Grim's Hall

The Smell of Gasoline

I don't think this is the song I was thinking of yesterday, but it's a good pairing. I remember liking the smell of gasoline around my grandfather's service station. I pumped gas for him when I was a child, in deep defiance of Federal standards. The gasoline was leaded sometimes in those days. I'm fairly intelligent; who knows what I might have been without the lead in the gas I pumped, in which we washed our hands at end of day.

I guess it doesn't matter. I was wedded from birth to the hardware. V-type engines, motorcycles and chrome. Whatever I gave to it, it's given a lot to me in return.

Venison and Gasoline

So after this weekend's successful ride to and from the Stone Mountain Games, into Atlanta traffic down superhighways, my son came home and wrecked his bike on a road he rides every single day and knows perfectly well. The cause was a deer, as it often is, and he had reason to suspect it was there. A mother deer and a fawn crossed in front of him, so (as I have taught him) he began to slow down and look for others. The second fawn bolted from cover at the last second, fouling his front tire and causing the wreck. The bike went down, twisting his ankle underneath it, slid across the road, and then flipped into the air and crashed onto its side once it hit the dirt. North Carolina highways have no shoulders to speak of, in the mountains especially.

When I heard the sirens going down the valley, somehow I knew it was him. I started down the road after them and came across them tending to him shortly thereafter. Of course all the firefighters were friends of ours, except one fellow from Cullowhee who happened by.

As motorcycle wrecks go, it was everything you could want. I doubt the bike will be repairable. This is a bike I put sixty thousand miles on myself, and that he grew up on the back of as a child before I gave it to him for Christmas one year. I put two brand new tires on it for him just last week before the Stone Mountain run.

Nevertheless, it was all you could want because he seems to have escaped any serious injury. We do need to follow-up with the orthopedist for an MRI to check the soft tissues in the ankle, but the X-rays showed no broken bones at least according to the reading of the emergency medicine physician. Some minor abrasions. The bike didn't drag him even as it twisted his ankle because the highway crash bars I put on it kept it from pinning his foot or leg. When the 800-pound bike flipped and crashed to earth, he wasn't on it: all that kinetic energy went away from him when he sensibly let it go.

As far as I can tell he did everything exactly as I taught him, and on his own account always wears complete safety gear -- leathers, helmet, gloves, strong leather boots. That worked to his advantage today.

So many of my friends are bikers. Every one of them, including myself, has been in at least one motorcycle wreck. None of them have died thereby. All of my biker friends who have died have done so from heart attacks or the like. It's an inherently risky activity, but skill and preparation can help you.

All the same, today I got lucky. So did my son. If the bike didn't make it, she died with honor after a long and glorious career.

One of the firefighters got the deer.

Memento Mori

The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

The Catholic priest who was killed by a falling crucifix over the weekend in Ecuador had been giving a sermon about the fleeting nature of life just before the freak accident was caught live on camera.

Father Patricio Sánchez Molinari, of the Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in southern Guayaquil, was reflecting on the words of Jesus when he told his congregation they should not waste their lives scrolling on their phones and instead dedicate them to God and their loved ones.

“One day, all of us here will also die, and sometimes the time we’ve spent on things doesn’t have as much meaning as the time we spend with God,” he said....

The priest went on to ask God to bless his congregation as he began another prayer — when the giant crucifix behind him suddenly fell off the wall and landed on him.

So it is written. We cannot be surprised when it continues to happen.

Category Errors

A "category error" is a serious philosophical error in which, because something is assigned to the wrong category, a whole set of mistakes is sure to follow. A fairly common one among conservatives is Ross Perot's dictum that 'government should be run like a business.' No, it shouldn't; those aren't the same kind of things at all. This is also an example of the fallacy of composition, in which it is assumed that something which holds at one level of organization holds at all levels of organization: this is not true either. Oxygen and hydrogen at room temperature are gasses that lack the property of 'wetness,' but combined into a new form of organization -- water -- they are liquid and wet.

I was thinking about this while reading of a classroom experiment this morning.

One lecture in Industrial Psychology, in particular, I will never forget.

The professor spoke about how an effective job description focused on concretely measurable tasks, not vague instructions, or characteristics.

For example, "maintain an 85% or greater average on customer feedback surveys", instead of "be cheerful and upbeat", or even "interact positively with customers".

This means that goals are clear, and performance is measurable....

Once some of the students had wrapped their minds around this concept, the professor decided to do a class exercise.

He asked the female students to come up with a job description for "husband". At first, this went fine. The girls noodled around a bit with things they wanted their husbands to be (tall, etc), but he was able to gradually steer them towards describing what they wanted in terms of actions.

But then he asked the male students to define a wife in the same way.

And all the girls became upset. Some of them had full-on meltdowns.

Every single thing that a male student wanted, or expected, from his hypothetical future wife was sexist, oppressive, old-fashioned, misogynistic, patriarchal, etc.

