Lunatic

That is what one of the NYT's top opinion authors is telling their readers about the new plan for price controls. Bret Stephens, in a conversation with Gail Collins:

The best thing that can be said about her promise to go after price “gouging” is that she knows it has no hope of passing and that she understands that every serious economist on the planet will warn her that the consequences of price controls would be shortages, hoarding and, soon enough, black markets. In fact, my only hope for Harris is that her agenda is for campaign purposes only and that she’ll become a normal Democrat once in office....

I just think that a vote needs to be earned, and so far Harris — unlike Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden — has done absolutely nothing to earn mine. She hasn’t won a primary. She hasn’t had a major legislative achievement of her own. She hasn’t had a distinguished vice presidency. Instead of moving to the center with her veep pick, she moved further to the left with Tim Walz. Her signature economic proposal isn’t liberal; it’s lunatic. 

Emphasis added. 

Long-time blogger Vodkapundit thinks the point of the proposal isn't to win with it, but to introduce the idea of a socialist takeover of the economy so that it won't seem so wild and strange later. That's possible, but the Times is not doing much to pad the idea here -- and as we saw last week, the other big establishment newspaper is heatedly against it.

The DNC is this week. We'll see how that goes.

"The Pro-Life Case for Kamala"

David French, performing the pro-Sauron maneuver.

Coyotes and Cowboys

McCoy

Most people have heard of Tom Mix, the cowboy movie star of the generation before John Wayne. You might not have heard of Tim McCoy, who did really cowboy in Wyoming before he was a star. He fled Jesuit school and hopped a train west, not knowing where he was going. 

It’s a great story. He cowboyed for eight years, including for the “Outlaw Train” that was reputed to steal and brand strays; met some of the remaining legends from the real Old West, including of the Hole in the Wall Gang; recruited cavalry for Teddy Roosevelt; and finally became a movie star. 

Almonds are much Bigger than you Expect

These things are the size of peaches, to which they are closely related. My wife and son planted some raw almonds and now we have a tree. 

The apples are doing well this year too. Not just ours; the other night at the concert I picked an apple off a nearby feral tree for my wife. She said it was delicious. 

Riding the Rain

Last night my wife and I rode over to a mountain town and heard a local band singing the old songs, then we rode back on the very edge of a severe thunderstorm. We made it home so close to the edge that while my wife got into the garage dry, I was soaked because I parked less than a minute after her. 

Tonight we just got caught in it. 

Sometimes you get rainbows out of these thunderstorms near dusk. That one last night was a visible double. 

The Conservative Case for Sauron

Conservative political thought can have limits, as when Aragon offered a revolutionary return of the king. It also seems to draw pretenders. 

We are the children of Numenor... but who truly brings us back to Numenor and its values? Is it the directionless Stewards? The absent kings? Or will it be the One who served directly under Ar-Pharazôn himself in Numenor’s Golden Age? Character matters: record matters too, and Sauron has one.

 One of each, as a matter of fact. 

On Temptation

I believe most of you regularly read AVI's page, but I would like to direct your attention to this post in particular. 

Progress!

We do now have a couple of economic proposals from the Harris campaign. The Washington Post was so upset about one of them that it attacked it in an editorial before she even gave the speech announcing it.

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad this policy is. It is, in all but name, a sweeping set of government-enforced price controls across every industry, not only food. Supply and demand would no longer determine prices or profit levels. Far-off Washington bureaucrats would. The FTC would be able to tell, say, a Kroger in Ohio the acceptable price it can charge for milk.

At best, this would lead to shortages, black markets and hoarding, among other distortions seen previous times countries tried to limit price growth by fiat....

If your opponent claims you’re a “communist,” maybe don’t start with an economic agenda that can (accurately) be labeled as federal price controls. 

Transparency and public criticism. That's nice to see in the papers for a change.

The other one is a help-first-time-housebuyers-with-free-money scheme, which is drawing a lesser degree of fire but still reminds people of the global financial crisis of 2007-8 that was fueled by the collapse of subprime mortgage securities. That likewise began with a government push to make the market work with people who really couldn't afford what they were buying.

They also included price controls, of course: 

The rent caps are the “ugly” part of Harris’ plan, said Lanhee Chen, director of domestic policy studies at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and a past CNN opinion contributor who worked on campaigns for Republicans, including Utah Senator Mitt Romney.

