Lotus Blossoms

Stopped by an aquatic garden today. 

John Wayne Loved Chess

 

John Wayne playing chess, with the cast of Rio Bravo looking on.

Apparently John Wayne loved to play chess. It's featured in McClintock, but apparently it was a big thing of his. One of his wives was a a major tennis player or something like that, and he would come to her events and put up a sign outside their trailer: "Play Chess with John Wayne!"

I like chess myself. I taught my son to play, and probably beat him 10,000 times in a row until he really learned to play. Now I have to really watch myself when we play together.

Another Victory over Unconstitutionalism

This one is another occasion of the ATF trying to change the definition of laws without the bother of getting Congress involved. It's a technical issue, but the principle that only Congress can legislate -- no taxation without representation, no laws of any kind without representation -- is a crucial one. 

A Polite Society

There's no newspaper that covers the area in which I live, but there are a few in nearby towns. One of them, the Sylva Herald & Ruralite, likes to pull stories from archives as it has been around a while. This story is from 1926-7.

A young local businessman had gotten wind of apparent indiscretions between his wife and a young man contracted to work on the road from Sylva to Balsam who had recently arrived in the area. He’d apparently become quite worked up, and on a quiet Friday morning in Sylva the alleged suitor pulled up in front of the Woman’s Shop on Main Street.

Before he had a chance to get out of his vehicle, the husband stepped from the sidewalk, pulled a revolver and began shooting, striking the man in the face and twice in the right lung. The man emerged from his car and began running, the husband still firing, hitting him once more below the right shoulder. 

The husband then went into Hooper’s Drug Store and handed his gun to a town alderman, then on to the jail with a deputy. The shooting victim was rushed to the hospital in Bryson City.

The young local businessman was apparently well-regarded, because the judge flatly refused to convict him of any crime. 

In October of 1927 the Journal reported prayer for judgment for the shooter was continued for two years by Judge W.F. Harding. The paper reported Harding remarked from the bench, “Mr. Solicitor, you may get some judge to pronounce judgment in this case; but you will never get this one to do it.” 

The shooter, who entered a plea of guilty of an assault with a deadly weapon, offered testimony of his good character and witnesses who testified to the affair, in addition to letters the wife had written to the suitor. The latter lead the judge to remark “it appeared the wrong man was on trial.” 

The judge opined there was no statute the suitor had violated, but said the legislature should make provisions for such cases, as, the Journal reported, “as the law stands there is little left for an injured husband to do except use a shotgun. (The judge) asserted that this is one place in which our law falls down, and that he would like to issue a bench warrant for (the suitor), if there were a law under which be could be tried.

The paper goes on to note that the young businessman must have remained in business for many years, as their paper hosted ads for his store. The young suitor was never mentioned again. Apparently adultery was a much more serious matter in those days. 

The Herald ends with some musing on the state of society, which we always think is getting more violent.

It’s certainly been a long time since shots rang out on the streets of downtown Sylva, but given the drumbeat of other acts that flicker across our screens daily, the question often comes up if we’ve become a more violent society over time.

It is worth noting that the front pages relating the above incident also carried stories about a fight and shooting at the Glenville polling place, the murder of a man in the Southern Railway waiting room in Dillsboro, and an assault with a pistol with intent to kill Sylva Police Chief Allen Sutton.

Given that, the aforementioned question is one we’ll leave for sociologists and other experts to answer. 

UPDATE: I related this story to my wife, who expressed her opinion that the judge showed excellent sense and that the young businessman's conduct was entirely understandable. "Of course he has a genetically predisposition to react badly to another man stealing his mate," is how she put it. 

The story reflects what may be a culturally Appalachian or Scottish/Scots-Irish sentiment that such cases call for violence against the other man, but none against the woman. Violence by men against women is always wrong, I was taught when I was raised, almost regardless of provocation. Women could slap a man across the face to demonstrate displeasure, not in self defense against an actual threat; a man was not to respond in any way. I remember that I was quite shocked when I first heard Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger and discovered that the protagonist -- a preacher at that! -- actually killed both his wife and her lover. Yet I think that is a more common standard globally, and the restriction a cultural artifact that is probably fading as we move to emphasize the concept of equality in everything.

