Elementary Arithmetic

Mom is chaperoning a trip to the Grand Tetons National Park for my niece’s school tomorrow. As a reward, the children of families who chaperone got to choose the groups. 

So tonight mom was complaining to another mom that Clio had made her life difficult by choosing a group of five with TWO boys in it, boys being unruly compared to little girls. 

“I did not!” my niece exclaimed. 

“You didn’t?”

“No,” said my niece. “I chose FOUR boys.”

The Yellowstone, Day II

We spent the morning in the northern section of the park, crossing Dunraven Pass a little after noon. 

The Yellowstone, Day I

Lower Falls of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, from Artist’s Point.

Leaving Eden

I've just thoroughly enjoyed a 2018 book by an author new to me, "Against the Grain" by James C. Scott. The author challenges the assumption that the great civilizations that sprang up after the dawn of agriculture improved things for anyone. Without romanticizing the hunter-gatherer life, he reports solid evidence bearing on the severe disadvantages of sedentary agriculture, and explores the considerable changes (including genetic) it wrought on the human race. He argues that sedentary agriculture succeeded for millenia before agrarian states arose. He draws a parallel between tax-collecting states and the surrounding barbarian civilizations engaged in what must be recognized as a protection racket. Both treated the farmers essentially as domesticated livestock and extracted as much as possible of the excess food they produce via the momentous replacement of hunter-gathering with sedentary cultivation.

Scott's prose is a pleasure. There is no tiresome hectoring against colleagues who might dispute his revisionism. He organizes his thinking clearly and makes a sustained argument with solid evidence and logic--something that shouldn't be rare in academic literature but sadly is. I'm off to read some of his other books, including one on anarchy, a subject he obviously has grappled hard with. It's no easy thing to construct a society that restrains people from seizing the results of other people's labor by force, rather than requiring us all to proceed by some form of consent.

Tetonia

Two of the three businesses are bars. 

Prophecy versus Psychological Warfare in Dune 2

On the long flight out here, I had time to watch Dune Part II. It’s different from the book in a number of conceptual respects. Most of these are predictable refusals by contemporary writers to honor the vision of their ancestor (and benefactor) where it defies their own ideals. The young are shockingly alienated from all human history. 

One place where an interesting dialogue develops, though, is in the film’s criticism of the Bene Gesserit. It’s interesting that the current generation would criticize the Bene Gesserit, since it represents a successful feminine wrenching of power from the male structures: the Emperor is really mastered by them, and the Guild hates them because it recognizes their power over the mental magics of the Spice. They successfully prevent the generation of a male who can do and be what Paul is for generations by controlling reproduction, seduction, bloodlines. 

But they do commit one sin against the mode of the young, and that is colonialism. They wage sexual war against all men, the Guild, the Emperor, and the Great Houses: well enough. But they also tell stories to the Fremen, and others, to colonize their minds. That’s where the film really gets sideways with them: colonizing a third world minority group to establish psychic control over them. 

There’s a subplot unique to the film in which worldly Northerners (Fremen!) reject the superstitions and fundamentalist religious beliefs of the Southerners (still Fremen!). The Southerners are totally captured by these religious forces, which the Northerners doubt. The conquest of Paul and Jessica of the minds of the Fremen is treated as a kind of hostile, manipulative psychological war. 

Yet it is also a prophecy, one that comes true at important moments in ways not in human control. Yes, Paul ‘knows the ways of the desert’ because worldly feminist Chani teaches him (‘we are equals, male and female,’ she says while submitting to Fremen social roles that silence women in sacred places). But Paul really does summon the Grandfather Worm, and rides him; you can make up a story about that, and tell it for generations, but ultimately it is up to the worm if he comes. 

It ends up leaving a question about how much of these Bene Gesserit tales were psychological warfare and how much were true prophecy. That is the road by which the divine gets in: however much the stories were lies, were colonialist modes of control, were wiles aimed at mastery, somehow the truth got in. Somehow, in spite of all attempts at manipulation and mastery, the tales were true for the Fremen after all. 

Up the Teton Canyon

I really enjoyed this hike last year, and this year my wife was able to come along. It was a beautiful day and a fine hike — praise the day at evening— and we had a wonderful time together. 

Facing into the canyon from above, you can see the peaks that you will be slowly approaching.

A panoramic view of the canyon from the junction with the Alaska Basin trail.

For Mike G.

The elk antler arches now stand at all four corners of the Jackson city square. A brass plaque explains that the antlers are collected after the shed by the local Boy Scouts, with many additional ones auctioned off for charity. 

One arch on the right, opposite the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar. Hank Williams, Jr. played there not long ago, and it has many artifacts from the great years of Outlaw Country as well as the Old West.

Another arch from inside the square. Today there was a busker playing Waylon Jennings outside it, which drew a donation from me.

LR1’s Fiction

In the comments below, longtime community member LittleRed1 offers access to stories. LR1 writes:

The series titles are tabs from the home page. History-based fantasy includes the Merchant series, which has been called "blue collar fantasy." The Familiars books are urban fantasy, Colplatschki is military sci-fi, and the Shikari series is "Kipling in space." ...

