Privateers

There’s no ‘constitutional right’ at work here, in spite of the headline, but you can get Congress’ permission.

It may not get much publicity, but there it is, smack-dab in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: Congress has the power to grant citizens “letters of marque and reprisal.” Meaning that, with Congress’s permission, private citizens can load weapons onto their fishing boats, head out to the high seas, capture enemy vessels, and keep the booty. Back in the day, these patriotic pirates were known as “privateers.” At the start of the Revolutionary War, America had a meager navy, so we had to rely on these privateers, who captured nearly two thousand British vessels and confiscated vast amounts of food, uniforms, weapons, and barrels of sherry....

The Founding Fathers were big fans of privateers. Late in life, John Adams wrote glowingly about the 1775 Massachusetts law that first legalized them, calling it “one of the most important documents in history. The Declaration of Independence is a brimborion in comparison with it.”

The author is playing this for laughs, while trying to make the point that originalist thinking is foolish. 

For several minutes, we spoke about originalism and the Constitution. Though it’s obscure, the privateering clause highlights that this document—for all its brilliance and prescience—was written in a vastly different time. Some passages—such as those about the “blessings of liberty” and “equal protection”—are timeless. But others are clearly the product of the eighteenth century.

He would not know this, but there has been quite a lot of recent thought given to restoring privateering. During the early phases of the Global War on Terror, it was regularly discussed as a way of making the market work against the problem. Not just at sea, either: just as land-based forms were used in the 19th century, known as ‘filibusters,’ so too there was considerable thought given to licensing private armies with similar privileges to seize prizes to fight terrorist forces in Africa and elsewhere. 

Probably the best known example is Erik Prince of Blackwater fame, who proposed doing exactly that in Africa and in Ukraine. In the end the government decided that it preferred to keep direct control over armed forces, but consider how poorly that strategy ultimately fared. Really the Russian government did what Prince wanted with the Wagner group, fairly successfully. Those forces proved unreliable against American-backed irregulars in Syria, and haven’t been effective in Ukraine, but they were pretty effective against Islamist irregulars across Africa. 

China, meanwhile, is effectively using a ’gray zone fleet’ of fishing privateers to war against the Philippines over control of the sea lanes and fishing areas. It’s proving quite difficult to contest effectively. Privateers are in play right now. 

Less piratical but still more on the side of militia forces, several US States maintain naval militia to this day. 

It may be that walking around in a tricorn hat and writing petitions with a quill pen s carrying a lot of the weight of making this originalist idea seem dated. With a little more attention, like other constitutional matters it too proves to be of continuing interest. 

Spangled

 

Red, White, and Blue breakfast with huckleberry jam. 

Independence Day

The wife and I rode over to the unincorporated village of Cashiers for their fireworks show. Cashiers is an interesting little mountain town. It has no government, but somehow has a fully-funded independent rescue service, fire department, and ambulance service. It only has seven hundred residents, but this time of year there's about twenty-five thousand people there on vacation in condos or second homes. It's a very pleasant little town, which enjoys its anarchy so much that it turned down an invitation from the state legislature to formally re-incorporate. 

Fireworks were pleasant and plentiful, and then we rode home. It's a promising start to the Independence Day holiday, which we will be celebrating intensely as always. It's the most wonderful time of the year.

Brought to you from the other half of the Range 15 team, the ones who don't sell coffee these days.

Like a Fox

I was introduced to this song at a very young age by Banks & Shane, the band from Atlanta. For many years I didn’t understand it at all. My limited understanding of women forbade it. 

In a way it is really only now that I understand the song. I suppose it is amazing that I maintained such a naive view of women until my 50th year. Maybe I have mostly just known good and virtuous women. 

Fist-Fighting

There's probably something healthy about fighting that our society refuses to accept. At a recent concert out Texas way a young singer named Miranda Lambert broke up a fight between some female fans (verbally), and then had the wisdom to set terms for when fighting was allowed during her set. Like G. K. Chesterton said about Christianity, it has the wisdom to divide the world in recognition of human nature: "Here you can swagger, there you can grovel." 

Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy—that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, “Neither swagger nor grovel”; and it would have been a limit. But to say, “Here you can swagger and there you can grovel”—that was an emancipation.

One of the thing about The Bikeriders movie that is striking is how little violence is in it -- and the worst of that either from those completely outside motorcycle culture, or those from the younger generation who had been explicitly rejected as unworthy for the culture and who found a way to worm their way in anyway. Early in the film Johnny faces a challenge, and asks if it should be answered with fists or knives. "Well, I don't want to kill you," the other man says, so they just fight with fists. Likewise in a later brawl, Johnny spends his time either trying to avoid it or breaking it up, and all the sides drink beer and become friends afterwards. There's another scene of drunken brawling, but it's just for fun. Nobody is really trying to hurt anybody.

