Rand Paul Takes on the Tyrant

Rand Paul on the Senate floor:

Taxation without representation is tyranny, bellowed James Otis in the days and weeks leading up to the American Revolution. This became the rallying cry of American patriots. . . . Our founding fathers believed so strongly in this that they embodied in our Constitution. Our Constitution doesn't allow any one man or woman to raise taxes. It must be the body of Congress. And this wasn't new; it was part of maybe a thousand-year tradition from Magna Carta on. . . . This principle was long-standing, it was non-negotiable; this was what sparked the Revolution.

And yet today we are here before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes. This is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The constitution forbids it. . . . Forty, fifty years before our Constitution, Montesquieu wrote, "when the executive and legislative powers are united in one person, there can be no liberty." Our founding fathers took this to heart. They said, we must separate the powers, we must at all costs limit the powers of the presidency. This isn't about political parties. I voted for and supported President Trump, but I don't support the rule of one person. We are set to have a 25% tax on goods coming from Canada and Mexico. This is a tax on the American people, plain and simple. One person can't do that. Our founding fathers said no, that would be illegal. It can't come from one person. It has to come to Congress.

You can't simply declare an emergency and say, well, the Constitutional Republic was great but gosh we've got an emergency, our times are dire. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said, there are no exemptions for emergencies. There was no exemption for a pandemic. The taxation clause stands. . . .

[after trashing the excuse of fentanyl as an "emergency," Rand said]

Even if the problem is valid, even if that is something that we all agree on, you can't have a country ruled by emergency. You can't have a country without a separation of powers, without checks and balances. . . . Part of the problem we face today with this emergency is that Congress has abdicated their power. Not just recently, not just for this president. This is a bipartisan problem. . . . I am a Republican, I am a supporter of Donald Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem. I don't care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat; I don't want to live under emergency rule. I don't want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me.

One person can make a mistake; and guess what, tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work, they will lead to higher prices, they are a tax, and they have historically been bad for our economy. But even if this was something magic and it was going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn't want to live under emergency rule. I would want to live in a constitutional republic where there are checks and balances against the excesses of both sides, right or left. If one person rules, that person could make a horrible mistake. . . .

The emergency declaration we are considering today is unprecedented. By declaring an emergency, the president invoked the Internation Emergency Economic Powers Act. . .  It's a law that has been used to put sanctions on like Iran. That's what it was intended for. It was never intended for tariffs and the word tariff doesn't appear in the law. Using this bill to impose tariffs is attractive to a president. He doesn't have to work with the messiness of democracy, the messiness of Congress. But you know what; that messiness is a check and a balance on power. . . . Expedience is not the same as legality. 

This is not a partisan question. To me it makes no difference if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. This is about the distribution of power. This is about the separation of powers. This is about the admonition that Montesquieu gave us, that when the executive power and the legislative power are united in one person, there can be no liberty. Our founding fathers all believed that. They so feared the power of taxation that they gave it only to Congress. . . . This goes against the traditions of our country.

I stand to speak against these tariffs. I stand to speak against these emergencies. I stand against the idea of skipping democracy, of skipping the constitutional republic, of rejecting our founding principles. Not because I have any animus toward the president. I do this because I love my country and I want to see it protected from the amalgamation of power into one person so that it can be abused.

Another name for emergency rule is martial law. Who would want to live under the rule of one person? The thing we object to in all the countries around the world that we dislike is that they don't have democratic rule. We should vote. This is a tax, plain and simple, and taxes should not be enacted by one person. I will vote today to end the emergency. I will vote to day to try to reclaim the power of taxation to where the constution designated it should properly be, and that is in Congress.

Dire Wolves?

Colossal Biosciences, which spent years trying and failing to bring back the woolly mammoth, now claims to have brought back the dire wolf. (NY Times, Time, company post on Twitter/X with wolf pup howls)

Sort of. What they did was find some dire wolf DNA, identify 22 places on the genome where they differed from modern gray wolves, alter those locations to be like their dire wolves, insert that DNA in a gray wolf egg cell and have it carried to term by a wolf.

The offspring are different from modern wolves, bigger and with paler, thicker fur. So they are something different from modern wolves. But I am not willing to call them dire wolves.

Still, this is pretty cool, the biggest step yet in the de-extinction program. But note that dire wolves were so closely related to gray wolves that they seem to have interbred with them in the past. Nothing about this success says we might be close to bringing back animals without such a close living relative.

Fernanda Melchor, "Hurricane Season"

The amazing thing about Hurricane Season (2017, English translation 2020) is its frantic energy, an electrical storm of words, images and emotions. In a poor part of rural Mexico, a strange character known only as The Witch is murdered. The story is told from the perspectives of four characters, two male and two female, all with their own passions and their own hatreds, their own vocabularies of abuse that they direct at the world around them. In particularly they despise and abuse the opposite sex. The crimes here are all sex crimes, in a broad sense: they are about gender relations, male attempts to control women, female attempts to get something from men, straight scorn for homosexuality, and the rage of men whose machismo is threatened. In one sense it is an indictment of male misdeeds, but it is not preachy; it just turns its electric gaze on awful things, lighting up the horror and the pain of those acts like it lights up everything about its characters' worlds.

I don't recommend it for everyone. It is obscene, profane, confusing, and sometimes grim, but it is the least boring book I have listened to in years.

Links 4 April 2025

Karl Cauer, Strega (Witch), 1874

Wonderful Scott Siskind piece on the evil Atlantean dwarves that populated Amazing Stories in the 1940s, and the widespread myths that seem related.

