Standing Down

There was a similar closure and folding-into-State of the US Information Agency during the Clinton administration. It resulted in a permanent loss of capacity and expertise in information warfare, which was thought not to be needed any longer due to the end of the Soviet Union. Russian Active Measures did take a while to get back to full speed, or whatever you would describe as their current speed; but after 9/11, we realized that we had lost a lot in terms of our ability to recognize and respond to dangerous messaging in the Islamic world. 

This one is way faster and more hostile. 

A brief message posted late Tuesday night on USAID’s website states, “On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally,” except for select employees in “mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs. Essential personnel expected to continue working will be informed by Agency leadership by Thursday, February 6, at 3:00pm (EST).”

The government will arrange return flights for all USAID workers stationed outside the United States within 30 days. The administration “will consider case-by-case exceptions and return travel extensions based on personal or family hardship,” such as children’s school term, “personal or familial medical needs, pregnancy, and other reasons.”

“Thank you for your service,” concludes the message.

We've seen a lot of demonstration that USAID was also performing improper functions -- maybe mostly performing improper functions -- so perhaps it is warranted. It won't be free, though.

Trump Hotel & Resort: Gaza

I was definitely not expecting the concept of the US taking over and developing a resort complex in the Gaza strip. 

Removing the people from Gaza, that I was expecting. That's the obvious solution to ending what the President called "the death, the destruction, and frankly bad luck" arising from the combination of history, distrust, and the poisonous Revolutionary Marxist political culture that was trained into Palestine for generations. Getting the world to agree to it, especially the host country for these new citizens, that's very hard -- but it is the obvious way to proceed, and frankly almost certainly to the benefit of the Palestinians of Gaza in the long run. It's ugly and the sort of ethnic cleansing that international diplomats claim to oppose (but that they don't seem too opposed to in Xinjiang). It's what happened in Syria, though, without the same level of protest from the diplomats of the world. 

Turning it into a resort community, that I was expecting. It's beachfront property on the Mediterranean Sea. Once you had cleared it out (and removed all the mines and bombs and other explosives), a resort community was the obvious usage. 

The US taking it over and turning it into a new International Zone of hotels and resorts, that's the part I never saw coming. Probably I should have, given who the President is and where his mind goes. And there is precedent for it -- Jerusalem's Old City is itself divided into quarters, two of which (the Christian and the Armenian Quarter) are led and governed by international organizations including the Catholic and Orthodox churches, as well as the Armenian Christian churches. They're fairly pleasant places to visit, by the way. The Armenian Mass is beautiful even though I don't understand the language at all; and the Franciscans who run the Catholic Mass do it in Latin, which is quite an experience sitting in Jerusalem. There are some fine hotels and restaurants that have grown up there to serve the wealthier pilgrims, and in spite of the nearby Muslim Quarter there is very little terrorism. 

Now if it were me, the last thing on earth I might do is insert the US and especially the US military into the middle of this nightmare. I'm not in charge, though. I would tend to advise staying a long way from Gaza as a general thing if anyone is interested in my opinion on the subject. Get private funding for this project, from the hotels or resorts or whatever; have them hire private security forces, deputized by Israel or something. It's not a wholly implausible idea. I just wouldn't want any part of it.

Anabasis IV: The Great Battle

In ancient times the region Cyrus has been traveling through, which is part of Anbar Province today, was called Arabia. Now that he has come into the region that is now Baghdad -- that city was not founded until the Islamic age -- it is known as Babylonia. Babylon itself is quite a bit further south, near the city of Hillah, Iraq. It is in this area of Mesopotamia where Baghdad now stands, at the time a place of villages and farms, that the Battle of Cunaxa ends up happening.

Cyrus believes he is closing on where his brother will meet him, so he holds a midnight muster to order and review his army. He places his Greek mercenaries on the army's right, anchored by the Euphrates. This is an interesting tactical decision. It gives his army an unbreakable core, as the Persian forces have nothing that can crack the Greek hoplites. The river protects them from being enveloped. His own forces in the center end up serving chiefly to cover the flank and rear of the Greek unit, so that as it successfully advances through its opponents it cannot be surrounded from behind.

Yet in doing this he ends up not placing them where they can fight the strongest and most central units of the King's army. He ends up in the center himself with his cavalry, to cover the Greek rear but also to strike as a cavalry reserve if weak points appear. To his left he puts his native troops.

They sleep in position and begin at dawn their advance. The Persian king chooses the stratagem of retreating before them for several days. This leads them to believe that he is choosing not to fight, and thus their army grows increasingly poor at keeping the discipline of their positions. Thus, when on the third day he turns and comes upon them strongly, they are not in order and scramble to get into place.

Cyrus realizes that his best card is not going to be very useful against his brother because it is on the right instead of in the center. He tries to reorder his forces but the Greek mercenary commander, Clearchus, refuses to attempt the ordered maneuver given that it would expose his flanks. Thus, the battle commences as described above. 

The Greeks meet no effective resistance, and exactly as expected press through the Persian army -- which is vastly, vastly larger but not coherent -- until their rear is in danger of being exposed. Cyrus defends their rear with his cavalry until he realizes that he has come close to where the King of Persia actually is, in the center of the Persian formation. Seeing that, he takes his own picked men -- his 'table companions' -- and tries to kill the King.

Cyrus' charge leads to a personal combat between himself and the King, whom Cyrus wounds through his breastplate. However, one of the King's companions kills Cyrus with a javelin through the face. (This Persian is not named at this time, but was one Mithridates who was reportedly later executed for it as he had stolen the honor of the King's kill.)  Cyrus' death leads to the defense of his body by his table companions, who all die in place. The Persians then pass into the camp and plunder all the baggage, leaving the remnants of Cyrus' army without supplies. Only then do they return to the Greek hoplites, who were coming back from a very successful day (so they thought).

When the Greeks meet the King and his reunited forces, they once again drive them with great success. The King's forces retreat before them, unable to resist the hoplite advance. Eventually the Greeks allow the retreat -- they are infantry after all, and have been fighting all day without food -- and return to their camp only to find it plundered. There is no supper to be had. 

And there has been no word from Cyrus. They are completely cut off from command, without clear intelligence about the battle, and hungry. 

Xenophon includes a touching brief biography of Cyrus, whom he apparently admired and considered a genuinely just and good man. Cyrus has the heroic virtues: courage, of course -- he once killed a she-bear in personal combat -- but also love of horses, great generosity, such honor that his word once given was thought completely reliable, and the ability to issue punishments to criminals with great firmness. One would regularly see on the bigger roads in his domain, Xenophon relates, men with amputated hands or feet: and therefore, he tells us, one could travel wherever one liked in Cyrus' domain with anything one choose to take without fear. Maimonides uses a similar argument as a proof of the existence of God; Genghis Khan's reign was reputedly also a place where 'a virgin dressed only in gold jewelry' could travel wherever she liked without fear of being troubled. Xenophon thought that Cyrus was a very good and virtuous man and, in the same way Aristotle would describe a generation later, therefore a good leader. The Greeks were there as his mercenaries, but they fought for him not only for gold but also because they thought he was worth fighting for. 

