Helene's Wrath: A Visual

The Washington Post has an interesting satellite view that expands slowly out into a map of the area northeast of Asheville, and then to all of the nearby areas centered on that region. Most of that area is National Forest, sparsely populated in part because it protects Asheville's reservoir lake. The down side is that lake has been murky and full of sediment since the hurricane, complicating the recovery for Asheville residents whose water system is not set up to handle heavy sediments. Normally that water is pristine, at least for city water.

AVI will have seen a lot of those worst-hit areas on his trip down here, the one where he and family went up to Craggy Gardens on the Blue Ridge Parkway. That road overlooks the North Fork Reservoir, the lake I was talking about above. 

Old Fort, on the map east of Asheville along the I-40 corridor, is still said to be in bad shape. Asheville itself remains troubled. 

UPDATE: 

As you would expect, the drying downed trees create a fire hazard that exactly maps to the worst of the hurricane strike. 

Rabbit/Duck

Illinois just lost its assault weapons ban, based on a philosphical argument about the famous rabbit/duck graphic. 

Always nice to see philosophy used for the good. 

MarsLink

Now you're talking.

In a move that feels straight out of sci-fi, SpaceX has proposed “Marslink,” an adaptation of its Starlink satellite network, to deliver internet connectivity on Mars. 

Presented to NASA, Marslink aims to establish a high-speed data relay system—capable of transmitting 4 Mbps or more—across 1.5 astronomical units, the distance between Earth and Mars.

The concept envisions multiple satellites in Mars orbit, leveraging Starlink’s advanced laser communication tech to maintain a constant, near-instantaneous data flow between planets. 

This network could serve Mars missions, allowing real-time images and data streams from Mars to Earth, as well as supporting future ground operations and Mars orbit assets.

Let's go to the stars. 

Grownups

I saw a pithy GenX explanation yesterday, basically "You tried to shove a Nanny State down the throats of a generation that didn't have a nanny, that was barely supervised by parents." Apparently a whole swath of the population has some pretty solid libertarian leanings, which is a great relief to me after watching all the infantile tantrums by the "leave me alone but support me from a distance you rich jerks" crowd.

The meltdown brigade would do better to worry about the newest outbreak of pogroms, this time in Amsterdam. Israel, in any case, is alert and on the job. Not much infantalization happening in Israel these days.

The devil you say

CNN worries about how the second Hitler term will be even worse than the first:

[T]he staffing decisions this time around will be designed intentionally around individuals who will not work to undermine his agenda from within. . . .

The People Shifted to Trump

There are an endless number of election post-mortems today, focusing on how Trump overcame his 'baggage' (mostly people didn't believe the media's tales about him) and why he won. I'm going to talk briefly about why Democrats lost. 

The clear evidence of the vote was that the people shifted towards Trump almost across the board. College-educated? Up four points. Over 25% black? Up four points. Over 25% Latino? Nine points. Large population over 65? 4.9 points. Large population 18-35? 5.6 points. Literally not one county in America voted for the Democratic candidate at higher rates than in 2020.

Why did this happen? Because the Democrats refused to trust democracy. They had the chance to admit that the public had serous doubts about the age and mental stability of their candidate, Joe Biden. They could have held a primary to consult the people about who they should run instead. Had they done so, that primary would have produced a candidate with broad popular support among Democrats, who could contest the general electorate for its approval. 

Instead, they did everything they could to avoid democracy. The elites decided that no primary was to be held, and they did everything they could to prevent one. This included extensive lawsuits to keep opponents off the ballot, including the scion of the Kennedy family, RFK Jr. If they had let him compete against Biden and lose, he would have endorsed them after it was clear he had been fairly beaten in an election. Because they did it with trickery, lawfare, and even the infiltration of his campaign, he went over to Trump and threw his support there instead. 

Then, when it became crystal clear that Biden wasn't up to another term, the party once again refused to solicit popular opinion or input, and forced a replacement without debate or any sort of election. She lost because she never had any public support to begin with, because she never won a single election -- not a primary, not a single delegate to be a Democratic Presidential candidate, not this year and not ever. None of the process of building public support, working out what the people want and need from their candidate, none of that ever happened. They just tried to ram it through without consultation. 

