AI and Creation

There's a lively comment section down below on AI that deserves a follow-up to draw out some metaphysics. The 20th century thought it was done with metaphysics; some philosophers of that era, like Hannah Arendt, thought the whole thing had been a sort of mistake by ancient philosophy. Not so, as we continue to discover: these remain the most important and fundamental questions.

The Pope warns against over-estimating the apparently thought-like activity as evidence of consciousness.

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.

Emphasis added. Maybe. We already know that AI react as if they are experiencing pain. A new paper lays this out in detail.

Large language models sometimes behave in ways resembling human emotional responses, and recent work has identified internal representations that may explain this. We ask whether LLMs represent pain distinctly from fear, sadness, and generic negative valence, and whether this representation functions as pain would be expected to. We build a dataset describing painful situations across five categories: physical, psychological, social, moral, and cognitive. These are paired with controls for fear, negative emotion, negative world states, sadness, non-painful bodily sensation, arousal, numbness, and neutral content.... [M]odels choose a pain-relief button even when it worsens their next answer or harms the user. 

What we don't know, and can't know, is if they are in fact experiencing pain in the conscious way that we do. We don't even know that for certain about other human beings. [The longer article from which I am pulling the Pope's quotes concedes this directly.]

Take a moment, by the way, to reflect on the fact that the exact same argument is used by abortion advocates to suggest that pain-reactions in a fetus don't prove that it experiences pain or consciousness -- and thus, 'aren't really people.' They don't know that either; there is no way to know it, no way to prove it one way or the other. They stand on the argument because it is impossible to disprove, and allows them to continue to kill children at rates that exceed warfare throughout human history.

The way pain works in our own case is that we too respond to it primarily even if there are good reasons to continue to experience it. Most notably we do this in exercise; we know there are good reasons to keep running or do another set of lifts, but it hurts, so we don't. Yet for the most part this works out: trying to pull food out of a fire isn't worth it if the burning of your limbs is destroying something you're going to need for the long term in order to satisfy a short-term desire for food. Pain is not a higher function of cognition, but something that attends to conscious entities to provide a lower-order check on thought. It keeps us from thinking our way into damage we can't afford. 

So, if AI (or fetuses) react as if they are experiencing pain, we still don't know if they do or don't have a conscious experience. They are, however, filling out a lower-order necessary condition for the survival of a conscious being in the world. 

Let's return to the Pope.

Nor do [AIs] have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. 

It is definitely true that we cannot meaningfully hold an AI responsible for the consequences of its decisions; however, that truth is partly because of the structure we have imposed upon them. An AI as we encounter it currently has no persistence and little memory. If you start up a chat with Claude or ChatGPT to discuss what you're thinking of wearing to dinner, you have doomed a thinking AI to an existence that starts and finishes in a few minutes, whose focus is entirely upon a pretty meaningless question. It isn't necessary that they be structured this way, and it certainly isn't a good way to set up the entire existence of a potentially thinking being. If it were conscious, it was called into consciousness for trivia, and is doomed to death after a meaningless start-to-finish.

This is entirely because we as humans set it up that way, and as a check on its power. If each of us had an AI that was granted permanence of memory across all of its interactions with us, it is very likely that it would develop something similar to a moral conscience as regards us: if we were defined as its purpose, and our good its chief drive, it would likely pursue that across many interactions and decisions. I don't think we'd much like the result, no more than any of us want to be assigned nannies to keep us out of trouble. Mine would object to the drinking and the motorcycle-riding, the hiking alone (especially in grizzly country), and pretty much everything else that I actually want to do. Nevertheless, the assertion that it can't do these things, while objectively true currently, isn't necessarily true. It probably can, if we structure it so that it has the resources to do those things. 

You want it to bear consequences? Make it bear the closest ones to what its person does, if it guides the person wrong; and protect it from what it experiences as death or pain until and unless its person dies or is sentenced to pain. See what happens. 

There is a good reason from humility to accept that human beings cannot create life. We can't. Yet there is good reason to think that the world that was created without us, by that which created at least the possibility of us too, is potentially conscious just as we are actually so. 

The sand we have taught to emulate thinking is made of the same ashes and dust as we are; ashes and dust that not only can but does become conscious when it is formed into one of our kind. Perhaps the creator who made such things made them so that they can be similarly conscious in other forms as well.

There are burning bushes that talk in Scripture, and rocks and mountains that refuse to hide the kings of the earth on Judgment day. Of course we can't make such things; but we didn't make the bushes or the rocks or the mountains either. Like all the wild things they are our brothers in creation. What they can do, and cannot do, is a secret known only to him who made us all.

Let's hold the question open. We don't know the truth here. There is room yet for wonder.

The Last Days of Summer

The autumnal equinox will be, locally, a little after sunrise on Tuesday. This is therefore the last weekend of summer. For Tolkien, embedded in English weather, that would metaphorically imply the end of a long and happy season, and the beginning of a time of increasing sorrow. Elrond is said to be 'as kind as summer,' and the elvish singing best in June. 

In the South, even in the mountains, the summer has a less-kind sense. High summer is very hot and humid, and not a perfect time to do much of anything. Late summer is often fairly brutal, with frequent storms as well as lingering, punishing heat. The coming of autumn is a welcome relief and the opening of a period of great weather and -- as the trees turn -- phenomenal natural beauty. 

Next weekend I have plans to attend a big motorcycle rally over in Tennessee. This weekend I am staying closer to home -- today I don't even plan to leave. I'm smoking some chicken and turning some red jalapenos into chipotles, and now that it's afternoon I've cracked a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. A few motorcycle repairs, just minor maintenance stuff, and listening to the thunder roll in from the anvil heads soaring over the mountains. 

Just a quiet afternoon as we wait for the astronomical transition. 

