Up the Teton Canyon

I really enjoyed this hike last year, and this year my wife was able to come along. It was a beautiful day and a fine hike — praise the day at evening— and we had a wonderful time together. 

Facing into the canyon from above, you can see the peaks that you will be slowly approaching.

A panoramic view of the canyon from the junction with the Alaska Basin trail.

For Mike G.

The elk antler arches now stand at all four corners of the Jackson city square. A brass plaque explains that the antlers are collected after the shed by the local Boy Scouts, with many additional ones auctioned off for charity. 

One arch on the right, opposite the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Hank Williams, Jr. played there not long ago, and it has many artifacts from the great years of Outlaw Country as well as the Old West.

Another arch from inside the square. Today there was a busker playing Waylon Jennings outside it, which drew a donation from me.

LR1’s Fiction

In the comments below, longtime community member LittleRed1 offers access to stories. LR1 writes:

The series titles are tabs from the home page. History-based fantasy includes the Merchant series, which has been called "blue collar fantasy." The Familiars books are urban fantasy, Colplatschki is military sci-fi, and the Shikari series is "Kipling in space." ...

"Blackbird" in the Colplatschki series, and "The Lone Hunter" (Familiar Generations 1) are about heroic gentlemen (or "eventually become gentlemen") who are not perfect, but do their best.

Freedom

Wyoming. 

Scenes from Skyrim

Playing by Jenny Lake:

Bull Moose

UPDATE: Deer as well. 

Jackson Hole

Freegrazers

A fair amount of land out here is open range, and even when it’s not the law often protects freegrazers. These cattle on my sister and brother-in-laws acres are elements of two different herds that have wandered onto their land, jumping or pushing down fences as convenient to cattle. The owners know they’re wandering, but it’s apparently not a big deal here. 

I asked if they were allowed to lay claim to one as payment for eating their grass, but apparently that is a big deal. Rustling, I guess. 

UPDATE:

The Church Rocket War

Another religious custom I learned about today is the Easter rocket “war” on Chios. I learned about it because my mother is doing Friday homeschooling of my niece, due to the local school system going to a four-day week. She was going to teach a unit today on Greece because one of the neighborhood families is moving there; but being opposed to all forms of danger or risk, my mother was horrified by the inclusion of this subject in a children’s book. 

I was correspondingly delighted. It looks like a great time. 

The Laws of the Beautiful Captive

Because of the war, I’ve been paying attention to goings on in Israel. Thus I know what I would not normally know, that it is the holy month of the new year there, and that today’s Sabbath reading includes something called “the laws of the beautiful captive.”

I hadn’t heard of this, but it derives from an episode in Deuteronomy. Islam has a similar but much less kindly set of laws for women taken in war. The Greeks of the Homeric period exercised similar conduct, but with no clear restrictions; probably both of the religious standards represented a positive improvement in the treatment of captive women. 

Men, of course, were always killed in the bitter wars; or subjected to unrestricted slavery in the less bitter ones.

The rabbis who formalized the Torah apparently found the laws already uncomfortable, and suggest that they are a concession to the hardness of human nature. Interestingly to me, the Jewish article I cited above ends with a reflection on how the rabbinical commentary compares to the teaching of Jesus on divorce. 

A Rainy Day in Teton Valley

Reportedly there were bears about, but the horses and mule were so relaxed I knew that was old news. I did see a moose yesterday.

UPDATE:

The pot of gold appears to be right in front of the tire shop in Driggs, Idaho. 

More on Fantasy Fiction

The flip side of humanized orca is no real heroes. 

In my childhood, the nihilism that seems to be so common today wasn’t really a thing. We had grand adventures with heroes who might not have been perfect but were still heroes.

Today, we have a lot of fiction where no one is really the good guy. Rings of Power has been trying to humanize the orcs, making all the good races of Middle Earth darker than they were. Game of Thrones saw just about every truly heroic character killed while so many of the despicable characters lasted until the end.

To the West

I will be traveling to visit my family in the Tetons for the next two weeks. Hopefully I will have interesting experiences there. 

DOJ: Don't Be Removing those Fake Voters, Now

People in several states are cleaning up the voter rolls. In Georgia, fake names get added back in almost as soon as they're cleared out the first time.

After engineer and data scientist Kim Brooks worked on cleaning the voter rolls in Georgia for a year, she realized she was on a stationary bicycle. She’d clear a name for various reasons, dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old, etc., and back it would come within a month. At that juncture she realized that a program within the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding back fake names.

She looked deeper. For new registrants, the culprit was principally Driver’s Services creating new registrations and in this case, the manufacturer was a person, or persons. Within the government office, someone was stealing names and duplicating, even tripling that person’s vote and then forging their signature.

The DOJ says such states had better be careful, and stop well before the election.

The Justice Department issued a warning to states Monday to tread lightly in trying to clean up their election systems of bogus names and ineligible voters, firing a shot across the bow of GOP-led states that have been trying to erase noncitizens from their rolls.... the department said federal law allows states to clean their rolls, but it must be done within strict guidelines and only for approved reasons such as a voter has moved out of the jurisdiction, has died or has requested removal.

Someone who has been inactive can be removed only after being notified and failing to show up for two more federal elections.

Changes cannot be made too close to an election.

All the way at the end of the article, you get an appreciation of the scale.

Voting rights groups argue that noncitizen voting is rare.

Republican state officials, though, say they’re finding plenty of evidence noncitizens have signed up.

Virginia said it removed 6,303 names of noncitizens from its rolls.

Texas, meanwhile, says it has culled 6,500 “potential noncitizens” from its rolls since 2021. That’s part of a broader purge of 1.1 million names, including 457,000 dead people, 463,000 inactive people, 65,000 who didn’t respond to notices and 134,000 who said they had moved.

Of the noncitizens, Texas said 1,930 had voted in elections before.

Two thousand in an election of millions is not a big deal, probably; but half a million dead people and half a million inactive names is a big deal when it's now standard practice to send out tons of mail-in ballots, and accept them without signature matching when they return. 

Requiescat in Pace Thulsa Doom

The great actor James Earl Jones, whose most famous role was probably not Thulsa Doom, has died at 93 years of age. The role, though not the character's name, did make the obituary. 

