Requiescat in Pace, Dolly Parton

A very young Dolly singing in Fountain City, Tennessee.

Dolly Parton will be missed here in Appalachia. I don't doubt that such a forward-thinking and cunning operator -- for she was that, as much as she was a darling of everyone and a much-beloved singer and songwriter -- will have set up all the proper contingencies to keep her charity for the poor children of her home running long into the future. She will still be missed for her example. 

Dolly was the same age as my mother, who is still alive. As such mom, who grew up in nearby Bearden, Tennessee, got to watch Dolly from a very young age and all her long career. That show whose (silent) video opens this post was a Cas Walker show, a local politician and shopkeeper to the Knoxville area who used country music and his radio show to advance his position (and thus was a sponsor of such events).*

From her beginnings from the age of 10 as an extra on a local politician's radio show, she progressed to real success as a songwriter first. She then got on with Porter Waggoner's show -- he is usually though incorrectly credited with having the first all-female backup band in country music (in fact it was David Allan Coe who did that first, but he wasn't famous enough yet to be remarked for it). From 1967 to 1974, when she left the show and broke with Waggoner professionally, her duets with him were some of her biggest successes. In 1973 she had a real independent hit with the famous "Jolene" -- thus the name of one of my second cousins' only daughter -- and then went off on her own. The song she wrote about that departure is "I Will Always Love You," a song later more famously covered by another female vocalist.

She had a long and varied career, but what I always keep coming back to in my mind is all the good she did for those growing up poor in the place where she once did. Music has the ability to last forever; some songs are so old that we don't really know when or where they came from. Some of hers may, if not exactly as she wrote them than in the manner of folk songs. Yet her good deeds for the poor of the mountains, that is what I will always remember about her and her life's work. 

Rest in peace.

* Cas Walker was a noted character. Dad's favorite Cas Walker story was from the radio show, The Farm and Home Hour. Shortly after radar guns became a thing that the state police were using, Cas gave an editorial against them on the show. "Some of our best citizens," he said, "are being caught in these traps." 

The Commancheros

In American history, the Comancheros were a group of Europeans who traded with Comancheria, the Comanche Empire, during its period of dominance in the Southwest. In the John Wayne movie of that name, these traders deal especially in weapons, making them enemies of the Texas Rangers. 

In Australia, for some reason it's the name of a Motorcycle Club. Like the Texas Rangers before them, the Australian police are hot enemies of theirs for reasons chiefly related to firearms (though the press release mentions seizing large amounts of tobacco as well as cannabis and meth). 

All of this explains, if it does not quite make sense of, the current Kafka-like attempt to send a biker down for 15 years because he played Duck Hunt at a carnival shooting gallery to try to win his daughter a teddy bear. 

During the festival, the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang member allegedly tried his luck at a sideshow game where players use an air rifle to shoot plastic ducks and win prizes.

Footage obtained by 7News showed Simpson loading and firing the rifle while attempting to win something for his daughter.... Detectives from the South Australia Police Crime Gangs Task Force launched an investigation after learning about the alleged incident. Simpson was arrested in Adelaide on August 21....

The firearm order charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years behind bars or an AU $75,000 fine. Being unlawfully present at a shooting gallery can result in up to 10 years in prison or an AU$50,000 fine 

It is not the first unusual object to trigger weapon rules. A six-year-old was suspended for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun, while another child faced punishment after bringing a tiny LEGO gun to school.

In another incident, this time from the UK, a man was sentenced to four months in prison for carrying a six-inch Master Sword replica from The Legend of Zelda.

As a general rule, any time a police agency starts giving its task forces hardcore names like the the Raptor Squad or the Scorpion Units, you should probably disband them and start over with a fresh crop. They've already lost the plot, and are no longer conceiving of themselves as peace officers but as some sort of commando operation targeting members of the public. 

Praise the Day at Evening

Give praise to the day at evening, | to a woman on her pyre,
To a weapon which is tried, | to a maid at wed lock,
To ice when it is crossed, | to ale that is drunk.

-Havamal verse 81 

This weekend a friend of mine texted "About to do what I hope is the last suspension related job on this thing. It SEEMS like it will be easy and only take an hour or two..."

I texted him back, '"The last job.” “It’ll be easy!” “Only an hour or two.” You’re already ******.' The original was not censored. 

Sure enough, he broke a bolt off inside the hole, and had to go buy a new cobalt extractor kit because it was a high grade bolt. 

I had a good shop day on Sunday. My son and I worked on three different motorcycles, just making minor adjustments and doing preventative maintenance and tune-up work like swapping spark plugs. I didn't say anything good about it, though, until it was all over. 