“What is effectively a federal rent-control measure … was a bad idea when President Biden proposed it a few weeks ago,” said Chen. 

The pretty part? Repurposing public lands for housing. I wonder how well 'developing the national parks into cheap housing tracts' will poll? 

UPDATE: The W. Post follows up its pre-speech editorial by a single author with a full-fledged editorial from its entire board condemning the Kamala plan as unserious "gimmicks." 

More Scottish Geology

Around the time of "Snowball Earth," what is now Scotland was near the equator. As such, an outcropping of rocks from the Inner Hebrides may have the best surviving geological record of that period, after which animal life emerged.

Clues hidden in rocks about the freeze have been wiped out everywhere - except in the Garvellachs. Researchers hope the islands will tell us why Earth went into such an extreme icy state for so long and why it was necessary for complex life to emerge.

The relevant island is uninhabited except for researchers. 

Range War

Let's say your ancestors put up a fence 75 years ago, and your neighbors never said anything about it in all that time. So you put up a 'No hunting/trespassing' sign on the fence, some hunter comes by and sees it, and complains about it because he has permission to hunt on your neighbor's land and he thinks your fence is in the wrong place. You and your neighbor get together and agree to survey the land and determine where the boundary really is, and move the fence if necessary.

Then your neighbor sends an armed man to threaten you with ten years in prison.

A South Dakota ranch couple is fighting federal indictments served to them by a U.S. Forest Service agent who allegedly showed up unannounced on their front steps — armed and in tactical gear. The agent was there to serve them with indictments in a modern-day range war between the ranchers and feds.

“It’s is stressful, financially and mentally. It’s something nobody should have to go through,” rancher Charles Maude of Caputa, South Dakota, told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday.

He and his wife Heather, who is a Wyoming native, were served with separate federal grand jury indictments June 24, for alleged theft of government property. The government claims the fence put up by the ranchers is over a boundary with federal grasslands.

The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

If it sounded to you like they had a good-faith agreement that shouldn't be occasion for indictments, it sounds that way too to some retired rangers the paper interviewed about it. 

[T]he situation in South Dakota might have been one in which the old standard of a “common sense, reasonable interaction” would have been more effective — and not left the Forest Service looking bad, he said.

Brauneis said that in the wake of what happened in South Dakota, and similar incidents eroding the Forest Service’s relationship with the public, some soul-searching might be in order for the agency.

To illustrate how things used to work, he recalled an incident from his career... “I drove out to talk to the land owner who was an elderly lady. She invited me in and we had coffee. I explained what happened and she understood,” he said.

“We concluded that if we burned the slash on her property along with ours and planted trees the same as on forest that we were all good to go,” Brauneis said. “We shook hands and I left. Old-school community in a Christian culture.”

Another ranger they spoke to wasn't surprised, and said he would have expected the agency to send armored vehicles and a dozen agents to deliver the indictments. The culture of the agency has changed, he said.

Admission of Limits

There's only so much a man can do.

Orcadian Stonehenge

A fingerprint of the Altar stone proves that it came from Scotland, not Wales as long thought. 

Viking Age Costs

A new interpretation of a Viking Age runic inscription tells us some things about costs and fines.

The new interpretation shows that the Vikings had a system where both oxen and silver served as units of payment. This system allowed for multiple types of units of accounts to be used concurrently, reducing transaction complexity and making it easier for people to meet their financial obligations. The new interpretation also aligns better with how the system functioned later according to later regional laws and is, according to Rodney Edvinsson, significant for our understanding of both Scandinavian and European monetary history.

"As an economic historian, I particularly look for historical data to be economically logical, that is, to fit into other contemporary or historical economic systems. The valuation of an ox at two ore, or 50 grams of silver, in 10th-century Sweden resembles contemporary valuations in other parts of Europe, indicating a high degree of integration and exchange between different economies," says Rodney Edvinsson.

A human thrall was six times as expensive, if you're keeping score at home. 

Jealous

I’m not myself; I have complete faith in my wife of 25 years. Some are though. 

Faker Fake News

The news headlines you see may be written by political campaign operatives rather than editors. 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign team has been quietly editing news headlines in Google search ads to make it seem like major news outlets are on her side, according to a report.

The altered headlines — appearing on Google ads and paired with a “Paid for by Harris for President” banner — were changed without the news outlets’ knowledge, Axios reported Tuesday.

