Believers

 

This Would Be A Good Year to Plant A Garden

Thirteen percent of global calories won't get raised this year due to the war in Ukraine.

The US has an option here: suspend ethanol for the year, and use that corn for food instead. That violates the dearly-held Green policies of the current administration and those in power in Congress, however. 

As Predicted

"Scientists, gender law scholars and philosophers of biology" have weighed in on the question of what a woman is and -- exactly as predicted yesterday -- they want to be clear that a biologist couldn't tell you either.

Slandering Americans Overseas

The 'very good people on both sides' slander aimed at Trump is bad enough, but -- as David Reaboi points out -- it is amazingly awful to slander American citizens as Nazis while in Europe supporting a government that actually has an openly neo-Nazi wing, the Azov Regiment.

Ukraine may still be worthy of support because they are being invaded, and we are supposedly devoted to opposing wars of aggression. Or they may be worthy of supporting because it is in our national interest to tie the Russian military down and degrade it, so that it is less of a competitor. 

However, if you support Ukraine it's not because you're opposed to Nazis in some sort of principled way. You're siding with a government that has formally integrated Nazis into its military; and while the government has suspended political parties that have any sort of pro-Russian agenda, the Nazi political party associated with Azov is still licensed to operate.

Army Approves Lower Standard for Women

The ongoing saga of the Army's new fitness test has reached a crescendo. As you will recall, the Army declared it was getting rid of its 'old fashioned' fitness test -- which consisted of a two mile run, pushups, and situps -- in favor of a new-fangled "Combat Fitness Test" that would test a wider range of capacities more directly related to the things you'd really do in combat. Unlike the old test, too, they declared that the test would be both gender neutral and age neutral.

It turned out that 65% of female soldiers failed the new test, which would have had to result in their expulsion from the force. The rest scored notably lower than male soldiers, which would have made them less able to obtain promotions as enlisted promotions are partly based on fitness scores. So, they started talking about redesigning the test -- but not, we were assured, in a way that would hold women to lower standards.

The next step was to admit that women would have to be scored only relative to each other, and not relative to the men in order for them to remain promotable under the new system.

That was not sufficient either. The test will now scrap the events women couldn't pass, and allow both women and older men to pass with lower scores. 

At this point, then, the ACFT has comprehensively failed: it will neither be age nor gender neutral, it will not hold women to equal standards, it has eliminated test of combat-related capacities that are difficult for women, and it has become thoroughly a political exercise designed to produce desirable results rather than to serve as a fitness exam. In addition, it still has the logistical problems that come from swapping from equipment-free events like running or pushups to tests that require equipment to perform. 

Comprehensive failure is becoming the norm, I notice, whenever the brass gets involved.

Beware Fitness & Good Health

Fitness especially may lead to terrible things. Allegedly Nazism, that perennial fear of leftists even though it’s a form of socialism. 

After discussion of how fitness is now feared as yet another gateway to right-wing politics, the author makes a good point: the left is who is building all these gateways. 

The Left has made a habit out of forbidding things that are normal or even admirable to pursue—physical excellence is just one of those things. Raise doubts about transgender pronouns or election integrity and you—moderate, well-adjusted, not-even-all-that-political you—are suddenly a potential Unabomber.

If you wanted to force people into the arms of conspiracy theorists, you could hardly come up with a better strategy than to pathologize normalcy and make observing basic facts into a thought crime.

Who among us can define woman, though? 

A Sword of Eisenhower

Well, it passed through his hands anyway. It originally dates from the tenth century.

The Definition of a Woman

FOX News mischaracterizes Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson's response as a "refusal" to give the definition of "a woman." She did not refuse so much as she claimed an incapacity to define it, stating that she was not a biologist. 

What's truly sad about this response is that it won't even satisfy the intended clientele. By implying that only a biologist could define 'a woman,' she is conceding that the answer is related to material biological reality. It is not, then, a matter of felt or claimed or chosen identity. It's something about one's physical body.

This is the kind of absurdity that must eventually collapse, but it may well not collapse quickly enough to avoid putting this person -- woman? -- on the Supreme Court.

UPDATE: The Federalist points out that Judge Jackson has used the word "woman" extensively in her legal rulings. 

