According to Military.com, the Navy has run out of pants.
Since we're here, Don McMillan seems like a comedian some of us can relate to.
Update: McMillan has a short skit on pi that's great.
The Heliand
Occasionally in this space I have cited "Lean Times in Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber, a delightful story of how two companion heroes fall away from each other in hard times. One of them joins a religion, a lightly-fictionalized early Christianity. Being himself a heroic barbarian skaldic poet, he begins to adapt the story a bit.
As delivered over and over by Fafhrd, the History of Issek of the Jug gradually altered, by small steps which even Bwadres could hardly cavil at had he wished, into something considerably more like the saga of a Northern hero, though toned down in some respects. Issek had not slain dragons and other monsters as a child—that would have been against his Creed—he had only sported with them, swimming with leviathan, frisking with behemoth, and flying through the trackless spaces of air on the backs of wivern, griffin and hippogryph. Nor had Issek as a man scattered kings and emperors in battle, he had merely dumbfounded them and their quaking ministers by striding about on fields of poisoned sword-points, standing at attention in fiery furnaces, and treading water in tanks of boiling oil—all the while delivering majestic sermons on brotherly love in perfect, intricately rhymed stanzas.
Leiber was well-educated enough to know that such a translation had actually been performed by an ancient Saxon poet, and this volume is the result: the Heliand. I came across a copy today at a used scholarly bookstore, much to my delight, and purchased it immediately. I fell in love with the opening lines:
Song 1The Creator's spell, by which the whole world is held together, is taught to four heroes.There were many whose hearts told them that they should begin to tell the secret runes, the word of God, the famous feats that the powerful Christ accomplished in words and deeds among human beings. There were many of the wise who wanted to praise the teaching of Christ, the holy Word of God, and wanted to write a bright-shining book with their own hands, telling how the sons of men should carry out His commands. Among all these, however, there were only four who had the power of God, help from heaven, the Holy Spirit, the strength from Christ to do it. They were chosen. They alone were to write down the evangelium in a book, and to write down the commands of God, the holy heavenly word. No one else among the heroic sons of men was to attempt it[.]
I am really going to enjoy reading this book.
UPDATE: Within a page, there's a tremendous insight given in a footnote. The four heroes -- Luke, Mark, Matthew and John -- have the Holy Spirit implanted in their hearts so they can "chant God's spell." The footnote to this reads, "godspell, God's speech, gospel," and notes that in the Anglo-Saxon this is naturally either "God's word" or "good speech" or "a good spell" or "God's spell." In the thought and the language of the heroic era of the poem, these concepts blend together naturally.
UPDATE: This is so good. "In Jerusalem, Herod was chosen to be king over the Jewish people. Caesar, ruling the empire from the hill-fort Rome, placed him there -- among the warrior-companions -- even though Herod did not belong by clan to the noble and well-born descendants of Israel. He did not come from their kinsmen."
A White Stout
In spite of the light color, this is a stout. It’s the Whiteout Breakfast Stout Ale, with strong coffee flavors as well as maple and bacon. Delicious.
Kind of a dog-friendly place.
Decolonizing: What Does it Mean?
A pair of articles consider the issue, via the always-valuable Arts & Letters Daily.
For those of you who liked Tom's videos the other day, they also have an article on Chaucer.
An Amusing Moment
Hot Air covers the withdrawal of RFK from swing states and his endorsement of Trump over the Democrats:
Kennedy accused American media outlets of colluding with both the DNC and government agencies on censorship. It's a "naked exercise of executive power" against its political opponents, and told reporters in the room that they and their employers are responsible for the decline of American democracy as a result."Governments don't censor lies," Kennedy observed. "They don't fear lies. They censor the truth."...Fun fact: almost all of the US media outlets cut their live coverage after he accused them of participating in government censorship.
UPDATE: A transcript of his speech. Sadly, some these words are important and momentous rather than the wild ravings they would have appeared even a few years ago.
President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin's 88% landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot.
But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me.
During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave only two live interviews from me.
Those networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage....
This week, a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House's censorship project, quote, "The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."
Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how just 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA—which is a censorship agency, it's the center of the censorship-industrial complex—DHS, the IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.
Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards. Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was still attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.
Unrealized Gains
Another item of economic instability under discussion is a tax on 'unrealized capital gains,' which is apparently in the Biden budgetary proposals that have been more or less uncritically adopted by the Harris campaign.
It reminds me of the story about a poor student tenet in Paris who was sued by a nearby restaurant's chef because he had been subsisting on his poor food more comfortably because of the incredible smells from the restaurant, for which he had provided no compensation. The judge is supposed to have agreed that the chef deserved compensation, and had the student shake the coins in his pocket. "You have been paid for the smell of your food," he said to the chef, "with the sound of his money."
That's the only way something like this could work. Markets go up and down. If my house is worth a lot more now than when I bought it, nevertheless I sunk money into it six years ago and have gotten no money out of it. I couldn't pay you for its appreciation, but even if I somehow managed to send the IRS a sufficient check to cover it, the market could crash next year. So now I've paid taxes on money I not only never received, but in fact will never receive. I should be able to pay these taxes with the sound of my money, since there's no actual money involved.
As the guy at the link points out, nobody seems to be trying to defend the idea; the ones on their side just laugh and say it'll never happen, so don't worry about it. This also reminds me of a joke, of sorts: the law of merited impossibility. "That'll never happen, and you'll deserve it when it does."
Nicole Shanahan and Political Sabotage
This is part of a Twitter interview with RFK Jr's vice-presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan. Her description of the different ways the Democratic Party sabotaged their campaign is rather shocking, at least to me.
Elitist Philosophy
Here is a study of to what degree belonging to a wealthy family correlates with your likelihood of being cited in key academic journals. This is studied in two ways: whether you come from a family that has risen in wealth over recent generations or not ("intergenerational persistence"), and whether you were able to rise to the same rank within the profession as your mentor professor ("rank-rank correlation"). Those who went to Ivy League schools are much more likely, for example, to attain full professorships than those who went to state schools. In some fields, if you didn't go to one of the top schools (and thus probably come from a wealthier background) you really have little chance of ever obtaining tenure.
Unsurprisingly, it depends on your field, with harder sciences tending to cite papers from academics or give them good jobs regardless of whether they are also from the rich.
There are some surprising lessons, though.
