"No Evidence"

In an article about Biden's D-Day speech, the Washington Post has this paragraph:

Trump has sought to spin around concerns about his authoritarian instincts by accusing Biden of acting like a dictator or undermining democracy. He has repeatedly accused Biden of spearheading political prosecutions, though there is no evidence of White House involvement in the four criminal cases against Trump.

This has become a favorite locution since the 2020 election, about which we were endlessly told that there was "no evidence" of fraud or bad practices. In fact there is nearly endless evidence about it; what there wasn't was a formal inquiry that could turn evidence into proof. This is because courts resolved questions on issues like standing or timing, avoiding evidentiary hearings. But we never had proof that Saddam stole his 97% victories either; we just had evidence, evidence of exactly the same kind as we have about 2020.

As for these trials, there is also evidence that the Biden administration is involved. 

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating a top prosecutor on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against former President Trump for his past work as a senior Justice Department official during the Biden administration. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, is demanding that Attorney General Merrick Garland turn over records related to the employment of Bragg prosecutor Matthew Colangelo amid a "perception" of coordination. 

The Post knows about this, because they wrote a story claiming to debunk what they described as a "theory." 

Among them: the idea that President Biden’s Justice Department was involved in the successful Manhattan criminal prosecution of Trump. (Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts last week.) Trump has long blamed Biden for this prosecution, without any evidence.

The evidence that Garland didn't dispatch him to assist is, by the way, that Garland denies it. Of course you should believe the word of a public servant like Garland, or any FBI or ATF agent for that matter. So there's no evidence for the 'theory,' but Garland's denial is firm evidence. 

It's science, you know. Political science.

80 Years On

AI Cowboy

Out at the Cowboy State Daily, regular columnist Rod Miller had an AI produce this week's column after studying his style. 

I've been considering that as an experiment, but I can see from his results that it's not quite time yet.

Another Stupid Train Idea

The love affair with spending vast sums of money on trains nobody will ride continues. Asheville is in the early (but still expensive!) planning stages of adding an Amtrak spur line for tourism. It'll take many years and cost a fortune, but if all that money is spent we can expect the following travel times: 

Salisbury to Asheville

Train: 3 hours and 35 minutes

Car: 2 hours and 10 minutes

Bus: 3 hours and 30 minutes 

Raleigh to Asheville

Train: 6 hours and 47 minutes

Car: 3 hours and 50 minutes

Bus: 6 hours and 20 minutes 

Charlotte to Asheville

Train: 4 hours and 26 minutes

Car: 2 hours and 10 minutes

Bus: 2 hours and 55 minutes

So it's objectively worse on every option, as well as extremely expensive. (They're not even offering a comparison to flight times: Charlotte to Asheville is a route I fly regularly, and it takes about 30 minutes although you have to factor in security and other things too.) But it's a train, and good people love trains. 

Look, I like riding on trains too. It's peaceful and kind of a pleasant throwback to an earlier time. However, this isn't Europe, and trains just aren't practical in most of America. 

Virtue and Physical Fitness

Occasionally one reads columns like this one that suggest that physical fitness is somehow related to politics. 

OK, this is going to sound a little hypocritical, as I have hard-recommended every activity and pursuit, every wellness wheeze and rejuvenation exercise the modern world has dreamed up.... at some time or another, I have insisted to anyone who will listen that it’s only their failure to incorporate, say, a horse into their weekly schedule that is standing between them and their best self.

As a matter of fact, I have also written extensively about the importance of horses to achieving one's best self. It's been a while since it was a regular topic, but at one time that was a major focus of the blog. What I thought it inculcated was courage, not recklessness; gentleness, and the compassion necessary to understand a very different kind of mind and build trust with it; honor, to ride with other people as well as with your horse; and a capacity for building each of these virtues that can become a skill at building virtue itself. 

She worries that it might bring traits that she finds objectionable in politics.

The mechanism is incredibly simple: you embark on this voyage of self-improvement, and more or less immediately see results. You feel stronger and more energetic, probably your mood lifts, and pretty soon you think you are master of your own destiny. You’re still not, by the way: destiny does not care about your step count. But until that fact catches up with you, which it may never, there you are, high on self-righteousness. You can tell this has happened to you when you start inhaling performatively, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel.

Inescapably, you start to situate other people’s problems within their failure to be as fit as you. This is particularly true if you don’t know them and they’re just a bunch of numbers. All those statistics – depressed people, obese people, people with IBS – imagine how much better they would be if only they took responsibility for their health, the way that you have.

There's always a correlation/causation issue with things like physical fitness and, say, disease; maybe people who are healthier are more likely to engage in physical activities than those who are less healthy to begin with, say. On the other hand, some causal events like stronger bones from strength training and stronger hearts from cardio are provable, and these seem to have follow-on causal effects on health. Likewise, it's pretty clear that exercise both teaches the body to adapt to stress and encourages it to produce higher levels of its own antioxidants. 

Still, what she's really worried about is that you might blame people for their bad luck if they aren't also physically fit. That's fair to some degree, and something to consider.

On the other hand, she is wrong about the nature of virtue. 

I realise it’s not really a question of an unwitting slide into fascism, hastened by a treadmill. It’s more that there is a fixed amount of excellence in any self, and the more you spend on your biceps, the less you have for your personality. 

It's only true that there's a zero-sum game insofar as you're spending all your time building virtue; then you might be building one sort or another. No one, however, is 100% focused on virtue-building. There's always capacity for more.

Rather, virtue building is a skill that you can learn, and you learn it by practice just like you do any of the virtues. Like many things in Aristotle, this is a matter that is conceptually severable even though as a matter of fact the activities are the same. I mean that you practice horseback riding (say) and you develop skill at horseback riding, but also courage, and gentleness, and the rest. Severably, you are learning how to build virtues by building all these virtues. When you want to build another one, you will have greater skill at the business of building any sort of virtue.

The question of what kind of morals one should have thus also ends up being severable. Whatever kind they ought to be, building the moral virtues to support successful practice of those things is just another virtue you can learn. If you've been developing your skills at virtue-building, it'll be easier and you will likely be more successful. All sorts of physical fitness can help with this (although you should be careful of ones that produce concussions, like boxing, where the negative physical effects on cognition may outweigh the virtue-building). It's good for you all the way around.

Killdozer

How is it that this spectacular event occurred 20 years, and I never heard a whisper of it? You'd think it would have been all anyone talked about for weeks.

Who's the Threat?

