An Alternative Look at Student Loans

The White House says it is going to go aggressively after student loans in default. He's also planning on resumption of payments, and cancelation of some of the easier-term payment plans. 

Student loans are an effective culture war tool for the President, because his support tends to be strongest with those who have less education. If you've been to graduate school, the odds that you will support him were much smaller than they are for the general public in all three of his elections.

When I hear Republicans talking about this, they tend to describe it in terms of fairness: you took a loan, you ought to pay it back in full (with interest). When I hear Democrats talking about it, they also talk in terms of fairness: the government made a deal with the students that included loan forgiveness at some point (usually 20 years, sometimes 10 for those in public service jobs), and it's not fair to revoke that deal now.

There's an alternative way of looking at the problem that I haven't heard people discussing. The government has essentially inflated these debts twice. It did so first by making student loans the main way of paying for college, so that the costs soared as the colleges could add on fees and higher tuition knowing that Uncle Sam would foot the bill. That's not the fault of anyone who wanted an education, but it is a fact that they had to deal with. 

Then, since the 1990s but especially under President Obama, the government made deals on how much former students had to pay that caused their loans to increase again. If you were in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program and also Income Based Repayment, you weren't paying enough every month to pay off the debt in the 10 years it would take for you to get to forgiveness. Therefore, your loan balance continued to grow. You could have chosen a more expensive option, but since the government was promising to forgive the debt, why should you take money out of your family's pocket to do so? You were keeping up your end of the deal the government had made with you.

As a result of the first inflation, it now costs almost thirty times as much to go to college as it did in the 1970s. As a result of the second, people who owed X amount now may owe 2X as a consequence of keeping faith with the government. Assuming you relied on loans to go to college as many do X was, thus, thirty times what it used to be, and now is sixty times what it was. 100% of that vast increase in debt is due to government action, the largest part of which no one could escape except by virtue of being born earlier than they were. 

The government is basically altering the deal with people after the fact, mostly in order to punish them for political opinions. Likewise, Biden's ham-handed and failed attempts at student loan forgiveness were mostly to reward people for their political opinions. 

That's not really a legitimate function of government. It's certainly not fairness, no matter how you look at it. It's more like extortion in the one case and bribery in the other; criminal behavior in either case, when it isn't being done by the government. 

In Praise of my Father

Today was my father’s birthday. Because of the damnable algorithms I have been seeing all day ads for products that you should buy to capture your father’s story before it’s gone. 

Well, it’s gone, you bastards. He told me so many stories so many times that I thought I could never forget them, but I have. 

He was the best man I ever met, and far better than I could ever relate. I cannot imagine that he needs my prayers nor yours, but pray for him anyway, as you might pray for me. I definitely need your prayers. 

Not Quite, Doc

You'd think an expert opinion might indeed be forthcoming from a man with these qualifications: 

John D. Bessler is a law professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law, an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center and a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School’s Human Rights Center.

I wanted to agree with him, because as you know I also have 8th Amendment concerns about Trump and especially his stated intention to deliver American citizens to foreign prisons. However, the professor's logic doesn't work.

The Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment prohibits this course of action. White House lawyers should read the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Trop v. Dulles. The court barred the government from rendering U.S. citizens stateless, which is similar to what Trump is threatening to do if Americans are imprisoned abroad.

During World War II, Albert Trop, an American citizen, was serving as a U.S. Army private in Morocco. He escaped a stockade and was taken into custody the next day and court-martialed. Convicted of desertion, he was sentenced to three years of hard labor, forfeiture of pay and a dishonorable discharge. When Trop applied in 1952 for a passport, his application was denied on the ground that, under the Nationality Act of 1940, he had lost his U.S. citizenship by virtue of his conviction.

In Trop, the Supreme Court held that denationalization as a punishment is a violation of the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Eighth Amendment....The Trop case makes clear that any effort to incarcerate U.S. citizens abroad would be an Eighth Amendment violation. Were that to happen, people would — as a practical matter — be deprived of their fundamental constitutional rights. 

Apparently the professor missed the part of his own story in which Trop was incarcerated in Morocco. That wasn't an issue for the court. They just said that he couldn't be denaturalized. Trump hasn't proposed denaturalizing American citizens, just having them incarcerated outside the territorial USA. Trop was so incarcerated himself, presumably by the US Army but there's no reason the prison couldn't be run by foreign contractors instead of American soldiers or prison guards.

Likewise here: 

The case of Kilmar Abrego García, an immigrant and longtime Maryland resident who the Trump administration admitted in court was sent in error to El Salvador, illustrates the threat. The Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate García’s return, but it has resisted taking action. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III — a Reagan appointee — warned in his Fourth Circuit order on April 17 that “the government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”

The government’s claim that nothing can be done for García now that he’s out of U.S. custody, Wilkinson observed, “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” 

That's surprisingly irrelevant to the case of Trump doing the same thing to American citizens. The reason they have no authority to do anything about Garcia is that he is a Salvadoran citizen, in El Salvador, under the control of his own lawful government. An American citizen abroad continues to enjoy US protection (and, in fairness to Trump, he has been pretty energetic about getting US citizens out of foreign prisons during his tenure). Whereas the US has no lawful power to demand El Salvador do much of anything for its own citizens, the US has a keen interest in protecting American citizens abroad.

I would like to believe that this is forbidden by the Constitution and specifically by the 8th Amendment, but this is not a good set of arguments for that being the case. I think the conditions in CECOT plainly violate the 8th Amendment, and that it shouldn't be legal to send Americans there under any circumstances. I wouldn't want to send them even to a nicer and more humane prison in El Salvador (or anywhere else). 

Saw That Coming

"Tesla, take me somewhere I've never been before."

Car's got jokes.

The Times Are A'Changing

PJM points out that comedian Larry David's mockery of Trump-as-Adolf doesn't line up beautifully with their actual coverage of Adolf back when he was a going concern. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning “journalist” Anne O’Hare McCormick traveled to Berlin to become the first reporter from an American news outlet to interview the new chancellor, and she turned out to be an intriguing choice for the Times editors to make to conduct this interview, for she appears to have been something of a Hitler fan. In the presence of this man whose name has become today synonymous with evil, she was decidedly starry-eyed... Oh, the Führer’s eyes! “His eyes,” she told the world, “are almost the color of the blue larkspur in a vase behind him, curiously childlike and candid. He appears untired and unworried. His voice is as quiet as his black tie and his double-breasted black suit.”

