Another Federal Victory

Dad29 sends this news of an FBI victory over a Nazi motorcycle club — one that they themselves founded. 

Apparently, someone in the FBI had the idea of merging a domestic terrorism case with a biker case. Killian planted the idea in Kreis’s head to start a neo-Nazi motorcycle club, the 1st SS Kavallerie Brigade Motorcycle Division—named after a horse-mounted unit of Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS….

So they couldn’t get the Outlaws MC to have anything to do with this. They clearly want there to be Nazi MCs. I guess they watch old movies where the bikers wear Nazi emblems, without grasping that they meant something different by them. They had these things as war trophies, either their own or from friends who passed them down. They weren’t declaring allegiance to the enemy, they were counting coup and showing brotherhood with their own. Since that generation, the usage has fallen away. There is no longing for Nazi-themed clubs, which is why they had to build one.

But they want the American right to be Nazis, so they just keep believing. They convinced dude to set one up, in partnership with him, and then they had a state attorney knock it down.

“We decided to strike against the Kavallerie Brigade by bringing these heavy-duty drug charges to shut the active members down,” Foster reportedly said, bragging about shutting down an FBI front group.

Emphasis added both times. 

So just remember that anyone who wants you to join them in celebrating Nazis is a Fed. Anyone who wants to talk even in theory about the potential need for bombs is a Fed. Anyone who wants to speculate about using guns to stage attacks is a Fed. 

This is basically the same story as several other stories we’ve seen lately. The secret police are working hard, which may not be obvious from all the Hamas-friendly groups running around. 

Tangled web

It's no picnic keeping straight the ostensible reasons for denying Kamala Harris a shot at the top position in the White House. Sure, there's the obvious problem that she's an unpleasant fool. But then how to explain how she ended up as VP in the first place? No one wants to admit explicitly that she has literally zero redeeming qualities beyond checking intersection boxes, still less that her appeal (like that of her boss before her, to a lesser extent) was the in terrorem effect of imagining the impact of the sitting president's exit. And yet that seems to be the exact corner they're backed into.

OK, say Harris is great but doesn't appeal to the foolish masses, though party leaders assert their sophisticated ability to appreciate her privately. So how come no one thinks it would be a good idea to put her on a new ticket under Newson or Whitmer as VP? She's so unelectable that she'd drag down the newly anointed candidate for the top position?

Knock her leadership experience? True, she was an undistinguished senator, but she has been VP for four years. The problem there is that she has been sidelined as VP even more, perhaps, than the usual hapless possessor of that office. "Groomed for the top seat" she is not, even in the context of a top spot that for several years has been filled by various unelected flacks, in short anyone or everyone but the technical holder to that position. But calling attention to Harris's hollow title doesn't do much to pander to the black or female vote, or the lack of seriousness of an administration or a party who couldn't face up to the real danger that an unusually elderly president might not make it even through his first term.

Black Turlogh

Here are a pair of articles about one of Robert E. Howard’s lesser-known heroes, Turlogh Dubh O’Brien. “Dubh” is Gaelic for “black”; with reference to the previous post, the name “Douglas” is an anglicized version of “Dubhglas,” which translates literally as “Blackwater.”

Modern readers usually forget that the Cimmerians were supposed to have been the ancestors of the Scottish Highlanders and Irish Gaels. The movies often use the term “Northman,” which was originally used for the Norse of Norway. Even when Howard wants to write about the Vikings, he usually introduces a Gaelic leader, more often Cormac Mac Art. (The Vikings, meanwhile, were Danes in those stories).

Privateers

There’s no ‘constitutional right’ at work here, in spite of the headline, but you can get Congress’ permission.

It may not get much publicity, but there it is, smack-dab in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: Congress has the power to grant citizens “letters of marque and reprisal.” Meaning that, with Congress’s permission, private citizens can load weapons onto their fishing boats, head out to the high seas, capture enemy vessels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patriotic pirates were known as “privateers.” At the start of the Revolutionary War, America had a meager navy, so we had to rely on these privateers, who captured nearly two thousand British vessels and confiscated vast amounts of food, uniforms, weapons, and barrels of sherry....

The Founding Fathers were big fans of privateers. Late in life, John Adams wrote glowingly about the 1775 Massachusetts law that first legalized them, calling it “one of the most important documents in history. The Declaration of Independence is a brimborion in comparison with it.”

The author is playing this for laughs, while trying to make the point that originalist thinking is foolish. 

For several minutes, we spoke about originalism and the Constitution. Though it’s obscure, the privateering clause highlights that this document—for all its brilliance and prescience—was written in a vastly different time. Some passages—such as those about the “blessings of liberty” and “equal protection”—are timeless. But others are clearly the product of the eighteenth century.

He would not know this, but there has been quite a lot of recent thought given to restoring privateering. During the early phases of the Global War on Terror, it was regularly discussed as a way of making the market work against the problem. Not just at sea, either: just as land-based forms were used in the 19th century, known as ‘filibusters,’ so too there was considerable thought given to licensing private armies with similar privileges to seize prizes to fight terrorist forces in Africa and elsewhere. 

Probably the best known example is Erik Prince of Blackwater fame, who proposed doing exactly that in Africa and in Ukraine. In the end the government decided that it preferred to keep direct control over armed forces, but consider how poorly that strategy ultimately fared. Really the Russian government did what Prince wanted with the Wagner group, fairly successfully. Those forces proved unreliable against American-backed irregulars in Syria, and haven’t been effective in Ukraine, but they were pretty effective against Islamist irregulars across Africa. 

China, meanwhile, is effectively using a ’gray zone fleet’ of fishing privateers to war against the Philippines over control of the sea lanes and fishing areas. It’s proving quite difficult to contest effectively. Privateers are in play right now. 

Less piratical but still more on the side of militia forces, several US States maintain naval militia to this day. 