Jones married the actor Celia Hart in 1982, the same year he starred opposite budding action star Arnold Schwarzenegger as an evil sorcerer in “Conan the Barbarian.”

Thank you for everything. 

UPDATE: 

What Job Do You Think You Are Training For?

The nearby city of Waynesville's police chief is appealing the suspension of his police training and certification program.

Waynesville Police Chief David Adams had all of his law enforcement instructor certifications suspended by the North Carolina Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission.... Adams was an instructor at Blue Ridge Community College’s Basic Law Enforcement program in Henderson County, where he’s originally from and where he cut his teeth as a young police officer. That program came under fire earlier this year when an investigation that began last year determined that “physical and verbal abuse” was inflicted on trainees by instructors, and some trainees even suffered injuries.

Abuse, you say?

A video obtained by the television news station WLOS depicts a session where trainees are learning how to apprehend a combative suspect using a variety of blocks and strikes, including with a simulation baton. The video shows instructors who are role playing as belligerent suspects striking trainees. When one trainee’s helmet is knocked off, an instructor hits the trainee as he turns around with what is described in the corresponding article as “basically a sucker punch.”

Fortunately, even the most roguish of our local citizens would certainly never take advantage of a police officer whose personal protection equipment became disabled in such a manner. Even during a spirited exchange of ideas, their robust commitment to fair play is well known by all. No wonder this sort of training seemed unacceptable to the commissioners! 

I can't guarantee that the same spirit of sportsmanship will hold for the cartels who have moved into some of the local areas with the mass immigration of late, however. There's just a chance that, if your helmet were to be knocked off in a clash, you might benefit from being trained to watch out for a 'sucker punch.' 

Surely as the great American melting pot takes hold of these newcomers, they too will come to understand that a friendly neighborhood brawl is no place for such things! In the meantime, however, would-be policemen might benefit from the instruction.

On the Importance of Orcs

Orcs are evil and twisted to the core, aren't they?

Modern entertainment is creatively bankrupted, uninspired, or even just plain morally skewed. What that says about the minds behind these shows, movies, and books, I’ll leave for you to decide. What I want to speak on is a simple topic: orcs.

Yes, you read that right, I want to talk about orcs. Specifically, orcs who are just trying to provide for their families. Recently, The Rings of Power has once again been making headlines, this time for testing the waters with sympathetic orcs. To any hardcore and/or longtime Tolkien fans, this notion sounds ludicrous, but it is about what we can expect from modern Hollywood. 

It's not just Amazon's troubled billion-dollar rethinking of Tolkien. Dungeons & Dragons also has decided that it's just problematic if there are "evil races," so they've gotten rid of both the evil and the 'race' (now "species").

“Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game — orcs and drow (dark elves) being two of the prime examples — have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated,” Wizards said in a statement. “That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in.”

The company says the current version of the RPG, known as 5th Edition, was designed to include a wide range of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations and beliefs.

Oh, it does do that. Rather than looking like the Fellowship of the Ring, already diverse with a maia, humans, an elf, a dwarf, and several hobbits, a modern D&D party is going to be a collection of sea monsters, vampires, half-devils, half-dragons, half-gods, genies, hobgoblins, minotaurs, and yes, orcs. And many more! 

None of them are evil, though. Not by nature. Not even the ones born of devils in Hell itself, nor the vampires that subsist on blood alone.

Defenders would doubtless say that this is a more morally sophisticated universe, and perhaps note that even Darth Vader proved redeemable. So many shades of grey, so few Gandalfs. 

All Things Beowulf

Speaking of poetics, AVI has reposted a playful version of Beowulf (or at least Scyld Scefing) going to the coffee shop.

Ode to the BLT

A poem.

The sentiment reminds me of a clip I saw about a family whose tomatoes have typically come from a regular grocery store getting some real ones.

UPDATE:

The sentiment of the poem caused me to make BLTs for my wife's lunch.

Voters More Socially Liberal

Reason offers evidence that Trump voters were less racist than Romney voters, even though they were mostly the same people.

Ohio State political scientist Thomas Wood tried in 2017 to measure the relationship between Americans' presidential votes and how they scored on the "symbolic racism" or "racial resentment" scale, which Wood described as a way to uncover "racial attitudes among respondents who know that it's socially unacceptable to say things perceived as racially prejudiced."

This scale is controversial, because some of the statements it asks people to evaluate—such as "Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve"—could elicit the "wrong" answer for reasons unrelated to prejudice or resentment. The underlying problem was highlighted when surveys found substantial numbers of African Americans endorsing the purportedly racist positions, leading some social scientists to call for giving the measurement a less loaded label. At best, the scale measures whether people attribute racial disparities to structural barriers or individual failings.

But whether or not the people who score higher on the scale are racists, it seems fair to say that the people who score lower on the scale are racial liberals. So what did Wood find?

For Wood, the big takeaway was that "we've never seen such a clear correspondence between vote choice and racial perceptions" in three decades of these surveys: The higher you landed in the scale, the more likely you were to vote Republican. But as Musa al-Gharbi pointed out in a critique of Wood's work for The American Sociologist, this ignored the direction those Republicans were moving in. According to Wood's own data, al-Gharbi noted, whites who backed Trump over Hillary Clinton were "less racist than those who voted for [Mitt] Romney. The same holds among whites who voted for Clinton as compared to those who voted for [Barack] Obama." Again, voters in both parties were getting more racially liberal; it's just that Democrats went further.

Trump voters were also more tolerant than earlier Republican voters of gays, lesbians, and pretty much all the social liberal things. America has just been moving in that direction, they suggest. Reason writers and editors are libertarian, of course, so for them that's an almost unmitigated good thing. "Time and again, once-vivid fights have receded, as with same-sex unions, or disappeared almost entirely, as with interracial marriage."

Interesting debate question: ‘Are you less racist than you were four years ago?’ 

A Fine Manly Day

Today I rose and cooked some of our eggs up for me and my wife, then I went and wrestled tree trunks and a chainsaw to cut up a bunch of firewood for the coming winter. Afterwards, I rode over to the Thunder in the Smokies motorcycle rally.

