Fall’s Eve

I, like many, consider September 1 the start of Autumn. In fact, I advance all seasons by 21 days. And most of the time the earth is flat. I thought you might want to know.

What lawyers are doing lately

If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.

So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.

Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.

Miloš Miljković

Status versus contract redux

Steve Robinson, who always leaves me wanting more so rarely does he blog or podcast, has fostered 50 boys over the years, housed his dying father-in-law, housed his dying parents, and now is housing his daughter’s family of three. Somewhere along the way, the coin dropped:

We have all embraced the idea that a multi-generational home is not a financial “last resort”, a rescue operation, a pit stop to self-sufficiency, or an end game for losers. It is how families normally (should) exist. A multi-generational household is a world-wide cultural norm, a given, not an embarrassing alternative lifestyle choice, pragmatic financial arrangement (nor even an admirable “noble sacrifice”) that says to the world “we cannot afford to sustain our nuclear, self-sufficient family or pay our medical bills”. In short, we all understand that living together as adults with kids is “normal”… even when it is difficult. None of us see ourselves as the recipients of some mercy, condescension, assistance, or being given a “loan” that will come due in some future emotional hostage taking family battle.

This is very not-America-in-2026. There may be a Chud in the basement, but nobody’s happy about it.

I don’t think living with my son’s family will ever be a financial necessity for my wife and me. And my late father-in-law made it his grim mission never to be dependent on his children as his mother was dependent on him after his father’s premature death. I’ve re-written this rest of this paragraph repeatedly; suffice that he succeeded in never becoming a financial burden.

But here’s the thing: I’ll take that burden 9 days out of 10 over the statist individualism of Sweden:

Swedes have come to prize relationships entered into freely rather than maintained by material necessity. Public child care helps women avoid financial dependence on husbands, state old-age homes liberate children from obligations to ageing parents, and so on. (Even marriage is a bit suspect: in France or Germany households are the basic unit of taxation, but in Sweden all adults file independently.) American parents sending their offspring to college must submit proof of their incomes for the youngsters to qualify for scholarships. In contrast, young Swedes are assumed to be on their own: the income of their parents is irrelevant. Their independence is a gift of the state, expensive as it is to sustain.

It’s reprise of what we used to talk about as “status versus contract.” Life without status-based obligations to other people sounds pretty terrible to me.

On this blog’s trajectory

While writing the preceding item, I thought that I must have written something or a few things around October-November 2014, when my wife and I each lost our surviving parent within two weeks and 5 hours of each other. Indeed I did, and I like what I wrote. I think it’s kind of timeless..

Nonsectarian Prayer

I had forgotten that the perfect nonsectarian prayer for public meeting was written many decades ago by one of our greatest writers:

Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place

(I prefer no prayer to “nonsectarian” prayer, and that’s a preference of many decades’ duration.)

Legal news, one click down from SCOTUS

The Institute for Justice publishes a weekly collection of pithy case summaries from U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal:

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New Hampshire parents (and a grandparent) are barred from school property after wearing pink wristbands at high school soccer game in protest of a trans player on the visiting team. First Circuit: Seems like a First Amendment problem.

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During an oversight visit to a federal immigration facility, N.J. congresswoman has a confrontation with federal officials. She’s later charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding a federal officer. She claims immunity under the Speech and Debate Clause and alleges vindictive prosecution. Third Circuit: She loses on two of the counts against her and we remand on the third. Dissent: Sure seems like she’s being treated worse than Jan. 6 defendants.

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Allegation: Woman peacefully protests fatal police shooting by grilling hot dogs and hamburgers outside Lafayette, La. mayor’s house. She is arrested for obstructing the roadway, which she wasn’t, and strip searched at jail. Unlawful retaliation for speech? Unconstitutional arrest without probable cause? Fifth Circuit: Qualified immunity. Dissent: Qualified immunity is made up and wrong, and also it doesn’t apply here.

