James' New Story
As you may also have seen at his blog or AVI's, James has published a new story in a collection called Magic Malfunction. I've just ordered a copy and so haven't read it yet, but I can't imagine that at least his part of it won't be good.
When to Start Killing
Unlike most respondents to this Substack post, which you've probably all read before now, I don't have a problem with it in principle. America was founded by revolutionary violence, and the logic of the Declaration of Independence is eternal. It is not madness to ask when it might be time to do what Washington himself did. The current administration is in fact destroying a lot of the government, which is what I like about it but is definitely offensive to those for whom that bureaucracy represents a set of desired goods.
Given the intense feelings on the left against the Trump administration it is probably healthy for them to have a conversation about what their terms are. I don't think it's unreasonable at all for them to discuss where they draw the line.
And when is that time? Your threshold may differ from mine, but you must have one. If the present administration should cancel elections; if it should engage in fraud in the electoral process; if it should suppress the speech of its opponents, and jail its political adversaries; if it ignores the will of Congress; if it should directly spurn the orders of the court; all these are reasons for revolution. It may be best to stave off, and wait for elections to throw out this scourge; but if it should threaten the ability to remove it, we shall have no choice.
That's actually pretty close to what Jefferson wrote.
...that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends [of securing the natural rights of the people], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
Some of the terms show a lack of understanding of the present moment: censorship of political opponents justifies a revolution, like what the Biden administration did so emphatically using cut-outs with NGOs, academia, and foreign governments? Fraud in the electoral process, like in 2020? Jailing political adversaries, like the current President who was hit with 34 'felonies' based on paperwork errors or his supporters who protested excessively on that infamous January 6th? Ignores the will of Congress, like the Biden ATF that decided it could just issue 'final rules' that rewrote gun control laws without Congressional input?
This is typical, however: it is similar to how college-educated conservatives understand the liberal position quite well, since all their educators explained it to them at length, but the liberals often don't have any visibility on right-wing arguments at all. It reminds me especially of the Gay Marriage debate before SCOTUS, in which the position of Justice Kennedy was that it just wasn't possible to have a rational argument opposing gay marriage -- even though Immanuel Kant, that most reason-oriented of philosophers, had constructed one in his Metaphysics of Morals. You don't have to agree with it; I don't agree with it. To say it wasn't possible to construct one is just ignorance. I imagine here too this young man doesn't know what he doesn't know.
Some of his terms are reasonable, though. I would expect a reaction perhaps to include revolutionary violence if the President were to cancel the elections and attempt to stay in office past his term. I trust that won't happen, but if it did happen I could definitely understand taking up arms.
In Pace Requiescat, Pope Francis I
I admired his courage; he set an early standard of getting out from behind the bulletproof glass to be among his people. De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.
We understand that God is not a wish fulfillment machine, but it is still a little surprising to see a public prayer so emphatically fail. I trust that the Lord knows best.
All We Know
A tale of Sam Houston:
Young Sam Houston was a lively, high-spirited lad, who caused his widowed mother more trouble than her other eight children combined. Sam had just turned twenty when he was aroused by the War of 1812. When a recruiting demonstration took place in his small Tennessee town, Sam stepped up and took a silver dollar from the drumhead. He was in the regular army by that token, but, since he was under age, he needed permission from his mother.She handed him a gun, saying, “My son, take this musket and never disgrace it: for remember, I had rather all my sons should fill one grave than that one of them should turn his back to save his life.”
Then she slipped a plain gold ring on his finger. Inside this ring was engraved a single word. That ring was his talisman for fifty years. The one word in contact with his flesh guided him through a lifetime of danger and leadership where others faltered....
It was not until his death that any man knew the command of that talisman he had used for half a century. Then his wife slipped the ring from his lifeless finger and held it to the light so that his children, too, could see the word that had led Samuel Houston steadfastly through trials to victories.
The word was “Honor.”
The Penitent Thief and Ecumenical Christianity
My grandparents were Christians in one of those "three bare walls and a cross" Protestant churches out in a rural town. They were wonderful people and some of the happiest, best people I have ever known.