Controversial!

Out Wyoming way, there’s some upset. 

Although Wyoming Democrats are mad because Rep. Hageman called Kamala Harris a 'DEI hire,' Hageman said, “If you don’t want people to say she was hired only because she’s a black woman, then maybe Biden shouldn’t have said he was only gonna hire a black woman.”

Kind of a fair point, right? It’s not slandering her to point out that that was the condition her employer clearly stated was his criterion. If diversity hiring were improving things as advertised, people would be proud to be diversity hires. As it is, the chief advocates of the practice are generally outraged if you suggest they are one themselves. 

More on the Recent Riot

All that flag burning, police-assaulting, and so forth turns out to have an explanation. Only 29 officers were detailed when it was known that thousands of protestors were coming, and when it's well-known how they behave. Much as the Capitol Police were very understaffed on J6, on a day when it was likewise well-known that there would be a mass demonstration about an event happening right then inside the Capitol, force posture was arranged to be unusually weak. 

Those 29 officers did manage to make 10 arrests while being attacked. 

And what happened to those 10 protesters who the police successfully arrested after assaulting police? 

They're out already--released the SAME DAY. At least some of them. I am not clear whether they all were released, but this is Washington D.C., where the only crime is being a Republican. Some January 6th protesters were held in solitary confinement for over a year before they were even tried. 

It seems likely that policing in DC, like prosecuting in NYC and elsewhere, has become a political tool. It was desirable that there be riots on these days, to make Netanyahu look unwelcome within the United States (though he is more popular than many of our own politicians) or to make Republicans look like they were dangerous insurrectionists (though surprisingly few of the 'insurrectionists' brought guns to their 'insurrection'). 

Coincidentally, police force posture was set to be provocatively weak in the face of those two protests. 

On the prosecutorial side, punishment was harsh for the one side and evaporated against the other, to transmit whose rioting is welcomed in the service of the state. The one set of decisions seems likely to have been intentional; the other set inarguably was.

A Real Victory

The most valuable man in industry strikes a blow.

Elon Musk's SpaceX turned a smallbore squabble about an alleged unfair labor practice into a massive assault on the administrative state that could result in the entire enforcement structure of the National Labor Relations Board being declared unconstitutional.

Lots more like this!

That's A Bold Move, Cotton

Gretchen Whitmer made a strange claim today: that Kamala Harris "has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together." 

At first I couldn't understand what she thought she was talking about, since half of that ticket actually has four years of experience being President. That's like saying that the guy who spent four years being Battalion Commander, Deputy Commander at Brigade, and then Brigade Commander has less experience than the guys who've never been a commander at all. 

But she's making a much wilder claim than that.

“Kamala Harris in and of herself has more experience than the whole GOP ticket put together. They only have six years of public service experience, and I often point out to people, you wouldn’t go into brain surgery and ask for the freshest neurosurgeon out of medical school,” Whitmer said[.]

"Ladies and gentlemen, unlike our opponents, our candidate is a career politician." 

Here I thought the prosecutor thing was a dangerous ploy. Or Maybe Whitmer's trying to sabotage Kamala to keep her from being in the way in four years?

'Raise Hail & Praise Dale'

A metal-loving friend of mine recommended this album for its, ah, concept.

That Reminds me of a Joke

Apropos of the last two posts, a Jewish business associate of mine is visiting Asheville next week and wanted to meet up. In case he wanted to meet over a meal, and in case he keeps Kosher, I was trying to see if there are any Kosher restaurants in Asheville. Yelp suggested this one.

I don't know a lot about Kosher, but I do know that shellfish isn't on the list! It turns out there aren't any Kosher restaurants in Asheville, and not many Jews either -- the closest synagogue I know of is actually a Methodist church that loans itself out to them on Saturdays. The very small Jewish population has been around long enough that there's a Jewish section in one of the old segregated cemeteries near Hendersonville, but the population has never grown large. It's no surprise that there are no restaurants that go to the very substantial trouble of maintaining a Kosher kitchen -- you have to have a whole separate kitchen, as well as separate utensils and all the rest -- to cater to such a tiny populace. 

