A New Law of Nature

For a long time it's been clear that Darwinian Natural Selection and random mutation-based Evolution couldn't be the whole story. For one thing, progress is too quick for the process to be purely random; there has to be something informing what kinds of mutations arise, not just a brute-force extinction mechanism to wipe out nonadaptive ones. Likewise there are examples like the multiple evolutions of crabs (five separate times we know of). Something must be guiding the process along lines that make a kind of sense.

Today I see that scientists have proposed an answer to this problem. 

[N]ine scientists and philosophers on Monday proposed a new law of nature that includes the biological evolution described by Darwin as a vibrant example of a much broader phenomenon, one that appears at the level of atoms, minerals, planetary atmospheres, planets, stars and more.

It holds that complex natural systems evolve to states of greater patterning, diversity and complexity.

"We see evolution as a universal process that applies to numerous systems, both living and nonliving, that increase in diversity and patterning through time," said Carnegie Institution for Science mineralogist and astrobiologist Robert Hazen....

Titled the "law of increasing functional information," it holds that evolving systems, biological and non-biological, always form from numerous interacting building blocks like atoms or cells, and that processes exist - such as cellular mutation - that generate many different configurations. Evolution occurs, it holds, when these various configurations are subject to selection for useful functions.

It's going to take a while to see if this holds water, as is the way with the scientific method. The problem they're treating is real enough, though, so it's good to see them trying out a new theory.

There are a number of second and third order questions that will arise if it does. It's going to have implications for the Fermi Paradox, for example. Of greater interest to me, it has implications for panpsychism and other questions around 'the hard problem' of consciousness. 

M-SAR

Yesterday AVI had a post called "Mountains and Nature" that was, I think, allied with his series of posts about naturalism, vegetarianism, and the like being aligned with Germanic paganism and therefore nazism (of the real sort, not the MSNBC sort). In it he quite correctly argued that early Christians viewed the city as the model for heaven rather than the Wild -- think of St. Augustine's City of God. 

Mountains have not always been considered beautiful. The Psalmist says that he lifts up his eyes unto the hills, and only then asks, "From whence cometh my help?" He never says that the hills are where his help comes from.  That is an entirely modern interpretation, post Romanticism.  

It was the Romantics who believed that we learned about God through Nature. They had gotten the idea from Puritans and other NW European Protestants, who indirectly inherited it from the concept of Wyrd among the pagans of that region. I discussed that in detail in 2010. (Be warned.  It's a series) 

I commented yesterday in agreement, noting that the Medievals and even Tolkien had made much of the garden, but viewed forest and mountain with grave suspicion -- at best, as places for adventure and spiritual development; at worst, places for madmen and outlaws. Somewhere in between the spiritual and the mad lies the hermit/eremetic ("desert") tradition that is said to have given rise to monasticism, but the monks built gardens and not wildernesses: not even St. Francis did that. 

...wonderful places like Rivendell and Beorn's hall are kinds-of gardens 'on the edge of the Wild,' where travelers can rest and regain strength after a challenging passage through dangerous mountains and forests. Forests, especially Mirkwood but even the old forest right by the Shire, follow the medieval presentation of being dangerous, frightening places.

And so they are; I have been through the certification course for Wilderness Rescue, which comes up regularly out this way. People get lost, hurt, and need rescuing when they go into the wilderness: not every time, but all the time.

I had the opportunity to reflect on this discussion last night, when a Mountain Search and Rescue call went out for a lost hiker, with the weather coming on 35 degrees and humid. We were out past 2 AM doing tight grid searches in a region of mountain wilderness, replaced by others who searched until dawn when we returned for another round. The hiker was eventually found alive, cold and rather viciously scratched up by the thickets of rhododendron and thorn. 

One can say without question that Bilbo Baggins or the Arthurian knights would hardly have been the admirable figures they became without the testing hardship of the Wild. In Tolkien, too, there is a third mode available to the elf whose faerie-like ability to live with the Wild is something like the hermit's, a kind of sacred existence that embraces the genuine wilderness in a way ordinary people can not do. Clearly Tolkien presents his elves as being metaphysically closer to God, beings among whom the angelic maiar walk and even marry. Even the fairy wants for a higher-fairy bride!