Hitler speaks “slowly and solemnly but when he smiles—and he smiled frequently in the course of the interview—and especially when he loses himself and forgets his listener in a flood of speech, it’s easy to see how he sways multitudes.” What’s more, “Herr Hitler has the sensitive hand of the artist.” He tells McCormick coyly: “Ah! Women! Why, women have always been among my stanchest [sic] supporters. They feel that my victory is their victory.”

By coincidence, the history I am currently reading contains a similar off-key note from the NYT. When WWI broke out -- I not II -- the NYT loved the new Espionage Act and its crackdown on free speech, especially speech by recent immigrants with radical views. They liked the draft too:

Powerful New Yorkers viewed [Federal law enforcement agencies] as allies in their effort to turn the war into a moment of broader social reckonings. The New York Times welcomed the arrival of the military draft as "a long and sorely needed means of disciplining a certain insolent foreign element in this nation." [Willrich, Anarchy, 190]

On the one hand, I suppose it would be a lot to ask of an institution to remain perfectly consistent over a hundred years of change such as we've experienced. Still, it's interesting to see that they took a very Trumpian position a hundred years ago, or even in Adolf's day. 

On the other hand, they do show perfect consistency in wanting to use Federal agencies to force the rest of the country into line with their views. "Disciplining a certain insolent... element in this nation" is one thing they've been clear supporters of right down the line. 

Whiskey before Breakfast

 

Remarkable what one can do with junk.

The Controversial Monument

I mentioned this the other day, but on the assumption that it will probably be defaced or destroyed, I went and took some photos of it for history's sake. 

The local town is not exactly the right place for such sentiments anymore, although it was rededicated in 1996, which is surprisingly late. These days it's a quite blue town.

A Beatles and Grateful Dead-themed restaurant side-by-side on Main Street.

A typical house with Ukraine flag replacing the American one, anti-Trump/Musk signage, muticultural multicolored sign, and Peace Sign.

Probably the local college kids will just spraypaint it over and over until the county gets tired of having to pay to clean it and arranges for it to be moved. But these days, you never know. The Georgia Guidestones got the dynamite stick, after all. 

Birth Control vs. Women's Suffrage

So, I am reading Michael Willrich's, AMERICAN ANARCHY: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books Perseus, 2023) which I mentioned recently. I am not ready to review it in full yet, but it has indeed been extremely enlightening. Not about the philosophy; the author doesn't really care about the ideas, and makes no attempt to elucidate them. He's a historian, not a philosopher, but he takes his part seriously -- that is, getting the facts straight and presenting them honestly.

One subset of the book that I have just finished was the way in which birth control arguments developed independently from the women's suffrage movement. I was quite surprised by this, as in my lifetime and my parents' as well the two things were presented as part of the same general feminist struggle for additional rights for women. 

That was not true at the beginning, however. Women's suffrage was a comfortably middle-class issue, with some wealthy women also quite engaged in it. Birth control was an anarchist movement, attempting to help poorer workers deal with the burden of large families. Richer women didn't have a problem with obtaining birth control, because their private physicians could prescribe it under existing laws. 

The obscenity laws that forbade even discussing or printing materials about birth control were protected first and foremost by the churches' influence on society. Anarchists wanted to reduce the amount of religious law affecting private conduct. The Suffrage movement, meanwhile, had been joined at the hip from the beginning with the Temperance movement, an intensely religious movement to drive out the demon alcohol from society -- which the anarchists also did not want, many of them being Germans and Italians, whose cultures were built around beer and wine respectively. 

The same class distinctions turned up in Prohibition as in birth control, in fact: even during the period of Prohibition, the 18th Amendment which was ratified just a year before the 19th Amendment, those same private physicians could prescribe you whiskey. The rich were omitted from both the obscenity laws and the anti-drinking laws through the same back door. 

Likewise, Suffrage was successful because it was an anti-immigrant move -- more men than women had migrated in the 19th century and early 20th century (as indeed also today), so giving women the vote was plausible to a lot of older American men (the ones who voted it in) because it diluted the migrant vote by more or less doubling the old American vote. Just as Prohibition was anti-immigrant, so too Suffrage in its way. 

So these things really didn't belong to the same 'feminist' movement at all, not at first. They were oppositional drives by women of quite different classes and mostly different ethnicities. 

What brought them together, you may be amused to learn, was a trial of 'Queen of Anarchists' Emma Goldman for passing contraception pamphlets. At her conviction, one member of the three judge panel (all male, of course) foolishly remarked not only that her pamphlets were obscene, but that he thought that the women who kept asking for 'equal votes' could do a lot more good by encouraging women to have more children instead.

That one remark, widely reported, incensed the wealthy women so much that birth control very quickly became taken up by the Suffrage movement as well. They were successful in getting birth control laws overturned well before getting either of their real desiderata, Prohibition or Suffrage. 

The rest is history. 

UPDATE: I wondered how Wikipedia told the same story, and they emphasize mostly different things. They suggest the movement started in 1914, which actually isn't the case according to Willrich's book, which mentions several predecessors among the anarchist movement dating into the 19th century. It also plays up Margret Sanger, who fled the country to avoid prosecution. Her husband ended up taking the rap for her after some police entrapment around his wife's work. 

Sanger and Goldman are reported by Willrich to have been increasingly antagonistic to each other over these issues. Sanger was one of the upper class women, younger and less famous than Goldman but more well-connected socially. She initially favored birth control over abortion, on the correct grounds that abortion necessarily involves taking life no matter how early it is done; but we all know how her organization turned out in the end. 

Yeah, You Wouldn't Like My Clothes Either

A writer for the NYT and Esquire decides that it's very important to detail how SECDEF Hegseth doesn't dress like one of the elite.

250th Anniversary

As it was Holy Saturday, I thought that should take precedence, but it's a good time to remember these things. I'm looking forward to the 250th celebrations.

Hoplophobia

 A good insight here, but coupled with a lot of irrational fear of weapons.

The good:

[E]very time we build a new tool of state power — every time we cheer on its use against our enemies — we increase the chances it will be turned around and used against us. And each time it happens, people act surprised.

That’s where we are now, again. President Trump is openly using the machinery of the federal government to prosecute political enemies. He wants to “root out” the deep state, deport migrants unilaterally and deploy the military on U.S. soil. He has made no secret of it.

Liberals see this and panic. They’re right to be alarmed — but they’re wrong to treat this as something new. What they’re witnessing isn’t the sudden collapse of American democracy. It is the logical consequence of decades spent building and normalizing a government that increasingly operates with few real limits.

This didn’t start with Trump. Many of the very tools Trump wants to wield were built with bipartisan support. The post-9/11 security state — with its surveillance dragnet, indefinite detention, “black sites” and bloated executive authority — was cheered on by both parties in the name of fighting terror.

