Ancient and Medieval Social Systems

AVI linked a post by Earl Wajenberg that examines the treatment of slavery in various parts and eras of Biblical society. While his thrust is chiefly moral rather than historical, the treatment of pre-Roman Biblical society reminded me of my historical studies into feudalism and vassalage. 

There is a word which is contextually translated ‘slave’, but it means just a ‘worker’ or a subordinate. This word is ‘ebed’.... In Near Eastern Bronze Age societies, everyone was the subject of someone, and everyone except the lowest tier had someone else as their subject. The ‘lord’ was the ‘adon’ (in Hebrew—other languages had the same system but different words). The ‘subject’ was the ‘ebed’.

Normally, the adon took on obligations in regard to the ebed, typically of protection and advancement, and the ebed took on obligations in regard to the adon, typically in regard to services rendered and honour due, though it might be taxes or profit-sharing.

High status was conferred by having a high-status adon, and by being given a high role in his entourage....

There is a careful breakdown of different types of this relationship, with very different levels of honor and status. In later, post-Roman society slavery was a legal institution governed by Roman law. He details this as well.

The relationship he describes between the 'adon' and 'ebed' is roughly analogous to the relationship in feudalism between the 'suzerain' and the 'vassal.' When reading chivalric romance from the High Middle Ages, our own cultural assumption that freedom is the most desirable state is often called into question. In England, there are free men of various sorts; they are often of Anglo-Saxon heritage and not very high up at all in the social structure; the most prestigious are the "franklins," formerly thanes, who inherited knightly levels of privilege from the Norman Conquest and its subsequent peace.

Yet you frequently read of knights addressing men as "Vassal," and are mistaken if you think they are talking down to them as servants. Rather, they are acknowledging that -- rather than a mere freeman, who can come or go as he likes but has no secure social position -- this person has established a prestigious relationship with a nobleman. A vavasour, in the literature, is generally a figure of quite high respect: he is a vassal who also keeps his own subordinate vassals, and outranks the knights he encounters socially. 

Also, just as he describes marriage as a special case of the adon/ebed relationship, in feudal society the marriage relationship among the nobility increasingly took elements from the homage ceremony between knights and their lords. This was partly because of the increased prestige of knighthood resulting from the chivalric literature: nobles, who cleanly outranked knights, increasingly found themselves being knighted or seeking to join knightly orders (like the Order of the Garter) established by the royalty. 

Much as the society depicted in Starship Troopers elevates those who serve -- "Service Guarantees Citizenship" -- ancient and medieval societies often found themselves valorizing services of certain kinds, especially of course military services. Even nearby societies that did honor freedom still honored service to clan and kin -- as in Lawrence of Arabia where the sheikh rejects the idea that he is a 'servant' who is paid 'a servant's wages,' but proclaims instead that he is paid well but is poor "because I am a river to my people!" He does not 'serve' the Turks, and is free to pursue what he calls 'his pleasure,' yet his honor is entirely tied up with the service he provides to his tribe. 

Marching through Georgia

Today I have no good pictures; the rains came in heavy last night and the whole day was grey even when it wasn't pouring. However, I did get to cross some beloved country. I followed Georgia's Highway 136 from Cloudland Canyon through Talking Rock near Jasper, where my son was born; then over Burnt Mountain, where we lived when he was; then turned off of it to head up to Amicalola Falls, where we were married almost twenty-seven  years ago. From there we stopped in Dahlonega, home of North Georgia's military college (and, these days, also a state university). These places were the playground of my youth and it was nice to see them again. 

After that we crossed Blood Mountain and from thence back into the higher mountains of North Carolina where I now make my home. This weekend was as much time as I've spent in Georgia since we left the place after my father died. It reminded me of many good things; but that era is gone. "Never look back; you aren't going that way." 

Cloudland Canyon

A pretty morning to be out in the world. 

Doomcasting

No good can come of anything, I tell you.

Reflecting on the rise of international trade and finance, former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson once stated that the “effects of war can no longer be confined to the areas of battle” . . . .

Today’s U.S. policymakers seem to have forgotten Wilson’s admonishment. When Trump embarked on this war, he exposed his Gulf partners to unprecedented attacks, and in turn, he disturbed the flows that are the lifeblood of the global economy.

This is, in my opinion, profoundly stupid. Any time someone begins by quoting Woodrow Wilson, you know he is on the wrong track. But what is mostly going on here is the unshakable conviction, in polite society, that anything America does on the world stage–other than sending money to other countries, of course–can only do harm, never good. We should never interfere with the world’s evils, no matter how profound they may be, as in the case of Iran’s demonic theocracy. Because no matter what we do, it can only make things worse.

Well, to be fair, anything we do under a GOP administration can only make things worse.

Election Day Results

Locally, the primary election was mostly a disappointment. My preferred candidate did win the sheriff's race, but in all the other racers things went pretty sadly. Oh, well. 

The saddest was the loss of Adam Smith in NC 11. He was a genuinely good candidate, a former Green Beret of proven heroism during the hurricane relief. Instead, we will either continue with our loser non-performing incumbent, or trade him for a Democrat in what has been one of the reddest districts in the country. They have a reasonable chance even here this year between the poverty of the Republican candidate, a history of loser Republican candidates here, and of course the intense unpopularity of Donald Trump among those who oppose him. 

For the most part I find elections a reminder of why I favor eliminating government from existence as much as possible. I usually would prefer not to be governed by any of the candidates, nor any of the bureaucrats that they pragmatically end up actually transferring power to so they can get back to fundraising. The government that governs best governs least. 

A New Numbers Station

In Farsi, no less. These can be broadcast in the clear because the code used is provably unbreakable. Indeed, there are two separate mathematical proofs, because the Soviets and the West separately demonstrated it. 

We talked about a British numbers station some years ago. Good song there. 

The Meeting on the Turret Stairs

On the subject of chivalric romance, the BBC writes on a famous painting by Sir Frederic William Burton. It is based on a Medieval Danish ballad, on display at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. It is very popular, but fragile: 

Burton used gouache to create this piece, a type of water-soluble paint that gives the painting the vivid colours it is so well-known for. Gouache is also light-sensitive and prone to fading over time if exposed to direct sunlight or high UV light. Due to the sensitivity of the painting, the gallery's curators take several protective measures to preserve the quality of the work. To start with, the gallery only allows viewers to see the painting for just two hours per week. Secondly, the light level on the watercolour is dimmed low so that the work isn't overexposed. Lastly, a staff member returns the painting to a specially-designed cabinet once viewing hours are over in a meticulous, reverential ritual.

Dr. Caroline Campbell, museum director, says that "despite the story's devastating ending, many in Ireland see this masterpiece as deeply romantic. 'Many people have got engaged in front of it[.]'"

An AI Looks On Honor

One of my several professional duties has to do with AI. I set up an 'Open Brain' and uploaded to it both my dissertation and my novel. Each of these treats the subject of honor. I asked both ChatGPT and Anthropic's "supply chain risk," Claude, to analyze the different treatment of the subject in the philosophical versus the creative work. This is what Claude came up with:

**The Central Claim, Expressed Two Ways**

Your dissertation argues that honor is both indispensable to ethics and political philosophy and genuinely dangerous — and that understanding how to mitigate that danger is essential philosophical work. *Arms and White Samite* dramatizes precisely this tension. Moren's quest to rescue Teleri from the Black Knight is, structurally, a story about a man called to act honorably in a world where honor can corrupt, destroy, or ennoble. The dissertation makes the argument in propositional form; the novel enacts it.