Philosophy is far and away the worst on both measures. If your terminal degree didn't come from one of those top schools, you probably will never have tenure; there's too much competition from those who did, and too few jobs in the field to exhaust the supply of Ivy Leaguers who want to teach. Likewise, the major philosophers as measured by citation form a sort of club, one that is sensitive to social class.
Note that mathematics is not too far away. To some degree, this may reflect that the wealthy are more likely to choose a pure knowledge field rather than one that will improve their station in life -- mathematics you'd think would be a field like microbiology where hard, demonstrable results mattered most. But maybe you don't usually study pure math (or philosophy) if your family is struggling. You'd go into engineering of some sort if you were good at math and needed social mobility.
I'm also surprised to see that Experimental Psychology falls where it does. I'm guessing that's a product of the replication crisis that is often tied to that field in particular: the ease of relative nobodies to get cited if they at least studied under somebody known suggests that the field is open to new ideas and ready to publish them. Since this study covers 2000-2013, when the crisis was in full effect, being positioned on that side of the graph may not always be an unalloyed good even if it's also a measure of relative equality of opportunity.
Heron on the Tuck
A Great Blue Heron joined us for tonight’s walk by the Tuckasegee River.
They’re frequently seen on the Tuck.
Undermining the Ground of Rebellion
This morning I was watching a short part of this video from a rally involving bikers in favor of Trump. Just below four minutes in, this guy plugs his new song: "It's about faith, family, and freedom."
Now that surprised me because I know that guy and his band from way back in 2003 when they were new. The band is called the Moonshine Bandits, and their first album is the only one I have ever heard, because the fusion of hip-hop and country -- new back then and novel -- didn't prove to be interesting enough to me to continue with over time. That debut album was not about "faith" or "family," although it was about freedom in the sense of rebellion. Here's the new song if you want to hear it. Apparently the pressure against faith, freedom, and family has come to alarm the rebels and called them back to a defense of the flag.
The case isn't unique, though. I remember that a couple of years ago Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels had died at age 83. "Barger is less well known for his more recent life, but if you followed him more recently you'd have found that in his older years he became a devout Christian and helped to publish a series of charming children's books." Faith and family, again, as well as freedom.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that this mode of rebellion is ironically grounded in the culture against which it rebels. To be a Hells Angel is to be rooted in a universe that has both Hell and angels. Trying to sweep away their metaphysical world -- to imagine there's no heaven -- undermines even the rebel's view: indeed, it suggests that mode of rebellion is perhaps a safety valve of the culture, a way of making a home within itself for its outlaws, rather than an attempt to supplant or replace it.
Or possibly it is the dynamic at play in Sir Walter Scott's "Harold the Dauntless," which has this most excellent opening passage:
List to the valorous deeds that were doneBy Harold the Dauntless, Count Witikind's son!Count Witikind came of a regal strain,And roved with his Norsemen the land and the main.Woe to the realms which he coasted! for thereWas shedding of blood and rending of hair,Rape of maiden and slaughter of priest,Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast:When he hoisted his standard black,Before him was battle, behind him wrack,And he burned the churches, that heathen Dane,To light his band to their barks again.
The poem's story is that Witikind grows old and converts from the heathen path to the Christian one, causing his son to disown him as cowardly; but then, over the course of six cantos, Harold in turn becomes mature enough to see the wisdom of it. What seemed right to Sonny Barger in 1969 and the Moonshine bandits in 2003 may have faded with age, and the spiritual promises seem brighter as the physical eye dims.
Or, perhaps, it is not that: even in 1980 when they were assembling a documentary involving a lawyer for the Angels, he and his lawyerly companions noted their conservative ethics.
There was Hells Angels Forever on YouTube, and at 29 minutes in, there was my father.He is seated with Herman Graber at a conference table in their office: soft, heavy men in wide ties and long sideburns. Herman explains to the camera not to be fooled by the swastikas and Nazi regalia, that the Angels are patriots, enthusiastic supporters of the Vietnam War, what you might in fact call right-wingers. He pauses, blinks, concerned that he might have gone too far. “But not fascists, no, I’m not saying they’re fascists.”My father cuts in. “Perhaps best suited to the most conservative wing of the Republican party — the Goldwater wing.”
It is and always has been an interesting dynamic. I noticed it too growing up in the South in the '70s and early '80s, when the most ardent Confederate flag displayers and Outlaw Country listeners were also firm patriots who loved Ronald Reagan. Charlie Daniels went from long hair to distrusting Gorbachev in a few years' time.
RFK
I don't listen to podcasts, but I did read in the paper that Joe Rogan got into some trouble with Trump over positive comments about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What he actually said was this:
“That’s politics. They do it on the left. They do it on the right. They gaslight you, they manipulate you. They promote narratives,” Rogan said on the podcast.“The only one who’s not doing that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I am a fan [of RFK Jr]. He’s the only one that makes sense to me. He doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas. He’s much more reasonable and intelligent.”
That's very similar to my own thoughts on RFK. I've listened to him talk about several problems he thinks we need to address, and what I notice is that about half the time he is thoughtful, intelligent, and sincerely trying to solve the problem. (Sadly the other half of the time it's brain worms and dead bear cubs, but he's a Kennedy.)
It's also clear that he is enamored of his father's America, and his father's Democratic Party, which is doubtless why the current Democratic leadership had such a convulsive allergic reaction to him. They cannot praise JFK, hardly more than they can praise Jefferson or Jackson, because of his 'imperialism' and certainty that the American nation was a positive influence on the world, and capable of internal reform even in matters of race if only we would appeal to its inherent decency. RFK is a genuine patriot of the old America, and that's not welcome right now among Democrats.
RFK now says he's thinking of dropping out and endorsing Trump to prevent a Harris presidency -- perhaps due to the communism that JFK was himself so committed to opposing -- and Trump has signaled that he'd be open to brining RFK into his administration. (Also Elon Musk.)
I don't know if a restoration of mid-century solutions and ideas about what America is like and how it should proceed can actually improve things at this point. America was already committed to the managerial/administrative state by Kennedy's time, and dismantling all that should be the chief business of any attempt at reforming the United States.
Still, it is nice to hear someone talk through problems, identify causal factors, and then propose solutions that might actually work. It certainly couldn't hurt to have someone like that around to talk things through with while trying to figure out the way. (Ditto for Musk.)