It's the sort of place a man can love, though; and for some of us, who hate the cities, the Wild is a happier place. It does require much from a man, and is more difficult to love in the middle of a cold night in a thicket on a steep mountainside. Even then, it is not entirely without its joys. 

We did find a bear on that midnight search. He was above hip-high when sitting down, and not especially inclined to run as many of them are. Eventually, he let us continue our search without incident.

Student Life as a Con

In an article AVI linked from the New Criterion, there is an aside that happens to align with something I was thinking about myself recently.

In the university context, such an inquiry might explore why student debt has gone up from $300 billion in 2000 to $2 trillion today. The cop-out answer is that the $2 trillion of student debt went to pay for $2 trillion worth of lies about how great education is. In my view this reading is too generous. How much of that $2 trillion actually went to education as opposed to room and board? If you analyze the universities in economic terms, you might even conclude that the dorms and residences are the profit center driving an elaborate real-estate racket. And this is not to mention the web of offices and administrators tasked with overseeing not education but “student life.” Scale this model up, and you begin to understand why it’s so hard to exist outside of a big city in the United States—a vast country with swaths of empty space and lots of affordable housing—and why those deplorables who leave the reservation are viewed with such disdain.

When I was walking around the local university, with the very-nice-looking dorms with racy slogans in the windows, I was reflecting on how much the university experience has become a kind of con. Take out the student loans, and you get to start your adult life -- the first time you live away from home -- in a nice little apartment with excellent gym facilities, trash pick-up, plumbing and utilities included, nicely kept grounds, football games and other sporting events available, regular plays and a cheap/free cinema, etc., etc. Your introduction to adult life in America leads you to believe that this is what life is like.

Then you get out and you have to start paying those debts back. Cheap housing in the cities is increasingly impossible to find. Even outside the cities, AirBnB and other short-term rentals have made even small towns expensive places to live, if you can find rentable spaces at all. (Just try it in Jackson, WY -- or even out this way in one of the little towns like Cashiers or Sylva).

Can you get a job with that degree you got? Maybe, if you were savvy in choosing your major. If not, you can always go to grad school and try to get a doctorate so you can teach whatever it was -- for another six figures in student loans, that is, entering into a job market for Ph.D.s that often sees hundreds of applicants for every tenure track position. Nobody explains this to the prospective students, who are sold the line that 'if you choose to do something you love, you'll never work a day in your life.' That may be true in the ironic sense that you'll never find a job! 

Even for those who succeed in getting a white-collar position that pays reasonably well, it's going to be hard to recapture the quality of life that they became accustomed to in college life. Setting their expectations that campus life was what adult life is like -- and with all these attendant luxuries now, paid for by those ever-increasing fees they can charge because they are covered by student loans -- sets them up for disappointment, anger, and a lifelong load of debt that is functionally just another tax they have to pay to the government (who now owns all student loans).

The promises of the university are increasingly fraudulent. It's still possible to go to school and get a job and life a decent life that way, but only if you dodge the system they have set up for you and are very choosy about the parts you accept. The cost of even that successful model is also going to be a lot higher than anyone will explain to you.

Atholl Brose

Speaking of drinks and history, here is an article on a Scottish oat-milk-whiskey concoction with a folk tale background. Along the way you’ll learn a lot more about the history of mixed drinks. 

Self-Hate Embraces Hate

A British writer notes a long, appalling trend. 

La France

My associate in France — Cannes— sent this picture this morning:

They’ve deployed 7,000 soldiers to their streets following a stabbing attack. Infantry units are kind of “disproportionate” to a knife attack, unless you are following the technical use of the term (see comments here).

Tasting History

Tasting History is a worthwhile YouTube channel on historical cooking. He presents historical recipes with some background and then tries them out.

Here's one for mead and one for a medieval outlaw's table.

His current medieval cooking playlist has 52 videos, and he has a lot of others as well.

War Hippies

 A band to keep an eye on?