In my generation, the great film was Fight Club. That film (and its earlier book) supposed that the way the culture had changed to forbid fighting had caused a kind of real psychic damage to young men. The earlier age depicted in the newer film allowed younger men to brawl on the weekends, under the eyes and guidance of older men who didn't anymore wish to, then go back to work on Monday. 

Fight Club suggests that the popularity of the fight, once released, will ennoble the men so that they can overthrow the whole world and end a civilization that hates them. The Bikeriders thinks they'll keep steady jobs if you just let them be themselves and don't make a big thing about the occasional fistfight. They're just blue collar guys, working things out for themselves. They'll be back on Monday to drive the truck or turn the wrench or whatever.

Maybe we shouldn't make such a big deal about it. The law says it's all 'simple assault' and subject to arrest and court intervention, but it really shouldn't be. No harm, no foul: and mostly, there's not really any harm. We're probably better off if we make room for it, especially for those who choose fists over knives, and leave the guns alone.

A Moment of Equality

For one brief shining moment, the Democratic Party treats its own just as shabbily as it treats everyone else. 

Multiple committee members on the call, most granted anonymity to talk about the private discussion, described feeling like they were being gaslighted.... Harrison offered what they described as a rosy assessment of Biden’s path forward. The chat function was disabled and there were no questions allowed.

Even the Inner Party eventually isn’t trusted.  

UPDATE: The first Democratic Congressman calls on Biden to withdraw.  

"Chevron deference" primer

Glen Reynolds sorts out some of the ignorant raving about the recent "power grab" that reversed the Chevron deference doctrine. What the Supreme Court ruled is that Congress passes laws, the executive branch enforces them as written, and courts kick them back to Congress if they're ambiguous and need to be amended. If executive-branch bureaucrats find a statute's actual words ill-suited to whatever their newest enforcement crusade is in any particular year, the cure is to get Congress to use better words.

The way statists are squawking, you'd think the only question worth asking is whether a particular crop of bureaucrats is pursuing a good policy. To the contrary, it's equally important how policy is set and who has the Constitutional power to contest it.

This is much like the caterwauling over whether Supreme Court decisions promote good policy in a particular area of controversy. Unless the policy is enshrined in the Constitution or a law properly enacted by Congress, it's not the point in a Supreme Court decision. That Court is charged with ensuring that, if the Constitution or a statute is at fault, it must be amended legally. Not overturned by mobs in the street or jackbooted bureaucrats, but voted on by elected officials according to well-understood rules and precedents. That's the "rule of law," no matter how unhappy it makes the New York Times.

Immune-ish

Ed Morrissey has a pretty good summary of today's Supreme Court's ruling on Trump's immunity claims. Much of what is alleged against him fails before an immunity defense, such as anything in his core Constitutional duties, and most of what could conceivably be called his official duties, subject to a certain amount of potential rebuttal. Some of the allegations, however, could be considered outside his official duties, depending on how the evidence works out.

Justice Thomas would have thrown out the entire prosecution on the ground that the special counsel appointment was unauthorized, but he appears to have no allies on this issue.

Good plan

From Holly MathNerd's Substack:

If Trump has the sense to refuse another debate and simply run ads from this one, he will probably win decisively. He should release a statement referring to the Axios report in which Biden staffers describe Biden as only cognizant from 10am to 4pm and stating simply: “President Trump’s commitment to fair play precludes him from debating President Biden after sundown. If President Biden’s team would like to schedule a daytime debate to permit him to participate during his hours of best cognizance, we are amenable to that.” It would have the predictable seismic effect without risking any need to actually have a second debate.

More hot takes: Politico cited this "research" as concluding that

President Biden was hurt badly by the debate, but Donald Trump didn’t benefit on any measure, except the vote.

This after roughly 100% of the MSM reported the debate as a kind of bad night for the incumbent, but one marked primarily by a million unidentified lies from the ex-President. To be fair, it was hard to tell whether most of the gibberish emitted from the incumbent could be fairly described as a lie, or even an opinion, but it would have been reassuring if the MSM had been capable of criticizing the startling claims that no servicemen had died under the incumbent's watch, and that the Border Patrol supports his policies. Luckily, however, his poor debate performance affected nothing but the "vote"--apparently to be distinguished from "the official ballot count we plan to announce later."

Movie Review: The Bikeriders

Today my wife and son and I all went to see The Bikeriders. It's loosely based on a photo-book of the same name, which was an older locution for what we call "bikers." The movie has some interesting qualities. 

One of them is that the two leads have almost nothing to do with the plot. The male lead is almost inconsequential to the movie; he's there to serve as the love interest for the female lead, whose role is to narrate the plot rather than to much participate in it. That's a very strange structure for a movie; at one point I realized that the male lead was just sitting around watching things happen, and not actually participating in the action in any meaningful way.

