WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

The Case of the Missing Chacmools: Soon after New Age icon and bestselling author Carlos Castaneda died in 1998, a group of his most loyal followers vanished, and many believed they’d made a suicide pact. Geoffrey Gray investigates the writer’s bizarre cult and finds himself entangled in a web of murky financial dealings, sex, possible foul play—and one death-defying supernatural being. (Geoffrey Gray, June 20, 2024, Alta)

Spirituality was Dee Ann’s escape hatch. She started reading New Age books, hanging out in sweat lodges, spending time with the local hippie set. It was the late 1970s, and, eventually, the inevitable next step was to head west, to move to California and find her guru.

“That was her mission,” Chris says. “To find a man who would take her to the next spiritual level.”

Chris remembers the scene in 1985 or 1986 when Dee Ann moved away. She packed a bag and jumped into a convertible with some new friends. Dee Ann left her two young children with Chris, and the kids screamed and cried and hollered as their mom sped off and abandoned them.

“She was laughing her ass off,” Chris says. “She was free. She was free from the chains.”

Dee Ann had wanted her sister to come with her. Together, they could escape, she promised. But Chris didn’t go along, and that was one of the last times she ever saw her sister. After moving to Los Angeles, Dee Ann found her guru: the famous writer Carlos Castaneda.

She joined his cult and became a witch—as his female followers called themselves—or a chacmool, a word from ancient Mexico for revered statues depicting guardians of the gods. As part of her initiation, she changed her name. She became Kylie Lundahl.

Then she disappeared. Days after Castaneda died, in the spring of 1998, Dee Ann and five other chacmools mysteriously vanished. More than 25 years later, they are still missing.

“SEE HOW DEEP THE BULLET LIES”

This Is Not an Escape Story: At 15, Darlene Stubbs walked away from a polygamous cult—then discovered a new life and community through running. (PAIGE KAPTUCH, JUN 5, 2024, Runner’s World)

May 2019. She is hard to miss. Her ankle-length dress is a flash of deep maroon against the chalky concrete sidewalk. Her French braid, thick and graying, sags as if trying to pull her down. She has to be miserable, running in the 90-degree heat of a southern Utah summer with a collar buttoned up to her chin, sleeves down to her wrists, in a dress with huge puffy shoulders.

She lumbers up the hill, grimacing as she reaches the top, and then turns and charges back down, the hem of her dress swishing over dirty white Reeboks. At the bottom, she turns around and does it again.

Hill repeats. In a prairie dress.

The old-fashioned uniform is unmistakable. She is a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the FLDS. But running? My previous encounters with fundamentalist Mormons in the area had given me the impression that exercise, much less running alone, isn’t something women are supposed to do.

SITUATION NORMAL:

A Prudential Way Forward in Trump v. United States (Philip Bobbitt, July 29, 2024, Just Security)

The issue in Trump v. United States, however, turned on the prudential necessities of executive authority that were repeatedly stressed in the majority opinion.

The Framers “sought to encourage energetic, vigorous, decisive, and speedy execution of the laws by placing in the hands of a single, constitutionally indispensable, individual the ultimate authority that, in respect to the other branches, the Constitution divides among many.”  They “deemed an energetic executive essential to ‘the protection of the community against foreign attacks,’ ‘the steady administration of the laws,’ ‘the protection of property,’ and ‘the security of liberty.’” (citations omitted)

If, as I have argued,[7] the reflections of the framers and other observations from the past can be effectively used outside the narrow frame of historical argument per se, the prudential nature of the quoted words should not confuse us. Moreover, prudential imperatives are often invoked both in historical arguments[8] and doctrinal arguments.[9] Where the distinction matters is in cases of first impression like this one. Then the power of historical argument is at its weakest – – we would not want the ratifiers’ original conception of global warfare as a series of naval engagements to govern our construction of the president’s war powers – – and, by definition, doctrine and precedent.  A case of “first impression” is, by definition, unprecedented.

The problem is a prudential one, as evidenced, not contradicted, by the Court’s reference to our founding history:

In his Farewell Address, George Washington reminded the Nation that “a Government of as much vigour as is consistent with the perfect security of Liberty is indispensable.” 35 Writings of George Washington 226 (J. Fitzpatrick ed. 1940). A government “too feeble to withstand the enterprises of faction,” he warned, could lead to the “frightful despotism” of “alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge.” Id., at 226–227.

