Hillz does her part

Bee

Another Gigantic Bill No One Read

It's almost three thousand pages, released after midnight and voted on the same day by the House. It passed, of course, because Congress is full of scoundrels. Amber Athey skimmed at least some of it and found quite a bit of waste.

...an unspecified portion of the nearly $4 billion available in bilateral economic assistance — meaning direct transfers from the United States to other countries — shall “be made available for programs to promote democracy and for gender programs in Pakistan.”

Gender programs in Pakistan? How much are we sending to Saudi Arabia? They're actually making progress on that front. 

Be On the Lookout for Spider Paratroopers

An invasive species invades.

Researchers say there's nothing we can do. They're coming... I say let's pool our resources now and build a dome around Georgia and keep them there.

It's too late. 

Mafia Economics

An interesting thread on Russia's situation. I think this insight is important:

Why old oil and gas tycoons were expropriated, while metallurgy oligarchs were spared and largely remained rich through the entire Putin's era? Because metallurgy is too complicated for Putin's friends to control it directly. They spared it, because they are too mafia to run it

 

The closer you are to the seat of power, the more mafia like and thus simpler you are. You are just unable to administer anything complex. That's why the highest-ranked and the simplest interest group took oil and gas - something they could rip off without destroying. immediately

1990s oligarchs are more complex but lower in dominance hierarchy. They took something that they could administer without ruining it immediately - the metallurgy. Ofc they're ruining it slowly. They're depleting old deposits without developing new ones. But it will take time

And only really complex stuff like competitive machinery is left for nerds like a nengineer Skurov - the owner of that mining machine producing factory I talked about. That's very important. Complex machinery is administered by guys who are very low in Russian dominance hierarchy

That's quite important for understanding the economic prospects of Russia. Complex industries, especially hardware industries are run by very weak interest groups. Higher-ups tolerate the nerds because someone should do it, but they'll milk those miserables dry 

I imagine it's like the banker in this scene:

It's probably easier to navigate. The banker in that scene thinks he lives in a place where there's rule of law; the nerds in Russia don't have any such illusions. 
 

The Past was not Conservative

A fascinating study of our (mis)perception of public attitudes. 

"Some men kiss their chains"

But not all do. Niall Ferguson observes that it's foolish to assume everyone shares our value for freedom, but there's no need to ignore those who do.

It turns out that Americans grasp that it’s foolish to try to make people like themselves — but they sure are happy to lend a hand when they see people who are like themselves. It also turns out that Americans have a pretty good grasp of the national interest, and factor both sentiment and calculation into their preference on what ought to be done.

NYT Reporter: J6 Rife with Gov't Informants

Another Project Veritas sting, this has NYT Journalist Matthew Rosenberg -- who was present at the January 6th event -- talking through what happened. He attested that there were "a ton" of FBI informants "among the people who attacked the Capitol."

UPDATE: Tucker Carlson has a piece on this sting, with an interview from the editor of Revolver news.

Good Government at the DMV

The DMV has for decades been infamous for its customer service, but here in North Carolina the COVID period has brought it to abject tyranny. Our local DMV has reduced its hours for walk-in appointments to two hours a day, 2:15-4:15 PM. The door is locked at all times, and only one customer -- no parents with minors, or elders, but just one person -- is allowed inside and the door locked behind them. 

For two years they stopped doing road tests, 'because of COVID,' so if you were a younger driver who needed a road test to get a license you just couldn't drive. For years. Too bad. I arranged a temporary address in another state for a young relative so they could get a license, and then transfer it back here to their permanent address. The DMV doesn't care if it screws up your life. You don't matter at all.

Mornings are for appointments only, and you can only make an appointment online because they stopped answering their phone. You can call; they won't answer. I've called a dozen times trying to obtain information from them, and never once has anyone picked up the phone. No online appointments can be made sooner than two months out, not because they are busy -- today they had just one appointment -- but because. These go on until noon, at which point the DMV staff begins a two-hour lunch.

Then, at 2:15, they begin allowing people to come in one at a time according to the waiting list. Today the waiting list was two pages long at noon, two hours before they started seeing anyone, and many of the people there had been coming in for days to try to get seen. Some had come in at six in the morning in order to get their names on the list somewhat higher up.

