I expect to be back Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on the weather. It's a little hard to say right now how that ride back will turn out.
Departing for the Road
First light, my son and I will be departing on motorcycles for the big ride on Memorial Day weekend. Hopefully there might be good stories or pictures from the road. Or, perhaps, you may not hear anything for a while. I'm not taking a computer, though I can blog from my phone in a limited fashion should that seem like a good use of my time.
Golden Age
Our friend David Foster has pulled together a summary post with links to several others, on the question of whether wages and happiness stagnated or fell in America over recent decades. Here are a couple of more links on that subject which tend to take the position that fiat currency is responsible for a lot of disruption.
Terrorism and Genocide
It's probably a mistake to universalize a lesson from a single loser like this guy who murdered two Israeli diplomats for no apparent reason except "Free Palestine." It was obviously, definitionally, an act of terrorism because he shot noncombatant civilians (employees of an Embassy, even, with diplomatic protections) in order to advance a political agenda.
However, his own personal and inexplicable decision to travel across several states to shoot two random people is obviously not part of a strategy by an organized group; these weren't even two crucial officers of the Embassy, just two young employees of no special importance. The other groups the shooter associated himself with -- BLM, ANSWER, etc. -- are the ordinary sort of Left-wing political groups that winks at violence, and maybe the occasional riot, but they're not executing a Hamas-style orchestration of terror on an organized scale. These groups are self-described radicals, but not "terrorist organizations" -- even though they occasionally produce an actual terrorist like this one.
It does point up how strange our cultural debate is at the moment about these two terms, though, "terrorism" and "genocide." We do have functional definitions if we wanted to use them, but mostly people want to use the emotional weight of the language rather than restricting themselves to its rational meaning.
Genocide, for example, has a definition. It's a new word, too, so the usual drift of natural language hasn't affected it much yet. We might say our present debate was natural language trying to exert itself on the definition, but a brake on that is that the word was newly coined and then codified in an international treaty. It's a very strong case for a word that means something.
Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as:... any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.— Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2[9]
There's a little bit of ambiguity, but not much. "Killing members of the group" doesn't mean, say, two members: the DC shooting wasn't an act of "genocide" even though the shooter explicitly targeted these two Jews for their group-membership.
This can extend to very large numbers in cases of war in which two ethnic groups or national groups are fighting each other, because their intent is not to destroy each other as a group, only to win their war aims. I don't think the current war in Israel is an example of genocide because the Israelis don't really seem to be trying to exterminate Palestinians as such, nor so far even to expel them from Gaza (as I frankly expected they would) in order to create a larger buffer zone given the October 7th demonstration that they were currently very vulnerable. The 50,000 figure killed is a tiny percentage of the total population of Palestinians, and 2.5% even of the population within Gaza -- a pretty restrained bit of killing given the intensity of the fighting and Israel's clear superiority in weapons.
Likewise, it doesn't extend to conflicts within a group: in the Syrian civil war, for example, fourteen million people were forced out of their homes and many killed or harmed, but nobody thought it was a genocide. There was even a religious difference here and there, Alawites and Muslims, Shi'ites and Sunnis, and even ethnic differences between Arabs and Kurds (who sometimes appeal to ancestral faiths as well). It wasn't thought a genocide all the same.
Is what is going on in South Africa genocide? The President and the media both have very certain opinions about that. Definitely there has been a campaign of killing/harming Boers in order to extract their land and resources to transfer to another ethnic group. The government of South Africa denies there is any intent by the government to engage in genocide, but that isn't a requirement under the convention: the fact that a large political party seems to be encouraging and celebrating all this (as President Trump decided to point out in a rather theatrical fashion this week) without the government doing much to discourage them may satisfy the requirement.
If the Boers had their own government, you could say that there was a war aim of seizing their land -- South Africa's history over the last two centuries is riddled with that. "Genocide" didn't exist as a term when Shaka Zulu was around; the Boer Wars might not qualify because the British attempting to subjugate the Boers were "white" as well, although I think they recognized a real ethnic difference between themselves in those days. However, the Boers are not a state or state-like entity waging a war, either offensive or defensive; like the Uighur (who definitely are suffering a genocide), they're a subjugated population whose government hates them.