Held three times a year, this was the 'fall' version that is the final such event for the riding season. It drew quite a large and varied crowd. I rode across Soco Gap into Maggie Valley behind a pack of East Coast Pagans MC members. I was surprised to see them up here, but curious how a coastal MC would handle the mountains. I have to say they merited my respect, as they rode the mountains' curves as well as anyone who does so regularly, using their gearing masterfully to keep the bikes under control. I only saw one of them touch his brakes one time, and the rest of them rode both up and down the gap without any need to refer to them. That's as good a job as I can do myself, and I ride these mountains every day.

Then we got to the rally.   

The beer tent is in the foreground.

It was a friendly crowd, Pagans and Outlaws and a lot of smaller clubs as well as the Legion Riders, the Leatherheads MC (a Firefighter club), and the Iron Order. Everyone was having a good time, and I have rarely received such a respectful treatment from younger riders as I did today.

After that, I took the Blue Ridge Parkway home.

Near Waterrock Knob.

Above the Cherokee boundary lands.

Licklog Gap.

A funny thing happened on the way in to the rally. I rode across the Cherokee boundary lands (not technically a reservation, in spite of the signs they put up that say, "Welcome to the Cherokee Reservation!", because they purchased the land free and clear rather than having it assigned to them by the government). The Eastern Band of Cherokee has decided to allow for recreational marijuana use and sales, and today was apparently the grand opening of their recreational dispensary. There were lots of cars in line to pull in to the dispensary, which included two drive-through lanes as well as a walk-in facility. I did not myself participate except to sit in the heavy traffic. As a consequence of the grand opening, the Cherokee tribal police were out directing traffic to ease the flow around the new dispensary.

I never thought I'd see the day that the police would be officially deployed to help sell marijuana, but here we are. 

The Last Expected Thing

Speaking of immodest dress, a restaurant here in North Carolina -- nowhere near my part of the state, but down east in Greensboro -- has been getting a lot of attention for adopting a dress code. The restaurant, named Kim's Kafe has adopted a rule that you may not wear "skimpy" clothes, short shorts, and that women may not wear leggings. 

"Is that legal?" asks local radio station WRAL, and is astonished to discover that the answer is 'definitely yes.' 

The local CBS News affiliate  ran a news clip asking the same question, and getting the same answer. USA Today covered it as well.

Who is this 'radical misogynist' who hates skimpy clothes and loves trampling on people's freedom of self-expression? You might guess at the answer from the fact that the name of the business is abbreviated 'KK,' suggesting the hat trick: perhaps these are that most regular villain of our popular culture, conservative white Southern racists. 

You would be completely wrong. 

Kim's Kafe is a soul food restaurant. A visit to their Facebook page makes clear that this is a worshipful, neighborhood cafe in the black community, and they're fed up with immodesty for upright religious reasons. 

The national media is completely blanking that out. Some of the local press makes it clear.

“She’s been a community staple for years,” the source said. “She would pull up to different nightclubs to serve food. She’s given food to the homeless countless times. If you’re someone in her area that patronizes her business, she’s the first one to jump and go overboard.”

When the business was finally able to open a storefront off of Dolley Madison Road after the pandemic, the community was excited to welcome another Black restaurant to the scene.

“There’s not that many Black businesses around here,” said Mutsa Mukahanana, who visited the restaurant last year after it went viral. “There’s not a lot of options for soul food.”

It sounds like she got her start carrying plates of food to sell in nightclubs, eventually earning enough to open the brick-and-mortar store. Many of her base customers are likely 'exotic dancers,' and while she wants them to come around she also wants the community as a whole to feel like it's a decent place where they can bring their family. The motto of the restaurant, "God did it," is also suggestive of motive, as are the worshipful videos she posts on FB.

Apparently she originally became famous because of a TikTok account called Ride with Yusuf, who loved the place. 

"When I had her food last year it was amazing," the TikTok star who goes by the name Ride with Yusuf, and has 140,000 followers, said on Labor Day. "The love and soul she put in that food was amazing."

It's her right and her business, he said before adding that he didn't know anything about her business policies. He said he had nothing but good interactions with her[.] 

So if any of you like soul food, and happen to be in Greensboro, I hear it's pretty good. 

Fear of Democracy

Rhetoric notwithstanding, it's the ruling class that professes love of "our democracy" that most fears true democracy (which they prefer to call 'populism').

They fear it, Ramesh Thakur says, because they know they've lost the confidence of the people.

It's a good article I won't excerpt. I do notice that the discussion of the UK Labor government's desire to ban hate speech veers immediately into a discussion of "extreme misogyny" that notices that somehow physical attacks on women for dressing immodestly are getting mild or suspended sentences. That's the kind of contradiction in practical reason that lets you know you're out of order, assuming you dare to pay attention to such things.

Happy Birthday D.A.C.

A day late and a dollar short, but he was born on 6 September 1939.

He and Willie Nelson are the last of the old crew still alive.

A Targeted Gun Control

After the latest school shooting, there has been the usual round of pointless politicking by people who know perfectly well that there will be no global changes in our firearms regimen but who think they can profit from the tragedy. Likewise, there has been the usual pointing-out that the security systems knew about this threat perfectly well, and did nothing to stop it as is so often the case (the "known wolf" problem, which occurs both here and in the UK). 

What I haven't seen people discussing is that we have as a society arrived at, and indeed instituted, a novel form of gun control targeting these cases.

The father of Colt Gray, the teen suspect in the Apalachee High School shooting, was arrested, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Thursday.

Colin Gray, 54, is being charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the GBI said. The 14-year-old shooting suspect has been charged with four counts of felony murder.

GBI Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference Thursday night that the charges against Colin Gray stem from "knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon." During a brief court hearing Friday morning, Judge Currie Mingledorff II told Colin Gray he faced up to 180 years in prison if he was convicted on all counts. The judge also advised him of his rights, and the father said, "Yes, sir," in response to some questions from the judge.

To my knowledge, this is only the second time this approach has been employed; to be effective, it will need to become a regular and expected thing. 

It's novel to charge people with murder when they never killed anyone nor tried to kill anyone. It may be pernicious to do so even if courts and juries agree to the approach.

However, it strikes me that it is a far more likely approach to achieve success at reducing the incidence of these shootings than the sort of global gun-control efforts that tend to be suggested. 

