We Don't Task By Email

When I was in Iraq, periodically somebody at higher headquarters would send an email down and then act offended when the unit in the field didn't get right on it as if it had been an order. Military orders between units follow a formal procedure, and are issued (usually as a 'FRAGO,' or 'fragmentary order' that updates a larger OPORD, or 'operations order') according to formal processes. So issued by the higher headquarters' operations officer, and signed by the commanding officer of that unit, it is a legally binding order that must be obeyed. An email from some staff officer to someone at a subordinate unit is not a legally binding order. Thus, occasionally some overeager staff dude would have to be reminded that "We don't task by email." 

Someone needs to explain to Biden's staff that X.com is not a constitutional organ.

There are two processes for amending the Constitution, and the office of the President has no role in either of them. The Archivist who records the changes does work for the Executive branch, but their job is only to record changes proposed by Congress and ratified by the states, or else proposed and ratified by the states alone. The President's opinion, however expressed, is entirely irrelevant to this process. 

UPDATE: To whit.

Asheville Hungers for Money

Buncombe County is considering that most hateful of things to a government, cutting spending. What could drive such a drastic step?

Much of the estimated shortfall, which ranges from $15.1 million to $25.7 million, is tied to reduced sales tax revenue and unpaid property taxes. While state law doesn't allow property tax waivers due to natural disasters, the collection rate as of Jan. 13 was nearly 1% lower at the same time last year.

Anticipating that some property owners who sustained damage to their property will have difficulty paying their tax bill, paired with increased unemployment, the county is projecting property tax revenue to fall by 2-2.5% this year, resulting in a $4.8 million to $6.5 million loss. Property tax is the largest revenue stream for the county.... 

In November, Buncombe County’s Tourism Development Authority estimated that the county would see a 70% decline in tourism in the last quarter of 2024. For businesses, that could mean a $584 million loss in revenue, the Citizen Times previously reported.

The county is also projecting to receive up to $11.6 million less from the state and federal government, permitting and licensing, and other services like EMS fees.

Emphasis added. 

I've been amazed by the tone of the journalism and remarks from government officials about the property taxes. 'You just owe us the money; it doesn't matter if you lost everything. It's the law! You've got to magic that money out of thin air for us, even though the property that your wealth was based upon was destroyed. We don't care that you can't even borrow against it because it all washed away. We recognize that you may "have difficulty" paying us given that your life savings was destroyed, but by thunder we intend to get it. We passed a law!'

Meanwhile, note that the state and federal inputs are actually expected to decline by eight figures this year. It's not just that storm aid isn't coming (not to North Carolina; California is slated to get lots). The year-over-year inputs are being sharply reduced.

Again, though, this is ultimately for the good. Cutting government spending will be good for Asheville, as it will be for everywhere where we manage to get government spending cuts. A lot of it is public-sector salaries and hiring, which are inflated. They're also looking at the public school system, which really ought to be eliminated entirely and replaced with private/voucher systems. The public education system, like the prison system, has at this point become positively harmful to the civilization it purports to support. We'll be better off the more thoroughgoing the reform finally turns out to be. 

Stoicism without Attribution

It's common for great ideas to be stolen -- Quentin Tarantino admits that he rather wantonly stole from earlier filmmakers in his work. One rarely sees it done so brazenly as with this "new" book. It's just Epictetus, for those of you who remember us going through that in 2022. It's not even all of Epictetus, just one core insight of his popularized with contemporary stories. 

People are getting tattoos with her book title. The hostess is swooning. It's an amazing display of a sentimental response to a plagiarism that the journalists and their audiences are too ignorant to recognize. 

"Aristotle's Masterpiece"

Long-suffering readers know that I have spent a lot of time with Aristotle's works, which I integrate regularly into analysis of contemporary events. How strange for me to discover that there was a hugely popular work attributed to Aristotle, republished for centuries, which I had never heard of until this morning. 