Maxine Waters: “I am going to spend some time with the criminal justice system, with the justice system, asking them, ‘Tell us what’s going on with the domestic terrorists. Are they preparing a civil war against us? Should we be concerned about our safety? What is he doing with this divisive language? It is dangerous, and we’re going to have to make sure that we understand, uh, that we’re not at risk with this man talkin’ in the way that he’s doing.'” 

Emphasis added. 

Meanwhile:

INSURRECTION: Anti-Israel protesters burn UC Berkeley police vehicle with ‘incendiary device’ in ‘retaliation’ for arrests. Have you noticed that MAGA people don’t “retaliate” for arrests?

Related: Yale students call for ‘open intifada,’ say activists should ‘escalate disruption’ and ‘paralyze all aspects of normal life.’

Berkeley and Yale students are aspirants to the ruling class, and usually also children of it; they're not a threat even if they actually firebomb police. The ones you've got to watch are the ones who aren't already powerful and privileged. 

UPDATE: Ayaan Hirsi Ali argues that those students are part of active subversion on the Soviet model.

Living in the West in 1983, Bezmenov gave a lecture in which he explained “Psychological Warfare, Subversion, and the Control of Society.” It begins:

Subversion refers to a process by which the values and principles of an established system are contradicted or reversed in an attempt to sabotage the existing social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. It involves a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system, often carried out by persons working secretly from within. Subversion is used as a tool to achieve political goals because it generally carries less risk, cost, and difficulty as opposed to open belligerency. The act of subversion can lead to the destruction or damage of an established system or government. In the context of ideological subversion, subversion aims to gradually change the perception and values of a society, ultimately leading to the undermining of its existing systems and beliefs.

The accompanying chart would seem to locate us in the "destabilization" phase, which last 2-5 years; ours started in 2020 with the BLM protests/riots and the Covid lockdowns (which, one recalls, made exceptions for the BLM protests), and now continues with these pro-Hamas protests. Assuming the chart were accurate, the next phase is 'crisis' (2-6 months) followed by Big Brother cementing its gains into a new, normalized system.

"I am not saying that Bezmenov’s formulation explains all that we are seeing. It clearly does not address all the West’s problems," she writes. "But once I immersed myself in his formulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place."

Well, or it could be paranoia, which is to be staunchly resisted. But the riots are real enough, and the government continues not to enforce the laws upon them -- though they maintain a weather eye for any counterrevolutionaries that might emerge on the other side. Perhaps that's just a coincidence, though, class privilege playing out as I was discussing in the original post.

Expel New York

Long time blogger Don Surber advocates this -- I assume facetiously -- as part of a clean-up program. He ran a poll at the end that showed supermajority support among his readership for this, and majority support for giving Mexico back California. This is not the first time this suggestion has been made; Business Insider (clearly facetiously) found that seven states might be expelled to general pleasure (and not the ones I would have expected).

On the non-facetious side, Reason magazine found that a quarter of voters wanted to extract their own state from the union. They then polled about everybody else's state.

Of the 17 percent who thought that was a fine idea, there was an overwhelming favorite for who gets tossed from the moving vehicle: California.

Yes, the Golden State was the choice of a whopping 53 percent of respondents who thought yanking a star off the flag would make the world a better place.

New York came in second with 25 percent of votes, and Texas was third at 20 percent.

I don't know why anybody would want rid of Texas. The Reason article also links a very helpful map ranking the states by freedom (New Hampshire is #1: Live Free or Die!).

The thing is, we don't actually have a mechanism for any of this. We have very clear standards for admitting new states. There's no apparent mechanism for releasing states that want to leave, or expelling states against their will. 

A political project of mine is to restore the defunct state of Franklin, made up of parts of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. Franklin would be pose a challenge to New Hampshire's #1 ranking as freest state, as the political culture of Appalachia has little enough use for governments. There is a constitutional mechanism for that, though it's a long shot: it needs approval by both houses of Congress as well as both the NC and TN legislatures. 

A Rainbow Sunset

The Sacred Flame

I suppose we'll continue the Pride Month series as long as it remains interesting. Today's entry is from D29.

So who are the martyrs of Uganda?  Now, that's a story you won't hear in these times, at least not from Fr. James Martin, SJ.

I'd never heard it from anybody, but even left-leaning Wikipedia agrees on the details. 

When preparations were completed and the day had come for the execution on 3 June 1886, Lwanga was separated from the others by the Guardian of the Sacred Flame for private execution, in keeping with custom. As he was being burnt, Lwanga said to the Guardian, "It is as if you are pouring water on me. Please repent and become a Christian like me."

Twelve Catholic boys and men and nine Anglicans were then burnt alive. Another Catholic, Mbaga Tuzinde, was clubbed to death for refusing to renounce Christianity, and his body was thrown into the furnace to be burned along with those of Lwanga and the others. The fury of the king was particularly inflamed against the Christians because they refused to participate in sexual acts with him.

I suppose it's a sort-of equality to recognize that homosexuals can be just as bad as anyone else. In any case, today is the feast day. 

JSOC FTW

"Doesn't appear the DOD ever publicized it."

Yeah, that's how JSOC works. 

Still the King

To round out the Texas Playboys discussions we've had lately, I'd like to point out an album that Spotify introduced to me this week. The whole thing is on YouTube.

"Abhorrent"

Continuing the unexpected Pride Month series, an article (h/t Instapundit) about a university chancellor who lost his job* due to making pornography.

A statement from Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman said that Chancellor Joe Gow was terminated on Dec. 27 following a unanimous vote from the UW Board of Regents.

“In recent days, we learned of specific conduct by Dr. Gow that has subjected the university to significant reputational harm,” Rothman said. “His actions were abhorrent.”

UW System Regent President Karen Walsh echoed this sentiment in a statement, saying Gow showed “reckless disregard for the role he was entrusted with,”  and that the board is “alarmed, and disgusted, by his actions, which were wholly and undeniably inconsistent with his role as chancellor.”

The firing comes after it was discovered that Gow had been producing and publishing pornographic content with his wife. The couple posts explicit content on X and porn websites, and hosts a YouTube channel called “Sexy Healthy Cooking,” which shows videos of them cooking alongside other porn actors and actresses.

The couple have also published two books under the pseudonyms Geri and Jay Hart, which they note “are the pen names of a married woman and man who serve in executive positions at two well-known organizations in the U.S.” on their Amazon author biography. 

