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.
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