More Google Cleanup

I went back through a few months of comments and restored the ones Google wrongly marked as spam. There were a lot of them, including some Mr. Hines made multiple times, along with a comment that he couldn’t understand why they kept disappearing. 

The effect of AI is likely to include increased speech suppression. Disapproved ideas will be much harder to express because human attention will no longer be a limiting factor on how much suppression can be done. 

FPC Wins Again

These boys are on a roll. This time they managed to have several of Maryland's firearm carry bans struck down as unconstitutional restrictions on the right to bear arms. 

Maryland is one of only twelve states where I cannot carry a handgun with my North Carolina permit, because Maryland only respects its own permits. North Carolina will accept the permits of forty-nine other states as well as its own; Maryland zero other states. This is common among states run by gun control regimes: they routinely disarm everyone they can, and disallowing any other states' permits means that they can insist that citizens of other states be disarmed while in their state. The FPC lawsuit doesn't help that issue.

However, it does allow Marylanders with permits -- not easy to come by in Maryland, but easier now thanks to groups like FPC -- to carry in places they were formerly forbidden from doing so. Everything that can be done to dismantle the disarmament regime is good; a free people have the right to defend themselves from harm, and therefore they have also the right to the necessary conditions of an effective defense to include the tools they need.

Drones

Recently drone warfare came up in the comments. Here are some videos I've found helpful in understanding this evolution of battlefield technology. There's a lot of focus on drones in warfare, but it's not exclusively that.

I would be very interested in any other sources any of you consider useful for understanding this aspect of warfare.

Task & Purpose offers a 16-minute overview of the development of drone warfare going back to the 19th century and bringing it up to about November 2023. (There's a sponsor ad in it after the intro. Skip to 2:17 to miss that, although it is a drone ad if you're interested.)

T.REX ARMS / LABS has a good series on drones. The first is a 25-minute dive into drone warfare in the Ukraine/Russia conflict. I've then posted the rest of their 5-part series below that.

Community Standards Vary

My wife has houseguests this weekend. I am of course detailed to cook for them. I just made dinner (bacon-wrapped jalapeño shrimp, with bruschetta and honey/balsamic Brussel sprouts as sides). To decide how much jalapeño to use, I yelled downstairs:

"Dear, verify your friends' comfort level with spice?"

"I like spicy!" one of them yelled back.

"I like spicy!" the other one yelled back.

"OK, here it comes," I said and walked away. 

Downstairs, I could hear my wife panicking. "No! No! You don't know what you asked for! Mildly spicy! Mildly!"

Strong Work, SECDEF

I met Lloyd Austin once briefly in Iraq, when he was the commanding general of the war effort. This is what I want to see from a man like him.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III on Friday relieved the overseer of the war court at Guantánamo Bay and revoked a plea agreement reached earlier this week with the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and two alleged accomplices....

In taking away the authority, Mr. Austin assumed direct oversight of the case and canceled the agreement, effectively reinstating it as a death-penalty case.

Because of the stakes involved, the “responsibility for such a decision should rest with me,” Mr. Austin said in an order released Friday night by the Pentagon.

“Effective immediately, in the exercise of my authority, I hereby withdraw from the three pretrial agreements that you signed on July 31, 2024.”

That's what I'm talking about. 'You are relieved and we're going to do it right' is something we need to hear a lot more often pointed at the senior officers corps. Well done. 

Rumors of War

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. 

Mt. 24:6

It's looking like a real war is brewing in the Middle East. It's the long-expected war between Iran and Israel, which Iran will be fighting from a disadvantage because they haven't finished their nuclear program yet. The rocket strikes are ongoing, but ineffective so far; Israel has designated medical facilities and emergency radio frequencies in expectation of a larger barrage. There are no-fly zones in the north. The United States appears to be evacuating our diplomatic personnel, but has deployed 12 additional warships in addition to the carrier group already in the Persian Gulf. 

As mentioned on Wednesday, Iran is throwing away its most effective strategy in favor of a more dangerous but less effective one. It will do more damage in the short term, but it will end the deniability of the proxy war and expose Iran to direct retaliation. Iran is a lot more fragile than it looks, and has only survived this long by avoiding being drawn into a real war.