I'm wondering what the community standard for "abhorrent" is at the University of Wisconsin; maybe D29 can comment on that. Naked cooking sounds pretty mild given the kinds of things that porn now embraces. Obviously I haven't seen their pornography, so maybe it's worse than it sounds. The books they have listed on Amazon sound like endorsements of open marriages, which while definitely not in the spirit of the institution of marriage is still on the conservative side for pornography.

Gow maintains that his actions are protected by the First Amendment, especially since he allegedly did not mention his position with the university during his pornographic work. 

Probably the 1A doesn't protect you from being fired by a private employer for your speech, but a state university is in a dubious middle position. 

* Lost his job as chancellor: as punishment he'll be 'transitioning' into a faculty role, where he can spend more time with students. Somehow this makes sense to people. 

The Sacred Band of Thebes

I wasn't planning on any 'Pride Month' observations, but the Washington Post managed to come up with one that I don't mind to forward. 

The Battle of Tegyra in 375 B.C. proved that the legendary Spartan army could be defeated.

A thousand Spartan soldiers, trained for combat from the age of 7, were returning from an expedition when they stumbled on a much smaller force from the rival city of Thebes. Rather than retreat, the Theban infantry charged, pulling into a close formation and piercing the Spartan lines like a spear. The Spartans turned and, for the first time ever in pitched battle, fled.

The most fearsome military force of its day had been defeated by the Sacred Band of Thebes, a shock troop of 150 gay couples.

This is almost true. The only thing that isn't quite is the description of the homosexual pairs as "gay," which is definitely a modern phenomenon that had nothing to do with their particular expressions. Plato described the ethic, though he was not speaking of the Sacred Banders but of an imaginary force.

Thus numerous are the witnesses who acknowledge Love to be the eldest of the gods. And not only is he the eldest, he is also the source of the greatest benefits to us. For I know not any greater blessing to a young man who is beginning life than a virtuous lover or to the lover than a beloved youth. For the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live at principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love.

Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any dishonourable act, or submitting through cowardice when any dishonour is done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any one else. The beloved too, when he is found in any disgraceful situation, has the same feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their loves, they would be the very best governors of their own city, abstaining from all dishonour, and emulating one another in honour; and when fighting at each other's side, although a mere handful, they would overcome the world. For what lover would not choose rather to be seen by all mankind than by his beloved, either when abandoning his post or throwing away his arms? He would be ready to die a thousand deaths rather than endure this. Or who would desert his beloved or fail him in the hour of danger? The veriest coward would become an inspired hero, equal to the bravest, at such a time; Love would inspire him. That courage which, as Homer says, the god breathes into the souls of some heroes, Love of his own nature infuses into the lover. 

The concept here is not necessarily homosexual at all; the idea is that since your lover would be watching you, you would not do any base thing like flee or throw down your arms. You would strive for honor, because you would want to be seen at your best while your beloved was watching.  The beloved could be heterosexual just as well, but in the world before firearms women generally were not going to be effective on the field of armed and armored combat. Yet the basic concern was one of pursuing the heights of honor and avoiding anything dishonorable, which pursuit we know from Aristotle's description of magnanimity to be the capstone of virtue. 

Unconsidered by Plato is the danger posed to unit cohesion by pairs of lovers who are loyal to each other in a way they aren't loyal to the rest of the band. Likewise, of course, the disruptive effect of introducing sexuality into a close unit like an infantry squad, where competition to be the beloved of an especially desirable soldier could tear the unit apart. (This has been a much bigger problem with the heterosexual soldiers since the introduction of women as well as gays to the military, simply because a single woman attracts almost all the male soldiers, whereas a gay soldier is mostly unattractive to the other males). 

The Sacred Band contested the latter problem by recruiting established couples rather than a free-for-all 'singles' environment. They had an impressive battlefield record, eventually being destroyed by Alexander the Great's forces.

A Diplomatic Embarrassment

The President of the United States announced what he described as an Israeli government proposal for a permanent ceasefire; today the Prime Minister of Israel said the proposal was a nonstarter. 

Either there was a significant misunderstanding, or one of the governments is outright lying. Whichever, it’s an embarrassment that will significantly undermine American diplomacy across the world. 

Spurs

Approximations of Justice

The only sense in which the outcome in the New York trial represents a sort-of justice is that it is an occasion in which the courts are treating a rich man as shabbily as they normally do with poor men. A rich man can't be forced to plea bargain by a poverty that prevents him from mounting a legal defense; as such, he has to be granted the formality of a trial. However, it can be a show trial. 

I'm sure you've all read lists lists of the extraordinary lengths the judge went to in this case to bring about the outcome he got. Now we have to reckon with the spectacle of 34 "felonies" that are really disputes about whether a declared expense should have been categorized in the books as "a legal expense" or "a campaign expense." This isn't even a bright-line issue; paying a lawyer to settle a dispute out-of-court in a way that produces an NDA is the sort of thing that would very regularly be a legal expense. It's the most common of common practices. They might also be campaign expenses, but it's definitely not obvious that they aren't legal expenses. 

So these are debatable even as the misdemeanors the law actually makes them out to be; but they were charged as felonies. On what justification? Because they were supposedly the basis of a conspiracy to commit some third crime. The prosecution didn't bother to say what that crime was for sure. The judge told the jury that they didn't even have to agree on what crime had been conspired, so long as each of them thought that one or another crime had been. 

Based on the word of a convicted perjurer, with the judge suppressing expert testimony to the contrary, the jury has decided to convict on all charges. What is the appropriate penalty for such a mass of felonies? I asked a couple of progressives I know what they thought, and they said, "A couple of nights in jail" or "I would prefer that he be prohibited from running for office, and no jail (or a couple days)." 

For 34 felonies? 

The lack of justice is a sort of justice only because it now applies to at least one rich man as it so often does to the poor. It's almost fair if no one gets any justice, and fairness per Aristotle is one of the two aspects of justice. 

Of course, the other aspect was lawfulness, and that's clearly gone here.

Right of Revolution

In a good but brief post today, Glenn Reynolds quotes the Tennessee Constitution. 

Note the first two sections of the Tennessee Constitution, which dates to 1796 and which Thomas Jefferson praised at the time:

Section 1. That all power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority, and instituted for their peace, safety, and happiness; for the advancement of those ends they have at all times, an unalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform, or abolish the government in such manner as they may think proper.

Section 2. That government being instituted for the common benefit, the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

This was unremarkable at the time of the Framers, when badges of office did not possess a talismanic power.

Quite right.  

God-Given Rights?