It seems like we should be able to get to clarity on this, given that we have a relatively clear standard that is formally codified. Our cultural institutions are not even trying to build a case either way, though; they're just asserting that it is obviously or obviously isn't.
So, Who Was Really President for Four Years?
So, we don't really have a government that respects the Constitution. The 2nd Amendment is violated outright in several places; Maryland, which I will be in this weekend, considers it a three-year prison "misdemeanor" to carry some of the items I normally keep handy. The 10th Amendment is a dead letter. The 4th and 8th are violated by outsourcing. The government is evil, frankly, and much in need of dissolution.
Who was actually in charge for the last few years, though? Not the elected President, who is the only Constitutional officer in the Executive branch (the VP has his duties entirely within the Senate unless he/she steps up to take the Presidential office).
The answer is Weber's: the administrative state, unelected and undemocratic, was running itself.
I don't think they mean to be the enemy of all of us; I think they conceive of themselves as our betters and protectors. They are, however, the enemy of all of us. They defend their own interests, and are a positive threat to human liberty.
A Manual for the Ages
One hesitates to say anything even a little bit positive about the Nazis, but listen to just the first bit of this to learn about the manual they included in their Panzers. It shows an awareness of the costs of government that is enviable, even if nothing else about their program was.
Courtesies of the White
A rare privilege:
The three royals are allowed to wear white in front of the Pope because they are Catholic Queens and Princesses.They are each one of only seven women in the world who have 'the privilege of the white' – or the ability to wear white when meeting with the Pope.Called le privilége du blanc in French or il privilegio del biacno in Italian, the special tradition is extended solely to designated Catholic queens and princesses and is reserved for important events at the Vatican, such as private audiences, canonisations, beatifications, and special masses.Normal protocol for papal audiences requires that ladies wear a long black dress with a high collar and long sleeves and a black mantilla.
An American woman can, of course, wear whatever she wants.
The Rhythms of Old Norse Poetry
A really interesting video by Jackson Crawford, if you're into Old Norse or metered poetry or both.
It's Not Wrong to Threaten the President
Come off it. He put up a post on Twitter. That shouldn't be occasion for an interrogation. I think there's a real chance the current President is still alive because he was chosen by God to be; if that's right, all actual assassins will fail as the prior ones have for as long as that divine will continues. Some loser running his mouth, and virtually where it's even less important, isn't going to change anything.
The natural rights are what matter. That's what the government itself allegedly exists to defend. If it can't do that, or worse if it betrays them, it is without function.
Let a man speak his mind. Even if he's a jerk; a loser; a liar; a nothing without honor. Who cares what a man like that says? His words are empty, cowardly, and without meaning.
What does matter is the right to speak your mind.
Rolling to Remember
If any of you are planning to attend this year's Demonstration Ride through Arlington and DC, I plan to be there again.
The Preservation of Books
Professor of history at the Catholic University of America Michael Kimmage writes an impassioned defense of a library in danger. It is rhetorically quite impressive.
Two oceans can be said to defend the United States. There are also the islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, outposts of security and pivot points on the U.S. Navy’s map of the world. The American territory not bounded by water is bordered by countries with no reason and no will to invade: Mexico, Canada, and the United States still have the remarkable option of friendship, should they choose to accept it. Were the will to invade ever to materialize in Mexico or Canada, it would have to contend with a military that commands immense power on land, on sea, and in the air. For those still undeterred, countless nuclear weapons stand ready. The security is not total — total security is an illusion; but it is a fact so formidable that it can be (and almost always is) taken for granted.