Books explicitly designed for sexual education also existed in the period [i.e. Regency England]. One well-known work was the grandiosely titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, first published in 1648 but regularly revised and reprinted throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. (No connection to the ancient Greek philosopher is supported by the historical record.) The manual includes descriptions and diagrams of sexual anatomy, including an explanation of the clitoris as crucial to female pleasure.... Though Aristotle’s Masterpiece and its later editions were often published anonymously, print runs were high and the book sold extremely well — even when the medical information therein was considerably out of date.

One of the most consequential events in theology as a branch of philosophy followed a similar misattribution: Plotinus' work was translated into Arabic under the title "the Theology of Aristotle." In fact the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian metaphysics weren't even especially compatible, but the misattribution caused the Islamic philosopher Avicenna to spend a decade or so developing a system that harmonized them. This system was extremely helpful to later Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, who wanted to incorporate rediscovered Aristotelian natural philosophy (i.e. science) into a Christian intellectual world that had strong Neoplatonic foundations thanks to some early saints. To this day, much of Catholic theology rests on Avicenna's work as reinterpreted by Aquinas and others. 

It's not clear that this other work had a similarly titanic effect. Hopefully it improved some marriages, however, which is not a small thing for human happiness. 

Good Girls

As the days grow longer again, the flock has resumed laying. They’re keeping me stocked up with protein including all the great amino acids. 

Orthosphere on Prison

Since it was a topic so recently, this is an amusing additional note:

In his 1896 biennial report to the Texas Legislature, the Superintendent of the State Penitentiary detailed the previous employment of the 4,446 convicts under his care.*  I was interested to note that 9 of these jailbirds had been “ministers of the gospel,” which placed them on par with “barkeepers” (also 9), but well below “cigar makers” (3), “cowboys” (1), “prostitutes” (1), and even “journalists” (2).

I would guess that Texas was then home to roughly the same number of barkeepers and ministers of the gospel, so we may suppose that the average moral quality of the men in these two professions was about the same.  I can report, however, that the category “ministers of the gospel” came off better than that sump of turpitude and iniquity, the category of “school teachers.”  Although statewide roughly equal in number to the ministers of the Gospel, pedagogues were incarcerated at nearly double their rate (17 total).

"Firefighters" wasn't a profession then, but it's pretty analogous to cowboying in many respects -- at least wildland firefighting like what is being discussed below, which has a lot of being outside, clearing land, and cutting fire breaks. Good for the soul, partly because it's real work for the body.

Cease-Fire in Gaza

Whether there is war or peace in Israel is none of my concern, although I have hospitality bonds with some Israelis that mean that I ought to be on their side if they are attacked and forced to defend themselves. The coming of the ceasefire announced yesterday surprised me a bit, however, in spite of the fact that our own incoming President was pushing for one rather strongly. It doesn't really make strategic sense for Israel; it does for Hamas, but why would anyone give a deadly enemy such relief? 

Sun Tzu says -- wisely enough -- generally to leave a road for your enemy to retreat upon, so you don't have to fight to the last man. But Hamas isn't going anywhere. This was always going to be a fight on Sun Tzu's "death ground." Structurally the conflict sounds like "enclosed ground," but the fact that no retreat is possible or contemplated shows the truth of the conflict that was forced upon Israel. 

It may be that peace is earnestly desired, even by many right-leaning Israelis, because of the pain of war. The numbers still don't come close to supporting the harsh language used against Israel, by the way: even by very Palestine-friendly estimates, we are under 50,000 dead in a year and a half of intense urban warfare. That's still less than one percent of the population of the Palestinian territories (0.891%), and about one-third-of-one-percent of Palestinians total (0.338%). Talk about 'genocide' remains irrational nonsense; if Israel had been set upon killing as many as possible, it could have posted much bigger numbers. It's a measure of how little they wanted to kill innocents that such intense fighting in a densely populated area has resulted in so few casualties -- cf. US efforts in the battle of Mosul, where the numbers there are blurry but run as high as 33,000 enemy/civilian dead (to stick with the 'numbers most favored by our opponents' metric used with the Gaza conflict) in only half a year.