It may be that walking around in a tricorn hat and writing petitions with a quill pen s carrying a lot of the weight of making this originalist idea seem dated. With a little more attention, like other constitutional matters it too proves to be of continuing interest. 

Spangled

 

Red, White, and Blue breakfast with huckleberry jam. 

Independence Day

The wife and I rode over to the unincorporated village of Cashiers for their fireworks show. Cashiers is an interesting little mountain town. It has no government, but somehow has a fully-funded independent rescue service, fire department, and ambulance service. It only has seven hundred residents, but this time of year there's about twenty-five thousand people there on vacation in condos or second homes. It's a very pleasant little town, which enjoys its anarchy so much that it turned down an invitation from the state legislature to formally re-incorporate. 

Fireworks were pleasant and plentiful, and then we rode home. It's a promising start to the Independence Day holiday, which we will be celebrating intensely as always. It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Brought to you from the other half of the Range 15 team, the ones who don't sell coffee these days.

Like a Fox

I was introduced to this song at a very young age by Banks & Shane, the band from Atlanta. For many years I didn’t understand it at all. My limited understanding of women forbade it. 

In a way it is really only now that I understand the song. I suppose it is amazing that I maintained such a naive view of women until my 50th year. Maybe I have mostly just known good and virtuous women. 

Fist-Fighting

There's probably something healthy about fighting that our society refuses to accept. At a recent concert out Texas way a young singer named Miranda Lambert broke up a fight between some female fans (verbally), and then had the wisdom to set terms for when fighting was allowed during her set. Like G. K. Chesterton said about Christianity, it has the wisdom to divide the world in recognition of human nature: "Here you can swagger, there you can grovel." 

Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy—that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, “Neither swagger nor grovel”; and it would have been a limit. But to say, “Here you can swagger and there you can grovel”—that was an emancipation.

One of the thing about The Bikeriders movie that is striking is how little violence is in it -- and the worst of that either from those completely outside motorcycle culture, or those from the younger generation who had been explicitly rejected as unworthy for the culture and who found a way to worm their way in anyway. Early in the film Johnny faces a challenge, and asks if it should be answered with fists or knives. "Well, I don't want to kill you," the other man says, so they just fight with fists. Likewise in a later brawl, Johnny spends his time either trying to avoid it or breaking it up, and all the sides drink beer and become friends afterwards. There's another scene of drunken brawling, but it's just for fun. Nobody is really trying to hurt anybody.

In my generation, the great film was Fight Club. That film (and its earlier book) supposed that the way the culture had changed to forbid fighting had caused a kind of real psychic damage to young men. The earlier age depicted in the newer film allowed younger men to brawl on the weekends, under the eyes and guidance of older men who didn't anymore wish to, then go back to work on Monday. 

Fight Club suggests that the popularity of the fight, once released, will ennoble the men so that they can overthrow the whole world and end a civilization that hates them. The Bikeriders thinks they'll keep steady jobs if you just let them be themselves and don't make a big thing about the occasional fistfight. They're just blue collar guys, working things out for themselves. They'll be back on Monday to drive the truck or turn the wrench or whatever.

Maybe we shouldn't make such a big deal about it. The law says it's all 'simple assault' and subject to arrest and court intervention, but it really shouldn't be. No harm, no foul: and mostly, there's not really any harm. We're probably better off if we make room for it, especially for those who choose fists over knives, and leave the guns alone.

A Moment of Equality

For one brief shining moment, the Democratic Party treats its own just as shabbily as it treats everyone else. 

Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted.... Harrison offered what they described as a rosy assessment of Biden’s path forward. The chat function was disabled and there were no questions allowed.

Even the Inner Party eventually isn’t trusted.  

UPDATE: The first Democratic Congressman calls on Biden to withdraw.  

"Chevron deference" primer

Glen Reynolds sorts out some of the ignorant raving about the recent "power grab" that reversed the Chevron deference doctrine. What the Supreme Court ruled is that Congress passes laws, the executive branch enforces them as written, and courts kick them back to Congress if they're ambiguous and need to be amended. If executive-branch bureaucrats find a statute's actual words ill-suited to whatever their newest enforcement crusade is in any particular year, the cure is to get Congress to use better words.

The way statists are squawking, you'd think the only question worth asking is whether a particular crop of bureaucrats is pursuing a good policy. To the contrary, it's equally important how policy is set and who has the Constitutional power to contest it.

This is much like the caterwauling over whether Supreme Court decisions promote good policy in a particular area of controversy. Unless the policy is enshrined in the Constitution or a law properly enacted by Congress, it's not the point in a Supreme Court decision. That Court is charged with ensuring that, if the Constitution or a statute is at fault, it must be amended legally. Not overturned by mobs in the street or jackbooted bureaucrats, but voted on by elected officials according to well-understood rules and precedents. That's the "rule of law," no matter how unhappy it makes the New York Times.

Immune-ish

Ed Morrissey has a pretty good summary of today's Supreme Court's ruling on Trump's immunity claims. Much of what is alleged against him fails before an immunity defense, such as anything in his core Constitutional duties, and most of what could conceivably be called his official duties, subject to a certain amount of potential rebuttal. Some of the allegations, however, could be considered outside his official duties, depending on how the evidence works out.

Justice Thomas would have thrown out the entire prosecution on the ground that the special counsel appointment was unauthorized, but he appears to have no allies on this issue.

Good plan

From Holly MathNerd's Substack:

If Trump has the sense to refuse another debate and simply run ads from this one, he will probably win decisively. He should release a statement referring to the Axios report in which Biden staffers describe Biden as only cognizant from 10am to 4pm and stating simply: “President Trump’s commitment to fair play precludes him from debating President Biden after sundown. If President Biden’s team would like to schedule a daytime debate to permit him to participate during his hours of best cognizance, we are amenable to that.” It would have the predictable seismic effect without risking any need to actually have a second debate.

