Nice to see the light coming on.
It Is Saturday
According to Military.com, the Navy has run out of pants.
Since we're here, Don McMillan seems like a comedian some of us can relate to.
Update: McMillan has a short skit on pi that's great.
The Heliand
Occasionally in this space I have cited "Lean Times in Lankhmar" by Fritz Leiber, a delightful story of how two companion heroes fall away from each other in hard times. One of them joins a religion, a lightly-fictionalized early Christianity. Being himself a heroic barbarian skaldic poet, he begins to adapt the story a bit.
As delivered over and over by Fafhrd, the History of Issek of the Jug gradually altered, by small steps which even Bwadres could hardly cavil at had he wished, into something considerably more like the saga of a Northern hero, though toned down in some respects. Issek had not slain dragons and other monsters as a child—that would have been against his Creed—he had only sported with them, swimming with leviathan, frisking with behemoth, and flying through the trackless spaces of air on the backs of wivern, griffin and hippogryph. Nor had Issek as a man scattered kings and emperors in battle, he had merely dumbfounded them and their quaking ministers by striding about on fields of poisoned sword-points, standing at attention in fiery furnaces, and treading water in tanks of boiling oil—all the while delivering majestic sermons on brotherly love in perfect, intricately rhymed stanzas.
Leiber was well-educated enough to know that such a translation had actually been performed by an ancient Saxon poet, and this volume is the result: the Heliand. I came across a copy today at a used scholarly bookstore, much to my delight, and purchased it immediately. I fell in love with the opening lines:
Song 1The Creator's spell, by which the whole world is held together, is taught to four heroes.There were many whose hearts told them that they should begin to tell the secret runes, the word of God, the famous feats that the powerful Christ accomplished in words and deeds among human beings. There were many of the wise who wanted to praise the teaching of Christ, the holy Word of God, and wanted to write a bright-shining book with their own hands, telling how the sons of men should carry out His commands. Among all these, however, there were only four who had the power of God, help from heaven, the Holy Spirit, the strength from Christ to do it. They were chosen. They alone were to write down the evangelium in a book, and to write down the commands of God, the holy heavenly word. No one else among the heroic sons of men was to attempt it[.]
I am really going to enjoy reading this book.
UPDATE: Within a page, there's a tremendous insight given in a footnote. The four heroes -- Luke, Mark, Matthew and John -- have the Holy Spirit implanted in their hearts so they can "chant God's spell." The footnote to this reads, "godspell, God's speech, gospel," and notes that in the Anglo-Saxon this is naturally either "God's word" or "good speech" or "a good spell" or "God's spell." In the thought and the language of the heroic era of the poem, these concepts blend together naturally.
UPDATE: This is so good. "In Jerusalem, Herod was chosen to be king over the Jewish people. Caesar, ruling the empire from the hill-fort Rome, placed him there -- among the warrior-companions -- even though Herod did not belong by clan to the noble and well-born descendants of Israel. He did not come from their kinsmen."
A White Stout
In spite of the light color, this is a stout. It’s the Whiteout Breakfast Stout Ale, with strong coffee flavors as well as maple and bacon. Delicious.
Kind of a dog-friendly place.
Decolonizing: What Does it Mean?
A pair of articles consider the issue, via the always-valuable Arts & Letters Daily.
For those of you who liked Tom's videos the other day, they also have an article on Chaucer.
An Amusing Moment
Hot Air covers the withdrawal of RFK from swing states and his endorsement of Trump over the Democrats:
Kennedy accused American media outlets of colluding with both the DNC and government agencies on censorship. It's a "naked exercise of executive power" against its political opponents, and told reporters in the room that they and their employers are responsible for the decline of American democracy as a result."Governments don't censor lies," Kennedy observed. "They don't fear lies. They censor the truth."...Fun fact: almost all of the US media outlets cut their live coverage after he accused them of participating in government censorship.
UPDATE: A transcript of his speech. Sadly, some these words are important and momentous rather than the wild ravings they would have appeared even a few years ago.
President Biden mocked Vladimir Putin's 88% landslide in the Russian elections, observing that Putin and his party controlled the Russian press and that Putin prevented serious opponents from appearing on the ballot.
