Sgt. MacKenzie
Studying the Classics
One of America's most famous colleges is drastically changing the concept of what it means to study the Classics.
Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer.”Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.
On the one hand, I'm delighted to learn that there is pressure from a diverse group of people to be included in the study of Homer or Cicero. Also, reading these things in the original may be less important now that we have 2,000+ years of translations available. I myself have never studied Latin or Greek formally, but rather am self-taught in the limited amount of each language I have. I still have managed to learn a fair amount about ancient philosophy.
On the other hand, we are still going to require a certain number of experts to check our work on these matters of fundamental texts. English drifts too, so that an older translation of Aristotle may now read differently to an English-language scholar than it was intended to read by the translator. Someone who can read the original can pull us back when we drift away from what was really meant by the text.
In addition, it sounds from the article like the discipline of studying difficult ancient languages is being replaced by racial-theory claptrap. This will only damage the thinking of students, whatever their backgrounds. It is replacing ancient things of proven value with fashionable nonsense driven by political aims.
Take Your Guns to Town
We usually call this "constitutional carry," but Rolling Stone is borrowing a line from Johnny Cash's old song about a young cowboy who gets himself killed on his first trip to town as a man. Now, a quick review of the song will show that the young cowboy's error wasn't carrying the guns, but trying to draw on another man over a matter of pride. The guns being at home could have stopped that, but so could good sense.
RS aren't fans of the law.
The Republican state representative who authored the measure insisted that the existing permitting regulations were no deterrent to crime. “The simple truth is that those that intend evil, those who are criminals, don’t care what we do in this building,” he said, adding: “We are charged with defending the freedoms that are owed to Texans and guaranteed by the Constitution.”
Wish they'd named the guy; that's the first politician I've heard in a while who seems to understand what the job of the government happens to be. He's exactly right about what they are charged with doing.
He also is correct that no criminals avoid carrying guns because of permit laws. Permit laws are defensible as a means to get law-abiding citizens to take firearm safety training, which is a reasonable public purpose; I don't oppose such laws provided that they are shall-issue and not onerous. Courses really should be provided for free* to any citizen who wants one. I have no objection to the 'well-regulated militia' being taught how to shoot accurately and carry safely. Still, the 2nd says "shall not be infringed," too; free courses readily available might not constitute much of an infringement, but almost any additional layer of difficulty would.
In any case crime rates in our "towns" (cities, really) are through the roof. You may not need your gun in the countryside, but there's a rising chance that you'll want one in town.
* Mr. Hines reminds me that 'nothing is free,' which is fair; I mean that they should be provided at public expense to the citizen, rather than a cost they have to pay in order to exercise their rights. The citizen may not find this totally 'free,' since obviously their local taxes may have to cover the cost; although, since mostly we already pay for police officers who have long periods of boredom on an average day, it may be that it wouldn't entail additional expenses for them to occasionally provide a public course on firearm safety and accurate operation.
Memoralizing Language
In reference to AVI's post on the same subject, when I was young Southerners still spoke like this.
At this point I think everyone in the country feels free to say "ya'll,"* but no one still sounds much like they're from anywhere. Only in the high mountains do I hear the tones of an older tongue; and they don't sound like Lewis, whose speech was lowland rather than Highland Southern.
I went by his home town on the recent ride to Mobile. I was gratified to see his name on the local highway. He was proud of his home; I'm glad they're proud of him, too.
* Faulkner spells it this way. Naysayers can go jump.
I'd Rather Carry the One that Works
Apparently the VP also gave a speech today.
"Just ask any Marine today, would she rather carry 20 pounds of batteries or a rolled up solar panel, and I am positive she will tell you a solar panel, and so would he," she said, before laughing.
You know their lives may well depend on whether the stuff works when they get to the end of that march, right? They aren't carrying all that gear for fun. I'm fairly positive that they'll want the gear that will reliably do the job that might complete their mission and/or save their lives.
These people are going to get our people killed, laughing all the time about how clever they are.
Kabul, Vietnam
Ralph Peters with an appropriate-to-the-holiday look at how we made the same mistakes again.
[I]n both the Republic of South Vietnam and Afghanistan, we supported—indeed, imposed—leaders we found convenient. In both cases, our enemies had homegrown leadership that had earned its way to high-echelon command through sacrifice, guile, and commitment. More Vietnamese were willing to give their lives for Ho Chi Minh’s vision than were willing to die for South Vietnamese generals—often corrupt, rarely competent, but cynically ingratiating. In Afghanistan, we supported anyone who spoke English and could tie a Windsor knot. The result was that, despite our tactical prowess, the Taliban never wanted for volunteers and the organization is stronger today than a decade ago, midway through our semi-occupation. Taliban chieftains inspire loyalty; “our” Afghan leaders provoke jokes in the bazaar. The proof of capacity is on the ground, not in cheery briefings by ambitious colonels.The second great mistake is directly related to the first: With shortsighted good intentions, we poured wealth into South Vietnam, corrupting the government and society we hoped to save. We were “the land of the big PX,” and our largesse broke our clients’ will to fight. North Vietnam’s greatest strength was its poverty. We sought to defeat Spartans with sybarites....Insurgencies are not fundamentally contests of wealth or weaponry but of strength of will.
