Author: thewriterinblack

I’m going to put out a minor heresy here:

People worry entirely too much about electing “the right candidate” as though that would be some magic bullet that would get them the government they want.  However, that’s going about it the wrong way.  You can vote for a candidate far outside the political mainstream and perhaps that candidate will actually win and perhaps will do some things that will make things better (in a limited fashion because there are all those other candidates in other races winning because they are in the political mainstream who will limit what your “right candidate” can do).  But it will not last, the next one along will simply undo the changes and probably double down on the “wrong things” (as you and your out of power “right candidate” see them) in backlash.

As Milton Friedman put it, the way we change things is not by electing the right people.  It’s good to elect the right people, but that’s not the way we change things.  No, the way we change things is by creating a climate of opinion such that it becomes politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.

That means that you need to worry less about the candidates running and more about convincing the electorate of the principles and values you want to further.

Anyone reading this blog very much should know that I lean very strongly libertarian.  What I mostly want government to do is “don’t.” Don’t do this.  Don’t do that.  That other thing?  Don’t do it either.  There are very limited areas where government can work to increase the overall liberty of the people.  (Being able to defend myself with arms is freedom; having to constantly do so because there’s no law and order is not.  thus, there is some small level of government where the freedom of the individual is maximized.) Yes, the bounds of those limits are fuzzy and hard to precisely nail down.  Yes, government will use any power it has to use that “fuzziness” to expand its power and continue to do so.  Those are part of that “eternal vigilance” thing.  It takes active, ongoing work to keep government in check to prevent it from growing beyond those narrow bounds.  And, sadly, humanity has historically seemed to have the attention span of a goldfish and so lets that vigilance slip so that government inevitably grows more and more invasive.

Ostensibly, the Libertarian Party exists to fight back against that growth of government.  the problem, from my experience dealing with folk involved in the official party, they tend to be focused too much on “electing the right people” (and generally focusing the vast majority of their attention on the Presidency) and far, far too little on “creating a climate of opinion.”

Outreach and recruitment is not exactly their strong suit.  Particularly since entirely too many have an all or nothing approach and so we get.

“You know, I really think government is much too intrusive, but if we cut all these programs cold turkey, a lot of people will be hurt at least in the short term and that will cause a backlash against…”
“Statist!  Taxation is Theft!”

“You know, I like the idea of a truly free society but if we import a lot of people who don’t believe in that then…”
“Statist!  Open borders!  People should be free to come here if they wish!”

“I really like the idea of free trade, but some places that don’t follow that have control of critical resources we need in order to maintain our standard of living.  Perhaps if we have some kind of leverage between just letting them bleed us and outright conquest then…”
“Warmonger!  You just want to impose your will on them by force!”

Frankly, I wonder sometimes if the Libertarians want to win.  After Jim Weeks, a prospective Libertarian candidate for President stripped down to his briefs on stage at the Libertarian candidate debate to…prove what exactly?  In my personal encounter with may Libertarian Party supporters I have come to the conclusion that they aren’t really interested in “winning” but in feeling good about their “no compromise” position. (Really?  How is support for forcing a baker to use his artistic skills to make and decorate a custom cake for a cause to which he is religiously opposed a “no compromise” position on Liberty?  Yet that’s one of the positions Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson stated in the last election.)

If they want to make themselves feel good, that’s fine.  Just close the door behind you and wash your hands afterward.

What we need is more outreach, more persuasion, more attempt to shift that “climate of opinion” so that liberty becomes politically profitable.  That means being prepared to engage people and explain, calmly and rationally, why liberty is good both for them and for the public at large.  It means accepting that not everyone, not even very many, will agree with everything right off the bat.  And that’s okay.  As long as they’re moving in the direction we want to go right now, in the direction of greater liberty, be willing to let go the points of disagreement for the time being.  Get things moving in the direction of greater liberty, even if it’s only a little bit.  Keep the big picture in mind.  Where do we want to go?  Is someone helping us get closer or are they moving us farther away?  If it’s moving us closer, even if it’s flawed, even if it’s extremely flawed, then it’s something we should be encouraging.

