So a very simple fire festival, expecting an intensifying winter. But today was warm enough to ride in the high afternoon, and I’ve plenty of wood that I’ve cut and split myself. We’ll be warm enough in the cold to come.
Hogmanay Muted
The event was canceled in Scotland this year due to wild weather, high winds and rain that made the outdoor Fire festival untenable. Here we are having it without the customary venison steak pie because our oven has died, and will be weeks without replacement. Such is life.
Black Moon Over Hogmanay
Tonight’s festivals will feature the second New Moon in a month. This is the “Black Moon,” a companion to the more-famous “Blue Moon” (i.e. a second full moon in a single month).
How the Victorians Celebrated Christmas
This is part of the Victorian Farm series, featuring some of the same people as the Secrets of the Castle and the Tudor Monastery Farm. I enjoyed this series quite a bit as well.
18th Century Hot Drinks for New Years
A bit of history interspersed with some cooking -- punch, egg nog, and hot buttered ale.
Good news updates
I wrote some days back how delighted I was to be able to help save two Corpus Christi dogs. One came to me last Friday for a short stay before he was to be picked up by transport to a rescue operation in Wisconsin. Within 24 hours he'd gotten away from me and disappeared. After 48 hours, however, he was safely caught up about a mile from here, thanks to the work of a lot of neighbors who kept watch and reported sightings. He won't even miss his transport, scheduled for Wednesday evening. I have another couple of days to try to fatten him up.
In the continuing saga of nanopreemie Riley, he went home with his parents yesterday, weighing a little over 5 lbs. He still hasn't reached his original due date.
The 12 days of Christmas on a Tudor Monastery Farm
This is part of the Tudor Monastery Farm series, which has the same experimental archeologists and historian who worked on Secrets of the Castle living on a recreation Tudor farm for a year. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Newly Relevant: US Army Equine Funeral Unit Troubled
Carter was Navy, but it's the US Army that runs Arlington, and their horse-drawn funeral unit has been having some serious problems. Somewhat ironically, as you can see from the formal photos, it's blue-cord Infantry from the Third Infantry Regiment that are running this equine operation, not a US Cavalry unit.
The plan as announced will have him buried in Plains, GA rather than Arlington, but it's very likely this unit would have been involved -- and may yet be. In any case the horses deserve better treatment than they've been getting at the hands of our Old Guard, another sign of the notable decline even in treasured elements of a once-unmatched military.
Requiescat in Pace Jimmy Carter
On the day I was born he was Governor of the Great State of Georgia, where I happened to come into the world due to my father's work having taken him from Tennessee to Atlanta. Georgia in the 1970s was far from the worst place in the world, and in fact a very nice place to grow up. For whatever he had to do with that, I thank him.
When I was young he was President of the United States. At the time I knew almost nothing about what that meant, and for whatever he did to keep a world in which children could be blessedly ignorant of politics, I thank him.
It is also due to him, at least in part, that I grew up in Reagan's America. That too is a matter of some gratitude he is partially owed.
De Mortuis nihil nisi bonum.
The Feast of Holy Innocents
Today is the most somber of feast days. James had just invoked it the other day following the shooting at the Abundant Life Christian School.
A Handsome Beast
Rare to get a photo of the tiny puppy, soon to be a father, not running around in circles banging everything with his teeth like a shark. Conan is going to be a pretty dog when he finally slows down a little. A pretty good dog, too.
The Feast of John the Evangelist
Such is the third day of Christmas.
UPDATE: In the Roman Catholic tradition; I realize Tom has a whole different set of dates to deal with.
Some Welcome Sunlight
Though we have not yet left the ancient regime for the new era that begins late next month, some welcome changes have already begun. The State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) has been shut down. I've mentioned the GEC once before in this space. My old think tank used to attempt to bring it to bear on its mission -- I once spoke to the Heritage Foundation about its lawful role and why it wasn't performing it, and how important it was that it might begin to do so instead of not -- and yet they never were interested in doing their job of engaging foreign publics to address damaging anti-American information wars by the Chinese or arising incidentally out of the various religious wars worldwide. The only thing the GEC actually got interested in doing was censoring American free speech.
The most astonishing thing in this congressional report on government conspiracy to censor and silence right wing media and views is that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) was apparently an effective and enthusiastic part. As far as I know, this is the first time it’s ever been effective or enthusiastic; turns out they were really taken with silencing American citizens instead of doing their actual job.The GEC is assigned by Congress the role of aligning all American foreign communications in pursuit of national interests. This means diplomatic messaging aligns with Army psychological operations and CIA special activities of a communications sort; broadcasts of American state media align with the values and policies of the administration.Especially when Republican administrations have existed, the GEC is wholly uninterested in its mission. But even when Democratic heroes have held the reins, they’re ineffective. For one thing they’re entirely too small to actually perform the job effectively; for another, they are at State. Most of the communications infrastructure we have is military, and the military doesn’t respect the State Department. More, the State Department itself views actual diplomacy as its real job, and “public diplomacy” — that is, talking to ordinary citizens instead of other diplomats — has a lesser stature.So it’s a second-rate sinecure for bureaucrats who lack prestige, resources, or interest in doing the crucial job assigned to them. Occasionally they take meetings and accomplish nothing, which normally makes them one of the less harmful government bureaucracies.Give them a chance to play secret police and violate the constitutional rights of their own citizens, though, and apparently they were hot to trot.