"Blackbird" in the Colplatschki series, and "The Lone Hunter" (Familiar Generations 1) are about heroic gentlemen (or "eventually become gentlemen") who are not perfect, but do their best.

Freedom

Wyoming. 

Scenes from Skyrim

Playing by Jenny Lake:

Bull Moose

UPDATE: Deer as well. 

Jackson Hole

Freegrazers

A fair amount of land out here is open range, and even when it’s not the law often protects freegrazers. These cattle on my sister and brother-in-laws acres are elements of two different herds that have wandered onto their land, jumping or pushing down fences as convenient to cattle. The owners know they’re wandering, but it’s apparently not a big deal here. 

I asked if they were allowed to lay claim to one as payment for eating their grass, but apparently that is a big deal. Rustling, I guess. 

UPDATE:

The Church Rocket War

Another religious custom I learned about today is the Easter rocket “war” on Chios. I learned about it because my mother is doing Friday homeschooling of my niece, due to the local school system going to a four-day week. She was going to teach a unit today on Greece because one of the neighborhood families is moving there; but being opposed to all forms of danger or risk, my mother was horrified by the inclusion of this subject in a children’s book. 

I was correspondingly delighted. It looks like a great time. 

The Laws of the Beautiful Captive

Because of the war, I’ve been paying attention to goings on in Israel. Thus I know what I would not normally know, that it is the holy month of the new year there, and that today’s Sabbath reading includes something called “the laws of the beautiful captive.”

I hadn’t heard of this, but it derives from an episode in Deuteronomy. Islam has a similar but much less kindly set of laws for women taken in war. The Greeks of the Homeric period exercised similar conduct, but with no clear restrictions; probably both of the religious standards represented a positive improvement in the treatment of captive women. 

Men, of course, were always killed in the bitter wars; or subjected to unrestricted slavery in the less bitter ones.

The rabbis who formalized the Torah apparently found the laws already uncomfortable, and suggest that they are a concession to the hardness of human nature. Interestingly to me, the Jewish article I cited above ends with a reflection on how the rabbinical commentary compares to the teaching of Jesus on divorce. 

A Rainy Day in Teton Valley

Reportedly there were bears about, but the horses and mule were so relaxed I knew that was old news. I did see a moose yesterday.

UPDATE:

The pot of gold appears to be right in front of the tire shop in Driggs, Idaho. 

More on Fantasy Fiction

The flip side of humanized orca is no real heroes. 

In my childhood, the nihilism that seems to be so common today wasn’t really a thing. We had grand adventures with heroes who might not have been perfect but were still heroes.

Today, we have a lot of fiction where no one is really the good guy. Rings of Power has been trying to humanize the orcs, making all the good races of Middle Earth darker than they were. Game of Thrones saw just about every truly heroic character killed while so many of the despicable characters lasted until the end.

To the West

I will be traveling to visit my family in the Tetons for the next two weeks. Hopefully I will have interesting experiences there. 

DOJ: Don't Be Removing those Fake Voters, Now

People in several states are cleaning up the voter rolls. In Georgia, fake names get added back in almost as soon as they're cleared out the first time.

After engineer and data scientist Kim Brooks worked on cleaning the voter rolls in Georgia for a year, she realized she was on a stationary bicycle. She’d clear a name for various reasons, dead, felon, stolen ID, living at a seasonal campground for twenty years, duplicate, moved out of state, 200 years old, etc., and back it would come within a month. At that juncture she realized that a program within the Georgia voter registration database was methodically adding back fake names.

She looked deeper. For new registrants, the culprit was principally Driver’s Services creating new registrations and in this case, the manufacturer was a person, or persons. Within the government office, someone was stealing names and duplicating, even tripling that person’s vote and then forging their signature.

The DOJ says such states had better be careful, and stop well before the election.

The Justice Department issued a warning to states Monday to tread lightly in trying to clean up their election systems of bogus names and ineligible voters, firing a shot across the bow of GOP-led states that have been trying to erase noncitizens from their rolls.... the department said federal law allows states to clean their rolls, but it must be done within strict guidelines and only for approved reasons such as a voter has moved out of the jurisdiction, has died or has requested removal.

Someone who has been inactive can be removed only after being notified and failing to show up for two more federal elections.

Changes cannot be made too close to an election.

All the way at the end of the article, you get an appreciation of the scale.

Voting rights groups argue that noncitizen voting is rare.

Republican state officials, though, say they’re finding plenty of evidence noncitizens have signed up.

Virginia said it removed 6,303 names of noncitizens from its rolls.

Texas, meanwhile, says it has culled 6,500 “potential noncitizens” from its rolls since 2021. That’s part of a broader purge of 1.1 million names, including 457,000 dead people, 463,000 inactive people, 65,000 who didn’t respond to notices and 134,000 who said they had moved.

Of the noncitizens, Texas said 1,930 had voted in elections before.

Two thousand in an election of millions is not a big deal, probably; but half a million dead people and half a million inactive names is a big deal when it's now standard practice to send out tons of mail-in ballots, and accept them without signature matching when they return.