The Principle of Reproductive Freedom
In the comments to yesterday's post, I mentioned the reframing of the abortion debate with the term "reproductive freedom." It's distinct from both pro-life and pro-choice because it eliminates any mention of the child.
Abortion for Harris/Walz doesn't consider the existence of the child at all. They frame it as purely an issue of reproductive freedom, one into which the child and the child's life does not rightly come as any sort of consideration. It's a more unrestricted liberty for them than the first amendment's, which Walz says doesn't apply to people who are spreading 'hate speech or misinformation,' certainly more than the second's, and based on Ms. Harris' prosecutorial days, more than the fourth, fifth, sixth, or eighth. It's the only genuinely unrestricted Constitutional liberty in their opinion; I notice it's also the one the Constitution doesn't protect or mention at all.
Today Reason makes note of the striking contrast between a party which is espousing a pro-family agenda, and one that is featuring vasectomy and abortion vans outside its convention hall. (The schedules for those vans filled up well before the convention began, too.)
Yet the principle of reproductive freedom doesn't have any enemies. The most devout Catholic agrees that no one should be forced into pregnancy; the Church opposes rape and teaches how to track ovulation cycles as a way of achieving that freedom.* This method may not be foolproof, but it is aligned with the principle that it's perfectly fine to want to be in control of one's reproduction or lack thereof. There is no group in America that opposes the principle being advocated.
What does concern some people is that business about the life of the child. That there is a living human being who is killed by an abortion is incontestably true as a matter of fact. That this killing is morally significant and shouldn't be excluded from the discussion of how to exercise this right of reproductive freedom is apparently controversial; but it's surely a reasonable position that killing a living human being is morally significant, and therefore deserves consideration in constructing any relevant ethical position.
We are a long way from the 1990s, when abortion advocates appended a desire that abortion be rare to their desire that it should be safe and legal. We are at the point at which the debate threatens to slide past a recognition that there is any issue at all about the necessary killing here, pitting a principle that everyone accepts against... well, nothing. On this formulation there is really nothing to oppose the right, because even the strongest pro-life advocate doesn't reject the principle being asserted; they were only concerned about the life. If the life is no longer a consideration, there's really nothing to discuss.
* The Church also teaches men reproductive freedom via chastity until marriage, which is in fact the most effective way for men to assert it. The principle of reproductive freedom doesn't extend to men on the left, as they have no parallel capacity to engender a child and then reject it in the way that abortion allows.
A Message from Harley-Davidson
Still, a start.
Lunatic
That is what one of the NYT's top opinion authors is telling their readers about the new plan for price controls. Bret Stephens, in a conversation with Gail Collins:
The best thing that can be said about her promise to go after price “gouging” is that she knows it has no hope of passing and that she understands that every serious economist on the planet will warn her that the consequences of price controls would be shortages, hoarding and, soon enough, black markets. In fact, my only hope for Harris is that her agenda is for campaign purposes only and that she’ll become a normal Democrat once in office....I just think that a vote needs to be earned, and so far Harris — unlike Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden — has done absolutely nothing to earn mine. She hasn’t won a primary. She hasn’t had a major legislative achievement of her own. She hasn’t had a distinguished vice presidency. Instead of moving to the center with her veep pick, she moved further to the left with Tim Walz. Her signature economic proposal isn’t liberal; it’s lunatic.
Emphasis added.
Long-time blogger Vodkapundit thinks the point of the proposal isn't to win with it, but to introduce the idea of a socialist takeover of the economy so that it won't seem so wild and strange later. That's possible, but the Times is not doing much to pad the idea here -- and as we saw last week, the other big establishment newspaper is heatedly against it.
The DNC is this week. We'll see how that goes.
McCoy
Most people have heard of Tom Mix, the cowboy movie star of the generation before John Wayne. You might not have heard of Tim McCoy, who did really cowboy in Wyoming before he was a star. He fled Jesuit school and hopped a train west, not knowing where he was going.
It’s a great story. He cowboyed for eight years, including for the “Outlaw Train” that was reputed to steal and brand strays; met some of the remaining legends from the real Old West, including of the Hole in the Wall Gang; recruited cavalry for Teddy Roosevelt; and finally became a movie star.
Almonds are much Bigger than you Expect
These things are the size of peaches, to which they are closely related. My wife and son planted some raw almonds and now we have a tree.
The apples are doing well this year too. Not just ours; the other night at the concert I picked an apple off a nearby feral tree for my wife. She said it was delicious.
Riding the Rain
Last night my wife and I rode over to a mountain town and heard a local band singing the old songs, then we rode back on the very edge of a severe thunderstorm. We made it home so close to the edge that while my wife got into the garage dry, I was soaked because I parked less than a minute after her.
Tonight we just got caught in it.
Sometimes you get rainbows out of these thunderstorms near dusk. That one last night was a visible double.
The Conservative Case for Sauron
Conservative political thought can have limits, as when Aragon offered a revolutionary return of the king. It also seems to draw pretenders.
We are the children of Numenor... but who truly brings us back to Numenor and its values? Is it the directionless Stewards? The absent kings? Or will it be the One who served directly under Ar-Pharazôn himself in Numenor’s Golden Age? Character matters: record matters too, and Sauron has one.
One of each, as a matter of fact.
On Temptation
I believe most of you regularly read AVI's page, but I would like to direct your attention to this post in particular.
Progress!
We do now have a couple of economic proposals from the Harris campaign. The Washington Post was so upset about one of them that it attacked it in an editorial before she even gave the speech announcing it.
It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat....If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls.
Transparency and public criticism. That's nice to see in the papers for a change.
The other one is a help-first-time-housebuyers-with-free-money scheme, which is drawing a lesser degree of fire but still reminds people of the global financial crisis of 2007-8 that was fueled by the collapse of subprime mortgage securities. That likewise began with a government push to make the market work with people who really couldn't afford what they were buying.
They also included price controls, of course:
The rent caps are the “ugly” part of Harris’ plan, said Lanhee Chen, director of domestic policy studies at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and a past CNN opinion contributor who worked on campaigns for Republicans, including Utah Senator Mitt Romney.“What is effectively a federal rent-control measure … was a bad idea when President Biden proposed it a few weeks ago,” said Chen.
The pretty part? Repurposing public lands for housing. I wonder how well 'developing the national parks into cheap housing tracts' will poll?
