Tennessee Motorcycles & Music Revival: AAR

I probably had a better time last weekend than on any occasion in decades. Partly this was due to excellent weather, and partly due to coming and going in safety and health, which are factors that are not entirely in my control. Nevertheless, it was a glorious adventure. 

On reflection I realize that the numerous posted rules, all of which were flagrantly broken, were merely an attempt by the Loretta Lynn Ranch to avoid liability for any negative consequences. (My wife suggests a second purpose: to give the assembled the pleasure of having rules to break). The Ranch clearly loves the event and holds it annually, and the staff I met often remarked that it was their favorite event of the year. I can see why. The mood was one of liberty and fellowship, hundreds and hundreds gathered together to share their joy in a common way of life and the freedom of the highway. Rules were not strictly necessary in such a community anyway. I never saw anyone engaged in risky behavior that anyone tried to talk them out of, stop, or limit; but I also did not see any injuries in spite of all the risks being taken. These were skillful men and women, finally for a moment allowed to be what they were without the walls of imposed safety restrictions. 

My son, who accompanied me, remarked that this was the America he has heard about but was born too late to experience. I told him that he had experienced it growing up, but was just too young to remember how good it was: the old Scottish Highland Games experience was very similar, especially our group who were all bikers of one sort or another anyway. The Wild Highlanders' founding father was a former motorcycle club member before drifting South. The last time the blog says I mentioned them was 2007, when my son was only five. 

This was, however, the Way Things Used to Be. Doubtless that also was one of the sources of my pleasure. For me the experience was much like being young again for a weekend; camping and sleeping on a single blanket on the ground; eating country cooking and at Tennessee truck stops like I often did with dad as a boy, and now got to do with my son; drinking beer around bonfires; freedom from rules but also from cares; the fellowship of a community of dangerous men who are nevertheless completely friendly and joyous companions as long as you are, yourself, a fit member of the community who behaves with honor. 

Yet in a way it was better even than youth, as I am now of an age to be liberated from the anxieties of youth. I no longer have to worry if I will be accepted or if I will be perceived as authentic enough. I don't need to stress over finding love or if a woman will ever want me. All those things that made youth more miserable than it is sometimes easy to remember have been relieved by time and experience. I could enjoy this in a way I could never enjoy the old days, because I no longer have anything to prove. 

One of the posted rules that was most regularly violated was the prohibition against carrying weapons. Once I understood the actual intent of the posted signs, I was glad to put a knife on my belt: I always carry one, and feel very odd without it, akin to if I had forgotten my pants perhaps. I brought a Buck knife for the camping trip, which is a good camping knife because it is stainless and easily replaced if lost. On Saturday night I was wearing it along with a Waylon Jennings t-shirt. I met another biker wearing the exact same knife on his belt, along with a different Waylon Jennings t-shirt. 

"Clearly," I told my son the next morning, "I have come home among my people." He laughed and agreed, and then we rode back. 

I mentioned that the health and safety were partly under my control. Skill in riding was important, but more important proved to be all that Wilderness Rescue and other rescue training. The heat in middle Tennessee at this time of the year was too much for my son, inured to mountain weather, and he developed a heat injury before noon on the ride back. All the endless hours of training were paid for by the ability to diagnose the injury on observation, assess its severity (mild but dangerous), and treat it appropriately with shade, water, rest, as well as vitamins and electrolytes. After an hour and a half he was feeling better; I then rerouted our trip to go through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so there would be a quicker return to shade and the coolness of the rivers and stones. He was fine by the time we reached Newfound Gap and returned to North Carolina.

Newfound Gap

I have written about the music in other posts, but it was well-collected. I had never heard of any of the groups or artists, and worried they would be Nashville bro-country slop; but that was not at all the case. The event organizers deserve praise for choosing wisely a collection of lesser-known artists who were all of quality, some of them great quality. That was another thing that added to the occasion. 

Overall, an excellent time. I am deeply grateful, both to the people who made it possible and to any divinely-oriented powers that might have been watching over all of us. 

Closings

My oldest friend is at her mother's deathbed. A few days ago, when her mother was still fairly alert, my friend forgave her for any lingering resentments, and told her some of the ways she had been a good mother. The patient visibly relaxed and smiled. I had told my friend if she could do this, she would remember it the rest of her life. Illness and death are inescapable, but there are ways to minimize remorse, and this is one of the best. Also, once this is over, if my own experience with my father is any guide, she'll never again fear watching someone die.

TMMR Saturday

Awake.

The fancy tents section.

I really envy Tennessee riders' access to a skull-and-crossbones motorcycle license plate. That is unusually cool for a government issue anything.

Pirate flags abound! I also saw where someone had posted a fake parrot with a Miller Lite outside their encampment.

A brief ride into Nashville to commune with the home of country music.

Layla's Honky Tonk downtown, the least corporate and most faithful of the many such places in what Nashville calls "The District." Layla's is also unusually female-friendly, not in the 'ladies' night' sense, but in the sense of having built a space with enough female-coded things that women actually feel included and welcome there. Here we see a band of good old boys throwing down a rockabilly cover of Merle Haggard's "Little Ole Wine Drinker, Me."

Not only pirate flags were in attendance. There was a lot of that sort of patriotism that I have long noticed both in the South generally and among bikers as well: love of the country, disdain and suspicion of the government.

Mufasa in his chariot.

For me, the hands-down best performance of Saturday night was Kendell Marvel. He's not an up-and-coming artist like most of them were, but an established success as a songwriter whose performances are strong. He has a deep singing voice like Hank Williams Jr. He performed the linked piece after a story about how he lives on a 200 year old farm but also keeps a place in Nashville, where his neighbors are hippies but they all get along just fine. One night they were out enjoying some wine together when his kids -- already grown, like my own son -- poked their heads out to say that he should come in and see the television because Sturgill Simpson was performing one of his songs. 