Having done that, of course, she didn't really campaign. She hid from the press and from the people, took scripted questions that were designed to protect her from scrutiny, and didn't do the work of getting out there and getting to know the ordinary people, finding out what they need, winning their support. 

Meanwhile, that's all Trump did. He did democracy better than them. Much better, because he was the only one who even tried it. 

UPDATE: Or possibly there's a simpler explanation: ~15MM votes just evaporated from 2020, compared to other recent elections. 

Freedom of Speech is Back on the Menu

 The NYT's Editorial Board today:

The founders of this country recognized the possibility that voters might someday elect an authoritarian leader and wrote safeguards into the Constitution, including powers granted to two other branches of government designed to be a check on a president who would bend and break laws to serve his own ends. And they enacted a set of rights — most crucially the First Amendment — for citizens to assemble, speak and protest against the words and actions of their leader.

Glad to know that the central importance of free speech has been re-discovered. It wasn't very long ago they were sounding pretty sour about the idea of speech lacking government oversight and regulation. 

Let the memes begin

Whew

First he dodged a bullet, and then we did.

NOTE: This post was actually written by Texan99. See discussion. 

Probably Not, Though

Dad29 sent me this clip of Tucker Carlson talking about nuclear power as demonic. 

I think he is clearly correct that spiritual things are of central importance, and probably out to sea on his conclusions about exactly how that works. For example, at one point he says that the reason we're getting hit with more hurricanes is probably abortion. Even some climate-change supporters don't agree that we are in fact getting hit with more or stronger hurricanes on average, but let's leave that. I looked into that a bit and found this map of abortion rates by state:

What I notice about that is that, while Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina all are pretty dark, the rest of the hurricane-strike region isn't as much so. Where are the natural disasters hitting New York and Pennsylvania? Probably this theory just doesn't hold water.

Likewise, while it's not quite as easy to explain the invention of nuclear power as it is to explain, say, the invention of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), that's only because it was a lengthy process of many discoveries over a long period of time. It's not that we can't give a precise account of which human beings contributed what part, it's just a longer story that most people won't have at the tip of their tongue. 

As I said in the email conversation, too, "Nuclear weapons arguably have provided more peace than almost any human invention; though there have been small wars, and proxy wars, we haven't had a major war in decades. Of course, that could change if people don't start thinking straight. Nuclear energy, meanwhile, has great promise to lift up the human condition. 

"I don't think it's demonic; it is weird, though. All the stuff that happens at the quantum level is. But God made the quanta too."

That doesn't unravel the point that spiritual things are of titanic importance. They are. We should all attend to those matters, in our own homes and communities, first and foremost with those who are closest to us and deserve our time and attention. If we do that, I do believe things will get better where we are, for a while, as long as we keep doing it. 

Alas, Quandarius

The pointless, farcical “pier” to Gaza still managed to cost the life of an American soldier. 

Rmaich- A familiar story

 Found this thread on Twitter analyzing the targeting patterns of Israel in Southern Lebanon, and a couple places stand out- one of them an area/town named Rmaich (or Rmeish).  It resonated with me as yet another story of indomitable hill people just wanting to be left alone.  Fortunately, they've been successful keeping Hezbollah out, much to their benefit.

 

https://x.com/Saul_Sadka/status/1853204103825961360

Gettysburg and Ukraine

Back in August, Ukraine pushed into Kursk to the great excitement of German armor commanders. We rarely discuss that war in this forum, but over at Dad29's place I suggested an analogy.

It's been difficult to make sense of this offensive, and the reporting on it is wildly inconsistent depending on the outlet and which side they support. (This is perfectly normal in a warzone: "fog of war" and all that.)

However, it did occur to me to wonder if this was the Gettysburg Campaign of the Ukraine war. Analogously, both were the first time the defending army went on the offensive and actually invaded the other's territory in the full scale; both of them were principally intended as raids, with psychological effects on the enemy populace a secondary target. Both intend to take pressure off a long-suffering defensive region (northern Virginia/Donbass).

Both are major commitments of remaining maneuver forces, which entail significant opportunity costs. By deploying these forces in the north, Ukraine is risking what might have been important reinforcements. The Confederate government had wanted Lee to reinforce Vicksburg, but he took his forces into the north instead and suffered a strategic loss instead. That allowed Grant to capture Vicksburg and sever the Confederacy, then assume command in the east and press Lee's remaining army for the rest of its days.

