Cheap Delicacies

It's St. Patrick's Day, so I considered making a shepherd's pie. I ended up making jambalaya. Both of these dishes are alike in being cheap local to their point of origin, and rather expensive delicacies further afield. Shepherd's pie is made with lamb or mutton, which if you are a shepherd is the most readily available food; but if you are buying lamb in an American grocery store, it's not so very cheap at all.

Jambalaya meanwhile has shrimp in it (omitted in my version tonight), which is plucked free out of the bayou down where the stuff originated. Shrimp is a lot pricier in the mountains, and of dodgy quality if it isn't frozen. 

Lots of famous foods are like this. You can't even make Scottish haggis in America unless you buy and butcher a sheep. Otherwise it's just not legal to sell you the heart, stomach, and lungs for food consumption. American haggis is mostly made with beef liver instead. You can't get the real thing at any price, but it too was meant to be a cheap food for the locals where it originated.

The jambalaya I made was all dry or frozen ingredients piled into a pressure cooker, except for the liquid chicken stock and some cayenne. It came out pretty great, and preserved the quality of being cheap that was the actual point of the original dish. Recommended. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day

 I always feel like I ought to include some religious content, it being a feast day, so here's a prayer called "the Deer's Cry," or "St. Patrick's Breastplate." 

Here, after, is a Spotify playlist of St. Patrick's Day songs. 

This is the way

"Universal school choice is growing in popularity across the United States, with Florida becoming the fourth in the nation to pass such legislation in the past year. A similar bill was passed in Iowa last month." It's on the legislative agenda in this year's session in Texas. The state school monopoly may have pulled off one of the great boners in history in shutting down schools. If they had it to do over again, maybe they'd think of a way to avoid letting parents look over their kids' shoulders in ZOOM sessions.

Happy 20th Anniversary!

This afternoon Grim's Hall is 20 years old. 

Looking back, the very first post was a call not to censor even a radical "jihadist" with proven ties to terrorists -- so we used to say in those days, still in the wake of the 9/11 and on the very eve of the Iraq War. It does call for the infiltration of the audience as a means of using the radical speaker as a kind of flypaper to attract the genuinely dangerous youth. 

Both of those facets are still quite relevant twenty years on: free speech is under increasing attack as a way of counteracting radicals -- who turn out to be ourselves, and not the 'jihadists' we thought we would be concerned about. Meanwhile the government's shift of enemies from radical Islamists to old-fashioned Americans has caused the 'infiltration' strategy to shift to an actual construction of flypaper groups, organized and led by government informants. I do remember that Patriot Act opponents in those days warned us that these grand new powers would be turned against us; turns out they were right about every part of that.

A lot has changed since those days on the sunny slopes of long ago. Not all of the change was for the worse. Thank you for your company along the way. 

Farmers fight back

No thanks to the mainstream press, which mostly depicts the Dutch farmers as budding Nazis if they cover the protests at all, but here's a bit of good news. Dutch voters just rose up somewhat against the recent wokista attempts to destroy their country's food production.

Ruy Texeira published a plea this week for Democratic messages that avoid the usual crazy-as-a-rat-in-a-coffee-can tone and concentrate on positions ordinary voters can embrace without embarassment or revulsion. He didn't mention things like "let's not destroy either the power grid or food production, because that might starve a lot of poor people in the immediate future," but he did come up with some unusually non-repulsive arguments:

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.

Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.

No one is completely without bias, but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.

People who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right. However, biological sex is real and spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved. Medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available on demand, especially for children.

Nah. Never happen.

The darling of clean-tech banking

While it's fun to lambast Silicon Valley Bank for having a risk manager who, shall we say, was focused in a less-than-helpful woke direction, Kimberley Strassel points out a more fact-based criticism of the bank's woke infection.

SVB was the lender of choice for tech dreamers. It claims to have banked nearly half of all U.S. venture-backed tech and healthcare startups. Yet in recent years those clients have skewed ever more in one direction. “We serve those creating positive environmental change,” SVB’s website brags, noting that the bank worked with some 1,550 companies in the “climate technology and sustainability sector.”

Most of these companies weren’t filling some vital market need. Rather, as the Journal reported, SVB was beloved for its willingness to offer “banking services to startups that often weren’t profitable, in some cases didn’t have a product, and would otherwise have a hard time getting a line of credit or a loan from a larger bank.” One tech entrepreneur provided law.com a more scathing description of SVB’s products: “They’re basically subprime business loans. You’re talking about companies that have no credit profile, they’re burning cash and are unlikely to raise the same type of capital because of interest rates. . . . It was basically social credit.”

