thought that reflected upon a millennium of intellectual culture and brought the scientific and moral theories of Plato, Aristotle, and the ethics of the Stoics into fruitful dialogue with literature, myth, and religious practice. In virtue of their inherent respect for the writings of many of their predecessors, the Neoplatonists together offered a kind of meta-discourse and reflection on the sum-total of ideas produced over centuries of sustained inquiry into the human condition.... 

Today, the Neoplatonic system may strike one as lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible, but to dismiss it out of hand is difficult, especially if one is prepared to take seriously a few fundamental assumptions that are at least not obviously wrong and may possibly be right.

Indeed, Einstein's revision of Newtonian physics began with a return to Plato and Platonic ideas; the problem is always that these ideas strike modern thinkers as 'lofty, counterintuitive, and implausible,' but that they often turn out to be right. Jonas too, as I said in the aside above, is really restating a truth that the Greeks had apprehended, even if Plato and Aristotle differed on how to apply it. 

So it might be worth starting with that article on Neoplatonism, so we can get a sense of what the different Christian churches were bringing forward in their two very different ways. It is a very fertile field, one that produces almost every time it is sought. 

Who Thought They'd Get as far as Lincoln?

The Great Emancipator's statue is now on the chopping block.

A Flattering Afternoon

Today I went to the Asheville Celtic Festival to see Albannach. The Festival has a mini-Highland Games out back, and many of my Strongman friends participate. I knew my friend Noel would be competing so I went out to see him on the sidelines. He hugged me and introduced me to the other competitors. 

While we were talking, the announcer saw me with him and started announcing to the crowd, “I see the stonelifters have started moving in! I don’t know if there’s a connection between lifting stones and ugliness, but if so it’s in full effect today!” Then he came over and hugged me too. 

Finally one of the Master Strongmen came over and asked me how old I was. I told him, and he said, “Dude, you’re thick as ****! You should be competing!” Noel explained our friendship and that turned into a nice conversation. 

I love the Strongman community, which dovetails with the Scottish Heavy athletics. It’s a great community of mutual respect, support, and friendship. 

Cognition tools

A Vagueness Problem

There's a longstanding debate about what it means for music to be "country music." Country music is a genre unto itself, with several sub-genres, and unsurprisingly there is a vagueness problem about some of the fringe cases. That is to say, there are plenty of clear-cut cases where nobody would argue that it's not country -- Johnny Cash doing Folsom Prison Blues, George Jones singing The Grand Tour (saddest song ever recorded, if you ask me), plenty of these. 

Likewise, there's plenty of stuff you can stay definitely is not country music, like The Cure or Beethoven. It's music, and Beethoven at least is great music, but without question it's not country music.

Vagueness problems come in when there's movement along the substratum between X and not-X. At first you have a clear-cut case of X and you know that it's X; later, you may be aware of some things that are not-purely-X in a case of X; later still, you may no longer be sure the thing is X at all. After a while, you'll be pretty sure it's not-X, and eventually totally sure. The problem lies in those cases where the vagueness blurs the categories in a way that can make knowledge of the truth uncertain. (That model of vagueness, and for that matter of knowledge, is philosopher Timothy Williamson's).

We are presented this week with a vagueness case, as the pop star known as Beyonce has released what she is pleased to describe as a country song. The question of what makes a song "country music" is thus relevant again.

I have not heard the song. I don't think I've ever heard a song by Beyonce; she's ordinarily operative in a part of the music world I actively dislike (which is not to say that I actively dislike the musicians or people involved: it's just the music I definitely don't like). Regular readers are aware that I think popular music is significantly degraded over the last few decades, replaced by a kind of publicity stunt without the merits of earlier popular music. An occasional topic of this blog is finding the better music that is being produced but not publicized. 

Beyonce is one of those acts that is the product of a contemporary publicity machine. For example, apparently this song was announced by an advertisement on the Super Bowl, itself a publicity machine product, which would have cost millions of dollars. It was accompanied by a photo-shoot designed to move eyebrows -- I mean eyeballs -- which was also placed in a tweet that was pushed by journalists across many outlets. You could be forgiven for thinking that prima facie this won't have much to do with country music's traditional themes of hardscrabble rural life, for example.

As country music outlet WhiskeyRiff puts it, however, the vagueness problem isn't limited to her anyway.

And while I know there will be, and already have been, complaints about the fact that this “isn’t a country song” and Beyoncé “isn’t a country artist,” I’d say the vast majority of what’s heard on country radio isn’t exactly that, either, so this really isn’t any different in my opinion.

As a side note, she’s also been rocking a cowboy hat pretty regularly since the Grammy’s, if that gives you any indication on the marketing aspect[.]

That's a very fair point. Given what Nashville is pushing, why not Beyonce? Dolly Parton has even suggested it, having just done her own adventure into rock music.

Given that it's Friday night, after the jump I'll include some videos playing with the question of what is and is not real country music, as well as another vagueness case by the Rolling Stones.

A Note of Sanity

This is a unique moment as far as I can recall, having followed this debate for decades: a sane and salient point on the viability of mutual defense by the citizenry, coupled with an admission that the very vast majority of guns are kept responsibly. 

Didn’t you feel a twinge of something deeply gratifying — and inspiring — in the way ordinary crowd members chased down a suspected gunman and collectively smothered him? They undertook momentary personal risk and sacrifice and then found greater safety in numbers, as helper after helper piled on until the suspect disappeared under their collective weight.

That’s real authority, and it didn’t come from a law or a cop.

....

There is no easy resolution to the gun debate. It’s estimated that there are about 398 million guns in the United States, and about 397.9 million of them are kept peaceably and responsibly for home protection or sport. Maybe gun haters need to start talking to those gun owners as allies rather than enemies.

The author apparently is a sports journalist rather than an opinion columnist as a rule, and that may be why she is able to see the issue more clearly. Those reared to produce commentary on this topic have been taught clear lines, but her fresh eyes are far clearer.  

