Grim's Hall

“Cancel Christmas”

Our Technical Rescue instructor, a mighty mountain man of many years’ service, used this phrase once in training to warn us of the dire dangers of loading your rappelling rope wrongly through your rack’s brake bars. If you do that and you step off the edge, he said, “Cancel Christmas.”

European people have made at least as serious an error, and are falling in upon the remedy.

Finland Has it All

Now including civilian gun ranges for national defense.

On Rituals

Sometimes we talk about archeology or anthropology assigning meanings to structures or observations. They very often tend to assign religious explanations when they can't think of anything else, but we often just don't really know why ancient ancestors did things. If there was a meaning at all, it is unknown and unknowable.

I was thinking about how easily meaning is lost when reading this article: If you're traveling out West and you see an old cowboy boot stuck up on a fence post, what does it mean? These are people who actually participate in the custom or know others who do, and they can't agree on what (if anything) it means.

Jack Farrell was a ranch boss at Sombrero Ranches in Colorado for decades.

He said there were many a wrangler that worked for him who discarded their old boots by adding to a collection of weatherworn boots already atop fence posts surrounding the ranch property.

“It’s like throwing bras onstage at a Tom Jones concert. Once one does it, they all have to do it and they don’t really even know why after long,” Farrell said. “I guess it all started with a purpose, but I’ll be danged if anyone ever knew what that was.”...

Most ranchers contacted for this story had either never seen it done or didn’t know the significance behind it.

“Never heard of it,” said Kelly Lockhart, patriarch of a sixth-generation family cattle ranch based in Jackson, Wyoming....

He assumed... coyotes would associate the smell of the boots with gun-toting ranchers and steer clear....

Footwear at the end of its life simply made for a handy decoration to spruce up the property line.

But the practicality of covering a fence post makes sense as some claim. A boot placed over a post would keep rain from seeping into the wood and decaying the post prematurely.

Typically, it is thought boots on a fence are there as a memorial to a favorite horse, a lost member of the family or a beloved ranch worker who passed away.

Some have speculated boots perched atop of fence post could also serve as communication in days before cellphones, for example. A visitor could instantly tell whether the homeowner was around or not.

A boot with its toe turned toward the main house indicated the rancher or farmer was at home. A boot pointed in any other direction was to show the owner was still at work — the boot pointing to the field he was working in.

How much harder is it to understand a cultural practice from the other side of the world, or an ancient age?

Human beings don't really like admitting that they don't know something, much less that they can't know it. We like to think we have more knowledge than we do, just as we like to believe we have a lot more control than we do. It may be that there's nothing you can really do about how you're going to die except to hurry it up with very bad decisions; but endless ink is spilled on the alleged benefits of this-or-that diet, or having a glass of wine for your cholesterol, or not having a glass of wine ever at all.

What do we know that we really know? Descartes came up with one item for the list: we experience thinking, and therefore our mind must exist. Everything else is suspect to a greater or lesser degree.

Pragmatically we have to get along in the world, though. So if you see a old boot on a fencepost, I wouldn't go as far as questioning the existence of the boot or the fencepost. If you can find the guy who put it there, maybe he can even tell you why he did it. Maybe he read this blog post and thought it sounded like a fun idea.

The last month of the year

On a more cheerful note:

Where does electricity come from, anyway?

As far as I can tell, neither the author of this NYT piece (not paywalled, I think) nor anyone running the show in Iran knows the answer to that question. Paragraph 5 takes us as far as the Iranian president's apology for having to cripple the country with power outages, and his plan for a solution:

“God willing, next year we will try for this not to happen.”

So that's comforting. The author meanders for many more paragraphs without revealing a single clue how a country rich in natural gas can't keep the power on. Can't get it out of the ground? Can't transport it? Can't build or properly maintain power plants? No power lines to get the electricity to homes or businesses? He barely seems curious.

Eventually it occurs to him how to blame it on (1) Jews, (2) stingy foreign investors, and (3) the refusal to use less energy, but that's not until paragraphs 19 and 22.

Regime change is a tempting hope, if only there were some reason to believe the country contained people with a clue what to replace it with. I doubt the problem will be solved by blaiming Jews, demanding charity from foreign investors, or conservation. At some point they're going to have to grasp how non-totalitarian economies work, or just drift back into the stone age--a maddening fate for a people with a rich history and natural resources.

Drive the Cold Winter Away

Reason for the Season

When I was in Ocean City, Maryland, earlier this month most of the businesses were closed for the season. I was a little shocked at how much this was true; Savannah, Georgia, is a similar sort of town but has a large enough resident population that even in the depth of winter pretty much everything is still open. Not so here! Not just hotels and restaurants and bars but grocery stores and other purveyors of regularly-required necessities were shut down.

