A Praiseworthy Action

While I have regularly criticized the police state aspects of the new administration, this executive order cuts just the opposite way and in a manner that is very healthy.

The Code of Federal Regulations contains over 48,000 sections, stretching over 175,000 pages — far more than any citizen can possibly read, let alone fully understand. Worse, many carry potential criminal penalties for violations. The situation has become so dire that no one — likely including those charged with enforcing our criminal laws at the Department of Justice — knows how many separate criminal offenses are contained in the Code of Federal Regulations, with at least one source estimating hundreds of thousands of such crimes.... This status quo is absurd and unjust. It allows the executive branch to write the law, in addition to executing it.... Agencies promulgating regulations potentially subject to criminal enforcement should explicitly describe the conduct subject to criminal enforcement, the authorizing statutes, and the mens rea standard applicable to those offenses.

Mens rea is a guilty mind. Imposing a mens rea standard on federal prosecutions for regulatory offenses means that the government will be expected to stop prosecuting people who didn’t know they were doing something illegal, or people whose guilty mind — their knowledge that they were doing something illegal, and meant to — can’t be proved. 

This order also cuts against the argument that the administration is in violation of the separation of powers doctrine. Putting the onus back on Congress to pass laws if laws are needed is healthy, partly because Congress just doesn't have as much time as the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats. 

We don't really need any new laws in this country -- if anything, we need fewer. All the really bad stuff has been illegal all along. An additional beneficial effect might be to get us back towards self-governance by making the law knowable to ordinary citizens, such that there aren't Federal felonies you could be guilty of without even knowing of them. 

So: well done, on three separate counts. 

Burying the Lede

In an article on women-focused podcasts as an answer to the 'manosphere,' you have to go to the 9th paragraph to find out something important:

If feminist news was the nucleus of “lady blogs” a decade ago, wellness takes its place today. Edison Research recently identified the two topics most interesting to female podcast listeners: self-care and mental health.

Given how much craziness one encounters with "wellness" -- especially "self-care" and popular discussions of mental health -- I don't know if this is an improvement. It is, however, a significant change.  

Rhonda Vincent and the Rage

 

I'd never heard of the ROMP Music Festival before, but it looks like a lot of fun. It's out in Owensboro, Kentucky, and this year it's the weekend of June 25-28.

Happy Mother’s Day

A glorious day to all of you who have mothers, and especially those of you who are one. 

The Virtue of Chastity

A good point by Professor Althouse.

I want to focus on "closeted bisexual." Mitchell's father was married to his mother, so how does he count as closeted if he just kept quiet about who else he's sexually attracted to? That's the general practice among married people, not to speak out about your interest in anyone other than your spouse and not to do anything about it. It might be a more poignant case if the man married a woman but only felt attracted to men, but this, we're told, was a bisexual. Presumably, he was attracted to his wife. Where's the closeting in restricting your sex relations to your spouse? It's not as if heterosexuals feel free to speak out and act out about their sexual attraction to others. No one admires these adulterers for "coming out of the closet."

Indeed, chastity in marriage is only really a virtue because you're attracted to others. Of course you are; that's out of your control due to basic biology like pheromones that affect you subconsciously. The virtue is the practice, eventually the habit and finally the character, of keeping faith with your spouse in spite of whatever temptations there are in the world. 

To link the discussion with an earlier one, here the virtue is an art that aims at the recognition of and then the perfection of nature. It would be a denial of nature to claim that you simply weren't attracted to anyone else but your spouse; indeed it would be the vice of lying. We use natural reason to understand that the best sort of relationship that such feelings can produce is one of faithful loyalty and duty to one another, and then we use our arts to nurture that thing into its actuality. 

Sir Thomas Malory was accused of an affair with a married woman and celebrated both Lancelot and Guinevere as well as Tristram and Isolde. Yet he understood the value of the thing even if he didn't himself always attain it. In the quest for the Grail, only three knights attain success -- and neither of those two, who were the great victors in battles and tournaments. Two of them were virgins, Galahad and Percival. The third was Sir Bors de Ganis (i.e. 'of Wales'), of whom Malory says this:

[F]or all women Sir Bors was a virgin, save for one, that was the daughter of King Brangoris, and on her he gat a child that hight ('was called') Elaine, and save for her Sir Bors was a clean maiden.

One rarely sees the term 'maiden' employed just that way, first aimed at a man, and also one who is almost but not quite a virgin. 