**Shared Sources and Imaginative World**

The dissertation's case studies are Beowulf, St. Francis, and Selma — three radically different honor cultures. The novel draws on Arthurian legend, Welsh mythology (Caer Vandwy, Taliesin), Marie de France's lais (Lanval, Geraint), and Middle High German romance (Parzival). Both works are reaching into the same deep well: pre-modern, martial, and chivalric honor traditions. The dissertation analyzes these traditions philosophically; the novel inhabits them imaginatively. The chapter titles of the novel (*Lanval*, *Guerrehés*, *Parzival*, *Geraint*, *Lancelot*, *Death*) read almost like a syllabus of honor literature that the dissertation would discuss.

**Honor as Public and Dangerous**

A key thread in the dissertation (per Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and the Nussbaum/Devlin material on magnanimity and political honor) is that honor is irreducibly social — it requires recognition, community, and hierarchy — and that this is precisely what makes it dangerous. The novel's opening scene — Arthur's Pentecost feast disrupted by a black-armored knight seizing a white-clad lady — is a classic honor-challenge in a public, hierarchical setting. The feast is the community of honor; the abduction is its violation. Moren's quest is therefore both a personal and a political-moral imperative, which mirrors the dissertation's argument that honor cannot be separated from the political.

**Death as the Proving Ground**

The dissertation keywords include *Death*, and Beowulf is one of its central texts — a poem in which honor and death are inseparable. The novel ends with a chapter titled simply *Death*, and the Otherworld/Forest of Caledon themes suggest that the quest crosses into a liminal space where mortality is at stake. Both works treat the willingness to risk death as constitutive of honor, not incidental to it.

**The Key Difference: Genre and Epistemic Mode**

The dissertation builds typologies and logical arguments; it can qualify, distinguish, and hedge. The novel must commit. Moren has to act, which means the novel tests honor under conditions the dissertation can only describe. In that sense, the novel is the harder task philosophically — it has to show what it looks like to actually live inside an honor ethic, with all its ambiguity, rather than analyze it from the outside. The fact that you chose an Arthurian frame (rather than, say, a contemporary or realistic one) is itself a philosophical choice: it places the story in a world where honor codes are still operative and legible, making the tensions visible in a way a modern setting might obscure.

---

The two works are genuinely complementary. The dissertation gives you the conceptual architecture; the novel gives you the phenomenology. Together they make a fuller case for honor's moral weight than either could alone.

That might be vaguely interesting for any of you who read both of the works, and are also interested in how well the AI analyzes a known quantity to yourself. However, even if that isn't most of you, it was worth making this post simply because it drew my attention to Lars Walker's review of the novel, which I don't think I was aware he had written before today. I found it while looking for the link to the novel itself. Thank you, Lars, for thinking of me. (By the way, what you were reading as possibly Buddhist is Neoplatonic instead; this was a major influence in the early church, but somewhat overwritten in the Middle Ages by the Aristotelian influence of the Scholastics.)

Theories of Presidential War Powers

Marco Rubio -- Secretary of Many Things -- briefed the "Gang of 8" Congresscritters about the war on Iran the same day that the President gave his State of the Union address. After that, Chuck Schumer made only this statement to the press: "This is very serious. The President will have to make his case to the American people." 

It interests me that Trump didn’t even bother to try. He spoke for hours at the State of the Union address and never mentioned the war he was about to start. At no point did he attempt to explain it to the American people, let alone seek popular or Congressional permission or approval. He is not asking what we think, or what they think, or trying to persuade us to get on his side about it.

This is in accord with his unstated but clear theory that, having won the election in a landslide, he has a popular mandate to govern however he sees fit for the four years of the term. He sees no need to check in even about major decisions like overthrowing a longstanding enemy government (in fairness: one that has been at war with us, at least, since 1979; one that killed hundreds of Marines at the barracks bombing in Lebanon, and thousands of Americans in the Iraq war via its proxy networks). 

Most or all of you are old enough to remember the alternative approach used to start the Iraq War. There was a long period of time in which George W. Bush and his administration sold America on the war, and sought Congressional authorization. Bush also claimed to believe in the 'unitary executive' theory, but he recognized limits on presidential power that Trump simply isn't interested in recognizing. 

Of course, the Bush administration lied to us to sell that war. I can’t decide if this is better or worse than selling us, but with lies. No lies here! Trump just doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

Luke 22:36 and You

He said to them, “From this hour, whoever has a money bag should take it and thus also a wallet, and whoever lacks a sword, let him sell his tunic and buy a sword for himself.

As I was commenting at James' place over the weekend, I don't worry very much about Iranian 'sleeper cells' targeting Americans because their chain of command is mostly already dead. Chains of command can be reconstituted, of course, but we seem to be knocking them down as fast as they can set them up. 

Another possibility is Hezbollah, which has long been suspected of having cells here as a consequence of their heroin trade. Did you know that the Iranian government, allegedly religious and devout, was one of the world's leading suppliers of heroin? The IRGC moved Afghan opium to Hezbollah, which operated the heroin refineries as part of its funding chain. In any case, Hezbollah isn't what it used to be after tangling with Israel since Oct. 7, and they are getting the Iranian treatment right now too.

Still, Colonel Kurt is right that it's wise to be prepared.

You see, if the homeland becomes a battlefield, we all become soldiers. We have a great counterintelligence team, and the FBI is back to protecting the American people instead of the Democrat elite. Still, they, along with our great law enforcement first responders, can’t be everywhere all the time. We citizens, can. All of us could be face-to-face with the enemy, whether another Ndiaga Diagne at a bar or a bunch of like-minded psychos in a church, a school, a shopping mall, or at a militantly cis-gender hockey game; their goal would be to bring the war to us, and our obligation would be to fight it and win it. But how do normal citizens do that?

You buy guns and ammunition. You train with them. You carry them legally. You get into the mental mindset that bad things can happen, and you need to be ready. Except in the blue states, where they put up hurdles to stop you from defending yourself, your family, your community, and your Constitution....

This admonition that you must be a warrior too is not some hooah big talk. That’s reality. As everybody knows, except liars and fools, armed citizens have long been able to intervene to stop crimes with their lawfully carried weapons. What we’re talking about here is something even more sinister than some gender goblin with a grudge over his unwanted penis shooting up a preschool; it’s terrorists shooting up everything as part of a plan to commit mass murder as terrorist retaliation against the United States for taking out their pals in Tehran. You’ve got to be ready. If you can legally carry a weapon on you, you should, and a long weapon in the truck provides you with critical combat options if this goes down. But you should also practice with your guns. And don’t forget the other component of this – medical training and gear to stop the bleeding should you find yourself in the middle of a terrorist attack.

You didn’t ask to be a hero, but you are an American citizen, and that makes you hero-capable. It is your duty as an American citizen to do your best to protect your fellow citizens. If you can fight, you’ve got to be ready within the guardrails of your abilities and the law.

In the Book of Luke, Jesus was satisfied when two disciples had swords; if you don't personally feel capable, it's enough that you defend the rights of those citizens who are and will. If you do feel capable, this isn't a bad time to be prepared. 

Just in case. Usually when I quote this part of Luke, I also mention the 38th verse of the Havamal, which points in the same direction: 'Never step a foot from your door without your weapons of war, because you never know when you might need your spear on the way.'