President Barack Obama didn’t dismantle that machinery — he streamlined it. He claimed the right to kill U.S. citizens abroad without trial, used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers and expanded domestic counterterrorism. He helped perfect the arsenal that Trump would later inherit.

It was the left, not the right, that normalized censoring disfavored online speech during the pandemic, often using intelligence-linked partners to do so. It was establishment liberals who applauded when the FBI investigated Trump-world operatives — not on the basis of principle, but because they liked the target.

The bad:

There’s a well-known finding in psychology called the “weapons effect.” It describes how the mere presence of a weapon increases the likelihood that it will be used — not just by hardened criminals or soldiers in combat but by anyone, in ordinary settings, even and especially in the home. The deadly object creates a condition of heightened possibility. Violence moves closer to the realm of the likely.

We rarely admit that this applies to government.

As I remarked at AVI's place, this is really a logical deduction rather than a 'finding in psychology.' A weapon that doesn't exist has a zero probability of being used. A weapon that does exist has a non-zero probability. Even if it's very low, logic dictates that the presence of a weapon makes it more likely that one will be used than if one is not present.

However, it wasn't just a logical error. He expands on this later in ways he would have been wiser to leave out.

The ugly:

Cultural neuroscience tells us that environments shape behavior more than we realize. The tools we surround ourselves with — whether in a home or in a bureaucracy — subtly shape what we think is possible. In a household with a loaded firearm, the gun doesn’t just sit there. Its presence hovers. In moments of anger, fear, confusion or desperation, it calls to be used.

"Cultural neuroscience"? Cultures do not have neurons, so he must mean a form of actual neuroscience that likes to talk about culture and its effects. 

This gun-fear is irrational, however. I have a revolver that hangs from my bedpost in a gun belt. It's been there for decades. I check it nightly, clean it regularly, but otherwise it really does just sit there in the holster. It doesn't have a 'presence' to 'hover.' It never 'calls' to me or to anyone else. This kind of talk is senseless. 

Still, the good part is really pretty good. It would have perhaps been better to use Chekhov's Gun as the metaphor, rather than reaching for 'psychology and cultural neuroscience.' In a drama -- which politics is, among other things that it is -- guns that are introduced or even displayed are usually used. I once saw a Roy Rogers film with a rifle that hung on the wall the whole movie without anyone using it for anything; I can remember how strange that seemed in a movie, even though it's exactly what I was just describing as the real fact of my own home.

The state is a kind of weapon, or a set of weapons, which are designed to be used chiefly against us. And that's something to remember when Trump is doing it, too: an excellent reason to stand firm against his police-state impulses is that what goes around comes around. Well, it's been around and it's come around again, but the cycle doesn't stop with him.

Senses of Humor

Out in Montana, some local police came up with a game.

The secret game came to light Thursday, when Bozeman Police Chief Jim Veltkamp held a press conference to reveal details about the game. In his statement to the press, Veltkamp insisted the rights of those stopped by BPD were not violated as part of the game. 

Veltkamp said officers, “Were engaged in a bingo competition where success in the game hinged on whether they engaged in actions listed on the bingo card.”

“It did look like your standard bingo card,” added Veltkamp. “They filled in squares of things they wanted to see happen or have happened in order to check off that box in the bingo card.”

Other categories included “FOOT PURSUIT FOR ARRESTABLE OFFENSE” and “APPLY TQ OR CHEST SEAL,” referring to the use of a tourniquet or sealing wounds to a person’s torso to stop blood loss. 

“One of those was to do a search warrant on a car,” said Veltkamp. “Which in and of itself, that is part of their duties. The concern is if they manipulated anything in order to be able to search a car.”

It took two and half months for the BPD, the Bozeman City Attorney's Office and the Gallatin County Attorney's Office to release information about the game. 

At the press conference held at the Bozeman Public Safety Center, Veltkamp said the game went on for 12 days until someone alerted command staff, who shut down the game.

I get the concern that improper searches or arrests might have been motivated by the desire to check off a bingo block. However, I have to say that the game sounds like it was probably just good fun. I could easily see a Firefighter or EMS version of this (especially since some of the things overlap -- "Apply Successful CPR" or "TQ" for example). 

It would never be permitted, just as the police had to cancel this one as soon as leadership learned about it. The problem is that members of the public do not always share the dark sense of humor that tends to develop in public safety. The hardest I usually ever laugh is often on EMS Continuing Education training night, which our various EMTs and Paramedics have to take regularly and which is helpful for me even though I don't require it. You need a sense of humor to confront injury, sickness, and death on a regular basis. It's good for them to laugh. It helps them help others.

It does hurt people's feelings, though, so you have to keep it behind closed doors. 

James' New Story

As you may also have seen at his blog or AVI's, James has published a new story in a collection called Magic Malfunction. I've just ordered a copy and so haven't read it yet, but I can't imagine that at least his part of it won't be good. 

When to Start Killing

Unlike most respondents to this Substack post, which you've probably all read before now, I don't have a problem with it in principle. America was founded by revolutionary violence, and the logic of the Declaration of Independence is eternal. It is not madness to ask when it might be time to do what Washington himself did. The current administration is in fact destroying a lot of the government, which is what I like about it but is definitely offensive to those for whom that bureaucracy represents a set of desired goods. 

Given the intense feelings on the left against the Trump administration it is probably healthy for them to have a conversation about what their terms are. I don't think it's unreasonable at all for them to discuss where they draw the line. 

And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice. 

That's actually pretty close to what Jefferson wrote.

...that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends [of securing the natural rights of the people], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. 

Some of the terms show a lack of understanding of the present moment: censorship of political opponents justifies a revolution, like what the Biden administration did so emphatically using cut-outs with NGOs, academia, and foreign governments? Fraud in the electoral process, like in 2020? Jailing political adversaries, like the current President who was hit with 34 'felonies' based on paperwork errors or his supporters who protested excessively on that infamous January 6th? Ignores the will of Congress, like the Biden ATF that decided it could just issue 'final rules' that rewrote gun control laws without Congressional input? 

This is typical, however: it is similar to how college-educated conservatives understand the liberal position quite well, since all their educators explained it to them at length, but the liberals often don't have any visibility on right-wing arguments at all. It reminds me especially of the Gay Marriage debate before SCOTUS, in which the position of Justice Kennedy was that it just wasn't possible to have a rational argument opposing gay marriage -- even though Immanuel Kant, that most reason-oriented of philosophers, had constructed one in his Metaphysics of Morals. You don't have to agree with it; I don't agree with it. To say it wasn't possible to construct one is just ignorance. I imagine here too this young man doesn't know what he doesn't know. 

