An Asheville Run

I hadn't been to Asheville in a long time. For some reason I kind of felt like it today.

The road out there is nice, anyway.

Devil's Courthouse, which you probably are familiar with by now.

This one is called the Pounding Mill Overlook. That's Looking Glass Rock in the left foreground. 

Same shot with a filter to alter the sky color, so you can zoom in and see how far the rippling mountains extend.

They must have known I was coming! This was happily located right across from my favorite pizza joint, The Mellow Mushroom.

Some window glare in this shot, but it's a skeleton riding a motorcycle shop in an outfitting store featuring knives and other wilderness goods.

A common sign. The small print warms my heart. I wish I believed they really meant it: nothing is more authentic to these mountains than resistance to Federal agents, whether moonshine agents or otherwise. I fear they'd be the first ones to hand you in to a Democratic administration. Maybe not though!

It was a very pleasant afternoon with only a short visit downtown, and a long ride in the countryside each way. One of the things I don't hate about Asheville is how small it is: it's a real city for a few square miles, and then you're in the country again right away. It's crazy in town, but it's only a few miles back to freedom when you're done taking the sights. 

Death is Cheap

As I occasionally mention, if unborn Americans count as Americans then abortion is the leading cause of death of all Americans. In Canada, it's getting to be "suicide," which in this case is really the government killing its own citizens. So far, they've sort-of been getting permission -- albeit often extorted by a refusal to provide other treatment for painful conditions for very long periods of time, so that if you won't take the 'suicide' you will be left to suffer for many months or years. 

Sounds like they've come around to the idea that there's still more money to be saved.

We noted that, “From a government bean counter’s perspective, the more suicides the better.” (See “Canada Shows The Gruesome Side Of Socialized Healthcare.”)

This week, we came across a study published in the OMEGA — Journal of Death and Dying that “explores the potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying (MAID) in Canada.”

What would the country save, the authors ask, if the program were expanded “to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes”?

These include “individuals with severe mental health issues, the homeless, drug users, retired elderly, and indigenous communities.” The researchers looked at “both voluntary and non-voluntary scenarios.”

Emphasis added. It's just a theoretical study, of course. Nothing to worry about.

Hey, wasn't some female politician ruthlessly mocked -- some lady from Alaska -- for warning about "death panels" empowered to make decisions about when you cost too much to deserve treatment? Something about how government-run health care might lead to that? Palin, maybe her name was. Sarah.

Well, that's ancient history I guess. This is the exciting new world:

Lo and behold, the savings are significant — up to nearly $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years if Canada went the “non-voluntary” route.

“For example,” the authors note, “for the retired elderly population, the savings could be $54.2 billion in the voluntary scenario or as high as $1.2 trillion in a non-voluntary scenario.” There’s even more money to be saved if the state dropped the requirement that doctors administer the drugs and let the work be outsourced.

Sure, that makes sense. No reason you'd need to be a doctor to kill somebody. Anybody can do that. I've seen it done. 

Room 101*

Given how much suspicion of Israel there is on the Left and the Right today, you'd think this would be comforting. [Probably paywalled; NYT]

Israel and the United States have long known, and tolerated, that each was spying on the other. But an intensified Israeli effort to learn about U.S. positions in talks with Iran has crossed a line, according to some American officials... 

Another report, written by the Defense Intelligence Agency and other military intelligence offices and focused on earlier events going back several years, said that the counterintelligence threat level posed by Israel had been increased in recent weeks to the top level, from high to critical. The report, to which the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency contributed, outlines various efforts by Israel to spy on American military personnel and government officials.

Assuming the report is accurate, which seems likely enough, the threat level was already assessed as "high," and is now "critical." Formal reports were drawn up about it, and action taken within the CI infrastructure. That doesn't quite line up with the popular view of our government as crawling to obey Israeli orders. I tend to think that the Israelis are a bit over their skis on Iran, having used up a substantial quantity of their intelligence advantages there as a set of favors to back American action. It'll take them years or decades to recover those advantages if they need to do.

* The title is a Roman Numeral joke; 101 is "CI." When I was at CENTCOM, they had decided to rename their Public Affairs to 'Communications Integration,' giving them the same initials as 'Counterintelligence.' You should have seen people's faces when somebody from Public Affairs would drop by to chat and some yeoman would inform the officer in charge that "CI is here to talk to you." 

Defense Department Greatly Reduces Religious Support

From Military.com:

Military.com has learned that the Department of Defense, for the first time in almost 10 years, has dramatically reduced its number of recognized religious faiths and belief systems by approximately 180... decreasing the total number of faiths from 211 to its new number of 31. The changes were iterated in a May 20, 2026, memorandum issued by the Under Secretary of War and signed by Anthony Tata, under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness[.]

Under Secretary Tata has a serious military service record, so I don't take him to be doing the usual political trolling here. He has some sort of serious purpose in mind. I haven't seen the memorandum, so I don't know how he justified this shift.