Paywall issues? Try this link to a search page, which usually takes care of it. If you were willing to drop bucks on an online subscription, though, you could do worse than the OpEd page that employs both Ms. Strassel and Holman Jenkins.

Weirdness in Begging

I was in Asheville again yesterday, crossing east of the French Broad River as usual in support of my wife's artistic endeavors. While in town, two different leftist organizations approached me on the street to panhandle.... er, 'to seek donations,' as it is called when you are begging for your organization instead of yourself. The first one told me that she was collecting to try to feed some hungry children; I offered her the spare change I happened to have.

"We don't take cash," she said. 

"Really?"

"Most nongovernmental organizations have gone away from accepting cash," she replied. "This is for our own safety."

Well, maybe, but she was carrying an iPad in order to process electronic donations. That was worth a lot more than the change I was going to give her, as a mugger would certainly know. Later that afternoon an environmentalist activist stopped me to ask the same thing, and also refused to accept cash.

Beggars cannot be choosers (a fact better understood by the actual homeless, or the various buskers playing instruments around Asheville, neither of whom refuse change when offered). I wonder if it is not allied to the general attempt to switch from cash to electronic funds, though, as those offer greater centralized control of our wealth as well as visibility on where and how we spend it. Left-leaning organizations gently nudge us towards electronic money, and offer us in return perhaps the virtue signal of having a donation to the Nature Conservancy showing up on our monthly statement. 

Maybe it's just that they themselves want to collect our information so they can continue to dun us. A fistful of change, or even a $20 bill, is small potatoes compared to getting the credit card number and contact information of someone who proved willing to pay. 

I guess they'll say anything

H/t Powerline: Imagine the pretzels you'd need to twist your brain into to come out with a rationale like this:

Last month the California Energy Commission thus determined that the state needs Diablo Canyon [Nuclear] Power Plant through 2030 to ensure electricity reliability in the face of energy supply shortfalls during extreme weather events driven by climate change.

But hey, whatever gets them there, even if it's "nukes are the only path to a carbon-free future."

In other good news, Georgia has managed to spin up a new nuclear reactor. I suppose the next step is to replace the new reactor's unexpectedly successful staff with wokistas until everyone is sufficiently distracted by nonsense to let the thing melt down.

In the meantime, I suggest that everything that needs to get done be justified by stamping it with the message: "necessary in the face of shortfalls during extreme weather events driven by climate change." We may also wish to add ". . . and systemic marginalization of heteronormiacs." Troubled by the reasoning? "It's intuitively obvious even to the most casual observer." The explanation is left as an exercise for the reader.

Taters

A new recipe for baked potatoes from a new cookbook: slice them very thin, toss them in butter and rosemary, arrange them in a pan, and bake them at 375 for an hour and 20 minutes. They're all crunchy on top and soft underneath. The thinner they're sliced, the nicer the crinkly effect. They look like one of those beautiful open-faced apple tarts.

The recipe called for a mandoline, but I just used a very sharp knife.

Tennessee Waltz

This is a song with an impressive recording history, including multiple hit versions and covers by great names. The thing is, I don’t think there actually is a “Tennessee Waltz,” only a country music song that features one. I wonder what waltz the original author was thinking of here? 

Moody Blues

Moody’s just cut the entire US banking system’s rating to negative. 

Buy high, sell low

Banking isn't as mysterious as we make it out to be. Adam Kessler at the WSJ sums up Silicon Valley Bank neatly:

Management screwed up interest rates, underestimated customer withdrawals, hired the wrong people, and failed to sell equity. You’re really only allowed one mistake; more proved fatal.

In case you hit the WSJ paywall and can't hop over it by Googling "Who Killed Silicon Valley Bank?"--here's a longer excerpt:

In January 2020, SVB had $55 billion in customer deposits on its balance sheet. By the end of 2022, that number exploded to $186 billion....

... There was no way SVB was going to initiate $131 billion in new loans. So the bank put some of this new capital into higher-yielding long-term government bonds and $80 billion into 10-year mortgage-backed securities paying 1.5% instead of short-term Treasurys paying 0.25%.

... SVB got caught with its pants down as interest rates went up.