Recycling Deceptions

Our county has "staffed recycling centers" where you can bring your trash for free,* provided that you have separated the recycling. Recycling has to be separated into aluminum/steel cans and plastic bottles. I've always suspected this was a scam of some sort -- aluminum is the only thing that is really cost-effective to recycle, but it's easily separated from the steel with electromagnets. 

Turns out it's a bigger scam than I realized.

* "At no additional charge in addition to your substantial taxes." Nothing is free.

Doon in th’ Borders

The town of Jedburgh is having its ball game today.

The Jethart Ba', which looks like a game of street rugby, dates back hundreds of years. It's believed to have been derived from the game of football - and is said to have originally been played using the head of an Englishman.

There aren't too many rules!

Februum

The word February comes down to us from a Latin word for a purification or a means of such. Apparently the Latin spelling was reintroduced in English in the 14th century, alongside the Hundred Years War with France, driving out the French spelling that had been standard until then. 

But what is a febrvvm? Apparently it could be almost anything. 

According to Ovid’s poem Fasti, pretty much anything that people used to purify something else was known as februa (the plural form of februum). Houses were purified with “roasted grain and salt,” land was purified with strips of animal hide, priests wore crowns made of leaves from trees, and so on.

This is the date of the purification festival Lupercalia, which was the racy precursor to St. Valentine’s Day in the same way that the Saturnalia was the racy precursor to Christmas. 

Open Source

Waiting to fly out of AVL airport today, I saw an F-22 launch from this non-military field. The airport bartender said she’s been seeing a lot of them just lately. Even more Chinooks. 

That is suggestive. Not definitive, but suggestive. 

Dallas

I'm taking a short trip to Texas tomorrow. I don't know that any of you regulars are in Dallas, but I'll be in town for one night only if you are. 

The Usual Gaslighting, Please

A woman brought an AR-15 to a megachurch and opened fire, fortunately not apparently knowing how to use the thing very well. The Washington Post reports:

Moreno’s motive remained unclear Monday[.]

That is interesting, because the rifle is supposed to have been equipped with a "Free Palestine" message. That didn't make the Washington Post's reporting. We may never know why this troubled woman would randomly carve those words into a rifle she was intending to turn into a murder weapon.

They did report on Texas' gun laws, which they don't even know if she broke.

She had previously been convicted or pleaded guilty in the Houston area to misdemeanor assault, fraud and drug charges, records show.

Some misdemeanor convictions bar people from legally buying guns in Texas, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether Moreno’s convictions would have. The state has few restrictions on gun purchases, with no firearm sales registry, no required waiting period to buy a gun and no red-flag law guarding against mentally ill or violent people having weapons.

So, really, they were basically asking for it. 

The Post did come up with this, at least: 

Moreno at times used a male first name, Jeffrey, and listed her sex as both male and female in records. It was not clear whether Moreno identified as transgender.

It's probably also unclear if she -- as the Post identifies her -- was using any drugs as "therapy" for this issue. By tomorrow we'll be assured that is a non issue even if it were so, assuming anyone is still even reporting on the case. Those Texas gun laws, though...

UPDATE: Vice is on schedule. 

Chaos

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat. 

A Partial Revision

A recent post was titled "The Uselessness of International Institutions." It turns out, however, that the UN did manage to be useful in a way: as a shield for one of Hamas' headquarters, which turns out to have been located physically beneath their own headquarters in Gaza. 

Another thing to consider when evaluating these institutions' condemnations and judgments. They turn out to have taken sides in the conflict they are presuming to judge, indeed are so committed to one side that they were willing to serve as human shields to protect its nerve center.

Experencing Eternity and the Divine

James put up a post a few days ago that I think is very worthy, as is AVI's comment there. I did not myself comment upon it at the time, but it dovetails with a work of philosophy I am rereading after several years. You should read both James and AVI before continuing with this one.

Hans Jonas was a German-born American philosopher, and his classic is The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology. He lived at the time of the second world war, in which he fought in both Italy and Germany. He wrote on Gnosticism and what is called existentialism; in fact, I think he derived a Neoplatonic metaphysics for himself without appearing to realize it. 

The early parts of the book are already concerned with theology as well as biology, disposing of the "god of the mathematicians" as inadequate because such a god would have no reason to favor life over death and indeed no capacity to recognize that something was alive instead of dead.* He is very much concerned with the problem James and AVI are concerned with, in other words: the ability of the divine and the mortal to encounter each other, to conceptualize each other, to interact.

This problem has a long history in philosophy. It also works both ways. It is proven by Aquinas and others that humanity cannot fully comprehend the nature of God; in fact, here as elsewhere, they were following Avicenna's arguments, who was following Aristotle's. The question of how a god that exists on Aristotelian lines could even know us is a real problem in any theology that starts with Aristotle's concept of actuality versus potentiality; it is likewise in theologies (like Nicholas of Cusa's) that try to reason about the relationship by analogy to the infinite and the finite. (Nor is it clear that this is the right way to speak about a divine creator, whose work provides the ground for both the finite and all the infinities, who governs their relationships and makes possible their interactions in defiance of Zeno's objections). 

In his eleventh essay, Jonas -- who has come to view symbolic myth as 'the glass through which we see darkly' -- returns to the relationship between ourselves and the eternal, meaning God. Here he derives, apparently independently, both a Neoplatonic view of our relationship to the divine and of our "higher selves" that somehow exist in eternity but yet still in relationship with ourselves as finite and mortal creatures engaged in activity in time. 

The bridge he comes up with is the now. Now doesn't seem to have finite boundaries: it isn't extended, with a beginning and an end. It just is, and it always is, but the now that was just now is not now any longer. When we decide and act, we do it in the now. This unextended time -- which is the only real time in the sense that it is the only time in which we can and do actually exist -- is like eternity in its neverending existence, and unlike the past and future that are extended and measurable. This is the ground where, he argues, mortal and divine meet. 