The Havamal didn't come down to us, even with the filter of Christian scholars writing it down centuries after conversion, as a book of commandments. It's not a set of prohibitions either, like the rules surrounding Kosher or Halal foods. It was apparently just intended as a collection of good advice. You don't have to do any of it, and the Wild Hunt isn't going to come get you if you don't; but things somehow seem to go better if you do. 

Foot-Washing

My great-grandmother and her folk were Primitive Baptists, for whom foot-washing was a crucial annual ritual (as it is for the Pope). My mother tells me stories about how carefully prepared were the feet of all the parishioners come Maundy Thursday, lest any rumors get around that they weren't perfectly upkept, those feet belonging to very hard working men and women from the mountains of rural Tennessee. 

Muslims do it five times a day, at least they're meant to do. In Texas there's a little controversy about it.

One of the justifications for installing the foot-washing stations is that travelers performing Wudu were washing their feet in ordinary bathroom sinks, which is disgusting and incredibly unhygienic. Can you imagine walking in on that? 

Indeed I can! I have encountered that fairly often in my life, first in China where a number of the folk in our residence hall were African Muslims. I don't know that it's any more unhygenic than washing their hands in the sink; our issue was that they washed their feet and their hands several times a day, but very rarely their armpits or other areas that might have benefitted from more regular attention. I was more than happy for them to wash. I only wished that they did a more thoroughgoing job of it.

There is probably a reasonable point of balance between "We don't want to favor any religion in public accommodations, especially not Islam as Muslims sometimes confuse accommodations with conquest," and "I really would prefer you not wash your feet in our shared sink." 

Dangerous Gentlemen

One of my county commissioners is apparently on a mission from God. 

Next time I run into that guy I'm going to ask him just what he means by "dangerous gentlemen." In principle it's compatible with my 2004 essay Social Harmony. All the same, religious angles make me suspicious when they come from a politician. 

In a California Rock Festival...

...you're supposed to bring your own rocks.

Arlo and their pickles is, you likely know if you hang around here, a reference to this old song:

Content warning, I guess -- 1970s drug and anti-authority lyrics. Ya'll were mostly all there, though. You probably can handle it. 

Range War II: The Ranchers Win

I noticed today this small note about a range war written up here in 2024.

Charles and Heather Maude, a small, fifth-generation farming and ranching family near Pennington County in South Dakota, were prosecuted by the Biden administration via the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in 2024. Both parents were charged separately, facing $250,000 fines and up to 10 years in prison each, for allowing their cattle to graze on 25 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.

The Maudes, whose family has owned their farm for five generations, disputed the fence line that marked the edge of their property with the grasslands, and claimed the U.S. Forest Service had originally set up an informal agreement Biden’s administration later violated.

What would normally be a small civil dispute was used by Biden’s Forest Service to severely prosecute the Maudes for theft and purloining. Charles Maude also told The Daily Signal that government officials advised them to find separate living arrangements for their children in the likely event that both parents were locked up for a decade.

Rollins, Noem, and several state and congressional officials commended the Maudes, and announced new efforts by the Trump administration to not only review new disputes and concerns of bureaucratic overreach via a new online portal but vowed to review older government decisions against American farmers and landowners.

“The prosecution of the Maudes is now over. They will not be driven from their homes, they will not be failed, they will not be fined and their children will grow up with a mother and a father that they love and who love them,” Rollins said. “We are ending regulation through prosecution.”

A happy ending, just like a Western from the golden age. 

Notes for the Scrapbook

A clipping from last weekend’s chile pepper contest. 

Sic transit gloria Mundi.

How Safe is the US Compared to Europe?

The Economist poses a novel dataset as a partial answer to the question (archive version because of paywall; original is here for subscribers).

Short answer: if you're interested in how safe you are walking down the street or operating a business, no, probably not. Murder rates are higher in US cities -- again, it's a few neighborhoods in a few cities driving those numbers up in the US -- but murderers usually know their victims. Your house is far more likely to be robbed in a European city than in an American one. Your business is far more likely to be robbed in London than in New York City, and even Chicago and LA are less likely to involve a business robbery than the capitol of the UK.

Only Chicago ranks among the worst European cities -- and below both Paris and London -- for how likely you are to be robbed on the street. Vehicle theft is more likely in Chicago and LA than in Europe, but on the other hand, Americans are more likely to own a vehicle to steal. 

The set doesn't include other offenses we might care about: assault, battery, violent sexual assault or rape. However, the picture that comes out overall is not the one you normally get from the press. If you compared the rural US, which has violent crime rates around half of our city average (i.e. not our very worst cities like Chicago), the safety of Americans would be even more stark.

Another Noble Victory

A judge rules the 'ghost gun' ban by the Biden administration to be unconstitutional. Most importantly, this governs the construction or finishing of your own firearms at home. 

State-level restrictions may remain, as with last week's victory; and once again, the judge's order might only apply to parties to the suit, which is a potential problem if you aren't a member of one of the organizations that sued.