But by my late teenage years I knew better and got away from all that church nonsense. I spent the next two decades slowly making myself ever more miserable. One day I decided I need to sort out some piece of happiness in life or get off the ride. I thought, who's been successful at this happiness thing? And of course my grandparents were the first in my mind. And church seemed to have a part in it, so I went to church. But it made no sense. What was all this strange stuff they asked me to believe?
I was about to give up on Christianity again when an acquaintance suggested C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I read it and it made sense to me. That is, I understood that Christianity might actually make sense, and so I started reading more. Since Lewis was Anglican, I started attending an Anglican church. It was my first experience of liturgical worship, which I found beautiful, and the people were kind in a dark time and helped me make some basic sense of many things.
Meanwhile, I'd kept reading, and I'd discovered the local Catholic radio channel. If I was driving, I was listening to Catholic news or apologetics or the great Dr Ray's show. Building on what I'd learned, they took me much deeper and I could see not only how profound Christianity was but how global it was.
My reading of church history took me to a small Eastern Orthodox parish, and I spent a couple of years attending services and asking questions and reading. It was beautiful, I could see happiness all around me there, and it became home. I was brought to plead, "Remember me in your kingdom, Lord."
That was only a few years ago, and I guess being new to Orthodoxy I'm enthused to share it here, or defend it if I feel it's mischaracterized. But I wouldn't even have a chance of salvation if a couple of wonderful Protestant witnesses hadn't shown me the way, if Lewis and the Anglicans hadn't taught me it could be reasonable, if the Catholic scholars hadn't explained many of the mysterious beliefs in detail and shown me the world. Who knows where I'd be without all of them, but it probably wouldn't be anywhere good.
Good Disruption
DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassifies Biden's "domestic terrorism" campaign -- which was really mostly a gun control campaign aimed at disarming Americans -- and establishes a task force to fight the weaponization of government against American citizens.
This is part of the good part of what the administration is doing.
Impossible Traditionalism
A challenging argument. I encountered it first at the Orthosphere, who summarizes it nicely at the beginning of the post and then goes on to list some personal examples. I'll quote the Orthosphere summary because I think it is clearer than the original post.
Bruce Charlton raises an important objection to professedly Traditionalist Christianity in the contemporary world, “Traditionalist” here meaning a faith accepted on the authority of Tradition and its ecclesial representatives rather than accepted as the outcome of individual discernment. The objection is not that such a faith is undesirable but that it is impossible. People in the world today are exposed to multiple live religious options, and even when one picks a particular Church, one finds that it is divided into factions and that its leaders have more-or-less assimilated to the global liberal order and made authoritative proclamations which more-or-less directly contradict their historical teachings. One must choose which Church, which faction and clergy within that Church, which of conflicting Magisterial statements one should credit, and this can only be done by individual discernment.
This is a serious challenge. In the West, the greatest Magisterium is the Roman Catholic Church: indeed, 'the West' as a concept arises precisely from that part of the world that aligned with Rome rather than Constantinople many centuries ago. When the Western Roman Empire fell, 'the West' was defined by the Roman Catholic Church. So if you are a Westerner who wants to fall back on the authority of a Magisterial tradition, that church is the obvious place to look.
Yet if you do this, you will at once find that the Pope is thought not to be very Catholic by many Catholics. Tradition holds that the Pope can speak infallibly under certain very specific conditions; but if you see the Pope rejecting earlier parts of the tradition, don't you end up having to choose -- and thus, as the argument points out, substitute your own personal judgment for the Magisterium?
I've tended to fall back on St. Thomas Aquinas as an authority, but isn't that a personal judgment of mine? I'm not alone in it: Aquinas was greatly honored for centuries as the authoritative writer on many topics. Yet the Catechism today diverges from Aquinas in many ways big and small, as generations of priests who belong to other factions have amended it. The Jesuits are especially known for their divergence, but the Franciscans have a view that is in many ways different as well.
And if you think that the Roman Catholic view is not the right one, but prefer instead the Magisterium of the Greek Orthodox church -- or the Russian Orthodox variation -- you have an exactly similar problem. If you are a Protestant, the same. If you are a Southern Baptist, your church may have split over irreconcilable differences in your lifetime. The Presbyterians seem to be doing it even now, and the Methodists, and the Episcopalians.