More hot takes: Politico cited this "research" as concluding that

President Biden was hurt badly by the debate, but Donald Trump didn’t benefit on any measure, except the vote.

This after roughly 100% of the MSM reported the debate as a kind of bad night for the incumbent, but one marked primarily by a million unidentified lies from the ex-President. To be fair, it was hard to tell whether most of the gibberish emitted from the incumbent could be fairly described as a lie, or even an opinion, but it would have been reassuring if the MSM had been capable of criticizing the startling claims that no servicemen had died under the incumbent's watch, and that the Border Patrol supports his policies. Luckily, however, his poor debate performance affected nothing but the "vote"--apparently to be distinguished from "the official ballot count we plan to announce later."

Movie Review: The Bikeriders

Today my wife and son and I all went to see The Bikeriders. It's loosely based on a photo-book of the same name, which was an older locution for what we call "bikers." The movie has some interesting qualities. 

One of them is that the two leads have almost nothing to do with the plot. The male lead is almost inconsequential to the movie; he's there to serve as the love interest for the female lead, whose role is to narrate the plot rather than to much participate in it. That's a very strange structure for a movie; at one point I realized that the male lead was just sitting around watching things happen, and not actually participating in the action in any meaningful way.

That said, the movie offers a helpful study of how motorcycle culture evolved in America. I thought a particularly insightful note was about how the club split, not formally but informally, into the beer-drinkers and the pot-smokers. This was roughly generational: the World War II era bikers were rowdy beer-drinking men, but the Vietnam-era veterans had often experienced psychedelic drugs. They also had two very different experiences of their society's embrace of them and what they'd done, and you can see how the older generation finds the newer one wilder and increasingly impossible to control. 

The trick the movie plays on audiences of young people is that the 'young people' who are impossible to control are the Baby Boomers; this device is a way of helping today's young see how wild the Boomer generation was when it was young. These days Boomers are in the minds of the young stereotypically hidebound and devoted to the older America, but in 1969 the story was rather different. The eroticism of the male and female leads is really doing nothing but drawing the young audience members into the plot, which is about how two older Americas interacted with each other as much as it is about the evolution of motorcycle clubs. 

In the movie the ending of that story is very sad, even though (or partly because) the lovebirds escape to a 'happy' life without motorcycles, brotherhood, honor or valor. Partly that is why the ending is sad; partly it is a measure of the lack of agency the lead characters actually have. A character devoted to honor, who defended brotherhood with valor, would have had the agency the author of the script decided to deny to his characters. Yet the club ends up losing those qualities too, as the older generation fails to enforce or explain them and the younger one doesn’t understand them. In the broader world outside the movie also, the older generation was not able to convey its values to the younger generation in a way that would defend those values. This is the tragedy.

A consequence of having the female lead serve as the narrator is to make an essentially masculine story -- all the club members are male -- be told in a way that is accessible to women. It also points up how bad the earlier generation is at expressing their feelings: the president of the club, Johnny, is incapable of saying what he means much of the time, and only under great duress can admit his needs and limitations. When the time comes to say goodbye, he can't do that at all. Asked a second time by the female narrator why he's come by to see her for no reason that is apparent to her, he just reiterates that he doesn't need anything. 

Strong drama, and a good study of an earlier set of generations. Watch everyone except for the two people you're being led to believe are the core of the story and you'll find there is a lot to learn.

Open the System

In the Cowboy State Daily, Rod Miller cites Thermodynamics and offers a solution. 

The only solution I can come up with is Ken Kesey’s Corollary to Newton’s Second Law. Kesey’s Corollary states that, “If the amount of energy in a closed system is finite, open the system.”

Opening our system – open conventions, for example – might truly allow our cream to rise to the top and prevent two inept has-beens like Biden and Trump from clogging our pipes.

Opening our system so that the best among us have an even chance of election will give the entrenched powers-that-be a serious case of the dropsy, and they’ll fight that notion tooth and claw. But I think its worth a shot, given what I saw Thursday night.

Department of own goals

"How dare you accuse me falsely of being prone to filing lawsuits! I know just the thing to clear my name."

Update July 1:

Every American Newspaper

It’s been a tough day for the literati. 

South of Macon

This woman has something to say. 

We Used To Drink A Lot

Yeah, we really did. 

Worthy Point

The dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor actually made the case for the majority opinion.

She wrote... “Litigants seeking further dismantling of the ‘administrative state’ have reason to rejoice in their win today, but those of us who cherish the rule of law have nothing to celebrate.”

Of course we want to dismantle the administrative state. We’re American citizens, not British subjects.

Dismantling the administrative state is one of my major political goals. Independence Day is next week.

The View from Europe

On a professional call this morning, the Europeans I was talking with -- it's afternoon for them -- had a lot to say about the debate last night. I had the restraint not to tell them what I thought of European opinions about how America governs itself.

I didn't watch the debate. I didn't need to watch it to know how I'm going to vote. However, it's clear that America's international position was badly weakened last night.

The Old .30-30

The NRA on the great American deer rifle.

Today, while we tend to look at the .30-30 cartridge and the guns it is chambered in as being suitable for close-range deer hunting, it is a fact that the cartridge has been used to take every species of North American big game. Elk, moose, black bear and grizzlies have all fallen to the .30-30 in the hands of hunters....

Interestingly enough, the .30-30 cartridge and the guns chambered for it became quite popular during the Mexican Revolution (1911-1920). Quite a large number of these guns were exported, legally and otherwise, to arm the revolutionary forces. Even today, south of the border, you will hear the Mexican folk song, “Carbina Treinta Treinta,” honoring the part that the cartridge played in that conflict.

I have a Winchester '94 downstairs myself. I had never heard of the song, though. It's not my favorite genre of music, but it's pretty punchy. 