Dean’s List

My son absolutely astonished me today by bringing home a letter from his Dean. He had a really tough start to college due to COVID disrupting his Senior Year in High School and his Freshman year in college. He has taken to these Emergency Management studies, though. I’m proud of him. 

"Defending Democracy Together"

A big story this morning is that Bill Kristol has been outed as the recipient of millions of dollars of USAID (closed as of this morning!) and State Department money, laundered through the Rockfeller Philanthropy Advisors foundation. 

A part of this story nobody has yet mentioned that I've seen is that the particular focus of the Kristol entity is anti-Trump politics. This is the US government (in)directly funding political operations against a disfavored political party/candidate.

Back before Trump came into power, Kristol was headlining a conference on American and Israeli Nationalism. Shockingly given his remarks on the subject since Trump became a leading figure, he was at the time a huge proponent of American Nationalism -- the conference was called "The Case for Nationalism" and he was the leading exponent of the American version. Once Trump came on the scene, he discovered that there was a lot more money to be made opposing the principle he had once intensely advocated. We knew, therefore, that he was not genuinely principled. 

But this rises above the level of scandal. This is money laundering US taxpayer funds into an active effort to inveigh against the election of a particular candidate in our internal elections. It is almost certainly illegal. Especially insofar as USAID's budget is informed by input from a certain intelligence agency, it is explicitly illegal for them to engage in information operations within the United States for the purposes of influencing American citizens. Even to the degree that influence cannot be shown in court, the administrative state funding efforts to sway voters on a partisan basis is going to violate who knows how many campaign finance laws. 

Anabasis III

Before we reach the great battle at Cunaxa, which is where modern Baghdad stands, some internal tensions start to appear. The army's core is of natures, Greek mercenaries and Persians who have some reason to be loyal to Cyrus (and therefore, because of the tight family relation, also some reasons to be loyal to his brother the Great King). It is noteworthy that the tensions erupt within the ethnic groups, and that it is the presence of both groups together that allows for them to be resolved. Diversity, in this case, is their strength.

Clearchus and Menon are two of the Greek mercenary captains, each of their own band. They quarrel, and a third of the captains -- Proxenus -- steps in to try to stop it, which further enrages Clearchus (who felt he was unduly offended by Menon's troops). Cyrus comes between them, and his argument that brings peace is this: "If you don't stop fighting right now, all these Persians 'friends' around us will kill us all." Cyrus is himself Persian, indeed a very Prince of Persia, a satrap, and a man to whom all these men have sworn bonds of friendship and loyalty. Nevertheless he knows that they will turn their knives on him if he loses the security of a united Greek bodyguard. The Greeks grasp and believe in his argument, and return to sensible behavior. 

A very young Grim at COP Dragon on the Euphrates during the Sunni Awakening.

We were in much the same position with our 'allies' in Iraq. They were working with us because the US forces were much stronger than anyone around them. They had bonds of friendship and loyalty with us, sealed with dinners and presents and payments of cash; also they had bonds with the enemies around us. If we had seemed to fall into weakness, as through disputes with each other, they would immediately realize that they were going to be killed by our enemies once we were too weak to support them. Each would have wanted to be the first to turn on us, in order to tell our enemies -- also their relatives or co-religionists -- that they were the ones who had done us in and removed us as a problem.

The Sunni tribal leaders we were working with often had the most to fear from their own minor cousins or outlying uncles. Those might advance themselves by treasonously reaching out to those contacts they had with relatives, friends, and our enemies -- and then acting at a moment of weakness to replace the traditional sheikhs or other leaders. The apparent friendship and peace was bought by strength, but they were always pulled in both directions by their pre-existing ties. If the facts on the ground changed, the pull in the other direction could instantly become too strong.

Later Cyrus and his army find that an enemy band ahead of them of about 2,000 cavalry is burning the land to make sure there is nothing to feed their army. One of Cyrus' allies, a fellow Persian, proposes to take some cavalry and go round them up. Cyrus approves this, but the traitor instead sends a messenger ahead to warn the Great King of the maneuver. The messenger further betrays his lord and brings the message to Cyrus. A council is called, with the Persians all present and the Greeks as well, and a death sentence is pronounced on the Persian traitor. Both the Greeks and the Persians unanimously proclaim his death, the Greeks providing an excuse for his relatives to agree. 

I would also like to draw attention to one moment of genuine excellence about the Persian conduct on this march. Herodotus says a lot in praise of the Persians, Greece's traditional enemies, and Xenophon observes at least one thing that really merits the same sort of praise. 

...once they found themselves involved in a narrow way, where the deep clay presented an obstacle to the progress of the wagons. Cyrus, with the nobles about him, halted to superintend the operation, and ordered Glus and Pigres to take a body of barbarians and to help in extricating the wagons. As they seemed to be slow about the business, he turned round angrily to the Persian nobles and bade them lend a hand to force the wagons out. 

Then, if ever... good discipline was to be witnessed. Each of those addressed, just where he chanced to be standing, threw off his purple cloak, and flung himself into the work with as much eagerness as if it had been a charge for victory. Down a steep hill side they flew, with their costly tunics and embroidered trousers--some with the circlets round their necks, and bracelets on their arms--in an instant, they had sprung into the miry clay, and in less time than one could have conceived, they had landed the wagons safe on terra firma.

Herodotus claimed that the Persian nobility was raised from youth only to do three things: "to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth." That common discipline in the face of company hardship is exactly what you would expect of men like that.  

The Feast of Saint Brigid

A very welcome feast.

Today is the feast day of St. Brigid, which also marks the end of my beer fast through Dry January. I may have to reschedule the dry month for a less tiresome season in the future. Today as on other years, though, it is a festive day here. 

I did get a motorcycle ride today as hoped, too. Leaving behind a miserable January of intense cold, sickness, and sobriety is very welcome. To your health!

Impoundment

So for the last week I've been thinking that a lot of these moves we've seen have been about trying to push a court fight on the impoundment power. Today the Washington Post affirms that a document claiming that intent exists, although the Trump team denies writing it. 

The presentation, obtained by The Washington Post and other news outlets, outlines in new detail how the White House could revive an obscure and controversial power known as impoundment, potentially allowing Trump to cancel federal funds as he sees fit.

Under a law enacted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the president may invoke that authority only in limited cases with clear notice to Congress. But the slide deck suggests Trump officials may seek to trigger a court case that could declare that law unconstitutional, ultimately enabling Trump to reduce or eliminate entire funding categories on his own.

If there is to be any chance of saving the United States from the debt default that is otherwise coming on down the tracks like a freight train, Presidents will need to recover that power. Contra the Post, impoundment doesn't take away Congress' power of the purse -- only Congress can appropriate money, not Presidents. It does provide a check on that power, which Congress has been using ruinously for decades. Such checks and balances are a normal feature of the constitutional system. 