Coincidentally, Sen. Cotton has opened a probe into Kamala Harris' national security adviser over ties to Iranian networks. Now that's not necessarily anything untoward; it can be helpful for your national security guy to have a backchannel to the people you're worried about. Sometimes you want to talk to them, or hear their perspective. Still, it's the sort of thing that ought to be interrogated, so good for the Senator for pressing them on it. 

Recession

Unsurprisingly, the economy slipped into recession according to a usual test. Dad29 has been pointing out that indicators have been unfavorable for some time. The price of copper, another heuristic, is at a four-month low as manufacturers don't expect to be making as much stuff. At the same link you can see that the price of lithium is way down, as the much-vaunted shift to electric vehicles stalls out in the face of both technical difficulty and consumer resistance. But the price of gasoline is also down, because people aren't traveling as much -- little money for summer vacations.

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, but it's hard to see much good here. As D29 points out, even if the recession were to get a new president elected he's going to have a rough couple of years.

One of the Good Ones

Someone of significant importance to my life died just a few days ago. She was, inter alia, the heroine of Grenada. This is not a secret any longer: here is a declassified cable between the CIA and the State Department describing her arrival under official cover. Her name was Linda Flohr.

She arrived three days before "the 1st and 2nd battalions of the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, the 82nd Airborne Division, and elements of the former Rapid Deployment Force, U.S. Marines, US Army Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and ancillary forces, totaling 7,600 troops, together with Jamaican forces and troops of the Regional Security System (RSS)." She is the one who took photographs of the airport and other assault sites, and smuggled day-glo spraypaint to the hostage students somehow so that they could mark the roof of their building for the SEALs.

(Relevant to current events also involving hostages, the UN was hotly opposed to this rescue mission. "The invasion was criticized by many countries.... The United Nations General Assembly condemned it as "a flagrant violation of international law" on 2 November 1983, by a vote of 108 to 9.")

I met her shortly after 9/11, when I was still young and highly adventurous. She taught me a great deal, and trusted me enough to introduce me to her old friends, who taught me more yet. My life would have been very different without that friendship and trust. The last time I saw her was at the deathbed of one of those old friends, Dewey Clarridge. 

These Reagan-era spies that I've met were all intensely patriotic, and conservative politically in spite of the wild tales they found themselves involved in over their careers. The Agency is not what it was in their day; a lot of reforms were made starting in the Clinton years to try to turn it into something else. Too bad: it used to draw some of the good ones, and put them into service of a nation that still deserved it. 

Boxing is a Male's Sport

This could be the year a male wins both the Men's and Women's boxing events in the Olympics. Incredible showing by Imane Khelif, whose opponent surrendered in the first round after taking a few shots to the head. 

I don't remember ever seeing a boxing match end in surrender before. Apparently it happens on very rare occasions, and is the subject of introspection when it does because it points to some extraordinary condition that should have been avoided. We will see if there is any introspection on this occasion.

Don't Do That

Kamala Harris follows Hillary Clinton in faking a Southern accent in what we shall call a deplorable manner. 

Why do they do this? 

Clinton's was demonstrably worse -- there are clips of both at the link -- but for Harris it's a pain point. Her inauthenticity issues are not going to be improved by fake accents. Whatever else she may be, she's not a Southerner, and nobody raised in Canada or California ever did a plausible Southern accent. It's obviously fake and skin-crawling.

Dune Style

Readers of the famous novel Dune -- I think everyone here, based on a recent discussion of a movie made from it -- will remember the assassination attempt carried out by a Harkonnen operative who was walled up inside the building well before the Atreides moved in. 

Apparently Israel used a similar technique with a bomb long-hidden in a room their target was known to use, detonated at least months later after they confirmed he was inside. There's no clarity in the reporting where or how the bomb was hidden.

I do admire that the Israelis straightforwardly use the word "assassination" for what our government would insist on calling "targeted killings." It's the same thing; the euphemism doesn't change the moral standing of it. If you've decided that ethics permits killing selected leaders instead of much larger numbers of lower-level soldiers, surely the ethics of speaking the truth rather than lying shouldn't trouble you. You might as well be honest about what you're doing. 

Train Songs on a Cigar Box Guitar

Ben Gitty Baker is a big name in the very small cigar box guitar world. I just discovered that a few years back he travelled across the US on trains and made a number of videos of him singing train songs on the trip. Here are a few of them.