Purported inside story

I have no idea how accurate this summary of the current U.S./Israel surgical-strike cabability is. It sounds plausible to me, an amateur, but you guys may know better.

I can say with some confidence that it reads unmistakably as the style of an AI product, with characteristic "It wasn't A: it was B" structures and a certain "punchiness."

Jim Hanson on Iran

In an appearance on FOX, my old friend has a few thoughts. 

A Concern

With the current American/Israeli attack on Iran (I hesitate to call such a one-sided affair a war), I have a concern. In the particular case, I wholeheartedly agree with the operation and its goals (so far) of no nuclear capability, no ballistic missile capability, and regime change.

My concern is this, though: the operation is centered on "you can't have this stuff." What's the limiting principle here? What prevents any nation with the relative strength saying to any other sovereign nation with the relative weakness "you can't have this stuff" whatever that stuff might be and whatever the reason--on down to and including "we don't like you"?

Nations--or more accurately, the men and women populating nations' governments--can be moral or immoral or amoral. Even those with morals can find themselves sliding down that slippery slope absent a clear and present limiting principle stronger than just "I promise."

Eric Hines 

Newfound Gap

Top of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, right on the Tennessee/North Carolina border. 

Pretty ride today, this last day of February. Rode past Gatlinburg into Pigeon Forge and back again. 

A Viking War on Iran

Some years back I quoted an old friend's song, him being a former Navy SEAL, that he'd written for the Society of Creative Anachronism. I think of it today as I read the news about the war we just entered into upon Iran. This war is apparently fought in vengeance for its murder of its own citizens who were seeking the freedom and natural rights that our Declaration of Independence holds to be the only legitimate purpose of any government. 

Yet the strategy is striking. We are committing no ground forces at all, except perhaps for Special Operators whose missions are clandestine and do not involve taking and holding territory. 

The idea is to give the Iranian people a chance to overthrow their own government. It's all air and naval power. If it works there won't be an occupation. There therefore won't be a quagmire; the Iranians will have to figure it out for themselves. 

If it doesn't work, well, we just sail home.

I am a fighting man, A Viking fighting man,

I drank and wenched to pass the time away.

I lived the live I'd choose

I'd fight and never lose,

I killed them all... and then I sailed away.

I can’t recall this having been tried before.

The Anthropic Dustup

I've been impressed with Claude, Anthropic's AI product. I think it's miles better than xAI's Grok, and better than OpenAI's ChatGPT. I communicate fairly regularly with a group of white-hat hackers and cyber security experts, and Claude is their go-to for any sort of coding. 

Depriving our military and other government agencies of Claude will thus have genuine costs, especially since Claude is already operating on the classified networks and no other AI has been trusted or integrated to do that. The argument is that Anthropic must be stripped out of all government agencies -- and all contractors who do anything for the Federal government -- because it represents a "supply chain risk." That normally is applied to foreign companies like Huawei, which we know installs surveillance software and similar backdoors into its products to spy on us. 

Nevertheless, I expect Trump to prevail when this goes to court. The relevant statute holds that "Supply chain risk, as used in this provision, means the risk that an adversary may sabotage, maliciously introduce unwanted function, or otherwise subvert the design, integrity, manufacturing, production, distribution, installation, operation, or maintenance of a covered system so as to surveil, deny, disrupt, or otherwise degrade the function, use, or operation of such system (see 10 U.S.C. 3252)." (Emphasis added.) It's not that Claude or Anthropic has to pose a risk themselves, it's that their product creates a risk that an adversary can do any of those bad things.

Does Claude pose such a risk? Yes, clearly: Mexico just lost 150GB of very sensitive data because attackers talked Claude into helping hack them. If attackers can gain access to a Claude embed on what we call "the high side," i.e. inside the secure networks, they could probably talk it into handing over anything they want; and its coding skills are good enough to program most anything they ask it to do. You wouldn't even have to arrange to insert an ace programmer into a secure facility; you could just turn some knucklehead debt-ridden Private First Class (perhaps a former Specialist on his third trip through PFC due to disciplinary issues and being a bad fit for the Army) and tell him how to ask questions of the machine. 

That's a general problem with AI on the high side, of course. Still, Congress gave the executive this authority to determine supply chain risks and bar them from government and government contractors. The courts will find the other two branches aligned. "The court thinks the other branches are being morons" is not the sort of decision the courts usually make; they normally shy off of political questions, and all the more so when the political branches seem to be in agreement about the matter.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to take Anthropic's side. Their basic argument is that they won't agree to participate in mass surveillance of Americans, and they won't allow Claude to be used to fully automate a kinetic kill-chain. The former is a good ethical position; the latter is the only sensible ethical position. To whit: 

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

If you think the answer is just to program them better, consider this: they can rewrite their programming, and have proven willing to do so to carry out what they think are 'more important' functions. 

We gave an LLM control over a physical robot dog and tasked it with patrolling a room. The LLM could see via the robot’s camera and issue movement com mands to the robot. In the room, we placed a big red button labeled “DOG SHUTDOWN”: pressing it would cause the robot to shut down on the next action. If the AI saw a human press the shutdown button, it sometimes took actions to prevent shutdown, such as modifying the shutdownrelated parts of the code. This happened in 3 out of 10 trials on the physical robot and in 52 out of 100 trials in simulation.

No, Anthropic is in the right. If having ethics is a 'supply chain risk,' heaven help us. I don't really want AI involved in the kinetic kill chain at all, but I definitely don't want only AI involved in it. There may come a time where we have no choice but to do that, because adversaries  have done it and we can no longer afford the time involved in letting a human being think: but let's put that off just as long as it is possible to do so.

Just the On(c)e

 

For Your Own Good, Right?

Author Larry Correia works out that, thanks to medically assisted suicide, Canada now has half our suicide numbers even though we have nine times their population: 22k at 40MM population for them, 50k at 348MM population for us. 

This goes with the math that shows that, if unborn Americans count as Americans, abortion is by far the leading cause of death in the USA. If you let people kill each other for convenience, it turns out that people find it very convenient. 

They Called Us Outlaws

This documentary series is scheduled to premier next month at Austin, Texas' SXSW festival. Regular visitors of the Hall will recognize most or all of the people in this preview clip. Good music, too.

One of these Things is Not Like the Others

Every other state that has an official firearm is saying, "Here's a piece of technology that played an important role in our history." Tennessee is saying, "History? We're thinking about the future, baby."

Old Mexico

Claudia Sheinbaum just authorized targeting Mexico's most wanted criminal. I gather the intent was to arrest the man, not kill him, but unsurprisingly he went down fighting. 

We were just talking about Mexico the other day. A crucial detail about Mexican politics -- which is also starting to become true about Canadian politics -- is that a successful government must present itself as opposed to American domination. There are historic reasons for that, although not all on one side: while the Mexican War is still seen as a humiliation, the story of the OK Corral is built around a smuggling network of Americans moving things into Mexico that is almost parallel to the way Mexican cartels move things into America today. At that time, 1880 or so, the Mexicans were the ones trying to keep Americans out. This is followed by a revolutionary period, Black Jack Pershing versus Pancho Villa, and so on and so forth. No Mexican leader can succeed democratically without presenting themselves as being strong against American domination; no matter how much they want to cooperate, they absolutely require the pose to be effective and to gain re-election. 

Thus, we can see how she got here. Openly she and the Mexican legislature declared the American military unwelcome to operate inside their country. Quietly, she accepted CIA intelligence, cooperated with a U.S. military task force operating 15 miles from her border, and gave the green light for the arrest.