There are two distinct reactions I have noticed from my Israeli friends. One set is disappointed, but blames their own leadership rather than Trump: they feel betrayed by a leadership that never really wanted to finish Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, but always wanted to find some way to return control of Gaza to them. The other set is quite happy, believing that this will represent an end to the hostages' suffering (those still alive, in any case) and a potential for a return to stability. This set views Trump very positively, and is currently engaged in sending symbolic gifts to Mar-a-Lago. 

It's their business, but I don't think any peace can last. That's their business, too. 

A Barrage of Dodged Bullets

Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.

Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade.... an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.

Imagine the inflation associated with this titanic flood of Federal spending. What we got was bad enough. Your dollar wouldn't have been worth anything if all that planned print-money spending had been dropped into the market.

When I think of the 'Build Back Better' slogan, I always remember this video.

This wasn't an American agenda from an American president targeting an American Congress, it was a wildly international agenda. Its supporting actors were drawn from that crowd for whom American and Western decline was baked into the plan; building back 'better' was not meant to make any of our lives better, not farmers or machinists in American small towns or small-business owners in American suburbs. It was meant for them, another chance to extract wealth from the American people for service to these international elites. 

In the old days we wouldn't have noticed because each of their televised addressed would have been delivered to a carefully segmented market. Only now can we begin to see how networked the mechanisms of control really are.

And yet they failed, largely, in spite of the titanic efforts of 2020 and the certain knowledge that this could easily be the last chance. It's amazing to think.

When reforms work the way they're supposed to

De Santis gets a law passed to require audits of teachers unions. Jacksonville union officials retire abruptly. So at least they got to "spend more time with their family" before the indictments came down for millions of dollars of embezzlement.

Rehabilitation through Firefighting

Participating in fighting the California fires are a number of volunteer prisoners. California pays them a pittance of under three dollars a day for such volunteers -- you may recall the debate about then-AG Harris keeping people incarcerated beyond the end of their sentences so she could use them on firefighting duty for almost nothing. Still, volunteer firefighters often aren't paid at all, and they do obtain some advantages by participating.

California has fixed one bad thing about this program, which is that after release the prisoners weren't eligible for employment as firefighters because of their criminal record. That's no longer true: volunteering for this program now lets you earn credits towards early release, and participate in a program that would qualify you to join local, state, and Federal wildland firefighting crews. 

Readers know that I think our approach to crimefighting via prison is a proven failure that should be replaced top-to-bottom in a way that eliminates prison. (Readers who have forgotten the details may wonder how; I think we should replace it with a combination of fines, labor like show-up-and-clean-the-roads crews, corporal punishments, and a much larger use of capital punishment for cases where locking people up for decades or longer currently seems rational to juries.) Prison's promise of rehabilitation has empirically failed in most cases, and it causes us to employ a scandalous number of our citizens as prison guards. A free society shouldn't detail a lot of its citizenry to keeping even more of its citizenry unfree. 

Nevertheless, here at least is an attempt to do something that helps the people in jail as well as the community at large. There's at least a chance that it might work sometimes. 

A Liberal Struggles

Michael Ignatieff at the Washington Post is another who can plainly see the damage that he and his have caused. He's willing to admit it and begin to struggle with it. 

Beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs were stripped out and shipped overseas. Those of us who got the credentials to enter the professional classes did well, but plenty of our fellow citizens fell behind. We didn’t notice this in time, and our failure opened up a chasm between who we were, what we believed and the people we represented. We kept offering “equality of opportunity,” a chance for the credentialed few to enter the professional elite, without tackling capitalism’s remorseless distribution of economic disadvantage itself.

It is not merely an ungenerous assumption but a declared fact in the piece that all this self-reflection is brought about by the loss of power. It's good to see and healthy, but it is prompted by the loss of the power to control other people's lives, and prompted by a desire to regain that power.  

Still, it isn't only the easy bugbear of 'capitalism' that he is suddenly willing to challenge. It is diversity and identity as well.