Some of his terms are reasonable, though. I would expect a reaction perhaps to include revolutionary violence if the President were to cancel the elections and attempt to stay in office past his term. I trust that won't happen, but if it did happen I could definitely understand taking up arms. 

In Pace Requiescat, Pope Francis I

I admired his courage; he set an early standard of getting out from behind the bulletproof glass to be among his people. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.

We understand that God is not a wish fulfillment machine, but it is still a little surprising to see a public prayer so emphatically fail. I trust that the Lord knows best. 

All We Know

A tale of Sam Houston:

Young Sam Houston was a lively, high-spirited lad, who caused his widowed mother more trouble than her other eight children combined. Sam had just turned twenty when he was aroused by the War of 1812. When a recruiting demonstration took place in his small Tennessee town, Sam stepped up and took a silver dollar from the drumhead. He was in the regular army by that token, but, since he was under age, he needed permission from his mother.

She handed him a gun, saying, “My son, take this musket and never disgrace it: for remember, I had rather all my sons should fill one grave than that one of them should turn his back to save his life.”

Then she slipped a plain gold ring on his finger. Inside this ring was engraved a single word. That ring was his talisman for fifty years. The one word in contact with his flesh guided him through a lifetime of danger and leadership where others faltered....

It was not until his death that any man knew the command of that talisman he had used for half a century. Then his wife slipped the ring from his lifeless finger and held it to the light so that his children, too, could see the word that had led Samuel Houston steadfastly through trials to victories.

The word was “Honor.”

Easter

Today I give you Dad29’s post, leading with Bach. 

UPDATE: We were talking about the dating schemes; here is an article that is going around on that topic.

UPDATE: The Clan sends. 

The Penitent Thief and Ecumenical Christianity

My grandparents were Christians in one of those "three bare walls and a cross" Protestant churches out in a rural town. They were wonderful people and some of the happiest, best people I have ever known.

But by my late teenage years I knew better and got away from all that church nonsense. I spent the next two decades slowly making myself ever more miserable. One day I decided I need to sort out some piece of happiness in life or get off the ride. I thought, who's been successful at this happiness thing? And of course my grandparents were the first in my mind. And church seemed to have a part in it, so I went to church. But it made no sense. What was all this strange stuff they asked me to believe?

I was about to give up on Christianity again when an acquaintance suggested C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I read it and it made sense to me. That is, I understood that Christianity might actually make sense, and so I started reading more. Since Lewis was Anglican, I started attending an Anglican church. It was my first experience of liturgical worship, which I found beautiful, and the people were kind in a dark time and helped me make some basic sense of many things.

Meanwhile, I'd kept reading, and I'd discovered the local Catholic radio channel. If I was driving, I was listening to Catholic news or apologetics or the great Dr Ray's show. Building on what I'd learned, they took me much deeper and I could see not only how profound Christianity was but how global it was.

My reading of church history took me to a small Eastern Orthodox parish, and I spent a couple of years attending services and asking questions and reading. It was beautiful, I could see happiness all around me there, and it became home. I was brought to plead, "Remember me in your kingdom, Lord."

That was only a few years ago, and I guess being new to Orthodoxy I'm enthused to share it here, or defend it if I feel it's mischaracterized. But I wouldn't even have a chance of salvation if a couple of wonderful Protestant witnesses hadn't shown me the way, if Lewis and the Anglicans hadn't taught me it could be reasonable, if the Catholic scholars hadn't explained many of the mysterious beliefs in detail and shown me the world. Who knows where I'd be without all of them, but it probably wouldn't be anywhere good.

Good Friday

A song on the occasion of suffering and death, as performed by my friend Jim Hanson. 

Good Disruption

DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassifies Biden's "domestic terrorism" campaign -- which was really mostly a gun control campaign aimed at disarming Americans -- and establishes a task force to fight the weaponization of government against American citizens. 

This is part of the good part of what the administration is doing. 

Impossible Traditionalism

A challenging argument. I encountered it first at the Orthosphere, who summarizes it nicely at the beginning of the post and then goes on to list some personal examples. I'll quote the Orthosphere summary because I think it is clearer than the original post.

Bruce Charlton raises an important objection to professedly Traditionalist Christianity in the contemporary world, “Traditionalist” here meaning a faith accepted on the authority of Tradition and its ecclesial representatives rather than accepted as the outcome of individual discernment. The objection is not that such a faith is undesirable but that it is impossible. People in the world today are exposed to multiple live religious options, and even when one picks a particular Church, one finds that it is divided into factions and that its leaders have more-or-less assimilated to the global liberal order and made authoritative proclamations which more-or-less directly contradict their historical teachings. One must choose which Church, which faction and clergy within that Church, which of conflicting Magisterial statements one should credit, and this can only be done by individual discernment.

This is a serious challenge. In the West, the greatest Magisterium is the Roman Catholic Church: indeed, 'the West' as a concept arises precisely from that part of the world that aligned with Rome rather than Constantinople many centuries ago. When the Western Roman Empire fell, 'the West' was defined by the Roman Catholic Church. So if you are a Westerner who wants to fall back on the authority of a Magisterial tradition, that church is the obvious place to look.

Yet if you do this, you will at once find that the Pope is thought not to be very Catholic by many Catholics. Tradition holds that the Pope can speak infallibly under certain very specific conditions; but if you see the Pope rejecting earlier parts of the tradition, don't you end up having to choose -- and thus, as the argument points out, substitute your own personal judgment for the Magisterium? 

I've tended to fall back on St. Thomas Aquinas as an authority, but isn't that a personal judgment of mine? I'm not alone in it: Aquinas was greatly honored for centuries as the authoritative writer on many topics. Yet the Catechism today diverges from Aquinas in many ways big and small, as generations of priests who belong to other factions have amended it. The Jesuits are especially known for their divergence, but the Franciscans have a view that is in many ways different as well. 

And if you think that the Roman Catholic view is not the right one, but prefer instead the Magisterium of the Greek Orthodox church -- or the Russian Orthodox variation -- you have an exactly similar problem. If you are a Protestant, the same. If you are a Southern Baptist, your church may have split over irreconcilable differences in your lifetime. The Presbyterians seem to be doing it even now, and the Methodists, and the Episcopalians. 

Maybe you just can't lay down the sword of individual discernment. And if that's true, as it seems to be, we're just in a different world. 