I didn't actually need anything from the DMV myself today, I just was taking lunch to one of the poor citizens waiting for their government to deign to accept their tax money. They'd taken the day off work to be there, and because they came in at noon -- two hours early -- they were at the bottom of page two of the list. 

"Look," I said as I was passing off their lunch amid a very large crowd, "the DMV are the worst people in the world." The crowd laughed appreciatively, but in a kind of shocked tone at my audacity of speaking so of the mighty bureaucrats who govern their lives. "They have done everything they can to make themselves inaccessible and unaccountable to the citizens who pay their salaries. All you can do is wait on them and hope they do their jobs during the two hours a day they actually pretend to work." 

Just at this time one of the DMV employees walked into the building with his lunch.

"AND THERE'S ONE OF THEM RIGHT THERE!" I said quite loudly, raising my finger to point at him. "That guy is one of these who works only two hours a day while citizens wait for hours and hours!" 

He literally backed into his office and audibly locked the door trying to get away from all the people suddenly glaring at him. 

Now as I said, I didn't need anything from them and was just there to bring somebody lunch, so I left. I heard later, though, that the DMV employees somehow managed to get through every single person on the waiting list this afternoon. The people who'd been waiting for days were just stunned at how quickly the line moved today, compared to other days recently. Nobody was sent away without being seen today.

These people work for us. It's about time they remembered it. 

A Buck and a Half Gas

I was only able to put half a tank's worth of gasoline in my Ford today, because that was $75 and the new daily limit at the local gas station. That makes a full tank of gas $150. 

We were energy independent just a little over a year ago. 

How to stir up parents

There was a news report this morning about the Biden administration's rejecting a FOIA request about last year's weaponizing of the federal criminal justice system against "terrorist" parents.  It prompted me to check in on how the National School Boards Association was doing.  A WaPo article from January gives a sympathetic account of how the misunderstood organization was targeted by conservatives.

The article begins on a promising note:

Now, the association is at risk of total collapse.... Nineteen mostly GOP-led states have withdrawn from the association or promised to when this year’s membership expires, and six members of what was a 19-person board have left. Several states are discussing forming an alternative association for school boards. A new executive director of the [NSBA] is working to save the organization, lobbying individual states to reconsider, but so far he has not persuaded any of them to change their minds.

The disgraced former director explained how he came up with his bright idea to engage the support of federal cops against parents alarmed by racist curricula and COVID mandates:

Slaven said that because this was a sensitive issue, he circulated the letter to the board’s four officers, who all signed off on it. He said he would not normally have done this, but he worried it would be seen as a slap at the Biden administration for not enforcing federal law so wanted them to see it first.

Probably it wouldn't have occurred to him to run the letter by any trusted advisors for fear that it would enrage parents. He just wanted to be sure he wasn't being unfair to President Biden. An NSBA board member reported Slaven's claim at the time that the letter had been solicited by U.S. Education Secretary Michael Cardona. Cardona denies this.  The WaPo article goes on to explain why the letter was in a good cause, because of the need to address all those awful parents, then describes the explosive aftermath, including the usual "drumbeat" from malicious conservatives.

About a month after the letter hit the press, ex-director Slaven was fired. His allies assert he was a scapegoat in a conservative movement to undermine public schools by portraying them as hostile to parents.  Heavens to Betsy, how would parents ever have gathered that impression?  "Many of the [NSBA]’s opponents are also outspoken supporters of school choice programs that direct tax dollars to parochial, private and charter schools." Oh, you'd better believe it. Jim Green, executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, offered this helpful advice:

“If you’re a person who doesn’t support public schools and want to see public schools go away, what better thing could happen than get rid of an organization like NSBA, one of the leading voices for public education,” he said.

Well, it's a leading voice for something.  Whether ensuring kids an access to education enters into it is less clear.

The Hag

Mark Pulliam over at Law & Liberty reviews Marc Eliot's biography of Merle Haggard:

It is sometimes difficult to place popular musicians in a larger cultural context, and this was not the goal of Marc Eliot’s The Hag, an impressively thorough biography of country music icon Merle Haggard. ... Fans of Haggard or country music generally will enjoy The Hag as a celebration of Haggard’s contribution to the “Bakersfield sound,” a distinctive variation of a genre typically associated with Nashville. Readers may balk at Eliot’s comparison of his subject to Robert Frost, Frank Sinatra, Bob Wills, and Bob Dylan, but they will emerge with a deeper appreciation for a musician who is often undeservedly overshadowed by “crossover” artists such as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings.

