Hard to Argue With That

The United States is bedeviled in part by the fact that its leadership lacks virtue, writes Barton Swain. Well, what he actually opens with is this:

It’s hard to contemplate American public life in the 21st century and not arrive at the unhappy conclusion that we are led by idiots.

He comes around to virtue after rehearsing some of the obvious debacles. 

The piece is called "The Case for an American Revolution in Morals," which is interesting to me because virtue ethics is often thought to be separate (or at least severable) from moral theory. A man can be courageous, moderate, self-disciplined, given to acts of public service, magnificence, even magnanimity without the moral structure that later thinkers added on about guilt, sin, grace, and so forth. 

Aquinas as much as Aristotle talked about the virtues, and found ways to link the Christian moral picture to the Greek ethical one: and they are certainly compatible for those who want both halves. Likewise, many a reverent Christian prays fervently for forgiveness for the sins he can't seem to avoid: failing in virtue does not keep him from justification through faith. Striving and failing is acknowledged to be part of the moral life, and even the pathetic sinner may be beloved of God; whereas failing at virtue is vice, and you can't be a virtuous man without in fact exercising the virtues (at least most of the time and to a greater or lesser degree).

Unfortunately the article is mostly behind a paywall, so many of you won't be able to read it. That is an irritating feature of the present moment; they seem to be cropping up everywhere.

Someone's Getting Fired

I want to know whose idea it was to pit Hillary Clinton versus Kim Kardashian on a legal quiz show, and how they got HRC to agree to do it. There was no upside to this idea; if it went as expected HRC would appear to be punching down at a 'famous for being famous' celebrity. If HRC lost, as in fact turned out to be the case, it could only be devastating to her image as the Smartest Woman in the World. 

"Cognitive decline is real," a friend said when we were discussing the affair. 

"Message to the Uncredentialed: 'Screw Em'"

Here is the NRO article referenced in the comments below.

Since there's a paywall, here is the relevant part to our discussion:

President Biden made clear today, this is a one-time deal, a lottery, a lightning strike. People who paid off their loans last week aren’t covered. People who will take out new loans after the policy has run its course aren’t covered.... This isn’t a reform. It’s not even pretending to be reform. It’s a contemptuous, abusive, unbelievably expensive shot in the dark...

It seems so arbitrary. Why does Biden not want to do the same thing for loans on trucks owned by plumbers? Why not for mortgages — which, given how heavily it subsidizes them, the federal government clearly thinks are worthwhile? Why not for credit cards or auto payments or mom-and-pop credit lines? The answer, I’m afraid to say, is disgustingly classist: Because Joe Biden and his party believe that college students are better than everyone else...

Electricians, store managers, deli workers, landscapers, waitresses, mechanics, entrepreneurs? Screw ’em. Sure, college graduates make more money than non-graduates, and their unemployment rate is lower, too. But non-graduates don’t have access to the president, so they don’t matter. 

It really is arbitrary and, well, stupid. If you went to college as an undergraduate on a merit-based scholarship that covered your costs because you worked hard to keep your grades up, you won't be eligible for the $20,000 that went to those who borrowed and got a Pell Grant. If you were a frat boy who spent the four years drinking up your student loans, you likely will. 

The major reform that cuts rates for loan repayment only affects undergraduate loans, though grad school loans tend to be much higher. The 'public service' thing we talked about yesterday: 'our kids' work at nonprofits, 'their kids' don't. There's no justification for that program that isn't tribal.

But Did They Use Whips?

 NY Post: "Video shows migrants attacking, taunting Border Patrol agents."

Since We're Doing "Stupid" Today

Here's someone else who has no idea how the world works.

Now that Rep. Liz Cheney has lost her primary to a Trumpist Republican in Wyoming, it’s time for President Biden to consider appointing her to his cabinet. Political tensions have risen to new levels since the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Aug. 8 search of Mar-a-Lago. Bringing a Republican into the administration would cool partisan temperatures and unite the country in support of the rule of law.

There can't be anyone outside the NYC/DC corridor who thinks this would plausibly 'cool partisan temperatures.' 

A Dumb Decision

I generally don't like to use terms like "dumb" or "stupid" in political discussions; mostly it's used to avoid engaging with the argument. This argument student loans is one I understand, though, and this is just stupid.

The way student loans work in America since the Obama administration is that the Federal Government 'owns' the debt, and it allows you to pay it off according to an income-based formula that is meant to determine what you can afford. You pay a percentage of your income in other words, not anything like what it would take to pay off the debt on the 20 year timeline; after 20 years, the government will write the rest of it off. If you work for a 'public service' like the Federal government itself, or any government or nonprofit, it's 10 years.

So a $10,000 forgiveness does nothing. Since you're already not paying off the interest -- you're paying much less than it would take to clear the debt -- the $10,000 is going to come right back over time anyway. Yet you won't have to pay it off, not before this decision and not after. In 20 years -- 240 monthly payments -- you can walk away from it, or only 120 if you work for an approved industry.

If you really want to help borrowers, either forgive the whole thing or else let for-profit employees off after 10 years too. (It's their employer that is for-profit or nonprofit, after all: there's no moral difference in the employees.) If you want the money, you have to change the payment schedule to a level that many people simply can't afford; then you still won't get the money, but you will at least get to seize whatever they have. If you want just more money, eliminate the nonprofit distinction the other way and make those employees pay for 20 years instead of 10.