Paper Beats Rescuers

The North Carolina government continues to demonstrate that it views public safety as an insurance scheme rather than the practical business of actually saving people in need. This time the affront to good sense is House Bill 675, which would force all existing or future EMS personnel to obtain national certifications in addition to the state certifications they already have. 

The material covered is the same, and many of these Paramedics, AMTs, EMTs, and EMRs already have not only state certificates but years of experience doing the job. Under this law, they would all be forced to stop and go back to school with a nationally-certified program. The Paramedic program is 13 months long, and the test costs $300, so you'd lose a year of pay and then be forced to pony up for the exam as well. The other programs are shorter but also have a similar issue.

This follows a move at the end of last year to cancel all Technical Rescue certification programs that were not fully complete at midnight on New Year's Eve. If you had completed 100 of the 120 hours of training, but were still one course short, you lost everything and had to start over. This was done just so they could issue a certificate under a different version of the NFPA manual governing such operations. Because of Hurricane Helene, we lost almost all opportunities to finish classes from late September through the end of the year. I asked my state representative to see if a waiver could be granted given the State and Federal states of emergency occasioned by the hurricane, but no: the paperwork rules all. Many thousands of training hours were lost across the state so that the paperwork would look better, at the cost of actual rescuers who could physically help you if you needed it. 

Government at its worst, pursuing documentation rather than actual goods and at the cost of the actual good that was really wanted by the people. If you're having a heart attack or lying broken at the bottom of a gorge, it's small comfort that the reason no one is coming to save you is so that the paperwork can look better for the insurance agencies. That is, however, what legislators and bureaucrats care about. 

Public Schools Trump First Amendment?

A Federal judge ruled that a school can exercise prior restraint on adults who are not students but are attending school functions. 

On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, a President George H. W. Bush appointee, ruled that the district acted reasonably in its decision to prevent parents from protesting.

McAuliffe said the parents’ "narrow, plausibly inoffensive" intentions were not as important as the wider context, and that adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment-protected right to convey messages that demean, harass or harm students.

"While plaintiffs may very well have never intended to communicate a demeaning or harassing message directed at Parker Tirrell or any other transgender students, the symbols and posters they displayed were fully capable of conveying such a message," he wrote. "And, that broader messaging is what the school authorities reasonably understood and appropriately tried to prevent."

Public schools are frankly on the same order as prisons in their deleterious effects on America's culture of liberty. They train the young to submit their freedoms to the dictates of authority, and here extend the command of this intelligentsia to control of their parents as well. Even if you didn't mean to engage in wrongthink, comrade, someone might have understood you to be -- so your speech must be prevented before it can occur. 

UPDATE: Over in the UK, a ruling that transwomen are not, legally speaking, women. 

Prisons are Not the Way

Readers know that I am a longtime advocate of abolishing prisons in favor of some other approach to dealing with crime. We discussed this as recently as January, and the more recent police-state tactics we are seeing here in March. 

I don't like what prisons do to people's minds. I think that all the evidence clearly demonstrates that they are complete failures at rehabilitation and indeed make things worse. It does this by taking someone out of the market for a long period of time, so they have both a felony record and no recent employment history when they do go to look for work. It does this by placing them in constant contact with criminals as their nearly-sole company for years or decades. 

They are hugely expensive things given that they don't work, and not just expensive in terms of money. Think of all the American men (and some women) whose lives are being wasted guarding prisoners. Whatever you think of the prisoners, people who are fit to be prison guards could be better employed in some gainful occupation. 

I thought of this today while reading up on CECOT, the prison in El Salvador that is much under discussion. It is an immoral entity, as close to Hell as men know how to create on earth; America ought to have no part of it. It at least does not pretend to be reforming anyone; its conceit is that no one will ever leave it again, and thus the harm caused by their transformation through suffering will be contained within its walls. If that is what is wanted, executions would be a kinder and far more efficient way of achieving the same result.

The 8th Amendment should bar our government from making use of it, since neither a sense of honor nor morals seems to bind the government to much. Yet I reflect that it is no worse than, and indeed quite similar to, the detention centers we helped set up in Iraq to which we contributed many detainees. Like at CECOT, the Iraqis ran the prisoners together, perhaps in the hope that the rival gangs or rival Baathists/Islamists would punish each other. 

Instead, as you will recall, that is how ISIS came to be forged. They learned to work together and became something worse and more effective than either had been alone. The transformative harms done to them were not, after all, contained forever behind the terrible walls. 

Why Is This Funny?

I don't know why this is funny, but it is. I must have reached the delirious stage of Lent.

The Kamala Harris one ...

Holy Monday

I saw a lot of 'driving the moneychangers out of the Temple' posts yesterday, but that event actually occurred on Holy Monday. 

Surf & Turf

My neighbor’s wife left shrimp in her car. Guess who?

A Joke for Palm Sunday

An elderly woman lives by herself. She is very religious, and knows the Bible very well. One night, she is awakened by a noise. She looks out the window and sees a man trying to force his way into the house with a crowbar. 

She creeps to the phone and quietly calls the police, but is worried that they might not get there in time. So she decides to appeal to the guy's conscience with a Bible verse. She yells out, "Acts 2:38!" On hearing this, the man puts down his tools, and puts his hands over his head. 

Just then, the police get there and arrest him. As he's being booked, the arresting officer says, "I've got to ask you something. You were almost in the house. Why did you stop and give up just because that lady yelled some scripture?" 

"Scripture?!" he answered. "I thought she was saying she had an ax and two .38's!"

Fairness and Heritability

This was linked at Instapundit, but it's up AVI's alley and a subject we sometimes discuss.

The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life.  The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids.  (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation.  The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....

Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair.  The children of the rich do better.  But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.”  Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair.  The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.” 

I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.

What, if anything, should be done about that? 

Palm Sunday

Today begins Holy Week, and occasions one of my favorite Bible stories. 

Our solar,/lunar/hebdomadalian holiday

I thought I'd figured out the schedule for Easter a while back: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This complicated formula draws together the solar cycle (equiox), the lunar cycle (full moon), and the weekly cycle (Sunday). But imagine my surprise when this month's full moon turned out to be today (April 12). Why isn't Easter tomorrow? Instead, tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Easter is not until April 20.

The mystery turns on the Western Christian Church's ancient practice of calculating the vernal equinox according to a formula that doesn't quite line up with the astronomically observed full moon or equinox. This year the archaic formula, which requires us to divide the year by 19 and look up the remainder in a chart, yields a liturgical Paschal Full Moon on April 13, which is Sunday (tomorrow). When the post-equinox full moon lands on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday.