Everyone, except SVB management it seems, knew interest rates were heading up. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has been shouting this from the mountain tops. Yet SVB froze and kept business as usual, borrowing short-term from depositors and lending long-term, without any interest-rate hedging.

People deposited tons of money in SVB over the federally insured limit. Uninsured deposits should be treated like any other risky investment, which people with more than a quarter of a million dollars they need to park should be considered competent to manage by diversification and otherwise. Naturally, however, the regulatory geniuses responded to SVB's failure by insulating large depositors from any consequences of choosing a risky bank to invest in. Otherwise, wealthy depositors might panic. They might even start evaluating depository banks according to their inherent safety, which would distract everyone from banks' important functions, such as DIE, ESG, and parting bonuses for deserving employees. Why manage risk the old-fashioned way when the regulators will manage it for you by imposing a tax on other banks instead?

Apparently Cross Cultural?

The BB had an amusing video series on Californians who moved to Texas. Apparently that’s just as real a divide if you’re also Mexican. 

Still the King

This week was Bob Wills’ birthday. 

Some Friday Music

There is some good songwriting on display here.

Bluegrass covers of Simpson's existing music.

Jan. 6 Fact Sheet

From Julie Kelly.

Among the most disgusting claims about the January 6 riot is the notion that half a dozen officers were killed. One officer died the following day of a stroke, after suffering from pepper spray on the day of the riot. Several more officers committed suicide later. In contrast, four protesters died on the scene: one was shot by an officer and died immediately, while three others succumbed on the scene to some kind of violence that is less clear in the record. The official version seems to be that two died of heart attacks and the third from an overdose; the protester version is that the heart attacks could be attributed to excessive police force, while the third, an unarmed woman, was frankly clubbed to death. I am aware of at least one later protester who appears to have been hounded to suicide.

If the same standard of lethal causality were applied to the protesters as to the officers, the body count would be far different from what has been peddled by the powers that be for the last couple of years. For that matter, if the same standards of law and order were applied to the BLM and Antifa mayhem throughout 2020, the conviction count would alter drastically. It's hard to imagine a clearer example of "protesting while Republican."

The riot was a stain on conservative politics. The aftermath, especially this week's appalling attempt at censorship, is an even worse stain on this country's leadership, including most recently Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. I've defended him for years, but I'm done. There can be no possible excuse for objecting to the airing of video evidence because it "contradicts" the way the police have chosen to "depict" the events. He has proved himself on a level with Senator Schumer.

Kudos to Jonathan Turley for continuing to point out the egregious Brady Rule violation of federal prosecutors in withholding exculpatory evidence for the last two years.

Women in Philosophy

The Cambridge Elements series on women in the history of philosophy is available for free download through the end of next week. They did a similar promotion a year or so ago, but at the time as I recall it was only part of the list that you could download. 

I think several of you would enjoy Early Christian Women by Dawn LaValle Norman of Australian Christian University. It raises an interesting claim about the introduction of these women to philosophy and its effect on how philosophy was anthropomorphized. Probably many of you have read Boethius' Consolation, and are familiar with his picture of Lady Philosophy. It was common to depict Philosophy as a sort-of goddess, sought through difficult and heroic adventures, or found in tragedy like Boethius. That conception was changed by the women who came into the practice: 

The personification of philosophy as a woman assumes that philosophers, her erotic desirers, are symbolically masculine. The binary of male lover–female beloved imagines that the target of such pleas are men who were inspired by the idea of choosing wisely between competing types of women. Yet in the third century CE, the Christian dialogue writer Methodius of Olympus reimagined the gendered relationships of allegorical females in educational ascent myths. Virtue, daughter of Philosophy, still dwelt on top of a mountain that was steep and dangerous. But instead of questing men who attempted to enter her secluded garden, educated women were invited to her garden party.

I can attest for the quality of at least one of the authors in this series, who is a dear friend of mine. I assume the others to be of similar quality. 

AI Illustrations

OpenAI, the same company that put out Chat GPT, also has an illustrator. I asked it to give me illustrations of the Elric the Barbarian story in the style of N. C. Wyeth. This is what it came up with.

"Elric the Barbarian," I suppose.

An older Elric.

These are obviously not anywhere near the quality of N. C. Wyeth illustrations, but they're good enough for a paperback cover. Hope you're not an illustrator, because you're out of work: there's no way a publisher will pay you hundreds or thousands of dollars when the job can be done 'well enough' for free.

Corruption is the Answer

This is an article with multiple significant insights about the problems of the moment. The conclusion is shocking to those of us from another era, but there may not be anything wrong with it.