I recently read and heard some commentary that used the phrase “God-given rights.” In each case, the commentator was referring to the idea that the origin of our political rights stem from God rather than government. This is not a new idea. In fact, this concept is eloquently asserted in the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence which states that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. However, with all due respect to Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration, is this an accurate statement regarding the origin our rights?

If it is, I find no sanction for this idea in the Bible, certainly not in the New Testament. I find no endorsement or explanation of rights that civil society is required to observe or respect anywhere in the teachings of Christ or his Apostles. In fact, 1 Peter Chapter 2, verse 13 specifically tells Christians to submit to every human authority. Slaves are to submit to their masters, even if the masters are cruel.  

This is not surprising because Jesus was clear that his Kingdom was not of this world. Christ is concerned with the state of our soul, not temporal political or legal concerns such as rights. Consequently, I think it is mistaken to think of our rights in society as originating with God.

This does not mean that I believe our rights are a gift of the government, to be removed or restricted as government officials see fit. Rather, our rights came into existence over time through the influence of societal variables such as history, experience, tradition, legal precedent and any number of phenomena that shaped our cultural values. Our rights are a product of our shared societal experience rather than something that was divinely granted. They are a cultural inheritance to be protected.

What is the value or impact of this observation? If rights are the product of a particular cultural experience they will differ from society to society. Different societies will understand and express rights in different ways. That being the case, it is futile if not illegitimate to try to force a particular understanding of rights on another culture. This is one reason why our attempt to force Western notions of rights on Afghanistan and Iraq failed so miserably. Consequently, foreign interventions to enforce a specific rights regime, or remake countries in our image is not only wrongheaded, it’s bound to ultimately fail.          

Some Western Swing

Gringo's been pretty patient with all the Outlaw Country. Let's do some of his favorites.

I like this live recording because it gives a sense of the style of the band at play.

An instrumental of a classic piece, with swing elements.

You may have heard of the Fallout television show, which has become a breakout hit. I think it derives a lot of its force from its use of this kind of classic American music -- including Western Swing -- which is just objectively better than what the kids are used to hearing. It's not even nostalgic for them, because they've never heard it before. The real trick is this: they've never heard anything like it. 

C'est Dommage

The US "relief" pier to Gaza collapses in high seas. The sad thing is that they're going to put it back up.

On the Birthday of Patrick Henry

We were just discussing Patrick Henry in the context context of the flags; today was his birthday. 

In addition to his well-known sentiments in favor of revolution and liberty, he was also a staunch opponent of establishing a strong central government that would overwhelm the states. Jefferson saw the federal government's role as 'looking out' while the states 'looked in,' so that the Federal government would deal exclusively with foreign affairs or disputes between two or more states. Henry realized that it would, instead, form a competing power that would tend toward domination. 

The fate of this question and of America may depend on this. Have they said, We, the states? Have they made a proposal of a compact between states? If they had, this would be a confederation. It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, sir, on that poor little thing — the expression, We, the people, instead of the states, of America. I need not take much pains to show that the principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous. Is this a monarchy, like England — a compact between prince and people, with checks on the former to secure the liberty of the latter? Is this a confederacy, like Holland — an association of a number of independent states, each of which retains its individual sovereignty? It is not a democracy, wherein the people retain all their rights securely. Had these principles been adhered to, we should not have been brought to this alarming transition, from a confederacy to a consolidated government.... It is radical in this transition; our rights and privileges are endangered, and the sovereignty of the states will be relinquished: and cannot we plainly see that this is actually the case? The rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and privileges, are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change...

Emphasis added; there is a great deal more to the speech that is worth review. 

As is well known, objections such as his gave us the Bill of Rights, which has been an insufficient but necessary defensive measure. On some occasions it has been successful, and on many occasions it has provided a part of a successful legal defense. 

He also talked about the danger posed by a central state to the physical defense of liberty. Even today his words bear consideration.

My great objection to this government is, that it does not leave us the means of defending our rights, or of waging war against tyrants. It is urged by some gentlemen, that this new plan will bring us an acquisition of strength — an army, and the militia of the states. This is an idea extremely ridiculous: gentlemen cannot be earnest. This acquisition will trample on our fallen liberty. Let my beloved Americans guard against that fatal lethargy that has pervaded the universe. Have we the means of resisting disciplined armies, when our only defence [sic], the militia, is put into the hands of Congress?... Whither is the spirit of America gone? Whither is the genius of America fled? It was but yesterday, when our enemies marched in triumph through our country. Yet the people of this country could not be appalled by their pompous armaments: they stopped their carer [sic], and victoriously captured them. Where is the peril, now, compared to that? Some minds are agitated by foreign alarms. Happily for us, there is no real danger from Europe; that country is engaged in more arduous business: from that quarter there is no cause of fear: you may sleep in safety forever for them. 

I likewise think that America is not ripe for conquest by a foreign power, certainly not a European one but not any one; and it is so not because of the fact that the central government has a strong army and has managed to turn the state militias into a National Guard it can federalize at will, but because the people remain heavily armed and capable of independent action. 

Indeed, this is the chief thing that has kept all of that centralized Federal power from becoming a true tyranny. The lines they wish to cross and do not remain uncrossed because they are cognizant of the limits of their power to control the ordinary people's ideals given the ordinary people's arms. 

That is a partial answer to his concern about whether we have the means to resist disciplined armies given the lack of a disciplined force loyal to each of the states. Like the Bill of Rights, however, it is not a complete defense even if it is a necessary one. 

Advising the Virtuous Youth

I got in last night about seven. It was a 533 mile ride from Arlington back home. Of course I made the same ride in reverse going up, but my thoughts were focused on the events to come. On the ride back I had time to reflect on the ride itself. 

I left Arlington by the George Washington Parkway, then took I-66 west all the way to I-81 in the Shenandoah valley. After that, I rode the Shenandoah valley and then the New River valley to the city of Bristol, which bestrides the border between Virginia and Tennessee. From there I continued west and then south to Johnson City, south to the high wall and crossed into North Carolina there. 

The great rivers I crossed yesterday were the Shenandoah, the Roanoke, the New River, and the French Broad. Lesser rivers include the Watauga and the Tuckasegee.

While I was stopped at the Tennessee Welcome Center, I met a young man who had just purchased his first motorcycle, a Kawasaki Ninja. He was learning to ride and came to me to seek advice. He had bought the bike exactly one month ago, having talked his young wife into accepting the idea of him riding in spite of her concerns. 

I advised him as I did with my own son: to be sure to take the safety course, which would help him develop crucial skills like emergency braking without laying the bike down, and defensive driving. Also, I suggested, he might want to avoid any roads with nicknames like "Snake" or "Dragon" for at least six months to give himself time to build those skills and turn them into internal habits. 