Washington, DC, lies within this endless zone of security. Daily the city that defends a nation and a hemisphere defends itself. It does so seamlessly, as the task of the millions who wear uniforms, work in cubicles, decipher intelligence, and debate strategy so that the nation’s capital might be forever unharmed. The War of 1812 scarred Washington and the Pentagon was hit in 2001, two vivid exceptions to the rule that the American capital is impregnable. Only bad weather can go where no great power would dare to go; only it can barge in and break things down. Apart from the remains of a few Civil War forts, Washington, DC has no ruins. It is unlikely ever to have ruins.
The unlikelihood of erasure, of ending, of extreme loss is psychological. Since it reflects certain realities – the reality, say, of two world wars that never directly threatened the American capital – this unlikelihood is unspoken. It is assumed, implicit, built-in, less an unlikelihood than an axiom of national security (and daily life). The White House was rebuilt after it was burnt down in 1812. The Pentagon was quickly repaired after it was damaged in 2001. And yet – a ruin is conceivable in this world-historical fortress, a ruin in a massive building on Pennsylvania Avenue a few blocks from the statue of General Sherman (who laid waste to Atlanta in the Civil War) and a few blocks from the White House. I am sure that such a ruin is conceivable in Washington, for I saw it with my own eyes.
This turns out, of course, to be the threat of Trump and DOGE; specifically, the threat posed by spending cuts, in this case to the Wilson Center for International Scholars' library. It does sound like an impressive library, and I agree that a collection like that deserves preservation.
The rhetorical flourishes are less impressive at the conclusion of the essay, however.
The libraries of Washington, DC must be protected by the citizens of the city, book by book, collection by collection, and if they have to be saved they should be saved merely as the necessary objects that they are, not as metaphors. Better yet, the city’s books should belong to the city’s employed librarians, who are not primarily guardians or warriors or self-conscious defenders of civilization but the giver of gifts, the enablers of so much that is necessary. Without them, an abyss opens. With them, the abyss is kept at bay. We must save the books.
That view of librarians is unfortunately antiquated, and not consistent with what the American Library Association has taken to be its actual mission. They defend their practice of "collection maintenance" -- a euphemism at best -- as "weeding." This is often done with ideological ends in mind, given the ALA's very clear and deep bias towards progressivism. All of the links in this paragraph are to the ALA's own sources, in the interest of fairness.
This shows up in local library collections finding themselves purged even of classics of world literature 'that are no longer of interest,' combined with additions that are drawn from 'the latest' fashions -- fashions that have been shaped by a parallel bias in publishing. Also in the interest of fairness, that link is to the NY Times.
Now, here's how that tension plays out locally, which is emblematic of the problem we face at scale.
“I continue to get hounded by people about the stuff they’re displaying in the libraries,” said Commissioner John Smith, who led the discussion about possible withdrawal. “They’re promoting the same ideology that most people in this county reject.”
[County Manager Kevin King] told the board that its most direct power over the library was through its appointments to the library boards, its appropriations to the library and its ability to exercise the right of withdrawal as permitted in the FRL interlocal agreement.
“The fourth option would be to close the library,” said Hooper, chortling audibly....
King said, “I guess that’s an option.”
Commissioners seem to be upset by some of the displays that are put up in the library, and voiced their disapproval that the nature of the displays have not changed... Commissioners also made it clear they were not happy with library leadership.... “It seems like they’re really promoting certain agendas,” said Commissioner Michael Jennings....
“You ought to be able to go to the library and not have to be appalled by anything that’s there, no matter which side you’re on,” said Jennings, apparently referring to political affiliation. Jennings and all his fellow commissioners are Republicans.
That's how we really got here, and it's a problem that has to be addressed if the libraries are to be preserved.
I agree that valuable collections ought to be preserved (rather than "maintained" in their euphemistic sense); even if Kimmage's rhetorical flourishes are a little overstated, I agree that keeping good libraries is a fundamental function of civilization. I too want to save the books, as a lover of books and of learning.
If librarians wish to resume the role that Prof. Kimmage ascribes to them, they need to reflect honestly on what they themselves have been doing to drive a wedge between themselves and the community of which they are a part. The work is itself communal, because the community pays for it even if most of the community doesn't do any of it. A community won't pay forever to be insulted, undermined, derided, or dissolved.