Maybe you just can't lay down the sword of individual discernment. And if that's true, as it seems to be, we're just in a different world.
Paper Beats Rescuers
The North Carolina government continues to demonstrate that it views public safety as an insurance scheme rather than the practical business of actually saving people in need. This time the affront to good sense is House Bill 675, which would force all existing or future EMS personnel to obtain national certifications in addition to the state certifications they already have.
The material covered is the same, and many of these Paramedics, AMTs, EMTs, and EMRs already have not only state certificates but years of experience doing the job. Under this law, they would all be forced to stop and go back to school with a nationally-certified program. The Paramedic program is 13 months long, and the test costs $300, so you'd lose a year of pay and then be forced to pony up for the exam as well. The other programs are shorter but also have a similar issue.
This follows a move at the end of last year to cancel all Technical Rescue certification programs that were not fully complete at midnight on New Year's Eve. If you had completed 100 of the 120 hours of training, but were still one course short, you lost everything and had to start over. This was done just so they could issue a certificate under a different version of the NFPA manual governing such operations. Because of Hurricane Helene, we lost almost all opportunities to finish classes from late September through the end of the year. I asked my state representative to see if a waiver could be granted given the State and Federal states of emergency occasioned by the hurricane, but no: the paperwork rules all. Many thousands of training hours were lost across the state so that the paperwork would look better, at the cost of actual rescuers who could physically help you if you needed it.
Government at its worst, pursuing documentation rather than actual goods and at the cost of the actual good that was really wanted by the people. If you're having a heart attack or lying broken at the bottom of a gorge, it's small comfort that the reason no one is coming to save you is so that the paperwork can look better for the insurance agencies. That is, however, what legislators and bureaucrats care about.
Public Schools Trump First Amendment?
A Federal judge ruled that a school can exercise prior restraint on adults who are not students but are attending school functions.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe, a President George H. W. Bush appointee, ruled that the district acted reasonably in its decision to prevent parents from protesting.McAuliffe said the parents’ "narrow, plausibly inoffensive" intentions were not as important as the wider context, and that adults attending a high school athletic event do not enjoy a First Amendment-protected right to convey messages that demean, harass or harm students."While plaintiffs may very well have never intended to communicate a demeaning or harassing message directed at Parker Tirrell or any other transgender students, the symbols and posters they displayed were fully capable of conveying such a message," he wrote. "And, that broader messaging is what the school authorities reasonably understood and appropriately tried to prevent."
Public schools are frankly on the same order as prisons in their deleterious effects on America's culture of liberty. They train the young to submit their freedoms to the dictates of authority, and here extend the command of this intelligentsia to control of their parents as well. Even if you didn't mean to engage in wrongthink, comrade, someone might have understood you to be -- so your speech must be prevented before it can occur.
UPDATE: Over in the UK, a ruling that transwomen are not, legally speaking, women.
Prisons are Not the Way
Readers know that I am a longtime advocate of abolishing prisons in favor of some other approach to dealing with crime. We discussed this as recently as January, and the more recent police-state tactics we are seeing here in March.
I don't like what prisons do to people's minds. I think that all the evidence clearly demonstrates that they are complete failures at rehabilitation and indeed make things worse. It does this by taking someone out of the market for a long period of time, so they have both a felony record and no recent employment history when they do go to look for work. It does this by placing them in constant contact with criminals as their nearly-sole company for years or decades.
They are hugely expensive things given that they don't work, and not just expensive in terms of money. Think of all the American men (and some women) whose lives are being wasted guarding prisoners. Whatever you think of the prisoners, people who are fit to be prison guards could be better employed in some gainful occupation.
I thought of this today while reading up on CECOT, the prison in El Salvador that is much under discussion. It is an immoral entity, as close to Hell as men know how to create on earth; America ought to have no part of it. It at least does not pretend to be reforming anyone; its conceit is that no one will ever leave it again, and thus the harm caused by their transformation through suffering will be contained within its walls. If that is what is wanted, executions would be a kinder and far more efficient way of achieving the same result.
The 8th Amendment should bar our government from making use of it, since neither a sense of honor nor morals seems to bind the government to much. Yet I reflect that it is no worse than, and indeed quite similar to, the detention centers we helped set up in Iraq to which we contributed many detainees. Like at CECOT, the Iraqis ran the prisoners together, perhaps in the hope that the rival gangs or rival Baathists/Islamists would punish each other.