I did not know Haggard was a prisoner in the audience when Cash did his concert at San Quentin.

It's an enjoyable review, and I expect to enjoy the biography as well.

Of course, as his biography notes, Haggard used cocaine and marijuana, and he was married five times. But good musicians tell the stories of a people, not necessarily of themselves.

Communist Bunk Fashionable Again

According to Business Insider, a growing number of economists are calling for price controls in the face of inflation. 

In the young blue bubbles

In the continuing saga of my laptop woes, I'm making the acquaintance of many bright young Mac Tech Support workers. Because of our slow rural internet service here, there are often long companionable period while we wait for something to download or upload, during which the nice young people are happy to chat away about local conditions. I get to play old codger, with dispatches from Boondockia: "Why, I remember the time we didn't have internet service for days . . . ."

Yesterday a nice young woman asked me how the changes in restrictions were going this week, or some such phrase. I didn't realize at first what she was talking about, then I laughed and said, oh, you mean COVID mandates! Shoot, I'm in Texas, we gave those up a long time ago. I can't remember the last time I wore a mask. The schools have been open forever. Most of us old folks got vaccinated a year ago and then moved on.

She was shocked. She didn't seem aware that much of the country hasn't been going along with this stuff, and that our disease trajectory was every bit as favorable as her area's. I daresay all she hears about Texas culture these days is that we're being cruel to transgender children, if that. More likely, we're like the giant gray area on Weather Channel maps south of the Rio Grande.

Another odd thing is that, because we're usually chatting on these calls because of a slow internet, I often mention that we're looking forward to Elon Musk and Starlink service. So far I haven't run into any tech support staff who know what I'm talking about. I'd have thought young people in the tech world would be keenly aware of Elon Musk, such a flamboyant figure.

Make America 1977 Again

There's a lot of talk about the 70s just now: stagflation, oil, and all the rest. Nobody ever talks about the good parts, like Waylon Jennings and Lynyrd Skynyrd. If we could find a way to come around to that again, it might be ok. Hell, even with Carter II.

Whiteside in Winter

Just a short stretch of the legs. Spring is coming, but it’s not here yet. 

Wisconsin Special Counsel: Election Was Crooked

D29 is more on top of this story than I have been, but the report is out now and it has some pretty substantial findings.

The topline finding in the press has been that the use of 'Zuckerbucks' to selectively influence turnout was illegal bribery. Of more importance, but much less interest to the press, is that the use of ballot dropboxes was (a) illegal, and therefore (b) unconstitutional, and also (c) sufficient to change the outcome of the election in Biden's favor.

Of still less interest has been the 100% turnout rate in nursing homes, which is a surprising and unlikely figure.

But there's also this, on the subject of the machines themselves:

The OSC was able to identify, through the reports of experts, that the failed machine recorded two anonymous and unauthorized access events from its VPN. This means, contrary to what Dominion has publicly stated, that at least some machines had access to the internet on election night. Shortly after the unauthorized access was recorded, the machine failed and was reset, wiping all voting history and forcing that election administrator to rely on unverifiable paper printouts from the failed machine. 

ESS machines were equally problematic. The central problem is that several of the machines are made with a 4G wireless modem installed, enabling them to connect to the internet through a Wi-Fi hotspot. One municipality under investigation in Wisconsin by the OSC admitted that these machines had these modems and were connected to the internet on election night. The reason given was to “transmit data” about votes to the county clerks.

The OSC learned that all machines in Green Bay were ESS machines and were connected to a secret, hidden Wi-Fi access point at the Grand Hyatt hotel, which was the location used by the City of Green Bay on the day of the 2020 Presidential election. The OSC discovered the Wi-Fi, machines, and ballots were controlled by a single individual who was not a government employee but an agent of a special interest group operating in Wisconsin. (pp. 13-14)

The report says that it is not in the Special Counsel's competence to challenge or revoke certification of the election, but they went to the trouble of including an appendix explaining how it could be done if elected officials decide to do so.