Georgia 2020

People keep advising to stop talking about the stolen election, but it really matters. (H/t D29)

All in-person votes in Fulton County, roughly 375,000, have no ballot images from the original results, and, according to the complaint, there are 17,852 missing ballot images from the recount. Statewide, there were 1.7 million ballot images missing or destroyed after the Election. By McGowan’s own admission, Georgia does not have a paper trail to justify its results.

Yet the press keeps telling us that there is "no evidence" of fraud, claims about which are "unfounded."  

RIP Kinky

Kinky Friedman is dead at 79 years old. He was responsible for a number of questionable songs, and was a friend to many of the greats of the era. The world is lessened by every such loss; eternity, perhaps, prospers. 

And so we should . . . what?

You have to wonder what policy preferences we're supposed to glean from this mess of an analysis from WaPo, a "newspaper" that probably needs to die in some kind of combination of light and darkness, both of which apparently could simultaneously contribute to disaster:

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming — it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet. Tiny particles from the combustion of coal, oil and gas can reflect sunlight and spur the formation of clouds, shading the planet from the sun’s rays. Since the 1980s, those particles have offset between 40 and 80 percent of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. And now, as society cleans up pollution, that cooling effect is waning. New regulations have cut the amount of sulfur aerosols from global shipping traffic across the oceans; China, fighting its own air pollution problem, has slashed sulfur pollution dramatically in the last decade.

The result is even warmer temperatures — but exactly how much warmer is still under debate. The answer will have lasting impacts on humanity’s ability to meet its climate goals.

“We’re starting from an area of deep, deep uncertainty,” said Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and research lead for the payments company Stripe. “It could be a full degree of cooling being masked.”

When you start from a "widely accepted premise" and reach a self-contradicting conclusion, it might be time to re-examine the areas of wide agreement. Besides being popular, do these ideas hold any water at all? And what do these writers think "irony" means?

For Father’s Day, and also our anniversary, my wife bought me this cup “so you can drink from the skulls of your enemies.” I don’t actually have any living enemies, but I was charmed all the same. 

The idea that Vikings drank from skulls is based on a misunderstanding by antiquarians of a line from Krákumál. The kenning was trying to allude poetically to drinking from horns, which of course are attached to skulls. Vikings would have understood the joke. It’s a fine sentiment all the same.

The knife was another gift of hers, some years ago: the blade is forged out of shards of an IED that was deployed against American forces in Iraq. Turning your enemy's weapon into your own is power. It was forged by the Stek family in the Pacific Northwest. Stag and buffalo horn hilt. One might argue that it is a literal magic blade. 

Trusted to Defend Democracy

The Washington Post wonders aloud: 

President Biden and his Democratic allies have cast his reelection campaign as a battle for the country’s survival, warning that a second Donald Trump presidency would present an existential threat to American democracy.

In speeches and campaign ads, Biden points to Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his incitement of an angry mob that ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the former president’s boasts that he will use the powers of his office to punish his political enemies.... 

In six swing states that Biden narrowly won in 2020, a little more than half of voters classified as likely to decide the presidential election say threats to democracy are extremely important to their vote for president... 

Yet, more of them trust Trump to handle those threats than Biden.

How can this be? 

You might start by asking people what they think the threats to democracy actually are. 

UPDATE: These two bits deserve separate mention.

Trump has tried to flip the democracy issue, claiming falsely that he and his allies are facing multiple criminal investigations because Biden is weaponizing the judicial system against him. The former president also continues to undermine the legitimacy of elections with baseless claims of widespread fraud.

...

David Dunacusky, a 61-year-old from Phoenixville, Pa., who serves as a constable, an elected law enforcement officer, is among those who believe that the threat to democracy is coming from the left. A staunch Trump supporter, he echoed Trump’s unfounded claims that voter fraud swung the 2020 presidential election to Biden and suggested that FBI agents were embedded with Jan. 6 rioters. He also expressed concern that the election won’t be legitimate this year. He said it’s “propaganda 100 percent” when Democrats say Trump is a threat to democracy because “they’re scared to death” of their corruption being exposed.

The journalist does not, of course, similarly characterize Biden's or Biden supporters' claims. 

Were FBI 'agents' embedded with the rioters, by the way? It may depend on whether you intend the word in the specific sense of 'a Special Agent,' or in the generic sense of 'an individual acting on behalf of another entity.' In the latter sense, it's established fact that they were: so many the FBI claims to have "lost count" of how many they had there.

Lies & Statistics

The Surgeon General of the United States has issued another attempt to distort the public's understanding on the danger of firearms. FPC dismantles it.

Essentially, in order to achieve the desired result -- "firearms are the leading cause of death for children" -- the government (a) included adults, both 18 and even 19 years old, and (b) excluded children who had not reached their first birthday. Including the latter pushes firearms way down the list even with the inclusion of the adults as "children," because there are several causes of death for infants that exceed the whole total for firearms. 

Likewise, the majority of these firearm deaths are gang members shooting each other with illegal weapons. That doesn't really crop up with true "children," but begins in the teenage years. Keeping the lights on for 18 and even 19 year-olds allows them to finally cobble together enough deaths to (barely) exceed automobile accidents. 

Leaving out the fact that most of these deaths are with firearms that are already illegal also tints the imagery towards their desired goal of more gun control; in fact, the illegality of the weapons shows that gun control has already failed. Enforcing the existing laws would suffice, if they could manage to do that. If they can't even manage to do that, what good are new laws going to be? 

Well, those laws would disarm ordinary people -- and that, as always, is the real goal of all these lies and statistics. 

Ancient Cave Signs

Constant Striving

Small Numbers

The Washington Post notes that the US Postal Service is helping the government spy on your mail.