Great music, great fun, and a sense of comradery one rarely finds in American life these days. 

A Diptych

Tennessee Motorcycles & Music Revival

Quite an event, it turns out. Held annually at the Loretta Lynn Ranch about an hour outside Nashville. 

The Pitbull’s name is Mufasa. He seems to have the run of the place. 

There’s a band we saw called The Waylanders that was awesome. I didn’t stay for the whole show only because they didn’t start until 11:30 (and this is Central Time, so after midnight for us). They were a high energy duo with visible connection who played robust Outlaw, mostly their own original music. They did cover a Johnny Cash song, but who doesn’t?

We also saw the Hogslop String Band. They did a combination of their own music — hillbilly, to use the categories Tom was discussing last week — and covers of the Allman Brothers, Loretta and Conway Twitty. 

On the Road Again

Tennessee. 

Surprisingly comfortable: I slept well.

 

Welcome Ruger

Sturm & Ruger has relocated from Connecticut to "gun-friendly North Carolina." I can't speak for the whole state, but the West is definitely gun country. Even the hippies who moved up here in the 60s and 70s to smoke weed in the Blue Ridge Mountains generally have guns; they're old enough now that we'd occasionally get called out to help them with medical or other rescue issues, and invariably there was a revolver sitting out where they could get to it if they needed. 

When the police are an hour away, if you're lucky, you're the only hope you've got. 

North Carolina has a number of legal restraints on firearm usage compared to many Red states, though. For example: if you are the aggressor in an encounter, you can't claim self-defense until and unless you can show that you attempted to retreat from the fight and were stopped or pursued; there's no 'citizens arrest' option like there was in Georgia. I would say it's at best the third-most gun-friendly state I've lived in, after Georgia and Virginia (at that time: obviously not now!).

Still, Ruger has probably made a wise move. They're my favorite handgun manufacturer; of the handguns I own, the clear majority are Rugers. When I shoot those poker cards, I'm usually shooting a Ruger Single Six -- the fixed-sight cowboy version. When I'm not shooting poker cards, I keep it loaded with snake shot in case of a close encounter with our Timber rattlers. They've bitten my wife and my dog since we moved up here, and they don't rattle any more like the earlier generations. The ones who rattled got shot, I guess: evolution in action. Now, the Timber rattlers just try to kill you straight off. 

UPDATE: The article is off on one point, I notice: we do have permitless OPEN carry in North Carolina. We don't have permitless CONCEALED carry. There are the usual restrictions about carrying to schools, etc. The legislature has approved full-scale Constitutional carry, but the governor vetoed it and the Senate has yet to act on the veto override (most likely because, like establishment Republicans generally, they prefer to fail to change things the way their voters want, they just like to fundraise off of the issues they don't fix).

CIA Raids Tulsi's Office

The Central Intelligence Agency almost certainly doesn't have the legal authority to raid the office of the Director of National Intelligence in order to seize files it doesn't want declassified. All the same, it did, at least according to a Congresswoman and a whistleblower.

If true, this is in direct defiance of a Presidential EO to declassify those documents. It's the administrative state openly defying the constitutional order.

UPDATE: A Newsmax journalist says it is not true, and that the WH has affirmed to him that the report is false. Keep an eye open on this one; it would be extraordinary if it pans out, but it deserves skepticism. 

90s Hip Hop References

I don't know how painful this was, but it is objectively funny to watch Jake Tapper painstakingly explaining these references like we don't all know them. Grim's Hall very rarely features hip-hop references, but even I knew all of these.

Alcohol as Social

This is not without plausibility.

Teen drinking fell because the old physical world of adolescence got dismantled. Alcohol belonged to a social ecosystem: unsupervised time, cars, parties, local jobs, malls, basements, boredom, flirting, older siblings, house gatherings, and the chaotic peer world where teenagers learned who they were by colliding with other people in real space.

That ecosystem was replaced by phones, surveillance, parental tracking, algorithmic entertainment, social anxiety, online status games, and a much thinner physical commons.... The young are less reckless because they are less socially embodied. Less initiation. Less unsupervised friction. Less courage-building. Less embarrassment and recovery. Less real dating. Less independence. Less contact with the physical world before adulthood demands it....

The new world suppresses visible risk while increasing invisible fragility.

Most things are tradeoffs. Alcohol too: it has a lot of downsides, and would be wisely replaced with a better technology that doesn't have so many tradeoffs. Here, though, we're replacing it with risk aversion, and that is expensive too. Maybe it is more expensive.

Illegal Immigrants and the 2A

The courts are working through cases involving both the status of illegal immigrants and also the Second Amendment; this particular case turns on both issues.

In 2022, the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen held that when an individual’s conduct falls within the Second Amendment’s text, the government can defend a gun restriction only by showing it is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Relying on Bruen, Rebollar, Osorio’s public defender moved to dismiss, arguing that § 922(g)(5) was unconstitutional as applied to him because, given his years in the country and close ties to U.S. citizens, he fell within “the people” the Amendment protects and the government could not justify disarming him.

Prosecutors countered that undocumented immigrants fall outside that protected category altogether or, alternatively, that § 922(g)(5) fits within a longstanding tradition of status-based restrictions on who may be armed. But District Judge Nancy Torresen didn’t buy this argument. Reading the Court’s precedents together, the judge held that unlawfully present noncitizens with substantial ties (like Rebollar Osorio) fall within that term. As a result, their right to possess firearms is protected by the Second Amendment, and the government must justify any restriction.

Judge Torresen then applied Bruen’s history‑and‑tradition test....

