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. 

I Won

At least initially. 

I won.

A Trill in the River

When I was a boy, we had a creek behind our house that had some stone cascades in it. I used to walk down with my dog and watch the water shooting across the stones, a cool place to spend hot summer days like these. You'd sit and watch the water, and watching it you would notice persistent shapes -- trills, you might call them -- that leapt up and curled as the water pressed against the stones just-so in its rush. 

Imagine that scene, or whatever version of it you grew up with yourself. Watching water flow over stones is almost universal among humanity. Imagine watching such a trill, and then you hear a rock upriver shift in the flow. This changes the pattern of the river ever-so-slightly, but the trill you were admiring for its beauty and perfect curves suddenly vanishes and can never be restored by anything you can do. 

Such, I realize tonight, is the human condition. We are like the trills in the river. All the parts of us that were us are already long gone down the flow. All the parts that are us are just coming to be us, will be part of us very briefly and will then flow on accordingly. And someday, when something in the world changes just-so, the trill itself will vanish and no human effort will be able to bring us back.

But what is it to love a trill? What is it to mourn one? What reality did it ever really have? It was just a shape of moving water. 

The Ballad of 155mm

D29 links a story ultimately from ProPublica about a failed Texas ammunition factory. The problem is that it was built with Turkish robots, which in a normal year the very phrase "Turkish robots" would have caused eyebrows to raise in shock and surprise. They didn't work, which wouldn't have surprised anyone.

The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.... 

[E]mployees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”

Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair.  

Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell.... 

A short interlude, courtesy of Bugs Bunny.

To resume our narrative: why on earth would anyone buy Turkish robots to make high explosive ammunition? 

The reason is that for close to three years now, the 155mm has been the workhorse in two great conflicts. The first is obviously the war in Ukraine, where not only Russia but the Ukrainians have been burning through gigantic stockpiles of heavy artillery. That war started in 2022, and at first it was an excuse for NATO to use up old stockpiles and replace them with fresh rounds. These things don't last forever, after all, so having new ones was a good deal and there were old stockpiles to use up. Russia is playing a similar game with its old Soviet stockpiles, still surprisingly deep in spite of all the decades of gunrunning.

But then in October of 2003, Hamas engaged in its act of blood magic and touched off a second regional war. Israel started using up 155mm as it went after hardpoints throughout Gaza. They make their own, but not enough of it. NATO supplies were already going to Ukraine. Manufacturers have been having a heyday ever since. It's a seller's market for anyone who can make it. You can sell as much as you can make or obtain. Both Ukraine and Israel have networks of scouts out looking for it through any channel that can manage the ITAR regulations and can offer a cheap enough price for their straining budget -- after all, they both need as much as they can get.

So it's a wise investment, increased 155mm capacity. Not just for the USA. Estonia has retasked part of its national economy to build precursors for 155mm ammunition. Some European factories are out of the filler explosive, so rather than build a factory Estonia is building filler and buying its ammunition in a kind of international barter. That way, if the Russians come calling, all of Europe's stockpiles will be bigger. 

All that makes sense. Why Turkey, though? I can tell you that the only places on earth that have excess capacity lately have been Turkey and South Korea. The Turks make plenty of 155mm because they regularly use up old stockpiles on the Kurds (and occasionally elsewhere). They're not doing anything right now, so they've been available to produce -- but being an Islamic country* they don't sell to Israel, at least not directly. Indirectly adds to the costs (and also could violate international arms regulations), and Israel is already strained because it needs to buy more interceptors too. South Korea will sell to anyone, as far as I know, within of course the confines of international law (such as they are).

So if you wanted to find someone who had excess 155mm ammunition-making equipment they could sell you, it'd have to be one of those two for now. I imagine the Turks were quite a bit cheaper, and you all know the story about the government going along with the lowest bidder. 

UPDATE: A sudden fire at an Italian factory that makes 155mm. 

* The supposed Islamic solidarity against Israel actually isn't universal at all; Uzbekistan, for example, has historically close relations with Israel and remains quite friendly. Turkey is definitely not one of the exceptions to it, though.

Changing Dynamics

Forbes explores the sudden collapse of Socialist darling Hong.

Socialist Francesca Hong was heavily favored to win the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday in betting odds and among politicos, but the few polls taken proved unreliable in a primary with several major last-minute developments that changed the dynamics in the race.

What were these dynamics? The changing roster of opponents in a crowded field, perhaps. The guy who won had actually dropped out of the race, then re-entered suddenly in spite of having never had any support.

Also, her anti-Thanksgiving posts had a news cycle right before the election.

Still, the guy who won had never reached more than half her numbers. 

Perhaps this is 'changing dynamics.' Or perhaps it's the same dynamic we keep seeing in numerous other places; the recent race in LA for mayor comes to mind. A certain "F" shaped curve in 2020's election. There does seem to be an intelligible signal in all this noise. 

UPDATE: Hot Air identifies these and more evidences of this signal.

Look, Hong is a crazy, but she's their crazy. If they'll cheat her they'll cheat you. Stand up for the crazy lady. It's important. 

UPDATE: One of the polling firms has shut down and admitted that its operations were bogus.