Scales, Eyes

Long-time Milblogger CDR Salamander points out that this is really an indictment of the schools she attended rather than of her, herself. All those student loans were ill-spent if she came away thinking that Russia wasn't a colonial power. "I think it’s fair to say that they left her with a poor understanding of Chinese, Arab, and Turkish imperialism as well," he adds. "We can just assume Aztec imperialism was ignored as a cherry on top."

A Partial Answer

Last week we were talking about the divergence between polling results and the electoral outcomes in the Hong race. Partly, it turns out, it's because some of the polls were what is called in military provenance an "Information Operation."

Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification. 

Thank you for your understanding.

Believe me, the last thing they want is for people to understand what that means. 

An Era of Peace and Safety

One would not get the impression from the news that we were living through a historic era of peace, nonviolence, and safety. Apparently we are!

The FBI estimates that murder fell 18 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. There was an estimated 9 percent drop in overall violent crime and a 12 percent drop in overall property crime.

Overall, it was the largest percentage point drop in murder, violent crime and property crime ever recorded. With murder you have to go all the way back to 2024 to find the previous largest one-year drop in murder and before that the previous largest one-year drop was in 2023....

I wrote about this as well a few months ago here and noted the unreliability of those mid-1950s estimates and that the more modern estimates really begin in 1958. I think it’s fair to say that the US murder rate in 2025 was roughly the lowest ever recorded and there probably won’t be any ambiguity when the 2026 data is released next year.

Emphasis added. His project includes an attempt to estimate what the FBI statistics will look like going forward, which his method has shown success at with this year's data. So next year, he estimates this based on what we've seen so far of 2026:

The 2026 US Murder Rate Will Be By Far The Lowest Ever Recorded

...The 2025 murder rate should come in at between 4.1 and 4.4 per 100k while the 2026 murder rate should come in at an astonishing 3 to 3.8 per 100k based on the currently available data. Could that change? Yes. Is it a sensible forecast given all we currently know? Also yes. Will the 2026 rate be substantially lower than anything we've ever recorded (FBI murder estimates back to 1960)? Almost certainly yes.

Emphasis not added. That's the headline.

All of this at least correlates with a vast expansion of the number of firearms owned by private citizens, now well more than one per person, almost all of them unregistered (more than 393 million unregistered firearms, that is). The historically low murder rate correlates as well as with SCOTUS' expansion of gun rights -- including the insistence in Bruen that states, even New York, allow for some form of concealed carry rights by citizens. 

As I have pointed out in the past, America was already a very safe nation. The illusion presented by the news is a version of the availability heuristic: we have a lot of news when things go wrong, so a lot of information. The fact that things go right almost always almost everywhere generates no information for our brains, and indeed happens at such a scale that it is beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of millions of people live together in peace and safety every day. We can't calculate that, or comprehend it as a whole against which to measure the rare exception.

A fact about the United States that is apparently difficult to grasp is that almost all homicide happens in a very small number of neighborhoods. Most American counties have a murder rate of zero -- not zero percent, zero murders. The vast majority of the remnant have very few murders. The murder rate of the United States as a whole is driven as high as it is not even by a few bad cities. It is driven there by a few neighborhoods within a few cities. For the most part, America has no violence problem, no 'gun violence' problem, no crime problem.

An armed society is a polite society. Ours is getting downright peaceful. Too bad no one knows it.

Democratizing War

Russians have apparently decided that it's not safe to keep accounts on deposit in the wake of the Kremlin's financial woes. (WPost paywall; archive version here.)

Total withdrawals this year could nearly double the amount taken out in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Taras Skvortsov, a senior executive at Sberbank, Russia’s biggest retail financial institution.

The withdrawals are causing liquidity problems, according to Skvortsov and a former senior Russian finance official, overstretching a financial sector already strained by increasing levels of bad debts following a government-directed lending boom to ramp up military output.... Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser to the Russian Central Bank, said the withdrawals reflected deepening fear among the Russian public.

“It means people have no trust in the Russian banking system or in the Russian financial system,” Prokopenko said. “This is all a consequence of the fear that the government will do something with the banking system, that it could nationalize deposits.”

It's not just ordinary Russians, either.

Now, big businesses are also seeking to move money out of the reach of Russian regulators as anxiety grows over potential asset seizures. That is further exacerbating the problems, the former official said. 

In all, more than $9.4 billion was transferred out of Russia in the second quarter of 2026, according to Central Bank data.

Emphasis added. Ordinary people who pull their money can put it in the mattress or bury it, but big businesses can remove it from the country's financial system altogether.

