Twelfth Night Cake
Chancellor Gates on America
For now, the United States would seem to be in a strong position vis-à-vis both China and Russia. Above all, the U.S. economy is doing well. Business investment in new manufacturing facilities, some of it subsidized by new government infrastructure and technology programs, is booming. New investments by both government and business in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and bioengineering promise to widen the technological and economic gap between the United States and every other country for years to come.
How Long Ago was the Dawn of 'Everything'?
Ath. Why, do you think that you can reckon the time which has elapsed since cities first existed and men were citizens of them?Cle. Hardly.Ath. But are sure that it must be vast and incalculable?Cle. Certainly.Ath. And have not thousands and thousands of cities come into being during this period and as many perished? And has not each of them had every form of government many times over, now growing larger, now smaller, and again improving or declining?Cle. To be sure.
Packing Mounts
A couple of months ago I sold my Jeep; a couple of weeks ago, my Ford decided it needed a new transmission valve body. This is an ideal time of year for living on the back of your motorcycle, which I mostly do anyway, but there are a few chores that it’s helpful to have a truck to do. I have been working around the issue using modified pack animal techniques.
For groceries, I lashed a Duffel bag across the back. That plus the saddle bags allowed me to carry everything I needed.
The trash situation after two weeks was approaching Alice’s Restaurant territory. So, today:
Zero points for guessing what I used to create the lashing points on the bag. You can see one of them here.
"Corporate Death Penalty"
A Manhattan judge on Tuesday found Donald Trump and his real-estate company liable for fraud.The judge ordered the Trump Organization's New York corporate charters revoked immediately.A receiver will be appointed to "dissolve" the company — but years of appeals may play out first.
...the penalty is so rare that the only previous time it's been attempted on such a grand scale — when James sought the corporate death penalty in her three-year-old, ongoing fraud lawsuit against the NRA — has failed."It's a staggering judgment," said John Moscow, a former financial-crimes prosecutor for the Manhattan district attorney's office."It means you are no longer a company, and the judge is appointing someone to take over the assets and distribute them as the court sees fit."
So the only two corporations in the history of Manhattan, home of Wall Street, that have merited this penalty in the eyes of the state are the NRA and the Trump Organization? That strongly suggests that corporate malfeasance isn't the real issue behind these prosecutions and the seeking of this penalty.
The Birthday of Bilbo Baggins
A Remarkable Poll
A police state is a tyrannical government that engages in mass surveillance, censorship, ideological indoctrination, and targeting of political opponents. How concerned are you that America is becoming a police state?"I'm Concerned-DEM: 67%IND: 72%GOP: 76%All Voters: 72%
So 2/3rds of Democrats, and nearly 3/4ths of all voters? That's not a fringe position, then.
A Remarkable Indictment
A misguided attempt to reform professional military education (JPME) in the 1980s led by the late Ike Skelton and other military reformers in Congress mandated that masters-level degrees be granted at all command and staff colleges, as well as a required study in "jointness." This forced all the military midlevel colleges to make room in their courses of study to accommodate the requirements of civilian academia to grant an advanced degree....Command and staff colleges had traditionally been the places where aspiring senior commanders really learned their trade as majors or lieutenant commanders. This used to include a serious study of military theory, history and staff planning. That is not currently the case.Today, seminar groups are led by two instructors -- one a uniformed officer and the other an academic. There is generally no requirement that either be an expert in combined-arms combat on land, in the air, or on the sea. In some cases, they're simply not knowledgeable about the study of war.
The GWOT and You
“I can’t imagine what you went through over there …”Most veterans of the Global War on Terrorism have heard this line at some point.... Before we left for war, the experience of most veterans was completely recognizable. We might not have attended your high school, but we went to a high school. We might not have rooted for your sports team, but we rooted for a sports team. The rhythms of our lives matched your rhythms. Then, we went to war. And, yes, war changed us.But it did not make us so different from you.... If you still believe we had truly unimaginable experiences at war, then it follows that we — America’s veterans — were forever altered in ways that make us unknowable. And, if that is true, it means we never really get to come home.
"You can never go home again" is a truism for everyone, though. For some people it's more strongly true than for others. Some people's homes were bulldozed and replaced by suburbs, or their communities uprooted and destroyed by rising or falling property values. The TVA flooded quite a few people's homes and communities back in the day. Yet even if your house is still where it was and your parents still live there, when you go back it's not the same. As you get older, more things have changed; more people have died.
A memorial only gives you a place in the world consecrated to the memory. The memory can live there, and you can go and visit it, and while the memorial last -- probably longer than you -- it will offer a stable home for your memories. It can't bring anything back.
Nevertheless, the Vietnam Memorial -- discussed at length in the piece -- has been important in the ways the author describes. The Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally for decades rode past it, in honor of those who had served in Vietnam.
The piece includes a call for participation in the design of the memorial. That's an interesting challenge. The war was fought in the Philippines, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, across Africa, and in less violent ways in the West itself. Its proximate cause was the fall of the Twin Towers, which is a ready symbol that could be employed, but also the strike on the Pentagon on the same day. Thinking about what the right symbol is for this is going to take some imagination.
If you have ideas, starting tomorrow you can submit them at this link.
Swedish Torch
Ætena Hlaf: An Experiment towards Beorning Honey Cakes
I have not forgotten that I promised to develop a more authentic recipe for Beorn's Honey Cakes. To that end, I am experimenting with a set of medieval recipes for similar items. The first one I decided to bake was Ætena Hlaf, "hlaf" being an obvious Anglo-Saxon/Norse cognate for "loaf" (like "hval" for "whale"). “Ætena” is less obvious: the cognate is ‘eating.’