The briar patch
Harvard says, "Fine, we'll show you, we'll fund our own research and not have to satisfy your demands."
What is a tariff?
Having always tended strongly to favor free markets, I struggle with the special problems posed by the risks of international commerce. I think Oren Cass is talking sense, analogizing Chinese supply lines to subprime loans:
Taking the risk on China paid off handsomely for many years, while businesses avoiding it likely faced higher costs. The dynamic is a common one across industries: taking risks, cutting corners, ignoring resilience is all fun and games while the weather is fair. All the while, companies behaving more responsibly assume the costs without seeing benefits. Paying insurance premiums when catastrophe does not strike can come to feel like a mug’s game.
But when winter comes and only the ant has food, the grasshopper doesn’t get to scream, “arbitrary decision by the government.” Conversely, of course, no one really wants to see the grasshopper starve. This problem is prevalent in public policy. In many insurance markets, it leads to mandates to maintain coverage. In financial markets, it leads to regulations requiring banks to maintain certain levels of capital or limiting the risks they can take. When it comes to international trade, how might we ensure that businesses betting on the low costs of risky supply chains internalize the costs of taking those risks, insofar as we do not want to just point and laugh when the storm comes? How might we ensure that better alternatives are available? One answer might be to impose some sort of tax or fee on the risky imports, reducing the cost advantage. We could call it a tariff.
Borrowing trouble
We do sometimes have to borrow trouble when our available supply runs short, as if insufficient to the day were the evils thereof.Powerline reports on a Minnesota story in line with an all-too-familiar journalistic trend, which I call the "Nation braces for" headline. In this case, a story reports that no one has any firm reason to suppose that the Trump administration is planning to grant clemency on the federal charges piled on to the George-Floyd convictions that landed Derek Chauvin in prison. The article dutifully reports that law enforcement has no information on any such plans. Governor Walz also has no information on any such plans. Nevertheless, "the governor and other public officials" are bracing for the inevitable riots that will result. Might as well get started on those riots right now, lest anyone be caught short on the looming five-year anniversary of the troubles.Similarly, we were treated recently to a spate of articles about the inflation and recession that would result from President Trump's tariff policy. The actual news reported inflation abating, while the brief stock market dip corrected itself convincingly, thus revealing itself as more of a panicked reaction to distorted news than a real economic development.None of this is novel. The climate catastrophe reported for the last 30 years has been almost 100% ill-founded predictions rather than news of genuine climate events. In each case, the nation braces for something awful that will have been caused by the bad people in charge.An acquaintance recently remarked that President Trump deserves no credit for causing a disaster and then fixing it. It's a way of coping, I suppose, with the embarassment of predicting a disaster that never happens: as if it had happened in a kind of virtual universe but was averted there. I'm reminded of the Goldie Hawn character in "Overboard" (very worth watching) who complains, "I almost had to wait."
Mother God
Over at Instapundit, an article on 'how New Age women are turning right.' The politics of it aren't very interesting to me, but the story itself is. Indeed, the particular woman they chose died of her New Agery before the recent election anyway; except as a poignant example of how it can go wrong, I don't know why she's relevant to what they want to discuss.
Women may have stopped flying, but they still needed miracles. Sottile writes that in the Victorian era, women could transcend their inferior status by channeling spirits. “Spiritualism and women’s rights were intertwined,” she adds, sometimes in dramatic fashion. At the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, “strange rappings” would shake “the very table where suffragists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Sentiments,” Sottile notes. When Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society a few decades later, she positioned herself as the chief spiritual authority of a new religious movement. She was an odd figure who’d fled her much older husband in a search for esoteric truth, and her tales bore a touch of the grandiose: She spoke of ascended masters, and ancient wisdom, and a great spiritual destiny for herself....By 2011, Sottile writes, the nexus of conspiracy and New Age belief had become so pronounced that experts coined a term for it. “Conspirituality” thrives on social media, and the rise of Trump has only supercharged it. Many of its most prominent voices are women like Carlson, who listen to their inner voices to the exclusion of all others, and they tilt, often, to the far right.
