Back in the USA
Rest in Peace, Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry passed away yesterday.
Some advice he gave to himself, but which seems to profit others as well:
How to Be a Poet
(To remind myself)
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Taipei
Tetraphobia
Fare Thee Well, Dolly
No Pictures Today
Robots on the March
7-Eleven in Taipei
Wheels Down Taipei
Eight Slapping Pistons
Up the Privateers
US to revive prize courts.
Once you have prize courts in place, there’s no reason not to revive letters of marque and reprisal.
L’adventure Commence
Requiescat in Pace, Dolly Parton
The Commancheros
During the festival, the Comanchero outlaw motorcycle gang member allegedly tried his luck at a sideshow game where players use an air rifle to shoot plastic ducks and win prizes.Footage obtained by 7News showed Simpson loading and firing the rifle while attempting to win something for his daughter.... Detectives from the South Australia Police Crime Gangs Task Force launched an investigation after learning about the alleged incident. Simpson was arrested in Adelaide on August 21....The firearm order charge carries a maximum penalty of 15 years behind bars or an AU $75,000 fine. Being unlawfully present at a shooting gallery can result in up to 10 years in prison or an AU$50,000 fineIt is not the first unusual object to trigger weapon rules. A six-year-old was suspended for biting a sandwich into the shape of a gun, while another child faced punishment after bringing a tiny LEGO gun to school.In another incident, this time from the UK, a man was sentenced to four months in prison for carrying a six-inch Master Sword replica from The Legend of Zelda.
As a general rule, any time a police agency starts giving its task forces hardcore names like the the Raptor Squad or the Scorpion Units, you should probably disband them and start over with a fresh crop. They've already lost the plot, and are no longer conceiving of themselves as peace officers but as some sort of commando operation targeting members of the public.
Praise the Day at Evening
Give praise to the day at evening, | to a woman on her pyre,
To a weapon which is tried, | to a maid at wed lock,
To ice when it is crossed, | to ale that is drunk.
-Havamal verse 81
This weekend a friend of mine texted "About to do what I hope is the last suspension related job on this thing. It SEEMS like it will be easy and only take an hour or two..."
I texted him back, '"The last job.” “It’ll be easy!” “Only an hour or two.” You’re already ******.' The original was not censored.
Sure enough, he broke a bolt off inside the hole, and had to go buy a new cobalt extractor kit because it was a high grade bolt.
I had a good shop day on Sunday. My son and I worked on three different motorcycles, just making minor adjustments and doing preventative maintenance and tune-up work like swapping spark plugs. I didn't say anything good about it, though, until it was all over.
The Havamal didn't come down to us, even with the filter of Christian scholars writing it down centuries after conversion, as a book of commandments. It's not a set of prohibitions either, like the rules surrounding Kosher or Halal foods. It was apparently just intended as a collection of good advice. You don't have to do any of it, and the Wild Hunt isn't going to come get you if you don't; but things somehow seem to go better if you do.
Foot-Washing
One of the justifications for installing the foot-washing stations is that travelers performing Wudu were washing their feet in ordinary bathroom sinks, which is disgusting and incredibly unhygienic. Can you imagine walking in on that?
Indeed I can! I have encountered that fairly often in my life, first in China where a number of the folk in our residence hall were African Muslims. I don't know that it's any more unhygenic than washing their hands in the sink; our issue was that they washed their feet and their hands several times a day, but very rarely their armpits or other areas that might have benefitted from more regular attention. I was more than happy for them to wash. I only wished that they did a more thoroughgoing job of it.
There is probably a reasonable point of balance between "We don't want to favor any religion in public accommodations, especially not Islam as Muslims sometimes confuse accommodations with conquest," and "I really would prefer you not wash your feet in our shared sink."
Dangerous Gentlemen
In a California Rock Festival...
Arlo and their pickles is, you likely know if you hang around here, a reference to this old song:
Content warning, I guess -- 1970s drug and anti-authority lyrics. Ya'll were mostly all there, though. You probably can handle it.