One things are moving in the direction of more liberty and once people see that the increased liberty is good then, with further encouragement, that will further snowball into yet more climate of opinion in favor of liberty.

And then it will be much easier to elect the right people.  It will also be much less necessary to elect the right people because even the wrong people will be doing the right things.

After all, it will be in their political self interest to do so.

As I have mentioned before, I was the guy who always got bullied growing up.  Late developing physically making me the “runt” all the time.  Slower, weaker, and less coordinated than my classmates.  “Odd” interests (space, science fiction, science in general).  Oh, and poverty.  Can’t forget poverty.  All of those added up to the “weird kid” that everyone picked on.

Take all that.  Add in a bit of “face blindness” (faces, unless I know them really well, tend to look alike to me; take two faces and let me compare feature by feature and I can differentiate them so long as I have both in front of me, but try to recognize someone, particularly in a crowd?  Not happening).  And even without the weird way my mind can be “wired” and it’s a recipe for never learning to read “social cues.”

I don’t get social cues.  And, as a result, I have major, major social anxiety issues.

So when this picture popped up on my social media feed, I got it, totally:

As what I said above suggests, I have no idea what “flirting” looks like on the receiving end.  Part of that is that, in addition to the above reasons, because I’m a big ugly, relatively “low status” by most markers (neither of remarkable physical attractiveness, nor with any significant wealth, nor fame, nor power/influence) guy so I don’t get flirted with much.  Even if I did I wouldn’t recognize it.  So, maybe I do get flirted with but just don’t recognize it.

If I did recognize it, I have no idea how to flirt back.  So, if someone were to flirt with me, getting no response, they probably wouldn’t do it twice.

And that’s just talking about casual flirtation.  If I wanted to go beyond flirtation to a relationship or even a dalliance?  Troubles just begin there.

What I said up above about not getting social cues?  That applies here.  Even if by some miracle I recognized “flirting”, I have no idea what “signals” suggest that moving beyond casual flirtation would be welcome.

And if, somehow I managed to recognize those signals (perhaps if said signals were applied with a baseball bat–see Neil Gaiman’s bit on “how to seduce a writer”–more on that in a bit), I have no idea how to actually take whatever steps I need to take to move things in that direction. (I don’t know and would be deathly afraid of crossing some line that I don’t get because I. don’t. get. social. cues.)

There’s also a problem with that “signals applied with a baseball bat”.  You see, sometimes in the past young women (this was mostly when I was in school) would do just that.  And in every case but three, they were doing it as part of a “set up” in which I ended up as the butt of some rather cruel joke–making me think I had a chance only to jerk the rug out from under me in a very public and messy fashion, leaving me humiliated.  Each of those three exceptions, well, they turned out badly for other reasons.

Did I mention social anxiety?  That’s a large part of it right there.

When people trying to be helpful say “you just…” every word after “just” turns into the adults talking in the old Peanuts’ cartoons.  “wah wah wah wah wah.” Okay, not that bad.  I mean, the words sound like English but they don’t combine into anything that makes sense to me.

So, yeah, Goku.  I get it.  More than you know, I get it.

 

No, this has nothing to do with the play which I have not seen and really have no interest in seeing.

My education in American History is, I’m ashamed to admit, thinner than it ought to be,  I had the requisite classes in grade school and junior high.  I had “Virginia History” in 4th grade way back in the day.  To a large extent it was “Rah rah” (that being in Virginia) but that’s okay.  Pride in one’s country and state and their accomplishments is a good thing.  Recognizing the flaws and endeavoring to make them better is also a good thing.  In my experience, however, if you start with the pride aspects, it’s not too difficult to teach the flaws as aberrations or just “the way things used to be before we learned better” and move on to making things better.  If, however, you start with the flaws it’s the devil’s own time trying to teach pride later.  In seventh grade we did Ohio History (we’d moved between those two times–actually it was quite a bit more complicated than that but let “we moved” suffice).  In eighth US history.  And I thank whatever gods there may be that all this was before Zinn’s “People’s History” had corrupted the Education-Industrial complex.  Still, these were all brief overview type courses and a long time ago.