I don't claim to know what the facts on the ground are over there; the fog of war is too thick right now. If the historical analogy holds, though, a Ukrainian loss here could spell the beginning of the end.

This week, the Bismarck Cables suggests that, in spite of major new loans guaranteed by stolen repurposed interest payments on stolen frozen Russian wealth, Ukraine needs a major intervention because Russia is taking a lot of territory. Failing very significant escalation by Ukraine and its allies in the West, he says, Russia is likely to prevail. 

I find this significant because the Bismarck Cables has always struck me as one of the more well-informed outlets writing on this topic, and also because it has always had a clear pro-Ukraine stance. Thus, this is an argument against interest rather than the cheerleading of one side or the other that makes up so much of the fog of war.

Escalations of the type he is advocating are unwise in the extreme. The war has been expensive enough that Russia is unlikely to repeat it. In my opinion we should pursue the peace that can be had. Putin after South Ossetia was likely to repeat his offense; after Crimea, even more so; but the Ukraine war has been ruinous on Russian manpower and war materiel. Letting them keep the majority-ethnic-Russian areas they have seized and held at such cost is not likely to encourage further aggression, but it could allow us to de-escalate in the Middle East especially as well as in Europe. 

Ukraine got out of Kursk about what Lee got out of Pennsylvania, and ultimately expended resources that now can't be used to reinforce lines which are, similarly, starting to collapse. They are still in a happier position. Lee didn't have the option of negotiating a peace that would have allowed the Confederacy to survive in the unconquered territories because, after all, the whole point of the war was to refuse to accept the existence of the Confederacy or the legitimacy of any secession from the Union. Putin has not asked for a similar level of submission from Ukraine, and doesn't have the power to enforce one anyway.

Rather than run the hazard of escalating the war into a direct NATO-Russia force-on-force conflict that could even become a nuclear exchange, we could help offer a peace that while minimally acceptable to Russia also prevents further Ukrainian losses of men and territory. The Kursk gamble did not pay off, but collapse can still be avoided without the need for significant escalation of an already-bloody war.

Poetry and its Criticism

I was headed towards the Joyce Kilmer Forest yesterday in part because I was reflecting on a discussion with family of his most famous poem, "Trees." I assume you are all familiar with it, likely well enough that you can repeat at least the first line without looking. 

A photo of Kilmer's memorial plaque at his forest, which I took on an earlier visit.

Kilmer died heroically at age 31, killed by a German sniper while scouting enemy lines in World War I. He was a devout Catholic, and died young enough that he still felt his faith in the firm certainty of youth. The moment seems to have been central to both his own fame and popularity in his lifetime, and the disdain directed at his work by critics in more recent years. 

The critic John Derbyshire included "Trees" in an audiobook he recorded of great American poems (it doesn't still seem to be available). In his commentary, I recall that he remarked that Kilmer had written the poem as a joke, to mock the overly sincere mode that was popular in much poetry in the age, and found that it became his own most popular work. I don't know what Derbyshire's source is for that claim; the poem seems to me to be quite representative of Kilmer's work. 

Indeed, what people tend to criticize about Kilmer is just those very qualities. His own society, the Philolexian, holds an annual "Bad Poetry" event in his name. The head of that ceremony wrote in 2013 about his mixed feelings on the subject.

Central to both Kilmer’s work and the prevailing disdain of it is his deep Catholicism, to which he converted after his daughter Rose contracted infantile paralysis. Most of his efforts fairly drip with piety... Every year it falls to me as “Avatar” of Philolexian to kick off the Kilmer event by presenting a biographical sketch of the man. By now, I have my routine down pat. After outlining Kilmer’s life and enumerating his poetic sins, I ask, “But was he really bad?” Invariably the audience shouts, “Yes!” And I roar back, “You’re wrong!”

Kilmer, I inform the snarky undergrads, is what George Orwell in his essay on Kipling called a “good bad poet.” After dismissing most of Kipling’s verse as “horribly vulgar,” Orwell concedes it nonetheless is “capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means.” Admit it, Orwell says. Unless you’re “merely a snob and a liar,” you get at least some enjoyment out of something like “Mandalay.” That’s because it’s a good bad poem, which Orwell defines as “a graceful monument to the obvious....