Range War II: The Ranchers Win
Charles and Heather Maude, a small, fifth-generation farming and ranching family near Pennington County in South Dakota, were prosecuted by the Biden administration via the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service in 2024. Both parents were charged separately, facing $250,000 fines and up to 10 years in prison each, for allowing their cattle to graze on 25 acres of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland.The Maudes, whose family has owned their farm for five generations, disputed the fence line that marked the edge of their property with the grasslands, and claimed the U.S. Forest Service had originally set up an informal agreement Biden’s administration later violated.What would normally be a small civil dispute was used by Biden’s Forest Service to severely prosecute the Maudes for theft and purloining. Charles Maude also told The Daily Signal that government officials advised them to find separate living arrangements for their children in the likely event that both parents were locked up for a decade.Rollins, Noem, and several state and congressional officials commended the Maudes, and announced new efforts by the Trump administration to not only review new disputes and concerns of bureaucratic overreach via a new online portal but vowed to review older government decisions against American farmers and landowners.“The prosecution of the Maudes is now over. They will not be driven from their homes, they will not be failed, they will not be fined and their children will grow up with a mother and a father that they love and who love them,” Rollins said. “We are ending regulation through prosecution.”
A happy ending, just like a Western from the golden age.
Notes for the Scrapbook
How Safe is the US Compared to Europe?
Another Noble Victory
Scales, Eyes
Long-time Milblogger CDR Salamander points out that this is really an indictment of the schools she attended rather than of her, herself. All those student loans were ill-spent if she came away thinking that Russia wasn't a colonial power. "I think it’s fair to say that they left her with a poor understanding of Chinese, Arab, and Turkish imperialism as well," he adds. "We can just assume Aztec imperialism was ignored as a cherry on top."
A Partial Answer
Median Strategies was created as a short-term social experiment examining how purported polling information could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification.Thank you for your understanding.
An Era of Peace and Safety
The FBI estimates that murder fell 18 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. There was an estimated 9 percent drop in overall violent crime and a 12 percent drop in overall property crime.Overall, it was the largest percentage point drop in murder, violent crime and property crime ever recorded. With murder you have to go all the way back to 2024 to find the previous largest one-year drop in murder and before that the previous largest one-year drop was in 2023....I wrote about this as well a few months ago here and noted the unreliability of those mid-1950s estimates and that the more modern estimates really begin in 1958. I think it’s fair to say that the US murder rate in 2025 was roughly the lowest ever recorded and there probably won’t be any ambiguity when the 2026 data is released next year.
Emphasis added. His project includes an attempt to estimate what the FBI statistics will look like going forward, which his method has shown success at with this year's data. So next year, he estimates this based on what we've seen so far of 2026:
The 2026 US Murder Rate Will Be By Far The Lowest Ever Recorded
...The 2025 murder rate should come in at between 4.1 and 4.4 per 100k while the 2026 murder rate should come in at an astonishing 3 to 3.8 per 100k based on the currently available data. Could that change? Yes. Is it a sensible forecast given all we currently know? Also yes. Will the 2026 rate be substantially lower than anything we've ever recorded (FBI murder estimates back to 1960)? Almost certainly yes.
Emphasis not added. That's the headline.
All of this at least correlates with a vast expansion of the number of firearms owned by private citizens, now well more than one per person, almost all of them unregistered (more than 393 million unregistered firearms, that is). The historically low murder rate correlates as well as with SCOTUS' expansion of gun rights -- including the insistence in Bruen that states, even New York, allow for some form of concealed carry rights by citizens.
As I have pointed out in the past, America was already a very safe nation. The illusion presented by the news is a version of the availability heuristic: we have a lot of news when things go wrong, so a lot of information. The fact that things go right almost always almost everywhere generates no information for our brains, and indeed happens at such a scale that it is beyond human comprehension. Hundreds of millions of people live together in peace and safety every day. We can't calculate that, or comprehend it as a whole against which to measure the rare exception.
A fact about the United States that is apparently difficult to grasp is that almost all homicide happens in a very small number of neighborhoods. Most American counties have a murder rate of zero -- not zero percent, zero murders. The vast majority of the remnant have very few murders. The murder rate of the United States as a whole is driven as high as it is not even by a few bad cities. It is driven there by a few neighborhoods within a few cities. For the most part, America has no violence problem, no 'gun violence' problem, no crime problem.
An armed society is a polite society. Ours is getting downright peaceful. Too bad no one knows it.
