They'd Do It Here Too

Black-clad agents from the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, Sebin, were seen smashing their way inside. They carried guns and a picture of the 19-year-old law student they had come to arrest. López was bundled into a vehicle as panicked relatives looked on. 

 “Neighbours came out to try and protect her but they pointed their weapons at them and took the girl,” said the witness, asking to remain anonymous for fear of suffering a similar fate.

Keep your rifle by your side. It's the only thing that keeps you free. Our politicians aren't any better than theirs.

High Stakes Gambling

FPC asks SCOTUS to explain whether there is or is not a 2A right to own an AR-15.

There is, according to the logic of all three major SCOTUS decisions on the subject. US v. Miller held that arms are protected insofar as they have a militia quality, and the AR-15 is the most suitable militia rifle due to its commonality in parts and ammunition with the military service rifle(s), as well as the ability of almost every Marine or Soldier to train citizens in its effective use. Heller holds that we have a right to common weapons used for legal purposes; the AR-15 is the most common of all rifles, and rifles account for only around 2% of gun crimes. Bruen holds that tradition matters, and the AR-15 has traditionally been lawful for citizens in most of the country.

It's high stakes, though. Thomas authored a concurring opinion holding that any ban of America's favorite rifle should draw Constitutional review; but he's the only one on the record.

An End to Night

I kind of like night, though. This project would let the rich decide if we get to have it.

“I had an interesting way to solve the real issue with solar power. It’s this unstoppable force,” Nowack said in the interview. “Everybody’s installing so many solar panels everywhere. It’s really a great candidate to power humanity. But sunlight turns off. It’s called nighttime. If you solve that fundamental problem, you fix solar everywhere.”

The company’s orbital mirror is set to launch in 2025, and you can “apply for sunlight” for the next few months. There’s “limited availability,” and already supposedly over 30,000 applications. It really just sounds like a one-time test, though: you only get four minutes for a diameter of 5km. No price is listed.

An Interesting Summary of Today's Division

Tom Klingenstein recently interviewed political philosopher* Glenn Ellmers about the state of the West today. In one of his responses, Ellmers gives what I think is a good summary of the current political division not only the in the US but in the West in general. I don't think there's much here that's new to the regulars here, but the clear summary of a division that is often put in more vague and ambiguous terms is worthwhile, I think.

There is a long and interesting story about how the Left got to this point, which can be traced to modern philosophy becoming more and more radical. Again, it is extremely useful, practically speaking, to study these matters. The point is that, apart from the apolitical or undecided people in the middle, we have two diametrically opposed factions in the United States today — whose differences are basically theological. One side still believes in traditional morality and the importance of the family, in the founder’s Constitution, and the idea that we are born into a world we didn’t create and can’t completely control. That is a world governed by the laws of nature and nature’s God, which means we are limited and guided by human nature, which is fixed. 

The woke Leftists reject all that in the name of complete individual freedom and total personal autonomy, without any limits imposed by God or nature or anything else. The role of the government, for them, is to facilitate the ability of everyone to meet their own subjective view of personal fulfillment. The whole architecture of racial grievances, group preferences, and white privilege is directed to removing the barriers imposed by racism, western colonialism, toxic masculinity, etc., which stand in the way of complete personal autonomy.

This deep, theological division is not confined to the United States. Look at the recent opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics. It included a mockery of the Last Supper, with drag queens and transvestites standing in for Jesus and the Apostles. And there was a rider “on a pale horse” — a clear celebration of death from the Book of Revelation. This had nothing to do with sports or athletics, so what was the point? Why do the Olympics have to become a celebration of radical sexual autonomy?

How you respond to this will depend on which basic view of the world you have. And this division — between the older morality and the new celebration of unbounded personal expression — can be seen all over the world. There is an emerging global elite, motivated by a radical ideology, that wants to eliminate the rule of the people in every nation. This is the great battle of our time. 

It's interesting that he sees it as a conflict between theologies. He doesn't explain what he means by that, and I wonder how he defines theology.

*Update: I tried to find an email address for Ellmer and discovered his PhD was in political science. I think I just inferred he was a philosopher from the topics he writes about.

Plato on Tyrants and the US Today

In a previous post we discussed how relevant Aristotle's Politics were today. In the following video on Plato's idea of the tyrant, I feel again that the professor is describing the US today to a striking degree.

The presenter is Daniel Bonevac, professor of philosophy at UT Austin.

Christmas

They saw the mighty angel of God coming toward them. He spoke to the guards face to face and told them they should not fear any harm from the light. "I am going to tell you," he said, "something very wonderful, something very deeply desired. I want to let you know something very powerful: Christ is now born, on this very night, God's holy child, the good Chieftain, at David's hill-fort. What happiness for the human race, a boon for all men! You can find Him, the most powerful Child, at Fort Bethlehem.

Beginning to Get It

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 1

The 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.

If I fle out tomorowe

Fre Bird -- The first version I've ever actually liked.

Since we're here ...

Crest of the Pisgah Ridge

 

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.

https://x.com/Geiger_Capital/status/1825966620482683084

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 done

By 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 there

Was 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.)