What's going on here doesn't make any actual sense at all. It's not clear who they're hoping to impress: hopefully the people who went to college to incur the debt have enough math to see this is a bunch of bull.

There's A Chance She Has A Point

Language warning, but there's an issue here that she's correctly identifying. 

"We're Subverting Existing Paradigms"

The Life of a Soldier

A Roman payslip shows that hand-to-mouth soldiers with payday loans are not all that new.

A Sailor Ain't a Sailor

 

Originally an acapella shanty by Tom Lewis and his Polish mates.

Another from the same band, which at first may seem a geographically challenged tune, but it works.

"Chivalry is Actually a Good Thing"

A young feminist writes on the sexual revolution. Not everything she says is right, but she has an interesting and valuable perspective. (For example, keeping rapists in prison does not reduce the incidence of rape: it just transfers the victimhood of rape to other prisoners. It turns out rapists aren't particular about their victims, they just like victimizing.)

There's no more important physical fact about a person than his or her sex. The attempts to get around this lead to misery. So, perhaps, have many attempts to account for it; one can go wrong in either direction. I still think, though, that the Western Medieval construction of chivalric love marks the high point of relations between the sexes. There was a time -- albeit only in a small place, and only probably among the social elite -- when male strength was willfully in the service of female beauty, female beauty honored and treasured male strength, and love was coupled with mutual respect. 

Requiem for a Bear

Bear hunting season does not start until mid-October, but the bear hunters can’t stand to leave the bears in peace except when killing them. All summer long, though they’re forbidden to hunt, they get up here and run their packs of hounds at the bears for the sheer joy of terrorism. 

Today there must have been a dozen or more hunting trucks, each with a cage filled with hounds up on the mountain. The packs push down from the Blue Ridge Parkway to harry the bears into what is traditionally called Bearpen Gap, currently known as Sugar Creek Gap. Supposedly this is to train the dogs; it’s really just an excuse to engage in hunting out of season. 

At Balsam Lake today a bunch of dogs chased a bear into the lake, where they tore off its ears and fought it until it drowned. Federal Forest Service officers eventually came to recover the bear’s body. The poor thing was living free in the forest this morning; tonight it has been killed in terror and pain, and not even for food as it was out of season. They just ran it for fun, and now it is dead for no better reason than their amusement. 

A 9th Circuit Dissent

Following the recent Supreme Court Bruen decision affirming gun rights, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals remanded a decision on Hawaii's 'may [or may not] issue' law for reconsideration by the district court. There was a noteworthy dissent pointing out that there is very clear guidance on the point, and they might simply have directed that the law was plainly unconstitutional. Instead, they are dragging out a lawsuit that has already been going on for ten years.

This is very courteously worded, including the thunderous final section. It is firm and clear without the requirement of discourtesy, strong in its reasoning and even stronger in conviction.

Cop Recruited Oath Keepers on J6 to Save Other Cops

And apparently they did just that. This is, actually, what I would have expected from what I knew of the Oath Keepers as an organization before January 6th.

Succinct

 

Sleep With No Doors Open

There’s a lot of training in the Fire Service; I often spend weekends or weeknights in classes and courses. Some of it is challenging and rewarding; some of it is not. Occasionally it’s just PowerPoint presentations or training videos we are required to watch. These rarely interest. 

This little training video might actually be of use to some of you, however. 

'A Sheepherder came and put up a Fence...'

'I saw him one day, but I ain't seen him since.'

This site is heavily paywalled, but you can get the sense of the article. Apparently the old rancher/sheepherder wars are still ongoing way out West.

Sanctuary!

We are familiar with 'sanctuary cities' and even 'sanctuary states,' where local or state governments refuse to cooperate with Federal immigration policy in order to avoid accidentally enforcing Federal immigration law. Now, under the Biden administration, the Federal government's police agencies will stop cooperating with each other in service of the non-enforcement of our laws.

The U.S. Marshals Service is drafting a sanctuary policy that would limit the agency’s ability to hold illegal immigrants for pickup by ICE... Under the policy, marshals would not be able to hold illegal immigrants for pickup by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on the say-so of an immigration warrant, or “detainer” request.... the person is to be released even if ICE has asked for a hold.

Officials said the policy is still in draft form, though The Times knows of one jurisdiction in Florida where it has already been implemented[.]

Remember this the next time you hear talk from the administration about how important 'the rule of law' is to them. 

Marine Corps Hymn a la Jerry Lee Lewis

This is from the Sun Records days and indeed from 1956, making it one of his first recordings. This is before the scandals that would plague him later, and long before the wild comeback occasioned by his 1964 Live at the Star Club recording.

It's lightweight, playful, but I offer it anyway for the Devil Dogs in the audience.

Uh-Oh

 The Big Bang didn't happen.

In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies... One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”

Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually say. The truth that these papers don’t report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”

Don't feel too bad. Even Aristotle turned out to be basically wrong about physics, in spite of being the most important physicist of all time. And Newton, and, well, everyone else. You still made a valuable contribution in error, because we can still learn a lot by studying why it was reasonable to think as Aristotle did (and it was -- empirically verifiable, even!). That helps us understand how we progress.