Statistically, AR-15s and similar rifles are used in almost no crime; the fact that the exceptions are spectacularly tragic doesn't change the fact that almost all such rifles are "in common use for lawful purposes." There are estimated to be around 20 million of them, but in 2022 rifles of all kinds accounted for only 541 of the ~8,000 firearm homicides. If we assumed for the sake of argument (without evidence, and as is in fact unlikely) that 500 of those were with ARs, and that each death used a separate AR, that would give you a rate of 0.0025%; that means that in a given year, 99.9975% of ARs are not used to murder anyone. Any attempt to solve the problem with global solutions is thus already way up against the point of diminishing returns. The effort required to reduce below 99.9975% is going to be huge and expensive. 

Raising the cost for parents who ought to know that their own particular kid is a risk, however, localizes the effort in places where there is a heightened risk. It addresses that 'known wolf' issue: the FBI and the local police knew this kid was a risk, and had in fact interviewed him and his father about it. The tool of holding the parent or guardian responsible gives them a tool they can use to encourage safer gun storage around dangerous youth, or even a decision by the parent to forgo having guns for a few years until the teenager moves on out to other things. 

I still have concerns about the morality of charging people for crimes they never even contemplated, let alone committed. Speaking merely about the effectiveness of the tactic, though, it seems like a better bet than other approaches people like to suggest. 

Congratulations to AVI

AVI notes his 10,000th post, and 10,001st. The latter is an ABBA tune, whose name reminds me of this classic from Bobby Bare.

It takes grit and good luck to stick to something that long. Good work.

WWII Unravelling

A remarkable interview -- I usually don't sit still for verbal talk and only read transcripts, but this guy caught my attention. What's really going on right now, he says, is that the order established by the Allied victory in WWII is unravelling. That's why all this is happening, and why it's all so strange.

"While You Cowered, We Studied the Blade"

Germany follows the UK in introducing a knife ban in response to terror attacks.

In the aftermath of a recent attack in which a Syrian Islamic extremist wielding a knife murdered three innocent festival goers and wounded eight others, authorities in Germany are pushing forward with a plan to ban knives.

According to a report at nbcnews.com, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack by Issa Al H in the western German city of Solingen, a city of about 160,000 residents where a celebration of the city’s anniversary was taking place.

It would be a tremendous irony for Solingen, "The City of Blades," whose steel and sword-making was legendary for centuries, to be the proximate cause of such a ban. Ironic, but they are a fallen people.

UPDATE: Meanwhile in Massachusetts, a ban on blades is struck down on 2nd Amendment grounds.

Legendary

In spite of the fact that I spent a lot of my life around universities, I never had anything to do with "Greek life." My father had belonged to an agricultural fraternity at East Tennessee State, though, and always liked the movie Animal House, so I knew what it was supposedly about.

These boys at Chapel Hill put Animal House to shame. Can you imagine getting Lee Greenwood to play your frat party?

Festivities commenced with singing the national anthem, complete with a colorful prop-plane flyover by local pilots who only charged for gas. About 1,000 attendees turned out on Labor Day weekend to see a lineup that included John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, Rome Ramirez of Sublime, Aaron Lewis, Cowboy Troy, and Lee Greenwood. 

These are the young men who saved an American flag from pro-Hamas protests at their college, to whom half a million dollars was donated for a party. I gather they used only part of it, and plan to donate the rest.

Journalists and other anti-freedom scolds pounced and seized on the specter of Flagstock, demanding answers to questions only they would ask: Should parties be fun? Should country music exist? Should celebrities be allowed to criticize Democrats in public? The New York Times, for example, reported on the handful of angsty UNC fraternity brothers who wished that "a significant portion" of the party funds would be donated to "relief efforts in Gaza." Some of the funds raised will eventually be dispersed to charities such as Back the Blue N.C., the Wounded Warrior Project, and organizations that combat anti-Semitism. The Free Beacon is still awaiting a response about how much money will be donated to Palestinian trans rights organizations.

Yeah, let us know as soon as you hear about that. 

Greens Defrauded Too

Jill Stein, once again the Green Party’s presidential candidate, explains at length the fraud and manipulation used by the Democrats to keep her party off the ballots. She says they infiltrated her campaign, like RFK’s, and used fraudulent members to get the Greens thrown off the ballot in the recent NC Senate race. 

Because he’s thought to draw votes from Trump, however, the Democrats who control NC’s ballot have refused RFK’s request to remove him from the ballot this year. He’s suing in a last ditch attempt to get off of the ballot. 

"Well, it hasn't happened"

Earlier this year, my sister kept trying to wind me up over the usual predictions of a busier Atlantic hurricane season than usual. Every year like clockwork, and she falls for it every time.

It's turned out a bit of a flop so far, leading this "climate expert" to explain why you should still totally believe us, you guys, the next time we try to rev you up. See, it didn't happen for us in the Atlantic because, ironically, the temperatures were too low. But they were high in the Pacific, and it's been pretty active out there! So we were in the ballpark, and besides, climate change can mean that it's colder, or hotter, or dryer, or wetter. Because science. Favorite line: "This is a good example of how climate change can change from place to place," a sentence construction that our Vice President might admire.

I Like His Attitude

The Education of a Free People

[O]f all the things which I have mentioned that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected. The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution, if the laws are democratical, democratically or oligarchically, if the laws are oligarchical....

Now, to have been educated in the spirit of the constitution is not to perform the actions in which oligarchs or democrats delight, but those by which the existence of an oligarchy or of a democracy is made possible. Whereas among ourselves the sons of the ruling class in an oligarchy live in luxury, but the sons of the poor are hardened by exercise and toil, and hence they are both more inclined and better able to make a revolution. And in democracies of the more extreme type there has arisen a false idea of freedom which is contradictory to the true interests of the state. For two principles are characteristic of democracy, the government of the majority and freedom. Men think that what is just is equal; and that equality is the supremacy of the popular will; and that freedom means the doing what a man likes. In such democracies every one lives as he pleases, or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fancy.' But this is all wrong; men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it is their salvation.

-Aristotle, Politics V.9

In the comments to a post below, I remarked that Tex once said that they want to turn America into the security zone of an airport, but that public schools are run much the same way. 