Joe Mullins and the Radio Ramblers

 

Some John Hartford for Saturday Night

Well, This Happened

5/12/25 Update: I've decided to add a bit of content advisory to this video. It's Willie Nelson & some fellow named Orville Peck (real name?) singing about gay cowboys. I posted it as a kind of "What the heck?" thing, but maybe it was too much; it does get a bit risqué toward the end, though still well within YouTube guidelines. I'll leave further discussion to the comments and maybe a later post on the topic of entertainment. Also, what the heck?

 

A Friar Becomes the Pope

Congratulations to Pope Leo XIV; may he be guided to wisdom in his new role. I know nothing about the man at all, having never heard of him until yesterday. I asked Dad29's opinion, which was mixed, although he did say that the Pope is reputed to say the Old Rite Mass, which is encouraging. D29 also noted a good article that the new Pope's X account had 're-tweeted,' but who knows if a Cardinal runs his own social media account? I wouldn't, if I could task that to some younger aide. 

What I do know is that the Augustinian Order he comes from is a mendicant order. Its members are friars, a recent innovation of Catholicism's dating only to the late Middle Ages. The Order is not subject to the bishops, one of whom this particular friar eventually became. 

To celebrate the occasion, I will reprint Sir Walter Scott's poem "The Barefooted Friar," from his excellent novel Ivanhoe.

1.

I’ll give thee, good fellow, a twelvemonth or twain,

To search Europe through, from Byzantium to Spain;

But ne’er shall you find, should you search till you tire,

So happy a man as the Barefooted Friar.

2.

Your knight for his lady pricks forth in career,

And is brought home at even-song prick’d through with a spear;

I confess him in haste—for his lady desires

No comfort on earth save the Barefooted Friar’s.

3.

Your monarch?—Pshaw! many a prince has been known

To barter his robes for our cowl and our gown,

But which of us e’er felt the idle desire

To exchange for a crown the grey hood of a Friar!

4.

The Friar has walk’d out, and where’er he has gone,

The land and its fatness is mark’d for his own;

He can roam where he lists, he can stop when he tires,

For every man’s house is the Barefooted Friar’s.

5.

He’s expected at noon, and no wight till he comes

May profane the great chair, or the porridge of plums

For the best of the cheer, and the seat by the fire,

Is the undenied right of the Barefooted Friar.

6.

He’s expected at night, and the pasty’s made hot,

They broach the brown ale, and they fill the black pot,

And the goodwife would wish the goodman in the mire,

Ere he lack’d a soft pillow, the Barefooted Friar.

7.

Long flourish the sandal, the cord, and the cope,

The dread of the devil and trust of the Pope;

For to gather life’s roses, unscathed by the briar,

Is granted alone to the Barefooted Friar.

Caput Apri Defero

I had to dig to the bottom of the big chest freezer for my wife today, and while I was there I remembered I still had the head of the deer I butchered last autumn. I didn’t kill him; he was shot by a poacher and survived with serious injuries long enough to encounter one of our firefighters. The firefighter was law abiding enough to call the game warden for permission to put the stag out of his misery and harvest him. 

He did have me butcher him in return for as much venison as I wanted. I kept the head meaning to clean the skull but never got around to it. 

Well, it’s a pretty afternoon to sit by a campfire. 

Police Corruption Has Costs

In Alabama, a Grand Jury -- famously an institution that will indict a ham sandwich -- just no-billed 58 felony cases over police corruption. The District Attorney is not upset.

Cullman County District Attorney Champ Crocker on Wednesday said the grand jury made the decision in April following an Alabama State Bureau of Investigation audit into the Hanceville Police Department. Crocker said the grand jury was left with no choice to dismiss dozens of cases that the Hanceville Police Department previously investigated due to “illegal actions” taken by former officers with the department.

“The Grand Jury that unanimously indicted the former Hanceville police officers determined that those officers’ cases, and other cases from the Hanceville Police Department, were unprosecutable,” Crocker said.

“The same Grand Jury reconvened in April and voted to no-bill, or dismiss, 58 felony cases due to the illegal actions of those former Hanceville officers. “Most of these cases involved drugs, and only a few were personal crimes with victims. One dismissal is too many, but the Grand Jury had no other recourse.”

One dismissal may be too many for a District Attorney, but it strikes me as a fair price to pay to make sure that the police obey constitutional protections of the rights of citizens. Although some dismissals are more expensive than others: in New York, it may be the most famous murderer of the hour.

Latest motion states patrolwoman searched Luigi’s backpack at McDonald’s without a warrant, then repacked the items and left the restaurant with the backpack, with no body cam footage for the next 11 minutes during her drive to the precinct. Upon arriving at the precinct, she resumed the warrantless search and “found a handgun in the front compartment.”