Democratizing War
Total withdrawals this year could nearly double the amount taken out in the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Taras Skvortsov, a senior executive at Sberbank, Russia’s biggest retail financial institution.The withdrawals are causing liquidity problems, according to Skvortsov and a former senior Russian finance official, overstretching a financial sector already strained by increasing levels of bad debts following a government-directed lending boom to ramp up military output.... Alexandra Prokopenko, a former adviser to the Russian Central Bank, said the withdrawals reflected deepening fear among the Russian public.“It means people have no trust in the Russian banking system or in the Russian financial system,” Prokopenko said. “This is all a consequence of the fear that the government will do something with the banking system, that it could nationalize deposits.”
Now, big businesses are also seeking to move money out of the reach of Russian regulators as anxiety grows over potential asset seizures. That is further exacerbating the problems, the former official said.In all, more than $9.4 billion was transferred out of Russia in the second quarter of 2026, according to Central Bank data.
Emphasis added. Ordinary people who pull their money can put it in the mattress or bury it, but big businesses can remove it from the country's financial system altogether.
Russia looks likely to be the first domino to fall in the new era of war made possible by drones. Wretchard argues that the effect of democratizing precision weapons could, ironically, be to limit state power in a way that benefits us all. The nation state cheerily sacrifices its citizens for its goals, but now starting a war like this can imperil the nation's survival even if another opposing army can't arise to conquer it.
Ironically the proliferation of precision weapon is a fact that can be used for peace. China for example, cannot assume that it can take Taiwan without putting the Communist Party of China at risk. The lesson of Ukraine is don't invade Taiwan.
The US has attempted to limit its engagement in the Gulf because it, at some level, understands this.
The natural order of the world in an era of mutual vulnerability should be one of trade and grudging peace. The fact that it is not, I think (and I may be wrong) is due to the legacy habits of the 20th century when "special military operations" were in fact possible and also to the fanatical irrationality of apocalyptic cults.
Here, knowingly or not, he is echoing anarchist Edward Abbey's endorsement of the civilian ownership of rifles and firearms in general.
It's a tool of equality, in other words. Edward Abbey said that was common to rifles:
The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state-controlled police and military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an "equalizer." Egalite implies liberte. And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed — but do not forget what the common people of this nation knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.
Emphasis added.
It'll be a good day when nation states fear to start wars because they know that the most likely effect is neither victory nor defeat, but the death of the leaders themselves -- as Iran's mullah's have learned, though their replacements still fight on. After that war finally grinds to its end, however, what political leadership will be eager to start another? They'll be the first ones to die, as likely as not. Defanging the nation state could be the start of a better world, just as an armed citizenry here at home has led to an era of unprecedented peace and safety (see next post).
A Non-Mystery about Tryggvason
At [the center of the naval battle at Svolder] stood Tryggvason’s great warship, the Long Serpent, one of the most famous vessels in saga literature. Enemy ships closed in from all sides, capturing Norwegian ships one by one until only Olaf’s flagship remained.From there, the king is said to have fought on the deck of his ship while his fleet was destroyed around him. But aggressors had the upper hand. Most accounts agree on the basic ending. Olaf disappeared into the sea.“Everybody thinks that he jumped overboard and drowned because he was wearing full armour,” Hollway says.This remains the view accepted by most historians. But not all.
When I saw the headline -- "He Was One of the Greatest Viking Warlords and His Death Is Still a Mystery" -- I thought the article was going to be about Sven Forkbeard. We know when Sven died, in England at the very height of his powers, but we have conflicting sources about how. Some say he'd been hiding a long illness, others that he fell off a horse. Either or both could be true.
Olaf Tryggvason's death, by contrast, is clearly recorded in the Heimskringla. Snorri has quite specific details about the whole thing, a matter on which he seems well-informed. Some of the Heimskringla shades into legendaria -- Odin is mentioned towards the beginning as a founder of the kingly line in Norway -- but that is mostly confined to the early books. By the time of Tryggvason, Snorri is writing solidly about history.