On appeal, the First Circuit reversed but did so without deciding whether undocumented immigrants like Rebollar Osorio are within “the people.” Instead, the panel assumed for argument’s sake that he could claim Second Amendment coverage and skipped directly to Bruen’s historical inquiry.... It did not look for founding-era statutes that specifically targeted undocumented immigrants, a category that did not exist in the same way. Instead, it asked whether there is a tradition of restricting arms to those firmly within the political community and disarming those deemed outside or insufficiently loyal. Drawing on English and early American case law and statutes, the panel emphasized laws that limited arms for groups such as non‑Protestants, persons who refused loyalty oaths, and others treated as outside the core polity. In the court’s view, those measures reflected a longstanding use of status-based rules to control who could be armed.

Nice to see the courts taking Bruen seriously as the controlling precedent. Both of the courts' conclusions are defensible, as both recognize the applicability of the Second as a right they have to take into account. The open question is to what degree it is a right available to those who have violated the laws to get here in the first place.

I like it

How to Make the Trump Battleship Even Deadlier with this One Weird Trick.

The Origins of Country Music

 Seems legit ...

Old Time vs Bluegrass vs Western Swing

Speaking of genres I've never been clear on, here are a couple of videos on the history of these three styles. I did not realize how new bluegrass and Western swing are.

I like them all.

Music below the fold.

Flamenco and Classical Guitar

I was curious about the flamenco guitars and techniques Eric mentioned, so here's some demonstration of some basic flamenco techniques.

Here's one on the physical and cultural differences between the guitars themselves:

Music below the fold.

Carne Asada

That fire roasted corn was amazing. The sirloin was good too, but I wasn’t expecting the corn to be as delicious as it was. The bacon-wrapped potato slices were a good experiment, but they needed more time and slower heat. 

Never Before

Possibly never again; depends on future events. Definitely unprecedented. 

A Good Orthodox/Catholic Joke from the Bee

I won't spoil it; go see for yourself. 

AIs and Zombies (Oh My!)

An amusing video, clearly inspired by Fallout but with a sense of humor Range 15 fans might appreciate. 

Licklog Gap

Tulsi Gabbard: Remarks at '26 Independent Women's Forum

Thanks to D29, who forwarded these remarks by Hall favorite Tulsi Gabbard to me. At one point in the remarks she tells a story about a debate early in her political career in which she asserts that she "smashed" her opponent. It was a local race to Hawaii so I didn't see it, but without looking it up I believe her. We all saw what she did to Kamala Harris the one time she got to debate Harris before Kamala decided to withdraw from consideration.

I don't know if it's significant that the only members of the administration that have earned the title "Hall favorite" are Tulsi Gabbard and Harmeet Dhillon, both ladies rather than gentlemen. That may be coincidence, because I believe the reasons are substantive and unrelated: Gabbard's aggressive pursuit of IC politicization and corruption, Dhillon's increasingly robust defense of the 2nd Amendment. Still, given that these were remarks at an explicitly 'women's' forum, for whatever it's worth, they're the ones I appreciate.

D29 notes that there's a lot of Aquinas in her remarks, as indeed there is. 

The Lawfulness of Revolution

A link I saw today mirrors a discussion Tom and I were having in a couple of the posts below. We were talking about piracy; this is about revolution. The question is whether either can be in some sense "lawful," or if indeed having a State whose law approves of the action in any way improves or alters the morality of the action.

The distinction between piracy and revolution is potentially less than it seems. Pirates were often breakaway sailors who had turned against their own government, for example -- indeed, during the period that occasioned the discussion, supporters of the Stewarts often found themselves fighting against the English Civil War government that executed their king Charles I, and then for the new government that followed the restoration of Charles II, and then against the government that rejected James II in favor of William of Orange. Such men could go from being defined as 'privateers' to 'pirates' and back again. 

Likewise, men like Stede Bonnet, an English gentleman who was briefly part of the Republic of Pirates -- the one in Nassau, not the one on Old Providence isle, which is now a part of Colombia (the one with two 'o's, for those following AVI's blog also) before being pardoned and made an English privateer, after which he returned to pirating his own nation's ships as well. Those activities gave information and inspiration to the Revolutionary war American privateers, who were of course considered pirates -- and traitors, as they considered all 'revolutionaries' -- by the English. 

Some of the American revolutionary leaders gave serious attention to the question of whether or not what they were doing could be called lawful, rather than merely just or virtuous or proper. Per the article, they fell on exactly the distinction I mentioned in the comments to Tom:

If you want to impose a religious context on top of the social one, one might not have violated the natural law or the divine law but acted in an upright way as a husband or father defending his family; the murderer clearly has sinned through wrath or lust or whatever brought him to the murder. However, since the religious context introduces a sort-of legislation, it might muddy the point to add it.

Since the article is specifically about 'lawfulness,' in their version of the discussion this is immediately relevant rather than water-muddying. The Natural Law does seem to endorse revolutions -- as the Declaration of Independence frames it, sometimes as a right and sometimes as a duty. 

"The Inquisition Invented Peer Review"

That tracks. 

She's an interesting historian our of the University of Chicago, with books on Viking mythology including a series on Ragnarok. She makes a pretty good case that academic feminism improved our understanding of Viking metaphysics. 

COWEN: What is it that women scholars understand better about Viking metaphysics?

PALMER: [laughs] It’s not mainly that women scholars understand it, but it was the entry of women scholars into the field that helped us understand it. For a long time in Viking studies, nobody wanted to touch metaphysics with a 10-foot pole. This was because during World War II, Hitler’s minister of culture was somebody who had done his dissertation on Viking metaphysics, and you couldn’t work on Viking metaphysics without citing him. So, it made it sort of a poisoned field for a while.

However, when, in the late ’60s and ’70s, the advances of feminism meant that more women were entering academia, but still often being sidelined within academia and pushed into corners of research that others didn’t want to touch, a number of them started looking at topics that people hadn’t looked at in a long time, including that one, especially because Viking metaphysics revolves around weaving.

Now, weaving is a feminine-coded, feminine-gendered subject, both in the Viking period and in the period when history took its formation in the 20th and 21st centuries. Lots of weaving-related equipment had been found in tombs and excavated here and there and then set aside, as this is women’s work and not of interest except to women.