UPDATE: The W. Post follows up its pre-speech editorial by a single author with a full-fledged editorial from its entire board condemning the Kamala plan as unserious "gimmicks."
More Scottish Geology
Around the time of "Snowball Earth," what is now Scotland was near the equator. As such, an outcropping of rocks from the Inner Hebrides may have the best surviving geological record of that period, after which animal life emerged.
Clues hidden in rocks about the freeze have been wiped out everywhere - except in the Garvellachs. Researchers hope the islands will tell us why Earth went into such an extreme icy state for so long and why it was necessary for complex life to emerge.
The relevant island is uninhabited except for researchers.
Range War
Let's say your ancestors put up a fence 75 years ago, and your neighbors never said anything about it in all that time. So you put up a 'No hunting/trespassing' sign on the fence, some hunter comes by and sees it, and complains about it because he has permission to hunt on your neighbor's land and he thinks your fence is in the wrong place. You and your neighbor get together and agree to survey the land and determine where the boundary really is, and move the fence if necessary.
Then your neighbor sends an armed man to threaten you with ten years in prison.
A South Dakota ranch couple is fighting federal indictments served to them by a U.S. Forest Service agent who allegedly showed up unannounced on their front steps — armed and in tactical gear. The agent was there to serve them with indictments in a modern-day range war between the ranchers and feds.“It’s is stressful, financially and mentally. It’s something nobody should have to go through,” rancher Charles Maude of Caputa, South Dakota, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.He and his wife Heather, who is a Wyoming native, were served with separate federal grand jury indictments June 24, for alleged theft of government property. The government claims the fence put up by the ranchers is over a boundary with federal grasslands.The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.
If it sounded to you like they had a good-faith agreement that shouldn't be occasion for indictments, it sounds that way too to some retired rangers the paper interviewed about it.
[T]he situation in South Dakota might have been one in which the old standard of a “common sense, reasonable interaction” would have been more effective — and not left the Forest Service looking bad, he said.
Brauneis said that in the wake of what happened in South Dakota, and similar incidents eroding the Forest Service’s relationship with the public, some soul-searching might be in order for the agency.
To illustrate how things used to work, he recalled an incident from his career... “I drove out to talk to the land owner who was an elderly lady. She invited me in and we had coffee. I explained what happened and she understood,” he said.
“We concluded that if we burned the slash on her property along with ours and planted trees the same as on forest that we were all good to go,” Brauneis said. “We shook hands and I left. Old-school community in a Christian culture.”
Another ranger they spoke to wasn't surprised, and said he would have expected the agency to send armored vehicles and a dozen agents to deliver the indictments. The culture of the agency has changed, he said.
Orcadian Stonehenge
A fingerprint of the Altar stone proves that it came from Scotland, not Wales as long thought.
Viking Age Costs
A new interpretation of a Viking Age runic inscription tells us some things about costs and fines.
The new interpretation shows that the Vikings had a system where both oxen and silver served as units of payment. This system allowed for multiple types of units of accounts to be used concurrently, reducing transaction complexity and making it easier for people to meet their financial obligations. The new interpretation also aligns better with how the system functioned later according to later regional laws and is, according to Rodney Edvinsson, significant for our understanding of both Scandinavian and European monetary history."As an economic historian, I particularly look for historical data to be economically logical, that is, to fit into other contemporary or historical economic systems. The valuation of an ox at two ore, or 50 grams of silver, in 10th-century Sweden resembles contemporary valuations in other parts of Europe, indicating a high degree of integration and exchange between different economies," says Rodney Edvinsson.
A human thrall was six times as expensive, if you're keeping score at home.
Faker Fake News
The news headlines you see may be written by political campaign operatives rather than editors.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team has been quietly editing news headlines in Google search ads to make it seem like major news outlets are on her side, according to a report.The altered headlines — appearing on Google ads and paired with a “Paid for by Harris for President” banner — were changed without the news outlets’ knowledge, Axios reported Tuesday.Nearly a dozen publishers were swept up in the faux headline campaign, including major companies like the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, the Associated Press and PBS.
This is an amazing scandal because the news is already so deeply on her side that there's no need for it. Let's do a quick review of Google News' headline aggregator. There are five stories about Trump, all of them negative, highlighting his weaknesses and losses; one of them compares his appeal to Harris', casting his as "old" and "White," while painting her vibrantly as youthful and energetic.
There are four stories about Harris, all of them either positive or actively defensive of her where she needs help. Two of them are 'fact checks' by the press intended to correct storylines they think are hurting her; one of them uncritically quotes her aides to defend her lack of specifics on her economic/climate plans.
All of the major papers seem to be reporting on polls that show Harris tied or ahead; I dug into the crosstabs of the NYT poll that found her four points ahead and found that it assumed a +3 Democratic advantage was natural in those states, and the margin of error was +/-5.1. The assumption that Democratic turnout will beat Republican turnout by three points is doing almost all the work, in other words; and even then it's within the margin of error. But it turns it into a 'She's got momentum!' headline, so it's everywhere.
Yet in spite of this atmosphere of complete support and devotion, her campaign isn't satisfied until they actually get to rewrite media headlines to be even more in her favor. That seems like a lack of confidence to me, perhaps a sense that there's really nothing holding up the magic carpet they're floating upon.
An Edgy Joke
I heard an Australian comedian tell the following joke, and actually laughed out loud at the punchline. It's the sort of humor that's right on the edge of what we allow these days; I suspect many of the folks who object to humor that touches on protected racial/ethnic/sexual minorities would want you not to tell it. For that reason, I'll put it after the jump, so you only have to read the joke if you want to do so. Then I'm going to talk about why I think it's a good joke, and a joke that's reasonable to tell even in this environment.
Blogger Comments
Google is being a real pain. I can’t comment myself half the time. It really hates VPNs right now; if I turn mine off long enough to post the comments they usually work.
It also seems to hate Windows. My iPhone seems to work better.
I checked for comments wrongly and automatically marked spam yesterday and didn’t find any new ones.
Aristotle, Tyranny & Today Part I
Tom expressed several of Aristotle's political points on tyranny in the comments to a recent post. Thoughtful people on both sides of the political aisle are thinking about Aristotle's account of tyranny; the above video was posted on Facebook by a left-leaning retired academic I know, and generated a discussion of how well Trump fits the model Aristotle described.