There's reasonable doubt that this handgun was in the backpack when she took it, given that she moved it out of sight of everyone to another location and then (still without a warrant) re-searched it and "found" a handgun. A jury might reasonably wonder if the handgun wasn't actually found at the site of the murder, and then placed in the backpack later. 

Of course there are other issues at stake in that case, like his alleged confession; a lawyer would have to get that suppressed, though that is frequently done on grounds of coercion. The fact that basic Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections weren't respected by a 'professional modern police service' -- indeed, the primus inter pares of such services is in America -- is a striking issue. I think I would grant the defense motion to suppress all the backpack evidence if I were the judge, including the handgun. You probably wouldn't go as far as no-billing the case, but the prosecution would find itself in a much harder spot. The risk to the public of turning Luigi loose on the world is less, however, than the risk of running a gigantic and well-armed police force that doesn't respect the Constitution. 

Turn it Around

I'm going to give them some leeway on this one because they open with an acknowledgement that Castro was, inter alia, an authoritarian. 

Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.

The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.

How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. 

Ok, fair enough. But before we go any further with this line of inquiry, have you considered what the cost was for opposing the government from, say, Obama through the present administration? The controlled opposition did OK, of course, because they are part of the system of control: John McCain wasn't in any danger because they knew they could count on him to defect to their side when it really counted. Mitt Romney was never. 

What about those who really wanted change? 

UPDATE: To borrow a tack from a recent post, what are the costs of opposing the government in the UK, where thousands are being arrested for expressing 'offensive' opinions? Is the UK an authoritarian state? Is France? Is there any major power left in the West that is not? 

What should be done about this problem?

Originality and Humanity

This is a short bit of thinking-out-loud from the Orthosphere, which isn't wholly wrong; I just want to take a moment to point out that it isn't entirely right, either. The Aristotelian tradition, so important to Aquinas et al, shows us why. Tolkien cements the picture.

How do you tell whether what you are reading was generated by AI, or by real humans (or, for that matter, other real spirits)?

What has been generated by real substantive beings is somehow original, somehow new, and somehow unsuspected in what has already transpired. What has been generated by mechanical procedures cannot be that. It must by comparison seem relatively boring, stupid, or repetitive.

How to tell the difference between creative originality and repetitive stupidity?

In the end, it seems to me that it must come down to something like smell. We don’t smell rot or poison on the basis of a process of ratiocination. Indeed, most of our apprehensions of falsehood or error arise not from some discursive procedure, but rather from a relatively raw intuition; a hunch, a stink, an unease, a horror.

Genuine originality is not what human beings' arts are for. As Aristotle points out, the function of art is to perfect nature. We know what an eye is for by applying reason, which we have by nature; once we know that, we can tell if the eye is performing its function well or badly. I was just at the eye doctor this week, so that he can apply the art of optics to perfecting what nature aims at but did not fully achieve (mostly because I read too much and have thus trained my eyes towards nearsightedness). 

That link just above is to an SEP article on Aristotle's aesthetics, which is in fact where the Orthosphere is going too. 

If something seems off to you, not so much wrongly (we can after all disagree honestly about facts and their reasons) as oddly or weirdly, it probably is.

Or fake or ghey; that, too, is a good indicator. What seems hard to entertain prima facie is … hard to entertain.

This should be the tell, actually, that the 'smell' metaphor works but that the article has pointed it wrongly. It is not the lack of originality that makes AI fail to 'smell' right, but the lack of connection to nature. The AI can't see nature. It can only see human reflections of nature that we have trained it on. It is more disconnected from the true thing that art exists first to understand, and then to perfect. 

I don't think AI had much to do with what he's calling 'fake or ghey'; mostly I think that was bad artists, human enough but also misunderstanding that the perfection of nature is the true teacher and target for art. That is why such art seems fake; it isn't tied to the real thing, which is the natural function and purpose that our reason discovers. 

Or, as Tolkien put it, it falls to us to be subcreators. In the Silmarillion, he proposes a creation story in which the god-figure creates with a song that all of his angel-figures are supposed to join in. Mostly they do, creating a harmonic beauty. One of them, the devil-figure, begins to introduce his own discordant notes. The creator is able to alter the work so that the discord deepens and improves the beauty of the whole; and thus the devil-figure is not able to disrupt the overall beauty of created nature as he had willed to do.

Subcreation happens within the context of the natural, to include natural reason's understanding of it and response to it. Only by accepting this do we properly perform the human arts, which adjust and perfect the natural good. We might be original at times, as perhaps the inventor of optical lenses was, but what is good or great about what we do is not the originality. It is the perfection of the natural good that we ourselves did not create.