Postal inspectors say they fulfill such requests only when mail monitoring can help find a fugitive or investigate a crime. But a decade’s worth of records, provided exclusively to The Washington Post in response to a congressional probe, show Postal Service officials have received more than 60,000 requests from federal agents and police officers since 2015, and that they rarely say no.

Each request can cover days or weeks of mail sent to or from a person or address, and 97 percent of the requests were approved, according to the data. Postal inspectors recorded more than 312,000 letters and packages between 2015 and 2023, the records show.

I yield to none in my disapproval of government spying on its own citizens. Nevertheless, these figures are shocking mostly because they're tiny. There are 335,000,000 Americans, more or less.  They found 60,000 requests over 8 years. Check my math, but I make that approximately 0.00223%. 

All things considered, that's remarkably restrained given that the Postal Service basically never turns them down when they ask. Of course, it could be that they don't often bother to ask because people don't often plan crimes by mail (though perhaps any prospective criminals among you should, given their relative inattention!). 

On the other hand, your mail would be a reliable indicator if you were "in the military, or religious." Apparently that's a matter of concern these days.

High Costs of War

 An excellent point by Luttwak (h/t Instapundit).

Today, however, with the average fertility of women across Europe less than two and still falling — the EU average was 1.46 in 2022 — there are no spare children.

The extreme case here is China, with its fertility rate of 1.1. President Xi is, by all accounts, a bellicose man who enjoys threatening war against Taiwan. And yet, curiously, in 2020 he took eight months to reveal that one PLA officer and three soldiers had died during the fighting on India’s Ladakh frontier. During that period of official silence, the families of the four were re-housed and provided with welfare payments or better jobs; the officer’s wife who taught piano in a village school was elevated to the Xi’an Conservatory of Music, with a new house to go with it. Each of the four also became the subject of dedicated media campaigns, which portrayed the youngest as cinematically good-looking and the officer as so conscientious that, up in cold Tibet, he would wake up before his soldiers to prepare hot-water bottles for them. Later, the names of the four were added to many highway bridges to remind all of their sacrifice.

Why the grand acts of remembrance? The answer is demographic. Thanks to China’s one-child policy, imposed in 1980 with the abundant use of forced abortions, the four deaths extinguished eight family lines.

Emphasis added. I only have one child, by fate rather than policy; if he were drafted and killed at war, it would end my family line. I only have one cousin in my father's line; he has one son as well. We're only two sons away from my grandfather's line being extinguished. 

Under those circumstances, how important is Taiwan? Quite a bit, really, and more important yet is control of the sea lanes nearby; but those are the concerns of nations, not families. Not our family's, and not Chinese families'.  

Aristotle held that the polis is an outgrowth of the decisions of families, not (as modern political theory has it) of individuals. When the interests of the families as a whole comes apart from the interest of the polis, the political project is in grave danger of being fundamentally illegitimate. It seems this new demographic reality has changed us, but the archaic political systems at work here and in Europe and in China all date to the era in which National Glory was something for which children could be sacrificed. 

Sword of the Mountain Man

Mountain Man Jim Baker’s sword has been donated to a museum focused on his life. That’s a Sharps rifle in the picture also. 

Honeymoon

Grim’s Mead

It’s commonly claimed (perhaps falsely) that the word ‘honeymoon’ refers to a month after the wedding in which honey mead is drunk in celebration by the newlyweds. Twenty-five years ago mead was hard to find! It’s enjoying some popularity now, but at the time we were married the only production mead was a brand called Chaucer’s that was only available as a speciality item in major cities. It’s not hard to make, but I didn’t know how, so our honeymoon involved no mead. 

Our silver anniversary, however, saw us broaching a bottle of my own concoction. My wife pronounced it to be “a very good batch.” 

Solace

Somehow I have never been familiar with this famous piece, the Emperor Concerto, which I stumbled on recently in a movie soundtrack. Other than recognizing it as Beethoven, I couldn't place it. Now I can't stop listening to it and can't wait for the piano sheet music to arrive by mail. This is the second movement, the Adagio. Look at the transport on the faces of the performers.

A Day of Some Local Importance

Twenty-five years ago today my wife and I were married at Amicalola Falls. In the ensuing years she has not accompanied me on all my adventures, but most of them; and when I have gone on ones too far or too dangerous, she has been the one I could trust to keep the home front secure in my absence.

Three years to the day later, we spent our third anniversary in the hospital as she gave birth to our son. He is twenty-two today, now studying emergency management by day and taking firefighter certification courses by night. I am very proud of him.

Today is also the summer solstice, aligning our personal time-keeping with that of the heavens. I hope you all have an excellent day today.

Bump-Stocks: A Compromise

After the Supreme Court struck down an unconstitutional ATF rule, Democrats in Congress tried to fake a vote to pass legislation banning them.

Democrats tried to force a voice vote on the bill to ban bump stocks, a tactic often used by both parties when they know that they don’t have the votes to pass legislation but want to bring an issue to the Senate floor. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, would ban the sale of the devices, similar to the rule issued by President Donald Trump’s administration after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country music festival in 2017 with semiautomatic rifles equipped with the accessories.

The Supreme Court ruling was not that these devices enjoy Second Amendment protections, but that the ATF rule process effectively stole legislative authority from Congress. If Congress did pass such a law, it would probably survive review: as I wrote at the time:

They're not good technology, making the rifle less accurate and unstable. I don't think it meets any the tests SCOTUS has set up for this: it's not a weapon that serves a viable military use suitable for militia service (US v. Miller), nor is it in common use for lawful purposes (it's uncommon), nor is it part of any sort of historical or traditional understanding of the right to bear arms (it's a gimmick mostly used to play on the range).

However, there's good reason to oppose the ratchet effect of increasingly banning things until Americans are less free than once. I could accept adding these devices to the list of those things controlled by the National Firearms Act, but in return we should get something back that we'd rather have. 