To assure me that he was practicing diligently, he turned his bike on so I could see his odometer. It read 495. "I just bought this bike a month ago," he told me.

I told him, "I'm riding further than that today." That got his attention, so we discussed the ride and then I reaffirmed the importance of him seeking the safety training. I hope that the conversation will encourage him to seek it out. 

Motorcycles are wonderful, but if any young people are reading this and thinking about doing it as well, please do get the training first, and then do the practice necessary to internalize it into habit. As Aristotle says, developing virtue only begins with understanding what the right thing to do is in a given circumstance. Virtue isn't knowledge, he says, but habit: you have the virtue only when you have practiced doing the right thing to the point that you can do it without having to think about it again. 

It might seem odd to describe skill at motorcycle riding as a sort of virtue, because the Christian inheritance tinges 'virtue' with a moral quality that is absent in the case of motorcycle riding. That isn't true in the Greek, though: the Greek word is arete, which means "excellence" and 'the ability to excel' at any practical thing. The moral virtues are like the practical ones, and the analysis holds for all of them. You practice moderation by moderating yourself until it is habitual to do so; you practice horsemanship by riding horses. Here as there, the skill of learning and then developing a virtue is a thing you can learn, and then you can apply that skill across your life. It will help you in everything that you do.

Across Tennessee

The statuary at the welcome center from Virginia on 81, a place which unsurprisingly plays excellent music. 

Looking back at Tennessee from the high wall at Sam’s Gap, the border with North Carolina. 

Riding Back

It’s 8 AM. I left DC at six. I have crossed the Shenandoah and put a mountain range between me and the city. 

I’m stopping for breakfast at a truck stop on I-81.

Prayers answered

This has been a busy dog-rescue week. I had no business taking in another dog, with 3 of my own and 3 fosters already, but the local rescue group took responsibility for a dog in my neighborhood whose "owners" couldn't keep him once he got flea infested and severely irritated their landlord, who didn't allow dogs in the first place. The young couple casually let him stay for the last 9 months after he wandered in during a storm, but I guess they don't know much about dogs. He's shockingly emaciated, every rib standing out, and has heartworms. After the current possessors relinquished him to the local rescue group, they took on the cost of his food and medical care, including plans to treat his heartworms, but won't have a place for him until next week, so I'm keeping him briefly. Lovely dog with lovely manners, no trouble at all.

On Friday, having posted a picture of him, we got word from a woman in a nearby town that she was sure he was her dog. She'd given him away two years ago to a friend of her son-in-law who had a large property and said he could give the dog a better life. Then the son-in-law's friend abruptly disappeared without a forwarding address. The rescue group, which has custody now, is deciding whether the original owner is an appropriate adopter, having once given him up so fecklessly. That owner really would like him back, and I hope she'll persuade the rescue group that she's a safe bet now. She has convincing pictures of him as a puppy and an adult. The dog, a Catahoula-Leopard-Chocolate-Lab mix, is down to 58 lbs. from the 120 lbs. he weighed when the original owner had him.

Also last week, what looked like a Labradoodle was spotted in my neighborhood but not caught up at the time. Word circulated on NextDoor, and because someone in town had found an eager foster mom for him [her, as it happens], I felt comfortable encouraging everyone to bring him [her] to me if he [she] could be induced to be confined. Early Friday morning, a neighbor jogging by my house encountered him [her] and slipped him [her] in my gate. Sadly, I didn't see the neighbor's text message until several hours later, and never caught sight of him [her]. I was afraid he'd [she'd] jumped the fence and moved on. Then a few minutes ago, late Sunday night, up he [she] trotted! He [she] must have been in my woods for the last three days, though I never saw any sign that he'd [she'd] found food that I left out for him [her]. He's [she]s safely ensconced in a kennel overnight with food, water, and a bed. Tomorrow his [her] foster mom will take him [her] . Surprisingly enough, he's [she's]not really emaciated, just a solid matted mess of fur. [Well, fairly skinny, though.] We'll shave that off and let him [her] start over.

New Flag

Jim installed a new flag today. 

Demonstration Ride

Far smaller than the 2019 Rolling Thunder rally, the Rolling to Remember rally still fielded tens of thousands of motorcycles. Veterans from around the country and many wars were present to solemnize the holiday. 

It was executed safely by everyone I saw, and we didn’t pass any incidents from the riders in front of us. Lots of folk came out to watch. 

BLACKFIVE Reunion

The guy with the Vespa and the teddy bear is a Green Beret 

Tomorrow is the Rolling to Remember demonstration ride. I don’t think he’s going to ride the Vespa in it. There will be five of us from China Post, though. 

Riding

I rode an easy 405 miles today, according to Google Maps’ measurement. It took about ten hours, adding in stops for lunch, water, gas, and rest. I could have made the last hundred miles to Arlington, but I decided to do that tomorrow. It would have been rush hour(s) when I got there, and I’d have been tired. Tomorrow is a holiday weekend and I’ll be fresh. 

Stopped to help a biker near Natural Bridge who had a broken rear brake line. It is the Code to always stop and help fellow bikers in need. 

Like the Pirate Code 🏴‍☠️, the Biker Code is more like guidelines. But there’s honor involved in keeping the Code. 

He was a nice guy from the Roughnecks MC, Tennessee. This is a public safety MC, cops and firefighters and such. As soon as he spoke to me I knew that he was originally from New York, and indeed it proved that he was headed back there to visit his daughter this weekend. 

Tomorrow I should see old friends and have good conversations. Also, grilled meats. The holiday will be honored with feasting as well as solemn observances. 

These People Just Hate Historic Flags

They hated the Confederate flag, sure. Then it was the Betsy Ross flag. Then it was the Gadsden flag. Then it was just the plain old American flag. Then it was that flag, upside down. Now it’s this one: 

One might say, well, they don’t like Biblical language. This, though, is a partial quote from Patrick Henry’s patriotic — or rebellious — and most famous speech. “An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!"

Henry had the phrase from Locke; it was well known in the era that when a government violated its obligations and just limits, the people still had the right to ‘appeal to heaven’ by taking up arms. As, indeed, they have. 

Riding North

This Memorial Day, I think I'll attend a motorcycle rally in Arlington built around Veteran riding groups and clubs. I don't know if Joel Leggett is around and is likely to be up there this year; we missed each other at the big Rolling Thunder rally of 2019. 

I'll probably start up Friday morning.