Imperfectly, actually, but there are some qualities that do apply. For example, Aristotle says that tyrants use 'the meanest group of people as leaders' to avoid challenges from within, and Trump historically has empowered some pretty low-class people like his former lawyer (the one who later confessed to perjury, but on whose sole testimony was Trump convicted of all those 'felonies'). He's also accepted leaders from within the group of his enemies, though, which was probably his single biggest mistake from his first term.
Perhaps he's learning on that score? Vance is a fairly strong choice with a genuine intellectual center (a point unrecognized by these left-leaning academics, for whom his intellectual influences are déclassé, a quality they confuse with stupidity). On the other hand, Trump outright rejected Heritage Foundation Project 2025's collection of cleared people who could work for his administration and had the right values and temperament. That could mean that he is rejecting qualified people in preference to ones he can control; or it could suggest he does not trust anyone in DC, even on the right. It will have to be seen if he is better on personnel choices than previously.
What is likely obvious to readers of this blog is how well Aristotle's account fits the establishment -- except that the establishment is definitely not a tyranny on Aristotle's terms, because there isn't a single ruler. It is an oligarchy, where even the President is now a figurehead (and that will certainly remain true if Ms. Harris should succeed to the office, as she has no accomplishments of her own: she will also be a puppet). Rule is being exercised extra-constitutionally by a group of people who were never elected to the relevant office.
I am going to put further reading, from the left side of the conversation, after the jump. In a second post I will later do an analysis of both positions and try to summarize where I think they are right and wrong.
The Outlaw Saloon
This is a charming review of Dubois, Wyoming's best dive bar, as well as the other bar. I've been to the Outlaw Saloon and it is described much as I remember it. I liked the place. I never went in the other one.
In just about a month I'll be back out West to visit my mother and sister, if any of you will be in the Wyoming/Idaho border region. Thos., I remember that you live out there. I'll be around for a couple of weeks.
Killing Your Dogs
Police interacting with American citizens often kill their dogs as a precautionary practice -- indeed, not just 'often,' but at least 10,000 times a year and possibly into "six figures." DOJ itself admits the matter is now "epidemic."
While officers in this country kill far more people than any other highly developed democracy and are shielded by powerful police unions, dog shootings still receive extensive national attention. “Given that there’s no shortage of actual human beings getting shot by police officers, pointing these stories out can sometimes seem a bit callous,” says Radley Balko, a journalist who has done much to expose cops killing dogs. “But I think they’re worth noting."
A database project that hoped to document and give better statistics on this had to shut down its collection efforts because there were too many submissions.
It shouldn't be a problem for you, since none of you should come into conflict with the law. Well, at least that's how things used to be.
The Real Enemy is not Islam
This piece at PJ Media on the problems associated with radical Islam -- murders of children, sometimes on a grand scale, among those problems -- would like to make the case that we should all be much more concerned about it. Yet the thing we should really be concerned about is mentioned later in the piece: it is that our own governments are increasingly turning their force against the citizenry.
Indeed, the “Regime” believes that ordinary white citizens and working-class people are the problem—not jihadists, Pakistani groomers, rampaging Muslim mobs, “undocumented” refugees, Palestinian demonstrators, or foreign criminal gangs. Heritage citizens are, apparently, the greatest threat to the status quo, purveyors of “disinformation,” by which the social and political elite mean what Steve Sailer in an important book has called “Noticing”—that is, seeing what is happening around one and to the culture by using common sense and honest observation.Thus, to say what you have noticed—and suffered—is to be guilty of disinformation, racism, bigotry or hate speech. To look the reality of immigrant and refugee violence in the face, to confront visibly corrupt two-tier policing, media duplicity, and Regime hypocrisy, and to describe it accurately is to be tarred by the state as a far-right extremist, a hooligan, a fascist or a white supremacist.
The British government has decided to release a lot of violent criminals from prison in order to free up prison spaces for ordinary people of this sort. Five hundred prison spaces are more of a threat than a real capacity to beat the issue: if the people rise up in their millions, that won't be a drop in the bucket. So, the government is cracking down on disapproved speech, even just a remark on Facebook or X, and they aren't alone. They are afraid of their own people far more than anything else.
We all remember the way the Canadian trucker convoy was targeted in Canada -- in a manner later found unconstitutional by its courts -- to the tune of freezing the accounts of people who donated, even though the cause to which they donated was not a terrorists group but a 501(c)3 charity lawfully formed under Canadian laws. They arrested and put into solitary confinement a preacher who gave an inspiring benediction to that convoy -- hardly an act of violence. They did this because they realized that the ordinary people involved in the trucker movement could shut down Canada's economy if they chose, and they feared their own ordinary citizens more than they do anything else.
Nor is our own government immune. This piece at Hot Air helpfully summarizes several of the recent affronts that have come to light, including the VP nominee declaring that there is "no right to free speech" if the speech is deemed hateful or misinformation by the government; placing Tulsi Gabbard, who served her country faithfully when called up by the National Guard (not to put too fine a point on it), under a terrorist air watch that has her followed by armed men onto airplanes; the security state burying any discussion of its failures (we hope they were failures!) leading to Trump's almost-assassination; a swing state announcing that it won't be prepared to count votes on election day, and that its expected changing vote totals "are not evidence" of cheating; and many more. Our media has taken to declaring that there 'is no evidence' on many controversial issues, rather than exploring the evidence for different propositions in order to help readers get to a good judgment. It has accepted a duty to oppose with hostility one side on this election, while doing everything it can to support the establishment side.
What's with all this 'fortification'? It suggests that our establishment is likewise motivated by a fear, not of criminals or terrorists or invasions across the border, and certainly not of Islam, but of ordinary Americans. What sins are they trying to hide from our eyes that justifies such fear? What do they tremble to think we will learn if the levers of control pass out of their hands?
Bee nails it as usual
I still can't embed images, but the caption is "Tim Walz backs out of VP nomination after learning VPs sometimes have to deploy to dangerous places overseas."
This Would Be Really Embarrassing if His Defenders Understood the Culture
One of the old milblog crew came up with this. This is a challenge coin made up by our Mr. Walz with a Command Sergeant Major insignia on it.
His former battalion commander put out a statement affirming that "he did not earn the rank or successfully complete any assignment as an E-9. It is an affront to the Noncommissioned Officers Corps that he continues to glom onto the rank." He does express satisfaction with his performance at lower ranks, so it's not like he's 'denigrating military service' per se. Just this one little aspect of evading an assignment and yet pretending to the rank he didn't earn because of that evasion.