Ancestry and Diversity

As is his wont, Donald Trump decided to throw a rhetorical grenade today.

"I've known Kamala a long time... She was always of Indian heritage... I didn't know she was Black until a couple of years ago when she happened to turn Black"

The media and the administration are apoplectic about this, which is silly because it was a major subject of discussion among Democrats when she ran for President in 2020. Reuters put out this fact check about it then. A whole lot of Democratic voters thought what he just expressed, which I think is an artifact of her diversity-candidate approach to politics: because there had been lots of black officeholders by the time she came of age but not many South Asian ones, she had prominently billed herself as "the first South Asian" whatever to get that "history making diversity!" headline. It's no wonder people knew that she had been billing herself as Indian but not as prominently or frequently as black, because they'd heard the line over and over again.

Perhaps they've forgotten how interested people were in this back then, so here are a couple more items on the subject from 2020. The Irish are interested in it too, because her Jamaican family claims descent from a prominent slave owner/trader who paid a huge damage compensation for their part in the slave trade. (So, she's Irish, and black, and Indian, and female, and you know, diverse.) Reuters’ fact check on the slave trading business is typical of the genre:

While it is true that Kamala Harris’ father claimed to be a descendant of a slave owner, Harris and her family’s relationship to Hamilton Brown remains unclear.  

In an article published by the Jamaica Globe (here), professor Donald Harris wrote: “My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town),” a town in Jamaica.  

According to the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership, Hamilton Brown was an Irish resident slave-owner in Jamaica, and founder of Brown’s Town (here). Snopes, which investigated this claim (here) in 2019, reported that Brown owned at least 121 and 124 slaves in 1826 and 1817, respectively.  

These in-depth Fact Checks by Snopes and Politifact (here) have determined that while there is no clear evidence to prove Kamala Harris is a descendant of slave owners, it is likely that she is a descendant of both slaves and slave owners. 

We've discussed the fact-checker and media love for the phrase "there is no evidence." Here we just get that "there is no clear evidence." But there is clear evidence: we have the direct testimony of her father, which was written down and published. Any historian would consider a direct, published testimonial to be evidence. That in fact is the primary and preferred sort of evidence with which historians work. You can perhaps argue that evidence does not suffice for proof, but you can't deny that there is clear evidence.

I imagine Trump is just throwing bombs because it's fun, but he does incidentally point out a major problem not just for Kamala but for the ideology she represents. The White House is responding that no one has any right to interrogate someone's identity; but if you're going to run a DEI program, in which preference points are assigned based on identity, you have no choice but to question the identities that people claim. Otherwise you end up with Elizabeth Warren cases everywhere. 

Further, there is a serious and unaddressed division on identifying as (say) a man/woman versus (say) black or Indian. In fact, let's use the American Indian for this example -- in Warren's honor, the Cherokee. The Cherokee will definitely interrogate your claim to be one of them, and they have a developed methodology for doing it. They defend this methodology in court and use it to deny some people (especially black people descended from Cherokee slaves) status as Cherokee. Because we have a very elaborate set of preferences and awards for verified Native Americans, businesses owned by them, land owned by them, and so forth and so on, this sort of interrogation is unavoidable. If you want a world in which no one can interrogate your identity, your identity can't be used to assign employment or benefits. If it is, others with whom you are in competition have a right to question whether you really deserved the preferences you received over them. They have standing, as the courts say.

When the Surgeon General of the United States adopts female pronouns and dress, however, we're told it's totally improper to question it. Yet here too, women have a lot of protections and advantages -- scholarships not least, but also physical spaces from which they can exclude men in moments of vulnerability -- that are imperiled if everyone can just identify and nobody can question it. So of course there are fights about this everywhere, in legislatures and in courts and in homes and schools. 

In addition, Trump is pointing to something that isn't often discussed because it's considered wildly impolite to mention, but that I wonder if a lot of black people don't have concerns about. I'm not the least bit black myself and don't pretend to be, but if I were I would wonder about how different not only Kamala but Barack Obama are from the Black American story. The smaller concern would be that they are each only half black, and are on the other side children of extraordinary privilege: on his white side Obama was a cousin of George Washington and descended from wealth and social connection in the white community; Harris' mother was a Brahmin who received advanced education 60 years ago, being about as well connected among the elite caste of India as Obama's white family was here. 