From this he goes on to derive a positive ethics, by which I mean that his work is not existential after all: our essence comes first, and is derivable from what it means to be a living, conscious organism with freedom of action and this relationship with the divine. What we do in the now is written in eternity, perfects or mars our noetic selves -- the image of us in the eternal -- and this gives us a real ethical duty to do right and not wrong. 

Jonas' thinking will not fully satisfy anyone here. He believes he has disproven any sort of immortality for mortals beyond this capacity to write on eternity, or to exist as an idea in the mind of God. As a way of getting at the problem of how mortals and God can conceive of each other and interact, however, it is a thoughtful and novel approach.

* In this same essay Jonas explains something critical about the organism, that is about life, and why life is different and special. I have cited this before as a fundamental proposition in philosophical objections to abortion, discussions of agency, as well as in my commentary on Plato's Laws. It is one of the more important philosophical ideas I have encountered, and yet it emerges almost as an afterthought because what he is really interested in here is the right conception of God.

The "3Fs"

Janet left an interesting closing comment on our discussion below, which discussion was itself also I think of interest. I had not heard of 'the 3Fs" before.

They propound the "3Fs": "F*** it" (willingness to act and low concern about consequences), "F*** that" (unwillingness to ignore problems and issues), and "F*** you" (insistence on social equality with everyone, regardless of credentials, etc.). That means that problems get dealt with (maybe by brawling, but they're dealt with), ideas get implemented (sometimes stupid ideas, but not always), and incompetents don't get a free ride (maybe, again, by brawling). Hence, America moves forward in a way that other countries just can't attain. Is that Disneyworld? Well, America invented Disneyworld, didn't it? 

It did, as a matter of fact. That reminds me of a post from 2015 when I mentioned how much I hate "soft tourist versions" of things like biker bars. It was Pigeon Forge rather than Disneyworld on that occasion that had stood up a "biker bar" right across from the Pigeon Forge Harley dealer that was all fake and full of Yuppies in khaki shorts. On the other hand, that bar is still there! Just because it doesn't please me doesn't mean that it isn't after all very popular; not too far away is a fake touristy version of the Titanic, as well as the infamous Dixieland Stampede (apparently recently renamed "Dolly Parton's Stampede" in deference to the cultural revolution).

People love that stuff, as Johnny Mercer pointed out in "I'm an Old Cowhand." Even in 1936, "The buffalo roam around the zoo... and the old Bar X is just a barbecue." 

Now if you want to go to a real biker bar, there's one not too far away. I've never seen a fight there, or in any such place actually. Another couple of "Fs" are understood in such places, which are commonly given by the acronym "FAFO." 

Outlaw Whiskey

A local act with national recognition, Outlaw Whiskey held an album release party tonight in Bryson City (a “city” more by custom and tradition than in fact). My son and I went over there to see them. 

Drinking Music for Mr Rollins

He didn't much like Toby Keith's drinking songs, so maybe he can find one he likes here. And if you enjoy cameos, videos 1 & 4 will make you smile. Happy Friday, y'all!

Everyone Hates to Fly

A columnist at the Washington Post raises her complaint, but the force of the article is a discussion she had with a reformer who has some thoughts on how to fix it.

Flying for me is a mixed bag. Because I am what the government is pleased to call 'a trusted traveler,' and because I fly out of a small regional airport rather than a big hub, the experience can be not-so-bad. I object to being disarmed on a philosophical basis, but aside from that it's mostly just a minor set of annoyances punctuated with expensive beers at airport bars if there are long waits. 

If anything goes wrong, though -- and it so often does -- it can quickly become an ordeal even with those advantages. The last trip was bedeviled by honesty horrendous weather, which is nobody's fault (not even the Romans'), but the airline abandoned me in Charlotte and didn't ever try to reschedule the flight. I had to get my son to drive halfway across the state and back to collect me. (At least I didn't have to hitchhike: few are going to pick up a bearded biker!).

So I'm sympathetic to the complaint and the desire to make improvements. Unfortunately most of the suggestions here are either (a) government regulations, or (b) pipe dreams like 'building a high-speed train network.' The author is wise enough to realize the latter isn't going to work out -- "pipe dream" is her choice of words for it -- but it still makes the list. 

Competition usually improves things more than government regulation (which is more likely to break things), but as she also points out there are very high barriers to market-entry with airlines. You can't just open up another airline like you can another bakery or machine shop. It requires a substantial amount of capital just to buy the planes and recruit the skilled labor necessary to operate them. 

So it could be the answer is really just to fly less: use more internet and phone instead of in-person meetings, travel by car instead, take the train if you live in the northeaster corridor (which is basically the only place in America where that option makes sense). The fewer people who fly, the less stress on the system.

A Rose By A Different Name

I’m not sure who told Stephen Green that the CIWS ‘had never been fired in combat’ before. Maybe it is true that the Navy never fired one, as his article says. 

When deployed on land, though, the same weapon system is called the C-RAM, and we fired them all the time against Iranian rockets and mortars in Iraq. Multiple times a day, sometimes, during the hottest months of the fighting. 

RIP Mojo Nixon

Tough week.

The Uselessness of International Institutions

I attended an online talk today by Justice Professor Elyakim Rubinstein, formerly a senior diplomat and Deputy Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, and Abraham D. Sofaer, formerly a federal judge and Legal Adviser to the US State Department and an emeritus senior fellow at Hoover. They were discussing, from the Israeli perspective, the recent preliminary ruling on Israel and genocide by the World Court.

As you may know, the court heard a challenge brought by South Africa's government against Israel, and issued a preliminary finding that genocide was possibly occurring. It then issued a series of orders that Israel is, of course, perfectly free to ignore because all these international institutions are a joke.* 

I was curious to hear the Zionist** perspective on this, so I tuned in to hear what they had to say. They pointed out that this court doesn't operate like a real court, and thus did not actually do a real finding-of-fact. What it did was pile all the allegations together, call it 'evidence,' and the ruling says that given 'all the evidence,' there's a high probability of finding some proof in there somewhere once it's evaluated. 