Admire the Effort

Almost every internal combustion engine would benefit from a turbo. Superchargers are usually not necessary. Air rams? 

Maybe not.

Recognizing the Imaginary

Norway, Spain, and Ireland took the unusual step of extending diplomatic recognition to a state that does not exist. They recognized "a" Palestinian state, but not any of the two entities that claims to be a government or a territory of Palestine. They are recognizing not any state that actually exists or has ever existed, but the one they wish existed.

Ireland said that it hopes its recognition will press Israel, the Palestinians and the international community toward a two-state solution, one that includes the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state drawn on the borders as they were in 1967, with Jerusalem as a shared capital.

That long-imagined dream — the goal of generations of U.S. diplomats — has never seemed so far away.

The attempt to bring the wished-for into reality by an act of pure will is magical thinking. This sort of diplomacy is akin to holding a ritual under the full moon designed to summon an otherworldly being, except that one might more readily believe in the ability to summon demons than a workable and demilitarized 'two-state solution.' 

There's at least a chance that demons are real and able -- willing -- eager -- to be summoned. No one who might become a leader of that demilitarized second 'state' wants it or wants to be part of it. They are certainly not eager to summon it into the world. They've had every chance for decades, and have summoned this state of affairs into the world instead.

One might usefully list all the similar magical thinking going on so hot and heavy in the editorial pages: to summon 'gender' in place of sex; 'a woman' in place of a man who's on hormones; 'a vibrant President the young aides can barely keep up with'; inflation that is transitory... the incantations continue not only under the full moons but under every moon, by day as well as night.

The House Rent Blues

Yeah, Elvin Bishop. Sounds like he'd fit in here, or show up in a Grim novel. From Tulsa, studied physics at U Chicago, joined the Butterfield Blues Band. Got mentioned in a Charlie Daniels song, too.

A Genuinely Shocking Finding

The most astonishing thing in this congressional report on government conspiracy to censor and silence right wing media and views is that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was apparently an effective and enthusiastic part. As far as I know, this is the first time it’s ever been effective or enthusiastic; turns out they were really taken with silencing American citizens instead of doing their actual job. 

The GEC is assigned by Congress the role of aligning all American foreign communications in pursuit of national interests. This means diplomatic messaging aligns with Army psychological operations and CIA special activities of a communications sort; broadcasts of American state media align with the values and policies of the administration. 

Especially when Republican administrations have existed, the GEC is wholly uninterested in its mission. But even when Democratic heroes have held the reins, they’re ineffective. For one thing they’re entirely too small to actually perform the job effectively; for another, they are at State. Most of the communications infrastructure we have is military, and the military doesn’t respect the State Department. More, the State Department itself views actual diplomacy as its real job, and “public diplomacy” — that is, talking to ordinary citizens instead of other diplomats — has a lesser stature. 

So it’s a second-rate sinecure for bureaucrats who lack prestige, resources, or interest in doing the crucial job assigned to them. Occasionally they take meetings and accomplish nothing, which normally makes them one of the less harmful government bureaucracies. 

Give them a chance to play secret police and violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, though, and apparently they were hot to trot. 

Broomstick on the Throttle

Flower of Scotland

Dad29 sends the story story of a priest from the Society of Jesus who ministered to his flock during those hours when Catholicism was banned in Scotland, then joined the Jacobite army that invaded England in the '45.

Fr. Alexander Cameron was a convert to the Faith who served the exiled Stuart king of England and Wales at his court in Rome. Cameron later became a Jesuit priest and returned to Scotland to minister to the illegal and underground Catholic Church in his native land. For four years he served as a “heather priest” in the Scottish Highlands, risking arrest and the harshest of weather conditions to provide spiritual succor and the sacraments to his outlawed flock. 

The "harshest of weather conditions" just means that he was a priest in the Highlands of Scotland.

The rest of the story is impressive, though.

The Frost-Giant’s Daughter

From The Sword, a piece of metal named for one of the great Conan tales. 

An Act of Justice

Following an absurd court case, the Texas governor pardoned a deserving man. 

"White People" and Spicy Food

Via Instapundit, a blog post from a Chinese girl person*** in the San Francisco area who has a German boyfriend. It is, as she(?) herself says, patronizing* about white people's inability to eat spicy food, which is a stereotype that I notice is employed pretty frequently. 

Like many stereotypes, it is not completely without justice: my in-laws from Indiana are incapable of handling any sort of spicy food. My wife, over the years of our association, has learned to handle fairly hot foods -- far hotter than anything made in China, where we lived in 2000-1 -- though still not as spicy as I like them. 

But also like stereotypes usually, this one has limits. There's the usual fault of stereotypes generalizing too much. A German isn't "white" the same way someone from Ohio is, and Cincinnati chili isn't much like Texas red chili, which isn't much like New Mexican red chili. 

More, though, there's a real corollary to this stereotype: while many white people don't like spicy foods, the white people who do like spicy foods like the spiciest food in the world. In fact the hottest chilies were mostly developed in the US, UK, or Australia. There's a reason that the second hottest chile pepper in the world is the Carolina Reaper, not something made in China (although this is obscured by the fact that all of them are part of the family capsicum chinense, which is due to a misconception by early Spaniards that the habanero and Scotch bonnets were from China; they were actually native to South America). 

In 2001, Paul Bosland, a researcher at the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, visited India to collect specimens of ghost pepper, also called the Bhut Jolokia or Naga king chili,** traditionally grown near Assam, India, which was being studied by the Indian army for weaponization.

We put it in food, bred hotter versions of it than nature ever dreamed, and put those in food too. If you go to any festival around the South, there will be a booth selling hot pepper sauces and/or pastes. These will definitely include not just habanero sauces, but sauces made out of Reaper peppers, Scorpion peppers, Viper peppers, and so forth. The super-hot peppers are new, but the love of spice in the South is not. Even when I was a boy, every truck stop restaurant had three kinds of pepper sauces on the table, including one that was just packed with hot peppers and white vinegar. In Smoky and the Bandit, from the same era, the sheriff orders a "diablo sandwich" in a hurry.

A friend of mine down the road was born in Acapulco, and married a Cherokee woman up here; his son is thus half-Mexican and half-Cherokee. That son ate chili with us exactly once, and then pleaded that he was full and wanted to take the rest home. He offered it to his father, who declared that it was too hot to eat; my wife likes to point out that I'd made that batch mild because she had a stomach bug. 

* She's also wrong. The heat of the chile isn't in the seeds, and isn't removed if you remove the seeds. Usually if you're going to be patronizing on purpose, it's a good idea to make sure you know what you're talking about.