The Post also fails to note that this power was used first by Thomas Jefferson, and then by every president for over a century. It's the normal way our system has operated, in other words; it was cut off by statute as part of the fight against the hated Richard Nixon. The statute probably isn't constitutional, and certainly an originalist jurist will find much to support in an argument that the power was historically and widely used for a very long time.

Nor is this a terribly controversial thing to think: "Most recent presidents supported the restoration of the impoundment power, including Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. Politicians such as John McCain, John Kerry, Al Gore, Pat Buchanan, Jeb Hensarling, Russ Feingold, Joe Lieberman, Judd Gregg and Paul Ryan also supported the restoration of the power."

It does suggest that the 'Anarcho-Capitalist' Argentina is behind these and also the personnel moves, which are designed to break the power of the administrative state and the spendthrift legislature so that the country can resume a sustainable financial course. Argentina is doing great, by the way.

Anabasis II

Cyrus has already crossed the Euphrates, wisely not leaving that for later as it grows quite wide further south. He puts the river on his army's right hand and begins a much more punishing march south. Because he was not resisted at the Gates of Syria by the army that fled before him, he knows that word will now be coming to his brother of his advance in force. Persia is a large empire, with its people spread out quite widely. Once word gets to his brother, the Great King will have to send riders out to summon aid from various places, and then that aid will have to come to him. Thus, the tempo of the march shifts from leisurely and with many rests to rapid; and Cyrus’ force, now concentrated instead of dispersed, moves together towards the coming battle. He hopes to force his brother to combat as early as possible, to prevent the opposing force from being any larger than can be helped.

This is all perfectly in accord with the best military science. We still teach young officers to 'disperse for movement, concentrate for attack.' In the first books Cyrus showed himself clever in his stratagems for raising and concealing a large army, and for getting past the structural roadblock of Cilicia. Now we see he is also possessed of a good tactical mind. He understands maneuver and he understands the logistics of the lines of communication. Xenophon understands them too, as clarified by some occasional remarks on why he thinks Cyrus did this or that.

The Euphrates from a pontoon bridge we stretched across it near Yusufiyah.

Although Cyrus had taken the trouble of purveying for some extra supplies, the forced march rapidly exhausts their stores of grain; what remains for sale in the civilian 'market' that is accompanying him is so inflated that the army has to start eating only meat. They attain this by hunting wild asses and large fowl native to the area -- I did not observe any of these birds, nor the ostriches he mentions, during my time there -- but probably also by eating many of the pack animals that they mention losing. 

They move through what would today be Anbar province in Iraq. Many of the ancient place names are disputed, and it is not clear even to our scholars exactly where some of these cities were. The city of Charmande is not otherwise attested; some scholars think it was Anah, Iraq. The country they are moving through is spare of food in spite of the Euphrates; only once it approaches the Tigris does the effect of the two rivers render the land lush. 

Oranges on the Euphrates, March 2008

However his description of the smells of the country does remind me of my own time on the Euphrates. These days the smell is mostly from the orange groves that grow along the river. I also remember it as a country filled with sweet-smelling bushes, quiet except for the noise of the moving army, full of people who would probably have preferred to be left alone but who were usually friendly to the heavily-armed men moving among them (as one might wisely be). Strange to think that this scene has been repeating itself in their neighborhood for at least two and a half thousand years, and probably twice so long.

Anabasis I

The first four chapters of Book I of the Anabasis detail the development of Cyrus' determination to wage war against his brother Artaxerxes The Great King of Persia, the assembling of his army from many pieces gathered in secret, and its passage and assembly on a fairly leisurely march to the Euphrates river. At the time of their father's death, Cyrus was satrap in the west of the Persian lands, which are cut off by a kingdom called Cilicia, which is close to modern day Armenia (and indeed there would later be an Armenian kingdom by that name). Here's a better map to understand the problem Cyrus faces in getting his forces around Cilicia. The king of Cilicia also holds the rank of satrap, and is placed there kind of to keep an eye on the younger brother Cyrus, whom The Great King had initially tried to just kill at the time their father died; only his mother's intervention saved Cyrus and got him this solution. To win the surprise attack he needs, Cyrus has to make this maneuver through territory held by his watchdog without alerting his brother. 

Cyrus draws his army from multifarious sources and some clever stratagems that make it seem as if he is dutifully quelling several problems at once on the western frontier, all the while sending the proper tribute to his elder brother. As a result, he is able to assemble a substantial force of more than ten thousand hoplites, the elite heavy infantry of the Greek world, as well as certain supporting light infantry called peltasts. He invites the Queen of Cilicia to join him and, in the manner of a Bene Gesserit, she comes and convinces him to put on a display and revue of the army so she can take its full measure; she also, likewise in that same manner, sleeps with him. 

He moves them a little out of his most direct route to maintain the pretense that he is doing one of those dutiful quellings, such that there is very little violence in this first stage. He sends the Queen home with a unit of his men, two companies of whom -- a hundred hoplites -- are lost somewhat mysteriously.  As a consequence Tarsus -- yes of St. Paul fame, but currently the headquarters of the King of Cilicia -- does get sacked by the remaining force out of a sense of anger at their lost comrades. By the time Cyrus arrives, the king has withdrawn to a fortress; they meet and exchange a very large ransom (to Cyrus) for a set of 'honor gifts' (fine robes and golden fittings for horses, that sort of thing). Cyrus uses this and other monies to convince his mercenaries, who still haven't been told they are going to take on the Great King, to push on into Syria to the Euphrates.

You might ask about supply lines. Cyrus has been planning for this for some time, and he has his fleet meet him at a pair of twin fortresses in mutual opposition called the Gates of Syria. There are also merchants whose business model is to follow mercenary armies like this; soldiers, well paid and especially these by the time Cyrus is done bribing them, are expected usually to buy their own food and whatnot. However, Cyrus wants to push across the desert so he has made additional provision. 

A lot hinges on speed and surprise. Cyrus' force is chiefly made up of powerful units of infantry that can hold the ground against almost anything during the era; you will notice that the force that abandons its fortress and flees from them to warn the Great King has a reported 20-1 numerical advantage over them. Even so, better part of valor. That figure is probably inaccurate; the actual estimate of the big battle to come was roughly a 4-1 numerical advantage for the Persian Great King.

If you are reading the translation that I am, the translator dubiously chose to use 'miles' for the word representing distances, farsang. This is for the convenience of the reader, but the ancient term is interesting. The Greeks and Persians measure distances kind of like we Americans do, by using time. We say, "It's an hour and a half to the airport," which estimate does not deploy a unit of measure of distance at all. There's a rough equivalent because everyone was moving on foot, or usually a walking horse if traveling a long way; and most people in good shape who are used to it can get along about fifteen to twenty miles a day. That seems to be about the pace the army was moving on the way down to the Euphrates, although they take long rests in between stages -- days to as much as a month -- because they're pretending not to be advancing on the Great King and because it allows the army to assemble across several routes. Thus, the size of the force is concealed until its final assembly.