The accepted view seems to be that the seven-day week, which depends on neither the solar nor the lunar cycle, has its roots in Genesis: the seven days of creation. Romans used an 8-day week for many centuries B.C. and A.D., but switched to the Jewish 7-day week with Constantine's converstion to Christianity. Later Europeans continued the Roman custom of naming the days of the week after the five classically visible planets plus the sun and the moon (though the Romans had added an eighth day with a name that had something to do with markets). In English, the modern names of the seven days of the week are rooted in the Norse gods for Tuesday through Friday, to the Roman god Saturn for Saturday, and to the Teutonic words for sun and moon for Sunday and Monday. In Romance languages, the days of the week are rooted in the Latin names for "Lord" for Sunday, moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and sabbath for Saturday.

Look, Sergeant Pepper…

Hank Jr. Getting It

I admire a man who has kept up his relationship with the ground this way.

Lazarus Saturday

One more week until Pascha, Holy Week.

I'll include the whole passage from John below the fold, but Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a prelude to the Passover, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, and it is this miracle that prompts some Jews to decide to kill Jesus. An odd juxtaposition: A resurrection causes some to decide to kill Jesus, which leads to both His resurrection and ours. God indeed causes all things to work together for good.

It is in this passage that we get the shortest verse, "Jesus wept," as he mourns for his friend, and also the passage where Jesus declares "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." And then he asks, "Do you believe this?" 

Isn't it strange that Jesus should weep for the death of a friend when he knows he will raise that friend from the dead? I think human death is always a tragedy; it is the result of the disease of sin and it is something to mourn. We are so allergic to any negative emotions in America that we now have "celebrations of life" at funerals. There is nothing wrong with that; I have friends and family who have had those and I always participate appropriately. That is what they wanted. But, sometimes it is good to weep and to weep openly in public as Jesus did. It is good to acknowledge the tragedy. It is no denial of the resurrection to grieve the death of the beloved.

Passover

I’m not aware of there being any Jews in the audience of this blog, but if there are, happy Passover. 

Easter is still quite a ways off this year, depending upon whether your church follows the Gregorian or the Julian calendar. 

Unintended Consequences

I hadn't heard of this series until this morning, although it's 18 episodes long already. It's from Reason magazine, and is very instructive.

...but we learned our lesson and it never happ... oh.

Alas Colorado

One of the more beautiful states, Colorado, but so was California. 

The [manufacture and sale] restrictions are real enough but as Complete Colorado reported last month, the law's definition effectively covers "almost every centerfire semiautomatic handgun" bigger than a .22. In fact, "There is only one centerfire semiautomatic handgun model that does not fall within the bill’s definitions. That unique item is the Benelli B-80, a collector’s item last manufactured in 1990."...

Up next: House Bill 1312 and its obliteration of 1st Amendment protections and parental rights. HB 1312 says, "It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful to, with specific intent to discriminate, publish materials that deadname or misgender an individual.” The law applies to everything from flyers to blogs to newspapers, and if it becomes law, I could find myself in hot water for referring to a dude in a dress as "he."

Going even further, according to Ari Armstrong:

Part of the bill pertains to child custody. Existing statutes define “coercive control” as “a pattern of threatening, humiliating, or intimidating actions, including assaults or other abuse, that is used to harm, punish, or frighten an individual.” The bill adds deadnaming and misgendering someone as types of “coercive control,” and it directs courts to consider deadnaming and misgendering when deciding matters of child custody.

So, as to the latter, a mother could lose custody of her child for the offense of calling her child by the name that she, the mother, bestowed upon her child at birth. 

The state should be forbidden from interfering inside families. I realize that some families are awful. It's still a good rule because governments are reliably awful. 

The firearm regulation is quite terrible, although as I understand it the law does not actually ban any guns, it just complicates the process for buying them (and imposes fees). That's still an unconstitutional set of infringements that I hope will be struck down by the courts, as they ought to be. It's still not as bad as, say, Maryland's law.

As I've written before, we've reached the point that literally the only real right the left believes in is the right to abortion. Everything else is subject to restrictions, and as severe a set of restrictions as they want that day.

Foreign Responses to the Tariffs

From Canada

From Ireland

From the Heard and McDonald Islands

Harley-Davidson CEO Out

Great job. Now bring back the Dyna. 

UPDATE: A friend from the Iraq days sends:

If you do, bring back the Dyna. 

Why Not Make It Worse?

The heavy rains we've had over the last week have finally allowed fire crews to finish containing the big wildfires that were near to me. Even the massive Table Rock fire is now fully contained. 

However, we still have millions upon millions of downed trees from Helene; and while the rains have wet the earth, the wood will continue to dry for years. It would be helpful if we could remove some of that fuel before the next round of fires.

The Trump administration decided to help with that -- it's been surprising how much more the Federal government has been wanting to help since the new administration came in. Enter the usual suspects:

C'mon guys. I love the forest as much as anyone, but these trees are already dead. Let's get as many as we can before they burn up the world. There's no way we'd get them all up anyway, but potentially we could reduce the fire hazard at least a little bit.

Why didn't we think of that?

Failing Houston schools are trying something new, or rather, something old-fashioned. The teacher stands in front of the class and teaches lessons. After an hour or so there's a short quiz, which lets the teacher split the class roughly in half. The half who are struggling the hardest get more hands-on teaching, while the half who are picking it up faster have a chance to work more on their own. Kids who disrupt class get a time out in a separate room, where they continue to be taught by a ZOOM link under adult supervision.

Sylva’s Confederate Monument Restored

Sylva’s town council is not happy about it, either. The county owns the thing, though, not the town. 

I imagine it will be defaced a half dozen times during the upcoming Pride Month celebrations, which Sylva does take seriously. Or once, really well. 

Two on Free Speech

This Spiked piece on the threat to free speech in the UK (h/t Hot Air) begins with "Lucy Connolly’s tweet was despicable, but it shouldn’t have landed her in prison." Back when we were running the think tank, I had a whole series on Free Speech that was part of the permanent sidebar collection. One of the articles was about why you had to defend deplorable cases. The reasons are that (a) it will always be the meanest sort of people who are the first to offend, because they don't care about people's feelings, so (b) it will always be here that you have to defend the principle. 

If you lose the principle, you've already lost the fight and you've lost the liberty. Now we're just arguing about whether the content was sufficiently bad to merit punishment. 

On the subject of the content, there was also the small matter of a hideous crime that provoked strong emotions. 