They were literally screaming. Some of them in tears.

And I realized something pretty quickly. It wasn't the actual, concrete responsibilities of the female role that they objected to.

It was the idea of there being a female role at all, with any attached responsibilities.

The obvious category error here is assigning an industrial concept to the family. Just as government is not and should not be run as if it were a business, the family is not a business and definitely should not be run as if it were. The point of a business is to generate profits. The point of a family is to provide an intimate space for humanity to achieve its natural ends. These can include happiness, children and their successful rearing, delight, meaning, and a whole host of other things that are important though they may not be profitable.

As a result, it is probably important that we don't assign concrete, measurable standards of performance to each other inside of our families even if we it is important that we do when running a business. In the family there needs to be room for growth, for comfort in bad times, for expansion and change as interests or capacities develop, and so on and so forth. It's not the point of the thing that we hit targets, but that we experience love and support and give others the same things in return.

To take an example from the field, cooking. Traditionally women cook meals while men work outside the home, but that's not very important. Even in the old days, some men decided to become cooks as a profession.

Apple pie.

It happens that I like to cook, and my wife doesn't like to cook, and as a consequence I'm better at it than she is -- no offense to the lady -- because you practice doing what you enjoy doing and it is practice that makes perfect. We're Gen X, not the younger people being complained about, but it works for us and it's nobody else's business. It's our marriage. We don't report to anyone else about how we run the thing.

The problem the young ladies in the original long quote have is thus not that they object to being tied down to an industrial performance standard in their prospective roles as wives; it's that they assume it is reasonable to tie the prospective husbands down to such standards as husbands. Each couple has to figure this out for themselves, and like us, they don't report to anybody about how they do it. The only thing that really matters is that they are loyal to each other while doing whatever it is they work out to do. The only thing you can't break is the bond of honor. What that bond entails is up to the two of them.

Mothers More Deadly than School Shootings

We've visited this occasionally with regard to abortion, which is the leading cause of death of Americans if unborn Americans count as Americans. This is for children already afoot.

Warning Shots

DataRepublican has made a tremendously serious allegation that we should probably take seriously.

Here is the allegation:

What you not have heard is - there is an operational plan to put [Democratic Socialists of America plans] all into action. If the Democratic Party sweeps 2026, then DSA will become "foot soldiers" in constant clashes with the administration to cross a "red line" or invoke a "doomsday scenario" - meaning, President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, probably sometime in 2027.

Then, a lot of coordinated responses kick off, including delegitimizing the federal government itself and handing that legitimacy to Democratic governors. 2028 then becomes a vote on whether to keep America governance as-is or to burn it all down to appease a "young and brown" demographic.

This is followed-up by a real-life example of this plan possibly being actioned in Virginia:

@DataRepublican
laid it out: coordinated clashes with the federal government to delegitimize it and hand legitimacy to Democratic state officials -- specifically governors & AGs

‼️Virginia’s AG just ordered election officials to:

• Deny ordinary DOJ monitors access to polls
• Tell federal agents to leave and call local police
• Document badges, weapons, vehicles & movements
• Challenge federal subpoenas
• While eliminating Election Day voter eligibility challenges

❌No specific unlawful federal operation identified—just preemptive resistance that sets up the “red line” showdown and shifts authority to the state and transfers legitimacy and control to Democratic state officials -- in Virginia's case, leftwing extremists Governor Abigail Spanberger and Attorney General Jay Jones --

❌This is an operational plan, not theory.

What I would add to this discussion is this: the governor of Virginia mentioned in the real-life example is a former case officer at CIA. A case officer, at times "operations officer," is the sort of real spy that is fictionalized in the James Bond novels. For those of you following a similar debate in which a sitting Congresswoman is speaking to the possibility of using lawfare to discourage anyone in college today from applying to the administration for fear of "problems" that might occur from working with the government, that woman is also former CIA, although an analyst rather than a case officer.

I am not suggesting that they represent a CIA plot to plant leaders within the government for the purpose of overthrowing it via this DSA action plan. However, the CIA is not that big compared to the US military; the odds of there being an informal alumni association who know each other and are prepared to work together at the high levels of government that they plainly occupy in a common interest are high enough to be a reasonable bet.

Provoking an insurgency as part of an attempt to delegitimize the Federal Government in favor of state governments they control is a high-risk plan with obvious downsides. Even the larger states do not have adequate coercive power to actually dominate their internal populations, for example; legitimacy is the only way governance works here. At the height of the insurgency in Iraq, we needed two divisions to keep anything like a lid on Baghdad (population 8MM); North Carolina's National Guard is not quite a whole brigade, which might be enough to control Charlotte (population 3MM) if they bring in the rest of the brigade from West Virginia and South Carolina, but not the rest of the state.