Socrates got himself killed by talking to 'experts' who used terms that it turned out they couldn't define. My favorite of these dialogues is the Laches, on courage, but perhaps more to the point is Euthyphro. There the question is whether Euthyphro can define "piety," a serious matter because he is doing something many thought impious at the time -- bringing a suit for murder against his own aged father on the word of a slave. It turns out that his definitions could not hold up to inquiry, leaving him open to the charge that he was acting as if he had confident knowledge on a deadly subject he did not in fact understand. 

Jackson evades the danger of being tested on her definition by refusing to give one, but her regular usage of the term implies that she is subject to the same critique. If you have regularly issued judgments on the subject of women, you are acting like you know what a woman is -- how else could you make any sort of reasoned judgment about them? Yet she claims to be unable to explain it, except that by implication it is a matter of biology. Indeed, she has testified under oath that she cannot define the word that has been the subject of so many of her judgments.

Quoting Jesus to Justify Invasion

Jesus is a much sterner figure than many people imagine, thinking of him as the King of Peace, Love, and Forgiveness -- which is not wrong, but not complete. It is not impossible nor even incongruent to think of Jesus as one who 'brings not peace, but a sword,' or who encourages his followers to 'buy a sword even if you have to sell your coat.' 

Still, it's harder to see him justifying an invasion.

Speaking to the crowd in a turtleneck and down winter coat, Putin said he ordered the invasion "to get people out of their misery, out of this genocide, that is the main reason, the motive and purpose of the military operation that we began in Donbas and Ukraine," according to The Washington Post. Russia has repeatedly accused the Ukrainian government of committing genocide in separatist-controlled areas of eastern Ukraine.

"And this is where the words from the Scriptures come to my mind: 'There is no greater love than if someone gives his soul for his friends,'" Putin continued, paraphrasing John 15:13.

Both the Post and ABC News translate the Russian word душу (dushu) as "soul," but most English translations of the passage use "life." 

If in fact a genocide was occurring, as he claims -- and perhaps believes -- it might work. One of the justifications of the Iraq War was that Saddam was engaged in a sort-of genocide against the "Marsh Arabs," and there are arguments in Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars that state that anyone who could stop a genocide has 'a right, at least, to try.' Walzer himself opposed the war, but the arguments exist whether or not he thought they fit the particular facts. 

So maybe, insofar as Putin truly believes these claims (and especially if he were right to believe them).

Push-Button Tyranny

A well-considered article in Tablet magazine warns of the perils of Trudeau-style cancelation without trial. It is a more dangerous power than may be apparent without such consideration. 

An Odd Correlation

Jordan Schachtel, a journalist who has been voicing a lot of skepticism about Ukraine, notes an odd correlation between vaccine status and support for risk military action in Ukraine.

Or perhaps not so odd: the same correlation shows up in Canada.

It's easy enough to guess why this is the case: those who have been inclined to take booster doses are more likely to be heavily exposed to information sources that have tended to portray this as the wise and responsible course; those same sources happen to be all about Ukraine right now. Those skeptics, by contrast, have been learning to discount those same sources and to trust alternative media -- which is more likely to be skeptical of the government here, as well. 

(Should you be skeptical of our government's support for Ukraine? The government there has barred opposition political parties -- but not formally neo-Nazi parties who are integrated with their armed forces -- and seized control of the media. Of course, it's wartime; on the other hand, those are totalitarian moves that contrast sharply with the narrative we're seeing in these pro-Ukraine US media sites. Make up your own mind how skeptical to be; I'm not here to tell you that.)

Maybe this all says less about Ukraine, and more about how deep the division is in our own society. Or maybe it says that this division is mostly a product of information choices, and otherwise might not be so deep after all. If it were possible to address that effectively, perhaps we would come together.

Or perhaps not; the divide may be more deeply rooted than where you get your news.

If you're interested in the Ukraine conflict, however, here's CDR Salamander on Russian amphibious operations.

Equinox

Happy springtime. The weather here is beginning to feature some nice days, but still freezing at night. There’s an eagle soaring on a thermal in the valley below. 

Another Twenty Minute Job

Lately it seems like every repair project has a broken bolt, or a head that rounds off, or some other weary complication. A job that ought to take a few minutes ends up taking all day, or in today's case will now take at least through tomorrow. Today I was just going to replace the front struts in my Ford, and I figured that if I was going to do that I ought to redo the brakes and maybe swap out that one wheel bearing that's been sounding funny. After all, you have to remove almost all the same stuff to get there. 

Well, maybe tomorrow. Or soon.