Now today the Brownstone Institute has a tremendous report, summarizing 500 pages of findings, on the work of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). CISA has only been mentioned here once before, quoting RFK's endorsement of Donald Trump in which RFK notes that CISA was among those brought in to spy on and disrupt his independent campaign. Federal Judge Terry Doughty called the White House's censorship project, quote, "The most egregious violation of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America."
CISA was one of the ways that those who called themselves 'the Resistance' attempted to get the first Trump administration to give it the rope by which they would be hanged; and while their attempt to tie him to Russia failed when the Mueller investigation found no evidence of any Americans participating with Russian intelligence, at least in the 2020 election CISA largely succeeded. They were at the heart of changing the way that election was conducted by 'handling' election security in that race as well as in the surprise-victory of Democrats in 2022. The whole report merits reading.
This report should be trumpeted from the mountains and read widely. These are two government agencies that have abandoned their Constitutional mission, and become what the Declaration of Independence calls "any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e. protecting the natural rights of the citizenry]," activating "the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it[.]"
It's time for some alterations and abolishments. CISA should follow the GEC; let them be the first of all such institutions that have betrayed their mission.
Swannanoa
Asheville is slated to get quite a bit of rain this weekend. It’s still recovering from the hurricane, as the French Broad and Swannanoa Rivers have their confluence downtown. The nearby town named after the Swannanoa River was also hard hit. That’s where the Harley dealership that was turned into a makeshift heliport by a bunch of veterans is located.
Hopefully no cave-ins this time.
Christmas Morning
I gave away the motorcycle I have ridden for about fifteen years, to the boy who grew up riding on it. I told him that it was the best gift I had to give him aside from the existence that I gave him almost 23 years ago. I hope he has the same good luck with her that I had.
Merry Christmas.
Christmas Day
May God be praised for bringing us all together again on Christmas Day. My gratitude knows no bounds.
Let us feast together as friends and brothers.
Christmas joy
As if I were in a Hallmark movie, I'm experiencing two Christmas miracles this Eve: First, two urgently endangered dogs are now safely scheduled for transport to waiting homes up north. One is safe because, as I see it, God firmly told me "Don't give up. Make one more call; it's the only way to find out if they'll say yes." And they did.Second, my friend's desperately premature grandson has strengthened so much that the hospital is very likely to send him home tomorrow, on Christmas Day, weighing just over 5 lbs.I don't remember ever feeling so grateful.
Your Intel Report for Christmas Eve
Official up-to-the-second NORAD reports on Santa's activities this evening. NORAD has been keeping a close watch on this fellow since 1955.
Medieval Christmas
Some of this is Renaissance or later, but a fair bit is honest Latin. It’s a Spotify playlist for those who use it.
Christmas Mead
The crystal goblets were wedding gifts, some 25 years ago. My aunt Jackie gave them to us for just such occasions.
An Appalachian Stack Cake
In honor of my paternal grandmother, who always made this cake especially at Christmas, I have produced a poor version of my own. Hers would have had at least twice as many layers, much thinner and better fit to absorb the apple. I'm not even sure if she used apple butter or cooked the filling from dry apples; I used an apple butter that is locally produced without added sweeteners, as the cake itself has a cup of each sugar and molasses and the apples have natural sugars as well.
Hers would have looked and tasted much nicer, but hopefully wherever she is she is pleased by being remembered and included. She was the only of my grandparents to live long enough to meet my wife, and also the only one to take a switch to me when she thought I deserved it. I learned to make biscuits from her, and always enjoyed her simple country cooking. Aside from cake-making, I don't know that she ever used spices other than plain salt and black pepper, but somehow everything she cooked was delicious. Her given name was Anna Lee, née Thurman, a common Southern name with Old Norse origins.
Green Eggs and Ham
By coincidence, we are currently getting several colors of eggs to go with the Christmas ham I will be cooking tomorrow.
Choose electricity or gas
Or, to put it another way, choose between terrorism and your own citizens.The NYT's recent pathetic attempt to explain Iran's collapsing energy system could take pointers from Ed Morrissey, who has no trouble sorting it out. Iran's leaders chose to pursue regional "theocratic adventurism" via terrorism and nuclear weapons, rather than develop their own lavish natural gas resources in a form that could both heat homes and power industry.Now there's not enough natural gas extracted in usable form to heat homes while also fueling electrical power plants. The solution? Shut off the gas supplies to power plants, with the result that electrical power outages are inconveniencing homeowners but, worse, outright crippling industry. The proposed strategy for homeowners to get through the winter is to ration. Maybe in the spring there will be industry again!Destroying Iran's nuclear program and proxy terrorism structure may be the best thing that could happen to its citizens. So if we must blame the Jews, let's blame them for not doing it sooner.
“Cancel Christmas”
Our Technical Rescue instructor, a mighty mountain man of many years’ service, used this phrase once in training to warn us of the dire dangers of loading your rappelling rope wrongly through your rack’s brake bars. If you do that and you step off the edge, he said, “Cancel Christmas.”
European people have made at least as serious an error, and are falling in upon the remedy.
On Rituals
Sometimes we talk about archeology or anthropology assigning meanings to structures or observations. They very often tend to assign religious explanations when they can't think of anything else, but we often just don't really know why ancient ancestors did things. If there was a meaning at all, it is unknown and unknowable.