However, the Lobster Trap bit reminded me of a joke I read in a book by Isaac Asimov. I no longer have the book, but the joke goes approximately like this:

On the holiday of Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement, a synagogue's congregation sat waiting for their rabbi to turn up. He was late, and later, and still hadn't appeared well into lunchtime. In addition to being hungry, they were very worried that something had happened to him. So they began calling all around town to see if they could locate him or get word of what might have happened to him. 

Finally someone reported that he had been seen at a local seafood restaurant. The congregation went to find him, and discovered him eating a big plate of oysters. Looking on in horror, they exclaimed, "Rabbi! Rabbi! How could you do this, on today of all days?"

He looked at them quizzically and replied, "What? There's an 'r' in 'Yom Kippur.'"

Go, Roy Cooper

One of the things that needs to happen now is for the Democratic Party to pick a vice presidential candidate. A name that's being floated is my own governor Roy Cooper's. Now, I despise Roy Cooper. He governs as if he were deeply hostile to the western, mountainous part of the state, its culture and its heritage. (This is described in the article as "a moderate Southern leader.")

For example, one of the executive orders he has signed forbids the state DOT from maintaining right of ways or roads to private cemeteries. In the mountains, there are very many of these as hundreds of years of families' burials on ground within walking distance of homes and churches produced a vast quantity. In fact there's one within easy walking distance of my house, near where a preacher's cabin used to be. It used to be that, once a year when the church wanted to have a 'decoration day' for the cemetery -- and every year, the local churches tend to hold one for each of the many cemeteries on different Sundays -- the state would do one day of maintenance to make sure the way was passable. These decoration days are an important part of the local mountain culture in this part of Appalachia, but the governor decided that this traditional support would be eliminated so he could spend still more money down East where the cities are.

The thought of being governed by Kamala Harris and Roy Cooper is even less happy than the thought of being governed by Kamala Harris alone. 

However, as the article points out, this would tend to take him out of the state a lot; and it would make the Lieutenant Governor, who is a good guy, the acting governor. I'm hoping this might be a down payment on that same fellow becoming the actual governor following the upcoming election. 

So, you know, if it happens that he is chosen there's a definite silver lining.

'Our Enemies are Your Enemies'

In a long speech that was framed much like a State of the Union address, the Israeli Prime Minister addressed a joint session of Congress yesterday -- with Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, their party's leaders in each chamber, conspicuously absent. The overall thrust of the address was that the real enemy is America's enemy, and that Israel's enemies are also our own. 

“If you remember one thing, one thing from this speech, remember this: Our enemies are your enemies,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “Our fight is your fight. And our victory will be your victory.”

Iran, he said, wants to impose “radical Islam” on the world and sees the United States as its greatest enemy because it is “the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power.”

He argued that Iran-backed militias like Hamas, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, whatever their aggression against Israel, are actually fighting a different war.

“Israel is merely a tool,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The main war, the real war, is with America.”

It's definitely true that Iran has been about destroying America from its beginning, and that it aspires to turn the whole world to its brand of Twelver Shi'ite Islam, which can reasonably be described as a radical position within Islam (both Twelver Shi'ite views and the view that the entire world needs to be brought under that particular strain; the view that the whole world should convert to Islam is not especially radical, any more than the view among Christians that every person will someday confess the divinity of Christ). 

Normally, in American politics at least, the other side would attempt to rebut such a central claim. Not this time! This time they pulled down the American flags off Union Station's poles and burned them, ran up the flag of Palestine, carried the black flag of ISIS with signs stating that Allah was bringing about "the final solution" (supposedly while protesting against 'genocide'), burned effigies of both Netanyahu and Biden, attacked the police perimeter around the Capitol while successfully storming the Capitol (remember how fighting the Capitol Police and storming the Capitol on J6 was portrayed as an insurrection against America itself?), vandalized every American monument nearby and generally did all they could to underline the same point. 

So ok, maybe there's some reasonable argument to make that things would calm down if there was a ceasefire in the war -- at least for a while, until Hamas rearmed and was ready to start the war back up again on its own terms. There isn't, apparently, any real debate that the side Israel is fighting is also an enemy of America. They themselves would like you to know that, would like to demonstrate it as clearly as they can.