At the crossing of the Euphrates, Cyrus finally has to admit to his men that he's leading them against the Great King of Persia. They did not sign up for this, and are predictably upset. He has prepared a convincing argument, however, at least from the mercenary's perspective: about four months' pay as a bonus per man, in addition to their regular wages. On consideration, they elect to go with him. 

In the next section we will enter into what is present day Iraq, along the river Euphrates where I spent quite a bit of time myself.

Heady Days

A friend of mine just forwarded me a copy of that email sent to Federal employees. It's stunning reading. I'll give you one bit of it to get your heart going: 

If you choose to remain in your current position, we thank you for your renewed focus on serving the American people to the best of your abilities and look forward to working together as part of an improved federal workforce. At this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency but....

Emphasis added. Now you're talking.

Thoughts on the burgeoning revolution are everywhere. I don't think I'll try to add to them, not for now.

UPDATE: The 'office of gun violence prevention' is already gone.

The Year of the Snake

Today is the Lunar New Year. You can read about the zodiac system here. My wife and I were in China for the start of the Year of the Snake some 24 years ago today. It’s a highly festive occasion, the Lunar New Year. 

Fritz Leiber adopted “the Year of the [Animal]” for his fantasy world Nehwon, but he didn’t spell it all the way out.  Unlike Tolkien who would write volumes of backstory and create whole languages, Leiber preferred the illusion of depth. Each approach has its advantages, but Leiber’s was decidedly easier. Fantastic stories all the same. 

Heroic Literature and the Flu

I've been fighting the flu for a few days. For some reason, the experience made me realize a key difference between Arthurian and most other heroic fictions. If you read Robert E. Howard, for example, you will find his heroes suffering wounds, being enslaved, being thrown into dungeons to die, even being crucified; but they don't seem to get sick or suffer long periods of weakness from injury. 

Sir Thomas Malory's knights, by contrast, very often undergo periods of severe injury or illness that cause them to lose their prowess for a time. The story of Elaine of Astolat is driven by Lancelot getting seriously injured and needing to spend time in her care in order to recover. Often knights who are injured are cared for by religious men who were themselves formerly knights. It is a more complete picture of what a life of risk and hardship entails, and identifies ways in which good things can come out of such periods. (In Elaine's case, a very good thing might have happened if only Lancelot had not been so set upon Guinevere; instead it is of course a tragedy.) 

Often I have mused on how non-Arthurian fairy tales are very good models for how to live life up until adulthood; once you have married, you're just supposed to live 'happily ever after.' (Chesterton thought so too; two chapters of Orthodoxy are on the subject of fairy stories as a model for life.) Only the Arthurian stories seem to provide much help for those who aren't still coming of age, but are grown men expected to deal with the hardships and temptations of life. 

Hopefully I'll be mostly better in another day or two. Once I am, I'm hoping to start the winter reading/commentary that we usually do here. I think this year I will not do a philosophical work but one allied to philosophy: Xenophon's Anabasis, a heroic story that involves quite a bit of hardship and suffering. Xenophon was an Athenian who didn't really get along with the leadership of Athens, partly because of his friendship with Socrates, and partly because he preferred Sparta's ideals and ways. Anabasis is the story of his leadership of a group of Greek mercenaries, "The Ten Thousand," as they survive a losing battle in Persia and then have to walk all the way back to Greece. 

If any of you wish to join me, I'll hopefully be starting that series soon. (UPDATE: I will be reading the Rex Warner translation, because I have it on hand. The Gutenberg translation is by E. J. Chinnock. I doubt the differences will be major, but if we run into anything confusing the Greek is available to check which translation was most accurate.)

A young death

My young nephew, not quite 40, died suddenly this week. It was a shock and yet not completely unexpected, given the complicated state of his mental and physical health. He was struck down savagely by bipolar disease at the age of 18, a blow that was followed by some of the predictable physical catastrophes that strike people given to passing out in snowdrifts, as well as bolts from the blue like cancer. At his memorial service this Saturday in Philadelphia, I will read (or have someone read for me) this elegy:

I have an affectionate but long-distance perspective to offer on our departed loved one, Luke.

He would call or text occasionally, to offer a cheerful greeting or update, or sometimes to ask very simply and directly for help. I was never present for the crisis times and can only imagine how devastating they were. The picture his life presented to me was of a young man whose life was upended by illness, and who tried diligently for 20 years to build a nest in a hurricane. He never gave up his search for a loving home and meaningful work, and what more does any of us ever want?

God rest you, my young nephew: your illness and trouble are over now.

Bounty Hunting

You've got to set priorities in this kind of work. Is it really worth it?

It's not. I did it for a while in Savannah going on thirty years ago, and it was not at all worth it.

I do have a friend who is a bounty hunter currently though. She's the wife of the guy I go to for motorcycle repairs when it's more than I can handle. Locally the bounty hunting is run through the school board(!). It's a little complicated, but somehow bail bonds turned out to be a worthwhile investment for them. 

Happy Songs

James linked a piece by Sippican Cottage on happy songs. (Thanks to Tex, I knew of them from the Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys). He warns that "The possibility of a thousand-way tie is more likely than a Top Ten list."

Fair enough! But it strikes me as odd that there are no bluegrass songs on the list. It's the happiest music of all!

Well, as long as you don't pay close attention to the words.

Simplicity in Cooking

I gather from our fantasy movies that are roughly Medieval in setting that people think the Medievals were inclined to nothing but roasted meat -- spiced with salt if anything -- bread and beer. Fancy people preferred wine, but otherwise just ate better versions of the same thing: salt and pepper, white bread instead of brown. It was a simple time, rustic and basic.

Yet in fact: 

...it is certainly quite odd by modern culinary lights to cook a capon in red wine, cut it up, and then fry the pieces before serving them with the cooking broth reduced to a sauce flavored with spices, thickened with the liver and white meat pounded into a paste and with powdered almonds. Like other similar dishes, this one (Brouet of Capon, recipe 35) is a harmonious composition, where the flavor and texture of the meat itself are mingled with the aroma and savor of a vivid sauce, making a unified impression as the dish gives the tongue a momentary surprise with its supple crispness.... We confess that we have lost both the desire for such culinary intricacy and the very notion of it, and that it is no longer of interest. Yet as historians... it is our job to highlight the gap between today's gastronomic system and that which informed medieval culinary practices. 

-Redon, Sabban & Serventi, trans. Edward Schneider, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 22.

The use of advanced pre-cooking techniques to create flavor and differentiate texture is not wholly lost. When describing how to create a venison braise, for example, I advised browning the meat, then the vegetables in the grease used to brown the meat, then assembling them together and braising them to get a richer flavor than you would get from just putting it all in the pot with liquid alone. There are still some modern recipes with pre-cooking stages, some of which use fire as did the Medieval ones.