Russia looks likely to be the first domino to fall in the new era of war made possible by drones. Wretchard argues that the effect of democratizing precision weapons could, ironically, be to limit state power in a way that benefits us all. The nation state cheerily sacrifices its citizens for its goals, but now starting a war like this can imperil the nation's survival even if another opposing army can't arise to conquer it.

Ironically the proliferation of precision weapon is a fact that can be used for peace. China for example, cannot assume that it can take Taiwan without putting the Communist Party of China at risk. The lesson of Ukraine is don't invade Taiwan.

The US has attempted to limit its engagement in the Gulf because it, at some level, understands this.

The natural order of the world in an era  of mutual vulnerability should be one of trade and grudging peace. The fact that it is not, I think (and I may be wrong) is due to the legacy habits of the 20th century when "special military operations" were in fact possible and also to the fanatical irrationality of apocalyptic cults.

Here, knowingly or not, he is echoing anarchist Edward Abbey's endorsement of the civilian ownership of rifles and firearms in general. 

It's a tool of equality, in other words. Edward Abbey said that was common to rifles:

The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

Emphasis added. 

It'll be a good day when nation states fear to start wars because they know that the most likely effect is neither victory nor defeat, but the death of the leaders themselves -- as Iran's mullah's have learned, though their replacements still fight on. After that war finally grinds to its end, however, what political leadership will be eager to start another? They'll be the first ones to die, as likely as not. Defanging the nation state could be the start of a better world, just as an armed citizenry here at home has led to an era of unprecedented peace and safety (see next post).

Amphorae

A clever explanation of the odd shape used by the ancients. 

A Non-Mystery about Tryggvason

I guess it's hard to get published without claiming that there's some unknown to be solved, or a mystery to be explored, or novel information to be had. This time there really isn't. (H/t: Hot Air)

At [the center of the naval battle at Svolder] stood Tryggvason’s great warship, the Long Serpent, one of the most famous vessels in saga literature. Enemy ships closed in from all sides, capturing Norwegian ships one by one until only Olaf’s flagship remained.

From there, the king is said to have fought on the deck of his ship while his fleet was destroyed around him. But aggressors had the upper hand. Most accounts agree on the basic ending. Olaf disappeared into the sea.

“Everybody thinks that he jumped overboard and drowned because he was wearing full armour,” Hollway says.

This remains the view accepted by most historians. But not all.

When I saw the headline -- "He Was One of the Greatest Viking Warlords and His Death Is Still a Mystery" -- I thought the article was going to be about Sven Forkbeard. We know when Sven died, in England at the very height of his powers, but we have conflicting sources about how. Some say he'd been hiding a long illness, others that he fell off a horse. Either or both could be true. 

Olaf Tryggvason's death, by contrast, is clearly recorded in the Heimskringla. Snorri has quite specific details about the whole thing, a matter on which he seems well-informed. Some of the Heimskringla shades into legendaria -- Odin is mentioned towards the beginning as a founder of the kingly line in Norway -- but that is mostly confined to the early books. By the time of Tryggvason, Snorri is writing solidly about history.

Kolbjorn the marshal, who had on clothes and arms like the kings, and was a remarkably stout and handsome man, went up to king on the quarter-deck. The battle was still going on fiercely even in the forehold. But as many of the earl's men had now got into the Serpent as could find room, and his ships lay all round her, and few were the people left in the Serpent for defence against so great a force; and in a short time most of the Serpent's men fell, brave and stout though they were. King Olaf and Kolbjorn the marshal both sprang overboard, each on his own side of the ship; but the earl's men had laid out boats around the Serpent, and killed those who leaped overboard. Now when the king had sprung overboard, they tried to seize him with their hands, and bring him to Earl Eirik; but King Olaf threw his shield over his head, and sank beneath the waters. Kolbjorn held his shield behind him to protect himself from the spears cast at him from the ships which lay round the Serpent, and he fell so upon his shield that it came under him, so that he could not sink so quickly. He was thus taken and brought into a boat, and they supposed he was the king. He was brought before the earl; and when the earl saw it was Kolbjorn, and not the king, he gave him his life. At the same moment all of King Olaf's men who were in life sprang overboard from the Serpent; and Thorkel Nefia, the king's brother, was the last of all the men who sprang overboard. It is thus told concerning the king by Halfred:—

"The Serpent and the Crane
Lay wrecks upon the main.
On his sword he cast a glance,—
With it he saw no chance.
To his marshal, who of yore
Many a war-chance had come o'er,
He spoke a word—then drew in breath,
And sprang to his deep-sea death."

The following chapter gives eyewitness reports of his death. It describes a rumor that spread at the time that the king might have slipped out his mail-coat underwater -- try that sometime, if you have access to a hauberk of mail! Be sure you have a friend to pull you back out again, because you won't be able to do it -- and somehow escaped, but it also contains a poem scolding people for raising such stories that was written by one of Olaf's own skalds.