More on 18 USC 1507

There's been a lot of discussion about this Federal law preventing, inter alia, protests outside the homes of judges. 

Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

I recently spoke with one of the protest organizers about this to see what she thought -- no names, of course. She said that they were coordinating their protests carefully with the local police to ensure that they remained within the letter of the law. 

A lot of work is being done by the phrase "or near" here: how near do you have to be to trigger enforcement?  According to her they stay on the correct side of police barricades, where they are told it is ok to protest, and are outside the entrances to the neighborhoods rather than outside the actual homes of the Justices. 

It occurs to me on reflection that the Federal law being cited doesn't actually mention Justices anyway. It mentions judges, witnesses, jurors, and so forth. The legislative intent is to protect the integrity of the trial process by preventing intimidation of witnesses, jurors, lawyers and judges. This is because the trial is supposed to be dispassionate in nature; passion is proper to the political branches. The Supreme Court, though, has arguably become a political branch -- indeed, I think it would be hard to argue any other view. If and insofar as it has, it must be subject to the First Amendment's 'free speech / free assembly / right to petition for redress of grievance' guarantees as any other political branch.

Daily dose of lunacy

You may not know that the problem with the Democratic Party is that it's too policy-based and rational. Poor things, they can't compete with the Right's ninja-masters of emotional manipulation. This Politico article explains that Democrats need to get angry to win. Maybe some riots? Some shrieking at the sky in online videos? No more Mr. Nice Guy Wonk. Spitballing here: there could be an issue with policy-based persuasion if the audience doesn't fully appreciate the fabulous results of the policies so far. If your opponent can generate rage and fear in the electorate by simply pointing to the effect of your recent initiatives in the core areas of our lives, the problem may not be the the unfair use of rage and fear in the politics of persuasion. I'll leave for the imagination of the reader the question whether the current batch of Ds could be said to favor gonads over gray matter more than any political movement in human history.

Good to Know

"The mere advocacy of political or social positions, political activism, use of strong rhetoric, or generalized philosophic embrace of violent tactics does not constitute domestic violent extremism or illegal activity and is constitutionally protected."

From a new DHS memo.

Hiking the Art Loeb Trail

Yesterday I went up on the Art Loeb Trail near the Shining Rock Wilderness, in the Pisgah Forest, just north of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The pile of rocks you can see behind me in this shot is Mt. Tennent.

I reached it shortly after snapping that shot. It has a plate in honor of its namesake. This view is looking south, over the Nantahala National Forest, this being approximately where the two national forests come together. (For Mike G., the exact border is NC 215, which separates the Pisgah's Shining Rock Wilderness from the Nantahala's Middle Prong Wilderness. There was a motorcycle wreck up there yesterday on my way back, also on a motorcycle. I stopped to help, but Balsam Grove Volunteer Fire Department had it in hand. We often partner on wildfires in the Nantahala.)

Goodbye, Madison Cawthorn

I may have mentioned my opinion that my current congressman is an idiot. A lot of people would describe him in worse terms: embarrassment, vicious, liar, and worse even than that. I don't bother with those matters. Of course a Congressman is a sexually-perverse liar who abuses those over whom he or she has authority. How can you expect any better than that, looking at Congress? They're the scum of the earth, with rare and blessed exceptions -- and fewer of those all the time.

No, what really bothers me is that every time he opens his mouth he says something dumb and/or useless. I don't expect a Congressman to be decent or moral or upright, but I do expect them to be useful. As far as I can tell Cawthorn isn't even useful to his funders or himself. 

Therefore it is with some small pleasure today that I notice his defeat in yesterday's primary. He will not be missed.

The general election will be between a Republican who is a member of the state legislature prayer club and shooting club, and an Asheville councilwoman who is a married lesbian mother of three and an ordained Christian minister. This perfectly summarizes the current condition of Western North Carolina. 

Food riots

There's not much people won't do in the face of starvation.

Crazy as a rat in a coffee can

I can add nothing to expose any more clearly the lunacy embedded in every sentence of this description of a political strategy.

Good wolf

Freddie DeBoer inadvertently makes the case that the last few decades of decline in U.S. colleges has been a clever Republican gambit to eliminate their taxpayer funding.