Jack Farrell was a ranch boss at Sombrero Ranches in Colorado for decades.He said there were many a wrangler that worked for him who discarded their old boots by adding to a collection of weatherworn boots already atop fence posts surrounding the ranch property.“It’s like throwing bras onstage at a Tom Jones concert. Once one does it, they all have to do it and they don’t really even know why after long,” Farrell said. “I guess it all started with a purpose, but I’ll be danged if anyone ever knew what that was.”...Most ranchers contacted for this story had either never seen it done or didn’t know the significance behind it.“Never heard of it,” said Kelly Lockhart, patriarch of a sixth-generation family cattle ranch based in Jackson, Wyoming....He assumed... coyotes would associate the smell of the boots with gun-toting ranchers and steer clear....Footwear at the end of its life simply made for a handy decoration to spruce up the property line.But the practicality of covering a fence post makes sense as some claim. A boot placed over a post would keep rain from seeping into the wood and decaying the post prematurely.Typically, it is thought boots on a fence are there as a memorial to a favorite horse, a lost member of the family or a beloved ranch worker who passed away.Some have speculated boots perched atop of fence post could also serve as communication in days before cellphones, for example. A visitor could instantly tell whether the homeowner was around or not.A boot with its toe turned toward the main house indicated the rancher or farmer was at home. A boot pointed in any other direction was to show the owner was still at work — the boot pointing to the field he was working in.
How much harder is it to understand a cultural practice from the other side of the world, or an ancient age?
Human beings don't really like admitting that they don't know something, much less that they can't know it. We like to think we have more knowledge than we do, just as we like to believe we have a lot more control than we do. It may be that there's nothing you can really do about how you're going to die except to hurry it up with very bad decisions; but endless ink is spilled on the alleged benefits of this-or-that diet, or having a glass of wine for your cholesterol, or not having a glass of wine ever at all.
What do we know that we really know? Descartes came up with one item for the list: we experience thinking, and therefore our mind must exist. Everything else is suspect to a greater or lesser degree.
Pragmatically we have to get along in the world, though. So if you see a old boot on a fencepost, I wouldn't go as far as questioning the existence of the boot or the fencepost. If you can find the guy who put it there, maybe he can even tell you why he did it. Maybe he read this blog post and thought it sounded like a fun idea.
Where does electricity come from, anyway?
As far as I can tell, neither the author of this NYT piece (not paywalled, I think) nor anyone running the show in Iran knows the answer to that question. Paragraph 5 takes us as far as the Iranian president's apology for having to cripple the country with power outages, and his plan for a solution:
“God willing, next year we will try for this not to happen.”So that's comforting. The author meanders for many more paragraphs without revealing a single clue how a country rich in natural gas can't keep the power on. Can't get it out of the ground? Can't transport it? Can't build or properly maintain power plants? No power lines to get the electricity to homes or businesses? He barely seems curious.Eventually it occurs to him how to blame it on (1) Jews, (2) stingy foreign investors, and (3) the refusal to use less energy, but that's not until paragraphs 19 and 22.Regime change is a tempting hope, if only there were some reason to believe the country contained people with a clue what to replace it with. I doubt the problem will be solved by blaiming Jews, demanding charity from foreign investors, or conservation. At some point they're going to have to grasp how non-totalitarian economies work, or just drift back into the stone age--a maddening fate for a people with a rich history and natural resources.
Reason for the Season
When I was in Ocean City, Maryland, earlier this month most of the businesses were closed for the season. I was a little shocked at how much this was true; Savannah, Georgia, is a similar sort of town but has a large enough resident population that even in the depth of winter pretty much everything is still open. Not so here! Not just hotels and restaurants and bars but grocery stores and other purveyors of regularly-required necessities were shut down.
Of the few hotels that were still operating, one of them had on its sign, "Let's keep the Christ in Christmas," or something similar to that. This greatly upset one of the comrades I had come to see, who felt it was exclusionary, perhaps even discriminatory, when displayed on a public accommodation. I said that I thought they should grant the Christians the justice of the statement, and, ah, 'turn the other cheek.'
That is not the spirit of what has come to be known as "liberalism," which used to mean "being ok with other people disagreeing with you." Today's Asheville Citizen-Times presents locals with a lecture from a retired superintendent from Vermont who has, like so very many before him, chosen to move South and then lecture us about how we need to change to be more like it is up North.
Naturally, the newspaper was delighted to publish the letter.
Opinion: Christmas season not about religion, but about pure and simple love[Really? Not at all about religion? -Grim]It is the time of the year that we are compelled to tell this wonderful story. In reality, the circumstances and conditions of this story are foreign to many of us. It is a story about poor people. It is a story about people of color. It is a story where might and wealth are on the opposite side. It is a story of Arabs. It is a story of Jews. It is a story of Phoenicians, at least that is what we are led to believe. It is a story where pieces and parts from separate Biblical writings are pulled together to give us a compelling version of what happened.Most know what story I am talking about. While it is a story that is embraced by the Christian faith, it might also be embraced by people of all faiths or people of no faith at all for it is a story of love.
That's enough to give you the flavor of the thing; you can read the rest if you want to, but you've probably read it before. The man was a career educator, which explains a great deal about the state of our society.