My reading since then has been a bit more focused–the Federalist Papers, de Toqueville’s “Democracy in America”, a bit here, a bit there, covering “high points” as I saw them.  I didn’t really get into the people and the events as more than broad strokes.  My various “On This Day” posts here are part of an attempt to remedy that lack.  In addition, I’ve been taking a biographical approach to studying history, starting with John Adams (who has largely become a personal hero of mine–flawed, to be sure, as witness the Alien and Sedition acts, but on balance very much “the right man in the right place at the right time” whose integrity and outspokenness to a large extent made America happen).  Patrick Henry is next up when I finish the Adams biography.

However it’s not about Adams I wish to write today.  Instead, I have come, through that biography, to get a bit of a glimpse of Alexander Hamilton that I had never had before.  I knew that he’d been one of the “Founding Fathers”.  I knew that he was the first Secretary of the Treasury but I didn’t know much about the actual policies he’d pushed–certainly not well enough to judge those policies.  And, of course, I knew about his duel with Aaron Burr.  Once I read The Federalist Papers, I learned a bit more.  I learned that he and Madison were complete, unmitigated idiots!  Okay, that’s not entirely fair.  But I kept seeing them write, in TFP that “it would be ridiculous that anybody would…” followed by something that history has shows us actually has happened.  One could, perhaps, forgive them for failing to take into account how succeeding generations would twist the Constitution and deliberately misconstrue it any place they could get away with it in the interests of their own power and authority.  Except, of course, they did think of these things or they wouldn’t have been able to bring them up.  They just claimed that no one would actually do them.

Now, The Federalist Papers were written to sell the Constitution, to encourage the various States to ratify it.  So it’s entirely possible that instead of believing that no one would do those things, they merely hoped to convince others and simply not worry about the truth of the matter.  Cupidity of venality.  That is the question.  Given what I have since learned about Hamilton, I have my suspicions.

It’s not my intent to write a biography here.  But let me give one bit.

After Hamilton resigned as Secretary of Treasury he returned to his law firm.  During the military build-up to the Quasi-war in France, Congress was taking steps toward building up an army and a navy.  The decision was to make George Washington commander of that army but some question remained about who would be the chief officers under him.  Hamilton used his influence with Washington to get him to insist that Hamilton be made his second in command.  Since, given Washington’s age, Washington was unlikely to actually take command in the field this would leave Hamilton as the actual field commander–an opportunity, should the war go “live”, to obtain martial glory.  Indeed, he urged that the army be used to conquer Spanish holdings in the Americas, Spain being an ally of France.  That the US was then at peace with Spain did not seem to factor in.  This ambitious proposal for conquest invited comparisons with those of General Bonaparte of the French First Republic–a comparison that perhaps should make us grateful that these plans never came to pass.  Instead, Adams combination of an insistence on a strong defense (chiefly Naval, echoing back to the “Wooden walls” of Athens) and a commitment to peace so long as it could be obtained honorably, undercut any inclinations to military adventurism that Hamilton harbored.

Hamilton got his revenge, after a fashion, in the 1800 election, working not only against Thomas Jefferson but also against John Adams.  In the end, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied with 73 electoral votes each (Adams received 65).  This threw the race to the House and, after further deal making by Hamilton behind the scenes arranging for several Federalist representative to abstain so that their States could instead go to Jefferson.

And that, pretty much was that for the Federalist party.  they never again won the Presidency.  They never again held the majority in the House, and they never again held majority in the Senate.

Hamilton sabotaged not merely his “rival” John Adams, but his entire party.

And, so, I find myself in remarkable sympathy with Aaron Burr.

As some folk may recall from their grade school science classes, irregularities in the orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune.  Again, according to those long ago science classes, Neptune was considered to not quite explain the irregularities in the orbit of Uranus and, further, seemed to have irregularities of its own which led, after nearly a century, to the discovery of Pluto.

Well, that tale is not entirely accurate.

Meanwhile, there were irregularities in the orbit of Mercury.  Specifically, the “perihelion precession” did not match that predicted by Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation and his three laws of motion.