UPDATE: Rasmussen Reports notes that there is documentation of a similar operation in a ballroom in Arizona.

How did we screw up Ukraine this badly?

Substack continues to publish useful articles you won't find in respectable newspapers any more.

Samaritan's Purse

I don't know for sure if this specific report is for real, but Samaritan's Purse, a Franklin Graham organization, claims to have put together an airlifted hospital facility and gotten it to (or at least near?) Ukraine. I know this charity organization pretty well from the good work they did in my little county after we were devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They rebuilt houses for people who had no insurance. They worked with a particularly difficult constituent of mine, one of those people who do their best to undermine any help they are offered, and were more kind and patient with her than I ended up able to be. All the agents I worked with were deeply compassionate but practical people who kept their eyes on the ball. No bureaucratic box-checking or pettiness at all, just good stewards of donated funds. Anyway, I donated and encouraged my neighbors to do the same.

Everything is free in Ukraine

I often talk about how there is socialism under my roof, and something very much like it among my closest circle, gradually shifting to outright free market behavior for strangers.  Money is a powerful tool for people who want to resolve their different needs and desires without violence.  Money is the symbol of a formal promise to return the favor.

People who all want the same thing, however, don't need a formal promise to return a favor.  Families and other intimates can get along for long periods with such unified goals that money means nothing within their boundaries.  Societies in fundamental catastrophes like wars and natural disasters approach this utopian state for a while.

It's heavenly in its way, but I'll be happier to see Ukrainians restored to a society in which they're all free to pursue different goals again, and use money to sort out their tradeoffs and preferences peacefully.

Enchiridion LI: The End

LI

The first and most necessary topic in philosophy is the practical application of principles, as, We ought not to lie; the second is that of demonstrations as, Why it is that we ought not to lie; the third, that which gives strength and logical connection to the other two, as, Why this is a demonstration. For what is demonstration? What is a consequence? What a contradiction? What truth? What falsehood? The third point is then necessary on account of the second; and the second on account of the first. But the most necessary, and that whereon we ought to rest, is the first. But we do just the contrary. For we spend all our time on the third point and employ all our diligence about that, and entirely neglect the first. Therefore, at the same time that we lie, we are very ready to show how it is demonstrated that lying is wrong.

Upon all occasions we ought to have these maxims ready at hand:

Conduct me, Zeus, and thou, O Destiny,

Wherever your decrees have fixed my lot.

I follow cheerfully; and, did I not,

Wicked and wretched, I must follow still.

Who’er yields properly to Fate is deemed

Wise among men, and knows the laws of Heaven.

And this third:

“O Crito, if it thus pleases the gods, thus let it be.”

“Anytus and Melitus may kill me indeed; but hurt me they cannot.”

The references to all the quotes are at the original, for those who wish to look them up. The one that mentions Crito is Socrates' talk with him, as recorded by Plato.

This is the final chapter of the Enchiridion. It is advice to philosophers, to whit, not to do what philosophers are so prone to do: to get after the language or the technical questions to the point that they never settle on answers to the real issues. The 20th Century was by far the worst in human history on this point; many very brilliant people followed Wittgenstein into these fascinating questions to the point that they came to regard much of philosophy, and certainly the whole project of metaphysics, as a mistake. How could we possibly enquire into first philosophy (as Descartes called it) when there were so many difficult problems of language, and so many technical questions? 

So too the issue of knowledge: Gettier found a clever story to tell that called Aristotle's definition of knowledge ("justified true belief") into question. Now we have people chasing after whether knowledge is possible to define, or for that matter whether knowledge is possible at all. 

Even for those who manage to get past those language games, there is the issue of living one's philosophy. If it is true that it is virtuous to be brave, then be brave. It is pointless to have a good account of why courage is a virtue if you deliver it behind scarless skin that never dares the sun, with soft hands that never strive with foes nor even work, with a timid voice that only speaks truth in the absence of enemies. 

You know why it is wrong to lie; you can say why. Therefore, do not lie. Be brave. Work always on moderation, which is hardest of all -- at least for me it always has been. Do right. Live well. That is all of ethics, and much of philosophy.