Helping your friends and harming your enemies was the account of justice that Plato's Republic attempted to rebut. However, one of the key rebuttals was that you might be mistaken about who your enemies are. At least in this case, it's hard to believe there's any mistake.

UPDATE: NPR: Protests “Largely Peaceful.”

Prosecutorial Discretion

Kamala Harris' introductory speech made a lot of her role as a prosecutor. She chose to paint herself as a prosecutor first in the public understanding of herself as a Presidential candidate in order to frame the race as a sort-of trial, with herself as prosecutor and Trump as 'convicted felon' defending himself against new charges.

I can understand why she (or her team) thinks that is a beneficial frame. Prosecutors enjoy a halo in the eyes of juries, one they definitely do not deserve given how much misconduct they engage in. Juries should be at least as skeptical of anything the government claims as anything defendants do; but the defendant stands accused, and the prosecutor is supposed to be the agent of justice. So too police who testify, for the same reasons.

All the same, it's a bold choice. Setting herself up that way sets her up to be knocked down by the same blows that killed her candidacy the last time. Her record as a prosecutor demonstrates that she is unworthy of any office.

 

Dad29 points out another case that didn't make Tulsi's list:

... “In 2003, a district attorney in San Francisco named Terence Hallinan was investigating Mayor Willie Brown’s friends. He was also investigating the priest scandal of sexual abuse in San Francisco, and that touched some very powerful institutions, including an elite prep school that involved the Gettys, Gov. Jerry Brown, etc. Their involvement with that school.”...

 ...“The priestly abuse scandal that was taking place, she never prosecuted a single case, Sean,” Schweizer added. “Of the 50 largest cities in America, San Francisco was the only one that that didn’t prosecute a single case, and she covered it up by deep-sixing documents that her predecessor had obtained. 

That by itself will be a damaging question to ask her; usually the priest-abuse scandal is a favorite of Democrats, as it undermines the Church's authority in favor of the State. Worse, it opens another question for public consumption: what was her relationship to Mayor Willie Brown? Pursuing that line of inquiry very deeply is impolite as well as vulgar, however; doubtless the ethical journalist will totally avoid it. 

“Go Back to Guarding Doritos”

I missed this line at the Secret Service hearing. The Daily Caller helpfully explains that her previous job was as the head of PepsiCo’s security. 

Fortunately the Secret Service has figured out the problem: Donald Trump should stop holding large outdoor rallies. Maybe he could campaign from his basement like Biden did. 

Secret Service Has No Radio from Assassination Day

How shocking, except that it somehow is always the case that the records were mysteriously lost or destroyed.

In fact remember how the Secret Service deleted text messages from two days around "January 6th" in spite of (because of) an Inspector General requesting them to preserve those records? 

"The Maidservant of Hillary Clinton, Queen of the Cabal of Warmongers"

Apparently Tulsi Gabbard, mentioned in the comments just below, wants another shot at Kamala. 

The reference to feudal titles reminds me of how Hillary received a coronation at the 2016 DNC, which was carefully structured to count none of the votes so as to suppress how closely she had run against Bernie Sanders. Actually the same was true in 2008, when Obama beat Hillary; the Clinton campaign had run an intense "count every vote!" effort against the Obama campaign, but at the DNC she agreed to not count any of the votes cast by primary election voters, but have Obama nominated by acclamation in return for being appointed his Secretary of State. Counting the votes is never important in a contested DNC.

The clear effort this year too is to avoid letting the delegates get the idea that they should vote independently. The primary election this year was aggressively managed to avoid giving voters an option except for Biden, excluding even Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from the Democratic primary so Biden would get all the delegates. Now that they need a new candidate, the attempt to endorse Kamala is to prevent any sort of a democratic process from being involved in the leadership succession. 

Coronations might be enjoyable spectacles for a certain sort of person -- even some Americans shamefully enjoy watching British royal pageantry, as if we hadn't expelled that by force of arms hundreds of years ago. They are neither American nor, especially, "Democratic" in character. It's shameful what the party has become that was founded by Jefferson and once housed great defenders of that old American ideal. 