A Single Political Post
I was not planning on doing any political posts during the holidays, barring unforeseen emergencies; but I do feel that I ought to note this article by David Samuels on the breakdown of the Obama machine that has been successfully manipulating American politics for the last few years. I ought to do so because we all owe Mr. Samuels a great debt, as it was his work that got Obama's messaging imp Ben Rhodes to confess the whole bit because he thought he was talking to a friendly outlet (namely, the New York Times Magazine).
Mr. Samuels, as it turned out, was an honest journalist who really believed all that talk about the free press serving a watchdog role. In faithfully performing what he had youthfully believed was a sacred duty he was freely assuming, he first revealed what he is now explicating.
My thoughts on having read through it are that his analysis understates Elon Musk's role, even though he puts him first in honor. Musk's breaking Twitter free from the censorship program created the friction in the gears of the machine that recently, and blessedly, caused it to fly apart. Samuels comes as close as a man educated to speak to secular audiences can to referring to blessings in his shorter remarks on the role of Donald Trump's survival of the assassination attempt against him.
It's a very long piece, and because of its author it deserves discussion. For now I will merely note it, and perhaps we will return to it in the New Year.
Yuletide
Christmas Cookies
Strait is considered one of the greats of Texas country music, but he’s a little late for me. He’s more of a revival figure from the 80s than one of the 70s greats who were revolutionary rather than traditional.
Thus, I’d never heard this piece until tonight. It’s not bad at all.
It is Illegal, Isn’t It?
I always wondered why DEI-style programs didn’t count as illegal discrimination. I once applied for a job with the Department of the Navy and was told I wasn’t qualified before they actually asked about my qualifications— just my demographics alone sufficed to exclude me from consideration. For any other demographic group, the law explicitly forbids such a ruling. For me and those in mine, somehow the discrimination was explicitly permitted, even required.
I understood the arguments in favor of such programs as remedial of decades of discrimination and centuries of slavery. Not that my ancestors— red dirt farmers, coal miners, drovers, welders— had benefitted a great deal from any social injustice. One of my grandfathers manufactured concrete blocks by hand, until he got a job as a forklift operator. The other repaired long-haul tractor trailer trucks. Others had it harder still, but this sort of race-based remediation was at best a blunt instrument that didn’t much treat the problem.
But what always confused me was how it wasn’t just illegal. It seemed to be, following from the principles. Yet every institution practiced some version of it, especially the government.
Maybe it’s illegal after all.
The Appalachian Stack Cake
My paternal grandmother always had one of these under glass every time I ever remember visiting. She was a tremendous cook, making three meals every day starting with breakfast before dawn. I learned to make biscuits from her, but she never taught me this recipe.
Here are two versions, one with dried apples and one with apple butter. If you have never tried it, it’s a great holiday cake.
The Horrors of Moderation
A group of Kenyan employees have been diagnosed with "severe" PTSD because of their jobs -- as moderators on Facebook.
More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism.The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to have PTSD, generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and major depressive disorder (MDD), by Dr Ian Kanyanya, the head of mental health services at Kenyatta National hospital in Nairobi.The mass diagnoses have been made as part of lawsuit being brought against Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Samasource Kenya, an outsourcing company that carried out content moderation for Meta using workers from across Africa.The images and videos including necrophilia, bestiality and self-harm caused some moderators to faint, vomit, scream and run away from their desks, the filings allege.
They must be doing a good job. I've never seen anything on Facebook that caused me to faint, vomit, or scream and run away.
A Gentle Suggestion
Lord Blackstone defined "gentlemen" as those "qui arma gerit," meaning, "who bear arms." Perhaps it's time to gentle your condition, as Shakespeare tells us Henry V once said.
All About the Drones
If you don't have your old Atari defensive gear, T-Rex Labs has some interesting thoughts on defending against drones.
Honesty in Journalism
Cowboy State Daily: “Shooting Drones is Illegal, But a Shotgun Would Work Best”
Magic & the German Shepherd Dog
Tonight Conan found two of his tennis balls in the basement, where they had fallen down the stairs and become lost. I picked each one up in turn and threw it up the stairs, to the main floor. Each time he thought I had thrown it across the basement, and went and searched the other side laboriously.
Then, after I finished lifting weights, we went back upstairs where he found the balls. He grabbed one and was running around showing it to everyone as if to say, “Daddy is a wizard! He threw this ball in the basement, and it reappeared on the main floor! Look! Wizard!”
A Poem by Czeslaw Milosz, Translated By Czeslaw Milosz & Robert Pinsky
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.
Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.
I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.
But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.
The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.
So darned unfair
For Schadenfreude, it's hard to beat about 90% of the election post-mortems in the last 5-6 weeks, but this Salon piece is a truly virtuoso performance in Looking Glass world analysis. Apparently Trump unfairly skunked the Democrats by sticking to big-picture themes and speaking about them consistently to national audiences. At the same time, he employed a "divide-and-conquer strategy while simultaneously building a multiethnic MAGA coalition." Harris, for her part, micro-targeted to splinter groups, which was apparently better because it had more details.On the other hand, Trump unfairly micro-targeted those same splinter groups with ads that purported to praise Harris's position on just the issue each group would hate. He targeted Muslims with her pro-Israel positions and Jews with her anti-Israel ones, or alarmed oilfield voters with her threatened ban on fracking, which she didn't even mention while she was campaigning this time! Evidently the ads implied they were from Harris fellow-travelers if not the Harris campaign itself, which research shows makes voters more receptive, again very unfair. It seems Harris's splinter groups were bored by her targeted message, assuming they believed a word of it, while the splinter targets of the Trump effort were galvanized by video evidence of her actual messages over time, which they totally believed.Salon quotes the NYT's lament that people don't seem to believe experts any more, and they couldn't hear Harris's message of joy/brat/whatever because they were so angry about feeling broke. Evidently nothing can be done to improve this state of affairs except for Democrats to stop playing so nice and try to dominate the culture that is upstream from politics, which they've never tried before and certainly didn't succeed at for decades by capturing most institutions from the press to the justice system to public schools to universities.