** There's not a universal standard on the spelling. Around here we use "chili" for the meat stew made with peppers we call "chiles," which is eaten whether or not the weather is "chilly." It's actually good in hot weather, as it makes you sweat, another reason that spicy food has long been popular in the South -- it's cooling. 

UPDATE: 

*** I assumed it was a girl because of the story being about a boyfriend, but I forgot how different San Francisco’s community standards are from the ones we have here. 

UPDATE: 

Back on the “part of this stereotype is justified” hand, I found this cookbook on the “Free! please take it!” shelf of a used bookstore in Waynesville, North Carolina. Apparently there was limited interest. That is too bad! It’s a fantastic cookbook that has great stuff from around the world. I recommend it highly. 

Honky-Tonk Ladies

A few classic pieces by greats of the genre.

High Angle Training in Paradise Gorge

 

I imagine Mike G. knows of Paradise Falls and its attendant gorge. There are innumerable waterfalls around this part of western North Carolina, but this is one of the most dangerous for several structural reasons. It's also very popular among risk-seeking college kids who obey no safety precautions whatsoever, drink and smoke dope, and sometimes try to leap from the top of the falls to the pool below (not always successfully). 

Naturally, therefore, we train there regularly and operate there regularly as well. Tonight a high-angle team came into the district for a training exercise, which we were invited to join. 

What Could Go Wrong?

The recent movie Oppenheimer pointed out that they set off the Trinity test bomb knowing that their calculations showed a non-zero chance it would destroy the atmosphere and kill all life on Earth. Turns out, that wasn't the craziest idea that came out of the Cold War.

The idea of Project Retro was simple: 1,000 huge rockets, normally used to launch nuclear weapons and spacecraft, would generate so much thrust that Earth’s rotation would briefly pause.

This would mean that Soviet nuclear missiles would overshoot the missile bases they were aimed at.

That's true, it would have meant that if it were technically feasible. But also...

[T]here were several flaws in the plan, Ellsberg realized.

The ‘angular momentum’ of rocks, air and water on Earth’s surface would mean that everything on the planet would continue moving sideways at enormous speed (at the equator, the speed of Earth’s rotation is just over 1,000mph....

'An awful lot of stuff would be flying through the air. Everything, in fact, that wasn't nailed down, and most of what was as well, would be gone with the wind, which would itself be flying at super-hurricane force everywhere at once.’

Ellsberg explained that cities on the coasts would be wiped out by huge tsunamis, and the apocalypse unleashed by Project Retro would, ironically, be as bad as anything that thermonuclear weapons could do to our planet.

Ellsberg wrote: ‘The Minuteman launch control officers, safe in their capsules deep underground, would have even less reason than in the foreseeable conditions of nuclear war either to launch their missiles or to come above ground, since there would be nothing left to destroy on the surface of the Soviet Union, or the United States, or anywhere.

‘All structures would have collapsed, with the rubble, along with all the people joining the wind and the water in their horizontal movement across the face of the earth, into space.’

Fortunately, it wouldn't have worked anyway. You'd need a lot more than a thousand rockets to stop the earth. 

VDH on Collapsing Legal Protections

This is another article on the rampant corruption and unfairness attendant to the multiple lawfare attacks on a certain Republican presidential candidate, but it's by VDH and has his usual care. I think he raises some very important issues, especially his first three points: the vacating of statutes of limitations in virtual bills of attainder; violations of the Bill of Rights being allowed and entertained -- even encouraged -- by the courts; and what he calls "the invention of crimes," which I have described here as "very novel legal theories" about what exactly the crimes are supposed to have been.

It's likely as not that these failures of our normal legal protections will end up hurting the rest of us too. It probably won't be the case that these weapons are cast aside once they've been used against their intended victim. If they prove powerful, those interested in power will continue to want them.

"Female Self-Pity"

I was reading a column by Heather MacDonald last week that contained this striking phrase. (I admit I don't always look at the author's name before reading the column, so it was only at that point that I realized I must be reading a female author and went back to check who it was: probably no male journalist would dare to have used those words.) 

She was talking about the wave of hysterical protests on college campuses that have gotten so much attention lately.

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female...  Why the apparent gender gap?... [note] the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female....

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. 

The phrase struck me, though, and I've been trying to decide whether or not -- or to what degree -- it is fair. On the one hand, I think that social media is responsible for giving women a skewed view of reality that leads them to conclude, on the basis of that skewed information, that they ought to view themselves as genuinely oppressed. 

For example, I saw a short clip on Facebook of Taylor Tomlinson talking about how women have to fear never getting home alive when they go out at night. I often see social media stuff that repeats that memetic point: women are in grave danger from men, who by contrast are happy-go-lucky in going abroad in the dark. 

Yet, as is often pointed out in this space, the statistics show the exact opposite: men suffer much higher rates of all forms of violence than women, including rape if our society's prison violence is included in our count. Indeed, the male experience of violence is so different that it can account for why some sex between men and women is thought consensual by one party and rape by the other:

My guess is that this didn't seem like violence at all to him. She invited him in, she didn't fight, she didn't curse or spit, perhaps she didn't even argue when asked "Why not?" In the morning she made him breakfast and carried on as if there was a romance. He may well have no sense of her experience of the evening at all, and can't be expected to without having it explained to him.

The markers that he would rely upon to know that he was entering the territory of violence are not present. In the world he likely lives in, if it's anything like my world, violence and force are accompanied by clear markers of rage and reaction. She showed no sign of either.

These female rage "sessions" are, I think, the product of a similar market function. There's money to be made teaching women they ought to be angry (and therefore pay for what the seller is pleased to describe as "therapy"). People tend to believe what those in authority tell them, and "therapist" is considered a position of authority even when the therapist's training is that they practice yoga and provide "intuitive," psychic, and speak-to-the-dead medium services on the side. (I personally know such a therapist, one highly praised by Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop network.) So of course they ought to be angry: their therapist says they've got a lot of anger to "heal." 

On the other hand, women aren't helpless victims of social media: they're active participants in telling each other these stories about how miserable their lives are. This Mother's Day weekend produced an endless stream of videos by women complaining about how horrible motherhood is, especially while the children are young. There does seem to be some self-pitying going on there, one that doesn't acknowledge or accept that the tough parts are shared by fathers too (another person I know, a younger father, spent ten hours in the ER with his son after a baseball injury this weekend). 

Women aren't given the data fairly, but the data is there for them to see and reflect upon if they wish. 