Women started looking at it and were like, wait a minute, this isn’t a weaving shuttle; this is a staff of sorcery, as described in the sagas that very clearly described these staffs of sorcery that look like weaving shuttles because Viking metaphysics is dominated by ideas of threads of fate, the Norns spinning fate, weaving fate, etc. And it was women who were first willing to look at that stuff in detail.

Sir Isaac Newton, Undercover

In conversation with AVI's thoughts on misinterpretations in the history of heredity where he brings up the natural philosopher, astrologer and pirate* Sir Kenelm Digby, I thought it would be interesting to review another 17th century natural philosopher who was an alchemist and undercover investigator for the English mint, Sir Isaac Newton.

As Wikipedia recounts:

"As Warden, and afterwards as Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 per cent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of 1696 were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason, punishable by the felon being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult, but Newton proved equal to the task.

"Disguised as a habitué of bars and taverns, he gathered much of that evidence himself. For all the barriers placed to prosecution, and separating the branches of government, English law still had ancient and formidable customs of authority. Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties. A draft letter regarding the matter is included in Newton's personal first edition of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which he must have been amending at the time. Then he conducted more than 100 cross-examinations of witnesses, informers, and suspects between June 1698 and Christmas 1699. He successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including the serial counterfeiter William Chaloner, who was hanged."

He also has an interesting coat of arms.

###

* Wikipedia says he was a privateer, but everyone seems dedicated to thinking of him as a pirate, which is admittedly more sexy.

Jesus Wasn’t The Way, Truth, Life “Exclusively”

Someone admitted this woman to the clergy. Not sure whose. She’s very earnest; she has an argument, even. 

New Possibilities

I admit that it took me a while to get into this article because of some of the rhetoric, which reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson's declaration that he wrote English 'as a musical instrument.' That can be fun to read, but is hard to take seriously. 

However, there are serious points made. Several of them dovetail with some of our longstanding discussions. 

He opens with some points that are not new. One is a point that Eric Blair used to make here regularly even a decade ago -- that there's actually more good art and music than ever now, and you can find it if you look outside of mass culture. Then he makes a point about expertise that was the heart of the Blog Era of ~2002-2012 (before Social Media began to capture this into corporate-controlled spaces): that real experts of practical experience can now contest credentialed 'experts' and demonstrate the superiority of genuine expertise. 

Then he acknowledges a dangerous downside, one that the post about the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance also shows is not brand new:

The limits of this positive picture must also be acknowledged, as there is a darker underside of increasing State control to this story, as described in these pages previously. But we are only at the start of this new age and there may be ways to address the risks to individual freedoms even while the world continues down the path of individual “sovereignty”.

What follows rhymes nicely -- to borrow the music metaphor for a moment -- with our 'anarchist as far as possible' discussions, the last of which ended with an exploration in the comments of various science fiction accounts of how technology might allow for more human freedom than has ever been possible before. He goes on to note that some kind of vast change is inevitable anyway: the old systems simply cannot survive the present challenge.

He concludes: 

Completely new thinking is required. Radical thinking that goes beyond ideas about “simply” rearranging or reforming the state, including its constitutional arrangements – hard as even that may be. But yet even more boldness is required to match the vast and profound challenges – societal as well as human challenges – that are actually facing us, and that we are still, collectively, in broad ignorance of. 

The best place to start, perhaps, is with the individual and his “sovereign” transformation that is already de facto underway. Political and philosophical work is required to understand how – or indeed whether – this process can shape wider changes in how we govern ourselves and the new rules and rights we might want to put in place in order to deal with what is coming in technology as well as societally. Truly novel thinking on first principles is hard and rare, but the present generation must rise to the task. 

That, indeed, is quite aligned with the project of the Hall. Yet I will say again what I have often said about attempts at genuine novelty: you can't do it from inside the system you're trying to criticize. You have to find a way to get outside of it in order to get enough perspective; and you have to have some alternatives to what you know in order to spark imagination. One way to do this is to study history: the past really was different, and seeing which things surprise you in understanding those differences will go along way to giving you ideas about what could be different in a future world. Science fiction, already mentioned, is another way: but then think about how many famous Sci-Fi or Fantasy efforts have relied upon incorporating elements of ancient or Medieval history into the future. 

The study of the history of philosophy in a sense combines these approaches. I think it is often the case that in the transition to the Modern world, we lost some insights of the ancient and Medieval that were valuable and even true. Even when they were false or wrong ideas, however, they were different approaches: being able to contrast how Aristotle thought about something versus how Kant thought about the same thing, how Plato did versus how Hegel or Marx did, these kinds of abilities to understand different systematic philosophies gives you a capacity to think about what else might be different. It's another road to thinking through truly novel ideas. 

Action on 2A from DOJ

A genuine step forward to try to overturn unconstitutional state laws -- even ones that have been allowed to persist for decades. 

The Justice Department is suing Denver through the Second Amendment Section of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, according to Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet K. Dhillon.

“I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our new Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding Americans from restrictions such as those we are challenging in these cases,” Dhillon said. “Law-abiding Americans, regardless of what city or state they reside in, should not have to live under threat of criminal sanction just for exercising their Second Amendment right to possess arms which are owned by tens of millions of their fellow citizens.”

Denver’s ban, which has been in place for 37 years, bans so-called assault rifles and magazines that hold more than 15 rounds.

“The Constitution is not a suggestion and the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said. “Denver’s ban on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles directly violates the right to bear arms.

It's rare for me to wish the Federal government luck in its attempts to meddle internally with the states; in general I have supported Jefferson's vision of a Federal government that 'looks out,' and deals with external threats or clashes between states only. However, as noted even in 2014:

We've added one more constitutional role to Jefferson's ideal, which is making sure that even within states government does not violate basic rights. Generally the Federal government has done this badly, but at times they've been the only one to do it at all. 