But here in America, the DNC also prevented opponents from appearing on the ballot, and our television networks exposed themselves as Democratic Party organs. Over the course of more than a year in a campaign where my poll numbers reached at times in the high twenties, the DNC-allied mainstream media networks maintained a near-perfect embargo on interviews with me.
During his 10-month presidential campaign in 1992, Ross Perot gave 34 interviews on mainstream networks. In contrast, during the 16 months since I declared, ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN combined gave only two live interviews from me.
Those networks instead ran a continuous deluge of hit pieces with inaccurate, often vile pejoratives and defamatory smears. Some of those same networks then colluded with the DNC to keep me off the debate stage....
This week, a federal judge, Terry Doughty, upheld my injunction against President Biden, calling the White House's censorship project, quote, "The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."
Doughty’s previous 155-page decision details how just 37 hours after he took the oath of office, swearing to uphold the Constitution, President Biden and his White House opened up a portal and invited the CIA, the FBI, CISA—which is a censorship agency, it's the center of the censorship-industrial complex—DHS, the IRS, and other agencies to censor me and other political dissidents on social media.
Even today, users who try to post my campaign videos to Facebook or YouTube get messages that this content violates community standards. Two days after Judge Doughty rendered his decision this week, Facebook was still attaching warning labels to an online petition calling on ABC to include me in the upcoming debate.
Unrealized Gains
Another item of economic instability under discussion is a tax on 'unrealized capital gains,' which is apparently in the Biden budgetary proposals that have been more or less uncritically adopted by the Harris campaign.
It reminds me of the story about a poor student tenet in Paris who was sued by a nearby restaurant's chef because he had been subsisting on his poor food more comfortably because of the incredible smells from the restaurant, for which he had provided no compensation. The judge is supposed to have agreed that the chef deserved compensation, and had the student shake the coins in his pocket. "You have been paid for the smell of your food," he said to the chef, "with the sound of his money."
That's the only way something like this could work. Markets go up and down. If my house is worth a lot more now than when I bought it, nevertheless I sunk money into it six years ago and have gotten no money out of it. I couldn't pay you for its appreciation, but even if I somehow managed to send the IRS a sufficient check to cover it, the market could crash next year. So now I've paid taxes on money I not only never received, but in fact will never receive. I should be able to pay these taxes with the sound of my money, since there's no actual money involved.
As the guy at the link points out, nobody seems to be trying to defend the idea; the ones on their side just laugh and say it'll never happen, so don't worry about it. This also reminds me of a joke, of sorts: the law of merited impossibility. "That'll never happen, and you'll deserve it when it does."
Nicole Shanahan and Political Sabotage
This is part of a Twitter interview with RFK Jr's vice-presidential running mate Nicole Shanahan. Her description of the different ways the Democratic Party sabotaged their campaign is rather shocking, at least to me.
Elitist Philosophy
Here is a study of to what degree belonging to a wealthy family correlates with your likelihood of being cited in key academic journals. This is studied in two ways: whether you come from a family that has risen in wealth over recent generations or not ("intergenerational persistence"), and whether you were able to rise to the same rank within the profession as your mentor professor ("rank-rank correlation"). Those who went to Ivy League schools are much more likely, for example, to attain full professorships than those who went to state schools. In some fields, if you didn't go to one of the top schools (and thus probably come from a wealthier background) you really have little chance of ever obtaining tenure.
Unsurprisingly, it depends on your field, with harder sciences tending to cite papers from academics or give them good jobs regardless of whether they are also from the rich.
There are some surprising lessons, though.
Philosophy is far and away the worst on both measures. If your terminal degree didn't come from one of those top schools, you probably will never have tenure; there's too much competition from those who did, and too few jobs in the field to exhaust the supply of Ivy Leaguers who want to teach. Likewise, the major philosophers as measured by citation form a sort of club, one that is sensitive to social class.
Note that mathematics is not too far away. To some degree, this may reflect that the wealthy are more likely to choose a pure knowledge field rather than one that will improve their station in life -- mathematics you'd think would be a field like microbiology where hard, demonstrable results mattered most. But maybe you don't usually study pure math (or philosophy) if your family is struggling. You'd go into engineering of some sort if you were good at math and needed social mobility.