Kolbjorn the marshal, who had on clothes and arms like the kings, and was a remarkably stout and handsome man, went up to king on the quarter-deck. The battle was still going on fiercely even in the forehold. But as many of the earl's men had now got into the Serpent as could find room, and his ships lay all round her, and few were the people left in the Serpent for defence against so great a force; and in a short time most of the Serpent's men fell, brave and stout though they were. King Olaf and Kolbjorn the marshal both sprang overboard, each on his own side of the ship; but the earl's men had laid out boats around the Serpent, and killed those who leaped overboard. Now when the king had sprung overboard, they tried to seize him with their hands, and bring him to Earl Eirik; but King Olaf threw his shield over his head, and sank beneath the waters. Kolbjorn held his shield behind him to protect himself from the spears cast at him from the ships which lay round the Serpent, and he fell so upon his shield that it came under him, so that he could not sink so quickly. He was thus taken and brought into a boat, and they supposed he was the king. He was brought before the earl; and when the earl saw it was Kolbjorn, and not the king, he gave him his life. At the same moment all of King Olaf's men who were in life sprang overboard from the Serpent; and Thorkel Nefia, the king's brother, was the last of all the men who sprang overboard. It is thus told concerning the king by Halfred:—
"The Serpent and the Crane
Lay wrecks upon the main.
On his sword he cast a glance,—
With it he saw no chance.
To his marshal, who of yore
Many a war-chance had come o'er,
He spoke a word—then drew in breath,
And sprang to his deep-sea death."
The following chapter gives eyewitness reports of his death. It describes a rumor that spread at the time that the king might have slipped out his mail-coat underwater -- try that sometime, if you have access to a hauberk of mail! Be sure you have a friend to pull you back out again, because you won't be able to do it -- and somehow escaped, but it also contains a poem scolding people for raising such stories that was written by one of Olaf's own skalds.
A Trill in the River
The Ballad of 155mm
The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week....[E]mployees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair.
Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell....
Changing Dynamics
Socialist Francesca Hong was heavily favored to win the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary Tuesday in betting odds and among politicos, but the few polls taken proved unreliable in a primary with several major last-minute developments that changed the dynamics in the race.
Happy Red Plants
National Firearms Act Loses a Fang
Because Congress eliminated the NFA’s making and transfer taxes for most regulated firearms in 2025, the Act’s remaining registration and recordkeeping mandates lack any valid constitutional foundation.FPC Statement: “This is a massive win and an important step forward in our strategic plan to end the NFA. We cannot wait to fully and finally eliminate this unconstitutional scheme so people can exercise their rights when, where, and how they choose.” — Brandon Combs, FPC President
The ruling was issued last week but delayed for a week to give time for an appeal by the ATF. The Trump Administration declined to appeal the ruling.
UPDATE: The NFA is down a fang most places. In 15 states (including mine, because of our lousy Democrat governor who backs every form of gun control he can) the Democratic leadership of that state is blocking transfers without the Federal paperwork at the state police level. That is arguably grounds for Federal prosecutions, not just another lawsuit: deprivation of rights under color of law.
Clear and Present Danger
The mysterious strikes targeting multiple Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands this year were carried out as part of a covert CIA program, The Washington Post has learned.
While many details about the agency’s involvement were not clear, one person with knowledge of the matter said the strikes were part of a “covert action” program, a type of secret operation overseas that is approved by the president but where the role of the U.S. government is not publicly acknowledged. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.
No agency or government has claimed responsibility for the incidents, including the disappearance in January of a fishing vessel and eight of its crew members.
The CIA’s involvement adds a new and secretive dimension to the Trump administration’s otherwise highly publicized campaign against alleged drug traffickers at sea.
Scars of Helene
Circle of Bears Update
The incident resulted in an insurance payout of 53 million rubles, roughly $650,000, according to Russian insurer AlfaStrakhovanie, which did not disclose the name of the vessel.... The insurer said the tanker sustained hull deformation while navigating through ice and stressed that icebreaker assistance does not eliminate the physical risks associated with Arctic navigation.“Even with icebreaker assistance, navigation in Arctic waters is associated with increased hull stress and the risk of damage,” AlfaStrakhovanie said in a company statement (in Russian).... AlfaStrakhovanie said its specialists investigated the incident, assessed the damage and calculated the insurance compensation before paying the shipowner the full amount.... an icebreaker can open a navigable channel but does not eliminate the stresses imposed on vessels following behind.
Medieval Studies
This graph compares modern city rates of violence with those of periods of Medieval Europe. The Medieval data is from here. I doubt its quality; the Thirty Years War, for example, should produce a very major spike that isn't evident. There may have been decisions taken to omit military conflicts, or the sources they used might not include that information. Nevertheless, the general picture of higher rates of interpersonal violence is probably broadly accurate.