I was thinking of course of Jim Crow style oppression by state and local governments when I wrote that, but it applies here also. 

UPDATE: Hall favorite Harmeet Dhillon predicts SCOTUS will declare the AR-15 legal and constitutionally protected across the nation. It certainly ought.

Old Story, New Telling

The MIT Press Reader has a story today about how we learned that the NSA had begun spying on Americans in the wake of the Patriot Act. Most of you know the story; there are details here, however, you probably didn't know. 

Cyberpunk 2026

Clever.

It reminds me of what the cyberpunk novels called 'skillsofts,' except you don't have to jack anything into your head; the thing is wholly external. I love the idea of being able to play a guitar, which I've never managed to learn even slightly in spite of several attempts; but now I could just put these on and play like Waylon Jennings, or the bass like Lemmy, or whomever else I wanted.

Killing the Petroyuan

“Yuan” isn’t actually the name of the Chinese currency; it is called the Renminbi (人民币), or “People’s Currency.” “Yuan” is what is called a ’counting word’ in Chinese: things that can come in various quantities have different words to specify what unit is under discussion  instead of “give me a beer,” you must ask for a glass of beer or a bottle of beer  “Yuan” is a quantity of Renminbi; but it’s so commonly used that yuan functions as if it were the name of the money.

Anyway, the Treasury Secretary has a plan.

A swap line is not a loan and it is not a bailout. It is a contractually-bounded currency exchange in which a foreign central bank delivers a deposit of its own currency to Treasury or the Federal Reserve and receives an equivalent dollar deposit, with both parties committing to reverse the trade at a specified future date and at the same exchange rate. The foreign central bank pays interest on the dollar borrowing. The US holds the foreign currency as collateral for the duration. Counterparty risk sits at the central-bank level, not the commercial-bank level. 

The structure is so conservative that the Federal Reserve's swap operations, including peak utilization of roughly $585 billion during the 2008 crisis and $450 billion during the 2020 crisis, have generated no documented losses to US taxpayers across the major episodes examined in the academic finance literature. As Bessent told Congress in defending the Argentina arrangement, "in most bailouts you don't make money. The US government made money." What Bessent is now doing is taking that demonstrated playbook and scaling it into the central instrument of 21st-century American economic statecraft. The strategic logic, which Bessent has stated plainly, runs as follows. Additional swap lines, in his words, "can benefit our nation by reinforcing dollar usage and liquidity internationally, maintaining smooth functioning in dollar funding markets, promoting trade and investment with the United States, and, in hypothetical stress scenarios, preventing disorderly sales of US assets." He went further and named the actual game: "Dollar dominance and reserve currency status are strengthened by constant long-term initiatives, including countering the growth of problematic, alternative payment systems." Translation for those who do not speak Treasury, this is about killing the petroyuan in its cradle.

A Pirate Philosopher

In the comments to a post at AVI's that began with an interesting character, I noted that pirates were pretty common among the English gentry of the era: "The English Civil War and its echoes also turned many adventurers into outlaws on Britain's wide frontier."

That turns out to be exactly what happened in this case. A Roman Catholic who converted to Anglicanism for political reasons under Charles I, he returned to Catholicism during his grief over the death of his wife. A successful privateer defending England's interests before the Civil War, he ended up in exile during the war; fought and won a duel against a French nobleman; became an emissary to the Pope for Oliver Cromwell; and after the Restoration, a popular figure at Charles II's court. He also developed a better wine-bottle than had existed before his time, stronger and tinted to protect the wine from the effects of sunlight.

One of his most famous philosophical/medical attempts was the powder of sympathy. As noted in the post I wrote about "Empathy vs. Sympathy," this was the original use of the term sympathy in English: sympathetic magic, we would call it today.

Up the Militia

Megan McArdle proposes what she clearly intends as 'a modest proposal' on firearms; but she's quite right.

Maybe we’re looking at the problem wrong. Maybe instead of putting so much energy into efforts to keep people from buying guns, we should be trying to change which guns the buy. Instead of trying to make gun purchases more onerous, we should try something more radical: help people buy long guns instead of handguns.

No, I haven’t gone crazy. I’ve just been reading a provocative new paper from economists Bradley Shapiro, Sara Drango and Sarah Moshary.

They start from a few simple and correct premises. First, handguns are associated with more harm than long guns — they are involved in 90 percent of firearm violence and a huge number of suicides. People own significantly more handguns because they are just easier to carry around and easier to conceal.

Second, most people who buy guns say they want them for personal or household safety. That’s a use for long guns as well. Displacing handgun purchases with purchases of less convenient long guns could reduce the likelihood of tragedy when the owner becomes angry or despondent.

So, what if the government gave first-time gun buyers a subsidy to choose a long gun instead?

The numbers on handguns vs. long-guns are well known to readers of the Hall. America is a safe country, a fact that is obscured by a few neighborhoods in a few cities in a few counties creating a vast bias in our statistics. The media likes to report on 'assault weapon' mass shootings, but those are a tiny percentage of the gun violence problem: long guns of all kinds, 'assault' or otherwise, account for a couple percent of the murders. If we then are only interested in mass shootings we reduce that percentage to statistical noise; they just get a lot of coverage in the press because the stories are exciting and drive clicks and viewers. In fact, almost no American guns as a percentage are ever involved in violent crime: once you appreciate that we have more guns than people, the math becomes overwhelming. 

That said, the money to be made in reducing gun homicides is clearly with illegally-possessed handguns: not new laws, since these things are already illegal (e.g. stolen) or illegally possessed (e.g. by felons), and readily done by increased policing in those few neighborhoods in those few cities in those few counties. Nobody ever raises that solution because it doesn't address the real issue that the politicians want to address, which is greater government control over the citizenry -- not the criminal class, but the law-abiding ones.

