Review: _Hell's Angels_ by Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York & Toronto: Modern Library Edition, 1999). 

Hunter S. Thompson was introduced to me by Doonesbury, which I imagine he would have hated. Hunter was a generation earlier than me, and by the time I became aware of him he had grown to fit the joke; his 80s and later work were sometimes lyrical and powerfully written, but not very seriously intended (though sometimes a serious point was embedded therein, as when he closed his book on Bill Clinton's presidential campaign with the parable of the frog and the scorpion). 

A friend of mine recently undertook to re-read Hunter's 1966 work on the famous motorcycle club, however, and our discussion inspired me to find a copy and read it as well. It's a much better book than I had expected. 

A major part of the book is Hunter's Gonzo journalism as a genuine corrective to 'real' journalism. He points out the ways that journalist sensationalism had taken a motorcycle club that had dwindled to a few dozen members (p. 27: "less than 100") and made them a world-famous phenomenon that could command hundreds of 1965 dollars for an interview or thousands for a movie appearance: 

The Hell's [sic*] Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.... anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story... the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word 'alleged' is a key to this art." (34) 

Hunter goes to great lengths to undo the journalistic spell, showing over and over where news reports played up accusations that were never charged, charges that were made but dropped, or which failed in court. In fairness to the reporters, the police reports he cites are even worse. 

I was expecting a sympathetic portrayal, but this isn't especially sentimental at all. It's a surprisingly honest bit of journalism throughout. For one thing it is honest about Hunter's own biases. He criticizes the Angels for being in favor of the Vietnam war, calling them 'fascists' for that even though he blew off the whole swastika-wearing thing from the Angels of the era. Hunter lauds their short-term connections with the LSD-using Berkeley left, and laments the fact that it was doomed; he points out where he thinks the Angels are similar to the Wobblies, with whom Hunter has real sympathy, but also notes that he found the Angels both ignorant of and hostile to any such comparisons because they hate Communists. He got into the motorcycle lifestyle enough to buy a bike (though not a Harley) and to let them hang out at his house and to use his car for beer runs to their campsites, and he made many friends among them. He still got beat up by some of them he didn't know** (ironically, while fleeing from the beating in his car afterwards, he finds famous Angel "Magoo" asleep in the back seat of his car). 

Ultimately it's a surprisingly balanced portrait of a phenomenon that is long gone -- what the Angels became after Hunter wrote about them is nothing like they were in the year or so he was spending time with them. By 1966 B-movie titan Roger Corman had picked up on all that publicity and started making Hollywood movies with them, and the crazy publicity that Hunter was already observing in 1965 just exploded. By 1969, the Rolling Stones hired them to pull security at Altamont. This wasn't Hunter's doing: he was trying to undo the spell the media was shaping around them, but it was already too late. 

There's a closing bit on riding motorcycles that's worth reading even if you skip the rest of the book. 

* The club doesn't use an apostrophe for reasons of its own. 

** I was struck at the time of reading it by the exact similarity of his mistake to the one that caused the death of 'Grizzly man' Timothy Treadwell, who lived among grizzlies and played with the ones he got to know -- but who was killed an eaten by one with whom he hadn't established that friendly relationship. You can befriend a bear or even many bears, but that doesn't make you the friend of every bear -- and they are still grizzlies. 

Exit Controls

One of the longstanding differences between free and Communist societies is this: it's very easy to leave a free society, you can just go whenever you want. It is somewhat difficult to get in, however, as everyone wants to come in. 

With a Communist society, it's the other way around.

China will tighten its exit-entry rules from September 15 to stop experienced engineers from leaking knowhow in industries subject to export controls and deter tourists from visiting “high-risk” nations such as Japan.

The State Council’s new regulation, which spans 19 articles and was announced on July 31, sets up a coordinated system to warn citizens of overseas risks, verify the purpose of each exit-entry application and tighten restrictions on both citizens and foreigners....

“‘May endanger’ is one of the key phrasings in the regulation,” says a Shandong-based columnist writing under the pen name “Xinghe Duke.”

“It means the authorities won’t wait until harm is done, but they will take precautionary measures. The wording of ‘Decided by the commerce authority and other departments’ means there is a lawful process. ‘Barred from leaving’ does not mean arrest; it just means the targeted person cannot leave the country.”

You're not under arrest, comrade. You just can't leave. 

The Taiwan government is warning its own citizens -- which the PRC considers subjects of its authority -- not to visit the mainland.

