Natural History

While down on the Mall after the ride, we also visited the Natural History Museum. I thought the dinosaur displays were fun, but my comrades inexplicably wanted to spend all their time in the fossils and gems section. Rocks are not nearly as exciting to me. 

I will note that both of these museums had what they were pleased to call a "full security screening," which entailed me having to be front-and-back wanded after emptying my pockets at both locations -- even though I had fully disarmed before entering the building. These practices serve no purpose, I think, except to accustom citizens to the idea that they have to accept being subject to being treated as a potential criminal according to the demands of authority even when they are suspected of no crime, no warrant is possessed against them, and so forth.

What did they think I was going to do? Rob them at gunpoint and walk out with the Space Shuttle or a Tyrannosaur on my back? If you're worried about me shoplifting the Hope Diamond, you need to search me on the way out, not the way in. 

You might say, "Well, they are worried about mass shootings," and perhaps they are; however, the data show that armed citizens are much more effective at stopping such shootings than police, with fewer wrong people getting shot to boot. There's no rational reason for the government to treat American citizens as a threat except to accustom citizens to the idea of subjugation. 

Udvar-Hazy Center

I have been to most of the Smithsonian museums over the years, but this time we went to one I hadn't: the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center just on the flight path to Dulles International Airport. It had a very impressive collection, far larger than could fit in the more famous Air & Space Museum downtown.

More impressive to me than the planes, rockets, gyrocopters and other flying machines was listening to my son talk about them. I had no idea he knew so much about, well, anything at all. But he would lecture freely about almost every plane we passed, and with such knowledge that at one point a listener asked him about the contents of the collection as if he were an employee. "Oh, look! That's Fw 190, one of the 20mm variants. They..." 

He went on for four hours like this. I've never seen him so excited. I was exhausted by the end but he seemed as fresh as when we first arrived. 

The Love that Moves the Stars

The President's Memorial Day address included a line that probably gathered little notice, but deserves some remark. 

President Trump’s Memorial Day address opened by reflecting on the power that drives sacrifice—not politics, but something far deeper.

“Great poets have written that it's love which moves the sun and the stars,” he said. 

“But here on the sacred soil, right where we are, we're reminded that it's love which moves the course of history and moves it always toward freedom. Always.”

Emphasis added. Great poets may have written that, but a great philosopher certainly did: the concept is from Aristotle's Metaphysics. 

We know that God cannot cause movement by moving (Metaphysics 1072a26). If God did cause movement in this way, God would be susceptible to change, possess potentiality, and would not be the pure the energeia that Aristotle believes God must be. [Also, following Aristotle, Aquinas etc. -Grim] This is why God must cause movement through desire (Metaphysics 1072a27). An object of desire has the power to move other beings without itself moving.... 

The notion of movement through desire is straightforward. Which one of us has not been excited to move here or there by our desire for this or that? We might even suppose that desire is the primary source of all movement. Such an idea is entertained by Aristotle in De Anima: “It is manifest, therefore, that what is called desire is the sort of faculty in the soul which initiates movement” (De Anima, 433a31-b1). 

Aristotle's basic account is that the soul that motivates the heavens has some capacity to perceive the eternal divine, and therefore loves it and longs to imitate it. The heavens cannot persist eternally in the same way, but they can move in a way that imitates eternity. This sort of motion is circular, because it begins and ends and begins again in the same place and continues in the same way. Thus, the way the stars and sun reel about forever in the heavens is motivated, he thought, by their longing to be like the divine they could perceive. 

The insight the President is citing here wasn't meant as a kind of beautiful metaphor. Aristotle meant it quite literally: it is love that moves the sun, that moves the stars. 

The Return Ride

I had meant to ride back today, but the weather coming in after this weekend was not promising. We made the ride yesterday instead, which was still not entirely easy. By morning we were riding through a 200 mile wide salient of air that had fallen to 50-52 degrees, which meant temperatures in the 30s at highway speed. Heavy drizzle turned to driving rain at points, soaking us in hypothermic temperatures. Even after we crossed the salient, air temperatures hovered just at 60-61 in which hypothermia would still have been possible for soaked bodies even without the windchill of the highway.  

It was 15 hours of this, or six hundred miles averaging forty miles an hour once you included stops to warm and eat. 

The whole thing reminded me of the episode where Saruman bends the cold down on the Fellowship as they are trying to pass the mountains at Red Horn, or Caradhras. Unlike the Fellowship, we were able to cross the High Wall at Sam's Gap into North Carolina. It was completely encased in cloud for hundreds of vertical feet, but thankfully not the snows that faced the Fellows. 

My son, who accompanied me on this his first thousand-mile-plus motorcycle adventure, is quite pleased with himself today. As well he might be, I suppose: success in spite of that hardship validates that he has become the kind of man he wanted to be. I am proud of him. 

In Memoriam

 

The Bellamy Brothers & The Isaacs

 

Rolling to Remember ‘25

The city government doesn’t care for the event, and at the end forces all riders onto I-395 into Virginia with no clear way back into town. We get back anyway. The people love it and come out in crowds to cheer us. They wave flags and salute and join in the honoring of the fallen.

Good turnout this year. 

UPDATE: AMVETS, one of the organizing groups for this event, sent this out: "To be clear, we had it in writing from the National Parks Service Permit Office that riders would be allowed the option at the end of the ride to continue on Independence Avenue and circle back behind the Lincoln Memorial to Henry Bacon Drive by the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial for a closing ceremony. We had crew on the ground at the intersection of Independence and 14th St. to ensure a roadblock was not erected before the run began. As our lead element in the run approached 14th, the escort police motor units turned wide and created a blockade, once again forcing everyone to turn left on 14th St.... We have requested, through the White House, a meeting with U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who is responsible for the NPS."

A dignified silence

The same Oxford memoir from which I drew the Chesterson quotations a few minutes ago mentioned Margot Asquith, second wife of Prime Minister Asquith (1908-1916). Asquith opposed women's suffrage on the ground that "women have no reason, very little humour, hardly any sense of honour... and no sense of proportion." Looking her up on the net, I found a quip that would contradict at least part of her judgment of her own sex, if it indeed happened. (I remember my father relating this story to me some decades ago, though I'd forgotten whom it was about.)

Asquith was known for her outspokenness and acerbic wit. A possibly apocryphal but typical story has her meeting the American film actress Jean Harlow and correcting Harlow's mispronunciation of her first name – "No, no; the 't' is silent, as in 'Harlow'."

Slavery and symbols

The incomparable G.K. Chesterton, from a debate and conversation at Oxford:

"Because I bow down to the sceptre, and because I take the words 'honour and obey' quite literally, you say that I am the slave of the symbol. But I bow down to the sceptre because I believe in the power that lies behind it. I keep to the smallest details of the marriage service because I believe in marriage. If you believe neither in the sceptre nor in the service, and yet bow down to them, then you are the slave of the symbol."

* * *

[As he was leaving the debate hall:] "A time will come--very soon--when you will find that you want this ideal of marriage. You will want it as something hard and solid to cling to in a fast dissolving society. You will want it even more than you seem to want divorce to-day. Divorce ..." and here, with a sort of groan, he thrust his second arm through his mackintosh--"the superstition of divorce."

A Candidate for Grim

 

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. 

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. 

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.

Getting Democrats to Support Border Security

 

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.

Common Sense Gun Laws

UPDATE:

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.