Exploring America
During the evening that the fort fell, [the fort's defending commander] Anderson was being held at the McAllister family home, the new headquarters of General William Babcock Hazen. General Hazen and Lt. Col. Strong invited General Sherman to dinner, to celebrate their victory. In a kind gesture of respect, General Hazen also invited Major Anderson to attend the meal, after clearing the request with Sherman. The discussion was surely lively - during the meal Anderson engaged in a heated exchange with General Sherman about the tactics employed to defend the fort and the bravery of all who fought there. Cigars were exchanged and smoked, and tributes were made to the fallen. However, Sherman remained greatly upset at Anderson's use of land mines in the defense of the fort, and ordered the Major [General] to personally join his fellow captured Confederates on mine-clearing detail.
Tradition! Tradition!
A San Bernardino County train was under fire Monday night after bandits attempted a Wild West-style heist.A group of suspects fired on officers with the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) in what appeared to be an effort to rob the train as it passed through the desolate Cajon Pass between the San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains.
Americans have traditions too. Wild West train robberies are a valued part of our national heritage.
UPDATE: The only time I've seen Fiddler on the Roof was when my high school did it as its annual musical. I don't know why they picked it; we didn't have any Jewish students in the county as far as I know. I only went to see it because my sister played the mother, which in a way was family tradition too. She became a Thespian because my father had been one, although in fairness to him he only built sets. He didn't have a non-genuine bone in his body, so pretending to be somebody he was not wasn't a skill he ever developed.
Russia's Desperate Maneuver
At the fleet’s current position, only four vessels are operating farther north: the Swedish icebreaker Oden, China’s polar icebreaker Xue Long, Norway’s research icebreaker Kronprins Haakon, and the ice-class expedition vessel Virgo, according to ship-tracking data.The routing places Russia’s Arctic oil fleet among the northernmost commercial vessels ever recorded. The route passes north of 81 degrees north, roughly 10 degrees farther north than Utqiagvik, Alaska, which sits at about 71 degrees north latitude....Arctic shipping experts say they cannot recall commercial traffic of this scale using the route, making the operation unprecedented despite isolated Soviet-era voyages several decades ago.The convoy includes the Suezmax tanker Dinasty, which industry observers say may become the highest-latitude commercial Suezmax tanker ever to operate. Suezmax vessels, among the largest tankers routinely engaged in international crude oil trade, are rarely seen operating in the high Arctic because of their size and the challenging ice environment...[T]he voyage remains challenging. Significant sea ice continues to cover parts of the East Siberian Sea. Three Russian nuclear icebreakers are currently deployed to escort commercial shipping along the Northern Sea Route.
Desperate times, desperate measures they say.
Consciousness
To address that question, Koch turns to a philosophical framework known as analytic idealism, which proposes that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of reality rather than something generated by the brain.Within this framework, the brain is viewed less as a producer of consciousness and more as a filter or shaper of conscious experience.
Sounds like he's on the right track this time!
Since consciousness debates are now tied up with AI, he adds this:
The ideas also have implications for artificial intelligence. If consciousness is not simply the product of increasingly complex computation, the path toward conscious machines may be more complicated than simply building increasingly powerful AI systems.That does not mean future AI systems could never become conscious. Rather, he argues that the debate cannot be settled simply by making computers more intelligent or more computationally sophisticated.
Several years ago, while sitting alone on a beach, he recalls the boundary between himself and the world dissolving, describing the experience as a timeless and universal reality.In his essay, Koch describes the experience as "the most meaningful of my life," writing that it "flipped my view of reality".Koch is careful not to present the experience as scientific evidence. Instead, he writes that it gave him "a view of Mind-at-Large" and prompted him to re-examine the metaphysical assumptions that had guided much of his scientific career, taking alternative philosophical perspectives more seriously.
The Wailin' Jennys
The name is a tribute to Waylon Jennings, but the music is their own.
More below the fold
Now That's Real Journalism
Rule No. 1: Hands OffA motorcycle is not a park bench.Don't sit on one.Don't lean against one.Don't climb aboard for a photograph.
Rule No. 4: Leave The Old Lady AloneA surefire way to get your ass kicked at Sturgis is by "messing with someone's old lady,” Pretty Bobbie continued.The term itself might sound less than flattering to an outsider.In biker culture, Pretty Bobbie said calling a woman “old lady” is "the utmost term of respect."