One speech criminal who has summoned up significantly less sympathy is Lucy Connolly, the Northampton childminder who was sentenced to two years and seven months for inciting racial hatred, over a vile, hateful missive she posted in the wake of the Southport stabbings. Seemingly in response to rumours swirling online that those three girls, slain at a Taylor Swift dance class, had been killed by an asylum seeker, Connolly took to X and said: ‘Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.’

Liberal governance fancies itself as committed to "humane" governance, meaning a government that creates the conditions for living a full human life. It would be humane to give people a little space for things like that. Strong emotions can make fools out of most of us. On the principle of the thing, however, it's better that she be allowed to say it -- both because of the core human liberty, and because it gets it out there that this kind of thing provokes a lot of anger that could be dangerous. The UK has a habit of trying to cover these things up instead of addressing them. That's causing a lot more harm than some babysitter fuming online. 

Meanwhile in Germany...

German journalist sentenced to seven months of probation for a Twitter meme poking fun at the Interior Minister's lack of commitment to free speech

Now we don't expect the Germans to be as committed to the principle of freedom of anything as the British once were. This is an egregious violation, however. Apparently in Germany public figures can sue individuals for defamation for saying things about them in public, such as on Twitter. Defamation is supposed to mean, however, that you said something that wasn't true. The very act of filing the suit to suppress the speech proves the journalist's case; yet the court sided with the powerful against the citizenry, as so often, and threatened the journalist with prison for daring to suggest this obviously true and proven thing. 

A TDS Specialist

 

In the Spirit of the Previous Post

 

Rev 21:8

One of my country Baptist friends posted this dire verse  on Facebook. Of course he cited the King James Version: my maternal grandfather, also a country Baptist, explained when I was young that it was the only true and completely accurate Word of God. 

What grabbed my attention was the word, “sorcerers.” What is sorcery exactly? What did they understand it to mean?

So I went to the Sacra Vulgata, and found out that in Latin the word is veneficus. Now we think of sorcerers as being like wizards, and wizards as being old men; so at first I thought the etymology might be shared with venerable. 

But I looked it up and it’s not! It shares the etymology for venomous. The Latin was for a maker of poisons and drugs. 

That reminded me of something that we just saw in the Anabasis. So I looked it up, and sure enough in the original Greek the word is pharmakois. 

This I take to be the meaning of the words, which are necessarily ambiguous, since {pharmakon}, "a drug," also means "poison." Did Cheirisophus conceivably die of fever brought on by some poisonous draught? or did he take poison whilst suffering from fever? or did he die under treatment?

That's true: the word that is the root of "pharmacy" or "pharmaceutical" can mean either "drug" or "poison." And so it is often the case even with true drugs, where the right dosage is efficacious and the wrong one is fatal.

Thus, the sorcerers who are headed to the Lake of Fire are poisoners and makes of false drugs that kill instead — one thinks of dealers of drugs laced with fentanyl, but also of pushers of hard drugs generally. Makers of false medicines. That’s what the word means. 

UPDATE: After I went to bed last night, another thought about this occurred to me. The passage seems on first glance to refer to something from fantasy stories, which in the mind of the modern is the sort of thing that puts the Bible into the genre of fantasy stories. That's how they prefer to think of it anyway, and "sorcerer" at first seems like evidence for that preferred proposition.

Once you understand that they're talking about drug dealers and pushers and makers of false medicines, however, you realize that this is a real and pressing problem that you read about every day in the newspaper. The Bible is suddenly speaking to very real problems that bedevil contemporary society.

Of course, since this is the Revelation of St. John the Divine, you still have the Beast and the Dragon and various other mystic imagery. It only moves the needle a little on that point; but it does move it.

Minus the accent . . . .

. . . . this is pretty much my peninsula.

Musk the Anarchist

Highlighted from a 2021 NYT article today by a book review in the NYT today on the importance of America's early anarchists to freedom of speech. The Times would like you to know that vandalism of Tesla dealerships is a crucial form of free speech, by the way.

Elon Musk, who hoisted a chain saw at the latest Conservative Political Action Conference convocation, saying he hoped to wield it against the federal bureaucracy. The brutality in the message was hard to miss, and yet Musk seemed taken aback when aggressive rejoinders came from the other side, in the form of attacks on Tesla dealerships across the land, one of them by a man who said defacing cars was a form of “free speech.” Absolutely not, said Musk. “Damaging the property of others, a.k.a. vandalism, is not free speech!” A few days later, Donald Trump went further, declaring the vandalism to be nothing less than an act of terrorism.

The antigovernment agitators of a century ago had a useful name for expressive threats of this kind: propaganda of the deed, a phrase whose most vocal proponent in early-20th-century America was the Italian immigrant Luigi Galleani. The provocations could be peaceful, but often enough they included “acts of spectacular violence,” as Willrich writes, meant to “seize the attention of the working people and inspire them to revolution.”

That's clearly not the view of Free Speech that Musk endorses. 

Well, there are often serious differences even between members of the same overarching philosophy. 

I did order the book they were reviewing, however, which I think sounds much better and more interesting than their review of it. Amazon has it for a lot less than the $35 the Times claims it would cost. I just finished the last book I was reading and could use another. 

Memorial Ride

Quite a few people came out. Several clubs joined including out of state charters. They host club, which was the Wingman MC's Western NC chapter, did the traditional pulled pork shoulder barbecue of this region. 

Beer was free and provided by Patch: he had a kitchen refrigerator in his shop he kept full of Natty Light to share with his customers. They brought his old beer over and served it to his friends. A proper wake, really.

I won't post pictures of anyone or of the clubhouse as I don't have permission and that can be sensitive. I was impressed with their leadership and their performance as hosts both. The rules of the road they set were focused on the safety of the riders. They held a brief prayer at the beginning of the ride for safety and fellowship. They had arranged both firefighter units and two deputies to control key intersections to avoid problems during the ride. Their president's speeches were brief, authoritative, and appropriate.

They had a nice little clubhouse down on a creek in the mountains. There was a grand firepit they'd built by cutting the domed top off a big old 1/2in. steel cylinder, which they tilted on a bed of stones back towards the sitting area by the creak so it reflected the warmth of the fire. As is very common with MCs, there were a lot of children present and at least as many women as men: the ethic of the culture draws a lot of women, who find the association one of protection and safety, which are exactly the qualities that also inspire procreation. I really enjoyed watching the happy children playing in the creek.

A very nice afternoon. It was beautiful, too, as if God smiled on the event. Today the heavy rains have come in from the West, and then it will get cold again; but yesterday was as fine as a day in April can be. 

He would have enjoyed it himself, or an event like it: he was too humble have wanted anyone to throw him a party as its guest of honor, but he would have enjoyed attending a party like this.