Dodd. v. Roe

Setting aside for a moment what the law of abortion should be, what the frantic controversy over the Supreme Court's impending ruling in Dodd suggests most strongly is that almost no one in the U.S. has the least notion how the three branches of government interact or what it means to have a system composed of federal and state governments, each with its own proper sphere. It's just too complicated, I think, and editors of moderately respectable newspapers suffer a brain freeze over the notion that there is a Single True Law enforced by a Single Dear Leader.

Jazz Shaw at HotAir often gets these things right:

[I]f they overturn Roe, they will not be criminalizing abortion. Nor will they be mandating it be legal. They will be allowing the states to decide for themselves. If a state chooses to restrict abortions through legislative action, it will not be “defying the Supreme Court” or undermining its authority. They will actually be following the court’s ruling by making their own choice. The same goes for states that elect to keep the procedure legal or even further safeguard it. If anything, the Supreme Court’s relevance and authority would be exemplified by such scenarios.

As the author notes, if you want an example of real confusion created between state and federal law, you have only to look at conflicts on gun law and drug law, and the problem isn't the Supreme Court, it's the other branches of government.

Red-pilled oddballs in LaLaLand

I have no idea if this guy Michael Shellenberger would make a good governor. I bought his book "San Fransicko" a while ago, but haven't yet read it. Still, the bar for sanity in California is low, and he does at least appear to have retained some capacity for rational thought, which makes him a unicorn in that state's politics. Per his interview with Bari Weiss:

It boggled his mind that the other candidates running for governor were 100-percent certain about what they couldn’t know, and weirdly unsure about how to fix things that could be fixed.

“Politics should be a means to an end of a good society,” Shellenberger said. “They’re making it the end.” He was referring to the homeless activists who were his nemesis, but he could have been talking about the environmentalists or the pro-lifers in the desert. “Their real goal is control and moralizing and power. Mine is freedom, care, civilization.”

Not that I agree that the goal of pro-lifers is control and moralizing and power, but the goal of some people in politics on any issue certainly can become that, and it behooves us to watch out for the trend.

[H]e knew there was a chasm between what progressive activists said they wanted and what they actually wanted. They claimed to want to end homelessness, just as the environmentalists had claimed to want to combat climate change. But that wasn’t true. Really, they wanted the fight, the feeling of moral superiority and, of course, the cash for their NGOs.

That sentiment alone makes him a valuable heretic.

Inflation, What Is It?

A bad first day.

The answer, which she never got near, was that government's raising taxes on the wealthiest (corporate or individual) could potentially decrease the money supply, such that fewer dollars were chasing the existing goods. However, since that answer depends on government controlling its own spending rather than just pumping those dollars out on something else, it's as fantastical as a chimera or a unicorn.

Red Moon at Night

My poor cellphone is inadequate for celestial photography, but last night was a clear night excepting a few low clouds. The lunar eclipse settled into the gap below the Corona Borealis, right of Serpens Caput and left of Bootes. 

At first I could only see the brightest five stars around the red moon, so it looked to be inside a pentagon. As the eclipse came on stronger, though, the constellations shone through more and more, until eventually you could see them all clearly. 

It was a fine sight.

One more reason to vote MAGA

Dr. Fauci says he couldn't bring himself to work for Trump again. I'm guessing not for De Santis either.

What Constitutes a Burger

A heated discussion with incorrect poll results. The patty melt is a burger. The patty melt is a variation of a burger, and therefore a member of a subset of the burger set. As a subset, all members of the subset are also members of the set. Therefore, all members of the patty melt subset are also members of the burger set. QED.

One can, however, defend a vagueness-theory answer in which some things are clearly burgers, and some things are clearly not burgers, but there are going to be median cases where -- while there may be a fact of the matter about whether or not they are -- we lose clarity on the question. "Is a hot dog a sandwich?" is a good example of another debate people have in which the answer seems vague rather than clear. 

This approach may finally be similar to AVI's in effect, where we ultimately lose any final answer on what is or isn't a burger or a sandwich; but there are facts of the matter about what different people take to be such things at different times and places.