To understand what this means, planets orbit around the sun* very close to elipses. (There are complications which we need not worry about here.)  The nearest approach is the perihelion.  The farthest point is the aphelion.  You can draw a line from the perihelion, through the Sun to the aphelion.  However, what actually happens is that every orbit this line shifts slightly as in the following picture (both the shift and the eccentricity of the orbit are greatly exaggerated for clarity):

The shift in perihelion from orbit to orbit wasn’t quite what Newton’s laws said it should be.  The difference was extremely small–43 arcseconds (0.0119 degrees) per century–but it was enough to show that Mercury’s orbit did not match what Newton’s Laws said it should.  Something was going on.

The presumption soon was made that a previously undiscovered planet, inside that of the orbit of Mercury, was affecting the orbit of Mercury and could explain the discrepancy.  This hypothetical planet was named “Vulcan” after the Roman blacksmith of the gods.  On March 29, 1959, Edmond Modeste Lescarbault described in a letter to French Mathematician Urbain Le Verrier seeing in transit across the sun an object that could be the new planet.  Le verrier became convinced that Lescarbault saw the supposed and previously undiscovered planet.  On January 2, 1860, he announced the discovery of the planet Vulcan.

There were, of course, doubts about the reality of Lescarbault’s observations.  Other’s, however, reported their own observations of this supposed planet.  And while controversy remained, there certainly had to be something out there as, after all, Mercury’s orbit continued to fail to match what Newton’s Laws predicted for it and Newton’s Laws were far and away the most thoroughly tested and validated laws in all of science.  Had they not successfully led to the discovery of Neptune (1846, 14 years before the “discovery” of Vulcan)?  It was “settled science.”

It was not until 1915 when a Swiss Patent Clerk (oh, you know where this is going, don’t you?) expanded on his previous work in Special Relativity which resolved the observation that the speed of light is constant no matter what the relative motion of the source and the observer and the effects that had on time and distance.  This new General Relativity led to a new theory of gravity related to a curvature in space-time.  And when the perihelion precession of Mercury was calculated in this new theory it was found to match within the limits of measurement precision (and remains so to this day).

The lessons from this tale are many, but I’d like to point out two:

1. The science is never settled.
2. Expectations can drive observations.  Often we see what we expect to see, which may, or may not, be what is.

 

In the days immediately after Christmas, my daughter Athena and I made a short visit down to the redoubtable Oleg Volk’s place in Nashville.  Oleg is a truly exceptional photographer and very much a “gun rights” person (makes me look like a gun grabber). I’ve heard him self-describe as an “escaped Russian Jew” who, like many of our best immigrants tends to out-American Americans.

While we were there, some top level competitors also visited, including Kaitlin Benthin who, at 12, is the 2018 Rimfire Youth World Champion. She and Athena took some pictures together which included Kaitlin giving Athena some coaching on improving her shooting:

Yep.  That’s a lot of pictures.

I also did a few for new candidate “author photos” for me:

And that’s all for today.

 

I do standing rib roast every Christmas.  This time I made it a bit differently from previous efforts.  This one worked out really well.

Ingredients

• 1 2 rib Standing Rib Roast (about 4.5-5.5 lbs)
• 1 lb butter
• 1/4 cup finely minced garlic
• 5 tbsp dried parsley
• 2 tbsp kosher salt
• 1 tbsp thyme
• 1/2 tbsp pepper
• 1-2 tbsp “liquid smoke”

About 1 week in advance:

Rinse off the rib roast and pat dry.  Set it aside.

Soften the butter, very soft but not completely melted.  It should be easy to stir but not liquid.  Mix in the seasonings.  Those are just suggestions.  Adjust as desired for your own particular tastes.  Mix well.

Using a rubber spatula, spread the butter over the rib roast.  Completely cover it so that none of the meat shows through.

Place the meat, bone side down, on a rack in a baking pan.  Refrigerate for about a week.

When ready to cook.

