Grim's Hall

Road Dog

A new truck-driving song, which is a genre we occasionally like to host around here.

Coming Right At Us

South Park anticipated, as they occasionally do, this line of retreat being posed by a Georgia police department that shot a baby donkey in its own field.

A Cedartown police officer has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates the shooting death of a baby donkey.
Hannah Israel, whose family owns Elsberry Riding & Farm in Rockmart, said officers shot and killed HeeHaw, a bottle-raised donkey, early Sunday.
Israel said the officers claimed they were in danger after HeeHaw ran toward them while braying. The officers used a Taser on the donkey before shooting him, she alleged in a Facebook post Sunday morning.
"HeeHaw was raised in the house and did petting zoos. He never knew a stranger and was shot and killed in his own pasture for doing what donkeys do, alerting to a stranger," Israel wrote. "There is no way this is legal!"

Sadly, that is not true. It will prove to be perfectly legal to murder your farm animals on your own land, just as cops tend to shoot our dogs with abandon.

Comments Issue

Blogger comments seem to be down, both here and at other Blogger-hosted sites I visit. This is a Google problem, not a local problem that I can fix; standby and hopefully they'll come back soon.

UPDATE: This seems to be fixed. Feel free to test in the comments to this post.

Tom Tugendhat is the new Shadow Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom; I met him on the Taiwan trip because he happened to be there too. Cool guy, with a military intelligence and special operations career and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

He has an article (W.Post original, but paywalled) on a concern in Taiwan around an airport on an island that, while currently under Taiwan's jurisdiction, is physically quite close to the mainland by comparison to the Isle of Formosa that is Taiwan's main island.

It's somewhat inside-baseball for most Americans, but it's an aspect of the conflict that I'm fairly confident Hall readers haven't heard about.

A Prophet Without Honor in Her Own Country

It is unsurprising to see disparaging remarks about the late Gloria Steinem on the political right, nor especially the political wing with Christian ideas about abortion's immorality. What is perhaps more surprising is to see how strong the reaction against her at the hour of her death happens to be on the political left, which views her as a CIA-funded effort in mind control, and her version of feminism as an attempt to suborn and subjugate genuine liberation movements in the name of American/Israeli hegemony.

The CIA connection is not a conspiracy theory in the usual sense of the term; it is well-documented, including by the CIA.

Was at least her feminism, or a strain aligned with it, a CIA project to destabilize traditional societies? It's not a ridiculous idea. We know that USAID -- often said to be a CIA funding/action arm -- supported similar transgender movements globally. The aim seems to have been to build out and identify networks of people with deep, existential grievances against their own society and its mores -- an ideal recruiting base for agents who would act against their own governments. The CIA also funded modern art as a psychological warfare approach against traditional societies.

In a way, such efforts were at once revolutionary and counter-revolutionary. The disruption being wrought by left-leaning movements to traditional societies is inherent in Marxism, which aspires to revolutions against agricultural/feudal societies towards capitalist/industrial ones and, then, against capitalist ones towards communist/socialist ones. Marxism always advocated for the equality of women as a liberation from traditional roles, even though women who joined Marxist and Maoist movements rarely found themselves in positions of power once the revolutions carried the day. Trying to find a way to suborn and redirect this feminist thrust to support the position of America and its allies was an insight that made a lot of sense to the American elites who ran both State and the Agency.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum. I merely note the controversy; may she rest in peace.

A Classical Lesson from Football

Louisiana being itself, the judge in the state-level case is reportedly a season-ticket holder for LSU football, who appears here with the LSU coach giving the LSU football hand sign; the lawyer representing LSU had endorsed the judge's wife in her election campaign; the Louisiana Attorney General began her remarks on the case with "Geaux Tigers!"; and the ruling was compared to 'a cup of cold gumbo.'

The South collectively having been subject to many rounds of legal and judicial interference in its culture and laws, the SEC knew not even to wait for the state-court ruling before filing its own case in Federal Court so the state court can be overridden. Southern football rivalries being what they are, it filed this suit in a Federal court not in Louisiana but in Alabama.

This is a very nice illustration of Aristotle's point in the Rhetoric about why you can't trust judges in matters of justice.

Now, it is of great moment that well-drawn laws should themselves define all the points they possibly can and leave as few as may be to the decision of the judges; and this for several reasons. First, to find one man, or a few men, who are sensible persons and capable of legislating and administering justice is easier than to find a large number. Next, laws are made after long consideration, whereas decisions in the courts are given at short notice, which makes it hard for those who try the case to satisfy the claims of justice and expediency. The weightiest reason of all is that the decision of the lawgiver is not particular but prospective and general, whereas members of the assembly and the jury find it their duty to decide on definite cases brought before them. They will often have allowed themselves to be so much influenced by feelings of friendship or hatred or self-interest that they lose any clear vision of the truth and have their judgement obscured by considerations of personal pleasure or pain. In general, then, the judge should, we say, be allowed to decide as few things as possible. But questions as to whether something has happened or has not happened, will be or will not be, is or is not, must of necessity be left to the judge, since the lawgiver cannot foresee them.

Emphasis added.

Wheels Down

My last flight has landed at Asheville. No more flying for a while! I’ve crossed the international date line twice in a week and spent long days working in time zones 12 hours off of each other. I’m glad to be back to my mountains.

My Second Favorite* Anglican Priest Gets Interviewed by My Favorite** Orthodox Iconographer

The Rev. Dr. Malcolm Guite has just published the first volume of an "Arthuriad," a projected 4-volume ballad that retells the Arthurian stories. It's made a bit of a splash.

If you're interested in Arthur, Tolkein, CS Lewis, poetry, fiction, history, the role of imagination in modern life, Christianity, or just hearing two interesting people talk about storytelling, you might enjoy this interview.

* My favorite Anglican priest will always be Fr. Terry, who was a kind and generous pastor when I was asking whether Christianity might be the right path or not.

** To be fair, he's the only iconographer I can name of any denomination, so it's not as impressive as I've made it sound in the title. His Symbolic World podcast / YouTube channel is what he's famous for, but "... Interviewed by a Podcaster" was a less-interesting title.

Back in the USA

I did hear a David Allan Coe song in a bar in Taipei, but this still feels more like home. I won’t actually be home until late tomorrow night.

Rest in Peace, Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry passed away yesterday.

Some advice he gave to himself, but which seems to profit others as well:

How to Be a Poet
(To remind myself)

i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Taipei

Downtown, with Taipei 101 on the skyline

Closer to 101.

An unexpected angel. It’s mostly Buddhist here; I saw many Buddhist monks and a few nuns, but no other signs of Christianity except that in the hotel room there was both a New Testament and a Teachings of the Buddha.

The Formosan Bear is, unofficially, the national animal of Taiwan (of old called Formosa Isle).

Taipei Main Station. I caught the High Speed Railway from here. Recommended.

The Most Important Store. Only very recently is it legal to buy a Harley in Taiwan. Until late, large displacement motorcycles were banned by law.

Kind of a rainy afternoon on the first of September, and my last day in country.

Tetraphobia

A lot of American skyscrapers don’t have a 13th floor, in the sense of a floor with that designation, because the number was thought to be bad luck.

In East Asia, the number omitted is four. The word for four and the word for death are the same syllable with only a slightly different pronunciation.

Fare Thee Well, Dolly

Dolly Parton and Carol Burnett

Dolly Parton giving an impromptu performance in Paídi Ó Sé's Pub

(I've started this video just a bit before she starts singing, skipping over several minutes of people milling about, a t-shirt being given, mic testing and so forth.)