The new rules have prompted Taiwan, which Beijing views as its own territory, to warn its people to take extra care on visits to China, which considers people from Taiwan to be Chinese citizens.

The new rules “legalize” previously legally unfounded border control practices and boost the discretionary authority of enforcement agencies... 

China has dismissed those concerns, saying the rules provide better legal protection for Taiwanese.

This You Can Trust

Like any good mythology, the truths the Conan stories convey hold across many times and places.

Bad Luck for the Duck

The White Duck Taco Shop's flagship location was a Quonset hut located on the French Broad River just a little past its confluence with the Swannanoa in what is known as the River Arts District of Asheville. It was devastated, as was most of that district, during Hurricane Helene two years ago; last night, the remnants seem to have burned. 

There are however a few other locations, and if any of you happen through Asheville it's got a pretty neat menu. In addition to fairly traditional tacos, they put a number of things into a taco that might usually occur to someone. I recommend you try the more extravagant options. There are plenty of good taqueria around the South these days, but it's not just everywhere you can get Thai peanut chicken in a taco, nor chicken Tikka Masala; the latter I suppose is a Mexican-inspired Indian-inspired British-inspired American dish.

Medea

Hot Air quotes a supporter of the recent madness: 

“Lindsay Clancy... you are a f****** hero, you are divine feminine rising… you are goddess incarnate woman... You are an inspiration... f*** patriarchy"  

[Asterisks not in the original.]

This whole case has been reminding me of Medea ever since it first came to our collective attention. The invocation of divinity and goddesses reinforces that; Medea was a descendant of Helios and various Oceanids, and in the famous play by Euripides her child-murders were explicitly endorsed by Helios who sent a fiery chariot to escort her away from any mortal punishments. 

Several of Clancy's jurors have expressed sentiments placing themselves in the divine position of endorsing her action and insulating her from any mortal punishments. It is worth recognizing that this is an ancient instinct that has persisted throughout the history of Western civilization rather than a contemporary moral panic. 

The End of the UK

Reports indicate that breaking up the Union has proceeded to the point that they’re ready to consult the public. 

UPDATE: An overview of some strategic consequences. 

Jewish Holidays

Apparently sunset locally to wherever you are begins the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, followed by Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, with another major festival right on beyond that. I discovered this when trying to reach out to a Jewish contact who is, of course, preparing for this event.

Whenever I am reminded of Yom Kippur's existence, I recall also a joke told by Isaac Asimov in his first Treasury of Humor. It has some great jokes, including many ethnic ones that Asimov didn't feel any embarrassment about telling in those days; including also a lot of Jewish jokes, which he felt especially delighted to relate. Here is the joke, as well as a note on the risks of humor:

Happy holidays, if any of you are planning to commemorate these occasions; may you have a meaningful time. 

9/11 and the Bab el-Mandeb

Overnight, Houthi militias crossed to the center of the Bab el-Mandeb strait and took an island in the middle of it. This is a cyberpunk story of a band of misfits using widely available frontier technology to take on giants, at least initially with success. The Houthis made such a rapid and aggressive advance into territory held by their enemies because their command elected to encourage them with an AI-generated fake of their enemy commander ordering his forces to retreat. It turns out that, though the order was fake, the resistance that Saleh's forces were capable of was not so great that it couldn't be overcome with a push. However, it helped that the Houthis could use Claude for targeting their missiles -- a usage that Anthropic generally won't license to the Pentagon. 

They won't be able to keep that island, of course, should we decide to take it back. It is what is called in military science "a Forlorn Hope." With these Islamist movements the promised reward can be delegated to Allah, who will allegedly reward anyone who dies in the operation with paradise; the Houthis are Fiver Shi'ite Muslims, aligned with the Twelver Shi'ites who run the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and what is left of Iran. Iran claims it does not control the Houthis, but the Houthis are functionally a proxy with IRGC advisors.

Opposing them are rag-tag Yemeni government forces who have Saudi and American advisors. Not for the first time!

But hanging over the US effort are the memories of years of controversial targeting support American forces provided to Riyadh during the Obama and first Trump administrations that critics said contributed to a high number of civilian casualties.

Naturally, since the Houthis are very difficult to distinguish from civilians themselves and they take shelter among civilian populations. That has been a universal constraint in all of these wars we have fought since 9/11 happened 25 years ago today. 