Under conditions of bureaucratic dysfunction typical of a party-state, corruption isn’t a problem, it is the solution. 

That was certainly my experience living in China, a party state of the sort he is describing. I had the wrong kind of visa to be employed, but I had a job. I didn't worry about it; the man who got me the job was the same man who signed for my visa renewal. I've told the story about getting paid in China before (although if you don't remember reading it, you should: it's one of my better stories). It was many months after I'd been working before I saw any of my promised pay. The problem wasn't that they weren't going to keep their word about paying me, it was that they had to build out a slush fund first. Once they'd solved the practical problem of arranging a corrupt solution, they paid me every single thing they promised.

As our system becomes captured by interests basically hostile to the people and the nation, we are all going to end up having to adopt these ways. They are like the illicit economies that prisoners develop, as a means of escaping the control of the guard towers. They are, in a way, a moral duty to embrace: just as a prisoner of war has a duty to try to escape out of loyalty to the country of his birth, so too do we. 

"Elric the Barbarian"

So the third thing I asked Chat GPT to do -- as discussed in the immediately prior post -- was to write a short story in the manner of Robert E. Howard. Here is what it came up with.

The sun beat down on the dusty plains as Elric the barbarian rode towards the small village. He had been wandering for days, searching for a way to ease the restless fire that burned within him.

As he rode into the village, he could sense the tension in the air. The people were on edge, their eyes darting nervously at him as he passed by.

Ignoring their wary glances, Elric strode into the local inn, his hand resting on the hilt of his trusty broadsword. He knew he needed a stiff drink and a warm meal before he could continue his quest.

The innkeeper eyed him warily as he approached the bar. "What brings a man like you to these parts?" he asked, his voice trembling.

"I'm just passing through," Elric replied, his voice low and rumbling. "I need a meal and a place to rest."

The innkeeper nodded, his eyes flickering towards the door. "You best keep your wits about you," he warned. "There's trouble brewing in these parts."

Elric raised an eyebrow. "Trouble? What kind of trouble?"

The innkeeper leaned in close, his voice dropping to a whisper. "There's a group of bandits that have been raiding the nearby villages. They're ruthless, and they've already killed dozens of innocent people."

Elric's grip tightened on his sword. "I'll take care of them," he growled.

The innkeeper looked skeptical. "You're just one man," he said. "How do you plan to take on a group of bandits?"

Elric smiled grimly. "I've faced worse odds than this," he said. "And I've always come out on top."

With that, Elric left the inn and rode out towards the bandit's hideout. As he drew closer, he could see the flicker of torchlight and hear the sound of raucous laughter.

Elric drew his sword and charged towards the bandit's camp, his battle cry echoing across the plains. The bandits were caught off guard, and they fell quickly to Elric's mighty sword.

As the last of the bandits lay dying at his feet, Elric felt a sense of satisfaction. He had protected the innocent, and he had once again proved that he was the greatest warrior in the land.

With a fierce grin on his face, Elric rode off into the sunset, ready for whatever adventure lay ahead.

You can see elements that are right: the use of a fantasy-style name, the existence of swords, the attempt at dramatic tension leading to violent sword-based conflict. Nevertheless the story is terrible to the point of being ridiculous. 

REH's works are in the public domain, so Chat GPT presumably can access large parts of them and map them. However, creating writing requires more than  just getting a lot of the right words into the right order. 

My guess is that this means we are doomed to even worse popular art than we have been subjected to already. Autotune proved attractive to the recording industry even though it is terrible, obvious, and offensive to the ear. This was because it allowed pop music stars (which now includes contemporary Nashville country music) to be selected for physical looks rather than the ability to sing. Since there are a lot more pretty faces than talented singers, that allowed the recording studios to shift more of the profit to themselves and pay less to the "talent" that is no longer talented.

AI generated visual art is already starting to pop up everywhere, and is having a similar negative function. Actual artists used to be well-paid because their talents took years to develop. Now you can generate something good-enough for free just by plugging a description into somebody's AI. It's not going to be great art, or even good art, but it will have the right elements more-or-less.

I expect we'll see a similar shift to crap like this in screenplays, especially for episodic TV but even for movies. It's free, and all they want is a consumable product to bring in money -- money they get to keep, since they don't have to pay anyone who actually knows how to produce something of genuine value. As a result, our popular entertainment will become even worse than it already is. 

It's a depressing thought.