Weird

 

Mirabile dictu: nobody in Western North Carolina has mentioned it to me either. I'm fielding a lot of questions about it from friends elsewhere, but locally it seems to be of no great concern. 

One of the request was from someone traveling on business in France. Did I have any advice on avoiding violence? Yeah, put "mosque" into your phone's map app, and don't go to any neighborhoods that have one. Friday afternoon is the most likely time for violence, because that's when the weekly sermons are. If you get through Friday and you're not in a neighborhood with mosques, enjoy your trip. It'll probably be all right.

That's not to say that Muslims can't, aren't, blah, blah, blah. It's just a straight risk assessment. CNN's Amanpour asked her guest if 'its possible to hold two thoughts in mind' (4:10)-- this is an Aristotelian inquiry about mental sophistication -- that the slaughter was as bad as it gets, but also that 'everyone has the right to live with rights and dignity... legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people...', etc. Sure, Muslims can aspire to political liberalism, and adopt a view of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Absolutely, if you are a political liberal, there's nothing more fundamental than the view that all people deserve dignity and rights. The question is what you do when your neighbors are not political liberals. Some neighbors don't accept that you have dignity, or even believe in political rights; and indeed, hold that it's not only fine but desirable to kill you, your children and your elderly. 

There's no logical contradiction here that would entail Aristotelian sophistication to entertain. If they were liberals, then you could live in a liberal order. Muslims can be, have been, liberals too. It only works out if that prerequisite has been satisfied. Otherwise, you're down to keeping out of the wrong neighborhoods when you can, and being well-armed when you can't. And really that's good advice anyway and all the time: Havamal 38, Lk. 22:36.

Mead

It’s made of honey.

Since I’m doing Beorn’s Hall this week, I decided to brew a batch of mead. I do this in five-gallon batches. This is ten pounds of honey, water, and wine yeast — I use champagne yeast because it tolerates a high degree of alcohol.

Grimbeorn’s Honey Cakes

Beorning Honey Cakes.

Recipe first, then I'll talk about it after the jump.

1 cup warm water

2 1/4 teaspoons yeast

1 stick plus 2 tablespoons room-temperature butter

1 cup honey

3 eggs

1 tablespoon heavy cream

3 cups flour, King Arthur White or alternative

1 tablespoon salt

First, dissolve the yeast in the warm water and set aside.

In a mixing bowl, cream the butter and honey together, whipping in plenty of air. We're going to use both air and yeast to create a cake-like texture. Add the yeast-water and combine so that the yeast can begin digesting some of the honey.

Whip in the eggs one at a time, at first slowly until combined, and then very briskly to add more air. Add the heavy cream at this time and whip as if it were another egg.

Add the flour and salt, stirring until combined and then whipping one more time. Allow to rise in a warm, undisturbed place for at least an hour before baking. Towards the end of the rising time, preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. 

You will get a batter rather than a kneadable dough, so it will be transferred for baking with a scoop or spoon. I used my æbleskiver pan for this, but you could bake them as whole cakes or muffins as well. Bake at this low temperature, so as not to burn the honey, until they are fully golden brown on the top. Baking times will vary by altitude -- I am on the shoulders of a mountain here -- but it should be under an hour if you make cakes like these, more if you make a single cake. You'll have to keep an eye on it to be sure; don't pull it out too soon. Make sure it's turned yellow and then gold, and darkened just a little bit. That will ensure they are thoroughly cooked but not dry.

UPDATE: I had batter left over so I covered it and let it mature overnight, then baked another batch this morning. Due to the extra time the yeast had with the honey they are significantly lighter and fluffier, and while they are less strongly honeyed, the butter flavor pops through better now. Therefore, for best results I recommend setting the batter the night before and baking in the morning. You’ll get hot honey cakes for breakfast. 

UPDATE: I am reminded of John Wayne's Hondo, in which the female lead at one point says that she 'has to set the batter for the morning.' It must have been a yeast batter like this, to ensure good hotcakes over the morning fire. 

More Math on Guns

Today's anti-gun front-page story at WaPo is titled, "Guns are found in US schools each day. The number is soaring." 