I think the obvious choice for a trade is the suppressor, often called the "silencer." The suppressor improves the function and safety of the weapon. Because they lengthen the barrel, they improve both accuracy and power. Because they reduce the noise, they reduce the risks of hearing loss associated with practice. 

They should be protected under the Second Amendment under two of the three tests. They have a clear militia function: the US military uses them, and so you can see a clear use for militia in similar roles. That satisfies Miller. They are in common use for lawful purposes -- they are so valuable that many people go through the trouble of obtaining one through the National Firearms Act regulatory structure. The only test not clearly satisfied is the Bruen test, because we do have about a century of historic tradition of them being regulated by the state. However, if Congress passed a law changing that, there's no reason they shouldn't.

Although I oppose the National Firearms Act in principle, legislation is generally an act of compromise. Here's one that seems reasonable to me: swap suppressor/silencers for bump stocks in an alteration of the National Firearms Act. That would not ban bump stocks, but make them available only under stricter regulations and with high taxes; it would, in return, allow suppressors to be sold more freely than they are currently. We would not be participating in the ratchet effect, but trading something better for something worse. 

As a compromise of the sort that Congress used to do when it was a more serious organization, that makes sense to me.

New Waylon Music

This is the most exciting news I’ve heard in ages. 

Pride and Tolkien

The other day AVI was writing about pride, in the Christian conception that it is a sin rather than the American elite's concept that it is a virtue. (This is, I reminded him in the comments, "Pride month"!)

Thomas Aquinas wrote quite a bit about this subject. As readers know, a major part of Aquinas' work was adopting Aristotle's ethics to Christian practice and theology. Here is an area where it might seem that Aristotle and Christianity come apart, though: for as readers of this blog also know, Aristotle's capstone virtue was Magnanimity, which is the virtue of those who use all their other virtues to pursue 'that which is most honorable.' This is actual, complete virtue, and it is the virtue of the best people who deserve the most honor. 

To do that which is most honorable is to merit high honors; and to seek to merit high honors is surely prideful, since it sets you above others who deserve less. The Latin word for pride is "superbia," meaning that you think you are better than others. But this man really is better than others, and strives to be so. In doing so, he not only becomes better than others, he becomes the best kind of person. This is really a virtue, too, because it creates an excellence in one's self -- and it also improves things for everyone else, who benefit from all the excellent things being done that merit their respect and gratitude. 

Aquinas gives a fairly straightforward answer that aligns magnanimity not with pride but with humility, which might at first seem surprising. The sin of pride is to seek not that which is most honorable, but things beyond what reason tells us is most honorable. To seek that which is best and most honorable, but not beyond what one ought to seek, is humble -- and therefore humility and magnanimity are almost the same thing. 

An analogy to Tolkien will make this puzzle become clear. It was the humility of Gandalf that kept him from taking the Ring and striving for the power of Sauron. In this way, however, he was also doing what was most honorable for a being of his station -- he, indeed, was the only one of the wizards who actually remembered and kept to his assigned mission. In this way he is the most praiseworthy of his order, which is magnanimity realized. He strove always for what was best, and never strove to go beyond his place in the created order. 

Saruman by contrast shows pride. Appointed to a higher position than Gandalf, to be the White Wizard and the leader of the Order of Istari and the White Council both, he strove to seize the Ring. His pride was his downfall, and led him not to deserve the highest praise but to deserve shame and condemnation. 

Honor is therefore a reliable guide to virtue, just as Aristotle says. It may be surprising that a desire for honor turns out to be compatible with humility, but the literary example shows that it is indeed. 

Hunting’s Over

Freedom for the other guy, too

HotAir on the ignorance of workers who overestimate their leverage with people who can walk away.

We have created a generation or two of profoundly ignorant people who think that they don't have to create value in order to extract it from others.

Fire Fighting Flyers

 This looks like fun!

Pickup Truck Song

He Does Not Listen

I will credit the artist once I figure out who it is. 

UPDATE: I got up early and split a load of firewood with my son, then made the egg breakfast from the post below. After that I took my son and dog to run some errands in the pickup truck. Then we had a traumatic injury call we ran together, as my father often did in his day. Now we’re going to have a great dinner of my chili and some tamales my wife whipped up while we were on the call. 

So a very fatherly day, in any event. 

Grim’s Egg Bites

Speaking of the chickens, here’s a breakfast dish I’ve developed because of the surplus of eggs. This dish quickly uses up eight. The three of us eat all eight in one sitting, my wife taking two, three each for my son and I. 

It’s a quick recipe to pull together. 

Preheat oven to 400 F. Grease the muffin baking tin; line with small, street-taco size tortillas.* Add one-half slice American** cheese, then one tsp. sausage***. Crack one egg into each. Sprinkle with herbs,**** and then bake for 20 minutes. 

* They come out nice and crispy this way, but a better version can be made with pastry. It’s more trouble, and this is intended to be a quick breakfast food. Do what you prefer. 

** Or any melting cheese; today I am out of American cheese, so I’m using Swiss. 

*** I use raw Hot Tennessee Pride. You can use anything. It cooks in the same time as the eggs. I tested this with a meat thermometer the first few times to be sure. You may substitute cooked sausage if you want. 

**** This step plus the choice of sausage/cheese gives easy variations: you could use Mexican oregano, chipotle, chorizo and Queso Chihuahua for a Mexican flavor, or Italian sausage, mozzarella, and basil for an Italian flavor. 

Lincoln’s Favorite Chicken

Cowboy Kent Rollins is a chuck wagon artist with a line of seasonings and videos. He’s given to adaptation of traditional recipes to easier substitutions for contemporary audiences— here he offers boneless, skinless chicken thighs as a substitute for starting with a whole (live?) chicken. If you keep chickens like we do, skinning them out is easier than plucking them and deboning them is not hard nor with practice slow. If not, use the substitution. 