In the meantime, we lament the “identity politics” of our populist and authoritarian competitors, when it would be more honest to admit that identity is where all political belief actually comes from, including our own. My identity — charter member of the White professional classes of Canada — defined my liberalism. What the liberal critique of identity politics does get right, though, we owe to our much-maligned individualism. Identity is not destiny....

We were naive about the nature of this problem [of increasing diversity], preferring to believe that all reasonable human beings would embrace a revolution of inclusion, when the reality was that our generation had upended the entire social order, and even our own place in it. Diversity — of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and class — was a virtue in comparison to the dire cantonment of peoples in silos of exclusion, but liberals turned diversity into an ideology. Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program of invigilation of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect.

Credentialed White people of my generation welcomed the revolution because we could invite recruits of color into our ranks without ever feeling that our own elite status was being challenged. We didn’t seem to notice that nonelite White people were threatened, even betrayed, by the new multiracial order. Faced with what we thought was White racism and sexism, when it was mostly fear, we began promulgating codes of speech and conduct to impose diversity as a new cultural norm.... Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bullshit detectors and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes. 

Tyranny, in other words, imposed with a clean conscience because they thought it was the best thing for everybody. A tyranny gladly accepted even over one's own thoughts, even when the ideas being presented were -- as the author himself says -- fairly obvious bullshit.

We began promoting arguments as true based on the gender, race, class, origins or backstory (oppression, discrimination, history of family violence) of the person uttering them. The value that we placed on diversity and inclusion led us by stages to jettison a care for truth itself. We ended up compromising the very epistemological privilege that had provided us with such unending self-satisfaction.

Again, a fairly healthy process even if it is badly motivated. It doesn't approach the questions that are of increasing interest to me, which is whether or not power itself is the problem -- a thing never to be trusted to anyone, however grand their ideas and serious their self-reflection, but always to be distributed as widely as possible to avoid the evils of its concentration. It is better that power should be placed in the hands of the virtuous, if it must be placed in any hands at all; but it might be better still to prevent such concentrations. 

Few men are good enough to rule themselves, and perhaps none fit to rule others; even this man admits to serious errors and misjudgments affecting the whole of society, which he and they carried on with until the wheels came off. Only now does he pause and reflect, and only for the purpose of getting the power back.

An Honest Piece on Alcohol

Following last week's Surgeon General broadcast about the cancer risks of alcohol, there's been another set of fulmination on the subject. I forget that there remain Prohibitionists out there, who really do still want to eliminate the stuff and regret that it didn't work the last time around. There are, though.

This piece is the most honest thing I've read from a doctor on the subject. 

The report describes the relationship between alcohol and cancer in different ways: the number of new cases of cancer a year in the United States potentially related to alcohol consumption (roughly 100,000); the number of annual cancer deaths that might be attributed to alcohol (roughly 20,000, compared to nearly 200,000 cancer deaths attributable to smoking); the increase in absolute risk for developing alcohol-related cancers (a 2.5-percentage-point increase for women and a 1.5-percentage-point increase for men); and the relative risk for specific cancers, such as breast cancer (one study suggests that a drink a day increases a woman’s risk by 10 percent).

But it’s hard for individuals to translate statistics to their own lives. A small increase in relative risk is difficult to make meaningful, even for people who understand what “relative risk” means. (It doesn’t mean a 10 percent risk of breast cancer; it means women who drink may be 10 percent more likely to get breast cancer than women who don’t.)

There are many other open questions that might seem important to a person deciding whether to change her habits: Is a glass of wine as carcinogenic as a daily martini? Does it matter how old you are when you start or stop drinking? And perhaps most important, do you lower your cancer risk if you quit drinking tomorrow, regardless of your age? The answers to all of these questions are unclear.

A one-point-five percent increase in absolute risk doesn't seem like a lot; and I think she raises a good point about the wine-vs-martini issue as well. Wine has a lot of antioxidants, especially red wine, which are supposedly associated with decreases in things like cancer. We keep getting told that one drink is the same regardless of format, whether it's 12 oz of beer or 8 oz of wine or 1.5 oz of hard liquor; but one thing I know from first aid training is that poisoning is often wisely treated by diluting the poison. It would make sense that a drink that is 92-96% water and carbohydrates was less toxic than one that was 40% pure alcohol. 