The number proves to be 1,150, almost all of them found by security without being fired. That's actually a tremendous success story about the way our schools have become safer by instituting security practices that effectively address a threat. A very good tale! If all beggars could tell such a good one, they might find me kinder.

There are over 128,000 schools in America, so this number also means that in 99.17% of American schools, no guns appeared -- and in the 0.83% where they did, they were mostly recovered without incident.

According to ATF data, there are 474 million guns in private hands in America, so that means that 99.9998% of American guns were not so involved, whereas only 0.0002% of those guns ended up in such (mostly successful) incidents.

Really, those numbers ought to be astonishing in exactly the opposite of the way the Post would like.

UPDATE: The ability to conceptualize numbers and scale is something gun control advocates often seem to actively work against. 

“The Massachusetts League of Women Voters supports HD.4607,” Art Desloges, speaking on behalf of the group, told the committee. “Statistically we have the lowest gun death rates nationwide, but gun violence archive reports 83 people killed by firearms in the Commonwealth through July of this year. We must get to zero. Even one person lost to gun violence is too many.”

The economic Law of Diminishing Returns suggests that getting from "the lowest in the nation" to "zero" will require approximately infinite effort. 

Here's a good round number, though: how about 100% opposition to this gun control law from the police? 

The state’s police chiefs do not support the Legislature’s efforts to strengthen Massachusetts gun laws — and it’s unanimous.

Mark Leahy, former chief of the Northboro Police Department and the executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, said his organization recently met and voted to come out against Bill HD.4607, or An Act modernizing firearm laws.

The bill simply won’t reduce crime, Leahy said.

“Earlier today our membership met. We ultimately polled our members concerning HD.4607 and the result was an unprecedented unanimous vote to not support this bill,” Leahy told the House Ways and Means Committee Tuesday.

Representing all 351 Bay State cities and towns and more than 100 university police departments, the law enforcement organization was joined by dozens of gun rights advocates and constitutionalists in opposing the gun control bill during a hearing held Tuesday.

How Fragile is America?

The prior post was about a report put together by The Wise in 2019. This was their definition of "fragility" as regards states.

Fragility

According to the Fragility Study Group, fragility can be defined as “the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people and their government.” Fragile states suffer from deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy that increase the risk of instability and violent conflict and sap the state of its resilience to disruptive shocks.

Now 2019 was before COVID, the 2020 "irregular" election, and a lot of other things. The US social contract has broken down a great deal. 

Our local pharmacy is in the front of a grocery store, so you end up sitting out in public while getting you flu shot. One of our older firefighters walked in while I was getting mine, and came over to talk to me for a moment. He said that this would be his first year in fifty years of not getting a flu shot, but, "I don't trust 'em anymore." That's a shame, because he's now of an age where the flu shot might actually save his life. You can put that to the whole cycle of saying things that weren't true about the COVID vaccine: it'll stop you from getting it, it'll stop the spread, it's "safe" and "effective" though it causes heart problems especially in young men and it doesn't actually work as promised. The second-order effects of all that lying by the highest levels of the government may never be overcome.

So too the effects of the sudden setting-aside of the social contract and constitutional order from that period. The most lasting effect of those set-asides is the result of the election, which was decided based on unconstitutional alterations of the method of voting by the executive without (as the constitution requires) consultation with the legislatures of the swing states involved. That changed everything, and nobody has forgotten it. Trust may, again, be impossible to restore. 

As for 'deficits of institutional capacity,' witness the Afghanistan withdrawal. That was the most trusted institution in the United States, the military, which has for decades stood right at the top of Gallup's Confidence in Institutions Poll. But also witness the loss of trust in the police, not only among those who sided with the George Floyd protests, but also among those who saw the police stand aside while rioters burned their cities because the police suddenly feared prosecution if they did their jobs.