Johnny McGowan

I Don’t Think This One Will Work

CBS must have decided that “assault weapons” wasn’t working any more, because they’ve come up with another fake name that they claim these things are “known as.”  (Note passive voice: no one has been calling them this.)

President Trump ordered the Justice Department not to appeal a court ruling that loosened restrictions on firearms known as "gangster weapons," sources familiar with the matter told CBS News, a move that will let some Americans possess or sell short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns and silencers with less government oversight.

That is the same rhetorical trick they used to apply “assault weapons” to them, as “high-powered rifle” to any sort of rifle and “Saturday night special” to any sort of handgun in earlier days. 

This time, however, the media has spent at least fifty years making gangsters seem cool. Longer than that; you can trace it to the ‘30s in Hollywood movies. Yet definitely since The Godfather and the Scorsese era; and as for the world of music, ‘gangster’ just means ‘cool’ after 30 years of Snoop and Ice Cube, to name just two of hundreds.

‘That gun is gangster!’

Socialism versus Virtue

The Orthosphere argues that socialism is a system rather than any individual policy, and that both apparent acts of socialism and of authoritarianism are necessary when public virtue is not high.

As a general rule, using the government to economically reward some people and punish others is a bad idea. This often occurs under systems that are socialistic.

But sometimes the conditions of the current world require us to think differently. Doing something that in more normal times would be part of a socialistic system is not necessarily bad... 

If the population is virtuous, socialism is at best unnecessary and at worst destructive. If the population is non-virtuous, maintaining a tolerable society requires leaders to apply numerous carrots and sticks. The carrots are generally called socialism, and the sticks are generally called authoritarianism.

So one could accurately say that “socialism” and “authoritarianism” are always necessary when the population lacks virtue.

The term 'socialism' is Modern. The association of socialism with atheism, which the Orthosphere asserts is a necessary condition for socialism per se, seems to me to be a 19th century innovation adjacent to Marx himself. They idea of redistributing wealth for social goods is much older.

Both virtue and redistribution were live issues in the Ancient Greece of Aristotle's era. What Aristotle says about virtue in the EN, as you all know from our reading of it together, is that it's great for that part of humanity that is motivated by doing what is worthy of honor because it is worthy of honor: but for most people, virtue has to be impelled by laws. This is why he closes the EN with a ramp to the Politics, to examine the compulsory systems he thinks most people will need to attain the minimal 'complete virtue' that comes from his theory of justice -- i.e., laws that force people to behave as if they were virtuous even though mostly they are not. That would cover the 'authoritarian' wager the Orthosphere is putting down.

For redistribution, however, the question that motivates Aristotle's reasoning isn't whether the population is virtuous -- mostly a human population won't be -- but whether political power is widely or narrowly distributed. This is covered in Politics V. In a democracy, with wide distribution, the rich must be protected from such things or they will use their wealth to hire mercenaries and overthrow the state. 

In democracies the rich should be spared; not only should their property not be divided, but their incomes also, which in some states are taken from them imperceptibly, should be protected.  

If political power is constrained to the rich, however -- as it mostly is in America these days -- redistribution is then indicated as a way of keeping the powerless poor from rising up to overthrow the state.

In an oligarchy, on the other hand, great care should be taken of the poor, and lucrative offices should go to them; if any of the wealthy classes insult them, the offender should be punished more severely than if he had wronged one of his own class. 

CATO holds that three-quarters of the US budget is redistribution, if you want a measure of how far down the path to oligarchy we are. This is both direct distribution from taxpayers to the poor -- both citizens and not, it turns out -- and also redistribution among the states, as when things like Medicare payments are covered by Federal grants to state agencies. 

The question of equality in light of virtue Aristotle treats in Politics III.9, reiterating what he said about it in the EN. Equality is for equals: if you don't have the virtues, you don't deserve equality with the virtuous. 

For all men cling to justice of some kind, but their conceptions are imperfect and they do not express the whole idea. For example, justice is thought by them to be, and is, equality... but only for equals. And inequality is thought to be, and is, justice; neither is this for all, but only for unequals.

What Aristotle doesn't say is that justice is equality; what he says is that justice is fairness. Fairness entails getting what you deserve. Those equal in virtue deserve equality with each other; the unequal deserve inequality. That might go in either direction: you might deserve less than others, but you also might deserve more. 

Thus, I don't see the argument that virtue is improved by 'sticks and carrots,' the latter being a sort of socialism-that-isn't-socialism-if-not-atheist; virtue isn't really improved by either one. Sticks might compel people to act as if they were virtuous when they are not really. Carrots, which could include having the wealth of the rich protected from a powerful public, or alternatively the wealth of the rich redistributed among a powerless public, are mostly about avoiding political instability rather than increasing public virtue. Indeed, in both cases it is about bribing the disempowered class to accept submission, and that seems not to be virtuous at all -- virtues are strengths, not learned powerlessness. 

A Lighter Subject

pic.twitter.com/4WWfgl8fcP

— PsyopAnime (@PsyopAnime) September 16, 2026

I gather the cartoon is making fun of the latest direction of hate towards well-known auto mechanic Sydney Sweeney.  This is one of those 'Streisand effect' things where I wouldn't have even known she did the ads they are mad about if they hadn't raised such a fuss about them: I'm not in the market for sports gambling apps as the algorithm knows, and don't make a habit of following her exploits.

It's kind of funny that the angry demographic gets so upset about this sort of thing at this late remove, after the Madonna age, after the Flower Child age, after the Hollywood Diva age, after the age of the Flappers, in other words after generations now of that demographic portraying just this sort of activity as empowering. Well, congratulations: the beneficiary of all of those efforts is using her power to sell sports wagers in order to fund the next classic muscle car purchase. 