However, the history of hamburgers is fun to read about. Sources are too unclear to be sure that we have the archetypal hamburger at any point before the 1920s, when early major chains like White Castle went into operation. However, there are viable claims all the way back to the 1740s. 

White Castle actually claims their sandwich originated at the hands of one Otto Krause in 1891, with a fried egg -- still very popular in Australia -- and was popularized by German sailors. I think that sounds entirely plausible: that period knew a great many German sailors, who could easily have spread the style to America and Australia as well. However, German instability had existed since the Thirty Years War, and there had been many earlier waves -- including in the 1700s, making the earlier claims quite possible too.

Of course we would run into that 'but was it really a hamburger qua ground beef mince, or some other kind of sausage that was known in Hamburg and just called a 'Hamburg sausage' in 1747? No one knows.

The late 19th century through all these Worlds Fairs and similar fairs that are mentioned in the article was also the great period for the American popularization of chili -- and also wide variants of exactly what chili might be, from the chili con carne of the Southwest, to Texas Red, to New Mexican Green and Red, to even the Midwest's Cincinnati chilli (not a typo). These days you get chili with and without beans, with and without meat, and with nontraditional meats. 

All quite fascinating stuff, and why I am up after midnight for no good reason.

A Moment of Punk Rock

I don't know Gentleman Jesse, but I went to college with his wife so we know each other on Facebook. She's proud of him and wanted everyone to hear his new single, which is part of a larger recording to be released on Third Man Records. (I don't know of them either, but I get the reference.)

We don't do a lot of punk rock around here, but I like the genre. This has something of the CBGBs era sound, which is later than I usually like; but the subject matter is a little more mature than you often get. It's a song about how your life will turn out to be meaningless if you don't spend it protecting something or someone that matters, because then at the end you won't matter to anyone either.

It doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but if you click through the first link you can listen on SoundCloud or in your browser. [UPDATE: Soundcloud has an embed option, so you can hear it below as well.]

Third Man Records · Gentleman Jesse, Protecting Nothing

Fear of the WHO

Following James' suggestion at AVI's place, when this wild-eyed letter came across my desk today I looked up the actual treaty they're freaking out over. There really are some worrisome aspects to it, just not the one the out-freakers identified. Actually-worrisome things include Article V, Surveillance, which authorizes the WHO to engage in direct surveillance operations inside member countries if they determine that the member country isn't spying enough on its own. Surely the last thing we need is even more surveillance by spies on ordinary people.

Likewise Article VI, which demands the submission of "wherever possible, genetic sequence data" to the WHO. You can understand exactly why they'd want that information as, you know, the World Health Organization. Genetic sequencing is a highly useful technology for disease control. It's also excellent for developing advanced biological warfare weapons that can target populations based on genetic data. 

Yet the parts the letter says to worry about are anodyne. They call out by name Article XII, sections 2, 3, and 5. Article 3 has already been struck. Article 2 authorizes the WHO's Director-General to "notify," "seek the views of the Committee," and then, if a public health emergency is identified, "seek the views of the Emergency Committee." There's nothing stopping them from doing that now. Everyone has a right to talk to people, notify them and/or seek their views on things. 

All this ultimately refers to Article 49, which lays out a procedure for determining if there is a public health emergency or not. This procedure explicitly permits dissenting views, and requires that all such views -- majority and dissent -- be made available to member states. Then the procedure allows for the collection of even more views, this time from the member state governments. 

The only muscular part of this comes at the very end, where the member states are obligated to enact these regulations into their own domestic laws within five years. Unless they don't: "If a State is not able to adjust its domestic legislative and administrative arrangements fully with these Regulations or amendments thereto within the periods set out in paragraph 2 of this Article, as applicable, that State shall submit within the period specified in paragraph 1 of this Article a declaration to the Director-General regarding the outstanding adjustments and achieve them no later than 12 months after the entry into force of these Regulations or the amendments thereto for that State Party."

So if you don't comply, you are required to send a letter explaining why you won't.

The UN isn't the threat people sometimes imagine it to be. It is, and always will be, a completely useless organization made of of rent-seeking bureaucrats with no actual power. 

News to me

Did Steny Hoyer mean to blurt out that the U.S. is at war in Ukraine?