There's doubtless male self-pity as well, especially among younger men (as younger people in general are more neurotic and therefore less happy; and what makes people happy is weird anyway). It doesn't have the cachet, though: crying women at protests may move mountains, but crying men aren't going to persuade anyone of anything except that they're losers. That may explain why we see a lot less of it on social media: not that men are less inclined to self-pity, but that it doesn't help young men to display it in the same way that it seems to be an important part of advancing the displaying young women's agendas, whether on Climate Change, anti-Zionist, or pro-Progressive/Socialist/Communist. 

In any case, it caught my eye in MacDonald's piece, and I wondered what the rest of you thought about it. 

Big Bear

I finally saw my bear. Conan alerted me. The bear is big and beautiful, 350 pounds at least. 

I’ve been protecting him from bear hunters for five years, and I’ve often seen his scat, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen him. He’s obviously thriven wonderfully under my protection.

He’s a good neighbor. Never bothered me, or my flock, or my garden except to roll the logs back from the raised beds to eat the ants, to which he is wholly welcome. 

Hiking the Graveyard Fields

For Mother’s Day, I took my wife hiking. We ate sandwiches on my fresh-baked bread to eat at the midpoint of the hike. 

The Graveyard Fields is a mile-high valley full of waterfalls and, of greater interest to my wife, innumerable species of trees and flowers that she can identify and lecture me about. Lecturing on her various passions is her very favorite thing; I only wish I were a better audience. I do try to listen politely, but even now I am sure I don’t remember all the details she was telling me about all the different plants. 

Fortunately the hike was pleasant and the motorcycle ride to and from there was also. This is a very popular area right on the Blue Ridge Parkway, but the crowds quickly winnow if you take the steeper hikes. Soon you will hear nothing but birds and, occasionally, the highway noise of the Parkway itself.  

The Last Chance Saloon

So in the comments to a post occasioned by one of Janet's comments back in February, an anonymous commenter asked me if I'd been to the Last Chance Saloon outside Walhalla, South Carolina. I said that I knew the place but didn't have time to stop when I saw it on a ride. Today I made a trip down through the gorge country that divides North and South Carolina, so on the way back I stopped in.

It is formally a member's only establishment, but that's only a formality; they let us sign in and served us as guests without any issue. It's a great place to drink cheap beer or pretty much any other kind of drink you might want, shoot pool, and like the Bobarosa Saloon in Tennessee, you can camp or rent a cabin if you want to stay over. 

I can see why you might if you didn't live up here, as it's on a great road in amongst quite a bit of good riding country. SC 28 goes south to Walhalla where it picks up SC 11, a good road for riding below the mountains and looking up at them until you decide to try the ascent; or  you can take SC 28 north to Highlands, NC, or to Cashiers, NC if you take the split at SC 107. This would be a good place to base a weekend of exploring the region on the back of a bike.

Parking for bikes along the front as well as the side.

Walhalla's museums house many Confederate relics, so it's no surprise to find the local biker bar flying the Rebel flag. Note, however, that it is in the subordinate position to the American flag, as is usual among those who fly it for reasons of heritage.

I liked the poker-themed lamp, but the picture didn't come out well. Lots of inked-up dollar bills stapled from the ceiling and other places, as is common in the best dive bars. The TV was playing Turner Classic Movies, which seemed to be doing a film noir weekend.

A very reasonable selection of drinks are available. 

Recommended. 

The Cult of State

David Wurmser, Senior Analyst for Middle East Affairs at the Center for Security Policy, asks and answers a question about our government's about-face.

How did the United States turn 180-degrees from supporting Israel in the first days of the war to where it functions now as a shield for Hamas, from understanding its paradigm had collapsed along with the parallel reigning paradigms in Israel – “they now get it” or as the Israelis say, “the token dropped” – to seeing the United States appearing to double down on policies that seem to emanate from those failed paradigms.... First, let me set aside ideology and the particular way in which this administration reacted to the collapse of paradigms – it just doubled down in its imagery. It saw October 7 confirming the imperative of establishing a Palestinian State under the PLO and the necessity of reaching a strategic condominium with Iran to stabilize the region[.]

If you read the whole article, you'll find that he doesn't actually believe that the Biden administration ever supported Israel, and in fact that they saw the greatest threat from the beginning as Israel actually crushing its enemies (or, as State likes to call them, "partners for peace"). The bureaucracy just carried on doing what it could to undermine Israel until the President finally caught up with them. 

What I want to focus on, though, is this 'doubling down' in the face of clear evidence that the earlier belief was false. A "Two State Solution" was never viable, but it was pursued lovingly for decades by State Department diplomats and Democratic politicians. October 7 should have been the moment 'the token dropped,' and everyone realized that there was just no peace to be had with a politics like the Palestinians' embrace of Hamas or the PLO. However, that's not how human brains work.

Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data.

Both of those articles draw their examples from a left-leaning perspective, but the point is well understood. It's not just cultists who return to their belief in the coming spaceship or apocalypse in the face of clear evidence that their initial prediction was wrong. It's a cognitive bias that afflicts most people, maybe all of us.

In the grip of such an irrational, though perfectly normal, impulse to reaffirm a worldview proven false, it is no surprise that irrational decisions are made. Here is a partial list of the ones being made right now. I would add to that list the fact that they claim to be concerned about innocent suffering, but they are denying Israel precision weapons that would limit innocent suffering. Israel has plenty of dumb bombs they can drop if we won't sell them the smart ones. If you want a really ugly war, like the one we just had in Syria, reduce their ability to be discriminate. The Israelis are not going to stop fighting just because they have to use less precise weapons, not against an enemy that could do an October 7, not against one that has promised to keep doing it over and over if they can. This is a betrayal of the Israelis, but also of the noncombatants under fire in a war they can't escape.

Some are talking about how this is an impeachable offense, since Trump was impeached for a lesser version of the same thing. It's not, though; Trump was impeached for being Trump, and not a member of the establishment in good standing. There's no way Congress will hold Joe Biden to the same standard, especially since it's what State really wants him to do. The establishment will back this most establishment of ideas, irrational and destructive though it is. That's the real standard, membership in the club, which you obtain in large part by fidelity to the club's ideas and values especially when those ideas and values are disproven by the facts of the world. That's how you show your real loyalty. Anybody can do things that work; you're proving that you'll do stupid stuff that emphatically and repeatedly fails in pursuit of these things. 

If any of them read this, which they won't, it wouldn't matter at all. They'd just come up with another story about why they were right after all, and this was the only way.