Preheat the oven to 225 F. Place the backing pan with the butter-covered roast into the oven.  Roast for 2-3 hours or until the internal temperature indicates desired doneness.  I went with an internal temperature of 130, giving a doneness between medium rare and medium.  Even with that low cooking temperature the outer surface browns nicely so I don’t consider there to be any need to sear it.  Let rest 15-20 minutes before carving.

The result is remarkably tender and juicy slices of roast that are practically bursting with flavor.

If I were to do anything different in the future, it would be to cook longer at a lower temperature to get a more even internal doneness.

First off, my apologies for missing the past few days.  I was out of town and didn’t have posts lined up in advance.  Today’s post expands a bit on a conversation I had with someone while I was away.

This post is about the concept of punishment whether legal, familial or otherwise.

Generally speaking, punishment serves some combination of three functions.  It can offer restitution to one person or group for harm done to them by another person or group.  It can be used as instruction for desirable behavior by coupling undesirable behavior with undesirable results. It can also be simple retribution–a person did something bad so they are “deserving” of having something bad done to them in return.

Note that there’s quite a bit of overlap in the three functions.  And any given punishment situation usually involves elements of all three.  For purposes here, I’m going to use “instruction” to specifically mean where the goal is for the person or group involved to learn not to engage in a particular behavior because they experience unpleasant consequences from doing so.  “Pour encourager les autres” is somewhat different.

Restitution is a fairly simple concept and to a large extent that’s what civil suits in law consist of.  One person’s actions impose an unjust cost on someone else–it can be a financial cost, physical injury, or simple inconvenience.  The court then decides if the cost was unjustly imposed, how much cost was, and orders the injurer to pay those costs to the injured party.  Note, that the “cost” isn’t just the dollar value of whatever the injured had taken but also the time, trouble, and aggravation of the whole thing.  “Pain and suffering” is also a cost (and generally the largest part of suits in which pain and suffering are factors).  But while it’s often not easy to determine what the cost actually is, the concept itself is straightforward.  You inflict a cost on someone; you reimburse them for that cost.

Instruction is also relatively simple in concept but a bit more complex in application.  Anyone who’s ever tried to raise children is familiar with the idea.  The children behave in undesirable ways, you inflict a punishment on them to discourage them from continuing that behavior.  Now, I’m not saying you have to beat your kids–punishments can take many forms and what works well for one child may be excessive for another and insufficient for a third.  But, particularly with younger children, simply explaining using logic and reason (never mind the dreaded “because I say so”) isn’t sufficient to change the behavior of most children.  Yes, Timmy knows that pain hurts and other people don’t like to be hit, but punching cousin Billy is so fun… But if Timmy learns that punching cousin Billy leads to consequences that Timmy doesn’t like (which could be that Billy punches back, or it could involve adult intervention) then there’s a reasonable chance that Timmy learns not to punch Billy.  Later, we can work on concepts like empathy and the moral issues involved once the immediate problem of Billy’s black eyes is resolved.

Then there’s retribution.  Consider, one person, call him George, kills another, call him Ed, and that this killing was what we, as a society, would call unjust (so not, a valid case of self-defense, for example).  The reasons George had to kill Ed were very specific.  They applied only to Ed and would not apply to anyone else such that George is no more likely to kill anyone else than a random person on the street would be.  What punishment, if any would be appropriate for George and why.  We can eliminate restitution as a justification (mostly; I’ll get to that in a moment).  There is no way to “pay back” the life that’s gone.  Taking George’s life doesn’t give Ed’s back (note:  I’m not arguing against capital punishment here, but against restitution as punishment in this case.) Likewise, “instruction” is not at play.  We’ve stipulated that George is no more likely to kill anyone else than some random person on the street and, so, we have no more reason to “teach” better future behavior to George via punishment than we would any random person on the street.

Does this mean that George should walk away unpunished?  We can’t “teach him a lesson” since there’s no lesson to be taught to him.  He can’t “pay” because there’s no way to give back what was taken.

(NB:  An interesting concept I have seen from time to time is indenturing or enslaving a killer to make up at least the financial loss that the killed individual represents.  So there can be a small element of restitution but it’s such a small part of the total loss involved that I’ll still proceed with the idea that restitution is not possible in such a case.)