Now at one point you might think he says that this dish is made with margarine, but he really says "marjoram," the herb. Margarine is demonstrably ahistorical. Margarine wasn’t invented until 1869, in a French competition to try and find a low price substitute for butter for the army and lower classes. Don’t use the stuff here or at all. I find that birds won’t eat it if you put it out like you would suet, and the internet says it's not good for them because it lacks the kinds of fat they need even if you can get them to eat it. I would suggest never using it, but definitely not in a historical recipe. 

Otherwise I think you might like this. There's an alternative recipe here which is similar and likewise does include the butter, and that one cites its source in case you're wondering about the historical basis of all this. Cowboy Kent is not bad in spite of these occasional lapses; he does sometimes bury a cast iron Dutch oven in the ground in the old way. Some concessions probably make it easier for contemporary audiences to actually get around to trying these things out, too. 

A Courtroom Win

Today, Firearms Policy Coalition announced a major legal victory in its Mock v. Garland lawsuit challenging the Biden Administration’s “pistol brace” ban rule issued by the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). In the decision, United States District Court Judge Reed O’Connor granted summary judgment in favor of FPC and its co-plaintiffs and issued a final judgment and order vacating the ATF’s rule. 

Congratulations to the FPC's team of young, energetic lawyers. 

The Biden administration has been inclined to wide-reaching, unconstitutional 'rule changes' that are attempts at actual legislation without the bother of consulting Congress. They are being effectively challenged by FPC, Gun Owners of America, and sometimes the NRA.

As they point out in the full press release, the Biden ATF just transformed millions of Americans into felons without consulting their constitutional representatives. This one (of several similar maneuvers) is dead for now. The government can appeal, of course, if they want to transform this into a SCOTUS ruling instead of a circuit court one.

UPDATE: Another one, this time from SCOTUS itself. This one was the 'bump stock' ban; the other one was the 'pistol brace' ban. 

Both of them turn on the same basic logic, which is that an administrative rule change can't fundamentally alter the law: they have to go through Congress to legislate. That's good news. 

In spite of the similarity of the technologies, both being attachments to the stocks of firearms, they're quite different in character. I wouldn't necessarily oppose a bump stock regulation enacted in a reasonable way. They're not good technology, making the rifle less accurate and unstable. I don't think it meets any the tests SCOTUS has set up for this: it's not a weapon that serves a viable military use suitable for militia service (US v. Miller), nor is it in common use for lawful purposes (it's uncommon), nor is it part of any sort of historical or traditional understanding of the right to bear arms (it's a gimmick mostly used to play on the range). I could see adding it to the National Firearms Act, so that Americans who wanted one could have one but only with the additional steps (and costs) involved.

The pistol brace, by contrast, helps especially disabled Americans to use a militia-quality firearm in a more stable and accurate way. It should enjoy protection even under Miller's logic, which is the most restrictive. 

However, the court is quite right to prevent the bureaucracy from just rewriting the law as if it were a representative, legislative authority.

UPDATE: Ironically, the abortion pill win is also a victory on similar grounds of restraining the government's dictatorial authority: here the court actually restrained its own, which is an impressive feat. Clarence Thomas often notes that the court rarely asks if it has the legitimate authority to do a thing; it just assumes it does. This time they didn't do that, and even though the subject is the tragedy of abortion on demand, it's good to see the court recognizing that even it has proper limits it should not transgress. 

All these Flags are False

We should all be delighted at the successful stopping of a planned mass murder in Atlanta, not just because the murders were prevented but because the information operation the murders were intended to effect was stopped also.

Officials say their investigation began when Prieto told a man at a gun show that he wanted "to incite a race war prior to the 2024 United States Presidential Election."...

As reported by the indictment, Prieto said he wanted to target a rap concert because "there would be a high concentration of African Americans" and planned to leave confederate flags after the violence and to shout phrases like "KKK all the way."

I'm struck by how no one in this story is who they claim to be. A man using a fake name who isn't a Klansman intended to pose as one, enlisting the aid of a man who was an undercover Federal spy -- a 'confidential human source' who spies on gun shows for the Feds. The CHS carried on these conversations with him "over several years," growing increasingly alarmed at the murderous wishes he expressed. So he introduced him to an actual undercover agent, who actually got him to confess to the murderous plans and try to enlist them to participate in the fake Klan attack.

“The reason I say Atlanta. Why, why is Georgia such a f*****-up state now? When I was a kid that was one of the most conservative states in the country. Why is it not now?"

When this 58 year old man was a kid, Jimmy Carter was the governor of Georgia, so that probably isn't as true as he believes it to be. Not that he sounds like a man of good judgment or clear reason.

Not a great judge of guns, either. 

PRIETO stated he preferred to use two rifles and a bolt-action sniper rifle because it was more accurate. PRIETO suggested the CHS and UC should use an AK-platform weapon, as AR variant rifles were less reliable.

That hasn't been true since the Vietnam era.

In any case, I'm happy that this kind of attack was stopped from happening. 

I'm also happy that the Klan is so weak these days that people have to fake them because there's not much of a real one left. Once upon a time if you wanted the Klan to stage an attack you'd start  by joining the Klan; these days you couldn't find a branch of them to join. 

That's a genuine improvement we should try to build upon. Fortunately starting a race war is probably out of the question; just another bit of bad judgment in his tangled mind. 

Life can turn on a dime

War Never Changes

Technically these are unregulated, even by the Biden administration.

"200 Shells"

The counterargument they like to make is that firearms are so obviously dangerous that you don't need to understand them to know that we need fewer of them and with more regulations. Still, the refusal to learn even the most basic facts about them before calling for regulations is a commitment to ignorance that is sometimes stunning to behold.