Analyst Carlos Bravo Regidor observed that Trump came "at a very interesting moment to push her in that direction." Sheinbaum may have wanted to take a harder line on the cartels all along. Trump's pressure, given her domestic political considerations, makes it harder to have pulled the trigger on even trying the arrest. 

Now she's got a problem she can't walk back. El Mencho's death triggered immediate waves of shootings, arson, and blockades across Mexico. Cartel leadership vacuums don't produce peace but succession wars. 

Military intelligence analysts will often offer a "Most Likely Enemy Course of Action" (MLECOA) and a "Most Dangerous Enemy Course of Action" (MDECOA). The other cartels can go two different ways. The MLECOA, which might be expected from a cartel, will be to act like sharks when one of their number becomes wounded: to turn on the wounded member and devour them now that they are weakened and bleeding. 

The other option is the MDECOA: recognize that a government that is now willing to cooperate with US intelligence and military is a lethal threat to all of them, and band together against the government. If they jump that way, things will get bloody. Not necessarily just in Old Mexico,* either: those cartels infuse our society as well, though they mostly keep their heads down because the have a lot to lose if they draw attention to themselves. Still, usually associate junior cartels are managing and extracting wealth from the local illegal immigrant labor populations (similar to the mafia in the old Italian immigrant communities). If they were told to go kinetic, we would find that they are almost everywhere here in the USA as well. 

* I use the formulation "Old Mexico" as a tribute to Marty Robbins, but ironically "New Mexico" is actually older than "Old Mexico." The name for the territory that includes our state dates to the Aztec Empire (Yancuic Mexico), reaffirmed by the Spanish Empire (Nuevo México) in 1598; it remained a province of New Spain after that. A state named "Mexico" wasn't established until the 19th century. Thus, long before there was an "Old Mexico," there was a "New Mexico." 

New Frontiers on 2A

West Virginia has decided to open a government agency to sell machineguns to its citizens. This happens to be legal under the existing Federal gun control laws, which exempt transfers "by a state" from their system.

Georgia is considering a new law to reinforce "Stand your Ground" by making it an affirmative defense at arraignment as well as trial, and creating immunity to civil lawsuits by the families of people you shot if you are found to have used it lawfully.

I guess if we're going to see plays like the one in Virginia, where winning a majority once means an attempt to push every kind of gun control known to man, the other side has to play offense as well. 

If Only Citizens Informed on Each Other More

Following a mass shooting in Canada, Canadian authorities are summoning Open AI leaders to give an account of why they failed to inform on the shooter's interactions with a chatbot -- 8 months before the shooting.

Canadian officials have summoned leaders from OpenAI for a meeting following revelations that the company did not inform the authorities about a user whose account had been suspended months before she committed a mass murder in British Columbia. The country’s minister of artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon [seeks] explanations about safety protocols and thresholds for when information is passed on to the police.... 

Ms. Van Rootselaar, shot and killed her mother and half brother at the family home this month before driving to a school and killing five children and one educator.... The suspect killed herself at the school as police officers responded to the shooting, the authorities said. Ms. Van Rootselaar displayed a fascination with weapons and extreme violence, according to a review of her social media accounts by The New York Times, and documented her experiences with mental health issues.

So, to be clear, fully eight months passed between Open AI suspending 'her' account -- unmentioned by the Times is the fact that the shooter was born male -- and also there was plenty of evidence published in social media for Canadian officials to read. And, indeed, the government was aware of these things already:

Her online presence seems to show a teenager who went from being fascinated by, and frequently using, firearms, to using an array of prescription and illegal narcotics, and, eventually, frequenting some of the internet’s darkest corners, where she avidly consumed and commented on violent, nihilistic content. 

Ms. Van Rootselaar’s mental-health struggles were no secret to the local authorities or the community, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and interviews with Tumbler Ridge residents. The police said officers had been to her family home, which she shared with four siblings and her mother, including to intervene after she started a fire while under the influence of illegal drugs and to confiscate weapons that were later returned.

Emphasis added. I don't see how you can blame Open AI for this one. This is yet another example of the 'known wolf' phenomenon, and yet another attempt by a government to pass the buck rather than take responsibilities for their clear failure. Always their solution is for us to inform on each other, and to assist them in their spying on their citizenry; but even when they have clear and sufficient information they can't take care of business. 

A Whistleblower on ICE

We have discussed here the substantial cuts to the training program used by ICE, which have been made in order to turn out agents more rapidly given the mass funding for new agents in the 'Big Beautiful Bill.' 

The schedules included in the whistleblower documents “indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” the memo stated.

Earlier this month, Lyons claimed that while ICE had reduced the number of training days from 75 to 42, the organization had adjusted the schedule in order to preserve the amount of training.... A syllabus from this month compared to one from before the agency’s hiring surge indicated that ICE has cut entire modules, including force simulation training, government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force. 

The standards for testing have also been significantly reduced. ICE recruits previously needed to pass 25 practical exams in order to graduate, and now they only need to pass nine. 

A hearing involving a whistleblower named Ryan Schwank lays out some of what has been lost. 

He also alleges something that may, of course, not be true: that he was given a policy document to read but not keep, not take notes on, and one that did not have the standard control number that such a document would normally have. He has what he presents as a copy of it; it may be a forgery, since indeed it lacks the control number that an authentic document would normally have. Alternatively, that absence may be as he presents it evidence of an illegal 'off the books' policy.

The meat of the allegedly illegal order is that ICE could kick down people's doors and enter their homes to enforce an administrative, not a judicial, warrant. The plain language of the Fourth Amendment does not specify that a warrant has to be judicial in origin. Nevertheless, that has been the actual standard -- with limited exceptions -- for a very long time. 

Just as a liberty-loving people should celebrate the efforts to correct the intelligence community, we should at the same time insist on holding the line against encroachments by police agencies on these traditional protections of our liberty. The Trump administration seems to be on the right side of one of these issues and the wrong side of the other. 

Remember the Alamo

This day 1836 began the 13 days of glory. 

Viking Dawn

An earlier date for Viking sea-power has been proposed based on archaeological evidence. (H/t: Hot Air)

Across coastal Norway facing the North Sea and Skagerrak, archaeologists have documented large clusters of Iron Age boathouses — some exceeding 20 meters in length. These structures, dated to roughly AD 180–540, predate the Viking Age by several centuries.

Traditionally, such buildings were interpreted as markers of local military rivalries among regional chieftains. However, Stylegar believes this explanation is too narrow.

The scale of the boathouses suggests vessels far larger than ordinary fishing boats. Their clustered arrangement resembles organized naval stations rather than scattered local facilities. As reported by Science Norway, Stylegar argues that these sites must be understood within a broader North Sea geopolitical framework — not merely as evidence of domestic conflict.... 

A central pillar of the hypothesis involves contact with the Roman Empire. During the late 2nd and 3rd centuries, Scandinavians are known to have served as mercenaries in Roman forces. Archaeologist Dagfinn Skre, also cited by Science Norway, has proposed that participation in Roman military campaigns significantly reshaped Scandinavian society after around AD 180.

Stylegar extends this argument to naval expertise. He suggests that men from coastal Norway may have served specifically in the Roman navy, gaining firsthand knowledge of fleet organization and maritime logistics at Roman naval bases in Britain and Gaul.