Our public school system is terribly designed for educating a free people. All the rights of citizens are suspended while you are on school grounds. You have no freedom of speech, but may be punished for speaking without permission on any topic. You may certainly not publish and post flyers critical of the government authorities. You have no freedom of movement: you have assigned seats in assigned classes, and to skip school is punishable by law as well as administratively. You certainly have no right to keep and bear arms, nor even to self defense -- our local high school has the policy of having all parties to a fight arrested by the school resource officers, and charged with assault, even if the were clearly defending themselves from a bully with a record of harassing them. There is no freedom from unreasonable search and seizure -- just like at the airport, all bags are subject to search and seizure at any time. 

There is no right to a fair trial, or any trial; punishments are meted out by administrative fiat. There is no guarantee the punishment will not be cruel or unusual. Every right an American has by birth and the grace of God is suspended by the schools, and the children are educated that way for a dozen years and more. 

A free people needs a different education. Our system is unfit for our purposes. Aristotle said the same thing about his own, and it was in the next generation that democracy was swept away for almost two millennia. One of his students, indeed, was the author of that: someone who'd gotten the education Aristotle thought worthy of a prince rather than a democrat. 

It is a powerful thing, education. We allow its corruption at our peril.

Jacobin Not Impressed

As you will infer by the name if you aren't already familiar with the publication, Jacobin is a formally-left aligned magazine. They have reviewed Ms. Harris' economic plans, and the top flight ones are not impressive to them. 

1. A $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers

This is a bad idea. It is unfair to people who, even with the subsidy, cannot afford to buy a home and those who prefer to rent. Because it is a demand subsidy without any corresponding price controls, some of the money will also just get captured as higher home prices, negating the affordability goals of the policy....

2. A tax credit for building starter homes

This is a bad idea. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the proximate barrier to building more housing is that it is not sufficiently profitable and that we need to therefore sweeten the pot with public subsidies. This is just a waste of money. Moreover, conditioning the receipt of the tax credit on whether the person who buys the home turns out to be a first-time homebuyer, as this proposal does, makes no sense. Home builders do not typically know in advance who they are going to sell it to....

3. A ban on price gouging for groceries and food

It is unclear what this even means. 

As noted, these haven't been getting good reviews anywhere. If even Jacobin is against them, it's hard to know who the audience is supposed to be. 

Rasmussen: Biden did not win Georgia in 2020

So they say, citing the ongoing refusal by Fulton County to comply with open records laws and lawsuits demanding the unsealed ballots. 

This is something that was obviously true for me as a longtime resident of Georgia who has been writing about its election fraud problem since 2018. Some would rather not continue to discuss this, but as they point out election security is an ongoing issue. It's not like any of the problems were fixed. Work is ongoing on several fronts, but it's also important that the truth gets out. People need to understand that the government isn't legitimate if the elections aren't legitimate: you owe no loyalty to a government that was imposed upon you by fraud or force.

UPDATE: Rasmussen wasn't done.

Let's Review: Georgia 2020 Trust Deficit

Forensic audit blocked

100 drop boxes lack surveillance videos

20K ballot images - vanished

13 election routers - vanished

10 Dominion tabulators - vanished

148,000 Fulton Cty Mail-ballot signatures unverified

Nor yet done:

Georgia: No records were created capturing 148,000 2020 mail-in ballot outer envelope signatures for matching to Fulton County records because their new electronic sig verification equipment - wasn't used.

Here the wording is actually "Nothing was scanned, your honor." Uh Oh 

Nor yet:

Georgia:

We have an electronic verification system, but we didn’t use it.

We have records of voter signatures, but we didn’t use them.

We could check our records for you, but it would take forever.

Aside from that, judge, is there anything else you’d like?

"...And It Has to Stop."

Also from the same fellow, a video clip of Kamala Harris calling for an end to free speech and freedom of the press, at least for social media. See if you read it differently.

"He has lost his privileges and it [X.com] should be taken down.... The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight, or regulation, and that has to stop."

Coors Beer Joins Harley Davidson

...and Tractor Supply, John Deere, and others, in giving in to pressure to abandon DEI and similar programs. This Starbuck guy is getting results. I'm sure they're trying to find ways to sneak the stuff in, but they're clearly responding to the public pressure. No doubt the Silver Bullet doesn't want to join the Blue Can beer in losing its place in the rankings.

The Dangerous Constitution

As an update to Saturday's post about the NYT asking whether the Constitution is "dangerous," ("And so am I, very dangerous," said Gandalf), a reader on Twitter points out that this has been a constant theme there lately.

Free speech and inquiry are important values, so I don't object to them publishing such things; but by the same token, one should pay attention and take note of it as well.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

Used to be dangerous, before Willie

Labor Day Cookout

Chicken, if you’re curious.

"Spark" and School Reform

The headline reads, "With his 1776 Commission on patriotism, Trump helped spark a culture war." The very first paragraph gives the lie to the headline: he was responding, they note, to the 1619 Project. The theme continues throughout.

Trump ripped into “left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” slammed the 1619 Project and asserted that “propaganda” in schools was making students ashamed of their history.

To fix all this, he had a solution: a new 1776 Commission that would promote patriotic education.

A national curriculum is probably a bad idea, but so too are almost all existing state and local curricula. We really need to abolish the public school system and start over. In any case, the idea that this 'divisive' 'culture war' is his fault is silly. It was the earlier revisionism that he was reacting to, angrily because it was based on some outright lies. (The link is to a set of criticisms by no less than the World Socialist; the 1619 Project later admitted that it was "not a history" but a fight to "control the national narrative.")

Replacing public schools with private ones sounds radical to a lot of people, but the earlier schools were better than the ones we have now. Consider this very early school on what was at that time the frontier:

The first recorded school in Jackson County actually predates the formation of the county by 31 years, as a school was started in Cullowhee Township in 1820.... the East LaPorte school started by Professor A.M. Dawson was renowned for its rigor and quality. A summary written for the Historical Committee of Jackson County NCEA in 1954 recounted, “Prof. A.M. Dawson who with Prof. Hughes, Misses Amaria and Jardedie Dawson, and Misses Ida and Lula Rogers, as assistants, conducted a high school at East LaPorte. This school… was the most notable and efficient one ever taught in this county before 1881.

