They Didn't Need Him Around Anyhow

Neil Young comes crawling back to Spotify after his alternatives also pick up the Joe Rogan podcast, which occasioned his departure as he views it as 'disinformation.' 

Pity. I was enjoying his absence. 

Misplaced Priority

Washington Post headline: "Whistleblower death compounds bad news for Boeing."

Ah, yes. "Poor Boeing!" is exactly what we all thought when we read the story of the whistleblower who 'committed suicide' right before his second round of testimony against Boeing. How unfortunate for them!

UPDATE: Whistleblower told family and friends that ‘if anything happens it’s not suicide.’

Definitely not exonerated

The spin on Hur's testimony is not impressing me, except with its gall.

MR. HUR: So during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center, or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working on?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, um .. . I , I, I, I, I don’ t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?

MR. HUR: Yes, sir.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Remember, in this timeframe, my son is either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the President. I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for President. And, and so what was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th –

MS. COTTON: 2015.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE SPEAKER: 2015.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Was it 2015 he had died?

I don't doubt that the President has a sharp memory of the terrible day his son died. But no one claimed he'd forgotten the death, only that he couldn't accurately place it within a couple of years, not even by considering whether it was before or after 2017, when he stopped being Vice President. Most people can place recent presidential administrations in their proper annual timeframes, even if they weren't actually in the White House at the time. For this reason among others, Hur concluded that, although the evidence of Biden's habitual mishandling classified documents was unmistakeable, it was too much to expect a (biased, DC-based) jury to look past his obvious mental decline. Calling this "exoneration" is appalling, as is the allegation that Hur's extremely soft-pedaled description of Biden's entirely relevant decrepitude was overly harsh. Nor is it possible to argue with a straight face that Hur dragged in Beau Biden's death unnecessarily; Joe Biden popped it into the conversation in his usual manner of changing a dangerous conversational focus to a more sympathetic context. Pure squid ink.

As for Adam Schiff's take on this, if he were capable of shame, I'd say he ought to be ashamed. Even he must know the difference between including information in a special prosecutor's report that might prejudice a potential defendant's to a fair trial, versus information that might prejudice his success in a current or future political campaign. Hur rightly nailed Schiff on this point.

Purity and the Holy Grail

Tom and I were talking about purity and its discontents a while ago in a post on theology. I want to talk about it a little more, in terms of the Quest for the Holy Grail and then in terms of practical societies. The quest for purity seems like a good ethical norm at first, but it reliably leads even very good men to destruction -- and normal men to truly terrible things. 

I'm starting with the Arthurian fiction because that's what I want to think and talk about today, much more than I want to think or talk about the practical societies of today. The Arthurian vision is one that inspired me for much of my life, adding beauty and meaning to existence. The knights of the Round Table were recognizably human, motivated by love and lust, family and kinship bonds that occasionally contested with their bonds of political loyalty or honor, virtues and vices. Yet they were recognizably good men, too, in spite of their flaws. Their society led men to strive for what was good and just, and to sacrifice of themselves to realize that kind of goodness and justice that was capable of being realized in the world. Their adventures nearly always began with an appeal from someone who had been wronged, and involved them striving and sacrificing to bring about a just ending to the adventure. 

So when they were granted a vision of the Holy Grail, most of these knights decided to go on that adventure too. It was a divine vision, one that called them to achieve the very highest things, things that could only be achieved through actual human perfection. As a consequence, the Round Table was destroyed, most of the knights killed or savaged; in Malory the few who proved good enough all died, one of them because he prayed to God to be allowed to die to avoid having to return to the impure world. In other versions Perceval achieves the Grail, but alone and only through tremendous suffering (the name per ce val seems to mean 'through the valley,' i.e. the famous one from the 23rd Psalm). Sometimes he dies afterwards, too.

In later literature partly inspired by all this, Fritz Leiber has a wizard tell his heroes: 

"Never and forever are neither for men/
You'll be returning again and again."