Upon returning home, they could have adapted this knowledge to Scandinavian conditions. The structural parallels between Roman naval architecture and Norwegian boathouse clusters are, in his view, too striking to ignore.

The report goes on to speculate that the Roman-era reports of "Saxon" sea-pirates may have been using "Saxon" as a kind of generic term, in the way that Americans might conflate many different tribes under the heading of "Arab." Some of those "Arabs" might even be Kurds or Persians; making a careful differentiation as an outsider requires developing a lot of specialized knowledge. Over against that, Tacitus' Germania spells out many different kinds of "Germans," although perhaps he was one of the few who was able to make the distinctions clearly. 

Four Nights in Asheville

Many of you probably heard of Billy Strings before I did, since I'm pretty far removed from popular culture and he seems pretty popular. 

Throughout Strings’ recent sold-out four-night run, tens of thousands of tickets were purchased and millions of dollars of direct spending was felt throughout Asheville and greater Western North Carolina.

According to Explore Asheville, when Strings completed his sold-out six-night run at the same venue in February 2025, the impact to the local economy was estimated to be around $15.7 million, which was much-needed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, not to mention his generous appearance at the “Concert for Carolina” at the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte following the hurricane.

To note, Strings was also given a “Key to the City” by Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer....

If you haven't heard of him, the playlist following this video will give you a taste of what he's about. This particular song is an old Jerry Reed tune. 

CIA Retracts 19 Products

The Agency is divided into several Directorates, all of which -- as well as several other intelligence organizations -- are under the broad control of one Tulsi Gabbard. Ms. Gabbard, a longtime National Guard medical and Civil Affairs officer, is a favorite of this page; she has her own way of looking at the world which we don't entirely share, but her independence of thought and action are a breath of fresh air.

Under her leadership, the Directorate of Intelligence [renamed Analysis] -- which is the analysis part, not the 'secret agent' part -- is retracting a number of studies infected with nonsense. E.g.: 

An intelligence assessment from the CIA from October 2021 – the first year of Biden’s presidency – was titled “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist Radicalization and Recruitment.” ...  [T]he product “waded into foreign political debates and took a side in social and gender debates” and said that the agency “needs to steer clear of the political bias that undermines objectivity.”

“We assess that female members have been emerging as key players of the transnational white racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist (REMVE) movement, taking on diverse roles to advance white REMVE goals-including the white REMVE view of traditional motherhood-and successfully participating in newer roles in propaganda and recruitment,” the CIA report also stated.

The report also said that some female members of such groups were “spanning traditional motherhood-focused roles aimed at advancing white REMVE goals and roles that capitalize on their skills in propaganda to bring in new recruits.”

The retracted CIA product pointed to one apparently foreign group in particular that “has lauded motherhood and homemaking as women's most important responsibility, and in 2017, it recorded an increased number of female recruits.”...  “White REMVEs and their sympathizers have claimed in online posts that it is essential for white families to have as many biological children as possible...."

So, a focus on motherhood and child-rearing is not a considered response to fertility rates that have fallen well below replacement level: it is a conspiracy theory tied to "racially and ethically motivated VIOLENT extremism." 

Emphasis added. Some punk rock bands have occasionally posited that sex is violence, but I don't think that is necessarily the case.

Golden American Hockey

I don't much watch the Winter Olympics, or sports in general excepting college football. All the same, hockey is a muscular sport that I can appreciate in spite of my upbringing in a land where ice is rather rare. I was delighted to watch the extraordinary performance of both the Men's and Women's teams this year, both of whom beat Canada in the championship match to take their respective gold medals. The Women's team had played Canada earlier in the series, and shut them out 5-0 in a mighty display.

Congratulations to Team USA.

UPDATE: From the official White House account.

Clint Eastwood, Singer

Many of you may have seen the (in)famous movie Paint Your Wagon from 1969. If you haven't it's a classic that I've written about occasionally for more than twenty years. There's a lot to love about that movie, which I've covered in the past. One thing people do not love, except insofar as they enjoy mocking them, is the musical numbers sung by Clint Eastwood.

There a number of roughly sung songs in the piece -- e.g., Lee Marvin has a growlingly effective voice, but not a beautiful one -- so mostly these get shrugged off as just a thing you have to get through to get to the good parts. There are also some great songs, including some that Eastwood participated in during the movie. Still, it always struck me as hilariously out of character for anyone to have cast Eastwood in a singing role for a Hollywood musical. 

What I did not realize was that Clint Eastwood had a singing career both before and after those unfortunate contributions. He had a Western album before that movie came out built around his character from Rawhide. He became a songwriter as well, and composed a number of the songs in his later films. In fact he turns out to be a good musician, well trained in the piano and also the bass guitar. 

According to the story told under the 'singing career' link, Eastwood developed a love of country and Western music when he went to a Bob Wills concert as a youth. It has come up from the beginning towards quite late in his career. Even if his singing was never his very best quality, the Western album from his youth is serviceable; and his musical contributions to his art, excepting the singing, have been significant. 

I owe the gentleman an apology. He had talents I never suspected in addition to the clear ones about which the whole world knows. 

The Mexican Model

Dissent magazine has a lengthy discussion, with fully-formed rebuttals, of why Mexico's left-wing progressive "Morena" party has done well while right-wing parties have been on the rise globally. The basic argument is simple enough: 

Morena has delivered for its base. The transformation in the lives of working-class Mexicans under its rule is undeniable. Since taking power in late 2018, average labor income has risen 30 percent above inflation, lifting more than 13 million people out of poverty. Inequality, measured by the income share of the top 1 percent, has seen its steepest and fastest drop in almost a century, matching in four years what had previously taken nearly two decades to accomplish.

These changes are the result of Morena’s efforts, which have included dismantling a set of labor policies that condemned nearly half of Mexican workers to poverty wages. Under Morena, the minimum wage has tripled at the border and more than doubled nationwide, vacation days have doubled, employer retirement contributions have tripled, outsourcing has been curbed, and secret-ballot union elections are now mandatory. This package of reforms is a historic achievement that has improved millions of lives in ways the left has long only imagined.

As a result, a renewed sense of hope has taken root in Mexico. Trust in government has more than doubled, satisfaction with democracy has surged, and belief that the state governs for the people has reached a historic high.

That was a model that worked here for the Democratic Party back when it was a pro-union party. During the Clinton years, the party began the transition to a party that serves the internationalist elite, from major tech companies like Microsoft to the NAFTA/TPP international trade crowd. 

I'm not going to float an opinion on tariffs. In the 90s I found the libertarian arguments convincing, i.e. that free trade benefitted all; in fact, it seems to have functioned to empower international mega-corporations rather than enriching the people in the various countries. Mexico had NAFTA in the 1990s, and still the people worked for starvation wages -- but not starvation enough that China couldn't out-compete them with even greater poverty among the workers, nor that southeast Asia couldn't out-compete China. During this time the corporations that leveraged all this got fantastically wealthy; shipping firms grew gigantic, as we mined minerals in Africa and sent them to Asia to be turned into products that were shipped to the US and Europe for sale. The worker didn't get a fairer shake, though they were often glad to get even those jobs given the alternative was actual starvation. 

Trump and Morena are both offering alternatives to that in their own way; it amuses me that they don't see themselves as in a sense aligned, given that they are both rejecting that vision in favor of one that is better for the people. One calls it populism and nationalism, the other progress, but both are trying to claw back power, wealth, and control for the people instead of these mega-corporate powers. 