“Dawson had graduated from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He came to Jackson County from Tennessee. “With well-balanced scholarship, being equally at home in mathematics, history, science and the languages, and with established reputation, Professor Dawson auspiciously began his four-year remarkable career in Jackson County. Arithmetic, Latin, Greek, philosophy and English grammar were the principal subjects of the curriculum taught. Geography and reading were also taught… Mr. Dawson was a strict disciplinarian and exacted thoroughness from his students. Intolerant of laziness, negligence, disobedience or disorder, he was a stern, unrelenting schoolmaster… There were two Literary Societies. They were the Olympiam, which meant ‘lovers of games,’ and the Phylomathin, which meant ‘lovers of learning.’ These societies met on Friday evenings. Dawson was also the first to introduce baseball as a school sport.”

Emphasis added. 

This was not a public school but a private "subscription school," but its presence on the frontier showed that it was not limited to the elites of the day. Voucher programs that aim to replace public school with independent funding would begin to address the downfall our education has suffered by being brought under control of government. 

Switching to a model that provided parents with the means to subscribe to a 'subscription school' would not change the fact that we have a class of teachers who are miseducated themselves; finding the right people to instruct the children could be the chief problem. 

UPDATE: Dad29 sends an eighth-grade final exam from 1895. The arithmetic section's difficulty sometimes turns on the use of what are now unusual forms of measure (bushel, rod), but clearly students were expected to manage complex calculations for the exam. I'm curious what the measure for 'bushel' was myself; the exam treats it both as a measure of volume and a measure of weight. Question 2 expects you to calculate the number of bushels from a given volume; the third one asks you to calculate it from weight. That implies some specialized knowledge that most of us wouldn't have.

Still, pretty interesting to examine.

The New Yorker on Soldier of Fortune

If you never expected to see The New Yorker write a warm and positive piece about Soldier of Fortune magazine, today is a surprising day!

Some years ago now Susan Katz Keating, the editor of Soldier of Fortune, at that time an independent journalist, interviewed me at length for a book she was writing about a project with which I was involved. The book she was writing didn't come off, which in a way is a shame because it would have exposed some serious problems with US intelligence in Afghanistan. Given how Afghanistan ultimately turned out, it might have been nice to know sooner. I asked her about it a year or so ago, and she told me that the laptop she had her notes on had crashed and burned, and she was left with nothing useful.

All the same, I found her to be an insightful and committed independent journalist of the old fashion. It's nice to see her considered opinion on the potential for violence in our current moment:

Not long after their meeting, Donald Trump was wounded on the ear in an assassination attempt. Keating provided an update on her violence forecast: she had become surprisingly sanguine.

“There have not been any follow-on attacks or counterattacks, which I think would have happened by now if this had been an Archduke Ferdinand moment,” she said. “I see the hit on Trump as another iteration of the school-shooter, mall-shooter phenomenon, and not as a political flash point. We are not headed for a civil war.” 

“Of course," she added, "I could be wrong.”

Interesting Political Videos

From Nicole Shanahan (RFK Jr's VP choice):

From the American Independent Party (whom I'd never heard of before):

They seem to be saying the military industrial complex assassinated both Kennedys. It's well-produced and the TH White quotes are a nice touch. The AIP claims to be the "fastest growing political party in California."

Here's one from the RFK Jr campaign, posted 2 days before he endorsed Trump:

The references to civil war and unity are interesting, but I wonder how he thought he could achieve unity. Or was it just campaign blather?

Is the Constitution Dangerous?

The New York Times publishes a book review that asks the question.

The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?

One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.

The content here is not going to surprise you; it turns out that the Constitution is uncomfortably difficult to amend (if you want to change things fundamentally, especially so). It tends to empower courts to resolve questions that the political branches find difficult (it doesn't, actually; that was a seizure of power during and following Marbury v. Madison). It has a lot of "compromises" that the NYT would like to track to slavery, especially the Electoral College, which is really not about slavery so much as the desire of the Founders not to concentrate power in the cities just as they sought the separation of powers elsewhere. (They were, after all, scholars of Greek and Roman history, and worried about exactly the transformations warned about by Aristotle and witnessed at the end of the Roman Republic.) 

The weirdness about these sorts of articles is how they don't seem to grasp that a very similar set of compromises would be necessary even if you were to renegotiate the terms today. You couldn't get the rural parts of America to give up the Electoral College, or the equal representation of states in the Senate (another regular bugaboo by those who resent that Wyoming gets equal representation with California or New York). You couldn't get them to give away the Second Amendment. If you sat down in a Convention of the States and asked the people to work out a deal they could agree to accept, it would look very similar to the deal that you have now. These so-called historical reviews just lament that compromise with the non-urbane and non-urban is a necessary feature of peace and stability. 

You could try to force the issue, just as the urban elites might have in 1787. Wise men and educated, though deeply divided on certain issues they elected to compromise rather than fight among themselves. 

Well, for a while.

You might think that such disputes would have been laid to rest by a bloody Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments, which outlawed slavery and granted all men the right to vote, regardless of race. Not to mention that the Constitution continued to change in the century after: Senators were to be directly elected; women were granted the right to vote.

You might well think so, since none of those items is in dispute. I would prefer to reverse the unmentioned 16th and the mentioned 17th Amendment, and the 18th we've already disposed of, but as far as I know there is no contest from anywhere to the 13th, 15th, or 19th. The 14th is argued about over its interpretation; very few ever suggest its repeal.

The clear tone of the article, though, is that the sweeping away by violent victory in the Civil War is the preferred mode; the continued compromises by courts interested in considering Originalism is as bad as having ever compromised at all. Victory and not peace is the desideratum. 

Sadly easy to find, the end of peace by those who seek violent victory over their opponents. Victory itself may prove to be more elusive. 

Do You Know Something I Don't Know?

It's a well-known fact that social media companies spy on you relentlessly. They use this information to pump ads in your direction that they believe are relevant to your life. I get lots of ads for motorcycle gloves and knives and camping equipment, but also some that are weirdly specific. 

For example, last week my doctor prescribed a new medicine for me she thought might be helpful, and noted out loud that it had a specific side effect she didn't think I'd find too bothersome. She prescribed the drug, and I ordered it from the Amazon pharmacy. By the time I got home, Facebook was offering up ads from numerous companies offering herbal remedies for the condition or else for the side effect.