So too perfection and actual purity, which belong in Christian theology only to God. Like "never" and "forever," these perfections exist in the realm of ideas rather than in the real world. The character of Galahad in Malory is a kind of blasphemy because he is an imagination of what Lancelot might have been like if he had been morally perfect. Galahad is Lancelot's son, conceived ironically out of wedlock; but the king's daughter who was Galahad's mother tricked Lancelot by enchantment into thinking she was Guinevere. Now that means that Lancelot didn't conceive his son while intending to commit the sin that he was committing, only a different sin of which he wasn't actually guilty (i.e. adultery with Guinevere); and somehow this is as close as Lancelot can get to a blameless union. His son, who descends on his mother Elaine's side from the lineage, King Pelles', that is associated with the Grail's keeping, is therefore allowed to be perfect. Perceval, more human, does not end up having as good a time in search of the Grail.

Yet all these sinful knights had been having a wonderful time up until this quest for perfection. They went from success to success in their wars, until no more wars needed to be fought. Then they had joyous tournaments and feasts, punctuated by occasional and successful quests for practical justice. The striving appropriate to the human condition -- as opposed to the devotion to true metaphysical perfection that is impossible for men -- brought about Aristotelian flourishing, eudaimonia, happiness.

"Was it something I thought?"

PowerLine asks this question about a City Journal article by Martin Kulldorff, formerly of Harvard University and the CDC, who lost both positions by committing heresy.

What Harvard and the CDC lost was their credibility.

Firefighters and Hussars

There's a commonplace in Russian humor about Hussars, cavalrymen whose lives of adventure and danger -- and livestock -- have given them a straightforward manner of speaking, one that clashes with the sensitivities of the nobility.

This theme culminates in the following joke, sometimes called "the ultimate Hussar joke":

Countess Maria Bolkonskaya celebrates her 50th anniversary, the whole local Hussar regiment is invited, and the Countess boasts about the gifts she has received: "Cornet Obolensky presented me a lovely set of 50 Chinese fragrant candles. I loved them so much that I immediately stuck them into the seven 7-branch candlesticks you see on the table. Such auspicious numbers! Unfortunately there is a single candle left, and I don't know where to stick it..."  

The whole Hussar regiment takes a deep breath... but the Hussar colonel barks out: "Hussars!!! Silence!!!"

Rather a similar situation going on in New York just now. What were those people thinking, putting a vain and sensitive politician in front of a bunch of firefighters?

Imagining LotR as 1950s Hollywood

Here’s a good use of these graphics AIs. What a film this might have been, had the timing been right to make it. 

The Rats are all High

New Orleans police have a rat problem, which has created an evidence problem. 

The Scariest of All

One animal frightens the beasts of Africa even more than lions. 

Small wonder. 

The Numbers Aren't Real

Now this is an interesting argument, with graphs to back it up: the Gaza numbers aren't real.

Even if you take the numbers at face value, they put paid to the idea that this represents a 'genocide' by the Israelis; 30,000 is 0.2% of the Palestinian population, after four months of fairly intense urban warfare. If they really wanted to wipe out the 14MM people, they'd need to be working a lot harder at it than this. 99.8% of them are still alive, even if we accept the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers.

But we shouldn't, as the article lays out. The mathematical anomalies are such that the numbers look invented, not natural.

Brutality in Philosophy: An Appreciation

A columnist named Kathleen Stock has penned a piece on what's wrong with academia, which she summarizes as a failure to replace the kind of professors who would destroy each other's weak arguments. 

In academic publishing too, there was scope to be savagely biting. In battles over theories of mind, one might find Colin McGinn feuding bloodily in the reviews section with Ted Honderich: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad”, began one notorious review...

I also come out of the more spirited tradition of creative destruction in philosophy, which remains in force in some schools. It was once thought crucial to get over the distress of having your ideas savaged by professors with keen wits and tongues alike; you would learn to make better arguments by seeing what was weak in what you already thought. I remember one distraught young woman being approached after such a savaging by the professor, who asked, "If you had argued the other side, I'd have come at you just as hard." It's nothing personal; it was the job. 