His analysis differs from mine, but not in ways that make one of us wrong and the other right. He's not wrong.
The Edited Declaration
I mean, at least he didn't forget "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." I already knew we didn't agree on what the rights were.
UPDATE: Another important thing forgotten was not to say this stuff out loud.
Georgia Update
A Georgia judge approved the unsealing of ballots for an audit in Fulton County. In response, Fulton County has hired lawyers -- specifically, criminal defense attorneys. Rather than rely on the county's own attorneys, they hired two top experts in criminal law from Atlanta firms.
Not election law experts, I notice. But of course everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and they're entitled to a vigorous defense against the charges they are anticipating.
AI and the Ethics of War
As is well known to readers of the Hall, the United States military attempts to follow the laws of war by including a heavy lawyering component in its operations. One of the jobs of this lawyer component is to approve strikes in questionable cases, checking to ensure that the laws of war are being followed closely. This takes time, which can be of no special moment if we are in a position to strike at leisure; but it can also be crucial if guys are waiting on called-for air support.
Israel has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based targeting process.
Collecting data using signal intelligence (SIGINT), visual intelligence (VISINT), human intelligence (HUMINT), geographical intelligence (GEOINT) and more, the IDF has mountains of raw data that must be combed through to find the key pieces necessary to carry out a strike.“Gospel” used AI to generate recommendations for troops in the research division of Military Intelligence, which used them to produce quality targets and then passed them on to the IAF to strike.
Against a non-peer adversary like Hamas, this is just one more tool in the toolkit. It occurs to me, however, that this greatly imperils the laws of war should the tool be employed by a near-peer adversary (or a peer, or a better).
If you're not very concerned about ethics, you can fully automate this process. "Gospel" can generate targets that are passed directly to automated drone strikes or artillery as soon as they are tagged by the first program. Just let it roll until "Gospel" stops telling you there's anything to hit, or you run out of ammo for the drones/guns.
As noted in our recent discussion about OODA-loops, the ability to make a decision and act on it faster than your opponent can be the fundamental determinant of victory in war. The AI shortens the decision chain; eliminating the human lawyers shortens it further. A peer-ish adversary using AI would quickly be inside our OODA loops as long as we continued to use our lawyers.
The only pragmatic way to avoid defeat would be to eliminate the lawyers and automate our own weapons' decision-making. You might be able to program the AI with the appropriate lawyerly criteria; but even then, you're adding extra processing cycles that the enemy AIs don't have to run. That too would allow the enemy to get inside your OODA loop.
As a consequence, the introduction of this AI-based targeting is likely to eliminate the laws of war as a practical feature of modern combat. Even if we avoid Skynet-style AIs, we will end up creating unethical ones because they'll be the only ones that can compete. The alternative is defeat by an even more vicious power; either way, we end up with worse wars and evil AIs in control of the weapons of war.
Have You Considered That Your Eyes Lie To You?
"As Americans are hitting the road," the White House explains, "they are paying less for gasoline than they have on average for the last 15 years -- [and] about the same as May 2018 and May 2019."
Meanwhile, as James Carville explains, Democrats are the law-and-order party.
So really, the problem is you. If you'd quit believing your lying eyes and listen to what you're told by the experts, everything would be fine.
Grid woes
I took a long break from the nyah-nyahing over the Texas grid failure in February. Today's WSJ carries a fascinating piece about the vulnerability of the "black start" capacity of the grid, which not only sends chills down my spine about how bad things could have gotten if ERCOT had delayed even a few more minutes before cutting off a huge fraction of Texas customers in the middle of the night, but also explains more than I'd read before about what happens if a grid shuts completely down and has to start back up. The article is behind the usual paywall, but you can get there by Googling.
How is it that we keep reading about these disasters in which the back-up systems turn out to be vulnerable to the same conditions that cause us to need a back-up? I call that anti-resilience.
When a grid has rolling blackouts or even partial long-term service interruptions, a crucial core of the grid stays active. "Crucial" means not only things we'd really rather not shut down, like hospitals, but the power plants themselves. Power plants shut down not only because they can't get fuel and electric power, but also because a grid with too low a frequency can damage their workings. Lack of fuel is a temporary problem, but disconnection from the grid or staying on a low-frequency grid are long-term bad news: a damaged plant will take time to repair, and restarting a plant and reconnecting it to a dead grid is tricky.
I guess I always assumed that a power plant generated its own internal power as a matter of course, but apparently that's not so. If the grid shuts down, or even the part of the grid that's attached to the power plant, the power plant doesn't hum along on its own power. It can't: the power has to go to a load. So when the local grid area shuts down, the plant shuts down, too. It needs a special "black start" local generating unit to get it going again.