Riding Out

I haven't had a lot to say for a couple of days. Today I'm going over to my friend Patch's memorial ride. Perhaps that will produce interesting stories. It should be a pretty day for a bunch of motorcycles.

A National Emergency

Because....

Section 1.  National Emergency.  As President of the United States, my highest duty is ensuring the national and economic security of the country and its citizens.  

I have declared a national emergency arising from conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits, which have grown by over 40 percent in the past 5 years alone, reaching $1.2 trillion in 2024.  This trade deficit reflects...

Is that an emergency? We had a National Emergency already because there was too much immigration. Presidents like National Emergencies because they can assume extra powers. 

Tariffs are hated by all economists and journalists, but I do note that some things were better before we started eliminating them. I supported NAFTA because the logic of the free trade argument made sense to me at the time. In 1998, though, I was working for the Unions in Savannah and really got to see the good they did for workers. Then I watched them dry up and die — not quite all, but all across the South. IBEW and the Boilermakers still exist around the port, but so many went away.

It was a pipeline for the poor from the swamp to ordinary middle-class prosperity. We gave it away for cheap goods from Mexico, which soon enough became cheap goods from China. Chinese control over so many of our basic goods has become, if not quite an emergency, a serious national security concern.

UPDATE: A play for all the marbles. 

UDPATE: A helpful graph of US tariff rates, which shows that we are at an all time, historic low. (H/t Wikipedia).

These new tariffs put us right back in the historic norm. It's only been in the post-WWII world that we've kept the rates so low, trading away our industry for the goods of free trade.

Why Philosophy?

A rant, it claims, but also a good essay.  

He quotes Aristotle differently than I would.  Aristotle agreed that the higher forms of philosophy were useless, because to be useful is to be useful for something else. The very highest things we pursue for their own sake, not because it will get us to some lesser goal. You should aspire to strive for useless things, so high and fine that you would never trade them for anything else. 

That's some mole

I'm at a loss to imagine how this guy got out of Iran alive. I remember that he was under suspicion in Iran at the time of Nasrallah's death. How he escaped with his life then, and how he got out now, I can't even imagine. How utterly demoralizing for Iran.

A Spring Vista

Conan and Stick, Among the Daffodils

He goes through a stick every day. The whole place is covered with splinters. Somehow he doesn’t get them in his gums. 

Gotta Give Him This One

Via Whiskeyriff, a man in Georgia was arrested for leaving his kids to play at the McDonald's playground while he went to a job interview.

Chris Louis was arrested on March 22 after leaving his three kids, including a 1-year old, 6-year old and a 10-year old, unattended at a McDonald’s (which had a playplace, by the way) while he went to a job interview.

Louis reportedly dropped the kids off after walking them to McDonald’s from his apartment, and returned to check on them before leaving again. He then returned to find police waiting for him, and was arrested for deprivation of a minor.

But the internet is rallying behind the father of 3, arguing that he was forced to make a tough decision while simply trying to get a job to provide for his kids.

As many of the comments pointed out, he left them in a place with air conditioner, a bathroom, and adults nearby who could help in case of an emergency, as opposed to simply leaving them alone at his apartment. And while some people were uneasy with the idea of leaving the 1-year old behind, they pointed out that he was forced to make a tough decision in order to try to get a job, and that the 10-year old was old enough to take care of the infant for a short period of time.

It's definitely not ideal, but a crime? The story points out that the 10-year-old was born when the man was 14, just a boy, and here he is ten years later still trying to support his kids. 

Sometimes 'as good as it gets' has to be good enough. It's a hard world. 

Requiescat in Pace Val Kilmer

Without a doubt his most famous and enduring role was as Georgia-born gunslinger "Doc" Holliday in Tombstone. 

However, I particularly loved the performances in Willow. He and his beautiful female opposite in this movie went on to marry in real life and had two children. 

I don't know what to say about a man who played many parts, but about whom I know nothing of himself. Fortunately, E. M. Burlingame -- a fellow Small Wars Journal alumnus --  wrote a poem about it that is worthy.

I Had No Idea 'Star Wars' Was Based on a Norse Saga

 

Remarkable!

Owens Gap

No smoke plume today from the huge Table Rock fire. The storm must have helped. 

Clear skies.

Blindness

A commenter at Althouse responds to a post about art museums:

"Museums, monuments, and public institutions should be spaces where these stories are held with care, not suppressed for political convenience."

A lot easier to do, when so many of the monuments you don't like have already been torn down.

Yes, exactly. So much of this stuff that is arguably wrong from first principles is being done because those principles were already violated by the other side. Somehow they can't see that they did it first, emphatically and regularly. 

That doesn't make it right. There's a sense in which it is fair, because 'turnabout is fair play.' Getting them to at least recognize that they started the ball rolling might help, but how do you do that?

Democracy

I and some friends were asked to test the quality of Egypt's 2018 election. The election was scrupulously fair, down to the maintenance of unbroken, numerically-keyed locks on the ballot boxes. Both the army and the police watched over each polling station as they didn't trust each other. 

They could afford a fair election because they'd removed all the opposition candidates from the ballot beforehand. The only choice except Sisi was his friend who, as a campaign promise, said he'd withdraw if elected and endorse Sisi instead.

We're getting that way in Europe. We almost were that way here, last time around. It's getting dark out there. 

No Third Terms

At least half of what the current administration is doing is highly praiseworthy: the DOGE inquiries into unconstitutional/evil spending, waste, fraud, and so forth; the desire to craft peace out of the bloodbath in Ukraine; the move to shrink the Federal government substantially. 

Some other things are not: the police state tactics, masked Federal agents arresting people off the street, foreign prisons that violate the 8th Amendment, censorship of disfavored words. These are not in line with America's best traditions and deserve outright condemnation. Insofar as we have any power -- one of the dearest fantasies of Americans is that we have some sort of power over the Federal government apart from the occasional elections -- they deserve our opposition.

A third class of things is both at once: bringing in aggrieved non-experts to run agencies is a necessary breath of fresh air, but will inevitably lead to amateur errors because amateurs are employed. They're not bad people, but we have to expect mistakes. That's ok, but there will be errors. 

Two things so far are clearly wrong, at least to me. The desire to take over Gaza from Israel reminds me of nothing more than JFK's decision to take over Vietnam from the French; that's not our fight and we shouldn't want any part of the decades of war it would entail. There should be no third terms, not for anyone. Washington's standard should hold.

That's how it looks to me, at least, so far.

This Is a Song about

Um ...

Can I get an amen?

I heard the optics were great!

This is possibly how I'll go, unless they collapse on me in an earthquake.