Of the few hotels that were still operating, one of them had on its sign, "Let's keep the Christ in Christmas," or something similar to that. This greatly upset one of the comrades I had come to see, who felt it was exclusionary, perhaps even discriminatory, when displayed on a public accommodation. I said that I thought they should grant the Christians the justice of the statement, and, ah, 'turn the other cheek.'

That is not the spirit of what has come to be known as "liberalism," which used to mean "being ok with other people disagreeing with you." Today's Asheville Citizen-Times presents locals with a lecture from a retired superintendent from Vermont who has, like so very many before him, chosen to move South and then lecture us about how we need to change to be more like it is up North.

Naturally, the newspaper was delighted to publish the letter.

Opinion: Christmas season not about religion, but about pure and simple love
[Really? Not at all about religion? -Grim]

It is the time of the year that we are compelled to tell this wonderful story. In reality, the circumstances and conditions of this story are foreign to many of us. It is a story about poor people. It is a story about people of color. It is a story where might and wealth are on the opposite side. It is a story of Arabs. It is a story of Jews. It is a story of Phoenicians, at least that is what we are led to believe. It is a story where pieces and parts from separate Biblical writings are pulled together to give us a compelling version of what happened.

Most know what story I am talking about. While it is a story that is embraced by the Christian faith, it might also be embraced by people of all faiths or people of no faith at all for it is a story of love.

That's enough to give you the flavor of the thing; you can read the rest if you want to, but you've probably read it before. The man was a career educator, which explains a great deal about the state of our society.

A Single Political Post

I was not planning on doing any political posts during the holidays, barring unforeseen emergencies; but I do feel that I ought to note this article by David Samuels on the breakdown of the Obama machine that has been successfully manipulating American politics for the last few years. I ought to do so because we all owe Mr. Samuels a great debt, as it was his work that got Obama's messaging imp Ben Rhodes to confess the whole bit because he thought he was talking to a friendly outlet (namely, the New York Times Magazine).

Mr. Samuels, as it turned out, was an honest journalist who really believed all that talk about the free press serving a watchdog role. In faithfully performing what he had youthfully believed was a sacred duty he was freely assuming, he first revealed what he is now explicating.

My thoughts on having read through it are that his analysis understates Elon Musk's role, even though he puts him first in honor. Musk's breaking Twitter free from the censorship program created the friction in the gears of the machine that recently, and blessedly, caused it to fly apart. Samuels comes as close as a man educated to speak to secular audiences can to referring to blessings in his shorter remarks on the role of Donald Trump's survival of the assassination attempt against him.

It's a very long piece, and because of its author it deserves discussion. For now I will merely note it, and perhaps we will return to it in the New Year.

Yuletide

The winter solstice is today. That guy, the motorcycle-club leader cum Druid, to whom the movie sword Excalibur was freely given because he had changed his legal name to Arthur Pendragon, he’s still around. Here’s a photo series from today’s revelry at Stonehenge that includes him.

Christmas Cookies

Strait is considered one of the greats of Texas country music, but he’s a little late for me. He’s more of a revival figure from the 80s than one of the 70s greats who were revolutionary rather than traditional.

Thus, I’d never heard this piece until tonight. It’s not bad at all.

A Little Boogie Woogie Christmas

From Lynyrd Skynyrd's Christmas Album

Christmas Tunes

It is Illegal, Isn’t It?

I always wondered why DEI-style programs didn’t count as illegal discrimination. I once applied for a job with the Department of the Navy and was told I wasn’t qualified before they actually asked about my qualifications— just my demographics alone sufficed to exclude me from consideration. For any other demographic group, the law explicitly forbids such a ruling. For me and those in mine, somehow the discrimination was explicitly permitted, even required.

I understood the arguments in favor of such programs as remedial of decades of discrimination and centuries of slavery. Not that my ancestors— red dirt farmers, coal miners, drovers, welders— had benefitted a great deal from any social injustice. One of my grandfathers manufactured concrete blocks by hand, until he got a job as a forklift operator. The other repaired long-haul tractor trailer trucks. Others had it harder still, but this sort of race-based remediation was at best a blunt instrument that didn’t much treat the problem.

But what always confused me was how it wasn’t just illegal. It seemed to be, following from the principles. Yet every institution practiced some version of it, especially the government.

Maybe it’s illegal after all.

The Appalachian Stack Cake

My paternal grandmother always had one of these under glass every time I ever remember visiting. She was a tremendous cook, making three meals every day starting with breakfast before dawn. I learned to make biscuits from her, but she never taught me this recipe.

Here are two versions, one with dried apples and one with apple butter. If you have never tried it, it’s a great holiday cake.

The Horrors of Moderation

A group of Kenyan employees have been diagnosed with "severe" PTSD because of their jobs -- as moderators on Facebook.

More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.

The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.

The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.

The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.

They must be doing a good job. I've never seen anything on Facebook that caused me to faint, vomit, or scream and run away.