I recommend her article for its insight; also this one of hers, which addresses a question we used to argue over quite a lot back in the early days. That question was whether or not there was a 'female brain,' appreciably distinct from a 'male brain,' and what it might mean if there were. Those of you who remember the grand feuds we used to have at Cassandra's place will find that the two pieces line up: she and I used to go hammer-and-tongs at each other's ideas, without ever failing to respect and honor each other personally. That was the spirit of the thing, back in the old days when this blog was headed by a quote from Chesterton's "The Last Hero":

How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,

Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.

Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,

When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.

The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, --

You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.

Perhaps there was wisdom in that.

Tennessee River

We live in the birthplace of headwaters. The creek that runs by my house joins the Tuckasegee river, which flows to the little Tennessee and thus to the Tennessee, Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Just a few miles away is the headwaters of the Chatooga, which flows to the Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean. Likewise the headwaters of the Pigeon, which joins the mighty French Broad River; and likewise the French Broad itself, which originates in forks within a few miles of my home. 

To love a land is to know its rivers, their origin, course, and rifts. You’ll know a man who loves his country when you meet one who can tell you how its rivers flow. 

Alternatives to the state

Texas Monthly, a supremely annoying publication, is sad about the "lurch to the right" in this week's Texas primaries. The problem, you see, is that capitalism can't function properly unless counterbalanced by other institutions--especially, in the author's view, the Democratic Party and unions.

This is a distorted shadow of something I've always believed, which is that government can't function properly unless counterbalanced by private institutions, some of the most important being families, churches, private enterprise, and voluntary civic organizations of all stripes. I'll lump unions in there if they're truly voluntary and not just tools to extract dues from unwilling members to be money-laundered for the Democratic Party. As a stretch, I'll include political parties, as long as we're not pretending there's only one.

Whatever one thinks about the voters' recent destruction of Texas RINO careers, it's not about capitalism triumphing over private institutions. Republican primary voters wanted school choice, border security, and an end to the war on Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose initiatives, especially his court-thwarted attempt to investigate election fraud, were quite popular in the Lone Star State. They'd also had it right up to here with current Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, who tends to appoint Democrats to head House committees and smothers conservative legislation in its crib when he can. Texas Republican primary voters had an immeasurably low interest in ensuring that either the Democratic Party or unions retained any power to hamstring the Texas legislature, but they're pretty open to measures to strengthen the role of families, churches, and private enterprise as a counterweight to government overreach.

Big Bear

Stack Up Or…

FPC has a proposition. 

We usually avoid that sort of language around here, out of courtesy and a desire to accommodate people of gentle temper. Still and all, the demand is hereby rejected. 

Biloxi by Two

Might as well keep on riding if you manage it. 

The Skies Above

This essay begins with an interesting set of questions and observations:

Is a god, or any divine power, only a mirage of the human-made political structures that oppress us? This understanding of religion, popularized by 19th-century thinkers like Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, has become received wisdom among the anthropologists and sociologists studying the origins and functions of religious life. We sense that we live under forces of authority that constrain us, and yet we cannot precisely locate or understand them. Needing to give some shape or form to this coercion, we project it onto the clouds, fashioning heavenly beings...

Yet the existence of societies without chiefs or kings, or any vertical political organization, challenges this picture. In communities that traditionally recognized no rulers or government, from Tierra del Fuego to the Central Arctic to the Philippines, we still find complex concepts of celestial hierarchies, metahuman authorities, and bureaucracies of deities and spirits with no correspondence to the human social order. Where do these ideas come from, which reflect no living conditions on the ground? 

The stories in the essay are also noteworthy, but the basic question is striking. It seems as if our sense of hierarchy doesn't reflect social or material conditions. It might still be materialist in its origin -- perhaps it represents an inherited sense of reality as played out in the DNA or genes of our evolved bodies. If so, it ought to be a pretty basic sort of inheritance given that it is expressed by all human societies; but if that is the case, why are the expressions also so different and varied? Why do some believe in a heavenly father, but others in mercenary spirits that have to be placated to avoid bad luck? 