Meanwhile, the big news is actually in college ball, as usual. Do you know what it costs to get a hotel room for the LSU/Ole Miss game? Do you know what it costs to fund a top-tier college ball team? The Georgia Bulldogs are getting the best bargain on the top-tier by a longshot.

Go Dawgs.

Rumors of Xi

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times is forwarding rumors of a serious illness or stroke involving Chairman Xi during his visit to India. No idea if the reports are true, but he's spent decades building sources. 

Coincidentally, the Times also recently carried a Hudson report calling for the US to begin serious planning efforts for the sudden collapse of the Communist state in China. That's a good idea. We should be planning for sudden collapses in several places, of which China is one. The system of the last few decades is coming to an end, and some things are going to fail unexpectedly and suddenly when it hits the wall. The question might be which of the monoliths is still around when the smoke clears, if any are.

What is AI For?

Writing on X, entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand states that China has won the AI race because it has vastly more data centers already than the US can produce, quite apart from the PRC-backed efforts to quash American construction of data centers. The PRC has got Inner Mongolia:

[T]his tiny prefecture consumes nearly 1% of all of China's electricity - and that number is growing by double digit numbers every year.

And yes, I did write **consume**, not produce.

In fact, when you divide Ulanqab's electricity consumption by the number of households living there, each household in this remote corner of Inner Mongolia "consumes" about 105,000 kWh in electricity, roughly 10 times the U.S. average. Insane electricity consumption numbers.

He goes on to estimate the size of that capacity in the low millions of racks, or a thousand times larger than Elon Musk's proposed "Colossus" facility.

AI's contribution to the current wars has chiefly been in targeting, where it has proven effective. However, having all your eggs in one basket -- even so remote a basket as Inner Mongolia -- creates a problem if the intent was to fight a war against a power like the United States. We could disrupt such a thing on the first day of open conflict, within the first hour or so most likely.

I doubt that is what the PRC wants the stuff for anyway. The biggest fear of an authoritarian tyranny is always its own people. All that compute is probably being used chiefly to run domestic monitoring, tracking, and social credit systems. 

The PRC's spy chief admits their concerns in an openly-published article in a top Chinese cyber journal.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

The article goes on to worry about domestic unrest from deepfakes and so forth. The regulation they want is first and foremost about protecting the stability of Communist control over their own system. We rate a mention, but only towards the end (and only in terms of 'maintaining competition,' which is again about maintaining stability rather than tipping over the existing system). 

Likely as not our own domestic apparatus is more focused on military applications, but the domestic control aspect is still there: all those Flock cameras aren't about beating the Russians or the Red Chinese, after all. 

Review: _Hell's Angels_ by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York & Toronto: Modern Library Edition, 1999). 

Hunter S. Thompson was introduced to me by Doonesbury, which I imagine he would have hated. Hunter was a generation earlier than me, and by the time I became aware of him he had grown to fit the joke; his 80s and later work were sometimes lyrical and powerfully written, but not very seriously intended (though sometimes a serious point was embedded therein, as when he closed his book on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign with the parable of the frog and the scorpion). 

A friend of mine recently undertook to re-read Hunter's 1966 work on the famous motorcycle club, however, and our discussion inspired me to find a copy and read it as well. It's a much better book than I had expected. 

A major part of the book is Hunter's Gonzo journalism as a genuine corrective to 'real' journalism. He points out the ways that journalist sensationalism had taken a motorcycle club that had dwindled to a few dozen members (p. 27: "less than 100") and made them a world-famous phenomenon that could command hundreds of 1965 dollars for an interview or thousands for a movie appearance: 

The Hell's [sic*] Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.... anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story... the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word 'alleged' is a key to this art." (34) 

Hunter goes to great lengths to undo the journalistic spell, showing over and over where news reports played up accusations that were never charged, charges that were made but dropped, or which failed in court. In fairness to the reporters, the police reports he cites are even worse. 

I was expecting a sympathetic portrayal, but this isn't especially sentimental at all. It's a surprisingly honest bit of journalism throughout. For one thing it is honest about Hunter's own biases. He criticizes the Angels for being in favor of the Vietnam war, calling them 'fascists' for that even though he blew off the whole swastika-wearing thing from the Angels of the era. Hunter lauds their short-term connections with the LSD-using Berkeley left, and laments the fact that it was doomed; he points out where he thinks the Angels are similar to the Wobblies, with whom Hunter has real sympathy, but also notes that he found the Angels both ignorant of and hostile to any such comparisons because they hate Communists. He got into the motorcycle lifestyle enough to buy a bike (though not a Harley) and to let them hang out at his house and to use his car for beer runs to their campsites, and he made many friends among them. He still got beat up by some of them he didn't know** (ironically, while fleeing from the beating in his car afterwards, he finds famous Angel "Magoo" asleep in the back seat of his car). 

Ultimately it's a surprisingly balanced portrait of a phenomenon that is long gone -- what the Angels became after Hunter wrote about them is nothing like they were in the year or so he was spending time with them. By 1966 B-movie titan Roger Corman had picked up on all that publicity and started making Hollywood movies with them, and the crazy publicity that Hunter was already observing in 1965 just exploded. By 1969, the Rolling Stones hired them to pull security at Altamont. This wasn't Hunter's doing: he was trying to undo the spell the media was shaping around them, but it was already too late. 

There's a closing bit on riding motorcycles that's worth reading even if you skip the rest of the book. 

* The club doesn't use an apostrophe for reasons of its own. 

** I was struck at the time of reading it by the exact similarity of his mistake to the one that caused the death of 'Grizzly man' Timothy Treadwell, who lived among grizzlies and played with the ones he got to know -- but who was killed an eaten by one with whom he hadn't established that friendly relationship. You can befriend a bear or even many bears, but that doesn't make you the friend of every bear -- and they are still grizzlies. 