It's good to see a medical professional trying to talk about it in an honest manner. I notice the editor changed the headline to "When it comes to drinking, there are no good answers." The original, which you can still see reflected in the bar at the top of the page, was "Don't overthink the connection between alcohol and cancer." 

Viking Stack Cake

The Appalachian stack cake apparently has an Icelandic cousin.

Equal Protection

A few people have noticed that the Federal response to California has been a little more emphatic than the Federal -- or even state or local -- response to North Carolina's suffering. Asheville is collecting property taxes on places that were destroyed at their pre-destruction valuation, 'because the law requires it.' Well, so much the worse for the law. 

FEMA got in touch with me this week to tell me that they were cutting off my housing assistance, which I never applied for and never received. They didn't get in touch with me to deal with any actual assistance; I've still never seen a FEMA employee, not even though I spent weeks doing rescue operations during the hurricane.

I'm not mad about it, though. We're better off without the government. I'll be happy to see the back of it. I feel bad for those people who've put their hopes in it to help them, protect them, or make their lives in any way better. Things are going to get better here, a little bit at a time. California isn't going to get any better because they remain enthralled by the idea that these evils are goods. 

Triumphant, Broken America

Foreign Affairs is one of those publications for those who think that managing the world is their calling in life. They've published a piece by Michael Beckley, a Tufts University professor who is also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute -- famously right-wing, AEI, but hardcore pro-immigration because robust immigration boosts American power (as well as suppressing American wages in ways that are helpful to their rich donors). There's a lot of talk about the virtues of immigration in this piece. That's not what I want to talk about. 

His basic thesis is that, in spite of all the problems facing America, the USA is still far and away the most powerful state and likely to remain so. There's a lot of pieces at work in that analysis, most of which I'm going to leave as exercises for the reader. What I want to discuss is his analysis of the rural/urban divide in America, which I think is the most important thing going in determining the future and character of the nation. He also sees it as a crucial problem.

I'm going to quote quite a bit of his analysis of this one problem and discuss it, leaving out the rest of his work, after the jump.

The Pleasure of Snow

Snowfall

 

It has begun. We're expecting, according to the weather service, somewhere between 2 inches and a foot of snow. Given how unpredictable the weather is in these mountains, I believe that delta is the best they can do. I spent the morning putting chains on trucks to get ready for possible emergency operations, but I hope to spend the weekend not going anywhere. Snow is a rare treat even in the mountains of the Southern Appalachians, so I hope that we will get to enjoy it. 

UPDATE: The snowfall accumulation wasn’t even two inches as it turned out. Quiet day though. People had the sense to take it seriously given how little infrastructure we have for dealing with snow and ice. 

Peaceful Coexistence

Just under sixteen minutes of myth-busting from a historian speaking against a fake claim by another historian (but a well-credentialed one).

Speaking of Horses

The little town where my mother, sister, and niece live has lost a locally famous one. Her name was Clementine. 

Magic and Chivalry

The real point of the article mentioned yesterday was to uphold the idea that some things are worth the time they take, most especially the development of persons and relationships. Shortcuts end up stealing the power and the value of these most valuable of things. Maybe they make them impossible to achieve at all.

What does it take to become a reasonably mature, reasonably wise, reasonably loving person? Inescapably, a great deal of time. Not just the years of cognitive and social development from infancy through adolescence into early adulthood—roughly 25 years from birth to the maturation of the prefrontal cortex. But also years of friendship, long hours of conversation, even the pause between hearing and speaking that marks the truly personal moment of really listening. In her 2011 book Alone Together, Sherry Turkle writes of the seven-minute mark at which conversations take a turn—the point when the usual opening gambits, pleasantries about weather or sports, have run out, there is a palpable pause, and someone has to take a risk. It takes seven minutes for a conversation, a real one, to even begin.