A writer in the Harvard Crimson trashes land acknowledgements, saying the university should "Either return the land that it occupies to whichever Native American tribe that it stole it from, or spare us the hollow, meaningless acknowledgements."

Meta-analysis of studies on people who have tried to give up social media, or take a break from it, finds that it does not make them happier.

The house mothers who ran boarding houses for working girls in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Mass grave of Roman soldiers found in Austria.

On Twitter/X, Nabeel Qureshi asked his followers to rate four translations of a passage from the Odyssey, one by GPT4 and three by humans. GPT4 won. I thought parts of the AI version were good, but it had a glaring modernism that rang harshly in my ears, so it wasn't my favorite. Via Marginal Revolution.

South Korea's Supreme Court finally removes their president from office for his bizarre coup attempt.

Using AI to find new uses for old drugs: NY Times, summary at Marginal Revolution.

Review of a new book about the Turkish siege of Malta in 1565.

The rain forest tree that thrives on being struck by lightning. (NY Times, Scientific American)

Should AIs hold financial resources, so they can be sued for bad behavior? (Marginal Revolution)

Review of the new volume of W.G. Sebald's essays: "Melancholy, far from being defeatist, is itself a kind of political resistance, a way of pushing back against the machinations of fascism by preserving the past against erasure."

NPR's Books We Love, 2024 edition.

Data on Russian recent casualties in Ukraine, via tire guy Trent Trelenko on Twitter/X: 

75% are caused by drones;
20% by artillery;
4% by small arms fire.

The Decline of the Book, and What Might Replace it.

Interesting musings from Sam Kahn about the decline of the book as a form, and what might replace it. After referencing the various doomsters who say that today's college students are functionally illiterate and so on, he notes that while books may be in trouble, "writing is undergoing a renaissance."

But if print can survive the flood — through articles, short-form writing, etc — books may still find themselves a casualty. In part, what the doomsaying articles are saying about students is not necessarily that they can’t read but that they can’t read long-form work. And to some extent the kids may have a point. It is a crowded marketplace out there; the more time you spend with one person means time taken away from others. And, by the same token, if so many people are so adept at saying what they have to say in short-form writing, why the need for a doorstop? Part of what the kids may be intuiting is that a book needs to be of a certain length in order to justify the cost of the binding — and writers writing books tend, even at the conceptual level, to pad out, trying in their minds to be worthy of the majesty in the implicit idea of a book. But readers’ behavior in the digital era is very different. They are not looking to fill out a train ride or long winter’s evening with a book. They are reading looking for an idea, for something interesting, and what that implies is that writers can use readers’ attention spans, rather than the imagined length of a book, in order to give shape to their ideas. A text should be as long as it takes to express the idea.

I agree with this completely. The world is full of books that should have been articles or short stories, padded out to 250 pages because that is what the publishing world requires. Even writers as well known as Kazuo Ishiguro do this, turning interesting little ideas into bloated "books."

What I would expect that means in the realm of serious writing is, over the next years, a good deal of structural innovation in text. Even in a domain like biography or history, where the book seems especially sturdy as a form, I notice writers chafing under its inherent limits. Why should biographers have to devote the precious real estate at the beginning of their book to discussing their subject’s grandparents while the subject’s main accomplishments often come somewhere towards the end when reader and writer are both exhausted? The ‘archipelago’ may be a more simpatico structure for history than the straight line. One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project. In fiction, I would imagine writers gravitating towards the novella (an excellent form that fell into disuse because it didn’t quite fit the exigencies of the publishing industry) and maybe on the more innovative, ambitious side we can imagine writers using the resources of the web to produce sprawling fictive worlds that don’t necessarily have to be connected by a throughline.

Reading this I imagined turning my old gaming world into a sort of hypertext story in which you could switch between cities and region and follow different characters and see both how the main events transpire or are reflected in every region, plus the local concerns of each. Imagine this for LOTR, an edifice within which the sort of nerds who write posts about "what was really happening in Umbar" can go read about it. George R.R. Martin might have loved this.

I like reading novels; it is a form I enjoy. I have also enjoyed writing them. But I do suspect that they are not the future of storytelling. I suspect that while novels will endure for a long time, writing may evolve in diverse directions. Many stories will be shorter. Writers with longer stories to tell may split them into pieces; this already happens in collections of linked short stories, and we may get more of it. I can also imagine stories told like The Princess Bride, with the "good parts" narrated in detail and much of the rest just sketched out in little text or video interludes.

After saying a bit about how powerful he has found the experience of writing novels, Kahn notes that what writers find meaningful for themselves is not necessarily what the world wants:

I would say the intelligent thing to do here is is to try to change up our values system for the digital age. Good writing can be done in short chunks — articles, short stories, novellas, whatever — just as good running can be done at any length. Novels should probably be treated as what they are — something like a marathon, a sort of circus freak event for those who for some reason or other are determined to pursue that — as opposed to what they are now, which is like a badge of entry for writing. In other words, novels seem singularly unsuited to the digital era. That’s unfortunate but should be clarifying for those who write novels: that they are doing it more as a spiritual exercise than to reach an audience.

For now, this is still not true; there are still many millions of novel readers out there. But we are aging, and I consider it an open question how many of us there will be in future generations. Storytelling will always be with us, but the novel is an invention of certain cultures, and most of humanity always did perfectly well without it.