Bee Stings
Running Low On Ideas, God Makes Oklahoma
It's a fair cop, though the southeastern and southwestern corners of the state as well as the panhandle have bits of interesting topography. Really, though, is there any interesting topography from Galveston, TX, on up through Kansas?
However, an even worse heresy has recently arisen: Die Hard is a Harry Potter movie!
Updates
"OTTAWA — Former Rightful-President Hillary Clinton has been awarded an honorary medical license by the Canadian Minister of Health due to her decades of experience providing dignified euthanasia services to men and women in America."
(It's actually worth the half minute it takes to read the whole article.)
"The pardon will reportedly cover any crimes that Sauron may have committed during the entirety of the Second Age of Middle Earth."
Home for the Holidays
Country Cooking at the VFD
I arrived home last night just in time for — literally within an hour of — the Volunteer Fire Department’s Christmas party. It’s always fairly early in Advent so as to preserve the actuality of Christmas for the family: after all, the Fire/Rescue service takes members away from their families often enough throughout the year.
Especially this year! We are grateful and fortunate to have come through so much so well.
The food at this feast reminds me so much of my childhood, when this kind of ‘country cooking’ was almost the only thing available even in local restaurants. Now, it’s hard to find. Just a simple meatloaf, fried chicken, potatoes with gravy, green beans (not pictured), rolls, and a selection of dump cakes and fruit cobblers for dessert. Water, tea or soda to drink, like the dry South in which I grew up. My wedding was dry: Georgia on a Sunday in the old days always was, except perhaps in Atlanta.
It’s good to be home.
UPDATE: I am reminded of this joke about Appalachian Southern cooking.
A Marian Carol
I came across this link on Twitter, and it leads to a post not just presenting the video, but the history, language, and musical evolution of the carol. Quite interesting. Reading that I came to suspect that the term for young ladies in the UK in the 60s- "bird"- may not have to do with the animals, but rather with a Middle English term (berde) that was resurrected with a modern spelling and understanding. Turns out that may not be exactly the case, but perhaps there's a relationship there regardless. Turns out she did a whole thread of carols, but I've not had time to go through them all yet. Something to help get you in the spirit of Advent.
Mordor Ascendant
Back in the District for three nights. With the expected transition coming in days, the bureaucracy is off the chain. Crazy times.
Assateague
A good day spent with wild horses (or feral ponies, depending upon whom you ask).
The horses are pretty calm, as long as you treat them with proper respect.
The island itself is very beautiful.
The Heart of a Bull
Peruvian cuisine tonight. The waitress carefully explained to me, after I ordered it, that it would be the actual heart of an animal. It was delicious.
The Great Eggnog Riot at West Point
Come for the riot-worthy recipe, stay for the story of Cadet Jefferson Davis's eggnog rebellion.
The lightbulb comes back on
A crazy thought from disappointed Democrats: maybe the Constitution has some answers for how to rein in government when we find ourselves in a minority. It turns out there's federalism, separation of powers, and all kinds of stuff we might want to look into.
Syria
A friend writes:
Events are moving quickly in Syria after Hezbollah was crushed. The Turkish terrorists have taken Hama, the Iraqi parliament has authorized troops to enter Syria, and Russia has pulled its fleet from Tartus. Because Turkey has closed the Bosporus to them, the Russians will have to sail to northwest Russia to reach a friendly port. What a mess. I blame Israel ;-).
Travels Before Yule
I’m making a final swing for business before settling down to winter on the mountain. I’ll be on the road until the 13th. Posting may be light.
What I been sayin'
Several reports of the surprising-but-not-surprising Hunter Biden pardon have mentioned that Hunter will no longer be able to plead the Fifth if called to testify in future probes of corruption on the part of his family, especially his father Joe and his uncle Jim. What that observation immediately suggested to me was that Hunter will be exposed to contempt charges if he does not testify and perjury charges if he does--assuming he won't simply tell the truth, a possibility I discount for the present. Jonathan Turley makes the same point in today's Hill article.Strangely enough, Still-Sort-of-President Biden could have avoided this trap by commuting Hunter's sentence instead of pardoning him. That was the approach followed by President Bush in the conviction of Scooter Libby. President Bush reportedly felt it was wrong to pardon a crime he actually believed had been committed, but it was reasonable to commute the sentence in light of the unfair and persecutory nature of the prosecution. That ostensibly is also Biden's explanation for the pardon.Like many, I look forward to pardons for the J6 participants, or commutation to time served at the very least, for any as to whom there may be credible evidence of violence. They've all already experienced more punishment than any rioters I can think of for the 2020-2022 period. Ditto for anyone convicted of standing around outside an abortion clinic praying.
