Three Times is Enemy Action

Third large-scale snake-induced power outage strikes North Carolina. 

Motorcyclist Killed By Deputies

Here in North Carolina, though up in Ashe County, deputies accidentally killed a motorcycle rider by triggering his airbag safety vest. They were unreasonably aggressive, pulling a gun on him and physically dragging him off the bike without bothering to disconnect the safety vest. If you don't know how these work, they are connected to the bike so that if you come off of it the ripcord causes the airbags to expand. These things exert pretty serious force (as you can see from that link), which can cause problems for breathing -- especially if you are also being choked out by a deputy sheriff. An autopsy ruled Mast’s death a homicide and found the cause of death was “compression asphyxia of the torso and neck.”

As you can see from the embedded video, the sheriff's statement doesn't line up with the body camera footage at all. There were no warrants; the suspect had not been observed in any illegal activity, and was driving the speed limit when the deputies decided to pull him over and forced him off the road (by their own admission on camera). The footage was withheld from the public until a local news station got a court order forcing its release following the autopsy report. 

From the last link: 

Representative Sarah Stevens (R-Surry) filed a bill that would make autopsy reports secret. Stevens told Axios Raleigh the proposal was pushed by the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys.

To better serve and protect you, no doubt.  

Interview with an Augustinian

If you were not as familiar with the Augustinian Order as with better-known Orders like the Franciscans or the Jesuits, partly it's because it is small. A helpful interview gives their leader, Father Moral Antón, as well as church historians and others a chance to explain how this group of friars operates. I did not realize, for example, that Martin Luther had been a member before provoking the Protestant Reformation. 

“The Holy Father will certainly be inspired by this search for communion and dialogue,” said Pierantonio Piatti, a historian of Augustinians with the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, a Vatican office. That would mesh with the concept of “synodality,” fulfilling Francis’ vision of a church that brings bishops and lay people together to make big decisions.

“The other great element of Augustinian spirituality,” Dr. Piatti added, is a “search for balance between action and contemplation, between contemplation and action.”

In part because of their small size, Augustinian priests are a tight-knit community around the world, and many have encountered Leo over the years.

“Even when we disagree on something like politics, we have no trouble talking to one another,” said Father Allan Fitzgerald, 84, an Augustinian priest and longtime professor at Villanova University northwest of Philadelphia, which Leo graduated from in 1977. “I think we are, in some ways, an image of the U.S. There is certainly a whole swath of us that is to one side and to the other. Even if we can’t talk directly about politics, we are still able to talk about things that matter.”

Dad29 points out that exactly what is meant by "synodality" is tremendously unclear, at least in terms of practical application. You can imagine trying to apply it to secular governance: sure, it would be nice if the government's officials also listened to the people in making big decisions, but what exactly is the mechanism for that? Public comment periods? Do those actually influence powerful bureaucrats? Referenda? More frequent elections, to subject officials to public approval? Less frequent elections, so the officials have time to listen rather than constantly campaigning and raising money? Even if you have a very generously-minded President, how would he go about soliciting the opinion of 400 million people? Given that they disagree, often sharply, how should he weight such opinions if he could gather them usefully?

In the religious context, there has been an additional consideration on top of those practical difficulties. It has normally been thought that those who are devoted to the religious life should have special authority when speaking to such matters. Unlike professional bureaucrats or politicians, the members of religious orders were thought to be especially devoted to virtue and morals. That presumption has been somewhat weakened in recent generations. 

Still Not Fascism

The Society for US Intellectual History has published what I gather they think is a takedown of a book citing numerous academics who, after 2016, denied that Trumpism was a fascist movement. They note that some academics cited against that proposition before now agree that, in fact, the term is appropriate. 

I notice however that the article doesn't cite a definition of fascism, and indeed tries to evade the question as not important.

The real question to be asked is not how Steinmetz-Jenkins’ mentors finally changed their minds, but what kept them so long? A clue was offered by Moyn, a contributor to this volume, who tweeted after Paxton declared J6 to be fascist: “FWIW, my reluctance was and is rooted less in the analytical propriety of the term as in my sense of the likely political consequences of certain framings.”

To wit: if we call it fascism, we declare the wolves have indeed arrived and we must do all we can to stave them off. Including coalescing with the very “centrist” liberals that socialists viewed as their main ideological adversary, ever since Senator Hilary Clinton voted for the Second Iraq War.

Trumpism may be wrong, if it is wrong, without being fascist. Fascism is not (as Orwell tried to point out) just anything you don't like. It is a Modernist species of corporatism. Trump isn't one not because he's a virtuous or upright person, but because he doesn't believe in that doctrine at all.  

Fascists believe in the state as the absolute center of human life, the definer of all values in the post-religious age, with which all churches and families must align, and nothing can be allowed to oppose. The centrality of the state is total:  as Mussolini put it, "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

A movement built around slashing the government so that it exercises less control over individuals and families is certainly not fascist in any sense of the word.... Pushback from within the Republican party is that there's no way it will happen, not because they have designs on conquest but because Congress won't agree to spend that much less.

The Trump administration has also got another sense of meaning and rightness that isn't just state dictates. Rightly or wrongly, they interpret sex according to nature, and want the state to comply with that external natural order. 

There may be fascists in America somewhere, but they aren't at the Daytona 500. 

Nor in the Hells Angels, even though they sometimes wear actual Nazi symbols: that's just not what they're doing. 

The Society publication is really fighting an internal fight between liberals and socialists, and its argument is simply that the socialists now need to compromise with them and give way to them. It's another one of those fights for position within a faction; the question of what is actually going on here is not of great interest to them.

It should be, however, of interest to all of us. We would all benefit from honest grappling with what makes Trump popular, what legitimate complaints he's addressing, as well as where he's going wrong either due to bad ideas or amateur execution. That might actually improve things; hardening the opposition to him, both when he's right and when he's wrong, is only going to prolong the suffering. 

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.