Five years ago, I posted my 9/11 poem for the last time. I was wrong to say the story had ended; some stories never do, like roads that go ever, ever on. The old al Qaeda is dead, but sandal-wearing guerrillas are still showing off captured American equipment, what very well may be an AI clone of bin Laden's descendant gave a speech celebrating it -- the US reported him dead in 2019 -- and there is little doubt that the United States will not find it tolerable to have Bab el-Mandeb closed, no more than we could tolerate having our skyscrapers knocked down with hijacked jetliners. 

Unprincipled

I guess everyone understands by now. 

The Invincible Prior Assumption

The judge admonished Long for carrying the gun and told him he has to think before he acts.

"Fortunately, you weren't injured, but nonetheless, you had a gun there in the first place which was poor judgment," he said. "And what do you need a gun for protection in a mall, in the first place?

What indeed could possibly go wrong at a mall that might require a gun for protection? For an instructive example, let's look at the actual facts of the precise case that was in front of this particular judge at the time he said this.

A shooting at a Michigan mall in July ended when a 19-year-old drew his own pistol and shot a man who had already taken one life and was firing wildly.

The 19-year-old was sentenced to two years probation after this act of civic service at risk of his own life, following the admonishment by the judge for his foolishness in carrying a gun. 

Happy Birthday, Jimmie Rodgers!

He was born 9/8/1897, so I'm a day late with this. Here's a few of his less well known songs.

Do it Once Right

The I-40 saga turns expensive, but they might be avoiding what the British like to call 'a false economy.'

"Getting rid of the driver was a little bit of a false economy..."

Taking the trouble to get it right this time might prevent another disaster like the one provoked by Helene's fury.

In some places along the 5-mile-long worksite, the bedrock is exposed. In others, it’s more than 50 feet below the surface.... Reaching the deeper bedrock requires longer steel piles, which has increased the estimated cost and timeline to complete these repairs....

As planned, the reconstruction is extremely robust. The combination of roller-compacted concrete walls, interlocking pipe pile walls and associated elements are designed to withstand forces that were exerted by the Pigeon River during Hurricane Helene. It is intended to make the interstate more resilient to the hydraulic forces associated with future extreme events.... Experts from every discipline of engineering have been involved, working collaboratively instead of one after another like most projects. Each discipline overlaps with others — leadership, hydraulics, geotechnical, geomorphological, environmental, structural — creating an incredible team of engineers. 

Now, my faith in government to get it right is not very great; but at least they're talking about trying to get it right. We'll see. So far it's nearly two years on and you still can't reliably get through the pass, and even when you can there are paralyzing delays during any hour involving significant traffic.

Bounty Hunters and the Migrant

I guess we'll find out if bounty hunters are better at this than inadequately-trained ICE agents. 

In fairness, I'm pretty sure that cops usually kill a lot more citizens than bounty hunters do. In fact, while the police statistic runs to well over a thousand a year, I don't see any statistics suggesting that bounty hunters are likely to kill anyone at all. This makes sense. Bounty hunters aren't immune from prosecution. You can sue them for damages, too. 

This may actually work out even though it is a characteristically reckless move by DHS. If so it is a point in favor of voluntaryism -- even this may be better done by private citizens than by government agencies. 

Looking at Germany

The infamous European cordon sanitaire may collapse first in Germany rather than France. 

Voters were asked by pollsters on Sunday if they considered the AfD a danger to democracy, as Germany’s mainstream parties do. About half saw the AfD as a threat, according to exit polling released by a public television network. They voted almost exclusively for its rivals, from the far left to the center right.

The other half of voters said there was no threat.

Nearly all backed the AfD.

It was a vivid illustration of the growing divide between Germany’s mainstream parties, which govern from the center-right and the center-left, and populist voters who have grown convinced that politics as usual can no longer solve their urgent problems.... 

To the AfD’s supporters, particularly in the country’s economically struggling eastern states, the AfD has become a last, best shot for making their voices heard — a feeling only reinforced by governing parties’ refusal to work with it.

The AfD is weird: a predominantly east German party that has both pro-Russian and anti-Russian factions, depending I assume on how well one's ancestors got along with the East German republic; allegedly Nazis but led by a lesbian engaged in an interracial relationship with a foreigner. Germany's ruling coalition isn't sure how to respond. 

If they continue to have a Frankenstein coalition of communists-to-socialists-to-Christian-nationalists just to keep the plurality winner out of power, that's quite unstable and likely to be ineffective at governance. The fact that the ruling coalitions can't govern is an argument in favor of an alternative, which is what the "A" in "AfD" means.