Experimental Archeology and Notre Dame Cathedral
In 1997 an experimental archeology project was begun near Treigny, France. The project was to build a new castle, Guédelon Castle, using only the materials and methods available in the 13th century, in order to learn more about how castles were built. It took 25 years and involved hundreds of craftsmen, bringing about whole new generations of masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc., who had years of experience in medieval building methods. In 2019 Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burned down and many of these craftsmen went to work on the rebuilding project.
Wikipedia article explaining the castle project -- lots of pics
Guardian article on the Guédelon Castle craftsmen going to work on Notre Dame
For anyone who is interested in 13th century castle building, I can't recommend the five episodes of the BBC series Secrets of the Castle highly enough. It seems to be available for free on YouTube. (That said, if you already know a great deal about the topic, the series was made for a popular audience and may not be all that exciting.)
Here is the Guédelon Castle website, especially useful if you plan to visit.
Women in Power
As a student of Medieval history I have read a vast number of papers by other students of such history. As the academy has grown more and more heavily female, the proportion of papers about Medieval history that are feminist has waxed larger and larger. Young women who go to college and then grad school are very likely to be feminists, and they want to study women and power-struggle issues because that's what they're interested in anyway. As a consequence, I have read variations of the following paper probably thousands of times:
As a feminist historian, I study the ways in which women were able to pursue and achieve their goals in spite of the restrictive patriarchy of the Middle Ages. In my study of X, I examined the way that she/they were able to achieve a remarkable degree of success in pursuing her/their goals. Even more surprisingly, given the strident patriarchy of the era, I found that her/their chief allies were often the men in her/their lives rather than other women.
I have read this paper many, many times -- about individual women or groups, across social classes whether nobility in Ireland or criminals in France, laity or nuns or abbesses, bakers and brewers and housewives. The conclusion of their research always comes as a surprise, an exception to the reality they assume held sway.
Except it's not an exception; all these papers find the same things, everywhere they look. Just because I have read it so often, I have long been waiting for the breakout female historian who will similarly read such papers and come to question the assumptions they brought to their initial work. Maybe we've been sold a bill of goods about how men and women related in the Middle Ages, as we were about the idea that medieval people thought the world was flat. At one time everyone 'knew' that was true, but it just wasn't the case.
The woman who makes this breakthrough -- and it will have to be a woman, because a man making that argument would never get anywhere, especially not in academia -- will one day be recognized as a historian of the first water. She will overturn the whole field of Medieval studies by showing that some of its basic assumptions are false. She will also improve her contemporary world, both by speaking the truth, but also by improving the relationship between educated men and women who are now taught to view each other as oppositional classes of beings.
While we aren't all the way there yet, historian Erika Graham-Goering has taken us a major step further. She studies especially the area of France around the early period of the Hundred Years War, sort of the height of High Medieval feudalism. What she found ought to be astonishing: she found that women held exactly as large a proportion of positions of power in Medieval France as they do today -- and more than they did after the modern revolution in France.
When historian Erika Graham-Goering checked the number of women who were in power worldwide five years ago, she was surprised. The proportion was the same as it was in France in the 14th century: one in five.
Graham-Goering’s area of expertise is power, who held it, and how it was exercised in the late Middle Ages....
Graham-Goering focuses on how society was organised. An important finding is that the exercise of power was much less authoritarian and more productive than the impression created in later times. It was about finding practical solutions to situations that arose in the moment....
“Women were somewhat more vulnerable to coups, but nonetheless, one in five of those in power were women. When Jeanne married, she remained the legitimate owner of the land.”Noblemen and women performed many of the same leadership tasks, although few women went to war. An important exception here is Joan of Arc (1412–1431), now a saint in the Catholic Church. For a period during the Hundred Years’ War, she led the French army in the war against England.“It’s a thought-provoking fact that women lost power after the French Revolution and the introduction of democracy. They could neither be elected nor vote themselves. Whereas when positions were inherited, they actually had a reasonably good chance of being at the top of the hierarchy and in power,” Graham-Goering concludes.
The rise of science in the early modern period has a similar feature: people like to think that history is the story of progress, so that the rise of science should align with a greater acceptance of women and an end to superstitions like witch-burning. In fact, we invented science when we started burning witches. The rise of science and superstition went hand in hand, accompanied with a rise in cultural misogyny.
By the way, in the US Congress it's a about one-in-four: 25 Senators plus the Vice President as a tiebreaker, 127 of 435 in the House. The fact that I didn't know that without looking it up suggests that we don't really view it as that big a deal; I know how many Republicans and Democrats there are in the Senate without having to look, for example. Among governors, it'll be 13 of 50. It's interesting that these very different times and places have settled on about the same ratio, in spite of having completely different methods of selection. That might also be worth studying, but it is not properly a question for historians.
"Rebels" Seize Aleppo
Yesterday a surprise offensive led to the fall of Aleppo, Syria's largest city. The most important question to ask yourself when trying to understand the various wars in the Middle East is, "Whose proxies are these?" The struggle for dominance and control in the region is led by different factions, and if a surprise offensive happens it means that one of them has provided clandestine support at sufficient scale to enable a breakout.
Let's see how the NY Times covers this to help its readers understand what is going on in Syria.
Headline: "Rebels Seize Control over most of Syria's Largest City."Subhead: "The rapid advance on Aleppo came just four days into a surprise opposition offensive that is the most intense escalation in years in the civil war."First paragraph: "Rebels had seized..."Second paragraph: "...antigovernment rebels..."Third paragraph: "...some rebels..."Fourth paragraph: "...surprise rebel offensive..."