It would be perfectly Constitutional, however, for the government to require that all non-felon adult citizens arm themselves with a rifle suitable for militia service. Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 gives Congress the authority to "arm" the militia, which would embrace the idea of subsidies for suitable firearms. The AR-15 is the obvious choice: it's the one that operates most similarly to and shares many parts with our service rifles, and shares ammunition with what we have in large military stocks. 

McArdle is only floating this as an idea to broaden the discussion, not as a serious proposal. Still, it has some points in its favor.

Mossadegh

A new report argues that our popular understanding of Iran’s mid-20th century history is almost completely wrong. 

Chamber of Commerce

A curious decision by the local Jackson County Chamber of Commerce as to what they wanted to highlight about their community, but who am I to judge? They seemed enthusiastic. 

Requiescat in Pace, David Allan Coe

Reliable sources are reporting the death of Outlaw Country legend David Allan Coe. 

He was one of the last of the greats, and a true Outlaw; he was a full patch member of the Outlaws MC. 

Next Up

 With the Supreme Court's solid ruling in Louisiana v Calais et al., next up, I say, is partisan gerrymandering, gerrymandering by political party. That gerrymandering, decades of court rulings notwithstanding, is just as unconstitutional as racial gerrymandering. While Alito centered the Calais ruling on the 15th Amendment, both forms of gerrymandering--all such forms, come to that--treat one group of American citizen voters entirely differently from and at the direct expense of all other groups of American voters in direct violation of the 14th Amendment.

As a man almost said not so long ago, "There's not a liberal American voter and a conservative American voter. There's the United States of America voter. There's not a black American voter and white American voter and Latino American voter and Asian American voter; there's the United States of America voter."

Full stop.

Eric Hines

Happy Birthday Willie

Willie Nelson is 93 today. 

Three Strikes

Coffee and Covid notes a disturbing pattern in these assassination attempts. (H/t D29).

Taken together, the three attempts highlight a paradox: the protective apparatus keeps evolving— and so do the shooters’ tactics. It’s almost like each successive shooter knows how the Secret Service’s protocols have changed.

In the most recent two, the attacker was successfully neutralized before Trump was physically harmed, and in the latest, the suspect never made it to the final stairway. Yet, in spite of increasingly paranoid and enhanced security, each incident exposed a brand‑new seam — an unguarded rooftop, a gap in a golf‑course fence, a “layered security” perimeter that still allowed an armed man to sprint the last 50 yards....

If this were just three different shooters exploiting three different weak spots, that would be bad enough. But when you look more closely at the details, the pattern gets even harder to wave away as “bad luck.”...

Combine those three stories, and our N=3 dataset starts to look a lot less like three independent miracles of bad fortune and a lot more like a system that keeps failing in eerily specific ways.

One rooftop that was covered and then mysteriously uncovered. One would‑be sniper who spends hours inside the outer perimeter without any sweep pushing him out. One gunman who manages to pick the exact right moment when a half‑dozen security professionals aren’t physically in his way at a choke point designed precisely so that someone should always be in the way.

We can dismiss those questions as coincidence —as lottery-level luck— for three separate, consecutive “lone wolves.” If so, well, the crack where “incredible luck” lives is getting microscopically skinny. 

By coincidence, this points to an unrelated sports article that AVI just posted with his own commentary about how people are bad at estimating the odds of three or more successive events.  

This is an example of people not understanding that successive reasonable probabilities quickly become unreasonable.  A 7-in-10 chance is good, but if it is combined with a second 7-in-10 chance it drops to 50-50 (0.7 x 0.7 = 0.49), and a third one brings you down to about a 1-in-3 chance. (0.343) 

That's true: even with good odds, getting three in a row is hard. How about with allegedly terrible odds? 

Inside help looks like the most probable theory. That's not an accusation, just an observation about the math. 

Looking for Bridges

In a comment to a post below, Tom was asking if anyone is still looking for common ground. The President of Dartmouth is. 

When an encampment went up in May 2024, Beilock had protestors arrested within two hours. Under her leadership, admissions has prioritized students who can act as "bridges between people" and students with "underrepresented" viewpoints—the admissions director used as an example someone who led his high school's Young Republicans club and was dialogue-focused. Her Dartmouth Dialogues project has spent hundreds of thousands bringing in speakers from both sides. 

Above all, Beilock believes schools should be "in service of truth," not "ideology," and cannot allow disruptions to free speech

One suspects that is a controversial position, especially in the Ivy League. An honorable one, though.

You Know What Some Peoples Trauma Is?

This is shockingly brutal. Did he seed the audience?

Another Piece on "Equality"

Now since all of you suffered through the long commentary on the EN last summer, which is available on the sidebar if you wish to revisit it (especially EN 5, for this matter), you can readily engage with this bit from American Thinker.

The equality of man is found at the forefront of our Declaration of Independence and is considered an uncontested virtue of free society.  However, disagreement over its implementation has raised the following questions: What exactly is equality in a state?  Which things should be equal?  Which should be unequal?  What are the consequences?  A nation’s concord depends on the answers — and yet today, these questions are rarely examined.  

Historically, this was not the case.  In Aristotle’s exploration in Politics, equality is governed by justice — the principle that each is given his due.  But exactly what is “due” depends on the object being distributed.  To account for this, Aristotle distinguished two types of equality: numerical, or equality of distribution, and value, or equality of proportion.  The first is characterized by each receiving the exact same, the second by each receiving an amount proportional to his contribution, ability, or merit.  

A just society requires a combination of both, each to its appropriate object.  Any misplacement of a form of equality to a domain where it doesn’t belong is an error that, if absolutized, manifests in two extremes.  The first assumes that if all are equal in one aspect, they ought to be equal in all aspects — e.g., if two people are equal in citizenship, then they should also have equal amounts of material goods or wealth.  The second supposes that if some are unequal in one aspect, they should be unequal in all aspects — e.g., different laws for different classes or levels of wealth. 