If they break the cordon sanitaire and allow a populist 'far right' party to wield actual power -- is a vote total of 44% really compatible with the idea that this is 'far' right? -- it's a new game in Europe.

A Thoroughgoing form of Empiricism about Arithmetic

If that description doesn't light up your heart, you may not be the right reader for this new book.

Some of the logical empiricists defended the claim that the basic mathematical axioms are definitions and that the theorems of mathematics are consequently analytic. This position has subsequently fallen out of favor. Critics have alleged that the position was refuted by Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems, that it is obscure what “analytic” and “definition” are supposed to mean, that there are no “analytic” truths, or that the axioms cannot be definitions. True by Definition revisits this debate. It introduces the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths and explains the controversy around the distinction in the philosophy of mathematics and beyond. The book also defends a radical new position. It is argued that, in certain contexts, the axioms of arithmetic have the status of definitions; however...

I don't want to spoil the suspense. I am of course immediately suspicious of the impulse to introduce the synthetic/analytic distinction. 

The author is a guy I know; he and his wife are both quality philosophers. Some of you might be into a work of philosophy of math.

Colby Acuff

I was a little surprised to learn that this young man apparently has no relation to Roy Acuff, the very famous Grand Ole Opry performer ("For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff, then God"). Young Colby is not bad, and not traveling on a family name. About halfway into one of his standards, he transitions into a Hoyt Axton song that Elvis and Waylon Jennings covered as well. 

Nice to see a young man keeping up traditions. 

Search for the Real Killers

Since this just came up recently, the claim caught my eye. I don't know what AI was used in that claim that is going around on social media, but I ran it through Claude as follows: "Help me check this statistic that is going around: Women since the 191h Amendment have aborted 5-10 times as many babies as all the men have killed in all the wars and murders over the same time. Leaving aside all the ways in which the comparison is problematic,* does the statistic hold water as a bare factual claim?"

Claude has a more nuanced response than this one: 

Short answer: no. Not because it's too aggressive, but because it isn't a number that falls out of any consistent scoping. Depending on how you define the denominator, the true ratio is either three to six times *larger* than claimed, or less than 1.

**The numerator.** Cumulative U.S. abortions since Roe are reasonably well documented: roughly 66.1 million from 1973 through 2025, built from CDC surveillance and Guttmacher provider censuses. The widely circulated 63,459,781 figure comes from National Right to Life tracking the same two sources, current to about 2021. The 1920–1972 portion is the weak leg: the standard 1955 estimate of 200,000–1,200,000 illegal abortions per year rested on qualitative assumptions, and a range that wide over five decades means the pre-Roe addition could be anywhere from ~5 million to ~40 million. Call the full-period total 66–100 million with genuine uncertainty in the upper half.

**The denominator, U.S.-scoped.** Since the 19th Amendment is a U.S. fact, the natural like-for-like comparison is U.S. war deaths plus U.S. homicides:

| | Deaths |

|---|---|

| WWII | 405,399 |

| Korea | 36,574 |

| Vietnam | 58,220 |

| Gulf War | 382 |

| Iraq + Afghanistan + GWOT | ~7,100 |

| **All U.S. war deaths since 1920** | **~508,000** |

| U.S. homicides, 1920–2025 (est.) | ~1.5 million |

| **Total** | **~2.0 million** |

The homicide figure is mine, built from decade-average rates against decade-average population — roughly 9 per 100,000 in the Prohibition years, near 4.5–5.0 in the 1950s, a peak of 10.2 in 1980 and 9.8 in 1991, and 5–7 since. It's good to maybe ±15%, which doesn't matter at this scale.

That gives a ratio of about **32 to 1**, not 5–10 to 1. On its own terms the claim substantially understates itself.

**The other scoping.** If "all the wars" means all wars everywhere, the denominator explodes. WWII alone killed an estimated 70–85 million, and one aggregate estimate puts 20th-century war deaths near 110 million, with others running to 130–142 million including civilians. Add global homicides (~440,000/year currently, so tens of millions cumulative) and you're at roughly 120–160 million. Against 66 million U.S. abortions, abortions are the *smaller* number — ratio about 0.5. The claim fails in the opposite direction.

Global-versus-global lands back in the same neighborhood as the U.S. comparison: global induced abortions currently run about 73 million a year, so the cumulative figure is in the billions and the ratio is again in the tens.