Instead, as you will recall, that is how ISIS came to be forged. They learned to work together and became something worse and more effective than either had been alone. The transformative harms done to them were not, after all, contained forever behind the terrible walls.
Why Is This Funny?
I don't know why this is funny, but it is. I must have reached the delirious stage of Lent.
The Kamala Harris one ...
Holy Monday
I saw a lot of 'driving the moneychangers out of the Temple' posts yesterday, but that event actually occurred on Holy Monday.
A Joke for Palm Sunday
An elderly woman lives by herself. She is very religious, and knows the Bible very well. One night, she is awakened by a noise. She looks out the window and sees a man trying to force his way into the house with a crowbar.
She creeps to the phone and quietly calls the police, but is worried that they might not get there in time. So she decides to appeal to the guy's conscience with a Bible verse. She yells out, "Acts 2:38!" On hearing this, the man puts down his tools, and puts his hands over his head.
Just then, the police get there and arrest him.
As he's being booked, the arresting officer says, "I've got to ask you something. You were almost in the house. Why did you stop and give up just because that lady yelled some scripture?"
"Scripture?!" he answered. "I thought she was saying she had an ax and two .38's!"
Fairness and Heritability
This was linked at Instapundit, but it's up AVI's alley and a subject we sometimes discuss.
The reason why kids from rich families do well isn’t that mom and dad buy their way through life. The reason, rather, is that rich families have genes that cause financial success, and pass these genes on to their kids. (Casual consumers of this literature often get confused by the fact that the effect of IQ is far too small to explain the intergenerational income correlation. The key thing to remember is that there is a lot more to genetics and success than IQ)....Stage 1 was defensive: “Sure, life’s not fair. The children of the rich do better. But the unfairness is pretty small, and almost vanishes after two generations.” Stage 3, in contrast, is offensive: “Life is fair. The children of the rich do better because talent breeds talent, and under capitalism, the cream rises to the top.”
I'm not at all convinced that social networks aren't more important than almost anything else -- if you went to Harvard, you got to know a lot of people who are going to end up on top of leading businesses or government agencies, and thus you will more readily get a job from them. Still, heritability of intelligence isn't the whole story: whole sets of virtues seem to be heritable as well. You still have to do the work of training them and inculcating them in yourself to bring them from potential to actual, but the potential is there for some when it really doesn't seem to be for others.
What, if anything, should be done about that?
Our solar,/lunar/hebdomadalian holiday
I thought I'd figured out the schedule for Easter a while back: the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. This complicated formula draws together the solar cycle (equiox), the lunar cycle (full moon), and the weekly cycle (Sunday). But imagine my surprise when this month's full moon turned out to be today (April 12). Why isn't Easter tomorrow? Instead, tomorrow is Palm Sunday, and Easter is not until April 20.
The mystery turns on the Western Christian Church's ancient practice of calculating the vernal equinox according to a formula that doesn't quite line up with the astronomically observed full moon or equinox. This year the archaic formula, which requires us to divide the year by 19 and look up the remainder in a chart, yields a liturgical Paschal Full Moon on April 13, which is Sunday (tomorrow). When the post-equinox full moon lands on a Sunday, Easter is celebrated on the following Sunday.
The accepted view seems to be that the seven-day week, which depends on neither the solar nor the lunar cycle, has its roots in Genesis: the seven days of creation. Romans used an 8-day week for many centuries B.C. and A.D., but switched to the Jewish 7-day week with Constantine's converstion to Christianity. Later Europeans continued the Roman custom of naming the days of the week after the five classically visible planets plus the sun and the moon (though the Romans had added an eighth day with a name that had something to do with markets). In English, the modern names of the seven days of the week are rooted in the Norse gods for Tuesday through Friday, to the Roman god Saturn for Saturday, and to the Teutonic words for sun and moon for Sunday and Monday. In Romance languages, the days of the week are rooted in the Latin names for "Lord" for Sunday, moon for Monday, Mars for Tuesday, Mercury for Wednesday, Jupiter for Thursday, Venus for Friday, and sabbath for Saturday.
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