But remember, these claims are made "without evidence," a term of art meaning that there is clear evidence but we're all supposed to pretend otherwise. It's very important that we all make-believe very hard in cases of these claims made "without evidence."
Brotherhood of Bikers
My wife's rear brake blew up near Waynesville today. I had just inspected it when I replaced her rear tire a couple of weeks ago and didn't see any metal fatigue, but obviously I missed something. Nobody was hurt, but she found herself with the brake locked and the axle locked by the parts of the exploded brake right in the middle of an intersection off US 276.
Her bike isn't that heavy, so I picked it up and moved it out of the road. Then my son and I worked at it with the tools we had in the tool bags until we managed to free the brake and axle so it could roll again. As befits the brotherhood of bikers, we had several people stop and offer additional tools.
In addition, a guy driving a Budget rental truck asked if he couldn't just fit the thing into the back of his truck and take it to the nearest shop. Well, of course we would be very happy if you would do that! So we wheeled it up the ramp and tied it down, and he transported it to the cycle shop maybe twelve miles off where we left it.
Possibly it'll get stolen before they open on Tuesday, but if so it's insured. I locked the forks and hid the key where nobody is likely to look, and left a message on the shop's answering machine so they'll know what's going on when they open Tuesday morning. Then we rode home with my wife in the passenger saddle, the way we used to before she decided she preferred to ride her own machine.
His what?
Walz's "manliness" is vewy scawy for Wepublicans. If a voter "doesn’t need traditional gender and racial hierarchies to validate his life choices, then what does he need Donald Trump and JD Vance for?"
That’s a terrifying question for a Republican ticket that offers little beyond resentment, rage and a promise to restrict the freedom and democratic power of its opponents. It explains why Vance immediately began smearing Walz’s military record, claiming — without evidence, of course — that Walz had “abandoned” his unit when he ran for Congress before the unit was deployed to Iraq.I wish I could be more sure that voters will ever get a chance to hear the stolen-valor case about Walz, not to mention his positions on communism, COVID snitch lines, the benefits to schoolchildren of closing schools, genital mutilation of minors, full-term abortion, denial of care to babies who survive abortion, abandoning police stations to rioters who have their hearts in the right place and need space to vent, and raising taxes after quickly blowing through a large state budget surplus. Instead, Walz is a manly Mister Rogers! As the Bee said, Workers of the world, let's get together sometime for a potluck! Without evidence, of course. In any case, the evidence might violate community standards. Which is lucky for Walz, because he's enjoyed full political cover for years from a compliant Minnesota press, so he's feared nothing from exposure, and most of these positions are extremely well preserved in print and on camera. Not that that will matter much if a now-compliant national press simply memory-holes them and concentrates on his Presbyterian green bean casserole recipe. I've been reflecting on this. I'm fairly certain I don't need traditional gender and racial hierarchies to validate my life choices. Trump's family life isn't much like mine, but I'm still voting for him for the third time.
Lying
Remarkable interview:
J.D. Vance: I think it's a problem for Walz to have lied about having gone to war.
Dana Bash: They've corrected that.
J.D. Vance: They've corrected it by admitting that he lied.
Dana Bash: Let's move on.And it's not as though he lied about it once. He's been dining out on stolen valor for a long time.
Magic
Arthur C. Clarke's Three Laws:
The laws are:
(1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
(2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
(3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.Apropos of Law 3, SpaceX’s new Raptor-3 methane-fueled engine is so advanced the CEO of ULA doesn’t understand it. Our SpaceLink internet service continues to give us fantastic speed and zero problems, as well, while the Spectrum cable connection drives my neighbors up the wall. Long live Elon Musk, who has done more than anyone else I can think of lately to preserve free speech on Earth.
In Fairness, However...
She's just right about this. This point is completely correct.
Her classism is showing, because she’s talking in terms of dormitories; but it’s also exactly why the services use barracks until they get young soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines married off to someone else who will look after them.
The Incoherence of Joy
So there's a recession on, one that is likely to get worse for at least a year or two. What's the plan for that? There isn't one, a fact even the New York Times has begun to notice.
It is impossible to make a similar estimate for Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent this fall. She has not laid out any tax or spending plans, or other economic policy proposals, with enough detail to estimate whether they would add to deficits or reduce them.
In fact there aren't any plans at all, and all of the old positions are recanted.
Ms. Harris, who began seeking the Democratic nomination late last month immediately after Mr. Biden stepped aside and endorsed her, has no policy proposals posted on her campaign website — economic or otherwise.
The media has settled upon a new idea, whose unity of expression shows that it is clearly coordinated with her campaign: she is the candidate of joy!
But she was selling herself as a prosecutor, remember? There's nothing joyful about prosecution. Alongside executioners, prosecutors wield the hammer of the state against members of the public. It is to be hoped that this is done in the interest of justice (as it manifestly was not in her case, as Tulsi Gabbard pointed out). It is not a happy job, however.
I suppose this makes sense to the media because they feel joyful when contemplating four years of being governed by a prosecutor like her. Too, there's a kind of sense to the promise that if only she's elected the media will do its best to fill our screens with joy instead of the rage, bitterness, and anger that will be our daily bread from them if we don't listen.
Still, it's another astonishing maneuver, akin to the earlier attempt to sell us on the basis that she's a career professional politician -- akin to a practiced surgeon.
Obviously the election isn't really about any of this, because none of this makes any sense. I can't decide if they're doing this because they can't think of anything better, or if they're so sure of the election's 'fortification' that they don't feel they need to run a real campaign. You'll find out what our economic policies are after the election, peasants.
The Chaplain Speaks
It's pretty tough when your chaplain reads you out from the altar, as it were.
The chaplain of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s field artillery regiment said there is no excuse for the Democratic VP pick to have abandoned his National Guard unit before a critical deployment — not even running for Congress.“In our world, to drop out after a WARNORD [warning order] is issued is cowardly, especially for a senior enlisted guy,” retired Capt. Corey Bjertness, now a pastor in Horace, North Dakota, told The Post.Bjertness, 61, was the chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery, of which Walz was command sergeant major before retiring in 2005, two months before the unit deployed to Iraq....“Running for Congress is not an excuse,” Bjertness said of Walz’s decision to quit. “I stopped everything and went to war. I left my wife with three teenagers and a 6-year-old and I was gone for 19 months.”