I'm also surprised to see that Experimental Psychology falls where it does. I'm guessing that's a product of the replication crisis that is often tied to that field in particular: the ease of relative nobodies to get cited if they at least studied under somebody known suggests that the field is open to new ideas and ready to publish them. Since this study covers 2000-2013, when the crisis was in full effect, being positioned on that side of the graph may not always be an unalloyed good even if it's also a measure of relative equality of opportunity.
Heron on the Tuck
A Great Blue Heron joined us for tonight’s walk by the Tuckasegee River.
They’re frequently seen on the Tuck.
Undermining the Ground of Rebellion
This morning I was watching a short part of this video from a rally involving bikers in favor of Trump. Just below four minutes in, this guy plugs his new song: "It's about faith, family, and freedom."
Now that surprised me because I know that guy and his band from way back in 2003 when they were new. The band is called the Moonshine Bandits, and their first album is the only one I have ever heard, because the fusion of hip-hop and country -- new back then and novel -- didn't prove to be interesting enough to me to continue with over time. That debut album was not about "faith" or "family," although it was about freedom in the sense of rebellion. Here's the new song if you want to hear it. Apparently the pressure against faith, freedom, and family has come to alarm the rebels and called them back to a defense of the flag.
The case isn't unique, though. I remember that a couple of years ago Sonny Barger of the Hells Angels had died at age 83. "Barger is less well known for his more recent life, but if you followed him more recently you'd have found that in his older years he became a devout Christian and helped to publish a series of charming children's books." Faith and family, again, as well as freedom.
I wonder how much of this has to do with the fact that this mode of rebellion is ironically grounded in the culture against which it rebels. To be a Hells Angel is to be rooted in a universe that has both Hell and angels. Trying to sweep away their metaphysical world -- to imagine there's no heaven -- undermines even the rebel's view: indeed, it suggests that mode of rebellion is perhaps a safety valve of the culture, a way of making a home within itself for its outlaws, rather than an attempt to supplant or replace it.
Or possibly it is the dynamic at play in Sir Walter Scott's "Harold the Dauntless," which has this most excellent opening passage:
List to the valorous deeds that were doneBy Harold the Dauntless, Count Witikind's son!Count Witikind came of a regal strain,And roved with his Norsemen the land and the main.Woe to the realms which he coasted! for thereWas shedding of blood and rending of hair,Rape of maiden and slaughter of priest,Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast:When he hoisted his standard black,Before him was battle, behind him wrack,And he burned the churches, that heathen Dane,To light his band to their barks again.
The poem's story is that Witikind grows old and converts from the heathen path to the Christian one, causing his son to disown him as cowardly; but then, over the course of six cantos, Harold in turn becomes mature enough to see the wisdom of it. What seemed right to Sonny Barger in 1969 and the Moonshine bandits in 2003 may have faded with age, and the spiritual promises seem brighter as the physical eye dims.
Or, perhaps, it is not that: even in 1980 when they were assembling a documentary involving a lawyer for the Angels, he and his lawyerly companions noted their conservative ethics.
There was Hells Angels Forever on YouTube, and at 29 minutes in, there was my father.He is seated with Herman Graber at a conference table in their office: soft, heavy men in wide ties and long sideburns. Herman explains to the camera not to be fooled by the swastikas and Nazi regalia, that the Angels are patriots, enthusiastic supporters of the Vietnam War, what you might in fact call right-wingers. He pauses, blinks, concerned that he might have gone too far. “But not fascists, no, I’m not saying they’re fascists.”My father cuts in. “Perhaps best suited to the most conservative wing of the Republican party — the Goldwater wing.”
It is and always has been an interesting dynamic. I noticed it too growing up in the South in the '70s and early '80s, when the most ardent Confederate flag displayers and Outlaw Country listeners were also firm patriots who loved Ronald Reagan. Charlie Daniels went from long hair to distrusting Gorbachev in a few years' time.