To put it in layman's terms, then, the ruling isn't actually a ruling that Israel is doing anything wrong; it's a ruling that a lot of accusations have been made, and 'where there's smoke there's fire.' 

A real court wouldn't issue even a preliminary injunction without a sufficient review to determine whether or not a case was likely to succeed on the merits. No such effort was made here. 

That's what the Zionists say. Unlike the clowns at the UN, they do at least mean what they say.

* The head of the UN declared that these sorts of rulings are "legally binding," and he "trusts" that Israel will abide by them. He knows perfectly well that they will not abide by any one of them, let alone all of them, and no one can do anything about it. In other words, the rulings are not in any sense "binding." Thus, there's not really a law; and a court that issues bootless rulings while draping itself in the costume of jurists is not really a court. 

The head of the UN's pantomime to the contrary just shows you how much of a joke these institutions really are. I also have a good laugh when they do things like appointing Saudi Arabia or Iran to the "Organization for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women."

** This term is usually employed as a perjorative and often unfairly, but here I am using it accurately and non-prejudicially: the institution that hosted this talk is explicitly and formally a Zionist organization.

Another from Keith

Toby Keith also did this piece, which I don't hate and kind of like. Note the ways, though, in which the video is much more transgressive than the lyrics -- up to and including the transgender in the men's room of the celebrated bar. Likewise, all the Confederate flags in the video that aren't hinted at in the lyrics. That's also true of the earlier video I posted of his.

Now this is obviously a tribute to an earlier (and better, no disrespect to the dead) song by David Allan Coe.

You have the same basic setup: a bar with bikers, cowboys, and hippies/yuppies coming into clash. The Keith version has this as a suitable resting place, a thing one could love and accept as home; the Coe version is stridently resisting it, striving to escape it and to move beyond to something better. But he can't, because "Country DJs know that I'm an outlaw; they'd never come to see me in this dive." The dive where nobody recognizes him: they tell him he 'sounds like' David Allan Coe. 

This is what I think Rollins was getting at in his letter. Keith often seemed to offer acceptance of the status quo; Coe was clearly fighting against it, and trying to transcend it through bare effort. He still played the gigs in the dives, but he wasn't accepting them as his ultimate fate; and in time, he rose above them, and became something more. 

Ironically Coe is still alive, one of the last of the old Outlaws, though he had to have drunk as much beer as Keith ever did. As younger star Sturgill Simpson says, life ain't fair and the world is mean.

More from Henry Rollins

I want to draw your attention also to these things that Henry Rollins did, which I like espeically among his works.

The first is a meditation on playing against Iggy Pop as a rocker.

The second is about the transformational quality of iron weightlifting on the young.

A Few More from Toby

Toby Keith was from Moore, Oklahoma, so he can make fun of us like this.

The Vesuvius Challenge

A high tech attempt to read scrolls cooked in the Pompeii explosion has succeeded. The first work they can read is Epicurean philosophy, and much more remains. It is hoped that even some of the lost works of Aristotle might be included. 

The Late Toby Keith

Country music superstar Toby Keith died last night, apparently after a long battle with stomach cancer. My wife was shocked, not so much that he died but to realize that a long-time fan of her artwork, who corresponded online with her under the name "Toby Keith," turns out to have been the actual Toby Keith and not just a pseudonym. 

I was never a huge fan of his music, sharing some of the concerns about it that Henry Rollins puts forward in this letter: sharing also, however, Rollins' appreciation for his faith towards our military and veterans. There's nothing wrong with a playful drinking song, of course; but his was a living made on celebrating the weekend bacchanalia of workers whose lives are otherwise empty of joy.

Still, I will put up my favorite of his songs. It shows humility and the ability to laugh at himself, which are good traits. 

Likewise, I trust -- based on his comments about his faith -- that death for him brings about only an end to what must have been significant suffering. It was surely nothing to fear. 

UPDATE: I was reminded of this story of Keith stepping in to save Merle Haggard’s final concert, an act of honor for which he deserves remembrance. 

Some Good Country Songs

More younger stuff, since you won’t find it on the radio. 

Axe-Throwing Bars

Prima facie this concept sounds both dubious and awesome; it is in fact awesome.

My son has a good arm for it. We didn’t keep score, but halfway through I started throwing left-handed and racked up several bullseyes. I quoted The Princess Bride to him, but he was too young when he saw it to remember. Another worthy thing to do, then!

Up Helly Aa

The Viking fire festival in Shetland looks to have been a success this year. But look at this version in Ramsden, West Yorkshire! Apparently a community of Shetlanders there does it up right. 

UPDATE: Or maybe it was just an AI picture. Too bad; we could all use a Viking fire fest around February. 

Candlemass

Technically yesterday, the feast of Brigid: Saint or goddess is still debated. Of old it was called Imbolc. 

Lex Victoriam

Ironically I was just discussing this idea in the comments of the last post. Richard Fernandez links to an essay on the subject this afternoon. I was calling it Right of Conquest; this author prefers “Law of Victory.”

Its absence, we seem to agree, creates permanent conflict instead of an end to war. 

Wartime Definitions

I remember my father complaining that Congress had never had the courage to pass a declaration of war in the Vietnam Conflict, preferring the fig leaf of calling it "a police action." It certainly was a war, fought between two hostile foreign powers -- Ho Chi Minh's and ours, with his side backed by China and the Soviet Union. A police action would seem to be an internal use of force, which might be quite violent but which happens in a territory over which one claims sovereignty. A military action to counter an actual insurrection could plausibly be a police action rather than a civil war; the debate Tom mentioned below over whether "the Civil War" was actually a civil war is one that remains hot among historians.