In many respects, the tests on remand to the district court would be the same whether a structural or a prudential rationale were employed: if the alleged act by the president can fairly be said, presuming good faith, to be an example integral to those official duties that are committed to him alone by the Constitution, he enjoys immunity from subsequent indictment. But there can never be valid constitutional authority to orchestrating a constitutional crime—an offense that would be a valid predicate for impeachment.  He may appoint whom he chooses, but he cannot accept a bribe for doing so; he may make peace overtures to a foreign state with whom the United States is at war but he may not do so acting as an agent for that state, betraying his own country;  he may extract a promise from a foreign state to pursue the harassment of his political adversaries but not by impounded congressionally authorized funds; he may pardon any offender he pleases, but it is a constitutional offense to use the pardon power to entice an informant to remain silent in order to obstruct an investigation into the president’s own criminality.

Such a prudential analysis would respond to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s cogent complaint that the majority in Trump simply does not provide a rationale sufficient to guide the lower courts – – or future presidents – – “ex ante.” The prudential approach would provide protection for the president that should be clearly perceived as consistent with our historic commitment to put the State under law, and it would ring fence a subsequent president from turning the powers of the U.S. government on his predecessor as Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to do in the 2024 presidential campaign. The Supreme Court, in Trump, provides the basis for such a prudential approach going forward.

FAITH IN REASON IS TREASON:

My Conservative Credo (John Dos Passos, Winter 1964, Modern Age)

Somewhere in the middle twenties a Frenchman named Julien Benda wrote a book called La Trahison des Clercs that made a great impression on me. As I look back on it, it was a somewhat superficial work, but its title summed up for me my disillusion with most of the men of letters I had considered great figures in my youth. This was during the period of the war of 1914–18. I was studying at Harvard up to the spring of 1916 and followed with growing astonishment the process by which the professors, most of them rational New Englanders brought up in the broadminded pragmatism of William James or in the lyric idealism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, allowed their mental processes to be so transformed by their conviction of the rightness of the Allied cause and the wickedness of the German enemy, that many of them remained narrow bigots for the rest of their lives. In joining in the wardance the American intellectuals were merely following in the footsteps of their European colleagues. Their almost joyful throwing off of the trammels of reason and ethics is now generally admitted to have been a real transgression against the cause of civilization. I can still remember the sense of relief I felt in taking refuge from the obsessions of the propagandists of hate, in the realities of war as it really was. The feeling was almost universal among the men of my generation who saw service in the field.

Benda analyzed this state of mind with pain and amazement. For two thousand years he saw the people we now tend to describe as intellectuals, whom he described as les clercs, as having been on the side of reason and truth. As he put it, although helpless to keep the rest of mankind from making history hideous with hatreds and massacres, they did manage to keep men from making a religion of evil. “L’humanité faissit le mal mais honorait le bien.” Surveying the racial hatreds, the national hatreds, the class hatreds that rose from the wreck of civilization in that most crucial of the worldwide wars, he concluded, “On peut dire que l’Europe moderne fait le mal et honore le mal.”

Western civilization is only just now beginning to recover from the carnival of unreason that went along with the military massacres of the First World War. The hideously implemented creeds of the Marxists and the Nazis and the Fascists of various hues were rooted in this denial of humane and Christian values. The task before us is somehow to restore these values to primacy in men’s minds and hearts.

It has been my experience through a pretty long life that the plain men and women who do the work of the world and cope with the realities of life respond almost automatically to these values. It is largely when you reach a certain intellectual sophistication that you find minds that have lost the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

Treason of the Intellectuals (MARK LILLA, DECEMBER 07, 2021, Tablet)

Our century will properly be called the century of the intellectual organization of political hatred. With this one sentence, we recognize Julien Benda as our contemporary. The hatreds he had in mind—racial, national, class-based—are once again our own. When Treason was written, street violence stoked by a hyper-partisan press was common between rival radical factions united only by their contempt for liberalism and parliamentary democracy. In France the most potent political force on the scene was the antisemitic Action Française, the monarchist social movement whose daily newspaper was widely read in elite circles and served as a microphone for the silver-tongued racism of its founder Charles Maurras and nationalist writers like Maurice Barrès. The diminutive Maurras was anything but a street fighter. Instead he invented what might be called the counter-intellectual screed, which can be defined as a ruthless attack on the intellectual class for faults to which one is oneself miraculously immune. In 1905 Maurras published a pamphlet titled The Future of the Intelligentsia (L’Avenir de l’intelligence), which portrayed France’s intellectuals as a déclassé caste that had lost its influence in the age of capitalism and mass democracy, and was now exacting revenge by turning against the fatherland and becoming the puppet of Jewish and German interests. By declaring writers and journalists to be political and racial traitors, Maurras was not too subtly putting targets on their backs.