Biden is out of the race.

New York Post. Biden endorsed Harris, as did the Clintons, but Obama and Pelosi rather pointedly did not.

Incoherent Thoughts

Instapundit gives the topline, where this person declares that she wishes the Trump assassin had been more accurate, but then immediately talks about how worried she is about political violence. 

But that's not the good part! The good part is that this person actually brought a crossbow to the protest in order to engage in violence if necessary. It's ok, though, because unlike evil firearms crossbows are "a much safer alternative" that are "only used for personal defense as an absolutely last resort." 

Somebody tell Pope Urban II. He appears to have been under a different impression. St. Sebastian likewise. 

The protestor goes on to claim that her hammer-and-sickle tattoo is a product of her having been born in the Soviet Union. So you know, it's not because of a commitment to worldwide socialist revolution -- i.e. political violence. No, that stuff is very scary. 

Approaches to Theology

I was planning on leaving off of theological speculation after last week's confessions, but the discussion -- and especially some thoughts provoked by Janet and Tex -- convinced me that it would be worthy to talk a little more about the broader issue of theology.

These are always contentious discussions, and partly the reason is that there are several different approaches that seem to lead to conflicting results. The first one is suggested by Janet: accept that God is so different from us that we can't really understand him at all. And yet even in that she makes some positive claims:

[W]e humans can't possibly understand God's ways. A worm understands more about your 401(k) investment strategy, than we understand about God's plan. To an unborn child, birth is a catastrophe, the end of everything he knows; but to us, we know that it's the start of something far greater, and the end of something that could not possibly go on any longer.

I would be very, very cautious about seeing "the hand of God" in anything other than your own life (and even that, mostly in retrospect). God is never doing just one thing, and further is primarily concerned with the salvation of individual souls rather than anything else.

"It's really hopeless" is not a happy claim, but it could be true without being happy. But it may not be functional even if it is true, as Kant said of determinism: even if you decide to believe that you have no free will and everything is determined by physics, the choice to make that decision about what to believe seems to be a free choice. You can't really function as someone who believes in determinism; every day you experience choices that you seem to make and need to reason about (e.g. 'should I have donuts for lunch, or something healthier?' doesn't seem to be deterministic; even if Krispy Kreme just opened across the street and makes donuts right at your lunchtime, it seems like you can at least occasionally decide to eat something else). Students and teachers like Nicholas of Cusa have gone a long way down this path of showing that God's infinity makes him fundamentally unknowable; I myself doubt whether infinity is a proper metaphor, because it seems to be a feature of creation rather than the uncreated. Still, many of Nicholas' basic points hold even if you say that infinity isn't a large enough concept, so to speak. 

Fortunately, you have another road you can choose, which is scripture. This seems to be the source of Janet's claim that God is principally interested in saving souls: it's not reasoned from nature, as we can't even prove the existence of souls from nature. Scripture provides a number of positive claims about God. For example, the prophecy of Ezekiel provides an extremely mysterious account of the chariot of God that Moses Maimonides wrote a book about interpreting. Such interpretations do tend to suggest that God takes sides for reasons of his own, as with Moses; we still may not always understand these reasons, as when he orders Joshua to engage in what seems like wholesale genocide. Sometimes people doubt at least some of the scriptures' authenticity, especially when it seems like an argument that God took one group's side over the other's; the scripture really does seem to say that, but it's out of order of deductions like those that begin the Declaration of Independence, i.e. that God loves everybody equally.

For Christians, scripture also includes an apparently easier path: Jesus as intermediary personhood, whom you can relate to directly as one human being to another (fully man and fully god, somehow). This point is raised by Tex; yet of course Jesus is not merely man, though fully man, and by nature exceptional and extraordinary, and thus a model that can't be expected to hold for the ordinary and normal. 

Still, it's attractive because then the path is not necessarily much harder than developing a relationship with another person, except that you only get to meet the person through scripture or as you imagine interactions through prayer. However, then you have the same problem as the mystic, who approaches God and knowledge of god through meditation: how much of what you are 'finding out about God' really is your imagination rather than a genuine encounter with the divine? I'm reminded of a favorite quote from the movie Ladyhawke, wherein the thief says to the knight, "Sir I talk to God all the time, and the truth is he never mentioned you." Yet at least in the movie, the thief was just trying to avoid an arduous and scary duty that really did lead to what the author depicts as prophecy and divine justice. 