Also, my oil dipstick on that truck broke in my hand when I went to check the oil. Flush with the engine block, it did. Now I'll have to tap the thing with a drill, run a screw into it, and pull it out with Vice Grips. But that will have to wait until the new one I ordered comes in.

UPDATE: I finished that list on Tuesday due to issues with the upper ball joint on one side, but now I have a new list of things to fix just as AVI warmed. 

Whee

Trudeau was so upset that some guy showed up at the trucker protest wearing a mask (at a protest aimed at eliminating COVID measures) and carrying a swastika flag. He was so upset that he mentioned it over and over, trying to paint the whole movement as if that one guy -- that one faceless guy in a crowd of people with no masks -- was emblematic of the movement as a whole. He even accused a Jewish MP of 'standing with the swastika' for questioning his repressive measures. 

So what's up this week?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland met with the co-founder of a far-right fascist party in Ukraine, which was styled off of Hilter’s Nazi Party, True North has learned.

Andriy Parubiy served as the equivalent of the legislative speaker of Ukrainian Parliament from 2016 to 2019, and during that time he personally met with Trudeau and Freeland several times.

Earlier in his career, Parubiy was an influential member of Ukraine’s far-right neo-Nazi movement. In 1991, he co-founded the Nazi-styled Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU) – a party focused on “racial nationalism” that even adopted the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol as its logo. 

Yeah, that's where we are with philosophical coherence and our leadership. There is none; it's just about power with them.

The Feast of St. Patrick

St. Patrick warns of dragons:

The Most High does not accept the gifts of evildoers. The one who offers a sacrifice taken from what belongs to the poor is like one who sacrifices a child in the very sight of the child's father. Riches, says Scripture, which a person gathers unjustly, will be vomited out of that person's stomach. The angel of death will drag such a one away, to be crushed by the anger of dragons. Such a one will the tongue of a serpent slay, and the fire which cannot be extinguished will consume.

I have read that in Ireland his feast day is generally somber, coming as it always does in Lent. 

Yellowstone

A friend of mine recommended this series -- now filming its fifth season -- to me recently. We've been watching it; we're now on season four. It has a lot to recommend it. This fellow thinks it's biblical in scale, and in a way it almost is. To be truly biblical, God should play a bigger role.

Its critics in the media get it wrong, though. As that linked article notes:

Reason reports that “media elites” are mystified by the success of “Yellowstone”: “It is not… saying anything grand or sweeping about our world.”

That's totally wrong, and the linked article gives an account of why. What "Yellowstone" is about is resistance to the fact that our whole economic and political system destroys traditional ways of life, forces settled people to become nomads, wipes out communities and families and homes. Nearly all human meaning derives from relationships with others: family, church, community, home. These are the things inexorably destroyed by the very system that sustains us.

These forces are titanic, and we both depend on them and struggle against them with all our might. When they win -- the county I grew up in was completely destroyed by the expansion of Atlanta, its way of life gone, almost all the people I grew up with forced into exile by rising property taxes and costs that could only be bone by the richer new arrivals -- they destroy almost all the meaning in our lives. Communities and churches are broken up when the congregation splits up and moves. Maybe family can survive in other places; maybe they can maintain their relationships in spite of the new distance and the fact they never see each other anymore. No one visits my father's grave down in Georgia. My mother and sister now live in Idaho. I haven't seen them in years. I have no idea where the friends of my youth now live. They aren't the sort of people who join Facebook, so they have vanished as completely as a sailor slipping beneath the waves.

Nothing grand or sweeping? This is almost everything. Only the one thing they leave out -- God, the hope of the dying -- remains when all these things are lost. Even God, for those who are neither hermits nor prophets, is harder to hear and know without a church.

"Yellowstone" is a fantasy because we usually can't sustain and survive. But it does lay out the task: hold the line as long as you can. Oppose progress in all its forms. No more roads; no more improvement. No more government, no more control. 

No more of any of it. No more. 

It's Important to Know Where You Are

At last night's training the instructor asked me where I was from, and I mentioned Dahlonega as a reference point close enough by that he'd know it. He did know it, and asked if I'd heard the story of the two Yankees who visited Dahlonega. He said they were traveling through and stopped at the Dairy Queen to get a milkshake. While they were waiting in line they were arguing about how to pronounce the Cherokee name of the town. They couldn't agree, and so when they got to the head of the line they asked the girl working the counter how to pronounce the name of the place.

She looked at them solemnly and said, "DAY-ree KWEEN."