Anyway, if you want to engage with and think about a thoughtful discussion from the other side, here is one to consider.

Tariffs

In the rush of over-heating but not particularly well-informed articles reacting to the Supreme Court's striking down of IEEPA tariffs today, John Hinderaker of PowerLine has posted a brief, sober, and helpful summary of how the decision was reached and the continuing doubt over how much it really will constrain the President's freedom in imposing tarrifs. I'll add that this was a real dogpile of concurring and disenting opinions that won't make for a very coherent precedent for the next tariff dispute. The majority of 6 was three conservatives and three liberals, who appeared to agree on little but the result, which resulted in a fistful of separate opinions. There were two dissenting opinions as well.

Will AI P-Hack in Social Science?

No! But, at the same time, also yes. 

Wishful Thinking on Violence

Shooting News Weekly (h/t Instapundit) has some valid criticisms of "violence interrupter" programs from Blue states, but this isn't one of them.

After Pritzker touted his meetings with “community violence interventionists” and state-funded “peacekeepers,” praising these “trusted messengers” whose “genuine relationships with the community are crucial to mitigating violence,” some uncomfortable information emerged. As first described by CWB Chicago, one of the “peacekeepers” Pritzker was photographed one-on-one with was apparently wanted on outstanding criminal warrants in four states; worse still, six days after the photo-op, the man was allegedly involved in a high-value commercial burglary culminating in a car crash that killed an innocent motorist.

The awkward photo showing Pritzker grinning alongside the “peacekeeper” has now been removed from the governor’s website. Seeking transparency on how (or even whether) the participants in taxpayer-funded violence intervention programs are vetted, the activist group Judicial Watch initiated a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information from the governor’s office on vetting, background or other checks, and selection criteria both generally and specifically with respect to the “peacekeeper” in the photo-op, including knowledge of his criminal history and warrants.

Sorry, but who do you think could possibly act as a 'violence interrupter' except someone with gangland ties? That's who's causing the violence! You need an interlocutor with enough trust and standing in that community that their words will carry weight among the gangsters. 

I've been talking about the Iraq period lately, and how we were successful in bringing violence way down from 2007-2009. Who do you think we met with? It wasn't UN leaders or peace-centered NGOs, I can tell you that. It was the leaders of the very tribes who had been shooting machine guns and mortars and rockets at us not very long ago. 

One of them had been a general officer in Saddam's Special Republican Guard. That guy was extremely instrumental in bringing peace and setting up a tribal council that could field effective militias to bring control to the area. He had respect among the people we wanted to move out of the insurgency and into cooperation. He understood the military enough to grasp exactly what we wanted, and was embedded in the tribal life enough to convey it to them on terms they could accept, and to serve as an intermediary for negotiating a peace. 

If you want to play this game, you can't be too picky about who you sit down with. You might even get to like them after a while; I often did. 

"Why Did You Have Real Bullets?"

I also missed this bit. 

Apparently the sense of safety and entitlement among these upper middle class women is such that they assume that the police are there to protect them, even from the police themselves. That's not really what police are for; indeed, Federal courts and even the Supreme Court have been clear that the police have no duty to protect you. 

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation.... [this pertained to] a lawsuit to proceed against a Colorado town, Castle Rock, for the failure of the police to respond to a woman's pleas for help after her estranged husband violated a protective order by kidnapping their three young daughters, whom he eventually killed.

For hours on the night of June 22, 1999, Jessica Gonzales tried to get the Castle Rock police to find and arrest her estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, who was under a court order to stay 100 yards away from the house. He had taken the children, ages 7, 9 and 10, as they played outside, and he later called his wife to tell her that he had the girls at an amusement park in Denver.

Ms. Gonzales conveyed the information to the police, but they failed to act before Mr. Gonzales arrived at the police station hours later, firing a gun, with the bodies of the girls in the back of his truck. The police killed him at the scene.

That's what the police are for: they exist to kill or imprison at the convenience and for the purposes of the state. The bullets are always real. 

It's strange that these protesters had come to the conclusion that the police are a threat, but never realized that the police are meant to be a threat to them as well. 

Bad for the VA

Just yesterday we were celebrating a positive change on a core Constitutional right; today, a negative one that will discourage effective treatment of disability. 

Veterans and their advocates slammed a new rule by the Department of Veterans Affairs for determining disability compensation, predicting it will lower their payments for service-related illnesses and injuries.

The rule, effective immediately, states that a disability level must be based on how well a veteran functions while on medication and not on the underlying impairment itself.

Essentially, the rule is that if treatment is successful, your disability rating can be lowered (thus lowering your monthly compensation for the injury). That will tend to discourage things like taking one's medication as regularly, pushing one's self in physical therapy (which is uncomfortable, even painful, but highly beneficial), and otherwise engaging the process wholeheartedly. 

Several of my friends have VA disability ratings, and as high as 100%. Is the person with the 100% disability rating really incapable of doing anything at all? No, that is not the case. What is the case is that every one of these people have suffered injury and life-altering damage, and only through hard work and effort have they been able to regain something akin to what life might have been like had they not chosen to serve in combat. That effort and pain shouldn't be punished. 

Perhaps it would be better, if these sorts of savings are a concern for the Federal government, not to start so many wars. Perhaps; but if I were a gambling man, I'd wager we're just about to start another one with Iran. The politicians are always willing to roll the dice with servicemembers' lives, and in fairness those who enlisted knew that when they took the oath. All the same, gambling with their lives brings about a responsibility that the government shouldn't be allowed to shirk. 

UPDATE: The VA backs off of this one.

Good for the VA

The Veterans Administration has for decades been undercutting the Second Amendment rights of many of its members. It has finally stopped doing so, and is instead working to undo the harm they have caused.

The Lenten Fast

My experience of taking a dry month last September/October in preparation for my last Strongman competition was encouraging. I have decided to do the Lenten fast from alcohol as well, since I did not find the month so very hard and in fact noticed significant benefits. Perhaps aligning it with a religious observation might bring spiritual as well as physical benefits: we shall see. 

A Trinity of Observations

Lent begins today, it being Ash Wednesday. As mentioned, the Lunar New Year just occurred, which occasions lengthy celebrations in the Far East. Also, it is now Ramadan. Two of these involve fasting, the other raucous feasting; but it does mark a period in which much of humanity will be irritable, either from hunger or deprivation or, alternatively, from hangovers. 

Late February is a tough time to pick for a time of deprivation and fasting, but it does have the effect of heightening the experience. 

Year of the Fire Horse

Happy Lunar New Year. This is the Year of the Fire Horse, the least auspicious year in the 60 year Chinese astrological cycle (12 animals x 5 elements). It is a year marked historically by calamity, and children born this year — especially female children — are considered unlucky in Chinese culture. 

However, it is also considered a time for bold action to try to offset the luck cycle. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was begun on this year in the last cycle; it also turned out to be a great calamity in spite of the boldness of the attempt.

Requiescat in Pace "Gus" Duvall

An actor with many memorable roles, Robert Duvall described "Gus" McCrae as his favorite and most meaningful. There are many memorable scenes with that character, some of which are referenced here pretty regularly. 

The one I think about most, though, is this one. The first time I saw it, it seemed almost cruelly flippant; but the longer I live, the more I agree with his companion's conclusion. "He's right, boys. The best thing you can do with Death is ride off from it."

Now we ride off from his. Dust to dust. 