That 'rest of the state' includes Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne and many Special Forces; so if there's a split between the Federal government and the Democratic state governors, North Carolina doesn't look like a happy example for the insurgents. For that matter, the 30th ABCT that the North Carolina National Guard makes up the heart of can be Federalized especially in cases of insurgency; in order to draw out the NC or VA national guards the insurgents would have to ask for mutiny, which means that any loyalist elements would have the law on their side in replacing their chain of command. The rest of the state also includes lots of Appalachia, as does West Virginia: in denuding WV of its National Guard in order to try to control Charlotte, they would free up a lot of literally unconquerable backcountry for counterrevolutionary guerrillas. Virginia itself has similar problems, and shares borders with both NC and WV.

The DSA is itself a kind of insurgent movement within the Democratic Party, in direct competition with the remnants of the Clinton faction and dodgy cooperation with the Obama faction for control of the party. I can see them causing serious problems in certain cities; the idea of delegitimizing and replacing the Federal government seems unlikely to succeed.

That doesn't mean that it wouldn't be attempted. However, there is no guarantee that a broken legitimacy will be replaced. The most dangerous elements of this alleged movement are the Party of Government, and in breaking the legitimacy of government they would in essence be destroying their own One Ring. They lack the force entirely to make good a conquest; if they convince the People to reject the Federal government, like Humpty Dumpty they will find that 'all the king's horses and all the king's men' may not be able to put the thing back together again.

Still, such madness has been attempted before, and wisdom is plainly no prerequisite for obtaining power. It's worth thinking about, and maybe talking about with people you trust. Islands of resistance broadly distributed are the one thing they cannot possibly overcome: just as the US military could never quite defeat a broadly-distributed resistance of ordinary men with rifles in Afghanistan, nor could the Soviet Union before them.

Home from Stone

We must have made quite a sight coming home, with the sword strapped to my motorcycle and that Lochaber Axe strapped to my son's. It was a gift to him from our chief, having belonged to a friend and longstanding member who had passed on. I don't know that such weapons are normally transported by motorcycle, but with a little thought the bike was perfectly serviceable as a mode of transportation. The axe will now reside in honor until it is needed again.

UPDATE:

I wanted to black out the parts of this photo with people in them, and also to blur out the license plates, both in the interests of the privacy of the people involved (some of whom were strangers whose privacy I wanted to protect for golden rule reasons). However, I do want Hall readers to enjoy how the bikes looked when rigged up with a sword and 'a battle axe in the Lochaber style.'

Stone Mountain

Good Highland athletics today.

UPDATE:

A well-respected Clan.

Stone Mountain Run

Headed south this weekend for the Scottish Highland Games.

Yes, that is a sword strapped to the bike. It’s important.

Encamped lakeside below the mountain.

Fall Color: October 15

Eye of the Beholder

Nidal Hasan's death sentence is as richly deserved as anyone's easily could be, but it apparently won't be televised.

"Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army Major turned traitor, is a very bad and evil man, who killed 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, who died, along with her unborn son, and injured, very seriously, 32 more innocent people," Trump posted to Truth Social earlier today.

"That said, the execution may be viewed in person by the immediate families of the victims, if they so choose. They deserve to witness JUSTICE!" he concluded.

You can read Trump's entire post here, where he also noted that "With all of that being said, I think streaming the execution for all to see might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan but, many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die."

The Washington Post account reads it as a rebuke of Sec. Hegseth, but that's pure and unsupported interpretation on their part. More likely in my opinion it is that the lawyers pointed out that such a livestream was likely a violation of Federal law as well as military regulations. The fact that Hasan has since become infirm may have diminished the value of the spectacle in any case.

Philosophically, the question of exemplary punishment is one we have discussed here occasionally since at least 2015.

Rational punishment does not look to the past but to the future, Protagoras says. Indeed, since we cannot change the past, the only reason -- that is, the only kind of purpose to which rationality even might apply itself -- for punishment must be an eye toward the future. Deterrence is rational. Rehabilitation is rational. Mere retribution is bestial, so he argues.

I think that the opposite is true. It is the beast who is most likely to forgo retribution. They will act not to revenge past harms, but to avoid fresh ones. They might kill you if they think you are still dangerous and sense a momentary advantage. They might just as readily avoid you to keep from presenting you with a chance to hurt them again. They will not feel any duty of honor to avenge themselves, or their families, nor to repay you for the wrongs you have done.

Retribution is a higher, not a lower quality. This is orthodox, is it not? Vengeance is the divine quality, not a bestial one. Human beings are urged to mercy and kindness toward their enemies not because it is irrational or animal to punish past wrongs, but because they are not high enough to do it well and justly. Be patient, return kindness for cruelty, and you will heap hot coals on their heads.

How fitting, then, that it was a Vicar who provided the author cited at the top of this post with his reasons. But this is not a purely Judeo-Christian view. The Ancient Greeks thought this too, those of them who were poets instead of philosophers. They also thought that vengeance and retribution were divine. Hesiod even tells you her name.