Nearly, if not every, society throughout history would say “no” to that.  George should be punished simply for committing the crime, whether he can make restitution or whether he can or will learn a “lesson” from it or not.  The crime itself calls for penalty.

Now part of that is that the lesson can be taken by other people.  George’s punishment may discourage Frank from going down the same road. “Pour encourager les autres.”

The concept can be fine (and, indeed, its very universality or near universality suggests that alternatives simply do not work well enough to have made much impact on history) but, like anything it can be overdone.  Extreme punishments for the most minor infractions at least in Western society are considered barbaric.  This is the reason for the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution–a quick look at actual punishments considered acceptable at the time should make it clear that it did not bar severe punishments.  It bared disproportionately severe punishments:  death by slow torture for the 8 year old orphan who stole a loaf of bread.

So, restitution, instruction, and even retribution are all valid components of the concept of punishment.  Which take precedence will depend on the details and circumstances of the behavior being punished.

And this is the main problem I have with most concepts of “divine punishment.” Restitution is not usually a factor.  There’s nothing being “paid back”, returned to someone else.  Instruction?  “Divine punishment” is usually applied after any opportunities for learning better and changing behavior going forward (particularly in cases where the punishment is forever where there is no “afterward” in which to behave better).  So we’re left with retribution.  And that’s where “disproportionate” comes in.  Humans are finite creatures, with finite lifespans and finite ability to do harm to others.  We as a society have decided that for most “bad things” people do there is a point where the punishment is enough.  Sometimes that “enough” is ending the malefactor’s life, but still, at some point the punishment for the given crime is enough and going beyond that stops being justice and becomes sadism.

And that, right there, is the problem.  In most concepts of “divine punishment” it never stops.  Ever.  Let’s go back to George.  Suppose we could inflict on George all the pain and suffering that Ed experienced, plus that of everyone who knew Ed and now are deprived of that, plus generations down deprived of the memory of Ed or the benefits of things Ed would have done, or descendants that Ed will never have now (being dead) might do.  Eventually, There will be a sum total of all that.  It may have to wait for the sun going off the main sequence and rendering Earth uninhabitable or even the heat death of the Universe (if we manage to get off this rock in a big way) to get a final tally but there will be some amount that aggregates the total harm George has done.  Would inflicting that amount of pain and suffering on George (or his shade) be sufficient?  If not, how about a hundred times that?  A thousand times?  A million times?  A trillion? Whatever value you come up with, sooner or later it must be “enough” and, sooner or later when “forever” is the scale, you’ll reach that amount.

And if “forever” is the time frame than “sooner or later it’s enough” is the same whether we’re talking about one “Ed” killed or a hundred million Chinese dissidents “persecuted to death.” At some point any retribution must be enough or it stops being justice and turns into torture for its own sake.

And so, if there is some form of deity out there, and if that deity is in any way just (let alone “loving” and “merciful”) than any place of divine punishment must eventually be empty.

Or whatever holiday suits your fance.

This story has been circulating for a bit.  Two Scandinavian girls, vacationing in Morocco–a majority Muslim country that has generally been considered relatively safe for visitors–were attacked and murdered, beheaded.  The story came out in bits and pieces.  Killed.  “Severe neck wounds.” And finally “beheaded.”

The bodies of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway were discovered at their camp site on Monday near Imlal, a small village on a hiking route to Mount Toubkal — the highest peak in North Africa.

The bastards who did it recorded it and released video of the murder of one of those girls. (No, I haven’t seen the video.  I’m not looking for it.  I already have enough rage which I cannot act already.) In this video, according to reports the killings were in revenge for “their brothers in Hajin” (an ISIS stronghold in Syria).

Suspects are in custody, and that’s the good news.  The bad news is that this behavior goes on.

The world is probably well off that I am not in charge: “You will deal with this and make it stop or we will, and if we do it, we won’t care shit about collateral damage.  I am declaring ‘terrorism’ as a weapon of mass destruction and reserving the right to respond in kind.  Chemicals are on the table.  Germs are on the table.  Nukes are on the table.  You will stop this or we will stop it for you.”

I am beyond pissed.