That makes what is going on in Israel a debatable case. Is it a war or a police action? On the one hand there is no actual Palestinian state, only a notional one with divided leadership; Israel is said to be occupying parts of, well, Israel, parts that notionally belong to a proposed Palestine but that are actually within Israeli borders. The action in Gaza is similar to a counter-insurrection action over a part of the territory where sovereignty is being contested by a hostile army (and an irregular one, also, guerrilla and without uniforms or other distinguishing marks that attend to regular military forces).

On the other hand, there is a substantial amount of diplomacy across decades that has treated Palestine as an entity that exists at least potentially, and that they were trying to create actually. It has a notional territory even if it has not actually been agreed to by anyone yet, and a notional government even if it is divided and mutually internally hostile, and people who claim to belong to it as citizens. It is treated as if it were a nation for diplomatic purposes, even though it has never had full control over any territory; the United Nations deems it a "non-member observer state," emphasis added, since 2012. 

If so, it might demand to be treated according to the laws of war; that would make things like this Israeli raid on the Ibn Sina* hospital an act of perfidy that would be prosecutable. Police can put on disguises and conduct such raids, but soldiers can't -- not if they are fighting other soldiers in a lawful war.

Of course, in order to demand such things Palestine would have to start adhering to the laws of war itself. That would be a tremendous step forward and not one anyone actually expects to see: Hamas' raid was intended to violate the laws of war, and the humanity of its victims, as much as it was possible to do. They aren't about to abandon acts of perfidy, hiding among civilian populations, and the like. That makes the issue somewhat moot according to the basic law of (human) nature: "Turnabout is fair play." 

* Ibn Sina, better known in the West as Avicenna, is a titanically important philosopher. Though Muslim, his metaphysical account of the universe ended up being largely incorpoated into Catholic theology by, inter alia, Thomas Aquinas. 

How did that hapapen? Avicenna was a genuine expert on Aristotle, and -- the story goes -- was mystified when he received a book entitled The Theology of Aristotle (that was actually a collection of works of Plotinus, founder of the Neoplatonic school). He had his doubts about it because he'd read and understood the Metaphysics, which doesn't sound anything like anything Plotinus ever wrote. After thinking about it for a long time, though, he came up with a way of making the two approaches compatible, which turns out to be his own novel metaphysical view.

When his view and other Islamic philosophy came into the hands of the Catholic Church via the reconquest of Spain, it answered a big problem that Aquinas and his contemporaries were facing. They wanted to incorporate the thinking of Aristotle into their world, as it had been lost and was much stronger than anything they had to go against it. However, many early Christians had been at one point Neoplatonists -- including Augustine -- and therefore Aristotle's basic view of the universe was not compatible with the one they had inherited from earlier saints. Not being saints themselves yet, they could hardly go against those who already were. 

Yet here comes Avicenna with an answer to that problem: he had made the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian views compatible! All that they needed to do was work in his explanations, which they did -- chiefly without mentioning him, as it would be embarrassing to admit that they were borrowing large parts of their theology from a Muslim. Aquinas does mention another Muslim philosopher often, Averrores, but only as 'the Commentator,' i.e., one who commented on 'the Philosopher,' i.e. Aristotle. Avicenna only gets one mention from him that I'm aware of, but if you've worked through the two thinkers' metaphysics the influence is obvious. 

Plagarism wasn't looked down on as much in the medieval university, I guess. Well, even today the standards are only enforced under duress. This footnote is now longer than the original blog post, but Ibn Sina merits extended attention. I should note that he thought of himself chiefly as a physician rather than a philosopher; his metaphysics is contained in the thirteenth book of a larger work called Healing (usually translated as 'The Healing,' but Arabic like Romance languages just likes to stick articles in front of everything: thus, as La France is just 'France' in English al-Shifā is properly just Healing). It therefore makes perfect sense that a hospital is named for him.

The End Is Nigh

In a further sign that the end times are near,* Ben Shapiro raps.

I'd never heard of Tom MacDonald before this, but apparently he's an independent rapper who's been hitting the top 10 in digital sales reasonably regularly for the last 5 years.

It's an interesting synergy. Both have very different audiences, but they share an anti-woke sentiment, so this is getting a bunch of cross-audience exposure.

So how did this happen?

The Grey Mouser

His name is actually Gandalf. Last night he caught a mouse and brought it to my wife, alive, and dropped it in her lap while she was reading in bed. 

She recovered admirably from the experience, during which the mouse’s escape was foiled by the cat. She then brought the mouse to me, holding it by the tail. I offered to kill it, or to feed it to the chickens, but she wanted to release it safely in the wild instead. 

Good kitty. 

The 2nd South Carolina String Band

For Texas:

According to the band's intro to this next song over on YouTube:

The theme-song of General J.E.B. Stuart’s famous cavalry is attributed to the leader of his camp band and banjoist, Sam Sweeney. This signature song, the words possibly penned by Stuart himself, was “Jine the Cavalry”. Though the composer is uncertain, it is thought to have been adapted by Sweeney, who, after enlisting in the cavalry in 1862, soon came to the general’s attention and suddenly found himself a member of Stuart's staff and his personal minstrel troupe. 

As Burke Davis wrote in his great biography of Stuart, “JEB Stuart - the Last Cavalier”, 

“Stuart must have more music.…there was always music. Sweeney on the banjo, Mulatto Bob on the bones, a couple of fiddlers […] Sweeney rode with Stuart on the outpost day and night. Stuart often sang and Sweeney plucked the strings behind him. . . .”

The chorus is:

If you want to have a good time, jine the cavalry!
Jine the cavalry! Jine the cavalry!
If you want to catch the Devil, if you want to have fun,
If you want to smell Hell, jine the cavalry!

And a Union song that apparently became popular on both sides during the Late Unpleasantness.*

The 2nd plays Civil War reenactments, among other things.

*I found this blog post from a Southern historian in looking up the origin of this way of referring to the Civil War and like what he has to say (although apparently he disagrees with calling it the Civil War).