**Verdict.** The "5–10x" is the one answer no consistent pairing produces. It reads like a hedge — someone with a sense that the number was very large, picking a multiplier that sounded defensible. If you want to use the underlying comparison, the U.S.-vs-U.S. version is the only internally coherent one, and the honest figure is roughly 30-to-1, with a caveat that the pre-1973 leg is an estimate resting on 1950s guesswork rather than data.

One measurement note that isn't just framing: homicide totals count victims, not male perpetrators. Since men commit roughly 88% of U.S. homicides, correcting for that shrinks the denominator slightly rather than growing it — it doesn't rescue the ratio.

Emphasis added. O.J. had nothing on this.

* There are many of these ways in which the comparison is problematic. In addition, the comparison leaves out justification entirely: some homicides are clearly justified and even proper, and some wars can be, and some abortions are on most ethical schema if they are necessary to save the life of the mother in a case where both the mother and child will otherwise die. (The exception is the Catholic standard of 'never actively choose and perform an evil action,' where the killing of an innocent is always evil; the Church argues that it is morally better not to take on performing the evil action even though it results in letting both die instead of saving the one who can be saved. I dissent from that teaching.) 

Still, here as elsewhere sorting out the problematic issues with the comparison doesn't save abortion's bacon. Even in an unjust war, the enemy one might have killed was probably trying to kill you; even in gang violence, the other gang likely was. The abortions not only happen on a vaster scale, they always target the morally innocent. 

A Return Home

From Mount Pisgah, NC.

Homemade ice cream at the Harley shop’s Labor Day weekend party. 

UPDATE:

I love American biker culture. I just got caught in a huge rainstorm. I found some shelter and soon enough was joined by another group of bikers. They were busily making fun of their group leader for steering them into the storm, and he was making fun back, and one of them handed me an airplane-sized bottle of Kentucky bourbon whiskey without asking or introduction.

Had to stand there for an hour waiting for the storm to pass anyway, so there was no reason not to warm the blood a bit until the rain went over. 

UPDATE:

I saw a healthy adult black bear running across the road in front of me on my ride today. It looked like a male, though I only saw it for a moment. It always makes me feel happy to see a bear in the wild, being free. 

Matria Potestas

In ancient Rome, the father who headed a household had extreme power over it -- a genuine patriarchy led by a patriarch, or in Latin, paterfamilias. In his legal powers he was patria potestas, which included the right to kill his sons (or sell them into slavery) even into adulthood. Willingness to kill a son who refused military orders was seen as a proof of the honor of the father and the family, as it placed the needs of the society over the needs of the family or the individual. Such sacrifices for the common good were taken as an exercise in virtue. 

Two years ago, a writer in the New Oxford Review proposed that modern women are insisting on a similar power over their children, mater potestas. 

Roe created an adversarial model of the mother-child relationship, one that the elite or mainstream culture imbibed and prizes, perhaps without even consciously examining its implications.

Its implications, however, are profound: Maternity has been turned into the matria potestas, a 21st century American version of legal rights over offspring, not just to give them a name but even an acknowledged existence. Berg and Wiseman claim that one-third of women in the prime years of becoming mothers insist they must have a matria potestas, the power of life or death, over their offspring. Let’s also be honest about the slavery part: a mother can sell her offspring (though prices might be regulated) to another person through surrogacy, a trafficking-in-persons most recently legalized in Michigan.

What I think is missing there is the scale, which is captured in the X post linked under the screenshot of the post. The scale of the killing is very hard for people to grasp: if unborn Americans count as Americans, then abortion is the leading cause of death of Americans. It's not close: even omitting at-home 'Plan B' style abortions for lack of information, it's on the order of a quarter million a year more than the next leading cause.

I don't think we can easily grapple, either, with the point about the moral harm to the fabric of our society of having blood-guilt spread that widely. Societies have had large-scale populations of killers before; in The Tigers of Baluchistan, an anthropological survey of that ancient people, Sylvia A. Matheson pointed out that no Balochi man could hope to marry until he had killed another man. Like the Romans, the equally-ancient Balochi believed that this demonstration of a willingness and ability to kill was a proof of personal virtue. 

What does it mean to have so many of our women bearing this guilt? And not openly as the Balochi or the Romans would: they bear it without admitting it, so many of them preaching loudly about empathy while neither conceiving nor granting empathy to all the innocent dead children? What do we get from so many women preaching so often about the violence of men, and convinced of how much better society would be with more women in power? If 25% of men were killers, let alone killers of children, it would be a very different world. 

Road Dog

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