Most likely Amazon sold me out as a customer; less likely, my iPhone is listening in and Apple is reporting it to Facebook. Somehow, however, they knew almost as soon as I did that I had a new hook for their advertisers.

I mention this because, in the last couple of days, I've received a similarly aggressive spur in ads for expunging my criminal records so that I can seek gainful employment again. Readers, I have never been arrested for anything nor charged with anything more serious than speeding or improper backing of a vehicle. Do you think they know something I don't know? 

The Ship-Knife

Many years ago, while I lived in China, a much younger version of me wrote but never published a novel about Vikings in the Byzantine Empire. This novel, The Ship-Knife, seemed appropriate to me to write at the time because I was like the Varangians present in an alien and ancient civilization, a foreigner enmired in strange architecture, food, culture, values. I was also writing my Master's (European history) thesis, and it was a pleasant break from the academic work while also being a way of exploring allied themes.

It involves among other things a retelling of the adventures of Harald Hardrada in Sicily, the original being in the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson. He was also the author of the Prose Edda, which was itself a retelling of older stories he had encountered and wanted to formalize. I had copies of both with me in China and was familiarizing myself with them at the same time.

I located a copy of the thing recently. Looking through it I realize how much I've changed in the ensuing 25 years. I don't know that I can even edit it now, or if it's worth bothering to edit. My thoughts as a younger man might not even be worth preserving (indeed, it predates even the oldest entries of Grim's Hall, which date to 2003 after the China expedition). 

If any of you would like to read it, and possibly help to edit it, please feel free to say so. I can't promise that it's great; it's probably not worse than most. It might at least be on a subject that interests some of you.

Evil Simpliciter Does Not Exist

Over at the Orthosphere, a propositional argument for the existence of God.

The syllogism is simple. Let P = God is ultimate; let Q = there is evil. Then:

1. ¬ P → ¬ Q
2. ¬ ¬ Q
3. ¬ ¬ P

In English:

1. If God is not ultimate, then there is no evil.
2. It is false that there is no evil.
3. It is false that God is not ultimate.

Clever, but wrong. It has been the position since St. Augustine that evil does not in fact exist because it cannot exist; and it cannot exist precisely because of God's ultimate status as creator of all, combined with God's goodness. Evil simpliciter would be a created thing that was not in any way good; but everything that follows from God must be good, because God is perfectly so (and in a way that is higher and better than things we encounter in the world are).

The orthodox position is that "evil is a privation," that is, a failure of the material to realize God's perfect design. Thus, all evil turns out to be is an imperfect realization of the good. Everything that exists must be good to some degree just because God created it.

[Even more emphatically in the later Aristotelian Christianity of Aquinas and his era, God's existence and his goodness are a mere prioritization of thought about the same quality. God's essence is existence: and as existence is the thing that all things desire, existence is just another name for the good (per Aristotle; because all things desire to continue to exist, to reproduce, to perfect their health and thus their existence, etc, 'the good' simpliciter is existence). Therefore, everything is good insofar as it has being; and evil thus cannot exist because it cannot have being, i.e. goodness.]

Then the syllogism doesn't work: 

1. ¬ P → ¬ Q
2. ¬ Q
3. ¬ P

That syllogism is a known fallacy, "Affirming the Consequent" or the "converse error." It doesn't prove anything because the form is invalid. For example, you could give the argument:

1. If she screams, someone pinched her.
2. She screamed.
3. Therefore, someone pinched her.

In fact it's obvious that there could have been several additional causes for the scream; she might have seen a dead body instead of being pinched.

Of course one can take the position that orthodoxy is wrong, and evil simpliciter does exist: that's the Manichaeist position, which in Christianity is traditionally considered a heresy. It doesn't work out logically to have two basic creative principles, as Avicenna explains: either one is really superior, or there must a third thing that holds them together and allows them to interact, in which case that thing is the ultimate creative principle (and you're back to one). Since this is the case, any syllogism that asserts that 'God is ultimate' but that evil simpliciter also exists as a countering force will prove to be illogical. 

One could further take the position that logic does not give you access to knowledge, but only preservation of knowledge, and that knowledge about God is ultimately ineffable at best (and thus inadmissible to logical forms). This is close to the Buddhist position, which might be true but won't be logical. At that point there's just no reason to even talk about syllogisms. 

Eyeball Numbers

We have fairly reliable Nielsen numbers, as that technology was invented in the golden age of America when television was the gold-standard of that golden age. It's had to adapt to changes since it was new, but it's had both time and resources to do so. So these figures are probably close:

The nearly 6 million viewers [of the Harris interview] is CNN’s best performance in the 9 p.m. ET hour since more than 9.5 million people tuned in for the June 27 debate between President Joe Biden and Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Internet numbers are wildly contested today, especially when the claim is made by a widely-detested figure like Elon Musk and the contest is coming from an outlet that is outright hostile to him. These figures are therefore not as reliable.

Later on in the interview, Trump appeared to be looking at the views on his post that shared the Space, which was at around 60 million views at the time. Post views on X function more like impressions, tracking each instance a post appears in front of a user, whether they actively clicked on it — or it just appeared on their feed as they scrolled.

The live audio Space itself between Trump and Musk peaked at around 1.4 million concurrent viewers.

Musk has leaned into Trump's inaccurate viewership references though.

"Combined views of the conversation with @realDonaldTrump and subsequent discussion by other accounts now ~1 billion," Musk said on X, calculating the total of all post views or impressions about the Space chat.

As of publishing time, the X Space between Trump and Musk has roughly 24 million views, which includes the live viewership numbers as well as replays. The post itself, however, claims 183 million views or impressions.

That's a pretty big delta, between a billion and 24 million. 

I notice, however, that even the lowest figure is four times the Nielsen figure. 

Does it matter? Who knows. The thing about the internet is people from everywhere could be watching it (making "a billion" more plausible than it would be if limited to the USA, while Nielsen numbers are localized to America). Most of those people don't vote; and anyway, just having an interest in what they have to say doesn't mean you're going to vote for them. I'd guess that most supporters of either candidate are planning to vote for them without regard to what they might say. 

Still, it's interesting to see how much more attention there is for the one candidate than the other.