Hypotheticals

With Biden’s encouragement of millions of illegal aliens entering and taking up residence in the United States along with 2024 being an election year, we might be in for a wild ride. Like Will Rogers, all I know about this is what I read on the internet (loosely paraphrased), but from what I’ve read lately I can easily imagine some bad scenarios. I am very interested in your takes on this, what you think is likely, what you are preparing for, and where you think I’m just being paranoid.

Up to this point, I have thought in terms of short-term disruptions, and that’s what I have been preparing for. This level of prep is also good for natural disasters, so it would be appropriate for everyone to prepare for a week or so of disruption. However, given that any foreign actor who wants direct action teams (terrorist, guerrilla, etc.) in place in the US has had plenty of opportunity to get them here, I’ve been thinking in terms of scattered small-scale actions like, e.g., maybe squad-size terrorist cells shooting up festivals or concerts, maybe even coordinated attacks so several of these squads hit at the same time in different places. Also, infrastructure sabotage, like taking down parts of an electrical grid, seems quite possible. Any of these could produce significant disruptions, but would probably not last too long, so preparing for a week or two of civil unrest seemed reasonable.

However, the recent letter on uncontrolled immigration by ten retired FBI leaders got me thinking in much larger scale terms. I encourage everyone to read the whole letter, but the following paragraph from it sparked this post:

It would be difficult to overstate the danger represented by the presence inside our borders of what is comparatively a multi-division army of young single adult males from hostile nations and regions whose background, intent, or allegiance is completely unknown. They include individuals encountered by border officials and then possibly released into the country, along with a shockingly high estimate of ‘gotaways’ – meaning those who have entered and evaded apprehension.

Several paragraphs later, the letter says:

… elements of this recent surge are likely no accident or coincidence. These men are potential operators in what appears to be an accelerated and strategic penetration, a soft invasion, designed to gain internal access to a country that cannot be invaded militarily in order to inflict catastrophic damage if and when enemies deem it necessary.

So, “multi-division army” caught my thoughts. What if – just thinking through that – we are not looking at possible action by disparate squads, but by platoons or companies? A company-sized element, hidden as smaller elements on different patches of private land around a target area, could carry out repeated coordinated attacks in that area, effectively rendering the area uncontrolled territory. Now, add in that several company-sized units could be coordinating attacks within a state. How long would it take National Guard units to get things under control? And if this were to happen in multiple states at the same time, federal assistance could take a while to arrive in any given affected area.

Or, the October 7 attack in Israel was carried out by about 3 battalions of terrorists, I think. I guess really good intelligence work would be the only thing that might prevent battalions of terrorists in the US from hanging out in small groups in geographically distant areas until the order to go is given and then gathering for and conducting a mass attack. Really good intelligence work is by no means assured.

I think we can all imagine other possible scenarios, and of course it is possible none of this will happen. I certainly hope and pray that none of it happens.

What do the rest of you think? What is likely to happen, in your opinion, and why do you think that? What should we as private citizens be prepared for this year, while we might still have time to make those preparations?

Edit: I just want to clarify that I'm thinking of what preparations to make, not a "let's go down the worst-case scenarios rabbit hole" conversation. Clearly, other than being ready to escape or make a good account of myself and die well, there's nothing I can really do to prepare for a 10/7-sized assault on my city. 

But if I'm not in the targeted area and just affected by loss of services, etc., how should I be prepared? I'm asking because I respect the regulars here and hearing what you think will give me a better idea of what's reasonable. It is a kind of check on my own imagination, if you will.

Burns Night

Forfar Brides, Neeps & Tatties, and Cock-a-Leekie. 

To the immortal soul of Robert Burns. 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to victory!

Now's the day, and now's the hour;
See the front o' battle lour;
See approach proud Edward's power—
Chains and slavery!

Wha will be a traitor knave?
Wha can fill a coward's grave!
Wha sae base as be a slave?
Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland's king and law
Freedom's sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fa',
Let him follow me!

By oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!—
Let us do or die!

Scottish shortbread and an Old Chub Scotch ale.

Has The Federal Government Broken The Compact Between The States And The Union?

We are about to have a serious, and overdue, conversation about the relationship between the states and the federal government. Governor Abbott's letter raises some important issues that Americans need to consider seriously.  

UPDATE BY GRIM: Twenty-five state governments including Texas, as governors have signed a letter of support for Abbot. 

Skin ‘Em Out

The only annoying part of cleaning the chickens (or wild upland fowl) is plucking the feathers. Otherwise, it’s just like cleaning any small game. 

Today my wife suggested just skinning them. For some reason I never thought of that. The skin is valuable for roasting, as it retains moisture and can be stuffed with butter and herbs. But for these little cockerels, which I’m planning to turn into Cock-a-Leekie for Burns Night tomorrow, it’s unnecessary. 

Skinning them saved a great deal of time. In less than an hour I went from three angry roosters to three cleaned birds ready for the pot. 

"Weapons of War"

A favorite argument for gun control advocates talking about the AR-15 and similar platforms -- which were in fact carefully designed as semi-automatics in order not to be weapons of war -- in the UK it now means kitchen knives and machetes. While it is possible to fight a war with a machete -- I suppose the 1990s Rwandan genocide was chiefly conducted with machetes -- they are literally a farming tool, not a purpose-designed weapon of war.

The Government put forward plans to ban some zombie-style* knives in August last year, but Ms Hayes said this is “insufficient” because the ban does not cover all offensive weapons, such as swords.

It turns out that just as there isn't properly a "weapon of war" there isn't really an "offensive weapon" either. All weapons can be used for defense as well as offense: even a tank can be used to deter an invasion rather than to fight one. 

Likewise, just about anything can be a weapon, and therefore 'an offensive weapon' as well.  

* This is a new one to me, who has spent his life around knives. It apparently means "the kind of knives one sees in Zombie TV shows," which accords with the language about banning "Rambo-style knives" as well. Is a "Rambo-style" or "Zombie-style" knife more dangerous? Absolutely not. Was it designed as a weapon of war? No, it was designed to make an impression on television or movie audiences.