Will we fight? Will we even struggle?

From Glenn Reynolds:

Also in the mix, somehow: Chinese think tank: China should cut Putin loose ASAP and make nice with the invigorated west. Yeah, all this Ukraine stuff runs the risk of reminding westerners what they believe in and convincing them to fight for it. Can’t have that!

Once the NYT figures that out, they’ll go from jingoist to pacifist overnight.

Plus: “China may be gambling that the western appetite for punishing Beijing if it sends military aid to Moscow will be weak at a moment of high inflation and sky-high gas prices. Western consumers can stand only so much pain; the U.S. and EU won’t open another front of global economic warfare when they’ve already gone nuclear with Russia via sanctions. But here’s the question: Is China in a position to risk that at the moment? They’re hurting economically already. . . . Putin also believed that the west wouldn’t dare wage economic war on him for attacking Ukraine by freezing his currency reserves or isolating Russia’s central bank. How’s that working out for him? Does China want to roll the dice that it won’t be hit surprisingly hard too at a moment when the U.S. and EU are in a mood to de-globalize? When China and Russia announced their “no limits” partnership against the west just six weeks ago, Beijing hoped that the alliance would be a force multiplier that gained each of them a sphere of influence at the expense of the U.S. Suddenly, to its horror, China is learning that Russia is a paper tiger not just economically but militarily.”

Imagine what trouble China would be in if the United States had a functional presidency.

Partisan Politics

Tonight at the VFD meeting yet another candidate for sheriff came to address us and seek our support. There are five candidates for the office this year. Sheriff is not a very political office, not usually, so none of them have made much of which party they are running with in the primary. It turns out that there are four Democrats and only one Republican (who will, perforce, make the general at least). The candidates are all older men, each boasting of decades of experience in law enforcement. When they picked their party as young men, it was as natural for them as for me to choose to be a Southern Democrat. 

That was the subject of significant discussion after the meeting, among a number of us firefighters. It turns out that all of us are Democrats too -- Southern, mountain Democrats of the old fashion. It must be the last place on earth where this faction, the Jacksonian faction, still exists. One fellow said he was going to go down to the registrar and change his party affiliation; another, the oldest of us, averred that he was ashamed now of his party membership. There were no kind words for the party, its leadership, its direction, its vision, nor any other facet of what it has become. 

The candidate seemed like a decent guy for a cop; when he's not doing work as a deputy US Marshal he sells auto parts and performs vehicle repairs. Like a good Southern Democrat, he addressed the meeting wearing a t-shirt with pictures of classic muscle cars. He had the sense to see that we were conducting a training session tonight that would take hours of our time, and the courtesy to keep his remarks short. 

I still won't vote for him because his solution to the problems was to bring in more Federal law enforcement, and more of the Federal government in my community is the last thing I want. He said that currently the Feds consider this county an almost forbidden zone for their activity; that's sweet news to my ears. Ordinary decent criminals I can deal with; indeed, they've never caused me one moment of trouble in my entire life. The political criminals are far worse. 

I probably will never switch to the Republican party, which is full of scoundrels as well -- especially its establishment wing. But the old party of my youth, still for the moment strong in these mountains, is probably in its last hours. 

Dressing as a Woman to Escape War

This is a story that occurs from time to time; it was said of Jefferson Davis, for example, that he fled Richmond dressed en femme. (Davis hotly denied this for the rest of his life.) This is the first time I've ever heard of a biological female confessing to dressing like a woman to evade war, but these are strange times.

But as a transgender man — a man assigned female at birth — different questions raced through his mind about leaving his homeland. Andriy is a pseudonym used to protect his identity.

He read the news that all men in Ukraine, ages 18 to 60, were not permitted to leave the country and were obligated to serve in the military.

He told Insider he needed to stay with his mother and care for her. Leaving her to flee Ukraine alone just was not an option....

"If the border force saw him as a man, he would have to stay in Ukraine and not care for his mother," Dubilewski said. "It was very painful for him to dress up as a woman, wear his mother's makeup, but it would have been more painful to leave her in a foreign country to start her life over." 

Yes, very painful.

I suppose 'Andriy' adequately proved he wasn't a man by dodging his duty to fight for his country in the face of invasion, but it's ironic to see someone who has been so insistent on the point reach for that female privilege just as soon as it matters. As usual the duties and hardships of  manhood aren't what 'Andriy' really wanted.