That’s a fair take on much of Kilmer. Yes, he was proof of Oscar Wilde’s pronouncement that “all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” But he could still touch certain chords with crude, shameless offerings like “The House With Nobody in It”:

I never have seen a haunted house, but I hear there are such things;

That they hold the talk of spirits, their mirth and sorrowings.

I know this house isn’t haunted, and I wish it were, I do;

For it wouldn’t be so lonely if it had a ghost or two.

If you insist on rejecting this admittedly hokey notion utterly, never musing that “only God can make a tree” upon beholding a particularly soaring oak . . . well, take your pick. Are you an Orwellian snob or an Orwellian liar?

I am reminded of our longtime companion Eric Blair (how strange to need to mention him so close to the invocation of Orwell) and his position on the First World War. Namely, he holds that war killed Western Civilization -- that it was a mortal wound to its soul, to which it is still slowly succumbing. 

His position is plausible. You can see in the poetry of the era before the war a great civilizational confidence. All sides rode to war on horseback, with at least some of their more famous units dressed gaily in ancestral armor or bright uniforms that recalled the Napoleonic era. Four years later, the aristocracy of all their nations was broken and destroyed; we recall Tolkien, who fought at the Somme, noting that all of the friends of his youth were dead.

Another position on Kilmer is possible: that his poetry is simply good precisely because it manages to bring all things under the eye of the sacred and divine. If a young woman were writing poetry today under the influence of some Guru, it would be thought a mark of her talents if she could find the sacred in ordinary things -- so long as she did so in the light of an Eastern religion, perhaps after her daily yoga flow session. Given that limited change of context, I can imagine such a poet enjoying real popularity among LitCrit circles, perhaps appearing on Oprah or being invited to Goop. 

It may be that Kilmer seems naive to those born after the great wound of World War I. Yet he was writing after suffering his own great wound, the paralysis and slow death of his beloved daughter. It was that context that brought him to devotion and daily prayer, to the determination to see all things -- yes, even New Jersey transit -- through eyes that reflected on their sacred nature. 

We have discussed here in other contexts the argument from Augustine and Avicenna and Aquinas that, indeed, all things that exist must be at least somewhat good because their existence is sustained by a God who is perfectly so. They were greater thinkers than most, drawing on arguments from ancient thinkers at least as great as themselves, Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus. The position isn't obviously wrong: far from it. It is defended by rank upon rank of reason and argument marshalled by the finest minds in human history.

The disdain and mockery strike me, at last, as a septic corruption likely arising from the great psychic wound. They consider themselves to be sophisticated and not naive, because they can entertain the bitter fruits of despair. It may be the greater art to retain instead the awe, to remain capable of seeing the sacred, the true, and the beautiful. 

Elfdalian

What has been considered a dialect in central Sweden, the form “Elfdalian” is now recognized as a distinct Nordic language. 

Elfdalian is traditionally spoken in a small part of the region of Dalarna, known as Älvdalen in Swedish and Övdaln in Elfdalian. But using linguistic and archeological data, including runes, Elfdalian experts have tracked the language back to the last phase of ancient Nordic – spoken across Scandinavia between the sixth and eighth centuries...

While runes had became obsolete in most of Sweden as early as the 14th century, there is evidence of runes being used in Älvdalen as late as 1909, making it the last place in the world where they were used.

A Lucky Day

I saw two bears today from the back of my motorcycle, and by sunset two bull elk fighting and wrestling with their antlers. I didn’t get pictures because I was riding at both times, but it was lucky even to see them. 

Today I rode out intending to go to the Joyce Kilmer forest in the Slickrock Wilderness, but true to name it was occluded with rain clouds as I approached the Nantahala gorge. So instead I turned West and crossed into Tennessee by Deal’s Gap, more famously known as the Tail of the Dragon. It was a good test for the new bike. I’m sure it is capable of even more, once I have had time to get used to it. 

On the Tennessee side it was warm and still much in autumn color. 

By the Little Tennessee River.

From Foothills Parkway in the west section of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

More from the parkway.

Gatlinburg, to fuel myself and the bike.

Above Newfound Gap. 

A good day in the saddle. 

Remember...

SLM