I find it noteworthy that of 31 recognized religions, 22 are Christian variations. Islam -- which has Sunni and Shia sects, for example -- gets only one; Judaism gets only one;  rather astonishingly, Agnostic remains a recognized religion even though it isn't actually one, as does "No Religion." There is a catchall "Other Religions" code that presumably will be applied to everyone who has been registered as one of the 180 formerly-recognized religions, so just because their faith will no longer be recognized by the military doesn't mean that they'll be forced into one of the remaining categories. 

My guess is what they are trying to cut down on is chaplain training hours, but that still makes it strange that you'd have 22 specific variations of one religion and one or none for the others, even faiths with large numbers of practitioners worldwide like Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. 

What will be of significance to me is if the VA follows up by removing the emblems of belief of the no-longer-recognized religions from eligibility for military headstones. 

Shel Silverstein Poems

I imagine that these are familiar to some or all of you, but they're fun nonetheless.

Falling Up

I tripped on my shoelace
And I fell up—
Up to the roof tops,
Up over the town,
Up past the tree tops,
Up over the mountains,
Up where the colors
Blend into the sounds.
But it got me so dizzy
When I looked around,
I got sick to my stomach
And I threw down.

Sick

“I cannot go to school today,”
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
“I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I’m going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I’ve counted sixteen chicken pox
And there’s one more—that’s seventeen,
And don’t you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut—my eyes are blue—
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I’m sure that my left leg is broke—
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button’s caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle’s sprained,
My ’pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow’s bent, my spine ain’t straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?
What’s that? What’s that you say?
You say today is . . . Saturday?
G’bye, I’m going out to play!”

And here's a song Shel wrote, though it's more famous sung by Johnny Cash.

Alexander Muse has been publishing excellent essays this year. On Iran's purported victory lap:

[A] closed strait [of Hormuz] is a chokehold on Iran’s own windpipe, because the overwhelming share of Iran’s trade and oil exports must pass through that same water.... A chokepoint you can obstruct but cannot profit from, defended by a navy that no longer exists, is not a lever of power. It is a siege, and Iran is on the losing side of it.

... The essay’s hidden premise is continuity, an Iran picking up where it left off, only leaner and bolder. Compare the two trajectories honestly. The Iran of the road not taken had a maturing missile and drone industry, a rebuilding air-defense network, an intact ring of proxies, and Hormuz leverage backed by a genuine fleet, all of it shielding a nuclear program as it advanced toward a survivable deterrent. The Iran of June 2026 has a defense-industrial base gutted by 90%, a navy measured in decades of repair, proxies severed and fending for themselves, an economy in freefall, and a command structure Cooper described as “shattered.” The first Iran was being built. The second is being salvaged.

[The uranium] ... sounds like a card Tehran still holds. It is closer to a noose. A stockpile is not a deterrent by itself. A deterrent requires a survivable means to build, conceal, and deliver a weapon, and an air-defense umbrella to keep the effort alive long enough to matter. Iran has lost all three. Nasr himself warns that ordinary Iranians increasingly see the bomb as their only shield. Precisely so. A hollowed-out state whose last available move is a dash toward a weapon it cannot protect is not safer for having the material. It is more exposed, because that dash is the single act most certain to summon the finishing blow the regime has so far been spared by President Trump.

Endorsed

Some of us get both the Seax and the Dirk, I would think. 

It's sad that there was a murder, but the carrying of a Kirpan is one of the best features of any religion. I strongly hold to approximately the same values as undergird that practice, even if I don't share their religious context at all.

Jokes on the Occasion of Pride Month

If any of you happen to be gay, allow me to convey that I don't have anything against it; indeed, the longer I live with a woman the more I can see the appeal. It's just not in me, you know? 

That to the side, there are some great memes this year for marking the occasion.

UPDATE: Ok, jokes are always fraught, but c'mon. Some of this is funny stuff.

The primary-defector pool that doesn't follow through

I recommend Alexander Muse's substack. This is a thoughtful article about the very slight impact on a general election of a bitterly contested primary fight, which is instructive in the case of Cornyn vs. Paxton. Frankly, not even Cornyn himself is urging the absurd choice of a Talarico (give me a break) vote in protest against the impervious horrors of a Paxton victory.

Lonna Rae Atkeson’s seminal paper “Moving Toward Unity” in American Politics Quarterly found that supporters of losing primary candidates revert to the eventual nominee at predictable rates as the general election approaches. Jeffrey Lazarus, writing in Legislative Studies Quarterly, established that the apparent correlation between divisive primaries and weaker general-election performance is not causal at all, but a joint product of candidate quality and pre-primary expectations. Fouirnaies and Hall at Stanford in confirmed that in base-state seats with partisan leans above 7 points, the measurable divisive-primary penalty is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Texas leans R+10 to R+13. It is the cleanest possible case for the proposition that the primary will leave no footprint on the general election.

But the historical record is where this argument lives or dies. The frame is simple. The runner-up’s coalition comes home. It has always come home. The mechanism is what political scientists call partisan reversion, and it has been visible in every contested base-state primary of the modern era.