That said, the movie offers a helpful study of how motorcycle culture evolved in America. I thought a particularly insightful note was about how the club split, not formally but informally, into the beer-drinkers and the pot-smokers. This was roughly generational: the World War II era bikers were rowdy beer-drinking men, but the Vietnam-era veterans had often experienced psychedelic drugs. They also had two very different experiences of their society's embrace of them and what they'd done, and you can see how the older generation finds the newer one wilder and increasingly impossible to control. 

The trick the movie plays on audiences of young people is that the 'young people' who are impossible to control are the Baby Boomers; this device is a way of helping today's young see how wild the Boomer generation was when it was young. These days Boomers are in the minds of the young stereotypically hidebound and devoted to the older America, but in 1969 the story was rather different. The eroticism of the male and female leads is really doing nothing but drawing the young audience members into the plot, which is about how two older Americas interacted with each other as much as it is about the evolution of motorcycle clubs. 

In the movie the ending of that story is very sad, even though (or partly because) the lovebirds escape to a 'happy' life without motorcycles, brotherhood, honor or valor. Partly that is why the ending is sad; partly it is a measure of the lack of agency the lead characters actually have. A character devoted to honor, who defended brotherhood with valor, would have had the agency the author of the script decided to deny to his characters. Yet the club ends up losing those qualities too, as the older generation fails to enforce or explain them and the younger one doesn’t understand them. In the broader world outside the movie also, the older generation was not able to convey its values to the younger generation in a way that would defend those values. This is the tragedy.

A consequence of having the female lead serve as the narrator is to make an essentially masculine story -- all the club members are male -- be told in a way that is accessible to women. It also points up how bad the earlier generation is at expressing their feelings: the president of the club, Johnny, is incapable of saying what he means much of the time, and only under great duress can admit his needs and limitations. When the time comes to say goodbye, he can't do that at all. Asked a second time by the female narrator why he's come by to see her for no reason that is apparent to her, he just reiterates that he doesn't need anything. 

Strong drama, and a good study of an earlier set of generations. Watch everyone except for the two people you're being led to believe are the core of the story and you'll find there is a lot to learn.

Open the System

In the Cowboy State Daily, Rod Miller cites Thermodynamics and offers a solution. 

The only solution I can come up with is Ken Kesey’s Corollary to Newton’s Second Law. Kesey’s Corollary states that, “If the amount of energy in a closed system is finite, open the system.”

Opening our system – open conventions, for example – might truly allow our cream to rise to the top and prevent two inept has-beens like Biden and Trump from clogging our pipes.

Opening our system so that the best among us have an even chance of election will give the entrenched powers-that-be a serious case of the dropsy, and they’ll fight that notion tooth and claw. But I think its worth a shot, given what I saw Thursday night.

Department of own goals

"How dare you accuse me falsely of being prone to filing lawsuits! I know just the thing to clear my name."

Update July 1:

Every American Newspaper

It’s been a tough day for the literati. 

South of Macon

This woman has something to say. 

We Used To Drink A Lot

Yeah, we really did. 

Worthy Point

The dissent written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor actually made the case for the majority opinion.

She wrote... “Litigants seeking further dismantling of the ‘administrative state’ have reason to rejoice in their win today, but those of us who cherish the rule of law have nothing to celebrate.”

Of course we want to dismantle the administrative state. We’re American citizens, not British subjects.

Dismantling the administrative state is one of my major political goals. Independence Day is next week.

The View from Europe

On a professional call this morning, the Europeans I was talking with -- it's afternoon for them -- had a lot to say about the debate last night. I had the restraint not to tell them what I thought of European opinions about how America governs itself.

I didn't watch the debate. I didn't need to watch it to know how I'm going to vote. However, it's clear that America's international position was badly weakened last night.

The Old .30-30

The NRA on the great American deer rifle.

Today, while we tend to look at the .30-30 cartridge and the guns it is chambered in as being suitable for close-range deer hunting, it is a fact that the cartridge has been used to take every species of North American big game. Elk, moose, black bear and grizzlies have all fallen to the .30-30 in the hands of hunters....

Interestingly enough, the .30-30 cartridge and the guns chambered for it became quite popular during the Mexican Revolution (1911-1920). Quite a large number of these guns were exported, legally and otherwise, to arm the revolutionary forces. Even today, south of the border, you will hear the Mexican folk song, “Carbina Treinta Treinta,” honoring the part that the cartridge played in that conflict.

I have a Winchester '94 downstairs myself. I had never heard of the song, though. It's not my favorite genre of music, but it's pretty punchy. 

Georgia 2020

People keep advising to stop talking about the stolen election, but it really matters. (H/t D29)

All in-person votes in Fulton County, roughly 375,000, have no ballot images from the original results, and, according to the complaint, there are 17,852 missing ballot images from the recount. Statewide, there were 1.7 million ballot images missing or destroyed after the Election. By McGowan’s own admission, Georgia does not have a paper trail to justify its results.

Yet the press keeps telling us that there is "no evidence" of fraud, claims about which are "unfounded."