Nearly a dozen publishers were swept up in the faux headline campaign, including major companies like the Guardian, Reuters, CBS News, the Associated Press and PBS.

This is an amazing scandal because the news is already so deeply on her side that there's no need for it. Let's do a quick review of Google News' headline aggregator. There are five stories about Trump, all of them negative, highlighting his weaknesses and losses; one of them compares his appeal to Harris', casting his as "old" and "White," while painting her vibrantly as youthful and energetic.

There are four stories about Harris, all of them either positive or actively defensive of her where she needs help. Two of them are 'fact checks' by the press intended to correct storylines they think are hurting her; one of them uncritically quotes her aides to defend her lack of specifics on her economic/climate plans. 

All of the major papers seem to be reporting on polls that show Harris tied or ahead; I dug into the crosstabs of the NYT poll that found her four points ahead and found that it assumed a +3 Democratic advantage was natural in those states, and the margin of error was +/-5.1. The assumption that Democratic turnout will beat Republican turnout by three points is doing almost all the work, in other words; and even then it's within the margin of error. But it turns it into a 'She's got momentum!' headline, so it's everywhere.

Yet in spite of this atmosphere of complete support and devotion, her campaign isn't satisfied until they actually get to rewrite media headlines to be even more in her favor. That seems like a lack of confidence to me, perhaps a sense that there's really nothing holding up the magic carpet they're floating upon.

An Edgy Joke

I heard an Australian comedian tell the following joke, and actually laughed out loud at the punchline. It's the sort of humor that's right on the edge of what we allow these days; I suspect many of the folks who object to humor that touches on protected racial/ethnic/sexual minorities would want you not to tell it. For that reason, I'll put it after the jump, so you only have to read the joke if you want to do so. Then I'm going to talk about why I think it's a good joke, and a joke that's reasonable to tell even in this environment.

Blogger Comments

Google is being a real pain. I can’t comment myself half the time. It really hates VPNs right now; if I turn mine off long enough to post the comments they usually work.

It also seems to hate Windows. My iPhone seems to work better. 

I checked for comments wrongly and automatically marked spam yesterday and didn’t find any new ones. 

Aristotle, Tyranny & Today Part I

Tom expressed several of Aristotle's political points on tyranny in the comments to a recent post. Thoughtful people on both sides of the political aisle are thinking about Aristotle's account of tyranny; the above video was posted on Facebook by a left-leaning retired academic I know, and generated a discussion of how well Trump fits the model Aristotle described. 

Imperfectly, actually, but there are some qualities that do apply. For example, Aristotle says that tyrants use 'the meanest group of people as leaders' to avoid challenges from within, and Trump historically has empowered some pretty low-class people like his former lawyer (the one who later confessed to perjury, but on whose sole testimony was Trump convicted of all those 'felonies'). He's also accepted leaders from within the group of his enemies, though, which was probably his single biggest mistake from his first term.

Perhaps he's learning on that score? Vance is a fairly strong choice with a genuine intellectual center (a point unrecognized by these left-leaning academics, for whom his intellectual influences are déclassé, a quality they confuse with stupidity). On the other hand, Trump outright rejected Heritage Foundation Project 2025's collection of cleared people who could work for his administration and had the right values and temperament. That could mean that he is rejecting qualified people in preference to ones he can control; or it could suggest he does not trust anyone in DC, even on the right. It will have to be seen if he is better on personnel choices than previously.

What is likely obvious to readers of this blog is how well Aristotle's account fits the establishment -- except that the establishment is definitely not a tyranny on Aristotle's terms, because there isn't a single ruler. It is an oligarchy, where even the President is now a figurehead (and that will certainly remain true if Ms. Harris should succeed to the office, as she has no accomplishments of her own: she will also be a puppet). Rule is being exercised extra-constitutionally by a group of people who were never elected to the relevant office. 

I am going to put further reading, from the left side of the conversation, after the jump. In a second post I will later do an analysis of both positions and try to summarize where I think they are right and wrong.

The Outlaw Saloon

This is a charming review of Dubois, Wyoming's best dive bar, as well as the other bar. I've been to the Outlaw Saloon and it is described much as I remember it. I liked the place. I never went in the other one. 

In just about a month I'll be back out West to visit my mother and sister, if any of you will be in the Wyoming/Idaho border region. Thos., I remember that you live out there. I'll be around for a couple of weeks.