Several other of his unit mates have choice words as well, as does the mother of one of them who didn't come home.
Thomas Behrends, the command sergeant major who replaced Walz, previously told The Post of the Minnesota governor: “He had the opportunity to serve his country, and said ‘Screw you’ to the United States.”...Walz’s old unit, whose main job was running security for US convoys in Iraq, suffered three casualties during the deployment he missed — including Kyle Miller, 19, who joined the National Guard while still in high school, and David Berry, 37....Miller’s mother told the Daily Mail this week that Walz had taken “the coward’s way out” by retiring before deployment....“Honestly, I think we lucked out when we got Command Sergeant Behrends,” he said of the CMS who took over after Walz retired. “Maybe Walz resigned because he knew he wasn’t up to the job, that he didn’t have the confidence to lead.”Behrends, who is from Brewster, Minn., called the Democratic vice presidential candidate “a traitor” for the timing of his retirement.“When your country calls, you are supposed to run into battle — not the other way,” the retired command sergeant major told The Post Tuesday. “He ran away. It’s sad.”
Meanwhile his brigade says that they were was informed that they were selected to deploy during 2004, months earlier than first reported, and before he made any decisions about running for Congress.
Not How That Works
While discussing the CSM matter, a left-wing fellow said to me, "Well, he was against the Iraq War. He couldn't go serve in it, could he?"
For socialists, that's a remarkably egotistical view of the ethics of national service. What about your oath? What about the men you trained with, who were depending on you to look out for their interests as their CSM? Even if you were staunchly opposed to the war, don't you have duties to your word, to your comrades, to the country you swore to serve?
Amazing.
A Pyramid of Falsehood
Picking up on yesterday's topic, an investigative reporter I've met decides to press on the Stolen Valor bit. He finds a couple of actual lies built upon the initial falsehoods about the CSM status.
The first falsehood might have an innocent explanation, but Waltz never appears to have attempted to correct the report:
Bloomberg’s Joshua Green, then employed at The Atlantic, was the first major reporter to profile Walz. In an interview with the then-congressional candidate, Green writes that in 2004, Walz left his hometown in Minnesota “to serve overseas in Operation Enduring Freedom.”It’s unclear if this is Green, a veteran reporter, omitting major facts, or if Walz, the interviewee, is selling Green on a particular narrative. Nonetheless, the assertion is incredibly misleading, as it leaves the reader under the impression that Walz served as boots on the ground in the Global War on Terror, when in reality, he merely deployed to Italy in 2003 for a six month stint.It gets much worse.
During a confrontation with the hated George W. Bush's team, Waltz engineered a claim that the Secret Service might "arrest" him over "opposing the president." He then challenged them in a way that made it into the press:
Green discusses a 2004 visit from former President George W. Bush to Gov. Walz’s hometown, in which a protesting Walz (who was still serving in the military) told the reporter about him supposedly demanding to speak to the then commander in chief.
“Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who'd just returned from fighting the war on terrorism,” Green writes.
This was before the Warning Order, so not only had he not "just returned from fighting the war on terrorism," he hadn't even been asked to fight the war on terrorism. We now know that, when asked, he found a way to evade his orders and responsibilities.
The piece closes with another set of outright lies by Waltz, one intended to disarm fellow veterans of the rifle with which they can best defend their families:
On Tuesday, The X account for the Kamala Harris campaign posted a video of Governor Walz discussing the need to disarm American citizens.
“We can research the impacts of gun violence. We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” he tells the audience.
1) The AR-15 is not a 'weapon of war,' but a purpose-designed civilian rifle capable of only semi-automatic fire.
2) It is therefore not the same as the M-16 or M-4 carbines that Waltz's fellow servicemen carried in war.
3) Waltz never went to war, and therefore never carried any sort of rifle at war.
4) In fact, Waltz not only didn't go to war, he abandoned his unit and left them to go without him even though as the assigned CSM he was their senior enlisted advisor. In other words it was his job to defend the interests of the enlisted servicemembers in that battalion to the commanding officer.
Instead, he abandoned them.
UPDATE: The National Guard officially disputes his claimed biography.
As Governor, he’s ex officio their commander, and you might expect them to avoid embarrassment for their commander if they could find a way. Far from taking steps to protect him they’re out with their top PAO to officially state that his claim is false. That underlines that he doesn’t have the respect of those who serve under him.
Warning Order
A 'warning order' or WARNO is an official order alerting you to expect another order that is coming soon. It's meant as a heads-up to let everyone start getting ready for something in advance of the complete information about what they are going to be commanded to do.
What you're supposed to do when you get one is to start taking appropriate steps to prepare for the command, in this case to prepare to deploy on a combat mission to Iraq. What you're not supposed to do is use the warning to figure out how to evade the command.
Two retired Command Sergeants Major accuse our new VP nominee of having done the latter.
On May 16th, 2005 he quit, leaving the 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion and its Soldiers hanging; without its senior Non-Commissioned Officer, as the battalion prepared for war. His excuse to other leaders was that he needed to retire in order to run for congress. Which is false, according to a Department of Defense Directive, he could have run and requested permission from the Secretary of Defense before entering active duty; as many reservists have. If he had retired normally and respectfully, you would think he would have ensured his retirement documents were correctly filled out and signed, and that he would have ensured he was reduced to Master Sergeant for dropping out of the academy. Instead he waited for the paperwork to catch up to him. His official retirement document states, SOLDIER NOT AVAILABLE FOR SIGNATURE.On September 10th, 2005 conditionally promoted Command Sergeant Major Walz was reduced to Master Sergeant. It took a while for the system to catch up to him as it was uncharted territory, literally no one quits in the position he was in, or drops out of the academy. Except him....The 1-125th Field Artillery Battalion was deployed for 22 months in 2006 - 2007. During this time, they were restricted by Army regulations and could not speak out against a candidate for office. In November 2006 he was elected to the House of Representatives.
Is it true? Well, he doesn't deny it.
A spokesperson for Walz previously said this topic has been covered before and referred Alpha News to a past story where Walz said “normally this type of partisan political attack only comes from one who’s never worn a uniform.”
Yeah? Ask John F. Kerry about what happens to those who betray their comrades in arms.