A Soaking Rain

After two hot days, rain broke the heat and made it nice out. I decided to take an evening walk. Well, the rain came back and I was quite wet by the time I got back under shelter. 

That’s fine. In the late August, even a cooling soak is welcome. 

Chicken Killing Dog

Conan killed one of the chickens, for no apparent reason. Any of my grandparents, kind and gentle people though they were, would have shot him for that. Of course, they came up in the Great Depression when chicken-killing dogs were a life or death matter potentially. I didn't shoot him or hurt him at all, but it raises a dilemma about what ought to be done -- or how to teach him not to do it without harming him. 

My wife suggested the old folk trick of tying the dead bird around his neck and leaving it there until it rots, but that also seemed pretty horrible to me. 

What do you think should be done? Ultimately I would miss having the fresh eggs if he killed all the chickens, but it wouldn't hurt my family's prosperity much. On the other hand, I do think there's an issue about having a dog who kills for pleasure. Back on the first hand, though, my last dog killed cats whenever he could, and he was a great dog. I'm a little mystified about how to approach this problem, and would like your advice.

Heresy

Dad29, who is having a lot of trouble with the recent commenting problems from Google, would like to draw your attention to this article on Heresy.

The basic idea is that heresy is the removal of one of the planks of a systematic understanding of the world; Newtonian physics is an example. So too Euclidean geometry, which in fact we know is false. Well, and Newton's physics also. 

So on this model heresy isn't necessarily wrong or even a mistake; it could be a step forward towards a better system. Yet it isn't obviously so; it could just be a new error.

Selah, as they say.

They'd Do It Here Too

Black-clad agents from the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, Sebin, were seen smashing their way inside. They carried guns and a picture of the 19-year-old law student they had come to arrest. López was bundled into a vehicle as panicked relatives looked on. 

 “Neighbours came out to try and protect her but they pointed their weapons at them and took the girl,” said the witness, asking to remain anonymous for fear of suffering a similar fate.

Keep your rifle by your side. It's the only thing that keeps you free. Our politicians aren't any better than theirs.

High Stakes Gambling

FPC asks SCOTUS to explain whether there is or is not a 2A right to own an AR-15.

There is, according to the logic of all three major SCOTUS decisions on the subject. US v. Miller held that arms are protected insofar as they have a militia quality, and the AR-15 is the most suitable militia rifle due to its commonality in parts and ammunition with the military service rifle(s), as well as the ability of almost every Marine or Soldier to train citizens in its effective use. Heller holds that we have a right to common weapons used for legal purposes; the AR-15 is the most common of all rifles, and rifles account for only around 2% of gun crimes. Bruen holds that tradition matters, and the AR-15 has traditionally been lawful for citizens in most of the country.

It's high stakes, though. Thomas authored a concurring opinion holding that any ban of America's favorite rifle should draw Constitutional review; but he's the only one on the record.

An End to Night

I kind of like night, though. This project would let the rich decide if we get to have it.

“I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It’s this unstoppable force,” Nowack said in the interview. “Everybody’s installing so many solar panels everywhere. It’s really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off. It’s called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.”

The company’s orbital mirror is set to launch in 2025, and you can “apply for sunlight” for the next few months. There’s “limited availability,” and already supposedly over 30,000 applications. It really just sounds like a one-time test, though: you only get four minutes for a diameter of 5km. No price is listed.

An Interesting Summary of Today's Division

Tom Klingenstein recently interviewed political philosopher* Glenn Ellmers about the state of the West today. In one of his responses, Ellmers gives what I think is a good summary of the current political division not only the in the US but in the West in general. I don't think there's much here that's new to the regulars here, but the clear summary of a division that is often put in more vague and ambiguous terms is worthwhile, I think.

There is a long and interesting story about how the Left got to this point, which can be traced to modern philosophy becoming more and more radical. Again, it is extremely useful, practically speaking, to study these matters. The point is that, apart from the apolitical or undecided people in the middle, we have two diametrically opposed factions in the United States today — whose differences are basically theological. One side still believes in traditional morality and the importance of the family, in the founder’s Constitution, and the idea that we are born into a world we didn’t create and can’t completely control. That is a world governed by the laws of nature and nature’s God, which means we are limited and guided by human nature, which is fixed. 

The woke Leftists reject all that in the name of complete individual freedom and total personal autonomy, without any limits imposed by God or nature or anything else. The role of the government, for them, is to facilitate the ability of everyone to meet their own subjective view of personal fulfillment. The whole architecture of racial grievances, group preferences, and white privilege is directed to removing the barriers imposed by racism, western colonialism, toxic masculinity, etc., which stand in the way of complete personal autonomy.

This deep, theological division is not confined to the United States. Look at the recent opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics. It included a mockery of the Last Supper, with drag queens and transvestites standing in for Jesus and the Apostles. And there was a rider “on a pale horse” — a clear celebration of death from the Book of Revelation. This had nothing to do with sports or athletics, so what was the point? Why do the Olympics have to become a celebration of radical sexual autonomy?

How you respond to this will depend on which basic view of the world you have. And this division — between the older morality and the new celebration of unbounded personal expression — can be seen all over the world. There is an emerging global elite, motivated by a radical ideology, that wants to eliminate the rule of the people in every nation. This is the great battle of our time. 

It's interesting that he sees it as a conflict between theologies. He doesn't explain what he means by that, and I wonder how he defines theology.

*Update: I tried to find an email address for Ellmer and discovered his PhD was in political science. I think I just inferred he was a philosopher from the topics he writes about.

Plato on Tyrants and the US Today

In a previous post we discussed how relevant Aristotle's Politics were today. In the following video on Plato's idea of the tyrant, I feel again that the professor is describing the US today to a striking degree.

The presenter is Daniel Bonevac, professor of philosophy at UT Austin.

Christmas

They saw the mighty angel of God coming toward them. He spoke to the guards face to face and told them they should not fear any harm from the light. "I am going to tell you," he said, "something very wonderful, something very deeply desired. I want to let you know something very powerful: Christ is now born, on this very night, God's holy child, the good Chieftain, at David's hill-fort. What happiness for the human race, a boon for all men! You can find Him, the most powerful Child, at Fort Bethlehem.

Beginning to Get It

Nice to see the light coming on.