It is at the seven-minute pause, Turkle observed in her lab, that many people take out their phones, implicitly signaling to each other that the conversation need not go any further or deeper, an exit ramp before the unpredictable and vulnerable words beyond the silence. That, of course, was more than a decade ago. What are the chances that conversations last even that long these days?...

[W]e have let [technology] colonize places where not only is it of no use—there is no magical way to raise a child—but where it actively displaces and undermines the essential process of personal formation. We have let the magic of technology into the formative stages of life—infancy, childhood, adolescence—so that from very early on, many if not most children experience the seductive power of instant, effortless results delivered through screens and digital devices (and many battery-powered toys as well).

And while these stages of life are singular and essential, magic is equally disastrous at other formative moments. A friend of mine found himself seated on an airplane departing Los Angeles next to a couple en route to their honeymoon in Hawaii. He observed with growing horror as the newly-married young woman opened up TikTok on her phone, began scrolling and swiping through videos, and did not stop, even for a bathroom break let alone a word to her husband, until the plane landed five hours later. One can only wonder how the rest of the honeymoon unfolded. 

So we want to develop virtuous people -- the author says "reasonably mature, wise, loving." Development of any sort of virtue requires time spent doing the work. As Aristotle explains, virtue is a kind of habituation to doing the right thing that is achieved by doing it, over and over, until it is what you do because it is who you are. The reason that the US Army still trains its elite soldiers as airborne units is not because it plans to drop them out of airplanes into Europe or Asia. It is because Airborne school trains the virtue of courage. It takes courage to step out of an airplane into the wild air. Habituating soldiers to do that brings about courageous soldiers. 

Courage is the model virtue for Aristotle because it's one that is easy to get as an example. Habituating wisdom (or lovingness) is harder to visualize, but it works the same way. The author has a good point here: we have to do the work, because it is only by doing the work that you develop the habits. Even if a technology came into being that made it easier to connect with and understand another -- perhaps some sort of mind-meld technology that let you experience the world from their perspective, thus shortening the process to understanding -- you'd still have to spend time doing it, and then time understanding and integrating what you'd experienced. You'd have to do this because they were worth it to you, and because you decided it was worth doing.

What this reminds me of most strongly is the old writing I did back when I rode horses a lot on the virtue of chivalry. This virtue, like lovingness, is about building the kind of character in yourself that can sustain a respectful relationship. This one requires spending time with horses.

What does it take to tame a horse? It takes courage, not recklessness, but that kind of disciplined and developed courage that comes from learning to fear being thrown, and getting on horses again. It takes self-mastery, because the horse is a prey animal that will amplify your fear. You must learn to ride through it, until even you don't really feel the fear in the same way anymore.

It takes gentleness. A horse responds to the slightest touch. You must be sensitive to its movements, its breathing, the language of its body.

What does it take to ride a horse to war? It takes trustworthiness. The horse must believe in you to charge into the smell of blood.

It takes honor. You can't ride alone. You must build relationships with other men like you, who know they can count on you while there is blood in your body. There is your self-sacrifice, even to death.

What does it build in you to do these things? Some of the things have been said. You get the virtues you practice, as Aristotle teaches in the Nicomachean Ethics. You must have some courage to begin, but you will build courage as you do. You must have some self-mastery, but you will become the master of yourself. You must be gentle, and able to understand another very different kind of living being through touch alone. You will become moreso.

The habit of keeping your word is like any other habit. After a while, it becomes part of you. The habit of honor likewise.

Can you do without chivalry? I don't know. Can you do without men like this?

That post closes by pointing out that the real question is not whether you can do without it, but whether you can build it without the horse. The author here is pointing to a similar question about other virtues, humane virtues like maturity and wisdom and being a loving person. It may be that you can capture these qualities in other ways. It may also simply prove to be true that you need the horse or the other people to get the virtue. If so, making a society where we spend time with people at the right stages and moments of life may be a necessary condition to building a life worth living, or people worth living with -- worth living for.