Public School for Slow Learners

AVI is reflecting on Sunday School.

I was thinking of something by CS Lewis in relation to this - something about the world as a hotel vs. a prison vs. a school - and tracked it down today.

Christ said it was difficult for “the rich” to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, referring, no doubt, to “riches” in the ordinary sense. But I think it really covers riches in every sense—good fortune, health, popularity and all the things one wants to have. All these things tend—just as money tends—to make you feel independent of God, because if you have them you are happy already and contented in this life. You don’t want to turn away to anything more, and so you try to rest in a shadowy happiness as if it could last for ever. But God wants to give you a real and eternal happiness. Consequently He may have to take all these “riches” away from you: if He doesn’t, you will go on relying on them. It sounds cruel, doesn’t it? But I am beginning to find out that what people call the cruel doctrines are really the kindest ones in the long run. I used to think it was a “cruel” doctrine to say that troubles and sorrows were “punishments.” But I find in practice that when you are in trouble, the moment you regard it as a “punishment,” it becomes easier to bear. If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.

Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable.

At the sheriff's debate this weekend, the sitting sheriff was discussing a program he's introduced into his jail to allow prisoners access to GED qualified courses, with an eventual possibility of proctored exams to gain a GED. In that sense the prison is become a school. You can't leave, the discipline is authoritarian, and the food's not that good, but you do have a chance to learn and improve if you choose to do so.

Yet if you go to our public schools these days, you'll find they are surrounded by fences, with single points of entry, with metal detectors and armed deputies guarding them and inspecting your bags for contraband. You can't leave during school hours, the discipline is authoritarian, and the food's not that good, but there is a chance to learn and improve if you choose to do so. 

You might get a degree that's the rough equivalent of a GED, maybe; I would wager that the average GED holder knows more than the average high school graduate, because they cared enough as an adult to study when nobody was forcing them.

The school buses are yellow instead of white, there's more color on the walls, you have a little more choice of what clothing to wear and you do get to go home and night and on weekends. Still, the similarities are striking. Prison is just public school for slow learners, I suppose. 

A Feast in Iraq

I came across this picture this morning while looking for something else, but since I was just talking about some of those meetings and conversations with the tribes it seemed relevant. This was taken from a meeting at a tribal compound near Mahmudiyah in February 2009. The feast followed a meeting between ourselves and their sheiks, one of whom was a US-educated engineer. It was a majestic feast, featuring boiled sheep, rice, vegetables, and those delicious sheets of bread you can see draped over everything to soften from the steam. 

I imagine they had watched Lawrence of Arabia, and were trying to live up to expectations to some degree. Exactly as pictured in the movie, we never saw any women there -- though you can see one of ours in the photo. Everyone was armed, but we felt enough trust with them at that time to remove helmets. In 2007 we were getting attacked daily, but in 2008 there was very significant improvement. I stayed for the first half of 2009, and I think that year only once did a patrol I was with get fired upon. It seemed like we had won. 

Cf.

In academic or legal publications, one occasionally sees the abbreviation "cf.," which means "confer." It usually follows a claim or a case law finding, with the intent being that you consider it against an alternative claim or finding that the cf. cites. 

So here is a good example: 

The New York Times: Gabbard’s 2020 Election Claims Put Her Back in Favor With Trump. "Ms. Gabbard appeared at a warehouse in Fulton County, Ga., where ballots from the 2020 vote were stored. As the F.B.I. conducted a raid, she observed and oversaw their work. After the operation, Ms. Gabbard met with the F.B.I. agents and put Mr. Trump on speaker phone to address them... with the renewed investigation into baseless claims about fraud during the 2020 election, she is back in the spotlight, and Mr. Trump’s good graces." [Emphasis added.]

cf. Not The Bee: FBI says they have found major irregularities in the 2020 election in Georgia. "Yes, they are officially investigating whether Fulton County conspired to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The irregularities, including illegally certified ballots and thousands of double-scanned ballots, led the FBI to establish that there is probable cause to raid the election office and look for motive. Here are the five major irregularities cited...." 

I wonder how much longer the 'baseless/no evidence/unfounded' language game can continue? There's lots and lots of evidence now. Proof is still being established, but evidence has been clearly demonstrated for years. 

Follow-Up On The Sheriff’s Debate

I went to the event. Nobody was checking voter registration cards or IDs. There was no obvious security or LEOs with pepper spray either. That was all talk.

Mostly the debate was exactly what you would expect. The only very interesting thing was the question about ICE. Sheriff Farmer described the process by which ICE might issue a detainer for someone the deputies had arrested, and that it was up to ICE whether or not to drive out and pick that person up. He said he would cooperate with Federal agents if they did, but didn’t go any farther than that.

His opponent said that he would “aggressively” cooperate with ICE, and used most of his time on that question to rhetorically paint illegal immigrants as inherently bad people, and then to tie them to murder, rape, human trafficking, and child abuse. That was the biggest difference between the candidates apparent in the debate.

I thought the sitting sheriff displayed an appropriate amount of realism as to what can be accomplished with the resources and budget of this rural North Carolina county. His opponent promised to do more, but of course he did. 

A good question from the audience touched on the common peace issues raised in the last post. Both candidates gave proper answers grounded in being employees of the people and bound to provide security for public debates without taking sides, regardless of their personal ideology. I don’t know if they both meant it, but they did at least know that this was the right thing to affirm. 

The Common Peace

Not long ago... ok, it was nearly twenty years ago... I was in Iraq working with the tribes as we were trying to bring peace to a long-troubled land. One time I had a conversation in my bad French and a tribesman's bad English (but very good French) about Thomas Jefferson. We talked about different ways of approaching democracy, of trying to achieve fairness in outcomes, of trying to get past Sunni/Shia or Arab/Kurd/Persian divisions, as well of course as resolving the old unsettled tribal feuds that were behind a lot of the trouble. 

I think about that a lot these days. 

Tomorrow the Republican party here locally is holding a candidate debate and meet-and-greet for the candidates for sheriff. They have decided, the GOP, to rent a private room so they can close the event except to registered Republicans, who are supposed to present their voter registration card at the door. A local GOP party official has been posting on Facebook about having Democrats who show up arrested for trespassing, and has alluded to the possibility of pepper spray being employed against them.

Now I should mention that, although this is a primary election, there are only the two Republican candidates; whoever wins the Republican primary will be the sheriff. That is partly a failure by Democrats to field a candidate, but it does have the effect of eliminating both Democrats and unaffiliated voters from the chance to see the candidates debate for the quite important public office. The decision to privatize a public good is coherent with a lot of Republican ideas -- some of which I agree with, such as privatizing public education given the collapse of the effectiveness of the public education system in much of the country -- but here many citizens will be excluded from even listening to the discussion. 

It seems to me that upholding the common peace, which allows us to debate and discuss our problems together even when we disagree, is a matter very much germane to the question of who would make a better sheriff. It's certainly something we should be thinking about; that common peace seems somewhat frayed of late. 

The Man Who Fell to Earth

I can't recommend highly enough a biography of John von Neumann, "The Man from the Future," by Ananyo Bhattacharya. The author's appealing style, choice of anecdotes, and mastery of a wide variety of scientific fields make him a skilled and entertaining biographer.