It is much less common, though. We tend to give our recipes variety by changing the ingredients instead: for lunch we will have venison, last night roast beef, perhaps chicken for dinner. At a time when there was less variety of ingredients and more time to devote to the exercise of cooking in the kitchen, these more sophisticated approaches made more sense. 

In any case our ancestors were much different from how we often imagine them as a culture. They were smarter, more sophisticated, and rather wiser than we often give them credit for having been. 

Shuttering FEMA

In NC, our new President suggests shuttering FEMA and just sending money to the states as necessary. 

That's only a very slight change from what is done now. For the most part, local responders are the front line -- we were the ones out the morning of Helene and for weeks afterwards -- with the state stepping in to provide support that the local organizations don't have. (For example, we have Swiftwater teams and rescuers -- I am one myself -- but the state has Swiftwater teams that have more equipment than we do locally, especially including boats.) The State governor declares a state of emergency, and that opens up a big funding window for local responders as well as increased ability for the National Guard to support us. FEMA's chief role is to coordinate providing additional Federal funding, and occasionally to provide personnel that mostly help fill out forms and verify the details so that money can flow. 

Their direct aid provision role is quite limited; I never once saw a FEMA employee doing anything, although I've heard there were some teams triaged to other areas. Other states, though, will also send resources across state borders to help (as in California now, where fire departments have deployed strike teams from as far away as, yes, North Carolina in support of local crews).

In general I'm always in favor of closing down parts of the Federal government, or government in general. Making things voluntary whenever we can, privatizing when we can't rely on volunteer resources alone, localizing when we can't privatize, driving things down to the lowest possible level is always what I like to see. Therefore, instinctively I like this idea.

It would require some combination of cutting red tape on all those forms and verification processes, and/or funding state/local employees to do the same stuff where tape can't get cut.

"As Equals"

Today the NYT ethicist asks the question, "What's the rule about looking at women in public?"

Glancing at someone in a public place is always permissible; there’s often a fleeting moment of mutual acknowledgment — perhaps a slight nod or smile — before both parties look away. This momentary connection is part of how we experience our shared social world. No doubt if you find the person attractive, your glance may well linger involuntarily for a moment. But prolonging that moment further can cross a line. We can’t control our initial notice of others; we can control our subsequent choices. I suspect your ‘‘quick’’ glance wasn’t so quick.

In public settings, it’s generally intrusive to display sexual interest. That it may sometimes be welcomed doesn’t change the situation. Yes, a brief friendly glance that produces a smile and a direct reciprocating look can mean you’re being invited to maintain eye contact. But if there’s any doubt, the unease caused by leering is bad enough that you should err on the side of averting your gaze. In your case, there normally should be doubt. Being aware of whatever shortcomings we may have in the skills of everyday life can guide us toward better practices. Just as people who know they have a poor sense of direction learn to check maps more often, someone who struggles to read social signals around looking would do well by being reserved and not risk making others uncomfortable. It’s a matter of taking the trouble to do what, for you, doesn’t come naturally, and adopting habits that respect everyone’s dignity.

When it comes to men looking at women, in particular, there’s a broader social context in which women often experience unwanted attention or feel unsafe. The sexual etiquette I’ve described allows men and women to enjoy public spaces as equals. 

Something weird is going on with these definitions of  'equality.' The other day we were talking about an assumption that women would need rights men don't have in order to have equality. Here we've got a rule that applies to men only -- though especially to men who 'have trouble reading social signals,' meaning unequally even among men -- which somehow make men and women 'equals' in public spaces.

In Iraq we were given similar advice: not to look at or acknowledge the presence of women at all. That was only a stronger version of this advice -- to err on the side of caution by looking away -- but it certainly wasn't effective at creating a more equal society. I gather that the ethicist thinks this is going to work better because the intent is now to avoid offending the women, as opposed to avoid creating an offense to which their male 'guardians' would be obligated to respond. It's nevertheless strange that 'the rule' in New York City, of all places, should so closely resemble the rules in Baghdad or Kuwait City.

Loving Big Brother

I was reminded of the haunting close to 1984 when reading this piece from the NYT about a woman who rejected the Presidential pardon she was given. 

A retired drug and alcohol counselor who lives in Boise, Idaho, she pleaded guilty in January 2022 to a misdemeanor offense for entering the Capitol during the riot and was sentenced to 60 days in prison and three years of probation.

She said she did not want a pardon.

“Absolutely not,” Ms. Hemphill said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s an insult to the Capitol Police, to the rule of law and to the nation. If I accept a pardon, I’m continuing their propaganda, their gaslighting and all their falsehoods they’re putting out there about Jan. 6.”

Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”

I'm not sure how fair my reaction is. On the one hand some of what happened on January 6th that year was genuinely bad and/or foolish behavior, for which it would be legitimate to feel sorry on reflection. One could consider this exactly the sort of rehabilitation that the system is supposed to produce (even if it rarely does).

On the other hand, the prosecutorial abuses we are now seeing come to light are stunning, fully enabled by DC judges and DC juries that are so hostile to Republicans, especially Trump supporters, that it calls into question whether it is even possible to hold a fair trial in that venue. The treatment of the prisoners, both before and after trial, is horrifying to see in America. Kurt Schlicter, a lawyer in Texas, has been making the argument that none of the trials were fair enough to be considered valid by our usual standards.

She got off fairly light, probably due to her age and sex, which is also arguably unfair but at least rationally defensible. I can see how she might want to put it all behind her; and her willingness to love big brother got her a glowing NYT profile, for whatever that's worth. I worry more about the role of therapy in bringing about this transformation than I do about the prison abuses, perhaps. The abused prisoner at least still maintains mental clarity about who is using power to dominate whom; perhaps my concern with that independence of thought is misplaced. Maybe it's health and not Stockholm syndrome encouraged and deepened by 'therapy' that she is displaying here. 

Perhaps.

Forgiveness

My Gutenberg project this week has been a biography of George M. MacDonald by his son Greville MacDonald. I've never been able to read the father's books, though I wanted to like them upon reading C.S. Lewis's raptures about "Lilith" and other stories. Lewis thought highly enough of MacDonald to make him the central teacher in "The Great Divorce," a favorite of mine. I'm going to try again with "The Princess and the Goblin." In the meantime, here is an excerpt from one of MacDonald's many letters to his wife, which made me see why Lewis was so devoted to the man:

I was preaching last Sunday about forgiveness, and I felt that not to forgive was just to send one to the hell of our little universe. Not to be forgiven and taken in by any human heart is the worst mishap that can befall. May I be taught a lesson hard to learn. You do not need it so deeply as I do--you only break out in thunder and lightning! I have a cold smile deep in my heart like a moth-eaten hole, when I feel really wronged....