Now look at just that middle bar from the graph below, on fragile states' relationship with extremisim:

Every part of that is true, right? You can each provide your own examples with only barely adjusted wording in a few cases: it's not that they've "failed to provide schools," but that they've provided schools in which sometimes no students can pass math proficiency exams. It's not only traditional religious authority that they've opposed and weakened -- it's intolerance and hate to oppose gay marriage or gay adoptions even in traditional churches in which there is a Biblical or Koranic definition of marriage, or to oppose provision of abortion even for an order of Nuns or in a Catholic hospital -- but it is certainly also those.

Pay attention to the log in one's eye, we are warned; but they walked right into it. Again, look at that list of Task Force members. They're the elites who had solid gold educations and careers, members of the Council of the Wise every one.

Failing Sun Tzu

The recent attack on Israel by Hamas and Iran gives us an occasion to review the failures of those whose job it was to prevent such things. They fail Sun Tzu's core dictum to "know thyself, and thy enemy." 

Consider, for example, the findings of this blue-ribbon panel called the "Task force on Extremism in Fragile States." It was published in February of 2019, so we can consider it a kind of five-year plan by the very people who got us into this mess (read the list of task force members), on the subject of how to get us out of it. 

It has three top-level recommendations, none of which survived contact with the bureaucracy. The main recommendation is to create an "initiative" to align all the various government authorities and agencies to address the problem. I have seen versions of this suggestion in high-powered 'how do we tackle extremism?' reports since the Defense Science Board report of 2004 that thought military strategic communications should be moved from the Pentagon to the Strategic Command in the hope of aligning various authorities and powers on psychological operations, information operations, public affairs, public diplomacy, etc., etc., in a way that would combat extremism.

Like everything else we've tried, after twenty years it hasn't worked. Reforming the ossified Federal government is beyond the strength of even the most well-respected, elite, tied-in-to-power clique. Neither did Congress undertake any of their priorities. It was, like all these panels, a complete waste of time and attention. The bureaucracy is too old, too stiff, and too unwilling to yield either money or power to allow itself to be reformed, or to accept a higher authority that would "align" it. Even where new bureaucracies are stood up on top of other ones -- Homeland Security, the ODNI -- the old bureaucracies maintain their independence and carry on as before. The top-level just generates paperwork.

As for Congress, it is not really interested in governing. Congressmen are interested in money, but actual governance they like to delegate to the executive branch.

This is failure to know thyself.

As for the enemy, there is also the usual problem of clarity of thought. The definitions of "extremism" and "fragility" are given in part III.

Extremism

As used by this Task Force, “extremism” refers to a wide range of absolutist and totalitarian ideologies. “Extremists” believe in and advocate for replacing existing political institutions with a new political order governed by a doctrine that denies individual liberty and equal rights to citizens of different religious, ethnic, cultural, or economic backgrounds. “Violent extremists” espouse, encourage, and perpetrate violence as they seek to create their extremist political order. Extremism is not unique to any one culture, religion, or geographic region....

Fragility

According to the Fragility Study Group, fragility can be defined as “the absence or breakdown of a social contract between people and their government.” Fragile states suffer from deficits of institutional capacity and political legitimacy that increase the risk of instability and violent conflict and sap the state of its resilience to disruptive shocks. Fragility also enables transnational crime, fuels humanitarian crises, and impedes trade and development.

Now the problem that they're really interested in they also name as "Salafi-jihadist," but they really want that last sentence: "Extremism is not unique to any one culture, religion, or geographic region." So instead of tackling what is already a very big problem, they elect to obscure it into a much larger category, which would require even more resources and moving parts to tackle. 

Along the way, they make a striking concession to relatively hard-right American critics like the Center for Security Policy (which the SPLC considers a hate group, a label they haven't yet followed the DOJ/ATF in wrongly assigning to the Hells Angels). It is only on the hard-right that one sees Islamic politics described as "totalitarian." In fact that description is understandable but incorrect: Islam's political philosophy is medieval, not a modern project like totalitarianism, and it only intends to assign totalizing power to God. Like totalitarian modern politics, Islamists like the Taliban or Iran do intend to encroach on what Westerners consider private matters -- sexuality, the appropriateness of music or art, and so forth. They do not imagine the kind of actual observation and control of all aspects of life that is coming into practice in the Chinese social credit system, or even in our own alliance between social media tech firms and the major government bureaucracies. They also envision a degree of tolerance -- coupled with submission, but tolerance -- for deviations from their ideas for those of certain protected minorities. Christians who pay the tax can worship more-or-less freely, and drink alcohol; Jews as well, at least until the end times. 