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Student visiting Michigan court as part of a vocational program falls asleep while judge is giving career advice. Yikes! The judge has her locked up for several hours and then puts her on fake trial. She sues. Judge: The “trial” may have been fake, but I am a real judge entitled to real judicial immunity. Sixth Circuit: We’ll give you points for chutzpah, but not immunity.

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Is possessing virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material in the privacy of the home protected by the First Amendment? Seventh Circuit: Under binding precedent, yeah, it seems to be protected. Two-judge concurrence: Perhaps SCOTUS should give a fresh look-see to its early-aughts precedent on this subject.

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Arkansas sex offender serves most of his 30-year-sentence, is granted parole, and seeks to live on property owned by family trust. Yikes! His parole officer fabricates a nonexistent daycare nearby and bars him from living there—a situation that other officials, apprised of the lie, do not remedy. A due-process violation? Eighth Circuit: There is no constitutional right to early release, so no.

Short Circuits excerpts for August 28. You can subscribe for free.

I’m a big first amendment guy, but virtual, AI-generated child sexual abuse material, even in the privacy of the home, strikes me as beyond the constitutional pale. I do remember Thomas Becket’s passionate admonition against punishing merely dangerous Richard Rich, but possessing kiddie porn is more than dangerous.

Celibacy, Chastity, Abstinence

Kevin Williamson, after a great accounting of Why Everybody Hates Capitalism, distinguishes three things that too often are treated as synonymous:

Celibacy, properly understood, does not refer to a state of sexual abstinence per se—it refers to the state of being unmarried or the state of having sworn off marriage, with the understanding that Christian morality requires sexual abstinence as a consequence of the unmarried state. Chastity, in the Christian moral vocabulary, does not refer exclusively to sexual abstinence, either, but to keeping sex in its place: Catholic doctrine speaks of chaste marriage, meaning one in which the dual unitive (we Catholics love our jargon) and procreative functions of sex are properly integrated into the marital relationship. Chastity may mean abstinence in one context and forbid practicing abstinence in another. Abstinence, of course, is the word for what often is meant by celibacy: abstaining.

Maybe some day he’ll get around to “immaculate conception,” too (which I didn’t capitalize because Orthodoxy holds no such doctrine, but I nevertheless know what it means).

Power to pick up and leave

British political commentator David Goodhart argues that globalization has created two types of people—the anywheres and the somewheres. The anywheres enjoy the benefits of the new networked world. They move comfortably through cyberspace and around the physical world. Their identity is the identity of the global network. The ability to move around networks freely is the new marker of power. Power is the ability to live in multiple places at once. To have the power to pick up and leave. The sense of meaning traditionally found in “place” is replaced with the freedom found in the app.

Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence

Shorts

I can’t figure out what made her so loveable. I think it was the sincerity of her artificiality—that she put herself together in the most artificial way possible, but believed in it like a kid believing that a cap pinned to his shoulders could make him fly. When she talked and sang, she was completely direct and honest, even into old age. The rhinestones were heavy, she told a family member, so she wanted to rest on a fluffy bed of cotton in the casket. She was one of a kind. (Frederica Mathewes-Green)
Under the circumstances, handing Darline Graham a Senate seat is tantamount to handing Trump himself a Senate seat. It’s akin to Caligula installing his horse in the chamber, this time with the people’s consent. Which, as others have noted, makes last night’s result feel like a logical outcome for the modern GOP. (Nick Catoggio)
The actual power of an undergrad Red Guard scrutinizing a candidate for some small-time faculty position he is ultimately thankful he did not get is nothing compared to the power of an unelected tech boyar and his greasy shock-troops dismantling the federal government. (Justin Smith-Ruiu)
Vote Republican. Vote red otherwise we’re all dead. … Your support of the Democrat party makes me seriously question how much I’m going to talk to you in the future. I don’t talk to democrats. They’re filth. Period. (Alleged remark of a clergyman grooming an emotionally fragile teenage girl) in the late twenty-teens.
How firm. How furious. How fleeting. (Frank Bruni’s description of one current Republican candidates reaction to January 6. I won’t name the candidate because it fits about 90% of the GOP.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.