Bambi to Burger

My mother bought us a quality meat grinder for Christmas that I’m finally getting to use tonight. It’s a real upgrade. If you are thinking about butchering your own venison or other game, or just want to buy in bulk and save on the butcher bill, I recommend it. 

Caption Contest

 There are a few images that come to mind.

"Angel Eyes"

"Mortal Kombat"

Perhaps some of you have clever thoughts, though? 

Model 1902

There's been a lot of talk about the dancing with 'a military sword' at the Inaugural ball. Since some of the regulars here are enthusiasts of the blade, I thought it worth pointing out that it was specifically a M1902 saber, currently in use by both the Army and the Air Force for all purposes for which swords are required. 

The Marine Corps uses two different swords, one for NCOs and another for officers. Vance just accepted one of the Army swords for the occasion, but he is entitled to his own on occasions when he might still wear the dress uniform. He elected civilian attire for this National Holiday as is appropriate for a Vice President. I have heard that NCOs in the Army can sometimes use the 1840 sword, but I have never seen it done.

“Ph.D.-Level”

Noticing this story about “Ph.D.-Level” AI, I have to assume that the phrase is similar to “Milspec.” I mean that it sounds more impressive the less you know about what it actually entails. 

See how effective faculty meetings are at achieving basic goals for a while, or spend time with actual military-spec equipment and supplies, and you get a different perspective. 

Sweeping Clemency

Gee, this might be shocking except that just earlier today…

But now it really isn’t, is it?

Scandalous Clemency

The last hours of the outgoing administration involved scandalous exercises of the pardon power. They are themselves demonstrations of the wickedness of the departing order. I suspect that there will be significant investigations into everyone pardoned, since there are crucial truths to uncover around each of them and they cannot now claim 5th Amendment protections. 

One defensible exercise was the clemency granted to Leonard Peltier. His conviction was always dubious, based on the testimony of the same FBI that was engaged in the COINTELPRO operations against the recently-mentioned MLK. The FBI hasn't just been bad in the last few years; this wannabe secret police has been bad since its foundation. Gun battles with them ought to be considered gently by juries, under the assumption that they probably deserved whatever resistance they provoked. Instead he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences and, eligible for parole since 1993, has been kept in harsh conditions amid regular beatings likely encouraged by the prison guards. 

Biden was typically cowardly here, not pardoning the one character on his list who might have merited a pardon. He just gave him clemency to "lifetime house arrest." What a disgrace.

UPDATE: More on Leonard Peltier’s case. 

A Big Day

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. He was a complex figure, much more than his simplified hagiography makes out, but he definitely did some good things as well as whatever bad things he may have done. 

In Mississippi and Alabama, it's also Robert E. Lee Day. Exactly the same sentence applies to that gentleman as to the one previously mentioned.

Also there's some other stuff going on.

It's still too cold here. 7 degrees this morning, windchill according to the National Weather Service down to twenty below. 

Tribute to a Shared Birthday

 

Whitey Morgan & the 78s

What took me to Asheville was that a great Outlaw Country band was playing at the local music hall. Tonight they’re playing in Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium. I don’t know why they’d come through this area to get there: I-40 is closed, and the route to Tennessee is far harder from Western North Carolina than once. 

The band has been recording and touring for 15 years now, and they’ve really matured in the last few. Their sound has deepened and sophisticated. I’ve heard that they spent some time with the last of the Waylors while Waylon’s old band was still alive, and learned how to make the rich sound that that band used to make in the ‘70s. Whether that’s true or not, they’ve now had time to fully integrate their approach. They really sounded good last night. 

They also had some kind words for the audience coming out to see them during such a hard time, and played multiple encore songs. 

In spite of the reputation of Outlaw acts and the promotional material promising a ‘rowdy’ show, it was a friendly crowd. A guy in a cowboy hat offered to buy me a beer. I thanked him and said I was ok. An hour or so later I walked to the bar, and another guy insisted on buying me a beer. Everyone was happy and there was no unpleasantness at all. 

The ERA and Abortion

Several of the articles about Biden’s (or more likely some junior Twitter staffer’s) declaration on the ERA held that it might somehow grant women a right to abortion. I have been trying to understand how this argument is supposed to work. 

My reproductive right (singular) as a man is that I have the right not to engender a pregnancy by forgoing sex. That’s the only right I have: no one may legally force me to breed against my will. Equality with that is already the law. 

As far as abortions go, I have no rights whatsoever. I have no right to demand one, should I engender a child I don’t want; I have no right to refuse one, should a child whom I desperately want be in danger of abortion from his mother. Women thinking the ERA will grant them a right to abortion surely don’t want equality with me on these points. Equality would mean no rights at all. 

Men can’t even terminate their legal duty to financially support an unwanted pregnancy, or the 18 years that follow. (Nor do I wish for them to do so; one ought to care for one’s children.) 

Here I finally found Senator Gillibrand making her version of the argument. 

“It’s the clearest pathway to challenge Dobbs’ holding that women in their reproductive years have no right to privacy, but arguably, men do,” she told POLITICO, referencing the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

There’s no male right to privacy in a court case alleging paternity. A man can’t tell the court that it’s none of their business if he fathered the child or not. Now in many states, a mother can abandon her child at certain places (often including fire departments) and be freed of all responsibility; every state has some version of this “safe haven” law. This does not apply to fathers who wish to be freed of their children.

It’s a little alarming that the main right this group seems to want is the right to kill unwanted children. However, I would like at least for everyone to understand that there is no parallel right being enjoyed by men. Equality with us means substantially fewer rights than women currently enjoy. 

Für Elise

Elise asked me for names of charity organizations still helping in western NC. I visited Asheville and Swannanoah and checked around. Most of the local churches did a big thing before Christmas, and are currently paused because they got hit by the hurricane too. However, Baptists on Mission still has a big operation going here. 

Meanwhile, Savage Freedoms is the group that was operating out of the Harley Dealer running helicopter operations. They are the go-to local group. 

That Harley dealer just reopened after 12 weeks of mud removal and repair. I went by there to ask the question about who was leading operations. SF is led by one of their customers, former Special Forces, and mostly comprises their customer base. 

Great people. They gave us a tour of everything after I explained that we were Jackson County firefighters who were looking for ways to help them. They have made a space for a sister shop from Chimney Rock, which was completely destroyed, on their back porch enclosure. I bought some stuff from them. 

Those seem to be the top two right now. 

Asheville is in tough shape. Swannanoah is worse. Not only the River Arts District but also the Biltmore village was totally destroyed. Giant piles of debris and mud everywhere. Most of the roads are open now, even if there’s no longer anything to service, but some near the river still aren’t. 

Almost all the fast food places are closed because of the water boiling order. Few restaurants are open except the ones with real kitchens so they can just boil water. Lots of businesses are badly damaged and may never reopen. 

