Per Whiskey Riff, this day 1985 an unlikely duet went big.
Riding Weather
Today was, and tomorrow is reported to be, ideal riding weather. I spent the morning engaged in an adventure I shall not relate because it involves rescue service participation in a murder investigation, and such things are wisely not spoken of before the trial. That was expected to take the day and didn't, so I had taken a day off from work that I suddenly had free. I spent seven glorious hours riding in fine spring weather, with a good meal at a smokehouse in amongst the pleasures of the road.
We shall see if I am able to get free tomorrow; certainly not all day, as many things need my attention in addition to the motorcycle. Still, the warm parts of the year bring their pleasures.
A Curious Question
President Donald Trump is expected to be indicted and charged with a crime soon, and reports are that "he Manhattan District Attorney's office will reach out to Trump and his Secret Service detail to make arrangements for his surrender[.]"
I admit it had not occurred to me to think about him having a Secret Service detail, but of course he does as do all Presidents during and after their term of service. This raises a question I find interesting: what would the Secret Service do in the event of his arrest and/or conviction and sentencing? Presumably as law enforcement officers themselves, they would want to cooperate with the court and penal system; but they also can't simply allow him to be sent to Rikers Island and put in the general population.
Other nations that have imprisoned opposition political leaders have sometimes resorted to house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest over a 21-year period. Since the Secret Service will be providing police officers to literally stand over the top of him all the time, there's no reason why a similar arrangement couldn't work here too: you wouldn't have to put him in a New York state-owned facility.
Since a lot of the point of this exercise seems to be public humiliation, however, I expect that the Secret Service will be asked to somehow work with his enclosure in a New York prison or jail of some sort -- certainly if a conviction is obtained, as it may well be given the poisoned jury pool in NYC, and maybe even as he awaits trial. I would expect the Secret Service to demand control over a cordoned-off part of the jail under those circumstances, with NY officers allowed to access Trump but only under observation.
Commentators seem convinced the case is hopelessly weak, but I wouldn't put much hope in the law or the courts here. Trump is a designated object of hate, perhaps the foremost one extant in our country, and he is unlikely to receive a fair trial in Manhattan of all places (only DC might be worse in terms of jury bias). His ability to obtain a dispassionate and fair trial according to our usual aspirational standards anywhere in America must be close to Osama bin Laden's, except that there are areas where it would be unfair in his favor as well. The odds of us having a Political Prisoner in Chief soon are nonzero, no matter what one thinks of the legal strengths or weaknesses of the charge. If I were the Secret Service, I'd be planning now for how to handle this.
"Backlash" exception to the 1st Amendment
I take minor comfort from the fact that this is a decision issued by a 3-judge panel of the Second Circuit, not en banc, but it has some pretty horrifying Constitutional law in it. The court dismissed an NRA complaint alleging that the New York Department of Financial Services bullied financial institutions into blacklisting the NRA on the ground of "reputational risk." The court explained that "backlash" against Second Amendment supporters was a legitimate reason for a state banking regulator to use threats to induce banks to blacklist customers with controversial advocacy records.
As Powerline suggests, the only right thing to happen now is for the Supreme Court to accept certioriari and punt this awful decision into the sun. In the meantime, however, it sure would be nice to see people cease to use New York banks. The risk there is very high, even beyond the general concern over concentrating the nation's financial system in any particular location.
Arkansas, Affirmative Action, and Walmart
Gail Heriot posted this on Instapundit. The comment thread there so far is a shining example of sheer ignorance and bad faith attacks on Arkansas Republicans. I don't care to create a Disqus account to comment there, so I thought I might say something useful here, even if it is by no means a complete answer.
Walmart is headquartered in Bentonville, AR, and is a chunk of the state economy. Whenever the Republican dominated legislature takes up conservative legislation to which the woke rulers of the Walmart empire object, Walmart implicitly threatens to take their money somewhere else.
I'm not saying the Republican politicians are right or wrong to take this into account. I'm just saying it's part of the political calculus there.
Rafe Heydel-Mankoo on Reparations
It's a British argument, but a good quick listen at 12 minutes. The title on YouTube ("Woke Cambridge Students HATE Historian's Facts") is misleading, I think -- the Cambridge students sit quietly and let him finish speaking, and there is some applause at the end.
More Weird Numbers
56.3% of liberal women 18-29 have been formally diagnosed with a mental health disorder, compared to 27.3% of conservative women and 16.3% of conservative men in the same age bracket.
There are several general trends visible here. Older people have fewer than younger; men have fewer than women; conservatives have fewer than liberals.
My sense about psychology is that you get diagnoses more or less because you ask for them, so these numbers may simply be explained as the willingness of these various groups to seek psychological counseling. You have to check however many boxes off for the current DSM, and then you get a diagnosis that will allow your insurance company to pay for the counseling you want. If someone doesn't believe in the value of such counseling, they won't go and they therefore won't get a diagnosis. I don't think this necessarily says anything about the actual mental health of these demographics.
Still, the delta is pretty big. There's an order of magnitude difference between the young liberal women and the oldest conservative men, and right at that big a difference between them and the oldest conservative women.
Shocking if True
NotTheBee has a summary of some propaganda being put out by a hockey team for some reason or other; of all the places to virtue signal, goalie-fighting hockey teams are a very strange choice. One of these things is actually shocking, though, assuming that the statistic is true.
Now that would be amazing. I'm in no way an expert on the demographics here, but assuming that there is a roughly equal distribution of these qualities across various ethnic groups, black LGBTQ should account for around 13% of the total; and this Gallup poll suggests that trans-* should account for only 10% of that, so 1.3% of the total. But that's all sorts of trans-*, of which transgender women are an additional subset, presumably on the order of half of it. (And that's accounting for the doubling of the rate in the youngest generation, which is an additional weirdness to the numbers we'll ignore for now.)
So that would give us approximately (and admittedly according to very back-of-the-envelope math) 0.8% of the total population being the subject of 50% of the violence. If that's true, it's stunning.
I'll Allow It
Wretchard asked Chat GPT-4 who he was, to see what it knows. It's a plausible thing to do; what it knows is the internet, and we've published a great deal of content on the internet.
I decided to try it too, since I was messing with GPT last week.
Close enough for government work.
UPDATE:
I decided to try again, clueing in the GPT bot that I was asking about a blog. It was under the impression that the blog had closed, when in fact its own database ceases. However, it characterized the philosophy of the blog in this way:
That's actually a pretty good summary.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
It's almost as if price controls led to supply crashes:
This regulatory environment explains why California insurers can’t charge rates that reflect their actual risks. It also shows why there’s so little competition in the state’s insurance industry. Over the long run, competition keeps rates low. Insurance commissioners can certainly hold premiums down by edict, but the result is a contracting market. Homeowners then have little choice but to buy inadequate policies in a government-run marketplace.Similarly, I made my living for years on the cleanup of the power grid crash in California, caused by regulators who were more interested in pretending that power doesn't cost what it costs than in ensuring that the grid produces power. Voters love the idea of putting bureacrats in charge of prices, until the goods disappear from the market. Then they always seem to like the idea of having the government step in to offer the product at a "fair" price. I call it the DMV-ization of the economy, my favorite examples being Obamacare and public schools. Source: Wall Street Journal, Insurance Companies Are Quietly Fleeing California (via DuckDuckGo search).
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.
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