You can try to test your imagination or meditations also against scripture, of course, to see that you're not getting too far astray. But we also have scriptural interactions with God the Father in the Old Testament, especially in the Book of Job. Job is actually full of a set of claims about God that I would say are characteristic of another major approach to theology, which is negative theology. Job, upset about all the misery inflicted upon him even though he has tried to live a just and faithful life, is confronted with evidence of things God is not: specifically, God does not share Job's limitations. Job can't hang the stars in the sky, or set the firmament on its foundations. We aren't really told anything about how God can do those things, so we don't really know much more about him: but we do know that there are ways in which God is different from us, and these are ways in which he lacks our limitations and instead possesses great powers. 

Job contains at least one passage, though, that suggests yet another approach to God. I have written before on several occasions about its description of the horse: 

Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

This is an interesting passage, though: because horses are like that, but only if men make them so. By pure nature, a horse will avoid any danger, and is scared like a grasshopper -- or of a grasshopper. The Lord's point in speaking to Job, if Job were the kind of man who could understand it, was that this is indeed what men do with horses.

We usually call this approach "natural theology." The basic idea is that you can learn about God from his works. It is possible to reason about the world that we do encounter, and here we find that God -- as authors of the rules of the world -- has set the basic moral structure of reality, which we can deduce. We can deduce it from the way the world works. This project was one that the Greeks were already working on when they encountered Christianity, and a lot of the machinery is Aristotelian. We can know what the virtues are because they are the qualities that fairly reliably produce good outcomes: self-discipline, mastery and moderation of appetites, courage, even justice because it helps us flourish among other people. Aristotle is clear that we should reason from what works 'always or for the most part,' because sometimes chance occurrences can create exceptions: the courageous man may usually save his life and carry the battle, but he might accidentally charge into an arrow he didn't see coming. The virtue still holds because it usually works out better for a person or a society to have it; chance is just when random things happen at the same time in a way that creates an unusual result. 

To bring this together with the horse, Aristotle argues that arts entail the perfection of what was left only partly perfected by nature. The horse's virtuous qualities that we encounter in Job are brought about by humans noticing the potential in the natural for these things, and then using art to bring them about and perfect them. In this way we are doing what J. R. R. Tolkien called subcreation: not a true act of creation of the sort that God can do, but a subordinate work on what we find in God's creation to make it a fuller realization of the qualities we have learned, also from the study of a nature that is God's creation, to be the virtuous and excellent ones. 

This creates conflicts with the other approaches. If God is so much more powerful and wise (Job), why didn't he create the things perfectly to begin with? Or perhaps he did, and we are screwing it up because our reasoning about his work is so inferior (Janet). But perhaps this is part of what God wants for us, and he does value our reasoning about his work as well as our own work; and in fact part of the point is that he wants us to do some of it (Tex).

Notice also the conflicts with reasoning from apparent miracles, which are places where what is ordinarily the usual course of actions is set aside for no obvious reason. To reason that Trump was protected by a miracle in the recent assassination attempt is to do exactly what Aristotle warned against: to reason not from what is 'always or usually' the case, i.e. where you can be reasonably sure that a Form is involved, but from wild chance exceptions. Maybe those just happen sometimes, and it is our error to find meaning in them.

Yet to bring us back around to the scriptural approach, it does seem like God gets involved sometimes, that he does take sides among men and among nations. Then miracles look like admissible evidence, if only we knew of what. 

That's the problem, all right

Nobody can force the powers that be to quit stonewalling and gaslighting. But their ability to keep it up has natural consequences that all their power can't prevent:

Given the lack of an adequate response from Biden administration officials and the public’s growing mistrust of the Biden FBI and Department of Homeland Security, people are looking at the timeline of the assassination attempt and drawing their own conclusions.

Look at what's happening in the polls as more and more people conclude these people are lying to us 24/7/365.