We Don't Task By Email

When I was in Iraq, periodically somebody at higher headquarters would send an email down and then act offended when the unit in the field didn't get right on it as if it had been an order. Military orders between units follow a formal procedure, and are issued (usually as a 'FRAGO,' or 'fragmentary order' that updates a larger OPORD, or 'operations order') according to formal processes. So issued by the higher headquarters' operations officer, and signed by the commanding officer of that unit, it is a legally binding order that must be obeyed. An email from some staff officer to someone at a subordinate unit is not a legally binding order. Thus, occasionally some overeager staff dude would have to be reminded that "We don't task by email." 

Someone needs to explain to Biden's staff that X.com is not a constitutional organ.

There are two processes for amending the Constitution, and the office of the President has no role in either of them. The Archivist who records the changes does work for the Executive branch, but their job is only to record changes proposed by Congress and ratified by the states, or else proposed and ratified by the states alone. The President's opinion, however expressed, is entirely irrelevant to this process. 

UPDATE: To whit.

Asheville Hungers for Money

Buncombe County is considering that most hateful of things to a government, cutting spending. What could drive such a drastic step?

Much of the estimated shortfall, which ranges from $15.1 million to $25.7 million, is tied to reduced sales tax revenue and unpaid property taxes. While state law doesn't allow property tax waivers due to natural disasters, the collection rate as of Jan. 13 was nearly 1% lower at the same time last year.

Anticipating that some property owners who sustained damage to their property will have difficulty paying their tax bill, paired with increased unemployment, the county is projecting property tax revenue to fall by 2-2.5% this year, resulting in a $4.8 million to $6.5 million loss. Property tax is the largest revenue stream for the county.... 

In November, Buncombe County’s Tourism Development Authority estimated that the county would see a 70% decline in tourism in the last quarter of 2024. For businesses, that could mean a $584 million loss in revenue, the Citizen Times previously reported.

The county is also projecting to receive up to $11.6 million less from the state and federal government, permitting and licensing, and other services like EMS fees.

Emphasis added. 

I've been amazed by the tone of the journalism and remarks from government officials about the property taxes. 'You just owe us the money; it doesn't matter if you lost everything. It's the law! You've got to magic that money out of thin air for us, even though the property that your wealth was based upon was destroyed. We don't care that you can't even borrow against it because it all washed away. We recognize that you may "have difficulty" paying us given that your life savings was destroyed, but by thunder we intend to get it. We passed a law!'

Meanwhile, note that the state and federal inputs are actually expected to decline by eight figures this year. It's not just that storm aid isn't coming (not to North Carolina; California is slated to get lots). The year-over-year inputs are being sharply reduced.

Again, though, this is ultimately for the good. Cutting government spending will be good for Asheville, as it will be for everywhere where we manage to get government spending cuts. A lot of it is public-sector salaries and hiring, which are inflated. They're also looking at the public school system, which really ought to be eliminated entirely and replaced with private/voucher systems. The public education system, like the prison system, has at this point become positively harmful to the civilization it purports to support. We'll be better off the more thoroughgoing the reform finally turns out to be. 

Stoicism without Attribution

It's common for great ideas to be stolen -- Quentin Tarantino admits that he rather wantonly stole from earlier filmmakers in his work. One rarely sees it done so brazenly as with this "new" book. It's just Epictetus, for those of you who remember us going through that in 2022. It's not even all of Epictetus, just one core insight of his popularized with contemporary stories. 

People are getting tattoos with her book title. The hostess is swooning. It's an amazing display of a sentimental response to a plagiarism that the journalists and their audiences are too ignorant to recognize. 

"Aristotle's Masterpiece"

Long-suffering readers know that I have spent a lot of time with Aristotle's works, which I integrate regularly into analysis of contemporary events. How strange for me to discover that there was a hugely popular work attributed to Aristotle, republished for centuries, which I had never heard of until this morning. 

Books explicitly designed for sexual education also existed in the period [i.e. Regency England]. One well-known work was the grandiosely titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, first published in 1648 but regularly revised and reprinted throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. (No connection to the ancient Greek philosopher is supported by the historical record.) The manual includes descriptions and diagrams of sexual anatomy, including an explanation of the clitoris as crucial to female pleasure.... Though Aristotle’s Masterpiece and its later editions were often published anonymously, print runs were high and the book sold extremely well — even when the medical information therein was considerably out of date.

One of the most consequential events in theology as a branch of philosophy followed a similar misattribution: Plotinus' work was translated into Arabic under the title "the Theology of Aristotle." In fact the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian metaphysics weren't even especially compatible, but the misattribution caused the Islamic philosopher Avicenna to spend a decade or so developing a system that harmonized them. This system was extremely helpful to later Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, who wanted to incorporate rediscovered Aristotelian natural philosophy (i.e. science) into a Christian intellectual world that had strong Neoplatonic foundations thanks to some early saints. To this day, much of Catholic theology rests on Avicenna's work as reinterpreted by Aquinas and others. 

It's not clear that this other work had a similarly titanic effect. Hopefully it improved some marriages, however, which is not a small thing for human happiness. 

Good Girls

As the days grow longer again, the flock has resumed laying. They’re keeping me stocked up with protein including all the great amino acids. 

Orthosphere on Prison

Since it was a topic so recently, this is an amusing additional note:

In his 1896 biennial report to the Texas Legislature, the Superintendent of the State Penitentiary detailed the previous employment of the 4,446 convicts under his care.*  I was interested to note that 9 of these jailbirds had been “ministers of the gospel,” which placed them on par with “barkeepers” (also 9), but well below “cigar makers” (3), “cowboys” (1), “prostitutes” (1), and even “journalists” (2).

I would guess that Texas was then home to roughly the same number of barkeepers and ministers of the gospel, so we may suppose that the average moral quality of the men in these two professions was about the same.  I can report, however, that the category “ministers of the gospel” came off better than that sump of turpitude and iniquity, the category of “school teachers.”  Although statewide roughly equal in number to the ministers of the Gospel, pedagogues were incarcerated at nearly double their rate (17 total).

"Firefighters" wasn't a profession then, but it's pretty analogous to cowboying in many respects -- at least wildland firefighting like what is being discussed below, which has a lot of being outside, clearing land, and cutting fire breaks. Good for the soul, partly because it's real work for the body.

Cease-Fire in Gaza

Whether there is war or peace in Israel is none of my concern, although I have hospitality bonds with some Israelis that mean that I ought to be on their side if they are attacked and forced to defend themselves. The coming of the ceasefire announced yesterday surprised me a bit, however, in spite of the fact that our own incoming President was pushing for one rather strongly. It doesn't really make strategic sense for Israel; it does for Hamas, but why would anyone give a deadly enemy such relief? 

Sun Tzu says -- wisely enough -- generally to leave a road for your enemy to retreat upon, so you don't have to fight to the last man. But Hamas isn't going anywhere. This was always going to be a fight on Sun Tzu's "death ground." Structurally the conflict sounds like "enclosed ground," but the fact that no retreat is possible or contemplated shows the truth of the conflict that was forced upon Israel. 