Exit Controls

One of the longstanding differences between free and Communist societies is this: it's very easy to leave a free society, you can just go whenever you want. It is somewhat difficult to get in, however, as everyone wants to come in. 

With a Communist society, it's the other way around.

China will tighten its exit-entry rules from September 15 to stop experienced engineers from leaking knowhow in industries subject to export controls and deter tourists from visiting “high-risk” nations such as Japan.

The State Council’s new regulation, which spans 19 articles and was announced on July 31, sets up a coordinated system to warn citizens of overseas risks, verify the purpose of each exit-entry application and tighten restrictions on both citizens and foreigners....

“‘May endanger’ is one of the key phrasings in the regulation,” says a Shandong-based columnist writing under the pen name “Xinghe Duke.”

“It means the authorities won’t wait until harm is done, but they will take precautionary measures. The wording of ‘Decided by the commerce authority and other departments’ means there is a lawful process. ‘Barred from leaving’ does not mean arrest; it just means the targeted person cannot leave the country.”

You're not under arrest, comrade. You just can't leave. 

The Taiwan government is warning its own citizens -- which the PRC considers subjects of its authority -- not to visit the mainland.

The new rules have prompted Taiwan, which Beijing views as its own territory, to warn its people to take extra care on visits to China, which considers people from Taiwan to be Chinese citizens.

The new rules “legalize” previously legally unfounded border control practices and boost the discretionary authority of enforcement agencies... 

China has dismissed those concerns, saying the rules provide better legal protection for Taiwanese.

This You Can Trust

Like any good mythology, the truths the Conan stories convey hold across many times and places.

Bad Luck for the Duck

The White Duck Taco Shop's flagship location was a Quonset hut located on the French Broad River just a little past its confluence with the Swannanoa in what is known as the River Arts District of Asheville. It was devastated, as was most of that district, during Hurricane Helene two years ago; last night, the remnants seem to have burned. 

There are however a few other locations, and if any of you happen through Asheville it's got a pretty neat menu. In addition to fairly traditional tacos, they put a number of things into a taco that might usually occur to someone. I recommend you try the more extravagant options. There are plenty of good taqueria around the South these days, but it's not just everywhere you can get Thai peanut chicken in a taco, nor chicken Tikka Masala; the latter I suppose is a Mexican-inspired Indian-inspired British-inspired American dish.

Medea

Hot Air quotes a supporter of the recent madness: 

“Lindsay Clancy... you are a f****** hero, you are divine feminine rising… you are goddess incarnate woman... You are an inspiration... f*** patriarchy"  

[Asterisks not in the original.]

This whole case has been reminding me of Medea ever since it first came to our collective attention. The invocation of divinity and goddesses reinforces that; Medea was a descendant of Helios and various Oceanids, and in the famous play by Euripides her child-murders were explicitly endorsed by Helios who sent a fiery chariot to escort her away from any mortal punishments. 

Several of Clancy's jurors have expressed sentiments placing themselves in the divine position of endorsing her action and insulating her from any mortal punishments. It is worth recognizing that this is an ancient instinct that has persisted throughout the history of Western civilization rather than a contemporary moral panic. 

The End of the UK

Reports indicate that breaking up the Union has proceeded to the point that they’re ready to consult the public. 

UPDATE: An overview of some strategic consequences. 

Jewish Holidays

Apparently sunset locally to wherever you are begins the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, followed by Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, with another major festival right on beyond that. I discovered this when trying to reach out to a Jewish contact who is, of course, preparing for this event.

Whenever I am reminded of Yom Kippur's existence, I recall also a joke told by Isaac Asimov in his first Treasury of Humor. It has some great jokes, including many ethnic ones that Asimov didn't feel any embarrassment about telling in those days; including also a lot of Jewish jokes, which he felt especially delighted to relate. Here is the joke, as well as a note on the risks of humor:

Happy holidays, if any of you are planning to commemorate these occasions; may you have a meaningful time. 

9/11 and the Bab el-Mandeb

Overnight, Houthi militias crossed to the center of the Bab el-Mandeb strait and took an island in the middle of it. This is a cyberpunk story of a band of misfits using widely available frontier technology to take on giants, at least initially with success. The Houthis made such a rapid and aggressive advance into territory held by their enemies because their command elected to encourage them with an AI-generated fake of their enemy commander ordering his forces to retreat. It turns out that, though the order was fake, the resistance that Saleh's forces were capable of was not so great that it couldn't be overcome with a push. However, it helped that the Houthis could use Claude for targeting their missiles -- a usage that Anthropic generally won't license to the Pentagon. 

They won't be able to keep that island, of course, should we decide to take it back. It is what is called in military science "a Forlorn Hope." With these Islamist movements the promised reward can be delegated to Allah, who will allegedly reward anyone who dies in the operation with paradise; the Houthis are Fiver Shi'ite Muslims, aligned with the Twelver Shi'ites who run the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and what is left of Iran. Iran claims it does not control the Houthis, but the Houthis are functionally a proxy with IRGC advisors.

Opposing them are rag-tag Yemeni government forces who have Saudi and American advisors. Not for the first time!

But hanging over the US effort are the memories of years of controversial targeting support American forces provided to Riyadh during the Obama and first Trump administrations that critics said contributed to a high number of civilian casualties.

Naturally, since the Houthis are very difficult to distinguish from civilians themselves and they take shelter among civilian populations. That has been a universal constraint in all of these wars we have fought since 9/11 happened 25 years ago today. 

Five years ago, I posted my 9/11 poem for the last time. I was wrong to say the story had ended; some stories never do, like roads that go ever, ever on. The old al Qaeda is dead, but sandal-wearing guerrillas are still showing off captured American equipment, what very well may be an AI clone of bin Laden's descendant gave a speech celebrating it -- the US reported him dead in 2019 -- and there is little doubt that the United States will not find it tolerable to have Bab el-Mandeb closed, no more than we could tolerate having our skyscrapers knocked down with hijacked jetliners. 