Meanwhile, the Task Force ends up excluding some other groups that I would think are more properly considered "extremists" or even "violent extremists." It was a violent anarchist who started World War I, for example, but he wouldn't qualify as an "extremist" under this definition because anarchists do not aspire to totalizing or absolutist control. The mobs that burned American cities the very year after this report came out would not have qualified as 'violent extremists' or, indeed, as extremists at all insofar as they were anarchists instead of Marxists. 

Look at this chart from page 20 for an example of lack of clarity:

Marxist totalitarians do not "cast secular governments as illegitimate," but in fact insist on secular government. They do not "use mosques" to "proselytize." They do not "propagate fundamentalist religious ideologies." By refusing to be clear about what they are even talking about, they end up lost in a fog of their own making.

Hamas is its own problem, not wisely roped in even to a discussion of "radical Islam" per se. It's unique, linked to the problem of Iran and Twelver radicalism but obviously distinct from it. It's unlike even the other radical Islamic groups opposing Israel. Trying to treat all of these as if they were symptoms of a bigger problem that's easier to name leads to ongoing lack of success at actually addressing the problem. 

This is failure to know thy enemy.

What Sun Tzu says about those who fail on both of those scores is that they will not know victory in a thousand battles. We've won a lot of gunfights, and even some things you might call "battles," like Second Fallujah or Third Mosul. We haven't won any part of the war.

I hope that Israel wins its war, but the honest truth is that they'll have a better chance if we don't try to help.

Surly Joe

I nearly always like cowboy songs, trucker songs, and biker songs. Here’s one of the former. 

Fall Color in the Mountains

It's just getting started here, still mostly green. If any of you are thinking of heading up to my mountains to see the show, here's a map that will help you plan the right dates for where you wanted to go.

Hardening the Society against Attacks

One step being taken in Israel is very wise and proper: arm the citizen militia.

“Any citizen who meets the detailed tests for carrying a private firearm due to self-defense and serving the security forces and is without a criminal or medical record will be required to undergo a telephone interview instead of a physical interview and will be able to receive permission to carry a firearm within a week,” Ben-Gvir said, according to a Google translation of the post. “(Self-defense tests: residence in an eligible settlement, rifle veterans 07 and above, officers in the rank of lieutenant and above and combatants in the rank of major and above in the IDF and the security forces, service in special units, firefighters, policemen, and workers and volunteers in the rescue forces).”

Eligible citizens who meet the criteria can now undergo a telephone interview instead of a physical one, and they can obtain permission to carry a firearm within a week. Any citizen who received a conditional permit to purchase a firearm in 2023 but did not purchase one can now buy a firearm without reapplying. Citizens who turned in their firearms over the previous six months, because they didn’t complete renewal training, can get their weapons back. The number of bullets that can be purchased by those with conditional permits has also been doubled. Gun-carry requirements will also be loosened.

The Second Amendment is already stronger than all of that put together, but it underlines and demonstrates the worth of a citizen militia in hardening a society against even coordinated violence.  

$100MM to fix EV Chargers in "Disadvantaged" Communities

Just out of curiosity, how many EVs can a 'disadvantaged' community afford? 

Furthermore, aren't these EV chargers nearly new just by nature of the technology? How quickly do they break? 

Happy Leif Erikson Day

The 9th of October celebrates the fearless explorer. 

Ready to Burn

All cleaned up.

It’s going to be 35 here tonight, heralding cold weather down the line. I took a wire brush to all the rust on the furnace. I reblacked it after I cleaned the iron. 

I also cleaned the inside with a shovel and a shop vac. I put a new gasket on the inside of the door. Then I went outside and opened and cleaned the chimney pipe, which is double-walled steel. 

No fire tonight, but we’re ready when the time comes.