The Pan American

I saw one of these the other weekend while I was at the Spring Bash. It's a great looking motorcycle, intended for offroad as well as on-road use. I probably won't go see the movie because I don't like superhero films, and this sounds like the anti-hero version of the Avengers. 

Short Story Review: "By the Book" by James

It's quite a change to go from a dense academic history with vast footnotes to a collection of short stories about magic. Our good friend James has penned a short story as part of a collection called Magic Malfunction. I have only read his story, so I can't attest to the quality of the book as a whole. 

James' story is a pleasing romp through cryptology and magic in Eastern Europe. The main character is bashful and imperfectly insightful, very quickly understanding that he is being recruited by a secret service but never understanding the women he meets. (In fairness, this is a problem many of us have; I think I finally understand my wife after nearly thirty years, but every now and then she still surprises me.)

I won't give the plot away in case any of you wish to read the story, but it revolves around grimoire. 

The etymology of grimoire is unclear. It is most commonly believed that the term grimoire originated from the Old French word grammaire 'grammar', which had initially been used to refer to all books written in Latin. By the 18th century, the term had gained its now common usage in France and had begun to be used to refer purely to books of magic. Owen Davies presumed this was because "many of them continued to circulate in Latin manuscripts".

I own one of these myself, the Icelandic Galdrabok. Don't rush out to buy that one; the spells probably don't actually work. I haven't actually tried them, mind you, but they don't sound plausible to me having read through it. I'm not sure I would want the powers it describes if they did work; winning a woman's heart, for example, should be done honestly or not at all. 

Bending lightning, which is a power discussed in James' story, that might be fun. So too is the tale, which you may enjoy if you choose.

Cathari Pars II

Dad29 wants to update us that he has found a version of the old Catholic Encyclopedia online; the entry on the Cathars is here. The whole encyclopedia is available, however. 

This is the same site I usually reference here when I'm quoting Aquinas in order to analyze problems where his thinking is relevant.  They have the full Summa Theologiae on it as well.

The Anglosphere Slips Away

Following the British decision to adopt a left-wing government that is now prosecuting thousands on free-speech issues, both Canada and now Australia have had left-wing governments win elections they had been expected to lose. The Canadian fellow looks especially likely to run the country right into the ground. 

The papers want you to know that this is Trump's fault, and maybe that's true. He is charting a course that America will have to travel alone for a while. If it succeeds, it will draw others to it in time. If not, of course it won't. Time will tell.

Review: American Anarchy by M. Willrich

Willrich, Michael. American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books, 2023.

Readers have already heard from me twice about this book since I've been reading it. I finished re-reading the epilogue last night,* and am now ready to formally review it. 

The author Michael Willrich is a good historian and also a good writer. These qualities do not always travel together, and it is not without cost when they do. There is some risk to being a good historian that arises from being a good writer, namely, that you can tend to shade the reader's perceptions of the history by incorporating dramaticism that will tend to make some of the characters seem like heroes, or victims, or villains. There is some of that going on here, though Willrich's real heroes are not the anarchists but the liberals who ended up supporting them. 

Indeed, this is the main lesson he wants you as a reader to take away from the work. Here is his summation in the epilogue:

The government's decades-long war against anarchy spurred the growth of federal institutions designed to repress political dissent. The same struggle also inspired the emergence of a modern movement for civil liberties, grounded in the Bill of Rights, including broad freedoms of speech, freedom from warrantless searches and 'third degree' interrogations, and rights of due process... 

It is the great irony of the story told in these pages that the many trials of the anarchists -- working-class thinkers who denounced the liberal ideal of the rule of law as a dangerous delusion -- breathed new life into the Bill of Rights and spurred a probing public debate about the proper legal limits of government power[.] (374)

The real heroes of his work are liberal lawyer Harry Weinberger and liberal Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post, not the anarchists that we spend so much time with during the telling. The villains are J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer, and a host of others who erected the police state we still labor under in their attempt to police immigrants they didn't trust. 

The victims, mostly, are the anarchists, although Willrich doesn't attempt to hide that their movement did indeed engage in numerous bombings and bombing plots, stabbings, shootings, and other mayhem. He does note that many other charges were made but not proven by any evidence or arrests, but he does so fairly: in the case of the largest bombing, which police could never solve, he points out that historians have since identified the probable criminal as an Italian anarchist. Similarly diligent, he points out that one of Emma Goldman's moving stories about the Statue of Liberty is impossible given the fact that the Statue hadn't been assembled yet at the time that she says it happened. 