In any case, I refer you as always to Havamal 38: "Never step a foot from your door/ without your weapons of war: for never sure is the knowing/ when you might be needing/ your weapons along the road." 

The Wine of Rome

Archaeologists tell us that the wines known in the ancient Roman Empire were quite different from the ones we know today. 

Wine colors, for example, were not standardly subdivided between white and red (as is done today), but for the Romans, they belonged to a wide spectrum of colors ranging from white and yellow to goldish, amber, brown and then red and black, all based on grapes macerated on the skin.

Because the fermentation technology was different, they say the wine would have smelled and tasted different from ours too: it would have had the aroma of bread, and a spicy flavor. The closest thing like it today is wine from the Republic of Georgia, still made in similar vessels called qvevri.

Goodnight, Uga X

In sad news, the University of Georgia's mascot bulldog, Uga X, passed away last night. They have royalty-like numbers after their names, and like royalty they often enjoy credit for things that happened during their reign.

He left as the most decorated mascot in school history, overseeing the Georgia football dynasty that lead to back-to-back national championships, two SEC titles, and victories in the Rose, Sugar, Peach, and Orange Bowls.

Long live the bulldog. 

Thanks, Lady

Cartoon rake, meet cartoon cat.

I grew up in the South in the same period she's talking about, and I never once heard the phrase "brown person" until the late 1990s -- and then it was in the mouths of liberals who were wishing it was a category they could assign to the thoughts of troglodyte rednecks, not a phrase used by the rednecks themselves. Racism against black people was very much a thing in the 1970s South, though as the article points out important aspects of the culture were already moving strongly against it. The irony is that the strength of the black/white division meant that anyone who wasn't black was, well, white. That's why the Irish had settled very easily into Savannah when they struggled in New York and Boston; it's why Jews were quite accepted in the Antebellum South when they were subject to great prejudice elsewhere. 

The people of South Carolina elected her as their governor, for goodness sake, even though she was a Republican who credited Hillary Clinton with inspiring her political career. She didn't win the office with closet Democratic votes, either, as she may hope to do with tonight's election. She was embraced by one of the most strident of the Southern states -- one whose votes she'll have to ask for again, soon. Why she chose to insult them with this falsehood at this time is probably because she's looking for a new constituency, and thinks she can best seek it by publicly rejecting her old one. That sort of disloyalty is typical of a Washington politician, who forget in their moment of wealth and power who it was that trusted them enough to empower them to begin with.

On the side issue of "remembering the 1970s," I heard some young people discussing a theory that people didn't drink water in the 1970s. They asked if bottled water was even for sale in the stores. Well, no, it wasn't: water in those days was free, everywhere, as a general civilizational courtesy. The late, great Lewis Grizzard of the Atlanta Journal wrote that his father thought that only Communists would charge for water (a good laugh line even then, given the obvious capitalism of figuring out how to charge for what had always been free). When Perrier began to become popular among Atlanta Yuppies in the 1980s, he had a lot of fun with the idea that you'd pay good money for a drink of water. It's not so funny now, is it? 

Choice and Happiness

The other day I was responding to a post by David Foster, with a discussion aimed at the unhappy youth. Specifically, I was trying to offer some advice on how to take charge of your happiness and become happier. I held that good philosophy can help you with that, as can bold practical actions:

The thing about anxiety is that it turns out to be one of the things you really can do something about. Stoic philosophy is a practice that tackles the problem of anxiety by helping you identify what you can control, what you can't control, and ways of focusing on the former. This does a great deal to eliminate anxiety from your life, because your focus ends up on things you absolutely can master. As you learn to let go of the other things and focus on your area of control, anxiety will diminish because you care less and less about the things outside your control....

Also, ride horses or motorcycles. As Aristotle teaches, you get virtues by practicing them. Get out and practice taking risks, being courageous, doing dangerous things. You'll get better and better at the things, but you'll also get better and better at handling risky situations in general.

I remember on reflection how exciting Aristotle was to me when I was young, and facing all the uncertainty of youth. Then one day I encountered a professor who told us, “Aristotle says that happiness is an activity, and the particular activity is using your reason to align your vital powers in the pursuit of excellence.”

That was a revelation to me. Happiness was in my hands. All I had to do was do it. The Stoics refined that picture, but that’s the truth. There’s no reason to be anxious. Just go do. 

Now it happened that just a day or so later AVI wrote a post on happiness that contains an implicit challenge to this view. 

Neuroticism decreases as we age.  Stated the other way, our sense of emotional stability increases as we get older. Fewer things bother us. We give a rat's ass about less and less stuff.  Put it however you want to, we calm down....

Because we are all moving in the direction of improved mood anyway - your 50s will likely be your happiest decade and your 60s your second-happiest - it gives us the impression that "when all is said and done, I made mostly right choices."  People who married feel vindicated because they feel emotionally better at 55 than at 25. But people who did not marry are also quite sure they made the right choice. 

(James had a theologically sound comment at that post, by the way.)

So the implicit challenge is that young people just are unhappier than older people; and thus, that adopting a good philosophy or having grand experiences merely correlates with a natural process of declining neuroticism. Correlation is not causation. Of course, getting older is itself also a correlation: it's just one of those things that happens to us -- at least, those of us who get ahold of our mental health sufficiently to avoid suicide or death by drug overdose. Susceptibility to those things may also be heavily influenced by genetics, though, and so also not necessarily the product of good philosophy or activity.

Epictetus tells us in Enchiridion V that misery is in our hands, because we can choose to take a view even of death that is not terrible (as, he points out, did Socrates). He goes on to say one of the most striking things in the whole book, which I think relevant to today's discussion: "It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself."