Two decades later, Julien Benda, a man of the left, published his brilliant riposte to Maurras that turned the accusation of betrayal around. The core of the book, as in Maurras’ own pamphlet, is a highly idealized portrayal of European intellectual life from the Middle Ages until the French Revolution. Benda imagined an honorable class of politically detached thinkers who for centuries had kept their eyes fixed solely on the eternal ideals of truth, justice, and beauty. He called them les clercs, an old French word for scribe that has a whiff of the ecclesiastical about it. Some of les clercs were saints (Thomas Aquinas), some were poets (Goethe), some were philosophers (Descartes), some were artists (Da Vinci), some were scientists (Galileo). What they shared was the sense of a transcendent calling and a commitment to guard it against the encroachment of power and necessity. They were not naïve; they recognized that power and necessity have claims on us, and at times we must bow to them. But they never confused necessity with truth and justice. Even Machiavelli, Benda reminds us, who taught his Prince the strategic use of evil to secure his rule, never called evil good, just necessary.

On Benda’s telling, this class of intellectuals was transformed in the 19th century under the influence of Romanticism and historicism, which lured them into thinking that their task was to shape the world, not simply understand it. In the wake of the French Revolution the strict rule of reason came to seem a paltry thing next to energy and feeling and the march of history and the evolution of the species. If existence is only a blur of pure becoming, the temptation is to enter its flow and participate in the process, bending it if one can. The value of an idea in such a process then becomes its effectiveness, not its timeless truth. And power, whether that of the creative genius, the leader, the race, the nation, a class, or a movement, becomes an idol. In abandoning their critical distance from the mundane world, modern intellectuals of left and right became moralists of realism, Benda charged, the spiritual militia of the temporal, herding the masses toward the next historical end. The scribe’s defeat begins right from the point where he claims to be practical. As soon as he asserts that he takes into account the interests of the nation or the established classes, he is already—inevitably—beaten. The arrow launched against Maurras here reaches its target, and the call to serve truth, justice, and beauty can once again be heard.

WIGGLING:

The Worm Charmers: A Florida family coaxes earthworms from the forest floor (MICHAEL ADNO, Summer 2024, Oxford American)

I wanted to know what spending their life in the woods hunting for worms meant, but I also wanted to know where this mysterious, artful tradition came from. In the UK, there are a handful of worm-charming competitions and festivals in Devon, Cornwall, and Willaston that began in the 1980s and another in Canada that started in 2012. I’d heard of similar events in east Texas, of people using pitchforks and spades as well as burying one stick in the ground and rubbing it with another to coax worms up to the surface. Later, I even found a newspaper clipping from 1970 reporting on the first International Worm Fiddling Championship, in Florida. I searched for a deep well of literature on the practice but found nothing. Certainly, worm grunting predated the Revells. But why did rubbing a stick stuck in the ground with a metal file conjure earthworms? The only way to understand was to follow the Revells into the woods.

TAMP ‘EM UP SOLID:

What Public Opinion Says About the Use of Nuclear Weapons (Jacqueline L. Hazelton, MIT Press Reader)

The U.S. public is widely assumed to believe that nuclear weapons use is bad. But new research by Joshua Schwartz, an assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology, finds high support for their use, even when foreign countries press the nuclear “button.” […]

Surprisingly, my research finds high support for hypothetical nuclear use, even when foreign countries press the nuclear “button.” In four survey experiments involving members of the public in the United States and India, support for hypothetical nuclear use is the same when an individual’s own country hypothetically uses nuclear weapons as when a foreign allied or partner country hypothetically uses nuclear weapons. For example, in one study on the U.S. public, support for a hypothetical nuclear attack against Iran was no different when Israel carried it out compared to the United States. Overall, I found that the use of nuclear weapons is not taboo in the United States and India. But support is lower when the public considers a non-allied or non-partner country’s hypothetical use of nuclear weapons.

EXPECTATION BIGOTRY:

Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: If you insist that the Jewish state is the only one that should not be allowed to defend itself against terrorist attacks, you are probably an antisemite. (David Benatar, 30 Jul 2024, Quillette)

The fact that anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are not necessarily antisemitic does not mean that they are never antisemitic. Similarly, the fact that anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are sometimes antisemitic, does not imply that they always are. Determining when anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel are antisemitism requires argument. There will be cases in which the answer is clear, and other cases in which there is scope for reasonable disagreement. In what follows, I will try to unpick the most important factors at stake in determining this.

The first step is to clarify what we mean by “anti-Zionism” and “antisemitism.” […]

I propose the following definition:

Antisemitism is wrongful discrimination against Jews as Jews.
This definition parallels similar definitions of racism and sexism:

Racism is wrongful discrimination against (or in favour of) some people as members of a particular racial group.