I recommend the book, which is insightful and illustrative. It is surprisingly relevant to the current moment when we are experiencing an even larger-scale attempt at mass deportation, a Federal government that is trying to limit due process in such cases in order to streamline them. While his heroes are the liberals, Republicans do get a nice word towards the end for standing up to the Wilson administration's tyrannical overreach. He quotes their platform of 1920: "[I]n view of the vigorous malpractice of the Departments of Justice and Labor, an adequate public hearing before a competent administrative tribunal should be assured to all." (376)

The weakness of the book, aside from the dramatic elements, is the author's lack of interest in philosophy. He takes no care to explain, and barely even to name, the different factions of anarchist thought. These are intricate and interesting, then and into the present day. The effect of this lack of interest is to convey the idea that anarchism was some sort of amorphous blob of working-class thought, perhaps mere utopian thinking (so he describes it in the epilogue), when in fact it was (and is still, in newer forms) deeply detailed and thoroughly considered with clear philosophical factions. You will learn almost nothing about anarchism by reading this book, but you will nevertheless learn a lot about America. 

* I read the epilogue the first time when I first started reading the book. This is a tip I learned in my graduate studies in history that I pass along to you, which is most useful when trying to tackle a large historical monograph: read the first and the last parts immediately, and then the rest of it. The author will introduce his topic and give you a hint of what he or she thinks the main lesson is in his introduction, and then will reaffirm that in the conclusion. Once you know the basic thing the author wants to convey, the whole work will make more sense because it will all fit into that pattern. You can then read and digest the book much faster and more effectively because you will understand why every part of it is being introduced and described, and what the author hopes you will get out of each piece of evidence. 

German Democracy

 

By an 'independent investigation' they mean exactly what our Democratic friends mean when they say that the Department of Justice is meant to be 'independent' of the President -- that is, that it should be controlled wholly by an administrative state that is not under the control of any democratically elected official. This just what Weber warned about (see the sidebar). 

The democratically elected officials, meanwhile, also have to ask the EU bureaucracy for permission to fund NATO in line with their treaty obligations (which, allegedly, make up part of the supreme law as they were democratically enacted and ratified). We are meant to believe that it is vitally important that no radical right-wingers be allowed to assume those democratic offices, which don't control the secret police or the budget but are controlled both above and below by 'administrative states.'

So "this is democracy," German style. An independent secret police deciding to spy upon a political party to which the government is hostile, and then the courts taking steps to ban it from participation. But if they did somehow get to participate and win, they still wouldn't be in charge of anything. They'd be controlled by the administrators above them and below them.

In fairness to the Germans, we weren't that far off of that in 2016, when the government was using spy powers targeting Carter Page to collect and read all of his communications with anyone, and then was allowed to further read all of the communications of anyone they collected that way -- i.e., the Trump campaign. And then they opened investigations like Crossfire Hurricane and Crossfire Razor, took down and tried to imprison a sitting National Security Advisor on made-up perjury charges based documents they edited long after the fact and disappeared, and then....

And by the way, what did we ever learn about that assassin in Butler last summer? How'd that happen? Well, perhaps that's just paranoia -- unlike the rest of it, which is clearly established fact.

It's Unconstitutional

Harmeet K. Dhillon,* Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, has joined the Solicitor of the United States in asking the Supreme Court to hear an FPC case against Hawaii's firearms ban. It is, after all, a direct violation of the Second Amendment. Why shouldn't the US government urge the Supreme Court to engage that issue in favor of the restoration of a natural and Constitutional right? That is the exact (and arguably sole) legitimate function of a government, to defend the natural rights of its citizens.

This at least is a very welcome move.

* I was introduced to Harmeet once via email, and was very surprised to learn -- as it was not suggested in the email and I didn't yet know her -- that 'Harmeet' is a feminine name in the Punjab. It is not in most of India, but I won't claim to know much about India. The reason it surprised me is that Hindi is an Indo-European language, and in all the Indo-European languages I know well enough to work in "Har-*" is a masculine formulation in names. In Semitic languages our expectations don't hold, but within our broad language family they usually do. 

At the time I was so surprised that I looked it up. In English the only two female names that start with "Har-" are "Harmony," which is of recent vintage, and "Harriet." Now Harriet is an interesting one; it is the feminine version of "Harry." But "Harry" is an Anglicized version of "Henri," which is more obviously Anglicized as "Henry." The reason that "Harry" is popular in the English-speaking world is the reason we find it in Shakespeare: the Hundred Years War produced several kings named Henry, whom due to the long animosity with France the English wished to distance from their French roots. Thus, it became popular to use a name that started with "Har-" rather than "Hen-," and that spread to English women as well. 

"Har-" in Hindi and Punjabi is a reference to a male god, Shiva, and having friendship with him. So, you see, I learned something just as a consequence of meeting our now-Assistant Attorney General. She's a smart lady, too.