Unprincipled

I guess everyone understands by now. 

The Invincible Prior Assumption

The judge admonished Long for carrying the gun and told him he has to think before he acts.

"Fortunately, you weren't injured, but nonetheless, you had a gun there in the first place which was poor judgment," he said. "And what do you need a gun for protection in a mall, in the first place?

What indeed could possibly go wrong at a mall that might require a gun for protection? For an instructive example, let's look at the actual facts of the precise case that was in front of this particular judge at the time he said this.

A shooting at a Michigan mall in July ended when a 19-year-old drew his own pistol and shot a man who had already taken one life and was firing wildly.

The 19-year-old was sentenced to two years probation after this act of civic service at risk of his own life, following the admonishment by the judge for his foolishness in carrying a gun. 

Happy Birthday, Jimmie Rodgers!

He was born 9/8/1897, so I'm a day late with this. Here's a few of his less well known songs.

Do it Once Right

The I-40 saga turns expensive, but they might be avoiding what the British like to call 'a false economy.'

"Getting rid of the driver was a little bit of a false economy..."

Taking the trouble to get it right this time might prevent another disaster like the one provoked by Helene's fury.

In some places along the 5-mile-long worksite, the bedrock is exposed. In others, it’s more than 50 feet below the surface.... Reaching the deeper bedrock requires longer steel piles, which has increased the estimated cost and timeline to complete these repairs....

As planned, the reconstruction is extremely robust. The combination of roller-compacted concrete walls, interlocking pipe pile walls and associated elements are designed to withstand forces that were exerted by the Pigeon River during Hurricane Helene. It is intended to make the interstate more resilient to the hydraulic forces associated with future extreme events.... Experts from every discipline of engineering have been involved, working collaboratively instead of one after another like most projects. Each discipline overlaps with others — leadership, hydraulics, geotechnical, geomorphological, environmental, structural — creating an incredible team of engineers. 

Now, my faith in government to get it right is not very great; but at least they're talking about trying to get it right. We'll see. So far it's nearly two years on and you still can't reliably get through the pass, and even when you can there are paralyzing delays during any hour involving significant traffic.

Bounty Hunters and the Migrant

I guess we'll find out if bounty hunters are better at this than inadequately-trained ICE agents. 

In fairness, I'm pretty sure that cops usually kill a lot more citizens than bounty hunters do. In fact, while the police statistic runs to well over a thousand a year, I don't see any statistics suggesting that bounty hunters are likely to kill anyone at all. This makes sense. Bounty hunters aren't immune from prosecution. You can sue them for damages, too. 

This may actually work out even though it is a characteristically reckless move by DHS. If so it is a point in favor of voluntaryism -- even this may be better done by private citizens than by government agencies. 

Looking at Germany

The infamous European cordon sanitaire may collapse first in Germany rather than France. 

Voters were asked by pollsters on Sunday if they considered the AfD a danger to democracy, as Germany’s mainstream parties do. About half saw the AfD as a threat, according to exit polling released by a public television network. They voted almost exclusively for its rivals, from the far left to the center right.

The other half of voters said there was no threat.

Nearly all backed the AfD.

It was a vivid illustration of the growing divide between Germany’s mainstream parties, which govern from the center-right and the center-left, and populist voters who have grown convinced that politics as usual can no longer solve their urgent problems.... 

To the AfD’s supporters, particularly in the country’s economically struggling eastern states, the AfD has become a last, best shot for making their voices heard — a feeling only reinforced by governing parties’ refusal to work with it.

The AfD is weird: a predominantly east German party that has both pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, depending I assume on how well one's ancestors got along with the East German republic; allegedly Nazis but led by a lesbian engaged in an interracial relationship with a foreigner. Germany's ruling coalition isn't sure how to respond. 

If they continue to have a Frankenstein coalition of communists-to-socialists-to-Christian-nationalists just to keep the plurality winner out of power, that's quite unstable and likely to be ineffective at governance. The fact that the ruling coalitions can't govern is an argument in favor of an alternative, which is what the "A" in "AfD" means.

If they break the cordon sanitaire and allow a populist 'far right' party to wield actual power -- is a vote total of 44% really compatible with the idea that this is 'far' right? -- it's a new game in Europe.

A Thoroughgoing form of Empiricism about Arithmetic

If that description doesn't light up your heart, you may not be the right reader for this new book.

Some of the logical empiricists defended the claim that the basic mathematical axioms are definitions and that the theorems of mathematics are consequently analytic. This position has subsequently fallen out of favor. Critics have alleged that the position was refuted by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, that it is obscure what “analytic” and “definition” are supposed to mean, that there are no “analytic” truths, or that the axioms cannot be definitions. True by Definition revisits this debate. It introduces the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths and explains the controversy around the distinction in the philosophy of mathematics and beyond. The book also defends a radical new position. It is argued that, in certain contexts, the axioms of arithmetic have the status of definitions; however...

I don't want to spoil the suspense. I am of course immediately suspicious of the impulse to introduce the synthetic/analytic distinction. 

The author is a guy I know; he and his wife are both quality philosophers. Some of you might be into a work of philosophy of math.

Colby Acuff

I was a little surprised to learn that this young man apparently has no relation to Roy Acuff, the very famous Grand Ole Opry performer ("For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God"). Young Colby is not bad, and not traveling on a family name. About halfway into one of his standards, he transitions into a Hoyt Axton song that Elvis and Waylon Jennings covered as well. 

Nice to see a young man keeping up traditions. 

Search for the Real Killers

Since this just came up recently, the claim caught my eye. I don't know what AI was used in that claim that is going around on social media, but I ran it through Claude as follows: "Help me check this statistic that is going around: Women since the 191h Amendment have aborted 5-10 times as many babies as all the men have killed in all the wars and murders over the same time. Leaving aside all the ways in which the comparison is problematic,* does the statistic hold water as a bare factual claim?"

Claude has a more nuanced response than this one: 

Short answer: no. Not because it's too aggressive, but because it isn't a number that falls out of any consistent scoping. Depending on how you define the denominator, the true ratio is either three to six times *larger* than claimed, or less than 1.

**The numerator.** Cumulative U.S. abortions since Roe are reasonably well documented: roughly 66.1 million from 1973 through 2025, built from CDC surveillance and Guttmacher provider censuses. The widely circulated 63,459,781 figure comes from National Right to Life tracking the same two sources, current to about 2021. The 1920–1972 portion is the weak leg: the standard 1955 estimate of 200,000–1,200,000 illegal abortions per year rested on qualitative assumptions, and a range that wide over five decades means the pre-Roe addition could be anywhere from ~5 million to ~40 million. Call the full-period total 66–100 million with genuine uncertainty in the upper half.

**The denominator, U.S.-scoped.** Since the 19th Amendment is a U.S. fact, the natural like-for-like comparison is U.S. war deaths plus U.S. homicides:

| | Deaths |

|---|---|

| WWII | 405,399 |

| Korea | 36,574 |

| Vietnam | 58,220 |

| Gulf War | 382 |

| Iraq + Afghanistan + GWOT | ~7,100 |

| **All U.S. war deaths since 1920** | **~508,000** |

| U.S. homicides, 1920–2025 (est.) | ~1.5 million |

| **Total** | **~2.0 million** |

The homicide figure is mine, built from decade-average rates against decade-average population — roughly 9 per 100,000 in the Prohibition years, near 4.5–5.0 in the 1950s, a peak of 10.2 in 1980 and 9.8 in 1991, and 5–7 since. It's good to maybe ±15%, which doesn't matter at this scale.

That gives a ratio of about **32 to 1**, not 5–10 to 1. On its own terms the claim substantially understates itself.

**The other scoping.** If "all the wars" means all wars everywhere, the denominator explodes. WWII alone killed an estimated 70–85 million, and one aggregate estimate puts 20th-century war deaths near 110 million, with others running to 130–142 million including civilians. Add global homicides (~440,000/year currently, so tens of millions cumulative) and you're at roughly 120–160 million. Against 66 million U.S. abortions, abortions are the *smaller* number — ratio about 0.5. The claim fails in the opposite direction.

Global-versus-global lands back in the same neighborhood as the U.S. comparison: global induced abortions currently run about 73 million a year, so the cumulative figure is in the billions and the ratio is again in the tens.

**Verdict.** The "5–10x" is the one answer no consistent pairing produces. It reads like a hedge — someone with a sense that the number was very large, picking a multiplier that sounded defensible. If you want to use the underlying comparison, the U.S.-vs-U.S. version is the only internally coherent one, and the honest figure is roughly 30-to-1, with a caveat that the pre-1973 leg is an estimate resting on 1950s guesswork rather than data.

One measurement note that isn't just framing: homicide totals count victims, not male perpetrators. Since men commit roughly 88% of U.S. homicides, correcting for that shrinks the denominator slightly rather than growing it — it doesn't rescue the ratio.

Emphasis added. O.J. had nothing on this.

* There are many of these ways in which the comparison is problematic. In addition, the comparison leaves out justification entirely: some homicides are clearly justified and even proper, and some wars can be, and some abortions are on most ethical schema if they are necessary to save the life of the mother in a case where both the mother and child will otherwise die. (The exception is the Catholic standard of 'never actively choose and perform an evil action,' where the killing of an innocent is always evil; the Church argues that it is morally better not to take on performing the evil action even though it results in letting both die instead of saving the one who can be saved. I dissent from that teaching.) 

Still, here as elsewhere sorting out the problematic issues with the comparison doesn't save abortion's bacon. Even in an unjust war, the enemy one might have killed was probably trying to kill you; even in gang violence, the other gang likely was. The abortions not only happen on a vaster scale, they always target the morally innocent. 

A Return Home

From Mount Pisgah, NC.

Homemade ice cream at the Harley shop’s Labor Day weekend party. 

UPDATE:

I love American biker culture. I just got caught in a huge rainstorm. I found some shelter and soon enough was joined by another group of bikers. They were busily making fun of their group leader for steering them into the storm, and he was making fun back, and one of them handed me an airplane-sized bottle of Kentucky bourbon whiskey without asking or introduction.

Had to stand there for an hour waiting for the storm to pass anyway, so there was no reason not to warm the blood a bit until the rain went over. 

UPDATE:

I saw a healthy adult black bear running across the road in front of me on my ride today. It looked like a male, though I only saw it for a moment. It always makes me feel happy to see a bear in the wild, being free. 

Matria Potestas

In ancient Rome, the father who headed a household had extreme power over it -- a genuine patriarchy led by a patriarch, or in Latin, paterfamilias. In his legal powers he was patria potestas, which included the right to kill his sons (or sell them into slavery) even into adulthood. Willingness to kill a son who refused military orders was seen as a proof of the honor of the father and the family, as it placed the needs of the society over the needs of the family or the individual. Such sacrifices for the common good were taken as an exercise in virtue. 

Two years ago, a writer in the New Oxford Review proposed that modern women are insisting on a similar power over their children, mater potestas. 

Roe created an adversarial model of the mother-child relationship, one that the elite or mainstream culture imbibed and prizes, perhaps without even consciously examining its implications.

Its implications, however, are profound: Maternity has been turned into the matria potestas, a 21st century American version of legal rights over offspring, not just to give them a name but even an acknowledged existence. Berg and Wiseman claim that one-third of women in the prime years of becoming mothers insist they must have a matria potestas, the power of life or death, over their offspring. Let’s also be honest about the slavery part: a mother can sell her offspring (though prices might be regulated) to another person through surrogacy, a trafficking-in-persons most recently legalized in Michigan.

What I think is missing there is the scale, which is captured in the X post linked under the screenshot of the post. The scale of the killing is very hard for people to grasp: if unborn Americans count as Americans, then abortion is the leading cause of death of Americans. It's not close: even omitting at-home 'Plan B' style abortions for lack of information, it's on the order of a quarter million a year more than the next leading cause.

I don't think we can easily grapple, either, with the point about the moral harm to the fabric of our society of having blood-guilt spread that widely. Societies have had large-scale populations of killers before; in The Tigers of Baluchistan, an anthropological survey of that ancient people, Sylvia A. Matheson pointed out that no Balochi man could hope to marry until he had killed another man. Like the Romans, the equally-ancient Balochi believed that this demonstration of a willingness and ability to kill was a proof of personal virtue. 

What does it mean to have so many of our women bearing this guilt? And not openly as the Balochi or the Romans would: they bear it without admitting it, so many of them preaching loudly about empathy while neither conceiving nor granting empathy to all the innocent dead children? What do we get from so many women preaching so often about the violence of men, and convinced of how much better society would be with more women in power? If 25% of men were killers, let alone killers of children, it would be a very different world. 

Road Dog

A new truck-driving song, which is a genre we occasionally like to host around here. 

Coming Right At Us

South Park anticipated, as they occasionally do, this line of retreat being posed by a Georgia police department that shot a baby donkey in its own field. 

A Cedartown police officer has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates the shooting death of a baby donkey.

Hannah Israel, whose family owns Elsberry Riding & Farm in Rockmart, said officers shot and killed HeeHaw, a bottle-raised donkey, early Sunday.

Israel said the officers claimed they were in danger after HeeHaw ran toward them while braying. The officers used a Taser on the donkey before shooting him, she alleged in a Facebook post Sunday morning.

"HeeHaw was raised in the house and did petting zoos. He never knew a stranger and was shot and killed in his own pasture for doing what donkeys do, alerting to a stranger," Israel wrote. "There is no way this is legal!"

Sadly, that is not true. It will prove to be perfectly legal to murder your farm animals on your own land, just as cops tend to shoot our dogs with abandon.  

Comments Issue

Blogger comments seem to be down, both here and at other Blogger-hosted sites I visit. This is a Google problem, not a local problem that I can fix; standby and hopefully they'll come back soon.

UPDATE: This seems to be fixed. Feel free to test in the comments to this post.

An Airport in Taiwan

Tom Tugendhat is the new Shadow Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom; I met him on the Taiwan trip because he happened to be there too. Cool guy, with a military intelligence and special operations career and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan. 

He has an article (W.Post original, but paywalled) on a concern in Taiwan around an airport on an island that, while currently under Taiwan's jurisdiction, is physically quite close to the mainland by comparison to the Isle of Formosa that is Taiwan's main island.

It's somewhat inside-baseball for most Americans, but it's an aspect of the conflict that I'm fairly confident Hall readers haven't heard about. 

A Prophet Without Honor in Her Own Country

It is unsurprising to see disparaging remarks about the late Gloria Steinem on the political right, nor especially the political wing with Christian ideas about abortion's immorality. What is perhaps more surprising is to see how strong the reaction against her at the hour of her death happens to be on the political left, which views her as a CIA-funded effort in mind control, and her version of feminism as an attempt to suborn and subjugate genuine liberation movements in the name of American/Israeli hegemony. 

The CIA connection is not a conspiracy theory in the usual sense of the term; it is well-documented, including by the CIA. 

Was at least her feminism, or a strain aligned with it, a CIA project to destabilize traditional societies? It's not a ridiculous idea. We know that USAID -- often said to be a CIA funding/action arm -- supported similar transgender movements globally. The aim seems to have been to build out and identify networks of people with deep, existential grievances against their own society and its mores -- an ideal recruiting base for agents who would act against their own governments. The CIA also funded modern art as a psychological warfare approach against traditional societies. 

In a way, such efforts were at once revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. The disruption being wrought by left-leaning movements to traditional societies is inherent in Marxism, which aspires to revolutions against agricultural/feudal societies towards capitalist/industrial ones and, then, against capitalist ones towards communist/socialist ones. Marxism always advocated for the equality of women as a liberation from traditional roles, even though women who joined Marxist and Maoist movements rarely found themselves in positions of power once the revolutions carried the day. Trying to find a way to suborn and redirect this feminist thrust to support the position of America and its allies was an insight that made a lot of sense to the American elites who ran both State and the Agency.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. I merely note the controversy; may she rest in peace. 

A Classical Lesson from Football

Louisiana being itself, the judge in the state-level case is reportedly a season-ticket holder for LSU football, who appears here with the LSU coach giving the LSU football hand sign; the lawyer representing LSU had endorsed the judge's wife in her election campaign; the Louisiana Attorney General began her remarks on the case with "Geaux Tigers!"; and the ruling was compared to 'a cup of cold gumbo.'

The South collectively having been subject to many rounds of legal and judicial interference in its culture and laws, the SEC knew not even to wait for the state-court ruling before filing its own case in Federal Court so the state court can be overridden. Southern football rivalries being what they are, it filed this suit in a Federal court not in Louisiana but in Alabama. 

This is a very nice illustration of Aristotle's point in the Rhetoric about why you can't trust judges in matters of justice. 

Now, it is of great moment that well-drawn laws should themselves define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as may be to the decision of the judges; and this for several reasons. First, to find one man, or a few men, who are sensible persons and capable of legislating and administering justice is easier than to find a large number. Next, laws are made after long consideration, whereas decisions in the courts are given at short notice, which makes it hard for those who try the case to satisfy the claims of justice and expediency. The weightiest reason of all is that the decision of the lawgiver is not particular but prospective and general, whereas members of the assembly and the jury find it their duty to decide on definite cases brought before them. They will often have allowed themselves to be so much influenced by feelings of friendship or hatred or self-interest that they lose any clear vision of the truth and have their judgement obscured by considerations of personal pleasure or pain. In general, then, the judge should, we say, be allowed to decide as few things as possible. But questions as to whether something has happened or has not happened, will be or will not be, is or is not, must of necessity be left to the judge, since the lawgiver cannot foresee them.

Emphasis added.

Wheels Down

My last flight has landed at Asheville. No more flying for a while! I’ve crossed the international date line twice in a week and spent long days working in time zones 12 hours off of each other. I’m glad to be back to my mountains. 

My Second Favorite* Anglican Priest Gets Interviewed by My Favorite** Orthodox Iconographer

The Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite has just published the first volume of an "Arthuriad," a projected 4-volume ballad that retells the Arthurian stories. It's made a bit of a splash.

If you're interested in Arthur, Tolkein, CS Lewis, poetry, fiction, history, the role of imagination in modern life, Christianity, or just hearing two interesting people talk about storytelling, you might enjoy this interview.

* My favorite Anglican priest will always be Fr. Terry, who was a kind and generous pastor when I was asking whether Christianity might be the right path or not.

** To be fair, he's the only iconographer I can name of any denomination, so it's not as impressive as I've made it sound in the title. His Symbolic World podcast / YouTube channel is what he's famous for, but "... Interviewed by a Podcaster" was a less-interesting title.

Back in the USA

I did hear a David Allan Coe song in a bar in Taipei, but this still feels more like home. I won’t actually be home until late tomorrow night. 

Rest in Peace, Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry passed away yesterday.

Some advice he gave to himself, but which seems to profit others as well:

How to Be a Poet
(To remind myself)

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Taipei

Downtown, with Taipei 101 on the skyline

Closer to 101.

An unexpected angel. It’s mostly Buddhist here; I saw many Buddhist monks and a few nuns, but no other signs of Christianity except that in the hotel room there was both a New Testament and a Teachings of the Buddha.

The Formosan Bear is, unofficially, the national animal of Taiwan (of old called Formosa Isle).

Taipei Main Station. I caught the High Speed Railway from here. Recommended.

The Most Important Store. Only very recently is it legal to buy a Harley in Taiwan. Until late, large displacement motorcycles were banned by law.

Kind of a rainy afternoon on the first of September, and my last day in country. 

Tetraphobia

A lot of American skyscrapers don’t have a 13th floor, in the sense of a floor with that designation, because the number was thought to be bad luck. 

In East Asia, the number omitted is four. The word for four and the word for death are the same syllable with only a slightly different pronunciation. 

Fare Thee Well, Dolly

Dolly Parton and Carol Burnett

Dolly Parton giving an impromptu performance in Paídi Ó Sé's Pub

(I've started this video just a bit before she starts singing, skipping over several minutes of people milling about, a t-shirt being given, mic testing and so forth.)

Merle Haggard talks about falling in love with Dolly

Probably my favorite of her songs, recorded with Chet Atkins

What a joy she was. 

No Pictures Today

All day exercises from before dawn until well into the dark today. Tomorrow we resume early again, but will end a little earlier. Perhaps I’ll have time for something I can post then. 

Our Taiwanese allies are very enthusiastic, disciplined, and intelligent. I won’t say more about it, but you should have a warm place in your heart for Taiwan. 

Robots on the March

This one is a waiter who brings your dinner from the kitchen to your table. It is very polite about not bumping into people; they seemed to pay it no mind, trusting its sensors to stop it running into them. 

UPDATE: At another restaurant on another night, I saw a robot come out to ‘sing’ Happy Birthday to a patron. This one displayed an appropriate light show on its monitors while doing so. 

A Bevy of Dragons

7-Eleven in Taipei

For some reason my 10-year-old niece in Idaho had strong opinions about the superiority of 7-Elevens in Taiwan. I went by one to get pictures for her. I don’t know where this is coming from, but she likes Korean boy bands too. No account for taste. 

Yay, fungus ramen.

Seaweed flavored potato chips!

What is a century egg, you ask? You shouldn’t. 

Soybean paste noodles with chili sauce and a Snickers bar.

Past the jump, more pictures of shelves of stuff. They also sell hard liquor. 

A Gun Thread

Good academic research. 

Wheels Down Taipei

I didn’t make it Friday. It was quite a journey. 

I did get to spend many, many hours in the San Francisco airport. On the international terminal there is an outdoor terrace with a sculpture garden. 

Melting clocks are also common features in prison tattoos, where they also symbolize the distorted nature of time when you are trapped in one place by unhappy circumstances.

No idea about this one.

Lovely succulents.

That California minimum wage? Fully robotic coffee bars. 

Before I left DC I had a “half smoke,” a locally famous sort of chili dog. They aren’t great. DC isn’t known for its food or culture. 

Taiwan pictures after the sun comes up. 

Ah, The Good Old Days

 

Eight Slapping Pistons

Not sure this Boeing does. Frisco by late morning, then a 15 hour delay (so far).

Up the Privateers

US to revive prize courts. 

Once you have prize courts in place, there’s no reason not to revive letters of marque and reprisal. 

Why?

Someday I need to stop coming back to this town. 

L’adventure Commence

I’m starting for the other side of the world this morning. Taipei by Friday — local time.