Sexism is wrongful discrimination against (or in favour of) some people as members of a particular sex.
These are not uncontroversial definitions. For example, there are those who think that we need to add the condition that the discrimination is systematic. I reject that addition, for reasons I have explained elsewhere—but in any case, antisemitism has deep historical roots and is often systematic. My proposed definition encompasses attitudinal and systemic, intentional and unwitting antisemitism. My proposed definition makes no reference to Jewish institutions or collectives, because by implication, one way of being antisemitic is to wrongfully discriminate against Jews by targeting their institutions or collectives on account of their being Jewish.

On the other hand: If you insist that the Jewish state is the only one that should be allowed to treat certain citizens differently on the basis of Identity, you are probably an antisemite.

ANYONE WHO BELIEVES:

Who Is an American?: Hint: It should not be about ancestry. (FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, JUL 26, 2024, Persuasion)

In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of principles … but a homeland.” He went on to illustrate this by referring to his family’s cemetery where he hoped seven generations would be buried in a plot in eastern Kentucky. He said the country welcomed newcomers like his wife’s family from India, but “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”

Taken at face value, this should not be particularly controversial. American identity has always been based on ideas like liberty and equality, making it what is sometimes labeled a “creedal nation.” But it also is a nation of shared memory and experience. And it is doubtless true that immigrants to the United States need to accept certain basic conditions for being an American, as required by their taking the oath of naturalization during the citizenship ceremony.

The real question is what Vance means by the phrase “on our terms” as a condition for Americanness. I would have thought that “our terms” meant precisely those ideas that constitute the American creed: loyalty to the Constitution and to the rule of law, and acceptance of the words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But Vance seems to be making the point that in addition to these ideas, ancestry is somehow also critical to Americanness. That quality is conferred by your progenitors, and is not simply a matter of your individual choice.

BE PURITAN:

Stricter Covid mask rules could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives, new study finds
Restrictions in Northeastern states likely ‘saved many lives’ say researchers (Josh Marcus, 7/28/24, The Independent)

The US could have avoided almost 250,000 Covid-19 deaths if every state had adopted stricter mask and vaccine requirements seen in the Northeast during the height of the pandemic, according to a new study.

Researchers say that the country, which saw more than 1.1 million Covid deaths, could have been spared an estimated 118,000 to 248,000 more lives.

TAX EXTERNALITIES:

The “Deaths of Despair” narrative is wrong: It’s time to be a little ruder about this (Matthew Yglesias, Oct 10, 2023, Slow Boring)

Over the past few years, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have unleashed upon the world a powerful meme that seems to link together America’s troublingly bad life expectancy outcomes with a number of salient social and political trends like the unexpected rise of Donald Trump.

Their “deaths of despair” narrative linking declining life expectancy to populist-right politics and to profound social and economic decay has proven to be extremely powerful. But their analysis suffers from fundamental statistical flaws that critics have been pointing out for years and that Case and Deaton just keep blustering through as if the objections don’t matter. Beyond that, they are operating within the confines of a construct — “despair” — that has little evidentiary basis. The rise in deaths of despair turns out to overwhelmingly be a rise in opioid overdoses. This increase is not happening in European countries that have not only been buffeted by the same broad economic trends as the United States, but are also seeing the rise of right-populist backlash politics. […]

Novosad, Rafkin, and Asher have provided a compelling analysis of a very concentrated problem of worsening health outcomes for the worst-off Americans. Case and Deaton, by contrast, have delivered a very misleading portrait of worsening health outcomes for the majority of Americans that (because they mistakenly think it’s a majority) they attribute to broad economic forces that exist internationally but which for some reason only cause “despair” in the United States. And then it gets worse, because as Matthews argues (citing Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights Project data), the growing disparities are located in specific parts of the country:

While it’s true that rich people in America live significantly longer than poor people, that’s much less true in New York City. It’s not true in California as a whole. Heavily urban areas with high education levels see a modest relationship between income and death rates. More-rural, less-educated areas, by contrast, see a very strong relationship between the two.

Areas with smaller mortality gaps tend to be places, the researchers find, with lower rates of smoking and higher rates of exercise, which makes sense when you consider that the variation in death rates between cities is driven not by factors like car crashes or suicide but conditions like heart disease and cancer, which are themselves driven in part by lifestyle conditions. Local unemployment rates and other indicators of the health of the local labor market did not seem to be associated with longevity, nor did income inequality. These aren’t firmly causal findings, to be clear, but they might be suggestive of potential causes to investigate.

Conveniently, there’s a new piece out in the Washington Post by Lauren Weber, Dan Diamond, and Dan Keating that I think explains this geographic variation very well: Places that adopt nanny state policies to improve public health get better public health.