The question, then, is which aspects of society should be governed by which types.  Citizens should have numerical equality in that which is innate and belongs to man by nature itself: rights endowed by the creator, equal protection under the law, respect, and dignity.  A just state gives these things equally to everyone; they don’t require another’s physical production and are intrinsically owed by the laws of nature.  Proportional equality, however, should be owed to objects that belong to man by action and do require external production by other humans: wealth, services, and material goods. 

There must be some advantages to philosophy, after all. Not serious ones, since it is worth doing for its own sake: as Aristotle says in the beginning of De Anima, the best kind of mind wants to know the truth about the highest things. The very highest things are useless, since to be 'useful' is to be useful for something else; and that something else must be higher in some sense than the first thing. Yet there are advantages to knowing, all the same.

Manfesto: "Message: I Care"

Usually a manifesto contains some sort of model for improvement that justifies revolutionary violence. This one does not. I infer from this that his revolutionary Leftism is an essentially conservative movement: it is trying to roll back the changes of the Trump administration, to restore the order of perhaps the Obama era. The shooter in this case was, after all, a credentialed California educator: he doesn't want to change anything, he just wants to stop the changes. 

He expresses this, however, in terms of how much he cares, a statement that follows a large number of apologies to express how much he cares about the people he is affecting. Then his 'manifesto':

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

I am also a citizen of the United States of America. I don't think I agree, however, that what my "representatives" do reflects on me at all. I don't feel the least bit responsible for them, and I don't think that I ought to do. For one thing, I don't think the system is in any way representative: my Senators work for the major corporations of North Carolina, not for me, as they prove every day (at least every day that they bother to work) by their conduct. Even my Congressman -- indeed my last few Congressmen -- have made no attempt to suggest that they care what I think or if I vote for them. Why should they? They're gerrymandered into perfect security. 

The Presidential races are at least competitive, but my input into that system is so minimal that I don't see how I can be morally responsible for the selection; and once selected, especially this President has made clear that he is not interested in further input from me or you or anyone for four years. 

I used to believe that citizens' thoughts were important to the system, and that we could influence the system through argument or letter-writing or petitions or demonstrations. I used, therefore, to argue passionately to try to persuade fellow citizens about what I thought were the best available policies. I no longer believe any of that; I think the political elections are a kind of dramatic show that is only intended to produce the illusion of choice and therefore to manufacture consent to what the permanent, unelected bureaucracy that actually is the government was going to do regardless of who was elected.

Those people aren't my representatives even in theory. They work for the state, and are self-selecting. I have neither influence nor input into their decisions; occasionally there is a public comment period for certain proposals, but they're going to do what they want regardless of how clever your arguments to the contrary may be. 

In any case, I feel that my duty to object to the government is mostly satisfied by stating the objection, which I usually do here. No one who reads the Hall probably thinks that I am in approval of the government of the United States in general, or the particular 'representatives' in especial. 

I generally think that political violence is fundamental to the American project, which began in revolution because people who likewise felt strongly about it decided to take up arms. I don't especially object to him trying, since he feels that way too; he's taken up what we used to call The Wager of Battle and lost. Having freely chosen it, he now has to pay up. In the old days we'd have hanged him; these days he'll probably get a life sentence that will be commuted by some future Democratic President, leading to a sinecure on talk shows where he'll be lecturing us all from his position of moral superiority as someone who "tried to do something about it." 

I'll be skipping the lectures when they arrive. I already know what he thinks; he thinks what they all think. It is the Standard Position of the credentialed class, and devoid of original thought. 

Gun Control vs. the White House Correspondents Dinner

Just as an aside, the shooter who went up against several Federal police agencies at the White House Correspondents' Dinner was armed solely with firearms that comply with the strictest gun control laws in America. The pistol he carried is Maryland and California compliant. His main choice of weapon was a pump-action shotgun, which he explains that he loaded with buckshot thinking that might let him get past the body armored security without killing them (a rather dodgy plan, but let's leave that for the moment). It wasn't even a semi-automatic weapon; you can get pump action shotguns even in the UK with the right friends in high places paperwork.

Once again, these laws don't actually solve the problems they purport to solve. Their regular and comprehensive failure leads me to conclude that no one actually cares if they work; their real intent must be something else.

I’d Like An Argument Please

The Heterodox Academy, which is doing good work in trying to create space for viewpoint diversity in American universities, is holding an event they call Disagree With A Professor.

Please join the Heterodox Academy Campus Chapter at Stanford University for the inaugural Disagree with a Professor lunch event on Meyer Green on Tuesday, April 28th from 12:00pm - 1:15pm where you’ll be able to engage with different faculty about a variety of claims, including: 

• Mail-in voting was a bad idea. Everyone should vote in-person on Election Day. 
• Forget the Electoral College; we should abolish the Presidency. 
• We are less prepared for the next pandemic now than we were before COVID, despite significant advances in our ability to detect, analyze, prevent, and treat infectious disease. 
• Grading of students by the professor who teaches the class is biased. It should be eliminated or supplemented with evaluations by unaffiliated evaluators. 
• The world is a safer place in the 21st century than ever before. 
• Geography is the force that drives history.

Those sound like spirited topics! Naturally, however, I thought of this:

 

SPLC and USAID

In the comments to the earlier post about the SPLC's criminal problems, I commented: "It sounds like the allegations aren't really about paying for sources, but about paying to create and sustain terrorist and extremist groups because it was useful to have them as a political foil. That's akin to how USAID was using 'aid' money to fund NGOs that were funding all sorts of bad activities. The SPLC was I suppose part of that large NGO archipelago."

That supposition is now confirmed.

USAID was funding the SPLC through an organization called the Tides Center, based in San Francisco.