The greater concern is that neither of their black parents shared the Black American experience of slavery and Civil Rights. Obama's father was not descended from slaves or Freedom Riders; he was a Kenyan whose ancestors did not share any of the American experiences. Obama opted in without any of the historical lack of privilege that most Black Americans descend from, and which has defined their struggle. Harris' family, as discussed above, were in her father's generation self-declared descendants from slavers and slave traders, not slaves. 

Again, I'm not black and this isn't my fight. I can't help but think that if I were, though, I'd be asking myself how it was that the first black President and Vice President were both of this strange stripe: not really like us, not at all, neither by blood nor by lived experience. I'd ask myself why they both came from such privilege, and opted into our community only when they found an advantage. At least that's what I think I'd ask myself.

But again, it's not my fight. I wonder if it isn't a fight that just got started, though.

The Red Flag of Revenge

Iran raises its sacred red flag of revenge over its holy city of Qom. (H/t Richard Fernandez.)

The flag's appearance doesn't necessarily mean that anything very bad is going to happen; the last time they raised it was before a large-scale but ineffective drone attack on Israel. Iran's problem is that it is probably being almost maximally effective already, via deniable proxy war; the more they create a conventional war the more they pit weakness against strength. They have no real air force, and their missiles aren't very accurate. They have no way to transport their ground forces and sustain them in action; the proxies are their best card, unless they actually build a nuke.  

Still, it reminds me of the Oriflamme. 

The Oriflamme (from Latin aurea flamma, "golden flame"), a pointed, blood-red banner flown from a gilded lance, was the sacred battle standard of the King of France and a symbol of divine intervention on the battlefield from God and Saint Denis in the Middle Ages. The oriflamme originated as the sacred banner of the Abbey of St. Denis, a monastery near Paris. When the oriflamme was raised in battle by the French royalty during the Middle Ages, most notably during the Hundred Years' War, no prisoners were to be taken until it was lowered. Through that tactic, they hoped to strike fear into the hearts of the enemy, especially the nobles, who could usually expect to be taken alive for ransom during such military encounters.

One of the greatest knights of the Hundred Years War died with the Oriflamme in his hands.

Froissart vividly describes porte-oriflamme Geoffroi de Charny's fall at the side of his king at the Battle of Poitiers in this passage:

There Sir Geoffroi de Charny fought gallantly near the king (note: and his fourteen-year-old son). The whole press and cry of battle were upon him because he was carrying the king’s sovereign banner [the Oriflamme]. He also had before him his own banner, gules, three escutcheons argent. So many English and Gascons came around him from all sides that they cracked open the king’s battle formation and smashed it; there were so many English and Gascons that at least five of these men at arms attacked one [French] gentleman. Sir Geoffroi de Charny was killed with the banner of France in his hand, as other French banners fell to earth.

Both of these red banners are supposed to have been sacred, but the idea has a purely profane variation in history. Pirates famously raised a black flag, including the "Jolly Roger," to indicate piratical intentions -- but it also promised quarter if a surrender was given at once. There was a red flag, "the bloody flag," that some would raise to signal that they intended to murder their prey without mercy no matter what.

Coincidentally I was wearing a t-shirt with this flag printed on it during my flight experiences. Sadly, in spite of my massive black beard, no one got the reference. 

Just tone it down a little

The Bee.

More Air Travel

Yesterday was not a very successful travel day. I was supposed to fly to Charlotte and then Asheville. I wake this morning still in Charlotte. After two delays we finally boarded our plane and went promptly into standby on the edge of an active taxiway for another hour. We then flew to CLT, where we were allowed to land but the field was closed due to lightning. Thus, we sat on the plane for another hour. 

Once I finally got out into the airport, I found that my remaining flight had been delayed as well. I had some hope it might leave near midnight, but no, they finally canceled it. Weather related, so of course the hotel is on me and not the airline that turned two short flights into a two day ordeal. 

Somehow the majesty of flight has become a very unpleasant chore. I dread air travel, but once in a while I have to get on a plane. It’s such a crapshoot as to whether it’ll be on time, or nowhere near so. 