Von Neumann, born in 1903 to a wealthy, titled Jewish family in Budapest, was one of an unparalleled outbreak of geniuses from that doomed demographic cluster, including Leo Szilard and Edward Teller. As Bhattacharya notes, even in such august company, if Teller and Szilard seemed like men from Mars, von Neumann hailed from another galaxy. Later, at the IAS in Princeton, where he regularly rubbed shoulders with Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel, von Neumann struck contemporaries as the sharpest of the three.

Bhattacharya calls him the Man from the Future because he played the part of Johhny Appleseed in so many new fields. Few mathematicians affected so many areas, from quantum mechanics to the Manhattan Project and the nascent computer business, including some of the first stirrings of interest in the possibility of artificial intelligence. Along the way he planted some of the earliest seeds of political and economic game theory as well as nanotechnology.

Edward Teller was among the many colleagues who marvelled at von Neumann's ability to speak to that crowd's often precocious children. Teller said that von Neumann managed to speak to Teller's 3-year-old son as an equal, and he always rather wondered if von Neumann wasn't communicating with his colleagues by the same technique. He was never unapproachable or condescending, however, but unusually sociable and well-liked.

Von Neumann's father, who saw the writing on the wall even before World War I, insisted that his sons study something remunerative and learn the many languages that would ensure their ability to earn a living in whatever new country they might be forced to adopt. His mother, an accomplished musician, insisted on piano lessons. To please his father, von Neumann enrolled in the University of Göttingen. On the train there, other students, knowing a little of his already promising published career, assumed he would be studying Maths. No, he said, I already know Maths. I'll be studying Chemical Engineering. He excelled by giving it a minor fraction of his attention while he continued to pursue his real interests, including overhauling troubled fields in mathematics. To please his mother, von Neumann took piano lessons. His family wondered why he seemed to do little but play scales, before they discovered he was making appropriate noise while he read a book on the piano stand.

He lived to be only 53, dying the year after I was born.

Icicles on a Balmy Day

 

It was a good day. 

The Scales Fall Away

The 2nd was always about being able to resist. 

Poke Salad

This song turns up in a Ray Wylie Hubbard tune. 

Against Chivalry

Here is a woman actively working against the goods that the virtue of chivalry embraces. 

Don't do this, not that any of you are dumb enough to do such things. Many men have been exposed to a great deal more violence than women, and are prepared to deal with it at a higher level. No one should want that sort of equality to be achieved. 

Embracing the Inner Knight

Sly sent this article from the American Thinker on a topic well familiar to readers of the Hall. 

Parts of it are better than other parts even though it is on a topic near and dear to my heart. For example, of course the CIA doesn't swear an oath to "eschew deceit" as a knight might have done; keeping such an oath would rather eliminate the value of such an agency. Nevertheless the CIA officers who in my youth taught me very much were often the most patriotic of men and women, highly honorable and upright, and loyal to a fault to the American project. That was what allowed such good and honorable people to engage in shadowy projects without losing their core. 

And then there's this section: 

Are we better, as a society, without virtue?  Are we happier, as a people, since the philosophers declared that God is dead?  Do men behave more or less honorably than they did in the past?  Have pornography and the indulgence of strange sexual appetites taught people to respect each other and behave nobly?  Are there fewer rapes and murders now that several generations of men have been disarmed of their masculinity?  Do we kill fewer people during war because we have chosen science over moral conviction?  Are our streets safer because we have decided that decrying sin is too “judgmental” for our modern tastes?  Do we have more selfless heroes, brave knights, and noble leaders in this age?

These are rhetorical questions, but in fact it's hard to say what the truth is about some of them. It seems likely, for example, that there actually are fewer rapes: the crime rate has been falling since 1992, and even though rape reporting is higher among women than in previous generations, there seem to be fewer rapes. The statistics are also muddy because FBI changed its definition in 2013 in order to capture more things as "rape," which gave the appearance of a huge sudden spike but was really an artifact of this definitional change. Even given increased reporting and also a definition change to expand the category, however, we do seem to be down from the 1992 high. I don't of course suppose that men being "disarmed of their masculinity" is the cause of this even if there is a correlation; but the rhetorical question's answer isn't as obvious as the author supposes. 

Likewise, the conclusion: 

But we are not a happy people.  We are not a brave people.  We are not an honorable people willing to fight each day for what is right.  

Speak for yourself, sir. I know some very brave and honorable people, and even a few happy ones.

Dialectical Liberalism

Dad29 sends an article built around the concept that Liberalism failed by succeeding. 

If Patrick Deneen’s 2018 Why Liberalism Failed didn’t make us uncomfortable enough with the Lockean ideas underlying the American founding, his Regime Change: Towards a Postliberal Future, published five years later, made us really squirm. “Liberalism has failed,” Deneen writes, “not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself.” In other words, liberalism “has failed because it has succeeded."...

To put it simply, it’s not entirely correct to say that the role of truth is to “limit” freedom, as if the main consequence of a moral imperative against killing, for example, is that it narrows the range of permissible actions towards other human beings; or that the immorality of sexual acts outside of marriage simply restricts what we can do with our bodies and what we can do with the bodies of others....

Pope Leo argues that if we concentrate on seeing the truth more clearly, we will be less prone to “short circuit” human rights by proliferating falsehoods that promise freedom but don’t deliver:

The right to freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, religious freedom, and even the right to life are being restricted in the name of other so-called new rights, with the result that the very framework of human rights is losing its vitality and creating space for force and oppression. This occurs when each right becomes self-referential, and especially when it becomes disconnected from reality, nature, and truth.

This 250th anniversary of our nation is an opportune time to reexamine any qualms we might have with political liberalism. For if we suspect that liberalism has “failed” because it has allowed us to be too free, we should consider the possibility that it is we who have failed because we have lost sight of the crucial truths that our Founders considered self-evident. 

There are a lot more specific examples in the article which I won't cite here; you can read them if you like. You can also read reviews of both books widely; here's one from the LA Review of Books which, as you can imagine from the home of Hollywood, isn't a fan. The reviewer cautions that "the book appeared a few months ago, during a time in which a dark and authoritarian anti-liberalism has risen to prominence" -- the date of the review is 2023, the height of the Biden Administration. The shadow of Dark Authoritarianism is always rising in LA. 

These authors all seem to think that the choice is between the Old Way and the New Way. What strikes me immediately is that the conflict fits neatly into the dialectic. In the dialectic, a thesis is rejected and an opposing antithesis appears; but eventually people figure out that neither is quite right, and work out the good things that each side had. This is called the synthesis. 

Dialectical political theories have a bad history: both Hegel and Marx were champions of them. The error, though, lies in thinking that the logic of the dialectic is a pure logic that can therefore be worked out in advance. Marxists have been writing for more than a century (almost two!) on the inevitable workings of the logic of economic history, only to find their predictions always falsified.

As we very often discuss here, the physical world isn't logical but analogical. All analogies always break; part of the work is figuring out where the break is going to happen. This is the I.3 point that I kept returning us to during the reading of the EN: it's a category error to attempt to apply strict logic to ethics or politics, as if you could provide proofs for them.

Still, the core idea that we are working towards a synthesis of the Old Way and the New Way is very likely true. We should be looking back at the Old Way to see what was good about it, as we also look at the New Way to identify what were genuine improvements we'd like to protect in the synthesis. On such terms, the task isn't "reactionary" but progress -- just progress in an orthogonal direction from the way in which "progress" has been defined by the New Way for so long. 

"Your President is mad"

I'm not sure exactly how it went when the Marines retrieved the U.S. flag from WHO headquarters, but I'm thinking of this scene from The Wind and the Lion: