The Feast of St. Nicholas

St. Nicholas is the patron saint of "sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers and students." Perhaps a few Congressmen, then, if they ever repent.

Of course he is of great importance to our understanding of Christmas.

In late medieval England, on Saint Nicholas' Day parishes held Yuletide "boy bishop" celebrations. As part of this celebration, youths performed the functions of priests and bishops, and exercised rule over their elders. Today, Saint Nicholas is still celebrated as a great gift-giver in several Western European and Central European countries. According to one source, in medieval times nuns used the night of 6 December to deposit baskets of food and clothes anonymously at the doorsteps of the needy. According to another source, on 6 December every sailor or ex-sailor of the Low Countries (which at that time was virtually all of the male population) would descend to the harbour towns to participate in a church celebration for their patron saint. On the way back they would stop at one of the various Nicholas fairs to buy some hard-to-come-by goods, gifts for their loved ones and invariably some little presents for their children. While the real gifts would only be presented at Christmas, the little presents for the children were given right away, courtesy of Saint Nicholas. This and his miracle of him resurrecting the three butchered children made Saint Nicholas a patron saint of children and later students as well.[51]

Santa Claus evolved from Dutch traditions regarding Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaas). When the Dutch established the colony of New Amsterdam, they brought the legend and traditions of Sinterklaas with them.[52] Howard G. Hageman, of New Brunswick Theological Seminary, maintains that the tradition of celebrating Sinterklaas in New York existed in the early settlements of the Hudson Valley, although by the early nineteenth century had fallen by the way.[53] St. Nicholas Park, located at the intersection of St. Nicholas Avenue and 127th Street, in an area originally settled by Dutch farmers, is named for St. Nicholas of Myra.[54]

It is thus fitting to feast in celebration of him during the Advent.

The Center of the World

NOW: Jerusalem Old City walls light up in colors of Israeli and American flags as Trump to declare Jerusalem capital of Israel. pic.twitter.com/uu6s1LNRR3

— Israel Breaking (@IsraelBreaking) December 6, 2017

DB: New 'Counterinsurgency' Video Game

Sounds realistic.

“You could be in the middle of stability operations in a nearby province, and a disillusioned soldier will desert his post or leak classified documents,” Cevalos explained, referring to unscripted incidents that can happen during gameplay. “And don’t be surprised if your best troops with fleshed-out skill trees quit the military and get replaced with inept morons.”

Making things worse, the insurgents are often indistinguishable from neutral non-playable characters, making accidental civilian deaths practically unavoidable. This problem is compounded by vindictive locals falsely accusing their rivals of being guerrillas, while others have no interest in ratting out their insurgent friends and family....

At press time, a leaked memo has revealed that the only way to win the game is by carpet-bombing the entire country.

Assessing Character in Politicians

Part of my problem with the arguments I've seen that character is important in political candidates like Roy Moore is that they focus on "our party's" candidate, which is a form of tribalism. Another part is that they seem to separate policy positions from character, as if support for a particular government policy tells us nothing about the character of the politician.

Focusing on the character of "our" candidate but ignoring the character of "their" candidate is tribalist. "Policing our own" is another way to put it, and that is one aspect of tribalism. It means that it's OK to have a wicked one of "them" in office because he or she wouldn't reflect on "us," whereas a wicked one of "us" is unacceptable because he or she would be associated with us and we don't want to be identified with wickedness. (Unless we're from Boston.)

The non-tribal way of treating character as important is to assess the character of all of the candidates by the same criteria. So, when we think about character in the current Alabama senate election, we need to assess the characters of both Roy Moore and Doug Jones and make the decision based on that direct comparison, forgetting the D and R tribes for the moment.

This presents us with another problem I have with recent articles arguing against Moore based on his character: Character cannot be separated from policy positions. Sure, there is a difference, but support for a particular policy is one expression of character. Supporting / opposing racist policies says something about character. Pro-life / pro-choice positions say something about character. Views on the role of government in society say something about character. These positions may be hypocritical, publicly endorsed but privately violated, but that also tells us about character. Policy positions are expressions of character.

The attacks on Moore's character are unproven. Jones's policy positions, which speak to his character, he himself has publicly announced. It's difficult for me to see why treating character as important leads to voting for Jones, who endorses what I consider to be infanticide and tyranny. That doesn't absolve Moore, but it does take character into serious consideration. Separating policy positions from considerations of character does not.

This kind of "policing our own" tribalism and the bizarre attempt to ignore the implications of policy positions for character weaken the arguments against Moore in my mind.

Both Things Could Be True

We are having an interesting discussion about the President, the Constitution, and obstruction of justice. I don't see anything wrong with Andy McCarthy's argument that the President can't commit obstruction by ordering Federal police to exercise discretion. As he says, the FBI/DOJ is not a separate branch of the Federal government. They exist as an arm of the executive branch, whose powers are all invested in whomever the President happens to be. The President may choose to let the Department of Justice operate independently, but it has no constitutional standing to insist on doing so.

In large part, that is because the Founders never intended the Federal government to have the general police power: that was to go to the states, or be reserved by the People. The Constitution does not imagine a Federal police agency with anything like the FBI's reach or jurisdiction: even the Secret Service only dates to the end of the Civil War. The idea that the Federal government should have a police agency that could go anywhere and arrest anyone -- let alone spy on them in the myriad ways that our Federal government does -- is nowhere imagined. Controls on those powers were never set by the Founders, because the powers were never granted by the Founders. Controls were never set by an amendment seeking new authority from the People, because no authority was asked. These powers were arrogated by the government to itself.

The spying powers in particular were done so behind walls of classification. The citizenry never voted to grant the Federal government those powers. The citizenry never even knew what powers were being assumed. Nor could they, of course, without greatly weakening the security the state hoped to gain for them by assuming these powers: a public debate on the propriety of this spying would mean informing the enemy, not just the citizenry, of the capacity for the spying.

By the same token, David Frum is not wrong to argue that this is dangerous and that it could lead to unacceptable results. He is only wrong to argue that, since there is a danger of unacceptable use of power, the power must not exist. Yes, the President is invested with a great deal of power; perhaps it is more than is wise. We can change that via the Article V amendment processes, or by throwing out the Constitution and writing another one.

All the same, consider the remedy more carefully. Do we really want this vast security state untethered from any elected official? Congress cannot run it in the place of the President; as today's Contempt of Congress resolution shows, they cannot even compel compliance with basic oversight requests even when the President would like the agencies to comply. Formalizing this independence, which is already too great to be safe, would mean taking the last chains off a demon.

Could the courts control these agencies where they decide they need to be independent from their elected officials? Of course not: the enforcement of the courts' orders already depends on the police.

Cassandra was just reminding us that sometimes there aren't good answers or easy solutions. Perhaps this is one of those cases. But as dangerous as a corrupt President might be, should we find ourselves (again) with one, at least there is a formal control on him in the form of the Article I impeachment power. The police need to be tightly chained to the President because a President can be removed and replaced. Loosing a mighty demon to protect us from Donald Trump is, as the metaphor intends to suggest, a devil's bargain.

A Great Day in History

Today the 18th Amendment was repealed, ending Prohibition. Now if we could just get rid of the 16th and 17th Amendments too, that'd be a good start.

Contempt of Congress

It's curious that a Republican administration isn't complying with a Republican Congress' orders on an investigation friendly to that administration. I'm guessing that the Department of Justice and the FBI have a lot to hide here -- and as much from the President as from Congress.

An independent law enforcement branch that is neither responsive nor responsible to the elected branches is an alarming thing to behold.

Savagery

The press has a penchant for reporting "Trump administration rolls back policy instituted by Barack Obama in his last days in office" as if restoring the order Obama himself maintained through seven-and-a-half years of his presidency is an unprecedented act of barbarity. The news at NPR today: "Trump Orders Largest National Monument Reduction In U.S. History"!

Well, only two monuments are being reduced -- and reduced, not eliminated. Of those two, one was created in whole cloth by Barack Obama in the final days of his office. (The other dates to a similarly late project by Bill Clinton.) There's no reason that a policy instituted by one administration shouldn't be reconsidered by another. As the NPR article eventually gets around to noticing, rural Utah has been fuming about the Clinton-era designation ever since it happened. The Federal designation means they can't do the things they have traditionally done on the land anymore.

Nevertheless: "This arbitrary review and illegal action will not go unchallenged," said Nicole Croft, executive director of Grand Staircase Escalante Partners.

Illegal, is it? The same way restoring the military recruitment policy of the last 43 & 7/8ths Presidents was unconstitutional? Right.

Turning over rocks

I came to the decision to run for local office with much reluctance.  (And you should hear my husband on the subject.  I think we can be sure he won't be standing around on podiums gazing at me with admiring support, or pressing the flesh at community gatherings.  I get the impression he doesn't enjoy crowds.)

Nevertheless, having concluded I had to step up and that was that, I have found that there are some compensations.  There's an endless fascination in finding out how things work.  Whether it's getting a chance to look inside a water treatment plant or learning where local government gets its powers and funding and seeing how the roads get paved and the trash gets picked up, the hidden mechanisms all around us are a constant source of joy and learning.  God made me a curious person and a quick study.  It's good to put it to use.

What I'm seeing is that the ramshackle machine that makes the trains run is staffed with equal amounts of people who have no clue and people of amazing competence and good character.  You have to find the latter and minimize the damage from the former.  The trick of politics seems to be to encourage a system that makes both of those tasks easier.

Texas has a funny wrinkle in its criminal prosecution system.  Normally a State District Attorney handles criminal cases for several rural counties, while a County Attorney in each county handles civil matters, including advising the County Commissioners on their contracts and their statutory duties and powers.  The Texas State legislature can, however, grant a county's (inexplicable) request to opt out of the local State DA system and give criminal prosecution powers over to the County Attorney.  From then on, the local DA will stay out of your county and perhaps lose interest in your problems.  If your County Attorney's background is, say, real estate, that may not seem like such a great idea.  If in addition she is given to obscure, intractable quarrels with the local police force and suddenly announces that she will prosecute no further cases referred by that body, things come unwound pretty quickly.  Suddenly we all have to turn to the thorny question, "How does one remove a sitting County Attorney, especially without any cooperation from a Commissioners Court that apparently doesn't see the problem?"  It's become a lively Facebook discussion, which I call a healthy thing.

My campaign is largely summed up in what is supposed to be George Washington's warning about fire being a dangerous tool and a terrible master.  We get a lot of droughts here; people who let their "controlled burns" get out of control come in for a lot of squinty-eyed ill humor.  I tell my prospective voters that, when you're thinking of handing over a new power to your elected officials, it's like setting a fire.  You don't do it until you've cleared a little area around the fire pit and gotten a water hose charged and ready.  Before we elect someone, not only should we find out a lot about his character and abilities, we should get conversant with the procedures for booting him back out of office.  Do we have recall elections?  What about impeachment?  Who has standing to get one of these procedures started?  How hard is it?  Do we have to go to court?  When will he be up for re-election?  How long does it take to get ready to run someone to challenge him?

From Facebook I judge that most people look at a situation like this and think "I'll write to the Governor," or may "to the Attorney General."  No great harm in that, but it discharges a sense of urgency without being very likely to produce results.  I keep coming back to the old lesson that there is not, and never will be, any substitute for people to organize and rule themselves, starting locally.  We can govern ourselves, or we will be governed.  As Benjamin Franklin said,  "A republic, if you can keep it."

It's also occurred to me lately that there's a swath of the Republican party that divides the world into "golf cronies" and "pool boys."  For me that's the GOPe in a nutshell.  What I want to know about a neighbor is:  Does he take responsibility for himself?  Can his neighbors count on him?  I have many neighbors I can count on, and it's not their incomes or their wardrobes that make the difference.

Scott Lynch's "Locke Lamora" Novels

One of my regular laments is that the genre of Sword & Sorcery has withered in recent years. This genre, which predates Tolkien's High Fantasy, grew out of some turn-of-the-last-century stories "set in exotic locations" and therefore mixing physical adventure with dark powers. By the time of the Great Depression, it has blossomed into its most famous flowering: the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard, which were only a small part of a whole world and deep history of his imagination. About the same time, the other great master of the genre began crafting the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. The genre was related to another offshoot of the earlier tales, the Horror genre characterized by Cthulhu; but in Sword & Sorcery stories, the heroes could overcome eldritch beasts through steel, wit, and courage.

Sword & Sorcery lacks most of the moral force of the Tolkien's High Fantasy, but it is in a sense more joyous and primal. It is that quality that, sadly, is lacking in the works of Scott Lynch, the first writer I've run into in a while to attempt it. His stories are almost entirely lacking in the joy that gave Fafhrd 'the laugh of the Elder Gods,' or the primal confidence that gave Conan the ferocity to contest demons with cold steel. I read Lynch's three books, hoping he might discover the power of the thing as he played with it; I am sorry to say that he did not.

Lynch's cities are well-drawn, and he has a place for eldritch magic that somehow comes to play little role beyond providing interesting architecture. His heroes are riddled with guilt and loathing, of themselves if they are male. Lynch is of the current fashion that has wholeheartedly adopted feminism as moral truth; female characters are invariably confident and accomplished in a way that his men never are, and yet retain adequate bitter loathing to lecture at length -- whole pages at a time in the third book -- on how unfair the world is to their sex. The books are blurbed by George R. R. Martin, and for good reason: they share his penchant for killing off sympathetic characters in horrible ways, but to no real point.

As a consequence the books are a slog to read rather than a pleasure, and I am sure I will not return to them the way I have to the classics of the genre. I am planning to give the whole set away in the hope that someone else may like them better.

Courage

The new fascists

Sebastian Gorka on the bizarre treatment he gets from the press:

My father, as a young boy at the age of 13, escorted his fellow schoolmates to school in Budapest during the German occupation because his fellow schoolmates were forced to wear the yellow Star of David as Jews. And my father, as a Catholic young 14-year-old, protected them from getting beaten up or spat on by the German forces occupying Budapest.

And for them to then accuse me of having some kind of extreme right-wing tendency … you don’t get to call yourself a journalist and lie that badly, but it tells you the state of journalism in America today. But I think that’s going to change.

First Sunday of Advent

Irish Medieval History has an account of the use of "X" as a Christian symbol.

White Shoes, Silver Britches

Mighty Bulldogs, SEC Champions.

Schubert's Erlkönig: Music, Visual Storytelling, and Subtitles

A Quiet Day in the Country

So today I went out to a farm that raises fallow deer and emus, as well as horses, and enjoyed a nice walk. Later the wife and I went to a leather shop to look at hides and plan some Christmas gift projects -- she's quite talented at many sorts of making, including leatherworking. Following that we had a dinner of home-made chicken soup.

A very quiet, uneventful day. Did I miss anything?

Not Quite My Grandfather's Story, but Close Enough (Plus, Tchaikovsky)

The funny thing here is that, although I think country music like this best tells the story of his life, my grandfather was never really a country music fan. While he didn't go to college and lived much of his life out in the sticks, he mostly listened to classical music. He'd probably rather I play Schubert or Tchaikovsky in his honor. Here's something he might have enjoyed more than the Alan Jackson I've been playing.

(The story the 1812 Overture tells is of the Russian defense against Napolean's invasion, an interesting read in its own right.)

Uranium One

A signature proves that a deal was made.

Harvard Law Profs Explain Conservative Dislike for Elite Colleges

Continuing the evening's trend, here's a WaPo article by two Harvard Law professors about why conservatives dislike elite universities. They offer four reasons:

First is the obvious progressive tilt in universities, especially elite universities ...

Second, the distinctive progressive ideology of elite universities is relentlessly critical of, to the point of being intolerant of, traditions and moral values widely seen as legitimate in the outside world ...

Third is the rise of anti-conservative “mobs,” “shout-downs” and “illiberal behavior” on campus ...

Fourth is the public contempt of so many university academics for those who fund their subsidies ...

Not bad.

Stanford Student Sam Wolfe: "Yes, Congress, Tax Stanford's Endowment"

Notable mostly because the Stanford Review published it:

After the Presidential election cleaved the country in two, pitting Trump’s “poorly-educated” deplorables against Hillary’s college-educated elites, it was probably only a matter of time before Republicans went after their tribal opponents. To this end, both the House and the Senate have proposed tax plans that include a 1.4% tax on the investment income of college endowments. ...

The Republicans have announced no serious rationale for this plan. With college campuses becoming increasingly liberal and the college-educated leaning more heavily Democratic than ever, it is a fairly transparent attempt to hit their opponents where it hurts. The justification that it treats colleges in line with private foundations, which currently face a 2% tax on investment income, rings hollow given that the proposed tax will only apply to about 140 institutions. The plan has faced backlash from liberals and conservatives alike ...

But please, Congress, pass it anyway.

Most income is taxed in some form, whether it be salaries hit by income tax, business revenues that face corporate tax, or private investment earnings slugged by capital gains tax. By failing to tax Stanford’s endowment at all, the government is effectively handing us a large subsidy (in addition to the government funding we already receive). The government is implying that it is happy to tax working Americans more than it otherwise would in order to give Stanford students, and their endowment, a free ride. In light of the damage that elite colleges do to the world, there’s really no excusing this.

...

The rest is Wolfe's justification, put in terms of simple economics and the left's own arguments for distribution of wealth. Worth reading.

Update: Or maybe it's not so surprising the Stanford Review published it. The Review claims to be "Stanford's Independent Newspaper" and some current headlines there include:

It's Time to End Net Neutrality
Rally Against Islamophobia Exposes the Double Standards of the Campus Left
Stanford Students Pretend to Support Free Speech, Stumble at Final Hurdle
Why America Still Needs Guns

Wolfe's article seems to be typical. Nice to know.