By the fifth paragraph, we finally get a hint of whose side these 'antigovernment rebels' might be on, at least in the negative:
"The timing of the assault suggested that the rebels could be exploiting weaknesses across an alliance linking Iran to the militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as the Assad regime in Syria and others."
So, they're not Iranian proxies. But who are they?
Sixth paragraph: "...well-armed rebel fighters... opposition forces..."
Seventh & Eighth paragraphs: "...rebels..."
Finally, in the ninth paragraph we learn that the Times knew all along who it was, and just didn't want to tell us:
"Within hours from Friday into Saturday, Syrian government soldiers, security forces and police officers fled the city, according to the war monitoring group. They were replaced by the Islamist and Turkish-backed rebels sweeping through on foot, motorbikes or on trucks mounted with machine guns."
Oh. They're Turkish and Muslim Brotherhood forces. Erdogan, who has been aligned with and backed the Muslim Brotherhood across the region, is making a play to take advantage of the recent crippling of Hezbollah by Israel to strengthen his power versus Iran. This is part of the long-running Sunni-Shia competition to dominate the Middle East, and Erdogan's personal quest to restore Turkey to the leadership position of the Islamic world. The Ottoman Turks held that position (and the title of 'caliph' of the 'caliphate,' which the Brotherhood exists to try and restore) for centuries; and while the oil and gas wealth of the Gulf states gives them power and independence from the traditional Sunni leadership in Egypt and Turkey, it's a goal of Erdogan's to reclaim that place.
Iran is the leading challenger to that traditional Sunni leadership, and it has had a good run for decades now following our deposing of Saddam and their consequent establishment of a 'Shia crescent' stretching from the gulf across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Levant and the Mediterranean. They use this to supply Hezbollah, and then Hamas and the Houthis. Their Houthi proxies at the mouth of the Red Sea have given them an ability to threaten shipping throughout the Middle East.
So what you're really seeing is an unintended consequence of Hamas' attack on Israel, which has led to the savaging of one Iranian proxy (Hamas) and the at-least-temporary crippling of another (Hezbollah). Assad is now under a push from the Turks -- these 'rebels' are actually the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army and their paramilitaries -- and Aleppo is closer to Turkey's border than it is to Damascus.
Turkey is a nominal American NATO ally, but in fact is no friend of ours; they frequently shell our own proxies, the Kurds, with whom we have SOF embedded. However, the enemy of your enemy is at least an opportunity; Turkey here is fighting another Iranian ally/proxy, and drawing off some Russian attention as well.
Recall that the Russians have also been supporting the Houthi with targeting data, without which they would far less effective as Iranian proxies. This is to punish us for supplying similar targeting support to the Ukrainian forces, who are functionally NATO proxies to bleed Russia; so too here the Turkish proxies are functionally NATO proxies in the world war we are in, even if they're really pursuing Erdogan's and the Brotherhood's agenda rather than NATO's.
Most likely Erdogan started moving the clandestine support for this play about the time Israel and Hezbollah started their clash, realizing he'd be able to expand and consolidate his zone of control in Syria in the wake of that. He has several times threatened Israel over the war in Gaza as part of asserting that claim for leadership of the Islamic world, but as you can see, he's functionally on Israel's side -- even if he's actually only on his own. His actions damage the Iran/Russia/Assad axis, and therefore are bad for Israel's enemies. Whatever he may say out loud, what he's doing advances their interests: accidentally, but actually.
UPDATE: Sure enough, Syrian “rebel” leader Abu Tow gave a statement to Israeli public broadcasting station Kann assuring that Israeli interests won’t be targeted by his forces “due to shared enemies.”
The Feast of St. Andrew
Today is the feast day of the first of Jesus’ disciples, Andrew the Apostle. Because he is the patron saint of Scotland, today is a national holiday there.
Georgia-Georgia Tech
Clean, old-fashioned hate had a banner year. Georgia beat Tech after being down 17 points at halftime, tying it up in the fourth quarter, and then going to eighth overtime to win 44-42.
Tech isn’t even ranked. Georgia has been ranked as high as #1, currently #6. This victory is not too far from Alabama losing to Vanderbilt, which they did this year.
2024 has been an interesting year.
The Renaissance of Notre-Dame Cathedral
That was back in September. Here's a much shorter video from today that shows more of the cathedral.
This would be worth going to see.
Thanksgiving Duck
I roasted a duck stuffed with apples and red onion, as well as various herbs. There are only three of us for the feast this year, so it seemed like a good time to try a small bird with different flavors.
Please accept my Thanksgiving wishes for all guests of good will. May it be a good feast and a time to celebrate many things for which you have reason to be thankful.
1924 Turkey Toss
Everyone remembers the WKRP episode, but in 1924 something similar really happened in Tulsa.
It’s something that would be hard to imagine today. Recipients had to slaughter and clean as well as cook their own adult turkey. In 1924 these skills were still very common. Today you’d have animal rights activists protesting, too.
Thanksgiving
An article James linked, deploring the commercialization of the West, notes that Europe absorbed Black Friday without Thanksgiving.