She May Argue With Her Logic
From the Easy Rider soundtrack, which is why I know the song, the lyrics came to my mind for some reason this morning and I was struck by how odd they are. The name of the song is "Wasn't Born to Follow," and this is how experts quoted by Wikipedia talk about the lyrics:
The lyrics of "Wasn't Born to Follow" celebrate the freedom that hippies enjoyed in the late 1960s. They express the need for escape and independence. Music critic Johnny Rogan describes the lyrics as an "evocation of pastoral freedom and the implicit desire to escape from the restrictions of conventional society." Music professor James E. Perone describes the singer as "a rugged individualist at one with nature."But that's not what the lyrics are about at all. They're about a guy who is trying to seduce, and then later abandons, a young woman who is part of the hippie culture.
And when it's time I'll go and wait
Beside the legendary fountain
'Til I see your form reflected
In its clear and jeweled waters
And if you think I'm ready
You may lead me to the chasm
Where the rivers of our visions
Flow into one another.
That is a non-subtle metaphor if I've ever heard one. Though this song is called 'wasn't born to follow,' the young man expresses not only his willingness to follow ("you may lead me") but even to be judged ("if you think I'm ready") until the act is completed. Only then will he leave her in spite of her pleas:
She may beg and she may plead
And she may argue with her logic
Mention all the things I'll lose
That really have no value
Though I doubt that she will ever
Come to understand my meaning
In the end she'll surely know
I was not born to follow.
The song is much less romantic than it sounds over the music; and rather than being an 'evocation of pastoral freedom,' or an 'escape from conventional society,' it's just about betraying a woman's love after a moment's pleasure.
Civility and Collegiality
These are qualities I respect, but I notice that they like everything are turned into weapons these days. On civility:
With less than a month before the primary, however, Smith withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Nethercott. Smith’s decision came after he and Nethercott met for coffee to discuss the campaign and the issues at stake.Another topic over coffee was the tenor of politics in Wyoming these days...the scorched earth nature of campaigns, the deluge of misinformation presented to voters, the intensely personal attacks and the overall feeling of nausea that results from seeing our political process degenerate into a gutter fight.Smith, not wanting to contribute to this political angst, withdrew and endorsed his opponent.I’ll correct myself. There are two examples of political statesmanship evident here.The first being two political rivals setting differences and all the attendant bullshit aside to sit down over coffee and pick each other’s brain. That is almost a revolutionary act of civility in today’s atmosphere. It should be applauded by voters and emulated by other candidates.The second act of statesmanship is Smith stepping down. This took courage and suggests that both candidates were motivated by reason instead of emotion. Politics in Wyoming needs a lot more reason and a lot less emotion these days. And this act, too, deserves to be applauded and emulated.So, my sweaty ol’ Stetson is tipped to both Tara Nethercott and Gregg Smith.
I really do appreciate that, but I notice that the rest of the column is devoted to running down "the Freedom Caucus" and "Young Americans for Liberty," and so forth and so on. So civility is great, as long as the right wing guy steps down and endorses the left wing girl.
Meanwhile, collegiality:
Of late, Justice Kagan has been pushing the latter conception of collegiality–that it entails having an open mind, and a willingness to be persuaded. I have to imagine this push is part of her effort to corral Justice Barrett's votes at every opportunity. If there is any common thread with Joan Biskupic's reporting, is that Justice Kagan flipped Justice Barrett in several cases. I've yet to see any indication that a conservative Justice has flipped a liberal member of the court to reach a conservative outcome. Flipping is not ambidextrous–it only works on the left.
There's got to be a way to be civil and collegial without giving away the store.
UPDATE: Related.
Unbelief
But Mark was come of the glittering townsWhere hot white details show,Where men can number and expound,And his faith grew in a hard groundOf doubt and reason and falsehood found,Where no faith else could grow.Belief that grew of all beliefsOne moment back was blownAnd belief that stood on unbeliefStood up iron and alone.
-GK Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse
It would be reckless indeed to vote for someone who has repudiated all their claimed beliefs. Perhaps they were lying then; perhaps they are lying now. Perhaps they have no core principles from which to reason, and will simply say or do whatever seems to help them in the moment. Either way, how could you know what you were voting for?
This is a very strange election; indeed it is not an election yet on the Democratic side, because all the votes were also repudiated in favor of a new candidate appointed by acclamation. Given her walk-back of all of her existing positions, we are in a situation in which no one has voted in favor of a candidate who has no positions. She gives no interviews; she takes no questions.
I don't know what we're doing here, but it isn't American democracy. This is something different, something I have not seen in this country before now.
Philosophy of Plants
This article has a nice introduction to a fairly new problem: what should we think now that we know that plants communicate with each other and, therefore, have a degree of agency? The article helpfully spells out the origin of our thoughts on the subject, which unsurprisingly lies with Aristotle's work.
Plants have a teleogical end of existence, survival, and reproduction: that was known from Aristotle's time. Now we know that they can pursue this end through the emission of organic compounds that cause not only themselves, but nearby plants as well, to erect defenses to further their survival against dangers. They're not especially good at it -- I have cut down quite a few trees in my time, and though I prefer to cut dead ones rather than living ones I have sometimes had to cut living trees too -- but it does show that they have a kind of consciousness, and are pursuing an end in communication with each other. Thus, they also have a kind of community.
These are ordinarily significant considerations in ethics. Why wouldn't they be here? And if they are, what does that mean for us in how we treat with these conscious beings and their communities?
Slaughtering Girl Children
So until I saw this today, I didn't understand that the children murdered in the knife attack in England were all girls. Somehow the media failed to convey that to me in their reporting.
The point of that post is that the British government has turned hard against anyone who is upset by that. All this gender neutrality is working out badly: Gods of the Copybook Headings badly, if you ask me. All those old rules may not all be necessary, but maybe we should rethink this commitment to treating sex as if it were subject to the rule of cæteris paribus rather than mutatis mutandum.
UPDATE: The post I linked was deleted, and Janet denies a part of it in the comments below. I'll take her word that she's better informed about that aspect.
Below Waterrock Knob
UPDATE: I met a biker turning 70 today who was riding the whole Blue Ridge Parkway while he still could. His lungs were ravaged by COVID back when it was new and nobody had any resistance. Still, he survived and now gets to take his ride. He was cheerful, and we had a long talk. I’ve done the ride several times, and was happy to help. His comrade on the ride was a firefighter.
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