In a sense the question is allied to another question, that of whether our attempts to track back the Indo-European language's evolution can similarly let us reconstruct an earlier proto-religion among the peoples who spoke those languages. I think it's well known that Thor looks a lot like pagan deities both Celtic and Slavic, just as one can find common ur-roots for Celtic and Germanic and Slavic words. Our words continue to evolve all the time, so perhaps it is no surprise to find Tacitus saying that he thinks of Woden as being the Germanic sort of Mercury, whereas to another Woden looks more like Bacchus. Just as words slip and change in meaning, perhaps so too the ideas speakers have about the divine. 

Even today, how we talk about these things follows the pattern described here:

If “power descends from heaven to earth,” Sahlins writes, “human political power is necessarily and quintessentially hubris, the appropriation of divinity in one form or another.” The charisma of politicians is always given by the gods, such as the mana handed down to legions of Melanesian chiefs. In his essay, Sahlins touches upon the interesting point that hubris, or overstepping the boundaries between the human and the divine, also underlies structures of class, with elites often seen as possessing or appropriating spirit-power. In turn, any emancipatory movement must mobilize the metahuman as “the necessary precedent of political action.”

Quite so. The Communists, who followed Marx's misunderstanding of all this, nevertheless ended up appointing "scientific materialism" to the role of explaining the necessary, unavoidable workings out of a dialectic embedded in humanity's material evolution -- what our own political left likes to call "the arc of history." Thus History, and Science, become the metahuman powers watching over our destiny and motivating us along towards it. 

If the exercise of political power is always hubris, then the mythic forms says that the exercise of power is always punished. More, that this punishment is a matter of divine justice, a restoration of the proper relationship between the human and the divine. Certainly as a matter of empirical fact all such human political powers collapse and are brought low. Christianity speaks of Christ the King, who will come and exercise such power directly and properly as a divine figure for whom it is not hubris, the only sort of rule that could even be imagined to last forever. 

Election Followup

So the activists swept the contests; apparently those big money donations really help you in getting your name out. For the example I gave yesterday, the activist won by almost 70/30.

This means that the state government is condemned to remain in chaos unless there's a wave election in November that allows one side's activists to dominate the whole government, which will merely push the chaos off until the counter-wave election to follow. 

Michigan made news when, on its election day, "Uncommitted" got 100,000 votes, 13% of the total. This was supposed to be because of Muslims in Dearborn voting in protest of the war against Hamas. However, North Carolina put up 88,000 "No Preference" votes -- 12.68% of the total -- in spite of having a statewide Muslim population of only about one percent. In my county, "No Preference" was 19.43% of the Democratic vote with a zero-percent Muslim population and no evidence of other Hamas-supporting communities in the area. 

I infer, then, that there's a much bigger issue -- looking across the several states that voted yesterday, I see that Biden got into the 90+% range in only a few of them. Even in states like ours, which refused to allow any of the other candidates running for the Democratic nomination onto the ballot, he's not breaking 90% while running unopposed in his own party's primary.

The school board races were lost by conservative candidates across the board, but the schools here are so bad that there's no saving them anyway. Besides, the chief problem they face is not ideology but immigration: they have now to deal with an exploded and unplanned-for population that brings no extra tax base with it to accommodate further school development. 

That's a problem with no solutions. Every other area of governance also faces increased costs associated with the migration, without an increase in the tax base that would allow them to offset those costs and in a terrible economy in which inflation has eaten up any ability of the existing base to sustain more taxes. At some point we'll have to start doing triage on what the government can actually do, in the context of a government led by warring activists who are opposed to compromise. 

Wednesday Motivation

 A metal version of Anvil Of Crom to get you over the midweek point.

Nasty Dan

There’s a chance you might not know this one either.