Hold the Phone

What a concept!

This oppressed majority has, finally, found an ally in the form of a bar in Idaho called Old State Saloon, which recently went viral for celebrating “Heterosexual Awesomeness Month”. On Mondays in June, “any heterosexual male dressed like a heterosexual male will receive a free draft beer”…

Idaho is a long way off, but I was there last year… 

Using hostages as a pretext for rescue

"Some things are so stupid, you have to be a UN official to say them."

Banana Republic

Chiquita held responsible for killings by the guerrilla groups that they bankrolled. If this keeps up, we will all end up paying for our crimes. 

Monday Night Music

Merle tells a funny story about Chet Atkins at the beginning of this.

Of course the Tennessee Ernie Ford version is great, but this next one is good as well. The thing's over at about 3:30 or so. I don't know why whoever posted this on YouTube left 2 minutes of nothing on the end.

The girl in the back playing bass, looking like she's tickled to be playing on stage with her dad or something, is actually Tal Wilkenfeld out of Australia who's recorded with a lot of big names (Ringo Starr, Brian Wilson, Toto, Todd Rundgren, Macy Gray, Dr. John, Trevor Rabin, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, Rod Stewart, John Mayer, Sting, Ben Harper, David Gilmour, Pharrell, Buddy Guy, Billy Gibbons, Lee Ritenour, Hiram Bullock, Susan Tedeschi, and Hans Zimmer, according to Wikipedia). I had no idea who she was.

Do any of you remember when TV stations went off the air around midnight and the last thing they'd play was the national anthem?

Bonds at home

I've been unusually ill, just when my husband has been down and out as well. I have also been lifted up in the most extraordinary way by my community.

Greg injured his back, then suffered first-onset a-fib problems, perhaps by coincidence, perhaps in reaction to oral steroids. A hospital stay with him later, I came back home with a bug. Apparently just as I was most clogged up with garden-variety bronchitis, I got a lungful of nasty garage-cleanup dust in connection with our plans to build out a ground-floor apartment in the garage under our house-on-stilts. Though I don't normally suffer from asthma, I suspect my airways were shrunk down to a point where the dust was the exact size to trigger spasm. Weeks later, I've only just now managed to open up my spasmed airways.

Meanwhile there are all these rescue dogs! And Greg really needs to limit movement and therefore to be waited on hand and foot. I had a dog-walker who unfortunately has a day job that got crazy busy, and in addition she fell ill. I advertised for more help, though, and not only did I snag some great workers, but several people insisted on helping out gratis. One I'd never even met before, but she knows something of my rescue work and does a great deal of it herself. On the whole it has been a profoundly heartwarming experience.

Today I am feeling very nearly normal, but still taking it easy until I'm sure my airways won't seize up again.

All the recent dogs rescued in extremis continue to do well, also an enormous boost to the spirits. There is a great deal to be grateful for.

Bonds

“The blood of your children is mixed with ours. This is an unbreakable bond.”

Am Yisrael Chai.

World's Fair 1982

Lileks is on about the World's Fair today.

It’s been decades since a World’s Fair last made a mark on the American imagination. Knoxville held one in 1982, and while a few may remember its landmark symbol—the Sunsphere—most Americans would look at a picture of the thing and think it was a failed Vegas attraction. The ’82 World’s Fair was a “specialized Expo,” dedicated to a particular theme—in this case, energy. 

I attended that fair! I don't remember it the same way because I was still a child; for me, the most memorable thing beside the Sunsphere was a WWI-fighter themed ride, which I loved because of Snoopy and the Red Baron. The fighters were done up as Sopwith Camels and Fokker Triplanes, in a series that allowed them to be dogfighting each other, strongly suggesting that the architect had the same vision that my youthful self had as well.

Many years later I met my wife under the Sunsphere for the first time. We had 'met' online earlier in a Tolkien appreciation group, long before meeting someone you had first encountered online was considered a safe thing to do. Unfortunately for me the local security was not clear on why I'd be standing around below the landmark, and tried to warn her off that some scary guy was hanging around with no better explanation of why he was there than that he was going to meet some woman he'd 'met online.' 

We'll be 25 years married later this month. 

Gandalf Bewildered

Hot Air quotes "Gandalf" -- actually the actor who played him -- as criticizing Trump's rhetorical skills. I understand exactly where he goes wrong because I did it myself.

 'Trump is an absolute bewilderment. I haven't seen him live. But he's one of the worst public speakers there has ever been. Whether he’s reading a script or not, it’s so patent what he is.”

I've always read transcripts of speeches rather than listening to them live because I wanted to understand the arguments being made, without being affected by the rhetorical flourishes. If you read the transcript of a Trump speech, it's almost incoherent. If that's what "Gandalf" is doing, I completely understand where he's coming from.

Yet the first time I heard Trump speak in 2016, at an airport where I couldn't get away from the monitors, I realized that he was definitely going to win. At the time the polls said he was 95% certain to lose. Nevertheless, I was sure about it. 

The style transposes as incoherent because he's in dialogue with the audience. He constantly stops, interrupts himself, begins a new line of inquiry based on the feedback he is getting. As a transcript you can't understand what he even thinks he is talking about. As a member of the audience, it's obvious. 

He is in fact an excellent rhetorician just because he's not on a script. He talks with people rather than to them. It's so different from ordinary politics that it just doesn't make sense until you immerse yourself in it once, and then it is clear why and how it works.

Another Song

 

[UPDATE: Some of the visuals in this YouTube version of the song are erotic and may be unwelcome to some viewers. I didn't realize that when I posted it; I was just looking for the song.]

Naturally “king” and “mountain” together produce other sentiments in me. 

It's All Going to Pot

The money follows the student

This is a good round-up article about the recent smashing success of the school choice platform in Texas and the likely effects in other states. Some rare good news.

"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.