Sanity outbreak at MIT

Yikes. Did you know MIT students' mean math SAT score is 790? I guess if you can't hit a solid 800 there you're chopped liver. Now for the sanity outbreak: schools all over the country are engaging in the suicide pact of ceasing to require SAT scores in the admissions process. MIT tried it at the beginning of the pandemic, then noticed it was having an awful retention problem with students who had been admitted to a program beyond their reach, so it's reverted to requiring SAT scores. Cue the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but since the school isn't willing to water down its standards, it faced a choice between eliminating students before they arrived or after.

Regardless of how unfair anyone may think it is, SAT scores are a fantastic predictor of academic success, particularly in the elite STEM fields. MIT requires a solid core of STEM courses no matter the students' major, so there's basically no escape from the horsepower requirement. I suppose the next step is to argue that the core STEM curriculum is colonialist and patriarchal.

Choosing a college

This link looked like classic click-bait, but I hit the bait like an eager fish. It turns out to be a fairly interesting list of the "worst" college for your money in each of the 50 states.

On the one hand, the approach of ranking the schools according to average cost per year, average total student debt, average earnings several years after graduation, and default rate on student loans is a helpful organizational and analytical tool. The article largely avoided the subject of the quality of education by focusing instead on whether a student could expect to earn a living sufficient to pay off his student debt. The odd thing was the comments section for each school, which dwelt almost exclusively on students' complaints about how non-nurturing the staff was and how un-fun the extracurricular life was, with a minor emphasis on how dilapidated the buildings were.

I was also surprised by the statistics on admission and graduation. The commentary assumed that a high admission rate was a good thing but a low graduation rate was a bad one. Maybe, and it certainly would interest me to find that schools sucked students dry after a couple of years then kicked them out once they couldn't qualify for any more student debt. When it comes to turning a degree into a job, however, it seems that a low graduation rate might easily result from a school's unexpected adherence to standards for graduation, especially if the admission rate is very high: admit 'em all and let the failure rate sort 'em out. But graduation rates in the neighborhood of 16%? Yikes. That's really testing an approach that encourages everyone to give it a shot, no matter unpromising a match there might be between their backgrounds and the prospects for higher education.

In general, neither the article nor the students interviewed showed much interest in anything that would occupy my attention in evaluating a college. Besides wanting to understand how much academic excellence could be encountered, I'd want to know whether including the degree on a resume would be likely to increase my chances in landing a job in a particular field and whether, once I'd landed it, the content of the coursework would be likely to improve my chances of demonstrating excellence in my new position. There may have been career counselors at my university (no life coaches, I feel sure), but I don't recall meeting any. Our sports programs were barely detectable. Campus party life did exist, but few of us had a lot of leisure for it, and to the extent we did, I suppose we mostly made our own fun. Catapult-propelled water balloon wars between dorms were popular. Parties tended to be private and impromptu. There were some bars and restaurants near the campus, but the supply of students was too small, too cash-strapped, too car-less, and too frantically busy to support the kind of off-campus student scene you might find at, for instance, UT Austin.

We did mostly manage to become gainfully employed. Student debt was not such a thing back then. Only the most determined Peter Pans among us were likely to experience serious difficulty in avoiding a student loan default.

All this made me curious to see how my alma mater's statistics compared to the nation's "worst" schools. The admission rate today is 11%, below any on that list, I think. The on-time graduation rate is 83%, high for the list. The average graduating salary is much higher, especially if you take the easiest path to riches: computer science. (When I graduated in 1978, that was an exotic new choice.) The loan default rate is extremely low, about 1%. I notice that the male/female admissions split is now 50/50. In my time, men outnumbered women about 4 to 1. I'd be interested to see what that ratio looks like today in the STEM majors.

The Two Best Days of My Life

I've just had them, and I can't tell you about them. I didn't get rich, and I very pointedly didn't hurt anybody. There's a convicted felon up on fresh assault charges right now who'll never understand how happy it made me to protect him... from me.

I did the right thing, spoke the truth, hurt no one and I'm a better and happier man than I was two days ago. It's always the morning of the world; every day you can suddenly wake up in it.

No questions.