RFK
I don't listen to podcasts, but I did read in the paper that Joe Rogan got into some trouble with Trump over positive comments about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
What he actually said was this:
“That’s politics. They do it on the left. They do it on the right. They gaslight you, they manipulate you. They promote narratives,” Rogan said on the podcast.“The only one who’s not doing that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I am a fan [of RFK Jr]. He’s the only one that makes sense to me. He doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas. He’s much more reasonable and intelligent.”
That's very similar to my own thoughts on RFK. I've listened to him talk about several problems he thinks we need to address, and what I notice is that about half the time he is thoughtful, intelligent, and sincerely trying to solve the problem. (Sadly the other half of the time it's brain worms and dead bear cubs, but he's a Kennedy.)
It's also clear that he is enamored of his father's America, and his father's Democratic Party, which is doubtless why the current Democratic leadership had such a convulsive allergic reaction to him. They cannot praise JFK, hardly more than they can praise Jefferson or Jackson, because of his 'imperialism' and certainty that the American nation was a positive influence on the world, and capable of internal reform even in matters of race if only we would appeal to its inherent decency. RFK is a genuine patriot of the old America, and that's not welcome right now among Democrats.
RFK now says he's thinking of dropping out and endorsing Trump to prevent a Harris presidency -- perhaps due to the communism that JFK was himself so committed to opposing -- and Trump has signaled that he'd be open to brining RFK into his administration. (Also Elon Musk.)
I don't know if a restoration of mid-century solutions and ideas about what America is like and how it should proceed can actually improve things at this point. America was already committed to the managerial/administrative state by Kennedy's time, and dismantling all that should be the chief business of any attempt at reforming the United States.
Still, it is nice to hear someone talk through problems, identify causal factors, and then propose solutions that might actually work. It certainly couldn't hurt to have someone like that around to talk things through with while trying to figure out the way. (Ditto for Musk.)
The Principle of Reproductive Freedom
In the comments to yesterday's post, I mentioned the reframing of the abortion debate with the term "reproductive freedom." It's distinct from both pro-life and pro-choice because it eliminates any mention of the child.
Abortion for Harris/Walz doesn't consider the existence of the child at all. They frame it as purely an issue of reproductive freedom, one into which the child and the child's life does not rightly come as any sort of consideration. It's a more unrestricted liberty for them than the first amendment's, which Walz says doesn't apply to people who are spreading 'hate speech or misinformation,' certainly more than the second's, and based on Ms. Harris' prosecutorial days, more than the fourth, fifth, sixth, or eighth. It's the only genuinely unrestricted Constitutional liberty in their opinion; I notice it's also the one the Constitution doesn't protect or mention at all.
Today Reason makes note of the striking contrast between a party which is espousing a pro-family agenda, and one that is featuring vasectomy and abortion vans outside its convention hall. (The schedules for those vans filled up well before the convention began, too.)
Yet the principle of reproductive freedom doesn't have any enemies. The most devout Catholic agrees that no one should be forced into pregnancy; the Church opposes rape and teaches how to track ovulation cycles as a way of achieving that freedom.* This method may not be foolproof, but it is aligned with the principle that it's perfectly fine to want to be in control of one's reproduction or lack thereof. There is no group in America that opposes the principle being advocated.
What does concern some people is that business about the life of the child. That there is a living human being who is killed by an abortion is incontestably true as a matter of fact. That this killing is morally significant and shouldn't be excluded from the discussion of how to exercise this right of reproductive freedom is apparently controversial; but it's surely a reasonable position that killing a living human being is morally significant, and therefore deserves consideration in constructing any relevant ethical position.
We are a long way from the 1990s, when abortion advocates appended a desire that abortion be rare to their desire that it should be safe and legal. We are at the point at which the debate threatens to slide past a recognition that there is any issue at all about the necessary killing here, pitting a principle that everyone accepts against... well, nothing. On this formulation there is really nothing to oppose the right, because even the strongest pro-life advocate doesn't reject the principle being asserted; they were only concerned about the life. If the life is no longer a consideration, there's really nothing to discuss.
* The Church also teaches men reproductive freedom via chastity until marriage, which is in fact the most effective way for men to assert it. The principle of reproductive freedom doesn't extend to men on the left, as they have no parallel capacity to engender a child and then reject it in the way that abortion allows.
A Message from Harley-Davidson
Still, a start.
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.
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.
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