Lotus Blossoms

Stopped by an aquatic garden today. 

John Wayne Loved Chess

 

John Wayne playing chess, with the cast of Rio Bravo looking on.

Apparently John Wayne loved to play chess. It's featured in McClintock, but apparently it was a big thing of his. One of his wives was a a major tennis player or something like that, and he would come to her events and put up a sign outside their trailer: "Play Chess with John Wayne!"

I like chess myself. I taught my son to play, and probably beat him 10,000 times in a row until he really learned to play. Now I have to really watch myself when we play together.

Another Victory over Unconstitutionalism

This one is another occasion of the ATF trying to change the definition of laws without the bother of getting Congress involved. It's a technical issue, but the principle that only Congress can legislate -- no taxation without representation, no laws of any kind without representation -- is a crucial one. 

A Polite Society

There's no newspaper that covers the area in which I live, but there are a few in nearby towns. One of them, the Sylva Herald & Ruralite, likes to pull stories from archives as it has been around a while. This story is from 1926-7.

A young local businessman had gotten wind of apparent indiscretions between his wife and a young man contracted to work on the road from Sylva to Balsam who had recently arrived in the area. He’d apparently become quite worked up, and on a quiet Friday morning in Sylva the alleged suitor pulled up in front of the Woman’s Shop on Main Street.

Before he had a chance to get out of his vehicle, the husband stepped from the sidewalk, pulled a revolver and began shooting, striking the man in the face and twice in the right lung. The man emerged from his car and began running, the husband still firing, hitting him once more below the right shoulder. 

The husband then went into Hooper’s Drug Store and handed his gun to a town alderman, then on to the jail with a deputy. The shooting victim was rushed to the hospital in Bryson City.

The young local businessman was apparently well-regarded, because the judge flatly refused to convict him of any crime. 

In October of 1927 the Journal reported prayer for judgment for the shooter was continued for two years by Judge W.F. Harding. The paper reported Harding remarked from the bench, “Mr. Solicitor, you may get some judge to pronounce judgment in this case; but you will never get this one to do it.” 

The shooter, who entered a plea of guilty of an assault with a deadly weapon, offered testimony of his good character and witnesses who testified to the affair, in addition to letters the wife had written to the suitor. The latter lead the judge to remark “it appeared the wrong man was on trial.” 

The judge opined there was no statute the suitor had violated, but said the legislature should make provisions for such cases, as, the Journal reported, “as the law stands there is little left for an injured husband to do except use a shotgun. (The judge) asserted that this is one place in which our law falls down, and that he would like to issue a bench warrant for (the suitor), if there were a law under which be could be tried.

The paper goes on to note that the young businessman must have remained in business for many years, as their paper hosted ads for his store. The young suitor was never mentioned again. Apparently adultery was a much more serious matter in those days. 

The Herald ends with some musing on the state of society, which we always think is getting more violent.

It’s certainly been a long time since shots rang out on the streets of downtown Sylva, but given the drumbeat of other acts that flicker across our screens daily, the question often comes up if we’ve become a more violent society over time.

It is worth noting that the front pages relating the above incident also carried stories about a fight and shooting at the Glenville polling place, the murder of a man in the Southern Railway waiting room in Dillsboro, and an assault with a pistol with intent to kill Sylva Police Chief Allen Sutton.

Given that, the aforementioned question is one we’ll leave for sociologists and other experts to answer. 

UPDATE: I related this story to my wife, who expressed her opinion that the judge showed excellent sense and that the young businessman's conduct was entirely understandable. "Of course he has a genetically predisposition to react badly to another man stealing his mate," is how she put it. 

The story reflects what may be a culturally Appalachian or Scottish/Scots-Irish sentiment that such cases call for violence against the other man, but none against the woman. Violence by men against women is always wrong, I was taught when I was raised, almost regardless of provocation. Women could slap a man across the face to demonstrate displeasure, not in self defense against an actual threat; a man was not to respond in any way. I remember that I was quite shocked when I first heard Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger and discovered that the protagonist -- a preacher at that! -- actually killed both his wife and her lover. Yet I think that is a more common standard globally, and the restriction a cultural artifact that is probably fading as we move to emphasize the concept of equality in everything.