It may be that peace is earnestly desired, even by many right-leaning Israelis, because of the pain of war. The numbers still don't come close to supporting the harsh language used against Israel, by the way: even by very Palestine-friendly estimates, we are under 50,000 dead in a year and a half of intense urban warfare. That's still less than one percent of the population of the Palestinian territories (0.891%), and about one-third-of-one-percent of Palestinians total (0.338%). Talk about 'genocide' remains irrational nonsense; if Israel had been set upon killing as many as possible, it could have posted much bigger numbers. It's a measure of how little they wanted to kill innocents that such intense fighting in a densely populated area has resulted in so few casualties -- cf. US efforts in the battle of Mosul, where the numbers there are blurry but run as high as 33,000 enemy/civilian dead (to stick with the 'numbers most favored by our opponents' metric used with the Gaza conflict) in only half a year.

There are two distinct reactions I have noticed from my Israeli friends. One set is disappointed, but blames their own leadership rather than Trump: they feel betrayed by a leadership that never really wanted to finish Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but always wanted to find some way to return control of Gaza to them. The other set is quite happy, believing that this will represent an end to the hostages' suffering (those still alive, in any case) and a potential for a return to stability. This set views Trump very positively, and is currently engaged in sending symbolic gifts to Mar-a-Lago. 

It's their business, but I don't think any peace can last. That's their business, too. 

A Barrage of Dodged Bullets

Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.

Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade.... an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.

Imagine the inflation associated with this titanic flood of Federal spending. What we got was bad enough. Your dollar wouldn't have been worth anything if all that planned print-money spending had been dropped into the market.

When I think of the 'Build Back Better' slogan, I always remember this video.

This wasn't an American agenda from an American president targeting an American Congress, it was a wildly international agenda. Its supporting actors were drawn from that crowd for whom American and Western decline was baked into the plan; building back 'better' was not meant to make any of our lives better, not farmers or machinists in American small towns or small-business owners in American suburbs. It was meant for them, another chance to extract wealth from the American people for service to these international elites. 

In the old days we wouldn't have noticed because each of their televised addressed would have been delivered to a carefully segmented market. Only now can we begin to see how networked the mechanisms of control really are.

And yet they failed, largely, in spite of the titanic efforts of 2020 and the certain knowledge that this could easily be the last chance. It's amazing to think.

When reforms work the way they're supposed to

De Santis gets a law passed to require audits of teachers unions. Jacksonville union officials retire abruptly. So at least they got to "spend more time with their family" before the indictments came down for millions of dollars of embezzlement.

Rehabilitation through Firefighting

Participating in fighting the California fires are a number of volunteer prisoners. California pays them a pittance of under three dollars a day for such volunteers -- you may recall the debate about then-AG Harris keeping people incarcerated beyond the end of their sentences so she could use them on firefighting duty for almost nothing. Still, volunteer firefighters often aren't paid at all, and they do obtain some advantages by participating.

California has fixed one bad thing about this program, which is that after release the prisoners weren't eligible for employment as firefighters because of their criminal record. That's no longer true: volunteering for this program now lets you earn credits towards early release, and participate in a program that would qualify you to join local, state, and Federal wildland firefighting crews. 

Readers know that I think our approach to crimefighting via prison is a proven failure that should be replaced top-to-bottom in a way that eliminates prison. (Readers who have forgotten the details may wonder how; I think we should replace it with a combination of fines, labor like show-up-and-clean-the-roads crews, corporal punishments, and a much larger use of capital punishment for cases where locking people up for decades or longer currently seems rational to juries.) Prison's promise of rehabilitation has empirically failed in most cases, and it causes us to employ a scandalous number of our citizens as prison guards. A free society shouldn't detail a lot of its citizenry to keeping even more of its citizenry unfree. 

Nevertheless, here at least is an attempt to do something that helps the people in jail as well as the community at large. There's at least a chance that it might work sometimes. 

A Liberal Struggles

Michael Ignatieff at the Washington Post is another who can plainly see the damage that he and his have caused. He's willing to admit it and begin to struggle with it. 

Beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs were stripped out and shipped overseas. Those of us who got the credentials to enter the professional classes did well, but plenty of our fellow citizens fell behind. We didn’t notice this in time, and our failure opened up a chasm between who we were, what we believed and the people we represented. We kept offering “equality of opportunity,” a chance for the credentialed few to enter the professional elite, without tackling capitalism’s remorseless distribution of economic disadvantage itself.

It is not merely an ungenerous assumption but a declared fact in the piece that all this self-reflection is brought about by the loss of power. It's good to see and healthy, but it is prompted by the loss of the power to control other people's lives, and prompted by a desire to regain that power.  

Still, it isn't only the easy bugbear of 'capitalism' that he is suddenly willing to challenge. It is diversity and identity as well.

In the meantime, we lament the “identity politics” of our populist and authoritarian competitors, when it would be more honest to admit that identity is where all political belief actually comes from, including our own. My identity — charter member of the White professional classes of Canada — defined my liberalism. What the liberal critique of identity politics does get right, though, we owe to our much-maligned individualism. Identity is not destiny....

We were naive about the nature of this problem [of increasing diversity], preferring to believe that all reasonable human beings would embrace a revolution of inclusion, when the reality was that our generation had upended the entire social order, and even our own place in it. Diversity — of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and class — was a virtue in comparison to the dire cantonment of peoples in silos of exclusion, but liberals turned diversity into an ideology. Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program of invigilation of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect.

Credentialed White people of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could invite recruits of color into our ranks without ever feeling that our own elite status was being challenged. We didn’t seem to notice that nonelite White people were threatened, even betrayed, by the new multiracial order. Faced with what we thought was White racism and sexism, when it was mostly fear, we began promulgating codes of speech and conduct to impose diversity as a new cultural norm.... Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bullshit detectors and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes. 

Tyranny, in other words, imposed with a clean conscience because they thought it was the best thing for everybody. A tyranny gladly accepted even over one's own thoughts, even when the ideas being presented were -- as the author himself says -- fairly obvious bullshit.

We began promoting arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins or backstory (oppression, discrimination, history of family violence) of the person uttering them. The value that we placed on diversity and inclusion led us by stages to jettison a care for truth itself. We ended up compromising the very epistemological privilege that had provided us with such unending self-satisfaction.

Again, a fairly healthy process even if it is badly motivated. It doesn't approach the questions that are of increasing interest to me, which is whether or not power itself is the problem -- a thing never to be trusted to anyone, however grand their ideas and serious their self-reflection, but always to be distributed as widely as possible to avoid the evils of its concentration. It is better that power should be placed in the hands of the virtuous, if it must be placed in any hands at all; but it might be better still to prevent such concentrations. 

Few men are good enough to rule themselves, and perhaps none fit to rule others; even this man admits to serious errors and misjudgments affecting the whole of society, which he and they carried on with until the wheels came off. Only now does he pause and reflect, and only for the purpose of getting the power back.