Even if all the black-start units operate perfectly, it's a wildly delicate operation to start the whole grid up again from scratch. If 1/2 or 3/4 of the grid is down, it's easier to add new sections gradually, though no picnic, with delicate attention to balancing the new power and the new load it can serve. When the whole grid goes down, it can take anything from days to the unthinkable months to black-start it.
In this case, ERCOT didn't have to do a black-start, which is a good thing, because about half of our black-start resources evidently were iffy. If they're to be reliable at all, they need a large standby fuel source. Gas that's got to come through vulnerable pipelines won't cut it. Nuclear is nice, as is hydro; failing those, giant oil or gas tanks would be good, or huge mountains of coal. The just-in-time inventory style has made those less common, and we're not giving power generators the right financial incentives to keep large expensive emergency fuel inventories handy.
This issue came up when ERCOT had a near-miss emergency in 2011. Predictably, we addressed the issue by ordaining committees to study the issue and work together to improve yada yada, the usual word salad. We won't have an actual solution until we figure out what it costs to have reliable standby power and reach a consensus on how to pay for it with real money from real electric power customers who have decided it's worth the price. What I'm reading is arguments about whether the free market or regulation is the panacea. The Texas system, while somewhat less regulated than some others, is hardly a free market, though it has a strong emphasis on market signals in some areas, generally in an attempt to force efficiency and keep prices down. Nevertheless, it's not all about efficiency, unless you include adequate backup resources for extreme emergencies in the concept of efficiency. Extra security costs money. We're going to have to get past the thinking that either a market or a regulation can change the cold equation telling us that something valuable has to be paid for by someone. "Someone" is going to be be (1) users or (2) people donating to users.
Memorial Day Weekend
Two years ago, I attended the last Rolling Thunder motorcycle demonstration. It was an amazing event, drawing at least half a million and perhaps a million bikers, including veteran motorcycle clubs and organizations from around the country.
There is a legacy event that is called Rolling to Remember. It appears to draw bikers on the order of one tenth the scale of the previous demonstration, but 40,000 bikers is still a fair crowd of bikers. The Biden administration yanked its permit in an attempt to finish off the tradition, but the Rolling to Remember ride is happening anyway.
If you happen to be in the area, go out and see it. They're there to honor the fallen, and those who never came home, as is the real purpose of the holiday weekend. Of course they'll also have a good time, another way of honoring those whose lives were given to defend the freedom to live a good life.
Baseball is Magic
We've been playing this game for more than a century, and this has never happened before. But there's no reason it's out of order with the rules; it's just a thing that never happens, until it does, one afternoon in May.
It's a pretty neat game, really. I don't watch it often, but every time I do I appreciate it anew.
Product Placement? Nah ...
Continuing with our JP theme, I thought I detected a familiar product placement in this one ... but, nah. It's probably a coincidence.
Red Lines
Michael Anton has a new essay that I think is very important because it lines up with a project of my own: the new state of Appalachia, which I someday hope to form out of elements of North Georgia, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, West Virginia and parts of Western Virginia. No big cities -- even Knoxville and Asheville will be omitted. Just good Highlander country, ideally a near-anarchy governed on voluntary lines such as I've been describing lately.
Anton is a very smart and well-educated guy whom I've met several times and have mentioned more than once before. I don't think he and I have much in common except the occasional idea; and sometimes not even that. But he's definitely worth reading once he sits down and maps something out, whether you end up agreeing with him or not.
This time, I do.
Genius Stinks
Well, maybe not, but it can be overrated. This article begins with 'creative genius,' but it then considers even physical prowess that is out of the ordinary.
Researchers have analysed the make-up of basketball and football teams, for example, to find out how the addition of highly rated players improves overall team performance. When analysing the World Cup, for instance, they examined how many of each nation’s players came from the most prestigious clubs, such as Manchester United or FC Barcelona. Surprisingly, they found that the benefits of that exceptional individual talent were often underwhelming. Thanks, perhaps, to the star players’ rutting egos, the teams with the highest number of stars often failed to collaborate effectively.
I don't know if the issue is really ego, though it might be; but it could also simply be that the rest of the team has trouble synchronizing with a physicality that is far beyond its average. In any case, I have noticed this effect in teams that try to buy themselves into a great position by recruiting 'genius' players. A team that thinks and acts as a team is often more effective in a team sport than one that is made up of people who are trying to support a single genius.
Of course, not all sports are team sports. Sometimes there's a case for the lone gunslinger.
Fake News Today
BB: New Amazon Bond Film
Amazon has purchased MGM Studios and the famous Bond franchise for $8.45 billion, according to reports. Current Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed his excitement over the purchase."We are looking forward to bringing the story of British superspy James Bond into new and exciting directions!" said Bezos. "I can't give away too much, but I can say that the next Bond film will be a story about how a powerful organization taking over the world is actually a good thing!"
DB: AWOL numbers skyrocket after Air Force transitions to camouflage that actually works
HT: Optimus Prime Forced to Walk Everywhere After Truck Form Fails Highway Safety Inspection
Advice For The People Running Biden
Since we're watching JP, he has some very good advice for the people running Biden.
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