I know several of these women, and none of them are remotely on the political right, for whatever that is worth. One of them was a banker in Charlotte with a significant position at the national headquarters and a husband who disappointed her; she left job and husband and moved to India, later returning a mystic who taught yoga and proclaims that she can spiritually heal you and talk to the dead. Another is a Doctor of Philosophy who didn't decide to pursue the academic career she had invested so many years in, but now teaches yoga in Savannah. There are quite a few others.
The article goes on to suggest that the practice is mentally unhealthy -- "The self is not boundless, and a woman who delves within her own mind can trap herself there" -- but these women seem quite happy to me. Well adjusted? No, not that: they have rejected that as an important consideration. But they seem happy. The one teaching yoga on the docks in Savannah in the morning is much happier than she was when I knew her as a Ph.D. candidate. The life of rising each day with the dawn and leading others through exercises to the subtropical sunrise sounds pretty idyllic. It seems (from afar) to have improved her mental health as well as her physical health.
It is definitely healthier than the article's conclusion:
In America you can believe anything, and you can sell just about anything, too. “For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known,” the apostle Paul told the Corinthians. We are all Paul by our mirrors, looking for the truth, wanting to be seen. But the glass is cracking. Behind it there’s only a wall.
That is merely despair. Despair by tradition is a mortal sin precisely because it destroys the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
Blood on the walls
The Commodities Futures Trading Commission apparently was persecuting defendants fairly lawlessly. One commissioner kept complaining and suffering retaliation for it. Now she's the acting chair. This week, a defendant in one of the more scurrilous cases got hold of the dirty laundry and filed a motion for sanctions against the Commission. The court agreed, dismissed the case, and commended the acting chair for starting to clean the place up. I'm guessing the court's order of dismissal suggested that the dirty actors at the CFTC should show up tomorrow prepared to line up against a wall, and advised them not to wear a nice shirt.
Russia Adapts
In the face of drone warfare, a Russian adaptation provides at least a propaganda victory.
Motorcycles are fast, nimble — and as actor Steve McQueen showed in the World War II movie "The Great Escape" — the epitome of cool. But replacing tanks with motorcycles?...Russian troops believe that motorcycles are fast enough to storm Ukrainian positions, light enough to infiltrate through terrain inaccessible to tanks, and agile enough to evade the drones that have helped destroy 10,000 Russian armored vehicles. "These assaults are quite large-scale: from a dozen to a hundred motorcycles," the Ukrainian spokesman said. "They believe that in this way they can quickly overcome the terrain and reach Ukrainian positions — faster than a drone can reach them. And if not — then one motorcycle is spent on one drone."
As many a Hollywood movie has shown (as well as foreign films like Mad Max), a large number of motorcycle riders can be quite impressive.
A Brief Lesson in Arab Manners
I was watching this video of Trump and the Saudi Crown Prince having a meeting, at which I assume coffee (but possibly tea) was served. In spite of the language of this tweet, he did eventually drink it as he should have -- hospitality is a valuable matter of honor, and though having been offered it is strictly good enough to trigger the protections, rejecting offered hospitality is quite insulting.
That's not the part I wanted to tell you. See how the Prince drinks his right away, and then shakes the cup back and forth until they come to take it? That's important to know.
In Iraq they served usually tea, and it was boiling hot. Iraq was already boiling hot, without being asked to hold a glass of boiling hot liquid in your hand. As soon as I could, I would drink it, and immediately the cup would be refilled with more boiling liquid. Nobody told me that was the way to signal that you'd had enough, and no more was wanted, thank you very much for the generosity.
So now you know. If you ever end up in the Middle East accepting hospitality, that is how you signal that you're finished and don't need any more.
Also, the word for "no" in Arabic is lā. If you want to be very polite, "no, thank you" is lā shukran. These are very important words to know when traveling in Arabic countries. (Also in China, where the Mandarin word at least is bù or bù yào for 'don't want [that]').
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