This is meant to apply to misfortunes, but it applies just as well to good fortune. I am happier now than I ever was, and I ascribe this to adopting a better philosophy as well as to having trained myself for action. Maybe I should not credit myself for this happiness, nor my teachers (nor, as per AVI's post, even my long-suffering and patient wife). Maybe it's just something that happened to me, like all the other things.

That's more Zen than Stoic, which brings me to a strong counter-argument: Richard Strozzi Heckler's In Search of the Warrior Spirit, his account of teaching Zen meditation to US Special Forces. He did so as part of a program that was meant to create improved capacities for things like marksmanship and stealth in these already-capable men. They absolutely hated the practice of meditation, which went counter to their nature as men of action. However, the practice did in fact increase their scores on the objective tests of their marksmanship and so forth. The practice of the philosophy -- not merely the thinking of philosophcial thoughts, but the union of practice according to philosophy -- did further improve outcomes, in other words. The unity of thought and practice altered their outcomes as predicted.

Of course these were especially excellent men to start with. The fact that they can do it does not mean that everyone can. It does offer hope, though, that it might work. If you happen to be miserable, why not give it a try? The worst that can happen is that you'll get older while you practice, and therefore happier; and in the meanwhile, it'll give you something to help pass the time.

Where the Griz Lives

Long guns loaded. So say wise men; wiser than me.

With Sorrow

Not unexpectedly, US Central Command has announced that the two Navy SEALs who were washed into the ocean during a raid on a vessel carrying Iranian arms are deceased. Such men are strong, but the ocean is stronger. 

A Fun Way to Tell War Stories

 

He has a whole series of these.

Other people's weather

We barely have weather, compared to you guys. In the last few years, it's true, we've faced freezes every winter that last for days. That has surprised me, because when I was growing up in Houston, which is slightly colder than here, it was nearly unheard of for a freeze to survive much past dawn, let alone all day for several days.

Still, you can't say much about barely-freezing weather a few days a year at most. In this last one, nearly all my greens crops and winter herbs came through unscathed even though I didn't cover them. We had to harvest a lot of green tomatoes. Those bushes, along with the eggplants and peppers, obviously didn't make it.

In the meantime, we're experiencing something more like true winter vicariously through our niece and heir, who met a nice fella, quit her job near San Antonio, sold her house, and hit the road with him. In warm months they live a sort of gypsy life, traveling around in an RV meeting up with friends and family and staying long enough to do some light repair contracting work. In the winter they hang out in a cabin they're building in a remote area of Wisconsin. It seems well dried-in now, and a little larger than last year, and quite cozy. My niece is having the time of her life. The two dogs, Southern flowers, have adapted well.

Generators and Hydropower

So the previous post produced a lot of knowledge about generators, which has clearly been of interest to many of you. I'm going to put a follow-up question out there: how much do you know about generating electricity with water?

I live on a mountain, with a clear and fast-running creek a few yards from my house. There's a good grade -- mountainside and all -- and the water flow is year-round. I've always thought that putting a turbine in the creek would generate enough power to run my house, and the source would be only a few yards away.

How much do you folks know about that project? 

An Icy Time

Power was out this morning before dawn due to ice on the lines; it came back, but then went out again due to a vehicle sliding off the road and taking out a power pole. It was barely above freezing at dawn, and is scheduled to fall all day and night to be near zero by morning. Snow is blowing, but so far not sticking. 

No force, as Sir Thomas Malory would say. I’ll suspend participation in’Dry January’ for the weekend, so there is homemade mead and fire. 

Don't Be Anxious

Via David Foster, an analysis of the worsening trend among the young of being anxious, combined with a graph that shows a correlation between the rise in words like 'caution/worry/risk' and the decline of words like 'progress/future' in our writings since the 1960s. I assume that the nuclear war scares of the Cold War are behind this, although the whole history since WWI points towards technology becoming more threatening and less promising. People endured airplanes turning into bombers and machines turning into machineguns because they could see the strong benefits as well. Nuclear power ended up getting billed as toxic, though, so at some point people started just being afraid of it all.

This is all wrapped up, for reasons that doubtless Mr. Foster can explain to us, with a lot of concerns about relationships and love. Young people are anxious about that too, I guess.

The thing about anxiety is that it turns out to be one of the things you really can do something about. Stoic philosophy is a practice that tackles the problem of anxiety by helping you identify what you can control, what you can't control, and ways of focusing on the former. This does a great deal to eliminate anxiety from your life, because your focus ends up on things you absolutely can master. As you learn to let go of the other things and focus on your area of control, anxiety will diminish because you care less and less about the things outside your control.

The Enchiridion and its commentary (see sidebar) are a good place to start here, but if you want support The Daily Stoic is a good institution as well.

Also, ride horses or motorcycles. As Aristotle teaches, you get virtues by practicing them. Get out and practice taking risks, being courageous, doing dangerous things. You'll get better and better at the things, but you'll also get better and better at handling risky situations in general.

UPDATE: I remember on reflection how exciting Aristotle was to me when I was young, and facing all the uncertainty of youth. Then one day I encountered a professor who told us, “Aristotle says that happiness is an activity, and the particular activity is using your reason to align your vital powers in the pursuit of excellence.”

That was a revelation to me. Happiness was in my hands. All I had to do was do it. The Stoics refined that picture, but that’s the truth. There’s no reason to be anxious. Just go do. 

Hunting Deer with an AR-15

In honor of the Washington Post's blacked-out-horror-show account of AR-15 lethiality, a reminder that it's illegal to hunt deer with one in 12 states because it isn't considered sufficiently lethal (and is, allegedly, cruel to use because it injures instead of kills the deer).

Personally I think it's perfectly adequate for deer hunting, provided you are a good shot. Note that those 12 states mostly include gun control havens like California or Maryland, though. As is so often the case, any stick is good enough to beat their enemies: the AR-15 should be banned, they say, both because it is too lethal and because it is not lethal enough. 

Usually in logic, deriving a contradiction is thought to prove the opposite of the assumption that got you there. Here they take it to prove that which they assumed at the beginning.