From 2016 through 2024, USAID granted $27 million to the Tides Network to “strengthen global civil society organizations, promote transparency, accountability, citizen engagement, and serve as fiscal agent for USAID’s Civil Society Innovation Initiative.”

The Tides Center set up a fund through its Tides Foundation with that money for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Vote Your Voice” initiative.

The executive director of the Tides Center is Ayesha Khanna. She was co-chair of Women for Obama in Atlanta, Georgia.

In the comments to AVI's post on the same topic, Tom and I had this exchange:

Tom

They needed an enemy, so they funded one. They became what they hate. Not sure where they go from here. If I recall, they have half a billion dollars in assets. Maybe, I don't know, give it to the poor?

3:49 PM

Grim

Your recollection is incomplete. They have about a quarter billion dollars in assets offshore. They’ve been moving them offshore aggressively for a decade— since just about the time of Unite the Right, I suppose.

https://freebeacon.substack.com/p/southern-poverty-law-centers-murky

6:02 PM

Tom

I stand corrected. Again. Still. 

Not still: even more. This sudden move to aggressively offshoring its wealth now looks strongly like knowledge of guilt, and a recognition that this wealth needed to be protected by being put beyond the ability of a future US government to target as a part of a prosecution like this. Last time I was questioning whether there was a real crime to target: now I see that they themselves appear to have recognized that there was a crime, and that they needed to offshore a lot of money in defense against future prosecution. 

AAR: Huntsville

Rocket City is a fun town. 

It has to be, I gather, because the space industry is going gangbusters and needs people to want to move to Alabama. Local unemployment recently hit 1.9%. Major corporations like JP Morgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, and Blue Origin are heavily engaged with state and local leaders to fund cheap housing for new employees, try to get high school students trained on coding so they can become 2-year college students then trained on machine welding and other technologies greatly in need in the rocket industry. Four-year colleges focus on engineering; the town claims the highest percentage of engineer citizens in the nation. They've also built parks, an arboretum, music venues, sporting facilities, trails, and anything else they can think of to make the place seem like a fun place to be -- which, indeed, it is. 

Here's one fun idea: they turned over one of those antiquated mid-century school campuses to local bars and game shops, which have had fun turning it into a punk/rockabilly sort of version of traditional high school.

Classic institutional architecture, now a reform reformed school.

Pool and Bud Light in the Principal's Office.

Dungeons and Dragons gaming shop among lockers festooned with once-forbidden stickers.

Prom, no. Rockabilly Prom? Maybe!

An arcade filled with nothing but pinball machines. I played the Star Wars one.

Well, and one more pool table at the back.

Rockabilly Prom? How about Zombie Prom?

The whole area is what we here in NC call a "Social District," meaning that you can walk around freely with open containers of alcohol. There are some rules that are mostly deference to state law, but generally it is set aside to be a more-fun space than usual.

Right across the street from all that is the IBEW Union Hall, so it's a place where you'll meet welders and working men. Also servicemen: the city features Redstone Arsenal, where the military component of all this lives, about 45,000 service members and civilians devoted to the space program in one way or another. Soon to be 55,000, because US Space Command is relocating there soon from Colorado Springs. 

A much fancier version of the same concept exists just two blocks away:

A similar space called Stovehouse built around an old factory. It’s got everything from ballroom dancing to taqueria to a Pilates studio.⁩

Also defense contractors. Lots of them have offices in the same facility: Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, etc.

Less wild and crazy than the reformed-school space, but it was fun to watch the happy children play in the water feature.

Because of the prosperity and low unemployment, Huntsville is a very clean and safe town. I think it is well understood that I generally dislike cities under the best of circumstances, but this one is actually a nice place to visit. Even better -- it's only about 12 miles from city-center to the farmlands outside, so it doesn't take long to escape when you get ready to climb on your bike and get out of town. 

Back in the Mountains

This was taken at the remnants of the site of the 1996 Olympic Games’ whitewater events. Those Games were mainly held in Atlanta, but there’s not much whitewater in Atlanta. This is just over the border into Tennessee in the Ocoee River country. 

All the Way Down to Ala-Bam

Had some business in Huntsville today, so I rode down yesterday. 

Boyd Gap, on the Tennessee side.

The TVA made many lakes; this one floods the Ocoee River.

That one is small compared with Nickajack Lake, which floods the mighty Tennessee River. 

Huntsville. Pretty sure this is the right place. Hard to miss, actually.

What Exactly is the Crime?

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) did helpful service many years ago by taking on the KKK; we're better off without that latter organization having the power and control it did of yore. More recently they've served as a kind of third-party validator of left-wing attempts to paint conservative organizations as unacceptable extremist groups. I can understand how that annoys people. 

What part of this conduct is illegal, though?

In the video posted Tuesday morning, CEO Bryan Fair said the probe focuses on bringing potential charges against both the organization and individuals connected to the group.

"The focus appears to be on the SPLC's prior use of paid confidential informants to gather credible intelligence on extremely violent groups," he said.

"This use of informants was necessary because we are no stranger to threats of violence. In 1983, our offices were firebombed, and in the years since, there have been countless credible threats against our staff," he said. "For decades, we engaged in unprecedented litigation to dismantle the Klan and other hate groups. In light of that work, we sought to protect the safety of our staff and the public. We frequently shared what we learned from informants with local and federal law enforcement, including the FBI. " 

The probe comes as the Justice Department has stepped up its scrutiny of nonprofits that it accuses of being involved with or funding "domestic terrorism." It was not clear if the criminal investigation is related to that initiative, and a spokesperson for the SPLC did not know the Justice Department's legal theory behind the probe.

Insofar as you are publishing the findings of such research, it's protected journalism under the first amendment as far as I can tell. The National Enquirer pays sources for scoops; that's how they nailed John Edwards back in 2007. As far as I know the fact that they paid for the information they published didn't make it illegal. Any of you lawyers have a theory about how this could be a crime?