As an American, I’m not sure whether to be embarrassed or offended, since we have a splendid and relatively uncommercialized holiday just the day before that expresses the best in American civic instincts. What could be more wholesome than giving thanks? And what do Europeans import? The parasite without the host, consumption without gratitude.
A Lesson in Hebrew
Today I was talking with a Jewish friend, who was telling me about one Thanksgiving he spent in Antwerp. He wanted to buy a Kosher turkey for the holiday. He found a Kosher butcher, but that guy only spoke Flemish and Hebrew. My friend speaks Hebrew, but didn’t know the word for ‘turkey.’ It was a funny story about him mimicking gobble sounds until the guy got the idea and told him the right name.
Hebrew was revived for spoken use in the 19th century, so the ancient language doesn’t really have a word for ‘turkey,’ as it was originally spoken in the Middle East and died out before the discovery of the Americas. Thus, the name of the bird was invented after the origin of our holiday.
The name has an ambiguous translation, which can mean “rooster of India” or “chicken of thanks.” Columbus thought he’d gone to India, after all. That the same word can also mean thanking or praising is a happy coincidence.
Ceasefire
There were reports of heavy rocket fire and 'suicide drones' (really just using drones as guided missiles) by Hezbollah in the hours leading up to the ceasefire announced today; Israel, meanwhile, struck Beirut. In the wake of the announcement reports are of troop movements by the army of Lebanon to the southern regions that they had abandoned to Hezbollah at the start of the conflict.
The official Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) depends upon and intertwines more than it likes to admit with Hezbollah. The US funds and equips the LAF, which our State Department likes to pretend is a reliable stabilizing force. Since we were also funding the IDF, this meme is almost accurate:
The rockets on the right are Iranian, of course, not US-provided ones; but thanks to the Obama administration and the Biden administration, we probably bought those rockets too. Hezbollah does get other forms of war materiel from us via the LAF. The only real inaccuracy is that this a shot of rockets coming from Gaza, so those are Hamas' Iranian-provided rockets rather than Hezbollah's.
None of this implies that peace is breaking out in the Middle East quite yet, as Israel and Iran are still going at it. The war against Hamas isn't over yet either. Things are a little bit quieter, though, assuming the ceasefire holds for a while. Right now that's as good as it gets.
Thanksgiving Conversations
If you can't have sympathy for the Left this Thanksgiving, maybe a little for the Devil?
UGA Rejoins the USA
The University of Georgia, where I spent a lot of time some years ago, has decided to reaffirm support for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
NEW: The University System of Georgia has:-Banned DEI statements in hiring and admissions.-Added free expression training to student orientation.-Declared political neutrality.-Required the teaching of the Declaration, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and more.
Students often oppose free speech for their enemies while relying on it themselves. Georgia has hosted a number of pro-Hamas demonstrations that walk right up to the line of First Amendment protection by asserting support for a State Department-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. Often it's those same students who join such protests and yet tend to support speech suppression towards their political opponents. It's not that they don't have principles, it's just that power rather than liberty tends to be behind those principles.
UGA compares well to a lot of academic institutions in that there has remained some room for sanity there. Georgia's Board of Regents are early adopters of this movement to recommit to founding principles.
Meanwhile, most of the college is much more concerned about Georgia's admission to the upcoming College Football championships. This has been the wildest college football year I can remember. Georgia whipped UMass last week by 21 points, but has lost to Alabama and Ole Miss; Alabama lost to Tennessee; Georgia beat Tennessee; Georgia also beat Texas, which it may play again in the championships if Texas beats Texas A&M, who just lost to Auburn, who usually can't beat North Korea. (Georgia beat Auburn by 23 points.) Alabama will also be admitted, in spite of losing to Tennessee, Oklahoma (who also lost to Tennessee, Texas, and Ole Miss but who beat Auburn), and, incredibly, to Vanderbilt.
Sanity, then, prevails in having more interest in the football than the politics; but sanity definitely does not prevail in determining who is going to win the championship games. You'd do as well to flip a quarter as to try to understand the stats.
First Time for Everything
Russia hits Ukraine with a ballistic missile. It’s supposed to be the first time this kind of intermediate-range missile has been employed in combat.
Is that true? I wonder. Ukraine is supposed to have struck its own airport with a ballistic missile in the opening hours of the war because it had been seized by Russia airborne and special forces. We discussed at the time the way that would redefine the tactical use of airborne to seize airheads (see comments).
It would be nice to see the escalation winding down. The good news is the provision of land mines, which suggests a hardening of the lines that will make it easier to accept the current status quo as a condition of peace. Odd to think of land mines as a humane consideration, but by setting the current boundaries as firm they satisfy Russian demands to keep what they’ve won as a condition of ending their operations. Likewise Ukraine’s concession that Crimea can only be recovered diplomatically, i.e. not at all.
The outgoing government here seems to be trying to tie the hands of the incoming administration, but it’s a dangerous game. I’ll be glad when they run out of time for it.
UPDATE: Per the Bismarck Cables, more signs of peace on the horizon: polls in both Russia and Ukraine show waning support for the war, and public desire for a negotiated peace. The exhaustion of the public coupled with the hardening of the lines suggest that there's little more for either side to gain by continuing the war.
Early Snow
I don't remember seeing snow here in November before, but this morning there was a light dusting -- enough to turn the world white, though not enough to completely cover the grass and stones.
Blue skies this afternoon, so it'll all be gone as if it were never here before you know it.
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